CHAPTER II.

ESTWICKE slept little that night. For long hours he lay gazing at the pallid wintry moonlight as it crept, barred with the shadow of the tiny window-panes, across the floor of his room at the village hotel. The winds had died away. The world without was mute. Within, the intense quietude was broken only by the light sound of his watch under his pillow checking off the seconds. It seemed loud and strident, and its monotonous iteration jarred upon his nerves. He drew it forth presently and stopped the works. And then he could hear only his passionate pulses beat. These he might not silence so lightly.

He rose after a time, stirred the failing fire, dressed and lighted a cigar. He drew a chair to the window and sat aimlessly looking out upon the street. More than once he sighed heavily,--heavily. The shadows and the moonlight shifted about the “Square.” The sonorous clangor of the clock, in the court-house tower, ever and anon warned the world how the time wore on. He watched a mist rise, and hover, and drift away. He looked to the east for the flush of dawn. But clouds were gathering silently, and in the morning they hung low and dense.

This assisted the somewhat dreary aspect of the place, for the pretty homes of Chattalla and the graces of its social life were well out of sight behind the two-story business blocks that surrounded the muddy, ill-paved Square, in the centre of which was the court-house yard and the Temple of Justice itself. A gaunt sycamore tree overhung this red brick structure; the grass was covered with dank withered leaves; to the iron fence saddle-horses were hitched in time-honored defiance of the august legislation of the county court. As Estwicke strolled out in front of the hotel after breakfast he was impressed by a certain military aspect about the citizens. The teamsters standing near their wagons, loaded with wood or country produce, shouldered their long-handled whips in a soldierly fashion, implying a similar habitude with a far deadlier weapon. An equestrian group, that might well have served a painter for a study of cavalry, had gathered about the town scales, where the weighing of cattle was in progress. A dry-goods clerk, middle-aged and iron-gray, came out of a store and crossed the Square to the bank. Estwicke’s eyes followed the erect figure with its practised, measured gait.

“That man has marched a thousand miles to the throb of the drum,” he said.

When the rain began to fall heavily in myriads of dun-colored lines it drove the population within doors except the teamsters, still lounging near their horses’ heads, and Saturday’s crowd of black humanity that surged about a row of Jew stores denominated by common consent “Jerusalem.”

The contemplation of this picture from the hotel window was his only resource during the morning, and he regarded the approach of the belated train as in the nature of a rescue.

He established himself with a newspaper and a cigar in the smoking-car, and did not look up until his name was called.

“Glad to see you back,” said a young man who was entering from the “ladies’ car.” He smiled agreeably and offered his hand, then leaned unsteadily against the arm of the seat while he struck a match and applied it to his cigarette. He was a tall, supple, dandyish young fellow, with a sparkling clever face, a girl’s complexion, a long, silky, brown mustache, and hair and eyes of the same shade. The officer moved to give room, and he slipped into the place assigned him with a panther-like ease and grace that habitually characterized his motions, and made heavier and more muscular men seem a trifle awkward and clumsy in comparison.

“I’m not going to tell you we’ve missed you. And why? Because you have come among us too lately to believe me,” he declared, lightly.

“Don’t think you overtax my credulity, Mr. Meredith,” said Estwicke, somewhat satirically. “I can fancy how the society of Yankee officers must be prized among you.”

Meredith laughed coolly. He had been too young to bear his share on this historic plain that stretched so far around them on every side; he had grown happily into manhood under the new _régime_. He held something of the old theories, but in the revolving years his mind had been caught on the cogs of new ideas, and revolved with them. He looked with unruffled serenity at his companion.

“You are so eager in helping us to keep the peace that you never forget your mission. It had escaped me for the instant. Do you find it hard work? Very arduous, eh?”

Estwicke laughed, too. “Well, on the whole you are not so bad as the Indians,” he said, temperately. “But you are duller,--far! There is some healthy snap and go on the frontier.”

