The chief clerk smiled. “It must be something pretty serious to rattle you that way,” was his comment. “You are a good enough railroad man to know that my department has nothing to do with yours, except to ask questions of it. And that reminds me: here is a letter from the general manager asking if we have a late map of the Denver yards. The president is coming west in a day or two, and there is a plan on foot for extensions, I believe.”
“Well?” said Brant.
“It isn’t well—it’s ill. We haven’t any such map, and I don’t see but what you will have to stay and make one.”
Now, to a man in Brant’s peculiar frame of mind employment was only one degree less welcome than immediate release. Wherefore he caught at the suggestion so readily that Antrim was puzzled.
“I thought you had to go away, whether or no,” he said curiously.
“Oh, I suppose I can put it off if I have to,” Brant rejoined, trying to hedge.
“Which is another way of telling me to mind my own business,” retorted Antrim good-naturedly. “That’s all right; only, if you have struck a bone, you can comfort yourself with the idea that you have plenty of good company. No one of us has a monopoly of all the trouble in the world.”
“No, I suppose not.” Brant said so much, and then got far enough away from his own trouble to notice that the chief clerk was looking haggard and seedy.
“You look as if you had been taking a turn at the windlass yourself, Harry. Have you?”
“Yes, something of that sort,” replied Antrim, but he turned quickly to the papers on his desk.