“It is easy enough if you shoot straight and carry heavy metal. This thing”—he took Harding’s revolver out of his pocket—“this thing throws a forty-five, and it would punch boiler plate at that distance.”
“Let me see it,” said Forsyth, and he took the weapon and examined it as one examines the tools of an unfamiliar trade. “It’s a young cannon, isn’t it? What is this name on the handle?”
“‘J. Harding’ is what it is meant for. He owned it until one night when I held him up and took it away from him.”
“Another battle royal, I suppose,” said the editor, shaking his great head in deprecation of battles royal and brawlings general. “You will have to drop all that, my boy, if you are going to join the great army of the well-behaved. And that reminds me, what kind of a coil are you in with these fellows that Jarvis overheard?”
Brant thought twice before he spoke once. Here was a matter about which the least said would be the soonest mended. If he should tell the facts in the case, Forsyth would insist that he was no better than an accessory after the fact if he should persist in his refusal to give Harding up to justice, and this he could not bring himself to do. Therefore he answered lightly:
“It is an old quarrel, and one which I don’t mean to take up. One of the fellows owes me a grudge, but he is in no condition to go to war with me—or with any one.”
“And yet you wanted to find him?”
“Yes; I was going to invite him to drop it and go away, but it’s hardly worth while,” said Brant, getting up to take his leave before he should be drawn into the giving of details.
“Well, keep out of it—keep out of everything that isn’t as plain as print and of a nature to be cried from the housetops, and you will come out all right. Don’t get downhearted, or, if you do, just come up here and I’ll abuse you some more. Good night.”
Brant went down the stairs and out into the street, and so on up to Mrs. Seeley’s, with his square jaw set and two ideas dominating all others in his thoughts. One was that without Dorothy’s love to sustain him he would be unequal to the task of maintaining the long probationary struggle outlined by Forsyth; and the other was an intense longing, born of the militant soul of him, to be given some desperate penance—to be tried by the fire of some crucial test which, should it leave him but a single day to glory in the victory, would prove him once for all a man and a gentleman, worthy to have lived and loved.