As a last resort he could always give the murderer of Henry Brinton up to justice; but he shrank from the thought of this as a brave man would scorn to ask aid in a personal quarrel. Doubtless the wretch deserved hanging, but the more Brant thought about it the more he was disinclined to play the part of the hangman. The alternative was to find Harding and to warn him once again that his safety lay not in reprisals, but in putting distance and oblivion between himself and his accuser.
It was to set the alternative in train that Brant tramped his companion from dive to den, dragging the murkiest depths of the pool, and leaving no place unvisited where he thought there was a chance of unearthing the plotters.
The search proved fruitless, as it was bound to, since Harding and Gasset were at that time closeted in the former’s room in the West Denver Gasthaus; but Brant did not give over until Forsyth intimated that it was time for him to go back to his desk. Even then Brant begged for five minutes in which to ransack yet one more kennel, and the night editor yielded and went with him.
It was the place in which Harding had met the man from Taggett’s Gulch on the day of his return to Denver—an evil-smelling lair half underground, with a bar fronting the entrance and a drug-like heaviness in the air pointing to what was beyond the bar-screened portal. It was Forsyth’s earliest sniff of an opium hell. He gasped for breath at the threshold, and had he been alone would have fled precipitately. As it was, he went in with Brant and stood at the bar while his companion searched the rooms beyond.
In a very short time Forsyth began to wish himself well out of it. First, the bartender scowled at him and asked what he would take, and when he refused to take anything, having a just fear that any liquor sold in such a place would be only less deadly than prussic acid, there was a stir in a little knot of ruffians clustered at the other end of the bar.
“What’s that?” demanded one of them, sidling up with threatenings. “What are ye here for, if ye don’t buy? Here, barkeep’, hand out the red liquor; this here gig-lamps is goin’ to set ’em up fer the crowd.”
As he had confessed to Brant, Forsyth was short-sighted almost to blindness; also, he was unarmed. But he was no coward, and he pushed the bottle back resolutely and shook his head.
“The gentleman is mistaken,” he said; “I haven’t asked any one to drink at my expense, and don’t mean to.”
Then there was trouble, as a child might have foreseen. In the midst of it, Forsyth found himself looking into the barrel of a huge revolver, the weapon thrust so close that not even his short-sightedness availed to obscure it. At the same moment there was a stir in the murky region beyond the bar, a fierce oath followed by the sharp crack of a pistol, and the ruffian’s weapon clattered harmless to the floor. Then Forsyth drew breath of relief, for Brant had thrust him gently aside and was standing before him.
“That is my bluff, gentlemen,” said the newcomer quietly. “Would any of you like to call it?”