After the meal, which was hurried in deference to the urgencies, Brant went up to his room to prepare for the quest. While there he appeared to be drawn into a struggle which, in view of all the wicked things he had sworn to do, was scarcely less than trivial. It manifested itself in sundry takings up and layings down of the big revolver, ending when he finally put the weapon, together with the unbroached bottle of brandy, into the drawer of his dressing case. “No, I’ll be hanged if I do!” he muttered. “I’ll not go armed like a desperado on any errand of hers. If I find the boy with Harding, there will probably be a row; but while I am about her business I’d rather suffer violence than do it.” Whereupon he ran down to Antrim, and together they set out on the quest for William Langford. Contrary to his expressed assumption, the first half of the undertaking proved more difficult than Brant had expected. Beginning with resorts of the Draco type, they went from bad to worse, working their way downward through the substrata of vice until Antrim held his breath and hoped for William’s younger sister’s sake that the search would be unsuccessful in that direction. And so, indeed, it proved to be, though Brant was indefatigable, dragging his companion from dive to den as he had once dragged Forsyth, until the chief clerk was half intoxicated with the mingled fumes of tobacco and opium and alcohol--half intoxicated and wholly disgusted. “Good Lord! and this is what I was coming to!” he gasped, as they emerged from a particularly noisome kennel. “Let’s give it up, old man, and go home. I’m sick and nauseated.” “Not yet,” Brant objected. “We are sure to find him, sooner or later; and it is early yet.” Antrim looked at his watch. “Eleven o’clock. I call that late. But go on; I’ll stay with you.” Eleven it was, and the policeman, whose beat included the quiet neighbourhood of which Mrs. Anna Seeley’s select boarding house for young men was the centre, had finished his round and had dropped into the nearest uptown saloon for a bite of bread and cheese and such other refreshment as the bartender was wont to set unasked before the guardians of the city’s peace. “You have a picnic on the uptown beat, don’t you, Sam?” said the licensed dispenser of stimulants, drawing a second glass of beer for the officer. “Pretty near that. Might jog around up here all night and never see nothing out of the way,” responded the civic soldier, helping himself to another sandwich. This he said, and yet, not ten minutes before, he had met a man carrying a ladder in a quiet street within an hour of midnight, and had not thought the matter curious enough to warrant looking into.