A private chivalry

It was between two and three o’clock in the morning before Brant would consent, at Antrim’s solicitation, to give over, or at least to postpone, the search for William Langford. The midnight wanderings in the realm of Abaddon were a wholesome corrective for the chief clerk, whose late aberration lay heavy on his self-respect; but, as he himself phrased it to Brant, he knew when he had enough. One of the results of this glimpse into the deeper depths of the pit he had so narrowly escaped was a fresh stirring of the pool of gratitude, and at the home-going he sought to put his debt to Brant into fitting terms of speech. But Brant cut him off with curt brutality:

“Let up on that. You don’t owe me anything.”

“Yes, I do,” insisted the grateful one.

“I say you don’t. But if you choose to think so, you can even things up by doing your part when we find this addle-brained boy.”

“Oh, I’d do that anyway, and without charging it to your account. He is Isabel’s brother.”

“Yes—and Dorothy’s.” The last two words said themselves, and it is conceivable that Brant would have bitten his tongue before letting that unruly member betray his secret. But Antrim’s quick apprehension and ready sympathy were answerable.

“I thought maybe she was the power behind the throne,” said the chief clerk, linking his arm in that of his companion. “You know my story, George; won’t you tell me yours?”

“There is nothing to tell,” said Brant shortly; and then, after an interval in which one might cuff ill humour into subjection: “That is to say, not anything out of the ordinary. I think a great deal of Miss Langford—I suppose you guessed that much long ago; but there is nothing between us—of the sort you have in mind, I mean. And there never will be. When I shall have found her brother I shall go away and probably never see her again.”

“Go away?” echoed Antrim. “I thought you had given up that idea. Why are you going away?”

They had reached the house, and Brant turned on the doorstep to put his hands on Antrim’s shoulders.

“Don’t ask me, Harry,” he said gently. “Passing your own words back to you, it is a thing I can’t talk about, even to you. You will know all about it some day, perhaps, and then you will understand—if you don’t go over to the enemy, horse, foot, and artillery, with the rest of them.”

Antrim laughed. “I’m not much on making rash promises, and talk is pretty cheap; but when that day comes you will have a friend who will stay with you if you haven’t another on the face of the earth.”

“Don’t commit yourself blindfold,” warned Brant, fitting his key to the nightlatch. “The chances are that you will be ashamed to admit that you have ever known me.”

They climbed the stair quietly, so as not to disturb the house, and Antrim entered his room and closed the door. While he was lighting the gas there was a tap on the panel and Brant came in.

“Will you give me a shakedown on your lounge till morning?” he asked. “Mrs. Seeley evidently thought I was going to make a night of it, and she has put some one into my room.”

Antrim made haste to be hospitable, but he looked mystified.

“Surely. But I don’t understand that a little bit. It isn’t at all like Mrs. Seeley.”

“No; it is rather odd.”

“I should say so. Are you sure there is somebody there?”

“On the evidence of two separate senses. I struck a match and saw a man in my bed; and besides that—listen.” The subdued murmur of the intruder’s snoring was quite audible, and Brant went on: “Moreover, to add to the oddness of it, the man has been drinking. The room reeks like a pothouse.”

“Well, that is queer,” mused Antrim; and then: “Maybe it is one of the boys gone wrong and couldn’t find his room. But in that case I can’t imagine who it could be.”

“Nor I,” rejoined Brant, stretching himself wearily on the lounge. “Never mind; we’ll find out all about it in the morning.”

So he said, and fell asleep; but the morning event discredited the confident assertion. When they went down together to a late breakfast and mentioned the matter to Mrs. Seeley, the good lady was quite as astonished as her lodgers had been. Moreover, she was touched in a tender part, and her inn-keeping pride resented the imputation put upon it by Brant’s suggestion.

“Put any one in your room? Why, Mr. Brant! to think you would suspect me of doing such a thing! Why, never in all my born days did I——”

A chattering shriek from the upper regions cut the protest in half, and the three occupants of the dining room rushed into the hall in good time to meet the housemaid flying down, the stair, wild-eyed and incoherent.

