Part 13

“Perhaps you wouldn’t want to do it in Yankeeland, but you can do it safely enough here,” she argued. “Haven’t you heard the Denver boast that, for all it is such a ‘wide-open’ city, a woman who minds her own affairs is safe in the streets at any time of the day or night? And it is true, too--or almost true.”

“That may all be. Just the same, I am going to take you home,” Philip insisted. “I owe it to my own self-respect, if I don’t owe it to you. Do we walk or ride?”

“It is only a little way; and, really, Mr. Trask, I wish you wouldn’t!”

“It is ‘Mr. Trask’ now, but it was ‘Philip’ last spring,” he reminded her.

“Well, then--Philip, won’t you let me run away by myself this time? We mustn’t stand here cluttering up Mr. Charpiot’s sidewalk. Please!”

“Is there any really good reason why I shouldn’t see you home?”

“N-no; I don’t reckon there is any _reason_. Only----”

“Then that settles it. Come along,” and he made her take his arm.

In a very few minutes the truth of her saying that she had only a short distance to go was rudely thrust upon him. A silent walk of two squares down the nearest cross street toward the Platte ended at the stair of a brick building dingy and old as age might be reckoned in this Aladdin city of the plain; a building whose sidewalk-fronting windows yawned into the empty darkness of a former storeroom. And the street in which it stood was the street of the Corinthian plangencies. The neighborhood, as all Denver knew, was not merely a shabby one; it was disreputable.

“Good gracious!” he exclaimed, as they paused at the dark stairfoot. “You don’t mean to tell me you are living here!”

“You would come,” she answered reproachfully; then: “We have rooms on the second floor. I--I’m sorry I can’t ask you in.”

“But this neighborhood!” he expostulated, and the sternest of his Puritan ancestors could not have crowded more deprecation into the three words.

“I know,” she nodded. “But you remember the old saying--that beggars mustn’t be choosers. We were glad enough to find shelter anywhere. And the people ... they are not what they ought to be, perhaps; but they are kind to us. Won’t you let me thank you again and say good-night?”

Since there was nothing else to be done, he did it; though he waited until after she had disappeared up the unlighted stair before he turned to walk away, still shocked and dismayed at the thought of two unprotected women and two young girls living--being obliged to live--in such surroundings. It shouldn’t be permitted; it must not be permitted. Surely he and Bromley together could hatch up some plan by means of which Jean and her family could be helped; some plan which they could accept without becoming objects of charity.

It was at the Sixteenth Street corner that he came suddenly upon Middleton. The former tonnage cleric, clean shaven as to the beard, dapper and well fed, was standing in a dark doorway, fingering his mustaches and apparently waiting for some one.

“Hello, Philly!” he called. “Little off your beat down here,--what?”

With no definite reason for so doing, Philip began to bristle inwardly. Though he had worked with Middleton and roomed with him, he had never been quite able to conquer an ingrained aversion to the man.

“It is a public street, isn’t it?” he suggested.

“That is the trouble with it; it is too public for a truly good young man like yourself. Or perhaps you are not so truly good as you used to be. How about it?”

With the instinctive antagonism to prompt it, there was a sharp reply on the end of Philip’s tongue. But he suppressed it.

“I like to ramble around a little now and then in the evenings,” he substituted; and Middleton laughed.

“You don’t mean to say that you’ve become human enough to do a little ‘chasing’ for yourself?”

Philip did not affect to misunderstand. With the curious inner voice whispering that this was the proper time to answer a fool according to his folly, he said mildly: “Weren’t you continually setting me the example last year?”

The dapper one laughed again.

“You might go so far as to say that I am still setting it. I don’t mind telling you that right now I’m camping on the trail of one of the choicest little bits of womaninity you ever laid eyes on. If she shows up, I shall promptly shoo you away.”

Philip’s lip curled. “One of the Corinthians?” he queried.

