“Never you mind about that. I got two letters to-day in the train mail that didn’t belong in our office.”
“Oh. What did Disbrow say?”
“Nothing much. Swore a little on general principles, and said it was lucky I found it before the old man had time to raise Cain. It took me longer because I had to go and bake it over a gas jet; it was wet, you know.”
Antrim swallowed a lump in his throat and pulled himself together to meet the demands of the occasion.
“Brant, you have played the Good Samaritan to-night, if you never did before. You have pulled me out of the deepest hole I ever got into.”
“No, I haven’t; but I am going to. Now tell me how the thing happened.”
Antrim told the story of the day’s miseries, concluding with the curious experience in the darkness.
“It’s all plain enough but the miracle, and that is beyond me,” he confessed. “Did I know what I was about? or was I beginning to ‘see things’?”
“A little of both, I guess,” said Brant, and as he spoke the key of the incandescent lamp snapped and left them in the darkness. Brant laughed and got up to turn it on again.
“That is doubtless the snap you heard, and it accounts for the blindness. As for the rest, your brain was simply making another hunt for the missing clew. Does that satisfy you?”