A private chivalry

When he was suffered to escape after his attempt upon Brant’s life in the private room at Elitch’s, James Harding tarried in Denver only so long as the leaving time of the first westward bound train constrained him. Nevertheless, he went as one driven, and with black rage in his heart, adding yet another tally to the score of his account against the man who had banished him.

But, like Noah’s dove, he was destined to find no rest for the sole of his foot. Having very painstakingly worn out his welcome in the larger mining camps, he was minded to go to Silverette, hoping to pick a living out of the frequenters of Gaynard’s. Unluckily, he was known also in Silverette; and unluckily again, word of his coming preceded him from Carbonado, the railway station nearest to the isolated camp at the foot of Jack Mountain. Harding walked up from Carbonado, was met at a sharp turn in the wagon road by a committee from the camp above, and was persuaded by arguments in which levelled rifles played a silent but convincing part to retrace his steps.

Returning to Carbonado, his shrift was but a hand’s breadth longer. On the second day, when he was but barely beginning to draw breath of respite, he was recognised as the slayer of one William Johnson, was seized, dragged into the street, and after an exceedingly trying half hour was escorted out of camp and across the range by a guard of honour with drawn weapons.

Under such discouragements he promptly determined to face the ills he knew, drank deeply at the well of desperation, and, making a forced march to the nearest railway station, boarded the first train for Denver. It was a hazardous thing to do. Brant was a man of his word, and the banished one had known him to go to extremities upon slighter provocation. But, on the other hand, Denver was a considerable city, and their ways might easily lie apart in it. Moreover, if the worst should come, it was but man to man, with plenty of old scores to speed the bullet of self-defence.

So reasoning, Harding stepped from the train at the Denver Union Station in the gray dawn of an October morning, Argus-eyed, and with his hand deep buried in the pocket of his ulster. The time was auspicious, and he reached a near-by lodging house without mishap. Through one long day he remained in hiding, but after dark, when the prowling instinct got the better of prudence, he ventured out. In a kennel some degrees lower in the scale descending than Draco’s he met a man of his own kidney whom he had once known in the camps, and who was but now fresh from the Aspen district and from an outpost therein known as Taggett’s Gulch.

This man drank with Harding, and when his tongue was a little loosened by the liquor grew reminiscent. Did the Professor recall the killing of a man in the Gulch a year or so back—a man named Benton, or Brinton? Harding had good cause to remember it, and he went gray with fear and listened with a thuggish demon of suffocation waylaying his breath. Assuredly, everybody remembered. What of it? Nothing much, save that the brother of the murdered man was in Colorado with the avowed intention of finding and hanging the murderer, if money and an inflexible purpose might contribute to that end.

That was the gist of the matter, and when Harding had pumped his informant dry, he shook the man off and went out to tramp the streets until he had fairly taken the measure of the revived danger. Summed up, it came to this: sooner or later the avenger of blood would hear of Brant, and after that the end would come swiftly and the carpenters might safely begin to build the gallows for the slayer of Henry Brinton. Harding had a vivid and disquieting picture of the swift sequence of events. The brother would find Brant, and the latter would speedily clear up the mystery and give the avenger the proofs. Then the detective machinery would be set in motion, and thereafter the murderer would find no lurking place secret enough to hide him.

Clearly something must be done, and that quickly. Concealment was the first necessity; James Harding must disappear at once and effectually. That preliminary safely got over, two sharp corners remained to be turned at whatever cost. The incriminating evidence now in Brant’s hands must be secured and destroyed, and Brant himself must be silenced before the avenger of blood should find and question him.

The disguise was a simple matter. At one time in his somewhat checkered career Harding had been a supernumerary in a Leadville variety theatre. Hence, the smooth-shaven, well-dressed man who paid his bill at the Blake Street lodging house at ten o’clock that night bore small likeness to the bearded and rather rustic-looking person who engaged a room a few minutes later at a German Gasthaus in West Denver. The metamorphosis wrought out in artistic detail, Harding put it at once to the severest test. Going out again, he sought and found the man from Taggett’s Gulch, and was unrecognised. Introducing himself as a farmer from Iowa, he persuaded the man to pilot him through the mazes of the Denver underworld, and when he had met and talked with a dozen others who knew the Professor rather better than he knew himself, he went back to the West Side Gasthaus with a comforting abatement of the symptoms of strangulation.

