_BY FRANCIS LYNDE_

NOVELS

  THE TENDERFOOTS
  MELLOWING MONEY
  THE FIGHT ON THE STANDING STONE
  PIRATES’ HOPE
  THE FIRE BRINGERS
  THE GIRL, A HORSE, AND A DOG
  THE WRECKERS
  DAVID VALLORY
  BRANDED
  STRANDED IN ARCADY
  AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN
  THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS
  THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGEBRUSH
  THE PRICE
  A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT

BOYS’ BOOKS

  THE CRUISE OF THE CUTTLEFISH
  THE GOLDEN SPIDER
  DICK AND LARRY, FRESHMEN
  THE DONOVAN CHANCE

_CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_




THE TENDERFOOTS




  THE TENDERFOOTS

  BY
  FRANCIS LYNDE

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
  1926




  COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

  COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY STREET & SMITH, INC., under the title
  “The Prisoner and the Play-Boy”

  Printed in the United States of America

  [Illustration]




  TO
  MARY ANTOINETTE LYNDE

  THE SAME SMALL PERSON TO WHOM MY FIRST
  BOOK WAS DEDICATED MANY YEARS AGO, AND
  WHOSE MEMORIES ARE CLOSELY LINKED WITH
  MINE IN THESE PAGES, THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY
  INSCRIBED




THE TENDERFOOTS




THE TENDERFOOTS




I


FROM where he sat in the crowded day-coach, Philip Trask’s outlook was
bounded by the backward-wheeling plain of eastern Colorado on one hand,
and on the other by the scarcely less uninteresting cross-section of
humanity filling the car to its seating capacity. Much earlier in the
day he had exhausted the possibilities of the view from the car window.
Shack-built prairie towns, steadily lessening in size and importance
with the westward flight, had later given place to widely separated
sod houses, the outworks of a slowly advancing army of pioneer
homesteaders. Now even these had been left behind and there was nothing
but the treeless, limitless plain, with only an occasional prairie-dog
town or, more rarely, a flying herd of antelope, their fawn-colored
bodies fading to invisibility in the fallow-dun distances, to break the
monotony.

New England born and bred, provincial, and just now with a touch of
belated homesickness acute enough to make him contrast all things
primitive with the particular sort of civilization he had left behind,
Philip owned to no kindling enthusiasm for the region which the school
books were still teaching children to call the Great American Desert. A
student by choice, with an unfinished college course for his keenest
regret, he had left New Hampshire six months earlier on a plain quest
of bread. Though the migrating moment was late in the year 1879, the
aftermath of the panic of ’73 still lingered in the East; and while
there was work to be had for immigrant brawn, there was little enough
for native brain.

At this crisis, an uncle of one of his college classmates, a large
shareholder in Kansas Pacific railway stocks, had come to the rescue by
securing a clerkship for him in the company’s general offices in Kansas
City. Here, after an uneventful half-year spent at an auditing desk--a
period which had left his New England prejudices and prepossessions
practically untouched--consolidation, the pursuing fate of the railroad
clerk in the ’70’s and ’80’s, overtook him. But in the labor-saving
shake-up he had drawn a lucky number. Being by this time a fairly
efficient juggler of figures, he was offered a choice of going to Omaha
with the consolidated offices, or of taking a clerkship with another
and newer railroad in Denver.

For no very robust reason, but rather for a very slender one, Denver
had won the toss. Four years previous to the enforced breaking of
Philip’s college course the elder Trask had disappeared from New
Hampshire under a cloud. A defalcation in the Concord bank, in which
he was one of the tellers, was threatening to involve him, and between
two days John Trask had vanished, leaving no trace. Alone in the
family connection, which was large, the son had stubbornly continued
to believe in his father’s innocence; and since the West was ever the
port of missing men, it was in a vague hope of coming upon some trace
of the missing man that Philip had refused the Omaha alternative and
turned his face toward the farther West.

It was not until he had tried unavailingly to obtain sleeping-car
accommodations, at the outsetting from the Missouri city, that he was
made to realize that Colorado had suddenly become a Mecca of some sort
toward which a horde of ardent pilgrims was hastening. True, there
had been perfervid accounts in the Kansas City newspapers of a great
silver discovery at a place called Leadville, somewhere in the Colorado
mountains; but in his leisure, which was scanty, Philip--or, for that
matter, the Trasks as a family--read books rather than newspapers.
Hence the scene at the Kansas City Union Depot, when he went to take
his departure, was a revelation. Trains over the various lines from
the East were arriving, and excited mobs were pouring out of them to
scramble wildly for seats in the waiting Overland which, in less time
than it took him to grasp the situation, was in process of being jammed
to overflowing.

Fighting with the mob as best he could--and with every immiscible fibre
of him protesting that it was a most barbarous thing to do--he finally
secured a seat in one of the day-coaches; and here, save for the
three intervening stops at the meal stations, he had been wedged in,
powerless to do anything but to endure the banalities and discomforts,
wholly out of sympathy with the riant, free-and-easy treasure-seekers
crowding the car and the train, and anxious only to reach his
destination and be quit of the alien contacts.

The contacts, as he had marked at the outsetting, were chiefly
masculine. Though his coach was the one next to the sleeping-cars,
there were not more than a dozen women and children in it; and the
men, for the greater part, were, in New England phrase, an outlandish
company. His seatmate, to whom he gave all the room possible, was a
roughly dressed man of uncertain age, bearded to the eyes and smelling
strongly of liquor. Philip forgave him much because he slept most of
the time, and in his waking intervals did not try to make conversation.
Across the aisle a poker game with matches for chips was in progress,
and a few seats forward there was another. Now and again pocket bottles
were passed from hand to hand, and men drank openly with the bald
freedom of those who are far from home and its restraints and so are at
liberty to flout the nicer proprieties.

Philip pitied the few women who were forced by the travel exigencies
into such rude companionship; particularly he was sorry for a family
three seats ahead on his own side of the car. There were five of them
in all; a father, mother and three girls; and Philip assured himself
that they had nothing remotely in common with the boisterous majority.
In the scramble for seats at the Kansas City terminal the family had
been divided; the father and mother and the two younger girls occupying
two seats facing each other, and the older girl--Philip thought she
would be about his own age--sharing the seat next in the rear with an
elderly man, a Catholic priest by the cut of his clothes and the shape
of his hat.

Before the long day’s run was many hours old, Philip had accounted for
the family to his own satisfaction. The fame of Colorado as a health
resort had already penetrated to the East, and the colorless face and
sunken eyes of the father only too plainly advertised his malady.
Philip knew the marks of the white plague when he saw them; they were
all too common in his own homeland; and he found himself wondering
sympathetically if the flight to the high and dry altitudes had not
been determined upon too late to help the hollow-eyed man in the seat
ahead.

It was not until the middle of the afternoon that Philip’s attention
was drawn more pointedly to the family three seats removed. In the
day-long journeying there had been no shifting of places among its
members; but at the last water-tank station passed, the priest, who
had been studiously reading his breviary for the better part of the
day, had left the train, and the place beside the oldest girl had been
taken by a man whose evil face immediately awakened a curious thrill of
antagonism in Philip.

In a little time he saw that this man was trying to make the girl
talk; also, that she was seeking, ineffectually, to ignore him. Philip
had had little to do with women other than those of his own family,
and he hailed from a civilization in which the primitive passions
were decently held in leash by the conventions. Yet he could feel
his pulses quickening and a most unaccustomed prompting to violence
taking possession of him when he realized that a call for some manly
intervention was urging itself upon him.

In a fit of perturbation that was almost boyish, and with a
prescriptive experience that offered no precedent, he was still
hesitating when he saw the girl lean forward and speak to her father.
The sick man twisted himself in his seat and there was a low-toned
colloquy between him and the offender. Philip could not hear what was
said, but he could easily imagine that the father was protesting, and
that the offender was probably adding insult to injury, noting, as a
coward would, that he had nothing to fear from a sick man. In the midst
of things the invalid made as if he would rise to exchange seats with
his daughter, but the girl, with a hand on his shoulder, made him sit
down again.

After this, nothing happened for a few minutes. Then Philip saw the man
slide an arm along the seat behind the girl’s shoulders so that she
could not lean back without yielding to a half embrace, and again his
blood boiled and his temples began to throb. Clearly, something ought
to be done ... if he only knew how to go about it. He was half rising
when he saw the crowning insult offered. The man had drawn a flat
bottle, whiskey-filled, from his pocket and was offering it to the girl.

Quite beside himself now, Philip struggled to his feet; but another
was before him. Across the aisle one of the poker players, a bearded
giant in a flannel shirt and with his belted trousers tucked into his
boot-tops, faced his cards down upon the board that served as a gaming
table and rose up with a roar that brought an instant craning of necks
all over the car.

“Say! I been keepin’ cases on yuh, yuh dern’ son of a sea cook!” he
bellowed, laying a pair of ham-like hands upon the man in the opposite
seat and jerking him to his feet in the aisle. Then: “Oh--yuh would,
would yuh!”

Philip, half-dazed by this sudden ebullition of violence, caught his
breath in a gasp when he saw the flash of a bowie-knife in the hand of
the smaller man. There was a momentary struggle in which the knife was
sent flying through an open window, harsh oaths from the onlookers,
cries of “Pitch him out after his toad-sticker!” and then a Gargantuan
burst of laughter as the giant pinned both hands of his antagonist
in one of his own and cuffed him into whimpering subjection with the
other. The next thing Philip knew, the big man, still with his captive
hand-manacled and helpless, was singling him out and bawling at him.

“Here, you young feller; climb out o’ that and make room fer this
yere skunk! Yuh look like _you_ might sit alongside of a perfect lady
without makin’ a dern’ hyena o’ yerself. Step it!”

More to forestall further horrors of embarrassment than for any other
reason, Philip stumbled out over the knees of his sleeping partner and
slipped into the indicated seat beside the girl. Whereupon the giant
shoved his subdued quarry into the place thus made vacant and went back
to his seat to take up his hand of cards quite as if the late encounter
were a mere incident in the day’s faring.

Scarcely less embarrassed by having been singled out as a model of
decency than he had been by his inability to think quickly enough in
the crisis, Philip sat in bottled-up silence for the space of the
clicking of many rail-lengths under the drumming wheels, carefully
refraining from venturing even a sidelong glance at his new seatmate.
Not that the glance was needful. The day was no longer young, and he
had had ample time in which to visualize the piquantly attractive face
of the girl beside him. Its perfect oval was of a type with which he
was not familiar, and at first he had thought it must be foreign.
But there was no suggestion of the alien in the other members of the
family. In sharp contrast to the clear olive skin and jet-black hair
and eyes of the eldest sister, the two younger girls were fair, and so
was the mother. As for the father, there was little save the cut of his
beard to distinguish him. In a period when the few were clean shaven
and the many let the beard grow as it would, the invalid reminded
Philip of the pictures he had seen of the third Napoleon, though, to
be sure, the likeness was chiefly in the heavy graying mustaches and
goatee.

Philip thought it must have been somewhere about the hundredth
rail-click that he heard a low voice beside him say, in a soft drawl
that was as far as possible removed from the clipped speech of his
homeland: “Ought I to say, ‘Thank you, kindly, sir’?”

Philip put his foot resolutely through the crust of New England
reserve, as one breaks the ice of set purpose.

“I guess I’m the one to be thankful,” he returned, “since I’ve been
sitting all day with a drunken man. But you’d better not make me talk.
I don’t want to be dragged out by the collar and have my ears boxed.”

His reply brought the smile that he hoped it would, and he thought he
had never seen a set of prettier, whiter, evener teeth.

“Oh, I don’t reckon the big gentleman would hurt you.”

“Gentleman?” said Philip.

“Yes; don’t you think he earned the name?”

Philip nodded slowly. But he qualified his assent. “He might have done
it a little more quietly, don’t you think?”

This time the smile grew into a silvery laugh.

“You mean he made you too conspicuous?”

“No,” said Philip; “I wasn’t thinking of myself.” Then: “You are from
the South?”

“We are from Mississippi, yes. But how could you tell?”

“You said, ‘I don’t reckon.’”

“Where you would have said--?”

Philip permitted himself a grim little smile. “Where my grandfather
might have said, ‘I don’t calculate.’”

“Oh; then you are a Yankee?”

“I suppose that is what I should be called--in Mississippi. My home is
in New Hampshire.”

“I softened it some,” said the girl half mockingly. “When I was small,
I used to hear it always as ‘damn’ Yankee,’ and for the longest time I
supposed it was just one word. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Why should I mind? The war has been over for quite a long time.”

“Not so very long; and it will be still longer before it is over for
us of the South. We were whipped, you know.” Then, turning to the car
window: “Oh, look! See the deer!”

“Antelope,” Philip corrected gravely. “They told me in Kansas City that
only a few years ago the buffalo were so thick out here that sometimes
the trains had to be stopped to let the herd go by.”

“You never saw them?”

“Oh, no; I’m new--like everything else out here.”

“I suppose you are going to this place called Leadville to make your
fortune digging gold?--or is it silver? I never can remember.”

“Not at all,” he hastened to assure her. “I expect to go to work in a
railroad office in Denver.”

“We are going to Denver, too,” she volunteered. “The Captain isn’t
well, and we are hoping the climate will help him.”

“The Captain?” Philip queried.

“My father,” she explained. Then, as if upon a sudden impulse: “Would
you care to--may I?”

“I wish you would,” said Philip, adding: “My name is Trask.”

The easy, self-contained manner in which she compassed the
introductions made him wonder if such gifts came naturally to young
women of the South. He shook hands rather awkwardly over the back of
the seat with Captain Dabney; tried to say the appropriate formality
to the wife and mother; tried to make big-brotherly nods to the two
younger girls who were named for him as Mysie and Mary Louise.

“Now then, since you know us all around, we can talk as much as we want
to,” said the girl at his side.

“Not quite all around,” he ventured to point out.

“Oh, I don’t count; but I’m Jean--not the French way; just J-e-a-n.”

Philip smiled. “In that case, then, I’m Philip,” he said.

The eyes, that were so dark that in certain lights they seemed to be
all pupil, grew thoughtful.

“I’ve always liked that name for a boy,” she asserted frankly. “And it
fits you beautifully. Of course, you wouldn’t go and dig gold in the
mountains.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” he demanded.

“Oh, just because the Philips don’t do such things.” And before he
could think of the proper retort: “Why is everybody looking out of the
windows on the other side of the car?”

“I’ll see,” he replied, and went to investigate. And when he returned:
“We have come in sight of the mountains. Would you like to see them?”

“I’d love to!” was the eager response, and she got up and joined him in
the aisle. But with more than half of the car’s complement crowding to
the windows on the sight-seeing side there was no room for another pair
of heads.

“Shall we go out to the platform?” he suggested, and at her nod he led
the way to the swaying, racketing outdoor vantage where the car-wheel
clamor made anything less than a shout inaudible, and the cinders
showered them, and they had to cling to the hand-railings to keep from
being flung into space.

But for any one with an eye for the grandeurs there was ample reward.
Far away to the southwestward a great mountain, snow-white against the
vivid blue, was lifting itself in dazzling majesty above the horizon,
and on the hither side it was flanked by lesser elevations, purple
or blue-black in their foresting of pine and fir. For so long as the
whirling shower of cinders from the locomotive could be endured they
clung and looked, and the girl would have stayed even longer if Philip,
in his capacity of caretaker, had not drawn her back into the car and
shut the door against the stinging downpour.

“It would only be a matter of a few minutes until you’d get your eyes
full out there,” he said, in response to her protest. “Pike’s Peak
won’t run away, you know; and they tell me you can see it any day and
all day from Denver.”

“You don’t know what it means to flat-country people, as we are--our
plantation, when we had one, was in the Yazoo delta. I thought I saw
mountains as we came through Missouri day before yesterday, but they
were nothing but little hills compared with that glorious thing out
there. Isn’t it the finest sight you ever saw?”

Philip waited until they were back in their seat before he said:
“Pretty fine--yes,” which was as far as his blood and breeding would
let him agree with the superlatives.

A mocking little laugh greeted this guarded reply.

“Is that the best you can do for one of nature’s masterpieces?” she
asked. Then, with more of the appalling frankness: “I wonder if your
sort ever wakes up and lets itself go? I can hardly imagine it.”

“I guess I don’t know just what you mean,” said Philip; but he was
smarting as if the wondering query had been the flick of a whip.

“No; you wouldn’t,” was the flippant retort. “Never mind. How much
farther is it to Denver?”

Philip consulted the railroad folder with which he had supplied himself.

“We ought to be there in another hour. I suppose you’ll be glad. It’s a
long journey from Mississippi.”

“We’ll all be glad--for the Captain’s sake. It has been hard for him.”

“Your father was a soldier in the war?”

“Of course,” she nodded. “He is a Mississippian.”

“Was he--was he wounded?” Philip ventured.

“Not with bullets. But he spent a year in a Northern prison.”

Philip, abashed by the implication conveyed in this, relapsed into
silence. Libby Prison and Andersonville were still frightful realities
in the New England mind, and the remembrance of them extinguished the
fact that there had been war prisons in the North, as well.

“War is a pretty dreadful thing,” he conceded; adding: “My father was
wounded at Antietam.”

“Let’s not begin to talk about the war; we’ll be quarrelling in another
minute or two if we do.”

“I don’t admit that,” Philip contended amicably. “As I said a little
while ago, the war is over--it’s been over for fifteen years. But let
it go and tell me about Mississippi. I’ve never been farther south than
we are just now.”

“Dear old Mississippi!” she said softly. And after that the talk
became a gentle monologue for the greater part, in which Philip heard
the story duplicated so often south of Mason and Dixon’s line; of the
hardships of the war, and the greater hardships of its aftermath; of
ill health and property loss; of hope deferred and almost extinguished
in the case of the invalid father; of the final family council in
which it had been determined to try the healing effect of the high and
dry altitudes.

Philip listened and was moved, not only by sympathy, which--again in
strict accordance with his blood and breeding--he was careful not to
express, but also by a vast wonder. No young woman of his limited
acquaintance in the homeland could ever have been induced to talk so
frankly and freely to a comparative stranger. Yet there was also a
proud reserve just behind the frankness, and after a time he came to
understand that it was pride of birth. The Dabneys, as he gathered,
were an ancient family, descended from the Huguenot D’Aubignys, and
originally Virginians. As a Trask and a son of more or less hardy
New England stock, family traditions meant little to him. But he was
beginning to see that they meant very much indeed to the soft-speaking
young woman beside him.

“It is evident that you believe in blue blood,” he ventured to say,
after the Dabney lineage had been fairly traced for him. Then he added:
“We don’t think so very much of that in New England.”

“Oh, I don’t see how you can help it,” was the astonished exclamation.
“Don’t you believe in heredity?”

“Yes, I suppose I do, in a way,” he qualified. “We can’t expect to
gather figs from thistles. Still, it is a long step from that admission
to a belief in--well, in anything like an aristocracy of the blood.”

“You think there is no such thing as gentle blood?”

“Not in the sense that one person is intrinsically better than another.
Unless all history is at fault, the ‘gentle blood’ you speak of is
just as likely to go hideously wrong as any other.”

“I don’t agree with you at all,” was the prompt retort.

“I didn’t expect you would--after what you have been telling me. But we
needn’t quarrel about it,” he went on good-naturedly. “I suppose you
would call your family patrician and mine plebeian--which it doubtless
is; at any rate, it is farmer stock on both sides as far back as I know
anything about it, people who worked with their hands, and----”

“It was no disgrace for them to work with their hands; that isn’t at
all what I meant. It is something much bigger than that.”

“Well, what is it, then? A clean family record?”

“Honor above everything: not being willing--not being able to stoop to
anything low or mean or----”

“Exactly,” said Philip. “I guess we’re not so very far apart,
after all; though I doubt if I could tell you the Christian name
of any one of my four great-grandfathers--to say nothing of the
great-grandmothers. But look out of the window! Houses, if my eyes
don’t deceive me. This must be Denver that we’re coming to.”

Rounding a curve so long and gentle as to make the changing direction
approximate the slow inching of a clock’s minute-hand, the train was
beginning to pass signs of human occupancy, or of former occupancy;
on the right a collection of empty, tumble-down shacks and the ruin
of what seemed to be a smelting works. A little farther along, the
fringe of the inhabited town was passed, and the clanking of switch
frogs under the wheels signalled the approach to the freight yards.
Over a swelling hill to the northward the mountains came into view in
peaks and masses against which the plain seemed to end with startling
abruptness.

When the brakes began to grind, Philip excused himself and went to get
his hand luggage out of the rack over the seat he had formerly occupied.

“If I can be of any assistance?” he offered when he came back.

“Oh, I think we can manage, thank you; there are so many of us to
carry things,” the young woman replied. “Besides, we’ll have to take a
carriage--on the Captain’s account.”

With his attention thus drawn again to the invalid, Philip had a sharp
recurrence of the doubt as to whether the change of climate had been
determined upon soon enough to warrant any hope of recovery for the
hollow-eyed man in the seat ahead. For the past half-hour the sick
man had been coughing unobtrusively, and he seemed to have increasing
difficulty in breathing. Since Kansas City was the gateway for
westbound invalids, as well as for the mineral-mad treasure-seekers,
Philip had heard stories of the marvelous cures effected by the
Colorado climate; also he had heard that those who went too late were
apt to die very quickly, the swift railroad flight from an altitude of
a few hundred feet to that of a mile high proving too sudden a change
for the weakened lungs.

Acting wholly upon an impulse which he did not stop to define, or to
square with the New England reticences, Philip bent to speak to the
card-playing giant who had freed the young woman of her persecutor.

“Have you much hand baggage to take care of?” he asked.

“Nothin’ on top of earth but my gun and my blankets. Why?”

“If you wouldn’t mind taking my satchel and dropping it off outside?”
Philip went on, “I want to help the sick man.”

“Right you are, cully,” returned the giant heartily. “Reckon yuh can
handle him alone? Because if yuh can’t, we’ll chuck the plunder out o’
the window and both of us’ll tackle him.”

“Oh, I think I can do it all right. Maybe he won’t need any help, but I
thought he might.”

“Look’s if he’d need all he can get; ’s if it wouldn’t take much of
a breeze to blow him away. Shouldn’t wonder if he’d put it off too
long--this yere trailin’ out to the tall hills. Well, this is the
dee-po: leave me yer grip and jump in.”

Philip turned quickly to the group in the double seat and again
offered his help in the matter of debarking. This time it was accepted
gratefully. Picking up one of the Dabney valises, he gave an arm to the
sick man. The progress through the crowded aisle to the car platform
was irritatingly slow and fatiguing, and before the door was reached
the invalid was seized with another coughing fit. Through the open car
door the thin, keen wind of the April evening blew in the faces of the
outgoing passengers, and even Philip, who was as fit and vigorous as an
indoor man ever gets to be, found himself breathing deeply to take in
enough of the curiously attenuated air to supply his need.

In due time the descent of the car steps was accomplished, but the
exhausting coughing fit persisted, and Philip felt the invalid leaning
more and more heavily upon him. It was some little distance from the
tracks over to the line of waiting busses and hacks, and before it was
covered the oldest daughter gave her hand luggage to one of her sisters
and came back to help Philip with his charge. Philip was prodigiously
thankful. The painful cough had become almost a paroxysm, and he was
shocked to see that the handkerchief the sick man was holding to his
mouth was flecked with bright red spots.

“Just a little way farther, now, Captain, dearest!” Philip heard the
low-toned words of encouragement, and was overwhelmed with an unnerving
fear that the man would die before he could be taken to wherever it was
that the family was going. But with the fear, and presently overriding
it, was a kindling admiration for the daughter. She knew what the
red-flecked handkerchief meant, but she was not letting the frightful
possibility submerge her.

The hack rank was reached at last, and with the driver of the chosen
vehicle to help, the sick man was lifted into his place. While the
mother and the younger daughters were getting in, Philip spoke to his
late seat-sharer.

“Have you friends in Denver?” he asked.

“No; we shall go to a hotel for the present--to the American House.”

“Shall I go with you and try to find a doctor?”

“There will probably be a doctor in the hotel; anyway, we’ve no right
to trouble you any further. But I--we don’t forget. And I’m sorry I
said things about Yankees and the Philips, and about--about your waking
up. It was mean and unfriendly, and I’m sorry. Good-by--and thank you
so much for helping us. And please try not to remember the meannesses.
Good-by.”

Philip watched the laden hack as it was driven away and wondered if
he would ever see the black-eyed little Mississippian with the heroic
nerves again. He was still wondering when the good-natured giant came
along and gave him his valise.

“Got the little gal and her hull kit and caboodle on their way, did
yuh?” said the big one, with a fierce grin which was meant to be
altogether friendly.

“Yes,” said Philip. Then he picked up his valise and trudged off
in search of a horse-car that would take him to his own temporary
destination, a modest hotel on the west side of the town, to which a
travelled fellow clerk in the Kansas City railroad office had directed
him.




II


BRIGHT and early on the morning following his arrival in Denver, Philip
presented himself at the general offices of the narrow-gauge mountain
railroad to the officials of which he had been recommended by his
late employers in Kansas City, and was promptly given a desk in the
accounting department; the department head, whose thin, sandy hair,
straggling gray beard and protuberant eyes gave him the aspect of a
weird but benevolent pre-Adamite bird, asking but a single question.

“Not thinking of going prospecting right away, are you?”

“No,” said Philip, wondering what there might be in his appearance to
suggest any such thing.

“All right; the bookkeeper will show you where to hang your coat.”

The employment footing made good, the newcomer’s spare time for the
first few days was spent looking for a boarding place, the West Denver
hotel, regarded from the thrifty New England point of view, proving
far too expensive. The after-hours’ search gave him his earliest
impressions of a city at the moment figuring as a Mecca, not only for
eager fortune seekers of all ranks and castes, but also for mining-rush
camp followers of every description. With the railroads daily pouring
new throngs into the city, housing was at a fantastic premium, and
many of the open squares were covered with the tents of those for
whom there was no shelter otherwise. Having certain well-defined
notions of what a self-respecting bachelor’s quarters should be,
Philip searched in vain, and was finally constrained to accept the
invitation of a fellow clerk in the railroad office to take him as a
room-mate--this though the acceptance involved a rather rude shattering
of the traditions. Instead of figuring as a paying guest in a home-like
private house--no small children--with at least two of the daily meals
at the family table, he found himself sharing dingy sleeping quarters
on the third floor of a down-town business block, with the option of
eating as he could in the turmoil of the dairy lunches and restaurants
or going hungry.

“No home-sheltered coddling for you in this live man’s burg. The
quicker you get over your tenderfoot flinchings, the happier you’ll
be,” advised Middleton, with whom the down-town refuge was shared, and
who, by virtue of a six-weeks’ longer Western residence than Philip’s,
postured, in his own estimation at least, as an “old-timer.” “‘When
you’re in Rome’--you know the rest of it. And let me tell you: you’ll
have to chase your feet to keep up with the procession here, Philly, my
boy. These particular Romans are a pretty swift lot, if you’ll let me
tell it.”

Philip winced a little at the familiar “Philly.” He had known Middleton
less than a week and was still calling him “Mister.” But familiarity
of the nick-naming and back-slapping variety seemed to be the order
of the day; a boisterous, hail-fellow-well-met freedom breezily
brushing aside the conventional preliminaries to acquaintanceship. It
was universal and one had to tolerate it; but Philip told himself that
toleration need not go the length of imitation or approval.

Work, often stretching into many hours of overtime, filled the first
few weeks for the tenderfoot from New Hampshire. The narrow-gauge
railroad reaching out toward Leadville was taxed to its capacity and
beyond, and there was little rest and less leisure for the office
force. Still, Philip was able now and again to catch an appraisive
glimpse of what was now becoming a thrilling and spectacular scene
in the great American drama of development,--a headling, migratory
irruption which had had its prototypes in the rush of the ’49-ers to
the California gold fields, the wagon-train dash for Pike’s Peak, and
the now waning invasion of the Black Hills by the gold seekers, but
which differed from them all in being facilitated and tremendously
augmented by a swift and easy railroad approach. Vaguely at first, but
later with quickening pulses, Philip came to realize that the moment
was epochal; that he was a passive participant in a spectacle which was
marking one of the mighty human surges by which the wilderness barriers
are broken down and the waste places occupied.

With a prophetic premonition that this might well be the last and
perhaps the greatest of the surges, Philip was conscious of a growing
and militant desire to be not only in it, but of it. The very air he
breathed was intoxicating with the spirit of avid and eager activity
and excitement, and the rush to the mountains increased as the
season advanced. The labor turn-over in the railroad office grew to
be a hampering burden, and now Philip understood why the auditor had
asked him if he were a potential treasure hunter. Almost every day
saw a new clerk installed to take the place of a fresh deserter.
After the lapse of a short month, Philip, Middleton and Baxter, the
head bookkeeper, were the three oldest employees, in point of time
served, in the auditing department. Two railroads, the South Park
and the Denver & Rio Grande, were building at frantic speed toward
Leadville, racing each other to be first at the goal; and from the
daily advancing end-of-track of each a stage line hurried the mixed
mob of treasure-seekers and birds of prey of both sexes on to their
destination in the great carbonate camp at the head of California
Gulch. To sit calmly at a desk adding columns of figures while all this
was going on became at first onerous, and later a daily fight for the
needful concentration upon the adding monotonies.

By this time some of the first fruits of the carbonate harvest reaped
and reaping in the sunset shadow of Mount Massive were beginning to
make themselves manifest in the return to Denver of sundry lucky
Argonauts whose royal spendings urged the plangencies to a quickened
and more sonorous wave-beat. One victorious grub-staker was said to be
burdened with an income of a quarter of a million a month from a single
mine, and was sorely perplexed to find ways in which to spend it. A
number of fortunate ones were buying up city lots at unheard-of prices;
one was building a palatial hotel; another was planning a theater
which was to rival the Opéra in Paris in costly magnificence.

These were substantials, and there were jocose extravagances to chorus
them. One heard of a pair of cuff-links, diamond and emerald studded,
purchased to order at the price of a king’s ransom; of a sybaritic
Fortunatus who reveled luxuriously in night-shirts at three thousand
dollars a dozen; of men who scorned the humble “chip” in the crowded
gaming rooms and played with twenty-dollar gold pieces for counters.

Philip saw and heard and was conscious of penetrating inward stirrings.
Was the totting-up of figures all he was good for? True, there were
money-making opportunities even at the railroad desk; chances to lend
his thrifty savings at usurious interest to potential prospectors;
chances to make quick turn-overs on small margins, and with certain
profits, in real-estate; invitations to get in on “ground floors” in
many promising enterprises, not excepting the carefully guarded inside
stock pool of the railroad company he was working for. But the inward
stirrings were not for these ventures in the commonplace; they were
even scornful of them. Money-lending, trading, stockjobbing--these
were for the timid. For the venturer unafraid there was a braver and a
richer field.

“How much experience does a fellow have to have to go prospecting?” he
asked of Middleton, one day when the figure-adding had grown to be an
anæsthetizing monotony hard to be borne.

Middleton grinned mockingly. “Hello!” he said. “It’s got you at last,
has it?”

“I asked a plain question. What’s the answer?--if you know it.”

“Experience? Nine-tenths of the fools who are chasing into the hills
don’t know free gold from iron pyrites, or carbonates from any other
kind of black sand. It’s mostly bull luck when they find anything.”

“Yet they _are_ finding it,” Philip put in.

“You hear of those who find it. The Lord knows, they make racket enough
spending the proceeds. But you never hear much about the ninety-nine in
a hundred who don’t find it.”

“Just the same, according to your tell, one man’s chance seems to be
about as good as another’s. I believe I’d like to have a try at it,
Middleton. Want to go along?”

“Not in a thousand years!” was the laughing refusal. “I’ll take mine
straight, and in the peopled cities. I’ve got a girl back in Ohio, and
I’m going after her one of these days--after this wild town settles
down and quits being so rude and boisterous.”

Philip looked his desk-mate accusingly in the eye.

“It’s an even bet that you don’t,” he said calmly.

“Why won’t I?”

“I saw you last night-down at the corner of Holladay and Seventeenth.”

Middleton, lately a country-town bank clerk in his native Ohio, but who
was now beginning to answer the invitation of a pair of rather moist
eyes and lips that were a trifle too full, tried to laugh it off.

“You mean the ‘chippy’ I was with? I’m no monk, Philly; never set up
to be. Besides, I’m willing to admit that I may have had one too many
whiskey sours last night. Cheese it, and tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I’ve already told you. I think I’ll try my luck in the hills, if I can
find a partner.”

“Good-by,” grunted Middleton, turning back to his tonnage sheet. “As
for the partner part, all you have to do is to chase down to the
station and shoot your invitation at the first likely looking fellow
who gets off the next incoming train. He’ll be a rank tenderfoot, of
course, but that won’t make any difference: there’ll be a pair of
you--both innocents. Why, say, Philly; I’ll bet you’ve still got your
first drink of red liquor waiting for you! Come, now--own up; haven’t
you?”

“I should hope so,” said Philip austerely. “I didn’t come all the way
out here to make a fool of myself.”

This time Middleton’s grin was openly derisive.

“My, my!” he jeered. “The spirit moves me to prophesy. I know your
kind, Philly--up one side and down the other. When you let go, I hope
I’ll be there to see. It’ll be better than a three-ring circus. Wine,
women and song, and all the rest of it. Speaking of women----”

“You needn’t,” Philip cut in shortly; and he got up to answer the
auditor’s desk bell.

The process of securing a partner for a prospecting trip was scarcely
the simple matter that Middleton’s gibing suggestion had made it.
Though there were many haphazard matings achieved hastily at the
outfitting moment, a goodly proportion of the treasure hunters were
coming in pairs and trios hailing from a common starting point in the
east. In spite of the free-and-easy levelling of the conventions,
Philip found it difficult to make acquaintances, his shell of
provincial reserve remaining unchipped, though he tried hard enough to
break it. Besides, he felt that he was justified in trying to choose
judiciously. He could conceive of no experience more devastating than
to be isolated in the wilderness for weeks and perhaps months with an
ill-chosen partner for his only companion. The very intimacy of such an
association would make it unbearable.

It was while he was still hesitating that a small duty urged itself
upon him. It concerned the Mississippi family with the death-threatened
husband and father. In a city where all were strangers he had fully
intended keeping in touch with the Dabneys, if only to be ready
to offer what small help a passing acquaintance might in case the
threatened catastrophe should climax. Since he would shortly be leaving
Denver, the duty pressed again, and he set apart an evening for the
tracing of the Mississippians, going first to the American House to
make inquiries.

Fortunately for his purpose, one of the hotel clerks, himself a
Southerner, remembered the Dabneys. They had remained but a few days
in the hotel; were now, so the clerk believed, camping in one of the
tent colonies out on California or Stout Streets somewhere between
Twentieth and Twenty-third. Yes, Captain Dabney had been in pretty bad
shape, but it was to be assumed that he was still living. The clerk had
been sufficiently interested to keep track of the obituary notices in
the newspapers, and the Dabney name had not appeared in any of them.
Inquiry among the tenters would probably enable Philip to find them.

Reproaching himself for his prolonged negligence, Philip set out to
extend his search to the tent colonies. It was after he had reached
the more sparsely built-up district, and was crossing a vacant square
beyond the better-lighted streets, that a slender figure, seemingly
materializing out of the ground at his feet, rose up to confront him,
a pistol was thrust into his face, and he heard the familiar formula:
“Hands up--and be quick about it!”

It is probably a fact that the element of shocked surprise, no less
than the natural instinct of self-preservation, accounts for the easy
success of the majority of hold-ups. Sudden impulse automatically
prompts obedience, and the chance of making any resistance is lost.
But impulsiveness was an inconsequent part of Philip’s equipment.
Quite coolly measuring his chances, and well assured that he had a
considerable advantage in avoirdupois, he knocked the threatening
weapon aside and closed in a quick grapple with the highwayman. He
was not greatly surprised when he found that his antagonist, though
slightly built, was as wiry and supple as a trained acrobat; but in
the clinching struggle it was weight that counted, and when the brief
wrestling match ended in a fall, the hold-up man was disarmed and
spread-eagled on the ground and Philip was sitting on him.

When he could get his breath the vanquished one laughed.

“Made a complete, beautiful and finished fizzle of it, d-didn’t I?” he
gasped. “Let me tell you, my friend, it isn’t half so easy as it is
made to appear in the yellow-back novels.”

“What the devil do you mean--trying to hold me up with a gun?” Philip
demanded angrily.

“Why--if you must know, I meant to rob you; to take and appropriate to
my own base uses that which I have not, and which you presumably have.
Not having had the practice which makes perfect, I seem to have fallen
down. Would you mind sitting a little farther back on me? I could
breathe much better if you would.”

Philip got up and picked up the dropped weapon.

“I suppose I ought to shoot you with your own gun,” he snapped; and the
reply to that was another chuckling laugh.

“You couldn’t, you know,” said the highwayman, sitting up. “It’s
perfectly harmless--empty, as you may see for yourself if you’ll break
it. You were quite safe in ignoring it.”

Philip regarded him curiously.

“What kind of a hold-up are you, anyway?” he asked.

“The rottenest of amateurs, as you have just proved upon my poor body.
I thank you for the demonstration. It decides a nice question for me. I
hesitated quite some time before I could tip the balance between this,
and going into a restaurant, ordering and consuming a full meal, and
being kicked out ignominiously for non-payment afterward. This seemed
the more decent thing to do, but it is pretty evident that I lack
something in the way of technique. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“I should say that you are either a fool or crazy,” said Philip bluntly.

“Wrong, both ways from the middle,” was the jocular retort. “At the
present moment I am merely an empty stomach; and empty stomachs, as you
may have observed, are notoriously lacking in any moral sense. May I
get up?”

“Yes,” said Philip; and when the man was afoot: “Now walk ahead of me
to that street lamp on the corner. I want to have a look at you.”

What the street lamp revealed was what he was rather expecting to see;
a handsome, boyish face a trifle thin and haggard, eyes that were
sunken a little, but with an unextinguished smile in them, a fairly
good chin and jaw, a mouth just now wreathing itself in an impish grin
under his captor’s frowning scrutiny.

“Umph!--you don’t look like a very hard case,” Philip decided.

“Oh, but I am, I assure you. I’ve been kicked out of two respectable
colleges, dropped from the home club for conduct unbecoming a
gentleman, and finally turned out of house and home by a justifiably
irate father. Can I say more?”

“What are you doing in Denver?”

“You saw what I was trying to do a few minutes ago. The outcome
dovetails accurately with everything else I have attempted since I
parted with the final dollar of the even thousand with which I was
disinherited. Failure seems to be my baptismal name.”

“What is your name?”

“Henry Wigglesworth Bromley. Please don’t smile at the middle third of
it. That is a family heirloom--worse luck. But to the matter in hand:
I’m afraid I’m detaining you. Shall I--‘mog,’ is the proper frontier
word, I believe--shall I mog along down-town and surrender myself to
the police?”

“Would you do that if I should tell you to?”

“Why not, if you require it? You are the victor, and to the victors
belong the spoils--such as they are. If you hunger for vengeance, you
shall have it. Only I warn you in advance that it won’t be complete.
If the police lock me up, they will probably feed me, so you won’t be
punishing me very savagely.”

For once in a way Philip yielded to an impulse, a prompting that he was
never afterward able to trace to any satisfactory source. Dropping the
captured revolver into his coat pocket, he pressed a gold piece into
the hand of the amateur hold-up.

“Say that I’ve bought your gun and go get you a square meal,” he said,
trying to say it gruffly. “Afterward, if you feel like it, go and sit
in the lobby of the American House for your after-dinner smoke. I’m not
making it mandatory. If you’re not there when I get back, it will be
all right.”

“Thank you; while I’m eating I’ll think about that potential
appointment. If I can sufficiently forget the Wigglesworth in my name
I may keep the tryst, but don’t bank on it. I may--with a full-fed
stomach--have a resurgence of the Wigglesworth family pride, and in
that case----”

“Good-night,” said Philip abruptly, and went his way toward the tent
colony in the next open square, wondering again where the impulse to
brother this impish but curiously engaging highwayman came from.




III


IN circumstances in which it would have been easy enough to fail,
Philip found the family he was looking for almost at once; and it was
the young woman with the dark eyes and hair and the enticing Southland
voice and accent who slipped between the flaps of the lighted tent when
he made his presence known.

“Oh, Mr. Trask--is it you?” she exclaimed, as the dim lamplight
filtering through the canvas enabled her to recognize him. “This is
kind of you, I’m sure. We’ve been wondering if we should ever see you
again. I can’t imagine how you were ever able to find us.”

Philip, rejoicing in the softly smothered “r’s” of her speech,
explained soberly. It was not so difficult. He had gone first to the
hotel; and once in the tented square, a few inquiries had sufficed.

“I’m sorry I can’t ask you in,” she hastened to say. “You see, there
isn’t so awfully much room in a tent, and--and the children are just
going to bed. Would you mind sitting out here?”

There was a bench on the board platform that served as a dooryard for
the tent, and they sat together on that. For the first few minutes
Philip had an attack of self-consciousness that made him boil inwardly
with suppressed rage. His human contacts for the past few weeks--or
months, for that matter--had been strictly masculine, and he had never
been wholly at ease with women, save those of his own family. Stilted
inquiries as to how the sick Captain was getting along, and how they
all liked Denver and the West, and how they thought the climate and
the high altitude were going to agree with them, were as far as he got
before a low laugh, with enough mockery in it to prick him sharply,
interrupted him.

“Excuse me,” she murmured, “but it’s so deliciously funny to see you
make such hard work of it. Are there no girls in the part of Yankeeland
you come from?”

“Plenty of them,” he admitted; “but they are not like you.”

“Oh!” she laughed. “Is that a compliment, or the other thing?”

“It is just the plain truth. But the trouble isn’t with girls--it’s
with me. I guess I’m not much of a ladies’ man.”

“I’m glad you’re not; I can’t imagine anything more deadly. Are you
still working for the railroad?”

“Just at present, yes. But I’ll be quitting in a few days. I’m going to
try my luck in the mountains--prospecting.”

“But--I thought you said you wouldn’t!”

“I did; but I was younger then than I am now.”

She laughed again. “All of six weeks younger. But I’m glad you are
going. If the Captain could get well, and I were a man, I’d go, too.”

Philip was on the point of saying that he wished she were a man and
would go with him; but upon second thought he concluded he didn’t wish
it. Before he could straighten out the tangle of the first and second
thoughts she was asking him if he knew anything about minerals and
mining.

“Nothing at all. But others who don’t know any more than I do are
going, and some of them are finding what they hoped to find.”

“It’s in the air,” she said. “You hear nothing but ‘strikes’ and
‘leads’ and ‘mother veins’ and ‘bonanzas.’ Lots of the people in these
tents around us are here because some member of the family is sick, but
they all talk excitedly about the big fortunes that are being made, and
how Tom or Dick or Harry has just come in with a haversack full of ‘the
pure quill,’ whatever that may mean.”

“You haven’t been hearing any more of it than I have,” said Philip.
“Not as much, I think. The town is mad with the mining fever. I’m only
waiting until I can find a suitable partner.”

“That ought not to be very hard--with everybody wanting to go.”

Philip shook his head. “I guess I’m not built right for mixing with
people. I can’t seem to chum in with just anybody that comes along.”

“You oughtn’t to,” she returned decisively. Then, again with the
mocking note in her voice: “They say the prospectors often have to
fight to hold their claims after they have found them: you ought to
pick out some big, strong fighting man for a partner, don’t you think?”

Philip was glad the canvas-filtered lamplight was too dim to let her
see the flush her words evoked.

“You are thinking of that day on the train, and how I let the husky
miner take your part when I should have done it myself? I’m not such a
coward as that. I was trying to get out of my seat when the miner man
got ahead of me. I want you to believe that.”

“Of course I’ll believe it.” Then, quite penitently: “You must forgive
me for being rude again: I simply can’t help saying the meanest things,
sometimes. Still, you know, I can’t imagine you as a fighter, really.”

“Can’t you?” said Philip; and then he boasted: “I had a fight with
a hold-up on the way out here this evening--and got the best of
him, too.” Whereupon he described with dry humor Henry Wigglesworth
Bromley’s attempt to raise the price of a square meal; the brief battle
and its outcome.

“You haven’t told all of it,” she suggested, when he paused with his
refusal to accept Bromley’s offer to arrest himself on a charge of
attempted highway robbery.

“What part have I left out?”

“Just the last of it, I think. You gave the robber some money to buy
the square meal--I’m sure you did.”

“You are a witch!” Philip laughed. “That is exactly what I did do. I
don’t know why I did it, but I did.”

“_I_ know why,” was the prompt reply. “It was because you couldn’t help
it. The poor boy’s desperation appealed to you--it appeals to me just
in your telling of it. He isn’t bad; he is merely good stock gone to
seed. Couldn’t you see that?”

“Not as clearly as you seem to. But he did appear to be worth helping a
bit.”

“Ah; that is the chord I was trying to touch. You ought to help him
some more, Mr. Trask. Don’t you reckon so?”

“‘Mr. Trask’ wouldn’t, but perhaps ‘Philip’ would,” he suggested mildly.

“Well, ‘Philip,’ then. Don’t you see how brave he is?--to laugh at
himself and all his misfortunes, the hardships his wildness has brought
upon him? You say you are looking for a prospecting partner; why don’t
you take him?”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Certainly I mean it. It might result in two good things. If you could
get him off in the mountains by himself, and live with him, and make
him work hard, you might make a real man of him.”

“Yes?” said Philip. “That is one of the two good things. What is the
other?”

“The other is what it might do for you. Or am I wrong about that?”

“No,” he said, after a little pause. “I still think you are a witch.
You’ve found out that I live in a shell, and it’s so. I guess I was
born that way. You think the shell would crack if I should take hold of
a man like this Bromley and try to brother him?”

“I am sure it would,” she replied gravely. “It couldn’t help cracking.”
Then, as a low-toned call came from the inside of the tent: “Yes,
mummie, dear,--I’m coming.”

Philip got up and held out his hand.

“I am sorry I’m going away, because I’d like to be within call if you
should need me. If you should move into a house, or leave Denver, will
you let me know? A note addressed to me in care of the railroad office
will be either forwarded or held until I come back.”

“I’ll write,” she promised, and the quick veiling of the dark eyes told
him that she knew very well what he meant by her possible need.

“And about this young scapegrace who tried to hold me up: what you have
suggested never occurred to me until you spoke of it. But if you think
I ought to offer to take him along into the mountains, I don’t know but
I’ll do it. It wouldn’t be any crazier than the things a lot of other
people are doing in this mining-mad corner of the world just now.”

“Oh, you mustn’t take me too seriously. I have no right to tell you
what you should do. But I did have a glimpse of what it might mean. I’m
going to wish you good luck--the very best of luck. If you really want
to be rich, I hope you’ll find one of these beautiful ‘bonanzas’ people
are talking about; find it and live happily ever after. Good-by.”

“Good-by,” said Philip; and when she disappeared behind the tent flap,
he picked his way out of the campers’ square and turned his steps
townward.

It was after he had walked the five squares westward on Champa and the
six northward down Seventeenth, and was turning into Blake, with the
American House only a block distant, that a girlish figure slipped out
of a doorway shadow, caught step with him, and slid a caressing arm
under his with a murmured, “You look lonesome, baby, and I’m lonesome,
too. Take me around to Min’s and stake me to a bottle of wine. I’m so
thirsty I don’t know where I’m going to sleep to-night.”

Philip freed himself with a twist that had in it all the fierce virtue
of his Puritan ancestry. Being fresh from a very human contact with a
young woman of another sort, this appeal of the street-girl was like
a stumbling plunge into muddy water. Backing away from the temptation
which, he told himself hotly, was no temptation at all, he walked on
quickly, and had scarcely recovered his balance when he entered the
lobby of the hotel. Almost immediately he found Bromley, sprawled in
one of the lounging chairs, deep in the enjoyment of a cigar which he
waved airily as he caught sight of Philip.

“_Benedicite_, good wrestler! Pull up a chair and rest your face and
hands,” he invited. Then, with a cheerful smile: “Why the pallid
countenance? You look as though you’d just seen a ghost. Did some other
fellow try to hold you up?”

Philip’s answering smile was a twisted grimace. “No; it was a woman,
this time.”

“Worse and more of it. Lots of little devils in skirts chivvying around
this town. Too many men fools roaming the streets with money in their
pockets. ‘Wheresoever the body is, there will the eagles be gathered
together’--only they’re not exactly eagles; they are birds of another
feather. I know, because they clawed me a bit before my wallet went
dry.”

“You were one of the fools?” said Philip sourly.

“You’d know it without my telling you. But to the law and the
testimony. You see, the Wigglesworth family pride didn’t prevent me
from keeping your kindly hint in mind--and I’ve obeyed it. Where do we
begin?”

“Suppose we begin where we left off,” said Philip guardedly. “Is there
any decent ambition left in you?”

Bromley took time to consider, and when he replied he was shaking his
head doubtfully.

“To be perfectly frank about it, I’m not sure there has ever been
anything worthy the high sounding name of ambition. You see, there is
quite a lot of Bromley property scattered about in my home town--which
is Philadelphia, if you care to know--and the income from it has
heretofore proved fatal to anything like decent ambition on the part of
a play-boy.”

“Your property?” Philip queried.

“Oh, dear, no; the governor’s. But he hasn’t kept too tight a hand
on the purse strings; not tight enough, if we are to judge from the
effects--the present horrible example being the most disastrous of the
same. As I intimated on the scene of my latest fiasco, I stretched
the rubber band once too often and it snapped back at me with a
disinheriting thousand-dollar check attached. That, my dear benefactor,
is my poor tale, poorly told. You see before you what might have been a
man, but what probably--most probably--never will be a man.”

“Of course, if you are willing to let it go at that----” said Philip,
leaving the sentence unfinished.

“You mean that I ought to pitch in and do something useful? My dear Mr.
Good-wrestler----”

“My name is Trask,” Philip cut in shortly.

“Well, then, my dear Trask, I have never learned how to do useful
things. One has to learn, I believe, if it’s only washing dishes in
a cheap restaurant, or chopping wood. I should inevitably break the
dishes, or let the axe slip and chop my foot.”

Philip made a gesture of impatience.

“I had a proposal to make to you, but it seems that it’s no use. I am
about to strike out for the mountains, to try my luck prospecting. A
friend of yours, whom you have never seen or even heard of, suggested
that you might want to go along--as my partner.”

Bromley straightened himself in his chair and the mocking smile died
out of his boyish eyes.

“A friend of mine, you say? I had some friends while my thousand
lasted, but I haven’t any now.”

“Yes, you have at least one; though, as I have said, you have never
seen or heard of her.”

The play-boy sank back into the depths of his chair.

“Ah, I see; a woman, and you told her about me. Am I such an object of
pity as that, Trask?”

Philip forgot his New England insularity for a moment and put his hand
on the play-boy’s knee.

“It was angelic pity, Bromley. Surely that needn’t hurt your pride.”

“Angels,” was the half-musing reply. “They can rise so much, so
infinitely much, higher than a man when they hold on, and sink so much
lower when they let go. This angel you speak of--is she yours, Trask?”

