A private chivalry

The railway inspection party of which the chief engineer was a member did not return to Denver until late in the afternoon, and by consequence Brant wore out the day like a caged wild beast, tramping miles on end up and down the long apartment which served as a workroom in the chief engineer’s suite. Not once during the lagging hours did he uncover the drawing-board; but on the other hand, if he did not work, neither did he put himself in the way of temptation, spirituous or other. It was as if he had promised himself that he would quit clean-handed and clear-headed; that, until the colonel should release him, he would remain, as nearly as might be, the man whom the colonel had befriended.

The day was drawing to its close when the burly little man who was partial to college graduates bustled in and struggled out of his greatcoat. Brant assaulted promptly, saying what had to be said in terms of the simplest. He had made up his mind to leave Denver at once, and he would be glad if the colonel would give him his quittance and let him go.

The struggle with the greatcoat paused in the midst, and the burly one, who knew a capable man when he found him, protested vigorously:

“What’s that? Leave me just when I am beginning to know what a comfort it is to have you about? What’s gone wrong with you? Is it too much work, or not enough pay?”

“It is neither; it is nothing that you have done, or failed to do, my dear colonel. On the contrary, your kindness will be one of the things that I shall always be glad to remember. But I have never been able to stay long in any one place, and the time has come for me to move on.”

“But surely, my dear boy, you haven’t taken time to think about it! Why, it was only yesterday that you seemed perfectly contented.”

“I know; but I have been thinking about it for a week or more. I am afraid I can’t reconsider.”

“Well, well, I’m sorry; only that doesn’t half express it. I hope you haven’t to go right away. You can stay on a few days till I can look around a bit, can’t you?”

“I am sorry to have to say that I can’t do even that,” Brant began, and just here the entrance of the postman interrupted the colloquy. There were letters—several for the colonel and one for the draughtsman. Brant opened and read his, while the chief engineer hastily glanced through the others. Brant’s was a dainty note, and it appeared to move him strangely. His cheek flushed under the bronze, and his eyes kindled as he read; and when the talk was presently renewed he promptly stultified himself.

“You were asking if I could stay on until you had found some one else,” he said. “On second thought, I don’t know but I can, if it will be an accommodation to you.”

The colonel was too well pleased with the sudden change of front to show his surprise, though he could not help putting two and two together and wondering who was the writer of the dainty note which had evidently countermanded Brant’s marching orders.

“Of course it will be an accommodation,” he hastened to say. “I shall have to go back to the Extension to-night to figure on Hurlcrow’s estimates for next month, but I’ll come in as soon as I can, and then, if you are of the same mind, I’ll look around for some one to relieve you. But I hope you will find it possible to reconsider. I like you, and your work is as thorough and accurate as I knew it would be when you told me you were coached by my old friend Thirlwill.”

Brant did not commit himself, and the colonel tossed the lately opened letters into his desk and drew down the roll-top. “I shall be with the general manager and the president in the Aberystwyth till train time, and to-morrow you can reach me at the front,” he went on. “Take things a bit easy while I am gone, and see if you can’t make up your mind to stay with us.”

Being just then devoured with an impatience in comparison with which the restlessness of the long day was but a sedative, Brant did not seek to prolong the interview; and when he was once more alone he read and reread his letter until he could repeat it word for word. It was from Dorothy; and she had kept her promise to call upon him in the time of need. She wrote:

When he had quite committed the note to memory Brant set about answering it. Whatever else he was or might become—and under the sentence of ostracism this question seemed settled beyond peradventure of doubt—he was none the less Dorothy’s loyal liegeman, and while he could serve her, the future, good, bad, or indifferent, might wait for its due. Therefore, after a half dozen false starts, he wrote:

He read it over when it was written, and made as if he would tear it up. Certainly it was anything but loverlike in its measured coolness and conventional formality. He laid it aside and tried again:

He paused at the signature, and read and reread the two replies. And, after all, it was the formal note that a district messenger was presently bearing awheel to the transplanted Southern mansion in the Highlands, and the love letter lay torn into tiny fragments in Colonel Bowran’s wastebasket.

