Appletons’
Town and Country Library
No. 291

A PRIVATE CHIVALRY

PRIVATE CHIVALRY

A NOVEL

BY
FRANCIS LYNDE
AUTHOR OF A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT,
THE HELPERS, ETC.

Acts more dangerous, but less famous
because they were but private chivalries.
Sir Philip Sidney

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1900

Copyright, 1900,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

A PRIVATE CHIVALRY

CHAPTER I
THE WOMAN ... WHOSE HANDS ARE AS BANDS

The lights of Silverette were beginning to prick the dusk in the valley, and the clanging of a piano, diminished to a harmonious tinkling, floated up the mountain on the still air of the evening. At the Jessica workings, a thousand feet above the valley, even the clangour of a tuneless piano had its compensations; and to one of the two men sitting on the puncheon-floored porch of the assayer’s cabin the minimized tinkling was remindful of care-free student ramblings in the land of the zither. But the other had no such pleasant memories, and he rose and relighted his cigar.

“That is my cue, Ned. I must go down and do that whereunto I have set my hand.”

“‘Must,’ you say; that implies necessity. I don’t see it.”

“I couldn’t expect you to see or to understand the necessity; but it is there, all the same.”

The objector was silent while one might count ten, but the silence was not of convincement. It was rather a lack of strong words to add to those which had gone before. And when he began again it was only to clinch insistence with iteration.

“I say I don’t see it. There is no necessity greater than a man’s will; and when you try to make me believe that the honour man of my class is constrained to come down to dealing faro in a mining camp——”

“I know, Ned; but you don’t understand. You saw the fair beginning ten years ago, and now you are getting a glimpse of the ending. To you, I suppose, it seems like Lucifer’s fall—a drop from heaven to hell; and so it is in effect. But, as a matter of fact, a man doesn’t fall; he climbs down into the pit a step at a time—and there are more steps behind me than I can ever retrace.”

“But you can’t go on indefinitely,” insisted the other.

The fallen one shook his head. “That is a true word. But there is only one adequate ending to such a fiasco of a life as mine.”

“And that?”

“Is a forty-five calibre bullet, well aimed.”

“Bah! That is a coward’s alternative, and if you haven’t altogether parted company with the George Brant I used to know, we needn’t consider it. Why don’t you turn over a clean leaf and cut the whole despicable business?”

Brant sat down on the porch step and clasped his hands over his knee. Friendship has its key wherewith to unlock any door of confidence, but from disuse the lock was rusted and it yielded reluctantly.

“I have half a mind to let the game wait while I tell you,” he said at length. “It isn’t a pleasant tale, and if you are disgusted you can call me down.”

“Never mind about that; go on.”

“I’ll have to go back a bit first—back to the old college days. Do you remember the old woman who lived on the flat below the campus? the one who used to smuggle liquor and other contraband into the dormitories when she came to scrub?”

“Mother Harding? Yes.”

“Well, you don’t remember any good of her, I fancy—or of her daughter. But let that pass. The year after you went to Heidelberg the girl blossomed out into a woman between two days, and went wrong the day after, as the daughter of such a mother was bound to. I got it into my callow brain that I was responsible. I know better now; I ought to have known better then; but—well, to shorten a long story, she has managed to spoil my life for me, root and branch.”

The assayer got upon his feet and swore out of a full heart.

“Good God, Brant! You don’t mean to say that you married that brazen——”

But Brant stopped him with a quick gesture. “Don’t call her hard names, Ned; I shot a man once for doing that. No, I didn’t marry her; I did a worse thing. Now you know why I can’t turn the clean leaf. Let the blame lie where it will—and it is pretty evenly divided between us now—I’m not cur enough to turn my back on her at this stage of the game.”

Hobart tramped up and down the slab-floored porch, four strides and a turn, for two full minutes before he could frame the final question.

“Where is she now, George?”

Brant’s laugh was of hardihood. “Do you hear that piano going down there in Dick Gaynard’s dance hall? She is playing it.”

“Heavens and earth! Then she is here—in Silverette?”

“Certainly. Where else would she be?”

Hobart stopped short and flung the stump of his cigar far out down the slope.

“Brant,” he said solemnly, “I thank God your mother is dead.”

“Amen,” said Brant softly.

There was another pause, and then Hobart spoke again. “There was a brother, George; what became of him?”

“He went to the bad, too—the worst kind of bad. He laid hold of the situation in the earliest stages, and bled me like a leech year in and year out, until one day I got him at a disadvantage and choked him off.”

“How did you manage it?”

“It was easy enough. He is an outlaw of the camps, and he has killed his man now and then when it seemed perfectly safe to do so. But the last time he slipped a cog in the safety wheel, and I took the trouble to get the evidence in shape to hang him. He knows I have it, and he’d sell his soul, if he had one, to get his fingers on the documents. In the meantime he lets me alone.”

“He will murder you some day for safety’s sake,” Hobart suggested.

“No, he won’t. I have made him believe that his life hangs on mine; that when I die the dogs of the law will be let loose.”

“Oh!” The assayer made another turn or two and then came to sit on the step beside his guest. “One more question, George, and then I’ll let up on you,” he said. “Do you love the woman?”

Brant shook his head slowly. “No, Ned; I never did; at least, not in the way you mean. And for years now it has been a matter of simple justice. She was bad enough in the beginning, but she is worse now, and that is my doing. I can’t leave her to go down into the hotter parts of the pit alone.”

For a few other minutes neither of them spoke; then Brant rose and girded himself for the tramp down the mountain.

“I must be going,” he said. “I’m glad to have had an hour with you; it has given me a glimpse of the old life that is like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. And I want to see more of you, if you will let me.”

“It will be your own fault if you don’t. Have you got to go now?”

“Yes. There is a tough crowd up from Carbonado, and Gaynard will have his hands full to-night.”

“Wait a minute till I get my overcoat, and I’ll go with you.”

Brant waited, but when Hobart reappeared he made difficulties.

“You’d better stay where you are, Ned. It’s likely there will be trouble and a free fight; and you are new to the place.”

“New to Silverette, but not to mining camps and rough crowds,” Hobart amended.

Brant still hesitated. “I know, but there is always the risk—the bystander’s risk, which is usually bigger than that of the fellow with his gun out. Besides, you have a wife——”

Hobart pushed him into the downward path.

