HOW DOROTHY BLEW THE EMBERS ALIVE
THE railway inspection party of which the chief engineer was a
member did not return to Denver until late in the afternoon, and by
consequence Brant wore out the day like a caged wild beast, tramping
miles on end up and down the long apartment which served as a workroom
in the chief engineer’s suite. Not once during the lagging hours did
he uncover the drawing-board; but on the other hand, if he did not
work, neither did he put himself in the way of temptation, spirituous
or other. It was as if he had promised himself that he would quit
clean-handed and clear-headed; that, until the colonel should release
him, he would remain, as nearly as might be, the man whom the colonel
had befriended.
The day was drawing to its close when the burly little man who was
partial to college graduates bustled in and struggled out of his
greatcoat. Brant assaulted promptly, saying what had to be said in
terms of the simplest. He had made up his mind to leave Denver at once,
and he would be glad if the colonel would give him his quittance and
let him go.
The struggle with the greatcoat paused in the midst, and the burly one,
who knew a capable man when he found him, protested vigorously:
“What’s that? Leave me just when I am beginning to know what a comfort
it is to have you about? What’s gone wrong with you? Is it too much
work, or not enough pay?”
“It is neither; it is nothing that you have done, or failed to do, my
dear colonel. On the contrary, your kindness will be one of the things
that I shall always be glad to remember. But I have never been able to
stay long in any one place, and the time has come for me to move on.”
“But surely, my dear boy, you haven’t taken time to think about it!
Why, it was only yesterday that you seemed perfectly contented.”
“I know; but I have been thinking about it for a week or more. I am
afraid I can’t reconsider.”
“Well, well, I’m sorry; only that doesn’t half express it. I hope you
haven’t to go right away. You can stay on a few days till I can look
around a bit, can’t you?”
“I am sorry to have to say that I can’t do even that,” Brant began, and
just here the entrance of the postman interrupted the colloquy. There
were letters--several for the colonel and one for the draughtsman.
Brant opened and read his, while the chief engineer hastily glanced
through the others. Brant’s was a dainty note, and it appeared to
move him strangely. His cheek flushed under the bronze, and his eyes
kindled as he read; and when the talk was presently renewed he promptly
stultified himself.
“You were asking if I could stay on until you had found some one else,”
he said. “On second thought, I don’t know but I can, if it will be an
accommodation to you.”
The colonel was too well pleased with the sudden change of front
to show his surprise, though he could not help putting two and two
together and wondering who was the writer of the dainty note which had
evidently countermanded Brant’s marching orders.
“Of course it will be an accommodation,” he hastened to say. “I shall
have to go back to the Extension to-night to figure on Hurlcrow’s
estimates for next month, but I’ll come in as soon as I can, and then,
if you are of the same mind, I’ll look around for some one to relieve
you. But I hope you will find it possible to reconsider. I like you,
and your work is as thorough and accurate as I knew it would be when
you told me you were coached by my old friend Thirlwill.”
Brant did not commit himself, and the colonel tossed the lately opened
letters into his desk and drew down the roll-top. “I shall be with the
general manager and the president in the Aberystwyth till train time,
and to-morrow you can reach me at the front,” he went on. “Take things
a bit easy while I am gone, and see if you can’t make up your mind to
stay with us.”
Being just then devoured with an impatience in comparison with which
the restlessness of the long day was but a sedative, Brant did not seek
to prolong the interview; and when he was once more alone he read and
reread his letter until he could repeat it word for word. It was from
Dorothy; and she had kept her promise to call upon him in the time of
need. She wrote:
“DEAR MR. BRANT: You were kind enough to offer to help us again if
the occasion should arise. It _has_ arisen. Will left home yesterday
afternoon, and we have not seen him since. Mamma is wild with
anxiety, and my father is so greatly discouraged that he will do
nothing. Won’t you please try to find my brother again?
“P.S. Mrs. Hobart, whose husband is a friend of yours, is with us,
and she will be glad to see you when you find it convenient to come.”
When he had quite committed the note to memory Brant set about
answering it. Whatever else he was or might become--and under the
sentence of ostracism this question seemed settled beyond peradventure
of doubt--he was none the less Dorothy’s loyal liegeman, and while he
could serve her, the future, good, bad, or indifferent, might wait for
its due. Therefore, after a half dozen false starts, he wrote:
“MY DEAR MISS LANGFORD:
“Your note, which makes me both sorry and glad, has just found me. Be
assured that, while I grieve with you in your present trouble, I am
only too happy to place myself at your service. Be of good cheer. I
trust we shall speedily find your brother, and that nothing serious
has befallen him. If he should not come home to-night, send me a line
in the morning; and believe me, now as always,
“Your sincere friend,
“GEORGE BRANT.”