“Not on your sweet life; nothing like it. She’s a black-eyed, black-haired little darling, all frost on the outside and fire on the inside--works in a millinery shop and comes home about this time every evening. She’s a little offish yet, but she’ll get over that pretty soon.”

While one might count ten, the flaring gas street-lights turned darkly red for Middleton’s listener. But his voice was low and quite controlled when he said, “Of course you know her name?”

“Yep; she never would tell me, but I got it from one of the girls she works with. It’s a boy’s name--Jean.”

Nothing is more certain than that the inhibitions are dependent, more often than not, upon purely extraneous circumstances: environment, the mental attitude of the moment, even such trivial influences as the cut of one’s clothes and the obligations imposed thereby. Clad in a flannel shirt, baggy trousers and miner’s boots, Philip had thought nothing of the civilized restraints when he had flung himself, tooth and nail, upon the drunken bully who was menacing Bromley in the bar-room of the Leadville hotel. But now, with the mining-camp rawnesses put safely behind him, the conventional fetterings were not so easily broken. Middleton was a petty libertine, to be sure, but he knew that a few straightforward words of explanation about the Dabney family and his own connection with it would put an end to the ex-tonnage clerk’s pursuit of the daughter.

But the cool words were not spoken. In the moment of hesitation the curious inner voice prompted vengefully, “Will you stand for that? Haven’t you found out yet that you are in love with Jean Dabney--the girl to whom this fat rake is offering the bitterest insult a man of his breed can offer to a woman of hers?” and at this flame-hot goading the inhibitory bonds became as smoking flax and he lashed out with a swift, fury-driven uppercut to the smooth-shaven jaw.

At the smacking impact of the totally unexpected blow the fat victim gasped, gurgled, tried to duck aside and stumbled and fell on the sidewalk. There were no passers-by to interfere, and for a single instant Philip stood looking down upon his handiwork in a fit of half-awed astonishment. Then the mad vengeance wave submerged him again and he sprang upon the fallen man, beating him futilely and trying to grind his face into the pavement. And at the last:

“Get up, you dirty hound!--get up and run if you want to go on living! If you ever so much as look at that girl again, I’ll cut your rotten heart out and feed it to the dogs in the street! Run! you damned----”

XIV

WHEN Bromley came in at half-past eleven, glowing from his brisk walk in the cool night air from the Demming house in upper Fourteenth Street, he found that Philip had not yet gone to bed; was sitting with his hands locked over a knee and an extinct pipe between his teeth, his face the face of a man frowningly at odds with himself and his world.

“Heavens, Phil!” was the play-boy’s greeting, “You look as if you had lost every friend you ever had and never expected to find another. What’s gnawing you now?”

“I suppose you would call it nothing,” returned the loser moodily. “I’ve merely been finding out that I can be still another and different kind of a crazy fool.”

Bromley grinned. “You have been to the Corinthian again?”

“Oh, hell--no! I said a different kind of a fool. Drop it, Harry. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Thus extinguished, Bromley slipped out of his overcoat, struggled into a smoking jacket, and filled and lighted his pipe; all this in comradely silence. After a time the mere fact of his presence seemed to exert a mollifying effect, for when Philip spoke again it was to say, less irritably: “I have found the Dabney family, at last.”

“Good!” exclaimed the play-boy. “Nothing so very foolish about that. How did it eventuate?”

In clipped sentences Philip told of the accidental street meeting with Jean, and of the dinner _à deux_ at Charpiot’s, winding up with: “It fairly gave me a heartache to see how hungry she was. She said she hadn’t had time to go out to luncheon, but I am morally certain that was only half of the truth. The other half was that she couldn’t afford to feed herself in the middle of the day.”

Bromley whistled softly.

“Say, Philip, that is tough! I know, because I have been there myself. What else did you find out?”

“After dinner I walked home with her, though she didn’t want me to. When we reached the place I saw why she had tried to shake me. They are living in a shabby tenement block down there within a stone’s throw of the Corinthian. She apologized for not being able to ask me in.”

“Suffering Scott!--in _that_ neighborhood? Wasn’t there anybody to tell them what they were getting into down there?”

“She gave me to understand that there was no choice; that they were obliged to take shelter where they could find it--and afford it. They know--or at least she does--what sort of people they are mixing with. She says they are kind to her and her mother and the children.”

Bromley nodded slowly. “People of that sort would be--to hard-luck people of her sort. That is one of the queer things in this mixed-up world of ours. So far as sheer safety is concerned, she is probably just as safe in that tenement dive as she would be in the most respectable mansion in Denver. All the same, we ought to get them out of there. Have you thought of anything?”

“No; I can’t think. I had a crazy fit just after she left me, and I haven’t been able to think of much else since.”

“Suppose you unload on me and get it off your chest,” Bromley suggested.

“I will, because you ought to know. If you are to go on living in the same apartment with a howling maniac----”

“All right; tell me what the maniac has been doing.”

“You have heard me speak of Middleton, the fat-faced railroad clerk I was rooming with when you first met me?”

“Yes.”

“He isn’t half a bad fellow in some ways, but, like a good many others in this demoralized town, he has a rotten streak in him. He is--or was--engaged to a girl back in Ohio; but that hasn’t kept him from chasing all sorts of women out here. To-night, after I left Jean, I found him loafing on the nearest street corner. He told me he was waiting for a girl; a girl who worked in a millinery shop. I led him on until he told me her name, which he had got from one of her girl workmates. He said it was a boy’s name--Jean.”

“You labored with him in good, old Puritan-dominie fashion?” said Bromley, with a crooked smile.

“You know mighty well I didn’t; though that would have been the sensible thing to do. He has an obscene twist in his brain, but for all that, I have no reason to believe that he hasn’t some decent limitations. If I had told him who the Dabneys are, and that they are friends of mine, that would have settled it. Instead of doing that, I went crazy mad--knocked him down and beat him--made a shouting ass of myself.”

Bromley laughed and thrust a hand across the reading table.

“Shake--you old fighting Roundhead!” he said. “Now I know you are all human! Is that what you were looking so glum about? You needn’t lose any sleep over such a little gust of righteous indignation as that. As a matter of fact, you ought to sleep the better for it.”

“Wait,” said Philip soberly. “It isn’t the mere fact that Middleton got what he was asking for; it is the other and bigger fact that I am no longer my own man, Harry. The frantic gold chase we have been through has done something to me; I don’t know what it is; but I do know I am not the man I was when I left New Hampshire a little more than eighteen months ago. I’m hag-ridden--possessed of a dumb devil. Every now and then I am made to realize that there are hellish possibilities in me that I never even dreamed of before I came out here.”

Bromley grew philosophical.

“The possibilities, hellish or otherwise, active or dormant, lie in every man of us born of woman, Philip. If we are, at bottom, creatures of heredity, on the surface we are pretty strictly creatures of environment; by which I mean that the environment calls to the surface only those qualities in us that are in harmony with it--that will respond to it. Back home, I take it, you had your little commonplace round and lived in it. Out here, all the traditional strings are off, and we are free to revert to type, if we feel like it.”

“M-m,” said Philip, thin-lipped; “very pretty--in theory. But it doesn’t get me anywhere. You can’t argue from the general to the particular; not in my case, anyway.”

There was the wisdom of the wise fools of all the ages in Bromley’s smile.

“Of course; you want to be specialized. We all do. I’ve prophesied for you before, and I can do it again if you want me to. You are of the tribe of those who have to emerge through great tribulation. There is a strong man and a broad man inside of you, Philip, and some day he will break out and come to his own. When he does, there will probably be a great smashing of window-panes and a kicking-out of door panels--wreckage a-plenty--and after it is all over you will doubtless wonder why there had to be an earthquake in your particular case. But the fact will remain.”