“You don’t know Kate,” he objected. “She would drive me to it if she were here and knew the circumstances. She knows the camps better than either of us.”

Fifteen minutes later they entered Dick Gaynard’s dance hall together, and the assayer loitered in the barroom while Brant edged his way back to the alcove in the rear, where stood the faro table. Presently Hobart saw the dealer rise and give his chair to Brant; then the loiterer felt free to look about him.

There was nothing new or redeeming in the scene. There was the typical perspiring crowd of rough men and tawdry women surging to and fro, pounding the dusty floor to the time beaten out of the discordant piano; the same flaring oil lamps and murky atmosphere thick with tobacco smoke and reeking with the fumes of alcohol; the same silent groups ringing the roulette boards and the faro table. Hobart looked on, and was conscious of a little shiver of disgust—a vicarious thrill of shame for all concerned, but chiefly for his friend. And Brant had come to this for his daily bread! Brant, the honour man, the athlete, the well-beloved of all who knew him!

Hobart let himself drift with the ebb and flow of those who, like himself, were as yet only onlookers, coming to anchor when he had found a vantage point from which he could see and study the face of the fallen one. For all the hardening years it was not yet an evil face. The cheeks of the man were thinner and browner than those of the boy, and the heavy mustache hid the mouth, the feature which changes most with the changing years; but the resolute jaw was the same, and the steady gray eyes, though these had caught the gambler’s trick of looking out through half-closed lids when they saw most. On the whole the promise of youth had been kept. The handsome boy had come to be a man good to look upon; a man upon whom any woman might look once, and turning, look again. The assayer was not given to profanity, but he swore softly in an upflash of angry grief at the thought that the passing years had marred Brant’s soul rather than his body.

None the less, it was shipwreck, hopeless and unrelieved, as Brant had asserted; and from contemplating the effect of it in the man, Hobart was moved to look upon the cause of it in the woman. Perhaps there was that in her which might make the descent into the pit less unaccountable. Hobart would see.

He worked his way slowly around two sides of the crowded room, and so came to the piano. One glance at the performer was enough. It revealed a woman who had once been beautiful, as the sons of God once found the daughters of men; nay, the wreck of her was still beautiful, but it was the soulless beauty whose appeal is to that which is least worthy in any man. Hobart saw and understood. There be drunkards a-many who look not upon the wine when it is red in the cup; and Brant was of these—an inebriate of passion. The assayer turned his back upon the woman that he might the better make excuses for his friend.

Gaynard’s bar did a thriving business that night, and the throng in the gambling alcove thinned out early. The dance hall was the greater attraction, and here the din and clamour grew apace until the raucous voice of the caller shouting the figures of the dance could no longer be heard above the clanging of the piano, the yells and catcalls, and the shuffling and pounding of feet on the floor. Hilarity was as yet the keynote of all the uproar, but Hobart knew that the ceaseless activity of the bartenders must shortly change the pitch to the key quarrelsome, and he began to wish himself well out of it.

Brant glanced up from time to time, always without pause in the monotonous running of the cards, and when he finally succeeded in catching Hobart’s eye he beckoned with a nod. The assayer made his way around to the dealer’s chair, and Brant spoke without looking up:

“Get out of here, Ned, while you can. There will be the devil to pay before midnight, and there is no earthly use in your being mixed up in it.”

Hobart leaned over the table and placed a coin on one of the inlaid cards to keep up appearances.

“I’m here with you, and I mean to stay,” he insisted. “You may need— By Jove! it’s begun.”

The dance stopped and the clamour sank into a hush, which was sharply rent by a blast of profanity, a jangling crash of the piano keys, and a woman’s scream. Then the two fought their way into the thick of the crowd around the piano. A drunken ruffian was grasping the woman’s arm and brandishing a revolver over her head.

“You won’t play it, won’t ye? And ye’ll give Ike Gasset a piece of yer lip? By God, I’ll show ye!”

Brant’s pistol was out before he spoke. “Drop it right where you are, and get out of here before I kill you,” he said quietly.

The man’s reply was a snap shot in Brant’s face, and, though his aim was bad, both Hobart and Brant felt the wind of the bullet passing between them. The crack of the pistol was the signal for a scene a description of which no man has ever yet been able to set down calmly in black on white. Shouts, oaths, a mad rush for the open air foiled by a fiercer closing in of the crowd around the piano; all this while the ruffian levelled his weapon and fired again. At the death-speeding instant the woman started to her feet, and the bullet intended for Brant struck her fairly in the breast. Hobart heard the sharp snap of the steel corset stay, and saw Brant, catching her as she reeled, fire once, twice, thrice at the desperado. Then the assayer lifted up his voice in a shout that dominated the tumult:

“Silverettes! Out with them—they’ve killed a woman!”

There was a fierce affray, a surging charge, and when the place was cleared Hobart ran back. Brant was on his knees beside the woman. The smoking oil lamps burned yellow in the powder reek, but there was light enough to show that she was past help. None the less, Hobart offered to go for a doctor.

Brant shook his head and rose stiffly.

“She doesn’t need one; she is dead.”

Hobart grasped the situation with far-seeing prescience.

“Then you have nothing to stay here for; let us get out while we can.” The din of the street battle rang clamorous at the front, and he took Brant’s arm to lead him to the door, which opened upon the alley in the rear. “Come on,” he urged; “they will be back here presently, and you have nothing to fight for now.”

“No.” Brant yielded as one in a trance, but at the door he broke away, to dart back with the gray eyes aflame and fierce wrath crying for vengeance. Unnoted of all, the wounded desperado had lain where Brant’s fusillade had dropped him. But now he was on hands and knees, trying to drag himself out of the room. Brant was quick, but the assayer pinioned him before the ready weapon could flash from its holster.

“Good God, man, that would be murder!” he panted, wrestling with the avenger of blood, and possessing himself of the pistol. “Come on out of this!”

Again Brant yielded, and they made their way to the open air, and through the alleyway to the mountain path, and so in silence up to the Jessica and to the assayer’s cabin. Not until they were safe within the four log walls did Hobart open his mouth. But when he had struck a light and hung a blanket over the window which looked valleyward he spoke tersely and to the point:

“A few hours ago, George, you told me why you couldn’t turn your back on your shame, and I had nothing to say. But now the reason is removed, and you have had an object lesson which ought to last you as long as you live. What do you say?”

Brant spread his hands as one helpless. “What else am I good for?” he asked.

“That question is unworthy of you, and you know it. You have your profession; but without that you could still do as well as another.”

Brant was still afoot, and he fought his battle to a finish, pacing slowly back and forth with his hands behind him and his head bowed. For all his square jaw and steadfast eyes, rash impulse had been the bane of his life thus far, and the knowledge of it made him slow to decide even when the decision leaned toward the things which make for righteousness. So he fought the battle to its conclusion, and when it was ended was fain to sit down awearied with the stress of it.

“I am not in love with the degradation of it; I think you must know that, Ned. All these years I’ve had a yearning for decency and clean living and respectability that I could not strangle, do what I would. So you will understand that I am not halting between two opinions. It is simply this: Can a man turn over a new leaf and bury such a past as mine without being beset by a constant fear of its resurrection? Won’t it come up and slap him in the face about the time he thinks he has it decently buried and covered up and out of sight?”

Hobart’s rejoinder was prompt and definitive. “No. The world is wide, and a few years of one man’s life are no more than so many texts written in the sand.”

“You’re wrong there, Ned. The world is fearfully small, and its memory of evil deeds is as long as its charity is short.”

“Let be, then. You are not a woman. You are a man, and you can fight it out and live it down.”

Brant acquiesced without more ado. “I was merely stating the case,” he said, as if the matter were quite extraneous to him. “You have earned the right to set the pace for me, Ned; and I’ll do whatever you say.”

“That is more like the George Brant I used to know. And this is what I say: I know a trail across Jack Mountain that will take us to the railroad in three hours. The night trains pass at Carbonado, and you will be in good time to catch whichever one of them you elect to take, east or west. There is no station on the other side of the mountain; but there is a side track for the Hoopoee mine, and you can build a fire to flag the train. Have you money?”

“Yes.”

“Enough?”

“Yes; enough to try whatever experiment you suggest.”

“I don’t know that I have anything to suggest more than your own good judgment would anticipate. Find your allotted corner of the big vineyard and go to work in it; that’s about all there is to it.”

“How deep shall I dive?”

“You will have to decide that for yourself. You are a Western man now, and I suppose you don’t want to go back home. How about Denver?”

Brant shook his head slowly. “Denver is good enough—too good, in fact. I wonder if you will understand it if I say that I’d much rather have my forty days in the wilderness before I have to face my kind, even as a stranger in a strange city?”

“I can understand it perfectly, and the decency of the thing does you credit. And if that is your notion, I can help you. You used to be the best man in the ‘Tech.’ at map making; have you forgotten how to do it?”

“No; a man doesn’t forget his trade.”

“Good. I met Davenport at Carbonado yesterday. He was on his way to the Colorow district to do a lot of surveying and plotting, and was sick because he couldn’t find an assistant before he left Denver. Shall I give you a note to him?”

“It is exactly what I should crave if I had a shadow of the right to pick and choose.”

Hobart found pen and paper and wrote the note.

“There you are,” he said. “Davenport is a good fellow, and you needn’t tell him more than you want to. The job will last for two or three months, and by that time you will know better what you want to do with yourself. Now, if you are ready, we’ll get a move. It’s a stiffish climb to the top of the pass.”

They forthfared together and presently set their feet in the trail leading over the shoulder of the great mountain buttressing the slope behind the Jessica. The sounds of strife had ceased in the town below, and but for the twinkling lights the deep valley might have been as Nature left it. Since the upward path was rough and difficult there was scant breath for speech in the long climb; and for this Brant was thankful. The scene in Gaynard’s was yet fresh in mind and heart, and not even to the friend of his youth could he trust himself to speak freely.

The moon was rising when they reached the summit of the pass, and Hobart pointed down the farther slope to a dark mass hugging the steep mountain side.

“That is the Hoopoee shaft house,” he said. “The railroad is just below it. Got matches and cigars?”

“Yes, both.”

“Then I’ll go back from here. Good-bye, old fellow, and God bless you! Tie your courage in a hard knot, and let me hear from you.”

Brant grasped his friend’s hand and wrung it in silence. He tried to speak, but the words tripped each other.

“Never mind,” Hobart broke in. “I know what you want to say, and can’t. It is nothing more than you would have done if the saddle had been on the other horse. And about your—the woman: I’ll do whatever you could do, if you stayed. Now, then, down you go, or you’ll miss your train. Good-bye.”

CHAPTER II
THE VINTAGE OF ABI-EZER

It is not always given to prescience, friendly or other, to reap where it has sown; or to the worthiest intention to see of the travail of its soul and be satisfied. But if the time, place, and manner of Brant’s sequestration had been foreordained from the beginning, the conditions could scarcely have been more favourable for bulwark building between an evil past and some hopeful future of better promise.

The new mining district to which Hobart’s suggestion sent him was a sky-land wilderness unpeopled as yet, save by a few pioneer prospectors; his fellow-measurer of mining claims was a zealot of his profession, who was well content to take his friend’s friend at his friend’s valuation, asking no questions; and the work itself was such a fierce struggle with Nature in her ruggedest aspect as to afford a very opiate of antidotes to reflection, reminiscent or forecasting.

So it came about that the heart-hardening past with its remorseful reminders withdrew more and more into the dimnesses of willing forgetfulness, and the bulwark between that which had been and that which might be grew with the uncalendared days and nights till it bade fair in time to shut out some of the remorseful vistas.

The claim-measuring came to an end one flawless day in August, when the aspens were yellow on the high-pitched slopes and the streams ran low and summer clear in the gulches. Brant helped in the preparations for the retreat from the sky land of forgetfulness with a distinct sense of regret, which grew with every added mile of the day-long tramp toward Aspen, the railway, and civilization, until it became no less than a foreboding. Davenport, well satisfied with an assistant whose capacity for hard work was commensurate with his apparent love for it, had made him a proposal pointing to a partnership survey in a still more remote field, but Brant had refused. He knew well enough that his battle of reinstatement was yet to be fought, and that it must be fought in the field of the wider world. And toward that field he set his face, though not without misgivings—the misgivings of one who, having given no quarter, need expect none.

“So you have made up your mind to go to Denver, have you?” said Davenport, when they were smoking the pipe of leave-taking in the lobby of the Aspen hotel.

“Yes. I have made arrangements to go down on the night train.”

Davenport looked at his watch. “It is about time you were moving,” he said. “I’ll walk over to the station with you if you don’t mind.”

Brant did not mind. On the contrary, he was rather sorry to part from the man who had been the first to help raise the bulwark of forgetfulness. But their walk to the station was wordless, as much of their companionship had been.

They found the train ready to leave, and at the steps of the Pullman a party of four, an elderly man and three women. One of the women was young and pretty, and she was cloaked and hatted for a journey. So much Brant saw, and then he came alive to the fact that Davenport was introducing him. Of the four names he caught but one—that of the young woman who, it appeared, was to be his travelling companion.

“Well, now, that is lucky all around,” the elderly man was saying. “We have been hoping that some one would turn up at the last minute. Dorothy would go, whether or— Hello, there!”

The wheels were beginning to turn, and whatever poor excuse for a launching the acquaintance might have had in a few minutes of general conversation was denied it. Brant had no more than time to hand his charge up the steps of the Pullman, to stand for a moment beside her while she waved a farewell to the group on the platform, and his responsibility, such as it was, was upon him full fledged.

He did not make the most of it, as a better man might. So far from it, he erred painstakingly on the side of formality, leading the way with the young woman’s belongings to her section, asking her rather stiffly if he could be of any further service to her, and vanishing promptly to the solitude of the smoking compartment when her negation set him free.

But once alone in the stuffy luxury of the smoking den it was inevitable that the tale of the weeks of voluntary exile should roll itself up like a scroll and vanish, and that the heart-hardening past, and chiefly the tragic valedictory of it, should demand the hearing postponed by the toil-filled interlude in the wilderness. He was well used to scenes of violence, and there was a strain of atavistic savagery in him that came to the surface now and then and bade him look on open-eyed when stronger men blenched and turned away. But now the memory of the tragedy in Gaynard’s kennel laid hold of him and shook him in the very stronghold of ruthlessness. He could not pretend to be deeply grieved, for the woman had been little better than an evil genius to him; and yet he would willingly have thrust his own life between her and the destroyer. Instead, she had done that for him, though he did not harrow himself needlessly with the thought that she had intentionally given her life for his. He knew her well enough to be sure that she was only trying to save herself. None the less, when all was said, it was a tragedy of the kind to leave scars deep and abiding, and the remembrance of it might well threaten to be the dregs in any cup of hope.

For his swift retaliation on the slayer he took no remorseful thought, and for this environment was responsible. In the frontier mining camps, where law is not, men defend their lives and redress their wrongs with the strong hand, and one needs not to be an aggressive brawler to learn to strike fierce blows and shrewd. So in the matter of retaliation Brant was sorry only that, for all his good will, he had not slain the ruffian outright.

That the heart-hardening past with its grim pictures should thus obtrude itself upon his return to civilization seemed natural enough, and Brant suffered it as a part of the penalty he must pay. Not in any moment of the long evening did he remotely connect the sorry memories with the young woman in Section Six, who was at most no more than a name to him. Nevertheless, though he knew it not, it was the young woman who was chiefly responsible. If a good man’s introduction had not made him accountable for the welfare of a good woman, Brant might have smoked a cigar and gone to bed without this first reckoning with the past.

As it was, he smoked many cigars and was driven forth of the smoking-room only when the porter, avid of sleep himself, had suggested for the third time that the gentleman’s berth was ready. Even then sleep was not to be had for the wooing, and the gray dawn light sifting through the chinks around the window shades found him still wakeful.

The sun of a new day was half-meridian high when the porter parted the curtains of the berth and shook his single man passenger.

“Time to get up, sah; twenty minutes to de breakfas’ station.”

Brant yawned sleepily and looked at his watch.

“Breakfast? Why, it’s ten o’clock, and we ought to have been in Denver an hour ago.”

“Yes, sah. Been laid out all night, mostly, sah; fust wid a freight wreck, and den wid a hot box.”

Brant remembered vaguely that there had been stoppages many and long, but with the memory mill agrind he had not remarked them.

In the lavatory he found the porter ostentatiously putting towels in the racks for his single man passenger.

“Light car this morning, John?” he asked.

The negro grinned. “Yes, sah; you’ right about dat, sholy, sah. You-all come mighty close to hab’n a special cyar last night, sah.”

“So?”

“Yes, sah. De young lady and you-all had de Hesp’rus all to you’ own selves. Po’ portah ain’t gwine get rich out o’ dis trip, sholy.”

“No, I should say not.” Brant was sluicing his face in the dodging basin at the moment, but a little later, when he had a dry pocket hand, he gave the porter a coin of price.

“Take good care of the lady, John; they don’t remember about these little things, you know.”

“No, sah—t’ank you kin’ly, sah—dat dey don’t. But I’s take mighty good keer o’ dat young lady now, sah. Is—is you-all ’quaintin’ wid her, sah?”

“I haven’t so much as seen her face,” said Brant, which was near enough the literal truth to stand uncorrected. And a few minutes later he went back into the body of the car to repair the omission.

What he saw stirred that part of him which had long lain dormant. She was sitting in lonely state in the otherwise unoccupied car, and his first impression, at half-car-length range, was that she was a sweet incarnation of goodness of the protectable sort. Whereupon he shut the door upon the past and betook himself to her section with a kindly offer of service.

“Good morning, Miss Langford,” he began. “I hope you rested well. We are coming to the breakfast station, and there will doubtless be the usual scramble. May I have the pleasure of looking after your wants?”

Her smile was of answering good will, and he had time to observe that the honest gray eyes were deep wells of innocent frankness; and when she made answer, there was something in her speech to tell him that she was neither of the outspoken West nor of the self-contained East.

“It was kind of you to think of me,” she said. “But I think I needn’t trouble you.”

“Don’t call it trouble—it will be a pleasure,” he insisted; and when she had made room for him on the opposite seat he sat down.

“We are very late, are we not?” she asked.

“So late that we are not likely to get in before night, I’m afraid. A freight wreck and a hot box, the porter says.”

“I thought something was the matter. The train has been stopping all through the night, and I could hear them working at the car every time I awoke.”