He read it over when it was written, and made as if he would tear it
up. Certainly it was anything but loverlike in its measured coolness
and conventional formality. He laid it aside and tried again:
“MY LOVED ONE:
“May I write as I should if Mr. Crosswell had not come in upon us
the day before yesterday? If I may--if your own heart says I may--I
shall not need to tell you how glad your note makes me; what a joy it
is to have you turn to me in any time of need. Be very sure, my dear
one, that I shall run to do your bidding. There will be difficulties
in the way this time--difficulties which did not exist before. An
old enemy of mine has prejudiced your brother against me. But if the
obstacles were ten times as many I should overcome them for your dear
sake.
“Your note found me when I was in the depths of despair, and while
it has comforted me by giving me something to do for you, the future
is still very dark, and I know not what it holds for me. But this
I do know: that if your love may shine for me as a light in great
darkness, I shall have strength to keep from turning back; nay,
courage and strength to go forward, if only you will stand at the end
of the snare-beset way and beckon me.
“Let me have a line from you again in the morning if William has not
returned.
“Faithfully and lovingly----”
He paused at the signature, and read and reread the two replies.
And, after all, it was the formal note that a district messenger was
presently bearing awheel to the transplanted Southern mansion in the
Highlands, and the love letter lay torn into tiny fragments in Colonel
Bowran’s wastebasket.
The answer to Dorothy’s note despatched, Brant began to cast about
for ways and means to the end she besought. As he had intimated in
the letter which was not sent, there were difficulties. Harding had
doubtless sown the seed of prejudice and ill will, harrowing it well
in; in which case young Langford, when found, would have nothing to do
with the man against whom he had been warned. Brant gave the difficulty
a thoughtful half hour, at the end of which he sought Antrim. The chief
clerk was just closing his office to go to supper, and he was glad
enough to have company.
“What are you going to do with yourself to-night, Harry?” Brant asked,
when they were free of the downtown six-o’clock sidewalk throngs.
“I am just in from the inspection trip, and I meant to go back to the
office and work a while. Why?”
“I want you to do something for me, if you will.”
“After what you did for me last night, you have only to ask,” was the
grateful rejoinder. “State your case.”
Brant stated it at some length, omitting none of the details save those
which might have defined his own motive in playing the knight-errant.
“I think I know where to look for the boy,” he said in conclusion; “but
I am more than afraid that any argument that I could bring to bear on
him would be so much wasted eloquence. I want you to go along, and when
we find him it will be your part of the job to persuade him to go home.”
“He hasn’t much use for me, as I have told you,” Antrim objected. “But
I’ll go along and do what I can. It’s a great pity the judge doesn’t
set him to work at something.”
“What is his bent? or has he any?” asked Brant.
“I don’t know that he has any now. At school he was the best
mathematician in his class; and there was a time when he wanted to
learn your trade. Mrs. Langford was quite willing until it came to
field work, and then she put her foot down. Her Willie was not to go
careering around all over the world with a lot of rough engineers, she
said.”
“Oh, no; of course not,” assented Brant, not without scorn. “She was
quite right; we are a hard lot.”
The emphasis was so bitter that Antrim glanced up in surprise. “Has she
been giving you a lecture on the subject?” he asked quizzically.
“Who--Mrs. Langford? Certainly not,” denied Brant, hedging promptly.
“She has never mentioned my present occupation to me.”
“She will, some day; especially if--” But Antrim was not sure of his
ground in the matter of Brant’s leanings, and he broke off abruptly to
go back to the former question. “I suppose you will want to start out
right after supper?”
“Yes,” said Brant, and they went into the house and entered Mrs.
Seeley’s dining room together.
After the meal, which was hurried in deference to the urgencies, Brant
went up to his room to prepare for the quest. While there he appeared
to be drawn into a struggle which, in view of all the wicked things he
had sworn to do, was scarcely less than trivial. It manifested itself
in sundry takings up and layings down of the big revolver, ending when
he finally put the weapon, together with the unbroached bottle of
brandy, into the drawer of his dressing case.
“No, I’ll be hanged if I do!” he muttered. “I’ll not go armed like a
desperado on any errand of hers. If I find the boy with Harding, there
will probably be a row; but while I am about her business I’d rather
suffer violence than do it.” Whereupon he ran down to Antrim, and
together they set out on the quest for William Langford.
Contrary to his expressed assumption, the first half of the undertaking
proved more difficult than Brant had expected. Beginning with resorts
of the Draco type, they went from bad to worse, working their way
downward through the substrata of vice until Antrim held his breath
and hoped for William’s younger sister’s sake that the search would be
unsuccessful in that direction. And so, indeed, it proved to be, though
Brant was indefatigable, dragging his companion from dive to den as he
had once dragged Forsyth, until the chief clerk was half intoxicated
with the mingled fumes of tobacco and opium and alcohol--half
intoxicated and wholly disgusted.
“Good Lord! and this is what I was coming to!” he gasped, as they
emerged from a particularly noisome kennel. “Let’s give it up, old
man, and go home. I’m sick and nauseated.”
“Not yet,” Brant objected. “We are sure to find him, sooner or later;
and it is early yet.”
