Brant came out of his reverie and sat down on the cot beside the exponent of worldly wisdom.
“You say, if I could have carried it through,” he broke in. “But now?”
“Now there is nothing to do but to switch over and pull in harness with common sense. It will all come out at the trial—it’s bound to. The judge is making believe that he is going to be your counsel, whether or no; but you know you are not going to allow it, and the upshot of that will be that the court will appoint somebody else to defend you, and it is ten to one that it will be some keen young fellow with nothing to lose and everything to gain. There are a dozen young lawyers keeping up with the case, and any one of them will snap at the chance. And you know as well as I do what will happen if any lawyer in the wide world, save and excepting his own father, gets a chance to cross-examine Will Langford.”
Brant nodded, as one who may not controvert a self-evident fact. But what he said brought the reporter’s card house of hypotheses tumbling in ruins.
“You have made your case, Jarvis, and summed it up, but there is one small flaw in it. You are taking it for granted that young Langford killed Harding, and that I did not. What if I say that your basic premises are wrong?”
Jarvis laughed, but it was not the laugh of assurance. “You can’t bluff me out, George; I know what I know.”
“You don’t know anything. You are merely guessing from beginning to end.”
Jarvis took time to think about it, and assurance slipped still farther into the abyss of incertitude.
“If it is only a guess, you can make it a certainty,” he said at length.
Brant smiled. “You would hardly expect me to tie the rope around my own neck, even in a confidential talk with you. But I will tell you a little, and you may infer the rest—you are pretty good at inferences. My quarrel with Harding was of the deadly sort, and it had been going on for years. A few weeks ago I ran him out of town, telling him plainly that if he came back I should kill him. After he had gone I learned that he had done a thing for which there was no such word as forgiveness, and I swore then, and wrote it down in a letter, that his chance for life lay in keeping out of my way. Can you put two and two together?”