Part 15

“Nothing like that. The mine is all right. The values are increasing, as your next dividend will show. I wanted to talk to you about Trask. Do you know where he is?”

“I haven’t the remotest idea. He dropped out between two minutes one morning early last week, leaving a note which merely said that he was vanishing. It’s all right, though. He has been making a good many swings around the circle in the past month or so, on a sort of still hunt for his--for a man he is trying to find.”

“Did you see him before he left Denver this last time?”

“Why, yes; I was with him the evening before he left; and I saw him, for just a minute or two, the next morning.”

“Anything wrong with him then?”

Bromley took time to think back. Previous to that brittle meeting in the breakfast-room at Charpiot’s, Philip had been out, somewhere, all night. Now that he recalled it, he remembered that the meeting had been only momentary; that Philip had looked rather the worse for wear; that his refusal to take the spare room in the Dabney cottage had been almost brutal in its abruptness.

“I can’t say there was anything definitely wrong,” he replied. “I remember he looked a bit gloomy and wrought up, but that is nothing new for him. He has pretty bad attacks of the New England conscience at times--if you know what that means.”

Drew nodded. “I understand. But that isn’t to the point just now. Your partner is in Leadville, and he is badly in need of a friend; somebody near enough and intimate enough to take him by the neck.”

Bromley laughed easily.

“There must be some mistake about that. Philip, himself, is the one who rushes around taking people by the neck.”

“You are off wrong, this time,” the promoter cut in shortly. “I don’t believe he has been entirely sober at any one time during the past two weeks, and he seems to be permeated with an idea that he can use up all the red paint there is and break all the gambling banks in the camp if he only sticks at it long enough.”

“Good heavens!” Bromley gasped; “not _Philip_!”

“Yes, Philip. Of course, I understand that it’s none of my business, but I hate to see such a fine, upstanding fellow as he is go to the devil in a hand-basket. Has he had trouble of any sort?”

Bromley took a moment to consider whether or not he had a right to breach Philip’s confidence in the matter of the search for his father, and decided quickly that the present crisis warranted it. Very briefly he told Drew the little he knew about the Trask family tragedy, and of the futile search Philip had been making.

“Ah,” said the shrewd-witted developer of mines, “that may be the clue. You say Philip believed in his father’s innocence?”

“Absolutely and utterly. But from what he has told me, I gathered that he was pretty much alone in that belief; that, as a matter of fact, not even the other members of the family shared it.”

“I see. Then that may be the key to the present situation. Trask is pretty sensitive on the family honor question, and all that, isn’t he?”

“Exceedingly so. It, and his conscience, are his little tin gods.”

“There you are, then. You say his search for his father has been futile. You don’t know positively that it was, do you?”

“It was, up to the night before he went to Leadville.”

“Well, many a man has had his world turned upside down for him between dark and daylight in a single night. Whatever the cause may have been, the effects are as I have indicated. Philip is setting a pace that not even a half-share in a gold mine can stand indefinitely. If you think you can do anything with him, you’d better go after him. As I say, he is needing a friend mighty badly.”

“Sure I’ll go,” agreed the play-boy promptly. “I owe Philip a lot more than I’ll ever be able to pay. And you mustn’t judge him by this one fall-down, Mr. Drew. There are some people who suffer most from an excess of their virtues--if you know what I mean--and Philip is one of those. He has stood up stiff and straight all his life, and when a fellow who lives that way gets bowled over----”

“I know,” assented the man of large experience. “The greatest danger in a case of that kind lies in that ‘excess of the virtues’ you speak of. When the barriers are once thrown down, the job of rebuilding them is apt to seem hopeless.”

“That is where it will hit Phil the hardest, I’m sure. But we won’t hope for the worst. Are you stopping over for a few days?”

“Until Monday or Tuesday. Are your quarters here in the Windsor?”

“Oh, no; I have a boarding place in West Denver--with friends. I’m here just now to call upon some other friends--people from Philadelphia. And that reminds me: you said you used to live in Philadelphia; perhaps you know these friends of mine--the Follansbees?”

“Not Judge John?”

“You have called the turn; Judge John and Mrs. Judge John and Tom and Eugenia and Lucy Ann.”

“You don’t tell me! I know the judge and his wife very well, indeed; and the children, too, though they were only children in my time. You say they are here, in the hotel?”

“Yes. Wait a minute and I’ll carry the word to them.”

He was gone only a short time, and when he returned to the lobby, the judge and Mrs. Follansbee came with him. He stood aside while the three were happily bridging the gap of the years, and at the first lull he broke in smoothly to say to Drew: “Mrs. Follansbee has been good enough to include me in a dinner party for this evening, and I have just told her that I am unexpectedly obliged to leave town, but I was quite sure you would be willing to substitute for me.”

“Of course you will, Stephen,” put in the lady patroness, surveying the stocky figure of the promoter through her lorgnette; then, with a sigh for the vanished years: “My, my; what a man you’ve grown to be! I should never have known you, with that clipped beard and the eyeglasses. Can’t you spare a few minutes to come up to our suite and see Eugenia and Lucy Ann? They both remember you.”

Bromley glanced at his watch and slipped away. He had promised to take Jean Dabney to luncheon, and there was barely time to reach Madame Marchande’s place in Sixteenth Street by the appointed noon hour. When he did reach the millinery shop he found Jean waiting on the sidewalk for him, and he took her to a new chop house lately opened in the block next to the St. James, steering clear of the subject that was uppermost in his mind until after they were seated in one of the box-like private stalls and their order had been given and served. Then he began without preface.

“I want to ask you something about Philip, Jean. He walked home with you a week ago last Monday evening, didn’t he?”

“Let me think,” she answered reflectively. “To-day is Saturday; yes, it was a week ago Monday.”

“Did he--did he act as though he was especially troubled about anything?”

“Why, no; not that I saw. I remember he scolded me a little because he seemed to think I wasn’t quite as savagely righteous as I ought to be. But he has done that lots of times. He walks so straight himself that he can’t bear to see anybody lean over, ever so little.”

Bromley winced. If Drew’s story were true--and there was no reason to doubt it--Philip was not walking straight now; he was grovelling. What would Jean say if she knew? He had not meant to tell her what he had just heard; did not yet mean to tell her. Still, she would have to know, some time. If he could only be sure that the knowledge wouldn’t smash her.... He would have to feel his way carefully.

“I am wondering if Philip ever told you anything about his father,” he said; and he tried to say it casually.

“Oh, yes; he has told me all there was to tell, I think: how his father went away under a--under a cloud, and how he has been searching for him out here. Was that what you meant?”

Bromley nodded. There was nothing in her tone or manner to lead him to believe that she had anything more than a friendly interest in Philip’s problem, and he went on.

“He has been away for two weeks, or nearly two weeks. He left town the next morning after he walked home with you that Monday evening. He didn’t tell me where he was going. Did he tell you?”

“He said he might go to the camps down in the San Juan next. But he didn’t say anything about going so soon. Haven’t you heard from him since that time?”

“No; he hasn’t written me,” Bromley hastened to say, telling a half-truth which was little short of a lie direct.

“But you are not anxious about him, are you?”

“Anxious? Why should I be?”

“But I think you are,” she said, looking him fairly in the eyes.

As upon certain other occasions, he tried hard to plumb the depths of the dark eyes that were lifted to his, striving to read the answer to a question that had been tormenting him ever since his first meeting with her. How much did she care for Philip? Was she as much in love with him as he was with her? If she were, this was neither the time nor the place for the repeating of Drew’s story. But if she were not ... he made up his mind suddenly and took the plunge.

“Jean, you know you can trust me to the limit, don’t you? Tell me honestly what there is between you and Philip.”

“What there is between us?” The steady gaze of the dark eyes did not waver. “We are friends, of course; good friends, I hope.”

“Nothing more?”

“What more could there be?”

“Then I may talk to you just as I might to any other friend of his?”

“I don’t know why you shouldn’t.” Tone and manner both gave him the assurance that he might go on; that there was nothing more vital to be wounded than the friendship she had admitted.

“Something has happened to Philip. I lied to you a minute ago--said I hadn’t heard from Phil. I haven’t, not directly; but Mr. Drew is down from Leadville, and he tells me that Philip is up in the big camp, ripping things wide open. I couldn’t believe it--can hardly believe it yet.”

The deep-welled eyes were downcast now, and Bromley held his breath. If there were a little quiver of the sensitive lips when she spoke, the play-boy missed it--missed everything but the steady tone of her reply.

“I have been afraid of something like that, haven’t you? Of course, you know what has happened?”

“I don’t--I can’t imagine!”

“It is perfectly plain. He has found his father.”

“You think that is it?”

“I am sure of it.”

“But, even so--” he began.

“Don’t you see? He hasn’t--he didn’t find things as he hoped to find them. Don’t you know him well enough to know what that would do to him?”

It was said coolly enough, almost coldly; and Bromley marvelled. He had never imagined she could be so dispassionate. Before he could pull himself around to some half-way adequate matching of her mood, she went on:

“Philip has always walked in a very narrow and straight path for himself, and he is very proud, in his own way. If something has happened to break his pride.... I know that is what _has_ happened; I am sure of it.”

The play-boy drew a deep breath. The worst was over, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as he had feared it would be. Either she didn’t care, any more than a friendly soul should care, or she had more adamantine self-control than had fallen to the share of any other woman he had ever known.

“I’m going up after him to-night,” he said. “When I get him back here you’ll have to help me.”

“Of course--if I can,” she agreed. “But if it is as I think it is, I’m afraid neither of us will be able to help him very much.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Just because he is what he is. Some people have to be helped; they can’t get up unless they are helped. But there are others--and Philip is one of them--who have to fight their way back the best they can, alone. It’s hard to think of it that way, for a--for a friend. But it is true.”

Bromley forced himself to smile.

“You are a very wise little woman, much wiser than your years call for. But see here--you’re not eating enough to keep a kitten alive. How do you expect to be able to work if you don’t eat?”

“I’m not as hungry as I thought I was. It’s the hot weather, maybe.”

“Couldn’t you eat another cream puff if I should order it?”

“No, thank you. Besides, my time is up. I know it isn’t nice to eat and run, but if you _will_ invite a working girl out to luncheon, you’ll have to take the consequences.”

He walked back to the door of the millinery shop with her and at the moment of parting she said, “You’ll be gentle with Philip when you find him, won’t you? It won’t do any good to be the other way.”

“I shall take him by the neck,” he threatened good-naturedly, adding: “He’s old enough and man enough to have better sense.” Then: “I’m going to be fearfully busy this afternoon. Do you suppose Mysie could pack my grip for me if I should send a messenger after it with a note?”

“Mysie would be dreadfully humbled if she could hear you ask such a thing as that,” she smiled. “She isn’t the child you seem to persist in believing her to be. She will be sixteen in a few days. How long do you think you will be away?”

“Heaven knows; no longer than I can help, you may be sure. Good-by; take care of yourself, and don’t work too hard. If you want to do anything for me while I’m gone, just say a little prayer or two. It runs in my mind that I may need all the help I can get. Good-by.”

Having become, in a desultory way, a working capitalist, or at least an investing one, Bromley had a number of business matters to be despatched before he could leave town for an indefinite stay. None the less, out of a well-filled afternoon he clipped time enough to go around to the Colorado National Bank where Philip kept his account. Since he was known in the bank as Philip’s partner, he had no difficulty in finding out what he wished to learn. Philip had been drawing heavily on his checking account during the two weeks, and the drafts had all come through Leadville banks. Bromley asked for the approximate figure and gasped when he was told that the recent withdrawals totalled something over twenty thousand dollars.

Quartered in the sleeper for the night run to Leadville, Bromley, generously distressed, was still groping for some reasonable solution to the problem presented by Philip’s wild splash into the sea of dissipation--a plunge so wholly out of keeping with his character. Was Jean’s guess that he had found his father, and that the discovery had proved to be a calamity instead of a cause for rejoicing, the right one? If not, what other upsetting thing could have happened between half-past seven in the Monday evening, when he had left Philip in their common sitting-room in the Alamo Building, and the next morning when he had met him leaving the breakfast-table in Charpiot’s? Where had Philip spent the night? And what had occurred during those few unaccounted-for hours to put a look of morbid gloom in his eyes and to make him refuse, almost savagely, to become an inmate of the West Denver cottage?

“He’d had a knock-down fight of some sort with that strait-laced conscience of his, I suppose, and it must have been a bloody one to make him let go all holds like this,” the play-boy told himself, balancing on the edge of the made-down berth to take off his shoes as the train began its swaying, wheel-shrilling climb in the snake-like sinuosities of Platte Canyon. Then, as he drew the curtains and essayed the irritating task of undressing in the dark, cramped berth, with the car careening to right and left like a ship at sea: “He’ll find it bad medicine and bitter; but if it will only end by making a normal human man of him....”

It was deep in the night, and the train was halted at a mountain-side station, when Bromley awoke, shivering in the chill of the high altitude, and sat up to reach for the extra blanket at the foot of the berth. As he did so, a thunderous murmur in the air announced the approach of the Denver-bound train for which his own was side-tracked, and he ran a window shade up to look out just as the eastbound train, with its miniature locomotive and short string of cars, coasted down, with brake-shoes grinding, to the meeting-point stop.

Reflecting upon it afterward, he thought it a most curious coincidence that the night chill should have awakened him just at this time, and that the momentary stop of the opposing train should place the one pair of lighted windows in its single Pullman opposite his own darkened one. While one might have counted ten he sat staring, wide-eyed, across the little space separating the two standing trains. The lighted windows opposite were those in the smoking compartment of the eastbound sleeper. Around the little table bracketed between the seats sat three men with cards in their hands and stacks of red, white and blue counters before them. Though two of the men were unknown to the play-boy, he was able instantly to label them as birds of prey. The third man was Philip; a Philip so changed and wasted by two weeks of unrestraint as to be scarcely recognizable.

As Bromley looked he saw one of the birds of prey pass a flat pocket bottle across the table; and his final glimpse through the lighted window as the down train slid away showed him Philip with his head thrown back and the tilted bottle at his lips.

“Good Lord!” groaned the play-boy, falling back upon his pillows, “Drew didn’t stretch it an inch! Those two blacklegs will strip Phil to the skin before they let go of him and before they will let him get sober enough to realize what they’re doing to him! And I’ve got to go through to Leadville and come all the way back before I can get a chance to stick my oar in!” At the word the westbound train began to move, and he pulled the blankets up to his ears, muttering again: “There’s only one ray of comfort in the whole desperate business, and that is that Jean isn’t going to break her heart over this diabolic blow-up of Philip’s. I’m glad I took the trouble to make sure of that, anyhow.”

But if, at this precise moment of midnight, he could have looked into the bed-room next to his own in the West Denver cottage, the room occupied by Jean and her sister Mysie, the comforting reflection might have lost something of its force. The younger sister was sleeping peacefully, but the elder had slipped quietly out of bed to kneel at the open, westward-fronting window with her shoulders shaking and her face buried in the crook of a bare white arm.

XIX

THOUGH Bromley, swiftly changing from the up to the down train on the Sunday morning arrival in Leadville, should have won back to Denver at six o’clock Sunday evening, a freight wreck on the Kenosha Mountain grade held him up, and it was between nine and ten when, tired as he was by more than twenty-four hours of mountain railroad travel, he set out in search of Philip, making the rooms of the Alamo Building his starting point.

To his relief, the lighted transom assured him that the sitting-room was occupied; and when there was no answer to his knock, he opened the door noiselessly and entered. At first he thought the hunched figure in the hollowed-out easy chair beside the reading table was in a drunken stupor; but when he drew nearer he saw that the fancied stupor was merely a deep sleep of exhaustion. Silently placing a chair for himself on the other side of the table, he lighted his pipe and waited. After a time the sleeper in the hollowed chair stirred, stretched his arms over his head, and, at the smell of live tobacco smoke, opened his eyes and sat up with a jerk.

“You?” he muttered, blinking across the table at the play-boy.

“It’s nobody else. Had a good nap?”

Philip’s wordless response was to get up and reach for a half-emptied bottle standing on a bookcase; but Bromley stopped him.

“Let that alone, Phil--for the moment, anyway; long enough to tell me what has hit you. You owe me that much, at least.”

Philip sank back into the sleepy-hollow chair. “How much do you know?” he demanded sullenly.

“What Stephen Drew could tell me, added to what I happened to see at midnight last night when your train on the South Park met mine at the passing point in the mountains.”

“You were going to Leadville to hunt me up?”

“Yes. Drew told me you needed to be knocked down and dragged out.”

Philip’s dull eyes glowed suddenly. “I ought to have had a gun last night!” he broke out savagely. “Those two tinhorns robbed me blind!”

“Of course they did. That is what they were out for. No, wait; I’m not going to preach. I grant you it’s every man’s privilege to go to the devil in his own fashion. Still, I’m a trifle curious.”

Silence for the space of a long minute. Then: “You wouldn’t understand, Harry; I couldn’t make you understand if I should try. Say that the cursed atmosphere of this God-forsaken country got hold of me at last and that I stubbed my toe and fell down. That will cover it as well as anything.”

“A good many of us fall down, but we get up again. Have you got to stay down?”

“It looks that way. I haven’t anything to get up for.”

“Why haven’t you?”

“That question runs you up against a shut door, Harry; a door that I’ll never open for anybody so long as I can keep it shut. Let that be understood, once for all.”

“All right; we’ll let it go at that, if you say so. Just the same----”

“Well?”

“Oh, confound it--you know what I want to say, and can’t Phil! You’ve been more than a brother to me, ever since you picked me up out of the gutter a year ago and stood me on my two feet. Can’t you see where this thing hits me?”

Philip leaned forward, elbows on knees, face propped in his hands, lead-heavy eyes fixed upon the blank wall opposite. When he replied, the harshness had gone out of his voice.

“I can see a great many things now that I have never been able to see in the past, Harry ... one of them is that I’ve been a self-blinded Pharisee all my life. All I needed was a hard enough kick to show me that at bottom I’m no better than other men; not half as good or as strong as some other men who make no profession of their goodness or strength. I got the kick, finally--no matter how, but I got it--and ... well, I guess I have found my level. I’ve been in hell for the last fourteen days and nights, and if I am just beginning to struggle out, it is at the bottom and not at the top.”

Bromley was silent for a little time; then he said huskily: “You’re not going to break with me, Phil? I couldn’t stand for that, you know. You will have to go your own way, I suppose; but wherever you go, or whatever you do, I’m still your partner. Just remember that when the pull comes the hardest, won’t you?”

“I’ll try to. But you can’t do anything for me, Harry; nobody can. I’ve walked deliberately into the devil’s wood and got lost. If there is any way out--as there doesn’t seem to be now--I’ve got to find it for myself. Can you understand that?”

“Perhaps I can.” Another silence, and then Bromley went on: “What shall I say to Jean?--or will you say it to her yourself?”

“You know very well I won’t say it myself. If you tell her anything you must tell her the plain truth: that the man she has known as Philip Trask was a sorry hypocrite; a whited sepulchre, with the cleanliness all on the outside and full of dead men’s bones within.”

“It isn’t that bad, Philip.”

“Yes it is; just that bad. I got my kick, as I have said, and it was hard enough, God knows. Instead of taking it like a man, I went under. In a single fortnight I have measured all the depths--broken all the moorings. I have shut myself out of the world of decent people, and I’ve only decency enough left in me to know that I shall never be able to look a pure woman in the face again. I have only one comfort now, Harry, and that is that I have never given Jean any reason to believe that I was in love with her.”

“You are sure of that, are you?”

“Yes; quite sure. After the fatuous fashion of the complete Pharisee I have been holding off, telling myself that there was plenty of time, that I would wait until----” he stopped abruptly, and Bromley finished the sentence for him, not without an edge in his tone.