A private chivalry

It was quite dark when the reporter left the Langford gate and set out at a rapid walk toward the nearest street-car corner. As he was turning out of Altamont Terrace a four-wheeler with two men on the box swung into the curving street of the suburb from the boulevard. Jarvis gave a shrill whistle, and the carriage drew up at the curb.

“Is that you, Jarvis?” said Antrim, from his seat beside the driver.

“Yes. You’re ’way too early; they haven’t been to dinner yet.”

“Did you see her?”

“Sure.”

“Can she do it?”

“She knows she’s got to do it.”

“Good enough; I’ll go on up to the house and help her.”

Jarvis reached up, felt in Antrim’s vest pocket, found a cigar, and coolly purloined it. “Begging your pardon, you will do nothing of the kind, savez vous? That little battle is one she will have to fight for herself. You go away and kill time for an hour and then come back.”

Antrim held his watch down so that the flare of Jarvis’s match lighted the face of it.

“Six-thirty—seven-thirty. The train Hobart is coming on is late, and I’ll time things so we can go by the station and pick him up. That gives me a clear hour to spare. Get in, and we’ll take you back to town.”

The reporter took his place in the empty four-wheeler and rode cityward in solitary state, rode as far as the Union Depot, and then got out to walk uptown. Recalling the incidents of that eventful night, he could never quite account for the impulse which led him to drift aside from the straight course to the Plainsman building, to turn the corner at Blake Street, and finally to stroll aimlessly into Draco’s. At that early hour the place was all but deserted, and Tom Deverney was glad enough to have some one to talk to. As a matter of course, he reverted to the impending fate of the one known to both.

“Poor old George!” he said in rough sympathy. “To-morrow morning winds him up, doesn’t it? By cripes, if the old town was what it used to be, they’d have to call out the soldiers before they could hang him!”

But Jarvis would not speak of Brant.

“Tell me once more, Tom, about that fellow who was running with the Professor—about how he looked, I mean.”

“Still a-twanging on that old string?” laughed the bartender. “I have told you till I can’t remember how he looked myself.”

“Never mind; dig it over once more,” begged Jarvis “It’s the last time I’ll ever bother you about him.” And thus besought, Deverney racked his memory and described the unknown man for the twentieth time.

“Old clothes—always the same old clothes,” Jarvis groaned in despair. “Didn’t he ever change them, I wonder?”

“Not that anybody ever saw or heard of. I—” The bartender stopped short and knitted his brows till they met above his eyes. “Say, I told you he was in here to get a drink the night of the killing, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he’d changed ’em that night, for once—gone into mourning. I recollect, because I joshed him about the misfit; asked him which one of his uncles had died and left him the blacks.”

“What!”

“It’s a fact. Didn’t I tell you that before?”

“No.” Jarvis grew suddenly cool and wary. “That is, I don’t remember it if you did. Now, cudgel your brain once more, Tom, and try to guess me at about what hour that was.”

“It just so happens that I can tell you to a dot. A minute or two after ‘his Blacks’ was in here a fellow came up from the faro game and wanted twenty-five cases on his watch. I let him have ’em, and when I went to put the ticker in the safe I noticed the time. It was half past eleven.”

Jarvis bought a bad cigar, but he did not light it. On the contrary, he was absently crushing the little roll of alleged tobacco in his hand as he went out and up the street. And a little later, when he was crossing Larimer Street on his way to the rendezvous, he was still scattering the powdered cabbage leaves in a thin trail of brown dust behind him as he strode along.

“It is a sheer miracle—nothing less!” he muttered. “Tom Deverney has told me that story more than a dozen times before, and he left out the whole heart of it every time until to-night. That knocks out one of the mysteries with a good clean body blow. It wasn’t young Langford who ransacked Brant’s room; it was ‘his Blacks,’ as Deverney calls him. And if he was drunk when he did it, he was sober enough when he sent the boy for the cast-off pepper-and-salts that might have betrayed him. Lord of love! if I only knew what he was after!”

Like a flash of inspiration the answer tripped upon the heels of the question. Antrim had told the reporter about the packet of papers given him by Brant for safe-keeping, but not until this instant had Jarvis been able to put two and two together.

“That’s it—that is the whole thing in a nutshell!” he ejaculated. “This fellow and Harding were partners and Harding put him up to steal those papers. Lord, Lord, what a flock of purblind bats we’ve been!”

