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Dorothy sat back in the great chair and thought it all out in the
turning of a leaf.
“Mr. Brant must be made to listen to reason,” she said decisively. “He
must let papa defend him; he must let papa use these papers; and
he must tell us all the things we don’t know.”
Antrim’s gesture was of despair. “Pity’s sake! that is just what we
have all been trying to get him to do for two whole weeks!”
“I can’t help it; that is what must be done.”
“And done it shall be, if you will only go a step farther and tell me
how we are to bring it about.”
“Can’t you persuade him?”
“Persuade nothing! Why, Dorothy, you haven’t an idea what a mule
the man is! Your father, and Forsyth, and Colonel Bowran, and I
have fairly worn ourselves out trying to make him open his head.
There isn’t a thing any of us could think of that hasn’t been tried; not
a— Yes, by Jove, there is one thing, too!”
An inspiration much too large to be readily clothed in words came to
Antrim, dazzling him with its invincible simplicity. Dorothy divined it
with quick intuition, and her heart sank within her at the bare
suggestion.
“What is it?” she asked faintly.
“Why, it is the simplest thing in the world! Brant won’t talk to any of
us, but if you will go to him——”
“O Harry—I can’t, I can’t!” she wailed.
But he would not be turned aside. “Yes, you can, Dorothy, and you
must. It is life and death with him now. Only this morning Forsyth told
me it was all up with him. Think of a man being hanged for a thing
that he didn’t do; think how awful it would be if you had to remember
that you might have done something to prevent it, and didn’t! Think
of—think of Isabel, Dorothy, and be a brave little sister of mercy, as
you have always been to every one in trouble.”
“Oh, don’t, don’t!” she pleaded pitifully. “Don’t say any more, Harry.
You haven’t any idea of what you are asking me to do, but I—I’ll go.
Can we do it now—right away—before I have to go home and face
them all again?”
Antrim made a quick dash for his hat and coat, and they were
halfway to the jail before she spoke again.
“Isn’t it a very dreadful thing for me to do?” she asked shamefacedly.
“Do—do ladies ever go to see the prisoners?—alone, I mean.”
“I don’t know; and you must not care, Dorothy—not for this once. I’ll
go as far as the corridor with you and wait till you come out. You
must just keep saying to yourself that it is life and death; and—and
Isabel’s happiness,” he added softly.
She caught the inspiration of his unselfishness, and answered it in
kind.
“You are very good and noble, Harry. I’ll remember; and I’ll try to do
my part—as you are doing yours. Is this the place? Oh, what a
terrible Castle of Despair!”
 CHAPTER XXXI
A FEAST OF MINGLED CUPS

Brant was lying down when he heard the heavy step of the turnkey
in the corridor; heard the heavy step and a lighter one, and the rustle
of a woman’s dress. He made sure it was another of the cut-flower
faddists who had lately been making his prison life a hot bath of
vicarious shame, and sprang up with a muttered malediction
comprehensive enough to include the entire procession of the
sentimentalists. A moment later the key grated in the lock, the bolts
clanked, and the door swung back. He stood transfixed for an
instant, hardly daring to believe his eyes. Then the clamour and
crash of the closing door brought him to his senses and he turned
away and hid his face.
Dorothy stood still, abashed at her own boldness and waiting timidly
for some sign of recognition. When it was overlong in coming she
plucked up courage and went to him.
“Haven’t you a word of welcome for me, Mr. Brant?” she asked softly.
“Don’t ask me. What can I say? Why did you come?”
“Because you made me,” she said simply. “You wouldn’t listen to any
of the others, you know; and—and—but you will listen to me. You
must.”
He turned to face her, and even in the dim half-light of the cell she
could see that he was nerving himself for a struggle.
“Please sit down,” he said, pointing to the single chair. “I think I know
what you have come to say, but it isn’t any use—indeed, it is not.”
She ignored the pointing and the invitation, and leaned against the
wall within arm’s reach of him.
“Please don’t say that—not to me. None of the others had my right. It
was I who sent you.”
He flinched at that and gave ground a little. “You have a good right,
Miss Langford, though it isn’t builded upon your little cry for help.
What would you have me do?”
“Whatever papa wants you to do,” she rejoined quickly, deeming it
best not to go too deeply into particulars.
