HOW THE SMOKING FLAX WAS QUENCHED
A WISER than any here has said that as a man lieth down, so riseth he
up; and inasmuch as a good deed had rounded out the Tuesday which was
to be held worthy of anniversaries, it was Brant the brother-keeper who
thrust his head into Antrim’s room on the Wednesday morning what time
the convalescent was dressing.
“Peace to your ashes, Henry, my son! How do you pan out by this time?”
“Better, thank you; only I’m black and blue in spots and too sore to
talk about. Say, do you know, I think I must have been in a fight last
night! But I don’t remember the first thing about it.”
Brant grinned. “I had been aching to get a chance at you, and it
came in my way last night--trying to make you come alive to your
responsibilities, you know. Never gave anybody such a jolly good
beating in all my life. Shall I come in and shake you into your
raiment?”
“Oh, no, thank you; I’ll be down directly. Wait for me, if you are not
in too much of a hurry. I’ll eat with you.”
Brant waited, and after breakfast they walked down town together. It
was a tonic autumn morning, with a crisp clean wind blowing fresh from
the snow-capped peaks, and a marvellous clarity in the atmosphere that
seemed to bring the nearer foothills within easy speaking distance. On
such a morning it was good to be alive, and Brant said something to
that effect--an assertion to which Antrim gave conditional assent.
“Yes, if a fellow’s head could be as clear and bright as the morning
and the atmosphere.”
“A fellow shouldn’t roil his brains with muddy fire water, then.”
“No; but I didn’t mean just that. That is only a consequence.”
“A very unnecessary consequence in your case. You know you haven’t a
peg of an excuse to hang your villainy on, Harry.”
“I suppose I haven’t, when you get down to the marrow of the thing. A
man never has a water-tight excuse for making several kinds of a donkey
of himself. But I’d like to be allowed to say that it was the worst
facer I have ever had. You see, I had been banking on a certain kind of
happiness ever since Isabel and I used to go to school together; and
then to have to give it up--well, it just knocked me out, that’s all.”
“But you are not going to stay knocked out, and you are not going to
give it up--unless you are a donkey sober as well as a donkey drunk.”
“Oh, no; I’ve had my little fling, and I paid the piper’s bill last
night. That settles the bottle imp. But as to the other, you don’t know
Isabel.”
“Of course; no one but your own sapient self could know her. How long
is it since you have seen her?”
“A week.”
“No longer than that? Suffering humanity! You didn’t lose any time
on the way down, did you? Are you far enough out to transplant a few
little cuttings of advice?”
Antrim nodded, and then qualified the nod. “I guess so; anyway, you
have earned the right to tell me what I ought to do.”
“_Bueno_; and this is what you are to do: Go over to Hollywood this
evening, just as if nothing had happened. Keep your wits about you, and
see if Isabel isn’t quite as glad to see you as you are to see her.”
But Antrim’s mood was not optimistic. “I know; that is the way it looks
to you. But, you see, I have known her all her life, and----”
“And therefore you think you know it all. But you don’t. I have seen a
good bit of the Langfords in the last few weeks, and if you haven’t a
mortgage on the future of the younger daughter, no one else has.”
Now it is one of the peculiarities of jealousy that it will come alive
again and again long after there is reason to believe that it has been
effectually killed. Antrim stole a swift side glance at his mentor, and
there was a fine-lined frown between his level brows.
“I wish I were as sure of that as you seem to be.”
Brant looked up quickly. “Now, what fresh idiocy is this? You know well
enough that however little she may seem to care for you, she doesn’t
care anything for any one else.”
“Do I?”
“If you don’t, you are a greater donkey than I thought you were.”
“Well, let that pass. But if another man hasn’t the inside track, art
has.”
“Oh, art be hanged! Once in a thousand years or so you may find a girl
who is an artist first and a woman afterward, but you haven’t run up
against the exception. If you will bear with me, I’ll dare say that
Isabel is the merest _dilettante_; she can’t paint a little bit.”
“She can’t, eh? That is all you know about it!” Antrim retorted hotly.
“What the dickens do you know about art, anyway?”
Brant chuckled joyously. “Nothing, my son--less than nothing. I did
but skewer you to see if you were really jealous of Miss Isabel’s poor
little passion. Go in and win, Harry, my boy; and may your house be
decorated in many colours, as it is pretty sure to be.”
In such heartening manner began a day fraught with many happenings.
