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You can't afford to stir up a row. Old man Portman and Mary and Christine won't thank you for stirring things up. They're not anxious to 'ave a scandal. If you go arfter Brad too rough, it will percipitate matters instead of 'olding them back. And he'll know to onct that you are acting for his wife a sort of go- between, don't you see. That will make it the wuss for 'er.
In point of fact it had, but the outlaw leader knew that as they picked their way among the broken boulders of the gulch bottom the enemy would have them in the open for more than a hundred yards of slow going. He had chosen the alternative of sending Brad quietly up the rough face of the cliff. The other plan would do as a last resource if this failed.
"What did you follow me over here to-night for?" demanded Braddock fiercely, after thirty steps. "You know why, Brad. Don't ask." "This is my affair," went on the big man. "I was doing no harm, sitting across there. Can't a man sneak off for a single look at his own child in the dark, at that without being hounded by Say, you must stop dogging me, d' you hear? I'm not a rat. I'm a human being.
Go home! pooh! pooh! why, man, I have not seen my wife, nor put my house to rights, and if you do but listen to me I tell you again and again that not a hair of our heads can be touched." "You know best, honoured sir; I bow to your decision." "Bravo, honest Brad! and now for dinner. I have the most glorious champagne that ever danced in foam to your lip. No counsellor like the bottle, believe me!"
Rarely, however, did any one condemn it, and that showed that it was harmless. Mr. Brad had given it quite a lift in the Spectrum. The notice was mainly personal the first work of a brilliant young man at the bar who was destined to go high in his profession, unless literature should, fortunately for the public, have stronger attractions for him.
Going into one corner of the room she fixed the brad awl into the woodwork; then, unwinding the ball, proceeded to the other end of the room, straining the string tightly, and tied a knot to mark the length. Then she went back and crossed the room, and again make a knot to mark the width. Then she hastily gathered up the string, pulled the brad awl from the woodwork, and put them in her pocket.
They all cheered the speech, but a majority tabled the matter as usual. The galleries cheered and the women swarmed about the young champion, Ida among them. Her hand-shake and smile was his greatest reward. "Come and see me," she said. "I want to thank you." The Judge was immensely proud of him. "A great speech, Brad; if I wasn't so old-fashioned and set you'd have converted me.
As his mind swam back to consciousness through troubled waters a far-away voice came out of the fog that surrounded him. "He's coming to, looks like. I reckon you ain't bust his head, after all, Brad." Vague, grinning gargoyles mocked him from the haze. Slowly these took form. Features stood out. The masks became faces.
He rode with the loose seat and the straight back of the Westerner to the saddle born. Just now he was looking back with impassive, reddened eyes at the approaching figure. "Hold on, Tom! Don't shoot! It's Brad," he decided. "And I wonder what in Mexico he is doing here." The leader of the outlaws was soon to learn.
By this time Philip's novel had been submitted to a publisher, or, rather, to state the exact truth, it had begun to go the rounds of the publishers. Mr. Brad, to whose nineteenth-century and newspaper eye Philip had shrunk from confiding his modest creation, but who was consulted in the business, consoled him with the suggestion that this was a sure way of getting his production read.
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