ESTWICKE slept little that night. For long hours he lay gazing at the
pallid wintry moonlight as it crept, barred with the shadow of the tiny
window-panes, across the floor of his room at the village hotel. The
winds had died away. The world without was mute. Within, the intense
quietude was broken only by the light sound of his watch under his
pillow checking off the seconds. It seemed loud and strident, and its
monotonous iteration jarred upon his nerves. He drew it forth presently
and stopped the works. And then he could hear only his passionate
pulses beat. These he might not silence so lightly.
He rose after a time, stirred the failing fire, dressed and lighted a
cigar. He drew a chair to the window and sat aimlessly looking out upon
the street. More than once he sighed heavily,--heavily. The shadows and
the moonlight shifted about the “Square.” The sonorous clangor of the
clock, in the court-house tower, ever and anon warned the world how
the time wore on. He watched a mist rise, and hover, and drift away.
He looked to the east for the flush of dawn. But clouds were gathering
silently, and in the morning they hung low and dense.
This assisted the somewhat dreary aspect of the place, for the pretty
homes of Chattalla and the graces of its social life were well out of
sight behind the two-story business blocks that surrounded the muddy,
ill-paved Square, in the centre of which was the court-house yard and
the Temple of Justice itself. A gaunt sycamore tree overhung this red
brick structure; the grass was covered with dank withered leaves; to
the iron fence saddle-horses were hitched in time-honored defiance of
the august legislation of the county court. As Estwicke strolled out
in front of the hotel after breakfast he was impressed by a certain
military aspect about the citizens. The teamsters standing near
their wagons, loaded with wood or country produce, shouldered their
long-handled whips in a soldierly fashion, implying a similar habitude
with a far deadlier weapon. An equestrian group, that might well have
served a painter for a study of cavalry, had gathered about the town
scales, where the weighing of cattle was in progress. A dry-goods
clerk, middle-aged and iron-gray, came out of a store and crossed the
Square to the bank. Estwicke’s eyes followed the erect figure with its
practised, measured gait.
“That man has marched a thousand miles to the throb of the drum,” he
said.
When the rain began to fall heavily in myriads of dun-colored lines it
drove the population within doors except the teamsters, still lounging
near their horses’ heads, and Saturday’s crowd of black humanity
that surged about a row of Jew stores denominated by common consent
“Jerusalem.”
The contemplation of this picture from the hotel window was his only
resource during the morning, and he regarded the approach of the
belated train as in the nature of a rescue.
He established himself with a newspaper and a cigar in the smoking-car,
and did not look up until his name was called.
“Glad to see you back,” said a young man who was entering from the
“ladies’ car.” He smiled agreeably and offered his hand, then leaned
unsteadily against the arm of the seat while he struck a match and
applied it to his cigarette. He was a tall, supple, dandyish young
fellow, with a sparkling clever face, a girl’s complexion, a long,
silky, brown mustache, and hair and eyes of the same shade. The officer
moved to give room, and he slipped into the place assigned him with a
panther-like ease and grace that habitually characterized his motions,
and made heavier and more muscular men seem a trifle awkward and clumsy
in comparison.
“I’m not going to tell you we’ve missed you. And why? Because you have
come among us too lately to believe me,” he declared, lightly.
“Don’t think you overtax my credulity, Mr. Meredith,” said Estwicke,
somewhat satirically. “I can fancy how the society of Yankee officers
must be prized among you.”
Meredith laughed coolly. He had been too young to bear his share on
this historic plain that stretched so far around them on every side;
he had grown happily into manhood under the new _régime_. He held
something of the old theories, but in the revolving years his mind had
been caught on the cogs of new ideas, and revolved with them. He looked
with unruffled serenity at his companion.
“You are so eager in helping us to keep the peace that you never forget
your mission. It had escaped me for the instant. Do you find it hard
work? Very arduous, eh?”
Estwicke laughed, too. “Well, on the whole you are not so bad as the
Indians,” he said, temperately. “But you are duller,--far! There is
some healthy snap and go on the frontier.”
