Brant still hesitated. “I know, but there is always the risk—the bystander’s risk, which is usually bigger than that of the fellow with his gun out. Besides, you have a wife——”
Hobart pushed him into the downward path.
“You don’t know Kate,” he objected. “She would drive me to it if she were here and knew the circumstances. She knows the camps better than either of us.”
Fifteen minutes later they entered Dick Gaynard’s dance hall together, and the assayer loitered in the barroom while Brant edged his way back to the alcove in the rear, where stood the faro table. Presently Hobart saw the dealer rise and give his chair to Brant; then the loiterer felt free to look about him.
There was nothing new or redeeming in the scene. There was the typical perspiring crowd of rough men and tawdry women surging to and fro, pounding the dusty floor to the time beaten out of the discordant piano; the same flaring oil lamps and murky atmosphere thick with tobacco smoke and reeking with the fumes of alcohol; the same silent groups ringing the roulette boards and the faro table. Hobart looked on, and was conscious of a little shiver of disgust—a vicarious thrill of shame for all concerned, but chiefly for his friend. And Brant had come to this for his daily bread! Brant, the honour man, the athlete, the well-beloved of all who knew him!
Hobart let himself drift with the ebb and flow of those who, like himself, were as yet only onlookers, coming to anchor when he had found a vantage point from which he could see and study the face of the fallen one. For all the hardening years it was not yet an evil face. The cheeks of the man were thinner and browner than those of the boy, and the heavy mustache hid the mouth, the feature which changes most with the changing years; but the resolute jaw was the same, and the steady gray eyes, though these had caught the gambler’s trick of looking out through half-closed lids when they saw most. On the whole the promise of youth had been kept. The handsome boy had come to be a man good to look upon; a man upon whom any woman might look once, and turning, look again. The assayer was not given to profanity, but he swore softly in an upflash of angry grief at the thought that the passing years had marred Brant’s soul rather than his body.
None the less, it was shipwreck, hopeless and unrelieved, as Brant had asserted; and from contemplating the effect of it in the man, Hobart was moved to look upon the cause of it in the woman. Perhaps there was that in her which might make the descent into the pit less unaccountable. Hobart would see.
He worked his way slowly around two sides of the crowded room, and so came to the piano. One glance at the performer was enough. It revealed a woman who had once been beautiful, as the sons of God once found the daughters of men; nay, the wreck of her was still beautiful, but it was the soulless beauty whose appeal is to that which is least worthy in any man. Hobart saw and understood. There be drunkards a-many who look not upon the wine when it is red in the cup; and Brant was of these—an inebriate of passion. The assayer turned his back upon the woman that he might the better make excuses for his friend.
Gaynard’s bar did a thriving business that night, and the throng in the gambling alcove thinned out early. The dance hall was the greater attraction, and here the din and clamour grew apace until the raucous voice of the caller shouting the figures of the dance could no longer be heard above the clanging of the piano, the yells and catcalls, and the shuffling and pounding of feet on the floor. Hilarity was as yet the keynote of all the uproar, but Hobart knew that the ceaseless activity of the bartenders must shortly change the pitch to the key quarrelsome, and he began to wish himself well out of it.
Brant glanced up from time to time, always without pause in the monotonous running of the cards, and when he finally succeeded in catching Hobart’s eye he beckoned with a nod. The assayer made his way around to the dealer’s chair, and Brant spoke without looking up: