WHEN HATE AND FEAR STRIKE HANDS
WHEN he was suffered to escape after his attempt upon Brant’s life in
the private room at Elitch’s, James Harding tarried in Denver only so
long as the leaving time of the first westward bound train constrained
him. Nevertheless, he went as one driven, and with black rage in his
heart, adding yet another tally to the score of his account against the
man who had banished him.
But, like Noah’s dove, he was destined to find no rest for the sole
of his foot. Having very painstakingly worn out his welcome in the
larger mining camps, he was minded to go to Silverette, hoping to pick
a living out of the frequenters of Gaynard’s. Unluckily, he was known
also in Silverette; and unluckily again, word of his coming preceded
him from Carbonado, the railway station nearest to the isolated camp at
the foot of Jack Mountain. Harding walked up from Carbonado, was met at
a sharp turn in the wagon road by a committee from the camp above, and
was persuaded by arguments in which levelled rifles played a silent but
convincing part to retrace his steps.
Returning to Carbonado, his shrift was but a hand’s breadth longer.
On the second day, when he was but barely beginning to draw breath of
respite, he was recognised as the slayer of one William Johnson, was
seized, dragged into the street, and after an exceedingly trying half
hour was escorted out of camp and across the range by a guard of honour
with drawn weapons.
Under such discouragements he promptly determined to face the ills he
knew, drank deeply at the well of desperation, and, making a forced
march to the nearest railway station, boarded the first train for
Denver. It was a hazardous thing to do. Brant was a man of his word,
and the banished one had known him to go to extremities upon slighter
provocation. But, on the other hand, Denver was a considerable city,
and their ways might easily lie apart in it. Moreover, if the worst
should come, it was but man to man, with plenty of old scores to speed
the bullet of self-defence.
So reasoning, Harding stepped from the train at the Denver Union
Station in the gray dawn of an October morning, Argus-eyed, and
with his hand deep buried in the pocket of his ulster. The time was
auspicious, and he reached a near-by lodging house without mishap.
Through one long day he remained in hiding, but after dark, when the
prowling instinct got the better of prudence, he ventured out. In a
kennel some degrees lower in the scale descending than Draco’s he met a
man of his own kidney whom he had once known in the camps, and who was
but now fresh from the Aspen district and from an outpost therein known
as Taggett’s Gulch.
This man drank with Harding, and when his tongue was a little loosened
by the liquor grew reminiscent. Did the Professor recall the killing
of a man in the Gulch a year or so back--a man named Benton, or
Brinton? Harding had good cause to remember it, and he went gray with
fear and listened with a thuggish demon of suffocation waylaying his
breath. Assuredly, everybody remembered. What of it? Nothing much,
save that the brother of the murdered man was in Colorado with the
avowed intention of finding and hanging the murderer, if money and an
inflexible purpose might contribute to that end.
That was the gist of the matter, and when Harding had pumped his
informant dry, he shook the man off and went out to tramp the streets
until he had fairly taken the measure of the revived danger. Summed
up, it came to this: sooner or later the avenger of blood would hear
of Brant, and after that the end would come swiftly and the carpenters
might safely begin to build the gallows for the slayer of Henry
Brinton. Harding had a vivid and disquieting picture of the swift
sequence of events. The brother would find Brant, and the latter would
speedily clear up the mystery and give the avenger the proofs. Then the
detective machinery would be set in motion, and thereafter the murderer
would find no lurking place secret enough to hide him.
Clearly something must be done, and that quickly. Concealment was the
first necessity; James Harding must disappear at once and effectually.
That preliminary safely got over, two sharp corners remained to be
turned at whatever cost. The incriminating evidence now in Brant’s
hands must be secured and destroyed, and Brant himself must be silenced
before the avenger of blood should find and question him.
The disguise was a simple matter. At one time in his somewhat checkered
career Harding had been a supernumerary in a Leadville variety theatre.
Hence, the smooth-shaven, well-dressed man who paid his bill at the
Blake Street lodging house at ten o’clock that night bore small
likeness to the bearded and rather rustic-looking person who engaged
a room a few minutes later at a German _Gasthaus_ in West Denver. The
metamorphosis wrought out in artistic detail, Harding put it at once to
the severest test. Going out again, he sought and found the man from
Taggett’s Gulch, and was unrecognised. Introducing himself as a farmer
from Iowa, he persuaded the man to pilot him through the mazes of the
Denver underworld, and when he had met and talked with a dozen others
who knew the Professor rather better than he knew himself, he went back
to the West Side _Gasthaus_ with a comforting abatement of the symptoms
of strangulation.