Antrim looked at his watch. “Eleven o’clock. I call that late. But go
on; I’ll stay with you.”
Eleven it was, and the policeman, whose beat included the quiet
neighbourhood of which Mrs. Anna Seeley’s select boarding house for
young men was the centre, had finished his round and had dropped into
the nearest uptown saloon for a bite of bread and cheese and such
other refreshment as the bartender was wont to set unasked before the
guardians of the city’s peace.
“You have a picnic on the uptown beat, don’t you, Sam?” said the
licensed dispenser of stimulants, drawing a second glass of beer for
the officer.
“Pretty near that. Might jog around up here all night and never see
nothing out of the way,” responded the civic soldier, helping himself
to another sandwich. This he said, and yet, not ten minutes before,
he had met a man carrying a ladder in a quiet street within an hour
of midnight, and had not thought the matter curious enough to warrant
looking into.
But if the officer had been unmoved, the man with the ladder had not.
On the contrary, he was greatly disturbed, and was deterred from
casting down his burden and taking to his heels only by the fear that
a bullet from the civic soldier’s pistol might outrun him. When the
danger was overpast, he rested the ladder against the fence and took a
long pull from a flat pocket bottle.
“Whooh!” he growled, stopping to take breath, and glancing up at the
darkened windows of the Seeley house. “I’ll just about get my blooming
leg pulled for twenty years before I get through with this deal! Run
right smack against that cop, when I’d been dodging him for a half hour
and better!”
The flat bottle gurgled again, and then the ladder was lifted and
dropped quietly over the fence, to be reared presently behind a tangle
of evergreen vines at the end of the veranda. A minute later the man
appeared at the top and made his way cautiously over the tin roof,
which bulged and crackled under his weight until the sweat of fear
made him damp and uncomfortable. He paused before Brant’s window, and,
inserting a thin-edged bit of steel beneath the sash, tried it gently.
“Fastened, of course,” he muttered, and a knife blade was slipped
deftly between the upper and lower sash. There was a muffled click, and
then the window opened noiselessly. Once safely inside, the burglar’s
first care was to close the window and to draw the curtains. Then he
lighted a dark lantern and flashed its beam around the room.
“So far, so good,” was his comment. “Camp cached, and nobody at home.
Now for them dockyments.”
He took another pull at the flat bottle as a preliminary, and then
proceeded to ransack the apartment with the skilful rapidity of one to
whom the craft was not new. The belongings of a man’s room are soon
overhauled. Brant’s impedimenta were of the lightest, and in a short
time the burglar came to the end of his quest without finding anything
more to the purpose than a large revolver and a bottle of brandy.
Laying the weapon aside, he unstoppered the bottle and sampled its
contents.
“Brandy--ten-year-old cognac, as I’m a sinner!” He held the bottle
up and flashed the beam of the lantern on it. Then he gave a toast.
“Here’s to you, Mister Snap-shot Brant; and may you live happy and die
suddint--when I git the drop on you!”
The liquor paid the penalty of the toast at a frightful cost, and the
burglar smacked his lips and wiped them on the sleeve of his coat.
“Blast him! he knows what good liquor is,” he remarked. “I’ll say that
much for him, anyway. Now, then, I’ll have a squint among his clothes.”
He dived into the closet and came out with an armful of clothing,
and when the pockets yielded nothing he broke out in a monologue of
thick-tongued malediction, and again had recourse to the brandy bottle.
After a deeper potation than any of the preceding he did that which was
afterward to prove his undoing. He drew up Brant’s easy-chair and sat
down to curse his ill luck.
The process was a long one, and it was eked out by many more tiltings
of the bottle. When it was wrought out to its conclusion the bottle
was empty, but the man was not. Some glimmerings of sanity remained,
but they pointed only to his bafflement, and not to the necessity for
escape. When he staggered to his feet it was to determine what spoil,
lacking the papers, would best repay his hazard.
So he fell to rummaging again, and after much dubitation decided to
carry off the easy-chair as the thing most greatly to be desired.
Failing to get the chair through the opened window, he compromised upon
a suit of clothes; and after trying vainly to roll them into a portable
bundle, he cut that Gordian knot by struggling out of his own garments,
kicking them into the depths of the closet, and arraying himself in the
suit of black.
That done--it took so long that the china clock on the mantel was
tinkling out the midnight hour--he put the big revolver in his pocket
and sat down on the edge of the bed to gather himself for the passage
perilous over the crackling tin roof of the veranda and down the
ladder. But in the midst of the gathering the foolishness of those who
tarry long at the wine came upon him, and the bed transformed itself
into his bunk in the West Denver _Gasthaus_. That being the case, there
was no occasion for further efforts, perilous or other. He tried to
remember how he had got out of the house of peril; how it was that he
came to be sitting on the edge of his bunk in safety; but in the thick
of it sleep laid its heavy hand on him, and when the china clock on the
mantel chimed the quarter past twelve the man who had tarried too long
was snoring brazenly with his head on Brant’s pillow.