One small fact, and one only, refused to fit into the chain of circumstantial evidence. It was this—and to one unfamiliar with the progressive stages of the liquor disease it might have appeared trivial: Brant had found the empty brandy bottle on the floor of his room, and it seemed incredible that a mere boy in the beginnings of the case-hardening process could drink so deeply in a single night and still be able to run away in the morning. But stubborn as this fact was, Brant would not allow it to upset his theory. It was William Langford who had broken into his room; and it was James Harding who had planned and instigated the raid. Therefore, when Harding should be found, the search for the boy would be successful.
With these premisings Brant renewed the quest in the evening methodically. He took Antrim into his confidence, but only so far as to hint that Will would be found in the company of a man whose description was thus and thus; and the chief clerk’s part in the search was to make the round of the hotels and lodging houses.
Reserving the more dangerous share for himself, Brant went first to Draco’s; and when Deverney assured him that nothing had been seen of Harding since the night of his banishment, he set the peg of conclusion one hole farther along. In his dealings with young Langford, Harding would be likely to keep up the fiction of respectability; hence there would be no frequenting of the more public resorts.
Acting upon this suggestion, Brant began a round of the more exclusive “clubhouses,” making guarded inquiries of doorkeepers, and using his reputation with the craft unsparingly as a pass-key to unlock doors which would have been so many dead walls to a detective or a policeman. Since this was a slow process, it was well upon midnight when he ran his quarry to earth. It was in a club called the “Osirian,” a very palace of the goddess of Chance. The doorkeeper was known to Brant, and under question he was able to answer in the affirmative. Two men tallying accurately with Brant’s description had come in early in the evening. They were still upstairs in one of the private rooms, the man thought; which room the attendant in the upper corridor could doubtless point out.
Brant went up, and at the stairhead found himself in a large apartment richly furnished, with a high wainscot of polished mahogany and walls and ceilings of bronze pacrusta wrought into curious designs centring in clusters of softly shaded incandescent lamps. The central space, which served as a vestibule for a series of ceilingless private rooms built out from the walls, was fitted as a club parlour, and Brant made his way noiselessly over the thick carpet to the room whose number he had obtained from the attendant at the stairhead. The door was closed, but since the walls of the private room were merely an extension of the high wainscoting, there was no obstruction to sound. Beyond the door there was a clicking as of ivory counters, and the swish of cards across a table. Brant laid his hand on the doorknob, and at that moment the noises ceased and a boyish oath dropped into the gap of silence.
“I won’t pay it—that’s all there is about it!”—this in the voice of the boyish oath. “By gad, I’m tough enough, Mr. Harding, and I don’t like him any better than you do; but I’m not a sneak thief yet!”
“I don’t see but you will have to pay it, Willie; it is a debt of honour, you see,” the gambler insisted. “You put up your promise for a stake in the game, and you have lost, fair and square. It won’t be much trouble—knowing him as well as you do.”
“But you don’t understand; or rather you won’t understand. I can’t do a thing like that, tough as I am, and nobody but a cursed cad like you would try to make me. And, by gad, I believe you cheated me, anyway! Let me see those cards.”
“Oh, I cheated you, did I? And you are going to kick out, are you? You’re a nice, innocent kid, you are! Now, see here: you have gone too far, a good deal too far, to back down; and, by God, you know too much! You are going to do just what you promised to do before we played this game, or I’ll give you dead away for what you did last night.—No, you don’t!—just keep your hands on the table right where they are! I’ve got the drop on you.”
Silence for a leaden-winged half minute, and then Harding spoke again. “Are you going to do it, or not?”