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The Project Gutenberg eBook of A private
chivalry
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
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laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: A private chivalry

a novel

Author: Francis Lynde

Release date: February 1, 2024 [eBook #72849]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1900

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This book was produced from images made available
by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PRIVATE

CHIVALRY ***
 Appletons’
Town and Country Library

No. 291

A PRIVATE CHIVALRY
PRIVATE CHIVALRY
A NOVEL

BY
FRANCIS LYNDE
AUTHOR OF A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT,
THE HELPERS, ETC.

Acts more dangerous, but less famous

because they were but private chivalries.
Sir Philip Sidney

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1900
 Copyright, 1900,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

All rights reserved.

 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.— The woman ... whose hands are as bands 1
II.— The vintage of Abi-Ezer 13
III.— “The wreck of the Hesperus” 23
IV.— The migrants 33
V.— The scale ascending 44
VI.— A molehill levelled 49
VII.— And a mountain upreared 55
VIII.— A blow in the dark 64
IX.— The eye to the string 72
X.— The string to the shaft 78
XI.— And the shaft to the mark 85
XII.— The way of a maid with a man 88
XIII.— “Through a glass darkly” 99
XIV.— The anchor comes home 107
XV.— When hate and fear strike hands 118
XVI.— The goodly company of misery 125
XVII.— “As apples of gold in pictures of silver” 131
XVIII.— “Let the righteous smite me friendly” 139
XIX.— The leading of the blind 149
XX.— The demoniac 159
XXI.— “A rod for the fool’s back” 166
XXII.— How the smoking flax was quenched 177
XXIII.— How Dorothy blew the embers alive 190
XXIV.— “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein” 201
XXV.— “Silence is an answer to a wise man” 213
XXVI.— In the valley of the shadow 221
 XXVII.— Showing how faith may out-buffet a fact 234
XXVIII.— How the judge gave of his best 243
XXIX.— In which a wilful man has his way 255
XXX.— How love and friendship threw a main 260
XXXI.— A feast of mingled cups 266
XXXII.— Such friends are exultation’s agony 276
XXXIII.— Te morituri salutamus 281
XXXIV.— The wing-beat of Azrael 290
XXXV.— The wisdom of many and the wit of one 297
XXXVI.— In which a fox doubles once too often 310
XXXVII.— The law of the Medes and Persians 321
XXXVIII.— In which darts are counted as stubble 326
A PRIVATE CHIVALRY
 CHAPTER I
THE WOMAN ... WHOSE HANDS ARE AS BANDS

