A private chivalry

“Hello, Brant!” said the reporter. “Been to see Forsyth?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are posted, of course. What do you think about it?”

“I hardly know what to think of it yet,” replied Brant, unwilling to go into details with Jarvis. “You are sure those fellows were talking about me, and not about somebody else?”

“I’m sure they were talking about a man named Brant who boards at Mrs. Seeley’s. That makes the peg fit the hole, doesn’t it?”

“It seems to. I guess we shall have to call it a mystery, and hope to learn more about it later on. Going upstairs?”

“Not just yet; let’s go and liquidate.”

“I don’t drink,” Brant objected.

“The dickens you don’t! Since when?”

“Never mind the date—since I quit.”

“I’ll bet money that was no longer ago than yesterday. Come and take a cigar, then.”

“I don’t mind doing that, if you are thirsty enough to drink alone.”

“I am thirsty enough to envy the fellow who went and got himself drowned in a butt of Malmsey,” rejoined the reporter, linking arms with Brant and pointing like a trained retriever for the nearest pothouse.

“That thirst will be the death of you, my boy, if you are not careful,” ventured the older sinner, catching step.

“Don’t you lose any sleep about that. I know blessed well when to take a drink and when to let it alone.”

“Yes, I have met you before,” said Brant ironically. “You are one of a fair-sized crowd. The first ‘when’ is whenever you happen to think of it; the second is when the thing itself is temporarily out of reach.”

Jarvis whistled derisively, and his retort was out of the heart of flippancy:

“You missed your calling, old man; your layout is the Prohibition platform. Why don’t you join the Salvation Army?”

“For good and sufficient reasons; but that has nothing to do with your bad habits.”

“Oh, come off! You’re a one-horse lay preacher, that’s what you are! Your theory is all right, but the wheels won’t go round in practice. Man can’t be a reporter and not drink.”

“Without knowing more than I have to about the askings of your job, I’ll venture to dispute that,” Brant asserted. “According to my notion, a man can’t be the best of anything so long as he hobnobs with any devil of appetite.”

“Oh, let up—you make me limp! I’ll bet a gold mine against a skinny little Indian pony that you’ve got wickedness enough in your system to cover my one little weakness like a bedspread and tuck in all around the edges. Come now, own up.”

But for obvious reasons Brant could not own up; and since the random thrust found the joint in his harness, he must needs go dumb. But a little later, when they were standing together at the bar, he was again moved to protest at the spectacle of Jarvis putting absinthe into his whisky.

“The red liquor is bad enough by itself, my boy,” he remarked, clipping the end of his cigar, “but the other is enough worse. It will make an idiot of you before your time.”

“That’s right; share a man’s hospitality and jump on his personal preferences all in the same breath. If you’ve got to reform somebody, why don’t you tackle that railroad friend of yours over there in the corner? He is sliding down the stair on the balustrade thereof. Go over and preach to him, while I see if I can’t rustle up an eleventh-hour suicide for Forsyth.”

Brant wheeled at the word and saw that which suddenly buried his own trouble deep under the débris of a shattered ideal. At a small table in the corner of the room two men sat playing cards. One of them was so good a type of his clan that Brant was able to summarize him tersely in the word “rook.” The other was Harry Antrim—Antrim, the self-contained, the immaculate, the very pride and pattern of the well-behaved. The chief clerk was evidently much the worse for liquor; his face was flushed, and his hands trembled when he dealt the cards; but he was sober enough to recognise Brant when the latter came up and accosted him.

“It’s about time you were going home, Harry,” he said. “Get your overcoat, and I’ll walk up with you.”

The obscene bird across the table took Brant’s measure in a swift glance, and, scenting trouble, sought to make his peace with the newcomer.

“We were just having a little game for pastime, you understand—low man pays for the dr—for the cigars,” he explained.

Brant ignored the peaceful overture and the maker of it, and asked Antrim what he had done with his coat.

“It’s all right about the coat,” replied the foolish one, making a pitiful effort to keep the consonants in their proper places. “Man don’t need any overcoat in summer time. Le’s go home.”

Brant saw that the man across the table wore an overcoat, and that he was sitting upon another.

