CHAPTER XXXIII
TE MORITURI SALUTAMUS
If it was late in the day when Jarvis left the Plainsman building armed with his chief’s request for an order to visit the prisoner in the jail, it was still later when the formalities were finally appeased and he gained access to the inner fastnesses of the city’s house of detention and to Brant’s cell.
Having but now parted from Dorothy, Brant was in the seventh heaven of love’s aftermath when the cell door opened to admit the reporter; and since love breaks ground for far-reaching kindliness, the news-gatherer’s welcome was all that could be desired.
“I wonder if any unlucky dog of them all ever had better friends or more of them than I have, Jarvis? The way you all stand by me would warm the cockles of a worse heart than mine ever was.” Thus the prisoner of good hope, love-tempered; and Jarvis laughed.
“You don’t deserve to have any friends. May I sit on your bed? Thanks. A fellow that loses the combination on his tongue the way you have ought to be hanged on general principles. But you’ve got to talk to me, or thrash me, one of the two.”
“I’ll do both, if you insist,” said Brant with cheerful levity. “Which will you have first?”
“The answers to two or three questions first, and then, if there is any fight left in you, we’ll see about the thrashing.”
“Go ahead. What is it you want to know?” said the aforetime bondsman of reticence.
“A lot of things that you can’t tell me, and some few that you can. Did you at one time have a gun—a Colt’s forty-five—that had once belonged to Harding?”
Brant lost levity and freedom of speech in the dropping of an eyelid, but he could not in common fairness refuse to answer.