“A man—a man in Misther Brant’s room!” was all she could say, and, at the word, Brant and the chief clerk darted up to the second floor three steps at a bound. Arrived on the scene of the mystery, they found an empty room smelling strongly of brandy, an open window, and a little heap of Brant’s clothing in the middle of the floor. Antrim made a dash for the window, and was out upon the tin roof of the veranda in a twinkling. When he climbed back into the room there was the light of discovery in his eye.

“There is a ladder standing against the end of the porch. That is how he got away.”

“Yes; and it is how he came,” said Brant. “He was a—” He stopped abruptly and clapped his hand upon his pocket. There was only one thing among his belongings that any one would risk life or liberty to obtain, and that thing was safe. He drew out the packet of papers and gave it to the chief clerk.

“He was a burglar,” he said, finishing his sentence, “and he made the mistake of taking a drop too much.”

Antrim was turning the packet over and reading the superscription: “To be opened at my death. George Brant.” “What is this?” he asked curiously.

“It is what the burglar was after. Take it and lock it up in your safe, and I’ll tell you about it later. Now we’ll go down and get the fellow’s description from Mary.”

That was easier said than done. The housemaid was too thoroughly frightened to be successfully cross-examined. The intruder was tall, he was short. In one breath he wore a beard and was a very buccaneer in general appearance; in the next, he was smooth-shaven. Picked out and pieced together, her facts were but two: she had seen a strange man dressed in black, and he had rushed first at her and then toward the window.

Mrs. Seeley and Antrim badgered the servant for further data and sank deeper into the mire of wonderment at each fresh rendering of her adventure; but Brant stood aside as one who rides upon his own train of thought. The burglar’s object defined, there was only the question of identity to be answered. Harding was a coward, and he was much too shrewd to defeat his own end and risk his neck for the sake of a bottle of brandy. Wherefore, Harding must have employed an emissary. But who could he find who was at once brave enough to take the risk and foolhardy enough to get drunk in the midst of it? No seasoned house-breaker, certainly; it was more like the hare-brained prank of a reckless boy; such a boy, for instance, as William Langford.

Brant bided his time, and when Mrs. Seeley went above-stairs to view the scene of the invasion he lagged behind with Mary McCarthy.

“You say he had on black clothes, Mary. Are you sure of that?”

“’Deed I am that, sorr.”

“Did you have time to notice the kind of a coat he wore?—how it was cut, I mean.”

“I did that. It was as like to the wan ye’re wearing as two peas in a pod. On’y but I knowed ye’d gone down to breakfast, I might have been misdeluded intirely till I saw the oogly face av him.”

Inasmuch as both garments had been cut by the same tailor from the same measurements, there was every reason for the similarity; but Brant did not know this, and he tallied his score and went on:

“At first you said he had black hair, and just now you told Mrs. Seeley it was brown. Take time to think about it, and tell me which it was.”

“’Deed, sorr, it was both—lastewise, it was that darrk it might be ayther wan.”

“Was it long, or short?”

“Nayther the wan nor the t’other; joosht betwixt and betune, like.”

“Exactly.” Brant nodded assent. The answers came so readily, pointing step by step to the inevitable conclusion, that they drew out a leading question:

“One more point now, Mary, and we have him. Pull yourself together and try to remember his face. He was a young fellow, wasn’t he?—smooth-faced and rather thin, with heavy eyebrows, a straight nose, and a mouth turned down a little at the corners?”

“That’s it—that’s joosht him to the parin’ av a finger nail! ’Deed and ye might be readin’ aff from his photygraph, Misther Brant!”

Brant asked no more questions. Slipping a dollar into the housemaid’s hand, he laid a finger on his lip. “Mum’s the word, Mary, and it will be a favour to me if you will let the thing die out as soon as it will. I know who it was, and it was only a bit of boy’s play, meant to frighten me instead of you. You will help me keep it quiet, won’t you?”

“’Deed and I will, then. It’s a fine gentleman ye are, intirely, Misther Brant; and it’s never an intilligent wurrud will they get out o’ me at all at all forninst the b’y. But joosht to think av the impidence of the young spalpeen!”

Brant thanked her and ran up to his room, where Mrs. Seeley and Antrim were debating what should be done. Mrs. Seeley appealed to the draughtsman.

“What do you think about it, Mr. Brant? I was just asking Mr. Antrim to notify the police on his way downtown, but he thinks we ought first to know what has been taken. Will you look through your things and see if anything is gone?”