Philip grunted. “Are you trying to tell me that I am hidebound?”

“Call it that, if you like. Life is little to you yet; some day you will see how wide the horizons really are. But, as I say, you are likely to pay for the privilege--pay in advance. It’s coming to you.”

Silence for a few moments while the smoke curled upward in delicate little rings from Bromley’s pipe. Then Philip said soberly: “You spoke a while back of reversion to type. I don’t know what type it is that I am reverting to. My people are all decent and well behaved, as far back as I know anything about them.”

“Oh, that,” said Bromley lightly. “When it comes to ancestors and the heredities, most of us can find anything we are looking for, if we go back far enough. It is a family tradition of ours that there was once a Wigglesworth who was a raw-head-and-bloody-bones pirate and wound up by getting himself hanged in chains. I shouldn’t worry, if I were you.”

“That is just the difference between us, Harry,” was the somber rejoinder. “You wouldn’t worry if you knew the world were coming to an end to-morrow. I don’t happen to be built that way. For a time this evening, while I was with Jean Dabney, I was able to recognize myself as the normal Philip Trask. But a few minutes after we parted I was a bloody murderer--in all but the actual accomplishment of the thing; I could have killed Middleton without a qualm. If the crazy fit had lasted a minute or two longer, I don’t doubt but I should have killed him.”

“Well, you didn’t kill him; which is the main thing, after all. Let it go. You’ve got it out of your system now. I suppose your silly conscience will make you go and apologize to the masher, but that’s a future--a bridge to be crossed when you come to it. Let’s talk about me for a while. I’ve had a jolt, too, to-night.”

“A jolt? You don’t look it.”

“That’s it; no matter how sick a fellow is, if he doesn’t look sick he gets no sympathy. Just the same, I’m stabbed to the heart. I have been discovered.”

Philip’s smile was grim, but it was a smile. “Sheriff after you with a warrant?” he bantered.

“Worse. At Mrs. Demming’s to-night I met a man who knows me--knew me back home, I mean.”

“Anything fatal about that?”

“The fatality lies in what he told me. Have I ever, by any chance, happened to mention the Follansbees to you?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Friends of the family for three generations. Tom Follansbee was my classmate in college for the little time the powers that were let me stay on the campus. My governor and the Judge were also classmates. You get the idea?--the two families as thick as peas in a pod?”

“I’m listening.”

“Just a minute and you’ll get the full impact of my jolt. There are two daughters, Eugenia and Lucy Ann. Back in the dark ages, when we were both in frocks and pinafores, the two families settled it that Eugenia and I were to marry when we grew up.”

“And when you did grow up you both revolted?”

“No; only one of us--more’s the pity. I’m a worse rotter than your man Middleton. Of course I like Eugie--like her immensely; we grew up together. The trouble is she likes me; not wisely, but a lot too well. She has always taken the pinafore arrangement as a settled thing. I am afraid she still takes it that way.”

“Well, there isn’t any other ‘one and only’ in the case, is there?”

“Not so you could observe it. But that isn’t the question. I haven’t any conscience--not in your meaning of the word--but I have something that partly answers the same purpose. I don’t want to be cajoled into marrying a woman that I don’t love in a marrying way. It would be a sorry bargain for the woman.”

“I see. But this is all back-number stuff. Where does your jolt come in?”

“At the front door, and as large as life. The younger sister’s health isn’t good; weak lungs. Thurlow--he’s the chap I met at Mrs. Demming’s--tells me that the whole Follansbee clan is about to come to Colorado to try the effect of the altitudes on Lucy Ann. Philip, old boy, I’m a ruined community!”

Philip smiled again, less grimly, this time. The play-boy was presenting another facet of his many-sided character, an entirely new and different one.

“Afraid the charming Eugenia will marry you out of hand?” he jested.

