Part 20

“I don’t get enough; they’re only paying me seventy-five a month. I lost the money here, and I _had_ to come and try to get it back. The travelling auditor will be at the office in the morning to check us up, and then----”

“I see. Jackie, there is nothing in this dizzy whirl for you or for anybody; I know, because I’m in it myself. I’ll make a bargain with you. How much did you say you are short?”

“I--I took six twenties.”

Philip drew a handful of yellow coins from his pocket.

“This is the bargain, Jack. I’ll lend you the six twenties if you will promise me to quit this business for good and all. How about it? Is it a go?”

The boy’s gratitude was almost dog-like in its frantic extravagance.

“Will I promise? My God, if you only knew how I’ve suffered! I didn’t sleep a wink last night. And I’ll never forget this, the longest day I live, Mr. Trask! I didn’t mean to be a thief, but--”

Philip saw Sheeny Mike, one of the game room spotter hawks, watching them narrowly.

“Chase your feet out of this, Jack, and remember your promise,” he said; but the hawk had seen the passing of the gold pieces and he started in pursuit of the boy. Philip detained him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Not this time, Mike; the kid is a friend of mine.”

“To hell with you! That don’t get the house anything!”

“Maybe not; just the same, it goes as it lies. You ought to know me by this time. Keep your hands where I can see them--it’s safer, because I can always beat you to the draw. Now listen: if you had the brain of a louse, Sheeny--which you haven’t--you’d know that I am worth more to the house in a month than a little one-horse railroad clerk would be in a year.” And to show his good will, he turned to the nearest roulette wheel and took his place in the circle of players.

It was something like an hour later, and after he had consistently and painstakingly lost considerably more than the sum he had given young Middleton, that he drifted aimlessly out of the game room and across the stair-head landing into the open space serving as the back gallery of the varieties theater. A dancing girl in chalk-white tights had just finished her turn, and men in the crowded lower part of the theater were pitching silver dollars onto the stage in lieu of bouquets, stamping their applause with booted feet. Philip, looking down upon the scene in a saddened reverie from the gallery height, saw the beginning of a drunken fight in the pit. Two shirt-sleeved men from the third row of seats in the orchestra struggled up, went into a fierce clinch and stumbled into the aisle in a pummelling wrestle. Before any of the aproned bar-servers could drop their trays and intervene, the wrestlers fell apart and there was the sharp report of a pistol to dominate the clamor of stamping feet--the crack of a pistol and a woman’s scream.

The gurgling scream came from one of the gallery boxes on the left, and Philip whipped out of his sober reverie with a bound and ran. Half-way down the passageway behind the row of cell-like boxes he collided with a red-faced man racing to escape. “They’ve shot the woman!” he gasped, struggling to free himself from Philip’s detaining grasp. “Lemme get out of here--I ain’t in it!”

Philip let the craven go and hurried on. In the box of tragedy the curtain had been drawn and two women were kneeling over a third who was lying on the floor. One of the women sprang to her feet as he entered and her eyes were blazing.

“That pie-eyed ---- ---- ---- down there shot at nothin’ and got Lola!” she raged. “Don’t let her die in this hell-hole! Get help to carry her over to her room! It’s just across the street.”

In a trice Philip had captured two of the gallery drink servers, and the victim of the wild shot was quickly carried out and down the stairs and across to the darkened building opposite, the two women following. At the foot of the unlighted stairway where Jean Dabney had more than once turned him back, Philip found himself in the clutch of the woman with the blazing eyes.

“Wait,” she panted. “There’s enough of ’em to carry her up and to run for a doctor and her man. What she’s needin’ is a priest, but she ain’t a Catholic, and none o’ the others’d dirty their hands with the likes of us.”

“You are mistaken,” said Philip evenly. “I know of one, at least, who will go where he is needed.”

“Then get him quick, for God’s sake! She’s dyin’; the bullet went clean through and come out at her back!”

“Go on and keep her alive if you can,” Philip urged. “I’ll hurry.”

Luckily, he found an idle two-horse hack standing in front of the American House, and he sprang in and gave his order, bidding high for haste. After a reckless race of a dozen blocks the hack halted in front of a house yarded in the same enclosure with a small brick church carrying a gilt cross on its gable; and Philip was relieved to see that, late as it was, there was still a light burning in the minister’s study. A heavy-set, fair-haired young man with the face of a wise and compassionate saint answered his ring.

“I have come again, Father Goodwin,” he began hurriedly. “It’s a tragedy, this time. A woman has just been accidentally shot in the Corinthian theater, and I think she is dying. Can you come?”

“She is not a Catholic?”

“No.”

“I’ll be with you in a moment.”

On the galloping race to the appointed destination the young clergyman put an arm across Philip’s shoulders in the darkness of the hack’s interior.

“Tell me, Philip: how long are you going to go on throwing yourself away? The other time you came to me from a woman dying in a brothel; and this time you come from the Corinthian. Doesn’t your life mean anything more to you than a wallowing in the mud?”

“It did, once,” was the low-toned response. “But I have found out that it is one thing to knock the barriers down, and another to try to build them up again. As long as I hadn’t wallowed, it was easy not to. But one night the props went out all at once, and--well, I can’t seem to set them back again.”

“They were not the right kind of props, Philip; you may be sure of that. Won’t you come and talk to me like a man, some time?”

“Maybe,” said Philip; and then the hack was pulled up at the doorway of the darkened stairway.

Philip led the way up the stairs and around the gallery-like upper corridor to a lighted room with an open door. The scene that revealed itself as he entered and stood aside to make way for the clergyman stunned him. The bed upon which the victim of the drunken miner’s chance bullet lay had been drawn out from the wall, and on one side of it a doctor, with Jean Dabney standing by to help as she could, was trying to determine the seriousness of the wound. On the other side of the bed knelt a man with graying hair, cold eyes and a hard-lined face which was now drawn and pinched and haggard as he stared at the still figure over which the doctor was working. Bromley caught Philip’s arm and took him apart from the others.

“Jean knows, and I know,” he explained in a low whisper. “We had come down to see the sick old lady on the other side of the building. When they told me who this woman was, I went after your father. Don’t do anything to make it harder for him, Phil.”

For a long minute Philip stood looking down at the face of the woman who had supplanted his mother. It was the wreck of a face that had once been attractive, perhaps even beautiful with a wild, gypsy allure. While he looked, the dark eyelids fluttered and opened, and the carmined lips framed a single word, “_John!_”

The doctor straightened up and drew Jean away, shaking his head to signal that the end had come. The clergyman knelt beside the dying woman and began to speak in low tones. Bromley followed the doctor and Jean into the corridor, and at the door he looked back. He saw Philip hesitate, somber-eyed, but only for an instant. Then the son went to kneel, with bowed head, beside his father.

XXVII

“I SAW what you saw as we were leaving the room--yes. But what did Philip do afterward?” Jean asked, looking up from her seat in the low wicker rocking-chair.

After taking Jean home on the night of the tragedy, Bromley had gone back to the tenement building to stand by as a loyal partner should, and for the three succeeding days his room in the West Denver cottage had remained unoccupied. Late the third evening he had returned to find Jean sitting up, sewing, with the two younger girls poring over their school books in the rear half of the double sitting-room.

“Phil did his full duty,” was his answer to the low-voiced question. “Took everything upon his own shoulders--funeral arrangements, and all that; acted just as if there had been no breach between his father and himself--a thing he wouldn’t have done six months ago, not if the heavens had fallen.”

“And you have been helping?”

“Naturally, I did what I could--which wasn’t much beyond backing Phil up and running errands. He seemed glad to have me to lean upon, so I stayed with him. It was the least I could do.”

“Of course. Where is his father now?”

“Vanished into thin air, right after the funeral; wouldn’t tell Phil where he was going; wouldn’t take any of Phil’s money; wouldn’t talk, except to say that he wouldn’t get in Philip’s way again--not if he had to take the other side of the world for his.”

“And Philip--where is he?”

“He left on to-night’s train for New Hampshire. He is going back to square the--er--the matter with the bank--so far as a return of the money can do it.”

“But he didn’t need to go in person to do that, did he?”