“No; only an acquaintance. I have met her only twice. But you haven’t
said what you think of my proposal. It is made in good faith.”

“Don’t you see how impossible it is?”

“Why is it impossible?”

“A partnership presupposes mutual contributions. I have nothing to
contribute; not even skill with a miner’s pick.”

“You have yourself and your two hands--which are probably not more
unskilled than mine, for the kind of work we’d have to do.”

“But the outfit--the grub-stake?”

“I have money enough to carry the two of us through the summer. If we
strike something, you can pay me back out of your half of the stake.”

For quite a long time Bromley sat with his head thrown back, and with
the half-burned cigar, which had gone out and was cold and dead,
clamped between his teeth. And his answer, when he made it, was
strictly in character.

“What a hellish pity it is that I didn’t find you and try to hold
you up weeks ago, Trask--while I had some few ravellings of the
thousand left. Will you take a beggar with you on your quest of the
golden fleece? Because, if you will, the beggar is yours. We mustn’t
disappoint the angel.”




IV


THE August sun had dropped behind a high-pitched horizon of saw-tooth
peaks and broken ranges, leaving the upper air still shot through with
a golden glow that was like the dome lighting of a vast celestial
theater, by the time two young men, whose burro packs of camp
equipment, supplies and digging tools marked them as prospectors, had
picked their way down the last precipitous rock slide into a valley
hemmed in by the broken ranges. At the close of a hard day’s march
the straggling procession was heading for running water and a camp
site; the water being a clear mountain stream brawling over its rocky
bed in the valley bottom. Reaching the stream before the upper-air
effulgencies had quite faded into the smoke-gray of twilight, a halt
was made and preparations for a night camp briskly begun.

Two full months had elapsed since the partnership bargain had been
struck in the lobby of the American House in Denver, and during the
greater part of that interval Philip and the play-boy had prospected
diligently in the foot-hills and eastern spurs of the Continental
Divide, combing the gulches in the vicinity of Fair Play and Alma,
and finding nothing more significant than an occasional abandoned
tunnel or shaft, mute evidences that others had anticipated their own
disappointment in this particular field. Drifting southwestward, past
Mount Princeton, they had ascended Chalk Creek, crossed the range over
a high pass into Taylor Park, and were now in new ground on the western
side of the Divide.

“This side of the world looks better; or at least a little less
shopworn,” Bromley remarked, after they had cooked and eaten their
supper and were smoking bed-time pipes before the camp fire. “I think
we have outrun the crowd, at last, and that is something to be thankful
for.”

Philip opened his pocket knife and dug with the blade into the bowl
of his pipe to make it draw better. The two months of outdoor life
and hard manual labor had done for him what the treasure search was
doing for many who had never before known what it was to lack a roof
over their heads at night, or to live on a diet of pan-bread and bacon
cooked over a camp fire. With the shedding of the white collar and its
accompaniments and the donning of flannel shirt, belted trousers and
top boots had come a gradual change in habits and outlook, and--surest
distinguishing mark of the tenderfoot--a more or less unconscious aping
of the “old-timer.” Since his razor had grown dull after the first week
or two, he had let his beard grow; and for the single clerkly cigar
smoked leisurely after the evening meal, he had substituted a manly
pipe filled with shavings from a chewing plug.

Bromley had changed, too, though in a different way. Two months’
abstention from the hectic lights and their debilitating effects had
put more flesh and better on his bones, a clearer light in his eyes
and a springy alertness in his carriage; and though his clothes were
as workmanlike as Philip’s, he contrived to wear them with a certain
easy grace and freedom, and to look fit and trim in them. Also, though
his razor was much duller than Philip’s, and their one scrap of
looking-glass was broken, he continued to shave every second day.

“I’ve been wondering if a later crowd, with more ‘savvy’ than we have,
perhaps, won’t go over the same ground that we have gone over and find
a lot of stuff that we’ve missed,” said Philip, after the pipe-clearing
pause.

“‘Savvy,’” Bromley chuckled. “When we started out I was moved to
speculate upon what the wilderness might do to you, Phil; whether it
would carve a lot of new hieroglyphs on you, or leave you unscarred in
the security of your solid old Puritan shell. ‘Savvy’ is the answer.”

“Oh, go and hire a hall!” Philip grumbled good-naturedly. “Your
vaporings make my back ache. Give us a rest!”

“There it is again,” laughed the play-boy. “Set the clock back six
months or so and imagine yourself saying, ‘Go hire a hall,’ and ‘Give
us a rest!’ to a group of the New England Trasks.”

“Humph! If it comes to that, you’ve changed some, too, in a couple of
months,” Philip countered.

“Don’t I know it? Attrition--rubbing up against the right sort of
thing--will occasionally work the miracle of making something out of
nothing. You’ve rubbed off some of your New England virtues on me; I’m
coming to be fairly plastered with them. There are even times when I
can almost begin to look back with horror upon my young life wasted.”

“Keep it up, if you feel like it and it amuses you,” was the grunted
comment. “I believe if you were dying, you’d joke about it.”

“Life, and death, too, are a joke, Philip, if you can get the right
perspective on them. Have you ever, in an idle moment, observed the
activities of the humble ant, whose ways we are so solemnly advised to
consider for the acquiring of wisdom? Granting that the ant may know
well enough what she is about, according to her lights, you must admit
that her apparently aimless and futile chasings to and fro--up one side
of a blade of grass and down the other, over a pebble and then under
it--don’t impress the human beholder as evidences of anything more than
mere restlessness, a frantic urge to keep moving. I’ve often wondered
if we human ants may not be giving the same impression to any Being
intelligent enough to philosophize about us.”

“This feverish mineral hunt, you mean?”

“Oh, that, and pretty nearly everything else we do. ‘Life’s fitful
fever,’ Elizabethan Billy calls it--and he knew. But in one way we have
the advantage of the ant; we can realize that our successive blades of
grass and pebbles are all different.”

“How, different?”

“We put the day that is past behind us and step into another which is
never the same. Or, if the day is the same, we are not. You’ll never be
able to go back to the peace and quiet of a railroad desk, for example.”

“Maybe not. And you?”

“God knows. As I have said, you’ve rubbed off some of your virtues
on me--suffering some little loss of them yourself, I fancy. We’ll
see what they will do to me. It will be something interesting to look
forward to.”

“Umph!” Philip snorted; “you’re getting grubby again--maggoty, I mean.
Which proves that it’s time to hit the blankets. If you’ll look after
the jacks and hobble them, I’ll gather wood for the fire.”

Bromley sat up and finished freeing his mind.

“Philip, if anybody had told me a year ago that within a short
twelve-month I’d be out here in the Colorado mountains, picking,
shovelling, driving jack-asses, cooking at least half of my own meals,
and liking it all ... well, ‘liar’ would have been the mildest epithet
I should have chucked at him. Comical, isn’t it?” And with that he went
to valet the burros.

The first day after their arrival in the western valley was spent in
exploring, and they finally settled upon a gulch not far from their
camp of the night before as the most promising place in which to dig.
Though they had as yet mastered only the bare rudiments of a trained
prospector’s education, the two summer months had given them a modicum
of experience; enough to enable them to know roughly what to look for,
and how to recognize it when they found it.

The gulch in which they began operations was a miniature canyon, and
the favored site was indicated by the half-hidden outcropping of a
vein of brownish material which they could trace for some distance up
the steep slope of the canyon wall. During the day’s explorations they
had frequently tested the sands of the stream bed for gold “colors,”
washing the sand miner-fashion in their frying pan, and it was upon
the hint given by the “colors” that they had pitched upon the gulch
location. Below the gulch mouth microscopic flakes of gold appeared now
and again in the washings. But the sands above were barren.

“It looks as if we may have found something worth while, this time,”
Philip hazarded, after they had cleared the rock face to reveal the
extent of the vein. “The ‘colors’ we’ve been finding in the creek sand
come from a lode somewhere, and this may be the mother vein. We’ll put
the drills and powder to it to-morrow and see what happens.”

Accordingly, for a toilsome fortnight they drilled and blasted in the
gulch, and by the end of that time the prospect had developed into
a well-defined vein of quartz wide enough to admit the opening of a
working tunnel. Having no equipment for making field tests, they could
only guess at the value of their discovery, but the indications were
favorable. The magnifying glass showed flecks and dustings of yellow
metal in selected specimens of the quartz; and, in addition, the ore
body was of the character they had learned to distinguish as “free
milling”--vein-matter from which the gold can be extracted by the
simplest and cheapest of the crushing processes.

Taking it all in all, they had good reason to be hopeful; and on the
final day of the two weeks of drilling and blasting they skipped the
noonday meal to save time and were thus enabled to fire the evening
round of shots in the shallow tunnel just before sunset. A hasty
examination of the spoil blown out removed all doubt as to the
character of the material in which they were driving. The vein was
gold-bearing quartz, beyond question; how rich, they had no means of
determining; but there were tiny pockets--lenses--in which the free
metal was plainly visible without the aid of the magnifier.

That night, before their camp fire, they held a council of war. Though
it seemed more than likely that the lode was a rich one, they were
now brought face to face with the disheartening fact that the mere
ownership of a potential gold mine is only the first step in a long and
uphill road to fortune. In the mining regions it is a common saying
that the owner of a silver prospect needs a gold mine at his back to
enable him to develop it, and the converse is equally true.

“Well,” Bromley began, after the pipes had been lighted, “it seems
we’ve got something, at last. What do we do with it?”

“I wish I knew, Harry,” was the sober reply. “If the thing turns out to
be as good as it looks, we’ve got the world by the tail--or we would
have if we could only figure out some way to hold on. But we can’t hold
on and develop it; that is out of the question. We have no capital, and
we are a good many mountain miles from a stamp-mill. Unless the lode is
richer than anything we’ve ever heard of, the ore wouldn’t stand the
cost of jack-freighting to a mill.”

“That says itself,” Bromley agreed. “But if we can’t develop the thing,
what is the alternative?”

“There is only one. If our map is any good, and if we have figured out
our location with any degree of accuracy, we are about thirty miles,
as the crow flies, from Leadville--which will probably mean forty or
fifty the way we’d have to go to find a pass over the range. We have
provisions enough to stake us on the way out, but not very much more
than enough. I cut into the last piece of bacon to-night for supper.”

“All right; say we head for Leadville. We’d have to do that anyway, to
record our discovery in the land office. What next?”

“Assays,” said Philip. “We’ll take a couple of sacks of the quartz
along and find out what we’ve got. If the assays make a good showing,
we’ll have something to sell, and it will go hard with us if we can’t
find some speculator in the big camp who will take a chance and buy our
claim.”

“What?--sell out, lock, stock and barrel for what we can get, and then
stand aside and see somebody come in here and make a million or so that
ought to be ours?” Bromley burst out. “Say, Philip--that would be death
by slow torture!”

“I know,” Philip admitted. “It is what the poor prospector gets in
nine cases out of ten because, being poor, he has to take it. If we
had a mine, instead of a mere prospect hole, we might hope to be able
to capitalize it; but as it is--well, you know what’s in the common
purse. My savings are about used up; we came in on a shoe-string, in
the beginning.”

“Yes, but, land of love, Philip!--to have a thing, like this may turn
out to be, right in our hands, and then have to sell it, most likely
for a mere song! ... why, we’d never live long enough to get over it,
neither one of us!”

Philip shook his head. “It’s tough luck, I’ll admit; but what else is
there to do?”

Bromley got up and kicked a half burnt log into the heart of the fire.

“How nearly broke are we, Phil?” he asked.

The financing partner named the sum still remaining in the partnership
purse, which, as he had intimated, was pitifully small.

“You said, just now, if we had a mine to sell, instead of a bare
prospect,” Bromley went on.... “We’ve got nerve, and two pairs of
hands. Suppose we stay with it and make it a mine? I know good and well
what that will mean: a freezing winter in the mountains, hardships till
you can’t rest, half starvation, maybe. Just the same, I’m game for it,
if you are.”

Philip rapped the ashes from his pipe and refilled it. From the very
beginning of the summer Bromley had been offering a series of grateful
surprises: dogged endurance, cheerfulness under privations, willingness
to share hard labor--a loyal partner in all that the word implied.
Slow to admit any one to the inner intimacies of friendship, as his
Puritan heritage constrained him to be, Philip had weighed and measured
the play-boy coldly, impartially, and before they had been many weeks
together he was honest enough to admit that Bromley was as tempered
steel to his own roughly forged iron; that it had been merely a lack
of an adequate object in life that had made him a spendthrift and a
derelict.

“You’d tackle a winter here in these mountains rather than let go?” he
said, after the refilled pipe was alight. “It will be hell, Harry. You
remember what those fellows in Chalk Creek told us about the snows on
this side of the range.”

“I’m discounting everything but the kind of hell that will be ours if
we should let go and see somebody else come in and reap where we’ve
sown.”

“All right; let’s see what we’ve got to buck up against. First,
we’ll have to go out for the recording, the assays, and the winter’s
provisions. We’d have to buy at least one more burro to freight the
grub-stake in; and then one of us will have to take the jacks out for
the winter. They’d starve to death here. All this is going to take
time, and the summer is already gone. And that isn’t all; we’ll have
to build a cabin and cut the winter’s wood. It will be a fierce race
against time to get holed in before we’re snowed under.”

“Still I’m game,” declared Bromley stoutly. “If it turns out that we
have something worth fighting for--and the assays will say yes or no to
that--I’m for the fight.”

Philip scowled amiably at the transformed play-boy. “You nervy little
rat!” he exclaimed in gruff affection. “Think you can back me down on a
fighting proposition? I’ll call your bluff. We’ll put in one more day
setting things to rights, and then we’ll pull out for Leadville and
that starvation winter grub-stake.”

“Setting things to rights,” as Philip phrased it, did not ask for an
entire day. By noon they had cached their tools and what remained of
the stock of provisions after enough had been reserved to supply them
on the journey; had filled a couple of ore sacks with samples for the
assay; and had paced off and re-staked their claim, posting it with the
proper notice and christening it the “Little Jean,”--this at Philip’s
suggestion, though he did not tell Bromley why he chose this particular
name.

With nothing more to be done, Philip was impatiently eager to break
camp at once, but Bromley pleaded for a few hours’ rest.

“It’s Sunday,” he protested. “Can’t you possess your soul in patience
for one little afternoon? This bonanza of ours--which may not be a
bonanza, after all--won’t run away. I’d like to sleep up a bit before
we strike out to climb any more mountains.”

The impatient one consented reluctantly to the delay; and while
Bromley, wearier than he cared to admit, slept for the better part of
the afternoon, Philip dumped the sacked ore and spent the time raking
over the pile of broken rock and vein-matter blasted out of the shallow
opening, selecting other samples which he thought might yield a fairer
average of values. Beside the camp fire that evening he stretched
himself out with the two sacks of ore for a back rest; and Bromley,
awake now and fully refreshed, noted the back rest and smiled.

“Like the feel of it, even in the rough, don’t you, Phil?” he jested.
Then: “I’m wondering if this treasure hunt hasn’t got under your
skin in more ways than one. At first, you were out for the pure
excitement of the chase; but now you are past all that; you are plain
money-hungry.”

“Well, who isn’t?” Philip demanded, frowning into the heart of the
fire. “Still, you’re wrong. It isn’t the money so much, as what it will
buy.”

“What will it buy--more than you’ve always had? You won’t be able to
eat any more or any better food, or wear any more clothes, or get more
than one tight roof to shelter you at a time,--needs you have always
had supplied, or have been able to supply for yourself.”

Getting no reply to this, he went on. “Suppose this strike of ours
should pan out a million or so--which is perhaps as unlikely as
anything in the world--what would you do with the money?”

For the moment Philip became a conventional, traditional worshipper at
the altar of thrift.

“I think I should emulate the example of the careful dog with a bone;
go and dig a safe hole and bury most of it.”

Bromley’s laugh came back in cachinnating echoes from the gulch cliffs.

“Not on your life you wouldn’t, Philip. I can read your horoscope
better than that. If it does happen to happen that we’ve really made
a ten-strike, I can see you making the good old welkin ring till the
neighbors won’t be able to hear themselves think, for the noise you’ll
make.”

“I don’t know why you should say anything like that,” Philip objected
morosely.

“Of course you don’t. You’d have to have eyes like a snail’s to be able
to see yourself. But just wait, and hold my little prophecy in mind.”

Philip, still staring into the heart of the fire, remembered a similar
prediction made by his desk-mate in the Denver railroad office. “I know
your kind....” Middleton had said. What was there about his kind that
made other people so sure that the good thread of self-control had been
left out in his weaving?

“I’ll wait,” he said; and then: “You haven’t said what you’d do in case
it should turn out that we’ve made the improbable ten-strike.”

“I?” queried the play-boy. “Everybody who has ever known me could
answer that, off-hand. You know my sweet and kindly disposition. I
wouldn’t want to disappoint all the old ladies in Philadelphia. And
they’d be horribly disappointed if I didn’t proceed to paint everything
within reach a bright, bright shade of vermilion.”

Philip looked at his watch.

“Nine o’clock,” he announced, “and we start at daybreak, sharp. I’m
turning in.”

In strict accordance with the programme of impatience, the start was
made at dawn on the Monday morning. Their map, though rather uncertain
as to the smaller streams, seemed to enable them to locate their valley
and its small river, and their nearest practicable route to Leadville
appeared to be by way of the stream to its junction with a larger
river, and then eastward up the valley of the main stream, which the
map showed as heading in the gulches gashing the western shoulder of
Mount Massive.

A day’s tramping behind the two diminutive pack beasts brought them
to the larger stream, and the third evening found them zigzagging up
the slopes of the great chain which forms the watershed backbone of
the continent. Philip had been hastening the slow march of the burros
all day, hoping to reach the pass over the range before night. But
darkness overtook them when they were approaching timber line and they
were forced to camp. It was at this high camp that they had the unique
experience of melting snow from a year-old snowbank at the end of
summer to water the burros and to make coffee over their camp fire. And
even with double blankets and the tarpaulins from the packs, they slept
cold.

Pushing on in the first graying light of the Thursday dawn, they
came to the most difficult stretch of mountain climbing they had yet
encountered: a bare, boulder-strewn steep, gullied by rifts and gulches
in which the old snow was still lying. At the summit of the rugged
pass, which they reached, after many breathing halts, a little before
noon, there was a deep drift, sand-covered and treacherous, and through
the crust of this the animals broke and floundered, and finally did
what over-driven burros will always do--got down and tried to roll
their packs off. It was then that Philip flew into a rage and swore
savagely at the jacks; at which Bromley laughed.

“You’re coming along nicely, Phil,” he chuckled. “A few more weeks of
this, and you’ll be able to qualify for a post-graduate course in the
higher profanities. Not but what you are fairly fluent, as it is.”

Philip made no reply; he was silent through the scarcely less difficult
descent into a wide basin on the eastern front of the range. On the
lower level the going was easier, and in the latter half of the
afternoon they came to the farther lip of the high-pitched basin from
which they could look down into the valley of the Arkansas; into the
valley and across it to a distant, shack-built camp city spreading
upward from a series of gulch heads over swelling hills with mighty
mountains for a background--the great carbonate camp whose fame was
by this time penetrating to the remotest hamlet in the land. A yellow
streak winding up one of the swelling hills marked the course of the
stage road, and on it, in a cloud of golden dust, one of the rail-head
stages drawn by six horses was worming its way upward from the river
valley.

“Think we can make it before dark?” Bromley asked.

“We’ve got to make it,” Philip declared doggedly; adding: “I’m not
going to wait another day before I find out what we’ve got in that hole
we’ve been digging. Come on.”

The slogging march was resumed, but distances are marvelously deceptive
in the clear air of the altitudes, and darkness was upon them before
the lights of the big camp came in sight over the last of the hills.
Bromley, thoroughly outworn by the three-days’ forced march coming
upon the heels of two weeks of drilling and blasting and shovelling,
had no curiosity sharp enough to keep him going, after the burros had
been stabled and lodgings had been secured in the least crowded of
the hotels; but Philip bolted his supper hastily and announced his
intention of proceeding at once in search of an assay office.

“You won’t find one open at this time of night,” the play-boy yawned.
“There’s another day coming, or if there isn’t, it won’t matter for any
of us.”

“I tell you, I’m not going to wait!” Philip snapped impatiently; and
he departed, leaving Bromley to smoke and doze in the crowded and
ill-smelling hotel office which also served as the bar-room.

It was perhaps an hour later when Bromley, who, in spite of the
noise and confusion of the place, had been sleeping the sleep of
utter exhaustion in his chair in the corner of the smoke-befogged
bar-room, was awakened by a shot, a crash of glass and a strident
voice bellowing, “_Yippee!_ That’s the kind of a hellion I am! Walk
up, gen’lemen, an’ le’s irrigate; the drinks’re on me. Th’ li’l’ ol’
prospect hole’s gone an’ turned an ace an’ I’m paintin’ the town.
_Yippee!_ Line up, gen’lemen, an’ name yer pizen. Big Ike’s buyin’ fer
th’ crowd!”

Vaguely, through the smoke fog, Bromley saw a burly miner, bearded like
a fictional pirate, beckoning the bar-room crowd up to the bar, weaving
pistol in hand. Possibly, if he had been fully awake, he would have
understood that the easy way to avoid trouble with a manifestly drunken
roisterer was by the road of quietly following the example of the
others. But before he could gather his faculties the big man had marked
him down.

“Hey, there--yuh li’l’ black-haired runt in th’ corner! Tail in yere
afore I make yuh git up an’ dance fer th’ crowd!” he shouted. “I’m a
rip-snortin’ hell-roarer fr’m ol’ Mizzoo, an’ this is my night fer
flappin’ my wings--_yippee!_”

Bromley was awake now and was foolish enough to laugh and wave the
invitation aside airily. Instantly there was a flash and crash, and the
window at his elbow was shattered.

“L-laugh at me, will yuh!” stuttered the half-crazed celebrator. “Git
up an’ come yere! I’m goin’ to make yuh drink a whole durn’ quart o’
red-eye fer that! Come a-runnin’, I say, afore I----”

The door opened and Philip came in. He had heard the shot, but was
wholly unprepared for what he saw; Bromley, his partner, white as a
sheet and staggering to his feet at the menace of the revolver in the
drunken miner’s fist; the shattered window and bar mirror; the group of
card players and loungers crowding against the bar, and the barkeeper
ducking to safety behind it.

In the drawing of a breath a curious transformation came over him. Gone
in an instant were all the inhibitions of a restrained and conventional
childhood and youth, and in their room there was only a mad prompting
to kill. At a bound he was upon the big man, and the very fierceness
and suddenness of the barehanded attack made it successful. With his
victim down on the sawdust-covered floor, and the pistol wrested out of
his grasp, he swung the clubbed weapon to beat the fallen man over the
head with it and would doubtless have had a human life to answer for if
the bystanders had not rushed in to pull him off with cries of “Let up,
stranger--let up! Can’t you see he’s drunk?”

Philip stood aside, half-dazed, with the clubbed revolver still
grasped by its barrel. He was gasping, not so much from the violence
of his exertions as at the appalling glimpse he had been given of the
potentialities within himself; of the purely primitive and savage
underman that had so suddenly risen up to sweep away the last vestiges
of the traditions, to make his tongue like a dry stick in his mouth
with a mad thirst for blood.

It was Bromley who drew him away, and nothing was said until they had
climbed the rough board stair and Bromley was lighting the lamp in the
room they were to share. Then, in an attempt to lessen the strain under
which he knew his companion was laboring, he said: “It’s lucky for me
that you didn’t have your real fighting clothes on, that night when I
tried to hold you up, Philip. There wouldn’t have been anything left of
me if you had really meant business. Did you find an assay shop?”

Philip dropped into a chair and nodded. “A sampling works that runs
night and day. We’ll get the results in the morning.”

“For richer?--or poorer?”

“I wish to God I knew! I showed the assayer some of the quartz, but he
wouldn’t commit himself; he talked off; said you could never tell from
the looks of the stuff; that the bright specks we’ve been banking on
might not be metal at all. God, Harry!--if it were only morning!” he
finished, and his eyes were burning.

“Easy,” said Bromley soothingly. “You mustn’t let it mean so much to
you, old man. You’ve worked yourself pretty well up to the breaking
point. There are plenty of other gulches if ours shouldn’t happen to
pan out. Get your clothes off and turn in. That’s the best thing to do
now.”

Philip sprang up and began to walk the floor of the small bed-room.

“Sleep!” he muttered, “I couldn’t sleep if the salvation of the whole
human race hung upon it.” Then: “We’re simpletons, Harry; damned
tenderfoot simpletons! We never ought to have left that claim--both
of us at once. How do we know that there isn’t a land office nearer
than Leadville where it can be registered? How do we know we won’t find
claim jumpers in possession when we go back?”

“Nonsense! You know you are only borrowing trouble. What’s the use?”

“It’s the suspense.... I can’t stand it, Harry! Go to bed if you feel
like it; I’m going back to the sampling works and see that quartz put
through the mill--see that they don’t work any shenanigan on us. I
believe they’re capable of it. That slant-eyed superintendent asked too
many questions about where the stuff came from to suit me. Go on to
bed. I’ll bring you the news in the morning.”




V


THE level rays of the morning sun were struggling in through a dusty
and begrimed bed-room window when Bromley awoke to find Philip in
the room; a Philip haggard and hollow-eyed for want of sleep, but
nevertheless fiercely, exultantly jubilant.

“Wake up!” he was shouting excitedly. “Wake up and yell your head off!
We’ve struck rich pay in that hole in the gulch!--do you hear what I’m
saying?--pay rock in the ‘Little Jean’!”

Bromley sat up in bed, hugging his knees.

“Let’s see where we left off,” he murmured, with a sleepy yawn. “I was
headed for bed, wasn’t I? And you were chasing back to the assay shop
to hang, draw, quarter and gibbet the outfit if it shouldn’t give us a
fair shake. I hope you didn’t find it necessary to assassinate anybody?”

“Assassinate nothing!”--the news-bringer had stripped off coat and
shirt, and was making a violent assault upon the wash-stand in the
corner of the room. “Didn’t you hear what I said? We’ve struck
it--struck it big!” Then, punctuated by vigorous sluicings of cold
water: “The ‘Little Jean’s’ a thundering bonanza ... six separate
assays ... one hundred and sixty-two dollars to the ton is the lowest
... the highest’s over two hundred. And it’s free-milling ore, at
that! Harry, we’re rich--heeled for life--or we are going to be if we
haven’t lost everything by acting like two of the most footless fools
on God’s green earth.”

“‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and
we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there
is no health in us,’” quoted the play-boy, thrusting his legs out of
bed and groping for his clothes. “For what particular sin do we pray
forgiveness?”

“For leaving that claim of ours out of doors with nobody to watch
it,”--this out of the mufflings of the towel. “It gives me a cold sweat
every time I think of what may have happened since we left; what may be
happening right now, for all we know!”

“What could happen?” Bromley queried. “It is our discovery, isn’t
it? And we have posted it and are here to record it and file on it
according to law.”

“Yes, but good Lord! Haven’t you been in these mountains long enough to
know that possession is nine points of the law where a mining prospect
is concerned? I knew it, but I took a chance because I thought we had
that country over across the range pretty much to ourselves.”

“Well, haven’t we?”

“No; the woods are full of prospectors over there, so they told me at
the sampling works; we just didn’t happen to run across any of them.
Did you ever hear of a man named Drew?”

“You mean Stephen Drew, the man who bought the ‘Snow Bird’ for five
millions?”

“That’s the man. He happened to be down at the sampling works this
morning when our assays were handed out. I guess I made a bleating
idiot of myself when I saw what we had. Anyway, Mr. Drew remembered
meeting me in the railroad offices in Denver and he congratulated me.
One word brought on another. He asked me if we wanted to sell the
claim, and I told him no--that we were going back to work it through
the winter. He said that was the proper thing, if we could stand the
hardships; that if we did this and pulled through, he’d talk business
with us next spring on a partnership or a lease.”

“Good--immitigably good!” chirruped Bromley. “And meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile, we take out our legal papers and get back to that gulch
as quick as the Lord will let us. Mr. Drew shook his head when I told
him how we had left things. He said we’d be lucky if we didn’t find a
bunch of mine jumpers in possession when we got back; that there were
plenty of thugs in the mountains who wouldn’t scruple to take a chance,
destroy our posted notice and stick up one of their own, and then fight
it out with us when we turned up, on a basis of might making right. I
mentioned our rights and the law, and he smiled and said: ‘You are a
long way from the nearest sheriff’s office over there, and you know the
old saying--that possession is nine points of the law. Of course, you
could beat them eventually, but the courts are slow, and you would be
kept out of your property for a long time. Take my advice, and get back
there as soon as you can.’ I told him we’d go back right away and be
there waiting for him next spring.”

“Oh, Lord!” Bromley groaned in mock dismay; “have we got to hit that
terrible trail again without taking even a couple of days to play
around in?”

“Hit it, and keep on hitting it day and night till we get there!” was
the mandatory decision. “If you are ready, let’s go and eat. There is a
lot to be done, and we are wasting precious time.”

It was at the finish of a hurried breakfast eaten in the comfortless
hotel dining-room that Bromley took it upon himself to revise the
programme of headlong haste.

“You may as well listen to reason, Phil,” he argued smoothly. “The land
office won’t be open until nine o’clock or after; and past that, there
is the shopping for the winter camping spell. You are fairly dead on
your feet for sleep; you look it, and you are it. You go back to the
room and sleep up for a few hours. I’ll take my turn now--do all that
needs to be done, and call you when we’re ready to pull our freight.”

Philip shook his head in impatient protest. “I can keep going all right
for a while longer,” he asserted obstinately.

“Of course you can; but there is no need of it. We can’t hope to start
before noon, or maybe later; and it won’t take more than one of us to
go through the motions of making ready. You mog off to your downy couch
and let me take my turn at the grindstone. You’ve jolly well and good
had yours.”

“Well,” Philip yielded reluctantly. Then: “Late in the season as it is,
there will be a frantic rush for our valley as soon as the news of the
‘Little Jean’ discovery leaks out. Mr. Drew warned me of this, and he
cautioned me against talking too much here in Leadville; especially
against giving any hint of the locality. You’ll look out for that?”

Bromley laughed. “I’m deaf and dumb--an oyster--a clam. Where can I
find this Mr. Stephen Drew who is going to help us transmute our hard
rock into shiny twenty-dollar pieces next spring?”

Philip gave him Drew’s Leadville address, and then went to climb the
ladder-like stair to the room with the dirty window, where he flung
himself upon the unmade bed without stopping to undress, and fell
asleep almost in the act. When next he opened his eyes the room was
pitchy dark and Bromley was shaking him awake.

“What’s happened?” he gasped, as Bromley struck a match to light the
lamp; and then: “Good God, Harry!--have you let me waste a whole day
sleeping?”

“Even so,” was the cheerful reply. “I’ll tell you about it while you’re
sticking your face into a basin of cold water. To make it short--the
way you did this morning--the cat’s out of the bag. This whole town
knows that there has been a big gold strike made on the other side of
the range. What it hasn’t found out yet is who made the strike, or
where it is located. Mr. Drew put me on.”

“Good Lord!” Philip groaned. “And we’ve lost hours and hours!”

“They’re not lost; they’ve only gone before. Friend Drew is
responsible. He said, since the news had got out, we would better wait
until after dark to make our start, and then take the road as quietly
as we could; so I let you sleep. So far, as nearly as Mr. Drew could
find out, we haven’t been identified as the lucky discoverers.”

“That will follow, as sure as fate!” Philip predicted gloomily.

“Maybe not. While there’s life there’s hope. I’ve paid our bill here
at the hotel, and we’ll go to a restaurant for supper. Everything is
done that needed to be done; claim recorded, grub-stake bought, jacks
packed and ready to move, and a couple of tough little riding broncos,
the horses a loan from Mr. Drew, who pointed out, very sensibly, that
we’d save time and shoe-leather by riding in, to say nothing of leg
weariness. Drew has one of his hired men looking out for us at the
livery stable where the horses and jacks are put up, and this man will
give us a pointer if there is anything suspicious in the wind. If you
are ready, let’s go.”

As unobtrusively as possible they made their way down the steep stair
to pass out through the office-bar-room. As they entered the smoky,
malodorous public room Philip thought it a little odd that there were
no card players at the tables. A few of the evening habitués were lined
up at the bar, but most of them were gathered in knots and groups
about the rusty cast-iron stove in which a fire had been lighted. With
senses on the alert, Philip followed Bromley’s lead. There was an air
of palpitant excitement in the place, and, on the short passage to the
outer door, snatches of eager talk drifted to Philip’s ears; enough to
make it plain that the new gold strike was responsible for the group
gathering and the excitement.

“I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars that Hank Neighbors--that big cuss
leanin’ up ag’inst the bar--knows who struck it, and whereabouts it’s
located,” was one of the remarks that he overheard; and, glancing back
from the door, he saw the man to whom the reference was made--a tall,
loose-jointed man, with deep-set, gloomy eyes and a curling brown beard
that masked something more than half of his face.

Upon leaving the hotel, Bromley led the way down Harrison Avenue
toward a restaurant not far from the stable where their outfit waited
for them. With the mining excitement now at its most populous height,
and the sidewalks filled with restless throngs of men, there was
curiously little street disorder; this though the saloons, dance-halls
and gaming rooms of a wide-open mining-camp city were running full
blast, their garishly lighted entrances lacking even the customary
slatted swing doors of concealment. For the greater part, the crowds
were good-natured and boisterously hilarious; and where the not too
infrequent drunken celebrator came weaving along, the sidewalk jostlers
gave him room, shouting such encouragements as “Walk a chalk, old boy!”
or “Go it while you’re young--when you’re old you can’t!” One of the
staggerers who bumped against Philip and his partner was repeating
monotonously: “’Rah for Jimmie Garfield--canal boy, b’gosh--nexsht
presh’dent!” an exotic injection of the politics of a campaign year
into an atmosphere as remote as that of another planet from matters
political or governmental.

In the side-street restaurant Philip chose a table in a corner and sat
with his back to the wall so that he could see the length and breadth
of the room. The hour was late, and the tables were no more than half
filled; but where there were groups of two or more, there was eager
talk.

“It’s here, too,” Philip commented in low tones, indicating the eager
and evidently excited groups at the other tables.

“It is everywhere, just as I told you. The town is sizzling with it.
When I was a little tad I used to sit goggle-eyed listening to the
tales of a cousin of ours who was one of the returned California
Forty-niners. I remember he said it was that way out there. A camp
would be booming along fine, with everybody happy and contented, until
word of a new strike blew in. Then the whole outfit would go wild and
make a frantic dash for the new diggings. It’s lucky nobody has spotted
us for the discoverers. We’d be mobbed.”

“I wish I could be sure we haven’t been spotted,” said Philip, a wave
of misgiving suddenly submerging him.

“I think we are safe enough, thus far,” Bromley put in, adding: “But
it was a mighty lucky thing that we came in after dark last night with
those sacks of samples. If it had been daytime----”

The Chinese waiter was bringing their order, and Bromley left the
subjunctive hanging in air. Philip sat back while the smiling Celestial
was arranging the table. As he did so, the street door opened and
closed and he had a prickling shock. The latest incomer was a tall man
with sunken eyes and a curly brown beard masking his face; the man who
had been leaning against the bar in the Harrison Avenue hotel, and who
had been named as Hank Neighbors.

“What is it--a ghost?” queried Bromley, after the Chinaman had removed
himself.

“It is either a raw coincidence--or trouble,” Philip returned. “A
fellow who was in the bar-room of the hotel as we passed through has
just come in. He is sitting at a table out there by the door and
looking the room over ... and trying to give the impression that he
isn’t.”

“Do you think he has followed us?”

“It is either that or a coincidence; and I guess we needn’t look very
hard for coincidences at this stage of the game.”

“Don’t know who he is, do you?”

“No, but I know his name. It’s Neighbors. Just as we were leaving the
hotel, one of the bar-room crowd named him; pointed him out to his
fellow gossips as a man who probably knew who had made the new gold
strike, and where it is located.”

“Well,” Bromley began, “if there is only one of him----”

“If there is one, there will be more,” Philip predicted. Then, at a
sudden prompting of the primitive underman: “I wish to goodness we had
something more deadly than that old navy revolver we’ve been lugging
around all summer.”

Bromley’s smile was cherubic.

“As it happens, we are perfectly well prepared to back our judgment--at
Mr. Drew’s suggestion. Our arsenal now sports a couple of late model
Winchesters, with the ammunition and saddle holsters therefor. I bought
’em and sneaked ’em down to the stable this afternoon.”

Philip looked up with narrowed eyes. “Would you fight for this chance
of ours if we’re pushed to it, Harry?”

Bromley laughed.

“I’ll shoot any man’s sheep that’ll try to bite me. Have you ever
doubted it?”

“I didn’t know.”

“How about you?”

“I have never fired a rifle in my life; not at anything--much less at a
man. But if I had to----”

“I know,” said Bromley with a grin. “You’re a chip off the old Puritan
block. If the occasion should arise, you’d tell your New England
conscience to look the other way, take cold-blooded aim, pull trigger
and let the natural law of expanding gases take its course. But we
mustn’t be too blood-thirsty. If we are followed to-night it needn’t be
a foregone conclusion that the trailers are going to try to take our
mine away from us. It is much more likely they’ll be tagging along to
do a little hurry stake-driving of their own, after we’ve shown them
the place.”

Philip had drained his second cup of coffee. “If you are through?” he
said; and as they left the restaurant he shot a quick glance aside at
the man who either was, or was not, a coincidence. To all appearances,
suspicion had no peg to hang upon. The Neighbors person was eating his
supper quietly, and he did not look up as they passed him on their way
to the street.

At the stable they found Drew’s man; a young fellow who looked like a
horse-wrangler, and who dressed the part, even to a pair of jingling
Mexican spurs with preposterous rowels, and soft leather boots with
high heels.

“Everything lovely and the goose hangs high,” he told them; and as they
were leading the loaded jacks and the saddle animals out: “The big boss
said I was to ride herd on yuh till yuh got out o’ town. He allowed
it’d be safer if yuh didn’t go pee-radin’ down the Avenoo.”

In silence they followed their mounted guide through the lower part of
the town and so came, by a rather long and dodging detour, into the
rutted stage road at some distance beyond the last of the houses. Here
their pace-setter turned back and they went on alone. It was a moonless
night, but they had no trouble in following the well-used road over the
hills and down to the valley of the Arkansas.

At the river crossing, however, the difficulties began. Though hardly
more than a mountain creek at this short distance from its source,
the river still held hazards in places for a night crossing with
loaded pack animals, and it was some little time before they found the
shallows through which they had led the burros the previous evening.
Just as they reached and recognized the crossing place they heard the
sound of galloping hoofs, and Philip jerked his rifle out of its saddle
scabbard and began to fumble the breech mechanism.

“Don’t shoot!” Bromley warned; and when the single horseman closed up
they saw that he was the guide who had piloted them out of Leadville.

“Sashayed out to tell yuh there’s a bunch a-trailin’ yuh,” he announced
laconically. “Five of ’em, with Hank Neighbors headin’ the procession.
Must’ve got onto yuh, some way.”

“Did you see them?” Philip asked.

“Passed ’em as I was goin’ back, and circled round to get ahead of ’em.”

“What sort of a man is this Neighbors?”

“Minin’ man, is what he lets on to be.”

“Straight or crooked?”

“You can’t prove nothin’ by me. But if I was you-all, I’d try to make
out to lose him and his pardners in the shuffle somewheres betwixt here
and wherever it is you’re a-headin’ for. I shore would.”

“Have they horses?” Bromley inquired.

“Yep; and three jacks, packed same as yourn.”

“Then they can’t make any better time than we can,” Philip put in.

“That depends on how much time yuh make and how much yuh lose. But that
don’t make no difference. They can trail yuh, if yuh don’t figger out
some trick to throw ’em off.”

“Are they armed?” Philip asked.

The horse-wrangler chuckled at the tenderfoot naïveté of the question.

“Folks don’t trail round much in this neck o’ woods without totin’
their artillery. Leastways, a _hombre_ like Hank Neighbors don’t. Far
as that goes, you-all seem to be pretty well heeled yourselves.”

“We’ll try to hold up our end of the log,” Philip boasted. Then: “If
they’re chasing us, I guess we’d better be moving along. Much obliged
for your trouble--till you’re better paid. Get hold of that canary’s
halter, Harry, and we’ll pitch out.”

The river crossing was made in safety, and, to their great relief,
they had little difficulty in finding their way to the high basin.
Since the trail threaded a dry gulch for the greater part of the
ascent, there were only a few stretches where they had to dismount and
lead the horses, so not much time was lost. Nevertheless, it was past
midnight when they reached the easier travelling through the basin
toward the pass of the crusted snowdrifts. Riding abreast where the
trail permitted, they herded the jacks before them, pushing on at speed
where they could, and slowing up only in places where haste threatened
disaster.

“What’s your notion, Phil?” Bromley asked, when, in the dark hour
preceding the dawn, they found themselves at the foot of the
precipitous climb to the pass. “Don’t you think we’d better camp down
and wait for daylight before we tackle this hill?”

Philip’s reply was an emphatic negative. “We can make it; we’ve got to
make it,” he declared. “If those people are chasing us, they can’t be
very far behind, and if we stop here they’ll catch up with us. And if
we let them do that, we’d never be able to shake them off.”

“As you like,” Bromley yielded, and the precipitous ascent was begun.

With anything less than tenderfoot inexperience for the driving power,
and the luck of the novice for a guardian angel, the perilous climb
over a trail that was all but invisible in the darkness would never
have been made without disaster. Convinced by the first half-mile
of zigzagging that two men could not hope to lead five animals in a
bunch over an ascending trail which was practically no trail at all,
they compromised with the necessities and covered the distance to
the summit of the pass twice; once to drag the reluctant broncos to
the top, and again to go through the same toilsome process with the
still more reluctant pack animals. It was a gruelling business in the
thin, lung-cutting air of the high altitude, with its freezing chill;
and when it was finished they were fain to cast themselves down upon
the rocky summit, gasping for breath and too nearly done in to care
whether the animals stood or strayed, and with Bromley panting out,
“Never again in this world for little Henry Wigglesworth! There’ll be
a railroad built over this assassinating mountain range some fine day,
and I’ll just wait for it.”

“Tough; but we made it,” was Philip’s comment. “We’re here for sunrise.”

The assertion chimed accurately with the fact. The stars had already
disappeared from the eastern half of the sky, and the sharply outlined
summits of the distant Park Range were visible against the rose-tinted
background of the coming dawn. In the middle distance the reaches of
the great basin came slowly into view, and in the first rays of the
rising sun the ground over which they had stumbled in the small hours
of the night spread itself map-like below them. Far down on the basin
trail a straggling procession of creeping figures revealed itself, the
distance minimizing its progress so greatly that the movement appeared
to be no more than a snail’s pace.

“You see,” Philip scowled. “If we had camped at the foot of this hill
it would have been all over but the swearing.”

Bromley acquiesced with a nod. “You are right. What next?”

“We have our lead now and we must hold it at all costs--get well down
into the timber on the western slope before they can climb up here. Are
you good for more of the same?”

“A bit disfigured, but still in the ring,” said the play-boy, with his
cheerful smile twisting itself, for very weariness, into a teeth-baring
grin. Then, as the sunlight grew stronger, he made a binocular of his
curved hands and looked back over the basin distances. As he did so,
the twisted smile became a chuckling laugh. “Take another look at that
outfit on the trail, Phil,” he said. “It’s my guess that they have a
pair of field-glasses and have got a glimpse of us up here.”

Philip looked, and what he saw made him scramble to his feet and shout
at the patient jacks, lop-eared and dejected after their long night
march. The group on the distant trail was no longer a unit. Three of
the dots had detached themselves from the others and were coming on
ahead--at a pace which, even at the great distance, defined itself as a
fast gallop.




VI


WITH the vanguard of the army of eager gold-hunters fairly in sight,
the two who were pursued cut the summit breathing halt short and
resumed their flight. Avoiding the sand-covered snowdrifts in which
they had come to grief on the journey out, they pushed on down the
western declivities at the best speed the boulder-strewn slopes and
craggy descents would permit, postponing the breakfast stop until they
reached a grassy glade well down in the foresting where the animals
could graze.

After a hasty meal made on what prepared food they could come at
easily in the packs, and without leaving the telltale ashes of a
fire, they pressed on again westward and by early afternoon were in
the mountain-girt valley of the stream which had been their guide out
of the western wilderness two days earlier. Again they made a cold
meal, watered and picketed the animals, and snatched a couple of hours
for rest and sleep. Scanting the rest halt to the bare necessity,
mid-afternoon found them once more advancing down the valley, with
Philip, to whom horseback riding was a new and rather painful
experience, leading his mount.

One by one, for as long as daylight lasted, the urgent miles were
pushed to the rear, and after the sun had gone behind the western
mountains they made elaborately cautious preparations for the night.
A small box canyon, well grassed, opened into the main valley on
their left, and in this they unsaddled the horses and relieved the
jacks of their packs and picketed the animals. Then, taking the needed
provisions from one of the packs, they crossed the river by jumping
from boulder to boulder in its bed, and made their camp fire well out
of sight in a hollow on the opposite bank; this so that there might
be no camp signs on the trail side of the stream. But in the short
pipe-smoking interval which they allowed themselves after supper,
Bromley laughed and said: “I guess there is a good bit of the ostrich
in human nature, after all, Philip. Here we’ve gone to all sorts of
pains to keep from leaving the remains of a camp fire in sight, when
we know perfectly well that we are leaving a plain trail behind us for
anybody who is even half a woodsman to follow. That’s a joke!”

“Of course it is,” Philip agreed; and for a time before they
extinguished the fire and recrossed the river to roll up in their
blankets in the box canyon where the animals were grazing, they
discussed the pressing matter of trail effacement without reaching any
practical solution of the problem.

The next morning they were up and on their way in the earliest dawn
twilight. As yet, there were no signs of the pursuit. The mountain
silences were undisturbed save by the drumming thunder of the swift
little river and the soft sighing of the dawn precursor breeze in the
firs. Convinced that all the haste they were making was clearly so much
effort thrown away unless they could devise some means of throwing
their followers off the track, they resumed the camp-fire discussion,
falling back in the end, not upon experience, which neither of them
had, but upon the trapper-and-Indian tales read in their boyhood. In
these, running water was always the hard-pressed white man’s salvation
in his flight, and, like the fleeing trapper, they had their stream
fairly at hand. But the mountain river, coursing along at torrent
speed, and with its bed thickly strewn with slippery boulders, was
scarcely practicable as a roadway; it was too hazardous even for the
sure-footed broncos, and entirely impossible for the loaded jacks.

Next, they thought of cutting up one of the pack tarpaulins and
muffling the hoofs of the animals with the pieces, but aside from the
time that would be wasted, this expedient seemed too childish to merit
serious consideration. In the end, however, chance, that sturdy friend
of the hard-pressed and the inexperienced, came to their rescue. Some
seven or eight miles beyond their night camp they came upon a place
where, for a half-mile or more, the left-hand bank of the stream was a
slope of slippery, broken shale; the tail of a slide from the mountain
side above. Bromley was the first to see the hopeful possibilities.

“Wait a minute, Phil,” he called to his file leader; “don’t you
remember this slide, and how we cursed it when we had to tramp through
it coming out? I’ve captured an idea. I believe we can delay this mob
that’s chasing us, and maybe get rid of it for good and all. Is the
river fordable here, do you think?”

Philip’s answer was to ride his horse into the stream and half-way
across it. “We can make it,” he called back, “if we can keep the jacks
from being washed away.”

“We’ll take that for granted,” said Bromley. “But we don’t need to go
all the way across. Stay where you are, and I’ll herd the rest of the
caravan in and let it drink.”

This done, and a plain trail thus left leading into the water, Bromley
explained his captured idea. While they couldn’t hope to make a roadway
of the stream bed for any considerable distance, it was quite possible
to wade the animals far enough down-stream to enable them to come out
upon the shale slide. After they had been allowed to drink their fill,
the expedient was tried and it proved unexpectedly successful. On the
shale slide the hoof prints vanished as soon as they were made, each
step of horse or burro setting in motion a tiny pebble slide that
immediately filled the depression. Looking back after they had gone a
little distance they could see no trace of their passing.

“This ought to keep the mob guessing for a little while,” Bromley
offered as they pushed on. “They’ll see our tracks going down into the
creek, and think we crossed over. They’ll probably take a tumble to
themselves after a while--after they fail to find any tracks on the
other side; but it will hold ’em for a bit, anyway. Now if we could
only scare up some way of hiding our tracks after we get beyond this
slide----”

Though the continuing expedient did not immediately suggest itself,
the good-natured god of chance was still with them. Before they came
upon ground where the tracks of the animals would again become visible,
they approached the mouth of one of the many side gulches scarring
the left-hand mountain, and in the gulch there was a brawling mountain
brook with a gravelly bottom.

“This looks as if it were made to order, don’t you think?” said Philip,
drawing rein at the gulch mouth. “If we turn up this gulch we can walk
the beasts in the water.”

“But that isn’t the way we want to go,” Bromley objected.

“I’m not so sure about that. The map shows our valley lying on the
other side of this southern mountain range. The route we took, coming
out, was along two sides of a triangle, following the streams--which is
the long way around. I’m wondering if we couldn’t cut straight across
and save a lot of time. We’ve climbed worse mountains than this one
looks to be. And there’s another thing: we can take the water trail up
this gulch for a starter, and the chances are that we’d lose the hue
and cry that’s following us--lose it permanently. What do you say?”

“I’m good for a try at it, if you are,” was the prompt reply; and so,
without more ado, the route was changed.

For the first half-mile or so through the windings of the gulch they
were able to hide their tracks in the brook bed, but the farther they
went, the rougher the way became, until finally they had to drag the
horses and pack animals up out of the ravine and take to the mountain
slopes, zigzagging their way upward as best they could through the
primeval forest. Luckily, though there were craggy steeps to be climbed
with shortened breath, perilous slides to be avoided, and canyon-like
gulches to be headed at the price of long detours, they encountered
no impassable obstacles, and evening found them far up in the forest
blanketing of the higher slopes, with still some little picking of
grass for the stock and with plenty of dry wood for the camp fire which
they heaped high in the comforting assurance that its blaze would not
now betray them.

It was after they had cooked and eaten their first hearty meal of the
toilsome day, and had stretched themselves luxuriously before the fire
for the evening tobacco-burning, that Bromley said: “How about it,
Philip?--are you getting a bit used to the millionaire idea by this
time?”

Philip shook his head slowly.

“No, Harry; I can’t fully realize it yet. For a little while after I
saw the figures of those assays I thought I could. But now it seems
more like an opium dream. It doesn’t seem decently credible that
after only a short summer’s knocking about in these hills, two raw
green-horns like ourselves could stumble upon something that may change
the entire scheme of things for both of us for the remainder of our
lives. It’s fairly grotesque, when you come to think of it.”