Now, in view of the inevitable conclusion, an investigation by the police was not to be thought of. So Brant made his examination perfunctory, missing nothing but the revolver and the bottle of brandy—and not missing the suit of clothes.

“There is nothing gone—nothing of any consequence,” he said. “If I were you, I shouldn’t call in the police. If we had lost anything valuable, it would be different; but as it is, we should gain nothing but a lot of newspaper notoriety, and that would hurt the house. Don’t you think so?”

Mrs. Seeley demurred at first. She did not quite like the idea of having her house broken into, and then to be denied the poor consolation of stirring up the lazy, good-for-nothing police. But when Antrim added his word, she yielded. On the way downtown Antrim asked Brant a single question and no more:

“Tell me one thing, George. Did you give Mrs. Seeley your real reason for wanting to keep the thing quiet?”

“No,” said Brant.

And as he volunteered no further information, the chief clerk dropped the subject and took up another.

“I suppose you will keep on hunting for Will Langford?”

“I shall; if he hasn’t already turned up at home. I asked Dorothy to send me a line this morning, and if he is still missing I shall keep on till I find him.”

“All right; I’m with you. Let me know what she says, and I’ll do what I can to help. I shall be too busy to do much through the day, but after supper I’ll be yours to command again.”

Dorothy’s note came just before noon. She had been delayed by the difficulty of finding a trustworthy messenger, she wrote. Her brother had not returned, and the situation at home was most trying. Her mother was sick with anxiety, and her father would hear to nothing less harsh than the turning of the matter over to the police. Mrs. Hobart had not been told; and, altogether, the household was in a most grievous state. Wouldn’t Mr. Brant send her a line of encouragement?

Brant would, and did; sat down at once to indite it, ringing first for a messenger, so that no time should be lost.

“I was not able to find William last night,” he wrote, “but I have every reason to believe that he is alive and well; indeed, I may say that I have had speech with a person who saw him as recently as nine o’clock this morning. From this person, and from some circumstances connected with her sight of him, I have obtained a clew to his whereabouts—no, not quite that, either; but I know what he is doing and what company he is keeping. Owing to the peculiar nature of the affair, this clew can not be followed up until to-night; but again I say, be of good cheer, and by all means dissuade your father from calling in the police. This would merely complicate matters, and it would doubtless prove disastrous to any hopeful future for your brother.”

After this note was signed, sealed, and despatched, Brant drowned the remainder of the day in hard work over the drawing-board. It was the best antidote for impatience, and, since his task chanced to be more or less mechanical, he was able to lay his plans for the evening as he wrought. Following out the theory verified by Mary McCarthy’s answers, the mystery of William Langford’s disappearance was easily accounted for. Harding had doubtless broken his parole and returned to Denver. He had managed in some way to get hold of young Langford, and, with the help of the bottle imp, to turn the boy into a house-breaker.

Just how the cautious fugitive from justice could bring himself to trust the lad with the information necessary to an intelligent search for the papers was unexplainable. But that it had been done was beyond question.

One small fact, and one only, refused to fit into the chain of circumstantial evidence. It was this—and to one unfamiliar with the progressive stages of the liquor disease it might have appeared trivial: Brant had found the empty brandy bottle on the floor of his room, and it seemed incredible that a mere boy in the beginnings of the case-hardening process could drink so deeply in a single night and still be able to run away in the morning. But stubborn as this fact was, Brant would not allow it to upset his theory. It was William Langford who had broken into his room; and it was James Harding who had planned and instigated the raid. Therefore, when Harding should be found, the search for the boy would be successful.

With these premisings Brant renewed the quest in the evening methodically. He took Antrim into his confidence, but only so far as to hint that Will would be found in the company of a man whose description was thus and thus; and the chief clerk’s part in the search was to make the round of the hotels and lodging houses.

Reserving the more dangerous share for himself, Brant went first to Draco’s; and when Deverney assured him that nothing had been seen of Harding since the night of his banishment, he set the peg of conclusion one hole farther along. In his dealings with young Langford, Harding would be likely to keep up the fiction of respectability; hence there would be no frequenting of the more public resorts.

