THE WISDOM OF MANY AND THE WIT OF ONE
IT was quite dark when the reporter left the Langford gate and set out
at a rapid walk toward the nearest street-car corner. As he was turning
out of Altamont Terrace a four-wheeler with two men on the box swung
into the curving street of the suburb from the boulevard. Jarvis gave a
shrill whistle, and the carriage drew up at the curb.
“Is that you, Jarvis?” said Antrim, from his seat beside the driver.
“Yes. You’re ’way too early; they haven’t been to dinner yet.”
“Did you see her?”
“Sure.”
“Can she do it?”
“She knows she’s got to do it.”
“Good enough; I’ll go on up to the house and help her.”
Jarvis reached up, felt in Antrim’s vest pocket, found a cigar, and
coolly purloined it. “Begging your pardon, you will do nothing of the
kind, _savez vous_? That little battle is one she will have to fight
for herself. You go away and kill time for an hour and then come back.”
Antrim held his watch down so that the flare of Jarvis’s match lighted
the face of it.
“Six-thirty--seven-thirty. The train Hobart is coming on is late, and
I’ll time things so we can go by the station and pick him up. That
gives me a clear hour to spare. Get in, and we’ll take you back to
town.”
The reporter took his place in the empty four-wheeler and rode cityward
in solitary state, rode as far as the Union Depot, and then got out to
walk uptown. Recalling the incidents of that eventful night, he could
never quite account for the impulse which led him to drift aside from
the straight course to the Plainsman building, to turn the corner at
Blake Street, and finally to stroll aimlessly into Draco’s. At that
early hour the place was all but deserted, and Tom Deverney was glad
enough to have some one to talk to. As a matter of course, he reverted
to the impending fate of the one known to both.
“Poor old George!” he said in rough sympathy. “To-morrow morning winds
him up, doesn’t it? By cripes, if the old town was what it used to be,
they’d have to call out the soldiers before they could hang him!”
But Jarvis would not speak of Brant.
“Tell me once more, Tom, about that fellow who was running with the
Professor--about how he looked, I mean.”
“Still a-twanging on that old string?” laughed the bartender. “I have
told you till I can’t remember how he looked myself.”
“Never mind; dig it over once more,” begged Jarvis “It’s the last time
I’ll ever bother you about him.” And thus besought, Deverney racked his
memory and described the unknown man for the twentieth time.
“Old clothes--always the same old clothes,” Jarvis groaned in despair.
“Didn’t he ever change them, I wonder?”
“Not that anybody ever saw or heard of. I--” The bartender stopped
short and knitted his brows till they met above his eyes. “Say, I told
you he was in here to get a drink the night of the killing, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he’d changed ’em that night, for once--gone into mourning. I
recollect, because I joshed him about the misfit; asked him which one
of his uncles had died and left him the blacks.”
“What!”
“It’s a fact. Didn’t I tell you that before?”
“No.” Jarvis grew suddenly cool and wary. “That is, I don’t remember it
if you did. Now, cudgel your brain once more, Tom, and try to guess me
at about what hour that was.”
“It just so happens that I can tell you to a dot. A minute or two after
‘his Blacks’ was in here a fellow came up from the faro game and wanted
twenty-five cases on his watch. I let him have ’em, and when I went to
put the ticker in the safe I noticed the time. It was half past eleven.”
Jarvis bought a bad cigar, but he did not light it. On the contrary, he
was absently crushing the little roll of alleged tobacco in his hand as
he went out and up the street. And a little later, when he was crossing
Larimer Street on his way to the rendezvous, he was still scattering
the powdered cabbage leaves in a thin trail of brown dust behind him as
he strode along.
“It is a sheer miracle--nothing less!” he muttered. “Tom Deverney has
told me that story more than a dozen times before, and he left out the
whole heart of it every time until to-night. That knocks out one of the
mysteries with a good clean body blow. It wasn’t young Langford who
ransacked Brant’s room; it was ‘his Blacks,’ as Deverney calls him. And
if he was drunk when he did it, he was sober enough when he sent the
boy for the cast-off pepper-and-salts that might have betrayed him.
Lord of love! if I only knew what he was after!”
Like a flash of inspiration the answer tripped upon the heels of the
question. Antrim had told the reporter about the packet of papers given
him by Brant for safe-keeping, but not until this instant had Jarvis
been able to put two and two together.
“That’s it--that is the whole thing in a nutshell!” he ejaculated.
“This fellow and Harding were partners and Harding put him up to steal
those papers. Lord, Lord, what a flock of purblind bats we’ve been!”