But the night of miracles was yet young. When the reporter had crossed the street, narrowly escaping the wire scoop net of a passing cable car in his abstraction, he stumbled upon one of the employees of the Osirian Club, the doorkeeper who had been on duty in the upper corridor on the night of the tragedy. Jarvis stopped to buttonhole the man from sheer force of reportorial habit.

“Hello, Binkie! Going on watch?” he queried.

The man nodded.

“One demnition grind, isn’t it? Anything new?”

“No. Business has been mighty quiet with us since that scrap in Number Seven.”

“Go shy, do they? That will wear off in time. By the way, Binkie, there wasn’t anybody else in the big room that night when George Brant went in, was there?”

“Not a soul.” The man shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, and then added, as one who seeks to divide a harassing burden: “That’s what I told the police, and it’s what I say now. But for all that, there was a blamed queer thing happened that I haven’t told anybody, and I’ve sweat about it till I’m galded raw.”

“What was it?” Jarvis forced himself to ask the question carelessly, but anxiety and eagerness were fairly suffocating him.

“Why, it was this: George came up and asked me about those two fellows, and which room they were in, and I told him. Then I saw him go swinging up the middle of the big room with that get-out-of-my-road gait of his as plain as I see you now. Well, about two minutes afterward I got up to go and close a window in the far end of the hall, and when I got back to my chair at the door there he was yet, still going up the room the same as I’d seen him before. Blame me, if I didn’t think I’d got ’em again, for a minute!”

“You are sure it was Brant?” said Jarvis, hungering and thirsting for the negative answer which he did not dare to so much as suggest.

“Sure enough,” said the doorkeeper briefly. “At first I wasn’t so cocksure; it seemed like he’d gone thinner just in that minute or two, so that his clothes didn’t fit him so well; and he wasn’t swinging along any more—he was going cautiouslike, as if he were listening for something that he couldn’t hear. But of course it was George. It couldn’t have been anybody else, or I’d have seen him come up the stairs. See?”

If the man craved buttressing in his own belief it was not denied him.

“Of course, it couldn’t have been any one else,” Jarvis agreed. “Most likely George came back to ask you something, didn’t find you at the door, and went on again. Well, I must get a move. Good night.”

Thus Jarvis, with every word of the nonchalant reply carefully weighted down with disinterest. But when he had left the latter-day Egyptian on the corner, repressed excitement found speech commensurate with the importance of the new miracle.

“Holy Smoke! and yet they say there isn’t any such thing as a miracle nowadays! Why, good Lord! here there have been two of them within an hour—within fifteen minutes—and they go together like the foot and the shoe! Yes, it was Brant—like fits! It was his double in the stolen suit of black clothes—that’s what Binkie saw! And he has been keeping it dark because he was afraid of losing his job if he admitted that some one might have made a sneak on him.”

This time Jarvis went straight to the editorial rooms of the Plainsman, and, finding them untenanted, sat down to wait with what patience he could muster for the others to come in. The interval was not ill spent. Before the reporter’s reverie was interrupted he had cleared up more of the mysteries—so many of them, indeed, that only one of any magnitude remained to baffle him. But that one was impregnable. If the unknown one were the murderer—and with this Jarvis had closed as with a fact assured—why had the man shot his late confederate?

In the meantime Antrim had killed his hour, and had driven once more to Altamont Terrace. He found the judge ready to accompany him, and from the elder man’s grave preoccupation he argued that something of moment had occurred in the interval of slain time.

As prefigured, they drove by way of the Union Depot and stopped to pick up Hobart. The train was not yet in, and Antrim had time to run up to the telegraph office. When he came down he was scowling and cursing his luck.

Whereupon the judge came out of his preoccupation enough to ask what had happened.

“Oh, it’s that despatcher at Voltamo again; he is always getting sick at the wrong time. I’ve got to drop everything and ‘sub’ for him, and I suppose I shall have to go up on Seventeen. That lets me out of the conference, but I don’t know that I could do any good if I stayed. It isn’t going to make any difference. It’s all up with poor Brant.”

The judge shook his head. “I must confess I don’t see any light; but since Dorothy has told me—” He broke off abruptly. “Do you know what she believes, Harry?”

Antrim nodded.

“I—I more than half believe it myself, now,” the judge admitted, and his voice had in it a tremulous quaver which was not of age. “It is the height of incredibility; it is more like a chapter out of some old romance of the dead-and-gone age of chivalry, but—but——”

“I have believed it all along,” said Antrim.

