Part 15

“To go back to New Hampshire with me and fight those liars, who said you stole from the bank, to a finish in the courts; to make the Trask name once more what it has always been--an honest one. I’ll back you, to the last dollar there is in my half of the mine.”

The thin lips of the older man parted in the ghost of a smile.

“Spoken like a good son--or at least a dutiful one,” he said, in a tone that seemed slightly acid. “But why be so anxious about the name?”

“Why?--why?” Philip demanded. “Why shouldn’t I be anxious about it? Isn’t it the name I bear?”

“A name is nothing unless you make it something--but we won’t argue about that. You say you want me to go back to New Hampshire and set things right. It hasn’t occurred to you that there might be a certain difficulty in the way?”

“You mean the fact that you didn’t stay and fight it out at the time?”

The ghost of a smile came again.

“No; I didn’t mean that. I mean the fact that not all of your money could help me to prove what isn’t so. I took the money from the bank; stole it, you’ll say, though I chose to call it squaring accounts with Hiram Witherspoon, who had kept me on starvation wages for years. I took it and got away with it.”

Once again Philip’s heart skipped a beat and stopped, and for a moment the room whirled in dizzying circles for him.

“You--you stole it?” he faltered, in a voice that he scarcely recognized as his own. Then, helplessly: “I--I don’t understand.”

“You wouldn’t,” was the curt reply, “you are too much of a Sanborn. They never kick over the traces.” A pause, and then: “You’d never understand in a month of Sundays, Phil. Your grandfather was a hard man and a hypocrite. He never took his hand off my collar until after I was a man grown--bull-necked me into everything I ever did, even to my marriage with your mother, forgetting that I had the same blood in me that he had in him. He lived a double life until he died, and thought nobody knew; but I knew, and I did the same until the time came when I could help myself and bolt--with the other woman.”

“Oh, my God!” Philip groaned, and covered his face with his hands to shut out the sight of the man who sat opposite, calmly indifferent, as it seemed, to the havoc he had wrought.

When Philip looked up it was to say harshly: “Where is the other woman now?”

“She is here--in Denver. She does a turn now and then at the Corinthian when the cards run queer for me.”

Philip staggered to his feet in a desolate rage.

“Then I’m the son of a thief, a gambler and the paramour of a kept woman!” he blazed out madly. “That’s the name I bear, is it?--the reward I get for believing in you, like the damned fool that I was, when everybody else was against you?” He shook his fist in his father’s face. “Do you know what you’ve done to me? You’ve killed my soul--that’s what you’ve done!--blasted my faith in all humankind! Let me get out of here, before I--Oh, God!...”

He choked and clapped his hands to his face, stumbling toward the door. As he fumbled for the knob and twisted it, the chill voice behind him said: “You had no call to chase me, and you needn’t worry about the name. I haven’t called myself John Trask since I left New Hampshire. And one thing more: I’ve put a bullet through a man before this for saying less than you said a minute ago. That’s all, I guess.”

Philip groped his way through the upper passage and down the two flights of stairs to the sidewalk. The reaction from the fit of mad rage set in as he stepped into the open air and he went suddenly weak and nauseated. The Tabor Building was just opposite, and in the alley beside it he saw the light of the saloon at the back. Two minutes later he had staggered across the street, up the alley and into the lighted bar-room, which proved to be momentarily empty of other patrons. “Whiskey!” he gasped, leaning against the bar. “I’m sick!”

The bartender set out the bottle and a glass of water, and spun the empty whiskey glass along the polished mahogany. With a hand that was shaking as if with palsy, Philip tilted the bottle, poured himself a drink that ignored the miniature pig etched in the side of the glass with the motto, “Don’t drown the hog,” and gulped it down. The neat liquor was like a draft of liquid fire to his unaccustomed palate and throat, and he choked and strangled until the bartender reached over and put the glass of water into his hand with a grinning comment: “Guess you hain’t got the knack yet o’ takin’ it straight, son. Wash ’er down with a chaser o’ water.”

With his throat still afire, Philip took to the streets. Since the huge drink he had just swallowed was the first he had ever taken, its intoxicating effect was almost instantaneous. Before he had walked half a dozen blocks his brain was spinning and he fancied he was treading upon thin air. From that time on, consciousness faded little by little; all he knew was that he was walking, walking endlessly, sometimes through streets that seemed dimly familiar, at other times with all the surroundings singularly strange.

