CHAPTER XVITHE GOODLY COMPANY OF MISERY
Havinggone so far astray on the Sunday, it was inevitable that Brant should awake repentant and remorseful on the Monday. He slept late, and when he had breakfasted like a monk and had gone downtown to face another day of enforced idleness in his office, conscience rose up and began to ply its many-thonged whip.
What a thrice-accursed fool he had made of himself, and how completely he had justified Mrs. Langford’s opinion of him! How infinitely unworthy the love of any good woman he was, and how painstakingly he had put his future beyond the hope of redemption! If Colonel Bowran would only come back and leave him free to go and bury himself in some unheard-of corner of the world! This was the burden of each fresh outburst of self-recrimination.
So much by way of remorse, but when he thought of Dorothy, something like a measure of dubious gratitude was mingled therewith—a certain thankfulness that the trial of his good resolutions had come before he had been given the possible chance of free speech with her—a chance which might have involved her happiness as well as his own peace of mind.
“Good Lord!” he groaned, flinging himself into a chair and tossing his half-burned cigar out of the window. “I ought to be glad that I found myself out beforeI had time to pull her into it. If they had let me go on, and she would have listened to me, I should have married her out of hand—married an angel, and I with a whole nest of devils asleep in me waiting only for a chance to come alive! God help me! I’m worse than I thought I was—infinitely worse.—Come in!” This last to some one at the door.
It was only the postman, and Brant took the letters eagerly, hoping to find one from Hobart. He was disappointed, but there was another note from the end-of-track on the Condorra Extension, setting forth that the chief engineer’s home-coming would be delayed yet other days.
Brant read the colonel’s scrawl, and what was left of his endurance took flight in an explosion of bad language. A minute later he burst into Antrim’s office.
“Where is Mr. Craig?” he demanded.
“He has gone to Ogden,” said Antrim, wondering what had happened to disturb the serenity of the self-contained draughtsman.
“The devil he has! When will he be back?”
“I don’t know—the last of the week, maybe.”
“Damn!”
Antrim laughed. “What ails you this morning? You look as if you’d had a bad night. Come inside and sit down—if you’re not too busy.”
Brant let himself in at the wicket in the counter-railing and drew up a chair.
“I am not busy enough—that is one of the miseries. And I want you to help me out, Harry. You have full swing here when the old man is away, haven’t you?”
“Why—yes, after a fashion. What has broke loose?”
Brant looked askance at the stenographer, and the chief clerk rightly interpreted the glance.
“O John,” he said, “I wish you would take theseletters down and put them on No. 3. Hand them to the baggageman yourself, and then you’ll be sure they have gone.” And when the door closed behind the young man he turned back to Brant. “Was that what you wanted?”
“Yes, but I don’t know as it was necessary. There is nothing particularly private about what I want to say. You see, it is this way: Colonel Bowran is out on the Extension, and Grotter is with him. I am alone here in the office, and I’ve got to leave town suddenly. What I want you to do is to put somebody in there to keep house till the colonel returns.”
The chief clerk smiled. “It must be something pretty serious to rattle you that way,” was his comment. “You are a good enough railroad man to know that my department has nothing to do with yours, except to ask questions of it. And that reminds me: here is a letter from the general manager asking if we have a late map of the Denver yards. The president is coming west in a day or two, and there is a plan on foot for extensions, I believe.”
“Well?” said Brant.
“It isn’t well—it’s ill. We haven’t any such map, and I don’t see but what you will have to stay and make one.”
Now, to a man in Brant’s peculiar frame of mind employment was only one degree less welcome than immediate release. Wherefore he caught at the suggestion so readily that Antrim was puzzled.
“I thought you had to go away, whether or no,” he said curiously.
“Oh, I suppose I can put it off if I have to,” Brant rejoined, trying to hedge.
“Which is another way of telling me to mind my own business,” retorted Antrim good-naturedly. “That’s all right; only, if you have struck a bone, youcan comfort yourself with the idea that you have plenty of good company. No one of us has a monopoly of all the trouble in the world.”
“No, I suppose not.” Brant said so much, and then got far enough away from his own trouble to notice that the chief clerk was looking haggard and seedy.
“You look as if you had been taking a turn at the windlass yourself, Harry. Have you?”
“Yes, something of that sort,” replied Antrim, but he turned quickly to the papers on his desk.
“Nothing that I can help you figure out, is it?”
“No,” said the chief clerk, so savagely that Brant smiled.
“Which the same is none ofmybusiness, and so we are quits,” he rejoined.
Antrim was much too good-hearted to let the matter rest there, and he made halting amends.
“I would give you a chance, Brant, quicker than I would anybody else I know; but it is no use. Every fellow has to take his own medicine.”
Brant nodded, and after a little Antrim went on as one who changes the subject.
“Been over to the Highlands lately?”
“No.”
“I thought you hadn’t. Dorothy was asking about you the last time I saw her.”
“When was that?” The question was so eager that Antrim, remembering his unjust suspicion of Isabel, had a pang of honest shame.
“Last Wednesday. She wanted to know if you had left town.”
Brant was plunged at once into a problem in which there were many more unknown quantities than integral facts. When he came to the surface it was to catch at a straw. Perhaps, after all, Dorothy was yet in happy ignorance of all the distressing things her mother couldtell her; in which case she had merely failed to see him when he had lifted his hat to her the day before. And, if that were true, his late excursion into the realm of things evil was nothing better than the sequence of a hideous mistake. The logic of the thing appalled him, and he made haste to go back to first principles, planting himself desperately upon the assertion that she must have seen him. Having done that, he was immediately swept adrift again by an overwhelming desire to know the truth of the matter beyond peradventure of doubt. A suggestion offered, and he pounced upon it. He would make an unconscious messenger of Antrim.
“When are you going over there again, Harry?” he asked, making the question as incurious as might be.
“I don’t know,” replied the chief clerk, burying his face in his desk.
“Well, when you do, if Miss Langford asks you any more questions about me, you may say that I haven’t been away, but that I am going before long.”
Antrim looked up with a puzzled frown.
“I don’t begin to know what you are driving at. Why don’t you go and tell her yourself; you know the way.”
It was Brant’s turn to prevaricate, and he did it so clumsily that Antrim stopped him in sheer pity.
“That will do,” he interrupted. “You are only getting tangled up in a lot of polite lies, and that doesn’t help matters. Besides, if it is a question of carrying messages to Hollywood, I can’t help you; I am out of the running myself—no, don’t ask any questions, please. I can’t talk about the thing, even to so good a friend as you are.”
At this conjuncture the stenographer came back, and Brant took up the general manager’s letter. “I’ll take this and make the map,” he said. “Does he want a tracing, or a blue print?”
“A tracing, I guess; they will want to make marks on it,” replied Antrim.
And Brant went back to his office and fell upon the task with such singleness of purpose that the day was gone before he realized it.
As he was leaving the office at six o’clock, a messenger boy met him at the door with a note. It was from the editor of the Plainsman, and it was both brief and noncommittal.
“If you have nothing better to do, come down to the office this evening,” it ran. “I have a promising little mystery in hand in which you may be interested.”
Brant went back to his desk and wrote a reply. He had meant to go on with his work during the evening, but the editor’s invitation came as a happy alternative. The making of a single map would not afford surcease from the devil of idleness for very long, and anything which promised to postpone the evil day of emptiness was to be accounted a blessing. Wherefore he accepted gladly, and, when the answer was written and despatched, went to supper with the comforting thought that the next few hours were safely provided for.