Part 16

“You’d wait until the peach was fully ripe; then you’d reach up and pluck it.”

“No,” was the sober denial, made with no touch of resentment. “You must give the devil his due, Harry. It wasn’t altogether as rotten as that, though maybe it did lean a little that way, at times. Never mind; it’s all over now. You have a free field.”

“I?”

“Yes. I haven’t been blind. Jean is heart-free, and I saw at once that it was going to lie between us two. I’m eliminated.”

The edge had gone out of the play-boy’s voice and there was a faint smile at the bottom of his eyes when he said: “But, according to the way you stack things up, I am just as much of a false alarm as you are. Heaven knows, I’ve waded fully as deep in the mud as you have in the mire.”

“No; there is a difference. I know it now. Whatever you have done, you have contrived somehow, in some way, to keep your soul out of the mud. Flout the idea if you want to, but I know. I’ve lived with you for something better than a year and know what I’m talking about.”

Another interval of silence, and at the end of it Bromley got upon his feet.

“You are off?” said Philip, without looking up.

“Yes, I must go. I’m train-tired and perishing for a bath. You’re not meaning to run away from Denver, are you?”

“Oh, no; I suppose not. There is nowhere to run to.”

At the door Bromley paused with his hand on the knob.

“Just one other word, Phil--and you may throw a chair at me if it bites too hard: you’re no gambler. I mean you can’t hold your own against the crooks and short-card men.”

“You are right. I have learned my lesson out of that book this early in the game. Anything else?”

Bromley pointed to the half-empty bottle on the bookcase.

“That stuff is never much of a friend, and it is always a pretty bad enemy. I wouldn’t trust it too far, if I were you. There is always a morning after to follow the night before.”

“Yes; I have learned that, too. I am learning a good many things these days. I guess I had it coming to me. Are you going? Well, good-night.”

After Bromley had gone, Philip heaved himself wearily out of the deep chair and began to pace the floor with his head down and his hands locked behind him. Two weeks of mad, unbridled rebellion against all the inhibitions had left him weak and shattered in mind and body. Twice in the circling round of the room he reached for the bottle on the bookcase, and once he took it up and started to draw the cork. He knew that a swallow or two of the liquor would steady the twittering nerves, temporarily, at least; and that if he should drink enough of it, he could go to bed and sleep.

But the good fighting strength which had been his up to that fatal Monday evening a fortnight in the past, broken and spent though it was, strove to make itself felt. Had it already come to this, that he could no longer go to sleep without first drugging himself with whiskey? If two short weeks of indulgence had thus far maimed and crippled him, how long could he hope to delay the descent into the lowest gutter of degradation?

“No, by God!” he exclaimed finally. “No more of it to-night--not if I have to lie awake in hell till daylight!” And, such is the strength derivable from even a partial resistance to temptation, he went to bed and slept the clock around.

XX

BEING gratefully appreciative of a good bed after a night and a day in a narrow-gauge Pullman, Bromley slept late on the morning following his return to Denver; and when he put in an appearance in the cottage dining-room he found that the family had already breakfasted and Jean had gone to her work. Sixteen-year-old Mysie, housewifely and starry-eyed, was the only member of the household visible, and it was she who poured his coffee and made the toast.

“Did I disturb you folks when I came in last night?” he asked.

“Jeanie said she heard you; but nothing ever wakes me. I’m the sleepy-head of the family. Are your eggs cooked right?”

“How could they be otherwise if you cooked them?” said the play-boy gallantly. He liked to make Mysie talk. More than either of her sisters she retained the soft Southern speech with its submerged “r’s” and lingering vowels. “Where is Mary Louise this fine morning?”

“She and Mummie have gone marketing while it is cool. Shan’t I toast you another slice?”

Bromley let his eyes rest for a moment upon the fresh, fair young face opposite. The elder of the two younger girls was a sharp contrast to Jean, whose dark hair and eyes and warm skin were inheritances from her far-away French ancestry. As an artist’s model Mysie Dabney might have posed for an idealized study of blushing innocence awakening, of sweet girlhood poising for the flight into womanhood.

“You spoil me utterly,” he said, smiling into the wide-open, dewy eyes. Then: “I wonder if you are old enough to let me ask you a horribly improper question?”

“Improper? Why, Uncle Harry, I don’t believe you could be improper if you should try ever so hard!”