“I know; I know you have. As you say, I don’t see how we are to accomplish anything by talking it over again to-night, but this I have determined: when we have sifted it down to the last grain of evidence, I shall go to the Governor and get him reprieved, if one man may, with God’s help, move another to do a little deed of mercy.”

“God bless you!” said Antrim fervently; and then: “After it’s all over I wish you would drive by and give the facts to the train despatcher upstairs—Disbrow, you know. He’ll wire them to me on Seventeen and I sha’n’t sleep much till I hear.”

The judge promised, and a moment later caught sight of Hobart in the stream of outcoming passengers from the delayed train. There was no time sacrificed to the formalities, and when the assayer had shaken hands with an old friend and a new one, the judge passed quickly to the matter in hand.

“You are barely in time, Ned; we had despaired of reaching you. Leave your valise at the check stand and come uptown with me. I can explain what we hope to do as we go.”

As he promised, so he performed; and by the time they reached the editor’s room at the top of the Plainsman building, Hobart knew all that the judge could tell him. Forsyth welcomed the newcomer heartily, and then Jarvis was introduced.

“Here is a young man whom I have been misjudging from the first,” said the night editor, by way of preface to what the reporter had to tell. “While we have been content to accept one theory, following it blindly to its present desperate conclusion, he has built up and torn down half a dozen, with the result that he is ready to-night to open a most astounding budget of discoveries.—Jarvis, do you begin at the beginning and go over the ground carefully, remembering that Mr. Hobart knows none of the details.”

Jarvis drew up his chair, lighted a fresh cigar, and told his story succinctly and with commendable clarity. Hobart heard it through without comment, but at the close of the narrative he fetched a sigh of relief.

“These mysterious details, with their open doors of possibility, help me out wonderfully,” he said. “As you all know, I had my first news of the tragedy last night, and it was meagre enough. But, from information in my hands—in fact, from a letter which Brant wrote me a short time before the shooting—I had every reason to believe that he had simply avenged himself on his enemy. Indeed, he swore he would do it if the man ever crossed his path again.”

“His enemy?” echoed the judge.

“Yes. Listen, and I will tell you his story, so far as I know it.”

He fulfilled the promise literally and truthfully, beginning with their intimacy and close friendship in college, and ending with a description of the impressive parting in the moonlight on Jack Mountain, when Brant had promised to turn his back upon his evil past and to set his face toward better things.

“What has happened since that night you all know better than I do,” he concluded. “But I may add this from my knowledge of the man: As boy and youth he had his faults, and the chiefest of these were impulsiveness and a reckless uncounting of the cost when he had set his heart upon doing a thing. But he was always as loving and tender as a woman, and as chivalrous as any Bayard of them all. Every one in college knew what Harding’s sister was, and Brant was merely a scapegoat for a half dozen worse men. But because he, too, had sinned, he paid the penalty—would be paying it to this day if the woman were alive. That was one of his redeeming characteristics; and another was his absolute and fearless truthfulness. If he says he did not do this deed for which he is to suffer to-morrow morning, that settles it. He wouldn’t lie about it if the lie would save his life a dozen times over.”

The judge was profoundly moved. Twice he essayed to speak, but what he had to say would have naught of formal phrasings. And when he began, the words came haltingly, and there was generous emotion at the back of them.

“My good friends, this is no time to let false pride or a strained sense of family honour stand in our way. I have that to add to Mr. Hobart’s story which makes the young man’s hitherto inexplicable reticence a part of a most chivalrous and heroic purpose—a deed worthy of the noblest knight that ever figured in ancient story. From the moment of darkness in which the deed was committed up to the present time Brant has believed that my son was the murderer of James Harding, and it was in this belief that he determined to sacrifice himself to save the boy. What the ulterior motive was you may perhaps divine for yourselves when I tell you that it was to my daughter, and after she had guessed his purpose, that he admitted the fact.”

A silence more eloquent than the loudest praise fell upon the little group gathered around the editor’s table. Hobart was the first to break it.

“It was very like him,” he said softly; “like the George Brant I used to know and love in the old days. But in our admiration we mustn’t lose sight of his peril. What are we to do?”

The judge shook his head. “While we have cleared up many of the mysteries, we are still far from having a reasonable excuse for asking the Governor’s intervention. If I go to him with the story of these later discoveries he may justly say that these things have no bearing upon our case and refuse to grant a reprieve. I presume it is sufficiently clear to all of us now that this unknown man who broke into Brant’s room and stole his clothes is the man who killed James Harding. But we can neither prove this nor establish the motive. If we could identify this man, and so be enabled to find him, we might be able to show why he shot a person with whom, by all accounts, he was on friendly terms.”

