“Disbrow, Despatcher, Denver:
“President Carothers, with his party in private car Aberystwyth, is moving westward on Eastern Division. A member of the party is sick, and car is running special to Denver with regardless orders. This special will reach——”
The chief clerk stopped with suspended pen and tried to recall the name of Lone Pine Junction. Though he had but now repeated it, it was gone, and, balanced as he was upon the sharp edge of collapse, the effort to remember the name turned the scale. The pen slipped from his fingers, his head sank upon his arm, and the swirling whirlpool laid hold of him, thrusting him down to oblivion in the black throat of its vortex.
CHAPTER XXI
“A ROD FOR THE FOOL’S BACK”
Comparing it with the fortnight of yesterdays, Brant reckoned the day of his meeting with Dorothy as one worthy of anniversaries. In good truth, his confession had stopped something short of its climax, and of the coveted personal absolution; but it was comforting to remember that he had spoken plainly, and that she had bidden him go forward hopefully. Notwithstanding the untimely interruption, there could be no reasonable doubt of the major fact: that she fully understood his parable and its application—understood and was glad, and would have let him go on but for the interruption.
So much for the good; and as for the ill, the rebuff at the church gate went for little. Being so well assured of the daughter’s—he was about to say “love,” but he changed it to “sympathy”—being so well assured of the daughter’s sympathy, he could afford to wait for reinstatement in the good graces of the mother. Women, even such women as the Mrs. Langfords, are not implacable, he reasoned; and when he should have shown how sincere he was, her resentment—her natural resentment, he was willing to call it—would be allayed, and she would see the injustice of her sentence of ostracism. Wherein he showed forth an unknowledge of womankind common to very young men, and to some older ones whose walk in life has led them much apart from women worth the knowing.
In the exuberance of his self-congratulation Brant lost sight of the one redeeming thread in the thought-woven fabric of the day, which thread was a brotherly concern for Antrim, and a half-formed resolve to turn bearwarden to the foolish one. By evening the half-formed resolve took permanent shape; and since a physician must first know something of the disease and the cause of it, he began by trying to breach Antrim’s reticence at the supper table. For reasons good and sufficient, the effort was bootless; and Brant, driven from ear to eye evidence, and having, moreover, considerable skill in diagnosing the symptoms of bottle sickness, saw with concern that Antrim was tottering on the verge of the abyss.
From that to keeping a solicitous eye on him was but a step; and when Antrim went upstairs, Brant, whose room was just across the corridor from the chief clerk’s, went too, mounting guard with a light, a book, and with his door ajar. For a long time there was no stir in the opposite room; but just as he was beginning to hope that Antrim had gone to bed, the door opened and the chief clerk hurried out.
Brant’s first impulse was to follow and bring him back without ceremony. Then he reflected that it is an ill thing to meddle, even with the best of motives, and so cast about for a plausible excuse. Luckily, he found one ready to his hand. The papers containing the evidence against Harding were in the drawer of his writing table, and in view of the late stirrings in that pool it would be well to put them under lock and key. There was a safe in Antrim’s office, and the errand would give him a chance to probe Antrim’s wound, and so haply he might find the bullet or the arrowhead, or whatever it might be that was rankling therein.
So he put the papers in his pocket and went out; and taking it for granted that Antrim would make straight for the nearest barroom, lost a half hour or more in a fruitless search among the drinking places. When he had widened the search circle to the farthest limits of the quasi-respectable district, outside of which Antrim would not be likely to venture, he stumbled upon Jarvis and stopped to inquire of him.