Acting upon this suggestion, Brant began a round of the more exclusive “clubhouses,” making guarded inquiries of doorkeepers, and using his reputation with the craft unsparingly as a pass-key to unlock doors which would have been so many dead walls to a detective or a policeman. Since this was a slow process, it was well upon midnight when he ran his quarry to earth. It was in a club called the “Osirian,” a very palace of the goddess of Chance. The doorkeeper was known to Brant, and under question he was able to answer in the affirmative. Two men tallying accurately with Brant’s description had come in early in the evening. They were still upstairs in one of the private rooms, the man thought; which room the attendant in the upper corridor could doubtless point out.

Brant went up, and at the stairhead found himself in a large apartment richly furnished, with a high wainscot of polished mahogany and walls and ceilings of bronze pacrusta wrought into curious designs centring in clusters of softly shaded incandescent lamps. The central space, which served as a vestibule for a series of ceilingless private rooms built out from the walls, was fitted as a club parlour, and Brant made his way noiselessly over the thick carpet to the room whose number he had obtained from the attendant at the stairhead. The door was closed, but since the walls of the private room were merely an extension of the high wainscoting, there was no obstruction to sound. Beyond the door there was a clicking as of ivory counters, and the swish of cards across a table. Brant laid his hand on the doorknob, and at that moment the noises ceased and a boyish oath dropped into the gap of silence.

“I won’t pay it—that’s all there is about it!”—this in the voice of the boyish oath. “By gad, I’m tough enough, Mr. Harding, and I don’t like him any better than you do; but I’m not a sneak thief yet!”

“I don’t see but you will have to pay it, Willie; it is a debt of honour, you see,” the gambler insisted. “You put up your promise for a stake in the game, and you have lost, fair and square. It won’t be much trouble—knowing him as well as you do.”

“But you don’t understand; or rather you won’t understand. I can’t do a thing like that, tough as I am, and nobody but a cursed cad like you would try to make me. And, by gad, I believe you cheated me, anyway! Let me see those cards.”

“Oh, I cheated you, did I? And you are going to kick out, are you? You’re a nice, innocent kid, you are! Now, see here: you have gone too far, a good deal too far, to back down; and, by God, you know too much! You are going to do just what you promised to do before we played this game, or I’ll give you dead away for what you did last night.—No, you don’t!—just keep your hands on the table right where they are! I’ve got the drop on you.”

Silence for a leaden-winged half minute, and then Harding spoke again. “Are you going to do it, or not?”

The boy’s voice was hoarse with passion. “I sha’n’t say anything as long as you hold that gun on me! Put it down, if you want me to talk to you.”

Brant’s big jaw was set like a mastiff’s. The knob turned silently under his hand and the door swung noiselessly inward. The card room, with its red-brown walls of polished mahogany, was lighted by a single incandescent globe bracketted from the wainscoting at the right of the doorway. A square table stood in the midst. On the farther side of it sat the gambler, glaring up at the intruder, with mingled terror and ferocity yellowing his lean face and burning in his evil eyes, and with his right hand creeping by hairs’ breadths toward the revolver lying upon the table. The boy was on the nearer side of the table; he was half out of his chair, poising catlike for a spring, and at the instant of Brant’s entrance he pounced upon the weapon.

Like a stone from a catapult Brant was upon them, smashing the globe of the bracket light in passing, and while one might draw a quick breath three pairs of hands clutched fiercely in the darkness for the weapon on the table. In the midst of the struggle—if that which has no duration in time can be said to have a middle part—came the crash of a pistol shot. There was a moment of ringing silence and darkness, broken by the clatter of a heavy weapon on the floor and a sudden burst of light from a suspended chandelier. Then, as if the light-burst had been a trumpet call to summon them, the attendants and habitués of the place rallied quickly, filling the small room to overflowing.

The first comers found Harding sitting bolt upright in his chair, with a clean-cut hole in his temple from which the blood was trickling in a thin stream. The boy was shrinking opposite, with his face averted and his hands held out before him as if to ward off a blow. Brant was leaning against the wainscoting near the broken lamp bracket, his arms folded and his gaze fixed upon the upturned face of the dead man.

That was all, save that on the floor at Brant’s feet lay the big revolver with an empty shell in one chamber.