“I am sorry to have to refuse you anything; but this that you ask is
altogether impossible.”
“Why is it impossible?”
“Because—God in heaven!—none of you know what you are
asking!”
“Then tell me, so I may know.”
“I can’t do that, either.”
“Won’t you tell me if I guess it?”
The pleading eyes unsteadied him, and he receded yet another step.
“Perhaps,” he said, hesitating.
“Are you afraid that if you defend yourself my brother will be in
danger?”
Is there something in the washing of tears that gives insight to
sympathetic eyes? She saw deep into him at that moment; saw that
to deny her accusation would be to lie; saw also that he could not
look into her eyes and find words to frame the falsehood. So she
was prepared for the evasion.
“And if that were true, what then?”
“You would be making a terrible and utterly useless mistake. Don’t
you know—haven’t they told you? It has been proved that my brother
could not have done it.”
He did not ask how it had been proved. It was enough that she
believed it, and it was the final drop of bitterness in the cup of
expiation that he had thought to drain bravely to the dregs. To her, as
to all others, save only Antrim, he was a murderer. It was more than
he could bear unmoved, and he turned from her lest she should see
the anguish in his face and be moved by it to say the thing which
was not true. When he did not reply she spoke again:
“That was the reason, wasn’t it?”
“It was—it is.” The words said themselves because there was no
strength left in him wherewith to hold them back.
She gave him no time to draw again the sheathed sword of denial. “I
was sure of it. But you won’t hesitate any longer now, will you?—not
after what I have told you.”
“Hesitate—to tell them I am guilty? No, I shall not hesitate; I’ll
confess to you—here—now, if you wish.” He faced her suddenly, but
again the tear-brightened eyes and their pleading unmanned him.
“No, I can’t say it to you,” he went on, softening and becoming as the
clay on the potter’s wheel in spite of himself. “In the eye of the law—
in the eyes of the whole world—I am a murderer, taken in the very
act. But I can not go to my death with the thought that the only
woman I have ever loved believes me guilty of such a cowardly
crime. I did not kill James Harding.”
Dorothy forgot her errand, forgot the papers, forgot everything in the
horror of a great doubt and the ecstasy of an unchartered joy still
greater than the doubt which suddenly threatened to suffocate her.
Nevertheless, a misunderstanding, rooted and grounded as hers
was, dies hard.
“You mean that I should—that you want me to—to tell my sister,” she
faltered; and she could no longer look him in the face.
“Your sister!” Brant fought a good fight for self-control and won it.
“No, Dorothy; it is not Isabel’s belief that troubles me; it is yours. How
could you have misunderstood?”
Dorothy felt her lips growing cold, and the solid floor of the cell
swayed under her feet until she clung to the wall for support.
“How could I? But she told me—” She broke off in pitiable confusion,
and Brant gave her the helping hand of a question:
“What was it she told you? I have given you the right to say anything
you please to me now.”
She saw instantly that she must go on or leave Isabel under an
imputation too dreadful to be contemplated. “She told me that—that
she sent you away.”
“Sent me away? But she didn’t send me away; that couldn’t be, you
know. It is all a mistake, Dorothy—an awful mistake. It was not I
whom she sent away; it was Harry.”
“Harry!” said Dorothy faintly. “Oh, dear, what have I done? Tell me
one thing, please. Whom did you meet the last evening you came to
see us?”
It was Brant’s turn to be confused and tongue-tied, and he answered
her with his eyes on the floor.
“I met—your mother. I went over that evening to tell you that—I—
loved you, my darling; to tell you what I had been, and what I hoped
to be, and to ask you to wait until I could make my promises good.
Your mother met me, and— But no matter about that. It was she who
sent me away—for good reasons, you will say now. None the less,
bad as I am, and good as you are, I love you—you and no other, my
dear one; how truly and passionately you may know some day.”
“Some day!” She knew at that sublime moment, and the keen joy of
the knowledge made her lose sight of everything save the heart-
quelling fact. “Thank God, I know it now!—know that you are here in
prison because you thought it was the only way to save my brother.
Oh, how could I——”
“Be so faithless,” she would have said; but he caught her in his arms
and his kisses put the remorseful exclamation to death.
“Say but two words, my darling,” he whispered. “Tell me that you love
me, and that you believe me innocent of this last horrible thing, and I
shall die happier than most men live.”
