“I know; I was a young man once myself. But if I had it to do over again I’d touch it lightly. Of course, you are new to the West, and naturally you want to see the animals; but even an onlooker has to be careful and not get the smell of the menagerie in his clothes. It’s devilish hard to get out.”
It was a random thrust, but it went home, and for a few minutes after the colonel’s departure Brant saw only the large humour of it. Truly, he had never posed before his chief as a reformed reprobate; but to be mistaken for an innocent youth, fresh from the moral environment of the well-behaved East, was mirth for the gods. Afterward, however, the pendulum swung to the opposite end of its arc. Was it quite honest that he should suffer the colonel—and others—to think better of him than the facts warranted? Obtaining money under false pretences was a crime: was it any less culpable to carry off booty of good repute in like manner?
As far as his chief was concerned, Brant had come to know the colonel well enough to be sure that a most intimate knowledge of the incriminating facts would have little weight with him on the professional side. He was well satisfied with his assistant, and, unlike many employers, he was frank enough to say so. But there was a standing invitation—as yet unused—holding the door of the Bowran home open to the draughtsman. This might not be withdrawn in so many words, but—Brant put himself in the colonel’s shoes—it would probably not be renewed.
From the Bowran generalities to the Langford particulars was but a step, and Brant presently began to ask himself curious questions touching the continuance of his welcome at Hollywood if the facts were known. That was a different matter, and he was not long in arriving at conclusions definite and humiliating. The judge would probably set him down as a hypocrite; Mrs. Langford would be horrified; Isabel would want him to pose as the central figure in a certain picture of mining camp life she was painting; Will would fellowship him frankly on the ground of similarity of tastes; and Dorothy—it was not so easy to prefigure her attitude, though pity and sorrow for a smashed ideal might well be the pointing of it.
“That settles it!” said this latter-day flagellant, scourging himself into a fine fury of self-abnegation. “I go there no more. It is only a question of time when they will find me out, and then I should do something desperate.”
So he affected to consider the determination taken once for all, and fell to work in a dull rage of resentment. But when that fire burned out for lack of fuel, as all fires will, another and a holier was kindled in its place. At thirty a man does not fall in love at first sight, and in the beginning Dorothy Langford had figured in his thoughts of her only as an incarnation of pure womanhood. But latterly the point of view had been changing. She was no longer a type; she was the eidolon of the type. Brant asked himself a blunt question, and the ink dried between the nibs of his ruling pen while the question waited for its answer. The windows of the map room looked northward, and he got down from the high stool to stand with his hands behind him, gazing abstractedly across the railway yards toward the quarter of the town he had come to know best.
“You have spun the web for me, little girl, and I couldn’t break away from you now if the heavens fall,” he said, letting his thought slip into speech. “I have just about one chance in a hundred of being able to carry it off without being found out, and I am going to take that chance; I’d take it if it were only one in a thousand.”
The outer office door opened and shut, but Brant heard it not. For which cause he started guiltily when some one behind him said:
“You have a fine view from here, Mr. Brant.”
Brant spun around as one shot, and found himself confronting the father of the young woman whom he had been apostrophizing. For a moment even the commonplaces deserted him, but presently he recovered himself sufficiently to join rather sheepishly in the laugh at his own expense.