“Not too many drinks, Ike, if you want to earn your money. Keep your head clear till this job is done, and then you can fill your skin to the queen’s taste, if you feel like it.”
They went out together, and Harding locked the door. In a neighbouring barroom, while they were drinking to the success of the plot, the cat’s-paw asked one other question:
“How are we going to find out if the coast’s clear? Had you thought o’ that?”
“Yes; we’ll shadow him from the time he leaves his office and see where he goes,” was the reply. “And it is about time to begin that right now. Come on.”
Thus the varying lines of events converged upon the unsuspecting one, who a little later cleaned his pens and put away his drawing instruments in deference to the failing daylight. It had been a comfortable day, and, contrary to his habit, which was abstemious even on the tobacco side, he lighted a cigar to smoke on the way up to supper. While he was putting on his coat a footstep echoed in the empty corridor. It was the postman making his final round. The letter slide in the door clicked, and a square envelope fell to the floor. Brant picked it up, read his own name in the superscription, and went to the window to save the trouble of lighting the gas.
The daylight was nearly gone, but there was enough of it to enable him to pick out his correspondent’s message from the tangle of fashionable angles and heavy downstrokes. Also there was light enough to show forth the change from disinterest to astoundment, and from astoundment to dull rage and desperation that crept into his face as he read.
“In view of his clandestine meeting with Miss Langford yesterday,” said the writer, “Mr. Brant will not be unprepared for such interference as Miss Langford’s natural guardian is constrained to make. Up to the present time the writer of this has refrained from discussing, even in the family circle, a subject which is as repugnant to her as it must prove humiliating to Mr. Brant; but if Mr. Brant does not find it convenient to relieve her of further disquietude in the matter by leaving Denver at once, it will become her unpleasant duty to take her daughters into her confidence—a duty which she sincerely hopes Mr. Brant will not make obligatory.”
There was no signature, and none was needed. Brant read the letter through twice, and then tore it slowly into tiny fragments, opening the window to brush the bits of paper out into the twilight, and watching them as they disappeared like circling snowflakes. Suddenly his clenched hands went up and he swore a mighty oath, and in that oath was a recantation of all the good resolves which had been writing themselves down throughout the day of comfort.
The outburst of cursings seemed to steady him, as the earthquake subsides when the volcano finds vent. He closed the window carefully and fastened it, and then went to spread the dust-cloth over his work on the drawing-board, folding it smoothly down at the corners, as one might drape the pall over the corpse of a thing dead. Some thought of the simile must have suggested itself, since he broke out in bitter speech:
“That is precisely what I am doing; it is a pall, and it covers the corpse of my little nursling of decency. God help me! Two hours ago—two minutes ago, I thought I had a chance for my life; and now it is all done and over with, and I am banished like an unclean thing. I’ll go. She knew I’d go when she thonged that whip for me. I’ll go to my own place.”