But, after all, he had to take the first of the two words for granted. His
saying that he should die happy brought her back to the peril of the
moment.
“Oh, please don’t say that! I know you are innocent; but so is
brother!”
He shook his head gravely and drew her closer. “I wish I could
believe that, but I can’t, Dorothy, dear,” he said sorrowfully. “I should
not have been weak enough to betray him, even to you; but now you
must keep my secret and help me to save him. Try to think of it as I
have. You remember what the Man of Nazareth said: ‘They that take
the sword shall perish with the sword.’ I have lived a life of violence,
and it is only just that I should pay the penalty.”
But her sense of right and wrong was keener and truer than his. “No,
you must not say that. Two wrongs never make a right. Can’t you
see that your blood will be upon the head of the judge and the jury,
and every one who has anything to do with punishing you for a crime
you did not commit? Oh, you mustn’t, you must not!”
“I have thought of all that, dear,” he said, “and at times it has shaken
me. But there is no other way. It is my life or your brother’s. He is
young; the lesson will be a terrible one, and he may live to profit by
it.”
His words carried such deep conviction of William’s guilt that she
gasped and gave a little cry of anguish.
“Oh, are you sure? Did you see him do it?”
“No, dear; it was done in the moment of darkness. But when they
turned the lights on from without he had the pistol in his hand, and I
saw him throw it upon the floor. Will you tell me why they say he
couldn’t have done it?”
“I don’t know well enough to make it clear; but Harry and one of Mr.
Forsyth’s young men made some measurements, and they both say
that the shot couldn’t have been fired from where Will was sitting;
that it must have been fired from the direction of the door.”
“From the door?” A great desire to live and love and be loved came
quickly to Brant, and he made haste to put it away before it should
possess him. “I wish I had known that sooner, but it is too late now. I
wasn’t near the door; I was trying to get between them when the shot
was fired.”
“It must not be too late!” cried Dorothy eagerly. “Oh, why didn’t they
tell you? Why——”
She broke off abruptly and struggled out of his arms at the sound of
a footstep in the corridor. It was the turnkey coming to release her,
and there was time for no more than a breathless question.
“May I tell—” she began; and he bent over her till his lips touched her
forehead.
“I am yours in life or in death,” he said gently. “Do with me what
seems best to you, my darling.”
A moment later she had rejoined Antrim in the corridor, but neither
spoke until they were out of the building. It was in the half-light
between day and dusk when they reached the street, and the chief
clerk curbed his impatience until they were hurrying to catch the
North Denver car. Then it slipped the leash.
“What luck?” he demanded, as they threaded the crowded sidewalk
in Larimer Street. “Did you find out anything? Would he talk to you?”
Dorothy blushed hotly and drew down her veil.
“Ye-yes, he talked very freely, and I found out a great many things.
Wait till we get out of the crowd and I will tell you.”
They missed the car, as a matter of course, and had to wait on the
street corner. Whereupon Antrim drew his companion into a
sheltered doorway and refused to be kept longer in ignorance and
suspense.
“For pity’s sake, tell me, Dorothy, what did he say? I’m on tenter-
hooks, and it seemed as if you would never come out.”
“He didn’t do it, Harry. He is innocent,” she began triumphantly, and
Antrim could see her eyes shining behind the veil.
“I have known that all along,” he interrupted impatiently. “What then?
What about the papers?”
“Oh, dear, I forgot all about them! I can’t talk about it, Harry; not here
in the street. But there is one thing I must tell you”—the hot blush
came again and its attendant emotion threatened to stop her, but she
went on bravely—“it is about—Mr. Brant and—and Isabel. I was just
dreadfully, horridly, stupidly mistaken. Isabel meant—that is, it’s not
Mr. Brant; it is somebody else. There is nothing at all between them,
and there never has been. I——”
Antrim waited to hear no more. There was an idle carriage standing
at the curb, and before she knew what he meant to do he had put
her into it, slammed the door, and swung himself up to a seat beside
the driver.
“To Judge Langford’s house, over in the Highlands. I’ll show you the
way if you don’t know it,” he said briefly; and then, “The quicker you
make it the more money you’ll earn.”
In an incredibly short time he was helping Dorothy out at the
Hollywood gate. “Fix it some way so that I can have ten minutes
alone with Isabel,” he begged as they hurried up the walk, “and then
I’ll be ready to hear all about Brant. You will do that much for me,
won’t you, Dorothy?”
Fortunately, it needed not to be arranged. Isabel met them in the
hall, and Dorothy had but to dart quickly into the library and so leave
them alone together. Two weeks of utter neglect had humbled Isabel
rather more than she would admit even to herself, but they had also
made her affectionately vindictive. Hence she gave him no more
than a cool little “Good evening, Harry. Won’t you come in?”
“I am in; and I’ll stay to dinner if you will ask me,” he retorted
promptly, penning her into the corner between the door and the
stairfoot. “But first I want to say something that I am going to repeat
every time we meet, regardless of time, place, or present company. I
love you, Isabel, I have always loved you, and I am always going to.”
“Indeed!” said Isabel with sweet sarcasm.
“Yes, in deed, and in thought, and in word. More than that, I know
now that you love me—oh, don’t take the trouble to deny it; it’s
wrong to tell fibs. You told Dorothy you did, and she gave it away
without meaning to. So you see it is no use, and you may as well
give me that kiss I asked for the last time you told me the biggest fib
of all the——”
“Not now—or ever!” she retorted, slipping under his arm and darting
down the hall to the drawing-room door. He caught at her as she
eluded him, and then ran after her. She paused with her hand on the
doorknob.
“Keep your distance, or I vanish!” she threatened. “Stand right there
where you are and tell me why you went off in a dudgeon that night;
and why you froze me out two weeks ago; and why you haven’t been
back since; and why——”
But the catechism was never finished. With a most lamentable want
of vigilance she took her hand from the doorknob, and Antrim— But
sufficient unto the day of youth are the small triumphs thereof.
Twenty minutes later Kate Hobart, coming down to dinner, stumbled
over two young persons sitting on the lowest step of the stair. She
recognised them even in the darkness, and being but a Sabbath-
day’s journey beyond her own love affair, understood at once why
the hall was not yet lighted.
Antrim sprang quickly to his feet and made the explanation which
does not explain; and Kate benevolently helped him out by asking if
there were anything new in Brant’s affair.
“No—yes, there is, too, by Jove! And we have been sitting here
talking—that is, ah—er——”
“Spooning, Harry, dear,” cut in Isabel with refreshing frankness; “tell
the truth and shame——”
But he went on without a break—“while Dorothy is waiting to tell us
about Brant. Let’s go in and hear her story.”
Isabel tapped at the library door, and they all saw within when the
judge opened to her. Dorothy was sitting on the lounge, her hat and
gloves still on, her face pale and tear-stained. The judge waved them
back.
“In a moment,” he said; and then he crossed the room to bend over
the still little figure on the lounge and to whisper a word of
encouragement.
“It is hard to win and lose in the same moment, but you must be
brave, my child—for your own sake and mine. I shall keep your
secret; your mother mustn’t suspect—now or ever.”
She nodded, and the tears came afresh.
“Go you up to your room,” he added, seeing that there was no
present balm for the hurt. “I’ll make your excuses at the table.”
Then he joined the trio in the hall. “Dorothy brought astounding
news,” he explained, leading the way to the dining room, “but it
comes too late. From what she tells me there seems to be a
reasonable doubt of the young man’s guilt; but there is nothing that
can be used in evidence, and his conviction is none the less certain.”
There was manifestly nothing to be said, and a sympathetic silence
followed the announcement. While they were taking their places at
table the telephone rang, and the judge excused himself to answer it.
“Don’t wait on me,” he said. “Harry, lad, take my place and carve, will
you?” and he went out and carefully closed the door behind him. And
inasmuch as the hall was not yet lighted, he failed to see a shadowy
little figure on the stair. It was Dorothy, and she paused and leaned
over the balustrade when her father answered the call.
 CHAPTER XXXII
SUCH FRIENDS ARE EXULTATION’S AGONY

“Arrah, now, Misther Jarvis, ’tis no use your flatthering me the like
of that. Fwhat I know, I know; and that I’ll keep to myself. Besides,
wasn’t it Misther Brant himself, poor dear! that says, says he, ‘Mum’s
the wurrud, Mary, me jool; sure ’tis but a b’y’s thrick, and I’ll not be
having it talked about at all at all.’”
“Yes; but that was before it all came out in the newspapers,” Jarvis
cut in glibly. “He doesn’t mind your talking about it now; in fact, he
told me to ask you.”
For something better than a week the reporter had been assiduously
cultivating Mrs. Seeley’s housemaid, and one of the results of the
intimacy was a second visit to Brant’s room, made in the landlady’s
absence and connived at and arranged by Mary McCarthy. Jarvis
hoped little from a second inspection of the room, and not much from
anything the housemaid could tell. Yet he lied brazenly to make her
talk, and the lie accomplished that whereunto it was sent.
“Ah, then, did he tell you that, poor man?” said the unsuspecting
Mary.
“He did, for a fact; couldn’t come himself, you know, poor fellow!”
rejoined the reporter, clinching the falsehood promptly. “Now show
me just what you did and tell me what you saw.”
Thus absolved and adjured, Mary McCarthy went circumstantially
over the account of her discovery of the burglar, Jarvis absorbing the
story as it was told, and leaving the journalistic compartment of his
brain to sift the salient facts from the mass of embellishment and
exaggeration.
“Black clothes, you say?” he interrupted, when the housemaid came
to the describing of the intruder.
“Black as Father Callahan’s cassock.”
“Then he didn’t look like a tramp or a tough?”
“On’y for the oogly face av him I might have mistook him for Misther
Brant himself.”
Jarvis strolled to the window and stood with his hands deep in his
pockets, looking out upon the tin roof of the porch.
“Dang the thing!” he muttered. “It gets blinder with every move. Now,
who the mischief is this gentleman burglar whom Brant wants to
screen, and what was he here for? By Jove! I wonder if it was young
Langford? He always wears gamblers’ mourning. But what the
dickens was he trying to steal?”
He turned away from the window and made another slow circuit of
the room in the vague hope that he might stumble upon some
overlooked clew to the puzzle. There was none, and he was about to
give it up when he came to the closet at the foot of the bed.
“Does this door open into the next room?” he asked.
“No, sure; ’tis on’y the closet where Misther Brant does be keeping
his clothes.”
Jarvis turned the knob and glanced at the garments hanging in an
orderly row at the back of the shallow recess. “These are all Brant’s,
I suppose,” he said carelessly.
“’Deed and they are, then. Whose else would they be?”
“Are these all he has?”
Mary McCarthy picked a fancied suspicion out of the meaningless
question and promptly resented it.
“D’ye think annybody would be shtealing them?” she demanded. “Av
coorse they are all there, barring fwhat Misther Antrim and the b’y
tuk to him at the jail.”
“Boy? What boy was this?”
“’Deed, then, I don’t know; some little scaramouch from the sthreets,
I’m thinking. But he did be bringing a letther from Misther Brant; ’tis
there on the table.”
Jarvis sauntered across the room and took a dirty scrap of paper
from beneath a paperweight on the small writing table. It was a
misspelled pencil scrawl, signed with Brant’s name, but he did not
have to look twice to decide that it was the clumsiest of forgeries,
written evidently by some one who had never so much as seen
Brant’s handwriting.
“Mary, dear,” he said feelingly, “you are a pearl of price, and the mate
to you has never been found.”
“Be off wid you wid your flatthering tongue!”
“It’s not flattery—never a word of it. Did Mrs. Seeley see this letter?”
“Sure, she did that same. ’Twas to her that the b’y did be giving it.”
“And she gave the boy the suit of clothes it calls for?”
“Av coorse she did. And ’tis myself as was wondering fwhat Misther
Brant would be wanting wid them ould rags.”
“From all our friends—so they be women—good Lord deliver us!”
said Jarvis under his breath; then aloud: “That was quite right, of
course. Did you happen to see the clothes yourself, Mary?”
“I did that; an ould dirty suit of pepper-and-salt it was, the likes of
fwhat Misther Brant never did be wearing in the whole swate life av
him.”
“Exactly.”
Jarvis slipped the note into his pocket and got away as quickly as he
could. It was but the slenderest thread of a clew, but it spanned one
of the many gaps he had been vainly trying for a fortnight to bridge.