“Well, I guess it isn’t a dream, at any rate. Mr. Drew gave me a good
bit of his time day before yesterday; went with me to the land office,
and afterward helped me in the horse market where I bought the extra
burro. He asked a lot of questions; about the width of the vein, how
far we had traced it, and how fair or unfair we’d been to ourselves
in picking the samples; and after I had answered him as well as I
could, he said, in effect, that we had the world by the neck, or we
would have, if the ‘Little Jean’ pans out anywhere near as good as it
promises to.”

Again Philip shook his head. “I’m not at all sure that I want to
grab the world by the neck, Harry. That doesn’t seem like much of an
ambition to me.”

“All right; say it doesn’t. What then?”

“Oh, I don’t know. If the miracle had happened a year or so ago ... but
it didn’t; so what’s the use?”

“Go on and turn it loose,” Bromley encouraged. “Set the clock back a
year or so and let us see what it strikes.”

“I had a few ideals then; modest ones, I guess you’d call them. I’d had
to break my college course in the third year--family matters. At that
time I wanted nothing so much as to go back and finish; and perhaps
have a try for a Ph.D. degree afterward.”

“And past that?”

“More of what you’d call the modesties, I guess: a teaching job in some
college back home, or something of that sort; a job in which I’d have
some leisure for reading, thinking my own thoughts, living my own life.”

“No wife and kiddies in the picture?” Bromley asked, with his most
disarming smile.

“No; not then.”

The play-boy laughed softly. “No sentimental foolishness for the
austere young student and pedagogue, of course. But the ‘not then’
tells a different story. You’ve met the incomparable ‘her’ in your
later avatar?”

It was some measure of the distance he had come on the road to
freer human expression that Philip did not at once retreat into the
speechless reticences.

“Yes,” he said: “I’ve met a girl.”

“The ‘angel’ you spoke of, the night you fed a hungry hold-up?”

“Don’t get it wrong. She is not so angelic that she can’t be perfectly
human.”

“But didn’t you say you’d met her only twice?”

“I did; and the saying still holds true.”

“Bowled you over like a shot, did she? I’d never have believed it of
you, Philip.”

“You needn’t believe it now. There was no ‘bowling over’ about it. I
first met her on the train coming to Denver--with her family; sat with
her for part of an afternoon. She isn’t like any other girl I’ve ever
known.”

“And that is as far as you’ve gone? You are a cold-blooded fish,
Philip, dear. But we were talking about futures. I take it the teaching
job in a New England college doesn’t appeal to you now; or won’t if our
mine keeps its promise?”

“Honestly, Harry, I can’t see very far ahead. I’m not at all sure
that I want to go back and finish my college course. There is nothing
truer than the saying we have hurled at us all the time out here--that
the West lays hold of a man and refuses to let go; that you may be
as homesick as the devil, but you’ll never go home to stay. But this
is all dream stuff--this talk. We haven’t got the millions yet. Even
if the mine is as rich as it seems to be, we may find jumpers in
possession, and so many of them that we can’t get away with them.”

“That’s so. ‘There’s many a slip,’ as we read in the copy-books.”

For a time the high-mountain silence, a silence curiously bereft of
even the small insect shrillings of the lower altitudes, enveloped
them. The cheerful fire was beginning to fall into embers when Philip
began again.

“A while back, you thought the money fever was getting hold of me,
Harry, but I hope you were wrong. Of course, there are things I want to
do; one in particular that money would help me to do. It was my main
reason for heading west from New Hampshire a little less than a year
ago.”

“Is it something you can talk about?”

“I guess so--to you,” and, breaking masterfully through whatever
barrier of the reticences remained, he told the story of his father’s
disappearance, of the cloud which still shadowed the Trask name, of his
own unshakable belief in his father’s innocence, and, lastly, of his
determination to find the lost man and to clear the family name.

“You see how the money will help; how I couldn’t hope to do much
of anything without money and the use of my own time,” he said in
conclusion. Then, the ingrained habit of withdrawal slipping back into
its well-worn groove: “You won’t talk about this, Harry? You are the
only person this side of New Hampshire who knows anything about it.”

“It is safe enough with me, Phil; you ought to know that, by this time.
And here is my shy at the thing: if it so happens that the ‘Little
Jean’ is only flirting with us--that we get only a loaf of bread where
we’re hoping to hog the whole bakery--you may have my share if your
own isn’t big enough to finance your job. I owe you a good bit more
than the ‘Little Jean’ will ever pan out on my side of the partnership.”

“Oh, hell,” said Philip; and the expression was indicative of
many things not written down in the book of the Philip who, a few
months earlier, had found it difficult and boyishly embarrassing to
meet a strange young woman on the common ground of a chance train
acquaintanceship. Then, “If you’ve smoked your pipe out, we’d better
roll in. There is more of the hard work ahead of us for to-morrow.”

But the next morning they found, upon breaking camp and emerging from
the forest at timber line, that the blessing of good luck was with
them still more abundantly. With a thousand and one chances to miss
it in their haphazard climb, they had come upon an easily practicable
pass over the range; and beyond the pass there was a series of gentle
descents leading them by the middle of the afternoon into a valley
which they quickly recognized as their own.

Pushing forward at the best speed that could be gotten out of the
loaded pack animals, they traversed the windings of the valley with
nerves on edge and muscles tensed, more than half expecting to find a
struggle for re-possession awaiting them in the treasure gulch. At the
last, when the more familiar landmarks began to appear, Philip drew his
rifle from its holster under his leg and rode on ahead to reconnoitre,
leaving Bromley to follow with the jacks. But in a few minutes he came
galloping back, waving his gun in the air and shouting triumphantly.

“All safe, just as we left it!” he announced as he rode up. And then,
with a laugh that was the easing of many strains: “What a lot of
bridges we cross before we come to them! Here we’ve been sweating blood
for fear the claim had been jumped--or at least I have--and I don’t
suppose there has been a living soul within miles of it since we left.
Kick those canaries into action and let’s get along and make camp on
the good old stamping ground.”




VII


THE autumn days were growing perceptibly shorter when the discoverers
of the “Little Jean” lode began to make preparations to be snowed in
for the winter in the western mountain fastnesses. By this time they
had heard enough about the mountain winters to know what they were
facing. With the first heavy snowfall blocking the passes they would
be shut off from the world as completely as shipwrecked mariners on a
desert island. But hardships which are still only anticipatory hold few
terrors for the inexperienced; and with the comforting figures of the
assays to inspire them, they thought more of the future spring and its
promise than of the lonely and toilsome winter which must intervene.

Since there was still sufficient grass in sheltered coves and forest
glades to feed the stock, they postponed the journey which one of them
would have to take to find winter quarters for the animals. The delay
was partly prudential. Though each added day of non-interference was
increasing their hope that their ruse at the shale slide had been
completely successful in throwing their pursuers off the track, they
had no reason to assume that the Neighbors party would turn back
without making an exhaustive search for the new “rich diggings”; and
Philip was cannily distrustful of the Neighbors purpose.

“It may be just as you say: that they are merely hungry gold-chasers,
breaking their necks to be the earliest stake-drivers in a new
district; but then, again, they may not be,” was the way he phrased
it for the less apprehensive Bromley. “If they happen to be the other
sort--the lawless sort--well, with both of us here to stand up for our
rights, they’d be five to our two. We can’t afford to make the odds
five to one. I’d rather wait and take the horses and jacks over the
range in a snow storm than to run the risk of losing our mine.”

“Meaning that we needn’t lose it if we can muster two to their five?”
said Bromley, grinning.

“Meaning that if anybody tries to rob us there’ll be blood on the moon.
Get that well ground into your system, Harry.”

“Ho! You are coming on nicely for a sober, peaceable citizen of
well-behaved New England,” laughed the play-boy. “But see here, didn’t
you tell me once upon a time that you had never fired a gun? If you
really believe there is a chance for a row, you’d better waste a few
rounds of ammunition finding out what a gun does when you aim it and
pull the trigger. It’s likely to surprise you. I’ve shot ducks in the
Maryland marshes often enough to know that pretty marksmanship is no
heaven-born gift.”

“Thanks,” returned Philip grimly. “That is a sensible idea. Evenings,
after we knock off work, we’ll set up a target and you can give me a
few lessons.”

Making the most of the shortening days, they had become pioneers,
felling trees for the building of a cabin, and breaking the two
broncos, in such primitive harness as they could contrive out of
the pack-saddle lashings, to drag the logs to a site near the tunnel
mouth. Like the drilling and blasting, axe work and cabin building were
unfamiliar crafts, to be learned only at a round price paid in the coin
of aching backs, stiffened muscles and blistered palms. Nevertheless,
at the end of a toiling fortnight they had a one-room cabin roofed in,
chimneyed and chinked with clay, a rude stone forge built for the drill
sharpening and tempering, and a charcoal pit dug, filled and fired to
provide the forge fuel. And though the working days were prolonged to
the sunset limit, Philip, methodically thorough in all things, did not
fail to save enough daylight for the shooting lesson, setting up a
target in the gulch and hammering away at it until he became at least
an entered apprentice in the craft and was able to conquer the impulse
to shut both eyes tightly when he pulled the trigger.

They were bunking comfortably in the new cabin when they awoke one
morning to find the ground white with the first light snowfall. It
was a warning that the time had come to dispose of the animals if
they were not to be shut in and starved. In his talk with Bromley,
Drew, the Leadville mine owner, had named a ranch near the mouth of
Chalk Creek where the borrowed saddle horses could be left, and where
winter feeding for the jacks might be bargained for; and after a hasty
breakfast Philip prepared to set out on the three-days’ trip to the
lower altitudes.

“I feel like a yellow dog, letting this herding job fall on you, Phil,”
protested the play-boy, as he helped pack a haversack of provisions for
the journey. “I’d make you draw straws for it if I had the slightest
idea that I could find the way out and back by myself.”

“It’s a stand-off,” countered the potential herd-rider. “I feel the
same way about leaving you to hold the fort alone. If that Leadville
outfit should turn up while I’m away----”

“Don’t you worry about the Neighbors bunch. It’s been three full weeks,
now, with no sign of them. They’ve lost out.”

“I’m not so sure of that. Better keep your eye peeled and not get too
far away from the cabin. If they should drop in on you----”

“In that case I’ll man the battlements and do my small endeavors to
keep them amused until you put in an appearance,” was the lighthearted
rejoinder. “But you needn’t run your legs off on that account. They’ve
given us up long ago.” Then, as Philip mounted and took the halter
of the horse that was to be led: “Are you all set? Where’s that old
pistol?”

“I don’t need the pistol. If I’ve got to walk back, lugging my own grub
and blankets, I don’t want to carry any more weight than I have to.”

“Just the same, you’re going prepared to back your judgment,” Bromley
insisted; and he brought out the holstered revolver and made Philip
buckle it on. “There; that looks a little more shipshape,” he approved.
“Want me to go along a piece and help you start the herd?”

“Nothing of the kind,” Philip refused; and thereupon he set out,
leading the extra horse and driving the jacks ahead of him.

It was his intention to back-track over the trail by which they had
first penetrated to their valley in the late summer, and being gifted
with a fairly good sense of direction, he found his way to the foot of
the first of the two enclosing mountain ranges without much trouble.
But on the ascent to the pass the difficulties multiplied themselves
irritatingly. The trail was blind and the snow was fetlock deep for
the animals. The led horse was stubborn and hung back; and wherever
a widening of the trail permitted, the jacks strayed and scattered.
Philip’s temper grew short, and by the time he had reached the high,
wind-blown, boulder-strewn notch which served as the pass over the spur
range, he was cursing the scattering burros fluently and fingering the
butt of the big revolver in an itching desire to bullet all three of
them.

“Damn your fool hides!” he was yelling, oblivious of everything but the
maddening impossibility of towing the reluctant bronco astern and at
the same time keeping the long-eared stupidities ahead in any kind of
marching order; “Damn your fool----”

He stopped short, swallowing the remainder of the shouting malediction
and flushing shamefacedly under his summer coat of tan. Seated beside
the trail on a flat-topped boulder from which the snow had been brushed
was a thick-chested, bearded giant of a man making his much-belated
midday meal on a sandwich of pan-bread and bacon; a grinning witness of
the outbreak of ill-temper. As Philip drew rein the giant greeted him
jovially.

“Howdy, pardner! Yuh must ’a’ had a heap o’ book-learnin’ to be fitten
to cuss thataway. Don’t blame yuh, though. It’s one hell-sweatin’ job
to herd canaries when they ain’t got no packs on ’em.”

Philip stared hard at the big man, his excellent memory for faces
serving him slowly but surely. When he spoke it was to say: “People are
always telling us this is a little world, and I’ll believe it, after
this. Don’t you remember me?--and the K.P. train last spring?”

The thick-chested giant got upon his feet

“Well, I’ll be dawg-goned! Sure I ricollect! You’re the young feller I
told to hump hisself and go sit with the li’l’ black-eyed gal that had
the sick daddy. Put ’er there!” and he gave Philip’s hand a grip that
made the knuckles crack.

Philip slid from the saddle, smiling a sheepish apology.

“Sorry I had to come on the scene swearing like an abandoned pirate,
but these chicken-brained jacks have just about worn me out. Queer we
should stumble upon each other in this God-forsaken place. Where do you
come from?”

“Hoofed it up from the Aspen diggin’s. Aimin’ to get out o’ the woods
afore I get snowed under and can’t. You ain’t had all the bad luck.
Yiste’day I lost my canary, pack, blankets and all, in the Roarin’
Fork. Li’l’ cuss slipped and rolled into the creek and I didn’t get to
save nothin’ but the old Winchester I was totin’ and a li’l’ bite o’
bread and meat I had in my pockets. Box o’ matches went with the hide
and taller, and I’d ’a’ slep’ cold last night if I hadn’t run onto a
bunch o’ Leadville men back yonder a piece and hunkered down afore
their fire.”

Philip started at the mention of the Leadville men, but he deferred
the question that rose instantly to his lips.

“You are going out by way of the pass over the main range at the head
of Chalk Creek?” he asked.

“Aimin’ to get out thataway; yes.”

“All right; I’m headed that way, too, and, as you see, I have one more
horse than I can ride. I’ll give you a lift, if you say so.”

The big man’s laugh was like the rumbling of distant thunder.

“If I say so? Say, young feller me lad, I ain’t got but one mouth, but
I reckon if I had a dozen of ’em they’d all be sayin’ so at once,” he
affirmed gratefully. “Want to pitch out right now?”

“No; I’ll eat first. Didn’t want to stop until I got to the top of the
pass.”

Philip unslung his provision haversack and spread the contents on the
flat rock. Over the meal, which he invited the wayfarer to share with
him, he got the story of the bearded man’s summer; weary months of
prospecting in the western slope wilderness with nothing to show for
it, not even the specimens from the few putative discoveries he had
made, since these had gone to the bottom of the Roaring Fork with the
drowned burro.

“Hard luck,” Philip commented, when the brief tale of discouragement
had been told. “What will you do now?”

“Same as every busted prospector does: hunt me a winter job in a
smelter ’r stamp-mill and sweat at it till I get enough spondulix ahead
to buy me another grub-stake.”

“Go to work as a day-laborer?”

“You’ve named it. Minin’s the only trade I know; and the mills ain’t
payin’ miner’s wages for shovelin’ ore into the stamps.”

“Why don’t you try for a job in one of the big mines?”

The giant’s laugh rumbled again.

“Not me--I ain’t that kind of a miner--ain’t wearing no brass collar
for a corp’ration! Gone too long without it. But lookee here, you ain’t
told me nothin’ about yerself. I didn’t allow you was aimin’ to turn
into a mount’in man when I rid the cars with yuh last spring.”

“I wasn’t,” said Philip; and thereupon he gave a short account of the
summer’s wanderings up to, but not including, the discovery of the
“Little Jean,” and entirely omitting all mention of Bromley’s part in
the wanderings. That his story did not explain his presence on the
outward trail with two saddle horses, three jacks and no tools or camp
equipment, he was well aware; but the canny traditions were warning him
not to betray the carefully guarded secret of the “Little Jean” to a
chance travelling companion.

“Tough luck, all round,” said the big man half absently; and Philip
saw plainly enough that he was trying to fit the present moment’s
inconsistencies into the story. Then: “Still and all, somebody’s had
good luck over here in this hell’s back kitchen. I heard about it in
the camp o’ them Leadville pardners last night.”

“What did you hear?” Philip asked, and his nerves were prickling.

“They said two young fellers, tenderfoots, both of ’em, hoofed it into
Leadville two-three weeks ago with some stuff that run away up yonder
in the assays--rotten quartz and free gold.”

“Well,” said Philip, still with nerves on edge, “that sort of thing is
happening every day, isn’t it? What more did you hear?”

“They was talkin’ ’mongst theirselves--not to me. The news had leaked
out, like it always does, and they’d trailed the young fellers, a
ridin’ two broncs and herdin’ three loaded jacks, acrosst the range and
over here. Then they’d lost the trail somehow. From what I picked up,
I allowed they was aimin’ to stay till they found it ag’in, if it took
all winter.”

Philip’s tongue was dry in his mouth when he said: “Whereabouts were
these Leadville people camped?”

“About ten mile north, at the mouth of a li’l’ creek that runs into the
Fork.”

There was one more question to be asked, and Philip was afraid to ask
it. Yet he forced himself to give it tongue.

“You say you camped with these fellows last night. What kind of a crowd
was it?”

The big prospector was staring at the three jacks and two horses as if
he were mentally counting them.

“Jist betwixt you and me and the gate-post, it’s a sort o’ tough
outfit. Hank Neighbors is headin’ it, and if half o’ what they tell
about him is so, he’s plum bad medicine.”

“Not prospectors, then?”

“W-e-l-l, you might call ’em so; but I reckon they’re the kind that
lets other folks do most o’ the hard work o’ findin’ and diggin’.”

“You mean they’re ‘jumpers’?”

“Least said’s soonest mended. But if I had a right likely prospect
anywheres in these here hills, I’d shore hate like sin to have ’em run
acrosst it.”

Philip’s resolve was taken upon the instant. From what had been said he
knew precisely where the Neighbors camp was; it was only a few miles
below the gulch of the “Little Jean”; so few that the campers may well
have heard the crashes of the evening rifle practice. And Bromley was
standing guard alone.

“See here,” he began, suddenly reversing all former resolutions of
canny secrecy; “I don’t know you--don’t even know your name. But I
believe you are an honest man, and I’m going to tell you something: I’m
one of the tenderfoots Neighbors is trying to trail.”

The wayfaring prospector greeted the information with a wide-mouthed
smile.

“Yuh didn’t hardly need to tell me that--with them five critturs
standin’ there a-hangin’ their heads, and you without any camp stuff
’r tools, and with two saddle hosses where yuh didn’t need only one.
What’s yer game?”

Being fairly committed now, Philip went the entire length--with nothing
hopeful to build upon save the big miner’s rough chivalry as he had
seen it manifested in the Kansas Pacific day-coach months before.
Frankly filling the blanks he had left in his earlier account of the
summer’s experiences, he wound up with an anxious question:

“What am I to do? I can’t go on and leave my partner to stand off this
robber gang alone. They’ll find our claim before I could get back. It’s
our own creek they’re camping on, right now!” Then: “You say you are
going out by way of Chalk Creek. I have a little money left; it isn’t
much, but it’s all yours if you’ll take these horses and jades out to
Nachtrieb’s ranch in the South Park and leave them there. Then I can go
back from here and take my share of what’s coming to us.”

The big man got up and brushed the crumbs from his clothes.

“I can beat that all holler, if you’ll say the word. I sort o’ like
your looks--liked ’em last spring when I chucked yuh in the seat with
the li’l’ black-eyed gal. Yuh say yo’re aimin’ to hole up for the
winter and work yer claim. S’pose yuh give me a job along with you and
yer pardner and lemme go back with yuh? I can hold steel ’r pound it,
and han’le powder. More’n that, I can shoot middlin’ straight when I
aim to.”

“You mean you’d stand with us if the Neighbors bunch should try to jump
our claim?”

“Why, suree! Yuh don’t reckon I’d go back on my bread and meat, do yuh?”

“But these beasts--what’s to be done with them?”

“I was comin’ to that. There’s a li’l’ ranch six-seven mile in the
park ahead of us; it’s the place where I was aimin’ to get enough grub
to walk out on. Queer old squatter runs it; li’l’ mite cracked in his
upper story on religion, they say. He’ll winter the stock for yuh.”

“Still, that isn’t all,” Philip went on desperately. “We have laid in
provisions for the winter, my partner and I; all we could afford to
buy. The stake is enough for two, but if there are three of us, we’ll
go short before spring. Besides, we haven’t enough money left to pay
your wages.”

“Ne’m mind about the wages; they can wait. If half o’ what they’re
sayin’ about this here strike o’ yourn is so, there’ll be ore enough on
the dump, come spring, to pay all the bills--and then some, I reckon.
All I’ll ask’ll be a chance to stake a claim somewheres round next to
yourn, maybe.”

“You won’t have to ask anybody’s permission to do that,” Philip put in.
“But still there is the question of the short grub-stake.”

The big man grinned cheerfully. “Might trust in the Lord a li’l’ bit,
mightn’t we? Maybe He’ll send us a short winter. Anyhow, I’ll take my
chance o’ starvin’; it won’t be the first time by a long chalk. Whadda
yuh say? Is it a go?”

It was far enough from Philip’s normal promptings to decide anything so
momentous without due and thoughtful consideration. But the exigencies
had suddenly become urgent. In his mind’s eye he could see the
Neighbors gang of desperadoes besieging the log cabin, with its scanty
garrison of two untrained defenders. One additional loyal pair of eyes
and hands might turn the scale. Hasty decisions, headlong initiative,
were the very essence of the time, and of the treasure-seekers’
existence. Impulsively he thrust out a bargain-clinching hand.

“It’s a go, if you want to throw in with us, and I’ll promise you you
won’t lose anything by it,” he said. “What may I call you?”

“Name’s Garth--‘Big Jim,’ for short.”

“Mine is Philip Trask. We are strangers to each other, but that’s an
even stand-off. I’m banking on you for what you did for the little girl
on the train. Let’s hurry and find that park ranch you speak of. It’s
running in my mind that we can’t get back to the claim any too soon.”

It was after they had mounted and were herding the jacks down the
descending trail that Garth said: “What about the li’l’ gal with the
sick daddy? Ever see her again?”

“Just once,” Philip returned, “five or six weeks after they reached
Denver. The family was living in one of the tent colonies, and from
what was said, I judged the father was pretty badly off.”

“Uh-huh,” said Garth. “You hear a heap nowadays about what the dry
air’ll do for them lungers, but the health boosters tell only half o’
the story. That same old thin air kills ’em swift if they come too
late. It shore do.”

By pushing the animals as fast as the hazardous trail would permit,
the ranch in the inter-mountain park was reached in the shank of
the afternoon. Philip made a hurried bargain with the ranch owner,
a white-haired, white-bearded old man who might have figured as a
reincarnation of Elijah the Tishbite; and after a consultation with
Garth, refused the old man’s offer of a night’s lodging. Garth’s vote
was for an immediate return to the “Little Jean.” The skies were clear
and there would be a moon for at least the first half of the night.

“We’ve left a trail in the snow that a blind man could back-track on,”
he pointed out. “I’m hep for the night tramp, if so be you are.”

Stiff from the long day in the saddle, Philip would have welcomed a
blanket bed before the Tishbite’s hearth fire, but the urgencies were
still acutely upon him; also, he was beginning to acquire the pride of
the outdoor man. If Garth, who had already tramped miles before the
afternoon meeting on the high pass, could stand it to keep on going,
surely he could.

“We’ll tackle it,” he said shortly; and presently they were taking the
steep mountain trail in reverse, slipping and sliding in the dry snow,
but doggedly making their way toward the high, wind-swept pass.

Visioning that long night tramp in the moonlight, afterward, Philip
knew it would be an enduring memory after many other experiences had
faded and gone. The slippery trail; the black shadows of the trees
while they were still in the foresting, and the blacker shadows of
great rocks and gulch cliffs after they had climbed above timber line;
the keen night wind sweeping over the bleak pass where they paused for
a short halt in the lee of a sheltering boulder to eat a few mouthfuls
of food before hitting the downward trail; the perilous descent to the
headwater gulches of the Roaring Fork, where more than once he owed his
escape from a sudden plunge into unknown depths to the quick clutch of
the silent giant plodding along tirelessly behind him--no detail of the
deadening, soul-harrowing fight for endurance, lapsing finally into a
sheer effort of the will to thrust one foot before the other, would
ever be forgotten.

The moon had long since disappeared behind the uplifted skyline of
the western ranges by the time they were measuring the last of the
weary miles in the valley of the lucky strike. At the foot of one of
the jutting mountain spurs, Philip broke the slogging monotony to say:
“We’re almost there. The next gulch is ours.”

“Good enough,” was the muttered comment from the rear; and then,
suddenly: “Hold up--hold your hosses a minute!”

Philip turned and saw Garth stooping with his rifle held in the crook
of an arm. He was peering down at the hoof tracks they had been
following.

“What is it?” he asked.

Garth pushed his flap-brimmed hat to the back of his head and looked up.

“Thought yuh said a while back that this here was your trail--the one
yuh made comin’ out with the cavoyard this mornin’.”

“Well, isn’t it?”

“Not by a jugful--not unless yuh was walking the hull caboodle of ’em
back’ards.”

“What’s that?”

“Sure as shootin’. The critters that made this trail was goin’ the same
way we are. Get down and take a squint for yerself.”

Philip was about to comply when he saw a spurt of red flame leap out in
the up-valley distance, the flash followed quickly by the reverberating
echoes of a rifle shot. At the flash and crash Garth leaped afoot with
a growled-out imprecation and worked the lever of his repeating rifle
to throw a cartridge into the chamber.

“That means business, son! They’ve called the turn on us and got yer
pardner in the nine-hole! Limber up that old hoss-pistol o’ yourn and
p’int the way to get into your gulch without bustin’ in at the front
door. That’s our chance--if we’ve got any. Jump to it!”




VIII


FAIRLY benumbed by the shock of the discovery that a battle for the
possession of the “Little Jean” was actually in progress, Philip
pointed to the right up a steep ravine.

“We can c-cross at the head of this draw,” he stammered, and it made
him furious to find that he could not better control his voice.

“Let’s be moggin’ along, then,” said the man of action, immediately
setting a pace up the wooded ravine that left Philip a stumbling
straggler at his heels. “They’ve got that pardner o’ yourn holed up
somewheres--in yer cabin, most likely. Reckon he’s got sand enough to
hang on?”

“Harry?--he--he’ll hang on till they kill him!” Philip panted.

“What-all’s he got for fightin’ tools?”

“Two Winchesters.”

“Good a-plenty. How much furder do we keep to this here draw?”

“Another hundred yards or so; then bear sharp to the left.”

Following directions, the big man presently turned short into the
ravine-side forest and began to climb, pulling himself from tree to
tree up the steep acclivity with an agility that seemed to take no
account of his great size and weight. Breathlessly Philip struggled
after him, marvelling at the reserves of energy Garth was able to
draw upon after a long day and night of steady tramping and mountain
climbing. For himself, he was nearly at the collapsing point when they
reached the easier going on the summit of the spur. As they pressed
on, the spattering crackle of rifle fire came intermittently from the
gulch, and at each fresh outblaze he started nervously and quickened
his pace.

“For God’s sake, hurry!” he gasped. “They’ll murder Harry before we get
there--if they haven’t already done it!”

But Garth read the story of the ragged firing with shrewder
intelligence.

“That there powder-burnin’s a good sign,” he commented calmly. “Hit
shows they ain’t got him yet, and ain’t rushin’ him. Keep me steered
right. You know the lay o’ the land, and I don’t.”

“To your left again, now,” Philip directed. “There’s a little side
gully along here somewhere ... if we can find it in the dark----”

As capably as if the darkness were interposing no obstacle, Garth found
the head of the dry arroyo and the descent into the gulch of the mine
was begun.

“Right careful, now,” he cautioned; “no slippin’ ’r slidin’ to make a
fuss! Got to work Injun medicine on that crowd.”

Silently, the snow serving to deaden their footfalls, they worked their
way to the gulch bottom and along its windings until Philip whispered:
“Around the next turn ahead ... if there’s light enough, you’ll see our
dump and the cabin.”

“Kee-rect,” Garth mumbled. “Stick to the shadders and keep that old
hoss-pistol handy. Yuh ain’t no ways back’ard about aimin’ it straight,
are yuh?”

“No,” said Philip; but he was promising for the intention rather than
for the ability. He was trembling like a leaf in the wind. It was one
thing to go into battle on the crest of a wave of berserker rage, and
quite another to face the hazards deliberately and in cold blood.

With caution redoubled they turned the last of the jutting promontories
obstructing a view of the lower reaches of the gulch. The young moon
had long since dropped behind the western ranges, but the reflection of
the starlight upon the white mantling of snow made the dump of broken
rock and ore marking the tunnel site, and beyond it the larger bulking
of the cabin, dimly discernible. Garth thrust a hand backward to signal
a halt, and as he did so, a jet of flame shot from a thick graving of
young firs on the right-hand slope of the gulch opposite the cabin,
and, preceding the jarring report by a fraction of a second, they heard
the smack of the bullet as it struck its target.

“Reckon I called the turn,” Garth whispered. “Yer pardner’s holdin’ the
cabin ag’in ’em. Ain’t no back door to that shack, is there?”

“No.”

“Well, there ain’t a ghost of a show for us to make a run for the front
door; they’ve got that plum’ sewed up. We got to work it some other
way. We’d ort to have one o’ them Winchesters o’ youm and a belt o’
ca’tridges. That old hoss-pistol won’t spit far enough to do much good.”

“But if we had the rifle?” Philip queried.

“Then we might work a li’l’ trick that’d be better than breakin’ into
the cabin: might make them cusses think the whole U.S. army was after
’em.”

Philip’s heart rose into his throat and threatened to choke him. On the
hurried race across the spur his teeth had been chattering, and it was
only by the supremest effort that he could keep them from rattling like
castanets now. If the extra rifle was to be secured, it was his part
to stalk the cabin and get it: Garth couldn’t do it; Bromley wouldn’t
surrender the gun to a stranger--if he were still alive it was more
than likely that he would mistake Garth for one of the outlaws and kill
him if he could find a convenient loophole through which to shoot.

Philip felt a cold sweat starting out all over his body. If he could
only summon the flaming rage fit that had possessed him on the night
when he had flung himself upon the drink-crazed prospector in the
bar-room of the Leadville hotel ... he prayed for its return, but it
wouldn’t come. By a curious telepathic prickling he knew that the
big man crouching beside him sensed his condition, and his shame was
complete.

“You skeered?” queried Garth in a hoarse whisper.

“As scared as hell!” was the gritting reply. “Just the same, I’m going
after that extra gun. What shall I do after I get it?”

“First off, you tell yer pardner to hold his hand till he hears the big
racket beginnin’, and then to blaze away like sin at anything in sight.
Next, you keep right on down the gulch and make a round and get on the
hill behind that bunch o’ saplin’s. When you’re all set and ready,
blaze away, and I’ll whale at ’em from up here, and yer pardner’ll
chip in from the cabin. If that don’t stampede them cusses, nothin’
will.”

Philip tightened his belt. “I’ll probably get killed trying, but
here’s f-for it,” he stammered; and in a chilling frenzy of the
teeth-chattering he began to worm his way down the gulch toward the
dump and the cabin.

How he contrived to drag himself over the short three hundred yards,
with every nerve and muscle straining to turn the advance into a
shameful retreat, he never knew. Every time another gunshot crashed
upon the night silence he fancied he was the target and flattened
himself with the blood slowly congealing in his veins. None the less he
kept on, hugging the shadows and taking advantage of every inequality
of the ground that would afford even the scantiest cover.

At last, after what seemed like an endless eternity of the creeping,
dodging progress, he found himself behind the cabin and sheltered by
it from the desultory gunfire which still kept up from the opposite
slope of the gulch. With his pocket knife he dug the clay chinking
from between two of the logs and listened. There was no sound from
within, and again his blood ran cold. Had one of the random bullets
found its mark and killed Bromley? He remembered, with a tingling shock
of terror, that all of the later firing had been on the part of the
outlaws; there had been no replies from the cabin.

Hastily enlarging the hole in the chinking, he put an eye to the
orifice. The interior was not wholly dark, as he had expected to find
it. There was a handful of embers on the hearth, and the glow made a
murky twilight in the cabin. Presently he made out the slender figure
of the play-boy stretched flat upon the earth floor, face downward, and
the blood-chilling shock came again. Then he looked more closely and
saw that the prone figure was not that of a dead man. Bromley was alive
and alert; he was lying behind a low breastwork built of the provision
sacks, and he had one of the rifles at his shoulder with the muzzle
thrust through a crack between the logs. Philip gulped and shut his
eyes. The sudden revulsion from horrified despair to relief made him
blind and dizzy.

Another shot from without steadied him and he called softly through the
opening he had made. Bromley heard, and recognized his voice.

“You, Philip? How the mischief ... where are you?”

“At the back--where the chinking is out. Don’t you see?”

“Coming,” said the one-man garrison, and as he crawled slowly across
the floor Philip could see that one leg was useless; it was bound with
a clumsy handkerchief tourniquet above the knee and was dragging.

“Damn them!” he whispered fiercely. “How badly are you hurt, Harry?”

“Can’t say; haven’t had time to look at it. But the honors are easy, so
far: I got one of them to pay for the leg, and got him good--I saw ’em
carrying him off. Where the devil did you drop from?--out of the blue?”

“Never mind that part of it now. I want one of the rifles and a belt of
ammunition. Hook ’em over here while I dig this hole big enough to take
them through!”

The transfer was quickly made, and with the gun in his hands, Philip
delayed only long enough to get a briefed story of the attack. Bromley
had been routed out of his bunk about an hour earlier by somebody
hammering on the door. When he opened in answer to the knocking there
was a short and brittle parley. Neighbors had made a blunt demand for
a surrender of the mining claim, asserting that it was his discovery,
made early in the summer.

“Naturally, I told him to go chase himself,” said the play-boy. “Then
the five of ’em started to rush little Harry, and one of them got me
in the leg with a pistol shot before I could slam the door and drop
the bar. I punched a hole in the chinking, and a few rounds from the
Winchester drove ’em back into the woods for cover. They’ve been
there--or four of ’em have--ever since, taking pot shots at the cabin.
Now tell me what happened to make you turn back.”

“Just a piece of good luck--the story will keep till we’re out of this
mess. You’re not fighting alone any more; there are two of us on the
outside. Keep down and don’t let them get you through the door. Those
slabs won’t stop a rifle bullet.”

“Haven’t I found that out?” said Bromley, with a grim chuckle. “But
tell me--what’s the plan of campaign?”

“This: I’m going to try to circle around and get behind that bunch
of trees where they’ve taken cover. I’ve picked up a helper--an old
prospector and mountain man that I met last spring. He has his own
rifle, and when the circus begins, you turn loose through your loophole
and pump lead just as fast as you can. In that way we’ll get ’em from
three directions at once. Will that hurt leg let you do your part?”

The grim little chuckle came again. “I don’t shoot with my legs. Wave
your little baton and I’ll come in on the fortissimo passages.”

“That’s all, then. Take care of yourself, and don’t unbar the door
until you are sure we are on the other side of it. I’m gone.”

While he had the shelter afforded by the cabin there was some little
sense of security. But as soon as he got beyond this bulwark the
shaking fit seized him again. For the first few yards there was little
or no cover save a few stumps and a pile of firewood, and behind these
he crept, hardly daring to breathe. He had buckled the filled cartridge
belt around him, but the rifle was an impediment that could not be
disposed of so easily. So long as he must crawl, he had to drag the
weapon along as best he could; and remembering that he had heard that
even a plug of snow will cause a gun barrel to burst when it is fired,
he halted behind the woodpile and stopped the muzzle of the rifle with
a rag torn from his handkerchief.

From the woodpile to the nearest forest cover on that side was only a
matter of a few rods, but the interval was bare, and he had to have
another fight with himself before he could drum up the courage to
cross it. Once among the trees, however, he felt safer; and after he
had emerged from the mouth of the gulch and could take shelter in the
groving of aspens that lined the valley stream, he told himself that
the worst was over.

In the fringe of quaking aspens he stumbled upon the horses and jacks
of the invaders, the burros still standing with their packs on. It was
not until he was fairly among the tethered animals that he remembered
the man that Bromley had shot, and reflected that if the outlaw was
only wounded, he would be somewhere near the horses. The thought had
barely flashed upon him before he saw the wounded man. He was sitting
with his back to a tree and mumbling curses. Philip slipped aside
cautiously and pushed on, again with cold chills racing up and down his
spine. The wounded man was evidently only half conscious.... If he had
been fully conscious....

Philip broke into a nervous run, following the stream for possibly an
eighth of a mile before he ventured to turn aside to climb the slope
which should lead to the outlying position above the thicket in the
gulch where the outlaws were in hiding.

Toiling upward breathlessly, it seemed to take him a frightfully long
time to gain the proper elevation. Unlike the spur on the western
side of the gulch, this one was thinly wooded and was besprent with
a scattering of boulders; he was in constant fear of dislodging one
of these and thus giving a premature alarm. With the occasional crack
of a rifle in the depths below to guide him, he finally reached a
height from which he could look down upon the clump of young firs; and
squeezing himself between two of the surface boulders he pumped the
loading lever of the Winchester and prepared to give the firing signal
agreed upon.

It was while he was steadying the rifle over the rock in front of him
that he felt something giving way and realized that the slight push
of his wedged-in body was tipping the bulwark boulder over to set it
in motion down the slope. In a frenzy of excitement at this discovery
his only thought was that with the boulder gone he would lose his
sheltering breastwork and be naked to rifle fire from below. Dropping
the gun, he clung to the tilting rock with both hands and tried to
hold it--to drag it back upon its balancing pinnacle. When his puny
effort failed, and the great rock turned slowly over to go bounding
down the declivity straight for the sapling grove and carrying a small
avalanche of lesser stones with it, he lost his head completely,
snatching up the rifle and firing it wildly again and again, and with
no attempt at taking aim, until he had pumped the last cartridge from
its magazine. It was this final shot that did for him. In his mad haste
he failed to hold the gunstock firmly against his shoulder, and at the
trigger-pulling the kick of the weapon slewed him around with a jerk
that snapped his head against the rock behind him. For a brief instant
the black bowl of the heavens was illuminated by a burst of fiery
stars, and after that he knew nothing more until he opened his aching
eyes upon a graying dawn to find Garth kneeling beside him, unbuttoning
his shirt to search for the presumptive effacing wound.

At the touch of the big man’s cold hands he sat up, with the buzzing of
many bees in his brain.

“It isn’t there,” he said; “it’s the back of my head. The gun kicked me
against the rock. How long have I been gone?”

“A hour ’r so. I allowed yuh was scoutin’ round to see what’d come o’
the jumpers; was why I didn’t come a-huntin’ for yuh. Besides, that
there game li’l’ pardner o’ yourn was needin’ to have his laig fixed
up.”

“What _has_ become of the jumpers?” Philip asked, holding his head in
his hands in a vain endeavor to quiet the bees.

Garth sat back on his heels and his wide-mouthed smile made him look
like a grinning ogre.

“Skedaddled; gone where the woodbine twineth an’ the whangdoodle
mourneth for her fust-borned, I reckon. Cattle o’ that sort ain’t
makin’ no stand-up fight, less’n they got the odds _all_ their way. And
what with this here mount’in tumblin’ down on ’em, and guns a-poppin’
three ways from the ace, they wasn’t stayin’ to wait for daylight--not
any.” Then: “That was a mighty fly li’l’ trick o’ yourn--shovin’ a rock
slide down at ’em.”

Philip was honest enough not to take credit for a sheer accident.

“I didn’t,” he denied. “I had jammed myself in between two rocks to get
cover, and I was scared stiff when I found the front one rolling away
from me; I was even silly enough to grab it and try to hold it back.”

“Ne’m mind; hit done the business, all the same.” A pause, and then:
“I took a li’l’ squint at yer strike afore I clim up here. You two
boys’ve sure had a chunk o’ tenderfoot luck! You’ve got the world by
the horns if that streak o’ pay rock don’t play out on yuh too soon.
Hit’s richer’n Billy-be-damn, right from grass-roots. Time she’s had a
winter’s work put in on ’er, there’ll be money enough on the dump to
buy yuh a whole raft o’ farms in God’s country. Reckon that bumped
head’ll let yuh drill down to the cabin? Or shall I h’ist yuh onto my
back and tote yuh?”

“I can walk,” said Philip, struggling to his feet. And after the
descent was begun, with Garth’s arm to steady him: “Harry’s leg--how
badly is he hurt?”

“Clean hole, and no bones broke. It’ll lay him out for a spell, but
that’s all.” Then, with the approving chuckle that Philip was learning
to anticipate: “Lordy-goodness! you couldn’t kill that nervy li’l’
pardner o’ yourn with a axe! And a while back I was foolish enough in
my head to ask yuh if he had sand enough to hold them pirates till we
got to him! Why, say; he’s all sand--that li’l’ rat is! Just laughed
like I was ticklin’ him when I was diggin’ in that hole in his laig to
clean it out--he did, for a fact! Yuh needn’t never worry yore head a
minute about _that_ boy.”




IX


THE beginning of the week after the clash with the claim jumpers found
the routine which the owners of the “Little Jean” hoped to maintain
through the winter catching its stride. True, Bromley was out of the
activities for the time being; but even as a cripple he contributed his
part by refusing to let Philip or Garth make a trip afoot to Leadville
on the slender chance of being able to persuade a doctor to cross the
ranges in the perilous edge of the closed season. As to this, however,
a second snowfall, coming almost upon the heels of the first, shut them
off conclusively from the outer world, and their isolation was complete.

“It’s perfectly all right,” Bromley maintained cheerfully. “I’m
doing fine--couldn’t be doing any better if I had all the doctors in
Leadville. The only thing that nags me is the fact that I’m tied down
and can’t pull my weight in the boat.”

“You have good and well earned all the time you have to lose,” was
Philip’s retort to this plaint; and with Garth as an able team-mate
he completed the preparations for the winter, cutting down trees for
firewood, setting up a third bunk in the cabin, and building a small
lean-to for the storing of the provisions and explosives.

When it came to a resumption of the mining operations, Philip found
that they had acquired much more than a mere day-laborer in the
experienced mining man. Quite apart from his great strength and
apparently unlimited capacity for hard work, Garth’s practical
knowledge of development processes proved invaluable, and it was at his
suggestion that the tunnel was straightened and enlarged, its future
drainage and ventilation provided for, and a rough-and-ready process of
hand-picked ore-sorting made a part of each day’s task.

“You got to look ahead a mile ’r so in this here minin’ game,” was the
experienced one’s business-like argument. “You let on like you boys
ain’t got the spondulix to buy a stamp-mill and tote it in over the
mount’ins, so you either got to make a stock comp’ny o’ this bonanza
o’ yourn ’r else lease it. Either way the cat jumps, it’s a-goin’ to
pay big if yuh’ve got a sure-enough mine, with rich ore on the dump, to
show up next spring.”

For two tenderfoots to whom, as yet, all things mining-wise were
unknown quantities, this practical advice was as water to the thirsty,
so the development work was planned accordingly. By the time Bromley’s
wound had healed and he was able to take his shift as third man in
the heading, the work of drilling and blasting had been expertly
systematized, and the stock of selected ore was growing day by day.

Speculations as to what had become of the would-be jumpers died out
after the first heavy snowfall, which blocked, not only the mountain
passes, but the high-lying valley as well. Garth had argued from the
first that, with at least one wounded man in the party, Neighbors
would not try to hold his footing in the snowbound western wilderness
through the winter.

“Now that he knows whereabouts them high-grade assays o’ yourn come
from, he’ll know how to beat the rush that’s shore goin’ to come
chargin’ in here the minute the passes are open in the spring,” was
Garth’s answer to the speculations; and since the snow blockade, daily
added to, shut all intrusion out, no less effectually than it shut the
occupants of the lonely log cabin in, the stirring incidents of the
night of battle became only a memory, and the day’s work filled the cup
of the days to overflowing for the three who had elected to brave the
winter in the solitudes.

The severity of the winter of 1880-81 in the mountains of Colorado
had--and still has--for its reminiscent chroniclers all those who
endured the rigors of that Arctic season. The trio in the high-pitched
valley of the Saguache were not the only mineral-mad gold-hunters who,
deliberately or in tenderfoot hardihood, disregarded the warnings
of the old-timers and stayed afield, many of them without adequate
supplies, and lacking the skill and experience necessary to successful
pioneering in a snowbound wilderness. As a consequence, the hard winter
took its toll on many a mountain side and in many an isolated gulch.
Snow slides swept precariously situated log cabins from bare slopes, or
buried them fathoms deep in débris in the gulches. In the ill-provided
camps starvation stalked abroad; and though there was game to be had,
it could not be pursued without snow-shoes; and few, indeed, were the
neophytes who had had the foresight to include snow-shoes in their
winter camp kits.

As for the three burrowing in the gulch of the “Little Jean,” the
hardships played no favorites, though Garth’s fund of experience stood
them in good stead, tiding them over many of the exigencies. Before
they became entirely shut in, the big man stalked and shot a deer:
the meat was smoke-cured and added to the store of provisions, and
the skin, Indian-tanned, served for an extra bunk cover in the cold
nights. But with the coming of the heavier snows deer-stalking became
impossible, so that source of food supply was cut off for the future.

Fortunately, by the middle of December, by which time zero-and-below
temperatures were clamping the western slope wilderness in an icy
vise, they had driven the mine tunnel to a depth to which the outdoor
frigidities only partly penetrated; hence they were still able to carry
on the mining operations. But the deepening drifts in the gulch were
now threatening to bury the small cabin, chimney and all, and no little
of their daylight time was spent in keeping the snow shovelled from
the roof, and the paths open to the tunnel, to the woodpile and to the
creek from which they were still obtaining their drinking water.

Life under such conditions--complete and unbreakable isolation,
day-long toil, much of which must be squandered in a bare struggle
for existence, and the constant and wearing demand upon fortitude and
endurance--exacts penalties in whatever coin the debtor may be able
to pay. For Philip Trask, his uneventful youth and early manhood,
with its years running in the well-worn grooves of tradition and the
conventional, faded and became as the memory of a dream--a memory
which was dimming day by day and withdrawing into a more and more
remote distance.

It was in the long winter evenings before the hearth fire in the
half-buried cabin that he began to understand that Bromley was humanly
and socially the better man; that there was in him a fine strain
of gentle breeding which not only enabled him to rise superior to
environment and association, but also gave him an outlook upon life
unattainable by the under-gifted. From the beginning the play-boy
had struck up a friendship, or rather an affectionate comradeship,
with Garth that he, Philip, could not bring himself to share, try
as he might. Little things, even the mountain man’s crudities of
speech, jarred upon him. It was quite in vain that he called himself
hard names, asking himself why he, of all men, should yield to the
nudgings of an intellectual or social snobbishness. But the fact
remained. Bromley could bridge the social gap between himself and Garth
apparently without effort; could and did. In the pipe-smoking hours
before the cabin fire it was the play-boy and the bearded frontiersman
who were companions, while Philip found himself sitting apart and
brooding.

“How do you do it, Harry?” he asked, one evening when Garth, who
thought he had seen deer tracks in the snow, had gone out to the water
hole in the creek to try for a moonlight shot at more meat.

“Do what--chum in with Big Jim? Why shouldn’t I? He’s a man, isn’t he?”

“Yes; but you and he have absolutely nothing in common. Garth washes
his face occasionally and calls it a bath; keeps his fingernails in
mourning; shovels his food with a knife; rolls into his bunk with his
boots on if he happens to forget to take them off.”

Bromley smiled and relighted his pipe.

“You have some queer notions in that narrow old Puritan head of yours,
Phil. Don’t you know that humanity is all common?”

“Is it?--from your point of view?”

“It’s the surest thing you know. ‘For a’ that an’ a’ that, a man’s a
man for a’ that.’ Big Jim is a diamond; an uncut diamond, I grant you,
but the pure quill is there, just the same.”

“Think so? By his own tell he is a spendthrift drunkard and gambler
when he has the means to buy or bet.”

“Well, what of that? Does the foolish evil cancel all the wise good?
When it comes to that, how many of us have a clean slate? I’m sure I
haven’t, for one. How about you?”

Philip was silent for a time, and when he spoke again it was to say,
rather complacently: “I think you have seen the worst of me, Harry.”

Bromley smiled again and shook his head. “I’ve seen the best of you,
Phil. I’m only fearing the worst.”

“Thanks”--curtly; “you have said something like that before. Make it
plainer.”

“I don’t know that I can; or that you’d thank me if I could. It is
merely the potentialities, I guess.”

“My potentialities for evil?”

“Both ways. You are, or you have been, virgin ground. This gold hunt is
the first thing that has ever put the plow into you. It remains to be
seen what kind of soil it is going to turn up. Don’t you feel that,
yourself?”

“I don’t know why it should turn up anything different.”

“I suppose you don’t: no man has ever seen the back of his own neck--or
the close limitations of his own rut. But the furrow is already
started. You are not the man you were when we took to the tall hills
last summer.”

“Better, or worse?”

“Let us say different. The man you are now would never go back to
school-teaching in New Hampshire.”

Philip nodded morosely. “I admitted that, a good while ago, if you’ll
remember. But we were talking about Garth. What are we going to do with
him after the winter is over? Pay him his wages and tell him to go?”

“I have been thinking about that. It occurs to me that we already owe
him more than wages. If you hadn’t met him on the way out with the
ponies and brought him back with you----”

“I know; you couldn’t have held out alone against the Neighbors gang
very long; and if I had come back by myself, there might have been a
different story to tell. When I made the bargain with Garth, he said
all he’d ask would be a chance to locate a claim near ours.”

“Anybody who gets here first can have that.”

“That is what I told him. Never mind; we’ll see about his case when
spring comes. I’ll agree if you think we ought to do something better
than day-wages for him.”

Further talk about Garth and his deserts was halted by the incoming of
the man himself, empty-handed.

“No good,” was his grumbling comment on the night deer stalking.
“Reckon we don’t get us no more deer meat this winter. I like to got
bogged down myself, gettin’ out to the water hole. There shore is one
big heap o’ snow in this neck o’ woods, if you’ll listen at me. _And_
more a-comin’.”

“Another storm?” said Philip.

“Shore as you’re a foot high. And that makes me say what I does. I
don’t like the looks o’ the way she’s pilin’ up on the spur back o’
this wickiup of ourn. The timber up there ain’t thick enough to hold
’er if she gets much heavier. There’s two ways it can slide; down
to-wards the creek, ’r straight down thisaway. Here’s hopin’.”

This was disturbing news. They had already seen one slide come down
on the opposite, thinly wooded side of the gulch, and it had afforded
an object-lesson as convincing as it was startling. Garth had had
hair-raising stories to tell of prospectors’ cabins crushed and buried
under thousands of tons of snow and débris, and their cabin site had
been chosen wholly without reference to safety from this peril.

“Can’t we do anything more than hope?” Philip asked, making room for
the giant before the fire.

“Could, maybe, if we had snow-shoes.”

“How?” It was Bromley who wanted to know.

“Shuffle up yonder and start the slide sideways with a blast. But we
ain’t got the shoes; and there ain’t nobody goin’ to h’ist hisself
up on that li’l’ hill without ’em. Yuh can bet your bottom dollar on
that.”

Garth’s prediction of another storm had its fulfilment within the next
few hours; and for two days and nights the feathery burden sifted down
almost continuously, adding unmeasured depths to the already heavy
blanketing of a whitened wilderness. Trees that had withstood the
storms of many years came crashing down under the added load, and for
the first time in the winter the three cabin dwellers were forced to
resort to melted snow for their drinking and cooking water; it was
impossible to keep the trail open to the creek; indeed, for the two
days of storm they found it useless to try to work in the mine.

During the period of enforced idleness, Garth busied himself hewing and
whittling out a pair of skis, for which the light spruce they had cut
for firewood furnished the material. Asked what he meant to do with
his footgear, he was non-committal, merely saying that he wanted to be
doing something, and that the skis might be handy to have around if the
spring should be late in coming.

“We’re chawin’ a mighty big hole in the grub-stake,” he added. “Maybe
we’ll have to take to the woods, yit, for more meat.”

But a starker use for the skis presented itself two nights later, when
they were all awakened by a muffled crash that made the solidly built
cabin rock as if shaken by an earthquake shock. Garth was the first to
leap afoot and give the alarm.

“Grab for yer clothes and blankets and run for it!” he shouted. “It’s
the slide a-comin’ down!”

Struggling into their clothes in frantic haste, the two who were the
most unready to fly for their lives joined Garth in the small cleared
area they had been keeping open in front of the cabin. It was a bright,
moonlit night, clear, calm and deadly cold. From the shovelled areaway
they could see that the low cliff behind the cabin had disappeared, its
place being taken by a slanting snowbank reaching up to the steep slope
of the mountain above. On the height they could plainly see the gash
left by the sliding mass that was now filling the space between the
cliff and the cabin and heaping itself well up toward the ridge-pole on
the roof.

“There she is,” said Garth, pointing. “If that other chunk lets go,
it’ll be hell and repeat for the cabin! We got to get a hump on us,
mighty sudden!”

“But what can we do?” Philip demanded.

“Ain’t but one thing. That snow mount’in a-hangin’ up there over us’ll
have to be eased down slaunchwise, ’r we’ll have it on top of us, shore
as shootin’. Come inside and dig out the powder and fuse whilst I’m
riggin’ for it!”

A handful of brush thrown into the fireplace blazed up, illuminating
the interior of the cabin fitfully. In the firelight they could
see that the rafters on the side facing the cliff were buckling
dangerously. Opening the door communicating with the lean-to where they
stored the provisions and explosives, they found the roof crushed in
and the contents of the small room half buried in snow. Garth had flung
the deerskin over his shoulders and was belting it about his waist.
“One of you get them skis down,” he commanded.

It was Philip who took the skis from their pegs on the wall, but it was
the play-boy who cut in quickly to say: “See here, Jim; it isn’t your
job to go up there and shoot that drift! Let me have those skis.”

“Like hell I will!” was the brusque refusal. “Didn’t you tell me,
t’other day, that you’d never had ’em on? Gimme that powder and fuse.”

“But there’s nothing like this in your contract,” Bromley insisted.

“Contract be damned! You goin’ to stand there chewin’ the rag till that
drift comes down and chokes you off? Gimme that stuff!”

“The dynamite will be frozen--it’s frozen now,” said Philip.

“It’ll be thawed out good-and-plenty, time I get up there,” Garth
asserted, cramming the coil of fuse into a pocket and opening his shirt
to thrust the dynamite cartridges in his armpit next the bare skin.
“Open the door and lemme out!”

Bitter cold as it was, they sallied out with him and watched him as he
“crabbed” over the drifts sidewise and began the ascent on the nose
of the spur. There was nothing they could do. Until the menace of the
overhanging avalanche should be removed, it would be a mere flirting
with death to try to relieve the cabin roof of its buckling burden. In
a few minutes Garth became a shapeless, climbing blot in the moonlight
on the bare slope, the muffling deerskin making him look like a clumsy
animal. That he could reach the critical point, impeded as he was by
the awkward foot-rigging, seemed incredible to the anxious watchers
below. Yet without the skis to support his weight, he could have done
nothing.

“Th-there goes a brave man, if you’ll l-listen to me!” stammered
Bromley between his teeth chatterings. Then: “D-did you say something a
time ago about dirty fingernails and such small matters?”

“_Don’t!_” exclaimed Philip sharply. And after a breath-holding moment:
“I’m a cad and a coward, Harry. I let you try to make him turn that job
over to you a few minutes ago, and I never said a word: I was scared
crazy for fear you’d insist upon the three of us drawing straws for it
and the lot would fall to me! That is God’s truth. Now and then I get
a glimpse of the real man inside of me, and then I know I’m not fit to
live in the same world with you and Jim Garth.”

“Easy,” Bromley deprecated. “After all, if the thing can be done, Garth
is the one who can come the nearest to pulling it off. We both know
that--and he knows it, too.”

The big man had climbed out of sight behind a clump of trees, but
now he reappeared higher up the slope and not far from the impending
mass that was threatening to break down upon the cabin. They saw him
prodding in the snow with the staff he carried and knew he was planting
the dynamite.

“Good Lord!” groaned Bromley, “why doesn’t he get above it? If he fires
it from where he is now, it will catch him, sure!”

“It’s the drift; he can’t get above it--don’t you see how it lips out
over his head? Besides, it’s got to be shot from that side. If it
isn’t, it will come straight down this way.”

“But, _Philip_! It’s suicide for him to shoot it from where he is now!”

“It looks that way. But that’s what he is doing. He is lighting the
fuses now--don’t you see them sputtering?”

Garth had risen to his feet, but now they saw him stoop again, as if he
were adjusting the fastenings of the skis. In the brilliant moonlight
they saw, or fancied they could see, the thin, wavering curls of smoke
rising from the burning fuses. Still the big man was crouching within
arm’s-reach of the blasts he had planted and set alight.

“God in heaven! Why doesn’t he get away from there?” The words stuck
in Philip’s throat and became an almost inarticulate cry. Garth was
up again and was evidently trying to edge away along the steep snow
slope. It was plainly apparent that something had gone wrong with one
of the long, unmanageable skis. For two or three of the edging steps he
contrived to keep it under him; then it came off and slid away down the
slope, and the two watchers saw him fall sidewise, buried to the hip on
the side that had lost its support.

With terrifying distinctness they saw him struggle as a man fighting
desperately for life. With one ski gone, the other was only a shackle
to hold him down. Fiercely he strove to kick the manacling thing off,
beating frantically with his bare hands, meanwhile, at the sputtering
fuses in an effort to extinguish them before the fire should reach the
dynamite. At last he gave over trying to free himself from the one
encumbering ski, and struggling out of the snowy pit into which his
exertions had sunk him, sought to roll aside out of the path of the
impending avalanche.

Given a few more precious seconds of time he might have made it. But
the reprieve was too short. Before he had floundered a dozen yards the
snow dam holding the huge cliff-top drift in leash leaped into the air
like a spouting geyser to the muffled cough of a triple explosion,
and an enormous white cataract poured into the gulch a short distance
valley-wards of the half-buried cabin.

“Shovels!” Bromley yelped; and together the two horrified witnesses
raced up to the tunnel for digging tools. When they ran back they had
to wallow waist deep in the yielding mass to reach the spot where the
tip of an up-ended ski marked the grave of the buried man; and they
had little hope of finding him alive as they burrowed desperately to
uncover him.

But Big Jim’s time to die had not yet come. When he had found himself
going, he had had the presence of mind to draw a fold of the deerskin
over his face, holding it with a crooking arm. He was all but
asphyxiated when they dragged him out of his snowy grave, but the fresh
air soon revived him; apart from a wrenched ankle owed to the too-well
fastened ski, he seemed to be unhurt.

None the less, back in the cabin and hovering over a roaring fire
in an attempt to thaw himself out, the big man began to shake as if
in an ague fit, paying the penalty of his violent exertions in a
teeth-rattling chill. In buying the winter’s supplies in Leadville,
Bromley had included a bottle of whiskey for emergencies. Philip
searched for the bottle in the wrecked storeroom, found it unbroken,
and poured a drink for Garth. The effect was magical. The chill
subsided and Garth begged for another drink, the single potation
making him loose-tongued and volubly eloquent. Philip said “no”
firmly, and hid the bottle; after which, with Bromley’s help, he got
Garth out of his wet clothes and into his bunk.

The giant fell asleep at once, or seemed to; and after deciding that
the buckled cabin roof would hold until they could have daylight for
its unloading, the two who were still stirring dried themselves out
before the fire, covered the embers and went to bed. When they awoke,
the sun was shining in at the single small window of the cabin, and
Garth was still asleep, or he appeared to be. But the empty whiskey
bottle lying on the earthen floor beside his bunk told another story.

“Look at that! There’s your ‘rough diamond’--dead drunk!” Philip
commented scornfully, sitting up in his bed and pointing across to
the comatose figure in the opposite bunk. “He was only shamming after
we put him to bed last night. He waited until we were asleep and then
got up and found the liquor. I have no use for a man who has no more
self-control or decency than that!”

But the play-boy was shaking his head.

“‘Touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless’,” he
quoted sardonically. “That’s you, Philip. It’s a gruesome thing to have
lived such a truly good life oneself that one can’t light a little
candle of charity for the poor sinners. I can’t forget that Big Jim
risked his life last night--and nearly lost it--to save us from being
turned out homeless and starving in this howling desert. Let’s get a
bite to eat and unload this roof while he’s sleeping it off.”




X


WITH the threat of the snow slides definitely removed, the routine of
ore-digging was resumed. Deeper and deeper the tunnel was driven into
the mountain, and each day saw the accumulation of ore and broken rock
on the dump grow in proportion. Nothing was said by any one of the
three about Garth’s night raid on the whiskey bottle; but Philip’s
attitude toward the big miner was stiffer for the lapse--as Bromley’s
was gentler. Since there was no more liquor in the stores, there were
no more lapses; and no fault could be found with the way Garth spent
himself in the drilling and shovelling, the ore-carrying and sorting.

After a fortnight of bright sunshine in January, with a thaw that
merely compacted the surface of the great snow blanket without
perceptibly thinning it, the cold weather came again; there were night
temperatures that made the green logs of the cabin walls crack and
snap with sounds like pistol shots, and the clay chinkings became
broad lines of hoar frost--this though the fire on the hearth was
never allowed to die down. With an ample supply of fuel they suffered
little from the cold; but by the middle of February the provisions were
running very low. Bromley’s turn at the cooking came in the final week
of the month, and it was he who found the bottom of their last sack of
potatoes.

“We can kiss the dear old Murphys good-by with this supper,” he
announced cheerfully, as he shook up and salted the last boiling in the
pot; adding: “And everything else in the chuck-hole is going the same
way,” Then to Garth: “You know a lot more about these mountain winters
than we do, Jim. How long is it going to be before we can break trail
for Leadville?”

“Wish I knowed,” was the sober answer. “Two year ago it was the last o’
May afore you could get over the range on most o’ the trails.”

Bromley gave a low whistle. “Two months, and more, of this? In less
than half that time we’ll be licking the skillet.”

Philip helped himself sparingly to the potatoes. “That means short
rations,” he thrust in morosely. “We ought to have had sense enough to
begin limiting ourselves long ago. Half quantities, from this time on,
Harry.”

Accordingly, the rationing was begun with the next meal, and thereupon
a grim battle with a foe hitherto unconfronted dragged its steadily
weakening length through the days and weeks. Day after day they toiled
doggedly in the tunnel, and night after night turned in hungry after
the long hours of hard work. As the hunger grew upon them they fell
silent; hours would pass without the exchange of a word; and a gloom,
which was not to be dispelled even by Bromley’s gallant attempts at
cheerfulness, settled down upon them.

It was in this famine time that the dour malady known as cabin
madness began to show its grisly head; the sickness that seizes upon
cabin dwellers shut in with one another and shut off from other human
contacts. As his ancestry and rearing would postulate, Philip was the
first to fall a victim to the splenetic mania, developing an increasing
irritability, with Garth for its principal target. As the hunger pangs
grew sharper, Bromley could see that the giant’s rough good nature was
slowly breaking down under Philip’s harsh girdings; that a time was
approaching in which surly bickerings would flare into open antagonism
and violence; and he did his best to stave off the evil day.

Unhappily, his best was not good enough. The volcanic outburst came one
evening while they were eating their scanty supper. Garth, who had dug
his home-made skis out of the slide, had climbed to the slope above
the mine to make sure that the tunnel portal and ore piles were not
menaced by another avalanche. While he was about it, Philip, coming out
of the mine to sharpen drills at the forge, had seen Garth working his
way cautiously along the upper slope of the spur. At supper he flatly
accused the mountain man of making an examination of the slide menace
an excuse for staking off a claim of his own which would intersect the
“Little Jean” at a certain depth in the hill.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on you!” he wound up harshly. “You may think
because we’re tenderfoots we can’t see through a millstone when there’s
a hole in it, but if you do, you’re missing it a thousand miles!”

“_Philip!_ You don’t know what you’re saying!” Bromley interposed
quickly. “Jim’s all right. Why, good Lord!----”

“You keep out of it!” Philip snapped back angrily. “You may be blind
but by God, I’m not!”

The big man was frowning sourly at his accuser.

“Say,” he growled in slow belligerence, “I been thinkin’, for quite a
li’l’ spell, that the time was a-comin’ when I’d have to take yuh over
my knee and larrup yuh a few. I reckon you’ve fetched it, now. You’re
the first livin’ live man that ever told Big Jim Garth to his face that
he wasn’t on the square; and when you say it, you’re a liar!”

Like a bolt from a crossbow, Philip hurled himself upon Garth, clearing
the hewn slab that served as a table at a bound. The attack was so
sudden that the big man was toppled off the block of wood upon which he
was sitting, and the two went down in a fierce clinch. Bromley sprang
up and strove to separate the combatants as they rolled over and over
upon the earth floor, striking and clutching madly at each other. But
the half-rations upon which they had all been starving for weeks proved
the better, or at least the more effectual, peacemaker. Breathless
exhaustion came speedily to both men to make the frenzied struggle
degenerate into a mere beating of the air; and when a sullen peace had
been patched up through Bromley’s urgings, Philip staggered outdoors to
hold a handful of snow to an eye that had stopped a blow from Garth’s
fist in the brief battle.

The aftermath of this savage flare-up marked an abysmal difference in
the characteristics of the two men; rather, perhaps, it served to mark
the distance Philip had come on the road to moral disintegration.
Having fought it out with his accuser in some sort, the rough
frontiersman was willing to let bygones be bygones; and he tried
patiently, in a blundering way, to make this plain. But Philip held
stubbornly aloof. With the cabin madness still souring in his veins he
had less and less to say to either of his fellow sufferers, and his
attitude toward Garth continued to be suspiciously hostile.

It was in the latter part of April, when the snow blanket had begun to
shrink visibly under the rays of the mounting sun, and the creek in the
valley had burst its icy bonds and was running bank full, that they
came to the famine end of things. A fortnight earlier even the short
working shifts in the mine to which weakness had reduced them had been
discontinued, and for days Garth, slipping and sliding on his home-made
skis had been going forth with his rifle in search of food, only to
return at night empty-handed and with the same growling lament.

“I’m jist so razzle-dazzled an’ no-account I ain’t fittin’ to do
nothin’ no more! They’s deer a-plenty in these here mount’ins--I see
’em every day; but I can’t see to shoot straight; never will get one
less’n it lets me come close enough to grab it by the neck and choke it
to death!”

With the beginning of the last week in April the losing battle with
hunger had become a grim waiting game, with their final reserves of
endurance pitted against the chance of the weather. If the thawing
weather should continue, if there should be no more storms, a few more
days might make foot travel over the passes possible. But even so, the
forty miles of snowy wilderness to be traversed loomed dismayingly.
Could they, in their weakened condition, fight their way out over the
slippery trails? It was an open question, and one which Philip, in whom
the cabin madness had now reached the stage of hopeless dejection,
answered in a gloomy negative.

“What’s the use of talking that way, Harry?” he raged weakly--this on
a day when Garth had once more gone out to waste powder and lead. “You
know well enough we couldn’t make five miles a day in the condition
we’re in now.” Then, with a jeering laugh: “This is the end of it....
With gold enough up there on the dump to sink a ship, we’re starving to
death. With a world full of food only thirty or forty miles away, we
can’t buy enough to keep us alive until the snows go.”

But Bromley, cheerful to the last, refused to be daunted. “While
there’s life, there’s hope,” he insisted. “The snow is melting fast
now.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to us how fast it melts; you and I will
never leave this gulch alive, Harry. As I’ve said, neither one of us
could tramp five miles in a day, even over a level trail. It’s the end.”

“You say ‘you and I’. Big Jim doesn’t complain much, but he is as badly
off as either of us.”

Philip, propped in his bunk, rocked his head on the blanket pillow.

“I don’t trust Garth,” he muttered. “One of these days, when he is sure
we’re too nearly dead to try to trail him, he’ll go and we’ll never see
him again.”

“Oh, give us a rest!” snapped Bromley, losing, for once in a way, the
cheerful equanimity which had enabled him to grapple sanely, thus far,
with the hardships and deprivations, “I wouldn’t have your narrow angle
on humanity for all the gold there is in the ‘Little Jean’! Why, good
Lord, man!--Jim has been loyalty itself, from start to finish! You’ve
simply got a crooked convolution in your brain, Philip!”

“Call it what you like; he’ll go, just the same. You’ll see. And after
he’s given us time to die properly, he’ll come back and take over the
mine.”

Bromley gave it up and crept from his bunk to the hearth to get a
light for his pipe, tobacco being the only provision supply that was
not completely exhausted. As the day wore away, the echo of distant
rifle shots penetrated to the cabin interior from time to time, but the
sounds meant nothing more to them than that Garth was trying again, as
he had heretofore, to kill something for the pot; trying and failing,
as a matter of course.

The sun had gone down and a cloudy twilight was filling the gulch with
shadows when Garth returned, dragging the hind quarters of a deer after
him. Gaunt, bush-bearded and long-haired, the giant was by this time a
mere bony framework of a man; and as he sank down upon his bunk he was
gasping for breath and whimpering like a hurt child.

“I got a doe, after the longest,” he choked; “an’ then I had to go an’
leave most o’ the meat for the coyotes and buzzards--durn ’em--’cause
I couldn’t tote it home! Time was when I could’ve took that li’l’ doe
across my shoulders and brought her in whole; but I ain’t no damn’ good
no more whatsoever!”

Bromley stumbled hastily out of his bunk.

“What’s that?--no good, did you say? By Jove, you’ve saved our lives,
just the same, old-timer! Don’t you worry a minute about what you had
to leave for the dogs and birds; half a deer is better than no meat.
You just stretch yourself out and rest your face and hands--and you,
too, Phil. I’ll call you both when supper’s ready.”

For the first time in many days they had a full meal for supper, and
under the stimulus of a couple of juicy venison steaks, hot from the
broiling twig, even Philip came out of his shell of hopelessness and
joined in the discussion of the ways and means of escape. It was Garth
who set the hopeful pace.

“With a couple o’ days feedin’ up, I believe we can try it,” he
ventured. “Snow’s deep yit, but it’s thawin’ days and freezin’ nights
so ’t there’s a crust early mornin’s that’ll hold a man. Weather’s the
only thing I’m afeard of.”

“Oh, good Lord!” Bromley groaned. “Don’t tell us there’s more snow
coming!”

The giant wagged his beard. “Looks mighty like it, over on the western
ranges. And the sun come up fire-red this mornin’. If it’ll only hold
off for a day ’r so, till we get a li’l’ stren’th in our bones....”

But the next morning when they turned out, the storm had come, silently
and as a thief in the night; there was half a foot of fresh snow in
their tiny dooryard, and the feathery flakes were still sifting down
endlessly from gray skies with no signs of a break in them. After
breakfast, Philip went back to his bunk and turned his face to the
wall, leaving Bromley and Garth to wash the dishes and shovel the snow
out of the small areaway.

“Winter’s been sort o’ hard on that pardner o’ yourn,” Garth remarked,
stopping to beat the snow from his battered hat. “Looks like he’d sort
o’ lost his sand lately.”

“We’re both tenderfoots, you must remember,” said the loyal play-boy.
“It’s all new to both of us, Jim. But Phil will come out all right.”
Then: “What is this fresh snow storm going to do to us?”

“Depends on how long it’s goin’ to keep up. There’s enough now to block
the trails for another week ’r so. I was afeard it was comin’.”

“Well, we have meat enough to last for a while, anyhow,” Bromley put in
hopefully. “And that’s thanks to you, Jim. We won’t say die till we’re
dead.”

All through the day the gray skies held their own and the snow sifted
down as though it would never stop. By nightfall the six inches of
new blanketing had grown to a foot, and the prospect of escape had
withdrawn into a remote distance. When Bromley raked the coals out and
made ready to broil the supper steaks, he was the only one of the three
who preserved even a semblance of cheerfulness. Philip was cursing the
weather bitterly; and Garth, stretched out in his bunk with a cold pipe
clamped between his teeth, was scarcely more companionable.

It was while the venison was sizzling over the coals that Bromley
cocked an ear and said: “Listen!” Into the silence thus commanded came
the muffled hoofbeats of a horse and then a shout of “Hello, the
cabin!” from without. Garth sprang up to unbar the door, and Philip
reached for a rifle, gasping out, “It’s Neighbors again!”

But the stocky figure that appeared in the doorway was not that of the
leader of the jumpers; it was a far more welcome apparition--the figure
of the man who, up to that time, had bought, sold and operated more
mines than any other promoter in Colorado--Stephen Drew.

“Well, well!” he said, coming in to shake the snow from his poncho and
to stamp it from his feet, “I thought I’d find you somewhere up in this
gulch! Found out what old winter can do to you in the Rockies, haven’t
you?” and he shook hands with the exiles, and not less heartily with
Garth than with the two younger men, saying: “You here, too, Jim? If I
had known that, I wouldn’t have been quite so anxious about these two
young tenderfoots.”

Philip sat down on his bunk and he was gasping again.

“Are--are the trails open, Mr. Drew?” he stammered.

“They were day before yesterday, when we crossed the main range, but
they will be blocked again for a few days, now. However, that doesn’t
matter. I knew you must be running short of supplies, so I brought a
pack train along. I left the outfit making camp in the valley below and
rode on ahead to see if I could locate you.”

Bromley laughed happily.

“You look like an angel out of heaven to us, Mr. Drew,” he bubbled.
“We’d eaten the last of our grub-stake and were starving when Jim
killed a deer and saved our lives. How did you find the way in?”

The promoter planted himself comfortably upon Garth’s bunk, and he was
smiling genially when he said: “We had to use a little diplomacy. One
of the Neighbors gang took one drink too many and spilled the beans.
We got hold of him and gave him his choice between going to jail and
coming along with us as a guide. He’s with the outfit now. But tell
me--have you got a mine to show me?”

It was Garth who got in the first word about the “Little Jean.”

“You’re shoutin’,” he said. “These boys’ve got a li’l’ bonanza, right!
There’s enough rich, free-millin’ ore on the dump to run you crazy.
We’re in a good piece on the vein, and she’s a-holdin’ up like a lady.
All these boys is a-needin’ now is somebody to back ’em with a li’l’
capital, and----”

“Easy, Jim,” laughed the promoter; “I know the color of your paints.
But never mind,”--this to Philip and Bromley. “If you’ve got something
that measures half-way up to those assays you had made last fall, I’m
ready to talk turkey with you. But we’ll have to talk fast and work
fast--if we want to protect ourselves. The rush for the new diggings
isn’t more than a day’s march behind us on the trail we’ve broken over
the range, and when it comes, we’ll be swamped. Jim, you old mossback,
see if you can’t carve a couple more steaks off that deer bone and
broil them for me. I’m as hungry as a hunter.”




XI


THOUGH it was now well into the summer edge of spring for the lower
altitudes, a late snow had fallen during the night, and the Continental
Divide, framed in the window where Philip was sitting, was clothed in
virgin white. In the street below, the snow had already been trampled
into a grimy batter by the hoofs and wheels of laboring streams of
traffic. Philip looked down upon the busy street scene, trying vainly
to realize that this teeming, throbbing, palpitant mining-camp city
of thirty-five or forty thousand souls was less than three years old;
that, only three backward turnings of the calendar in the past, the
marvelous treasure beds in its swelling hills were barely getting
themselves discovered.

From such contemplation of the material marvel his thoughts turned
inward. For the better part of a year, and with only the brief autumn
visit to the great wonder camp to break the wilderness monotonies, he
had been an exile with all the familiar human contacts dissevered;
it had been a period during which, for him and Bromley, the moving
world had ceased to exist. He was just now beginning to apprehend
the complete totality of the time eclipse. In the lost interval an
exciting national political campaign had run its course, Garfield had
been elected president, and his inauguration had taken place; all this
without disturbing, by so much as the turning of a leaf, the cosmic
procession of the weeks and months in the mountain fastnesses, or
recording itself in any way upon the pages of great Nature’s book of
the unpeopled immensities.

In the more intimate and personal relations there had been a
corresponding break. Never more than a desultory letter-writer, he had
sent a card to his mother and sisters in New Hampshire on the occasion
of his former trip to Leadville, telling them not to write again until
they should hear from him--that he expected to be out of reach of the
mails for the duration of the winter. Hence, there had been no home
letters awaiting him when he emerged from the western wilderness;
nothing to help bridge the separating chasm of the months.

In the few days that had elapsed since his return to Leadville he
had been making determined but futile efforts to close the gap;
to regard the year of exile as an incident, and to take up the
normal thread of life where he had dropped it the preceding spring.
The discovery that this could not be done--that the change from
flannel shirt, corduroys and miner’s boots to civilized clothes, and
from a log cabin in the wilds to a comfortable hotel in the great
mining-camp, wrought no miracle of readjustment--was confusing. Was
the curious inner consciousness of a changed point of view merely a
step forward in character development? Or had the step been taken
in the opposite direction--into the region of things primitive and
baldly disillusioning? He could not tell; and the inability to make
the distinction was strangely disturbing. When the attempt to account
for his present mental attitude became a fatiguing strain, he twisted
his chair from the window to make it face the scene in the handsomely
furnished business office.

At a table in the middle of the room, Bromley, garmented as a
gentleman of leisure and wearing his good clothes with an easy and
accustomed grace that Philip envied, was talking in low tones with
a stockily built man whose dark eyes, heavy brows and aquiline nose
gave his features a Jewish cast. Half absently Philip, compared the
two faces: Bromley’s high-bred, animated, impishly youthful; Stephen
Drew’s strong, kindly--the face of a man whose generous dealings with
his friends and business associates had given him a notability as
marked as that of the lavish spenders who were making the name of the
Colorado “lucky-strike” miner a synonym for all that was fantastic and
extravagant.

The moment, as Philip tried, rather ineffectually, to realize, was
epochal. Drew and his party of experts had spent a fortnight at the
“Little Jean,” exploring, testing, estimating the probable extent of
the ore body and preparing samples for additional assays. And now,
as the net result, at the farther end of the business office Drew’s
attorney was dictating to a young clerk whose pen was flying rapidly
over the pages of legal cap paper--using the pen, though one of the new
writing machines lately come into use stood on its iron-legged table
within easy reach.

After a time the lawyer came to the table in the middle of the room
with the finished document in his hands and ran through its provisions
with his client and Bromley. Drew nodded and dipped a pen, looking up
to say to Philip: “All right, Mr. Trask; if you’ll come and look this
over----”

Philip dragged his chair to the table and read the paper Drew passed
to him. It was an agreement defining the duties, responsibilities,
undertakings and emoluments of the three principals in the “Little
Jean”; namely, the two discoverers and the man who was furnishing the
working capital; and its provisions were simple and straightforward.
On his part the promoter undertook to develop the mine, paying an
equitable royalty to the discoverers, the royalty provision including a
liberal cash advance.

“I think that is about as we talked,” Drew said. “If you and Mr.
Bromley are agreeable, we may as well sign up and call it a deal.”

With a hand that shook a little in spite of his best effort to hold it
steady, Philip signed and passed the papers and pen to Bromley.

“Wigglesworth?” the promoter queried, when the papers came back to him
with Bromley’s signature. “Is that a family name?”

“Very much so,” admitted the play-boy, with a grin.

“I used to know some Wigglesworths in Philadelphia. Relations of yours?”

“They are, indeed. My mother was a Wigglesworth.”

Stephen Drew signed as lessee of the “Little Jean” with the intricate
pen flourish familiar to every bank teller in Leadville and Denver,
and the young clerk attested the signatures as notary. The formalities
concluded, Drew spoke of the practical details.

“We’ll go in as soon as we can get in with the machinery for a mill.
We’ll have to have our own mill, of course. Freighting the machinery
over the range will be a costly job, but there is no way to avoid it.
Rich as the ore is, it wouldn’t pay to jack freight it out over the
mountains. However, you have ore enough on the dump to take care of the
overhead.”

“I’m not sure that we don’t owe you an apology for not discovering
our mine in some place nearer the broad highways,” Bromley put
in whimsically. “It is due to us to say that we did try, pretty
faithfully, to do that very thing, before we crossed over to the
Western slope, but we couldn’t make it.”

Drew smiled. “Any old miner will tell you that the gold is where you
find it, and not anywhere else. Fortunately for all of us, the ‘Little
Jean’ is rich enough to warrant the building of a small mill, even at
the high cost of taking the machinery over the range piecemeal--rich
enough and with an ore body large enough. But I take it you two are
not very pointedly interested in the operating details, so long as the
dividends are forthcoming. Have you made any plans for the summer?--for
yourselves, I mean?”

Philip denied for himself.

“I think we have been merely living from day to day for the past few
weeks. I haven’t any plans reaching beyond Denver, at present. And you
haven’t, either, have you, Harry?”

Bromley shook his head. “Not the ghost of a plan.”

“Good,” said the promoter; “then we can keep in touch, more or less,
during the make-ready. I am back and forth between the mountains and
Denver every week or so. Now if you will come around to the bank with
me, I’ll deposit those cash advances to your credit and you’ll be
footloose to do as you please.”

The bank visited, and arrangements made for the transfer of the better
part of their fortune-earnest to a bank in Denver, the two who, a few
months before, had been merely marching privates in the eager army of
prospectors, shook hands with their lessee and fared forth into the
streets of Leadville as men of solid substance.

“Well?” said Bromley, after they had walked in silence for something
more than half the distance from the bank to their hotel--which, it is
needless to say, was not the second-rate tavern at which they had put
up on the occasion of their former visit.

“Say it,” Philip invited.

“I was just wondering where you were ‘at’; whether you were here in the
flesh, or a thousand miles away in the spirit.”

“I am trying to get my feet on the ground,” was the sober answer.

“Still seems like a pipe-dream, does it?”

“More than ever.”

Bromley laughed. “A little chunk of solitude is what you need--time off
in which to get used to it. Here is our bunk house. Capture a quiet
corner in the lobby, if you can find one, light your pipe and have it
out with yourself. I’m going to do a bit of shopping; buy me a bag and
a few more articles of glad raiment.”

Philip halted on the hotel steps to frown down upon his late camp-mate.

“You’ve been your own man for nearly a full year, Harry. Don’t go and
lie down now and roll your pack off like a fool jackass.”

This time Bromley’s laugh was a shout.

“So the good old New England conscience comes up smiling, after all,
does it?” he chuckled. “Give it a pat on the back and tell it to go to
sleep again, so far as I am concerned. I’m merely going to buy a bag
and something to put in it, and I’ll promise you to come back sober as
a judge. Want me to swear it?” and he held up his hand.

“I’d hate to see you ditch yourself now,” said Philip gravely; and with
that he went in and found the quiet corner and sat down to fill and
light his pipe.

An hour later he was still sitting in the corner of the writing-room
alcove, with the cold pipe between his teeth, as oblivious of his
surroundings as if he had been alone on a desert island. Realization
was slowly coming. He was no longer a striving unit in the vast army of
day-to-day bread-winners. Wealth, to which all things must bow and pay
tribute, was his. Twice, and yet once again, he found himself taking
the crisp bit of bank paper from his pocket to stare at it, to pass it
through his fingers so that he might hear the reassuring crackle of it.
To the possessor of that slip of paper, and of the treasure store of
which it was assumptively only an infinitesimal fraction, all things
humanly possible were as good as facts accomplished.

What to do with all this wealth? For an illuminating instant he was
able to appreciate the embarrassment of those other lucky ones who,
from having nothing but eager hopes, found themselves suddenly in
possession of more money than they knew how to dispense. Desires,
legitimate or the other kind, do not come into being in the turning of
a leaf. They must have time in which to germinate and burgeon. Philip
saw how easy it would be for the spendthrifts of luck to give free
rein to the impulses of the moment, however grotesque or extravagant;
more, for a passing breath he was conscious of the unfathered birth
in himself of just such impulses. But the traditions quickly asserted
their supremacy. It was not to breed a prodigal that his Trask and
Sanborn forebears had dug a frugal living out of the reluctant New
England soil. Whatever else might happen, there should be none of the
antics of the mad and extravagant wasters.

It was thus that Bromley found him at the early dinner hour;
still isolated in the quiet corner, and still with the
long-since-extinguished pipe clamped between his teeth.

“Back again, are you, Harry?” he said, hoisting himself with an effort
out of the deep gulf of the reveries.

“Same day; same afternoon. And I’ve made a discovery. The railroads,
two of them, have been creeping up since we were here before. There are
night trains. What do you say to ordering an early dinner and shaking
the slush of this metropolis from our muddy feet?”

“It suits me perfectly. There are sleeping-cars?”

“There are; and I have engaged a couple of berths. I’m beginning to
long for the flesh-pots; otherwise the comforts of a not-too-crowded
Denver hotel. Shall we go and eat a pasty or so and gird ourselves for
the flitting? Or has the piece of money paper you got a while back
killed your appetite?”

Philip did not reply until they were entering the dining-room together.
Then he said, quite as if there had been no interval between question
and answer: “It runs in my mind that money breeds many more appetites
than it kills. You ought to paste that saying in your hat, Harry.”

“I?” laughed the play-boy. “What about yourself?”

“I told you once that I hadn’t come to Colorado to make a fool of
myself.”

Bromley laughed again.

“If all mankind were only as virtuous and impeccable as you think you
are, Philip, what a Paradise we’d be living in! Let’s take that table
for two over in the alcove; then we won’t have to mix and mingle with
the plebeian crowd and run the risk of having some of the virtues
rubbed off of us.”

The dinner which was presently served was too appetizing to encourage
any more than desultory conversation, and it was not until after the
black coffee had been brought in that Bromley said: “By the way, I
wonder what has become of Big Jim?”

Philip looked up with a small frown creasing itself between his eyes.

“Garth? I haven’t seen him since the night after we reached town. He is
somewhere in the dives, blowing his winter’s wages, I suppose.”

Bromley’s eyes narrowed.

“And you don’t care a whoop. Is that the part of it you left unsaid?”

Philip’s answer was indirect, but none the less explicit.

“I haven’t much use for a man who begins to wallow as soon as he comes
to the first available mud-puddle; and you know that is what Garth did.
He was tanked full before we’d been six hours in Leadville.”

Bromley looked away and was silent for a time. When he spoke again
it was to say: “It’s a convenient thing to have a good, workable
forgettery, Phil. For my part, you know, I can’t help fancying that we
wouldn’t be here sipping this excellent black coffee to-night if Jim
Garth were taken out of the picture. However, that is probably only one
of my foolish hallucinations. I’m subject to them at times. If you are
quite through, suppose we call it a day and see if we can’t charter a
hack to take us to the railroad. The Denver train is due to leave in
less than half an hour; both of them, in fact--one over each of the two
roads.”

“Which one do we take?” Philip asked, rising and feeling for his pipe.

“The one whose brass collar you were wearing a year ago,” said Bromley
with a grin.

Philip took out his pocketbook and extracted from it the return portion
of an employee’s pass issued to him nearly a year before, the “going”
part of which he had used to the end of track at the beginning of the
prospecting trip; and New England thrift was seated firmly in the
saddle when he said: “Pshaw! why didn’t I think of it! I might have got
this renewed and so saved my fare to Denver!”

Harry Bromley’s laugh made the other diners look around to see what was
happening.

“What a pity you didn’t think of it!” he chuckled. “All that good money
that I paid for your ticket wasted--thrown away--tossed to the dogs!
And you with no resources whatever excepting the undivided half of a
bonanza gold mine. Come on; let’s remove ourselves from the scene of
such a crushing discovery.”

“Oh, let up!” said Philip sourly; but as they were leaving the
dining-room together he put the worn piece of a free pass carefully
back into his pocketbook.




XII


THE Denver to which Philip and Harry Bromley returned, after their year
in the mountain half of Colorado, had undergone many changes in the
twelve-month; was still undergoing them. Developing under the double
stimulus of the unabated rush of treasure--and health-seekers from the
East and the marvelous and increasing flow of wealth from the mines,
the city was growing like a juggler’s rose. In the business district
the one- and two-storied makeshifts of pioneer days were rapidly giving
place to statelier structures; a handsome railroad passenger terminal
had been completed at the foot of Seventeenth Street; horse-car lines
were extending in all directions; new hotels had sprung up; and the
theater which was to rival in magnificence, if not in actual size, the
Paris Opéra, was under construction.

Unlike that of other western communities owing their prosperity to a
mining boom, the city’s growth was notably substantial. With eastern
and Pacific Coast lumber at a high freight rate premium, brick and
the easily worked lava stone of the hogbacks were the chosen building
materials. In the outlying residence districts the empty squares were
filling with rows of brick cottages absurdly restricted in width by
the limitations of the standard twenty-five-foot lots, but making up
for the lack of breadth in slender length; and other streets besides
Larimer were acquiring massive steel bridges over the bisecting Cherry
Creek which, from being a mere moist sand bed in most seasons of
the year, could--and did upon occasion--become a raging cloud-burst
torrent, sweeping all before it.

After quarters had been secured in the new St. James Hotel in Curtis
Street, Philip left Bromley reading the morning papers in the lobby
and went around to the building in Lawrence Street where he had served
his brief apprenticeship in the auditor’s office of the narrow-gauge
railroad. Here he learned that the mountain road had been absorbed by
the Union Pacific, that its office force had been scattered, but that
Middleton, his former desk-mate, could be found at the car-record desk
in the Union Station. When he walked in upon the former tonnage clerk a
little later, Middleton’s greeting was salted with a bantering grin.

“Well, well, well; so the cat came back, did it? No, wait--let me say
it: you’ve had your fill of the tall hills and want a railroad job
again. Do I call the turn?”

“Not exactly,” Philip returned, seating himself at the desk end. “I
have looked you up to see if, by any chance, you have any mail for me.”

“Sure! There’s a bunch of it. You didn’t seem to think it worth your
while to send in any forwarding address, so we’ve been holding your
letters on the chance that you’d turn up sometime and somewhere. Wait a
minute and I’ll go get ’em for you.”

When the packet of mail came, Philip went through it leisurely. Most
of the letters were from his sisters in New Hampshire, the later
ones reminding him rather acidly that a correspondence was ordinarily
supposed to be two-sided. These, and two or three from former
classmates and friends, made up the accumulation.

“There was nothing else?” he asked, with a shade of disappointment.

“That’s the crop, I believe. Ought there to be more?”

“One more, at least.”

“Let me think,” said Middleton. “I believe all your mail was brought to
me while we were in the old Lawrence Street office. I kept the letters
in my desk for a long time, but after the consolidation I turned them
over to Baldwin in the superintendent’s office, thinking I might not be
here when you sent or came for them.” As he spoke, he opened a drawer
and rummaged in it, saying: “They were stacked here in this corner, and
... why, yes; here _is_ another. Don’t see how I came to miss it.”

Philip glanced at the envelope of the newly found letter. It bore the
Denver postmark, and the date was barely two weeks later than that upon
which the prospecting trip had been begun. The enclosure was merely a
note, but it was easy to read the heartbreak between the lines.

  Dear Mr. Trask:

  The Captain left us three days ago. We waited too long before
  bringing him here. I am writing because you asked me to, though I
  don’t know whether or not this will find you. The end came very
  suddenly at the last; but you will be glad to know that it was
  peaceful--that there wasn’t unbearable suffering.

  I don’t know yet what we shall do, or where we shall go; or if,
  indeed, we shall go anywhere. There is nothing to go back to
  Mississippi for, even if we could afford it; and there ought to be
  something for us--or for me--to do here in Denver. I shall try to
  find something, anyway.

  Mother wishes to be kindly remembered to you, and so do the children.
  You were friendly to us at a time when we needed friendship; and, as
  I once told you, we do not forget.

                                              Sincerely and sorrowfully,
                                                          Jean Dabney.

Philip returned the letter to its envelope and put it in his pocket.

“Bad news?” Middleton asked.

Philip was of no mind to share personal confidences with his former
desk-mate. “Sad for the writer,” he replied. “It is a note telling of
the death of a poor consumptive who was on the train with me coming out
from Kansas City last spring.”

This casual explanation side-tracked the matter, as he hoped it might;
and Middleton went on to say: “So you haven’t come to look for a job?
Perhaps you have a better one. You seem to be wearing pretty good
clothes.”

“The clothes are paid for,” said Philip with a close-lipped smile; and
then, the reticent traditions taking a fresh hold: “I have a fairly
good job at present, keeping personal books for a fellow who owns a
half-interest in a mine over on the other side of the Divide.”

“Pay better than the railroad?”

“M-m--some better; yes.”

“Had your pick-and-shovel summer for nothing, of course, like hundreds
of other tenderfoots, I take it?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that: I had a decently good time and picked up
some little experience. For one thing, I got better acquainted with
the fellow whose books I am keeping.”

“You knew him before you went prospecting?”

“Slightly; yes.”

“Is he here in Denver now?”

Philip smiled again. “If he weren’t here, I shouldn’t be here.” Then:
“Anything new with you? Haven’t made that marrying trip to Ohio yet,
have you?”

The fat-faced ex-tonnage clerk shook his head and looked as if Philip’s
question were more or less embarrassing.

“No; not yet.”

Philip got up to go. “Much obliged to you for keeping my letters for
me. If any more should come before I can let people know where to reach
me, just have the carrier bring them around to the St James.”

“Oho!” said Middleton, with his nickering laugh; “so we live in a
first-class hotel now, do we?”

“We do,” Philip admitted; and with that he took his leave.

Though he had carried it off casually for Middleton’s benefit, the
reading of Jean Dabney’s pathetic little note had moved him profoundly,
and he was disappointed at not finding some later word from her,
telling what course had been decided upon, and giving an address by
means of which he might communicate with her. Was the family still in
Denver? And, if so, how was it contriving to live? He had seen genteel
poverty at home at sufficiently short range to be able to recognize the
signs of it, and he wondered how much, if anything, had been left for
the widow and her three girls after the funeral expenses had been paid.

Then, too, Jean’s intimation that she would try to find work in Denver
stirred a deep pool of compassion in him. With the northern man’s
preconception of southern women it was difficult to envisage her as
the bread-winner for a family of four; but that it must have come to
this in the end he was fairly well assured. His single contact with the
Mississippi family as a whole had given him the impression that the
mother was devoted but not particularly resourceful in any practical
way; “do-less” would be the harsh New England word, but with a feeling
that large allowances should be made for any woman who had grown up in
the slave-served South, he did not apply it.

Eliminating the mother as a possible earner, the burden must have
fallen upon the eldest daughter, and he tried to picture Jean looking
for work in a city which was already boasting that it had a population
of over thirty thousand young men in addition to its familied quota.
There must have been difficulties insurmountable. Places ordinarily
given to women in the East were almost exclusively filled by men in the
Denver of the moment, even to clerkships at the ribbon counters. “Good
Lord!” he exclaimed, suddenly realizing that nearly a year had elapsed
since the writing of the sorrowful little death notice. “Why, all four
of them may have starved to death long before this!”

What to do about it was the burning question, and he went about the
doing promptly, first writing a note and addressing it to “Miss Jean
Dabney, General Delivery,” and next making a pilgrimage to the tent
colony where he had found the Dabneys on the eve of his departure for
the mountains. Nothing came of the pilgrimage. The tents were still
there, but the people occupying them were all newcomers; a shifting
population coming and going from day to day. Nobody knew anything of a
family of two women, two little girls and a sick man who had died.

Later in the day he went in search of the American House clerk who had
directed him in the former instance; but here, again, the kaleidoscopic
population-shifting baffled him. The clerk, whom he was able to
identify in his inquiry by the date of his employment at the hotel, had
left Denver--for Pueblo, so his informant thought; at least, that had
been his mail forwarding address for a time.

With the vanishing of this, the only other possible clue he could think
of, Philip spent the remainder of the day in aimless wanderings in the
streets, passing the sidewalk throngs in review in some vague hope that
he might thus stumble upon Jean or her mother. When the hope refused to
materialize, he returned to the St. James in time to join Bromley at
dinner, and for the first half of the meal was but a poor table-mate
for his lighthearted partner.

“What is the matter with you, Phil? Is the rich man’s burden crushing
you this early in the game?” Bromley inquired quizzically, after
a number of fruitless attempts to break through the barrier of
abstraction behind which his table companion had retreated.

“No, I guess not,” was the half-absent reply. “I haven’t been thinking
much about the money.”

“Well, what have you been doing with yourself all day?”

“I have been looking for somebody that I couldn’t find.”

“Ah!” said the play-boy with his teasing smile. “The angelic person,
for a guess. Am I right?”

“It’s no joke,” Philip returned soberly. “I found a note from her in my
mail at the railroad office. It is nearly a year old. Her father died a
few days after we left Denver last spring.”

Bromley became instantly sympathetic. “And you don’t know what has
become of her?”

“No; I can’t find a trace.”

“She was left alone after her father’s death?”

“Oh, no; there is a family--a mother and two younger girls.”

“Migrants, like all the rest of us, I suppose?”

“Yes; from Mississippi. They came out for the father’s health--and came
too late. He was an ex-rebel soldier.”

“Perhaps they have gone back to the South.”

Philip shook his head. “I hardly think so; I doubt if they had the
means. The war had left them poor.”

“Tell me more,” Bromley urged.

“I can’t tell you much more, only I suspect the burden of the family
support has been dumped upon the shoulders of the oldest daughter. And
I don’t know how she would be able to carry it in this man-ridden town.”

“The mother?” Bromley suggested.

“A dear lady, I should say, from what little I saw of her, but
helpless.”

“I understand; a woman who has never had to do for herself anything
that black servants could do for her.”

“Something of that sort,” said Philip.

“Tell me what you’ve done toward locating them.”

Philip briefed the story of the day’s efforts, and Bromley held his
peace while the waiter was clearing the table for the dessert. But
afterward he said: “Your note may bring the required information; but
if it doesn’t, we’ve got to think up some other way. Miss Jean and her
family must be found, if they are still in Denver.”

Philip looked up quickly. “How did you know her name?” he demanded; and
Bromley laughed.

“Didn’t you christen the ‘Little Jean’?” he asked. “It didn’t require
any great amount of clairvoyance to figure out where the name came
from. What is the rest of it?”

“Dabney.”

“A good old Southern name; they used to be D’Aubignys in Colonial
times.”

“What do you know about them?”

“Nothing, excepting what little leaked into me out of the history books
in school: French, of course, and Huguenots. Settled first in Virginia,
I believe. But that’s not to the point. As I say, we’ve got to find
Miss Jean.”

“‘We’?” Philip queried.

“That is what I said. Your relations with the young woman are your own,
and I’m not messing in on them. Mine are in the nature of a debt.”

“But you don’t know her!” Philip protested.

“No more I don’t; but the debt remains. Tell me baldly, Phil: would
you ever have thought of taking me on the prospecting trip, if she
hadn’t suggested it?”

“Since you put it that way, I might not have.”

“Very well, then. In that case I owe her my stake in the game, whatever
it is, or whatever it may eventually amount to. We must find this
shipwrecked family.”

Philip shook his head in discouragement.

“If she doesn’t get my note and answer it, it will be much like looking
for a needle in a haystack. You see what this town has grown to in a
single year. Besides, if we should find the Dabneys, I can assure you
in advance that they are not the kind of people you can give money to.”

“Trust me for that part of it,” Bromley said. “There are more ways
of killing a cat than by choking it to death with thick cream. If
you are through, let’s go out and see what this money-mad city looks
like by lamplight in the spring of a new year. I have a fairly
vivid recollection of its appearance under such conditions a short
twelve-month ago.”

In Philip’s acquiescence to this proposal there was a strong thread of
the brother-keeping weave, an inheritance from a long line of ancestors
who took their Bible literally. From the ancestral point of view,
Bromley was still figuring, in Philip’s estimation, as a brand snatched
from the burning. With the means now at his command to gratify the
worst impulses of the ne’er-do-well, could Bromley be trusted to walk
alone in the midst of temptations? Philip thought not; feared not, at
least. Therefore, the brotherly supervision must be maintained.

“Where to?” he asked, as they fared forth from the hotel.

“Oh, I don’t mind; anywhere you like,” was the careless reply. “The
theater, if that jumps with your notion.”

With the new opera house still figuring as an unfinished building, the
only legitimate theater was a remodeled billiard hall in Sixteenth
Street; and on this particular evening they found it dark.

“That puts it up to the varieties,” said Bromley. “Care to go down to
the Corinthian?”

It was a measure of the distance Philip had traversed in a year that
he did not immediately negative this proposal. He had known the
Corinthian--though only by repute--as a place sedulously to be avoided
by all self-respecting persons; a combined varieties theater, gambling
house and worse, catering only to the abandoned of both sexes. But now
an impulse which he was calling idle curiosity made him acquiesce. Why
shouldn’t a man go to such a place at least once in a way, if only to
see for himself and thus be able to condemn with knowledge, and not
merely from hearsay? And Bromley?--Bromley would be safe enough, with
somebody to look out for him and hold on to him. So he said: “I don’t
care--if you know the way around in such places. I’ve never been there.”

Bromley laughed.

“It will give you a vastly better opinion of the general run of
mankind--and womankind, I imagine,” he said half mockingly. “Come
along; I’ll chaperon you.”

Some hours later, when Philip wound his watch and put it under his
pillow, preparatory to undressing and going to bed, its hands were
pointing to midnight. With creeping shudders of repulsion he was
telling himself that in the time intervening between the half-hesitant
accession to Bromley’s suggestion and their return to the hotel he had
not only seen humanity at its lowest ebb, but had also besmeared his
own body and mind with the reeking mud of the tide flats.

A long, narrow, shop-like room, with a tawdry stage at one end, a
seated lower floor, and a row of curtained gallery boxes running along
both sides; on the main floor, filling the seats, a rough audience,
strictly masculine, uproariously applauding a painted woman on the
stage who was singing “Only a Pansy Blossom”: this was what they had
seen and heard upon making their way past the bar in the Corinthian.

For a time they had looked on from the rear of the lower floor, while
the five-piece orchestra blared and drummed and squeaked, and aproned
waiters came and went with liquor-bearing trays, and the air grew
foggy with tobacco smoke rising in a dim nimbus over the booted and
hatted crowd jamming the narrow room to suffocation. There had been
other numbers to follow that of the sentimental singer, most of them
suggestive, some of them baldly obscene. Then Bromley, with the impish
grin now in permanence, had proposed a retreat to the more select
surroundings of the gallery boxes, and they had gone up-stairs.

Philip, sitting on his bedside chair with one shoe off, was telling
himself, with a recurrence of the creeping shudder, that he should
never live long enough decently to efface the degrading experience of
the next hour. They had scarcely seated themselves in one of the boxes
before a woman came in--a woman without shame. Bromley, still grinning
amiably, had waved her aside, and had passed a friendly signal of
warning to him--Philip. But when the woman came to perch on his knee,
he did not know how to repulse her.

There was still a dingy smudge of rice powder on the breast of his
waistcoat, and he flung the garment across the room with an angry
curse. For the first time in his life he had held a wanton woman in
his arms, had talked to her, had yielded to her persuasions and bought
liquor for her. And it was small comfort now to remember that he had
refused to drink with her when the liquor came; or that--backed by
Bromley in this--he had refused to stay until the close of her working
day and go home with her.

“My God!” he exclaimed, as he turned off the gas and crept into bed
to lie wide-eyed and staring in the darkness: “My God! if I’d been
alone--if Bromley hadn’t been there to drag me out.... And all along
I’ve been calling myself a decent man and Harry’s keeper!”




XIII


THE next morning at breakfast, with the midnight reaction still
daggering him, Philip was shamefacedly reticent until after he found
that Bromley, charitably or otherwise, was completely ignoring the
Corinthian episode. Though he was far from being capable of banishing
it himself, he contrived to push it aside sufficiently to enable him to
carry his part in the table talk.

“No, I hadn’t thought of camping down in a hotel,” was his reply to
Bromley’s question as to his plans for the summer. “Comfortable as this
place is, it isn’t quite my idea of living: too monotonous. What I’m
thinking of is a bachelor apartment in one of the down-town buildings,
with meals wherever the eating is best; something of that sort for the
present, at least. How about you?”

“To tell the truth, I haven’t been thinking much more than a minute
or so ahead,” the play-boy confessed, with his disarming smile at
its attractive best. “This sudden cataracting of filthy lucre has a
tendency to make me lightheaded--that is, more lightheaded than usual,
which you will say is gilding the lily. I did have some vague notion of
taking a trip back home and astonishing the natives. It would astonish
them, you know.”

“To see you back again?”

“To see me come back with money in my purse--and more of it to follow.
They’d think the world was coming to an end. But, on second thought,
I guess it wouldn’t do. I shouldn’t care to give any of them heart
failure.”

“But if you don’t go home?” Philip queried.

“In that event your bachelor apartment idea has an irresistible appeal.
Unless you particularly long for complete solitude, I’d be glad to
join you. Say a couple of bed-rooms, a bath and perhaps a common
sitting-room?”

“Done,” said Philip shortly. “What next?”

“For me?--oh, confound your picture! You are bound and determined to
make me think more than one day ahead, in spite of everything, aren’t
you? All right, if I must. After we are settled, perhaps I shall look
around and try to find some safe investment niches into which I can
dribble my share of the golden showers from the ‘Little Jean’ as they
come in.”

“Good. That is the most sensible thing I’ve heard you say in a week
of Sundays!” said the one in whom the reaction to the New England
normalities had by this time wrought its perfect work.

“And the least expected, you would add--if you were not too
soft-hearted. That, too, is all right; I wasn’t expecting it myself.
Nothing has ever been farther from my promptings heretofore, I can
solemnly assure you.”

Philip became banal. “It is never too late to mend. I’ve been
hoping----”

“You mustn’t hope too violently, Philip mine. I am a creature of
impulse, and just now the spirit moves me to become a money grubber;
to hang on to what I have, and to plant it and watch it grow like
Jack’s beanstalk. Past that, the same spirit is moving me to get
acquainted with some really good people; if there be any such in this
infatuated town.”

“Don’t be snobbish. There are plenty of them, no doubt.”

“You don’t happen to know any of them yourself, do you?”

“Not socially; I wasn’t here long enough last spring to go about
any, though I did meet some of the solider citizens in the railroad
connection: Governor Evans, ‘Uncle Johnny’ Smith,--he owns the American
House, you know,--Colonel Eicholtz, Mr. Walter Cheesman, the Barth
brothers, Kountze, president of the Colorado National; men like that,
most of them old residents.”

“The ‘First Families,’” Bromley mused. “Of course there would be some
dating back to the ’sixties and the ox-team and ‘Pike’s-Peak-or-bust’
days; not so very ancient, at that, but still with the distinguishing
hallmark of the pioneers. We’ll fish around for some introductions.”

Philip sat back in his chair, shaking his head.

“I’m not at all sure that I want to go in for the social whirl just
yet, Harry,” he deprecated. “I want to find the Dabneys first, if I
can; and after that ... perhaps you may remember that I once told you
what my principal object was in heading for the west?”

“About your father; yes, I remember. You said at the time that you had
no definite clue to his whereabouts. Has anything come to light since?”

“No; nothing.”

“Going to be a rather blind job, looking for him, isn’t it?”

“Utterly blind. It will be only by chance, if I find him.”

“Any notion of how to go about the search?”

“No very clear idea, as yet. But now that I have money and leisure--can
go where I please and stay as long as I please--well, to begin with, I
had thought of making a round of the different towns and mining-camps.
Of course, I’m not at all certain that he is in Colorado. The Black
Hills rush was the big excitement when he dis--when he left home.”

“I see,” Bromley nodded; and, forbearing to add any word either of
curious questioning or of discouragement: “Have you finished your
coffee?”

“The coffee, yes,” Philip assented hesitantly. “But there is a thing
we’ve both been dodging, and we may as well have it out here and now.
What did you think of me last night, Harry?”

Bromley smiled. “I thought you were completely human; a fact I have at
times been somewhat inclined to doubt.”

Philip shook his head in reproachful deprecation.

“Do you make a joke out of everything?” he asked.

“Oh, no. But in this transitory scheme which we call Life, spelling
it with a capital letter, I try to give things their relative
value--that’s all.”

Again Philip shook his head.

“Can a man touch pitch and not be defiled? I wasn’t human, Harry; for
the time being I was just a brute beast.”

“Oh, good heavens! Are you going to let that bit of commonplace
asininity worry you for the rest of your life? Let it slide and forget
it. You didn’t do that painted and powdered Jezebel any harm--you
couldn’t.”

“Perhaps not: the harm I did was to myself.... It was the first time,
Harry. I wish I could make you believe that it will also be the last.”

Bromley pushed his chair back and got up, laughing quietly.

“What your conscience needs, Philip, is a rain-coat. You’re out for a
lot of trouble if you let such things soak in and make you soggy and
uncomfortable, and you’d find the rain-coat a profitable acquisition.
Let’s go get some cigars.”

Not knowing anything further to be done in the way of tracing the lost
Dabney family beyond waiting hopefully for an answer to his note,
Philip joined Bromley in making a round of the rental agencies; and,
when a suitable double apartment was found, in selecting their joint
stock of furnishings. This done, a period of inaction followed which
was more trying than the hardest labor he had ever performed. Under
the goading of unwonted idleness he grew moody and at times almost
irritable; a frame of mind that acquired an added touch of moroseness
when his note to Jean Dabney was returned to him from the post-office
with “Uncalled for” rubber-stamped across the face of the envelope.
Bromley had made a few social acquaintances and was constantly making
more; but his efforts to drag Philip out of the rut into which he had
fallen went for nothing.

“No, no--I wish you’d let up, Harry!” he would say, when Bromley
sought to include him in the invitations which were coming in
increasing numbers to the breezy young Philadelphian. “I can’t talk
silly nothings, I don’t dance, and I hardly know one card from another.
Your new friends wouldn’t have any use for me.”

“Or you for them, you might add,” retorted the play-boy. “As a social
animal you’re pretty nearly a total loss, Philip. Keep it up, and
in time you’ll be able to give cards, spades and little casino to
the sourest monk of the desert and beat him blind at his own game.
Incidentally, you are headed right to join the procession of the
unattached and unfettered in this hurrah city of the plain--the big
bunch of fellows who are finding all the bad doors wide open, and who
won’t take the trouble to knock at any of the decent ones.”

“You are preaching?--at me?” said Philip, with a sober smile.

“Call it what you please. I’ve been all the gaits and know what I’m
talking about. You’ll get dry rot, and that’s worse than the other kind
because it doesn’t show on the outside. You won’t think better of it
and go to Mrs. Demming’s little dinner-and-after with me?”

“Not to-night; I’m pretty comfortable as I am. Chase along and have a
good time in your own fashion. As you say, I’m more or less hopeless on
the social side.”

With Bromley gone, he drew the deepest of the easy-chairs up to the
table, lighted the gas reading-lamp and tried to lose himself in
Howells’s _The Lady of the Aroostook_, just out in book form; this
until it should be time to go out for his dinner in one of the hotels
or restaurants. The book failed to hold him, and he threw it aside,
struggled into the light overcoat demanded by the night breeze sweeping
down from the Snowy Range, and took to the streets.

Since it was still early in the evening the night life of the city
had scarcely begun. In Sixteenth Street the horse-cars made cheerful
music on the crisp evening air with their jingling bells, and at each
corner a group of homing workers waited under the gas street-light to
board them. Philip drifted northward in the sidewalk throng, absently
oblivious of his surroundings and curiously dissatisfied with himself
and the new outlook upon life engendered by the possession of money.
The free, hard-working, outdoor year, followed by the golden flood
which had swept away the necessity for work of any kind, had broken
orderly habit, and a sort of deadening _ennui_ was the result. With
all the healthy incentives to effort drowned in the flood, he could
settle upon no object that seemed worth while. Upon the first day of
his return to Denver he had sent his mother and sisters a sum which,
as he knew, would postulate riches to the family of plain-living New
England women; but with this dutiful channel filled--choked, for the
time being, at least, by the generous stream he had poured into it--he
had found no other reasonable use to which the golden surfeit could be
put.

While he was still drifting and trying aimlessly to decide where he
should go for his solitary dinner, he stepped aside to make room for
a group of women workers coming out of a millinery shop. As he did
so, two things occurred in swift sequence: he collided violently
with a heavy-set man hurrying in the opposite direction, and in the
rebound from the collision he found himself clasping a young woman in
his arms to keep from knocking her down. Recovering his balance, he
was beginning to apologize when the young woman gave a little cry of
surprise and called him by name. Then he saw that chance had succeeded
where directed effort had failed; that the young woman he had so
hastily embraced was Jean Dabney.

It was reticent habit, no less than the lapse of a year, that tied his
tongue and made his greeting awkwardly formal; and the inability to be
instantly at ease made him rage inwardly. But the young woman helped
him out.

“I have wondered, so many times, if we should ever meet again,” she was
saying; and by this time he had clubbed his inherited pauciloquy into
subjection sufficiently to say:

“I had almost given up the hope. I have been trying all sorts of ways
to find out what had become of you.”

“You have? That was kind, and--and neighborly. And I don’t wonder that
you couldn’t find us. It has been nearly a year, and everything changes
so quickly out here.”

“It does,” he agreed; and then: “Where were you going when I came so
near knocking you down?”

“Home--to give the family a surprise. I don’t usually get off before
eight or nine at this season of the year.”

“Get off?” he queried.

“Get out of the shop, I mean. You didn’t know I could be right
industrious and useful, did you? I’m trimming hats here in Madame
Marchande’s.”

Once more Philip struggled with inborn constraint and made himself say:
“You said the family wouldn’t be expecting you this early. I haven’t
been to dinner--I was just on my way. Won’t you go along and have a
bite with me?”

She hesitated, but only for a moment.

“I don’t know why I shouldn’t, if you want me to.” Then, as he drew her
arm under his own and steered her toward the Larimer Street corner;
“You got the note I wrote you last spring?”

“Not until just the other day, when I came back from my year in the
mountains. When I went away last spring I didn’t leave any forwarding
address; I couldn’t, very well, because I hadn’t the remotest idea
where I was going to be from week to week. So my mail was held here
in the railroad office. Since I read your note, I’ve been trying to
find out what had become of you and your mother and the girls, but I
couldn’t get even a starting point. You have been in Denver all the
time?”

“Yes; there was nothing to do but to stay here.” Then, as they turned
west on Larimer: “Where are you taking me?”

“I thought we would go around to Charpiot’s--unless you would rather
make it the Windsor or the St. James.”

“Oh, but you mustn’t do anything like that!” she protested quickly.
“They are all three too horribly expensive.”

He smiled under cover of the darkness, saying: “I guess we can stand
the expense, for once in a way. We will go to Charpiot’s. Bero always
has good cooks; imports them from New Orleans, so they say.” Then,
in a gratulatory outburst as foreign to his later moods--and to the
New England traditions--as was his praise of French cooks: “You can’t
imagine what a comfort it is to be with you again. I was beginning to
be afraid I had lost you for good and all.”

She acknowledged the outburst with a friendly little pressure of his
arm.

“It is nice to know that you hadn’t forgotten us. How long did you say
you have been back?”

“Only a few days; less than three weeks, to be exact.”

“And you are working in the railroad office again?” He did not answer
because they were entering the hotel and M’sieu Bero, successor to the
man who had made Charpiot’s the Delmonico’s of Denver, was bustling
forward to welcome them.

“Delight’ to see you, M’sieu Trask; _et vous_, Ma’mselle--or is it the
Madame?”

Philip flushed like an embarrassed boy and hastened to stand his
companion’s identity upon its proper feet. “Miss Dabney,” he said. “She
is from the South and knows your New Orleans cooking. Can you put us
where we will be by ourselves?”

“But, yes! A private room up-stairs, maybe?”

“Oh, no; not that,” Philip broke in, flushing again at the too plain
implication; “just a corner in the public room where we can have a
table together.”

“I fix you,” was the reply; and the table for two was secured, where
Philip, sitting opposite his guest, had his first good look at her in a
strong light.

She was thinner than she had been a year earlier, and the dark eyes
had candlelight shadows under them; still, the eyes were very much
alive, and the thinness had not marred the perfect oval of her face.
There was a lack of color in the pretty lips; that and a translucency
of skin hinting at confining work and long hours, and, quite likely,
he imagined, at sterner privations. The thought of the privations
stirred him deeply. She was too fine and precious to be thrown into the
grinding mill of a struggle for existence. Without doubt that was what
had happened. She was carrying the burden for the family of four, and
was, by her own admission, working all sorts of hours doing it.

The dining-room was warm, and when she slipped out of her coat he went
around to hang it up for her. With the coat in his hands he decided at
once that it was too thin for a Denver evening wrap. Also, he noted
that the collar and cuffs had been carefully turned and darned; and
the same observation went for the tight-fitting basque with its bit of
lace at the throat and the unmistakable signs of wear on the sleeves.
Philip was not unfamiliar with the pinchings and makeshifts of economy;
he had known them at home. But the signs of them here and now moved him
strangely, as if life, which had lightly tossed Bromley and himself an
incredible fortune, were bitterly unfair to the weak and more deserving.

Going back to his place, he picked up the menu card and asked her what
she would like to eat.

“After a day’s work everything tastes good to me,” she answered, with
the quick-flashing smile that carried him instantly back to a double
seat in the Kansas Pacific day-coach and the spring-time afternoon when
they had shared it together. “Won’t you order for both?”

He gave the dinner order, making it commensurate with the healthy
appetite he had brought back from the mountains. After the waiter had
left them, he said: “You asked me as we were coming in if I had gone
back to work in the railroad office. I haven’t--as yet.”

“But you are meaning to?”

“Not exactly. You see, I have another job now. I am keeping personal
books for a chap who owns a half-interest in a new mine on the other
side of the main range.”

She was not so easily misled as Middleton had been.

“Oh!” she said, with a little gasp; “then you _did_ find a mine?”

“Yes; after so long a time--after we had knocked about digging foolish
holes in the hills nearly all summer.”

“‘We,’ you say. Did you really take the wild young man with you? I have
thought about him so often.”

“You mean Bromley?--the fellow who tried to hold me up the night I went
out to the tent colony to see you?”

“Yes. You told me about him, you remember.”

He nodded. “Yes; he was the other half of the ‘we.’ He was my partner:
he still is.”

“And did he--was he----”

A lack of loyalty was not one of Philip’s failings.

“You may remember what you said of him that night a year ago. Your
intuition hit the mark. Harry Bromley has a heart of gold. He is a much
better man than I am.”

“A better man? In what way?”

“Well, for one thing, he has a much better sense of values--the life
values, you know. And for another, he isn’t burdened with a New England
conscience. But I am forgetting. You don’t know anything about New
England and its conscience.”

“You shouldn’t throw my ignorance up at me,” she bantered. “Where is
Mr. Bromley now?”

“He is here in Denver; we have rooms together in the Alamo Building.
Just at this present moment he is dining out with some new society
friends he has been acquiring--at a Mrs. Demming’s, I think he told me.”

“Oh,” she said; “the Demmings are rich people. I know, because I
trimmed a hat for the daughter last week. But then, I suppose you and
Mr. Bromley are both rich, too, now.”

Philip smiled. “Not offensively so, yet; though we both have money in
the bank; rather more of it than we know what to do with. But most of
the riches are still in the rough, as you might say. We have leased our
mine, and it won’t begin to pan out the real thing until later in the
summer.”

“You don’t know how glad I am!” she exclaimed, and her eyes were
shining.

“Glad for Harry, or for me?”

“For both of you, of course. I think it is perfectly splendid--to go
out into the wilderness that way and make it give you something that
makes you richer and doesn’t make anybody any poorer. I suppose you
will go back to Yankeeland now and live happily ever after?”

“If I ran true to form, I imagine that is precisely what I should do,”
Philip admitted soberly. “But I’m afraid I am not running true to form
any more. This country out here has done something to me. I don’t know
what it is, but I know that I don’t care to go back east to live. Are
you homesick for Mississippi?”

Her eyelids drooped, and he found himself wondering why he hadn’t
remembered how pretty and curved and long her eyelashes were.

“Sometimes I am,” she confessed, with a deeper note in her voice. “You
see, it’s this way: when you leave a place that has been home for you
as far back as you can remember.... But that is all over, now; there is
nothing for us to go back to.”

Her use of the plural reminded him that he had not yet asked about the
other members of the family. He hastened to atone for the neglect.

“Mummie isn’t at all well; she has never been very strong, you know.
And Mysie and Mary Louise are in school. We are keeping house, after a
fashion.” This was the brief reply his inquiry elicited; and then the
dinner began to come on.

It was an excellent dinner, as Philip had predicted it would be,
beginning with olives and celery and rich chicken gumbo, and ending
with a brandy-sauced pudding for which Bero’s place was famous. Philip
was again touched sympathetically when he saw how his table companion
ate and when she broke into his story of the year afield to say,
with a quaint twist of the pretty lips: “You must think I’m a perfect
pig, eating the way I do; but I was awfully hungry. Some days when we
are rushed in the shop I don’t take time to go out at noon. I didn’t
to-day.”

He nodded understandingly, telling her to eat heartily and give the
house a good name; this by way of covering his dismay at the conditions
to which her admission pointed. It was even worse than he had
prefigured. He was confident that it was only to save her pride that
she had pleaded the lack of time for a midday meal. With three other
mouths to fill, she simply couldn’t afford a luncheon for herself--he
knew it. Not to be able to get enough to eat was horrible!

“How do you come to be trimming hats?” he asked, trying to push aside
the discomforting thoughts stirred up by her tacit divulgence of the
family poverty.

“It is my one little gift; and I didn’t know I had it. Oh, of course, I
have always trimmed my own--and Mummie’s and the girls’; but that was
nothing. I was so glad I could have cried when I found that somebody
was willing to pay me money--real money--for doing it.”

“Yes; and I’ll bet they are not paying you half enough,” he frowned.
“And keeping you on until eight or nine o’clock--that is a plain
outrage!”

“You mustn’t find fault with my job,” she protested laughingly. “I can
tell you I was glad enough to get it, in a city where almost all the
places to work are filled by men.”

Though he maneuvered cleverly to prolong it to the uttermost, the
excellent dinner came to an end all too soon; and when she asked him
what time it was, and he was obliged to tell her that it was a quarter
past eight, she rose in a little panic of haste, saying that she must
go home; that her mother would be worrying.

When he went around to help her into her coat he again felt the
lightness of it and swore inwardly at the conventions that kept him
from taking her out and buying her a better one. Why couldn’t he do
just that? There was no reason save the silly inhibitions which kept a
man from doing for a woman in need what he would be applauded for doing
if the woman were a man. He thought of Bromley and his saying about the
various ways of choking the cat. Would the play-boy be able to find
some way of helping this dear, brave girl without hurting her pride?
And if Bromley could do it, why couldn’t he--Philip--contrive to do it?
It was a muddled world!

When he had paid for the dinners and had gone with her to the sidewalk,
she gave him a small surprise by thanking him gratefully and trying to
bid him good-by.

“But, see here!” he objected. “It isn’t ‘good-by’ yet. Of course I am
going to see you safely home. Do you think I would turn you loose in
the streets at this time of night?”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t want to do it in Yankeeland, but you can do it
safely enough here,” she argued. “Haven’t you heard the Denver boast
that, for all it is such a ‘wide-open’ city, a woman who minds her own
affairs is safe in the streets at any time of the day or night? And it
is true, too--or almost true.”

“That may all be. Just the same, I am going to take you home,” Philip
insisted. “I owe it to my own self-respect, if I don’t owe it to you.
Do we walk or ride?”

“It is only a little way; and, really, Mr. Trask, I wish you wouldn’t!”

“It is ‘Mr. Trask’ now, but it was ‘Philip’ last spring,” he reminded
her.

“Well, then--Philip, won’t you let me run away by myself this time? We
mustn’t stand here cluttering up Mr. Charpiot’s sidewalk. Please!”

“Is there any really good reason why I shouldn’t see you home?”

“N-no; I don’t reckon there is any _reason_. Only----”

“Then that settles it. Come along,” and he made her take his arm.

In a very few minutes the truth of her saying that she had only a short
distance to go was rudely thrust upon him. A silent walk of two squares
down the nearest cross street toward the Platte ended at the stair
of a brick building dingy and old as age might be reckoned in this
Aladdin city of the plain; a building whose sidewalk-fronting windows
yawned into the empty darkness of a former storeroom. And the street
in which it stood was the street of the Corinthian plangencies. The
neighborhood, as all Denver knew, was not merely a shabby one; it was
disreputable.

“Good gracious!” he exclaimed, as they paused at the dark stairfoot.
“You don’t mean to tell me you are living here!”

“You would come,” she answered reproachfully; then: “We have rooms on
the second floor. I--I’m sorry I can’t ask you in.”

“But this neighborhood!” he expostulated, and the sternest of his
Puritan ancestors could not have crowded more deprecation into the
three words.

“I know,” she nodded. “But you remember the old saying--that beggars
mustn’t be choosers. We were glad enough to find shelter anywhere. And
the people ... they are not what they ought to be, perhaps; but they
are kind to us. Won’t you let me thank you again and say good-night?”

Since there was nothing else to be done, he did it; though he waited
until after she had disappeared up the unlighted stair before he
turned to walk away, still shocked and dismayed at the thought of two
unprotected women and two young girls living--being obliged to live--in
such surroundings. It shouldn’t be permitted; it must not be permitted.
Surely he and Bromley together could hatch up some plan by means of
which Jean and her family could be helped; some plan which they could
accept without becoming objects of charity.

It was at the Sixteenth Street corner that he came suddenly upon
Middleton. The former tonnage cleric, clean shaven as to the beard,
dapper and well fed, was standing in a dark doorway, fingering his
mustaches and apparently waiting for some one.

“Hello, Philly!” he called. “Little off your beat down here,--what?”

With no definite reason for so doing, Philip began to bristle inwardly.
Though he had worked with Middleton and roomed with him, he had never
been quite able to conquer an ingrained aversion to the man.

“It is a public street, isn’t it?” he suggested.

“That is the trouble with it; it is too public for a truly good young
man like yourself. Or perhaps you are not so truly good as you used to
be. How about it?”

With the instinctive antagonism to prompt it, there was a sharp reply
on the end of Philip’s tongue. But he suppressed it.

“I like to ramble around a little now and then in the evenings,” he
substituted; and Middleton laughed.

“You don’t mean to say that you’ve become human enough to do a little
‘chasing’ for yourself?”

Philip did not affect to misunderstand. With the curious inner voice
whispering that this was the proper time to answer a fool according
to his folly, he said mildly: “Weren’t you continually setting me the
example last year?”

The dapper one laughed again.

“You might go so far as to say that I am still setting it. I don’t
mind telling you that right now I’m camping on the trail of one of the
choicest little bits of womaninity you ever laid eyes on. If she shows
up, I shall promptly shoo you away.”

Philip’s lip curled. “One of the Corinthians?” he queried.

“Not on your sweet life; nothing like it. She’s a black-eyed,
black-haired little darling, all frost on the outside and fire on the
inside--works in a millinery shop and comes home about this time every
evening. She’s a little offish yet, but she’ll get over that pretty
soon.”

While one might count ten, the flaring gas street-lights turned
darkly red for Middleton’s listener. But his voice was low and quite
controlled when he said, “Of course you know her name?”

“Yep; she never would tell me, but I got it from one of the girls she
works with. It’s a boy’s name--Jean.”

Nothing is more certain than that the inhibitions are dependent, more
often than not, upon purely extraneous circumstances: environment, the
mental attitude of the moment, even such trivial influences as the cut
of one’s clothes and the obligations imposed thereby. Clad in a flannel
shirt, baggy trousers and miner’s boots, Philip had thought nothing of
the civilized restraints when he had flung himself, tooth and nail,
upon the drunken bully who was menacing Bromley in the bar-room of the
Leadville hotel. But now, with the mining-camp rawnesses put safely
behind him, the conventional fetterings were not so easily broken.
Middleton was a petty libertine, to be sure, but he knew that a few
straightforward words of explanation about the Dabney family and his
own connection with it would put an end to the ex-tonnage clerk’s
pursuit of the daughter.

But the cool words were not spoken. In the moment of hesitation the
curious inner voice prompted vengefully, “Will you stand for that?
Haven’t you found out yet that you are in love with Jean Dabney--the
girl to whom this fat rake is offering the bitterest insult a man of
his breed can offer to a woman of hers?” and at this flame-hot goading
the inhibitory bonds became as smoking flax and he lashed out with a
swift, fury-driven uppercut to the smooth-shaven jaw.

At the smacking impact of the totally unexpected blow the fat victim
gasped, gurgled, tried to duck aside and stumbled and fell on the
sidewalk. There were no passers-by to interfere, and for a single
instant Philip stood looking down upon his handiwork in a fit of
half-awed astonishment. Then the mad vengeance wave submerged him again
and he sprang upon the fallen man, beating him futilely and trying to
grind his face into the pavement. And at the last:

“Get up, you dirty hound!--get up and run if you want to go on living!
If you ever so much as look at that girl again, I’ll cut your rotten
heart out and feed it to the dogs in the street! Run! you damned----”




XIV


WHEN Bromley came in at half-past eleven, glowing from his brisk walk
in the cool night air from the Demming house in upper Fourteenth
Street, he found that Philip had not yet gone to bed; was sitting with
his hands locked over a knee and an extinct pipe between his teeth, his
face the face of a man frowningly at odds with himself and his world.

“Heavens, Phil!” was the play-boy’s greeting, “You look as if you had
lost every friend you ever had and never expected to find another.
What’s gnawing you now?”

“I suppose you would call it nothing,” returned the loser moodily.
“I’ve merely been finding out that I can be still another and different
kind of a crazy fool.”

Bromley grinned. “You have been to the Corinthian again?”

“Oh, hell--no! I said a different kind of a fool. Drop it, Harry. I
don’t want to talk about it.”

Thus extinguished, Bromley slipped out of his overcoat, struggled
into a smoking jacket, and filled and lighted his pipe; all this in
comradely silence. After a time the mere fact of his presence seemed to
exert a mollifying effect, for when Philip spoke again it was to say,
less irritably: “I have found the Dabney family, at last.”

“Good!” exclaimed the play-boy. “Nothing so very foolish about that.
How did it eventuate?”

In clipped sentences Philip told of the accidental street meeting with
Jean, and of the dinner _à deux_ at Charpiot’s, winding up with: “It
fairly gave me a heartache to see how hungry she was. She said she
hadn’t had time to go out to luncheon, but I am morally certain that
was only half of the truth. The other half was that she couldn’t afford
to feed herself in the middle of the day.”

Bromley whistled softly.

“Say, Philip, that is tough! I know, because I have been there myself.
What else did you find out?”

“After dinner I walked home with her, though she didn’t want me to.
When we reached the place I saw why she had tried to shake me. They are
living in a shabby tenement block down there within a stone’s throw of
the Corinthian. She apologized for not being able to ask me in.”

“Suffering Scott!--in _that_ neighborhood? Wasn’t there anybody to tell
them what they were getting into down there?”

“She gave me to understand that there was no choice; that they were
obliged to take shelter where they could find it--and afford it. They
know--or at least she does--what sort of people they are mixing with.
She says they are kind to her and her mother and the children.”

Bromley nodded slowly. “People of that sort would be--to hard-luck
people of her sort. That is one of the queer things in this mixed-up
world of ours. So far as sheer safety is concerned, she is probably
just as safe in that tenement dive as she would be in the most
respectable mansion in Denver. All the same, we ought to get them out
of there. Have you thought of anything?”

“No; I can’t think. I had a crazy fit just after she left me, and I
haven’t been able to think of much else since.”

“Suppose you unload on me and get it off your chest,” Bromley suggested.

“I will, because you ought to know. If you are to go on living in the
same apartment with a howling maniac----”

“All right; tell me what the maniac has been doing.”

“You have heard me speak of Middleton, the fat-faced railroad clerk I
was rooming with when you first met me?”

“Yes.”

“He isn’t half a bad fellow in some ways, but, like a good many others
in this demoralized town, he has a rotten streak in him. He is--or
was--engaged to a girl back in Ohio; but that hasn’t kept him from
chasing all sorts of women out here. To-night, after I left Jean, I
found him loafing on the nearest street corner. He told me he was
waiting for a girl; a girl who worked in a millinery shop. I led him
on until he told me her name, which he had got from one of her girl
workmates. He said it was a boy’s name--Jean.”

“You labored with him in good, old Puritan-dominie fashion?” said
Bromley, with a crooked smile.

“You know mighty well I didn’t; though that would have been the
sensible thing to do. He has an obscene twist in his brain, but for
all that, I have no reason to believe that he hasn’t some decent
limitations. If I had told him who the Dabneys are, and that they are
friends of mine, that would have settled it. Instead of doing that, I
went crazy mad--knocked him down and beat him--made a shouting ass of
myself.”

Bromley laughed and thrust a hand across the reading table.

“Shake--you old fighting Roundhead!” he said. “Now I know you are all
human! Is that what you were looking so glum about? You needn’t lose
any sleep over such a little gust of righteous indignation as that. As
a matter of fact, you ought to sleep the better for it.”

“Wait,” said Philip soberly. “It isn’t the mere fact that Middleton got
what he was asking for; it is the other and bigger fact that I am no
longer my own man, Harry. The frantic gold chase we have been through
has done something to me; I don’t know what it is; but I do know I am
not the man I was when I left New Hampshire a little more than eighteen
months ago. I’m hag-ridden--possessed of a dumb devil. Every now and
then I am made to realize that there are hellish possibilities in me
that I never even dreamed of before I came out here.”

Bromley grew philosophical.

“The possibilities, hellish or otherwise, active or dormant, lie in
every man of us born of woman, Philip. If we are, at bottom, creatures
of heredity, on the surface we are pretty strictly creatures of
environment; by which I mean that the environment calls to the surface
only those qualities in us that are in harmony with it--that will
respond to it. Back home, I take it, you had your little commonplace
round and lived in it. Out here, all the traditional strings are off,
and we are free to revert to type, if we feel like it.”

“M-m,” said Philip, thin-lipped; “very pretty--in theory. But it
doesn’t get me anywhere. You can’t argue from the general to the
particular; not in my case, anyway.”

There was the wisdom of the wise fools of all the ages in Bromley’s
smile.

“Of course; you want to be specialized. We all do. I’ve prophesied
for you before, and I can do it again if you want me to. You are of
the tribe of those who have to emerge through great tribulation.
There is a strong man and a broad man inside of you, Philip, and some
day he will break out and come to his own. When he does, there will
probably be a great smashing of window-panes and a kicking-out of door
panels--wreckage a-plenty--and after it is all over you will doubtless
wonder why there had to be an earthquake in your particular case. But
the fact will remain.”

Philip grunted. “Are you trying to tell me that I am hidebound?”

“Call it that, if you like. Life is little to you yet; some day you
will see how wide the horizons really are. But, as I say, you are
likely to pay for the privilege--pay in advance. It’s coming to you.”

Silence for a few moments while the smoke curled upward in delicate
little rings from Bromley’s pipe. Then Philip said soberly: “You spoke
a while back of reversion to type. I don’t know what type it is that I
am reverting to. My people are all decent and well behaved, as far back
as I know anything about them.”

“Oh, that,” said Bromley lightly. “When it comes to ancestors and the
heredities, most of us can find anything we are looking for, if we go
back far enough. It is a family tradition of ours that there was once a
Wigglesworth who was a raw-head-and-bloody-bones pirate and wound up by
getting himself hanged in chains. I shouldn’t worry, if I were you.”

“That is just the difference between us, Harry,” was the somber
rejoinder. “You wouldn’t worry if you knew the world were coming to an
end to-morrow. I don’t happen to be built that way. For a time this
evening, while I was with Jean Dabney, I was able to recognize myself
as the normal Philip Trask. But a few minutes after we parted I was a
bloody murderer--in all but the actual accomplishment of the thing;
I could have killed Middleton without a qualm. If the crazy fit had
lasted a minute or two longer, I don’t doubt but I should have killed
him.”

“Well, you didn’t kill him; which is the main thing, after all. Let
it go. You’ve got it out of your system now. I suppose your silly
conscience will make you go and apologize to the masher, but that’s a
future--a bridge to be crossed when you come to it. Let’s talk about me
for a while. I’ve had a jolt, too, to-night.”

“A jolt? You don’t look it.”

“That’s it; no matter how sick a fellow is, if he doesn’t look sick he
gets no sympathy. Just the same, I’m stabbed to the heart. I have been
discovered.”

Philip’s smile was grim, but it was a smile. “Sheriff after you with a
warrant?” he bantered.

“Worse. At Mrs. Demming’s to-night I met a man who knows me--knew me
back home, I mean.”

“Anything fatal about that?”

“The fatality lies in what he told me. Have I ever, by any chance,
happened to mention the Follansbees to you?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Friends of the family for three generations. Tom Follansbee was my
classmate in college for the little time the powers that were let me
stay on the campus. My governor and the Judge were also classmates. You
get the idea?--the two families as thick as peas in a pod?”

“I’m listening.”

“Just a minute and you’ll get the full impact of my jolt. There are two
daughters, Eugenia and Lucy Ann. Back in the dark ages, when we were
both in frocks and pinafores, the two families settled it that Eugenia
and I were to marry when we grew up.”

“And when you did grow up you both revolted?”

“No; only one of us--more’s the pity. I’m a worse rotter than your
man Middleton. Of course I like Eugie--like her immensely; we grew up
together. The trouble is she likes me; not wisely, but a lot too well.
She has always taken the pinafore arrangement as a settled thing. I am
afraid she still takes it that way.”

“Well, there isn’t any other ‘one and only’ in the case, is there?”

“Not so you could observe it. But that isn’t the question. I haven’t
any conscience--not in your meaning of the word--but I have something
that partly answers the same purpose. I don’t want to be cajoled into
marrying a woman that I don’t love in a marrying way. It would be a
sorry bargain for the woman.”

“I see. But this is all back-number stuff. Where does your jolt come
in?”

“At the front door, and as large as life. The younger sister’s
health isn’t good; weak lungs. Thurlow--he’s the chap I met at Mrs.
Demming’s--tells me that the whole Follansbee clan is about to come to
Colorado to try the effect of the altitudes on Lucy Ann. Philip, old
boy, I’m a ruined community!”

Philip smiled again, less grimly, this time. The play-boy was
presenting another facet of his many-sided character, an entirely new
and different one.

“Afraid the charming Eugenia will marry you out of hand?” he jested.

“You’ve hit the nail squarely on the head! If she could find me as
you found me last spring--a shameless down-and-out--there might be
some hope for me. But now ... it’s a fearful price to have to pay for
bracing up, Philip!”

“What are you going to do about it--dodge?”

“I can’t dodge. Thurlow will meet the Follansbees when they arrive, and
the first thing he will tell them--oh, pot! don’t you see that I’m in
for it up to my neck?”

Philip tossed his cold pipe aside and got out of his chair.

“Better go to bed and sleep on it,” he counselled. “Perhaps it won’t
seem so much like an unmixed misfortune in the morning.” And as he
reached his bed-room door: “This Miss Follansbee--is she good-looking,
Harry?”

“A glorious blonde, handsome enough to make your hair curl.”

“Humph!” said Philip; “it strikes me you might be a lot worse off than
you are. You might have epilepsy, or rheumatism, or small-pox, or
something of that sort. Good-night.” And he went off to bed.




XV


EXUBERANT Denverites of the early ’eighties--not the bull-team pioneers
of the ’sixties, most of whom looked on with dry humor, but the clamant
majority of tenderfoot later comers--lived strenuously in a boosters’
Paradise, acclaiming their city the Queen of the Plains and extolling
impartially its Italian skies, health-giving atmosphere and matchless
scenic surroundings; its phenomenal growth, wealth and hilarious
“wide-openness.”

To this trumpeting mother of mining-camps came the Follansbees, fresh
from an America which was slow to concede an America west of the
Alleghenies; the judge, a fine, upstanding gentleman of the old school,
with silvering hair and beard; his wife, an ample and gracious lady
corseted to the moment and expert in the use of fan and lorgnette;
their son Thomas, a spectacled young man who had had a post-graduate
year at Oxford, returning with a pronounced English accent and as the
introducer of the curious English custom of wearing spats; an elder
daughter fully bearing out Bromley’s description of her as a “glorious
blonde,” and a younger, thin and pale, with wistful eyes looking out
upon a world which would always be alien to them.

True to his traditions, Bromley joined Thurlow in meeting the
migrants-for-health’s-sake at the Union Depot, saw them carriaged for
their hotel, saw to the transfer of their luggage, and afterward called
at the hotel, dutifully and at the proper hour, to pay his respects
and to place himself, as a somewhat seasoned Denverite, at the service
of the family in helping to find summer quarters in which the invalid
Lucy Ann could have the benefits to be derived from the miracle-working
climate.

“Their reactions to the ‘wild and woolly’ are delightful to behold,”
Bromley told Philip that night at dinner. “The judge and Lucy Ann take
things as they are; but Mrs. Aurelia and Tom and Eugie are distinctly
disappointed at finding themselves surrounded by all the comforts and
most of the luxuries of civilization. I don’t know just what they were
expecting to find, but they evidently haven’t found it--yet.”

“They will live at the Windsor?” Philip asked.

“Oh, no; their idea is to take a ‘villa,’ as Tom calls it, somewhere
in the suburbs and settle down in a housekeeping way. And, by the by,
Tom is a joke--a shout! He used to be a rather decent chap, as harmless
as a cockroach; a trifle on his toes, perhaps, because the Follansbees
date back to Colonial times, but otherwise quite bearable. But he spent
last year in England, at Oxford, and now he does everything but drop
his ‘h’s.’ He was out with me this afternoon and he wore a top hat and
spats. The grins we met, if put end to end, would reach from here to
Leadville. He calls me ‘my deah fellaw.’”

“And the fair Eugenia?” Philip inquired maliciously.

Bromley sighed and shook his head.

“I’m still a ruined community. She is as fair as ever and she hasn’t
changed a particle. I was in hopes some really good chap had cut in by
this time, but I am afraid she is still taking the parental bargain as
a matter of course.”

Philip’s grin was sardonic.

“And as long as she does, you’ll have to. Still, this is a man’s town,
and perhaps you won’t bulk so large in the lady’s imagination after she
has had time to look the Western collection over.”

Bromley shook his head again. “I shall feel like a cad doing it, but
she shan’t lack for introductions, Phil; I’ll promise you that. Want to
go around to the Windsor with me after dinner and meet them?”

Philip’s laugh was a bray. “And let you start the introductions with
me? Thanks, I wouldn’t be that unkind to you,” he bantered.

“Let’s talk about something pleasant,” Bromley broke in whimsically;
“our friends from Mississippi, for example. You remember the little
rescue plan we were talking about last week?”

“I remember telling you that it wouldn’t work.”

“But it has worked--like a charm. I bought the West Denver cottage
Saturday: you know the neighborhood--respectable and neat, but not
gaudy--short walk across the Curtis Street bridge to the University
School for the girls--short walk to business for the dear little
hat-trimmer. After I’d got the deed safely in my pocket, I called upon
Mrs. Dabney and told her what I had ‘found.’ She wept tears of joy.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” said Philip discontentedly. “As many
times as I have been with Jean since I took her to dinner that first
evening, she has never let me see the inside of their rooms in the
Whittle Block.”

The play-boy laughed.

“You know the saying about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread.
I got my foot in the door the first time I walked home with her--the
day you went to Boulder. The younger girls took to me and called me
‘Uncle Harry’; and after that it was easy.”

“Still, I don’t see how you got Mrs. Dabney’s consent to fall in with
your cottage scheme. I tried to offer Jean a loan, and she froze me so
quick----”

“Of course she would. That was what you might call the heavy-hand
method. I had to tell a few white lies about the cottage, but that was
all in the day’s work. A mining friend of mine was moving his family to
the Gunnison country and was willing to let his furnished house cheap
to the right kind of tenants. Past that, all that was needed was to
make the rent fit the Dabney purse.”

“But you haven’t fooled Jean with any such cock-and-bull story as that.”

“Haven’t I? That remains to be seen. Anyway, they are taking possession
to-morrow, and I’m to help them. You are not in it; not in one side of
it.”

“Evidently,” was the morose agreement. Then: “As I said before, I’d
like to know how you do it, Harry. You can get closer to people in
ten minutes than I can in a year. The first evening we were together
with Jean I could see that she accepted you that quick,”--with a snap
of his finger. “And she knew what you are--or rather what you were a
year ago. Don’t women, good women, care whether or not a man makes a
consummate fool of himself?”

Instead of laughing at this acerbic thrust, his usual reply to Philip’s
censorious references to his past, Bromley grew thoughtfully silent.
When he spoke, it was to say: “You may analyze women, good, bad and
indifferent, until the cows come home, Philip, but you’ll never fully
understand them; no man ever does, I think. That remark of yours
rubs shoulders with a pretty large truth. There is a good deal of
talk nowadays about the double standard. It is the women--the good
women--who, unconsciously, perhaps, do the most to maintain it. Why a
man who has sown a pretty generous acreage of wild oats should stand
a better chance with a good woman than the other sort of man--your
sort--is a question that has puzzled better brains than yours or mine.
But the fact seems to remain.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Philip doggedly.

“All right; your belief isn’t obligatory, and we won’t quarrel over it.
You asked me a question and I gave you the best answer I had in the
box. Would you like to amble across Cherry Creek and have a look at my
‘mining friend’s’ cottage on the west side? It is too fine an evening
to be wasted indoors. Besides, you’ll want to know the way.”

Together they walked down Larimer and across the bridge, turning south
in a street paralleling Cherry Creek. Three short squares brought
them to a darkened cottage on a corner; a small box of a place with
a pocket-handkerchief lawn and two half-grown cottonwoods for shade
trees. Bromley found a key and they went in. When the gas was lighted,
Philip looked around. There were three bed-rooms, a sitting-room, a
small dining-room and a lean-to kitchen, all plainly but comfortably
furnished. True, the carpets were worn and the furniture did not match;
but there was a home-like air about the place that made it seem as if
the former owners had just stepped out.

“Did you buy it all, just as it stands?” Philip asked.

“No, indeed. Just the empty house. I spent a whole day ransacking the
second-hand shops for the fittings; didn’t dare buy anything new,
naturally--that would have been a dead give-away. Like it?”

“It will do well enough--considering who did it. Of course, it’s
understood that you let me in with you on the expense?”

Bromley did not reply at once. When he did, his answer was a
conditional refusal.

“No, I think not, Phil. You don’t owe Jean Dabney anything, and I do.
If the time ever comes when you are in debt to her as I am, we’ll have
an accounting. If you have seen all you want to, let’s go.” And he
reached up to turn off the gas.

In their common sitting-room that evening, while Bromley was chuckling
over a magazine article which showed how little the writer really knew
about the Colorado to which he had evidently made no more than a flying
visit, Philip shut the _The Lady of the Aroostook_ upon a place-keeping
finger to say:

“I think I owe it to myself to tell you that I went to Middleton to-day
and apologized.”

“Of course; I knew you’d do that, sooner or later,” returned the
play-boy, with his best impish grin. “That is what you get for having a
conscience. What did he say?”

“He was very decent about it; doesn’t seem to bear malice. Shook hands
with me when I got up to go and said he couldn’t blame me so very much
for ‘losing my temper.’ Altogether, he made me feel like a fool--or
rather like a whited sepulchre.”

“Why the simile?” queried the magazine reader.

“Because I profess better things, and he doesn’t. He is a hopeless
pagan, but he shows a better Christian spirit than I did.”

This time Bromley’s grin was good-naturedly cynical.

“Deep down in your heart, Philip, you don’t really believe any such
thing as that; you know you don’t,” he said accusingly.

“Why don’t I?”

“Because, at this very moment, the old self-righteous Puritan in you is
patting itself on the back for its superior virtue and for the humility
in which you kept the letter of the Gospel to your own satisfaction and
comfort.”

“Oh, to the devil with you and your hair-splitting philosophy!” said
Philip impatiently; and, relighting his pipe, he went on with his
reading of the Howells novel.




XVI


THE spring of 1881, memorable for the jangling aftermath of the bitter
factional political struggle of the previous year which had resulted in
the nomination and election of President Garfield, waned to its close,
and on the second of July the nation was shocked by the news flashed
over the wires of the shooting of the President in a Washington railway
station by Charles J. Guiteau.

Isolated by distance from the populous East and Middle West, the new
Colorado yet felt the shock and responded to it. Partisanship and
the harsh pre-election epithets of “329” and the anti-Chinese cry of
“Remember the Morey letter” were forgotten, and the city of the plain
marked its sorrow and indignation, as it did everything else, with a
magnificent Western gesture.

Philip, now following out his plan of a blind search for his father
in the various mountain mining-camps, returned to Denver early in the
week following the national tragedy with other failures to add to those
which had gone before.

“You mustn’t let it dig too deep into you,” Bromley urged
sympathetically, after the story of the added failures had been told.
“You know you admitted in the beginning that there was only the
slenderest chance that you might turn him up here in Colorado. You
haven’t had any later clues, have you?”

“It is all groping in the dark,” was the discouraged answer. “All I am
sure of is that he would bury himself out of sight. To be the first
of his name to have the finger of suspicion pointed at him, however
unjustly ... you’d have to be New England born yourself to know how
these things cut to the bone, Harry.”

Something of the same nature he said to Jean Dabney that evening as he
was walking home with her from Madame Marchande’s. He had long since
told her about the cloud on the Trask name, and of his determination to
dispel it; as he made no doubt it could be dispelled if he could trace
his father and persuade him to return to New Hampshire, there to fight
the good fight of reinstatement with half the wealth of a Colorado gold
mine to back him.

“I do hope you will succeed,” said the one who was to the full as
sympathetic as Bromley. “You owe it to him to do your very best to find
him.”

“To him, and quite as much to myself,” Philip amended decisively.
“While the cloud remains, it rests upon all of us who bear the Trask
name. Until it is cleared away I can’t ask any right-minded woman to
marry me.”

They had reached the bridge over Cherry Creek and had paused to look
down upon the damp sands lying dark in the starlight The young woman’s
tone was merely argumentative when she said: “Don’t you think that is
carrying it rather far?”

“Not as I see it. The name a man gives to his wife ought not to have
even a shadow of disgrace upon it. Don’t you believe that?”

“Y-yes, I suppose I do,” was the half-hesitant reply. “Yet that seems
frightfully sweeping, when you come to think of it. It seems to shut
out all idea of repentance and forgiveness.”

“Take it home,” said Philip shortly. “Would you marry a man who had a
bad record, or whose father had been accused of a crime and was still
lying under that accusation?”

She was still staring down at the dark sands in the creek channel.

“Since the beginning of time both men and women have been forgiving
worse things.”

Never before in their renewed acquaintance had he felt so strongly the
difference that a year’s burden of heavy responsibilities courageously
taken up and carried had made in the dark-eyed young woman standing
beside him. It was only at rare intervals that a flash of the old-time,
teasing mockery came to the surface. He told himself that her burden
had not only sobered her; it had brought her too crudely in contact
with a world of compromises--ethical compromises. He remembered what
Bromley had said about the double standard of morals, and the part
good women played in maintaining or condoning it, and the recollection
brought a bitter taste in his mouth.

“If women like you take that attitude, what is the use of a man’s
trying to keep his record clean?” he demanded.

“Dear me! How savagely righteous you can be!” she exclaimed with a
little laugh. Then she cleared the air with a plain-spoken declaration
that served to increase the aloes taste in his mouth: “I suppose I am
like other women. When the time comes--if it ever does come--that I
think enough of a man to marry him, I shan’t ask what he has been; only
what he is and means to be.”

“That is heroic--but entirely wrong,” he decided magisterially. “My
code is stricter than that, and it applies to men and women alike. I
mean to be able to give as much as I ask. If I can’t give, I shan’t
ask.”

“What terrible spiritual pride!” she commented, laughing again. Then,
soberly: “Don’t you know, I shall be truly sorry for the woman you
marry.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you don’t know women at all--or yourself. And, besides, you
don’t know the meaning of love; the unselfish kind that takes for
better or worse. Let’s not talk about such things. We always get lost
in the woods when we do. Where shall you go next to look for your
father?”

“I haven’t decided. There are some camps in the San Juan that I haven’t
been to. Perhaps I shall go down there next.”

They went on across the bridge and presently reached the cottage on
the west side. At the gate Philip declined Jean’s invitation to come
in. The bitter taste was still with him, and as he walked slowly back
to town he was placing Bromley as the figurant upon whom Jean’s tacit
defense of the sinners was based. The play-boy’s acceptance by the
Dabneys one and all was of the unreserved sort that Bromley seemed to
be able to win wherever he went, and it was he who oftenest walked
home with Jean when she was kept late in the millinery shop.

Philip assured himself that he wasn’t jealous; he was merely
sorry. Jean was much too fine to be wasted upon a man who, by his
own confession, had “gone all the gaits.” True, Bromley showed no
indications of any desire to return to his wallowing in the mire; but
that made no difference: he _had_ wallowed, and Jean knew it--knew it
and was willing to condone. That was the bitter part of it. Did she, in
common with other women he had heard of, accept the devil’s maxim that
a reformed rake makes the best husband?

And about this business of reform: how deep did it go? Was there
ever any such thing as a complete reintegration? Could a man--or a
woman--ever fully regain the heights from which the descent had begun?
Admitting that Bromley had a heart of gold, as he--Philip--had once
characterized him for Jean, wasn’t he at best but a brand snatched
from the burning? And though the brand might not spring alight again,
wouldn’t there always be the charred scar and the ashes?

Philip climbed the stair in the Alamo Building determined to have a
straight talk with Bromley. But the time proved to be unpropitious. The
play-boy was dressing to go out--conscripted for a theater party with
the Follansbees, as he put it. “Have to be decently chummy, of course,”
he grumbled, “but I’d much rather go across the Creek and play parchesi
with Mysie and Mary Louise.” Then: “That reminds me of something I’ve
been chewing on ever since you went away this last time, Phil. Even
with the rent of the cottage as low as I dared put it without giving
the whole snap away, the load is still too heavy for Jean--much too
heavy. Can’t you see it?”

Philip nodded. “I have seen it all along. I don’t know what Madame
Marchande is paying Jean, but it stands to reason it isn’t enough to
keep a family of four properly alive.”

“You can bet your bottom dollar it isn’t. I’ve been with them enough to
note the little pinchings and scrimpings and they make my heart bleed.
It is up to us, one or the other of us, to climb into the breach, and I
have found the way to do it. There is a spare bed-room in the cottage,
and last evening I asked Mrs. Dabney if she would be willing to take a
lodger. She was so willing that she cried.”

“Well?” said Philip.

“As I say, it’s up to us--or one of us; the room isn’t big enough for
two.”

“Go over there and live with them, you mean?”

“That’s it. And since they were your friends before they were mine, you
shall have the first chance at it. But if you don’t go, I shall. They
need the money. Think it over, and we’ll thresh it out after I come
back.”

For some time after Bromley had gone, Philip sat in his reading chair
thrilling to his finger-tips. To live under the same roof with Jean;
to be with her daily in the close intimacies of the home life; to be
able to help her legitimately in the carrying of her heavy burden until
the time should come when, his own filial duty discharged and the
Trask name cleared, he might persuade her to shift the burden to his
shoulders--to his and not to Harry Bromley’s.... There was only one fly
in this precious pot of ointment: that saying of Jean’s scarcely an
hour old: “I suppose I am like other women. When the time comes--if it
ever does come--that I think enough of a man to marry him, I shan’t ask
what he has been; only what he is and means to be.” Was she trying to
tell him that Bromley was the man?

It was in that hour that the virtuous ego rose to its most
self-satisfied height. Jean, wise in the hard school of adversity but
innocent as a child in matters touching her soul’s welfare, should be
made to see that she must not risk her future happiness by marrying any
man who, however lovable, had once shown the weak thread in the fabric
of his character and might show it again. It should be his task to make
her see it; to convince her that her duty to herself and to her unborn
children lay in quite a different direction.

In the levitating exhilaration of this thought the room suddenly became
too close and confining to contain him, and he put on his coat and hat
and descended to the street. Conscious only of an urge to keep moving,
he began to walk aimlessly, through Curtis to Sixteenth Street, past
the new opera house now nearing completion, and so on down toward
Larimer.

It was in the final block that he saw something that jerked him down
out of the clouds and set his feet upon the pavement of the baser
realities. In the center of the block was one of the evidences of
Denver’s “wide-openness”: a luxurious gambling palace running, like
many others in the city of the moment, without let or hindrance from
the police. Through the green baize swinging doors, as he was passing,
Philip saw an entering figure and recognized it.

“Jim Garth!” he muttered, and hung upon his heel. He knew that Bromley
had been “staking” the big miner from time to time, and had himself
refused point blank to join in the contributions, arguing that it was
not only good money thrown away, but that it was merely giving a man of
ungoverned appetites the means of further degrading himself. But now,
in an upsurge of righteous responsibility--the legitimate child of the
thoughts he had been entertaining--he was moved to lay a restraining
hand upon this weak-willed giant who had toiled with him and Bromley
through the bitter winter in the Saguache. Before he realized exactly
what he meant to do, or how he should go about it, he had pushed the
swinging doors apart and was ascending the softly carpeted stair.

At the top of the stair he found a doorkeeper guard, but with a single
appraising glance the man let him pass into the room beyond. For a
moment he stood just inside the door, blinking and bewildered. The
transition from the cool outdoor air and semi-darkness of the street
to the brilliant light and smoke-drenched atmosphere of the crowded
upper room dazed him. It was the first time he had ever set foot within
a gambling “hell,” and it was some little time before he could force
himself to begin a slow circuit of the room in search of Garth.

To the soul inspired by predetermined righteousness the scene was a
blasting commentary on the depravity of human nature. The haggard,
eager, lusting faces of some of the players contrasting with the blank
immobility of others--the seasoned gamblers; the monotonous click of
the chips as some nervous amateur ran them through his fingers; the
skirling spin of the roulette balls followed by the _rat-tat-tat_ as
they came to rest in the red or black.... Philip saw and heard and
hastened, with a feeling that if he should linger too long the fell
madness of the place might somehow obtain a lodgment in his own brain.
He must find Garth quickly and drag him out.

It was at the upper end of the room that he came to a green-covered
table with inlaid cards in its center and a double row of players
ringing it, the inner row sitting and the outer standing. Upon a high
stool at one end sat the “lookout,” a man with the face of a graven
image and watchful eyes that marked each bet as it was placed upon the
table; and at one side sat the dealer, turning up cards with practiced
dexterity out of the nickel-plated box on the table before him.

Philip’s gaze swept the ring of faces until he came to that of the
shirt-sleeved dealer, flipping the cards two by two with automatic
precision out of the box under his hands. One glance at the clean-cut,
deeply lined face with its cold eyes, thin nostrils and lean jaw was
all that was needed, and Philip’s heart skipped a beat and stood
still. His fruitless search of the past few weeks for his father had
ended--_here_!

Gropingly, and as if his sight had suddenly failed him, he edged his
way around the table and touched the shirt-sleeved man on the shoulder.
The cold gray eyes were lifted to his for a flitting instant; then the
dealer made a sign to his substitute and got up from his place, saying
quietly to Philip: “I’ve been expecting you. We’ll go up-stairs.”

Wholly speechless, Philip followed his father into the hall, up a
stairway and into a room on the third floor where a gas jet, turned
low, was burning. John Trask reached up and turned the gas on full.

“Might as well sit down,” he said to his son; and Philip sank into a
chair and fought for speech. But the words would not come. The crushing
silence was broken at length by the father.

“You’ve been looking for me?”

Philip nodded and moistened his dry lips to say, “Everywhere.”

“I thought most likely you might--after I saw your name in the papers
as one of the ‘lucky-strikers.’” Then: “You knew me--without the beard?”

“Of course,” said Philip dully. “You look just the same, only older.”

“I am older; a good deal older than the six years will account for.
Tell me about your mother and sisters: you hear from them, don’t you?”

“They are well--and well provided for, now.”

“I suppose they have given me up for dead, haven’t they?”

“I don’t know; I only know that I hadn’t.”

“Maybe it would have been better if you had.”

“No!” Philip broke in desperately. “There is something for you to do--a
thing I can help you do, now that I have money.”

“What is it?”

“To go back to New Hampshire with me and fight those liars, who said
you stole from the bank, to a finish in the courts; to make the Trask
name once more what it has always been--an honest one. I’ll back you,
to the last dollar there is in my half of the mine.”

The thin lips of the older man parted in the ghost of a smile.

“Spoken like a good son--or at least a dutiful one,” he said, in a tone
that seemed slightly acid. “But why be so anxious about the name?”

“Why?--why?” Philip demanded. “Why shouldn’t I be anxious about it?
Isn’t it the name I bear?”

“A name is nothing unless you make it something--but we won’t argue
about that. You say you want me to go back to New Hampshire and set
things right. It hasn’t occurred to you that there might be a certain
difficulty in the way?”

“You mean the fact that you didn’t stay and fight it out at the time?”

The ghost of a smile came again.

“No; I didn’t mean that. I mean the fact that not all of your money
could help me to prove what isn’t so. I took the money from the bank;
stole it, you’ll say, though I chose to call it squaring accounts with
Hiram Witherspoon, who had kept me on starvation wages for years. I
took it and got away with it.”

Once again Philip’s heart skipped a beat and stopped, and for a moment
the room whirled in dizzying circles for him.

“You--you stole it?” he faltered, in a voice that he scarcely
recognized as his own. Then, helplessly: “I--I don’t understand.”

“You wouldn’t,” was the curt reply, “you are too much of a Sanborn.
They never kick over the traces.” A pause, and then: “You’d never
understand in a month of Sundays, Phil. Your grandfather was a hard man
and a hypocrite. He never took his hand off my collar until after I
was a man grown--bull-necked me into everything I ever did, even to my
marriage with your mother, forgetting that I had the same blood in me
that he had in him. He lived a double life until he died, and thought
nobody knew; but I knew, and I did the same until the time came when I
could help myself and bolt--with the other woman.”

“Oh, my God!” Philip groaned, and covered his face with his hands to
shut out the sight of the man who sat opposite, calmly indifferent, as
it seemed, to the havoc he had wrought.

When Philip looked up it was to say harshly: “Where is the other woman
now?”

“She is here--in Denver. She does a turn now and then at the Corinthian
when the cards run queer for me.”

Philip staggered to his feet in a desolate rage.

“Then I’m the son of a thief, a gambler and the paramour of a kept
woman!” he blazed out madly. “That’s the name I bear, is it?--the
reward I get for believing in you, like the damned fool that I was,
when everybody else was against you?” He shook his fist in his
father’s face. “Do you know what you’ve done to me? You’ve killed my
soul--that’s what you’ve done!--blasted my faith in all humankind! Let
me get out of here, before I--Oh, God!...”

He choked and clapped his hands to his face, stumbling toward the door.
As he fumbled for the knob and twisted it, the chill voice behind him
said: “You had no call to chase me, and you needn’t worry about the
name. I haven’t called myself John Trask since I left New Hampshire.
And one thing more: I’ve put a bullet through a man before this for
saying less than you said a minute ago. That’s all, I guess.”

Philip groped his way through the upper passage and down the two
flights of stairs to the sidewalk. The reaction from the fit of mad
rage set in as he stepped into the open air and he went suddenly weak
and nauseated. The Tabor Building was just opposite, and in the alley
beside it he saw the light of the saloon at the back. Two minutes later
he had staggered across the street, up the alley and into the lighted
bar-room, which proved to be momentarily empty of other patrons.
“Whiskey!” he gasped, leaning against the bar. “I’m sick!”

The bartender set out the bottle and a glass of water, and spun the
empty whiskey glass along the polished mahogany. With a hand that was
shaking as if with palsy, Philip tilted the bottle, poured himself a
drink that ignored the miniature pig etched in the side of the glass
with the motto, “Don’t drown the hog,” and gulped it down. The neat
liquor was like a draft of liquid fire to his unaccustomed palate and
throat, and he choked and strangled until the bartender reached over
and put the glass of water into his hand with a grinning comment:
“Guess you hain’t got the knack yet o’ takin’ it straight, son. Wash
’er down with a chaser o’ water.”

With his throat still afire, Philip took to the streets. Since the
huge drink he had just swallowed was the first he had ever taken, its
intoxicating effect was almost instantaneous. Before he had walked half
a dozen blocks his brain was spinning and he fancied he was treading
upon thin air. From that time on, consciousness faded little by little;
all he knew was that he was walking, walking endlessly, sometimes
through streets that seemed dimly familiar, at other times with all the
surroundings singularly strange.

Finally he found himself climbing what he took to be the steps of
the Alamo Building to his rooms, drenched and permeated now with an
overpowering desire to sleep. In some odd way the steps did not seem
quite right; there were not enough of them. And there was a lighted
door at the top which was opened for him before he could reach for the
knob. It was at this conjuncture that reasoning consciousness forsook
him completely. He had a vague impression that somebody--Bromley it
would be, of course,--was leading him somewhere; that his feet, from
being so lately shod with wings, had become unaccountably leaden; that
there were more steps to be climbed; and after that, the oblivion of a
sleep profound and trance-like.

When he awoke he found himself lying, fully clothed, upon a bed in a
strange room. The window shades were drawn, but the morning sun was
shining upon them. On the edge of the bed, with her single garment
slipping over one shoulder, sat a girl with carmined lips and pencilled
eyebrows; she was laughing at him and saying: “Had a good sleep,
honey?” adding: “You certainly had a lovely jag on last night when you
turned up here. Did somebody dope you?”

Philip leaped up and slewed himself around to sit beside the strange
girl. The quick movement set a trip-hammer pounding in his head, and he
had to wince and press his temples and wait a minute before he could
master the throbbing pain and say, “Where am I?”

“As if you didn’t know!” she gibed. “You sure had a skinful, but I
guess you still knew enough to come where you’d be took care of. Here’s
your pocketbook. Wonder somebody didn’t nip it off you before you got
here.”

Slowly he began to realize where he was.

“Are you trying to tell me that I’ve been here all night, with you?”

“Oh, no; not with me; not any; just with yourself. A cannon wouldn’t
’ve waked you after we got you up-stairs.”

“What made you take me in?”

The girl laughed again and pointed at the pocketbook in his hands.

“That, and your good clothes. The madam said she knew you wasn’t no
dead-beat.”

Soberly he took a bank-note from the well-stuffed pocketbook and gave
it to her.

“Is that enough?” he asked. “I’m new to this sort of thing.”

The girl flung her arms around his neck and kissed him.

“You’re a dandy--a prince!” she said; and as he staggered to his feet
and reached for his hat: “Have you got to go, right away? If you’ll
wait, I’ll dig you up a cup of coffee for a bracer.”

“No; I’ll go.”

“All right; I’ll show you the way out. There ain’t nobody else up in
the house yet. It’s early.”

She ran down the stair ahead of him and snapped the night latch on the
front door to let him out. As he passed her she patted him softly on
the shoulder. “Good-by, honey, dear. You’ll come back again, won’t you?
And next time, for Pete’s sake, don’t get so parboiled that you won’t
know me.”

When he reached the sidewalk he turned to look back at the place.
He knew the house. It was one that Middleton had pointed out to him
a year in the past as one of the few places of the sort where, as
the fat-faced tonnage clerk had phrased it, “a man needn’t carry a
burglar-proof safe with him to be sure of finding his wallet when he
wakes up in the morning.”

Philip looked at his watch. It had run down and he swore at it under
his breath. The aftermath of the single gluttonous drink was still with
him in the shape of a parched throat, a dry tongue, a fiercely aching
head and a set of jangled nerves. At first, he thought he would go to
his rooms and take a cold bath; but after he had gone a block or two in
that direction he changed his mind and once more sought the saloon in
the rear of the Tabor Building. The night bartender was still on duty
and he grinned when Philip came in.

“Want a little of the hair o’ the dog that bit you, I reckon?” he said,
setting out the bottle and glasses.

Philip poured a drink, a small one, this time, and since the mere smell
of the liquor gagged him, he held his nose as he drank. The stimulant
steadied the twittering nerves; and it did more--it cleared his
brain and brought the desolating revelation of the night back with a
vividness that hurt like the stabbing of needles. He set his watch by
the bar-room clock. As the girl in the other street had said, it was
quite early. Bromley would not be up yet. Suddenly it came to him that
he could not face Bromley; not yet, at any rate. He must eat breakfast
first; and he went around to Charpiot’s for the meal.

The breakfast, a light one, for his stomach was still in revolt, was
hastily despatched; and as he was leaving the table the play-boy came
in.

“Hello, there!” he exclaimed. “You are still in town? I looked into
your room and saw your bed hadn’t been slept in, so I concluded you’d
taken a night train to somewhere.”

“No,” Philip replied soberly; “I haven’t been out of town.”

“Well, don’t rush off. Sit down and be neighborly while I get a bite of
breakfast.”

“No,” Philip repeated, “I’ve got to go.” Then he turned back and forced
himself to look his partner in the eyes. “That matter we were talking
about last night before you went to the theater: I’m not going to take
that room at the Dabneys’. You are the one to go there.”

The play-boy looked his surprise.

“Why--what’s the matter with you, Phil? When I spoke of it last night,
I thought you looked tickled purple.”

“Last night was last night, and this morning is another day. Say that
I don’t care to give up the stuffy luxuries of the apartment in the
Alamo, if you like. Anyway, I’m not going to move; that is all there
is to it.”

And with this curt refusal he turned his back upon his partner and left
the dining-room.




XVII


PASSING out through the hotel office with one thought effacing all
others, namely, that companionship of any sort was not to be endured,
Philip, a prey to the instinctive urge that drives the wounded animal
to seek a hiding place, pulled his hat over his eyes, signalled to a
passing cab and got in, telling the driver to take him to the Alamo
Building.

Reaching his rooms, he scribbled a note for Bromley, merely saying
that he was going out of town, filled a travelling-bag, jamming things
into it with little regard for long-established habits of care and
orderliness, and was presently on his way to the Union Depot, urging
the cab driver to haste and still more haste. By a margin of seconds
he caught the South Park train for Leadville; and as the short string
of top-heavy, narrow-gauge cars went swaying and lurching out over the
switches in the West Denver yard, he was choosing an isolated seat in
the chair-car where he could settle himself to look the catastrophic
revelation of the night fairly in the face.

With the scene of the revelation actually withdrawing into the
distance, a vast incredulity seized him. Could it be possible that
he had grown up in daily association with his father without so much
as suspecting the existence of the iron-hard, desperate underman
biding its time beneath an exterior so like that of other men in his
walk of life as to be wholly unremarkable? It seemed fantastically
unbelievable. Yet, in looking back upon the conventional New England
home life he saw how it might be so.

The atmosphere of the home, as he had always known it, had been one
of silent restraint, and there had been nothing like man-to-man
comradeship between his father and himself. Not that this was at all
singular. He had known many other households in the homeland in which
the same spirit of reticence and aloofness, the same repression of
all the emotions, were the natural order of things. The attitude was
ingrained in the bone and blood; a heritage which, as he now realized,
was his and his forebears’; the bequeathing of the stern stock which
had fled from tyranny in England only to set up a repressive tyranny of
its own in the new land beyond the sea.

But such reflections as these did not serve to lessen the completeness,
the crushing completeness, of the blow that had fallen. Where was now
that righteous pride of race he had paraded before Jean Dabney, the
boast of honest and upright ancestors he had so confidently made?--he,
the son of a thief, a gambler, a hardened breaker of the laws of God
and man. Of what use to him now was the growing hoard of gold in the
Denver bank, since it could never buy back that which was irretrievably
lost? How could he go on living from day to day with the knowledge that
the accident of any day might give some sensation-mongering newspaper
reporter the chance to write up Lucky-strike Trask of the “Little Jean”
as the son of a well-known local faro-dealer and sporting man? In his
mind’s eye he could visualize the mocking headlines, and a wave of
impotent rage, the agony of a tortured ego, swept over him.

He had no desire to eat when the train halted at the midday dinner
station and did not leave his place in the chair-car. Later, through
the long afternoon, he looked out, with eyes that saw without
perceiving, upon the passing panorama of canyon cliffs and forested
mountain slopes, of undulating distances in the South Park and the
uplifted peaks of the Mosquito Range, deep in the misery of his
wounding; aghast at the prospect of the future. It was with an added
degree of wretchedness that he realized that his love for Jean Dabney,
restrained and calmly calculated hitherto, seemed to have been set free
in the chaotic crash of things, blazing up in passionate intensity
now that its object was, as he told himself bitterly, snatched out of
reach. That he could never go to her with the story of his humiliating
discovery was the first sickening conclusion that had burned itself
into his consciousness; and now this was followed by the appalling
after-conclusion that he could not go to her at all; that the discovery
in the gambling hell had cut him off at once and irrevocably from all
association with her.

It was only natural that the thought of his own lapse, the fact that he
had taken his first drink and in the drunkenness of it had spent the
night in a brothel, seemed of small account in the general wreck. With
the family honor already dragged so deeply in the mire of disgrace and
criminality, what he might or might not do made little difference one
way or the other. Not that he cherished as yet any desperate or boyish
determination to take a fool’s revenge by plunging into dissipation.
There was only a dull indifference. Pride was dead and the barriers of
self-control had been broken down, but life still had to be lived, in
some fashion.

Upon arriving in Leadville he had himself driven to the hotel where he
and Bromley had put up after they had come out of the mountains with
Drew in the spring. Still having no desire to eat, he tried to smoke;
and when the pipe, on an empty stomach, nauseated him, he went to the
bar and called for a drink. As in the morning, the swallow or two of
whiskey wrought a miracle and he sought the dining-room and ate a
hearty meal. Afterward, with a mild cigar that had none of the dizzying
effects of the empty-stomach pipe, he sat in the lobby, and it was
there that Drew ran across him.

“Back with us again, are you?” was the genial promoter’s greeting as
he drew up a chair and planted himself in it for his own after-dinner
smoke. “When did you reach?”

“Just an hour or so ago,” Philip answered, surprised to find himself
able to tolerate and even to welcome the companionship of the older
man. “I came up on the South Park day train.”

“And how is Henry Wigglesworth? Still making a quiet joke of the world
at large?”

“Harry is all right. Good luck hasn’t spoiled him, as I was afraid it
might.”

“Inclined to be a little wild, was he?” Drew remarked.

“When I first met him, yes. And I was foolish enough to think that
I had to brother him. Queer what notions a man gets into his head,
sometimes.”

Though he did not look aside, he knew that Drew was regarding him
curiously.

“You come of brothering stock, don’t you, Trask?”

“At one time I was ass enough to think so. That was another of the
queer notions. How is the ‘Little Jean’ coming along?”

“Splendidly. The vein values are increasing as we drive in on the lode.
We are making another clean-up from the plates this week, and you’ll
get a dividend that will warm the cockles of your heart.”

“Money,” said Philip half contemptuously. “When you don’t have it, it’s
the most desirable thing in the world. And when you get it----” he
broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished.

The promoter smiled. “Money is only a means to an end, of course. If it
is not too personal a question, what are you doing with yours?”

“Nothing, as yet. Bromley is investing his share here and there,
setting me a good example. But I haven’t followed it.”

From that the talk went back to the gulch on the western slope, and
Drew told how the shut-in valley had been overrun by prospectors as
soon as the snow was off. A few small leads had been discovered higher
up the gulch, but nothing at all comparable with the “Little Jean.”
Reference to the hard winter the discoverers of the “Little Jean” had
put in led Drew to ask about Garth; and the mention of the big miner’s
name stabbingly reminded Philip of the chance incident in which
Garth had figured, and which had led up to the blotting out of all
recollection of him.

“Garth is in Denver; or he was yesterday,” he replied.

“Pity about Jim,” said the promoter. “At bottom he’s a man, right; but
he can’t let liquor and the paste-boards alone. He has been moderately
well-fixed at least three times, to my certain knowledge, and each time
he has blown it all; gambled it and given it away--or so much of it as
he didn’t pass across the bar.”

Philip was conscious of a curious little shock when he realized that
this cataloguing of Garth’s weaknesses now stirred no resentful or
condemnatory emotion in him.

“Perhaps that is the way in which he gets the most out of life,” he
offered colorlessly. “There is no accounting for the difference in
tastes.”

“No; but Big Jim is really worth saving, if somebody would take the
trouble,” Drew put in, adding: “I don’t suppose anybody has ever cared
enough for him to try to brace him up--at least, nobody since his wife
died.”

“He was married?” Philip queried. “I worked beside him all winter and
never knew that.”

“It was one of those cases you read about--and seldom see in real
life,” Drew went on reminiscently. “It happened in one of the intervals
when Jim was on top, financially. A gambler, whose name I have
forgotten, brought a girl here from the East--a ‘chippy,’ I suppose
you’d call her--abused her shamefully, made her support him for a time
and then abandoned her. Jim heard about it, and after marrying the
girl off-hand, hunted up the gambler and shot him within an inch of
his life. The girl turned out to be a jewel as Jim’s wife; stuck to
him through thick and thin, and actually got him to stop drinking and
gambling. Then the altitude, and the hard life she had lived before she
met Jim, grabbed her and she died. Naturally, poor old Jim went all to
pieces again.”

“Naturally,” Philip agreed. His eyes were narrowed and he was conscious
of a curious deadening of the heart. The story of Garth’s tragedy did
not move him as it would have moved him no longer ago than yesterday.
Instead, he was asking himself why Garth shouldn’t take to drink and
dissipation to drown his grief? For that matter, why shouldn’t any man,
if he happened to lean that way?

Drew looked at his watch and rose.

“I have an appointment that I was about to forget,” he said. “Intending
to stop over with us for a while?”

“Perhaps. I haven’t made any plans.”

“All right; we’ll get together again. While you are here, my office
is at your disposal, of course. Come around and make it your loafing
place.”

After Drew had left him, Philip lighted another of the mild cigars
and took to the streets, walking until he was sodden with weariness.
Again and again the meager details of Garth’s tragedy passed themselves
in review. So the big miner had once made his little gesture of
righteousness by marrying a woman of the class for which the world
has no place of repentance, had he? That was fine! How crassly he had
misjudged Garth. Bromley’s insight had been better. Was the play-boy’s
assumption that there was no hard-and-fast line to be drawn between the
sheep and the goats--that there was good in the worst and bad in the
best--the right one, after all?

Philip’s thoughts went back to the scene of the early morning when
he had awakened to find a girl with pencilled eyebrows and painted
lips sitting on the edge of his bed in the strange room. “Scum of the
earth,” he had been calling her and her kind; and yet she, and her
still more degraded house mistress, had taken him in and cared for him,
and had not robbed him and turned him helpless into the street, as
they might have done. He had a vivid picture of the girl sitting there
and laughing at him as he opened his eyes. She was pretty, in a way,
and her talk and manner had given him the impression of recklessness
and misguiding rather than hardness. Was she one of these who are more
sinned against than sinning? He wondered.

Tired out finally, he returned to the hotel and went to bed. In the
life which was already withdrawing into a far-away past he had always
been able to fall asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow; but
now, though it was past midnight and he was weary to utter exhaustion,
sleep would not come. Over and over the harrowing details of the
discovery of his father and the scene in the upper room over the
gambling den rehearsed themselves as he tossed and tumbled and tried to
banish them; and at last, in sheer desperation, he got up and dressed
and went down to the lobby floor. The bar-room was closed, and he
appealed to the night clerk, money in hand.

“I’m sick and can’t sleep,” he said. “Couldn’t you break in back there
and get me a drink? I don’t want to take to the streets at this time of
night.”

The clerk smiled knowingly. “Got a hang-over, have you? I guess I can
fix you.” He disappeared, to return presently with a pint bottle of
whiskey. “Think that will do the business for you?” he asked.

“Yes; thanks. Don’t bother about the change.”

Once more in his room, he slipped out of his clothes, took a stiff
drink, and stretched himself upon the bed. In a little time the curious
and altogether pleasant feeling of levitation came and he floated off
through a spacious region of dreams which grew vaguer and vaguer until
they vanished in an abyss of forgetfulness.




XVIII


BROMLEY had been occupying the spare bed-room in the Dabney cottage
for nearly a fortnight on the Saturday when, calling at the Windsor
Hotel to tell the Follansbees about a bargain in furnished houses he
had happened to hear of, he saw Stephen Drew registering in at the room
clerk’s desk and crossed the lobby to shake hands with him.

“This is a piece of luck,” said the lessee of the “Little Jean,”
after the greetings were passed. “I didn’t know your address and was
expecting to have to dig you up through the bank or the post-office. I
came down on business, but also I was anxious to get hold of you. If
you have a few minutes to spare----?”

“All the time there is,” returned the play-boy cheerfully, leading the
way to a couple of the lobby chairs. Then, with a laugh: “I hope you
are not going to tell me the ‘Little Jean’ is petering out.”

“Nothing like that. The mine is all right. The values are increasing,
as your next dividend will show. I wanted to talk to you about Trask.
Do you know where he is?”

“I haven’t the remotest idea. He dropped out between two minutes one
morning early last week, leaving a note which merely said that he was
vanishing. It’s all right, though. He has been making a good many
swings around the circle in the past month or so, on a sort of still
hunt for his--for a man he is trying to find.”

“Did you see him before he left Denver this last time?”

“Why, yes; I was with him the evening before he left; and I saw him,
for just a minute or two, the next morning.”

“Anything wrong with him then?”

Bromley took time to think back. Previous to that brittle meeting in
the breakfast-room at Charpiot’s, Philip had been out, somewhere, all
night. Now that he recalled it, he remembered that the meeting had
been only momentary; that Philip had looked rather the worse for wear;
that his refusal to take the spare room in the Dabney cottage had been
almost brutal in its abruptness.

“I can’t say there was anything definitely wrong,” he replied. “I
remember he looked a bit gloomy and wrought up, but that is nothing new
for him. He has pretty bad attacks of the New England conscience at
times--if you know what that means.”

Drew nodded. “I understand. But that isn’t to the point just now. Your
partner is in Leadville, and he is badly in need of a friend; somebody
near enough and intimate enough to take him by the neck.”

Bromley laughed easily.

“There must be some mistake about that. Philip, himself, is the one who
rushes around taking people by the neck.”

“You are off wrong, this time,” the promoter cut in shortly. “I don’t
believe he has been entirely sober at any one time during the past two
weeks, and he seems to be permeated with an idea that he can use up
all the red paint there is and break all the gambling banks in the camp
if he only sticks at it long enough.”

“Good heavens!” Bromley gasped; “not _Philip_!”

“Yes, Philip. Of course, I understand that it’s none of my business,
but I hate to see such a fine, upstanding fellow as he is go to the
devil in a hand-basket. Has he had trouble of any sort?”

Bromley took a moment to consider whether or not he had a right to
breach Philip’s confidence in the matter of the search for his father,
and decided quickly that the present crisis warranted it. Very briefly
he told Drew the little he knew about the Trask family tragedy, and of
the futile search Philip had been making.

“Ah,” said the shrewd-witted developer of mines, “that may be the clue.
You say Philip believed in his father’s innocence?”

“Absolutely and utterly. But from what he has told me, I gathered that
he was pretty much alone in that belief; that, as a matter of fact, not
even the other members of the family shared it.”

“I see. Then that may be the key to the present situation. Trask is
pretty sensitive on the family honor question, and all that, isn’t he?”

“Exceedingly so. It, and his conscience, are his little tin gods.”

“There you are, then. You say his search for his father has been
futile. You don’t know positively that it was, do you?”

“It was, up to the night before he went to Leadville.”

“Well, many a man has had his world turned upside down for him between
dark and daylight in a single night. Whatever the cause may have been,
the effects are as I have indicated. Philip is setting a pace that not
even a half-share in a gold mine can stand indefinitely. If you think
you can do anything with him, you’d better go after him. As I say, he
is needing a friend mighty badly.”

“Sure I’ll go,” agreed the play-boy promptly. “I owe Philip a lot more
than I’ll ever be able to pay. And you mustn’t judge him by this one
fall-down, Mr. Drew. There are some people who suffer most from an
excess of their virtues--if you know what I mean--and Philip is one
of those. He has stood up stiff and straight all his life, and when a
fellow who lives that way gets bowled over----”

“I know,” assented the man of large experience. “The greatest danger in
a case of that kind lies in that ‘excess of the virtues’ you speak of.
When the barriers are once thrown down, the job of rebuilding them is
apt to seem hopeless.”

“That is where it will hit Phil the hardest, I’m sure. But we won’t
hope for the worst. Are you stopping over for a few days?”

“Until Monday or Tuesday. Are your quarters here in the Windsor?”

“Oh, no; I have a boarding place in West Denver--with friends. I’m here
just now to call upon some other friends--people from Philadelphia. And
that reminds me: you said you used to live in Philadelphia; perhaps you
know these friends of mine--the Follansbees?”

“Not Judge John?”

“You have called the turn; Judge John and Mrs. Judge John and Tom and
Eugenia and Lucy Ann.”

“You don’t tell me! I know the judge and his wife very well, indeed;
and the children, too, though they were only children in my time. You
say they are here, in the hotel?”

“Yes. Wait a minute and I’ll carry the word to them.”

He was gone only a short time, and when he returned to the lobby, the
judge and Mrs. Follansbee came with him. He stood aside while the three
were happily bridging the gap of the years, and at the first lull he
broke in smoothly to say to Drew: “Mrs. Follansbee has been good enough
to include me in a dinner party for this evening, and I have just told
her that I am unexpectedly obliged to leave town, but I was quite sure
you would be willing to substitute for me.”

“Of course you will, Stephen,” put in the lady patroness, surveying
the stocky figure of the promoter through her lorgnette; then, with
a sigh for the vanished years: “My, my; what a man you’ve grown to
be! I should never have known you, with that clipped beard and the
eyeglasses. Can’t you spare a few minutes to come up to our suite and
see Eugenia and Lucy Ann? They both remember you.”

Bromley glanced at his watch and slipped away. He had promised to take
Jean Dabney to luncheon, and there was barely time to reach Madame
Marchande’s place in Sixteenth Street by the appointed noon hour.
When he did reach the millinery shop he found Jean waiting on the
sidewalk for him, and he took her to a new chop house lately opened
in the block next to the St. James, steering clear of the subject that
was uppermost in his mind until after they were seated in one of the
box-like private stalls and their order had been given and served. Then
he began without preface.

“I want to ask you something about Philip, Jean. He walked home with
you a week ago last Monday evening, didn’t he?”

“Let me think,” she answered reflectively. “To-day is Saturday; yes, it
was a week ago Monday.”

“Did he--did he act as though he was especially troubled about
anything?”

“Why, no; not that I saw. I remember he scolded me a little because he
seemed to think I wasn’t quite as savagely righteous as I ought to be.
But he has done that lots of times. He walks so straight himself that
he can’t bear to see anybody lean over, ever so little.”

Bromley winced. If Drew’s story were true--and there was no reason to
doubt it--Philip was not walking straight now; he was grovelling. What
would Jean say if she knew? He had not meant to tell her what he had
just heard; did not yet mean to tell her. Still, she would have to
know, some time. If he could only be sure that the knowledge wouldn’t
smash her.... He would have to feel his way carefully.

“I am wondering if Philip ever told you anything about his father,” he
said; and he tried to say it casually.

“Oh, yes; he has told me all there was to tell, I think: how his father
went away under a--under a cloud, and how he has been searching for
him out here. Was that what you meant?”

Bromley nodded. There was nothing in her tone or manner to lead him to
believe that she had anything more than a friendly interest in Philip’s
problem, and he went on.

“He has been away for two weeks, or nearly two weeks. He left town the
next morning after he walked home with you that Monday evening. He
didn’t tell me where he was going. Did he tell you?”

“He said he might go to the camps down in the San Juan next. But he
didn’t say anything about going so soon. Haven’t you heard from him
since that time?”

“No; he hasn’t written me,” Bromley hastened to say, telling a
half-truth which was little short of a lie direct.

“But you are not anxious about him, are you?”

“Anxious? Why should I be?”

“But I think you are,” she said, looking him fairly in the eyes.

As upon certain other occasions, he tried hard to plumb the depths of
the dark eyes that were lifted to his, striving to read the answer to
a question that had been tormenting him ever since his first meeting
with her. How much did she care for Philip? Was she as much in love
with him as he was with her? If she were, this was neither the time nor
the place for the repeating of Drew’s story. But if she were not ... he
made up his mind suddenly and took the plunge.

“Jean, you know you can trust me to the limit, don’t you? Tell me
honestly what there is between you and Philip.”

“What there is between us?” The steady gaze of the dark eyes did not
waver. “We are friends, of course; good friends, I hope.”

“Nothing more?”

“What more could there be?”

“Then I may talk to you just as I might to any other friend of his?”

“I don’t know why you shouldn’t.” Tone and manner both gave him the
assurance that he might go on; that there was nothing more vital to be
wounded than the friendship she had admitted.

“Something has happened to Philip. I lied to you a minute ago--said I
hadn’t heard from Phil. I haven’t, not directly; but Mr. Drew is down
from Leadville, and he tells me that Philip is up in the big camp,
ripping things wide open. I couldn’t believe it--can hardly believe it
yet.”

The deep-welled eyes were downcast now, and Bromley held his breath. If
there were a little quiver of the sensitive lips when she spoke, the
play-boy missed it--missed everything but the steady tone of her reply.

“I have been afraid of something like that, haven’t you? Of course, you
know what has happened?”

“I don’t--I can’t imagine!”

“It is perfectly plain. He has found his father.”

“You think that is it?”

“I am sure of it.”

“But, even so--” he began.

“Don’t you see? He hasn’t--he didn’t find things as he hoped to find
them. Don’t you know him well enough to know what that would do to him?”

It was said coolly enough, almost coldly; and Bromley marvelled. He
had never imagined she could be so dispassionate. Before he could pull
himself around to some half-way adequate matching of her mood, she went
on:

“Philip has always walked in a very narrow and straight path for
himself, and he is very proud, in his own way. If something has
happened to break his pride.... I know that is what _has_ happened; I
am sure of it.”

The play-boy drew a deep breath. The worst was over, and it wasn’t
nearly as bad as he had feared it would be. Either she didn’t care,
any more than a friendly soul should care, or she had more adamantine
self-control than had fallen to the share of any other woman he had
ever known.

“I’m going up after him to-night,” he said. “When I get him back here
you’ll have to help me.”

“Of course--if I can,” she agreed. “But if it is as I think it is, I’m
afraid neither of us will be able to help him very much.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Just because he is what he is. Some people have to be helped; they
can’t get up unless they are helped. But there are others--and Philip
is one of them--who have to fight their way back the best they can,
alone. It’s hard to think of it that way, for a--for a friend. But it
is true.”

Bromley forced himself to smile.

“You are a very wise little woman, much wiser than your years call
for. But see here--you’re not eating enough to keep a kitten alive. How
do you expect to be able to work if you don’t eat?”

“I’m not as hungry as I thought I was. It’s the hot weather, maybe.”

“Couldn’t you eat another cream puff if I should order it?”

“No, thank you. Besides, my time is up. I know it isn’t nice to eat and
run, but if you _will_ invite a working girl out to luncheon, you’ll
have to take the consequences.”

He walked back to the door of the millinery shop with her and at the
moment of parting she said, “You’ll be gentle with Philip when you find
him, won’t you? It won’t do any good to be the other way.”

“I shall take him by the neck,” he threatened good-naturedly, adding:
“He’s old enough and man enough to have better sense.” Then: “I’m going
to be fearfully busy this afternoon. Do you suppose Mysie could pack my
grip for me if I should send a messenger after it with a note?”

“Mysie would be dreadfully humbled if she could hear you ask such a
thing as that,” she smiled. “She isn’t the child you seem to persist in
believing her to be. She will be sixteen in a few days. How long do you
think you will be away?”

“Heaven knows; no longer than I can help, you may be sure. Good-by;
take care of yourself, and don’t work too hard. If you want to do
anything for me while I’m gone, just say a little prayer or two. It
runs in my mind that I may need all the help I can get. Good-by.”

Having become, in a desultory way, a working capitalist, or at least
an investing one, Bromley had a number of business matters to be
despatched before he could leave town for an indefinite stay. None
the less, out of a well-filled afternoon he clipped time enough
to go around to the Colorado National Bank where Philip kept his
account. Since he was known in the bank as Philip’s partner, he had
no difficulty in finding out what he wished to learn. Philip had been
drawing heavily on his checking account during the two weeks, and
the drafts had all come through Leadville banks. Bromley asked for
the approximate figure and gasped when he was told that the recent
withdrawals totalled something over twenty thousand dollars.

Quartered in the sleeper for the night run to Leadville, Bromley,
generously distressed, was still groping for some reasonable solution
to the problem presented by Philip’s wild splash into the sea of
dissipation--a plunge so wholly out of keeping with his character. Was
Jean’s guess that he had found his father, and that the discovery had
proved to be a calamity instead of a cause for rejoicing, the right
one? If not, what other upsetting thing could have happened between
half-past seven in the Monday evening, when he had left Philip in their
common sitting-room in the Alamo Building, and the next morning when he
had met him leaving the breakfast-table in Charpiot’s? Where had Philip
spent the night? And what had occurred during those few unaccounted-for
hours to put a look of morbid gloom in his eyes and to make him refuse,
almost savagely, to become an inmate of the West Denver cottage?

“He’d had a knock-down fight of some sort with that strait-laced
conscience of his, I suppose, and it must have been a bloody one to
make him let go all holds like this,” the play-boy told himself,
balancing on the edge of the made-down berth to take off his shoes as
the train began its swaying, wheel-shrilling climb in the snake-like
sinuosities of Platte Canyon. Then, as he drew the curtains and essayed
the irritating task of undressing in the dark, cramped berth, with the
car careening to right and left like a ship at sea: “He’ll find it bad
medicine and bitter; but if it will only end by making a normal human
man of him....”

It was deep in the night, and the train was halted at a mountain-side
station, when Bromley awoke, shivering in the chill of the high
altitude, and sat up to reach for the extra blanket at the foot of
the berth. As he did so, a thunderous murmur in the air announced the
approach of the Denver-bound train for which his own was side-tracked,
and he ran a window shade up to look out just as the eastbound train,
with its miniature locomotive and short string of cars, coasted down,
with brake-shoes grinding, to the meeting-point stop.

Reflecting upon it afterward, he thought it a most curious coincidence
that the night chill should have awakened him just at this time, and
that the momentary stop of the opposing train should place the one pair
of lighted windows in its single Pullman opposite his own darkened
one. While one might have counted ten he sat staring, wide-eyed,
across the little space separating the two standing trains. The
lighted windows opposite were those in the smoking compartment of the
eastbound sleeper. Around the little table bracketed between the seats
sat three men with cards in their hands and stacks of red, white and
blue counters before them. Though two of the men were unknown to the
play-boy, he was able instantly to label them as birds of prey. The
third man was Philip; a Philip so changed and wasted by two weeks of
unrestraint as to be scarcely recognizable.

As Bromley looked he saw one of the birds of prey pass a flat pocket
bottle across the table; and his final glimpse through the lighted
window as the down train slid away showed him Philip with his head
thrown back and the tilted bottle at his lips.

“Good Lord!” groaned the play-boy, falling back upon his pillows, “Drew
didn’t stretch it an inch! Those two blacklegs will strip Phil to the
skin before they let go of him and before they will let him get sober
enough to realize what they’re doing to him! And I’ve got to go through
to Leadville and come all the way back before I can get a chance to
stick my oar in!” At the word the westbound train began to move, and he
pulled the blankets up to his ears, muttering again: “There’s only one
ray of comfort in the whole desperate business, and that is that Jean
isn’t going to break her heart over this diabolic blow-up of Philip’s.
I’m glad I took the trouble to make sure of that, anyhow.”

But if, at this precise moment of midnight, he could have looked into
the bed-room next to his own in the West Denver cottage, the room
occupied by Jean and her sister Mysie, the comforting reflection might
have lost something of its force. The younger sister was sleeping
peacefully, but the elder had slipped quietly out of bed to kneel at
the open, westward-fronting window with her shoulders shaking and her
face buried in the crook of a bare white arm.




XIX


THOUGH Bromley, swiftly changing from the up to the down train on the
Sunday morning arrival in Leadville, should have won back to Denver at
six o’clock Sunday evening, a freight wreck on the Kenosha Mountain
grade held him up, and it was between nine and ten when, tired as he
was by more than twenty-four hours of mountain railroad travel, he set
out in search of Philip, making the rooms of the Alamo Building his
starting point.

To his relief, the lighted transom assured him that the sitting-room
was occupied; and when there was no answer to his knock, he opened the
door noiselessly and entered. At first he thought the hunched figure in
the hollowed-out easy chair beside the reading table was in a drunken
stupor; but when he drew nearer he saw that the fancied stupor was
merely a deep sleep of exhaustion. Silently placing a chair for himself
on the other side of the table, he lighted his pipe and waited. After a
time the sleeper in the hollowed chair stirred, stretched his arms over
his head, and, at the smell of live tobacco smoke, opened his eyes and
sat up with a jerk.

“You?” he muttered, blinking across the table at the play-boy.

“It’s nobody else. Had a good nap?”

Philip’s wordless response was to get up and reach for a half-emptied
bottle standing on a bookcase; but Bromley stopped him.

“Let that alone, Phil--for the moment, anyway; long enough to tell me
what has hit you. You owe me that much, at least.”

Philip sank back into the sleepy-hollow chair. “How much do you know?”
he demanded sullenly.

“What Stephen Drew could tell me, added to what I happened to see at
midnight last night when your train on the South Park met mine at the
passing point in the mountains.”

“You were going to Leadville to hunt me up?”

“Yes. Drew told me you needed to be knocked down and dragged out.”

Philip’s dull eyes glowed suddenly. “I ought to have had a gun last
night!” he broke out savagely. “Those two tinhorns robbed me blind!”

“Of course they did. That is what they were out for. No, wait; I’m not
going to preach. I grant you it’s every man’s privilege to go to the
devil in his own fashion. Still, I’m a trifle curious.”

Silence for the space of a long minute. Then: “You wouldn’t understand,
Harry; I couldn’t make you understand if I should try. Say that the
cursed atmosphere of this God-forsaken country got hold of me at last
and that I stubbed my toe and fell down. That will cover it as well as
anything.”

“A good many of us fall down, but we get up again. Have you got to stay
down?”

“It looks that way. I haven’t anything to get up for.”

“Why haven’t you?”

“That question runs you up against a shut door, Harry; a door that
I’ll never open for anybody so long as I can keep it shut. Let that be
understood, once for all.”

“All right; we’ll let it go at that, if you say so. Just the same----”

“Well?”

“Oh, confound it--you know what I want to say, and can’t Phil! You’ve
been more than a brother to me, ever since you picked me up out of the
gutter a year ago and stood me on my two feet. Can’t you see where this
thing hits me?”

Philip leaned forward, elbows on knees, face propped in his hands,
lead-heavy eyes fixed upon the blank wall opposite. When he replied,
the harshness had gone out of his voice.

“I can see a great many things now that I have never been able to see
in the past, Harry ... one of them is that I’ve been a self-blinded
Pharisee all my life. All I needed was a hard enough kick to show me
that at bottom I’m no better than other men; not half as good or as
strong as some other men who make no profession of their goodness or
strength. I got the kick, finally--no matter how, but I got it--and ...
well, I guess I have found my level. I’ve been in hell for the last
fourteen days and nights, and if I am just beginning to struggle out,
it is at the bottom and not at the top.”

Bromley was silent for a little time; then he said huskily: “You’re
not going to break with me, Phil? I couldn’t stand for that, you know.
You will have to go your own way, I suppose; but wherever you go, or
whatever you do, I’m still your partner. Just remember that when the
pull comes the hardest, won’t you?”

“I’ll try to. But you can’t do anything for me, Harry; nobody can. I’ve
walked deliberately into the devil’s wood and got lost. If there is
any way out--as there doesn’t seem to be now--I’ve got to find it for
myself. Can you understand that?”

“Perhaps I can.” Another silence, and then Bromley went on: “What shall
I say to Jean?--or will you say it to her yourself?”

“You know very well I won’t say it myself. If you tell her anything you
must tell her the plain truth: that the man she has known as Philip
Trask was a sorry hypocrite; a whited sepulchre, with the cleanliness
all on the outside and full of dead men’s bones within.”

“It isn’t that bad, Philip.”

“Yes it is; just that bad. I got my kick, as I have said, and it was
hard enough, God knows. Instead of taking it like a man, I went under.
In a single fortnight I have measured all the depths--broken all the
moorings. I have shut myself out of the world of decent people, and
I’ve only decency enough left in me to know that I shall never be able
to look a pure woman in the face again. I have only one comfort now,
Harry, and that is that I have never given Jean any reason to believe
that I was in love with her.”

“You are sure of that, are you?”

“Yes; quite sure. After the fatuous fashion of the complete Pharisee I
have been holding off, telling myself that there was plenty of time,
that I would wait until----” he stopped abruptly, and Bromley finished
the sentence for him, not without an edge in his tone.

“You’d wait until the peach was fully ripe; then you’d reach up and
pluck it.”

“No,” was the sober denial, made with no touch of resentment. “You must
give the devil his due, Harry. It wasn’t altogether as rotten as that,
though maybe it did lean a little that way, at times. Never mind; it’s
all over now. You have a free field.”

“I?”

“Yes. I haven’t been blind. Jean is heart-free, and I saw at once that
it was going to lie between us two. I’m eliminated.”

The edge had gone out of the play-boy’s voice and there was a faint
smile at the bottom of his eyes when he said: “But, according to the
way you stack things up, I am just as much of a false alarm as you are.
Heaven knows, I’ve waded fully as deep in the mud as you have in the
mire.”

“No; there is a difference. I know it now. Whatever you have done, you
have contrived somehow, in some way, to keep your soul out of the mud.
Flout the idea if you want to, but I know. I’ve lived with you for
something better than a year and know what I’m talking about.”

Another interval of silence, and at the end of it Bromley got upon his
feet.

“You are off?” said Philip, without looking up.

“Yes, I must go. I’m train-tired and perishing for a bath. You’re not
meaning to run away from Denver, are you?”

“Oh, no; I suppose not. There is nowhere to run to.”

At the door Bromley paused with his hand on the knob.

“Just one other word, Phil--and you may throw a chair at me if it bites
too hard: you’re no gambler. I mean you can’t hold your own against the
crooks and short-card men.”

“You are right. I have learned my lesson out of that book this early in
the game. Anything else?”

Bromley pointed to the half-empty bottle on the bookcase.

“That stuff is never much of a friend, and it is always a pretty bad
enemy. I wouldn’t trust it too far, if I were you. There is always a
morning after to follow the night before.”

“Yes; I have learned that, too. I am learning a good many things these
days. I guess I had it coming to me. Are you going? Well, good-night.”

After Bromley had gone, Philip heaved himself wearily out of the deep
chair and began to pace the floor with his head down and his hands
locked behind him. Two weeks of mad, unbridled rebellion against all
the inhibitions had left him weak and shattered in mind and body. Twice
in the circling round of the room he reached for the bottle on the
bookcase, and once he took it up and started to draw the cork. He knew
that a swallow or two of the liquor would steady the twittering nerves,
temporarily, at least; and that if he should drink enough of it, he
could go to bed and sleep.

But the good fighting strength which had been his up to that fatal
Monday evening a fortnight in the past, broken and spent though it was,
strove to make itself felt. Had it already come to this, that he could
no longer go to sleep without first drugging himself with whiskey? If
two short weeks of indulgence had thus far maimed and crippled him,
how long could he hope to delay the descent into the lowest gutter of
degradation?

“No, by God!” he exclaimed finally. “No more of it to-night--not if I
have to lie awake in hell till daylight!” And, such is the strength
derivable from even a partial resistance to temptation, he went to bed
and slept the clock around.