The answer to Dorothy’s note despatched, Brant began to cast about for ways and means to the end she besought. As he had intimated in the letter which was not sent, there were difficulties. Harding had doubtless sown the seed of prejudice and ill will, harrowing it well in; in which case young Langford, when found, would have nothing to do with the man against whom he had been warned. Brant gave the difficulty a thoughtful half hour, at the end of which he sought Antrim. The chief clerk was just closing his office to go to supper, and he was glad enough to have company.

“What are you going to do with yourself to-night, Harry?” Brant asked, when they were free of the downtown six-o’clock sidewalk throngs.

“I am just in from the inspection trip, and I meant to go back to the office and work a while. Why?”

“I want you to do something for me, if you will.”

“After what you did for me last night, you have only to ask,” was the grateful rejoinder. “State your case.”

Brant stated it at some length, omitting none of the details save those which might have defined his own motive in playing the knight-errant.

“I think I know where to look for the boy,” he said in conclusion; “but I am more than afraid that any argument that I could bring to bear on him would be so much wasted eloquence. I want you to go along, and when we find him it will be your part of the job to persuade him to go home.”

“He hasn’t much use for me, as I have told you,” Antrim objected. “But I’ll go along and do what I can. It’s a great pity the judge doesn’t set him to work at something.”

“What is his bent? or has he any?” asked Brant.

“I don’t know that he has any now. At school he was the best mathematician in his class; and there was a time when he wanted to learn your trade. Mrs. Langford was quite willing until it came to field work, and then she put her foot down. Her Willie was not to go careering around all over the world with a lot of rough engineers, she said.”

“Oh, no; of course not,” assented Brant, not without scorn. “She was quite right; we are a hard lot.”

The emphasis was so bitter that Antrim glanced up in surprise. “Has she been giving you a lecture on the subject?” he asked quizzically.

“Who—Mrs. Langford? Certainly not,” denied Brant, hedging promptly. “She has never mentioned my present occupation to me.”

“She will, some day; especially if—” But Antrim was not sure of his ground in the matter of Brant’s leanings, and he broke off abruptly to go back to the former question. “I suppose you will want to start out right after supper?”

“Yes,” said Brant, and they went into the house and entered Mrs. Seeley’s dining room together.

After the meal, which was hurried in deference to the urgencies, Brant went up to his room to prepare for the quest. While there he appeared to be drawn into a struggle which, in view of all the wicked things he had sworn to do, was scarcely less than trivial. It manifested itself in sundry takings up and layings down of the big revolver, ending when he finally put the weapon, together with the unbroached bottle of brandy, into the drawer of his dressing case.

“No, I’ll be hanged if I do!” he muttered. “I’ll not go armed like a desperado on any errand of hers. If I find the boy with Harding, there will probably be a row; but while I am about her business I’d rather suffer violence than do it.” Whereupon he ran down to Antrim, and together they set out on the quest for William Langford.

Contrary to his expressed assumption, the first half of the undertaking proved more difficult than Brant had expected. Beginning with resorts of the Draco type, they went from bad to worse, working their way downward through the substrata of vice until Antrim held his breath and hoped for William’s younger sister’s sake that the search would be unsuccessful in that direction. And so, indeed, it proved to be, though Brant was indefatigable, dragging his companion from dive to den as he had once dragged Forsyth, until the chief clerk was half intoxicated with the mingled fumes of tobacco and opium and alcohol—half intoxicated and wholly disgusted.

“Good Lord! and this is what I was coming to!” he gasped, as they emerged from a particularly noisome kennel. “Let’s give it up, old man, and go home. I’m sick and nauseated.”

“Not yet,” Brant objected. “We are sure to find him, sooner or later; and it is early yet.”

Antrim looked at his watch. “Eleven o’clock. I call that late. But go on; I’ll stay with you.”

Eleven it was, and the policeman, whose beat included the quiet neighbourhood of which Mrs. Anna Seeley’s select boarding house for young men was the centre, had finished his round and had dropped into the nearest uptown saloon for a bite of bread and cheese and such other refreshment as the bartender was wont to set unasked before the guardians of the city’s peace.

“You have a picnic on the uptown beat, don’t you, Sam?” said the licensed dispenser of stimulants, drawing a second glass of beer for the officer.