The lights of Silverette were beginning to prick the dusk in the valley,
and the clanging of a piano, diminished to a harmonious tinkling,
floated up the mountain on the still air of the evening. At the Jessica
workings, a thousand feet above the valley, even the clangour of a
tuneless piano had its compensations; and to one of the two men
sitting on the puncheon-floored porch of the assayer’s cabin the
minimized tinkling was remindful of care-free student ramblings in
the land of the zither. But the other had no such pleasant memories,
and he rose and relighted his cigar.
“That is my cue, Ned. I must go down and do that whereunto I have
set my hand.”
“‘Must,’ you say; that implies necessity. I don’t see it.”
“I couldn’t expect you to see or to understand the necessity; but it is
there, all the same.”
The objector was silent while one might count ten, but the silence
was not of convincement. It was rather a lack of strong words to add
to those which had gone before. And when he began again it was
only to clinch insistence with iteration.
“I say I don’t see it. There is no necessity greater than a man’s will;
and when you try to make me believe that the honour man of my
class is constrained to come down to dealing faro in a mining camp
——”
“I know, Ned; but you don’t understand. You saw the fair beginning
ten years ago, and now you are getting a glimpse of the ending. To
you, I suppose, it seems like Lucifer’s fall—a drop from heaven to
hell; and so it is in effect. But, as a matter of fact, a man doesn’t fall;
he climbs down into the pit a step at a time—and there are more
steps behind me than I can ever retrace.”
“But you can’t go on indefinitely,” insisted the other.
The fallen one shook his head. “That is a true word. But there is only
one adequate ending to such a fiasco of a life as mine.”
“And that?”
“Is a forty-five calibre bullet, well aimed.”
“Bah! That is a coward’s alternative, and if you haven’t altogether
parted company with the George Brant I used to know, we needn’t
consider it. Why don’t you turn over a clean leaf and cut the whole
despicable business?”
Brant sat down on the porch step and clasped his hands over his
knee. Friendship has its key wherewith to unlock any door of
confidence, but from disuse the lock was rusted and it yielded
reluctantly.
“I have half a mind to let the game wait while I tell you,” he said at
length. “It isn’t a pleasant tale, and if you are disgusted you can call
me down.”
“Never mind about that; go on.”
“I’ll have to go back a bit first—back to the old college days. Do you
remember the old woman who lived on the flat below the campus?
the one who used to smuggle liquor and other contraband into the
dormitories when she came to scrub?”
“Mother Harding? Yes.”
“Well, you don’t remember any good of her, I fancy—or of her
daughter. But let that pass. The year after you went to Heidelberg
the girl blossomed out into a woman between two days, and went
wrong the day after, as the daughter of such a mother was bound to.
I got it into my callow brain that I was responsible. I know better now;
I ought to have known better then; but—well, to shorten a long story,
she has managed to spoil my life for me, root and branch.”
The assayer got upon his feet and swore out of a full heart.
“Good God, Brant! You don’t mean to say that you married that
brazen——”
But Brant stopped him with a quick gesture. “Don’t call her hard
names, Ned; I shot a man once for doing that. No, I didn’t marry her;
I did a worse thing. Now you know why I can’t turn the clean leaf. Let
the blame lie where it will—and it is pretty evenly divided between us
now—I’m not cur enough to turn my back on her at this stage of the
game.”
Hobart tramped up and down the slab-floored porch, four strides and
a turn, for two full minutes before he could frame the final question.
“Where is she now, George?”
Brant’s laugh was of hardihood. “Do you hear that piano going down
there in Dick Gaynard’s dance hall? She is playing it.”
“Heavens and earth! Then she is here—in Silverette?”
“Certainly. Where else would she be?”
Hobart stopped short and flung the stump of his cigar far out down
the slope.
“Brant,” he said solemnly, “I thank God your mother is dead.”
“Amen,” said Brant softly.
There was another pause, and then Hobart spoke again. “There was
a brother, George; what became of him?”
“He went to the bad, too—the worst kind of bad. He laid hold of the
situation in the earliest stages, and bled me like a leech year in and
year out, until one day I got him at a disadvantage and choked him
off.”
“How did you manage it?”
“It was easy enough. He is an outlaw of the camps, and he has killed
his man now and then when it seemed perfectly safe to do so. But
the last time he slipped a cog in the safety wheel, and I took the
trouble to get the evidence in shape to hang him. He knows I have it,
and he’d sell his soul, if he had one, to get his fingers on the
documents. In the meantime he lets me alone.”
“He will murder you some day for safety’s sake,” Hobart suggested.
“No, he won’t. I have made him believe that his life hangs on mine;
that when I die the dogs of the law will be let loose.”
“Oh!” The assayer made another turn or two and then came to sit on
the step beside his guest. “One more question, George, and then I’ll
let up on you,” he said. “Do you love the woman?”
Brant shook his head slowly. “No, Ned; I never did; at least, not in
the way you mean. And for years now it has been a matter of simple
justice. She was bad enough in the beginning, but she is worse now,
and that is my doing. I can’t leave her to go down into the hotter
parts of the pit alone.”
For a few other minutes neither of them spoke; then Brant rose and
girded himself for the tramp down the mountain.
“I must be going,” he said. “I’m glad to have had an hour with you; it
has given me a glimpse of the old life that is like the shadow of a
great rock in a thirsty land. And I want to see more of you, if you will
let me.”
“It will be your own fault if you don’t. Have you got to go now?”
“Yes. There is a tough crowd up from Carbonado, and Gaynard will
have his hands full to-night.”
“Wait a minute till I get my overcoat, and I’ll go with you.”
Brant waited, but when Hobart reappeared he made difficulties.
“You’d better stay where you are, Ned. It’s likely there will be trouble
and a free fight; and you are new to the place.”
“New to Silverette, but not to mining camps and rough crowds,”
Hobart amended.
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:
“Get out of here, Ned, while you can. There will be the devil to pay
before midnight, and there is no earthly use in your being mixed up
in it.”
Hobart leaned over the table and placed a coin on one of the inlaid
cards to keep up appearances.
“I’m here with you, and I mean to stay,” he insisted. “You may need—
By Jove! it’s begun.”
The dance stopped and the clamour sank into a hush, which was
sharply rent by a blast of profanity, a jangling crash of the piano
keys, and a woman’s scream. Then the two fought their way into the
thick of the crowd around the piano. A drunken ruffian was grasping
the woman’s arm and brandishing a revolver over her head.