XX


BEING gratefully appreciative of a good bed after a night and a day in
a narrow-gauge Pullman, Bromley slept late on the morning following
his return to Denver; and when he put in an appearance in the cottage
dining-room he found that the family had already breakfasted and
Jean had gone to her work. Sixteen-year-old Mysie, housewifely and
starry-eyed, was the only member of the household visible, and it was
she who poured his coffee and made the toast.

“Did I disturb you folks when I came in last night?” he asked.

“Jeanie said she heard you; but nothing ever wakes me. I’m the
sleepy-head of the family. Are your eggs cooked right?”

“How could they be otherwise if you cooked them?” said the play-boy
gallantly. He liked to make Mysie talk. More than either of her sisters
she retained the soft Southern speech with its submerged “r’s” and
lingering vowels. “Where is Mary Louise this fine morning?”

“She and Mummie have gone marketing while it is cool. Shan’t I toast
you another slice?”

Bromley let his eyes rest for a moment upon the fresh, fair young face
opposite. The elder of the two younger girls was a sharp contrast to
Jean, whose dark hair and eyes and warm skin were inheritances from
her far-away French ancestry. As an artist’s model Mysie Dabney might
have posed for an idealized study of blushing innocence awakening, of
sweet girlhood poising for the flight into womanhood.

“You spoil me utterly,” he said, smiling into the wide-open, dewy eyes.
Then: “I wonder if you are old enough to let me ask you a horribly
improper question?”

“Improper? Why, Uncle Harry, I don’t believe you could be improper if
you should try ever so hard!”

Bromley winced at the “Uncle Harry,” though both of the younger girls
had called him that almost from the beginning.

“I’m going to make a bargain with you,” he said lightly. “When is your
birthday?”

“Next Sunday.”

“All right; there is a pretty birthday gift coming to you next Sunday
if you will promise, after that day, to stop calling me ‘uncle.’”

The wide-open eyes opened still wider.

“Why--I thought you liked it!”

“I do--from Mary Louise; from little girls generally. But when you say
it, it makes me feel as though my teeth were coming loose and my hair
falling out--old and decrepit, you know.”

“I wish you’d listen!” she laughed. “What do you want me to call
you--after next Sunday?--‘Misteh Bromley?’”

“Oh, dear me, no; that is ever so much worse! Couldn’t you make it just
plain ‘Harry,’ without the ‘uncle’?”

He saw a faint wave of color rising to the fair neck and cheeks, and
the down-dropped eyes were no longer those of a child.

“I--I’ll try,” she promised; then, as one stepping lightly from ground
tremulous to ground firm: “What is the improper question that isn’t
going to be improper?”

“It is about Jean, and if you don’t want to answer it you can just
make a face at me and tell me it is none of my blessed business. Does
Jean--do you think she cares especially about--er--Philip?”

Again the dewy eyes were downcast. “Jeanie doesn’t talk ve’y much about
herself; I reckon--I mean, I think you know that. Sometimes I surmise
she cares a heap about him, and sometimes I just don’t know.” Then with
a naïveté which stepped well back into childhood: “I don’t think they’d
be ve’y happy together; do you?”

“Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know; maybe it’s just because Mr. Philip is so sort of
don’t-touch-me good; sort of Yankee-good, ain’t--isn’t it?”

Since the Philip of the present moment was neither “Yankee-good” nor
any other kind, Bromley’s reply to the innocent question was strictly
aphoristic.

“When you grow up to be a woman, Mysie, you will know that men are
never any too good,” he returned gravely; at which, declining a second
cup of coffee, he went away before he should be tempted to say more.

Turning up at Madame Marchande’s at noon, he found that Jean had been
given a half-holiday, on account of the slack midsummer season, and had
gone home. After he thought he had given her time enough to eat her
luncheon, he hired a horse and buggy for the afternoon and drove over
to the cottage in West Denver.

“Get your things on and come along with me for a ride,” he invited,
when Jean came out to pet the little white mare from the livery stable.
“I want to have a talk with you.”

“Is it about Philip?” she asked; and when he made the sign of assent,
she went in to get her coat and hat.

For the time it took the smart little mare to whisk them across the
bridge over the Platte, and up to the farther heights on the north side
overlooking the final undulations of the great plain rolling up in
swelling land waves to break against Castle Rock and Table Mountain,
the driving of the spirited little horse gave Bromley an excuse for
postponing the thankless task he had set himself. On the watershed
height between the Platte and Clear Creek, in sight of the great
house that “Brick” Pomeroy had built, or had begun to build, in the
flush times of the Clear Creek mining boom, there was a tiny lake,
tree-shadowed, and on its shore he drove in among the cottonwoods and
got out and hitched the mare.

“I’ve been wanting to show you this glorious view,” he said, as he
helped his companion out of the high, side-bar buggy. “Is there
anything to match it in Mississippi?”

She shook her head. “I think there is nothing like it anywhere else in
the wide world.”

Bromley took the lap-robe from the buggy and spread it under one of
the trees, and for a little time they sat quietly in the face of the
magnificent sweep of mountain grandeurs stretching from Long’s Peak on
the north around to the dim blue bulk of Pike’s on the south. It was
the young woman who broke the spell. “You said you wanted to talk to me
about Philip,” she reminded him. “Did you find him?”

“No. He left Leadville about the same time that I started from Denver.
Our trains passed in the night.”

“Then he is in Denver now?”

“Yes.”

Silence for a time, and then: “You needn’t be afraid to tell me. I’m
not a child.”

“All right; I’ll tell you what little there is to tell. I got in late
and found him in the rooms in the Alamo. He was asleep in a chair when
I went in, but he woke up after a while and talked to me. Drew hadn’t
exaggerated any, whatsoever. Phil has hit the bottom, good and hard.”

“He--he is drinking?”

“It is everything in the calendar, I guess--from what he said.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“No; he said that part of it was a shut door. But he isn’t charging it
up to the ‘why,’ whatever that may be; he is calling it by its right
name--his morbid self-righteousness and weakness.”

“He isn’t weak,” she asserted quickly. “He may say he is, but he isn’t.”

“I am merely telling you what he said. He was bitter about it at first;
called himself all sorts of hard names--whited sepulchre and the like;
but he softened down a bit before I left. What I am most afraid of now
is the reaction which is bound to come.”

“How do you mean?”

Bromley stole a look aside to see how she was taking it. Her gaze
was fixed upon the distant mountain skyline and there was nothing to
indicate that she was moved by any emotion deeper than a friendly
concern for the stumbler.

“We both know Philip pretty well,” he prefaced. “When he quits
coruscating--and I think he has reached that point already--he will
find himself in a valley of humiliation too deep to climb out of; or
he will think it is. So he won’t try to climb; he will merely try to
expiate. And that pit is likely to be as deep and as mucky as any
other.”

“There was no mention made of his father?”

“No. But I am quite ready to accept your guess; that Philip found his
father somewhere--probably that Monday night; and that he didn’t find
what he had hoped to find.”

“You mean he may have found that his father was really a--a--that he
_did_ take the bank’s money?”

“Yes, that’s it. From what Philip has told me I have gathered that he
was almost, or quite, alone in his belief in his father’s innocence. If
it has turned out the other way, that would account for everything that
has happened. Phil would feel that he shared the disgrace.”

Another little interval of silence, and at its end: “What will you do,
Harry?”

“I can’t do anything; he made that perfectly plain. The most I could
get out of him was a promise that he wouldn’t try to break with me. It
is just as you said Saturday at luncheon: he isn’t going to let anybody
help him.”

“No; I knew he wouldn’t. But you must try to keep hold of him.”

“You may be sure I shall do that. You know how much I owe to him--and
to you.”

“You don’t owe me anything at all.”

“Oh, yes, I do. Philip has told me, you know.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That you were the one who prompted him to take me with him on the
prospecting trip a year ago. I was a down-and-out at that time; he knew
it and you knew it.”

She looked up with the light in the dark eyes that he was never quite
able to read or to fathom.

“We were both right: you have proved it. Philip said to me once that
whatever you had done, you had kept your soul clean.”

“He did, eh? He said the same thing to me, no longer ago than last
night. That’s all either of you know about it. A year ago I wasn’t
worth the powder it would have taken to blow me up, Jean; that is the
plain, unvarnished fact. I’m not right sure that I am any better now;
not in Philip’s definition of goodness. Thanks to you and to him, I’ve
got a pot of money; and money brings responsibility; and responsibility
bespeaks some little effort at decent living. There you have it in a
nutshell.”

“I know,” she smiled; “I have heard you talk before.” Then: “You spoke
just now of Philip’s definition of goodness. Don’t you think it is the
right one?”

“Oh, yes; I suppose it is, when you come right down to the foundation
of things. The only danger is that it may breed a prickly lot of
spiritual pride. That was the chief thing that was the matter with
Phil--a pride that made him not only hate the sin, but despise the
sinner. The pride is gone now, and in going it has taken some of the
righteous hardness along with it, which, you might say, is all to the
good. I don’t believe he will ever set himself up in judgment again
upon the poor sinners--which is something gained, isn’t it?”

“Yes; but the price he is paying is terribly high.”

“Sure it is. Yet I’m not losing hope. There are certain mazes in this
thing we call life out of which a man has to grope his own way, if he
can. There is good stuff in Phil--royally good stuff at bottom, as we
both know. If--in the reaction--he doesn’t do something everlastingly
to smash his whole future----”

She nodded slowly. “That is the greatest danger; that he will cut
himself off from every chance of getting back. There are two Denvers
over there,”--with a glance backward at the city of the plain lying
map-like under the afternoon sun. “I think you know what I mean.”

“I do. There are good doors that are slow to open to the wayfarer, and
a lot of bad ones that are always open. At the present moment Philip is
one of the many drifters. But I am still betting on him.”

“If we only knew a little more about it,” she offered musingly. “If we
could find out where he went that Monday evening after you left him----”

He took her up quickly.

“You’d like to have me try to run the thing down, Jean?”

“I suppose we have no right to pry. And yet, if we knew----”

“I understand. If we can place the father, we shall at least know how
bad things are, and if they are or are not altogether past mending.
I’ll do my best. Anything else suggest itself?”

“You will not lose sight of Philip. He needs your friendship now more
than ever.”

“I’ll do my best there, too. But in his present frame of mind it is
going to be a man-sized job to brother him, even a little. He thinks he
has put himself beyond the pale--says so in so many words. Another man
might say some such thing in a morning-after gust of remorse; but he
means it.”

“That is just it,” she said sorrowfully. “He is going to punish himself
a great deal more savagely than--than he needs to. That is the part of
his pride that isn’t dead yet. Shall we go back now? If you don’t mind,
I--I think I’d like to go home.”

“Kittie will take you there as fast as we’ll let her,” said Bromley
cheerfully; and the little white mare confirmed the promise at a pace
that made her driver wonder how she had ever come to be degraded to
hack service in a livery string. As he was cutting the buggy at the
cottage gate, Jean laid a hand on his arm.

“Please don’t say anything to Mummie or the girls,” she begged.

“Not a word,” he agreed; and then: “You mustn’t let it hit you too
hard, Jeanie.”

“I’ll try not to. But you and Philip have been so good to us; and it
seems such a pity!--so wretchedly unnecessary.”

“It isn’t always given to us poor blind mortals to distinguish between
what is necessary and what isn’t,” he countered comfortingly. And with
this restating of a truth which was hoary with age long before he was
born, he drove away, wiping his brow and muttering under his breath.
“Lord! I’m glad that much of it is over, anyway. She never gave me a
glimpse at that stabbed little heart of hers, but I know how it hurt,
just the same.” Then, apostrophizing the offender: “Phil, old boy, if
you ever take a tumble to yourself and realize what you’ve done, you’ll
find you’ve got something perilously resembling murder to answer for
... you certainly will, for a fact!”




XXI


BROMLEY’S efforts to trace Philip’s movements on the Monday night of
cataclysms were quite fruitless, as they were likely to be, lacking
help from the chapter of accidents; and they so continued until a
certain morning when he went to the Union Depot to see the Follansbees
and Stephen Drew off for a trip to Manitou. Walking back across the
platforms after the Rio Grande train had pulled out, he saw Jim Garth,
flannel-shirted, booted, and with a rifle under his arm and a blanket
roll over his shoulder, making for the waiting South Park day train.

“Hello, Jim!” he called, turning to overtake the big man. “What ho!
Does this”--touching the blanket roll--“mean that you’ve had enough of
the bright lights for a while?”

“You’re mighty whistlin’,” laughed the giant. “I been a no-account bum
on you two boys good-and-plenty long enough, I reckon. I’m hittin’ for
the big hills and the tall timber where I can’t get a drink o’ red-eye,
no matter how bad I’m a-hankerin’ for it--that’s me.”

“But see here, old-timer; how about your grub-stake?” queried Bromley,
catching step and walking with Garth to the waiting train. “You’re
not going to tell me that you saved enough for it out of the check I
slipped you a week ago?”

The big man grinned foolishly.

“You’re whistlin’ ag’in, Harry. That there fish-eyed faro-dealer in
Clem Bull’s place raked in the last dollar o’ that hand-out afore I’d
had time to say ‘Howdy’ to it. I’d ’a’ gone hungry a heap o’ times
since then if it hadn’t been for Phil.”

“Phil?” said Bromley, recalling Philip’s stubborn refusals to join in
any of the check-slippings.

“Yep, you heard me,” Garth nodded, putting a foot on the step of
the car to be ready to swing up when the starting signal should be
given; “li’l’ old Phil. Yuh recollect how he kind-a soured on me ’long
to-wards the last up at the ‘Jean,’ and after you and him come here
to Denver, he’d pass me in the street without ever seein’ me--head up
and eyes straight out in front, like this”--illustrating in solemn
burlesque. “But he’s a whole lot different now; wouldn’t know him for
the same Phil a-tall.”

“How, different?”

Garth pushed his wide-brimmed hat back and scratched his head with a
reflective finger.

“Why, I dunno, eggzackly; more like folks, I reckon you’d say. Met up
with him yiste’day in Tom and Jerry’s place, and he was leanin’ up
ag’inst the bar, a-pourin’ hisself a drink o’ red likker like a man.
Wouldn’t buy me a drink, though--no, sir-ree!--not on your sweet life!
What he done was to drag me off into a corner and ask me if I didn’t
want to go prospectin’; allowed he’d stake me good if I’d premise not
to blow it; said he knowed if I’d promise, I’d stick.”

“Well?” queried Bromley.

“I shuck hands on it. He done it, and done it right. After we’d been
to the bank, and down to Wolfe Londoner’s place to git Wolfe to ship
me a bunch o’ grub to Buena Vista, Phil, he kind-a hung on and says,
says he, ‘Damn it, Jim, I’m half a mind to go along with you. When I
git to thinkin’ about the clean old hills....’ ‘Come on,’ says I, ‘and
we’ll hunt us up another li’l’ bonanza.’ But he says, ‘No, I ain’t a
coward, Jim; and that’s what I’d be if I took to the hills now.’ What
you reckon he meant by that?”

“Perhaps Phil is the only one who knows the answer to that question,
Jim; and if he is, he won’t tell.”

“Speakin’ o’ Phil,” Garth went on, with a glance over his shoulder to
see if the train conductor was in sight and ready to give the starting
signal; “what-all d’yuh reckon he’s got to do with that frozen-eyed
faro-dealer in Clem Bull’s?”

“I don’t know; tell me,” said Bromley, suddenly anxious to have the
train starting further delayed.

“It was three-four weeks ago, one night after you’d staked me,” Garth
explained. “I’d gone into Bull’s place, aimin’ to buck the tiger one
more li’l’ whirl to see if I couldn’t git some o’ my good money back
ag’in, and I happen’ to look over my shoulder and see Phil a-follerin’
me. Reckoned he was aimin’ to knock me down and drag me out for a
cussed fool, so I dodged him in the crowd and watched to see what he’d
do. He was lookin’ for me, all right; I could see that; but when he
come to the faro layout, he stopped dead, like he’d been shot--jus’
stood there a-starin’ at that dealer with his eyes a-buggin’ out.”

“And then?” Bromley prompted, hurriedly, because the conductor was now
coming down the platform, clearance order in hand.

“Then he kind-a groped his way ’round the table and touched old
Fish-eye on the shoulder. Fish-eye, he looks up and says somethin’,
quiet-like, and then calls in his mate to take the deal box, and goes
off up-stairs with Phil. That’s all I seen, but it got me guessin’.”

The train conductor had shouted his “All aboard!” and the wheels were
beginning to roll. Garth swung up to the step, and there was time only
for a hasty, “So long! See you later!” and the big miner was gone.
Bromley walked up-town, soberly thoughtful; and that evening, after
dinner, drifted into the Bull “palace” and slipped into the ring of
onlookers at the faro game. One appraisive look at the hard-faced man
running the cards from the dealer’s box was all that was needed, and
the play-boy saw to whom Philip owed his cool gray eyes, thin-lipped
mouth, and even the curious brow cow-lick in his hair.

An hour later Bromley had sought and found a redheaded young fellow
whose job as a railroad passenger agent brought him in contact with
all sorts and conditions of men--and women--in the strenuous mother of
mining-camps.

“You are a walking directory of this wild town, Reddick,” the play-boy
began, when he had trailed the breezy young railroad man to his office
in the Union Depot. “Do you happen to know any of the regulars in Clem
Bull’s place?”

Reddick grinned. “All of ’em, I guess; it’s my business to know people.
Which one of Bull’s outfit are you gunning for?”

“A sober, wooden-faced man, clean shaven, middle-aged, with his hair
turning gray, and with eyes as cold as a fish’s. He is one of the faro
dealers.”

“‘Deadwood’ Kent,” said Reddick, without a moment’s hesitation. “Came
from the Black Hills and landed in Leadville with the first rush.”

“What sort?” Bromley queried.

“As tough as they make ’em. They say he had his own private graveyard
in the Hills, though that may be just talk. But he did get his man in
Leadville--which may be the reason why he’s down here and not up there.
Better go loaded for bear if you’ve got a quarrel with him.”

“Nothing like it; nothing but a bit of idle curiosity. I thought he
looked like a hard one, and I fancied you’d know.”

“I do, and he is. New England born, I should say, from his clipped way
of talking. He is living with a woman who is just about as tough as he
is. I’ve seen her working the boxes in the Corinthian.”

“Not married?”

“Oh, I suppose not. People of his and her kind don’t bother about the
little moral formalities. Going up-town? Wait a minute and I’ll walk
with you. I’m about through here.”

It was on the way up Seventeenth Street that Reddick said: “Don’t see
you and Phil Trask chasing around together so much as you used to”--and
stopped short with that.

“No,” Bromley admitted. “I have the social bug, more or less, and Phil
hasn’t.”

“Money doesn’t spoil some people,” remarked the railroad man
cryptically.

“But it does others? Chuck it out, Reddick. What do you know about
Phil?”

“Oh, I run across him here and there--in places that I didn’t think
he’d consent to be found dead in. You see, I knew him when he was with
the narrow-gauge a year ago, before he went prospecting. In those days
all he needed to make him a saint was a halo; but now he gambles a
little, takes a drink when he feels like it--does a lot of things you
couldn’t have hired him to do when he first came to Denver.”

“I know,” said the play-boy easily. “I take a drink now and then,
myself.”

“But I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars you don’t take it solo, and in
the places where I’ve seen Phil. However, let’s forget it. It’s none of
my business.”

At the corner of Curtis and Seventeenth, Bromley bade his walking
companion good-night and turned westward. In the West Denver cottage he
found that Jean was the only one sitting up; she was trimming a hat for
herself.

“I was in hopes I’d find you still up,” said Bromley, casting himself
into the easiest chair the living-room afforded; then, scanting all the
preliminaries: “I have found out what we wanted to know.”

It was not like her to demand details, and she did not do so.

“Is it bad?” she asked, without looking up from her work.

“Just about as bad as it can be. I got the clue from Jim Garth, and
then went to see for myself. Afterward, I talked with a man who knows.”

“It did happen that Monday night, then?”

“No doubt about it; though Garth couldn’t be sure of the date.”

“Mr. Garth was there?”

“Yes; he saw Phil and his father when they met, and saw them go off
together. Things being as they are, it isn’t much wonder that Phil went
to pieces. A whole worldful of misfortunes couldn’t have handed out a
blow that would more completely smash a man of Phil’s make-up.”

“But Philip isn’t to blame for what his father has done--or is!” she
protested.

“It isn’t the blame Philip is taking; it’s the shame.”

“Does the man--Philip’s father--call himself by his right name?”

Bromley’s smile was bleak. “No; he is known as ‘Deadwood’ Kent. It
seems that he had decency enough to take an _alias_--though it might
have been only for his own protection.”

“You think there is no doubt but that he took the bank’s money?”

The bleak smile came again. “The man I’ve been looking up this evening
has done a good many worse things than robbing a bank, if half of what
people say about him is true.”

“Poor Philip!” she sighed, and bent lower over her sewing. Then: “He
ought not to stay here in Denver, Harry. Can’t you persuade him to go
away?”

“Who? Philip, or the Kent person?”

“I meant Philip, of course.”

“I doubt if he’ll budge. Yesterday he outfitted Garth to go prospecting
again, and said he had half a mind to go along. But when Garth urged
him, he said no; that he’d be a coward if he took to the hills.”

She nodded. “I told you he would punish himself. It is pitiful, isn’t
it? Do you see much of him now?”

“Not as much as I should like to. He doesn’t dodge me particularly, but
he is keeping all sorts of hours, and it is only a chance if I find him
in his rooms when I go up.”

“But when you do see him?” she prompted.

“He is a wonderfully changed man, Jean. You wouldn’t know him at all
for the old Philip. I don’t know how to describe the change except
to say that it is somehow strangely softening--mollifying--if you
know what I mean. It is as if he’d been down into the lower depths
himself, and had learned to pity rather than to condemn. His changed
attitude toward Jim Garth shows the line he is taking. He has never had
anything but harsh contempt for Garth and people of his kind ... you
know--people with appetites and no self-control. But now he has done
what I have been trying all summer to do, and couldn’t: braced Garth
up and sent him into the mountains where he will be out of the way of
temptation.”

“I know,” came in low tones from the busy hat-trimmer. “That is the
real Philip. But it is terrible that he had to suffer so before he
could find himself.”

“He is still suffering; you can see that plainly enough.”

“Is he--is he still drinking?”

“I am afraid he is; though perhaps not so much to excess; at least,
I haven’t seen him the worse for liquor since he came back from
Leadville. As to that, this wide-open town is partly to blame. It is no
exaggeration to say that half of the business of Denver is transacted
in the bar-rooms. I get it every day. The minute I begin to talk
business with a man, he will say, ‘Well, let’s go and have a drink and
talk it over.’ It is in the air.”

A pause for a few moments, and then Jean looked up to say quietly:
“Philip was here to-night.”

“What?--here in this house?”

“No; he just walked past--twice. I saw him through the window.”

The play-boy got out of his chair and his voice shook a little when he
said:

“That is pathetic, Jean. It means that the sidewalk in front of the
house you live in is as near as he will permit himself to approach the
old relations. I’m going to bed. For heaven’s sake, don’t sit up and
work yourself blind over that hat after you’ve already put in a long
day at the shop! Good-night.”




XXII


IT was on the second evening after he had walked up-town with Harry
Bromley that Reddick, the railroad passenger agent, squared himself at
his desk in the Union Depot office to scowl discontentedly at a basket
of freshly opened mail. Though the redheaded young man boasted that he
was case-hardened and had no nerves, he had the quick sympathies of
his temperament, and he had lately figured in a business episode the
effect of which had been to leave him chafing and ashamed and ready to
quarrel with his job. While he was absently fingering the letters in
the “Unanswered” basket, the door was opened and Philip drifted in.

“Loafing around down below, I saw your office lighted and thought I’d
climb up and smoke a pipe,” was his greeting to Reddick. “If you are
busy, go on with your job and don’t mind me. I shan’t talk.”

The redheaded one tilted back in his pivot chair and frowned.

“I can’t seem to get down to the job to-night, Phil. I’ve just been a
party to something that makes me sick and disgusted with the railroad
business and everything connected with it in this blasted, rotten-egg
town!”

“Turn it loose if you feel like it,” said the smoker. “I’m a good
listener.”

“It isn’t fit to talk about, but I’ll tell you and get it off my chest.
You may not know it, but women--of a certain sort--are shipped into
this over-manned town like so much freight--prepaid freight, at that.
The landlady deposits the passage money with me, and has me wire our
agent in New York, or wherever it happens to be, to deliver the ticket,
check the woman’s trunk, and send the check to me by mail. In that way
the woman lands in Denver in debt for her railroad fare, and with her
clothes in hock to secure the debt. You can see how it works. It is
slavery, pure and simple. Once in the toils, the poor girl never has a
chance to get out, no matter how badly she may want to. She is shipped
from place to place, and always in debt; is kept that way purposely.”

Philip swore softly. “You’re telling me that the railroad companies
accept that sort of blood money?”

Reddick shrugged.

“If you had worked in the traffic department instead of the accounting,
you’d know that the railroad, like most corporations, doesn’t look
for the finger-prints on the money it takes in. My orders are to get
business. I got into this at first through playing square--through the
boss-women finding out that I didn’t graft on them by overcharging--as
nearly everybody else does; and now the dirty business chases me--hunts
me up.”

“You have had that kind of a job to-day?” Philip asked.

“To-day it was a straight-out, bloody crime, Phil; I’m confident of it.
When I get to thinking about my part in it, I want to go hang myself.
Of course, this traffic, most of it, is in women who know perfectly
well what they are doing; but now and then there are exceptions--some
careless or ignorant girl who is tolled along by rosy promises of an
easy job in the wild West. I had such a case as that this evening, and
it made me want to throw the whole cursed business of railroading into
the discard and go buy me a pick and shovel.”

“Let’s have it,” said Philip shortly.

“The girl who came in this evening was ticketed from Des Moines, but
her folks--so she told me--live on a farm somewhere north of the Iowa
capital. I had the check for her trunk, and I took her and her baggage
out to Madam Goguette’s, the place she was booked for. Philip, as
long as I live I shall never forget the look in that girl’s eyes when
she found out what she was in for; the look and the way she burst
out crying and flung herself on the floor when she was told that she
couldn’t run away--that she’d have to stay and work out her debt.”

“Pretty tough,” said the pipe smoker evenly. “But, as you say, business
is business.”

“I didn’t say any such damned thing!” Reddick broke out hotly. Then:
“You’ve come to be a devilish cold sort of fish since you struck it
rich, Phil. A year ago a story like this I’ve just told you would have
made you rush off and get a lawyer to swear out a writ of _habeas
corpus_, or something of that sort. But now you merely say, ‘Pretty
tough,’ and go on smoking your rotten pipe!”

Philip smiled. “You get hot under the collar rather easily, don’t you,
Reddick? It is a good fault, and sometimes I wish my own hair were a
little nearer the color of yours. I’ll quit you and let you get down
to work. You won’t get anything done so long as you have somebody
around to beef at. Good-night.”

He was about to let himself out when Reddick halted him.

“Hold up a minute, Phil. I’m no spoil-sport, or I don’t mean to be,
but while we’re talking about the things that are and ought not to be,
I want to make a little roar for the underdog. You’ve been up here
evenings playing poker in the car-record office with Middleton and some
more of the clerks, off and on, haven’t you?”

“Now and again, yes. What about it?”

“Two things. While pretty nearly everything goes in this wild and
woolly neck of woods, it is still barely possible that the Old Man
might object to having the car-record, or any other of his offices,
turned into a gambling shop. I have a horrible suspicion that he’ll
make it hot for somebody, when he finds out. That is one thing, and the
other is this: you oughtn’t to gamble with those boys, Phil. They’re
not in your class. You carry too long a purse; you know you do. They
have nothing but their salaries.”

Philip’s smile was grim.

“I didn’t ask to be let in. I guess some of them thought, because I
happen to own a share in a gold mine, I might be good picking. But you
are right. I shan’t rob them any more. Anything else on your mind?”

“No. You are a pretty reasonable sort of devil, after all, Phil. Are
you going? Well, so long.”

Gaining the street level, the reasonable devil refilled his pipe,
lighted it, and set off briskly townward. A square short of Larimer
Street he turned to the left past the house where he had once spent
a drunkenly unconscious night and went on to another of the same
character in the square beyond. The woman who admitted him in answer
to his double knock was of the type of her class: large, shapeless,
hard-eyed, painted and garishly bejeweled. “Mother Goguette” was the
name she went by, but there was little that was motherly about her.

Philip slipped out of his light overcoat and hung it and his hat upon
the hall rack as one who knew what was expected of him.

“Reddick, the railroad man, tells me you took in a new girl this
evening,” he announced brusquely. “She is the one I want to see.”

“And a lotta good it’ll do you!” was the snapped out reply. “The little
fool’s up in her room, cryin’ her eyes out and tryin’ to make me
believe she didn’t know where she was comin’ to! She’s no fit comp’ny
for a gentleman like you. What she needs is somebody that’ll knock a
little sense into her.”

Philip felt in his pocket and put a gold coin into the bejeweled hands.

“I’ll take a chance,” he said. “Which is her room?”

“First one to the right at the head o’ the stairs. You’ll hear her
snifflin’, most likely. Sure you wouldn’t rather see one of the other
girls?”

“Quite sure,” said Philip, and he ran up the carpeted stair.

On the upper landing he had no difficulty in finding the right door.
It opened into a room lighted by a single singing gas jet. Lying face
downward on the bed was a girl, “little” only by comparison with the
gross-bodied woman down-stairs who had used the word. He had a glimpse
of a swollen, tear-stained face, the face of a frightened animal,
lifted at the moment of his entrance, only to be buried in the pillows
again when she saw him. He closed the door noiselessly and drew up a
chair.

“You needn’t be afraid of me,” he began. “I haven’t come here to make
things worse for you. I’m here to help you, if you want to be helped.”

The girl turned her face to the wall and sobbed afresh.

“You’re lying to me--everybody’s lied to me. _She_ sent you up--I know
she did!”

“No,” he denied gently; “I came because I knew you were needing a
friend--a real friend, I mean. Don’t be afraid of me. Sit up here and
tell me about it.”

She obeyed the quiet authority in his voice, sitting dishevelled on the
bed’s edge and wiping her swollen eyes with a balled and tear-dampened
handkerchief. It was the commonplace story too often repeated, of a
country girl dissatisfied with the round of farm life; of the lure
of the city; and, finally, of the persuasion of the tempter who had
started her on the downward road and finished by pretending to find her
employment in Denver.

Philip heard the story through to its pathetic end. There was the stamp
of truth on every part of the ill-worded confession. It was plainly
evident that the girl was not yet old enough in guile to fabricate such
a tale on the spur of the moment.

“What may I call you?” he asked.

“Sadie Hansen’s my name.”

“All right, Sadie; let me ask you just one question: would the old
folks take you back if you should go home now?”

“They--they’ve never quit writin’ me and beggin’ me to come. If they
knew where I am now.... My God--it would kill ’em!”

“Don’t cry any more; it’s all right. You are not going to stay here.”

“But I’ve got to stay. That woman down-stairs says she paid my fare out
here, and she’ll make me stay till I can pay her back!”

“Never mind about that. Have you unpacked your trunk?”

“No.”

“That’s good.” He rose and looked at his watch. “Wash your face and
comb your hair as quickly as you can. Have you had any supper?”

“No; I couldn’t eat anything if I’d die for it.”

“We’ll see about that later. Straighten yourself up and get ready to
go. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She caught at him as he was turning away.

“Tell me what you’re goin’ to do to me! I’ll kill myself if you----”

“Don’t worry; I’m going to send you home--back to your people.”

Before he could stop her she had gone on her knees to him in a frenzy
of gratitude.

“Don’t do that!” he protested sharply, lifting her to her feet.
“There’s nothing to thank me for, and you haven’t any time to lose. Get
busy with the wash-basin.”

In the lower hall he found the hard-faced woman with the bejeweled
ears, neck and hands. She was evidently waiting to find out what would
befall. Philip was bluntly direct.

“That girl up there will never be any good to you,” he asserted
crisply. “If you will tell me how much she owes you, I’ll pay her out
and send her home.”

The woman saw her chance and grasped it avidly.

“Yes, you will!” she jeered. “I know your la-de-dah kind. You want her
for yourself. I’m short o’ girls, and I ain’t goin’ to let her go!”

“Oh, yes; I think you will,” he countered evenly. “It is only a
question of money, isn’t it? How much?” and he drew out a handful of
the gold coins.

The woman laughed, a hoarse chuckle with a choking noise to punctuate
it.

“Oh, well; if you’re so dead set on it, I’ll sell her to you. How much
will you give for her?”

Philip’s eyes burned and his reply was shot-like.

“I’ll pay the price of a human soul. It’s for you to name it, if you
haven’t forgotten that you have a soul of your own.”

The woman shrank back as if he had struck her in the face, and in a
flash she became a snuffling suppliant.

“There, there, dearie--don’t you look at me that way!” she whimpered.
“Of course I ain’t sellin’ nobody’s soul. You pay me what it cost to
fetch her here and take her along.” And she named the amount.

He counted the money out and gave it to her; after which he stepped
to the hall telephone and twisted the crank until he got a connection
with a near-by hack stand. By the time he had brought the girl down, a
hack was at the curb. Sending the driver up for the trunk, Philip led
the girl to the door. As he did so, the Goguette had recovered herself
sufficiently to give a parting flick of the whip.

“Good-by, girlie,” she said. “When he gets through with you, you know
where to come.”

“Don’t answer her,” said Philip in low tones; and when the man came
with the trunk he got a curt order: “To the Union Depot, and be swift
about it.”

At the station Philip again glanced at his watch. There was still time
enough, and he took the girl to the depot restaurant, tipped a waiter
for a rush order, and told her she must eat. While she was at supper
he bought a ticket and a sleeping-car berth and checked the shabby
little trunk. Afterward, he went to sit with her until she finished
eating, telling her to take her time; that he would see to it that she
did not miss her train. Now that she had bathed her face and eyes and
made herself presentable, he saw that she was, not pretty, perhaps, but
wholesomely comely; and though she did not talk, the look in the big
blue eyes that were evidently an inheritance from her Swedish or Danish
ancestry was almost dog-like in its affection and gratitude.

When he took her out to the waiting eastbound train, the Denver & Rio
Grande express from Pueblo and Colorado Springs had just pulled in, and
if he had looked aside he would have seen Bromley welcoming a group of
debarking travellers, with Stephen Drew carrying a hand-bag for one of
them--a very beautiful and statuesque young woman with a peach-blow
complexion and hair like spun gold. Also, he might have seen that, in
the procession of the group toward the station egress, Bromley lagged
behind, with an eye for himself and the girl standing at the steps of
the eastbound sleeper.

“You will find some money in this envelope with the tickets,” he was
saying to the girl, “and there is no string tied to it. Just go back to
your people and thank God you’ve got the best part of your life before
you yet.”

It was then that Harry Bromley, glancing back over his shoulder, saw a
thing that he immediately wished he had not seen. The girl had tucked
the ticket envelope into her bosom and put up her arms. “I wish you’d
let me kiss you, just once,” she said chokingly. “I never knew there
was ever such a man as you on top of God’s green earth!”

“There isn’t--not the way you mean it,” Philip denied quickly. “You
mustn’t trust any of us--not even me.” Then he took her round face
between his hands and kissed her and put her aboard her train; and
Bromley, having witnessed the parting, plodded on after the Follansbee
group, shaking his head and muttering to himself. He had been hoping
that Philip’s plunge into the depths had stopped with the whiskey
bottle and the gaming tables, but here was proof positive that it
hadn’t. It was a man-killing world, this world of the unfettered West,
and the trail of the serpent was over it all.

It was perhaps five minutes after the eastbound train had clanked out
over the station switches when Philip lounged into Reddick’s office to
lean upon the counter rail and watch the passenger agent as he fingered
the keys of one of the lately introduced writing machines. Reddick
stopped his two-finger performance and looked up to say, “Back again,
are you?”

“Yes,” said the lounger, “but not to stay; just to ease your mind. The
girl you were telling me about: she is on her way back to her folks in
Iowa, on the train that has just pulled out. I don’t believe you will
have to check her trunk again.”

“You went up to the Goguette’s and got her out?”

“Yes.”

Reddick thrust a hand over the railing. “Shake!” he said. “I wish there
were more good devils like you in this rotten world--good devils with
money to burn. I’d have done it myself, if I’d had the wherewithal. But
it was too near pay-day for me.”

“I know you would,” said Philip soberly; and as he turned to go: “When
you hear of any more jams like that, just give me a tip, Reddick. As
you say, I have money to burn, and I haven’t much else. ’Night.”




XXIII


HAVING seen the Follansbees and Stephen Drew off for their hotel,
Bromley lingered on the broad station-plaza platform which served as
a hack stand, knowing that Philip must pass this way on his return
up-town. When Philip appeared at last, not through the station archway,
but at the foot of the stair leading down from the offices on the
second floor, the play-boy caught step with him.

“I thought you’d show up if I waited long enough,” he began. Then,
taking a leaf out of Philip’s own book of directness: “Who was the
girl?”

Philip’s smile was soberly tolerant. “So you were looking on, were you?
What did you see?”

“I saw you kiss her and put her on the train.”

“Well?”

“You mean it’s none of my business? I suppose it isn’t. But I did hope
you’d stop short of the women, Phil.”

“Why should I?”

“For one reason, if for no other. You’ve been in love with Jean; though
you may think you are not, you are still in love with her. How can
you----”

Another man might have said the few words which would have made all
clear. But Philip Trask was of those who rub salt into their own wounds
and find a certain gruesome satisfaction in the process.

“You can’t think any worse of me than I think of myself, Harry. As
for Jean ... that is all over and done with, as I told you in the
beginning. The stars are not more completely out of my reach, now.”

Bromley gave it up, and they walked on up-town in silence until the
Curtis Street corner was reached.

“Not going any farther my way?” Bromley inquired, pausing before he
turned westward.

The drifter’s laugh was brittle. “No. Your day is ended, but mine is
just fairly beginning. Good-night.”

It was on the day following this evening episode that Bromley, dropping
into Charpiot’s for luncheon, found himself seated at a table for two
with Reddick. For a time the talk was of mines and mining, and the
opening of the new metal and coal fields in the Gunnison country,
toward which two railroads were hastily extending their lines to
accommodate the anticipated rush to the new district.

“More flotsam and jetsam to be caught later in our own little back-wash
here in Denver,” was Reddick’s cynical prophecy; “and more crooks and
tinhorns and highfliers to keep ’em company. I’m getting mighty sick of
all this high-keyed razzle-dazzle and excitement, Harry. The pace is
too swift for little Reddy. I don’t suppose I had taken half a dozen
drinks in my life until after I came out here; and now I am getting to
be a walking whiskey-barrel.”

Bromley smiled. “Why don’t you cut it out?” he asked.

“Cut it out? I can’t--not in my business. I’ll give you a sample. With
the Tabor Opera House about to open, theatrical companies are beginning
to book the circuit--Denver, the Springs, Pueblo and Leadville--and,
of course, I try to get a share of the haul for my railroad. This
morning I went up to the Opera House office to see one of the troupe
managers, and the first thing he did was to push the wall button for
a round of drinks. I’d had three or four already with other pie-eyed
patrons of the company, and when the bar-boy came, I ordered a plain
seltzer. ‘Whatzzat?’ shouts the man from New York. ‘You’ll drink with
me, or you don’t carry us a mile over your damn’ railroad, see?’ It
made me so hot that I told him to go to hell, and walked out--and I
lose the business.”

“It is demoralizing, I grant you,” said Bromley. “But Denver--all
Colorado, for that matter--is merely in the effervescent stage; it will
settle down, after a while.”

“Not until after it has beautifully spoiled a lot of us fellows who
would have been at least half-way decent, normally. Just in my limited
little circle I can point you to dozens of young fellows who never had
any leanings toward the toboggan till they came West, but they are on
it now. I’m one of ’em, and your partner’s another; only, as I told him
last night, he can still be a pretty good sort of devil when the fit
strikes him.”

“Last night?” echoed the play-boy. “What, in particular, happened last
night?”

Briefly but succinctly Reddick told the story of the assault upon the
Goguette stronghold and its outcome.

“Ah!” said Bromley at the finish; “I’m mighty glad you told me that,
Reddick. I saw him putting the girl on the train and was by way of
doing him a rank injustice. Afterward, I offered him his chance to
tell me about it, but of course he wouldn’t take it; he isn’t built
that way.”

“You’ve hit the nail on the head, Harry. In some ways, Phil is as
queer as they make ’em. He has developed into an all-night rounder,
all right; don’t make any mistake about that; but in spots he is as
soft nowadays as he used to be high-headed and flinty when I first knew
him a year ago. They tell me he has his hand in his pocket for the
down-and-out every minute of the day. I’d like to know what hit him. It
must have been something pretty solid to give him the jolt he’s had.”

“It was,” Bromley confirmed; but he added nothing to the bare admission.

“Some girl go back on him?”

“No; for a man of his make-up it was something even worse than that. I
can’t tell you what it was, because, thus far, it is his own secret--or
he believes it is.”

“I’ve quit,” said the passenger agent; and so the subject died.

After this explanation of the girl-at-the-train incident, Bromley
breathed freer; and though he saw less and less of Philip as time
passed, he continued to hope for the best, the hope founding itself
upon nothing better, however, than an illogical theory of reactions
good, bad and indifferent--swings of the pendulum, he called them. When
Philip should see the ghastly emptiness of the life he was living--and
he was too intelligent not to see it, in time--he would pick himself up
out of the mire into which the blow to his pride had buffeted him and
be the better and broader man for the humbling experience.

Something of this confidence the play-boy tried to pass on to Jean;
and he could see that while she caught at it eagerly there was always
a shadow in the dark eyes when Philip was mentioned. Bromley knew what
was behind the shadow: it was the fear that she had once put into
words--that the prisoner of reproach would end by taking some step
which could never be retraced--that would put him once for all beyond
the hope of redemption and reinstatement. Wise in his generation, the
play-boy knew that there might be such a step; knew, also, that a man
of Philip’s temper and resolution would be precisely the one to take it
if the expiatory urge should drive him far enough and hard enough.

In these talks with Jean his heart went soft with pity for her. It was
plain enough now that she had let herself go as far on the road to love
for Philip as Philip’s prideful self-repression had permitted her to
go; and at such times he would have given anything he possessed to be
able to comfort her. So far as he might, with the Eugenia Follansbee
entanglement still tacitly binding him, he did what he could. On the
opening night at the new opera house, upon the building and furnishing
of which a princely fortune had been lavished, he had all the Dabneys
as his guests; and thereafter, whenever he could persuade Jean to go
out, he took her and Mysie.

It was on one of these theater nights, when Mysie, now in her final
year in the University preparatory school, and with lessons to prepare
for the next day, had failed him, that he discovered that his and
Jean’s seats were in the same row with those of Stephen Drew, the judge
and his wife and Eugenia. Since a guilty conscience needs no accuser,
he was not slow to interpret Eugenia’s appraisive scrutiny of his
companion during the _entr’actes_; and when, in the dispersal after the
play, despite his best efforts to dodge the Follansbee party in the
outgoing crush, he found himself and Jean jammed with Drew and Eugenia
in the aisle, he was not wholly unprepared for what followed.

“Introduce me,” was the whispered command from the statuesque beauty
upon Drew’s arm; and he obeyed, with such formality as the informal
conditions would sanction. Then: “Harry has been neglecting us
shamefully of late, Miss Dabney. Can’t you persuade him to be a little
more neighborly with his old friends?”

Bromley scarcely heard Jean’s murmured reply. He made sure that the
beauty’s conventional protest and query were merely another command,
and one which he dare not ignore. Eugenia meant to have it out with
him. There was to be no more dallying and delaying.

With this discomforting thought in his mind the short walk over to
West Denver was begun in silence; and it might have so continued and
ended if Jean had not opened the floodgates by asking a simple and most
natural question.

“Who is Miss Follansbee, Harry?”

It struck him as a piece of disloyalty of a sort that he had never
mentioned the Follansbees by name to her, though he had often spoken of
his friends from Philadelphia.

“What did you think of her?” he evaded.

“I think she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

“Wouldn’t you think there was something lacking in a man who couldn’t
fall in love with her at sight?”

“Oh, that doesn’t necessarily follow,” was the cool-voiced rejoinder.
“Love won’t always go where it is sent--or come when it is called.”

It all came out then; the story of the family alliance and agreement,
planned while he and Eugenia were mere babes in arms; its tacit
acceptance by both as they grew up; his own abnormal and inexcusable
distaste for it and rebellion against it--an attitude which, he had
every reason to believe, was not shared by Eugenia.

“You know something about my ratty life in the past, Jean,” he went on.
“While I was doing my best to break all of the Ten Commandments, the
thing fell down of its own weight, naturally. I wasn’t an ‘eligible,’
even in society’s rather loose interpretation of the word. But now----”

“But now you are no longer living that kind of a life, and you are a
rich man,” she finished for him. “You are going to marry her?”

“It is up to me, isn’t it?”

“No. I should say a thousand times, no.”

“Why isn’t it?”

“Because you couldn’t do her a greater wrong than by marrying her when
you don’t love her.”

“Don’t you think I could make her happy?”

“I think you could make any woman happy, in a way, if you tried. But
that isn’t the question. No doubt there are many marriages made
without love, of the kind we are talking about, on either side; and
they are happy, after a fashion. But where there is love on one side
and only consent on the other ... I can’t conceive of anything more
dreadful for the loving one.”

“Perhaps you are right. Just the same, I don’t see where you get all
this wisdom of the ages, Jean. I’ve often wondered if there were ever a
wall of sophistry built so thick that you couldn’t see through it at a
glance.”

“I have lived a long time in the past year, Harry; you know that,”
she answered, with a little catch in her voice; and then she began to
talk about the play they had just sat through, and there were no more
confidences.

Dutifully obeying the command concealed under the conventional protest
and query, Bromley made a telephone appointment with Eugenia, and at
the proper calling hour the following afternoon presented himself
at the furnished house in Champa Street taken for the season by the
Follansbees. It was the statuesque beauty herself who admitted him and
led the way to the darkened drawing-room, and her first question, when
they were alone together, was disconcertingly direct.

“This Miss Dabney I met last night, Harry: is she the daughter of the
widow you are boarding with in West Denver?”

“One of three daughters; the others are schoolgirls. Jean is the man of
the family; she is a hat-trimmer in Madame Marchande’s.” It took a good
deal to shake the play-boy’s easy confidence in himself, but he had
a feeling that if he gave the grim demon of consternation the merest
shadow of an opening, he would be lost.

“She is a very pretty girl; much too pretty to be wearing out her life
in a millinery shop, don’t you think?”

“I do,” he asserted frankly. “But there seems to be no present help for
it.”

“Isn’t there? When I saw her with you last night, I was--I was----”

Coming in out of the bright sunlight, Bromley had been half blind in
the cool, darkened room. But now that his eyes were becoming accustomed
to the gloom he saw that his lovely questioner had stopped in curious
embarrassment. Her eyes were downcast and she was folding and refolding
the filmy handkerchief in her lap. Suddenly she left her chair and came
to sit beside him on the old-fashioned, rep-covered sofa.

“Harry, dear,” she began, “I have something terrible to confess; but
first let me ask you.... Last night, you know, when I saw you with Miss
Dabney, and saw how pretty and sweet she is ... Harry, aren’t you the
least bit in love with her?”

He tried to turn the question aside with a laugh.

“You wouldn’t ask that if you could see her sister next younger. Mysie
is the raving beauty of the family.”

“No, but, really, Harry; I’m dreadfully in earnest. Wouldn’t you marry
Jean Dabney if you were--if you were free?”

Again he evaded, rather clumsily--for him--this time.

“It wouldn’t rest with me, Eugie. Jean hasn’t the remotest idea of
marrying anybody.”

The beauty beside him, statuesque no longer, but almost girlish in her
confusion, sighed deeply.

“You are making it terribly hard for me, Harry, but I suppose I
deserve every bit of it. I--I’ve been untrue to you and to our--to our
engagement.”

It took every atom of his self-control to keep him from bounding to his
feet. “Wha--what’s that?” he gasped.

“It’s your fault, in a way,” she pleaded defensively. “We might never
have known anything about Mr. Drew if you hadn’t told him we were here
in Denver.”

“Stephen Drew!” He almost shouted the name.

“Yes. He asked me last night, you know--after we came home from the
theater. I tried to stop him; I knew I ought to; but--but he wouldn’t
stop.”

He turned and put his hands on her shoulders. “Tell me just one thing,
Eugie: do you love Steve Drew? Is that it?”

She lifted swimming eyes to his for a flitting instant and then dropped
them quickly.

“You can say anything you please to me, Harry, dear; I know I deserve
it: but--but I love him so hard that it hurts--actually _hurts_!”

“God bless you, Eugie, dear,” he broke out, taking her in his arms
and kissing the tears away. “Don’t you cry for a single minute. Your
happiness is all I care for--all I’ve ever cared for. And you have
picked a man in all his inches. Don’t you fret the least little bit
about a thing that was handed out to us, wrapped up in the original
package years and years ago, by the old folks!”

“You--you’re not sorry--not even a little?” she faltered.

“How could I be sorry when you have found your true happiness, my dear?
That is the biggest thing in the world. And Steve will make you happy.
He is one of the finest!--head and shoulders above any other man I’ve
met in Colorado. I wouldn’t give you up to a rotter: but to Stephen
Drew.... But see here, I’ve got an appointment at the bank, and it’s
nearly closing time, right now. Will you forgive me if I run?”

She got up and went with him to the door. At the moment of leave-taking
she said shyly: “You’ll marry Miss Dabney some day, won’t you, Harry? I
want you to be happy, too.”

“I don’t have to marry anybody to be happy; I’m perfectly happy this
minute, because you are. As for Jean ... as I’ve said, I’m sure she
isn’t thinking about marrying. There was--er--another man, you know,
and he has put himself out of the running. That is why I’ve been taking
her out a bit and trying to make it easier for her. She is a dear girl,
and I wish you knew her better. They are good people--good old Southern
stock left poor by the war. Isn’t that your telephone ringing? I’ll bet
that is Drew, wanting to tell you he is coming out. I’m escaping just
in time. Good-by, you happy girl!” And, kissing her again, and even
more exuberantly than before, he fled to keep the mythical appointment.




XXIV


IT was on one of these matchless September nights, when the stars were
blazing in the black bowl of the heavens with a lustrous brilliancy
that shamed the flaring gas street-lamps of the city of the plain, that
the younger son of an English lord, who was supposed to be learning
cattle ranching at first-hand on a range in Middle Park, wound up a day
of gaudy dissipation in Denver by galloping his bronco down Holladay
Street, yelling like a madman and firing his pistols right and left in
true Wild West fashion.

To escape the flying bullets, the few late-hour pedestrians dodged for
shelter as best they might, darting into alleyways or disappearing
through doors that were always open after candle-lighting. As on a
certain other epoch-marking night, Philip found his door of refuge
opening for him apparently of its own accord, and when it was quickly
closed behind him a pair of silken-soft arms went about his neck, and a
voice that he had recalled many times in the past few weeks said, “Gee,
Mr. Prince-man! It took you a fine long time to remember where I lived,
didn’t it? But I knew you’d come, some time. That shooting fool didn’t
hit you, did he?”