“That pleasing uncertainty about being scalped is the one redeeming
feature of your profession--otherwise it is too painfully definite,”
said Meredith, philosophically. “If you keep your scalp--when it is
gray you’ll still be _Captain_ Estwicke, unless we can get up
a foreign war or a civil commotion for your advancement. Whereas
_I_,” with a hopeful rising inflection, “may in the course of
time, and by the force of talent alone, be a Chief Justice--and then
again, by the force of talent alone, I mayn’t. Room for speculation,
eh?”
“Strikes me, on the contrary, that your prospects are painfully
definite, too,” said Estwicke. “Your father and his partner will take
you in as a third after a while. So you’ll be perpetually bringing up
the rear, overcrowed by the two big lawyers. Your father will think he
ought to do something for you--that’s the way he’ll do it.”
“Not he--not he,” protested Meredith. “I wish he would. My father has
a theory that if a young lawyer is not helped he will help himself--to
any stray litigation that may be afloat, as it were, in the air. He has
left me to illustrate this theory.”
“How does it work?” asked Estwicke, with interest.
“I pray God I mayn’t starve,” said Meredith, tersely.
“Room for speculation, eh?” suggested Estwicke.
Chattalla had faded in the distance, and now the earthworks loomed up
through the low-lying vapors and the blurring rain, vague and distorted
but always grim and grewsome. As the train thundered with a hollow roar
on the railroad bridge, there could be caught a fleeting glimpse of
the isolated piers, and of the ferry-boat, pausing in mid-stream that
Tom Toole might gaze after the cloud of smoke, which lay on the top of
the cars, and drifted back to the redoubts and hung about the empty
embrasures suggestively.
Estwicke, oblivious of the landscape, was absorbed in the conversation.
He was essentially a man of this world. He craved the companionship
of other men. He could not live apart from it. He had none of those
intimate inner resources that make solitude sweet. Except for some
principles of gunnery, bearing upon a still unperfected improvement
of his own, he cared nothing for the study of science. Apart from the
history of splendid achievement, some stirring martial lyrics, the
biographies of great commanders, he had no fondness for reading. His
books were the men about him; their experience, their lives, formed
his interest, and as in the ever shifting combinations of human events
they lapsed upon his own life he too bore a part in this sentient
literature. He had a quick understanding of men, and a passionate
sympathy with them. He did not even affect an appreciation of art; he
looked blankly at its results. But an unrecognized something in the
burnished sunlight, the silver-shotted moonlit mists, the haze on the
purple hills, the sound of the melancholy autumn wind subtly thrilled
to his heart and prevailed within him mightily. He found a wondrous
sensuous exaltation in the mystery and the joy of being. He felt that
his blood was swift in his veins; he stretched his limbs; he admired
his muscles; he took cognizance of an involuntary alertness of his
mental faculties; he knew that he was strong, and well, and graciously
endowed. But he had no questions to ask of Heaven or Earth. He was too
definite for mere abstractions, and adhered mechanically to the faith
of the fathers.
Despite his imperfectly tempered aggressiveness he possessed certain
qualities of good-comradeship,--his zest in life, his soldierly
frankness, and his ardor commended themselves to Meredith, who was
presently surprised in the midst of the desultory talk, which was
neither wise nor witty, to see that the twenty miles had slipped
past, that billowy sweeps of hills were on every side, that the city
was elusively appearing and disappearing, mirage-like, in the purple
distance.
They parted at the depot, and until evening Estwicke was greatly
harassed with loneliness, for his regiment had but recently been
stationed in the vicinity, and he knew few of the citizens. Nothing
was going on at either of the theatres, and he could only mitigate the
tedium after tea by lounging about the hotel with a promiscuous crowd
of smokers, who habitually congregated here, for Marston boasted no
club-houses. A fountain in the centre of the tessellated floor was
tossing up pretty corolla-shaped jets of spray, that sparkled in the
gaslight. The clerks bullied the incoming travellers. A mocking-bird
in a cage sang shrilly; the cheerful click of billiard balls was heard
from behind a colonnade, and through its vistas might be descried
delicately poised cues and nimbly attitudinizing figures.