Bromley winced at the “Uncle Harry,” though both of the younger girls had called him that almost from the beginning.

“I’m going to make a bargain with you,” he said lightly. “When is your birthday?”

“Next Sunday.”

“All right; there is a pretty birthday gift coming to you next Sunday if you will promise, after that day, to stop calling me ‘uncle.’”

The wide-open eyes opened still wider.

“Why--I thought you liked it!”

“I do--from Mary Louise; from little girls generally. But when you say it, it makes me feel as though my teeth were coming loose and my hair falling out--old and decrepit, you know.”

“I wish you’d listen!” she laughed. “What do you want me to call you--after next Sunday?--‘Misteh Bromley?’”

“Oh, dear me, no; that is ever so much worse! Couldn’t you make it just plain ‘Harry,’ without the ‘uncle’?”

He saw a faint wave of color rising to the fair neck and cheeks, and the down-dropped eyes were no longer those of a child.

“I--I’ll try,” she promised; then, as one stepping lightly from ground tremulous to ground firm: “What is the improper question that isn’t going to be improper?”

“It is about Jean, and if you don’t want to answer it you can just make a face at me and tell me it is none of my blessed business. Does Jean--do you think she cares especially about--er--Philip?”

Again the dewy eyes were downcast. “Jeanie doesn’t talk ve’y much about herself; I reckon--I mean, I think you know that. Sometimes I surmise she cares a heap about him, and sometimes I just don’t know.” Then with a naïveté which stepped well back into childhood: “I don’t think they’d be ve’y happy together; do you?”

“Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know; maybe it’s just because Mr. Philip is so sort of don’t-touch-me good; sort of Yankee-good, ain’t--isn’t it?”

Since the Philip of the present moment was neither “Yankee-good” nor any other kind, Bromley’s reply to the innocent question was strictly aphoristic.

“When you grow up to be a woman, Mysie, you will know that men are never any too good,” he returned gravely; at which, declining a second cup of coffee, he went away before he should be tempted to say more.

Turning up at Madame Marchande’s at noon, he found that Jean had been given a half-holiday, on account of the slack midsummer season, and had gone home. After he thought he had given her time enough to eat her luncheon, he hired a horse and buggy for the afternoon and drove over to the cottage in West Denver.

“Get your things on and come along with me for a ride,” he invited, when Jean came out to pet the little white mare from the livery stable. “I want to have a talk with you.”

“Is it about Philip?” she asked; and when he made the sign of assent, she went in to get her coat and hat.

For the time it took the smart little mare to whisk them across the bridge over the Platte, and up to the farther heights on the north side overlooking the final undulations of the great plain rolling up in swelling land waves to break against Castle Rock and Table Mountain, the driving of the spirited little horse gave Bromley an excuse for postponing the thankless task he had set himself. On the watershed height between the Platte and Clear Creek, in sight of the great house that “Brick” Pomeroy had built, or had begun to build, in the flush times of the Clear Creek mining boom, there was a tiny lake, tree-shadowed, and on its shore he drove in among the cottonwoods and got out and hitched the mare.

“I’ve been wanting to show you this glorious view,” he said, as he helped his companion out of the high, side-bar buggy. “Is there anything to match it in Mississippi?”

She shook her head. “I think there is nothing like it anywhere else in the wide world.”

Bromley took the lap-robe from the buggy and spread it under one of the trees, and for a little time they sat quietly in the face of the magnificent sweep of mountain grandeurs stretching from Long’s Peak on the north around to the dim blue bulk of Pike’s on the south. It was the young woman who broke the spell. “You said you wanted to talk to me about Philip,” she reminded him. “Did you find him?”

“No. He left Leadville about the same time that I started from Denver. Our trains passed in the night.”

“Then he is in Denver now?”

“Yes.”

Silence for a time, and then: “You needn’t be afraid to tell me. I’m not a child.”

“All right; I’ll tell you what little there is to tell. I got in late and found him in the rooms in the Alamo. He was asleep in a chair when I went in, but he woke up after a while and talked to me. Drew hadn’t exaggerated any, whatsoever. Phil has hit the bottom, good and hard.”

“He--he is drinking?”

“It is everything in the calendar, I guess--from what he said.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“No; he said that part of it was a shut door. But he isn’t charging it up to the ‘why,’ whatever that may be; he is calling it by its right name--his morbid self-righteousness and weakness.”