“That pleasing uncertainty about being scalped is the one redeeming feature of your profession--otherwise it is too painfully definite,” said Meredith, philosophically. “If you keep your scalp--when it is gray you’ll still be _Captain_ Estwicke, unless we can get up a foreign war or a civil commotion for your advancement. Whereas _I_,” with a hopeful rising inflection, “may in the course of time, and by the force of talent alone, be a Chief Justice--and then again, by the force of talent alone, I mayn’t. Room for speculation, eh?”

“Strikes me, on the contrary, that your prospects are painfully definite, too,” said Estwicke. “Your father and his partner will take you in as a third after a while. So you’ll be perpetually bringing up the rear, overcrowed by the two big lawyers. Your father will think he ought to do something for you--that’s the way he’ll do it.”

“Not he--not he,” protested Meredith. “I wish he would. My father has a theory that if a young lawyer is not helped he will help himself--to any stray litigation that may be afloat, as it were, in the air. He has left me to illustrate this theory.”

“How does it work?” asked Estwicke, with interest.

“I pray God I mayn’t starve,” said Meredith, tersely.

“Room for speculation, eh?” suggested Estwicke.

Chattalla had faded in the distance, and now the earthworks loomed up through the low-lying vapors and the blurring rain, vague and distorted but always grim and grewsome. As the train thundered with a hollow roar on the railroad bridge, there could be caught a fleeting glimpse of the isolated piers, and of the ferry-boat, pausing in mid-stream that Tom Toole might gaze after the cloud of smoke, which lay on the top of the cars, and drifted back to the redoubts and hung about the empty embrasures suggestively.

Estwicke, oblivious of the landscape, was absorbed in the conversation. He was essentially a man of this world. He craved the companionship of other men. He could not live apart from it. He had none of those intimate inner resources that make solitude sweet. Except for some principles of gunnery, bearing upon a still unperfected improvement of his own, he cared nothing for the study of science. Apart from the history of splendid achievement, some stirring martial lyrics, the biographies of great commanders, he had no fondness for reading. His books were the men about him; their experience, their lives, formed his interest, and as in the ever shifting combinations of human events they lapsed upon his own life he too bore a part in this sentient literature. He had a quick understanding of men, and a passionate sympathy with them. He did not even affect an appreciation of art; he looked blankly at its results. But an unrecognized something in the burnished sunlight, the silver-shotted moonlit mists, the haze on the purple hills, the sound of the melancholy autumn wind subtly thrilled to his heart and prevailed within him mightily. He found a wondrous sensuous exaltation in the mystery and the joy of being. He felt that his blood was swift in his veins; he stretched his limbs; he admired his muscles; he took cognizance of an involuntary alertness of his mental faculties; he knew that he was strong, and well, and graciously endowed. But he had no questions to ask of Heaven or Earth. He was too definite for mere abstractions, and adhered mechanically to the faith of the fathers.

Despite his imperfectly tempered aggressiveness he possessed certain qualities of good-comradeship,--his zest in life, his soldierly frankness, and his ardor commended themselves to Meredith, who was presently surprised in the midst of the desultory talk, which was neither wise nor witty, to see that the twenty miles had slipped past, that billowy sweeps of hills were on every side, that the city was elusively appearing and disappearing, mirage-like, in the purple distance.

They parted at the depot, and until evening Estwicke was greatly harassed with loneliness, for his regiment had but recently been stationed in the vicinity, and he knew few of the citizens. Nothing was going on at either of the theatres, and he could only mitigate the tedium after tea by lounging about the hotel with a promiscuous crowd of smokers, who habitually congregated here, for Marston boasted no club-houses. A fountain in the centre of the tessellated floor was tossing up pretty corolla-shaped jets of spray, that sparkled in the gaslight. The clerks bullied the incoming travellers. A mocking-bird in a cage sang shrilly; the cheerful click of billiard balls was heard from behind a colonnade, and through its vistas might be descried delicately poised cues and nimbly attitudinizing figures.

