THE GOODLY COMPANY OF MISERY
HAVING gone so far astray on the Sunday, it was inevitable that Brant
should awake repentant and remorseful on the Monday. He slept late,
and when he had breakfasted like a monk and had gone downtown to face
another day of enforced idleness in his office, conscience rose up and
began to ply its many-thonged whip.
What a thrice-accursed fool he had made of himself, and how completely
he had justified Mrs. Langford’s opinion of him! How infinitely
unworthy the love of any good woman he was, and how painstakingly he
had put his future beyond the hope of redemption! If Colonel Bowran
would only come back and leave him free to go and bury himself in some
unheard-of corner of the world! This was the burden of each fresh
outburst of self-recrimination.
So much by way of remorse, but when he thought of Dorothy, something
like a measure of dubious gratitude was mingled therewith--a certain
thankfulness that the trial of his good resolutions had come before he
had been given the possible chance of free speech with her--a chance
which might have involved her happiness as well as his own peace of
mind.
“Good Lord!” he groaned, flinging himself into a chair and tossing his
half-burned cigar out of the window. “I ought to be glad that I found
myself out before I had time to pull her into it. If they had let me
go on, and she would have listened to me, I should have married her out
of hand--married an angel, and I with a whole nest of devils asleep in
me waiting only for a chance to come alive! God help me! I’m worse than
I thought I was--infinitely worse.--Come in!” This last to some one at
the door.
It was only the postman, and Brant took the letters eagerly, hoping to
find one from Hobart. He was disappointed, but there was another note
from the end-of-track on the Condorra Extension, setting forth that the
chief engineer’s home-coming would be delayed yet other days.
Brant read the colonel’s scrawl, and what was left of his endurance
took flight in an explosion of bad language. A minute later he burst
into Antrim’s office.
“Where is Mr. Craig?” he demanded.
“He has gone to Ogden,” said Antrim, wondering what had happened to
disturb the serenity of the self-contained draughtsman.
“The devil he has! When will he be back?”
“I don’t know--the last of the week, maybe.”
“Damn!”
Antrim laughed. “What ails you this morning? You look as if you’d had a
bad night. Come inside and sit down--if you’re not too busy.”
Brant let himself in at the wicket in the counter-railing and drew up a
chair.
“I am not busy enough--that is one of the miseries. And I want you to
help me out, Harry. You have full swing here when the old man is away,
haven’t you?”
“Why--yes, after a fashion. What has broke loose?”
Brant looked askance at the stenographer, and the chief clerk rightly
interpreted the glance.
“O John,” he said, “I wish you would take these letters down and put
them on No. 3. Hand them to the baggageman yourself, and then you’ll be
sure they have gone.” And when the door closed behind the young man he
turned back to Brant. “Was that what you wanted?”
“Yes, but I don’t know as it was necessary. There is nothing
particularly private about what I want to say. You see, it is this way:
Colonel Bowran is out on the Extension, and Grotter is with him. I am
alone here in the office, and I’ve got to leave town suddenly. What
I want you to do is to put somebody in there to keep house till the
colonel returns.”
The chief clerk smiled. “It must be something pretty serious to rattle
you that way,” was his comment. “You are a good enough railroad man
to know that my department has nothing to do with yours, except to
ask questions of it. And that reminds me: here is a letter from the
general manager asking if we have a late map of the Denver yards. The
president is coming west in a day or two, and there is a plan on foot
for extensions, I believe.”
“Well?” said Brant.
“It isn’t well--it’s ill. We haven’t any such map, and I don’t see but
what you will have to stay and make one.”
Now, to a man in Brant’s peculiar frame of mind employment was only one
degree less welcome than immediate release. Wherefore he caught at the
suggestion so readily that Antrim was puzzled.
“I thought you had to go away, whether or no,” he said curiously.
“Oh, I suppose I can put it off if I have to,” Brant rejoined, trying
to hedge.