“I heard them, too,” said Brant, though his memory of the stoppages was of the vaguest. “It didn’t impress me at the time, but it does now. I’m hungry.”

She laughed at this, and confessed a fellow-feeling.

“So am I; and I was just hoping for two things: a good breakfast, and time enough to enjoy it.”

“We are pretty sure of the first, because the Van Noy people always set a good table; but as to the time, our being so late will probably cut it short. If you please, we’ll go out to the front platform and so be ready to get in ahead of the rush.”

She went with him willingly enough, and a little later they were partakers of the swift down-grade rush of the train in the open air. It was before the day of vestibuled platforms on the mountain lines, and when the lurching and swaying of the car made the footing precarious he slipped his arm through hers for safety’s sake.

And she permitted it, does some one gasp? Yea, verily; and, since she was much too clean-hearted to be constantly on the watch for unworthy motives in others, thought no harm of it. Moreover, Brant’s conclusion that she was neither of the East nor the West was well founded in fact, and this had something to do with her frank trust in him. She was Tennessee born and bred, and to a Southern girl all men are gentlemen until they prove themselves otherwise.

And as for Brant, if she had been an angel of light, preaching repentance and a better mind to the hardened sinner of the mining camps, nothing she could have said or done would have touched him so nearly as this tacit acceptance of his protection. But also it gave him a soul-harrowing glimpse of the bottomless chasm separating the chivalrous gentleman of her maidenly imaginings from one George Brant, late of Silverette and Gaynard’s faro bank. How this clean-hearted young woman would shrink from him if she could but dimly imagine the manner of man he was! There was honest shame and humiliation in the thought; and in so far as these may give a moral uplift, Brant was the better man for the experience. None the less, he was glad when the train slowed into the breakfast station and the demands of the present once more shut the door upon the past and its disquieting reminders.

Having a clear field for the run across the station platform, Brant and his charge were the first to reach the dining room, and they had chosen their table and given their order before the other seats were taken. As a matter of course, Brant’s order was filled first, and thereat his vis à vis, a hard-featured man in a linen duster and a close-fitting skullcap, broke forth in remonstrance.

“That is the curse of the tip system!” he growled, looking pointedly at Brant and addressing no one in particular. “I object to it on principle, and every self-respecting traveller ought to help put it down.”

Brant’s eyelids narrowed and the steel-gray eyes behind them shot back a look that aforetime had quelled more than one wild beast of the gaming tables. But he held his peace, and here the matter might have rested if the irascible fault-finder had not seen the look and accepted it as a challenge.

“Yes, sir, I referred to you!” he exploded, hurling the explanation at Brant’s head. “I submit it to the entire company if it is fair for you to monopolize the attention of the servants while the rest of us go hungry?”

Now Brant was by nature a very madman of impulse, but the one good thing he had brought out of the hard school of lawlessness was the ability to be fiercely wrathful without showing it. So he said, placably enough: “I am sure you will excuse me if I decline to discuss the question with you. We were the first comers, and my order was given before you sat down.”

Here again the matter might have rested, but the hard-featured critic must needs have the last word:

“What I said, sir, had no reference to the matter of precedence. What I particularly object to is the shameless subsidizing of the servants.”

Whereupon Brant, who was as yet innocent of the implied charge, took occasion to call the waiter who had served him and to fee him openly in sight of all and sundry. The man in the linen duster scowled his disapproval, but, inasmuch as his own breakfast was served, said nothing. There was a lull in the threatened storm, and Brant was still congratulating himself on his own magnanimity, when hostilities broke out afresh. His charge had finished her breakfast, and he had prevailed upon her to take a second cup of coffee. When it came, the man across the table, who had given a similar order, claimed it for his own. Brant expostulated, still in set terms exuding the very honey of forbearance. The tyrant of breakfast tables fell into the trap, mistook his man completely, and in a sharp volley of incivilities proved that a soft answer may not always deflect the course of righteous indignation. In the midst of the volley Miss Langford rose to leave the table.

That was the final straw, and it broke the back of Brant’s self-control. Rising quickly, he leaned across the table and smote the offender out of his chair; one open-handed blow it asked for, and it was given with red wrath to speed it. That done, he took the arm of his companion and stalked out of the dining room before the smitten one could gather breath for an explosion.

Brant marched his charge straight to the Pullman, drawing deep warrior breaths of defiance world-inclusive; but by the time they were halfway across the platform he came to his senses sufficiently to be heartily ashamed of himself; nay, more, to be ready to welcome anything which might come by way of reproach. But whatever Miss Langford thought of it, she was self-contained enough to keep her own counsel, and they boarded the train in silence. In the seclusion of the deserted sleeping car Brant laid fast hold of his courage and said what he might by way of apology.

“I can’t ask your forgiveness, Miss Langford,” he began; “I know I have put myself beyond that. But I beg you to let me say just one word in my own defence. For years I have been roughing it in these mountains, eating at tables where that man’s insolence would cost him his life before he could measure words with the mildest man in the camp. And so I forgot myself for the moment—forgot what was due you. Now I’ll make the only reparation I can, and keep out of your sight for the rest of the day.”

And straightway he vanished without giving her a chance to reply.

CHAPTER III
“THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS”

Having set himself to expiate his fault, Brant wore out the day in the smoking compartment in comfortless solitude, doing penance by limiting himself to one cigar an hour. It was dull work, but not altogether profitless. For one thing there was plenty of time to think; and for another the expiatory mill had a chance to grind out a goodly grist of conclusions. The first of these was that there were going to be more obstacles in the way to amendment than those interposed by an uncharitable world; that apart from the sharp fight on the firing line, he was likely to have trouble with an insubordinate garrison.

Now a fine scorn of obstacles was another of the lessons learned in the hard school of abandonment, and Brant set his teeth on a doughty resolution to override them in the race for retrieval, as he had overridden them in the mad gallop pitward. Self-respect, or some comforting measure of it, should be regained though the devil himself held the present reversion of it. There should yet come a day, please God, when he would not be constrained in common decency to put the length of a Pullman car between himself and a good woman. Moreover, the past should henceforth be a dead past, and woe betide the enemy, man or devil, who should have the temerity to resurrect it.

The gage of battle thus thrown to the powers of darkness was promptly taken up. After one of the many stops with the troublesome axle the rear brakeman came into the smoking compartment and sat down, as one weary. To begin at once the shedding of the churl shell of the master gambler, Brant nodded pleasantly; whereupon the brakeman passed the time of day and immediately began, railwaywise, to abuse his calling and to ease his mind in respect of the hot box.

“She never has made a run yet without keeping everybody on the keen jump,” he declared. “By gum! I’ve been chasing up and down with the dope kettle ever since one o’clock this morning.”

“She?” said Brant, to whom railway speech was an unknown tongue.

“Yes; this here car—the Hesp’rus. Last time we had her it was the back box on this end; now it’s the for’ard one under the drawing-room—blazing away like a blooming track torch more’n half the time.”

“Keeps you busy, does it?”

“You’re mighty right it does. And when I have a job like this, I like to have some blame’ fool pilgrim come up and begin to jaw about the soft snap a brakeman has now they have the air brakes.”

“Did somebody do that?”

“Sure; first thing this morning. Big chap in a linen duster and smoking cap; same one that—” The brakeman stopped short, as one who suddenly finds himself treading upon what may prove to be dangerous ground.

“Go on,” said Brant encouragingly.

“Well, I mean the fellow you had the scrap with. Great Moses! but he was hot!”

“Was he? So was I.”

“You’d better believe he was. Came out of that dining room rearin’ like a buckin’ bronco; said he was going to have the law on you, and wanted the old man to wire ahead for a policeman to meet the train.”

“What old man—the conductor?”

“Yes; and Harker told him he couldn’t do it, because the row didn’t happen on the train; said he didn’t know who you was, anyway. Then I chipped in, and told ’em you was Plucky George, the man that cleaned out the six toughs when they tried to run the bank up at Silverette. Holy Smoke! but you ought to’ve seen old linen duster fall apart when I said that!” The brakeman laughed joyously, but Brant groaned in spirit at this ominous hint that his reputation meant to keep pace with him.

“You’d better believe he was rattled right!” the man went on. “He just went yaller, and the last I saw of him he was up ahead, looking for you so’t he could apologize. Ain’t that rich?”

“Very rich,” said Brant grimly. Then he saw his advantage and made good use of it. “In fact, it is much too rich to spoil. Go find the fellow and tell him I’m in a bad humour, but that he is safe as long as he keeps away from me. Will you do that?”

“Sure,” assented the brakeman, getting upon his feet. “I’ll do better than that: I’ll scare him till he won’t get a good breath this side o’ the Missouri River.”

Brant’s eyes narrowed, and in the turning of a leaf the mantle of humility slipped from him and he became Brant the man-queller.

“You will do nothing of the sort. You will tell him just what I say, and no word more or less. Now go.”

The man of dope kettles and rear-end signals was no coward, but neither was he minded to pick a quarrel with the hero of a dozen savage battles. Brant let him get to the door and then called him back:

“Where does your run end?”

“Voltamo; next stop but one.”

“Then you don’t go into Denver?”

“No.”

“But some time you may. In that case, it will be as well for you to forget what little you may happen to know about me. Do you understand?”

“You’d better believe I do. I can hold my jaw with anybody when I have to; and I don’t have to be hit with a club neither.”

“Good. Have a cigar—and don’t forget what I say.”

The brakeman took the proffered cigar and vanished; and thereupon Brant began to repent once more and to grope for the lost mantle of humility. Here on the very heels of his good resolutions he had balked at one of the smallest of the obstacles, bullying a man in his displeasure and trading upon his reputation as a man-queller like any desperado of the camps. It was humiliating, but it proved the wisdom of the smoking-room exile. Truly, he was far enough from being a fitting companion for the young woman in Section Six.

As he had predicted, the train lost time steadily throughout the day, and an early supper was served at the regular dinner station. Brant went to the dining room with the other passengers, and when Miss Langford did not appear, he sent the porter to her with a luncheon and a cup of tea.

“It is about what I had a right to expect,” he told himself when he was once more back in the solitude of the smoke den. “She was afraid to trust herself in the same dining room with me. Why the devil couldn’t I have held my cursed temper just ten seconds longer? Here I’ve had to sit all day and eat my heart out, when I might have been getting miles away from the old life in her company. What a fool a man can make of himself when he tries!”

“That is a fact,” said a voice from the opposite seat; and Brant, who had been staring gloomily out of the window at the wall of blackness slipping past the train, and so was unaware that he was not alone, was unreasonable enough to be angry.

“What’s that you say?” he began wrathfully, turning upon his commentator; but the pleasant face of the young man in the opposite seat was of the kind which disarms wrath.

“It’s on me,” he laughed. “I beg your pardon. I spoke without thinking, but what you said about the fool-making faculty calls for general ratification. We all have it.”

Brant nodded, and the newcomer relighted his cigar, which had gone out in the explanation. “Going in to Denver?” he asked, willing to let interest atone for impudence.

“Yes.”

“Wish I were. I’ve been out a week now, and I’m beginning to long for the fleshpots.”

“You have my sympathy if you have to stop overnight anywhere between this and Denver,” said Brant, who knew the country.

“Luckily, I don’t have to. I am merely riding down to the meeting point with Number Three to kill time. I have to go back to Voltamo to-night.”

Brant laughed. “Do you find it cheaper to ride than to wait?”

“It is quite as cheap in my case; the railway company has to foot the bills, anyway.”

“Oh—you are in the service, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Engineer corps?”

“No; operating department. I am chief clerk in the superintendent’s office.”

They smoked companionably for a while, and then Brant said: “Perhaps you can tell me some of the things I want to find out. Who is your chief engineer now?”

“Colonel Bowran.”

“Good fellow?”

“Out of sight; gentleman of the old school, you know; West Point, regular army, and all that. They say he won’t hire a chainman unless he is a college graduate.”

“Is his office in Denver?”

“Yes; right next door to ours.”

“All of which is comforting,” said Brant. “I hope you will have me for a neighbour. I am going to try for a billet on the C. E. & W.”

“Good!” exclaimed the chief clerk, rising at the sound of the locomotive whistle. “My name’s Antrim, and you will find me in Superintendent Craig’s office. Latchstring hangs on the outer wall.”

“And my name is Brant. Do you quit us here?”