“I’ll trouble you to let me have my friend’s coat,” he said mildly, but the cold gray eyes narrowed and shot a look with the words that made the request a demand.

“Oh, certainly, if he is a friend of yours”—the rook had never laid eyes on Brant before. “But it wasn’t no brace game; I win it fair enough.”

Brant helped Antrim to his feet and into his coat, after which he walked him home with no word of inquiry or reproach. Truly, the foolish one was far enough beyond the reach of admonition, but he was also sane enough to appreciate the value of the silence which is golden, and he made an effort to say as much when Brant led him into his room and lighted the gas.

“Much obliged, George, for what you haven’t said.” He steadied himself with his hands on the table and tried to catch Brant’s eye: “’Nother fellow would’ve preached, and a sermon isn’t jush what I need.”

“I know that. Good night,” said Brant, and therewith he left the prisoner of fools to the company of an accuser which is not to be silenced save by many applications of the searing iron.

The night editor of the Plainsman was in the midst of the last batch of copy when Brant redeemed his promise to return, and Forsyth motioned to a chair.

“Sit down; I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said, and when the desk was cleared he wheeled the pivot chair to face his visitor and drew up another for a foot rest.

“Thanks be; that is the last of it for one more day. It’s a ‘demnition grind,’ but I suppose that is true of every occupation under the sun. Haven’t you found it so?”

“Honestly, no. I think I am in love with my profession. If I didn’t have other things to trouble me, I believe I could go on making maps to the end of the chapter.”

“You think that now because the drudgery is preferable to the other things, maybe. Tell me about the other things.”

“I shall, and I’ll cut it short. You know what the public knows about George Brant of Silverette and elsewhere, so we needn’t go into that, though perhaps you will let me say that I was no worse than other men of my tribe. I mean by that that I never dealt a brace game, and I never picked a quarrel of my own motion.”

“These things say themselves. Go on.”

“Well, one day I came to the end of things. You may imagine that the life would nauseate any man who has ever known anything better, and that is what it did to me. So I turned short, pasted down the old leaf, and began all over again.”

“So far so good. And then?”

“Then I began to hunger and thirst after respectability, and a wife, and a home, and all the commonplace blessings of the well-behaved. And because I can’t have them I am minded to do a lot of foolish things.”

The editor removed his glasses and fell to polishing them absently. “Perhaps you are not willing to pay the price,” he suggested.

“Yes, I am—if I know my own mind.”

“Then you have found the—what shall we call her?—the affinity?”

“I have; found her and lost her again.”

“Very few things are lost in this world—beyond the hope of finding them again, I mean. What happened?”

“That which was sure to happen, sooner or later. Her mother found me out and sent me adrift with a Scotch blessing.”

“H’m! that was a bit hard. Does the young woman know?”

“That is what I can’t find out, though I am afraid she does. I met her face to face yesterday, and she passed me without a word.”

“Which proves nothing more than that she may be nearsighted. I shouldn’t lose any sleep over that.”

“But I did; I went mad, and spent half the night in a gambling den.”

“You did? That is the worst thing I know about you thus far. It was unworthy of you.”

“Don’t I know it? Haven’t I been eating the bread of bitterness all day?”

“I suppose you have; but you will have to eat a good bit of it before you get through. You say you are willing to pay the price, but I have my doubts about that.”

Now Brant could be steel cold in the fiercest fray, but he was not beyond flinching under a friendly lash. Forsyth’s doubt whipped him out of his chair, and he made two or three quick turns up and down the narrow walkway behind the desk before the pot of passion boiled over.

“God in heaven, Forsyth, you don’t know what you are talking about!” he burst out. “I’d sell my soul and the reversion of it to win that girl’s love—and respect.”

“Exactly; but you are not required to sell it. You are expected to pay it out of debt.”

“I am willing to do that. But what can I do more than I have done?”

“A great deal, I should say. Let me use the knife a little, and then I’ll try to sew the wound up. You went your own way—which you admit was not the way of decency—till you got tired of it. Then you faced about and said to yourself that all these things should be as if they never had been. That was right and proper, but it was only the first step in a longish journey. Since that time you have taken several other steps, and now you have reached a point where society begins to concern itself, demanding from you a reasonable guarantee of good faith.”

“Hang society! I suppose that is what the mother meant when she said I hadn’t repented.”