“Pretty near that. Might jog around up here all night and never see nothing out of the way,” responded the civic soldier, helping himself to another sandwich. This he said, and yet, not ten minutes before, he had met a man carrying a ladder in a quiet street within an hour of midnight, and had not thought the matter curious enough to warrant looking into.

But if the officer had been unmoved, the man with the ladder had not. On the contrary, he was greatly disturbed, and was deterred from casting down his burden and taking to his heels only by the fear that a bullet from the civic soldier’s pistol might outrun him. When the danger was overpast, he rested the ladder against the fence and took a long pull from a flat pocket bottle.

“Whooh!” he growled, stopping to take breath, and glancing up at the darkened windows of the Seeley house. “I’ll just about get my blooming leg pulled for twenty years before I get through with this deal! Run right smack against that cop, when I’d been dodging him for a half hour and better!”

The flat bottle gurgled again, and then the ladder was lifted and dropped quietly over the fence, to be reared presently behind a tangle of evergreen vines at the end of the veranda. A minute later the man appeared at the top and made his way cautiously over the tin roof, which bulged and crackled under his weight until the sweat of fear made him damp and uncomfortable. He paused before Brant’s window, and, inserting a thin-edged bit of steel beneath the sash, tried it gently.

“Fastened, of course,” he muttered, and a knife blade was slipped deftly between the upper and lower sash. There was a muffled click, and then the window opened noiselessly. Once safely inside, the burglar’s first care was to close the window and to draw the curtains. Then he lighted a dark lantern and flashed its beam around the room.

“So far, so good,” was his comment. “Camp cached, and nobody at home. Now for them dockyments.”

He took another pull at the flat bottle as a preliminary, and then proceeded to ransack the apartment with the skilful rapidity of one to whom the craft was not new. The belongings of a man’s room are soon overhauled. Brant’s impedimenta were of the lightest, and in a short time the burglar came to the end of his quest without finding anything more to the purpose than a large revolver and a bottle of brandy. Laying the weapon aside, he unstoppered the bottle and sampled its contents.

“Brandy—ten-year-old cognac, as I’m a sinner!” He held the bottle up and flashed the beam of the lantern on it. Then he gave a toast. “Here’s to you, Mister Snap-shot Brant; and may you live happy and die suddint—when I git the drop on you!”

The liquor paid the penalty of the toast at a frightful cost, and the burglar smacked his lips and wiped them on the sleeve of his coat.

“Blast him! he knows what good liquor is,” he remarked. “I’ll say that much for him, anyway. Now, then, I’ll have a squint among his clothes.”

He dived into the closet and came out with an armful of clothing, and when the pockets yielded nothing he broke out in a monologue of thick-tongued malediction, and again had recourse to the brandy bottle. After a deeper potation than any of the preceding he did that which was afterward to prove his undoing. He drew up Brant’s easy-chair and sat down to curse his ill luck.

The process was a long one, and it was eked out by many more tiltings of the bottle. When it was wrought out to its conclusion the bottle was empty, but the man was not. Some glimmerings of sanity remained, but they pointed only to his bafflement, and not to the necessity for escape. When he staggered to his feet it was to determine what spoil, lacking the papers, would best repay his hazard.

So he fell to rummaging again, and after much dubitation decided to carry off the easy-chair as the thing most greatly to be desired. Failing to get the chair through the opened window, he compromised upon a suit of clothes; and after trying vainly to roll them into a portable bundle, he cut that Gordian knot by struggling out of his own garments, kicking them into the depths of the closet, and arraying himself in the suit of black.

That done—it took so long that the china clock on the mantel was tinkling out the midnight hour—he put the big revolver in his pocket and sat down on the edge of the bed to gather himself for the passage perilous over the crackling tin roof of the veranda and down the ladder. But in the midst of the gathering the foolishness of those who tarry long at the wine came upon him, and the bed transformed itself into his bunk in the West Denver Gasthaus. That being the case, there was no occasion for further efforts, perilous or other. He tried to remember how he had got out of the house of peril; how it was that he came to be sitting on the edge of his bunk in safety; but in the thick of it sleep laid its heavy hand on him, and when the china clock on the mantel chimed the quarter past twelve the man who had tarried too long was snoring brazenly with his head on Brant’s pillow.