“Which is another way of telling me to mind my own business,” retorted
Antrim good-naturedly. “That’s all right; only, if you have struck a
bone, you can comfort yourself with the idea that you have plenty of
good company. No one of us has a monopoly of all the trouble in the
world.”
“No, I suppose not.” Brant said so much, and then got far enough away
from his own trouble to notice that the chief clerk was looking haggard
and seedy.
“You look as if you had been taking a turn at the windlass yourself,
Harry. Have you?”
“Yes, something of that sort,” replied Antrim, but he turned quickly to
the papers on his desk.
“Nothing that I can help you figure out, is it?”
“No,” said the chief clerk, so savagely that Brant smiled.
“Which the same is none of _my_ business, and so we are quits,” he
rejoined.
Antrim was much too good-hearted to let the matter rest there, and he
made halting amends.
“I would give you a chance, Brant, quicker than I would anybody else I
know; but it is no use. Every fellow has to take his own medicine.”
Brant nodded, and after a little Antrim went on as one who changes the
subject.
“Been over to the Highlands lately?”
“No.”
“I thought you hadn’t. Dorothy was asking about you the last time I saw
her.”
“When was that?” The question was so eager that Antrim, remembering his
unjust suspicion of Isabel, had a pang of honest shame.
“Last Wednesday. She wanted to know if you had left town.”
Brant was plunged at once into a problem in which there were many more
unknown quantities than integral facts. When he came to the surface it
was to catch at a straw. Perhaps, after all, Dorothy was yet in happy
ignorance of all the distressing things her mother could tell her;
in which case she had merely failed to see him when he had lifted his
hat to her the day before. And, if that were true, his late excursion
into the realm of things evil was nothing better than the sequence of
a hideous mistake. The logic of the thing appalled him, and he made
haste to go back to first principles, planting himself desperately upon
the assertion that she must have seen him. Having done that, he was
immediately swept adrift again by an overwhelming desire to know the
truth of the matter beyond peradventure of doubt. A suggestion offered,
and he pounced upon it. He would make an unconscious messenger of
Antrim.
“When are you going over there again, Harry?” he asked, making the
question as incurious as might be.
“I don’t know,” replied the chief clerk, burying his face in his desk.
“Well, when you do, if Miss Langford asks you any more questions about
me, you may say that I haven’t been away, but that I am going before
long.”
Antrim looked up with a puzzled frown.
“I don’t begin to know what you are driving at. Why don’t you go and
tell her yourself; you know the way.”
It was Brant’s turn to prevaricate, and he did it so clumsily that
Antrim stopped him in sheer pity.
“That will do,” he interrupted. “You are only getting tangled up in a
lot of polite lies, and that doesn’t help matters. Besides, if it is a
question of carrying messages to Hollywood, I can’t help you; I am out
of the running myself--no, don’t ask any questions, please. I can’t
talk about the thing, even to so good a friend as you are.”
At this conjuncture the stenographer came back, and Brant took up the
general manager’s letter. “I’ll take this and make the map,” he said.
“Does he want a tracing, or a blue print?”
“A tracing, I guess; they will want to make marks on it,” replied
Antrim.
And Brant went back to his office and fell upon the task with such
singleness of purpose that the day was gone before he realized it.
As he was leaving the office at six o’clock, a messenger boy met him at
the door with a note. It was from the editor of the Plainsman, and it
was both brief and noncommittal.
“If you have nothing better to do, come down to the office this
evening,” it ran. “I have a promising little mystery in hand in which
you may be interested.”
Brant went back to his desk and wrote a reply. He had meant to go on
with his work during the evening, but the editor’s invitation came as a
happy alternative. The making of a single map would not afford surcease
from the devil of idleness for very long, and anything which promised
to postpone the evil day of emptiness was to be accounted a blessing.
Wherefore he accepted gladly, and, when the answer was written and
despatched, went to supper with the comforting thought that the next
few hours were safely provided for.