THE LAW OF THE MEDES AND PERSIANS “SO you have quite made up your mind to leave Denver, have you?” It was the day of deliverance, and Hobart, claiming the elder right, had met Brant at the opening of the prison doors, whisking him off straightway to Elitch’s and to a private box therein, where they could have a quiet talk over their luncheon and a quiet smoke afterward. Brant shrugged. “That says itself, doesn’t it? I am not wholly shameless. After all the free advertising I have been getting lately, people will stop and point me out in the streets.” Hobart’s laugh was a friendly jeer. “That is what you get for trying to play the part of Providence--a not altogether blameless Providence, either, since you were going to let a judge and a jury hang an innocent man. How did you come to get so befogged in the ethical part of you?” Brant waved the question aside in the gesture which flicked the ash from his cigar. “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” he quoted. “We’ll drop that part of it, if you don’t mind.” “But I do mind; I am curious to know.” Brant did not hasten to explain, and when he spoke again it was to ask a seemingly irrelevant question. “Do you know what it means to love a woman, Ned?” “I’m supposed to, am I not?” “I don’t know. There’s many a man married--happily married, too--who doesn’t know what it means. Luckily for the common good, the kind of love I have in mind is a thing apart. It is both more and less than a passion; it is a mania in the sense that it blinds the eye to everything save the present happiness of its object. Can you grasp that?” “Ye-yes, in a measure. But in your case there were so many things to be considered----” “There was no time to consider them. In such a crisis one must act first and think afterward. At the critical moment I thought of but one thing--the misery of one woman if her brother should not have a chance to run for his life.” Hobart nodded. “I can follow you that far. But afterward, when you found he wasn’t going to run for it?” “That was another matter. I was bitter, at first; I had given him his chance, I thought, and he was contemptible enough to deny me mine. But I had time enough to think then; to see that the object to be attained remained the same; to see what a sorry sham I was and had been. It broke me, Ned; and while I was down I made a clean sweep of it. I hadn’t killed James Harding, as it happened, but under other conditions I might have killed him--should have killed him, I said. In which case the judge and jury couldn’t err greatly in hanging me.” Hobart heard him through, but at the summing up he scoffed openly. “That is the baldest sophistry, George, and you know it,” he asserted. Brant smiled. “Perhaps it is; but you must remember that I loved the woman. I meant never to speak of this to any one, Ned; none the less, I am glad you have made me speak of it to you.” “Why?”