Reserving the more dangerous share for himself, Brant went first to Draco’s; and when Deverney assured him that nothing had been seen of Harding since the night of his banishment, he set the peg of conclusion one hole farther along. In his dealings with young Langford, Harding would be likely to keep up the fiction of respectability; hence there would be no frequenting of the more public resorts. Acting upon this suggestion, Brant began a round of the more exclusive “clubhouses,” making guarded inquiries of doorkeepers, and using his reputation with the craft unsparingly as a pass-key to unlock doors which would have been so many dead walls to a detective or a policeman. Since this was a slow process, it was well upon midnight when he ran his quarry to earth. It was in a club called the “Osirian,” a very palace of the goddess of Chance. The doorkeeper was known to Brant, and under question he was able to answer in the affirmative. Two men tallying accurately with Brant’s description had come in early in the evening. They were still upstairs in one of the private rooms, the man thought; which room the attendant in the upper corridor could doubtless point out. Brant went up, and at the stairhead found himself in a large apartment richly furnished, with a high wainscot of polished mahogany and walls and ceilings of bronze pacrusta wrought into curious designs centring in clusters of softly shaded incandescent lamps. The central space, which served as a vestibule for a series of ceilingless private rooms built out from the walls, was fitted as a club parlour, and Brant made his way noiselessly over the thick carpet to the room whose number he had obtained from the attendant at the stairhead. The door was closed, but since the walls of the private room were merely an extension of the high wainscoting, there was no obstruction to sound. Beyond the door there was a clicking as of ivory counters, and the swish of cards across a table. Brant laid his hand on the doorknob, and at that moment the noises ceased and a boyish oath dropped into the gap of silence. “I won’t pay it--that’s all there is about it!”--this in the voice of the boyish oath. “By gad, I’m tough enough, Mr. Harding, and I don’t like him any better than you do; but I’m not a sneak thief yet!” “I don’t see but you will have to pay it, Willie; it is a debt of honour, you see,” the gambler insisted. “You put up your promise for a stake in the game, and you have lost, fair and square. It won’t be much trouble--knowing him as well as you do.” “But you don’t understand; or rather you won’t understand. I can’t do a thing like that, tough as I am, and nobody but a cursed cad like you would try to make me. And, by gad, I believe you cheated me, anyway! Let me see those cards.”