While the judge was speaking, Jarvis was sketching a crude outline of a human face on the blotter under his hand. He did it mechanically, and without realizing that he was trying to draw the features of the man of many descriptions. When he did realize it, he passed the blotter across to Hobart with a query.

“Does that remind you of anybody you have ever seen?”

Hobart shook his head.

“I didn’t suppose it would,” said the reporter, taking the blotter and beginning to obliterate the picture by adding a bushy beard and a bristling mustache to the face.

The judge and Forsyth were anxiously discussing the advisability of calling in the senior member of a great law firm to act as a go-between in the appeal to the Governor, the editor urging it and the lawyer objecting on the score of time.

“It is my impression that he isn’t in town,” the judge was saying. “And, in any event, what is done must be done quickly. It is a matter of hours for Brant now.”

Hobart took no part in the discussion. He was leaning over the reporter’s shoulder watching the strokes of the idle pencil. Suddenly he put out his hand and stopped it:

“Hold on a minute; that begins to look something like a man I’ve seen somewhere. Let me think.”

The exclamation drew the attention of the others, and they examined the sketch while the assayer was trying to recall the suggestion.

“Let me look at it again,” he said, and he knitted his brows over it for a breathless minute while they waited in silence.

“I can’t place it,” he added, at length. “I thought at first it looked a little like the man Isaac Gasset.”

“Who is he?” asked the reporter.

“Didn’t I mention him by name? He is the ruffian who shot Harding’s sister in the affray at Gaynard’s—the fellow that Brant winged and would have killed, if I had let him.”

The editor’s pivot chair made a quick half circle, and Forsyth smote upon the table with his fist in an ecstasy of exprobration.

“What an infernal lot of idiotic chumps we are!—saving your presence, judge,” he burst out. “Why, the thing is as plain as daylight! Gasset is the man who was plotting with Harding against Brant, and he is the man who followed Brant into the Osirian that night and fired the shot which killed Harding. And that shot missed its mark; it was meant for George Brant!”

Hobart’s pose was self-repression, but he sprang to his feet with something very like an imprecation. “Why, of course! If I’d had any time at all to pull myself together! Why, gentlemen, I knew—knew all about it, but it didn’t occur to me. This man Gasset got out of the hospital before I left Silverette, and it was the talk of the camp that he was hunting for Brant with blood in his eye. I meant to write George about it at the time; but since he had cut the whole business I didn’t think there was any great danger.”

But it was the judge who went to the heart of the matter in two words. “Thank God!” he said earnestly, “at last we have something with which to go to his Excellency, the Governor. And afterward, if we can only lay hands on this man Gasset——”

There was a volley fire of suggestions from Hobart and Jarvis, but the night editor’s genius for organization came quickly to the fore:

“We shall have him, if he is anywhere this side of his master’s smelting pot, and——”

“And when you find him,” Jarvis cut in, “he will probably have in his possession a big 45-calibre Colt’s with the name ‘J. Harding’ scratched on the butt.”

“What’s that? how do you know?” demanded Forsyth; and the marshalling of forces paused while Jarvis explained.

“I know, because the existence of that same big pistol has been the one thing which has kept me alive. Everybody took it for granted that the murder was committed with the pistol which was found on the floor. I wasn’t sure of that, and when I began to doubt, I saw the possibility of another weapon and another man behind it. Gasset was the man who had the original ‘J. Harding’ weapon at the time of the killing, and if he still has it when we catch him—if we catch him—it will be a strong point in evidence if he happens to have the pistol he stole from Brant’s room in his possession.”

“It is a good point, and we’ll put it in the telegrams,” said the editor. “Now, gentlemen, to work. Judge Langford, if you will go with Mr. Hobart to the Governor’s house, Jarvis and I will see to the telegraphing, and I’ll have my young men ransack the city—they will do it better and quicker than the police. Jarvis, send the boys in here, and then chase over to the jail and get word to Brant—if it costs money.” Then to the judge: “You think there is no doubt about your being able to make your case with his Excellency?”

“None whatever now, I think.”

“Good. Then we’ll all meet here in two hours and compare notes, if you please.”

It was an hour after midnight when Despatcher Disbrow was finally able to answer Antrim’s impatient inquiries from Voltamo. He gave the chief clerk the story of the later discoveries, closing the long message with a succinct account of what had been accomplished up to date: