A private chivalry

It was yet early in the evening when Brant climbed the stairs of the Plainsman building to keep his appointment with Forsyth. The presses were roaring in the basement, but on the top floor the reporters’ rooms were untenanted, and the telegraph editor, writing furiously under the sheen of the droplight in his noisy den, was the only member of the staff on duty. When Brant’s form darkened his doorway, the man of specials snapped his key and looked up.

“Forsyth’s gone down to supper,” he said. “Told me to tell you to make yourself at home till he came back.”

Brant nodded, and went on through the deserted offices to the night editor’s room. The windows were open, but the chill of the October night was in the air, and a bit of fire smouldered in the grate. Brant stirred it into a blaze and was drawing up a chair when Forsyth entered.

“Good man!” he exclaimed cheerily. “Sit down and light a fresh cigar while I unfold you a tale. Did my note stir up your curiosity? or do you disown any such womanish weakness?”

Brant laughed. “I disown nothing in the way of weaknesses, and we’ll admit the curiosity, with this qualification: it isn’t a womanish weakness—on the contrary, it is altogether masculine. What is the mystery?”

Forsyth took a paper from a pile of exchanges and ran a blue pencil around an advertisement in the “Personal” column. “That is the text,” he said. “Read that, and then I’ll go on and preach my sermon.”

Brant read: “If Mr. George Brant, formerly of Taggett’s Gulch, Pitkin County, will communicate with J. B., care of the Herald, Leadville, he will hear of something to his advantage.”

“I suppose that is pointed at my namesake,” he commented, handing the paper back with an effort at nonchalance. “I hope he will come in for a good thing.”

“So do I,” rejoined the editor, smiling inscrutably. “But wait till you hear the story. Last night, one of our reporters—Jarvis, you know him—was hobnobbing with a lot of variety people in one of the private rooms in Heddrigg’s restaurant. He swears he was sober, but you can draw your own conclusions as to that when I tell you that the company withdrew and left him alone without his knowing it.”

“Sleepy, perhaps,” suggested Brant.

“That is what he says. When he woke up he was alone, but the box beyond him was occupied by two men who were talking in whispers. Now Jarvis is a good fellow, but he is a reporter first, and everything else afterward, so of course he listened. The men were arguing about an ‘ad’ in the Leadville Herald, and Jarvis gathered that it boded ill for one of them, though he couldn’t tell which one. In the course of the talk your name was mentioned—oh, yes, it was you, because they spoke of your boarding place out in Welton Street,” Forsyth insisted, in rebuttal of Brant’s incredulous negative, “and Jarvis heard enough to make him think they meant to do you a mischief.”

“One moment,” Brant interrupted. “What time of night was this?”

“I don’t know exactly, but it was between twelve and two.”

“All right. Go on.”

“That is all. Only, as I say, Jarvis thinks they mean mischief, though he caught only a few words pointing to the necessity for haste in what they had to do. They seemed to be much afraid that you would see the ‘ad.’”

Brant leaned forward to flick the ash from his cigar. “I presume Jarvis saw them when they went out. What did they look like?”

“That is just where the otherwise irreproachable Jarvis fell down,” said the editor. “He posted himself conveniently behind the curtains of his box when they stirred, but unfortunately there is a back door to Heddrigg’s place, and they used it.”

“Leaving the Herald behind them?” queried Brant.

“Not much! But Jarvis went through the file and found the ‘ad’ after he came back here.”

Brant smoked reflectively for a few minutes and then rose to go.

“I am much obliged to you, Forsyth. It was good of you to give me the pointer.”

The editor made an effort to detain him. “Don’t be in a hurry; the night is young.”

“Yes, but I think I would better be going.”

Forsyth tilted his chair and made a monocle of one side of his pince nez through which to quiz his visitor.

“Brant, you are most provokingly cold-blooded, don’t you know it? Here I have been at the trouble to put you in the way of opening up a veritable mine of first-class sensation, and you are going away without so much as giving me a squint down the shaft thereof. Do you call that giving a man a fair shake?”

Brant sat down again. “What do you want me to say?” he asked.

“Say? Why, everything. Do you know these men? or is it a case of mistaken identity? Are they after your scalp? or do you yearn for theirs? Can’t you open up the blinds and let in a little daylight?”

Brant shook his head. “Not for publication. You don’t know what you ask, Forsyth.”

“Publication be hanged! Who said anything about printing it, I’d like to know! Don’t you suppose a newspaper man has bowels as well as other people? I didn’t get you up here to work you for the Plainsman.”

“Then that is different,” Brant conceded. “I’ll tell you what I can, which isn’t much. I have seen these men; they followed me home last night at midnight. But if I ever knew them, I have forgotten who they are. As to the advertisement, I can only guess its purport. If the guess is right, there is only one man in Colorado who need be disturbed about it, and he is not in Denver.”

The editor turned to his desk and ran through a pile of telegrams, pausing at one dated from Leadville.

“Does that help your guess?” he inquired, handing the message to Brant.

“Advertiser’s name is John Brinton,” was what the typewritten line said; and Brant nodded.

“Yes, and no; I can’t understand. Forsyth, I am going out to hunt those fellows down.”

Forsyth looked at his watch. “Will you take a partner? My rush won’t be on for a couple of hours yet.”

“I shall be glad to have you along, if you don’t mind going into the dog kennels. I can’t promise you a pleasure trip.”

“I’d like to go,” said the editor. “I suppose you share the opinion of the public, that all newspaper men are seasoned rounders; but it is a fiction in my own case—and in that of many others too, I think.”