Finally he found himself climbing what he took to be the steps of the Alamo Building to his rooms, drenched and permeated now with an overpowering desire to sleep. In some odd way the steps did not seem quite right; there were not enough of them. And there was a lighted door at the top which was opened for him before he could reach for the knob. It was at this conjuncture that reasoning consciousness forsook him completely. He had a vague impression that somebody--Bromley it would be, of course,--was leading him somewhere; that his feet, from being so lately shod with wings, had become unaccountably leaden; that there were more steps to be climbed; and after that, the oblivion of a sleep profound and trance-like.

When he awoke he found himself lying, fully clothed, upon a bed in a strange room. The window shades were drawn, but the morning sun was shining upon them. On the edge of the bed, with her single garment slipping over one shoulder, sat a girl with carmined lips and pencilled eyebrows; she was laughing at him and saying: “Had a good sleep, honey?” adding: “You certainly had a lovely jag on last night when you turned up here. Did somebody dope you?”

Philip leaped up and slewed himself around to sit beside the strange girl. The quick movement set a trip-hammer pounding in his head, and he had to wince and press his temples and wait a minute before he could master the throbbing pain and say, “Where am I?”

“As if you didn’t know!” she gibed. “You sure had a skinful, but I guess you still knew enough to come where you’d be took care of. Here’s your pocketbook. Wonder somebody didn’t nip it off you before you got here.”

Slowly he began to realize where he was.

“Are you trying to tell me that I’ve been here all night, with you?”

“Oh, no; not with me; not any; just with yourself. A cannon wouldn’t ’ve waked you after we got you up-stairs.”

“What made you take me in?”

The girl laughed again and pointed at the pocketbook in his hands.

“That, and your good clothes. The madam said she knew you wasn’t no dead-beat.”

Soberly he took a bank-note from the well-stuffed pocketbook and gave it to her.

“Is that enough?” he asked. “I’m new to this sort of thing.”

The girl flung her arms around his neck and kissed him.

“You’re a dandy--a prince!” she said; and as he staggered to his feet and reached for his hat: “Have you got to go, right away? If you’ll wait, I’ll dig you up a cup of coffee for a bracer.”

“No; I’ll go.”

“All right; I’ll show you the way out. There ain’t nobody else up in the house yet. It’s early.”

She ran down the stair ahead of him and snapped the night latch on the front door to let him out. As he passed her she patted him softly on the shoulder. “Good-by, honey, dear. You’ll come back again, won’t you? And next time, for Pete’s sake, don’t get so parboiled that you won’t know me.”

When he reached the sidewalk he turned to look back at the place. He knew the house. It was one that Middleton had pointed out to him a year in the past as one of the few places of the sort where, as the fat-faced tonnage clerk had phrased it, “a man needn’t carry a burglar-proof safe with him to be sure of finding his wallet when he wakes up in the morning.”

Philip looked at his watch. It had run down and he swore at it under his breath. The aftermath of the single gluttonous drink was still with him in the shape of a parched throat, a dry tongue, a fiercely aching head and a set of jangled nerves. At first, he thought he would go to his rooms and take a cold bath; but after he had gone a block or two in that direction he changed his mind and once more sought the saloon in the rear of the Tabor Building. The night bartender was still on duty and he grinned when Philip came in.

“Want a little of the hair o’ the dog that bit you, I reckon?” he said, setting out the bottle and glasses.

Philip poured a drink, a small one, this time, and since the mere smell of the liquor gagged him, he held his nose as he drank. The stimulant steadied the twittering nerves; and it did more--it cleared his brain and brought the desolating revelation of the night back with a vividness that hurt like the stabbing of needles. He set his watch by the bar-room clock. As the girl in the other street had said, it was quite early. Bromley would not be up yet. Suddenly it came to him that he could not face Bromley; not yet, at any rate. He must eat breakfast first; and he went around to Charpiot’s for the meal.

The breakfast, a light one, for his stomach was still in revolt, was hastily despatched; and as he was leaving the table the play-boy came in.

“Hello, there!” he exclaimed. “You are still in town? I looked into your room and saw your bed hadn’t been slept in, so I concluded you’d taken a night train to somewhere.”

“No,” Philip replied soberly; “I haven’t been out of town.”

“Well, don’t rush off. Sit down and be neighborly while I get a bite of breakfast.”

“No,” Philip repeated, “I’ve got to go.” Then he turned back and forced himself to look his partner in the eyes. “That matter we were talking about last night before you went to the theater: I’m not going to take that room at the Dabneys’. You are the one to go there.”

The play-boy looked his surprise.

“Why--what’s the matter with you, Phil? When I spoke of it last night, I thought you looked tickled purple.”

