THE STRING TO THE SHAFT
AS for Brant, the day following the retrieval of the body of William
Langford was a day to be marked in the calendar as the Feast of the
Mingled Cups. Having been up rather more than half the night, he was
a little late at the office, and he found the chief engineer getting
ready to go up the line on the day train.
“Good morning, Brant,” said the colonel. “You are just in time. I want
Grotter’s field notes to take with me. What did you do with the book?”
Brant found the notebook, and began to say something about late hours
and their next morning consequences, but the colonel only laughed
good-naturedly:
“I know; I was a young man once myself. But if I had it to do over
again I’d touch it lightly. Of course, you are new to the West, and
naturally you want to see the animals; but even an onlooker has to be
careful and not get the smell of the menagerie in his clothes. It’s
devilish hard to get out.”
It was a random thrust, but it went home, and for a few minutes after
the colonel’s departure Brant saw only the large humour of it. Truly,
he had never posed before his chief as a reformed reprobate; but to be
mistaken for an innocent youth, fresh from the moral environment of
the well-behaved East, was mirth for the gods. Afterward, however, the
pendulum swung to the opposite end of its arc. Was it quite honest that
he should suffer the colonel--and others--to think better of him than
the facts warranted? Obtaining money under false pretences was a crime:
was it any less culpable to carry off booty of good repute in like
manner?
As far as his chief was concerned, Brant had come to know the
colonel well enough to be sure that a most intimate knowledge of
the incriminating facts would have little weight with him on the
professional side. He was well satisfied with his assistant, and,
unlike many employers, he was frank enough to say so. But there was a
standing invitation--as yet unused--holding the door of the Bowran home
open to the draughtsman. This might not be withdrawn in so many words,
but--Brant put himself in the colonel’s shoes--it would probably not be
renewed.
From the Bowran generalities to the Langford particulars was but a
step, and Brant presently began to ask himself curious questions
touching the continuance of his welcome at Hollywood if the facts were
known. That was a different matter, and he was not long in arriving
at conclusions definite and humiliating. The judge would probably set
him down as a hypocrite; Mrs. Langford would be horrified; Isabel
would want him to pose as the central figure in a certain picture of
mining camp life she was painting; Will would fellowship him frankly
on the ground of similarity of tastes; and Dorothy--it was not so easy
to prefigure her attitude, though pity and sorrow for a smashed ideal
might well be the pointing of it.
“That settles it!” said this latter-day flagellant, scourging himself
into a fine fury of self-abnegation. “I go there no more. It is only
a question of time when they will find me out, and then I should do
something desperate.”
So he affected to consider the determination taken once for all,
and fell to work in a dull rage of resentment. But when that fire
burned out for lack of fuel, as all fires will, another and a holier
was kindled in its place. At thirty a man does not fall in love at
first sight, and in the beginning Dorothy Langford had figured in his
thoughts of her only as an incarnation of pure womanhood. But latterly
the point of view had been changing. She was no longer a type; she was
the eidolon of the type. Brant asked himself a blunt question, and the
ink dried between the nibs of his ruling pen while the question waited
for its answer. The windows of the map room looked northward, and he
got down from the high stool to stand with his hands behind him, gazing
abstractedly across the railway yards toward the quarter of the town he
had come to know best.
“You have spun the web for me, little girl, and I couldn’t break away
from you now if the heavens fall,” he said, letting his thought slip
into speech. “I have just about one chance in a hundred of being able
to carry it off without being found out, and I am going to take that
chance; I’d take it if it were only one in a thousand.”
The outer office door opened and shut, but Brant heard it not. For
which cause he started guiltily when some one behind him said:
“You have a fine view from here, Mr. Brant.”
Brant spun around as one shot, and found himself confronting the father
of the young woman whom he had been apostrophizing. For a moment even
the commonplaces deserted him, but presently he recovered himself
sufficiently to join rather sheepishly in the laugh at his own expense.
“I was fairly caught,” he admitted. “How long have you been here?”
“Not long enough to hear any secrets,” replied the judge. “You were
saying something about ‘one in a thousand’ when I came in, and it
struck me as being a very natural remark for a young man in a trance.”
“It is one of my bad habits,” Brant confessed--“talking to myself, I
mean. It began when I was a little fellow and lacked playmates.”
“It is a very common habit. I once knew an attorney who had it in a
most peculiar form. His office was adjoining mine, and he would lock
the door and discuss a case with himself. We used to laugh at him a
good bit, but he was always the best-prepared man in court.”