The scene soon palled upon Estwicke. He began to think of driving out
to the barracks to-night instead of in the morning, but Meredith came
in from the street, and the resolve faded.
“I’m glad to see that you are still in town,” said the lawyer, as they
met.
Following, as was often the case, in Meredith’s footsteps, was his
cousin, Tom West, a jaunty young sprig, some twenty or twenty-two years
old, who effusively claimed Estwicke’s acquaintance. As they shook
hands the officer became aware of a close scrutiny directed upon him
from over the tall, young fledgling’s shoulder. It emanated from a pair
of cold, fishy eyes, set in an impassive, florid face, which belonged
to a stout, middle-aged, soberly dressed, responsible-looking party.
Estwicke could not have said explicitly why he was so unfavorably
impressed, nor why when West, with callow self-sufficiency, introduced
the stranger as his friend, Mr. Casey, it seemed so very odd that
he should have a friend like this. Estwicke, mechanically extending
his hand, looked at Casey with wonted fierce intentness, and noted
the indefinable but strong intimations lurking about him of solid
commercial pursuits. Somehow his breadth of waistcoat, his sparingness
of speech, his quiet, grave manner, assisted this effect. The man who
knew men could not reconcile it with the look in his eye and stony
countenance.
He showed a disposition to devote himself to West, and said little to
Estwicke, who presently turned back in relief to Meredith.
“How do you get away with these long evenings?” he demanded.
“Professional study, generally; regular midnight oil business.”
“Nice boy!” ejaculated Estwicke.
“Sometimes,” said Meredith, signifying by a gesture that he desired
the favor of a light from Estwicke’s cigar, “sometimes clients get as
scarce as hen’s teeth, and the justice’s court--most of my practice is
in that humble modern _pie poudre_--the justice’s court knows me
no more. Then I make up my mind to renounce the profession before it is
in everybody’s mouth that the profession has renounced me. So I play
billiards in the evening, or go to the theatre, or call on the young
ladies.”
“Oh, the young ladies!” cried Estwicke, stroking his whiskers. “That’s
mighty bad!”
He looked at Meredith, and laughed as he received his cigar back.
A band of itinerant musicians suddenly struck up a popular waltz,
and the rotunda was filled with surging waves of sound. “This is
insufferable,” said Meredith. “Suppose we go up to my room, where we
can have a quiet smoke and talk.”
As they passed the fountain West approached them. “Going upstairs?” he
asked of his cousin.
Meredith nodded. “Will you come with us?”
“And I’ll bring Casey,” West declared agreeably, very slightly
lowering his voice; “that is if you have no objection. I’m under great
obligations to him, and as he knows nobody in town but us I feel bound
to see him through and make his stay as pleasant as possible.”
Meredith frowned, and hesitated. But Casey was standing at no great
distance, and had evidently overheard the conversation. Estwicke
experienced a twinge of uneasiness. Despite his ill-defined antipathy
toward Casey, and although the suggestion that he should join them had
destroyed every prospect of pleasure, it seemed to Estwicke almost a
cruelty to refuse publicly so slight and apparently so reasonable a
request. He watched Meredith with expectant eyes.
“Certainly, if you like,” the young lawyer assented, not too
graciously, and turned away.
“That’s a boon,” he muttered to Estwicke, who made no reply, for at
that moment they stepped into the elevator, and stood silent and with
their cigars held low and reversed, like the muskets of privates at a
military funeral, in deference to a group of ladies within.
“I roost high,” said Meredith, when they had gotten out on an upper
story. “It comes cheaper up here, and there’s better ventilation.
‘Beggars all, but, marry, good air.’”
After they were seated before the blazing fire in Meredith’s room, West
seemed altogether unaware of the reluctant toleration with which his
entertainer regarded the amendment to the quiet smoke and talk. With
his gay, youthful self-sufficiency, he absorbed the conversation as far
as he might. He was facetious, and flippantly fraternized with Casey.
“Captain,” he said to Estwicke, with an explanatory wave of his hand
toward his solemn red-faced friend, “there is the great original David!