“Last night was last night, and this morning is another day. Say that I don’t care to give up the stuffy luxuries of the apartment in the Alamo, if you like. Anyway, I’m not going to move; that is all there is to it.”

And with this curt refusal he turned his back upon his partner and left the dining-room.

XVII

PASSING out through the hotel office with one thought effacing all others, namely, that companionship of any sort was not to be endured, Philip, a prey to the instinctive urge that drives the wounded animal to seek a hiding place, pulled his hat over his eyes, signalled to a passing cab and got in, telling the driver to take him to the Alamo Building.

Reaching his rooms, he scribbled a note for Bromley, merely saying that he was going out of town, filled a travelling-bag, jamming things into it with little regard for long-established habits of care and orderliness, and was presently on his way to the Union Depot, urging the cab driver to haste and still more haste. By a margin of seconds he caught the South Park train for Leadville; and as the short string of top-heavy, narrow-gauge cars went swaying and lurching out over the switches in the West Denver yard, he was choosing an isolated seat in the chair-car where he could settle himself to look the catastrophic revelation of the night fairly in the face.

With the scene of the revelation actually withdrawing into the distance, a vast incredulity seized him. Could it be possible that he had grown up in daily association with his father without so much as suspecting the existence of the iron-hard, desperate underman biding its time beneath an exterior so like that of other men in his walk of life as to be wholly unremarkable? It seemed fantastically unbelievable. Yet, in looking back upon the conventional New England home life he saw how it might be so.

The atmosphere of the home, as he had always known it, had been one of silent restraint, and there had been nothing like man-to-man comradeship between his father and himself. Not that this was at all singular. He had known many other households in the homeland in which the same spirit of reticence and aloofness, the same repression of all the emotions, were the natural order of things. The attitude was ingrained in the bone and blood; a heritage which, as he now realized, was his and his forebears’; the bequeathing of the stern stock which had fled from tyranny in England only to set up a repressive tyranny of its own in the new land beyond the sea.

But such reflections as these did not serve to lessen the completeness, the crushing completeness, of the blow that had fallen. Where was now that righteous pride of race he had paraded before Jean Dabney, the boast of honest and upright ancestors he had so confidently made?--he, the son of a thief, a gambler, a hardened breaker of the laws of God and man. Of what use to him now was the growing hoard of gold in the Denver bank, since it could never buy back that which was irretrievably lost? How could he go on living from day to day with the knowledge that the accident of any day might give some sensation-mongering newspaper reporter the chance to write up Lucky-strike Trask of the “Little Jean” as the son of a well-known local faro-dealer and sporting man? In his mind’s eye he could visualize the mocking headlines, and a wave of impotent rage, the agony of a tortured ego, swept over him.

He had no desire to eat when the train halted at the midday dinner station and did not leave his place in the chair-car. Later, through the long afternoon, he looked out, with eyes that saw without perceiving, upon the passing panorama of canyon cliffs and forested mountain slopes, of undulating distances in the South Park and the uplifted peaks of the Mosquito Range, deep in the misery of his wounding; aghast at the prospect of the future. It was with an added degree of wretchedness that he realized that his love for Jean Dabney, restrained and calmly calculated hitherto, seemed to have been set free in the chaotic crash of things, blazing up in passionate intensity now that its object was, as he told himself bitterly, snatched out of reach. That he could never go to her with the story of his humiliating discovery was the first sickening conclusion that had burned itself into his consciousness; and now this was followed by the appalling after-conclusion that he could not go to her at all; that the discovery in the gambling hell had cut him off at once and irrevocably from all association with her.

It was only natural that the thought of his own lapse, the fact that he had taken his first drink and in the drunkenness of it had spent the night in a brothel, seemed of small account in the general wreck. With the family honor already dragged so deeply in the mire of disgrace and criminality, what he might or might not do made little difference one way or the other. Not that he cherished as yet any desperate or boyish determination to take a fool’s revenge by plunging into dissipation. There was only a dull indifference. Pride was dead and the barriers of self-control had been broken down, but life still had to be lived, in some fashion.

Upon arriving in Leadville he had himself driven to the hotel where he and Bromley had put up after they had come out of the mountains with Drew in the spring. Still having no desire to eat, he tried to smoke; and when the pipe, on an empty stomach, nauseated him, he went to the bar and called for a drink. As in the morning, the swallow or two of whiskey wrought a miracle and he sought the dining-room and ate a hearty meal. Afterward, with a mild cigar that had none of the dizzying effects of the empty-stomach pipe, he sat in the lobby, and it was there that Drew ran across him.

