“Then you don’t go into Denver?”
“No.”
“But some time you may. In that case, it will be as well for you to forget what little you may happen to know about me. Do you understand?”
“You’d better believe I do. I can hold my jaw with anybody when I have to; and I don’t have to be hit with a club neither.”
“Good. Have a cigar—and don’t forget what I say.”
The brakeman took the proffered cigar and vanished; and thereupon Brant began to repent once more and to grope for the lost mantle of humility. Here on the very heels of his good resolutions he had balked at one of the smallest of the obstacles, bullying a man in his displeasure and trading upon his reputation as a man-queller like any desperado of the camps. It was humiliating, but it proved the wisdom of the smoking-room exile. Truly, he was far enough from being a fitting companion for the young woman in Section Six.
As he had predicted, the train lost time steadily throughout the day, and an early supper was served at the regular dinner station. Brant went to the dining room with the other passengers, and when Miss Langford did not appear, he sent the porter to her with a luncheon and a cup of tea.
“It is about what I had a right to expect,” he told himself when he was once more back in the solitude of the smoke den. “She was afraid to trust herself in the same dining room with me. Why the devil couldn’t I have held my cursed temper just ten seconds longer? Here I’ve had to sit all day and eat my heart out, when I might have been getting miles away from the old life in her company. What a fool a man can make of himself when he tries!”
“That is a fact,” said a voice from the opposite seat; and Brant, who had been staring gloomily out of the window at the wall of blackness slipping past the train, and so was unaware that he was not alone, was unreasonable enough to be angry.
“What’s that you say?” he began wrathfully, turning upon his commentator; but the pleasant face of the young man in the opposite seat was of the kind which disarms wrath.