Philip unwound the clinging arms from his neck, but he did it gently.

“No, I’m not hurt,” he answered. “I was on my way here, and all he did
was to hurry me a little. Were you expecting anybody else?”

“Not me. I’d just come down when I heard the racket in the street and
was opening the door to see what had broke loose. Want to go in the
parlor with the bunch for a while?”

“No; we’ll go up to your room. I want to talk to you.”

She slipped an arm around him as they went up the stairs together,
saying: “This is like old times, only the other time you was too
parboiled to know where you was going. You ain’t been drinking
to-night, have you?”

“Not enough to amount to anything. I am as nearly sober as I ever get
to be, nowadays.”

In the room above a gas jet was burning low, and the girl turned it on
full. Philip took off his hat and coat and threw them on the bed.

“I don’t want to drink any more to-night, and I don’t want you to
drink,” he said. “But I’ll pay my way, just the same.” He handed her a
twenty-dollar gold piece: “Take this down to Madam Blanche and tell her
your friend is buying her best for the house, and that it is the price
he is paying to be let alone.”

While she was gone, he made a slow circuit of the room, alert to
all the small details of his surroundings. By this time he knew the
household routine of such places--that each woman took care of her own
room. There were little hints of personality that were not lost upon
him: a single late-blooming rose in a tiny vase on the dresser, placed
exactly in the middle of the freshly laundered linen cover; the girl’s
comb and brush and toilet appliances as clean and shining as if they
had just come from the shop; spotless cleanliness everywhere. He pulled
the dresser drawers open, one by one; here, too, there were decent
orderliness and the smell of fresh laundering.

She came in just as he was closing the drawers and laughed
good-naturedly.

“Didn’t find anything to bite you, did you?” she asked. Then: “Blanche
says the house is yours. She’ll turn everybody else out in the street,
if you say so.”

“I don’t want any part of the house but this,” he returned. Then he
reminded her of an omission: “When I was here before, you didn’t tell
me your name.”

“A name’s nothing. They call me ‘Little Irish’ here, and I’ve never
told ’em the name my mother gave me.”

“But you will tell me, won’t you?”

“If you care enough for me to want to know. It’s Mona--Mona Connaghey
is the whole of it.”

Philip sat down, and immediately she came and perched on his knee.
Almost roughly he caught her up and planted her in a chair.

“I want to talk sense to you, Mona, and I can’t do it if you stir up
the devil in me,” he told her soberly.

“Is it the devil you’re calling it?” she laughed.

“Yes; and you know well enough that is the right name for it. But never
mind; let me ask you this: I know it is a part of your business to tell
lies and nothing but lies to any man who comes here. Can you tell the
truth for once in a way, if you try?”

“I guess so, maybe--to you.”

He fixed her with a half-absent gaze. “How old are you, Mona?”

“If I live till Christmas, I’ll be twenty.”

“Twenty years old and well on the road to hell,” he said musingly;
adding: “Or perhaps you are not calling it hell?”

“Am I not?” she flashed back. “But what’s the use? You didn’t come here
to put the whip to me, did you? God knows, I can do that well enough
for myself!”

“No,” he answered, “I came to ask you a few questions. What is there
for a woman in your condition to look forward to?--or is there
anything?”

Her lips twisted in a wry smile.

“A few years of this, maybe, and then a little bigger dose of the
chloral than it takes to put you to sleep. That is, for them that have
got the nerve.”

“Nothing else?”

“Oh, yes; in a way of speaking. Once in a while a bit of heaven comes
now and then to one or another of us--when some man lets a girl go and
live with him till he gets tired of her.”

“And you call that heaven?”

“Some does: for me, I’d say it depends on who the man is.”

He lighted a cigar and puffed at it in silence. And when he spoke
again: “Do you care to tell me what brought you to this, Mona?”

“You wouldn’t want to know.” Then, in lower tones and with her face
averted: “I ain’t got no hard-luck story to tell. I just went bad
because I was ... but what’s the use of trying to make you see? It’s
just in the blood, or it ain’t; and I’m thinking it ain’t in your blood
at all.”

He smiled soberly.

“Maybe there are worse things in my blood than anything you will ever
have to plead guilty to. But that is neither here nor there. Tell me
this, Mona: if you could have one wish, and could be sure it would be
granted, what would it be?”

“My God! Can you ask me that?--after what I’ve been telling you?”

“I can and I do. I have been thinking a good deal about you
since--since that morning when you sat here on the bed and told me how
I came to be here in this room. You were honest with me then. I’ve been
wondering if you could go on being honest with me.”

“You mean that you’d take me out of this--for a little while--and let
me--let me----”

“No,” he denied gravely; “I didn’t mean that. But if I should do
that--what then?”

A soft light leaped into the blue Irish eyes and for a moment the
reckless look vanished and the girl’s face became almost beautiful.

“I’d--I’d work my fingers to the bone to make it last as long as I
could--with you!”

“Why with me, rather than with another man?”

“I can tell,” she said. “You’re not like other men. Even when you’re
drunk, you don’t forget. I know!”

Another little silence, and at the end of it: “You must know the truth
about me, Mona. I have been to the bottom--I’m on the bottom, now; just
as much out of the decent running as you are. And I have fallen so hard
that it makes me feel for other people who are caught and can’t get
loose. Can you understand that?”

“It’s terribly dumb I’d be if I couldn’t--the way I’m living.”

“All right; then we’ll go on. When I was here before it seemed to me
that you hadn’t gone quite stony hard--as some of them do; that if you
had a chance, you might climb back. Would you?”

She shook her head.

“There’s no chance for the woman; you’d know that very well.”

“There is one chance; just one, I suppose. Do you want to get out of
this badly enough to marry me, Mona?”

“_Marry you?_ My God, man, what are you talking about! Do you think
I’d----”

“Wait,” he commanded; “let me finish. We won’t say anything about love;
we’ll leave that out of it. I have money, and I can take you away from
Denver, where you are known, and give you your chance to straighten up.
No, I am neither drunk nor crazy, and this is no sudden thing with me.
I know what I am proposing, and I want to do it. I have talked with a
man who knows you, and he tells me you have no home to go to; no people
of your own who would take you in. That is why I am offering you a
chance with me.”

To his astonishment the girl sprang up and flung herself upon the bed,
burying her face in his overcoat and sobbing as if her heart would
break. He let her alone; let the fit of weeping exhaust itself. It
was a good sign, he decided; it showed that there were still depths
that could be touched--deeply touched. But he was wholly unprepared
for what followed when she sat up, wiping her eyes and smiling at him
through her tears. For this is what she said:

“You dear, dear man! Do you know, I’d rather die, right here in this
room to-night, than marry you?”

“But why?” he demanded. “Don’t you want to get out of this life?”

“Not at the price--the price you’d have to pay. Oh, don’t I know?
There’s not a corner on God’s green earth you could take me to where
there wouldn’t be some man to turn up and say, ‘Hell’s chickens!
there’s “Little Irish”--the girl that used to be in Madam Blanche’s
in Denver!’ And that isn’t all, either, nor the worst of it. Some day
you’ll brace up and go back to the other world--the one you come from.
A man can do that whenever he likes, and you’ll do it. And then you’d
be tied to a----”

“Don’t say it,” he interrupted quickly. “What you are saying only makes
me more determined. I shall get a license in the morning, and to-morrow
afternoon I shall expect you to be ready to go with me.” He threw a
handful of gold coins on the bed. “There is money to square you with
Madam Blanche, and to pay for whatever you want to buy. Let me have my
coat.”

For a moment, while he was struggling into his coat, he thought she
had acquiesced. She sat on the bed with her hands tightly clasped and
would not look up at him. Dimly he sensed that there was a struggle
of some sort making the tapering shapely fingers grip until they were
bloodless. Then....

When he won out to the open air of the street his brow was wet and his
hands were trembling. There had been a fierce battle in the upper room,
and he had come out of it a victor, though only in the strength of a
glimpse into the heart of a woman--a glimpse vouchsafed to him in the
thick of the struggle. With every wile and weapon she possessed she had
fought to make him stay; and but for the saving glimpse which had shown
him what her real object was, he might have yielded.

“Poor little lost soul!” he muttered, as he turned his steps toward the
better-lighted cross street. “Reddick didn’t strain the truth when he
said she had heroine stuff in her. She knew if she could make me stay,
there would be no more talk of marriage; and it was for me that she
wanted to kill that chance--not for herself. What a hell of a world
this is, anyway!”




XXV


IT was in the forenoon following the Englishman’s staging of an
imitative attempt to “shoot up the town” that Reddick spent an earnest
hour trying to find Bromley, and finally ran across him as he was
coming out of the Colorado National Bank.

“Been hunting high and low for you,” said the redheaded one. “There is
the devil to pay and no pitch hot. Have you seen Phil this morning?”

“No,” said the play-boy.

“Well, I have. One of our county officials is sending his family east,
and I went up to the court house this morning to take him the tickets.
While I was there, Phil came in and went through some sort of business
at the counter. He didn’t see me; and after he was gone, I was curious
enough to go and pry. He is taking the big jump, Harry--the one that
will smother him for life! His business at the court house was to take
out a marriage license for himself and ‘Little Irish’ Connaghey!”

“And who is the Connaghey?”

“She is a girl in Madam Blanche’s. Phil was asking me about her the
other day. I told him the truth; that she was one of the straightest of
the lot--for whatever that was worth. I thought he might be wanting to
help her in some way, but I hadn’t the remotest idea he was thinking of
making a complete fool of himself.”

“Where did Phil go after he left the court house?”

“I don’t know; I haven’t seen him since. It’s up to you to hustle,
Harry. If this thing goes through, it is the end of Phil Trask. You
know that as well as I do.”

“I do, indeed. Thank you for putting me on. I’ll find Phil, if I have
to take out a search warrant for him.”

Losing no time, Bromley went first to the Alamo Building, and in the
upper corridor he met a Jew second-hand furniture dealer coming out of
Philip’s rooms and his heart sank. This meant that Philip was already
disposing of his effects and preparing for flight. In the sitting-room
he found Philip packing a trunk.

“Quit that, Phil, for a minute or so and talk to me,” he began
abruptly. Then: “We’ll skip the preliminaries; I know all about
it--what you’ve done, and what you are intending to do. Don’t you know
that it is preposterously impossible?”

“No, I don’t,” was the firm denial. “It isn’t impossible. Jim Garth did
it, and nothing but good came of it. He would be a different man to-day
if the woman he rescued and married hadn’t died. But that is beside the
mark, Harry. You know what I have done: I have spoiled my life, and I
am no better than the woman I am going to marry; not half as good in
some respects.”

“She isn’t too good to let you ruin yourself, world without end, by
marrying her!” retorted the play-boy.

“You are mistaken again,” was the mild dissent. “She proved to me, no
longer ago than last night, that she was capable of sacrificing herself
utterly to break my determination. I have come around to your point of
view, Harry. There is no poor wretch on earth too low down to answer
the appeal if one only knows how to make it. It has cost me pretty much
everything I value, or used to value, to learn this, but I have learned
it, at last.”

“But, good heavens--you can’t love this woman!”

“Who said anything about love? Don’t make another mistake, Harry; it
isn’t an infatuation. I am merely giving this girl a chance to become
what God intended her to be--a one-man woman; and the obligation this
will impose will keep me from sinking any deeper in the mud--or I hope
it may.”

For a fervid half-hour the play-boy argued and pleaded, all to no
purpose. It was quite in vain that, argument and persuasion failing, he
plied the whip, refusing to credit the altruistic motive, and accusing
Philip of making the final and fatal sacrifice to his own swollen ego;
not, indeed, that he believed this to be wholly true, but only that he
hoped there might be enough of the steel of truth in it to strike fire
upon the hard flint of Philip’s desperate resolution.

“If that is your motive--a monkish idea that by punishing yourself you
can wipe the slate of whatever things you’ve been writing on it since
you let yourself go--it’s a gross fallacy, Phil, and you know it. You
may fool yourself, but you can’t fool the God you still believe in.”

“You’ve got me all wrong, Harry,” was the placatory answer to this.
“I am still enough of a Christian to believe that there is only one
sacrifice for sin. That isn’t it at all. I’m not trying to atone; I am
merely trying to give another human being, to whose plane I have sunk
myself, a chance for the only redemption that can ever come to her--in
this life. I wish I could make you understand that I am not playing to
my own gallery--not consciously, at least. The ego you speak of is very
dead, these days. God knows, it needed to die. It wasn’t fit to live.”

It was in sheer desperation that Bromley fired his final shot.

“You told me once, Phil, that you had never said or done anything to
let Jean know that you were in love with her, or to win her love. That
was not true.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean just this: that you did win her love, whether you meant to or
not.”

“I don’t believe it, Harry; but if it were true, it applied only to the
Philip Trask she knew--or thought she knew--and not at all to the man
who is going to marry Mona Connaghey. Surely you can see that?”

“I can see that you don’t yet know any more about women than a new-born
baby!” was the fierce retort. “I have been living in the same house
with Jean Dabney all summer, and----”

“Hold on,” Philip interposed; “let’s get this thing straight, while we
are about it. I love Jean Dabney; I never knew how much I loved her
until after I had made it a shame to think of her in the same breath
with myself. But I have done just that, Harry. Whatever else I have
gained or lost in the past few months, I haven’t lost the sense of the
fitness of things. If Jean knew ... but probably she does know ... that
is the bitterest drop in the cup for me ... to know that she’d feel
she’d be obliged to cross the street to avoid meeting me. But what is
done is done, and can’t be undone.”

“Then there is nothing I can say or do that will keep you from taking
this last long jump into the depths?” said the play-boy, disheartened
at last.

“Nothing at all. It is no sudden impulse. I have considered it well in
all its bearings. We shall go away from Denver, of course; the farther
the better. If I don’t see you again----”

A lump came into Bromley’s throat as he grasped the hand of
leave-taking, and the fierceness of what he said was only a mask for
the emotion that was shaking him.

“You are a hideous fool, Phil, and if I did what I ought to, I’d break
a chair over your head to bring you to your senses. Since I can’t do
that--well, I hope the time may never come when you’d sell your soul to
undo what you are planning to do to-day. Good-by.”

In the street the play-boy hesitated, but only for a moment. He knew,
none better, what a blow this last irrevocable plunge of Philip’s would
be to the woman who had loved him--who still loved him--and his one
thought, born of manly pity and sympathy, was to soften the blow for
her, if that could be done.

A few minutes later he was leaning upon the counter in Madame
Marchande’s millinery shop and making his plea to the ample-bodied
Frenchwoman into whose good graces he had long since won his way.

“Ah, Monsieur; I think you will make marry with this preetty Mees Jean
wan day, is it not? Then I shall lose my bes’ hat-trimmer. How you
goin’ pay me for dat, eh? You say you’ll wan’ take her for buggy ride?
_Eh bien_; she can go w’en you come for her.”

Bromley ate his luncheon alone. What he had to say to Jean could not be
said across a restaurant table. Moreover, he knew she had carried her
luncheon to the shop, as usual. As soon as he thought he had given her
time to eat it, he called for her, with the little white mare of the
livery string between the shafts of the light side-bar buggy.

“How did you know that I was tired enough to fairly long for a
half-holiday?” she asked, as the little mare whisked them over the long
Platte River bridge in a direction they had once before driven, toward
the Highlands.

“How does anybody know anything?” he returned, smiling and adding: “I
flatter myself that there is not much about you that I don’t know,
Jeanie, dear.”

“I wonder?” she said soberly; then: “You have been a good brother to me
this summer, Harry.”

“I hope I have been something more than a brother. Brothers are not
exactly my idea of a hilariously good time. Shall we drive on up to our
little lake?”

“Anywhere you please. It is such a joy to be out of the shop and
outdoors on a day like this that places don’t matter in the least.”

Accordingly, he repeated the programme of the former excursion,
hitching the mare among the cottonwoods on the shore of the tiny
highland lake, and spreading the lap-robe on the hillside where they
had sat once before to revel in the glorious view of sky-pitched
mountains and swelling plain. For a time they spoke of nothing but the
view; but that was only because Bromley was waiting for his opening. It
came when Jean said:

“The other time we sat here it was to talk about Philip. Do you see
much of him now?”

“Not very much.” Then he took his courage firmly in hand: “I am afraid
we shall have to forget Philip, in a way, Jean. Do you think you can do
that?”

“Why should we forget him?”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“You can’t always forget people just because you might want--because it
might be best to forget them.”

“But--what if they deliberately walk out of the picture?”

She looked up quickly, and in the pools of the dark eyes there was the
shock of a fear realized.

“Philip has done that?” she asked.

He nodded sorrowfully.

“That is what it amounts to. You remember what you once said: that he
might do the irrevocable thing that would cut him off from us for good
and all?”

“I remember.”

“Well, it is done; or the same as done.”

She drew a quick breath. “Tell me, Harry.”

“I will, but only because you’d have to know it anyhow, a little later.
This morning he took out a marriage license for himself and a--a--I
can’t name the woman for you, Jean. I suppose they are married by this
time. Will you believe me when I say that I did everything I could
think of to prevent it?”

There was no answer to this, and when he looked aside at her again he
saw that she was crying quietly, and his heart grew hot.

“Don’t cry,” he broke out almost roughly. “He isn’t worth it, Jean.”

“Yes, he is,” she faltered. “You don’t know him as I do, Harry; though
you have been more to him and closer to him than I ever could be. _I_
know why he has done this.”

“Well, I guess I do, too,” he admitted grudgingly. “I must talk plainly
to you this once, Jean, if I never do again. The woman is--oh, well,
we’ll say she is pretty nearly everything she ought not to be; and
Philip thinks and says that he can go no lower than he has already
gone. What he said to me when I wrestled with him was this: ‘I’m merely
trying to give another human being, to whose plane I have sunk myself,
a chance for the only redemption that can ever come to her--in this
life.’ And I’ll do him this much justice: he didn’t know--because I
couldn’t tell him--how much it was going to hurt you.”

A cool breeze swept across the plain from the mountain rampart in the
west, and the yellow leaves of the cottonwoods sifted down upon them
in a golden shower. Over in the Clear Creek valley a freight train
inched its way along toward Denver like a monstrous caterpillar. In
the transparent atmosphere of the perfect autumn day Long’s Peak stood
out as clearly as if its vast bulk rose from just behind the nearest
swelling of the foot-hills. When the silence grew over-long, the
play-boy spoke again.

“Philip didn’t know--doesn’t know; but I have known all along. You love
him, Jean. It is nothing to be ashamed of,” he hastened to add. “It is
just something to be sorry for, now. I know well enough you can never
give another man what you have given him ... but I want the right to
stand by you--to comfort you. I’m asking you to marry me, Jean, dear.”

The shock of a fear realized had gone out of her eyes when she turned
to him, and in its place there was something almost like adoration.

“You’d make sacrifices, too, wouldn’t you?” she said, very gently.
Then: “Are you forgetting Miss Follansbee?”

“Oh, no; Eugie is going to marry Stephen Drew. I meant to have told
you. It is to be next month, I believe.”

Another speechless moment while a second shower of the yellow leaves
came circling down. Then she spoke again, still more gently.

“I think you are one of God’s gentlemen, Harry; I shall always think
so. But there are two good reasons why we can’t marry. One is----”

“I know what you are going to say,” he interrupted: “that I don’t love
you at all--in a marrying way; that I am only sorry for you. But let
that go. Suppose there isn’t any marrying love on either side. You
remember what you said the evening when I told you about Eugie; that
people might marry and be a comfort to each other without that kind of
love. Besides, when you come right down to it, what is marrying love,
anyway?”

She got up and shook the fallen leaves from her lap.

“You have given one of the reasons, Harry; and some day, when you are
not expecting it, I may hold a looking-glass before you and show you
the other. You ask me what marrying love is: it is what I have seen,
more than once, in your eyes ... and you were not looking at me. Let us
get in and drive somewhere else. I don’t believe I shall ever want to
come back to this place again.”

As it chanced, it was at the precise moment when Bromley was putting
his companion into the buggy preparatory to continuing the afternoon
drive, that Philip was descending from a hired hack before a door that
was seldom opened for callers in the daytime. It was Madam Blanche
herself, a woman who still retained much of what had once been the
beauty and charm of a riant, joyous girlhood, who admitted him. He
stated his errand briefly.

“I have come for Mona--the girl you call ‘Little Irish.’ Is she ready
to go with me?”

“Ready? Why, she’s gone!”

“Gone?--gone where?”

“She wouldn’t tell me where she was going; wouldn’t give me even a
hint. But I guess she took one of the morning trains. She left early
enough to catch any one of ’em. She said you’d given her the money to
go with.”

“No,” he denied soberly; “I gave her money so that she could pay you
whatever she might be owing you, and get ready to marry me.”

The woman collapsed into the nearest chair.

“Marry you? Why, my dear man! What do you think she’s made of? She’s
too good a girl to do anything like that!”

“Too good?” he queried vaguely.

“Sure! She’d know too well what it would do to you on the day you’d
want to turn your back on the sporting life. She cried when she went,
but she wouldn’t tell me what for: she said I’d know some time to-day.
And I do know now. She went to keep you from doing the craziest thing a
man of your kind ever does. Some day maybe you’ll know what she’s done
for you, and what it cost the poor little soul to do it.”

Philip found his hat and moved toward the door.

“I think I know it now,” he returned half absently; and after he
had paid and dismissed the hackman, he went in search of the Jew
second-hand man to stop the dismantling of his rooms which had already
begun, tearing a small legal document, which he took from his pocket,
into tiny squares and scattering them in the street as he hurried along.

Two days later, Reddick, who had dropped into the Curtis Street chop
house for a midday bite, found himself seated opposite Bromley.

“Well,” he observed, “it proved to be a false alarm, after all, didn’t
it?”

“I suppose it was, if you say so,” replied the play-boy with his
good-tempered grin; “only I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“You don’t? Haven’t you seen Phil?”

“Not since day before yesterday when I bade him good-by.”

“Gosh! Then it’s all new to you, is it? He is still here--in his old
diggings in the Alamo. It was a flash in the pan--that marriage of
his. The girl saved his bacon by skipping out.”

“Um,” said Bromley curiously. “She must have hated him good and hard to
run away from half a gold mine.”

“Hate nothing! It was exactly the other way around. She thought too
much of him to let him ruin himself for life. Madam Blanche was in the
office yesterday, and she told me about it. A mighty fine thing for the
little outcast to do, it strikes me. This is a queer old round world,
and you can’t most always sometimes tell what’s going to happen in it
next.”

“Amen,” chanted the play-boy; and his appetite, which had been
capricious for a pair of days, began to return with gratifying zest.

During the afternoon, which dragged interminably, he changed his mind
a dozen times as to the advisability of telling Jean the newest news.
On one hand, it seemed to be a plain duty; but there was also something
to be said in rebuttal. Jean had already been given the deepest wound
she could suffer, and he hoped it was beginning to heal--a little. Was
it any part of kindness to reopen it? True, she might learn any day
for herself that Philip had not left Denver; but every day’s delay was
something gained for the healing process.

About the time when, still undetermined as to which course to pursue,
he was on his way to Madame Marchande’s to walk home with Jean,
he suddenly remembered that he had a dinner engagement with the
Follansbees. Telling himself that this postponed the decision for the
time, at least, he hailed a passing hack, made a swift change to
dinner clothes in his West Denver room, and kept his engagement at the
house in Champa Street.

It was three hours later when he had himself driven home from the
rather dull dinner and its still duller aftermath. Entering the cottage
living-room, he found Jean in hat and coat, as if she had just come in
or was just going out, and there was a napkin-covered basket on the
table beside her.

“I was hoping you would come before it got too late,” she said. “Are
you too tired to walk a few blocks with me?”

“Never too tired when I can be of any use to you--you know that,” he
answered cheerfully. “Where to?”

“You remember the poor old lady who had the room next to ours in the
Whittle Building, don’t you?”

“Old Mrs. Grantham?--sure!”

“I found a note from her when I came home this evening. She is sick and
she wants me to come and see her. It is late, but I think I ought to
go. She is all alone, you know; no relatives or friends. That is the
pitiful thing about so many people here in Denver.”

“I know. Let’s toddle along. I have been to a pretty stodgy dinner
and the walk will do me good. No you don’t--I’ll carry that basket of
goodies, if you please. What else am I good for, I’d like to know?”

All the way down Eleventh Street to Larimer, and over the Cherry Creek
bridge to the cross street leading to the dubious district centered by
the Corinthian varieties and gambling rooms, Bromley was trying once
more to decide whether or not to say the word which, as he made sure,
would reopen the grievous wound in the sore heart of his companion.

But when at last he took her arm to help her up the dark stair in the
disreputable tenement opposite the Corinthian, the word was still
unspoken. And the thing he was hoping for most devoutly was that they
might be permitted to do their charitable errand and win back to better
breathing air without running afoul of the man who, as he had ample
reason to know, was now no stranger to the purlieus below Larimer
Street.




XXVI


AFTER he had rued his bargain with the Jew second-hand man--paying
a stiff forfeit for the privilege--and had reëstablished himself in
his rooms in the Alamo, Philip slipped back into the drifting current
which had been only momentarily arrested by the Mona Connaghey episode,
turning day into night and night into day, gambling a little, drinking
a little, assiduously avoiding the few daylight friends he had made,
and adding nightly to a different and more numerous collection, some of
whom were grateful for the largesse he scattered, while others regarded
him only as a soft-hearted fool to be played upon and cozened out of
his money as occasion might offer.

It was at this time that Middleton, the fat-faced railroad clerk,
appealed to him for help, and Philip heard the appeal with the
tolerant, half-amused smile which aptly mirrored his changed point of
view. A younger brother of Middleton’s had recently joined the rush to
the golden West, and Middleton had secured him a railroad clerkship
in the freight station. So far, so good; but almost immediately,
it seemed, the boy had been caught in the wide-spreading net of
dissipation and was in a fair way to be ruined.

“It is only gambling, for a beginning; but since he is in the cashier’s
office, handling company money, that is bad enough,” Middleton said.
“It won’t take him very long to find out that his salary won’t be a
drop in the bucket when it comes to going up against the skin games.”

“Well, why don’t you take him in hand?” Philip asked, the thin-lipped
smile accentuating itself.

Middleton flushed uncomfortably.

“I was expecting you’d say that. But you know how a kid bucks at taking
anything from an older brother. Besides, I can’t say that I’ve been
setting him any too good an example.”

“No; I guess you haven’t. But what makes you think I might set him a
better one?”

“I don’t. Just the same, he’d take a jacking-up from you as coming from
a--er--a sort of case-hardened rounder, you know. That’s what you’ve
got the name of being, now, Philly--if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“No, I don’t mind. If I come across your brother, I’ll try to choke him
off.”

This conditional promise was made in the afternoon of the second day
after he had agreed to the costly compromise with the Jew furniture
man; and late in the evening of that day he caught a glimpse of young
Jack Middleton, hands buried in pockets and head down, turning a corner
and hurrying toward the Corinthian. As Philip chanced to know, it was
the railroad pay-day, and it was a fair assumption that the boy had his
month’s salary in his pocket.

Entering the game room of the Corinthian a few steps behind young
Middleton, Philip waited only long enough to see the boy plunge into
play with all the crass ignorance and recklessness of a beginner,
before he intervened. Standing at the youth’s elbow while he was
staking and losing five-dollar gold pieces in swift succession at one
of the roulette wheels, he said, in a tone audible only to the ear it
was intended for: “Whose money is that you’re losing, Jackie?”

The boy jumped as if he had been shot. Then he saw who it was who had
spoken to him and began to beg:

“You--you mustn’t stop me, Mr. Trask! I’ve _got_ to win--I tell you,
I’ve just _got_ to!”

Philip drew him aside.

“Just how bad is it, Jack?” he asked. “I mean, how much are you short
in the office?”

“Oh, my God!--how did you know?” gasped the boy.

“Never mind about that. How much is it?”

“It’s--it’s over a hundred dollars.”

“Well, don’t you know you haven’t a dog’s chance of getting it back in
a place like this?”

“But some of them win,” was the desperate plea.

“Yes, and a great many more of them lose. When did you take the money
from the office?”

“L-last week.”

“You called it borrowing, I suppose. But when you got your pay to-day,
why didn’t you put it back?”

“I don’t get enough; they’re only paying me seventy-five a month. I
lost the money here, and I _had_ to come and try to get it back. The
travelling auditor will be at the office in the morning to check us up,
and then----”

“I see. Jackie, there is nothing in this dizzy whirl for you or for
anybody; I know, because I’m in it myself. I’ll make a bargain with
you. How much did you say you are short?”

“I--I took six twenties.”

Philip drew a handful of yellow coins from his pocket.

“This is the bargain, Jack. I’ll lend you the six twenties if you will
promise me to quit this business for good and all. How about it? Is it
a go?”

The boy’s gratitude was almost dog-like in its frantic extravagance.

“Will I promise? My God, if you only knew how I’ve suffered! I didn’t
sleep a wink last night. And I’ll never forget this, the longest day I
live, Mr. Trask! I didn’t mean to be a thief, but--”

Philip saw Sheeny Mike, one of the game room spotter hawks, watching
them narrowly.

“Chase your feet out of this, Jack, and remember your promise,” he
said; but the hawk had seen the passing of the gold pieces and he
started in pursuit of the boy. Philip detained him with a hand on his
shoulder.

“Not this time, Mike; the kid is a friend of mine.”

“To hell with you! That don’t get the house anything!”

“Maybe not; just the same, it goes as it lies. You ought to know me by
this time. Keep your hands where I can see them--it’s safer, because I
can always beat you to the draw. Now listen: if you had the brain of a
louse, Sheeny--which you haven’t--you’d know that I am worth more to
the house in a month than a little one-horse railroad clerk would be in
a year.” And to show his good will, he turned to the nearest roulette
wheel and took his place in the circle of players.

It was something like an hour later, and after he had consistently and
painstakingly lost considerably more than the sum he had given young
Middleton, that he drifted aimlessly out of the game room and across
the stair-head landing into the open space serving as the back gallery
of the varieties theater. A dancing girl in chalk-white tights had just
finished her turn, and men in the crowded lower part of the theater
were pitching silver dollars onto the stage in lieu of bouquets,
stamping their applause with booted feet. Philip, looking down upon the
scene in a saddened reverie from the gallery height, saw the beginning
of a drunken fight in the pit. Two shirt-sleeved men from the third
row of seats in the orchestra struggled up, went into a fierce clinch
and stumbled into the aisle in a pummelling wrestle. Before any of the
aproned bar-servers could drop their trays and intervene, the wrestlers
fell apart and there was the sharp report of a pistol to dominate the
clamor of stamping feet--the crack of a pistol and a woman’s scream.

The gurgling scream came from one of the gallery boxes on the left, and
Philip whipped out of his sober reverie with a bound and ran. Half-way
down the passageway behind the row of cell-like boxes he collided with
a red-faced man racing to escape. “They’ve shot the woman!” he gasped,
struggling to free himself from Philip’s detaining grasp. “Lemme get
out of here--I ain’t in it!”

Philip let the craven go and hurried on. In the box of tragedy the
curtain had been drawn and two women were kneeling over a third who
was lying on the floor. One of the women sprang to her feet as he
entered and her eyes were blazing.

“That pie-eyed ---- ---- ---- down there shot at nothin’ and got Lola!”
she raged. “Don’t let her die in this hell-hole! Get help to carry her
over to her room! It’s just across the street.”

In a trice Philip had captured two of the gallery drink servers, and
the victim of the wild shot was quickly carried out and down the stairs
and across to the darkened building opposite, the two women following.
At the foot of the unlighted stairway where Jean Dabney had more than
once turned him back, Philip found himself in the clutch of the woman
with the blazing eyes.

“Wait,” she panted. “There’s enough of ’em to carry her up and to run
for a doctor and her man. What she’s needin’ is a priest, but she ain’t
a Catholic, and none o’ the others’d dirty their hands with the likes
of us.”

“You are mistaken,” said Philip evenly. “I know of one, at least, who
will go where he is needed.”

“Then get him quick, for God’s sake! She’s dyin’; the bullet went clean
through and come out at her back!”

“Go on and keep her alive if you can,” Philip urged. “I’ll hurry.”

Luckily, he found an idle two-horse hack standing in front of the
American House, and he sprang in and gave his order, bidding high for
haste. After a reckless race of a dozen blocks the hack halted in front
of a house yarded in the same enclosure with a small brick church
carrying a gilt cross on its gable; and Philip was relieved to see
that, late as it was, there was still a light burning in the minister’s
study. A heavy-set, fair-haired young man with the face of a wise and
compassionate saint answered his ring.

“I have come again, Father Goodwin,” he began hurriedly. “It’s a
tragedy, this time. A woman has just been accidentally shot in the
Corinthian theater, and I think she is dying. Can you come?”

“She is not a Catholic?”

“No.”

“I’ll be with you in a moment.”

On the galloping race to the appointed destination the young clergyman
put an arm across Philip’s shoulders in the darkness of the hack’s
interior.

“Tell me, Philip: how long are you going to go on throwing yourself
away? The other time you came to me from a woman dying in a brothel;
and this time you come from the Corinthian. Doesn’t your life mean
anything more to you than a wallowing in the mud?”

“It did, once,” was the low-toned response. “But I have found out that
it is one thing to knock the barriers down, and another to try to build
them up again. As long as I hadn’t wallowed, it was easy not to. But
one night the props went out all at once, and--well, I can’t seem to
set them back again.”

“They were not the right kind of props, Philip; you may be sure of
that. Won’t you come and talk to me like a man, some time?”

“Maybe,” said Philip; and then the hack was pulled up at the doorway of
the darkened stairway.

Philip led the way up the stairs and around the gallery-like upper
corridor to a lighted room with an open door. The scene that revealed
itself as he entered and stood aside to make way for the clergyman
stunned him. The bed upon which the victim of the drunken miner’s
chance bullet lay had been drawn out from the wall, and on one side of
it a doctor, with Jean Dabney standing by to help as she could, was
trying to determine the seriousness of the wound. On the other side of
the bed knelt a man with graying hair, cold eyes and a hard-lined face
which was now drawn and pinched and haggard as he stared at the still
figure over which the doctor was working. Bromley caught Philip’s arm
and took him apart from the others.

“Jean knows, and I know,” he explained in a low whisper. “We had come
down to see the sick old lady on the other side of the building. When
they told me who this woman was, I went after your father. Don’t do
anything to make it harder for him, Phil.”

For a long minute Philip stood looking down at the face of the woman
who had supplanted his mother. It was the wreck of a face that had once
been attractive, perhaps even beautiful with a wild, gypsy allure.
While he looked, the dark eyelids fluttered and opened, and the
carmined lips framed a single word, “_John!_”

The doctor straightened up and drew Jean away, shaking his head to
signal that the end had come. The clergyman knelt beside the dying
woman and began to speak in low tones. Bromley followed the doctor and
Jean into the corridor, and at the door he looked back. He saw Philip
hesitate, somber-eyed, but only for an instant. Then the son went to
kneel, with bowed head, beside his father.




XXVII


“I SAW what you saw as we were leaving the room--yes. But what did
Philip do afterward?” Jean asked, looking up from her seat in the low
wicker rocking-chair.

After taking Jean home on the night of the tragedy, Bromley had gone
back to the tenement building to stand by as a loyal partner should,
and for the three succeeding days his room in the West Denver cottage
had remained unoccupied. Late the third evening he had returned to find
Jean sitting up, sewing, with the two younger girls poring over their
school books in the rear half of the double sitting-room.

“Phil did his full duty,” was his answer to the low-voiced question.
“Took everything upon his own shoulders--funeral arrangements, and all
that; acted just as if there had been no breach between his father
and himself--a thing he wouldn’t have done six months ago, not if the
heavens had fallen.”

“And you have been helping?”

“Naturally, I did what I could--which wasn’t much beyond backing Phil
up and running errands. He seemed glad to have me to lean upon, so I
stayed with him. It was the least I could do.”

“Of course. Where is his father now?”

“Vanished into thin air, right after the funeral; wouldn’t tell Phil
where he was going; wouldn’t take any of Phil’s money; wouldn’t talk,
except to say that he wouldn’t get in Philip’s way again--not if he had
to take the other side of the world for his.”

“And Philip--where is he?”

“He left on to-night’s train for New Hampshire. He is going back to
square the--er--the matter with the bank--so far as a return of the
money can do it.”

“But he didn’t need to go in person to do that, did he?”

“That is what I told him; but he seemed to think he ought to go and
face it out, man to man; that it was part of the price he must pay
for the sake of the name--since his father wouldn’t pay any of it. I
imagine, too, that he wants to be there to bargain that his mother
and sisters are not to be harried by a revival of talk about the old
scandal.”

She nodded complete intelligence, saying, “I told you you didn’t know
the real Philip, Harry.”

“I didn’t; I admit it. He is as gentle and compassionate now as he used
to be opinionated and hard. But he still believes he has put himself
entirely beyond the pale.”

She made a swift little gesture of appeal. “You must try to make
him understand that there isn’t any pale--not in his sense of the
word--after he comes back.” Then: “He is coming back, isn’t he?”

Bromley nodded. “Yes; I think he is coming back. But as to making him
understand: I fancy there is only one person in the world who can do
that successfully, Jean. That person is yourself.”

She bent lower over her sewing. “What makes you say that, Harry?”

He was not looking at her when he answered. His gaze had wandered to
the far end of the room; to a girlish face framed in a tousled mass of
yellow hair; ripe lips pressed together and the fair brow wrinkled as
their owner puzzled over her lesson for the next day.

“I say it, Jeanie, dear, because, in spite of everything he has been
and has done, Philip loves you, even as you love him,” he said. “But
he believes he has sinned beyond your forgiveness. If you can forgive
him----”

She looked up to see why he had let the sentence lapse, and when the
distracting reason became apparent, she laid her work aside and slipped
away to the bed-room she shared with Mysie. When she came back she
was holding one hand behind her. Suddenly the play-boy found himself
staring at a reflection of his own face in a little hand-mirror. He
glanced up at her with the boyish smile that endeared him to all women.

“You are a little wretch, Jean!” he laughed. “You caught me red-handed,
didn’t you?--just as you said you would that day when we were out in
the Highlands. All right; it’s a fact, and I plead guilty. But I’ll be
good and patient and wait until you won’t have to say that I’m robbing
the cradle. Now that you know what I was dreaming about, may I go and
see if I can’t give Mysie a bit of help? She seems to be finding her
trigonometry harder than usual to-night, judging from the way she is
making faces at it.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Bromley’s prediction that Philip would return to Colorado came true
within a fortnight, and the news of his arrival reached the play-boy
through Reddick. Going at once to the rooms in the Alamo Building,
Bromley found the returned traveller opening his mail.

“You made a quick trip, Phil,” was his greeting. “How did you find
things in the old home?”

Philip laid the envelope opener aside and felt for his pipe.

“I found them pretty much as I expected to. And there was nothing to
stay for, after my errand was done.”

“No trouble about the errand, was there?”

“No. The bank people didn’t ask any questions. They were only too glad
to see the color of their money again.”

“And your mother and sisters?”

“They wanted me to stay, of course. They couldn’t see any reason why
I shouldn’t retire and settle down at home as a solid citizen; why I
should want to go back to the outlandish West.”

“Well, why should you?” Bromley asked, with his most disarming smile.

“You know the answer to that as well as I do, Harry. In the old rut at
home I had to be once more a Pharisee among the people who had known
me from childhood, and one week of that was enough. Another week of it
would have stifled me.”

The play-boy’s smile broadened into a grin. “There is plenty of
breathing room out here, if that is what you want.”

“Not room enough--in Denver.”

“No? Whereabouts, then?”

Philip picked up a badly spelled letter written in pencil and glanced
over it.

“This is from Jim Garth. He has found a prospect up somewhere near
the Mount of the Holy Cross, and he asks me if I will grub-stake him
for a winter’s work on it. I shall leave this evening to put in the
winter with Jim. He says his claim is at altitude eleven thousand and
something. There ought to be breathing space enough up there.”

“But why, Phil?”

“I think you know why. This gold-mad country, or my own innate weakness
or wickedness--call it what you please--has made a sorry castaway of
me, Harry. As you know very well, I’ve travelled a long and crooked
trail since we came out of the mountains together last spring. I don’t
know whether or not I can find my way out of the woods; it’s all rather
chaotic just now. I only know that I want to go bury myself for a while
and see if I can’t fight through to daylight, somewhere and somehow.”

After a little pause, Bromley said: “You are thinking only of yourself,
Phil? What about Jean?”

“Jean? I thought I had given you time enough there, Harry.”

“Nonsense! Jean loves me dearly--as a brother--as she ought to. I’m
going to marry Mysie when she is old enough; that is, if she’ll have
me.”

“Mysie? I never dreamed of that! But how about the Follansbee affair?”

“Humph!” said the play-boy. “You don’t keep up with the neighborhood
gossip. Eugie begged off some time ago. She is going to marry Stephen
Drew next month.”

“Oh; so that little problem solves itself, does it? But we were
speaking of Jean. How much does she know about my father--and me?”

“All there is to know. She has known it all along.”

“And she doesn’t despise me?”

“You’ll not get anything out of me; go and ask her for yourself. Or are
you going to drop out for a whole winter without seeing her?”

It was the new Philip who turned his face away and said, quite humbly:
“I’m not fit to go to her now, Harry; you know that. It would be a
sacrilege--another and worse indecency--to go to her with the smell of
the pit-fires still in my clothes. I love her too well for that.”

“But you have never told her so.”

“No; and it is too late, now.”

The play-boy got out of his chair.

“Perhaps you are right, Phil; I won’t say you are not. Is there
anything I can do toward helping you in the make-ready?”

“No; nothing that I think of. I’ll outfit in Leadville.”

“All right; I’ll be at the train to see you off.” And as he shook hands
at parting: “Don’t you know, Phil, there are times when I almost envy
you your confounded old burn-yourself-at-the-stake Puritan conscience?
There are, for a fact; and this is one of them. Good-by--till this
evening.”




XXVIII


“I DON’T believe I can climb any higher, Harry; the air up here is so
frightfully thin. You and Mysie go on if you want to. I’ll sit down and
wait for you. I wouldn’t ask for any grander view than this is, right
here from this rock.”

Spring had come again for the altitudes, and though the higher peaks
of the Continental Divide were still heavily blanketed with snow,
the gulches were free and the mountain streams were running bank
full. Bromley, with an ulterior motive that he was still carefully
concealing, had won Mrs. Dabney’s consent to take Jean and Mysie on a
flying trip to the summit of the Great Divide, saying it was a shame
that, after a residence of two years in Denver, the girls had not yet
seen any more of the mountain grandeurs than could be glimpsed from a
car window on a Sunday excursion up one of the canyons.

Making Leadville only a halting point, they had come on up the railroad
to a flag-station hamlet high in the backbone range. By making a few
judicious inquiries in the hamlet, Bromley had learned what he wanted
to know, and which trail to take. In one of the gulches far above the
railroad, the gray, beard-like dump of a mine or prospect tunnel could
be seen, with the help of the field-glasses, and it was on the steep
trail toward this that he was leading his breathless charges.

“Well wait until you get your breath,” he offered, in answer to Jean’s
protest. “There is no hurry. It will be hours before we can get the
return train.”

As he spoke, he was sweeping the upper reaches of the trail with the
glass. On one of the nearer loopings a man was descending. Bromley
readjusted the focus of the binocular and fixed the descending
mountaineer fairly in its field. What he saw made him stultify himself
immediately and shamelessly.

“If you really don’t care to go any farther, Jean,” he said hastily,
“Mysie and I will climb up to that monument rock over there on the
other spur. You won’t mind? We’ll be in plain sight nearly all the way.”

“Of course I won’t mind. I could sit here and enjoy this magnificent
view all day. Run along.”

Philip Trask, no longer crippled in body, mind or vision, saw the
three human dots on the trail below him; saw two of them separate
from the third and move away to the left toward a hunched shoulder
of the mountain with a curiously shaped pinnacle rock at its summit.
“Tenderfoots,” he said to himself, “and one of them is already out of
breath.” He looked again, squinting his eyes against the hard light of
the forenoon sun. “Humph!--skirts. I wonder who was fool enough to drag
a couple of women eleven thousand feet up in the air? No wonder one of
them has pegged out.”

A turn in the trail hid the motionless figure at the halting place for
the time, though he could still see the others making their toilful
way onward and upward over the rock-strewn talus. As he drew nearer
to the one who had been left behind, the rock, upon one of the lower
shelf-like ledges of which she was sitting, kept him from getting a
fair sight of her, and it was not until he was about to go on past her
that he saw who she was and stopped short.

“_Jean!_” he gasped.

She stood up and held out both hands to him, and what she said appeared
to take no account of anything that had intervened, save the lapse of
time.

“You, Philip? I wonder if I’m dreaming? Is it really you--after all
these months? Where did you come from?”

“Out of a pretty mucky hole in the ground, as you’d imagine,” he
grinned, looking down at his earth-stained corduroys and boots. “But
tell me: how under the canopy did you get here?”

“‘Canopy,’” she smiled; “that is New England, isn’t it? We came on the
train. Harry brought us--Mysie and me--just for a little outing. We
left Leadville this morning. But I hadn’t the slightest idea that we’d
find you up here.”

“Just one of Harry’s little jokes, I suppose. I think he meant it to
be a surprise, all around. I wrote him last week and told him where we
were--Big Jim Garth and I--and how we could be reached, now that the
snows have melted. I thought perhaps he might care to run up and have a
look at Jim’s prospect. It isn’t a bonanza, but Jim can probably sell
it for enough, with the development work we’ve done, to take care of
him in his old age.”

“You have been working with him all winter?”

“Yes. We were snowed in most of the time, but that didn’t matter. We
had plenty to eat. But this morning we found that the tobacco was all
gone, and at that, of course, everything had to stop dead until one of
us could go down to the railroad and get some. No tobacco, no work.”

She sat down again on the rock ledge and made room for him beside her.

“As I say, I hadn’t the remotest idea we were going to find you up
here. Harry never gave us the least little hint--which was just like
him. What a perfectly glorious view there is from here!”

Her enthusiastic exclamation was well warranted. The atmosphere was
crystal clear, and across a mountain-studded interval of nearly two
hundred miles of sheer distance earth and sky met on the remote horizon
formed by the serrated summits of a blue range in eastern Utah.
Philip pointed out and named some of the eye-filling grandeurs: White
Mountain, Shingle Peak, the rampart buttressings of the White River
Plateau, and beyond these the Book or Roan Mountains, too distant
to show the striated colorings of their majestic cliffs, and in the
southwest, the far-away bulwark of the Uncompahgres.

“I can never look at it without being made to feel my own, and all
human, littleness,” he said. “And, after all, tremendous as it is, this
is only a dot, a vanishing point, in a universe too vast to be even
faintly comprehended by our little insect minds.”

She stole a glance aside at him. Lean, wind-tanned, athletic, with
work-hardened hands and knotted muscles, there was little to remind
her of the neatly groomed, reserved young railroad clerk who had sat
beside her in the Kansas Pacific day-coach two years earlier; the “damn
Yankee” she had told him she had been taught to call him and his kind.
Even his speech was different now.

“This is a country of big things--this Colorado of ours,” he went on,
“and we little human insects have to grow and expand to fit it--do
that, or be blotted out and lost in the shuffle. Doesn’t it make you
feel that way?”

She nodded. Though she was far from realizing it, or had been, up to
this moment, her two years of burden-carrying in Denver had changed
her quite as much as his varied experiences and the breaking down of
the barriers had changed him. Then, with a smile: “We were terrible
tenderfoots two years ago, weren’t we?”

“It was a country of tenderfoots then; it still is, in a great measure.
What a world of meaning there is crammed into that one coined word!
We call this a new country; in reality, it is old--very old and
wise and shrewdly discriminating. It sifts the grain from the chaff
without mercy; and equally without mercy the chaff is scattered to the
four winds. We are the new things; we who call ourselves the lords
of creation! Most of us were mere babes in the wood when we came
here--tenderfoots in all that the word implies. At least, I am sure I
was. You were different.”

“Not so very different,” she disagreed. “I remember how sneery and
unmannerly I was the day we met on the train ... how I made fun of
the ‘Philips,’ and told you you’d never go to the mountains. I don’t
believe you ever quite forgave me for that.”

“The Philip you knew then was quite capable of holding it against you,”
he admitted, with a reminiscent smile. “In fact, if I remember right,
I believe he did cherish some boyish notion of showing you, some time,
how completely mistaken you were; how far superior he was to your
prejudiced opinion of him.”

She looked around at him with a flash of the old-time mockery in her
eyes.

“Does he feel that way now?” she asked.

“Ah!” he returned quickly, “I think you know very well how he feels
now. Harry has told you everything there was to tell, hasn’t he?”

She made the sign of assent, adding: “But only as a loyal friend, you
may be sure.”

“Of course. Harry is incapable of disloyalty. What I am afraid of is
that he was too loyal; that he hasn’t stood the thing upon its rightful
feet. It wasn’t the finding of my father as--well, as I did find him,
that smashed me, Jean.”

“What was it, then?”

“Just my own miserable pride and Phariseeism--and weakness. There was
no excuse; none whatever. I didn’t have to go to the devil merely
because my father had chosen to do so. On the other hand, it was up to
me to make the name honorable again, if I could. But I didn’t stop to
think of that.”

“How curiously things turn out,” she mused. “We lived almost next door
to your father in the Whittle Block. I saw him nearly every day; he
would be coming in in the morning just about the time I would be going
to work. And we--that is, I--knew his--the woman, a little. She was
not all bad, Philip; she was human and kind-hearted. When Mummie was
sick----”

“I know,” he interposed. “There is no shadow of bitterness in me now,
Jean; and I thank God there is none of the old narrowness left--or I
hope there isn’t. It is a thousand pities that some of us have to go
through hell to find out that there is no such thing as a hopelessly
lost soul.”

“Have you found that out, at last?” she asked softly.

“I think so; I hope so. And God knows, the price I am paying for the
knowledge is heavy enough.”

“What is the price, Philip?”

He hesitated for the fraction of a second. Then he turned to her
impulsively, hungrily, and held out his arms.

“It is the knowledge that I can’t come to you with clean hands and
heart and soul, Jean. Isn’t that enough?”

The dark eyes met his gray ones fairly and there were quick-springing
tears in them.

“Ah, Philip, dear ... it’s been such a long time! And it might be
enough to come between us--what you have done; perhaps it would be,
if--if I didn’t love you so!”

On the pinnacle rock of the western shoulder of the great mountain
Bromley had been keeping his companion interested in the wide-flung
view; also, he had been stealing a glance now and again through the
field-glasses, as he stood behind Mysie, at the two figures sitting
side by side on a ledge of rock over on the distant trail. It was not
until after he had seen the two figures melt into one that he said:

“If you have looked your fill, Mysie, mine, perhaps we’d better be
getting back to Jeanie. Shouldn’t you think she’d be missing us
horribly by this time? Let me climb down first; then I can catch you as
you jump.”


(THE END)




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.