Brant completed the map in good time for the purposes of the general
manager, and it was scarcely off the drawing-board when Colonel Bowran
returned, summoned by wire to meet the other officials of the railway
company. And since the colonel brought the Grotter notebook with
plentiful data for more map work, the chance of enforced idleness,
which Brant dreaded more than anything else, was pushed forward into an
indefinite future.
Moreover, the chief was well pleased with the work done on the yard
map, and was gratified to be assured that he had at last found an
office man who could go ahead on his own responsibility. So there was
hearty approval and commendation for the draughtsman; and what with
this, and the blessings which belong rightfully to those of the helping
hand, Brant won through the day on the crest of the wave.
But the purely personal point of view, pitched as it may be upon any
hilltop of present satisfaction, is necessarily restricted; and beyond
the ken of the satisfied one other things were happening which were to
bear heavily upon his future.
For one, the train speeding down the cañon on the day run from the
region of mining camps was bringing Hobart and his wife to Denver. For
another, Antrim’s purposed visit to Hollywood was postponed by order of
the general manager. The party in the private car Aberystwyth was to
go out on a tour of inspection, and, in the absence of his superior,
Antrim was required to do the honours of the Western Division. Again,
late in the afternoon Mrs. Langford wrote a letter which she put into
the post office with her own hands. This was the third happening, and
the fourth was still more portentous. At the moment when Mrs. Langford
was mailing her letter, two men met behind a locked door in a West
Denver lodging house to lay the train of a mine in which the explosives
were already stored.
In this conference behind the locked door there was a slight
disagreement arising in a very natural reluctance on the part of one of
the plotters to play the cat’s-paw for the other.
“Coming right down to brass tacks, Jim Harding, I don’t see why I want
to monkey with your end of the game, anyhow,” said the cat’s-paw. “All
I need is to get even with him for knocking me out, and I can do that
the first time I get the drop on him, ’thout mixin’ up any in your
deal.”
“Yes, and you can get yourself choked with a rope for doing it,” added
Harding. “Now, on the other hand, if my scheme works--and it will work
if you will do your part--the sheriff will do the evening-up business
for you, and you can sit back and read all about it in the newspapers
the next morning.”
“Yes, ‘if’; but that there ‘if’ is bigger than Pike’s Peak. You seem to
think if you can get hold o’ them dockyments he’s got, you can change
a few words in ’em and make out that Plucky George is the man they
want--chuck him plumb into your shoes. Maybe you can; but there’s a
heap o’ holes in a skimmer. Seems like you’ve lived long enough to know
that.”
“That is all right; I know what I am doing,” was the confident
assertion. “As it stands now, it is between me and Brant. It was an
all-around free fight, and he was mixed up in it, too. Once let me get
hold of those papers, and he will have his hands full to prove that
_he_ didn’t kill Hank Brinton.”
“I don’t savez it that way; but that part of it is your funeral--not
mine. What is it you want me to do? Measure it off.”
“You know; I want you to get the papers.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
“It’s out of my line. I don’t happen to have been over the road for
house-breaking--as you have--and I am not up in that branch of the
business.”
Gasset scowled and gritted out an oath at this, but finally asked,
“Well--when?”
“The quicker, the sooner; the first night we can be sure he isn’t in
his room.”
“Reckon he keeps the papers in his room?”
“Surely. Where else would they be?”
“I don’t know. But it appears like if it was me, I’d lock ’em up
somewheres where they’d be safe.”
“He might, if he thought anybody was trying to lift them. But he
doesn’t suspect anything of the kind. He doesn’t even know I’m in
Denver.”
“All right; it’s a go. I’ll swipe the papers for you if I can find ’em,
and after that you fork over, and we’re quits. I tell you right now,
though, I’d a heap rather play it alone.”
“Do what you please after you get the papers. When you hand them over
to me, it’s a cool hundred in your clothes. After that, if you would
rather take the chance of dancing on nothing instead of letting him
do it, why, go ahead. You may kill him and welcome, so far as I am
concerned.”
“Oh, yes; you’re all right. You’ve got everything to gain, and nothing
much to lose, as near as I can make out. But let her go. Better try it
to-night?”
“One time is as good as another, if he will stay out late enough to
give you a chance.”
“Enough said. Let’s go and have a drink on it.”
“Not too many drinks, Ike, if you want to earn your money. Keep your
head clear till this job is done, and then you can fill your skin to
the queen’s taste, if you feel like it.”
They went out together, and Harding locked the door. In a neighbouring
barroom, while they were drinking to the success of the plot, the
cat’s-paw asked one other question:
“How are we going to find out if the coast’s clear? Had you thought o’
that?”