The scene soon palled upon Estwicke. He began to think of driving out to the barracks to-night instead of in the morning, but Meredith came in from the street, and the resolve faded.

“I’m glad to see that you are still in town,” said the lawyer, as they met.

Following, as was often the case, in Meredith’s footsteps, was his cousin, Tom West, a jaunty young sprig, some twenty or twenty-two years old, who effusively claimed Estwicke’s acquaintance. As they shook hands the officer became aware of a close scrutiny directed upon him from over the tall, young fledgling’s shoulder. It emanated from a pair of cold, fishy eyes, set in an impassive, florid face, which belonged to a stout, middle-aged, soberly dressed, responsible-looking party. Estwicke could not have said explicitly why he was so unfavorably impressed, nor why when West, with callow self-sufficiency, introduced the stranger as his friend, Mr. Casey, it seemed so very odd that he should have a friend like this. Estwicke, mechanically extending his hand, looked at Casey with wonted fierce intentness, and noted the indefinable but strong intimations lurking about him of solid commercial pursuits. Somehow his breadth of waistcoat, his sparingness of speech, his quiet, grave manner, assisted this effect. The man who knew men could not reconcile it with the look in his eye and stony countenance.

He showed a disposition to devote himself to West, and said little to Estwicke, who presently turned back in relief to Meredith.

“How do you get away with these long evenings?” he demanded.

“Professional study, generally; regular midnight oil business.”

“Nice boy!” ejaculated Estwicke.

“Sometimes,” said Meredith, signifying by a gesture that he desired the favor of a light from Estwicke’s cigar, “sometimes clients get as scarce as hen’s teeth, and the justice’s court--most of my practice is in that humble modern _pie poudre_--the justice’s court knows me no more. Then I make up my mind to renounce the profession before it is in everybody’s mouth that the profession has renounced me. So I play billiards in the evening, or go to the theatre, or call on the young ladies.”

“Oh, the young ladies!” cried Estwicke, stroking his whiskers. “That’s mighty bad!”

He looked at Meredith, and laughed as he received his cigar back.

A band of itinerant musicians suddenly struck up a popular waltz, and the rotunda was filled with surging waves of sound. “This is insufferable,” said Meredith. “Suppose we go up to my room, where we can have a quiet smoke and talk.”

As they passed the fountain West approached them. “Going upstairs?” he asked of his cousin.

Meredith nodded. “Will you come with us?”

“And I’ll bring Casey,” West declared agreeably, very slightly lowering his voice; “that is if you have no objection. I’m under great obligations to him, and as he knows nobody in town but us I feel bound to see him through and make his stay as pleasant as possible.”

Meredith frowned, and hesitated. But Casey was standing at no great distance, and had evidently overheard the conversation. Estwicke experienced a twinge of uneasiness. Despite his ill-defined antipathy toward Casey, and although the suggestion that he should join them had destroyed every prospect of pleasure, it seemed to Estwicke almost a cruelty to refuse publicly so slight and apparently so reasonable a request. He watched Meredith with expectant eyes.

“Certainly, if you like,” the young lawyer assented, not too graciously, and turned away.

“That’s a boon,” he muttered to Estwicke, who made no reply, for at that moment they stepped into the elevator, and stood silent and with their cigars held low and reversed, like the muskets of privates at a military funeral, in deference to a group of ladies within.

“I roost high,” said Meredith, when they had gotten out on an upper story. “It comes cheaper up here, and there’s better ventilation. ‘Beggars all, but, marry, good air.’”

After they were seated before the blazing fire in Meredith’s room, West seemed altogether unaware of the reluctant toleration with which his entertainer regarded the amendment to the quiet smoke and talk. With his gay, youthful self-sufficiency, he absorbed the conversation as far as he might. He was facetious, and flippantly fraternized with Casey.

“Captain,” he said to Estwicke, with an explanatory wave of his hand toward his solemn red-faced friend, “there is the great original David! And I am Jonathan! Wasn’t it David who saved Jonathan’s life?” He pulled at his mustache and laughed and smoked his big cigar with manly gusto.

