In the clouds

by Charles Egbert Craddock

He did not fear the sentence of the House. He was resolute in the position he had taken, but he carried throughout the evening an imperative sense of abeyance. He noticed with a secret scorn the clumsy efforts of his legislative friends to sound his state of mind, when they came down from the Capitol; he divined their fear of a collision, their anxiety that the asperities with Harshaw should be allowed to quietly drop. They sought to have him observe that they considered he had the best of it, and that an apology now from him would mean merely a desire to promote public interest. Only the age of another adviser—his father’s friend as well as his own—restrained him from openly ridiculing the deep satisfaction which this mentor evidently derived from the fact that the young man’s mind would be occupied with lighter themes during the evening, and he might forget the rancors of the debate. His thoughts, however, were incongruous enough with the scene of a fashionable wedding, where he officiated as an usher, and he paced the aisles of the church with as mechanical a notice of his surroundings as a somnambulist. His attention hardly pretermitted its hold upon the subject that had absorbed him, and when again at liberty he went at once to his room at the hotel, with a view of changing his dress to attend the night session of the House.

It was the slightest matter that attracted his notice. He had lighted the gas, and as he glanced into a drawer of the bureau some trivial difference from the usual arrangement of his effects caught his eye. He stood for a moment in motionless surprise. Perhaps it was accident, perhaps his alert divination, but he slipped his hand beneath the pile of garments and touched a wooden case of pistols. He flushed slightly, and for a moment he was ashamed. He had doubted if it were still there. He had thought that perhaps his cautious friends might have robbed him, pending the time when he was in anger, of the means to do more than war with words. He had taken instant fire at the idea of an interference with his liberty. It was the smouldering embers of this thought that actuated him rather than any serious expectation, but suddenly he turned back to the bureau and lifted the case. He opened it slowly. It was empty. He gazed at the vacant space, his eyes flashing, his cheek flushing. The pistols had been abstracted and the case left that his attention might not by its absence be directed to the weapons. He could easily divine all of his friends’ arguments. He would not notice the disappearance of the pistols, they must doubtless have said, unless he wanted them. He would not want them unless he were intent upon some fatal folly. He could not supply himself anew, for all the shops were closed, and by to-morrow he would be in a cooler frame of mind.

His indignation was natural enough. He took heed, too, of contingencies of which his anxious friends, accustomed to him always in the character of assailant, lost sight. “I should be helpless,” he said, “if that man should attack me. I should be incapable of self-defense.”

Suddenly he caught up a light spring overcoat, threw it over his arm, and left the room. As he went down the staircase into the rotunda of the hotel, he seemed the embodiment of handsome, gay, fortunate youth. His cheek was flushed; his eyes were very brilliant. He paced up and down the floor for a moment in front of the counter, for strangers were registering their names and the clerks were busy. The fountain tossed up its spray, and the tinkling drops fell into the basin; around it plants were blooming. Somebody journeying from the South had presented the hotel with a little alligator, that splashed about in the water and was a source of diversion to the out-comers and in-goers, many of whom paused to rouse it up with their canes and punch the head of the infant saurian. Kinsard walked presently to the desk.

“I want to borrow a pistol,” he said to the clerk, to whom he was well known.

The official, fancying that the guest contemplated a journey or a long nocturnal drive into the country, and that the request was a matter merely of precaution, turned with alacrity, took a pistol out of a drawer, and laid it on the counter. He was looking for the cartridges, when an acquaintance of Kinsard’s demanded casually, “What do you want a gun for?”

Kinsard lifted his brilliant, reckless eyes. “To shoot Bob Harshaw,” he declared.

The clerk turned hastily from his search and made a motion to clutch the pistol.

Kinsard’s grasp had closed upon the handle.

“Man alive!” he cried angrily, “do you think I would use it except for self-defense?”