“Got to do it—wish I hadn’t, now. Glad to have met you, I’m sure. Don’t forget to hunt me up. Good night.”

They shook hands heartily at parting. It was Colorado, in the day when strangers became friends—or enemies—on the spot; when one unconsciously dropped the “Mr.” in an hour, and then slipped easily around the surname to hobnob with Tom, Dick, or Harry in the first interview.

For the exile the little chat with the chief clerk was heartening in its way; and when the train was once more swaying and lurching along its crooked course down the cañon he looked at his watch and figured out the probable arriving time.

“Eleven hours late; that will make it ten o’clock in Denver. I wonder if Miss Langford will find somebody to look after her when she gets in. If she doesn’t——”

The interruption was the advent of the porter. The negro had been trying to get speech with his patron for half an hour, but he was much too discreet to deliver his message in Antrim’s presence.

“’Bout de supper, sah; de lady in lower Six say, T’ank you kin’ly, sah, and would you-all be so kind and step back in de cyar a minute?”

“Certainly.” Brant rose to comply, but he was no sooner on his feet than he was thrown violently all across the compartment.

“Golly Lawd! she’s on de ties!” gasped the negro, and the exclamation ended in a yell of terror.

Brant kept his head, and thought only of the young woman alone in the body of the car. With the floor heaving and bounding under him like the deck of a storm-tossed ship, he darted out of the smoking-room and flung himself against the swinging door in the narrow side vestibule. It was jammed, but the glass of the upper panel fell in fragments under his blow, and he was past the obstruction when the end came. The heavy sleeper lurched first to the right, reeled drunkenly for a critical instant on the brink of the embankment facing the river, righted itself with a jerk when draw bars and safety chains gave way, and then settled back to topple over against the cañon wall, stopping with a crash that sent Brant to his knees just as he was starting down the aisle.

The broken glass was still falling from the shattered deck lights when he reached Section Six. The young woman was unhurt, but she was very pale, and the gray eyes were full of terror.

“Don’t faint,” said Brant very gently, though he was wondering what he should do in case she did. “It is all over now, I think.”

“But the others?” she faltered.

“Let us hope that the other cars have kept the track—that it is only the ‘wreck of the Hesperus.’”

She smiled at the conceit, and asked what they should do.

“If you will promise not to faint while I am gone, I’ll go and find out. There is no danger now.”

“I’m not going to faint; but please don’t be gone long.”

He was back in a moment, gathering up her belongings.

“There is nothing smashed but our car,” he explained. “They will leave flagmen with it, and go on to Denver with the remainder of the train. Will you take my arm?”

The wrecked sleeper was already surrounded by a throng of curious passengers and anxious trainmen, and ready hands were extended to help them down from the uptilted platform. But Brant put them all aside, and lifted his companion to the ground as if the right were his alone.

“It is all right, Mr. Harker,” he said, singling out the conductor. “I mean, we are all out. There was no one else in the car except the porter, and he isn’t hurt.”

They made their way through the throng of curious ones, and so on down the track to the train. Brant found a seat in the day coach, disposed his charge comfortably therein, and then, once more laying hold of his courage, sat down beside her.

“I am not going to leave you again until I see you safe in Denver,” he asserted; “that is, unless you send me away.”

“I didn’t send you away this morning,” she rejoined, with a smile that went far toward making him forget for the moment who and what he was.

“I know you didn’t; but you had a right to. And after what I had done, there was nothing for it but to take myself off.”

She did not speak until the train was once more lurching on its way. Then she said: “I thought at the time you were very patient; and—and I think so still.”

“Do you, really? That is very good of you; but I think I don’t deserve it. My first thought should have been for you, and I might have kept my temper for another half minute.”

Now this young woman could rejoice in an excellent upbringing, as will presently appear, and she knew perfectly well that Brant was right. But where is the woman, old or young, who does not secretly glory in a vigorous championship of her rights, even at the expense of the proprieties?

So she spoke him fair, telling him that she was sending for him at the moment of the accident to thank him and to pay him for her supper. Nay, more: she made the next two hours so pleasant for him that they were as but a watch in the night, and their flitting seemed to push his life in the camps into a comfortably remote past.

And so they chatted amicably until the outlying lights of Denver began to flash past the windows; and then Brant bethought him of her further well-being.

“Will there be some one at the train to meet you?” he inquired.

“No; but my street-car line is only a block from the depot, and the car takes me almost to our door.”

“I will put you on the car,” he said; and this he did some few minutes later, bidding her “Good night,” and standing in the street to catch a last glimpse of her as the car droned away to the northward. Then he turned away to seek a hotel, and was well uptown before he remembered that he had not thought to ask her address, or to ask if he might call upon her.

“But that is all right,” he mused. “Denver isn’t London, and if I can ever pull myself up into the ranks of the well-behaved, I shall find her.”

CHAPTER IV
THE MIGRANTS

Time was, and is no more, when invalids, hopeful and hopeless, thronged the eastern foothills of the Rockies till there was no longer houseroom for them in the cities, and a new word “lunger” was grafted upon the exuberant stock of Western folk speech to distinguish them. Unlike the pioneers of a still earlier day, who crossed the plains with their worldly possessions snugly sheltered beneath the canvas tilt of a single prairie schooner, these migrants for health’s sake were chiefly of the class which neither toils nor spins, and to the foothill cities they presently added suburbs architecturally characteristic each after its kind. In these suburbs the trim-built town house of New England is the commonest type, but the more florid style of the middle West is not lacking, and now and then, in the roomier city fringe, there are replicas done in red brick of the low-storied, wide-verandaed country house of the South.

Such was the home of the Langfords in the Highlands of North Denver. Driven from the ancestral acres in the blue-grass region of Tennessee in the late afternoon of his life, the judge had determined to make the new home in the life-giving altitudes as nearly like the old as money and the materials at hand would compass, and he had succeeded passing well. He had bought acres where others bought lots, and the great roomy house, with its low-pitched roof and wide verandas on three sides, stood in the midst of whatsoever Tennessee greenery would stand transplantation from the blue-grass region to the less genial climate of the clear-skied altitudes.

