A private chivalry

The lights of Silverette were beginning to prick the dusk in the valley, and the clanging of a piano, diminished to a harmonious tinkling, floated up the mountain on the still air of the evening. At the Jessica workings, a thousand feet above the valley, even the clangour of a tuneless piano had its compensations; and to one of the two men sitting on the puncheon-floored porch of the assayer’s cabin the minimized tinkling was remindful of care-free student ramblings in the land of the zither. But the other had no such pleasant memories, and he rose and relighted his cigar.

“That is my cue, Ned. I must go down and do that whereunto I have set my hand.”

“‘Must,’ you say; that implies necessity. I don’t see it.”

“I couldn’t expect you to see or to understand the necessity; but it is there, all the same.”

The objector was silent while one might count ten, but the silence was not of convincement. It was rather a lack of strong words to add to those which had gone before. And when he began again it was only to clinch insistence with iteration.

“I say I don’t see it. There is no necessity greater than a man’s will; and when you try to make me believe that the honour man of my class is constrained to come down to dealing faro in a mining camp——”

“I know, Ned; but you don’t understand. You saw the fair beginning ten years ago, and now you are getting a glimpse of the ending. To you, I suppose, it seems like Lucifer’s fall—a drop from heaven to hell; and so it is in effect. But, as a matter of fact, a man doesn’t fall; he climbs down into the pit a step at a time—and there are more steps behind me than I can ever retrace.”

“But you can’t go on indefinitely,” insisted the other.

The fallen one shook his head. “That is a true word. But there is only one adequate ending to such a fiasco of a life as mine.”

“And that?”

“Is a forty-five calibre bullet, well aimed.”

“Bah! That is a coward’s alternative, and if you haven’t altogether parted company with the George Brant I used to know, we needn’t consider it. Why don’t you turn over a clean leaf and cut the whole despicable business?”

Brant sat down on the porch step and clasped his hands over his knee. Friendship has its key wherewith to unlock any door of confidence, but from disuse the lock was rusted and it yielded reluctantly.

“I have half a mind to let the game wait while I tell you,” he said at length. “It isn’t a pleasant tale, and if you are disgusted you can call me down.”

“Never mind about that; go on.”

“I’ll have to go back a bit first—back to the old college days. Do you remember the old woman who lived on the flat below the campus? the one who used to smuggle liquor and other contraband into the dormitories when she came to scrub?”

“Mother Harding? Yes.”

“Well, you don’t remember any good of her, I fancy—or of her daughter. But let that pass. The year after you went to Heidelberg the girl blossomed out into a woman between two days, and went wrong the day after, as the daughter of such a mother was bound to. I got it into my callow brain that I was responsible. I know better now; I ought to have known better then; but—well, to shorten a long story, she has managed to spoil my life for me, root and branch.”

The assayer got upon his feet and swore out of a full heart.

“Good God, Brant! You don’t mean to say that you married that brazen——”

But Brant stopped him with a quick gesture. “Don’t call her hard names, Ned; I shot a man once for doing that. No, I didn’t marry her; I did a worse thing. Now you know why I can’t turn the clean leaf. Let the blame lie where it will—and it is pretty evenly divided between us now—I’m not cur enough to turn my back on her at this stage of the game.”

Hobart tramped up and down the slab-floored porch, four strides and a turn, for two full minutes before he could frame the final question.

“Where is she now, George?”

Brant’s laugh was of hardihood. “Do you hear that piano going down there in Dick Gaynard’s dance hall? She is playing it.”

“Heavens and earth! Then she is here—in Silverette?”

“Certainly. Where else would she be?”

Hobart stopped short and flung the stump of his cigar far out down the slope.

“Brant,” he said solemnly, “I thank God your mother is dead.”

“Amen,” said Brant softly.

There was another pause, and then Hobart spoke again. “There was a brother, George; what became of him?”

“He went to the bad, too—the worst kind of bad. He laid hold of the situation in the earliest stages, and bled me like a leech year in and year out, until one day I got him at a disadvantage and choked him off.”

“How did you manage it?”

