“What is your theory? Set it in words.”
Jarvis settled himself on the cot, nursing one knee in his clasped hands and chewing an extinct cigar. “It’s as simple as twice two. You heard young Langford’s testimony at the preliminary examination?”
“Naturally, being within a few feet of him when he gave it.”
“Very good. You were in that card room at the Osirian and saw what he saw. Did he tell the truth?”
Brant was silent.
“You know he didn’t tell the truth; or, at least, he didn’t tell all of it,” Jarvis went on. “He said that Harding drew a pistol on him, but he did not say that he had already drawn his own. Also, he left the inference wide open that the big pistol on the table, the pistol from which the shot was fired, was Harding’s—that Harding had laid it there. That wasn’t so.”
Brant sprang to his feet in a frenzy of impatience. “For God’s sake, have done with this beating about the bush and tell me what you know or what you suspect!”
Jarvis complied in set phrase. “This: Young Langford was the man who broke into your room. He was the man who took the pistol, who carried it all the next day, who drew it upon Harding, who—” He broke off abruptly, leaving the categorical accusation unfinished. “You know what happened just as well as I do. It was that young cub who did the shooting, and you are here because—well, I know the why and wherefore of that, too, but we needn’t go into it. You’ve been all sorts of a Don Quixote, and I believe you’d keep it up to the finish, if you had your way. But it won’t go, George.”
Brant said nothing. He was leaning against the wall, just where Dorothy had stood a little while before, and there was a far-away look in his eyes—the look that comes into the eyes of a soldier when duty calls and death beckons. But Jarvis was not skilled in reading face signs, and he went on, secure in the worldly wisdom of his own point of view.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t a fine thing. If you had lived two or three centuries ago they would have drawn and quartered you first and made a demigod of you afterward. But it won’t go now. When people find out, half of them will laugh at you, and the other half will say you ought to be sent to a lunatic asylum. If you could have carried it through——”