“Yes; we’ll shadow him from the time he leaves his office and see where
he goes,” was the reply. “And it is about time to begin that right now.
Come on.”
Thus the varying lines of events converged upon the unsuspecting
one, who a little later cleaned his pens and put away his drawing
instruments in deference to the failing daylight. It had been a
comfortable day, and, contrary to his habit, which was abstemious even
on the tobacco side, he lighted a cigar to smoke on the way up to
supper. While he was putting on his coat a footstep echoed in the empty
corridor. It was the postman making his final round. The letter slide
in the door clicked, and a square envelope fell to the floor. Brant
picked it up, read his own name in the superscription, and went to the
window to save the trouble of lighting the gas.
The daylight was nearly gone, but there was enough of it to enable him
to pick out his correspondent’s message from the tangle of fashionable
angles and heavy downstrokes. Also there was light enough to show forth
the change from disinterest to astoundment, and from astoundment to
dull rage and desperation that crept into his face as he read.
“In view of his clandestine meeting with Miss Langford yesterday,” said
the writer, “Mr. Brant will not be unprepared for such interference
as Miss Langford’s natural guardian is constrained to make. Up to the
present time the writer of this has refrained from discussing, even
in the family circle, a subject which is as repugnant to her as it
must prove humiliating to Mr. Brant; but if Mr. Brant does not find
it convenient to relieve her of further disquietude in the matter by
leaving Denver at once, it will become her unpleasant duty to take her
daughters into her confidence--a duty which she sincerely hopes Mr.
Brant will not make obligatory.”
There was no signature, and none was needed. Brant read the letter
through twice, and then tore it slowly into tiny fragments, opening
the window to brush the bits of paper out into the twilight, and
watching them as they disappeared like circling snowflakes. Suddenly
his clenched hands went up and he swore a mighty oath, and in that
oath was a recantation of all the good resolves which had been writing
themselves down throughout the day of comfort.
The outburst of cursings seemed to steady him, as the earthquake
subsides when the volcano finds vent. He closed the window carefully
and fastened it, and then went to spread the dust-cloth over his work
on the drawing-board, folding it smoothly down at the corners, as one
might drape the pall over the corpse of a thing dead. Some thought of
the simile must have suggested itself, since he broke out in bitter
speech:
“That is precisely what I am doing; it is a pall, and it covers the
corpse of my little nursling of decency. God help me! Two hours
ago--two minutes ago, I thought I had a chance for my life; and now it
is all done and over with, and I am banished like an unclean thing.
I’ll go. She knew I’d go when she thonged that whip for me. I’ll go to
my own place.”
Thereupon one may conceive that all the good in him would rise up and
plead strenuously for a little respite, for a few hours of sober second
thought in which the soul-destroying possibilities of such a relapse
might be weighed and measured; but to such a plea such a man must needs
harden his heart and drive out the better prompting with muttered
curses, as thus: “No, by God! I have listened to that song for the last
time! From now on there is nothing to do but to forget, if I can. And I
shall forget, I will forget, if I have to smother myself in the reek of
the bottomless pit to do it!”
As he passed the colonel’s desk on his way to the door his hand sought
the train mail box mechanically and from force of habit. There were two
letters in the box, letters written by the chief engineer before going
out with the party in the private car, and Brant slipped them into his
pocket, excusing himself to himself for letting the bit of routine
obtrude itself into the presence chamber of desperate resolves. “I’ll
take them down and put them on the train. It is my last day of honest
work, and I’ll round it out fairly.”
The masthead electric lamps over the platform at the Union Depot
lighted the customary train-time pandemonium when he passed through the
archway and made one in the jostling crowd under the arc lamps. It was
before the day of gates and gate keepers, and the unquiet throng filled
the open space opposite the archway. From the open space as a fountain
head little rivulets of humanity filtered away to trickle up and down
between the trains headed in either direction.
A symphony of sound, pitched in the key of preparation, rose upon the
still air of the outer night. The hum of human voices; the rumblings
of the baggage trucks piled mountain-high with outgoing luggage; the
monotonous “Look out!” of the baggagemen as they steered the rumbling
mountains slowly through the throng; the measured beat of the air-brake
pumps on the waiting engines, drowned at irregular intervals by a
cacophonous blast from some overloaded safety valve--these contributed
to a din which was rather harmonious than discordant.
But if the savage scowl of him told the truth, Brant was in no mood
to find harmony in anything--to find it or to contribute to it.
Having mailed the two letters in the baggage car, he pushed his way
aggressively through the narrow space between the trains, intent only
upon getting free of the crowd. At the steps of the Pullman he jostled
one man so rudely that the victim turned in pardonable heat. It was
Hobart; and when he recognised the offender resentment gave place to
gladness.