“That is what I told him; but he seemed to think he ought to go and face it out, man to man; that it was part of the price he must pay for the sake of the name--since his father wouldn’t pay any of it. I imagine, too, that he wants to be there to bargain that his mother and sisters are not to be harried by a revival of talk about the old scandal.”

She nodded complete intelligence, saying, “I told you you didn’t know the real Philip, Harry.”

“I didn’t; I admit it. He is as gentle and compassionate now as he used to be opinionated and hard. But he still believes he has put himself entirely beyond the pale.”

She made a swift little gesture of appeal. “You must try to make him understand that there isn’t any pale--not in his sense of the word--after he comes back.” Then: “He is coming back, isn’t he?”

Bromley nodded. “Yes; I think he is coming back. But as to making him understand: I fancy there is only one person in the world who can do that successfully, Jean. That person is yourself.”

She bent lower over her sewing. “What makes you say that, Harry?”

He was not looking at her when he answered. His gaze had wandered to the far end of the room; to a girlish face framed in a tousled mass of yellow hair; ripe lips pressed together and the fair brow wrinkled as their owner puzzled over her lesson for the next day.

“I say it, Jeanie, dear, because, in spite of everything he has been and has done, Philip loves you, even as you love him,” he said. “But he believes he has sinned beyond your forgiveness. If you can forgive him----”

She looked up to see why he had let the sentence lapse, and when the distracting reason became apparent, she laid her work aside and slipped away to the bed-room she shared with Mysie. When she came back she was holding one hand behind her. Suddenly the play-boy found himself staring at a reflection of his own face in a little hand-mirror. He glanced up at her with the boyish smile that endeared him to all women.

“You are a little wretch, Jean!” he laughed. “You caught me red-handed, didn’t you?--just as you said you would that day when we were out in the Highlands. All right; it’s a fact, and I plead guilty. But I’ll be good and patient and wait until you won’t have to say that I’m robbing the cradle. Now that you know what I was dreaming about, may I go and see if I can’t give Mysie a bit of help? She seems to be finding her trigonometry harder than usual to-night, judging from the way she is making faces at it.”

* * * * *

Bromley’s prediction that Philip would return to Colorado came true within a fortnight, and the news of his arrival reached the play-boy through Reddick. Going at once to the rooms in the Alamo Building, Bromley found the returned traveller opening his mail.

“You made a quick trip, Phil,” was his greeting. “How did you find things in the old home?”

Philip laid the envelope opener aside and felt for his pipe.

“I found them pretty much as I expected to. And there was nothing to stay for, after my errand was done.”

“No trouble about the errand, was there?”

“No. The bank people didn’t ask any questions. They were only too glad to see the color of their money again.”

“And your mother and sisters?”

“They wanted me to stay, of course. They couldn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t retire and settle down at home as a solid citizen; why I should want to go back to the outlandish West.”

“Well, why should you?” Bromley asked, with his most disarming smile.

“You know the answer to that as well as I do, Harry. In the old rut at home I had to be once more a Pharisee among the people who had known me from childhood, and one week of that was enough. Another week of it would have stifled me.”

The play-boy’s smile broadened into a grin. “There is plenty of breathing room out here, if that is what you want.”

“Not room enough--in Denver.”

“No? Whereabouts, then?”

Philip picked up a badly spelled letter written in pencil and glanced over it.

“This is from Jim Garth. He has found a prospect up somewhere near the Mount of the Holy Cross, and he asks me if I will grub-stake him for a winter’s work on it. I shall leave this evening to put in the winter with Jim. He says his claim is at altitude eleven thousand and something. There ought to be breathing space enough up there.”

“But why, Phil?”

“I think you know why. This gold-mad country, or my own innate weakness or wickedness--call it what you please--has made a sorry castaway of me, Harry. As you know very well, I’ve travelled a long and crooked trail since we came out of the mountains together last spring. I don’t know whether or not I can find my way out of the woods; it’s all rather chaotic just now. I only know that I want to go bury myself for a while and see if I can’t fight through to daylight, somewhere and somehow.”

After a little pause, Bromley said: “You are thinking only of yourself, Phil? What about Jean?”