But the night of miracles was yet young. When the reporter had crossed
the street, narrowly escaping the wire scoop net of a passing cable
car in his abstraction, he stumbled upon one of the employees of the
Osirian Club, the doorkeeper who had been on duty in the upper corridor
on the night of the tragedy. Jarvis stopped to buttonhole the man from
sheer force of reportorial habit.
“Hello, Binkie! Going on watch?” he queried.
The man nodded.
“One demnition grind, isn’t it? Anything new?”
“No. Business has been mighty quiet with us since that scrap in Number
Seven.”
“Go shy, do they? That will wear off in time. By the way, Binkie, there
wasn’t anybody else in the big room that night when George Brant went
in, was there?”
“Not a soul.” The man shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, and
then added, as one who seeks to divide a harassing burden: “That’s what
I told the police, and it’s what I say now. But for all that, there was
a blamed queer thing happened that I haven’t told anybody, and I’ve
sweat about it till I’m galded raw.”
“What was it?” Jarvis forced himself to ask the question carelessly,
but anxiety and eagerness were fairly suffocating him.
“Why, it was this: George came up and asked me about those two fellows,
and which room they were in, and I told him. Then I saw him go swinging
up the middle of the big room with that get-out-of-my-road gait of his
as plain as I see you now. Well, about two minutes afterward I got up
to go and close a window in the far end of the hall, and when I got
back to my chair at the door there he was yet, still going up the room
the same as I’d seen him before. Blame me, if I didn’t think I’d got
’em again, for a minute!”
“You are sure it was Brant?” said Jarvis, hungering and thirsting for
the negative answer which he did not dare to so much as suggest.
“Sure enough,” said the doorkeeper briefly. “At first I wasn’t so
cocksure; it seemed like he’d gone thinner just in that minute or two,
so that his clothes didn’t fit him so well; and he wasn’t swinging
along any more--he was going cautiouslike, as if he were listening
for something that he couldn’t hear. But of course it was George. It
couldn’t have been anybody else, or I’d have seen him come up the
stairs. See?”
If the man craved buttressing in his own belief it was not denied him.
“Of course, it couldn’t have been any one else,” Jarvis agreed. “Most
likely George came back to ask you something, didn’t find you at the
door, and went on again. Well, I must get a move. Good night.”
Thus Jarvis, with every word of the nonchalant reply carefully weighted
down with disinterest. But when he had left the latter-day Egyptian on
the corner, repressed excitement found speech commensurate with the
importance of the new miracle.
“Holy Smoke! and yet they say there isn’t any such thing as a miracle
nowadays! Why, good Lord! here there have been two of them within an
hour--within fifteen minutes--and they go together like the foot and
the shoe! Yes, it was Brant--like fits! It was his double in the stolen
suit of black clothes--that’s what Binkie saw! And he has been keeping
it dark because he was afraid of losing his job if he admitted that
some one might have made a sneak on him.”
This time Jarvis went straight to the editorial rooms of the Plainsman,
and, finding them untenanted, sat down to wait with what patience he
could muster for the others to come in. The interval was not ill spent.
Before the reporter’s reverie was interrupted he had cleared up more of
the mysteries--so many of them, indeed, that only one of any magnitude
remained to baffle him. But that one was impregnable. If the unknown
one were the murderer--and with this Jarvis had closed as with a fact
assured--why had the man shot his late confederate?
In the meantime Antrim had killed his hour, and had driven once more to
Altamont Terrace. He found the judge ready to accompany him, and from
the elder man’s grave preoccupation he argued that something of moment
had occurred in the interval of slain time.
As prefigured, they drove by way of the Union Depot and stopped to pick
up Hobart. The train was not yet in, and Antrim had time to run up to
the telegraph office. When he came down he was scowling and cursing his
luck.
Whereupon the judge came out of his preoccupation enough to ask what
had happened.
“Oh, it’s that despatcher at Voltamo again; he is always getting sick
at the wrong time. I’ve got to drop everything and ‘sub’ for him, and
I suppose I shall have to go up on Seventeen. That lets me out of the
conference, but I don’t know that I could do any good if I stayed. It
isn’t going to make any difference. It’s all up with poor Brant.”
The judge shook his head. “I must confess I don’t see any light; but
since Dorothy has told me--” He broke off abruptly. “Do you know what
she believes, Harry?”
Antrim nodded.
“I--I more than half believe it myself, now,” the judge admitted, and
his voice had in it a tremulous quaver which was not of age. “It is
the height of incredibility; it is more like a chapter out of some old
romance of the dead-and-gone age of chivalry, but--but----”
“I have believed it all along,” said Antrim.
“I know; I know you have. As you say, I don’t see how we are to
accomplish anything by talking it over again to-night, but this I have
determined: when we have sifted it down to the last grain of evidence,
I shall go to the Governor and get him reprieved, if one man may, with
God’s help, move another to do a little deed of mercy.”
