Part 10

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

Philip denied for himself.

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

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

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

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

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

“Say it,” Philip invited.

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

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

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

“More than ever.”

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

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

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

This time Bromley’s laugh was a shout.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bromley laughed again.

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

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

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

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

Bromley’s eyes narrowed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One more, at least.”

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

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

Dear Mr. Trask:

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

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

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

Sincerely and sorrowfully, Jean Dabney.

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

“Bad news?” Middleton asked.

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

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

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

“Pay better than the railroad?”

“M-m--some better; yes.”

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

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

“You knew him before you went prospecting?”

“Slightly; yes.”

“Is he here in Denver now?”

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

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

“No; not yet.”

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

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

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

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

Then, too, Jean’s intimation that she would try to find work in Denver stirred a deep pool of compassion in him. With the northern man’s preconception of southern women it was difficult to envisage her as the bread-winner for a family of four; but that it must have come to this in the end he was fairly well assured. His single contact with the Mississippi family as a whole had given him the impression that the mother was devoted but not particularly resourceful in any practical way; “do-less” would be the harsh New England word, but with a feeling that large allowances should be made for any woman who had grown up in the slave-served South, he did not apply it.

Eliminating the mother as a possible earner, the burden must have fallen upon the eldest daughter, and he tried to picture Jean looking for work in a city which was already boasting that it had a population of over thirty thousand young men in addition to its familied quota. There must have been difficulties insurmountable. Places ordinarily given to women in the East were almost exclusively filled by men in the Denver of the moment, even to clerkships at the ribbon counters. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed, suddenly realizing that nearly a year had elapsed since the writing of the sorrowful little death notice. “Why, all four of them may have starved to death long before this!”

What to do about it was the burning question, and he went about the doing promptly, first writing a note and addressing it to “Miss Jean Dabney, General Delivery,” and next making a pilgrimage to the tent colony where he had found the Dabneys on the eve of his departure for the mountains. Nothing came of the pilgrimage. The tents were still there, but the people occupying them were all newcomers; a shifting population coming and going from day to day. Nobody knew anything of a family of two women, two little girls and a sick man who had died.

Later in the day he went in search of the American House clerk who had directed him in the former instance; but here, again, the kaleidoscopic population-shifting baffled him. The clerk, whom he was able to identify in his inquiry by the date of his employment at the hotel, had left Denver--for Pueblo, so his informant thought; at least, that had been his mail forwarding address for a time.

With the vanishing of this, the only other possible clue he could think of, Philip spent the remainder of the day in aimless wanderings in the streets, passing the sidewalk throngs in review in some vague hope that he might thus stumble upon Jean or her mother. When the hope refused to materialize, he returned to the St. James in time to join Bromley at dinner, and for the first half of the meal was but a poor table-mate for his lighthearted partner.

“What is the matter with you, Phil? Is the rich man’s burden crushing you this early in the game?” Bromley inquired quizzically, after a number of fruitless attempts to break through the barrier of abstraction behind which his table companion had retreated.

“No, I guess not,” was the half-absent reply. “I haven’t been thinking much about the money.”

“Well, what have you been doing with yourself all day?”

“I have been looking for somebody that I couldn’t find.”

“Ah!” said the play-boy with his teasing smile. “The angelic person, for a guess. Am I right?”

“It’s no joke,” Philip returned soberly. “I found a note from her in my mail at the railroad office. It is nearly a year old. Her father died a few days after we left Denver last spring.”

Bromley became instantly sympathetic. “And you don’t know what has become of her?”

“No; I can’t find a trace.”

“She was left alone after her father’s death?”

“Oh, no; there is a family--a mother and two younger girls.”

“Migrants, like all the rest of us, I suppose?”

“Yes; from Mississippi. They came out for the father’s health--and came too late. He was an ex-rebel soldier.”

“Perhaps they have gone back to the South.”

Philip shook his head. “I hardly think so; I doubt if they had the means. The war had left them poor.”

“Tell me more,” Bromley urged.

“I can’t tell you much more, only I suspect the burden of the family support has been dumped upon the shoulders of the oldest daughter. And I don’t know how she would be able to carry it in this man-ridden town.”

“The mother?” Bromley suggested.

“A dear lady, I should say, from what little I saw of her, but helpless.”

“I understand; a woman who has never had to do for herself anything that black servants could do for her.”

“Something of that sort,” said Philip.

“Tell me what you’ve done toward locating them.”

Philip briefed the story of the day’s efforts, and Bromley held his peace while the waiter was clearing the table for the dessert. But afterward he said: “Your note may bring the required information; but if it doesn’t, we’ve got to think up some other way. Miss Jean and her family must be found, if they are still in Denver.”

Philip looked up quickly. “How did you know her name?” he demanded; and Bromley laughed.

“Didn’t you christen the ‘Little Jean’?” he asked. “It didn’t require any great amount of clairvoyance to figure out where the name came from. What is the rest of it?”

“Dabney.”

“A good old Southern name; they used to be D’Aubignys in Colonial times.”

“What do you know about them?”

“Nothing, excepting what little leaked into me out of the history books in school: French, of course, and Huguenots. Settled first in Virginia, I believe. But that’s not to the point. As I say, we’ve got to find Miss Jean.”

“‘We’?” Philip queried.

“That is what I said. Your relations with the young woman are your own, and I’m not messing in on them. Mine are in the nature of a debt.”

“But you don’t know her!” Philip protested.

“No more I don’t; but the debt remains. Tell me baldly, Phil: would you ever have thought of taking me on the prospecting trip, if she hadn’t suggested it?”

“Since you put it that way, I might not have.”

“Very well, then. In that case I owe her my stake in the game, whatever it is, or whatever it may eventually amount to. We must find this shipwrecked family.”

Philip shook his head in discouragement.

“If she doesn’t get my note and answer it, it will be much like looking for a needle in a haystack. You see what this town has grown to in a single year. Besides, if we should find the Dabneys, I can assure you in advance that they are not the kind of people you can give money to.”

“Trust me for that part of it,” Bromley said. “There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it to death with thick cream. If you are through, let’s go out and see what this money-mad city looks like by lamplight in the spring of a new year. I have a fairly vivid recollection of its appearance under such conditions a short twelve-month ago.”

In Philip’s acquiescence to this proposal there was a strong thread of the brother-keeping weave, an inheritance from a long line of ancestors who took their Bible literally. From the ancestral point of view, Bromley was still figuring, in Philip’s estimation, as a brand snatched from the burning. With the means now at his command to gratify the worst impulses of the ne’er-do-well, could Bromley be trusted to walk alone in the midst of temptations? Philip thought not; feared not, at least. Therefore, the brotherly supervision must be maintained.

“Where to?” he asked, as they fared forth from the hotel.

“Oh, I don’t mind; anywhere you like,” was the careless reply. “The theater, if that jumps with your notion.”