“He isn’t weak,” she asserted quickly. “He may say he is, but he isn’t.”

“I am merely telling you what he said. He was bitter about it at first; called himself all sorts of hard names--whited sepulchre and the like; but he softened down a bit before I left. What I am most afraid of now is the reaction which is bound to come.”

“How do you mean?”

Bromley stole a look aside to see how she was taking it. Her gaze was fixed upon the distant mountain skyline and there was nothing to indicate that she was moved by any emotion deeper than a friendly concern for the stumbler.

“We both know Philip pretty well,” he prefaced. “When he quits coruscating--and I think he has reached that point already--he will find himself in a valley of humiliation too deep to climb out of; or he will think it is. So he won’t try to climb; he will merely try to expiate. And that pit is likely to be as deep and as mucky as any other.”

“There was no mention made of his father?”

“No. But I am quite ready to accept your guess; that Philip found his father somewhere--probably that Monday night; and that he didn’t find what he had hoped to find.”

“You mean he may have found that his father was really a--a--that he _did_ take the bank’s money?”

“Yes, that’s it. From what Philip has told me I have gathered that he was almost, or quite, alone in his belief in his father’s innocence. If it has turned out the other way, that would account for everything that has happened. Phil would feel that he shared the disgrace.”

Another little interval of silence, and at its end: “What will you do, Harry?”

“I can’t do anything; he made that perfectly plain. The most I could get out of him was a promise that he wouldn’t try to break with me. It is just as you said Saturday at luncheon: he isn’t going to let anybody help him.”

“No; I knew he wouldn’t. But you must try to keep hold of him.”

“You may be sure I shall do that. You know how much I owe to him--and to you.”

“You don’t owe me anything at all.”

“Oh, yes, I do. Philip has told me, you know.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That you were the one who prompted him to take me with him on the prospecting trip a year ago. I was a down-and-out at that time; he knew it and you knew it.”

She looked up with the light in the dark eyes that he was never quite able to read or to fathom.

“We were both right: you have proved it. Philip said to me once that whatever you had done, you had kept your soul clean.”

“He did, eh? He said the same thing to me, no longer ago than last night. That’s all either of you know about it. A year ago I wasn’t worth the powder it would have taken to blow me up, Jean; that is the plain, unvarnished fact. I’m not right sure that I am any better now; not in Philip’s definition of goodness. Thanks to you and to him, I’ve got a pot of money; and money brings responsibility; and responsibility bespeaks some little effort at decent living. There you have it in a nutshell.”

“I know,” she smiled; “I have heard you talk before.” Then: “You spoke just now of Philip’s definition of goodness. Don’t you think it is the right one?”

“Oh, yes; I suppose it is, when you come right down to the foundation of things. The only danger is that it may breed a prickly lot of spiritual pride. That was the chief thing that was the matter with Phil--a pride that made him not only hate the sin, but despise the sinner. The pride is gone now, and in going it has taken some of the righteous hardness along with it, which, you might say, is all to the good. I don’t believe he will ever set himself up in judgment again upon the poor sinners--which is something gained, isn’t it?”

“Yes; but the price he is paying is terribly high.”

“Sure it is. Yet I’m not losing hope. There are certain mazes in this thing we call life out of which a man has to grope his own way, if he can. There is good stuff in Phil--royally good stuff at bottom, as we both know. If--in the reaction--he doesn’t do something everlastingly to smash his whole future----”

She nodded slowly. “That is the greatest danger; that he will cut himself off from every chance of getting back. There are two Denvers over there,”--with a glance backward at the city of the plain lying map-like under the afternoon sun. “I think you know what I mean.”

“I do. There are good doors that are slow to open to the wayfarer, and a lot of bad ones that are always open. At the present moment Philip is one of the many drifters. But I am still betting on him.”

“If we only knew a little more about it,” she offered musingly. “If we could find out where he went that Monday evening after you left him----”

He took her up quickly.

“You’d like to have me try to run the thing down, Jean?”

“I suppose we have no right to pry. And yet, if we knew----”

“I understand. If we can place the father, we shall at least know how bad things are, and if they are or are not altogether past mending. I’ll do my best. Anything else suggest itself?”

“You will not lose sight of Philip. He needs your friendship now more than ever.”

