Brant sprang to his feet in a frenzy of impatience. “For God’s sake, have done with this beating about the bush and tell me what you know or what you suspect!” Jarvis complied in set phrase. “This: Young Langford was the man who broke into your room. He was the man who took the pistol, who carried it all the next day, who drew it upon Harding, who--” He broke off abruptly, leaving the categorical accusation unfinished. “You know what happened just as well as I do. It was that young cub who did the shooting, and you are here because--well, I know the why and wherefore of that, too, but we needn’t go into it. You’ve been all sorts of a Don Quixote, and I believe you’d keep it up to the finish, if you had your way. But it won’t go, George.” Brant said nothing. He was leaning against the wall, just where Dorothy had stood a little while before, and there was a far-away look in his eyes--the look that comes into the eyes of a soldier when duty calls and death beckons. But Jarvis was not skilled in reading face signs, and he went on, secure in the worldly wisdom of his own point of view. “I’m not saying it wasn’t a fine thing. If you had lived two or three centuries ago they would have drawn and quartered you first and made a demigod of you afterward. But it won’t go now. When people find out, half of them will laugh at you, and the other half will say you ought to be sent to a lunatic asylum. If you could have carried it through----” Brant came out of his reverie and sat down on the cot beside the exponent of worldly wisdom. “You say, if I could have carried it through,” he broke in. “But now?” “Now there is nothing to do but to switch over and pull in harness with common sense. It will all come out at the trial--it’s bound to. The judge is making believe that he is going to be your counsel, whether or no; but you know you are not going to allow it, and the upshot of that will be that the court will appoint somebody else to defend you, and it is ten to one that it will be some keen young fellow with nothing to lose and everything to gain. There are a dozen young lawyers keeping up with the case, and any one of them will snap at the chance. And you know as well as I do what will happen if any lawyer in the wide world, save and excepting his own father, gets a chance to cross-examine Will Langford.” Brant nodded, as one who may not controvert a self-evident fact. But what he said brought the reporter’s card house of hypotheses tumbling in ruins. “You have made your case, Jarvis, and summed it up, but there is one small flaw in it. You are taking it for granted that young Langford killed Harding, and that I did not. What if I say that your basic premises are wrong?” Jarvis laughed, but it was not the laugh of assurance. “You can’t bluff me out, George; I know what I know.” “You don’t know anything. You are merely guessing from beginning to end.”