“It was easy enough. He is an outlaw of the camps, and he has killed his man now and then when it seemed perfectly safe to do so. But the last time he slipped a cog in the safety wheel, and I took the trouble to get the evidence in shape to hang him. He knows I have it, and he’d sell his soul, if he had one, to get his fingers on the documents. In the meantime he lets me alone.”

“He will murder you some day for safety’s sake,” Hobart suggested.

“No, he won’t. I have made him believe that his life hangs on mine; that when I die the dogs of the law will be let loose.”

“Oh!” The assayer made another turn or two and then came to sit on the step beside his guest. “One more question, George, and then I’ll let up on you,” he said. “Do you love the woman?”

Brant shook his head slowly. “No, Ned; I never did; at least, not in the way you mean. And for years now it has been a matter of simple justice. She was bad enough in the beginning, but she is worse now, and that is my doing. I can’t leave her to go down into the hotter parts of the pit alone.”

For a few other minutes neither of them spoke; then Brant rose and girded himself for the tramp down the mountain.

“I must be going,” he said. “I’m glad to have had an hour with you; it has given me a glimpse of the old life that is like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. And I want to see more of you, if you will let me.”

“It will be your own fault if you don’t. Have you got to go now?”

“Yes. There is a tough crowd up from Carbonado, and Gaynard will have his hands full to-night.”

“Wait a minute till I get my overcoat, and I’ll go with you.”

Brant waited, but when Hobart reappeared he made difficulties.

“You’d better stay where you are, Ned. It’s likely there will be trouble and a free fight; and you are new to the place.”

“New to Silverette, but not to mining camps and rough crowds,” Hobart amended.

Brant still hesitated. “I know, but there is always the risk—the bystander’s risk, which is usually bigger than that of the fellow with his gun out. Besides, you have a wife——”

Hobart pushed him into the downward path.

“You don’t know Kate,” he objected. “She would drive me to it if she were here and knew the circumstances. She knows the camps better than either of us.”

Fifteen minutes later they entered Dick Gaynard’s dance hall together, and the assayer loitered in the barroom while Brant edged his way back to the alcove in the rear, where stood the faro table. Presently Hobart saw the dealer rise and give his chair to Brant; then the loiterer felt free to look about him.

There was nothing new or redeeming in the scene. There was the typical perspiring crowd of rough men and tawdry women surging to and fro, pounding the dusty floor to the time beaten out of the discordant piano; the same flaring oil lamps and murky atmosphere thick with tobacco smoke and reeking with the fumes of alcohol; the same silent groups ringing the roulette boards and the faro table. Hobart looked on, and was conscious of a little shiver of disgust—a vicarious thrill of shame for all concerned, but chiefly for his friend. And Brant had come to this for his daily bread! Brant, the honour man, the athlete, the well-beloved of all who knew him!

Hobart let himself drift with the ebb and flow of those who, like himself, were as yet only onlookers, coming to anchor when he had found a vantage point from which he could see and study the face of the fallen one. For all the hardening years it was not yet an evil face. The cheeks of the man were thinner and browner than those of the boy, and the heavy mustache hid the mouth, the feature which changes most with the changing years; but the resolute jaw was the same, and the steady gray eyes, though these had caught the gambler’s trick of looking out through half-closed lids when they saw most. On the whole the promise of youth had been kept. The handsome boy had come to be a man good to look upon; a man upon whom any woman might look once, and turning, look again. The assayer was not given to profanity, but he swore softly in an upflash of angry grief at the thought that the passing years had marred Brant’s soul rather than his body.

None the less, it was shipwreck, hopeless and unrelieved, as Brant had asserted; and from contemplating the effect of it in the man, Hobart was moved to look upon the cause of it in the woman. Perhaps there was that in her which might make the descent into the pit less unaccountable. Hobart would see.

He worked his way slowly around two sides of the crowded room, and so came to the piano. One glance at the performer was enough. It revealed a woman who had once been beautiful, as the sons of God once found the daughters of men; nay, the wreck of her was still beautiful, but it was the soulless beauty whose appeal is to that which is least worthy in any man. Hobart saw and understood. There be drunkards a-many who look not upon the wine when it is red in the cup; and Brant was of these—an inebriate of passion. The assayer turned his back upon the woman that he might the better make excuses for his friend.

