CHAPTER XTHE STRING TO THE SHAFT
Asfor Brant, the day following the retrieval of the body of William Langford was a day to be marked in the calendar as the Feast of the Mingled Cups. Having been up rather more than half the night, he was a little late at the office, and he found the chief engineer getting ready to go up the line on the day train.
“Good morning, Brant,” said the colonel. “You are just in time. I want Grotter’s field notes to take with me. What did you do with the book?”
Brant found the notebook, and began to say something about late hours and their next morning consequences, but the colonel only laughed good-naturedly:
“I know; I was a young man once myself. But if I had it to do over again I’d touch it lightly. Of course, you are new to the West, and naturally you want to see the animals; but even an onlooker has to be careful and not get the smell of the menagerie in his clothes. It’s devilish hard to get out.”
It was a random thrust, but it went home, and for a few minutes after the colonel’s departure Brant saw only the large humour of it. Truly, he had never posed before his chief as a reformed reprobate; but to be mistaken for an innocent youth, fresh from the moral environment of the well-behaved East, was mirth for the gods. Afterward, however, the pendulum swung to the opposite end of its arc. Was it quite honest that heshould suffer the colonel—and others—to think better of him than the facts warranted? Obtaining money under false pretences was a crime: was it any less culpable to carry off booty of good repute in like manner?
As far as his chief was concerned, Brant had come to know the colonel well enough to be sure that a most intimate knowledge of the incriminating facts would have little weight with him on the professional side. He was well satisfied with his assistant, and, unlike many employers, he was frank enough to say so. But there was a standing invitation—as yet unused—holding the door of the Bowran home open to the draughtsman. This might not be withdrawn in so many words, but—Brant put himself in the colonel’s shoes—it would probably not be renewed.
From the Bowran generalities to the Langford particulars was but a step, and Brant presently began to ask himself curious questions touching the continuance of his welcome at Hollywood if the facts were known. That was a different matter, and he was not long in arriving at conclusions definite and humiliating. The judge would probably set him down as a hypocrite; Mrs. Langford would be horrified; Isabel would want him to pose as the central figure in a certain picture of mining camp life she was painting; Will would fellowship him frankly on the ground of similarity of tastes; and Dorothy—it was not so easy to prefigure her attitude, though pity and sorrow for a smashed ideal might well be the pointing of it.
“That settles it!” said this latter-day flagellant, scourging himself into a fine fury of self-abnegation. “I go there no more. It is only a question of time when they will find me out, and then I should do something desperate.”
So he affected to consider the determination taken once for all, and fell to work in a dull rage of resentment.But when that fire burned out for lack of fuel, as all fires will, another and a holier was kindled in its place. At thirty a man does not fall in love at first sight, and in the beginning Dorothy Langford had figured in his thoughts of her only as an incarnation of pure womanhood. But latterly the point of view had been changing. She was no longer a type; she was the eidolon of the type. Brant asked himself a blunt question, and the ink dried between the nibs of his ruling pen while the question waited for its answer. The windows of the map room looked northward, and he got down from the high stool to stand with his hands behind him, gazing abstractedly across the railway yards toward the quarter of the town he had come to know best.
“You have spun the web for me, little girl, and I couldn’t break away from you now if the heavens fall,” he said, letting his thought slip into speech. “I have just about one chance in a hundred of being able to carry it off without being found out, and I am going to take that chance; I’d take it if it were only one in a thousand.”
The outer office door opened and shut, but Brant heard it not. For which cause he started guiltily when some one behind him said:
“You have a fine view from here, Mr. Brant.”
Brant spun around as one shot, and found himself confronting the father of the young woman whom he had been apostrophizing. For a moment even the commonplaces deserted him, but presently he recovered himself sufficiently to join rather sheepishly in the laugh at his own expense.
“I was fairly caught,” he admitted. “How long have you been here?”
“Not long enough to hear any secrets,” replied the judge. “You were saying something about ‘one in athousand’ when I came in, and it struck me as being a very natural remark for a young man in a trance.”
“It is one of my bad habits,” Brant confessed—“talking to myself, I mean. It began when I was a little fellow and lacked playmates.”
“It is a very common habit. I once knew an attorney who had it in a most peculiar form. His office was adjoining mine, and he would lock the door and discuss a case with himself. We used to laugh at him a good bit, but he was always the best-prepared man in court.”