“God bless you!” said Antrim fervently; and then: “After it’s all over
I wish you would drive by and give the facts to the train despatcher
upstairs--Disbrow, you know. He’ll wire them to me on Seventeen and I
sha’n’t sleep much till I hear.”
The judge promised, and a moment later caught sight of Hobart in the
stream of outcoming passengers from the delayed train. There was no
time sacrificed to the formalities, and when the assayer had shaken
hands with an old friend and a new one, the judge passed quickly to the
matter in hand.
“You are barely in time, Ned; we had despaired of reaching you. Leave
your valise at the check stand and come uptown with me. I can explain
what we hope to do as we go.”
As he promised, so he performed; and by the time they reached the
editor’s room at the top of the Plainsman building, Hobart knew all
that the judge could tell him. Forsyth welcomed the newcomer heartily,
and then Jarvis was introduced.
“Here is a young man whom I have been misjudging from the first,”
said the night editor, by way of preface to what the reporter had to
tell. “While we have been content to accept one theory, following it
blindly to its present desperate conclusion, he has built up and torn
down half a dozen, with the result that he is ready to-night to open
a most astounding budget of discoveries.--Jarvis, do you begin at the
beginning and go over the ground carefully, remembering that Mr. Hobart
knows none of the details.”
Jarvis drew up his chair, lighted a fresh cigar, and told his story
succinctly and with commendable clarity. Hobart heard it through
without comment, but at the close of the narrative he fetched a sigh of
relief.
“These mysterious details, with their open doors of possibility, help
me out wonderfully,” he said. “As you all know, I had my first news of
the tragedy last night, and it was meagre enough. But, from information
in my hands--in fact, from a letter which Brant wrote me a short time
before the shooting--I had every reason to believe that he had simply
avenged himself on his enemy. Indeed, he swore he would do it if the
man ever crossed his path again.”
“His enemy?” echoed the judge.
“Yes. Listen, and I will tell you his story, so far as I know it.”
He fulfilled the promise literally and truthfully, beginning with their
intimacy and close friendship in college, and ending with a description
of the impressive parting in the moonlight on Jack Mountain, when
Brant had promised to turn his back upon his evil past and to set his
face toward better things.
“What has happened since that night you all know better than I do,” he
concluded. “But I may add this from my knowledge of the man: As boy and
youth he had his faults, and the chiefest of these were impulsiveness
and a reckless uncounting of the cost when he had set his heart upon
doing a thing. But he was always as loving and tender as a woman, and
as chivalrous as any Bayard of them all. Every one in college knew what
Harding’s sister was, and Brant was merely a scapegoat for a half dozen
worse men. But because he, too, had sinned, he paid the penalty--would
be paying it to this day if the woman were alive. That was one of his
redeeming characteristics; and another was his absolute and fearless
truthfulness. If he says he did not do this deed for which he is to
suffer to-morrow morning, that settles it. He wouldn’t lie about it if
the lie would save his life a dozen times over.”
The judge was profoundly moved. Twice he essayed to speak, but what he
had to say would have naught of formal phrasings. And when he began,
the words came haltingly, and there was generous emotion at the back of
them.
“My good friends, this is no time to let false pride or a strained
sense of family honour stand in our way. I have that to add to Mr.
Hobart’s story which makes the young man’s hitherto inexplicable
reticence a part of a most chivalrous and heroic purpose--a deed worthy
of the noblest knight that ever figured in ancient story. From the
moment of darkness in which the deed was committed up to the present
time Brant has believed that my son was the murderer of James Harding,
and it was in this belief that he determined to sacrifice himself to
save the boy. What the ulterior motive was you may perhaps divine for
yourselves when I tell you that it was to my daughter, and after she
had guessed his purpose, that he admitted the fact.”
A silence more eloquent than the loudest praise fell upon the little
group gathered around the editor’s table. Hobart was the first to break
it.
“It was very like him,” he said softly; “like the George Brant I used
to know and love in the old days. But in our admiration we mustn’t lose
sight of his peril. What are we to do?”
The judge shook his head. “While we have cleared up many of the
mysteries, we are still far from having a reasonable excuse for
asking the Governor’s intervention. If I go to him with the story of
these later discoveries he may justly say that these things have no
bearing upon our case and refuse to grant a reprieve. I presume it is
sufficiently clear to all of us now that this unknown man who broke
into Brant’s room and stole his clothes is the man who killed James
Harding. But we can neither prove this nor establish the motive. If we
could identify this man, and so be enabled to find him, we might be
able to show why he shot a person with whom, by all accounts, he was on
friendly terms.”