“Jean? I thought I had given you time enough there, Harry.”

“Nonsense! Jean loves me dearly--as a brother--as she ought to. I’m going to marry Mysie when she is old enough; that is, if she’ll have me.”

“Mysie? I never dreamed of that! But how about the Follansbee affair?”

“Humph!” said the play-boy. “You don’t keep up with the neighborhood gossip. Eugie begged off some time ago. She is going to marry Stephen Drew next month.”

“Oh; so that little problem solves itself, does it? But we were speaking of Jean. How much does she know about my father--and me?”

“All there is to know. She has known it all along.”

“And she doesn’t despise me?”

“You’ll not get anything out of me; go and ask her for yourself. Or are you going to drop out for a whole winter without seeing her?”

It was the new Philip who turned his face away and said, quite humbly: “I’m not fit to go to her now, Harry; you know that. It would be a sacrilege--another and worse indecency--to go to her with the smell of the pit-fires still in my clothes. I love her too well for that.”

“But you have never told her so.”

“No; and it is too late, now.”

The play-boy got out of his chair.

“Perhaps you are right, Phil; I won’t say you are not. Is there anything I can do toward helping you in the make-ready?”

“No; nothing that I think of. I’ll outfit in Leadville.”

“All right; I’ll be at the train to see you off.” And as he shook hands at parting: “Don’t you know, Phil, there are times when I almost envy you your confounded old burn-yourself-at-the-stake Puritan conscience? There are, for a fact; and this is one of them. Good-by--till this evening.”

XXVIII

“I DON’T believe I can climb any higher, Harry; the air up here is so frightfully thin. You and Mysie go on if you want to. I’ll sit down and wait for you. I wouldn’t ask for any grander view than this is, right here from this rock.”

Spring had come again for the altitudes, and though the higher peaks of the Continental Divide were still heavily blanketed with snow, the gulches were free and the mountain streams were running bank full. Bromley, with an ulterior motive that he was still carefully concealing, had won Mrs. Dabney’s consent to take Jean and Mysie on a flying trip to the summit of the Great Divide, saying it was a shame that, after a residence of two years in Denver, the girls had not yet seen any more of the mountain grandeurs than could be glimpsed from a car window on a Sunday excursion up one of the canyons.

Making Leadville only a halting point, they had come on up the railroad to a flag-station hamlet high in the backbone range. By making a few judicious inquiries in the hamlet, Bromley had learned what he wanted to know, and which trail to take. In one of the gulches far above the railroad, the gray, beard-like dump of a mine or prospect tunnel could be seen, with the help of the field-glasses, and it was on the steep trail toward this that he was leading his breathless charges.

“Well wait until you get your breath,” he offered, in answer to Jean’s protest. “There is no hurry. It will be hours before we can get the return train.”

As he spoke, he was sweeping the upper reaches of the trail with the glass. On one of the nearer loopings a man was descending. Bromley readjusted the focus of the binocular and fixed the descending mountaineer fairly in its field. What he saw made him stultify himself immediately and shamelessly.

“If you really don’t care to go any farther, Jean,” he said hastily, “Mysie and I will climb up to that monument rock over there on the other spur. You won’t mind? We’ll be in plain sight nearly all the way.”

“Of course I won’t mind. I could sit here and enjoy this magnificent view all day. Run along.”

Philip Trask, no longer crippled in body, mind or vision, saw the three human dots on the trail below him; saw two of them separate from the third and move away to the left toward a hunched shoulder of the mountain with a curiously shaped pinnacle rock at its summit. “Tenderfoots,” he said to himself, “and one of them is already out of breath.” He looked again, squinting his eyes against the hard light of the forenoon sun. “Humph!--skirts. I wonder who was fool enough to drag a couple of women eleven thousand feet up in the air? No wonder one of them has pegged out.”

A turn in the trail hid the motionless figure at the halting place for the time, though he could still see the others making their toilful way onward and upward over the rock-strewn talus. As he drew nearer to the one who had been left behind, the rock, upon one of the lower shelf-like ledges of which she was sitting, kept him from getting a fair sight of her, and it was not until he was about to go on past her that he saw who she was and stopped short.