And I am Jonathan! Wasn’t it David who saved Jonathan’s life?” He
pulled at his mustache and laughed and smoked his big cigar with manly
gusto.
“Oh, it was nothing, nothing whatever,” declared Casey. His manner
suggested that from good nature he was content to lightly waive
recognition of a feat.
The sharp young lawyer apprehended the intimation.
“Nothing?” he repeated satirically. “Nothing to save Tom West’s life?
Why, it was a public benefaction!”
Estwicke, with his quick interest in exploits, his love of danger, his
enthusiastic admiration of bravery, turned to Casey with a sudden sense
of respect.
“May I ask how that came about?”
Casey hesitated, and Estwicke presently recognized in this a tact
which was hardly consonant with such a slow-seeming man, for West,
after waiting expectantly for a moment, plunged into an account of
a recent railroad accident, that might have been very disastrous,
but had resulted in nothing worse than cooping him up in the debris,
whence by some exercise of thews and sinews--of which Mr. Casey was
amply capable--he was extricated. His rescue had evidently involved
no risk, but it had served as an introduction of Casey, who was
adroitly abetting West in magnifying its importance. Estwicke listened
with contemptuous amusement, and Meredith’s efforts to conceal his
impatience had grown so lame that his relief was very evident when a
knock at the door interrupted the conversation, and a card was brought
in. He glanced at it in surprise.
“Show the gentleman up,” he said, and the brisk, and grinning bell-boy
disappeared.
The interval that ensued was expectant. Perhaps this was the reason
the new-comer appeared upon the scene with the impressiveness of the
principal character of a drama. Perhaps it might be that life had
always cast Maurice Brennett for the leading business, and he bore
himself in a manner befitting the title _rôle_. His eyes had
a peculiar brilliancy, and were capable of an intent expression so
concentrated that when suddenly elicited it had a sinister effect, and
put its subject instinctively on guard. He was tall, thin, angular,
and dressed with an elaborate fastidiousness that was somehow oddly
incongruous with his pale, powerful, intellectual face--he seemed
rather the type of man who scorns the minutiæ of externals. Between
his mobile eyebrows many a scheme had registered itself in subtle
hieroglyphics. There was a look of severely maintained repression about
the hard lines of his lips as if the controlling influences of his
nature had had a struggle for ascendency over other wild and turbulent
forces. Even now the slight annoyance of finding a group here instead
of the man he wanted had brought a quiver to the thin, sensitive
nostrils of his sharp, hooked, and delicately chiselled nose. His
pallor was the pallor of late hours--not such as these young fellows
kept, but the anxious vigils of thought, the canvassing of opportunity,
and the inception of plans. He had his hat in his hand, and the
gaslight revealed such glimmers here and there in his dark hair,
clipped close about a shapely head, and in his full, dark mustache, as
might intimate that he was fast growing gray, which is premature at
forty.
His presence exerted a singular influence upon the other men; their
personal peculiarities were suddenly abnormally pronounced.
Casey seemed trebly slow, stolid, rubicund. West looked very callow,
and felt very callow too; Meredith’s dainty complexion, his silky
mustache, his sparkle, were almost effeminate. Estwicke silently
measured the stranger with challenging eyes.
“I have hardly time for this,” Brennett said, as he took the cigar
which Meredith tendered him. “My business with you is rather
imperative.”
Meredith was a trifle confused, having naturally enough supposed that
the visit at this place and hour had only a social significance. Upon
the word business, the others made a motion as if to take leave.
“I fear I am interrupting you,” Brennett continued, looking round
at the group. “I feel rather like the ghost of fiction who routs a
pleasure party. It is a hackneyed theme, but no one has adequately
considered the embarrassing position of the ghost.”
There was a laugh at this and a momentary hesitation.
“You will greatly alleviate it if you won’t allow me to put you to
flight. I only want a few minutes’ consultation with Mr. Meredith. I
ventured to look you up out of office hours and on Saturday night,” he
continued turning to the young lawyer, “because I have information that
a debtor of mine is about to run off his cotton on a Sunday freight,
and this may be my last opportunity to get out an attachment.”