“Back with us again, are you?” was the genial promoter’s greeting as he drew up a chair and planted himself in it for his own after-dinner smoke. “When did you reach?”

“Just an hour or so ago,” Philip answered, surprised to find himself able to tolerate and even to welcome the companionship of the older man. “I came up on the South Park day train.”

“And how is Henry Wigglesworth? Still making a quiet joke of the world at large?”

“Harry is all right. Good luck hasn’t spoiled him, as I was afraid it might.”

“Inclined to be a little wild, was he?” Drew remarked.

“When I first met him, yes. And I was foolish enough to think that I had to brother him. Queer what notions a man gets into his head, sometimes.”

Though he did not look aside, he knew that Drew was regarding him curiously.

“You come of brothering stock, don’t you, Trask?”

“At one time I was ass enough to think so. That was another of the queer notions. How is the ‘Little Jean’ coming along?”

“Splendidly. The vein values are increasing as we drive in on the lode. We are making another clean-up from the plates this week, and you’ll get a dividend that will warm the cockles of your heart.”

“Money,” said Philip half contemptuously. “When you don’t have it, it’s the most desirable thing in the world. And when you get it----” he broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished.

The promoter smiled. “Money is only a means to an end, of course. If it is not too personal a question, what are you doing with yours?”

“Nothing, as yet. Bromley is investing his share here and there, setting me a good example. But I haven’t followed it.”

From that the talk went back to the gulch on the western slope, and Drew told how the shut-in valley had been overrun by prospectors as soon as the snow was off. A few small leads had been discovered higher up the gulch, but nothing at all comparable with the “Little Jean.” Reference to the hard winter the discoverers of the “Little Jean” had put in led Drew to ask about Garth; and the mention of the big miner’s name stabbingly reminded Philip of the chance incident in which Garth had figured, and which had led up to the blotting out of all recollection of him.

“Garth is in Denver; or he was yesterday,” he replied.

“Pity about Jim,” said the promoter. “At bottom he’s a man, right; but he can’t let liquor and the paste-boards alone. He has been moderately well-fixed at least three times, to my certain knowledge, and each time he has blown it all; gambled it and given it away--or so much of it as he didn’t pass across the bar.”

Philip was conscious of a curious little shock when he realized that this cataloguing of Garth’s weaknesses now stirred no resentful or condemnatory emotion in him.

“Perhaps that is the way in which he gets the most out of life,” he offered colorlessly. “There is no accounting for the difference in tastes.”

“No; but Big Jim is really worth saving, if somebody would take the trouble,” Drew put in, adding: “I don’t suppose anybody has ever cared enough for him to try to brace him up--at least, nobody since his wife died.”

“He was married?” Philip queried. “I worked beside him all winter and never knew that.”

“It was one of those cases you read about--and seldom see in real life,” Drew went on reminiscently. “It happened in one of the intervals when Jim was on top, financially. A gambler, whose name I have forgotten, brought a girl here from the East--a ‘chippy,’ I suppose you’d call her--abused her shamefully, made her support him for a time and then abandoned her. Jim heard about it, and after marrying the girl off-hand, hunted up the gambler and shot him within an inch of his life. The girl turned out to be a jewel as Jim’s wife; stuck to him through thick and thin, and actually got him to stop drinking and gambling. Then the altitude, and the hard life she had lived before she met Jim, grabbed her and she died. Naturally, poor old Jim went all to pieces again.”

“Naturally,” Philip agreed. His eyes were narrowed and he was conscious of a curious deadening of the heart. The story of Garth’s tragedy did not move him as it would have moved him no longer ago than yesterday. Instead, he was asking himself why Garth shouldn’t take to drink and dissipation to drown his grief? For that matter, why shouldn’t any man, if he happened to lean that way?

Drew looked at his watch and rose.

“I have an appointment that I was about to forget,” he said. “Intending to stop over with us for a while?”

“Perhaps. I haven’t made any plans.”

“All right; we’ll get together again. While you are here, my office is at your disposal, of course. Come around and make it your loafing place.”

After Drew had left him, Philip lighted another of the mild cigars and took to the streets, walking until he was sodden with weariness. Again and again the meager details of Garth’s tragedy passed themselves in review. So the big miner had once made his little gesture of righteousness by marrying a woman of the class for which the world has no place of repentance, had he? That was fine! How crassly he had misjudged Garth. Bromley’s insight had been better. Was the play-boy’s assumption that there was no hard-and-fast line to be drawn between the sheep and the goats--that there was good in the worst and bad in the best--the right one, after all?