One evening Vance worked very late setting type on the Prospector. It was past midnight when he went to his sleeping room. He was about to retire when he heard some one knocking at the printing office door. He admitted the visitor and found it to be J. Arthur Boast.
“Good evening, Mr. Gilder,” said he, “I have come to see you on a little matter of great importance to myself.”
“Come in,” said Vance, “I have no light in this room; come on into my bedroom.”
"You will remember a conversation we had,” said Boast, “some time ago at the hotel.” Vance assented that he did. “Well, I have come tonight to claim a little of the reciprocal friendship which you promised me.”
“Circumstances,” said Boast, “indeed, shape the destiny of man. Of this I am more and more convinced. To think of us sitting down together as friends a month ago would have been preposterous, and yet I am happy to know we meet as such to-night. What impelled me to send for you the night you visited me at the hotel, I am unable to explain; an impulse that I was not strong enough to overcome, compelled me to do it. I feel, Mr. Gilder, that I have much to be thankful for in your friendship, and yet it has all been brought about by a circumstance over which I had no control. It was not the result of a premeditated judgment, but the outcome of an impulse.”
“I hope,” said Vance, as he reached Boast a cigar and lit one himself, “that you have no regrets in regard to our late friendly understanding.”
“No, indeed,” replied Boast, “on the contrary I feel that I am one of the most fortunate men living. By the way,” he continued, “this is an excellent cigar.”
“Yes,” replied Vance, “I received a box from one of my New York friends. It is a luxury that I am not able to indulge in very freely, unless some old chum happens to remember my isolation in these Western mountains and takes pity on me.”
“Have I told you,” asked Boast, “that I have quit drinking?”
“No!” replied Vance, in some surprise.