“I insist that you don’t go,” said Meredith, addressing himself
specially to Estwicke. “This won’t keep me long--meantime suppose you
have a game of cards. I am not going to my office--we can talk the
matter over here.”
He flung a pack of cards on the table; then he and Brennett turned away
to a desk which was on the opposite side of the room. The trio at the
table chatted for a few moments in a desultory strain, but presently
West, glancing at lawyer and client now fairly immersed in business,
shrugged his shoulders, gathered up the cards, and with a juvenile leer
at the others, proposed to deal for “draw.”
“I haven’t played for so long, I scarcely remember the game,” protested
Casey.
West laughed jeeringly; he joyed so in his amiable wickedness.
“Oh, Casey’s afraid of getting turned out of church. We’ll take you in
out of the wet--won’t we, Captain? We belong to the ‘big church’--we
do.”
Estwicke made no reply; he hardly relished even a “big church”
membership with Casey.
“I suppose we play with a limit?” he asked impatiently, showing some
eagerness to begin.
West’s _was_ an amiable wickedness. In fact it was only a
weak-kneed semblance--that would, yet might not, be. He quaked at the
bare suggestion of the alternative.
“Captain, you shock me,” he declared. “Of course we play with a
limit--fifty cents--say.”
They talked very little when once fairly at it. For a time Meredith,
who sat with his back toward them, only knew vaguely that somebody was
“passing” or “straddling the blind,” or “seeing and going better.” Once
or twice West laughed out loud and long in triumph. And again his voice
rose in excited remonstrance, to which his companions seemed to pay
no attention. Then the room was quiet for a time, and the lawyer lost
cognizance of everything except the complications of Brennett’s liens
and his debtor’s duplicity.
“How many bales do you suppose he has there?” Meredith asked, after a
meditative pause.
There was no answer.
He glanced up impatiently. Brennett’s face was instinct with an alert
interest. His eyes, lighted by some inward sardonic laughter, were
fixed upon the group by the fire.
Meredith turned quickly, and at this moment Estwicke,--his coat thrown
off upon the floor, his hat thrust on the back of his head, the hot
blood crimsoning his sunburned cheek, the perspiration standing thick
in his close-clipped red hair, his eyes blazing with that most unholy
fire, the gambler’s passion,--cocked his cigar between his set teeth
and raised the blind one hundred dollars.
West had passed out of the game, had drawn away from the table, and
was gazing with dismayed surprise at the swollen proportions of the
pool and at the impassive, stony countenance of Casey. Not a feather
was ruffled as he looked cooly into Estwicke’s burning eyes; he was as
decorously florid, his waistcoat as commercially rotund as ever, but
his demeanor was the demeanor of the professional expert.
He stolidly made good--and then he drew one card, Estwicke standing
Pat. After this, for a few moments, each seemed cautious, making very
small bets. But presently, when Estwicke raised him fifty dollars,
Casey “saw it” and went a hundred better.
Then the slow, cumbrous fellow, according to his habit, laid his cards,
face downward, on the table in front of him, with a single chip upon
them to hold them in place, and clasping his hands lightly upon his
substantial stomach, calmly awaited Estwicke’s “say.”
And all at once Estwicke looked hard at the man, with a change on his
expressive face. There was an eager surprise in his eyes; the flush
of sheer excitement deepened to an angry glow; he seemed lost for an
instant in a sort of doubting confusion. Suddenly he made good, and
“called.”
Meredith was thunder-struck as he realized the full significance of the
scene. He rose hastily. “Gentlemen,” he said, sternly, “this is going
entirely too far.”
They took no heed. With one hand Casey laid his cards, a straight
flush--ace, king, queen, jack, and ten of diamonds--upon the table
beside Estwicke’s jack full, while with the other hand he gathered the
pool toward him, giving no sign of elation.
“I protest,” began Meredith. He stopped suddenly short.
Brennett sprang to his feet with a sharp exclamation.