“Why, George! By all that’s good, this is lucky! I had given up all
hope of seeing you on this trip.”
Brant shook hands as if it were a thing which could not be avoided,
and his greeting was anything but cordial. “How are you?” he said; and
then, reverting to the hope, “I guess it wasn’t very hard to give up; I
haven’t been hard to find.”
“Perhaps not, but I managed to miss you all around; drove first to your
boarding house, and have just come down from your office. I have been
in town only an hour and a half, all told, and a good bit of that was
used up in taking Kate over to Judge Langford’s. But never mind about
that; luck is with us for a minute or two. How are you getting along?
and why don’t you write once in a while?”
Brant ignored the friendly questions, and went back of them to the
statement of fact.
“Do you know the Langfords?” he asked.
“Why, yes; didn’t I tell you? I meant to send you a note of
introduction to them. The judge is one of the stockholders in our
mine--the vice-president, in fact.”
“And you say Mrs. Hobart is at Hollywood?”
“Yes; I brought her down on a visit. Too much altitude for her on Jack
Mountain. But tell me about yourself. How has the world been using you?”
“As well as I deserve, I suppose,” answered Brant shortly--so shortly
that Hobart knew not what to make of it. Then the conductor’s cry of
“All aboard!” warned him that he had but a moment more, and he took a
card from his case and scribbled a line on the back of it.
“Take this and call upon them--only you won’t need it if you will make
yourself known to Kate. Sixteen, Altamont Terrace, is the number; but
if you know Hollywood, you know the place. They are good people to
know, and Kate will put you on an old friend’s footing from the start.”
Hobart tossed his handbag up to the porter and turned back for a last
word. “Now don’t put it off; go soon--this evening, if you have time.”
And seeing that Brant stood as one indeterminate, he bent to whisper:
“Kate knows nothing but good of you, if that makes any difference.”
Now in the face of all this kindly interest none but a churl could
withhold the decent meed of gratitude. Brant did not withhold it, but
if the light had been better Hobart must have seen that the thanks were
little more than perfunctory--or, at least, less than hearty. Then the
wheels began to turn, and there was time only for a hasty leave-taking;
this also without heartiness on the part of the one who was not going.
He stood scowling after the receding train until the two red eyes of
the tail lights disappeared around a curve; then he turned and walked
slowly uptown, with his hands deep in his overcoat pockets and his eyes
on the sidewalk. There was little comfort to be got out of the late
incident on the station platform. To be sure, it proved that Hobart
was still stanch, and that he had not received the letter which was
a cry for help. But Mrs. Hobart’s presence at Hollywood could only
complicate matters.
What was in Brant’s mind as he tramped up the street was not readable
in the face of him, but just before he turned out of the shop-lined
thoroughfare he strode into a drug store and called for a pint of
brandy. He had the bottle in his pocket when he reached his room, and
when he had locked the door he stripped off his coat, found a glass,
and poured himself a drink vast enough to drown a very amphibian
trouble. At the moment of pouring the gas burned blue and sank to a pin
point, as poor gas will, and the sheen from the arc light in the street
set the liquor afire in the glass. The illusion was strong enough to
draw him to the window, where he stood holding the glass to the light
and watching the play of the electric beam in the brown liquid. In the
act the gas burned brightly again, and two men who had been watching
the house from the opposite sidewalk darted into the blue-black shadows
of the curbstone cottonwoods.
Brant put the liquor down untasted, and waited long and patiently for
the two figures to reappear beyond the cottonwoods. When it became
apparent that the blue-black shadows were still concealing them, he
turned out the gas and went back to the window to look again. This time
his patience was rewarded by a glimpse of the two men; and when he had
made sure of their identity, he drew up a chair and sat at the window
to await further developments, with the big revolver laid across his
knees.
And it was thus, sitting in his shirt sleeves, with his hand on the
big revolver, that the morning sun shining broadly in at the casement
found and aroused him; aroused him with a start for which there was no
apparent call, since the room and its belongings were undisturbed, even
to the uncorked brandy bottle on the dressing case, and the untasted
half glassful on the window seat.
It was characteristic of the man that when he came out of his bath a
half hour later, breathing the fragrance of cleanliness, he should pour
the untasted drink back into the bottle, corking it therein against a
time not of greater need, but of less responsibility. For he remembered
that Colonel Bowran was again out of town, and until his chief returned
he could by no means have his quittance from the claims of duty--or of
decency.