Gaynard’s bar did a thriving business that night, and the throng in the gambling alcove thinned out early. The dance hall was the greater attraction, and here the din and clamour grew apace until the raucous voice of the caller shouting the figures of the dance could no longer be heard above the clanging of the piano, the yells and catcalls, and the shuffling and pounding of feet on the floor. Hilarity was as yet the keynote of all the uproar, but Hobart knew that the ceaseless activity of the bartenders must shortly change the pitch to the key quarrelsome, and he began to wish himself well out of it.

Brant glanced up from time to time, always without pause in the monotonous running of the cards, and when he finally succeeded in catching Hobart’s eye he beckoned with a nod. The assayer made his way around to the dealer’s chair, and Brant spoke without looking up:

“Get out of here, Ned, while you can. There will be the devil to pay before midnight, and there is no earthly use in your being mixed up in it.”

Hobart leaned over the table and placed a coin on one of the inlaid cards to keep up appearances.

“I’m here with you, and I mean to stay,” he insisted. “You may need— By Jove! it’s begun.”

The dance stopped and the clamour sank into a hush, which was sharply rent by a blast of profanity, a jangling crash of the piano keys, and a woman’s scream. Then the two fought their way into the thick of the crowd around the piano. A drunken ruffian was grasping the woman’s arm and brandishing a revolver over her head.

“You won’t play it, won’t ye? And ye’ll give Ike Gasset a piece of yer lip? By God, I’ll show ye!”

Brant’s pistol was out before he spoke. “Drop it right where you are, and get out of here before I kill you,” he said quietly.

The man’s reply was a snap shot in Brant’s face, and, though his aim was bad, both Hobart and Brant felt the wind of the bullet passing between them. The crack of the pistol was the signal for a scene a description of which no man has ever yet been able to set down calmly in black on white. Shouts, oaths, a mad rush for the open air foiled by a fiercer closing in of the crowd around the piano; all this while the ruffian levelled his weapon and fired again. At the death-speeding instant the woman started to her feet, and the bullet intended for Brant struck her fairly in the breast. Hobart heard the sharp snap of the steel corset stay, and saw Brant, catching her as she reeled, fire once, twice, thrice at the desperado. Then the assayer lifted up his voice in a shout that dominated the tumult:

“Silverettes! Out with them—they’ve killed a woman!”

There was a fierce affray, a surging charge, and when the place was cleared Hobart ran back. Brant was on his knees beside the woman. The smoking oil lamps burned yellow in the powder reek, but there was light enough to show that she was past help. None the less, Hobart offered to go for a doctor.

Brant shook his head and rose stiffly.

“She doesn’t need one; she is dead.”

Hobart grasped the situation with far-seeing prescience.

“Then you have nothing to stay here for; let us get out while we can.” The din of the street battle rang clamorous at the front, and he took Brant’s arm to lead him to the door, which opened upon the alley in the rear. “Come on,” he urged; “they will be back here presently, and you have nothing to fight for now.”

“No.” Brant yielded as one in a trance, but at the door he broke away, to dart back with the gray eyes aflame and fierce wrath crying for vengeance. Unnoted of all, the wounded desperado had lain where Brant’s fusillade had dropped him. But now he was on hands and knees, trying to drag himself out of the room. Brant was quick, but the assayer pinioned him before the ready weapon could flash from its holster.

“Good God, man, that would be murder!” he panted, wrestling with the avenger of blood, and possessing himself of the pistol. “Come on out of this!”

Again Brant yielded, and they made their way to the open air, and through the alleyway to the mountain path, and so in silence up to the Jessica and to the assayer’s cabin. Not until they were safe within the four log walls did Hobart open his mouth. But when he had struck a light and hung a blanket over the window which looked valleyward he spoke tersely and to the point:

“A few hours ago, George, you told me why you couldn’t turn your back on your shame, and I had nothing to say. But now the reason is removed, and you have had an object lesson which ought to last you as long as you live. What do you say?”

Brant spread his hands as one helpless. “What else am I good for?” he asked.

“That question is unworthy of you, and you know it. You have your profession; but without that you could still do as well as another.”