It happened in an instant. There was a swift movement of Estwicke’s
intent figure; he thrust his hand behind him, and seemed to draw from
his pistol-pocket a glancing, steely flash of light; there was a sharp,
metallic click--of a peculiarly nerve-thrilling quality; he lunged
across the table, and held the weapon at full cock at the man’s head.
Warned by Estwicke’s motion, Casey had made an effort to draw his
pistol. His hand grasped it in his pocket.
“Move your right arm and you’re a dead man,” said Estwicke between his
set teeth. They were strong and white, and unconsciously he showed
them. The veins that crossed his forehead were black and swollen. His
breath came hot and fast and with a sibilant sound. He seemed to think
as Brennett sprang up that there would be an effort to disarm him.
“If you interfere,” he said, in a low voice,--“if you touch me--I will
kill you--I will kill you!”
It was a moment of terrible suspense, but as Brennett moved hastily
back, he laughed aloud--a short, ungenial laugh, nervous perhaps--or
was the fancy so absurd that he should interfere!
Meredith’s motion toward Estwicke was arrested by his next words. “Drop
that card out of your sleeve--the card I dealt you.”
Casey gazed abjectly at him, turning even paler than before, and made a
weak, spasmodic effort to speak, to deny.
“No use talking,” said Estwicke, cutting him short. “Drop the card.”
His finger by accident or design quivered slightly on the trigger.
The sharper shook his sleeve, and the three of diamonds fell upon the
table.
“The exchange was quick as lightning--but I _saw_ it!” Estwicke
declared.
Without lowering his eyes or moving the weapon, he placed with his left
hand the three of diamonds on the table beside the straight flush to
illustrate the self-evident fact that, no matter which of the cards
Casey had substituted for it, the hand after the draw was merely a
flush.
“And a full out-ranks a flush!” he proclaimed, with a fierce,
dictatorial air.
Casey sat before him, silent, cowed, helpless, the revolver that he
still grasped in his pocket as useless as if his right hand was palsied.
“My ‘Full’ raked the pool!” thundered Estwicke. “I won it all! I’ll
have it all! Fork! With your left hand--mind.”
As Casey hastily pushed the money across the table, a modest nickel
that had served in the half dollar limit game with which they began,
fell to the floor and rolled away among the shadows.
He had surrendered utterly--it was all over. A breath of relief was
beginning to inflate his lungs, which in the surprise and fright
had seemed to forget and bungle their familiar functions. The other
men moved slightly as they stood,--an involuntary expression of the
relaxation of the tension--the creak of Tom West’s boots was to him
like the voice of a friend. Then they realized, with the shock of an
infinite surprise, that Estwicke sat as motionless as if he were carved
in stone, his pistol still held at the cheat’s head. The room was so
silent that they might hear the rumble of the elevator on its missions
up and down, the throb of the engine in the cellar, the faint rattle of
the dishes in the dining-room far, far below the high story where the
young man’s room was perched. They understood at last, and it came upon
them with the amazing effect of a flash of lightning from a clear sky.
Estwicke was waiting for the nickel!
The card-sharper was panting, failing, almost losing consciousness. He
did not dare to stoop and search for the coin--he could not summon his
voice for speech. The tears sprang into his eyes when he saw that the
situation was at length comprehended by the others.
West hastily knelt on the floor, passed his tremulous fingers over the
dark carpet, clutched the coin and placed it on the table.
To the two men who knew Estwicke best the episode was a frightful
illustration of a certain imperious exactingness which they
had discovered even in their short acquaintance was a notable
characteristic of his nature. For one instant longer he looked hard at
the sharper. Then he brought his heavy hand down upon the table in the
midst of the pile of greenbacks, with a vehemence that sent a shiver
through every glass in the room.
“Damn you!” he cried out, fiercely. “Keep it!”
He thrust his pistol into his pocket. Without another word he strode
heavily out of the room, leaving Casey staring blankly at the money so
strangely relinquished, and the others standing petrified under the
yellow gas-jets gazing after the receding figure that marched through
the shadowy vagueness of the dimly lighted hall without.
When he was fairly gone Meredith turned to Casey. The sharper had
before hardly seemed able to breathe. He was on his feet now and ready
to walk. His god was good to him. The touch of it had made him whole.
