Jarvis whistled derisively, and his retort was out of the heart of flippancy:
“You missed your calling, old man; your layout is the Prohibition platform. Why don’t you join the Salvation Army?”
“For good and sufficient reasons; but that has nothing to do with your bad habits.”
“Oh, come off! You’re a one-horse lay preacher, that’s what you are! Your theory is all right, but the wheels won’t go round in practice. Man can’t be a reporter and not drink.”
“Without knowing more than I have to about the askings of your job, I’ll venture to dispute that,” Brant asserted. “According to my notion, a man can’t be the best of anything so long as he hobnobs with any devil of appetite.”
“Oh, let up—you make me limp! I’ll bet a gold mine against a skinny little Indian pony that you’ve got wickedness enough in your system to cover my one little weakness like a bedspread and tuck in all around the edges. Come now, own up.”
But for obvious reasons Brant could not own up; and since the random thrust found the joint in his harness, he must needs go dumb. But a little later, when they were standing together at the bar, he was again moved to protest at the spectacle of Jarvis putting absinthe into his whisky.
“The red liquor is bad enough by itself, my boy,” he remarked, clipping the end of his cigar, “but the other is enough worse. It will make an idiot of you before your time.”
“That’s right; share a man’s hospitality and jump on his personal preferences all in the same breath. If you’ve got to reform somebody, why don’t you tackle that railroad friend of yours over there in the corner? He is sliding down the stair on the balustrade thereof. Go over and preach to him, while I see if I can’t rustle up an eleventh-hour suicide for Forsyth.”
Brant wheeled at the word and saw that which suddenly buried his own trouble deep under the débris of a shattered ideal. At a small table in the corner of the room two men sat playing cards. One of them was so good a type of his clan that Brant was able to summarize him tersely in the word “rook.” The other was Harry Antrim—Antrim, the self-contained, the immaculate, the very pride and pattern of the well-behaved. The chief clerk was evidently much the worse for liquor; his face was flushed, and his hands trembled when he dealt the cards; but he was sober enough to recognise Brant when the latter came up and accosted him.