“I’ll do my best there, too. But in his present frame of mind it is going to be a man-sized job to brother him, even a little. He thinks he has put himself beyond the pale--says so in so many words. Another man might say some such thing in a morning-after gust of remorse; but he means it.”

“That is just it,” she said sorrowfully. “He is going to punish himself a great deal more savagely than--than he needs to. That is the part of his pride that isn’t dead yet. Shall we go back now? If you don’t mind, I--I think I’d like to go home.”

“Kittie will take you there as fast as we’ll let her,” said Bromley cheerfully; and the little white mare confirmed the promise at a pace that made her driver wonder how she had ever come to be degraded to hack service in a livery string. As he was cutting the buggy at the cottage gate, Jean laid a hand on his arm.

“Please don’t say anything to Mummie or the girls,” she begged.

“Not a word,” he agreed; and then: “You mustn’t let it hit you too hard, Jeanie.”

“I’ll try not to. But you and Philip have been so good to us; and it seems such a pity!--so wretchedly unnecessary.”

“It isn’t always given to us poor blind mortals to distinguish between what is necessary and what isn’t,” he countered comfortingly. And with this restating of a truth which was hoary with age long before he was born, he drove away, wiping his brow and muttering under his breath. “Lord! I’m glad that much of it is over, anyway. She never gave me a glimpse at that stabbed little heart of hers, but I know how it hurt, just the same.” Then, apostrophizing the offender: “Phil, old boy, if you ever take a tumble to yourself and realize what you’ve done, you’ll find you’ve got something perilously resembling murder to answer for ... you certainly will, for a fact!”

XXI

BROMLEY’S efforts to trace Philip’s movements on the Monday night of cataclysms were quite fruitless, as they were likely to be, lacking help from the chapter of accidents; and they so continued until a certain morning when he went to the Union Depot to see the Follansbees and Stephen Drew off for a trip to Manitou. Walking back across the platforms after the Rio Grande train had pulled out, he saw Jim Garth, flannel-shirted, booted, and with a rifle under his arm and a blanket roll over his shoulder, making for the waiting South Park day train.

“Hello, Jim!” he called, turning to overtake the big man. “What ho! Does this”--touching the blanket roll--“mean that you’ve had enough of the bright lights for a while?”

“You’re mighty whistlin’,” laughed the giant. “I been a no-account bum on you two boys good-and-plenty long enough, I reckon. I’m hittin’ for the big hills and the tall timber where I can’t get a drink o’ red-eye, no matter how bad I’m a-hankerin’ for it--that’s me.”

“But see here, old-timer; how about your grub-stake?” queried Bromley, catching step and walking with Garth to the waiting train. “You’re not going to tell me that you saved enough for it out of the check I slipped you a week ago?”

The big man grinned foolishly.

“You’re whistlin’ ag’in, Harry. That there fish-eyed faro-dealer in Clem Bull’s place raked in the last dollar o’ that hand-out afore I’d had time to say ‘Howdy’ to it. I’d ’a’ gone hungry a heap o’ times since then if it hadn’t been for Phil.”

“Phil?” said Bromley, recalling Philip’s stubborn refusals to join in any of the check-slippings.

“Yep, you heard me,” Garth nodded, putting a foot on the step of the car to be ready to swing up when the starting signal should be given; “li’l’ old Phil. Yuh recollect how he kind-a soured on me ’long to-wards the last up at the ‘Jean,’ and after you and him come here to Denver, he’d pass me in the street without ever seein’ me--head up and eyes straight out in front, like this”--illustrating in solemn burlesque. “But he’s a whole lot different now; wouldn’t know him for the same Phil a-tall.”

“How, different?”

Garth pushed his wide-brimmed hat back and scratched his head with a reflective finger.

“Why, I dunno, eggzackly; more like folks, I reckon you’d say. Met up with him yiste’day in Tom and Jerry’s place, and he was leanin’ up ag’inst the bar, a-pourin’ hisself a drink o’ red likker like a man. Wouldn’t buy me a drink, though--no, sir-ree!--not on your sweet life! What he done was to drag me off into a corner and ask me if I didn’t want to go prospectin’; allowed he’d stake me good if I’d premise not to blow it; said he knowed if I’d promise, I’d stick.”

“Well?” queried Bromley.

