THE TENDERFOOTS

BY
FRANCIS LYNDE

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

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[2] 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,[3] 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.

[4]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,[5] 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,[6] 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[7] 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[8] 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.

[9]“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[10] 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.

[11]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[12] 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?”

[13]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[14] 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,[15] 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[16] 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[17] 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[18] 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?”

[19]“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.

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[21] 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[22] 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[23] 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[24] 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?”

[25]“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[26] 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[27] 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[28] 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,[29] 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?”

[30]“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[31] 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.

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[33] 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[34] 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[35] 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[36] 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[37] 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[38] 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[39] 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[40] 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.[41] 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.”

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,[43] 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[44] 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[45] 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?”

[46]“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[47] 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[48] 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,[49] 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!”

[50]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[51] 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[52] 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[53] 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....”[54] 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[55] 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,[56] 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[57] 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[58] 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.

[59]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[60] 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.”

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[62] 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[63] 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;[64] “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;[65] 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[66] 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[67] 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[68] 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.

[69]“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.”

[70]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[71] 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[72] 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.”

[73]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[74] 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.”

[75]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.

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[77] 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,[78] 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[79] 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[80] 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[81] 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[82] 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[83] 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.”

[84]“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[85] 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.

[86]“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.”

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.

[88]“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[89] 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[90] 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[91] 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[92] 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,[93] 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.”

[94]“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[95] ’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’.”

[96]“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[97] 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[98] 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[99] 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.”

[100]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[101] 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[102] 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!”

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[104] 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[105] 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.

[106]“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[107] 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[108] 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!”

[109]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.[110] 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[111] 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[112] 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[113] 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[114] 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.”

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[116] 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,[117] 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.

[118]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[119] 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[120] 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[121] 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.”

[122]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.”

[123]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[124] 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[125] 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!”[126] 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!”

[127]“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[128] 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[129] 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.”

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[131] 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[132] 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!”[133] 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[134] 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[135] 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.”

[136]“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[137] 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[138] 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[139] 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.[140] 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.”

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,[142] 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.[143] 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[144] 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.

[145]“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[146] 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,[147] 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.[148] 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?”

[149]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[150] 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[151] 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.

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[153] 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[154] 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.

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[156] 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.

[157]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[158] 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?”

[159]“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[160] 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[161] 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.

[162]“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[163] 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[164] 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!”

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?”

[166]“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[167] 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.”

[168]“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[169] 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[170] 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[171] 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[172] 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[173] 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[174] 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[175] 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.

[176]“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——”

[177]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[178] 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[179] 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[180] 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[181] 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.”

[182]“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.

[183]“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[184] 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[185] 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——”

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.”

[187]“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[188] 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[189] 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,[190] 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.”

[191]“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.

[192]“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[193] 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?”

[194]“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.

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[196] 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.

[197]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.[198] “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[199] 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[200] 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,”[201] 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.

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[203] 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[204] 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[205] 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[206] 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[207] 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[208] 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,[209] 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[210] 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[211] 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[212] 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[213] 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[214] 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[215] 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?”

[216]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.”

[217]“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[218] 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.[219] 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.

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[221] 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[222] 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[223] 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[224] 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[225] 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,[226] 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.[227] 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[228] 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.

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[230] 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[231] 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.”

[232]“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?”

[233]“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[234] 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[235] 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[236] 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[237] 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[238] 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.”

[239]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?

[240]“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[241] 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[242] 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.

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[244] 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?”

[245]“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,[246] 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[247] 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.”

[248]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[249] 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.

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[251] 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[252] 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[253] 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[254] 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[255] 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[256] 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?”

[257]“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.

[258]“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[259] 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!”

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?”

[261]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.[262] 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[263] 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?”

[264]“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.”

[265]“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[266] 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.”

[267]“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[268] 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.”

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[270] 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[271] 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[272] 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[273] 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[274] 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.

[275]“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.”

[276]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[277] 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[278] 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[279] 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.”

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.

[281]“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[282] 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[283] 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[284] 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,[285] 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.

[286]“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[287] 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[288] 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?”

[289]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[290] 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.

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[292] 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[293] 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.”

[294]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[295] 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[296] 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[297] 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....

[298]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!”

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.”

[300]“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[301] 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[302] 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[303] 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[304] 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[305] 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[306] 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[307] 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[308] 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!”

[309]“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[310] 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,[311] 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,[312] 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.

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[314] 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[315] 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[316] 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[317] 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[318] 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[319] 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[320] 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.

“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[322] 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?”

[323]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[324] 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?”

[325]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[326] 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.”

“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[328] 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[329] 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.”

[330]“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[331] 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,’[332] 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[333] 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[334] 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)