“You’ve hit the nail squarely on the head! If she could find me as you found me last spring--a shameless down-and-out--there might be some hope for me. But now ... it’s a fearful price to have to pay for bracing up, Philip!”

“What are you going to do about it--dodge?”

“I can’t dodge. Thurlow will meet the Follansbees when they arrive, and the first thing he will tell them--oh, pot! don’t you see that I’m in for it up to my neck?”

Philip tossed his cold pipe aside and got out of his chair.

“Better go to bed and sleep on it,” he counselled. “Perhaps it won’t seem so much like an unmixed misfortune in the morning.” And as he reached his bed-room door: “This Miss Follansbee--is she good-looking, Harry?”

“A glorious blonde, handsome enough to make your hair curl.”

“Humph!” said Philip; “it strikes me you might be a lot worse off than you are. You might have epilepsy, or rheumatism, or small-pox, or something of that sort. Good-night.” And he went off to bed.

XV

EXUBERANT Denverites of the early ’eighties--not the bull-team pioneers of the ’sixties, most of whom looked on with dry humor, but the clamant majority of tenderfoot later comers--lived strenuously in a boosters’ Paradise, acclaiming their city the Queen of the Plains and extolling impartially its Italian skies, health-giving atmosphere and matchless scenic surroundings; its phenomenal growth, wealth and hilarious “wide-openness.”

To this trumpeting mother of mining-camps came the Follansbees, fresh from an America which was slow to concede an America west of the Alleghenies; the judge, a fine, upstanding gentleman of the old school, with silvering hair and beard; his wife, an ample and gracious lady corseted to the moment and expert in the use of fan and lorgnette; their son Thomas, a spectacled young man who had had a post-graduate year at Oxford, returning with a pronounced English accent and as the introducer of the curious English custom of wearing spats; an elder daughter fully bearing out Bromley’s description of her as a “glorious blonde,” and a younger, thin and pale, with wistful eyes looking out upon a world which would always be alien to them.

True to his traditions, Bromley joined Thurlow in meeting the migrants-for-health’s-sake at the Union Depot, saw them carriaged for their hotel, saw to the transfer of their luggage, and afterward called at the hotel, dutifully and at the proper hour, to pay his respects and to place himself, as a somewhat seasoned Denverite, at the service of the family in helping to find summer quarters in which the invalid Lucy Ann could have the benefits to be derived from the miracle-working climate.

“Their reactions to the ‘wild and woolly’ are delightful to behold,” Bromley told Philip that night at dinner. “The judge and Lucy Ann take things as they are; but Mrs. Aurelia and Tom and Eugie are distinctly disappointed at finding themselves surrounded by all the comforts and most of the luxuries of civilization. I don’t know just what they were expecting to find, but they evidently haven’t found it--yet.”

“They will live at the Windsor?” Philip asked.

“Oh, no; their idea is to take a ‘villa,’ as Tom calls it, somewhere in the suburbs and settle down in a housekeeping way. And, by the by, Tom is a joke--a shout! He used to be a rather decent chap, as harmless as a cockroach; a trifle on his toes, perhaps, because the Follansbees date back to Colonial times, but otherwise quite bearable. But he spent last year in England, at Oxford, and now he does everything but drop his ‘h’s.’ He was out with me this afternoon and he wore a top hat and spats. The grins we met, if put end to end, would reach from here to Leadville. He calls me ‘my deah fellaw.’”

“And the fair Eugenia?” Philip inquired maliciously.

Bromley sighed and shook his head.

“I’m still a ruined community. She is as fair as ever and she hasn’t changed a particle. I was in hopes some really good chap had cut in by this time, but I am afraid she is still taking the parental bargain as a matter of course.”

Philip’s grin was sardonic.

“And as long as she does, you’ll have to. Still, this is a man’s town, and perhaps you won’t bulk so large in the lady’s imagination after she has had time to look the Western collection over.”