While the judge was speaking, Jarvis was sketching a crude outline of a
human face on the blotter under his hand. He did it mechanically, and
without realizing that he was trying to draw the features of the man of
many descriptions. When he did realize it, he passed the blotter across
to Hobart with a query.
“Does that remind you of anybody you have ever seen?”
Hobart shook his head.
“I didn’t suppose it would,” said the reporter, taking the blotter
and beginning to obliterate the picture by adding a bushy beard and a
bristling mustache to the face.
The judge and Forsyth were anxiously discussing the advisability of
calling in the senior member of a great law firm to act as a go-between
in the appeal to the Governor, the editor urging it and the lawyer
objecting on the score of time.
“It is my impression that he isn’t in town,” the judge was saying.
“And, in any event, what is done must be done quickly. It is a matter
of hours for Brant now.”
Hobart took no part in the discussion. He was leaning over the
reporter’s shoulder watching the strokes of the idle pencil. Suddenly
he put out his hand and stopped it:
“Hold on a minute; that begins to look something like a man I’ve seen
somewhere. Let me think.”
The exclamation drew the attention of the others, and they examined the
sketch while the assayer was trying to recall the suggestion.
“Let me look at it again,” he said, and he knitted his brows over it
for a breathless minute while they waited in silence.
“I can’t place it,” he added, at length. “I thought at first it looked
a little like the man Isaac Gasset.”
“Who is he?” asked the reporter.
“Didn’t I mention him by name? He is the ruffian who shot Harding’s
sister in the affray at Gaynard’s--the fellow that Brant winged and
would have killed, if I had let him.”
The editor’s pivot chair made a quick half circle, and Forsyth smote
upon the table with his fist in an ecstasy of exprobration.
“What an infernal lot of idiotic chumps we are!--saving your presence,
judge,” he burst out. “Why, the thing is as plain as daylight! Gasset
is the man who was plotting with Harding against Brant, and he is the
man who followed Brant into the Osirian that night and fired the shot
which killed Harding. And that shot missed its mark; it was meant for
George Brant!”
Hobart’s pose was self-repression, but he sprang to his feet with
something very like an imprecation. “Why, of course! If I’d had any
time at all to pull myself together! Why, gentlemen, I _knew_--knew all
about it, but it didn’t occur to me. This man Gasset got out of the
hospital before I left Silverette, and it was the talk of the camp that
he was hunting for Brant with blood in his eye. I meant to write George
about it at the time; but since he had cut the whole business I didn’t
think there was any great danger.”
But it was the judge who went to the heart of the matter in two words.
“Thank God!” he said earnestly, “at last we have something with which
to go to his Excellency, the Governor. And afterward, if we can only
lay hands on this man Gasset----”
There was a volley fire of suggestions from Hobart and Jarvis, but the
night editor’s genius for organization came quickly to the fore:
“We shall have him, if he is anywhere this side of his master’s
smelting pot, and----”
“And when you find him,” Jarvis cut in, “he will probably have in his
possession a big 45-calibre Colt’s with the name ‘J. Harding’ scratched
on the butt.”
“What’s that? how do you know?” demanded Forsyth; and the marshalling
of forces paused while Jarvis explained.
“I know, because the existence of that same big pistol has been the one
thing which has kept me alive. Everybody took it for granted that the
murder was committed with the pistol which was found on the floor. I
wasn’t sure of that, and when I began to doubt, I saw the possibility
of another weapon and another man behind it. Gasset was the man who
had the original ‘J. Harding’ weapon at the time of the killing, and
if he still has it when we catch him--if we catch him--it will be a
strong point in evidence if he happens to have the pistol he stole from
Brant’s room in his possession.”
“It is a good point, and we’ll put it in the telegrams,” said the
editor. “Now, gentlemen, to work. Judge Langford, if you will go with
Mr. Hobart to the Governor’s house, Jarvis and I will see to the
telegraphing, and I’ll have my young men ransack the city--they will do
it better and quicker than the police. Jarvis, send the boys in here,
and then chase over to the jail and get word to Brant--if it costs
money.” Then to the judge: “You think there is no doubt about your
being able to make your case with his Excellency?”
“None whatever now, I think.”
“Good. Then we’ll all meet here in two hours and compare notes, if you
please.”
It was an hour after midnight when Despatcher Disbrow was finally able
to answer Antrim’s impatient inquiries from Voltamo. He gave the chief
clerk the story of the later discoveries, closing the long message with
a succinct account of what had been accomplished up to date:
“They have ascertained that Gasset left town on night of the murder,
and the wires are hot after him with a big reward out. Governor has
granted a reprieve, and Brant has been notified. Judge L. says Gasset
must be found and made to confess; otherwise Brant’s case still hangs
on the ragged edge. Call up again in the morning.
“DISBROW.”