At the very beginning of his investigation the reporter had stumbled
upon Harding’s disguise—the wig and the false beard—in the West
Denver Gasthaus; and a painstaking inquiry into the habits of the
red-haired and fiery-bearded lodger had developed the fact that he
was seen often in company with another man whose description
Jarvis had gathered from many sources, but whom he was as yet
unable to identify.
So far as could be ascertained, the unidentified one had disappeared
on the night of the tragedy. He had been seen alone at Draco’s in the
earlier hours of that night, and he had not been seen by any of
Jarvis’s informants since that time. Apart from the overheard
conference in Heddrigg’s restaurant—a conference in which Jarvis
had long since recognised Harding in his character of red-beard and
the unknown man as the two participants—there was nothing to
remotely connect the unidentified man with Brant’s affair; nothing,
unless the forged letter to Mrs. Seeley might be taken as a
connecting link. But just here the reporter’s incomplete knowledge of
the facts hampered him. He knew nothing of the papers at which the
burglary pointed, and could only guess from the overheard
conversation in Heddrigg’s restaurant that the burglar was an
emissary of Harding’s. At the finding of the forged letter he had
jumped to the conclusion that the house-breaker and Harding’s
unknown companion were one and the same person; but cooler
after-thought brought doubt, and a leaning toward the William
Langford hypothesis.
“I am afraid it was the young fellow, after all,” he said at the summing
up. “That guess fits the other guesses a little more as if it belonged.
Nobody but a fool of a boy would do such a thing and get stone blind
in the middle of it; and there is nobody else in the whole shooting
match that Brant would go out of his way to shield. As for the clothes
and the letter, they don’t count very hard. Even as big a fool as the
boy would have sense enough not to wear his everyday clothes
while he burgled a house.”
So Jarvis concluded; and he did not change his mind when, later in
the day, in another talk with Deverney, he learned that Harding’s
unknown companion had always appeared in dingy “pepper-and-
salt.” That was a mere coincidence, he argued; and the pattern was
certainly common enough to warrant the supposition.
It was in the evening of this same day that the reporter asked his
chief to procure him an order to visit the prisoner, or, rather, asked if
such an order could be procured.
“I don’t know,” said the night editor. “It’s after hours. But we can try.
What have you stumbled upon—anything new?”
“Nothing much. Write me the request for an order, and I’ll tell you
about it when I come back. I have an idea.”
The request was written and Jarvis forthfared to the jail. His idea was
but the piecing together of some irrelevant facts. He had learned
from his chief that Brant had at one time taken a pistol from Harding,
and from the editor’s description the weapon was a facsimile of the
one found on the floor of the card room after the murder. Out of this
the reporter built a new theory, and an interview with Brant was
needed to confirm or disprove it.
 CHAPTER XXXIII
TE MORITURI SALUTAMUS

If it was late in the day when Jarvis left the Plainsman building
armed with his chief’s request for an order to visit the prisoner in the
jail, it was still later when the formalities were finally appeased and
he gained access to the inner fastnesses of the city’s house of
detention and to Brant’s cell.
Having but now parted from Dorothy, Brant was in the seventh
heaven of love’s aftermath when the cell door opened to admit the
reporter; and since love breaks ground for far-reaching kindliness,
the news-gatherer’s welcome was all that could be desired.
“I wonder if any unlucky dog of them all ever had better friends or
more of them than I have, Jarvis? The way you all stand by me
would warm the cockles of a worse heart than mine ever was.” Thus
the prisoner of good hope, love-tempered; and Jarvis laughed.
“You don’t deserve to have any friends. May I sit on your bed?
Thanks. A fellow that loses the combination on his tongue the way
you have ought to be hanged on general principles. But you’ve got to
talk to me, or thrash me, one of the two.”
“I’ll do both, if you insist,” said Brant with cheerful levity. “Which will
you have first?”
“The answers to two or three questions first, and then, if there is any
fight left in you, we’ll see about the thrashing.”
“Go ahead. What is it you want to know?” said the aforetime
bondsman of reticence.
“A lot of things that you can’t tell me, and some few that you can. Did
you at one time have a gun—a Colt’s forty-five—that had once
belonged to Harding?”
Brant lost levity and freedom of speech in the dropping of an eyelid,
but he could not in common fairness refuse to answer.
“I did.”
“Did you have this admirable weapon about you on the night of the
shooting?”
“No.”