“Oh, it was nothing, nothing whatever,” declared Casey. His manner suggested that from good nature he was content to lightly waive recognition of a feat.

The sharp young lawyer apprehended the intimation.

“Nothing?” he repeated satirically. “Nothing to save Tom West’s life? Why, it was a public benefaction!”

Estwicke, with his quick interest in exploits, his love of danger, his enthusiastic admiration of bravery, turned to Casey with a sudden sense of respect.

“May I ask how that came about?”

Casey hesitated, and Estwicke presently recognized in this a tact which was hardly consonant with such a slow-seeming man, for West, after waiting expectantly for a moment, plunged into an account of a recent railroad accident, that might have been very disastrous, but had resulted in nothing worse than cooping him up in the debris, whence by some exercise of thews and sinews--of which Mr. Casey was amply capable--he was extricated. His rescue had evidently involved no risk, but it had served as an introduction of Casey, who was adroitly abetting West in magnifying its importance. Estwicke listened with contemptuous amusement, and Meredith’s efforts to conceal his impatience had grown so lame that his relief was very evident when a knock at the door interrupted the conversation, and a card was brought in. He glanced at it in surprise.

“Show the gentleman up,” he said, and the brisk, and grinning bell-boy disappeared.

The interval that ensued was expectant. Perhaps this was the reason the new-comer appeared upon the scene with the impressiveness of the principal character of a drama. Perhaps it might be that life had always cast Maurice Brennett for the leading business, and he bore himself in a manner befitting the title _rôle_. His eyes had a peculiar brilliancy, and were capable of an intent expression so concentrated that when suddenly elicited it had a sinister effect, and put its subject instinctively on guard. He was tall, thin, angular, and dressed with an elaborate fastidiousness that was somehow oddly incongruous with his pale, powerful, intellectual face--he seemed rather the type of man who scorns the minutiæ of externals. Between his mobile eyebrows many a scheme had registered itself in subtle hieroglyphics. There was a look of severely maintained repression about the hard lines of his lips as if the controlling influences of his nature had had a struggle for ascendency over other wild and turbulent forces. Even now the slight annoyance of finding a group here instead of the man he wanted had brought a quiver to the thin, sensitive nostrils of his sharp, hooked, and delicately chiselled nose. His pallor was the pallor of late hours--not such as these young fellows kept, but the anxious vigils of thought, the canvassing of opportunity, and the inception of plans. He had his hat in his hand, and the gaslight revealed such glimmers here and there in his dark hair, clipped close about a shapely head, and in his full, dark mustache, as might intimate that he was fast growing gray, which is premature at forty.

His presence exerted a singular influence upon the other men; their personal peculiarities were suddenly abnormally pronounced.

Casey seemed trebly slow, stolid, rubicund. West looked very callow, and felt very callow too; Meredith’s dainty complexion, his silky mustache, his sparkle, were almost effeminate. Estwicke silently measured the stranger with challenging eyes.

“I have hardly time for this,” Brennett said, as he took the cigar which Meredith tendered him. “My business with you is rather imperative.”

Meredith was a trifle confused, having naturally enough supposed that the visit at this place and hour had only a social significance. Upon the word business, the others made a motion as if to take leave.

“I fear I am interrupting you,” Brennett continued, looking round at the group. “I feel rather like the ghost of fiction who routs a pleasure party. It is a hackneyed theme, but no one has adequately considered the embarrassing position of the ghost.”

There was a laugh at this and a momentary hesitation.

“You will greatly alleviate it if you won’t allow me to put you to flight. I only want a few minutes’ consultation with Mr. Meredith. I ventured to look you up out of office hours and on Saturday night,” he continued turning to the young lawyer, “because I have information that a debtor of mine is about to run off his cotton on a Sunday freight, and this may be my last opportunity to get out an attachment.”

