A private chivalry

by Francis Lynde

The claim-measuring came to an end one flawless day in August, when the aspens were yellow on the high-pitched slopes and the streams ran low and summer clear in the gulches. Brant helped in the preparations for the retreat from the sky land of forgetfulness with a distinct sense of regret, which grew with every added mile of the day-long tramp toward Aspen, the railway, and civilization, until it became no less than a foreboding. Davenport, well satisfied with an assistant whose capacity for hard work was commensurate with his apparent love for it, had made him a proposal pointing to a partnership survey in a still more remote field, but Brant had refused. He knew well enough that his battle of reinstatement was yet to be fought, and that it must be fought in the field of the wider world. And toward that field he set his face, though not without misgivings—the misgivings of one who, having given no quarter, need expect none.

“So you have made up your mind to go to Denver, have you?” said Davenport, when they were smoking the pipe of leave-taking in the lobby of the Aspen hotel.

“Yes. I have made arrangements to go down on the night train.”

Davenport looked at his watch. “It is about time you were moving,” he said. “I’ll walk over to the station with you if you don’t mind.”

Brant did not mind. On the contrary, he was rather sorry to part from the man who had been the first to help raise the bulwark of forgetfulness. But their walk to the station was wordless, as much of their companionship had been.

They found the train ready to leave, and at the steps of the Pullman a party of four, an elderly man and three women. One of the women was young and pretty, and she was cloaked and hatted for a journey. So much Brant saw, and then he came alive to the fact that Davenport was introducing him. Of the four names he caught but one—that of the young woman who, it appeared, was to be his travelling companion.

“Well, now, that is lucky all around,” the elderly man was saying. “We have been hoping that some one would turn up at the last minute. Dorothy would go, whether or— Hello, there!”

The wheels were beginning to turn, and whatever poor excuse for a launching the acquaintance might have had in a few minutes of general conversation was denied it. Brant had no more than time to hand his charge up the steps of the Pullman, to stand for a moment beside her while she waved a farewell to the group on the platform, and his responsibility, such as it was, was upon him full fledged.

He did not make the most of it, as a better man might. So far from it, he erred painstakingly on the side of formality, leading the way with the young woman’s belongings to her section, asking her rather stiffly if he could be of any further service to her, and vanishing promptly to the solitude of the smoking compartment when her negation set him free.

But once alone in the stuffy luxury of the smoking den it was inevitable that the tale of the weeks of voluntary exile should roll itself up like a scroll and vanish, and that the heart-hardening past, and chiefly the tragic valedictory of it, should demand the hearing postponed by the toil-filled interlude in the wilderness. He was well used to scenes of violence, and there was a strain of atavistic savagery in him that came to the surface now and then and bade him look on open-eyed when stronger men blenched and turned away. But now the memory of the tragedy in Gaynard’s kennel laid hold of him and shook him in the very stronghold of ruthlessness. He could not pretend to be deeply grieved, for the woman had been little better than an evil genius to him; and yet he would willingly have thrust his own life between her and the destroyer. Instead, she had done that for him, though he did not harrow himself needlessly with the thought that she had intentionally given her life for his. He knew her well enough to be sure that she was only trying to save herself. None the less, when all was said, it was a tragedy of the kind to leave scars deep and abiding, and the remembrance of it might well threaten to be the dregs in any cup of hope.