All of which was quite beside the mark, as Brant well knew; but he made
courteous answer, having it in mind to let his visitor pick his own way
through the generalities. This the judge seemed to find very difficult,
since he made several false starts before coming finally to the object
of his visit. Brant set the hesitancy down to pardonable family pride,
and stood ready to help when he should be given the chance. At length
the judge came to the point and waded reluctantly into the domestic
pool.
“I came down to thank you for what you did for us last night,
Mr. Brant. My daughter has told me the circumstances, and it was
exceedingly good of you to interest yourself in my poor boy.”
Brant said “Not at all,” meaning thereby that the service had been
freely rendered, and the judge went on:
“It was a great relief to us all to find William safe at home this
morning. He left us in anger, and I feel quite sure that we have you
to thank for his return, though I am wholly in the dark as to how you
managed it.”
Brant answered the implied question frankly.
“It was a very simple matter. I found your son in company with a man
whose influence over him seems to be quite as great as it is sure to be
bad. I happened to know this man, and I persuaded him to take the boy
home.”
The judge leaned back in his chair and matched his finger ends
reflectively. “William mentions a Mr. Harding as having accompanied him
home in a carriage. Is he the man?”
Brant bowed.
“Then the boy must be very much mistaken in his estimate of Harding. He
seems to think he is a gentleman.”
“I don’t doubt that in the least. Harding has probably been at some
pains to make him think so. Just the same, you may believe me when I
say that he is the worst possible companion for your son, or for any
young man.”
“H’m; that is a little odd.” The judge was fairly surprised into saying
so much, but since he did not go on, how was Brant to know that the odd
thing was the exact coincidence of his opinion of Harding and Harding’s
opinion of him as reported by William Langford? And not knowing this,
he went on straightway to his own undoing.
“Odd that he should try to mislead your son? Knowing the man and his
kind as well as I do, I should say that any other proceeding on his
part would be odd. Harding is a professional gambler.”
The judge began to put two and two together.
“You say you know him well?”
“Yes; I have known him a long time, and I owe him an ill turn or so on
my own account,” said Brant, whose throat still ached from the pressure
of Harding’s fingers.
“Ah.” The judge’s mind began to lay hold of something like a sequence
of threads in the mystery tangle. “Pardon me, Mr. Brant, if I am dull:
but what possible use could a professional gambler make of my son?
Surely William’s pocket money would be scarcely worth plotting for.”
“Certainly not. Harding would be much more likely to give him money
than to take it from him. Here is the layout,” Brant went on, dropping
unconsciously into the jargon of the craft in describing its processes;
“Harding poses, let us say, as a gentleman of leisure. He lays siege
to some tenderfoot with more money than brains, perhaps, but who isn’t
altogether blind, and proposes a quiet game for amusement. If he worked
it alone the rawest greenhorn of the lot might suspect a trap, but with
your son as a third party the thing looks perfectly square. Don’t you
see?”
The judge rose and walked slowly the length of the room with his hands
behind him and his head bowed. When he looked up again the paternal
anxiety in his face had given place to judicial severity.
“Yes, I see two things: One is, that you have a much worse opinion of
my son than the facts, bad as they are, justify; and the other is, that
you seem to have a--an unenviable familiarity with the methods you have
been describing.”
Brant saw his error when it was too late, and tried to retrieve it.
“Don’t mistake me, Judge Langford. In such a case as I have
been describing an inexperienced boy might well be an innocent
accomplice--indeed, he would have to be to be of any use to his
principal. And as to my knowledge, one learns much in the rough school
of the frontier.”
The judge’s hand was on the doorknob.
“I can believe that; pardon me if I spoke hastily,” he said. “To be
very frank with you, I am in deep trouble about William. If what you
tell me about this man Harding be true, the boy is ruined.”
“Not necessarily,” Brant amended. “Harding has left the city; and if
you can keep your son from forming another such intimacy----”
“How do you know Harding is gone?” interrupted the father.
“He went at my suggestion.”
“And was it also at your suggestion that the newspapers omitted my
son’s name in reporting a certain wholesale arrest made by the police
night before last?”
“It was.”
The judge smiled and shook his head.
“You seem to be all-powerful, Mr. Brant, but I dislike mysteries--even
beneficent mysteries. In this matter, however, I am your debtor; let me
know when I may square the account.” And before Brant could add another
word in explanation or extenuation he was gone.