“I insist that you don’t go,” said Meredith, addressing himself specially to Estwicke. “This won’t keep me long--meantime suppose you have a game of cards. I am not going to my office--we can talk the matter over here.”

He flung a pack of cards on the table; then he and Brennett turned away to a desk which was on the opposite side of the room. The trio at the table chatted for a few moments in a desultory strain, but presently West, glancing at lawyer and client now fairly immersed in business, shrugged his shoulders, gathered up the cards, and with a juvenile leer at the others, proposed to deal for “draw.”

“I haven’t played for so long, I scarcely remember the game,” protested Casey.

West laughed jeeringly; he joyed so in his amiable wickedness.

“Oh, Casey’s afraid of getting turned out of church. We’ll take you in out of the wet--won’t we, Captain? We belong to the ‘big church’--we do.”

Estwicke made no reply; he hardly relished even a “big church” membership with Casey.

“I suppose we play with a limit?” he asked impatiently, showing some eagerness to begin.

West’s _was_ an amiable wickedness. In fact it was only a weak-kneed semblance--that would, yet might not, be. He quaked at the bare suggestion of the alternative.

“Captain, you shock me,” he declared. “Of course we play with a limit--fifty cents--say.”

They talked very little when once fairly at it. For a time Meredith, who sat with his back toward them, only knew vaguely that somebody was “passing” or “straddling the blind,” or “seeing and going better.” Once or twice West laughed out loud and long in triumph. And again his voice rose in excited remonstrance, to which his companions seemed to pay no attention. Then the room was quiet for a time, and the lawyer lost cognizance of everything except the complications of Brennett’s liens and his debtor’s duplicity.

“How many bales do you suppose he has there?” Meredith asked, after a meditative pause.

There was no answer.

He glanced up impatiently. Brennett’s face was instinct with an alert interest. His eyes, lighted by some inward sardonic laughter, were fixed upon the group by the fire.

Meredith turned quickly, and at this moment Estwicke,--his coat thrown off upon the floor, his hat thrust on the back of his head, the hot blood crimsoning his sunburned cheek, the perspiration standing thick in his close-clipped red hair, his eyes blazing with that most unholy fire, the gambler’s passion,--cocked his cigar between his set teeth and raised the blind one hundred dollars.

West had passed out of the game, had drawn away from the table, and was gazing with dismayed surprise at the swollen proportions of the pool and at the impassive, stony countenance of Casey. Not a feather was ruffled as he looked cooly into Estwicke’s burning eyes; he was as decorously florid, his waistcoat as commercially rotund as ever, but his demeanor was the demeanor of the professional expert.

He stolidly made good--and then he drew one card, Estwicke standing Pat. After this, for a few moments, each seemed cautious, making very small bets. But presently, when Estwicke raised him fifty dollars, Casey “saw it” and went a hundred better.

Then the slow, cumbrous fellow, according to his habit, laid his cards, face downward, on the table in front of him, with a single chip upon them to hold them in place, and clasping his hands lightly upon his substantial stomach, calmly awaited Estwicke’s “say.”

And all at once Estwicke looked hard at the man, with a change on his expressive face. There was an eager surprise in his eyes; the flush of sheer excitement deepened to an angry glow; he seemed lost for an instant in a sort of doubting confusion. Suddenly he made good, and “called.”

Meredith was thunder-struck as he realized the full significance of the scene. He rose hastily. “Gentlemen,” he said, sternly, “this is going entirely too far.”

They took no heed. With one hand Casey laid his cards, a straight flush--ace, king, queen, jack, and ten of diamonds--upon the table beside Estwicke’s jack full, while with the other hand he gathered the pool toward him, giving no sign of elation.

“I protest,” began Meredith. He stopped suddenly short.

Brennett sprang to his feet with a sharp exclamation.

It happened in an instant. There was a swift movement of Estwicke’s intent figure; he thrust his hand behind him, and seemed to draw from his pistol-pocket a glancing, steely flash of light; there was a sharp, metallic click--of a peculiarly nerve-thrilling quality; he lunged across the table, and held the weapon at full cock at the man’s head.

Warned by Estwicke’s motion, Casey had made an effort to draw his pistol. His hand grasped it in his pocket.

“Move your right arm and you’re a dead man,” said Estwicke between his set teeth. They were strong and white, and unconsciously he showed them. The veins that crossed his forehead were black and swollen. His breath came hot and fast and with a sibilant sound. He seemed to think as Brennett sprang up that there would be an effort to disarm him.

“If you interfere,” he said, in a low voice,--“if you touch me--I will kill you--I will kill you!”

It was a moment of terrible suspense, but as Brennett moved hastily back, he laughed aloud--a short, ungenial laugh, nervous perhaps--or was the fancy so absurd that he should interfere!

Meredith’s motion toward Estwicke was arrested by his next words. “Drop that card out of your sleeve--the card I dealt you.”

Casey gazed abjectly at him, turning even paler than before, and made a weak, spasmodic effort to speak, to deny.

“No use talking,” said Estwicke, cutting him short. “Drop the card.” His finger by accident or design quivered slightly on the trigger.

The sharper shook his sleeve, and the three of diamonds fell upon the table.

“The exchange was quick as lightning--but I _saw_ it!” Estwicke declared.

Without lowering his eyes or moving the weapon, he placed with his left hand the three of diamonds on the table beside the straight flush to illustrate the self-evident fact that, no matter which of the cards Casey had substituted for it, the hand after the draw was merely a flush.

“And a full out-ranks a flush!” he proclaimed, with a fierce, dictatorial air.

Casey sat before him, silent, cowed, helpless, the revolver that he still grasped in his pocket as useless as if his right hand was palsied.

“My ‘Full’ raked the pool!” thundered Estwicke. “I won it all! I’ll have it all! Fork! With your left hand--mind.”

As Casey hastily pushed the money across the table, a modest nickel that had served in the half dollar limit game with which they began, fell to the floor and rolled away among the shadows.

He had surrendered utterly--it was all over. A breath of relief was beginning to inflate his lungs, which in the surprise and fright had seemed to forget and bungle their familiar functions. The other men moved slightly as they stood,--an involuntary expression of the relaxation of the tension--the creak of Tom West’s boots was to him like the voice of a friend. Then they realized, with the shock of an infinite surprise, that Estwicke sat as motionless as if he were carved in stone, his pistol still held at the cheat’s head. The room was so silent that they might hear the rumble of the elevator on its missions up and down, the throb of the engine in the cellar, the faint rattle of the dishes in the dining-room far, far below the high story where the young man’s room was perched. They understood at last, and it came upon them with the amazing effect of a flash of lightning from a clear sky.

Estwicke was waiting for the nickel!

The card-sharper was panting, failing, almost losing consciousness. He did not dare to stoop and search for the coin--he could not summon his voice for speech. The tears sprang into his eyes when he saw that the situation was at length comprehended by the others.

West hastily knelt on the floor, passed his tremulous fingers over the dark carpet, clutched the coin and placed it on the table.

To the two men who knew Estwicke best the episode was a frightful illustration of a certain imperious exactingness which they had discovered even in their short acquaintance was a notable characteristic of his nature. For one instant longer he looked hard at the sharper. Then he brought his heavy hand down upon the table in the midst of the pile of greenbacks, with a vehemence that sent a shiver through every glass in the room.

“Damn you!” he cried out, fiercely. “Keep it!”

He thrust his pistol into his pocket. Without another word he strode heavily out of the room, leaving Casey staring blankly at the money so strangely relinquished, and the others standing petrified under the yellow gas-jets gazing after the receding figure that marched through the shadowy vagueness of the dimly lighted hall without.

When he was fairly gone Meredith turned to Casey. The sharper had before hardly seemed able to breathe. He was on his feet now and ready to walk. His god was good to him. The touch of it had made him whole.

“I have never before had occasion,” said Meredith, sternly, “to show a man the door.” He waved his hand toward it.

The hardened creature insolently lifted his cold, fishy eye and grinned. His plethoric pocket-book was overflowing in his hands; he tucked the other bills into the pockets of his respectable, commercial-looking waistcoat.

“Sorry to have any disagreement, I’m sure. Your friend is a little too choleric--apt to be the fault of military men. I have to thank you for a most delightful evening. I’ll come again soon. Bye-bye, West!”

He bowed and grinned and grimaced at the door. Meredith was scarlet with indignation. Tom West thrust his hands into his pockets and turned sheepishly away. Brennett flung himself against the mantel-piece and laughed with an intense enjoyment so chilling, so derisive, so repellant in its quality that Casey paused in the hall and glanced back through the open door in surprise and a vague distrust. Meredith saw among the shadows his white, heavy-jawed face, from which the smile had faded in an expression of inexplicable wonder, of fear. Then he turned once more and disappeared.

Meredith hastily handed Brennett his memoranda and, with a promise to return in a few moments, started toward the door.

“Where are you going?” West demanded inquisitively.

“To look up Captain Estwicke,” Meredith replied, curtly.

The “elevator boy” knew the number of Estwicke’s room on the transient floor by reason of having had the key left with him during the evening. Estwicke had hardly entered and closed the door when Meredith knocked. He looked around with a flushed face as the young lawyer came in.

“I hope you will remember how that blackguard was forced upon me,” Meredith began, hotly. “I don’t usually consort with cheats. I am not responsible for your meeting such company in my room.”

Estwicke gave a bitter laugh.

“What does it matter to me where I met him?”

“It matters to me,” said Meredith, tersely.

Estwicke was tramping back and forth the length of the room.

“I thought I had given that thing up!” he cried in a tumult of despair. “I haven’t touched a card for years. I can’t play in moderation. I can’t, you see. I go wild--wild! It’s an hereditary passion.”

Meredith was a lawyer, and an acute one. He changed his base with a celerity that did infinite credit to his acumen. Estwicke was taking himself to task--not his entertainer. He briskly joined the onslaught.

“Oh hereditary!” he sneered. “I have often noticed that a man credits his father with his own pet vices. What was the reason you let the rascal have the money?”

“I had no reason--no positive idea; it was only an impulse,” said Estwicke. “Somehow when I got it--I--couldn’t touch it. That _I_ should brawl with a fellow like that for money! But why not?” he added after a sullen pause. “He is as good as I am--that is, I am as bad as he is.”

“Bless me!” exclaimed Meredith, satirically, “I wouldn’t say _that_.”

“I know better. He doesn’t.”

“But some of it was yours on the strictest moral construction.”

Estwicke stood in the middle of the floor staring at his visitor.

“I mean the money you originally bet,” Meredith explained.

This was a distinction that Estwicke could not grasp. “It was _all_ mine!” he bawled. “My--full--raked--the--pool!” He came hastily and sat down in the green-rep arm-chair, expounding how the game stood, checking off his cards and Casey’s on the fingers of his right and left hands respectively. His excited words in their confused haste stumbled and tripped up over each other in his throat; his eyes were eager and earnest; he trembled with the intensity of his interest. Even the wordy lawyer could not interrupt.

“Well,” he said, when Estwicke had concluded, “I knew all that before--and it’s a nice business. You told me once that you have nothing but your pay. I should think,” he continued, exasperatingly, “this night’s work would make a considerable hole in it. I hope you feel that you have invested your time and money to the best advantage.”

“Oh, I got disgusted with the money. I couldn’t endure to keep step, morally, you know, with that contemptible, poor devil. I tell you he looked at the money with tears in his eyes.”

Meredith stared.

“This is rather a belated sympathy with the ‘poor devil,’” he said, sarcastically. “Captain Estwicke,” he continued, “I don’t pretend to understand you, but I feel it almost a duty to tell you how heartily I disapprove of your conduct to-night. Pistoling a man at a card-table for cheating is a practically unprovoked, cruel and abhorrent crime.”

“Didn’t do it,” said Estwicke, grimly, on the defensive.

“You would have done it--if he had not instantly yielded.”

“Ha-a-rdly,” drawled Estwicke. The tone was significant. Meredith looked at him expectantly. Estwicke glanced uneasily up at the ceiling, then down at his boots. As he turned doubtfully toward Meredith their eyes met, and he broke into an uproarious peal of laughter.

“Why, man!” he cried, hilariously, “the pistol wasn’t loaded!”

He drew the weapon from his pocket and held it at arm’s length, revolving its empty chambers, and setting the walls to echoing its sharp click.

Meredith laughed, too, partly in sympathy with the other’s boisterous enjoyment of what he considered so exquisitely flavored a joke and partly in relief. “I’m glad you let me know this,” he declared. “Forget what I said when I didn’t know it.” Presently he added with a view of contingencies of which Estwicke seemed utterly incapable--“But suppose that that fellow had persisted in heaving up the thing _he_ had in his pocket?”

“Oh, but I was sure he wouldn’t. Moral suasion, you know. There’s a wonderful deal of moral suasion in giving a man a peep down an iron tube. It puts the best of us out of countenance.” After a pause he said, gravely,--“Nothing would have induced me to hurt the man--besides, I _couldn’t_. All I wanted was my own money.”

“And you didn’t want that little long.”

“I feel like the devil,” said Estwicke, impatiently. “I’m so much like the devil to-night that I don’t know us apart.”

“Well,” persisted Meredith, “you’ve given us a fine sensation. I never saw a man so entertained as that fellow, Brennett.”

“I don’t care to set up as a show,” said Estwicke, sulkily.

“A cat may look at a king.”

“I doubt if it is altogether safe for the cat.”

“In the light of late events, I certainly should not take the liberty if I were a cat,” said Meredith, with a laugh.

“He is not a cat,” rejoined Estwicke, with that sudden insight into character which was so marked a quality of his mind. “He has a hawk’s face and a hawk’s eyes--the most startlingly brilliant eyes I ever saw. I never met a human hawk before--though I’ve known human wolves, and monkeys, and dogs, and cats. We don’t want to claim kin with our poor relations. But some of us can’t help ourselves. We will look like ’em, and sometimes we will behave like ’em.” He stretched out his legs to the fire, and thrust his hands in his pockets. “I’m misanthropic, ain’t I?” He glanced up with a laugh. After a pause he asked--“What’s his business?”

“Getting rich.”

“I could have guessed as much,” declared Estwicke. “That man has his soul in his pocket. And his pocket doesn’t bulge. Such a soul as that won’t crowd things.”

“Don’t know about his soul, but he certainly has an instinct for money. He speculates heavily in cotton futures. And he owns a half interest in a mine out west that they used to say was as good as a mint.”

The young lawyer had risen to take leave. With an almost affectionate impulse he paused at the door. “Estwicke,” he said, “I want to tell you--you’re a good fellow.”

“That I am,” said Estwicke, mockingly, “I’m mighty good.”

He looked about him wearily, with a haggard, hunted face after the door had closed. Then suddenly he rang the bell, called for his bill, packed his traps dexterously, methodically, and in surprisingly small compass--one of his military accomplishments--and the full moon was hardly swinging past the meridian before he was bowling swiftly along the turnpike among the hills that encompassed the city. Through the carriage windows he saw it lying behind him in many an undulation, its domes and its mansard roofs idealized in the glamour and the distance to a castellated splendor. It had faded away in the dusky shadows long before he caught sight of the white-framed barrack buildings. His heart warmed at the thought of his friends so close at hand, of the familiar surroundings, and the old routine. He saw the sentry’s bayonet glisten in the moonlight, and catch on its point a star of fire. And the evening and the scene he had left slipped into the dark corners of his recollection.