“_Jean!_” he gasped.

She stood up and held out both hands to him, and what she said appeared to take no account of anything that had intervened, save the lapse of time.

“You, Philip? I wonder if I’m dreaming? Is it really you--after all these months? Where did you come from?”

“Out of a pretty mucky hole in the ground, as you’d imagine,” he grinned, looking down at his earth-stained corduroys and boots. “But tell me: how under the canopy did you get here?”

“‘Canopy,’” she smiled; “that is New England, isn’t it? We came on the train. Harry brought us--Mysie and me--just for a little outing. We left Leadville this morning. But I hadn’t the slightest idea that we’d find you up here.”

“Just one of Harry’s little jokes, I suppose. I think he meant it to be a surprise, all around. I wrote him last week and told him where we were--Big Jim Garth and I--and how we could be reached, now that the snows have melted. I thought perhaps he might care to run up and have a look at Jim’s prospect. It isn’t a bonanza, but Jim can probably sell it for enough, with the development work we’ve done, to take care of him in his old age.”

“You have been working with him all winter?”

“Yes. We were snowed in most of the time, but that didn’t matter. We had plenty to eat. But this morning we found that the tobacco was all gone, and at that, of course, everything had to stop dead until one of us could go down to the railroad and get some. No tobacco, no work.”

She sat down again on the rock ledge and made room for him beside her.

“As I say, I hadn’t the remotest idea we were going to find you up here. Harry never gave us the least little hint--which was just like him. What a perfectly glorious view there is from here!”

Her enthusiastic exclamation was well warranted. The atmosphere was crystal clear, and across a mountain-studded interval of nearly two hundred miles of sheer distance earth and sky met on the remote horizon formed by the serrated summits of a blue range in eastern Utah. Philip pointed out and named some of the eye-filling grandeurs: White Mountain, Shingle Peak, the rampart buttressings of the White River Plateau, and beyond these the Book or Roan Mountains, too distant to show the striated colorings of their majestic cliffs, and in the southwest, the far-away bulwark of the Uncompahgres.

“I can never look at it without being made to feel my own, and all human, littleness,” he said. “And, after all, tremendous as it is, this is only a dot, a vanishing point, in a universe too vast to be even faintly comprehended by our little insect minds.”

She stole a glance aside at him. Lean, wind-tanned, athletic, with work-hardened hands and knotted muscles, there was little to remind her of the neatly groomed, reserved young railroad clerk who had sat beside her in the Kansas Pacific day-coach two years earlier; the “damn Yankee” she had told him she had been taught to call him and his kind. Even his speech was different now.

“This is a country of big things--this Colorado of ours,” he went on, “and we little human insects have to grow and expand to fit it--do that, or be blotted out and lost in the shuffle. Doesn’t it make you feel that way?”

She nodded. Though she was far from realizing it, or had been, up to this moment, her two years of burden-carrying in Denver had changed her quite as much as his varied experiences and the breaking down of the barriers had changed him. Then, with a smile: “We were terrible tenderfoots two years ago, weren’t we?”

“It was a country of tenderfoots then; it still is, in a great measure. What a world of meaning there is crammed into that one coined word! We call this a new country; in reality, it is old--very old and wise and shrewdly discriminating. It sifts the grain from the chaff without mercy; and equally without mercy the chaff is scattered to the four winds. We are the new things; we who call ourselves the lords of creation! Most of us were mere babes in the wood when we came here--tenderfoots in all that the word implies. At least, I am sure I was. You were different.”

“Not so very different,” she disagreed. “I remember how sneery and unmannerly I was the day we met on the train ... how I made fun of the ‘Philips,’ and told you you’d never go to the mountains. I don’t believe you ever quite forgave me for that.”

“The Philip you knew then was quite capable of holding it against you,” he admitted, with a reminiscent smile. “In fact, if I remember right, I believe he did cherish some boyish notion of showing you, some time, how completely mistaken you were; how far superior he was to your prejudiced opinion of him.”

She looked around at him with a flash of the old-time mockery in her eyes.

“Does he feel that way now?” she asked.