lay in her
berth, faith still, but able to give an occasional smile to Foster. In
the station on the Missouri the reporters were gathered around the
happy superintendent, smoking his cigars, and filling their note-books
with items. In Denver, their brethren would gladly have done the same,
but Watkins failed to gratify them. He was a man of few words. When the
train had gone through, and a friend remarked: "Hope they'll get
through all right, now," he simply said: "Yes, likely. Two shots don't
'most always go in the same hole." Then he went to the telegraph
instrument. In a few minutes, he could have told a story as wild as a
Norse _saga_, but what he said, when Denver had responded, was only--

"_No. 17, fifty-five minutes late_."

JAUNE D'ANTIMOINE
--------------------
BY THOMAS ALLIBONE TANVIER

_Thomas Allibone Janvier (born in Philadelphia in 1849) began work as a
journalist in his native city in 1870. In 1881 he went to spend several
years in Colorado, and New and Old Mexico--sojourns which left their
impression upon his literary work, A well-known writer of short
stories, Janvier is especially skilled in the delineation of the
picturesque foreign life of New York._

JAUNE D'ANTIMOINE
BY THOMAS ALLIBONE JANVIER
[Footnote: By permission of Charles Scribner's Sons. From "Color
Studies and a Mexican Campaign," copyright, 1891.]

Down Greenwich way--that is to say, about in the heart of the city of
New York--in a room with a glaring south light that made even the
thought of painting in it send shivers all over you, Jaune d'Antimoine
lived and labored in the service of Art.

By all odds, it was the very worst room in the whole building; and that
was precisely the reason why Jaune d'Antimoine had chosen it, for the
rent was next to nothing: he would have preferred a room that rented
for even less. It certainly was a forlorn-looking place. There was no
furniture in it worth speaking of; it was cheerless, desolate. A lot of
studies of animals were stuck against the walls, and a couple of
finished pictures--a lioness with her cubs, and a span of stunning
draught-horses--stood in one corner, frameless. There was good work in
the studies, and the pictures really were capital--a fact that Jaune
himself recognized, and that made him feel all the more dismal because
they so persistently remained unsold. Indeed, this animal painter was
having a pretty hard time of it, and as he sat there day after day in
th