“I have never before had occasion,” said Meredith, sternly, “to show a
man the door.” He waved his hand toward it.
The hardened creature insolently lifted his cold, fishy eye and
grinned. His plethoric pocket-book was overflowing in his hands;
he tucked the other bills into the pockets of his respectable,
commercial-looking waistcoat.
“Sorry to have any disagreement, I’m sure. Your friend is a little too
choleric--apt to be the fault of military men. I have to thank you for
a most delightful evening. I’ll come again soon. Bye-bye, West!”
He bowed and grinned and grimaced at the door. Meredith was scarlet
with indignation. Tom West thrust his hands into his pockets and turned
sheepishly away. Brennett flung himself against the mantel-piece
and laughed with an intense enjoyment so chilling, so derisive, so
repellant in its quality that Casey paused in the hall and glanced back
through the open door in surprise and a vague distrust. Meredith saw
among the shadows his white, heavy-jawed face, from which the smile had
faded in an expression of inexplicable wonder, of fear. Then he turned
once more and disappeared.
Meredith hastily handed Brennett his memoranda and, with a promise to
return in a few moments, started toward the door.
“Where are you going?” West demanded inquisitively.
“To look up Captain Estwicke,” Meredith replied, curtly.
The “elevator boy” knew the number of Estwicke’s room on the transient
floor by reason of having had the key left with him during the evening.
Estwicke had hardly entered and closed the door when Meredith knocked.
He looked around with a flushed face as the young lawyer came in.
“I hope you will remember how that blackguard was forced upon me,”
Meredith began, hotly. “I don’t usually consort with cheats. I am not
responsible for your meeting such company in my room.”
Estwicke gave a bitter laugh.
“What does it matter to me where I met him?”
“It matters to me,” said Meredith, tersely.
Estwicke was tramping back and forth the length of the room.
“I thought I had given that thing up!” he cried in a tumult of despair.
“I haven’t touched a card for years. I can’t play in moderation. I
can’t, you see. I go wild--wild! It’s an hereditary passion.”
Meredith was a lawyer, and an acute one. He changed his base with a
celerity that did infinite credit to his acumen. Estwicke was taking
himself to task--not his entertainer. He briskly joined the onslaught.
“Oh hereditary!” he sneered. “I have often noticed that a man credits
his father with his own pet vices. What was the reason you let the
rascal have the money?”
“I had no reason--no positive idea; it was only an impulse,” said
Estwicke. “Somehow when I got it--I--couldn’t touch it. That _I_
should brawl with a fellow like that for money! But why not?” he added
after a sullen pause. “He is as good as I am--that is, I am as bad as
he is.”
“Bless me!” exclaimed Meredith, satirically, “I wouldn’t say
_that_.”
“I know better. He doesn’t.”
“But some of it was yours on the strictest moral construction.”
Estwicke stood in the middle of the floor staring at his visitor.
“I mean the money you originally bet,” Meredith explained.
This was a distinction that Estwicke could not grasp. “It was
_all_ mine!” he bawled. “My--full--raked--the--pool!” He came
hastily and sat down in the green-rep arm-chair, expounding how the
game stood, checking off his cards and Casey’s on the fingers of his
right and left hands respectively. His excited words in their confused
haste stumbled and tripped up over each other in his throat; his eyes
were eager and earnest; he trembled with the intensity of his interest.
Even the wordy lawyer could not interrupt.
“Well,” he said, when Estwicke had concluded, “I knew all that
before--and it’s a nice business. You told me once that you have
nothing but your pay. I should think,” he continued, exasperatingly,
“this night’s work would make a considerable hole in it. I hope you
feel that you have invested your time and money to the best advantage.”
“Oh, I got disgusted with the money. I couldn’t endure to keep step,
morally, you know, with that contemptible, poor devil. I tell you he
looked at the money with tears in his eyes.”
Meredith stared.
“This is rather a belated sympathy with the ‘poor devil,’” he said,
sarcastically. “Captain Estwicke,” he continued, “I don’t pretend to
understand you, but I feel it almost a duty to tell you how heartily I
disapprove of your conduct to-night. Pistoling a man at a card-table
for cheating is a practically unprovoked, cruel and abhorrent crime.”
