A private chivalry

by Francis Lynde

So much for the boy and the first step in his rescue. After that it would be the father’s part to keep him from forming a new alliance—if he could.

For himself, however, Brant foresaw price payings of the dearest. The lower world was thickly peopled in the Denver of that day, and he could scarcely hope to win in and out unrecognised. As a citizen of that world his light had not been hidden under a bushel. He was known to the men of his tribe, and the tribe is nomadic, albeit it keeps well within its own marches.

What then? Merely this: It would be passed from lip to ear that Plucky George of the mining camps was in town; that, for reasons best known to himself, he was living for the time in retirement. And thereafter he would better cut off his right hand than be seen in public with any woman whose reputation he valued.

This was the barb of the arrow, and it rankled sorely while he was measuring the distance between the Plainsman building and the kennel of the dog. Nevertheless, he went on steadily enough until he stood before the baize doors screening the interior of the Draconian kennel. But here he hung reluctant for a moment, knowing that he had reached the turning point. Once beyond the swinging doors it would be too late to go back.

So he stopped, and put out his hand and withdrew it, and for the first time in many years the square jaw of him lacked something of its resolute outline. Within he could heard the shuffling of feet, the clinking of glasses, the b-r-r-r of the roulette balls—all the familiar sounds of the life he had put behind him. He was far enough away from it now to begin to loathe it; and yet it drew him irresistibly. What if he should be dragged back into the old paths again? Stranger things had happened; and the fascination of the serpent is not less potent because it is loathsome.

While he hesitated, it came to him like the thrilling of an electric shock that this was one of the penalties he would always have to pay—this calling to him of the underworld to which he had belonged. In a flash of the inner self-sight, one of those glimpses into heart possibilities that not even a good man may prolong to a scrutiny, he saw that he had lied in telling Hobart that his yearnings were altogether for better things. They were not. The woundings of the evil years were not healed, and they might never be. He turned and took a step away from the doors of peril.

There and then he saw a picture of a grief-stricken young woman leaning against a vine-covered veranda pillar and sobbing softly as one who mourns without hope. Then and there the thought of his promise to Dorothy Langford nerved him afresh, and the swing doors fell apart under his hand.

The baize screens were yet winging to rest behind him, and he had no more than taken the measure of the place, when the bartender threw up his hand by way of welcome. Here was recognition on the very threshold of the undertaking; and since it had come, Brant set his teeth and determined to make such use of it as his errand would warrant. So he went around to the end of the bar and waited until the man was at liberty. That was not long.

“Well, say, old pardner—shake! I thought you’d turn up all right. How are they coming, anyhow? Fellow came in here a while back and said you’d killed a man up on the range and lit out. I told him he lied; told him you wasn’t the runaway kind; see? What’ll you take?”

Notwithstanding Brant was but a short Sabbath-day’s journey away from the associations of which the bartender’s greeting was a part, he winced at the familiarity of it, at the oaths with which it was plentifully garnished, and even at the underworld argot in which it was couched. Then he humbled himself and put his newly found dignity under foot.