Under such discouragements he promptly determined to face the ills he knew, drank deeply at the well of desperation, and, making a forced march to the nearest railway station, boarded the first train for Denver. It was a hazardous thing to do. Brant was a man of his word, and the banished one had known him to go to extremities upon slighter provocation. But, on the other hand, Denver was a considerable city, and their ways might easily lie apart in it. Moreover, if the worst should come, it was but man to man, with plenty of old scores to speed the bullet of self-defence.
So reasoning, Harding stepped from the train at the Denver Union Station in the gray dawn of an October morning, Argus-eyed, and with his hand deep buried in the pocket of his ulster. The time was auspicious, and he reached a near-by lodging house without mishap. Through one long day he remained in hiding, but after dark, when the prowling instinct got the better of prudence, he ventured out. In a kennel some degrees lower in the scale descending than Draco’s he met a man of his own kidney whom he had once known in the camps, and who was but now fresh from the Aspen district and from an outpost therein known as Taggett’s Gulch.
This man drank with Harding, and when his tongue was a little loosened by the liquor grew reminiscent. Did the Professor recall the killing of a man in the Gulch a year or so back—a man named Benton, or Brinton? Harding had good cause to remember it, and he went gray with fear and listened with a thuggish demon of suffocation waylaying his breath. Assuredly, everybody remembered. What of it? Nothing much, save that the brother of the murdered man was in Colorado with the avowed intention of finding and hanging the murderer, if money and an inflexible purpose might contribute to that end.
That was the gist of the matter, and when Harding had pumped his informant dry, he shook the man off and went out to tramp the streets until he had fairly taken the measure of the revived danger. Summed up, it came to this: sooner or later the avenger of blood would hear of Brant, and after that the end would come swiftly and the carpenters might safely begin to build the gallows for the slayer of Henry Brinton. Harding had a vivid and disquieting picture of the swift sequence of events. The brother would find Brant, and the latter would speedily clear up the mystery and give the avenger the proofs. Then the detective machinery would be set in motion, and thereafter the murderer would find no lurking place secret enough to hide him.
Clearly something must be done, and that quickly. Concealment was the first necessity; James Harding must disappear at once and effectually. That preliminary safely got over, two sharp corners remained to be turned at whatever cost. The incriminating evidence now in Brant’s hands must be secured and destroyed, and Brant himself must be silenced before the avenger of blood should find and question him.
The disguise was a simple matter. At one time in his somewhat checkered career Harding had been a supernumerary in a Leadville variety theatre. Hence, the smooth-shaven, well-dressed man who paid his bill at the Blake Street lodging house at ten o’clock that night bore small likeness to the bearded and rather rustic-looking person who engaged a room a few minutes later at a German Gasthaus in West Denver. The metamorphosis wrought out in artistic detail, Harding put it at once to the severest test. Going out again, he sought and found the man from Taggett’s Gulch, and was unrecognised. Introducing himself as a farmer from Iowa, he persuaded the man to pilot him through the mazes of the Denver underworld, and when he had met and talked with a dozen others who knew the Professor rather better than he knew himself, he went back to the West Side Gasthaus with a comforting abatement of the symptoms of strangulation.
Having thus purchased temporary safety, the castaway began presently to look about him for the means to the more important end. Night after night he haunted the purlieus, hoping that a lucky chance might reveal Brant’s whereabouts. But inasmuch as Brant was yet walking straitly, nothing came of this, and in his new character Harding could not consistently ask questions. Twice he met William Langford face to face, and, knowing that the boy could probably give him Brant’s street and number, he was about to risk an interview with his protégé in his proper person when the god of evil-doers gave him a tool exactly fitted to his hand.
It was on the Sunday evening of Brant’s relapse. Harding had been making his usual round, and at Draco’s he met a man whose face he recognised despite its gauntness and the change wrought by the razor. A drink or two broke the ice of unfamiliarity, and then Harding led the way to a card room in the rear on the pretext of seeking a quiet place where they might drink more to their better acquaintance. In the place of withdrawal Harding kept up the fiction of bucolic simplicity only while the waiter was bringing a bottle and glasses. Then he said: “I reckon you’d be willing to swear you had never seen me before, wouldn’t you, Gasset?”
The big man gone thin was in the act of pouring himself another drink, but he put the bottle down and gave evidence of a guilty conscience by starting from his chair, ready for flight or fight as the occasion might require.
“Who the blazes are you, anyway?” he demanded, measuring the distance to the door in a swift glance aside.