“You won’t play it, won’t ye? And ye’ll give Ike Gasset a piece of yer
lip? By God, I’ll show ye!”
Brant’s pistol was out before he spoke. “Drop it right where you are,
and get out of here before I kill you,” he said quietly.
The man’s reply was a snap shot in Brant’s face, and, though his aim
was bad, both Hobart and Brant felt the wind of the bullet passing
between them. The crack of the pistol was the signal for a scene a
description of which no man has ever yet been able to set down
calmly in black on white. Shouts, oaths, a mad rush for the open air
foiled by a fiercer closing in of the crowd around the piano; all this
while the ruffian levelled his weapon and fired again. At the death-
speeding instant the woman started to her feet, and the bullet
intended for Brant struck her fairly in the breast. Hobart heard the
sharp snap of the steel corset stay, and saw Brant, catching her as
she reeled, fire once, twice, thrice at the desperado. Then the
assayer lifted up his voice in a shout that dominated the tumult:
“Silverettes! Out with them—they’ve killed a woman!”
There was a fierce affray, a surging charge, and when the place was
cleared Hobart ran back. Brant was on his knees beside the woman.
The smoking oil lamps burned yellow in the powder reek, but there
was light enough to show that she was past help. None the less,
Hobart offered to go for a doctor.
Brant shook his head and rose stiffly.
“She doesn’t need one; she is dead.”
Hobart grasped the situation with far-seeing prescience.
“Then you have nothing to stay here for; let us get out while we can.”
The din of the street battle rang clamorous at the front, and he took
Brant’s arm to lead him to the door, which opened upon the alley in
the rear. “Come on,” he urged; “they will be back here presently, and
you have nothing to fight for now.”
“No.” Brant yielded as one in a trance, but at the door he broke
away, to dart back with the gray eyes aflame and fierce wrath crying
for vengeance. Unnoted of all, the wounded desperado had lain
where Brant’s fusillade had dropped him. But now he was on hands
and knees, trying to drag himself out of the room. Brant was quick,
but the assayer pinioned him before the ready weapon could flash
from its holster.
“Good God, man, that would be murder!” he panted, wrestling with
the avenger of blood, and possessing himself of the pistol. “Come on
out of this!”
Again Brant yielded, and they made their way to the open air, and
through the alleyway to the mountain path, and so in silence up to
the Jessica and to the assayer’s cabin. Not until they were safe
within the four log walls did Hobart open his mouth. But when he had
struck a light and hung a blanket over the window which looked
valleyward he spoke tersely and to the point:
“A few hours ago, George, you told me why you couldn’t turn your
back on your shame, and I had nothing to say. But now the reason is
removed, and you have had an object lesson which ought to last you
as long as you live. What do you say?”
Brant spread his hands as one helpless. “What else am I good for?”
he asked.
“That question is unworthy of you, and you know it. You have your
profession; but without that you could still do as well as another.”
Brant was still afoot, and he fought his battle to a finish, pacing
slowly back and forth with his hands behind him and his head
bowed. For all his square jaw and steadfast eyes, rash impulse had
been the bane of his life thus far, and the knowledge of it made him
slow to decide even when the decision leaned toward the things
which make for righteousness. So he fought the battle to its
conclusion, and when it was ended was fain to sit down awearied
with the stress of it.
“I am not in love with the degradation of it; I think you must know
that, Ned. All these years I’ve had a yearning for decency and clean
living and respectability that I could not strangle, do what I would. So
you will understand that I am not halting between two opinions. It is
simply this: Can a man turn over a new leaf and bury such a past as
mine without being beset by a constant fear of its resurrection?
Won’t it come up and slap him in the face about the time he thinks
he has it decently buried and covered up and out of sight?”
Hobart’s rejoinder was prompt and definitive. “No. The world is wide,
and a few years of one man’s life are no more than so many texts
written in the sand.”
“You’re wrong there, Ned. The world is fearfully small, and its
memory of evil deeds is as long as its charity is short.”
“Let be, then. You are not a woman. You are a man, and you can
fight it out and live it down.”
Brant acquiesced without more ado. “I was merely stating the case,”
he said, as if the matter were quite extraneous to him. “You have
earned the right to set the pace for me, Ned; and I’ll do whatever you
say.”
“That is more like the George Brant I used to know. And this is what I
say: I know a trail across Jack Mountain that will take us to the
railroad in three hours. The night trains pass at Carbonado, and you
will be in good time to catch whichever one of them you elect to take,
east or west. There is no station on the other side of the mountain;
but there is a side track for the Hoopoee mine, and you can build a
fire to flag the train. Have you money?”
“Yes.”
“Enough?”
“Yes; enough to try whatever experiment you suggest.”
“I don’t know that I have anything to suggest more than your own
good judgment would anticipate. Find your allotted corner of the big
vineyard and go to work in it; that’s about all there is to it.”
“How deep shall I dive?”
“You will have to decide that for yourself. You are a Western man
now, and I suppose you don’t want to go back home. How about
Denver?”
Brant shook his head slowly. “Denver is good enough—too good, in
fact. I wonder if you will understand it if I say that I’d much rather
have my forty days in the wilderness before I have to face my kind,
even as a stranger in a strange city?”
“I can understand it perfectly, and the decency of the thing does you
credit. And if that is your notion, I can help you. You used to be the
best man in the ‘Tech.’ at map making; have you forgotten how to do
it?”
“No; a man doesn’t forget his trade.”
“Good. I met Davenport at Carbonado yesterday. He was on his way
to the Colorow district to do a lot of surveying and plotting, and was
sick because he couldn’t find an assistant before he left Denver.
Shall I give you a note to him?”
“It is exactly what I should crave if I had a shadow of the right to pick
and choose.”
Hobart found pen and paper and wrote the note.
“There you are,” he said. “Davenport is a good fellow, and you
needn’t tell him more than you want to. The job will last for two or
three months, and by that time you will know better what you want to
do with yourself. Now, if you are ready, we’ll get a move. It’s a stiffish
climb to the top of the pass.”
They forthfared together and presently set their feet in the trail
leading over the shoulder of the great mountain buttressing the slope
behind the Jessica. The sounds of strife had ceased in the town
below, and but for the twinkling lights the deep valley might have
been as Nature left it. Since the upward path was rough and difficult