Brant was still afoot, and he fought his battle to a finish, pacing slowly back and forth with his hands behind him and his head bowed. For all his square jaw and steadfast eyes, rash impulse had been the bane of his life thus far, and the knowledge of it made him slow to decide even when the decision leaned toward the things which make for righteousness. So he fought the battle to its conclusion, and when it was ended was fain to sit down awearied with the stress of it.

“I am not in love with the degradation of it; I think you must know that, Ned. All these years I’ve had a yearning for decency and clean living and respectability that I could not strangle, do what I would. So you will understand that I am not halting between two opinions. It is simply this: Can a man turn over a new leaf and bury such a past as mine without being beset by a constant fear of its resurrection? Won’t it come up and slap him in the face about the time he thinks he has it decently buried and covered up and out of sight?”

Hobart’s rejoinder was prompt and definitive. “No. The world is wide, and a few years of one man’s life are no more than so many texts written in the sand.”

“You’re wrong there, Ned. The world is fearfully small, and its memory of evil deeds is as long as its charity is short.”

“Let be, then. You are not a woman. You are a man, and you can fight it out and live it down.”

Brant acquiesced without more ado. “I was merely stating the case,” he said, as if the matter were quite extraneous to him. “You have earned the right to set the pace for me, Ned; and I’ll do whatever you say.”

“That is more like the George Brant I used to know. And this is what I say: I know a trail across Jack Mountain that will take us to the railroad in three hours. The night trains pass at Carbonado, and you will be in good time to catch whichever one of them you elect to take, east or west. There is no station on the other side of the mountain; but there is a side track for the Hoopoee mine, and you can build a fire to flag the train. Have you money?”

“Yes.”

“Enough?”

“Yes; enough to try whatever experiment you suggest.”

“I don’t know that I have anything to suggest more than your own good judgment would anticipate. Find your allotted corner of the big vineyard and go to work in it; that’s about all there is to it.”

“How deep shall I dive?”

“You will have to decide that for yourself. You are a Western man now, and I suppose you don’t want to go back home. How about Denver?”

Brant shook his head slowly. “Denver is good enough—too good, in fact. I wonder if you will understand it if I say that I’d much rather have my forty days in the wilderness before I have to face my kind, even as a stranger in a strange city?”

“I can understand it perfectly, and the decency of the thing does you credit. And if that is your notion, I can help you. You used to be the best man in the ‘Tech.’ at map making; have you forgotten how to do it?”

“No; a man doesn’t forget his trade.”

“Good. I met Davenport at Carbonado yesterday. He was on his way to the Colorow district to do a lot of surveying and plotting, and was sick because he couldn’t find an assistant before he left Denver. Shall I give you a note to him?”

“It is exactly what I should crave if I had a shadow of the right to pick and choose.”

Hobart found pen and paper and wrote the note.

“There you are,” he said. “Davenport is a good fellow, and you needn’t tell him more than you want to. The job will last for two or three months, and by that time you will know better what you want to do with yourself. Now, if you are ready, we’ll get a move. It’s a stiffish climb to the top of the pass.”

They forthfared together and presently set their feet in the trail leading over the shoulder of the great mountain buttressing the slope behind the Jessica. The sounds of strife had ceased in the town below, and but for the twinkling lights the deep valley might have been as Nature left it. Since the upward path was rough and difficult there was scant breath for speech in the long climb; and for this Brant was thankful. The scene in Gaynard’s was yet fresh in mind and heart, and not even to the friend of his youth could he trust himself to speak freely.

The moon was rising when they reached the summit of the pass, and Hobart pointed down the farther slope to a dark mass hugging the steep mountain side.

“That is the Hoopoee shaft house,” he said. “The railroad is just below it. Got matches and cigars?”

“Yes, both.”

“Then I’ll go back from here. Good-bye, old fellow, and God bless you! Tie your courage in a hard knot, and let me hear from you.”

Brant grasped his friend’s hand and wrung it in silence. He tried to speak, but the words tripped each other.

“Never mind,” Hobart broke in. “I know what you want to say, and can’t. It is nothing more than you would have done if the saddle had been on the other horse. And about your—the woman: I’ll do whatever you could do, if you stayed. Now, then, down you go, or you’ll miss your train. Good-bye.”