“Where was it at that time?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think I do know,” said the cross-examiner placidly. “You had lost it,
hadn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Now I am going to hazard a guess—dang the thing! it’s
all guesses, so far—and I shall know if I’ve hit it whether you admit it
or not. You left that gun in your room the night of the burglary, and
you haven’t seen it since.”
Brant did not attempt to deny it. “That is also true,” he admitted.
“So far, so good. Now, do you know who it was who broke into your
room, and slept in your bed, and stole your artillery?”
“I think I do, but I don’t care to discuss that point with you.”
“You needn’t, if you don’t want to. But it will be discussed in open
court next week.”
Brant’s start was not lost upon the young man, who had apparently
missed his vocation in electing to be a journalist rather than a
detective.
“Why should it come up at the trial?” Brant demanded.
“Because it is going to have a very considerable bearing on the
case,” said Jarvis coolly. “The man who took the pistol from your
room gave it back to Harding.”
“How do you know he did?”
Jarvis leered. “He did, or he didn’t; one of the two. I believe he
didn’t.”
“More theories,” said Brant, not without sarcasm. “What difference
does it make?”
“It makes all the difference in the world when you come to tie it to the
fact that Harding was killed with that same weapon.”
This time Brant’s start was visible to the naked eye of the least
critical observer, but his rejoinder was well measured and calm:
“What is your theory? Set it in words.”
Jarvis settled himself on the cot, nursing one knee in his clasped
hands and chewing an extinct cigar. “It’s as simple as twice two. You
heard young Langford’s testimony at the preliminary examination?”
“Naturally, being within a few feet of him when he gave it.”
“Very good. You were in that card room at the Osirian and saw what
he saw. Did he tell the truth?”
Brant was silent.
“You know he didn’t tell the truth; or, at least, he didn’t tell all of it,”
Jarvis went on. “He said that Harding drew a pistol on him, but he did
not say that he had already drawn his own. Also, he left the
inference wide open that the big pistol on the table, the pistol from
which the shot was fired, was Harding’s—that Harding had laid it
there. That wasn’t so.”
Brant sprang to his feet in a frenzy of impatience. “For God’s sake,
have done with this beating about the bush and tell me what you
know or what you suspect!”
Jarvis complied in set phrase. “This: Young Langford was the man
who broke into your room. He was the man who took the pistol, who
carried it all the next day, who drew it upon Harding, who—” He
broke off abruptly, leaving the categorical accusation unfinished.
“You know what happened just as well as I do. It was that young cub
who did the shooting, and you are here because—well, I know the
why and wherefore of that, too, but we needn’t go into it. You’ve
been all sorts of a Don Quixote, and I believe you’d keep it up to the
finish, if you had your way. But it won’t go, George.”
Brant said nothing. He was leaning against the wall, just where
Dorothy had stood a little while before, and there was a far-away
look in his eyes—the look that comes into the eyes of a soldier when
duty calls and death beckons. But Jarvis was not skilled in reading
face signs, and he went on, secure in the worldly wisdom of his own
point of view.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t a fine thing. If you had lived two or three
centuries ago they would have drawn and quartered you first and
made a demigod of you afterward. But it won’t go now. When people
find out, half of them will laugh at you, and the other half will say you
ought to be sent to a lunatic asylum. If you could have carried it
through——”
Brant came out of his reverie and sat down on the cot beside the
exponent of worldly wisdom.
“You say, if I could have carried it through,” he broke in. “But now?”
“Now there is nothing to do but to switch over and pull in harness
with common sense. It will all come out at the trial—it’s bound to.
The judge is making believe that he is going to be your counsel,
whether or no; but you know you are not going to allow it, and the
upshot of that will be that the court will appoint somebody else to
defend you, and it is ten to one that it will be some keen young fellow
with nothing to lose and everything to gain. There are a dozen young
lawyers keeping up with the case, and any one of them will snap at
the chance. And you know as well as I do what will happen if any
lawyer in the wide world, save and excepting his own father, gets a
chance to cross-examine Will Langford.”
Brant nodded, as one who may not controvert a self-evident fact. But
what he said brought the reporter’s card house of hypotheses
tumbling in ruins.
“You have made your case, Jarvis, and summed it up, but there is
one small flaw in it. You are taking it for granted that young Langford