“Didn’t do it,” said Estwicke, grimly, on the defensive.
“You would have done it--if he had not instantly yielded.”
“Ha-a-rdly,” drawled Estwicke. The tone was significant. Meredith
looked at him expectantly. Estwicke glanced uneasily up at the ceiling,
then down at his boots. As he turned doubtfully toward Meredith their
eyes met, and he broke into an uproarious peal of laughter.
“Why, man!” he cried, hilariously, “the pistol wasn’t loaded!”
He drew the weapon from his pocket and held it at arm’s length,
revolving its empty chambers, and setting the walls to echoing its
sharp click.
Meredith laughed, too, partly in sympathy with the other’s boisterous
enjoyment of what he considered so exquisitely flavored a joke and
partly in relief. “I’m glad you let me know this,” he declared. “Forget
what I said when I didn’t know it.” Presently he added with a view of
contingencies of which Estwicke seemed utterly incapable--“But suppose
that that fellow had persisted in heaving up the thing _he_ had in
his pocket?”
“Oh, but I was sure he wouldn’t. Moral suasion, you know. There’s
a wonderful deal of moral suasion in giving a man a peep down an
iron tube. It puts the best of us out of countenance.” After a
pause he said, gravely,--“Nothing would have induced me to hurt the
man--besides, I _couldn’t_. All I wanted was my own money.”
“And you didn’t want that little long.”
“I feel like the devil,” said Estwicke, impatiently. “I’m so much like
the devil to-night that I don’t know us apart.”
“Well,” persisted Meredith, “you’ve given us a fine sensation. I never
saw a man so entertained as that fellow, Brennett.”
“I don’t care to set up as a show,” said Estwicke, sulkily.
“A cat may look at a king.”
“I doubt if it is altogether safe for the cat.”
“In the light of late events, I certainly should not take the liberty
if I were a cat,” said Meredith, with a laugh.
“He is not a cat,” rejoined Estwicke, with that sudden insight into
character which was so marked a quality of his mind. “He has a hawk’s
face and a hawk’s eyes--the most startlingly brilliant eyes I ever saw.
I never met a human hawk before--though I’ve known human wolves, and
monkeys, and dogs, and cats. We don’t want to claim kin with our poor
relations. But some of us can’t help ourselves. We will look like ’em,
and sometimes we will behave like ’em.” He stretched out his legs to
the fire, and thrust his hands in his pockets. “I’m misanthropic, ain’t
I?” He glanced up with a laugh. After a pause he asked--“What’s his
business?”
“Getting rich.”
“I could have guessed as much,” declared Estwicke. “That man has his
soul in his pocket. And his pocket doesn’t bulge. Such a soul as that
won’t crowd things.”
“Don’t know about his soul, but he certainly has an instinct for money.
He speculates heavily in cotton futures. And he owns a half interest in
a mine out west that they used to say was as good as a mint.”
The young lawyer had risen to take leave. With an almost affectionate
impulse he paused at the door. “Estwicke,” he said, “I want to tell
you--you’re a good fellow.”
“That I am,” said Estwicke, mockingly, “I’m mighty good.”
He looked about him wearily, with a haggard, hunted face after the
door had closed. Then suddenly he rang the bell, called for his bill,
packed his traps dexterously, methodically, and in surprisingly small
compass--one of his military accomplishments--and the full moon was
hardly swinging past the meridian before he was bowling swiftly along
the turnpike among the hills that encompassed the city. Through the
carriage windows he saw it lying behind him in many an undulation, its
domes and its mansard roofs idealized in the glamour and the distance
to a castellated splendor. It had faded away in the dusky shadows long
before he caught sight of the white-framed barrack buildings. His heart
warmed at the thought of his friends so close at hand, of the familiar
surroundings, and the old routine. He saw the sentry’s bayonet glisten
in the moonlight, and catch on its point a star of fire. And the
evening and the scene he had left slipped into the dark corners of his
recollection.