All of which was quite beside the mark, as Brant well knew; but he made courteous answer, having it in mind to let his visitor pick his own way through the generalities. This the judge seemed to find very difficult, since he made several false starts before coming finally to the object of his visit. Brant set the hesitancy down to pardonable family pride, and stood ready to help when he should be given the chance. At length the judge came to the point and waded reluctantly into the domestic pool.
“I came down to thank you for what you did for us last night, Mr. Brant. My daughter has told me the circumstances, and it was exceedingly good of you to interest yourself in my poor boy.”
Brant said “Not at all,” meaning thereby that the service had been freely rendered, and the judge went on:
“It was a great relief to us all to find William safe at home this morning. He left us in anger, and I feel quite sure that we have you to thank for his return, though I am wholly in the dark as to how you managed it.”
Brant answered the implied question frankly.
“It was a very simple matter. I found your son in company with a man whose influence over him seems to be quite as great as it is sure to be bad. I happened toknow this man, and I persuaded him to take the boy home.”
The judge leaned back in his chair and matched his finger ends reflectively. “William mentions a Mr. Harding as having accompanied him home in a carriage. Is he the man?”
Brant bowed.
“Then the boy must be very much mistaken in his estimate of Harding. He seems to think he is a gentleman.”
“I don’t doubt that in the least. Harding has probably been at some pains to make him think so. Just the same, you may believe me when I say that he is the worst possible companion for your son, or for any young man.”
“H’m; that is a little odd.” The judge was fairly surprised into saying so much, but since he did not go on, how was Brant to know that the odd thing was the exact coincidence of his opinion of Harding and Harding’s opinion of him as reported by William Langford? And not knowing this, he went on straightway to his own undoing.
“Odd that he should try to mislead your son? Knowing the man and his kind as well as I do, I should say that any other proceeding on his part would be odd. Harding is a professional gambler.”
The judge began to put two and two together.
“You say you know him well?”
“Yes; I have known him a long time, and I owe him an ill turn or so on my own account,” said Brant, whose throat still ached from the pressure of Harding’s fingers.
“Ah.” The judge’s mind began to lay hold of something like a sequence of threads in the mystery tangle. “Pardon me, Mr. Brant, if I am dull: but what possible use could a professional gambler make ofmy son? Surely William’s pocket money would be scarcely worth plotting for.”
“Certainly not. Harding would be much more likely to give him money than to take it from him. Here is the layout,” Brant went on, dropping unconsciously into the jargon of the craft in describing its processes; “Harding poses, let us say, as a gentleman of leisure. He lays siege to some tenderfoot with more money than brains, perhaps, but who isn’t altogether blind, and proposes a quiet game for amusement. If he worked it alone the rawest greenhorn of the lot might suspect a trap, but with your son as a third party the thing looks perfectly square. Don’t you see?”
The judge rose and walked slowly the length of the room with his hands behind him and his head bowed. When he looked up again the paternal anxiety in his face had given place to judicial severity.
“Yes, I see two things: One is, that you have a much worse opinion of my son than the facts, bad as they are, justify; and the other is, that you seem to have a—an unenviable familiarity with the methods you have been describing.”
Brant saw his error when it was too late, and tried to retrieve it.
“Don’t mistake me, Judge Langford. In such a case as I have been describing an inexperienced boy might well be an innocent accomplice—indeed, he would have to be to be of any use to his principal. And as to my knowledge, one learns much in the rough school of the frontier.”
The judge’s hand was on the doorknob.
“I can believe that; pardon me if I spoke hastily,” he said. “To be very frank with you, I am in deep trouble about William. If what you tell me about this man Harding be true, the boy is ruined.”
“Not necessarily,” Brant amended. “Harding hasleft the city; and if you can keep your son from forming another such intimacy——”
“How do you know Harding is gone?” interrupted the father.
“He went at my suggestion.”
“And was it also at your suggestion that the newspapers omitted my son’s name in reporting a certain wholesale arrest made by the police night before last?”
“It was.”
The judge smiled and shook his head.
“You seem to be all-powerful, Mr. Brant, but I dislike mysteries—even beneficent mysteries. In this matter, however, I am your debtor; let me know when I may square the account.” And before Brant could add another word in explanation or extenuation he was gone.