Having thus purchased temporary safety, the castaway began presently to look about him for the means to the more important end. Night after night he haunted the purlieus, hoping that a lucky chance might reveal Brant’s whereabouts. But inasmuch as Brant was yet walking straitly, nothing came of this, and in his new character Harding could not consistently ask questions. Twice he met William Langford face to face, and, knowing that the boy could probably give him Brant’s street and number, he was about to risk an interview with his protégé in his proper person when the god of evil-doers gave him a tool exactly fitted to his hand.

It was on the Sunday evening of Brant’s relapse. Harding had been making his usual round, and at Draco’s he met a man whose face he recognised despite its gauntness and the change wrought by the razor. A drink or two broke the ice of unfamiliarity, and then Harding led the way to a card room in the rear on the pretext of seeking a quiet place where they might drink more to their better acquaintance. In the place of withdrawal Harding kept up the fiction of bucolic simplicity only while the waiter was bringing a bottle and glasses. Then he said: “I reckon you’d be willing to swear you had never seen me before, wouldn’t you, Gasset?”

The big man gone thin was in the act of pouring himself another drink, but he put the bottle down and gave evidence of a guilty conscience by starting from his chair, ready for flight or fight as the occasion might require.

“Who the blazes are you, anyway?” he demanded, measuring the distance to the door in a swift glance aside.

Harding pulled off the wig and beard and leered across at him. “Does that help you out any?”

Gasset sprang to his feet with a terror-oath choking him and retreated backward to the door, hand on weapon.

“Don’t you do it, Jim!” he gasped. “Don’t, I say. I never meant to hurt her—any of ’em will swear to that!”

Harding struck a match and relighted his cigar. He did it with leisurely thoroughness, turning the match this way and that and ignoring his quarry much as a cat ignores a mouse which can by no means escape. Gasset stood as one fascinated, watching every movement of the slim fingers and feeling blindly behind him for the knob of the door. Whereat Harding laughed mockingly and pointed to the bottle on the table.

“You had better come back here and take a little more of the same to stiffen your nerve, Ike. You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn just now.”

Gasset found the doorknob finally and breathed freer when it yielded under his hand. “Give me a show for my life, Jim!” he begged, widening the opening behind him by stealthy half inches. “It ain’t worth much, but, by God, I want it for a little while yet!”

Harding laughed again. “What is the matter with you? You would have been a dead man long ago if I had wanted to drop you. Come back here and finish your drink.”

Having more than once set his life over against his thirst, Gasset did it once again, filling his glass with hands that shook, and swallowing the drunkard’s portion at a gulp. The liquor steadied him a little and he sat down.

“Then you ain’t out gunning for me?” he ventured.

“No; what made you think I was?”

Gasset scratched his head and tilted the bottle again. “I don’t know, if you don’t. But it appears like to me, if anybody had killed a sister of mine I’d want to get square. And I reckon I wouldn’t split any hairs about his being drunk or sober at the time, nor yet about whether he went for to do it meaningly or just did it by happen-so.”

Harding ignored the implied reproach and went on to the more important matter:

“Damn that! It is enough for me to know that you were trying to kill George Brant,” he said coolly. “Do you still feel that way?”

Gasset rose unsteadily and the dull eyes of him glowed in their sockets. “Look at me now, Jim, and then recollect, if you can, what-all I used to be. You know what that was; not any man in the camp could put me on my back unless I was drunk. And now look at me—a poor, miser’ble, broke-up wrack, just out o’ the horspital! He done it—filled me plum full of lead when I was too crazy drunk to see single; that’s what he done!”

“Then I suppose you wouldn’t be sorry if you had the chance to even up with him,” said Harding, hastily building up a plan which would enable him to make use of this opportune ally.

“Now you are talking! Say, Jim, I’m hanging on to what little scrap of life he has left me for just nothing else. Understand?”

“Good; that is business,” quoth Harding. “I am with you to stay. Find him for me, and I’ll help you square the deal.”

“Find him?” echoed Gasset. “Why, man alive, he is right out yonder at the faro table! You rubbed up against him coming in here!”

“The devil you say!” Harding hastily resumed the wig and the false beard, with a word explanatory. “He mustn’t recognise me, or the game will be up before it begins. Pull up your chair and we’ll talk this thing over.”

Half an hour later the two conspirators left the card room and made their way singly through the crowd in the game room to meet at the bar. Gasset had lingered a moment at Brant’s elbow, and, having seen the winnings, incautiously spoke of them to Harding in Tom Deverney’s hearing. Harding shook his head, and dragged his companion out to the sidewalk.

“You will have to look out for Deverney—the barkeeper,” he said. “He is Brant’s friend. The first thing is to find out where he sleeps. We’ll go over to the other corner and wait for him till he comes out.”