A private chivalry

“Arrah, now, Misther Jarvis, ’tis no use your flatthering me the like of that. Fwhat I know, I know; and that I’ll keep to myself. Besides, wasn’t it Misther Brant himself, poor dear! that says, says he, ‘Mum’s the wurrud, Mary, me jool; sure ’tis but a b’y’s thrick, and I’ll not be having it talked about at all at all.’”

“Yes; but that was before it all came out in the newspapers,” Jarvis cut in glibly. “He doesn’t mind your talking about it now; in fact, he told me to ask you.”

For something better than a week the reporter had been assiduously cultivating Mrs. Seeley’s housemaid, and one of the results of the intimacy was a second visit to Brant’s room, made in the landlady’s absence and connived at and arranged by Mary McCarthy. Jarvis hoped little from a second inspection of the room, and not much from anything the housemaid could tell. Yet he lied brazenly to make her talk, and the lie accomplished that whereunto it was sent.

“Ah, then, did he tell you that, poor man?” said the unsuspecting Mary.

“He did, for a fact; couldn’t come himself, you know, poor fellow!” rejoined the reporter, clinching the falsehood promptly. “Now show me just what you did and tell me what you saw.”

Thus absolved and adjured, Mary McCarthy went circumstantially over the account of her discovery of the burglar, Jarvis absorbing the story as it was told, and leaving the journalistic compartment of his brain to sift the salient facts from the mass of embellishment and exaggeration.

“Black clothes, you say?” he interrupted, when the housemaid came to the describing of the intruder.

“Black as Father Callahan’s cassock.”

“Then he didn’t look like a tramp or a tough?”

“On’y for the oogly face av him I might have mistook him for Misther Brant himself.”

Jarvis strolled to the window and stood with his hands deep in his pockets, looking out upon the tin roof of the porch.

“Dang the thing!” he muttered. “It gets blinder with every move. Now, who the mischief is this gentleman burglar whom Brant wants to screen, and what was he here for? By Jove! I wonder if it was young Langford? He always wears gamblers’ mourning. But what the dickens was he trying to steal?”

He turned away from the window and made another slow circuit of the room in the vague hope that he might stumble upon some overlooked clew to the puzzle. There was none, and he was about to give it up when he came to the closet at the foot of the bed.

“Does this door open into the next room?” he asked.

“No, sure; ’tis on’y the closet where Misther Brant does be keeping his clothes.”

Jarvis turned the knob and glanced at the garments hanging in an orderly row at the back of the shallow recess. “These are all Brant’s, I suppose,” he said carelessly.

“’Deed and they are, then. Whose else would they be?”

“Are these all he has?”

Mary McCarthy picked a fancied suspicion out of the meaningless question and promptly resented it.

“D’ye think annybody would be shtealing them?” she demanded. “Av coorse they are all there, barring fwhat Misther Antrim and the b’y tuk to him at the jail.”

“Boy? What boy was this?”

“’Deed, then, I don’t know; some little scaramouch from the sthreets, I’m thinking. But he did be bringing a letther from Misther Brant; ’tis there on the table.”

Jarvis sauntered across the room and took a dirty scrap of paper from beneath a paperweight on the small writing table. It was a misspelled pencil scrawl, signed with Brant’s name, but he did not have to look twice to decide that it was the clumsiest of forgeries, written evidently by some one who had never so much as seen Brant’s handwriting.

“Mary, dear,” he said feelingly, “you are a pearl of price, and the mate to you has never been found.”

“Be off wid you wid your flatthering tongue!”

“It’s not flattery—never a word of it. Did Mrs. Seeley see this letter?”

“Sure, she did that same. ’Twas to her that the b’y did be giving it.”

“And she gave the boy the suit of clothes it calls for?”

“Av coorse she did. And ’tis myself as was wondering fwhat Misther Brant would be wanting wid them ould rags.”

“From all our friends—so they be women—good Lord deliver us!” said Jarvis under his breath; then aloud: “That was quite right, of course. Did you happen to see the clothes yourself, Mary?”

“I did that; an ould dirty suit of pepper-and-salt it was, the likes of fwhat Misther Brant never did be wearing in the whole swate life av him.”

“Exactly.”

Jarvis slipped the note into his pocket and got away as quickly as he could. It was but the slenderest thread of a clew, but it spanned one of the many gaps he had been vainly trying for a fortnight to bridge.

At the very beginning of his investigation the reporter had stumbled upon Harding’s disguise—the wig and the false beard—in the West Denver Gasthaus; and a painstaking inquiry into the habits of the red-haired and fiery-bearded lodger had developed the fact that he was seen often in company with another man whose description Jarvis had gathered from many sources, but whom he was as yet unable to identify.

So far as could be ascertained, the unidentified one had disappeared on the night of the tragedy. He had been seen alone at Draco’s in the earlier hours of that night, and he had not been seen by any of Jarvis’s informants since that time. Apart from the overheard conference in Heddrigg’s restaurant—a conference in which Jarvis had long since recognised Harding in his character of red-beard and the unknown man as the two participants—there was nothing to remotely connect the unidentified man with Brant’s affair; nothing, unless the forged letter to Mrs. Seeley might be taken as a connecting link. But just here the reporter’s incomplete knowledge of the facts hampered him. He knew nothing of the papers at which the burglary pointed, and could only guess from the overheard conversation in Heddrigg’s restaurant that the burglar was an emissary of Harding’s. At the finding of the forged letter he had jumped to the conclusion that the house-breaker and Harding’s unknown companion were one and the same person; but cooler after-thought brought doubt, and a leaning toward the William Langford hypothesis.

“I am afraid it was the young fellow, after all,” he said at the summing up. “That guess fits the other guesses a little more as if it belonged. Nobody but a fool of a boy would do such a thing and get stone blind in the middle of it; and there is nobody else in the whole shooting match that Brant would go out of his way to shield. As for the clothes and the letter, they don’t count very hard. Even as big a fool as the boy would have sense enough not to wear his everyday clothes while he burgled a house.”

So Jarvis concluded; and he did not change his mind when, later in the day, in another talk with Deverney, he learned that Harding’s unknown companion had always appeared in dingy “pepper-and-salt.” That was a mere coincidence, he argued; and the pattern was certainly common enough to warrant the supposition.

It was in the evening of this same day that the reporter asked his chief to procure him an order to visit the prisoner, or, rather, asked if such an order could be procured.

“I don’t know,” said the night editor. “It’s after hours. But we can try. What have you stumbled upon—anything new?”

“Nothing much. Write me the request for an order, and I’ll tell you about it when I come back. I have an idea.”

The request was written and Jarvis forthfared to the jail. His idea was but the piecing together of some irrelevant facts. He had learned from his chief that Brant had at one time taken a pistol from Harding, and from the editor’s description the weapon was a facsimile of the one found on the floor of the card room after the murder. Out of this the reporter built a new theory, and an interview with Brant was needed to confirm or disprove it.