“How cold your lips are, you mean,” said Dorothy playfully. “Go to bed, dear, and don’t worry any more. You will make yourself sick.”
But when her sister was gone she lay very still, with closed eyes and trembling lips, and so fought her small battle to the bitter end, winning finally the victory called self-abnegation, together with its spoils, the mask of cheerfulness and the goodly robe of serenity.
CHAPTER XIV
THE ANCHOR COMES HOME
Brant awoke on the morning following his excommunication with one idea dominant, and that pointed to flight. Whatever he might be able to do with his life elsewhere, it was evident that the Denver experiment was a pitiful failure. This he said, cursing the fatuous assurance which had kept him from flying to the antipodes at the outset. The city of the plain was merely a clearing house for the mining camps, and sooner or later his story would have found him out, lacking help from Harding or any other personal enemy.
“Anybody but a crazy fool would have known that without having to wait for an object lesson; but, of course, I had to have it hammered into me with blows,” was the way he put it to himself on the walk downtown. “Well, I have had the lesson, and I’ll profit by it and move on—like little Joey. If they would give me the chance I’d rather be a sheep dog than a wolf; but it seems that the world at large hasn’t much use for the wolf who turns collie—damn the world at large! If I hadn’t given my word to Hobart I’d be tempted to go back and join the fighting minority. As it is, I’ll run for it.”
So he said, and so he meant to do; but a small thing prevented. Colonel Bowran was away, and he could not well desert in his chief’s absence. But this need no more than delay the flight. The chief engineer’s absences were usually short, and a day or two more or less would neither make nor mar the future.
So ran the prefigurings, but the event was altogether different from the forecasting, as prefigured events are prone to be. For three days Brant made shift to sink his trouble in a sea of hard work, but on the fourth he had a note from the front, saying that the chief engineer’s absence would be extended yet other days. At the same time, lacking the data contained in the field notes carried off by the colonel, he ran out of work. After that the days were empty miseries. In the first idle hour he began to brood over the peculiar hardness of his lot, as a better man might, and with the entrance of the remorseless devil of regret such poor forgetfulness as he had been able to wring out of hard work spread its wings and fled away.
At the end of twenty-four hours he was fairly desperate, and on the second day of enforced idleness he wrote a long letter to Hobart:
“The devil has another job for me,” he began, “and if it wasn’t for my promise to you I should take it. Things have turned out precisely as I knew they would, and you are to blame; first, for dragging me out of the pit when I wasn’t worth saving, and next, for telling me that I might come to Denver when I should have gone to the ends of the earth. By which you will understand that my sins have found me out. I don’t know that you care to hear the story, but I do know that I shall presently go mad if I don’t tell it to somebody. If it bores you, just remember what I say—that you are to blame.
“Before I begin I may as well tell you that it is about a woman, so you can swear yourself peaceful before you come at the details. I met her on the train the day I came down from the Colorow district—the day of my return to civilization. Nothing came of that first meeting, save that I got a glimpse of the gulf that separates a good woman from a bad man; but later, after I had begun to look ahead a little to the things that might be, we met again—this time in her own home, and I with an introductory godfather.