For his swift retaliation on the slayer he took no remorseful thought, and for this environment was responsible. In the frontier mining camps, where law is not, men defend their lives and redress their wrongs with the strong hand, and one needs not to be an aggressive brawler to learn to strike fierce blows and shrewd. So in the matter of retaliation Brant was sorry only that, for all his good will, he had not slain the ruffian outright.
That the heart-hardening past with its grim pictures should thus obtrude itself upon his return to civilization seemed natural enough, and Brant suffered it as a part of the penalty he must pay. Not in any moment of the long evening did he remotely connect the sorry memories with the young woman in Section Six, who was at most no more than a name to him. Nevertheless, though he knew it not, it was the young woman who was chiefly responsible. If a good man’s introduction had not made him accountable for the welfare of a good woman, Brant might have smoked a cigar and gone to bed without this first reckoning with the past.
As it was, he smoked many cigars and was driven forth of the smoking-room only when the porter, avid of sleep himself, had suggested for the third time that the gentleman’s berth was ready. Even then sleep was not to be had for the wooing, and the gray dawn light sifting through the chinks around the window shades found him still wakeful.
The sun of a new day was half-meridian high when the porter parted the curtains of the berth and shook his single man passenger.
“Time to get up, sah; twenty minutes to de breakfas’ station.”
Brant yawned sleepily and looked at his watch.
“Breakfast? Why, it’s ten o’clock, and we ought to have been in Denver an hour ago.”
“Yes, sah. Been laid out all night, mostly, sah; fust wid a freight wreck, and den wid a hot box.”
Brant remembered vaguely that there had been stoppages many and long, but with the memory mill agrind he had not remarked them.
In the lavatory he found the porter ostentatiously putting towels in the racks for his single man passenger.