“She was quite right. You haven’t repented, in the sense that you are sorry for what you have done. You were merely tired of one thing and so took up another, forgetting that in this game of life he who plays must also pay.”

“I am paying now, at any rate.”

“No, you are not; you are only suffering the consequences of not having paid.”

Brant made more turns in the narrow walkway, and scowled and frowned and otherwise gave signs that the friendly knife had cut deep. It is not every man who can probe his own wound, but this man did it, as his silence-breaking word declared:

“Tell me what I am to do, Forsyth, and I’ll do it if it shortens my life.”

“The thing that you have to do makes for longevity. It is merely to settle down in humdrum good behaviour and wait.”

“For how long?”

The editor shrugged. “Quien sabe? Till the price is paid. Society will let you know when it believes you are to be trusted.”

Brant sat down again and jammed his hands deep into his pockets. “Wait, you say. That is the one thing I can’t do. Set me any task, however desperate, that I can do and have done with it, and I am your man. But the waiting game will first drive me mad and then kill me.”

“No, it won’t. Other men have had it to do.”

“But I shall lose my chance of happiness in any event.”

“Not necessarily. Certainly not if the young woman loves you.”

“You mean that she would wait, too? Possibly she might, if she knew; but she doesn’t, you know.”

Forsyth shrugged again. “I presume I am a traitor to my kind for suggesting it, but you are not under bonds not to tell her, are you?”

“No; I might have been, if the mother had seen fit to put it that way. But she didn’t. She declared open war, and she needn’t complain if I borrow her weapons.”

“No. And there is little doubt about your being able to hold your own in any stand-up fight. By the way, speaking of fights, did you shoot that fellow who was trying to bully me?”

“No; I shot his pistol out of his hand.”

“Purposely?”

“Of course.”

“It is a sheer marvel to me, the accuracy and the fact itself. I don’t understand how you managed to hit it; and I didn’t suppose a bullet would knock a pistol out of a man’s hand.”

“It is easy enough if you shoot straight and carry heavy metal. This thing”—he took Harding’s revolver out of his pocket—“this thing throws a forty-five, and it would punch boiler plate at that distance.”

“Let me see it,” said Forsyth, and he took the weapon and examined it as one examines the tools of an unfamiliar trade. “It’s a young cannon, isn’t it? What is this name on the handle?”

“‘J. Harding’ is what it is meant for. He owned it until one night when I held him up and took it away from him.”

“Another battle royal, I suppose,” said the editor, shaking his great head in deprecation of battles royal and brawlings general. “You will have to drop all that, my boy, if you are going to join the great army of the well-behaved. And that reminds me, what kind of a coil are you in with these fellows that Jarvis overheard?”

Brant thought twice before he spoke once. Here was a matter about which the least said would be the soonest mended. If he should tell the facts in the case, Forsyth would insist that he was no better than an accessory after the fact if he should persist in his refusal to give Harding up to justice, and this he could not bring himself to do. Therefore he answered lightly:

“It is an old quarrel, and one which I don’t mean to take up. One of the fellows owes me a grudge, but he is in no condition to go to war with me—or with any one.”

“And yet you wanted to find him?”

“Yes; I was going to invite him to drop it and go away, but it’s hardly worth while,” said Brant, getting up to take his leave before he should be drawn into the giving of details.

“Well, keep out of it—keep out of everything that isn’t as plain as print and of a nature to be cried from the housetops, and you will come out all right. Don’t get downhearted, or, if you do, just come up here and I’ll abuse you some more. Good night.”

Brant went down the stairs and out into the street, and so on up to Mrs. Seeley’s, with his square jaw set and two ideas dominating all others in his thoughts. One was that without Dorothy’s love to sustain him he would be unequal to the task of maintaining the long probationary struggle outlined by Forsyth; and the other was an intense longing, born of the militant soul of him, to be given some desperate penance—to be tried by the fire of some crucial test which, should it leave him but a single day to glory in the victory, would prove him once for all a man and a gentleman, worthy to have lived and loved.

This he yearned for, and, yearning, put it aside, little knowing that he had within the hour reached and passed the parting of the ways, or that his feet were already in the path leading straight to the goal of his soul’s desire.