They went down together, and in the street Forsyth asked if it would not be well to take an officer along. Whereat Brant laughed.

“You forget my errand, don’t you? We might as well look for these fellows with a file of soldiers at our backs as with a ‘Bobby’ for an escort. We shall get around all right by ourselves, and if we should happen to run afoul of trouble, you just stand from under while I cover the retreat.”

“Are you armed?” asked Forsyth.

“Assuredly.”

“Well, I am not, and I presume it is just as well. I can’t see four feet in front of me with or without glasses.”

“Can’t you? Then let me take your arm,” said Brant, with ready sympathy; and together they turned down Sixteenth Street to plunge presently into the depths of the underworld.

For reasons best known to himself, Brant made the search for the unknown conspirators a very thorough one. If, as he more than half suspected, one of the men should turn out to be Harding in disguise, the solution of the mystery would be reached at once. And in that case he knew his enemy well enough to be sure that nothing short of vigorous measures would serve to beat him off.

As a last resort he could always give the murderer of Henry Brinton up to justice; but he shrank from the thought of this as a brave man would scorn to ask aid in a personal quarrel. Doubtless the wretch deserved hanging, but the more Brant thought about it the more he was disinclined to play the part of the hangman. The alternative was to find Harding and to warn him once again that his safety lay not in reprisals, but in putting distance and oblivion between himself and his accuser.

It was to set the alternative in train that Brant tramped his companion from dive to den, dragging the murkiest depths of the pool, and leaving no place unvisited where he thought there was a chance of unearthing the plotters.

The search proved fruitless, as it was bound to, since Harding and Gasset were at that time closeted in the former’s room in the West Denver Gasthaus; but Brant did not give over until Forsyth intimated that it was time for him to go back to his desk. Even then Brant begged for five minutes in which to ransack yet one more kennel, and the night editor yielded and went with him.

It was the place in which Harding had met the man from Taggett’s Gulch on the day of his return to Denver—an evil-smelling lair half underground, with a bar fronting the entrance and a drug-like heaviness in the air pointing to what was beyond the bar-screened portal. It was Forsyth’s earliest sniff of an opium hell. He gasped for breath at the threshold, and had he been alone would have fled precipitately. As it was, he went in with Brant and stood at the bar while his companion searched the rooms beyond.

In a very short time Forsyth began to wish himself well out of it. First, the bartender scowled at him and asked what he would take, and when he refused to take anything, having a just fear that any liquor sold in such a place would be only less deadly than prussic acid, there was a stir in a little knot of ruffians clustered at the other end of the bar.

“What’s that?” demanded one of them, sidling up with threatenings. “What are ye here for, if ye don’t buy? Here, barkeep’, hand out the red liquor; this here gig-lamps is goin’ to set ’em up fer the crowd.”

As he had confessed to Brant, Forsyth was short-sighted almost to blindness; also, he was unarmed. But he was no coward, and he pushed the bottle back resolutely and shook his head.

“The gentleman is mistaken,” he said; “I haven’t asked any one to drink at my expense, and don’t mean to.”

Then there was trouble, as a child might have foreseen. In the midst of it, Forsyth found himself looking into the barrel of a huge revolver, the weapon thrust so close that not even his short-sightedness availed to obscure it. At the same moment there was a stir in the murky region beyond the bar, a fierce oath followed by the sharp crack of a pistol, and the ruffian’s weapon clattered harmless to the floor. Then Forsyth drew breath of relief, for Brant had thrust him gently aside and was standing before him.

“That is my bluff, gentlemen,” said the newcomer quietly. “Would any of you like to call it?”

“Holy Smut, it’s Plucky George!” gasped one in the rear; and in a twinkling the place was cleared—nay, more, the scowling bartender himself disappeared as if by magic.

Brant linked his arm in the editor’s and led him forth into the clean night air. Neither spoke until they were nearing the Plainsman building, and then it was Forsyth who broke the silence.

“You heard what that fellow said, Brant? Are you really the Silverette man?”

“Yes. Don’t be alarmed; I’ll quit you when I have seen you safe back to your office.”

Forsyth stopped, swung around, and put his hands on the stalwart one’s shoulders.

“You are a blessed idiot—no less; and I am minded to beat you,” he protested. “Why, confound it all, man, haven’t you just saved my life?”

“That is nothing. And, besides, you wouldn’t have been there if I had not taken you.”

“No more would I; but what of that? Say, Brant, don’t play the fool. I have known this thing, or suspected it, from the first, and I’ll leave it to you to say if it has made any difference with me. I am quite willing to take you for what you are, and I don’t care a little curse what you have been. That is no affair of mine, or of anybody’s else.”

“Do you think so? The world doesn’t agree with you.”

“The world is an impudent busybody,” quoth the editor, catching step again. “Come up to my pigeon-hole and tell me all about it. I’ll stave the rush off while you do it.”

“No, I sha’n’t let you do that, Forsyth; but I shall come up later on, if you will let me. I’ll own up frankly; I am in trouble, well up to my neck, and, barring yourself, there isn’t a soul in Denver that I can talk to.”

“All right; you come up and unload on me. I’ll look for you about the time the forms go down.”

It was the word fitly spoken, and Brant turned away with a warm spot in his heart. High ideals and puissant resolves are all very well in their way, but a single grain of human sympathy strikes deeper root and bears better fruit. For the time Brant felt at peace with all men, and instead of going back to the purlieus to renew the search for Harding, as he had intended, he went in quite the opposite direction, being minded to go to his office and work on the map while he waited on Forsyth’s leisure. So ran the intention; but at the corner he came upon Jarvis, and was straightway turned aside to do a better thing.