Having thus purchased temporary safety, the castaway began presently
to look about him for the means to the more important end. Night after
night he haunted the purlieus, hoping that a lucky chance might reveal
Brant’s whereabouts. But inasmuch as Brant was yet walking straitly,
nothing came of this, and in his new character Harding could not
consistently ask questions. Twice he met William Langford face to face,
and, knowing that the boy could probably give him Brant’s street and
number, he was about to risk an interview with his _protégé_ in his
proper person when the god of evil-doers gave him a tool exactly fitted
to his hand.
It was on the Sunday evening of Brant’s relapse. Harding had been
making his usual round, and at Draco’s he met a man whose face he
recognised despite its gauntness and the change wrought by the razor. A
drink or two broke the ice of unfamiliarity, and then Harding led the
way to a card room in the rear on the pretext of seeking a quiet place
where they might drink more to their better acquaintance. In the place
of withdrawal Harding kept up the fiction of bucolic simplicity only
while the waiter was bringing a bottle and glasses. Then he said: “I
reckon you’d be willing to swear you had never seen me before, wouldn’t
you, Gasset?”
The big man gone thin was in the act of pouring himself another drink,
but he put the bottle down and gave evidence of a guilty conscience by
starting from his chair, ready for flight or fight as the occasion
might require.
“Who the blazes are you, anyway?” he demanded, measuring the distance
to the door in a swift glance aside.
Harding pulled off the wig and beard and leered across at him. “Does
that help you out any?”
Gasset sprang to his feet with a terror-oath choking him and retreated
backward to the door, hand on weapon.
“Don’t you do it, Jim!” he gasped. “Don’t, I say. I never meant to hurt
her--any of ’em will swear to that!”
Harding struck a match and relighted his cigar. He did it with
leisurely thoroughness, turning the match this way and that and
ignoring his quarry much as a cat ignores a mouse which can by no means
escape. Gasset stood as one fascinated, watching every movement of the
slim fingers and feeling blindly behind him for the knob of the door.
Whereat Harding laughed mockingly and pointed to the bottle on the
table.
“You had better come back here and take a little more of the same to
stiffen your nerve, Ike. You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn just
now.”
Gasset found the doorknob finally and breathed freer when it yielded
under his hand. “Give me a show for my life, Jim!” he begged, widening
the opening behind him by stealthy half inches. “It ain’t worth much,
but, by God, I want it for a little while yet!”
Harding laughed again. “What is the matter with you? You would have
been a dead man long ago if I had wanted to drop you. Come back here
and finish your drink.”
Having more than once set his life over against his thirst, Gasset did
it once again, filling his glass with hands that shook, and swallowing
the drunkard’s portion at a gulp. The liquor steadied him a little and
he sat down.
“Then you ain’t out gunning for me?” he ventured.
“No; what made you think I was?”
Gasset scratched his head and tilted the bottle again. “I don’t know,
if you don’t. But it appears like to me, if anybody had killed a sister
of mine I’d want to get square. And I reckon I wouldn’t split any hairs
about his being drunk or sober at the time, nor yet about whether he
went for to do it meaningly or just did it by happen-so.”
Harding ignored the implied reproach and went on to the more important
matter:
“Damn that! It is enough for me to know that you were trying to kill
George Brant,” he said coolly. “Do you still feel that way?”
Gasset rose unsteadily and the dull eyes of him glowed in their
sockets. “Look at me now, Jim, and then recollect, if you can, what-all
I used to be. You know what that was; not any man in the camp could
put me on my back unless I was drunk. And now look at me--a poor,
miser’ble, broke-up wrack, just out o’ the horspital! _He_ done
it--filled me plum full of lead when I was too crazy drunk to see
single; that’s what he done!”
“Then I suppose you wouldn’t be sorry if you had the chance to even up
with him,” said Harding, hastily building up a plan which would enable
him to make use of this opportune ally.
“Now you are talking! Say, Jim, I’m hanging on to what little scrap of
life he has left me for just nothing else. Understand?”
“Good; that is business,” quoth Harding. “I am with you to stay. Find
him for me, and I’ll help you square the deal.”
“Find him?” echoed Gasset. “Why, man alive, he is right out yonder at
the faro table! You rubbed up against him coming in here!”
“The devil you say!” Harding hastily resumed the wig and the false
beard, with a word explanatory. “He mustn’t recognise me, or the game
will be up before it begins. Pull up your chair and we’ll talk this
thing over.”
Half an hour later the two conspirators left the card room and made
their way singly through the crowd in the game room to meet at the
bar. Gasset had lingered a moment at Brant’s elbow, and, having seen
the winnings, incautiously spoke of them to Harding in Tom Deverney’s
hearing. Harding shook his head, and dragged his companion out to the
sidewalk.
“You will have to look out for Deverney--the barkeeper,” he said. “He
is Brant’s friend. The first thing is to find out where he sleeps.
We’ll go over to the other corner and wait for him till he comes out.”