“I shuck hands on it. He done it, and done it right. After we’d been to the bank, and down to Wolfe Londoner’s place to git Wolfe to ship me a bunch o’ grub to Buena Vista, Phil, he kind-a hung on and says, says he, ‘Damn it, Jim, I’m half a mind to go along with you. When I git to thinkin’ about the clean old hills....’ ‘Come on,’ says I, ‘and we’ll hunt us up another li’l’ bonanza.’ But he says, ‘No, I ain’t a coward, Jim; and that’s what I’d be if I took to the hills now.’ What you reckon he meant by that?”

“Perhaps Phil is the only one who knows the answer to that question, Jim; and if he is, he won’t tell.”

“Speakin’ o’ Phil,” Garth went on, with a glance over his shoulder to see if the train conductor was in sight and ready to give the starting signal; “what-all d’yuh reckon he’s got to do with that frozen-eyed faro-dealer in Clem Bull’s?”

“I don’t know; tell me,” said Bromley, suddenly anxious to have the train starting further delayed.

“It was three-four weeks ago, one night after you’d staked me,” Garth explained. “I’d gone into Bull’s place, aimin’ to buck the tiger one more li’l’ whirl to see if I couldn’t git some o’ my good money back ag’in, and I happen’ to look over my shoulder and see Phil a-follerin’ me. Reckoned he was aimin’ to knock me down and drag me out for a cussed fool, so I dodged him in the crowd and watched to see what he’d do. He was lookin’ for me, all right; I could see that; but when he come to the faro layout, he stopped dead, like he’d been shot--jus’ stood there a-starin’ at that dealer with his eyes a-buggin’ out.”

“And then?” Bromley prompted, hurriedly, because the conductor was now coming down the platform, clearance order in hand.

“Then he kind-a groped his way ’round the table and touched old Fish-eye on the shoulder. Fish-eye, he looks up and says somethin’, quiet-like, and then calls in his mate to take the deal box, and goes off up-stairs with Phil. That’s all I seen, but it got me guessin’.”

The train conductor had shouted his “All aboard!” and the wheels were beginning to roll. Garth swung up to the step, and there was time only for a hasty, “So long! See you later!” and the big miner was gone. Bromley walked up-town, soberly thoughtful; and that evening, after dinner, drifted into the Bull “palace” and slipped into the ring of onlookers at the faro game. One appraisive look at the hard-faced man running the cards from the dealer’s box was all that was needed, and the play-boy saw to whom Philip owed his cool gray eyes, thin-lipped mouth, and even the curious brow cow-lick in his hair.

An hour later Bromley had sought and found a redheaded young fellow whose job as a railroad passenger agent brought him in contact with all sorts and conditions of men--and women--in the strenuous mother of mining-camps.

“You are a walking directory of this wild town, Reddick,” the play-boy began, when he had trailed the breezy young railroad man to his office in the Union Depot. “Do you happen to know any of the regulars in Clem Bull’s place?”

Reddick grinned. “All of ’em, I guess; it’s my business to know people. Which one of Bull’s outfit are you gunning for?”

“A sober, wooden-faced man, clean shaven, middle-aged, with his hair turning gray, and with eyes as cold as a fish’s. He is one of the faro dealers.”

“‘Deadwood’ Kent,” said Reddick, without a moment’s hesitation. “Came from the Black Hills and landed in Leadville with the first rush.”

“What sort?” Bromley queried.

“As tough as they make ’em. They say he had his own private graveyard in the Hills, though that may be just talk. But he did get his man in Leadville--which may be the reason why he’s down here and not up there. Better go loaded for bear if you’ve got a quarrel with him.”

“Nothing like it; nothing but a bit of idle curiosity. I thought he looked like a hard one, and I fancied you’d know.”

“I do, and he is. New England born, I should say, from his clipped way of talking. He is living with a woman who is just about as tough as he is. I’ve seen her working the boxes in the Corinthian.”

“Not married?”

“Oh, I suppose not. People of his and her kind don’t bother about the little moral formalities. Going up-town? Wait a minute and I’ll walk with you. I’m about through here.”

It was on the way up Seventeenth Street that Reddick said: “Don’t see you and Phil Trask chasing around together so much as you used to”--and stopped short with that.

“No,” Bromley admitted. “I have the social bug, more or less, and Phil hasn’t.”