On pleasant Sunday afternoons, when Dorothy was at her mission school and the judge slept peacefully in his own particular chair, when Mrs. Langford followed her husband’s example in the privacy of her room, and Will was no one ever knew just where, the hammock slung at the corner of the veranda which commanded a view of the mountains was Isabel’s especial convenience. For one reason, there was the view; for another, the hammock swung opposite that portion of the low railing which was Harry Antrim’s favourite perch during the hour or two which measured his customary Sunday afternoon visit.

Being very much in love with Isabel, Antrim was quite willing to turn his back upon the scenery for the sake of looking at her. And as between a winsome young woman swinging in a hammock—a young woman with laughing brown eyes and a profusion of glory-tinted hair framing a face to which piquancy and youthful beauty lent equal charms—who but a scenery-mad pilgrim of the excursion trains would think of making a comparison?

In these Sunday afternoon talks Isabel could be abstract or concrete as occasion demanded. What time the young man dwelt overmuch on railway matters, she found it convenient to be able to look over his shoulder at the mighty panorama unrolled and unrolling itself in endless transformation scenes against the western horizon. And when Antrim, finding himself ignored, would come back from things practical to things personal, she had but to close her eyes to the scenic background and to open them again upon the personality of her companion.

Conceding nothing to what he was pleased to call her artistic fad, Antrim was willing to condone Isabel’s indifference to railway affairs. His business was a part, the greater part, of his life, but he could understand why Judge Langford’s daughter, as such, might easily weary of railway shop talk. True, there had been more or less of it all along in the old days in Tennessee, when the judge was counsel for the railway company of which Antrim’s father was the superintendent; but that was because the Langfords and Antrims dwelt side by side and were friends as well as neighbours. Here in Colorado it was different. The judge was an invalid—a migrant for health’s sake, with gear sufficient to make him independent of railway counsellorships, and with little left of his former connection save a pocketful of annual passes and a warm affection for the son of his old friend the superintendent.

None the less, Antrim thought that Isabel might bear with him now and then, if only for the reason that she would at some time begin to eat the bread and meat of railway service and so continue to the end of the chapter. This, indeed, he had the temerity to say to her one Sunday afternoon some weeks after his return from the exile of division duty at Voltamo. By which it will be seen that Antrim was a very young man, and as yet no more than a novice in the fine art of love-making.

“I do take an interest in your affairs, Harry; you know I do. I am glad to see you succeeding in something you really like. But I wish”—she stopped, and let her gaze go beyond him—“I wish you wouldn’t always talk as if—” She paused again, and Antrim finished the protest for her:

“As if my prospects and your future were one and the same thing, you mean?”

“Yes; it stirs me up and makes me feel resentful. I know I can’t paint very much yet, but that is no reason why I shouldn’t attain by and by, is it?”

“None in the world. It’s only when you side-track me for art that I get restive. No man could be patient under that. Besides, you are never going to be a bachelor of art; you are going to be married to me, and then you can paint for fun as much as you like.”

Isabel’s retort was emphasized by a piquant little grimace of defiance:

“That is what you have been telling me ever since I can remember. I didn’t mind it so much in the boy and girl stage; but when you say such things now, it only makes it more than ever impossible.”

“Why does it?”

“Because it shows that you still cling to the idea that my love for art is nothing but a schoolgirl fad. It isn’t anything of the kind; and you and father and all the rest of them ought to know it by this time.”

“Oh, pshaw!” said Antrim, relapsing into disgusted silence.

Isabel touched the toe of her slipper to the floor and swung the hammock gently. As a comrade, brother—as anything, in fact, but a lover—she fellowshipped Antrim with hearty frankness. They had known each other from early childhood, and the outspoken familiarity of such an acquaintance is not to be set aside by the mere formality of a one-sided love-making.

He was a nice boy, she thought, suffering herself to moralize a little while he was recovering his equanimity. He always looked so well groomed, and his severe taste in the matter of raiment was very creditable. And he was capable, too; every one said that of him. Still he was but a boy; and his smooth-shaven face made him look years younger than he really was; and he wouldn’t wear a mustache, as she wanted him to; and—and——

“Why don’t you say something?” snapped the subject of her moralizings.

“I was thinking about you, and I supposed you would be glad to have me keep quiet if I would do that.”

“I don’t know about that. It depends very much upon what you were thinking. I could tell better if I heard the recapitulation.”

Isabel tossed her head disdainfully. “Anybody would give me a penny for my thoughts,” she said.

“Oh, if it’s a pecuniary matter, here”—and he took a coin from his pocket and gave it to her.

“Thanks! I need some new brushes, and father says I am extravagant. Now you shall have what you have paid for. I was thinking that you know how to dress becomingly—and that you are smart—and that your salary is enough to make poor people envious—and that you look absurdly young—and that a mustache would make you look years older—a-n-d——”

Antrim sawed the air with his arm as he would have slowed down a reckless engineer.

“That will do; you have earned the dollar. But you won’t mind my saying that I can get myself abused for less money. Do you ever have a really serious thought, Isabel? Take time to think about it, and tell me honestly.”

Again Isabel’s gaze went past him, bridging the bare plain and seeking infinity in the heights rising in mighty grandeur beyond the flat top of Table Mountain. When she spoke, raillery had given place to enthusiasm.

“Could any one live in sight of that”—pointing to the high-piled grandeur—“and not have thoughts too big for any kind of expression?”

“Oh, artistic thoughts, yes; I’ll admit that you can outthink most people on that line,” he rejoined.

“That is right; gird, if you want to. You are a Philistine, and you can’t help it, I suppose. Just the same, art is the real reality, and your petty business affairs are merely the playthings of life. If I could put on canvas the faintest impression, the merest foreshadowing of what you can see over there, every other accomplishment or enjoyment in the world would seem little by comparison.”

“There you go again,” said Antrim. “Now I like pretty things as well as anybody, but when you try to make me believe that the painting of them is the chief end of man—or of woman, for that matter—why, it’s like—” He searched for a sufficiently strong simile, and not finding one, ended rather irrelevantly. “Between you and Brant, I have a hard time of it trying to keep my feet on the everyday earth.”

Isabel ignored the tirade and went off at a tangent, as was her custom with Antrim.

“Mr. Brant is a college graduate, isn’t he?” she asked.

“Yes, I believe so. What of it?” demanded Antrim, who was so wholly imbued with the afflatus of business as to think small of scholarly attainments.

“Nothing; only I was thinking how much a college man has to be thankful for.”