Part 18

“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.”

“Money doesn’t spoil some people,” remarked the railroad man cryptically.

“But it does others? Chuck it out, Reddick. What do you know about Phil?”

“Oh, I run across him here and there--in places that I didn’t think he’d consent to be found dead in. You see, I knew him when he was with the narrow-gauge a year ago, before he went prospecting. In those days all he needed to make him a saint was a halo; but now he gambles a little, takes a drink when he feels like it--does a lot of things you couldn’t have hired him to do when he first came to Denver.”

“I know,” said the play-boy easily. “I take a drink now and then, myself.”

“But I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars you don’t take it solo, and in the places where I’ve seen Phil. However, let’s forget it. It’s none of my business.”

At the corner of Curtis and Seventeenth, Bromley bade his walking companion good-night and turned westward. In the West Denver cottage he found that Jean was the only one sitting up; she was trimming a hat for herself.

“I was in hopes I’d find you still up,” said Bromley, casting himself into the easiest chair the living-room afforded; then, scanting all the preliminaries: “I have found out what we wanted to know.”

It was not like her to demand details, and she did not do so.

“Is it bad?” she asked, without looking up from her work.

“Just about as bad as it can be. I got the clue from Jim Garth, and then went to see for myself. Afterward, I talked with a man who knows.”

“It did happen that Monday night, then?”

“No doubt about it; though Garth couldn’t be sure of the date.”

“Mr. Garth was there?”

“Yes; he saw Phil and his father when they met, and saw them go off together. Things being as they are, it isn’t much wonder that Phil went to pieces. A whole worldful of misfortunes couldn’t have handed out a blow that would more completely smash a man of Phil’s make-up.”

“But Philip isn’t to blame for what his father has done--or is!” she protested.

“It isn’t the blame Philip is taking; it’s the shame.”

“Does the man--Philip’s father--call himself by his right name?”

Bromley’s smile was bleak. “No; he is known as ‘Deadwood’ Kent. It seems that he had decency enough to take an _alias_--though it might have been only for his own protection.”

“You think there is no doubt but that he took the bank’s money?”

The bleak smile came again. “The man I’ve been looking up this evening has done a good many worse things than robbing a bank, if half of what people say about him is true.”

“Poor Philip!” she sighed, and bent lower over her sewing. Then: “He ought not to stay here in Denver, Harry. Can’t you persuade him to go away?”

“Who? Philip, or the Kent person?”

“I meant Philip, of course.”

“I doubt if he’ll budge. Yesterday he outfitted Garth to go prospecting again, and said he had half a mind to go along. But when Garth urged him, he said no; that he’d be a coward if he took to the hills.”

She nodded. “I told you he would punish himself. It is pitiful, isn’t it? Do you see much of him now?”

“Not as much as I should like to. He doesn’t dodge me particularly, but he is keeping all sorts of hours, and it is only a chance if I find him in his rooms when I go up.”

“But when you do see him?” she prompted.

“He is a wonderfully changed man, Jean. You wouldn’t know him at all for the old Philip. I don’t know how to describe the change except to say that it is somehow strangely softening--mollifying--if you know what I mean. It is as if he’d been down into the lower depths himself, and had learned to pity rather than to condemn. His changed attitude toward Jim Garth shows the line he is taking. He has never had anything but harsh contempt for Garth and people of his kind ... you know--people with appetites and no self-control. But now he has done what I have been trying all summer to do, and couldn’t: braced Garth up and sent him into the mountains where he will be out of the way of temptation.”

“I know,” came in low tones from the busy hat-trimmer. “That is the real Philip. But it is terrible that he had to suffer so before he could find himself.”

“He is still suffering; you can see that plainly enough.”

“Is he--is he still drinking?”

“I am afraid he is; though perhaps not so much to excess; at least, I haven’t seen him the worse for liquor since he came back from Leadville. As to that, this wide-open town is partly to blame. It is no exaggeration to say that half of the business of Denver is transacted in the bar-rooms. I get it every day. The minute I begin to talk business with a man, he will say, ‘Well, let’s go and have a drink and talk it over.’ It is in the air.”

A pause for a few moments, and then Jean looked up to say quietly: “Philip was here to-night.”

“What?--here in this house?”

“No; he just walked past--twice. I saw him through the window.”

The play-boy got out of his chair and his voice shook a little when he said:

“That is pathetic, Jean. It means that the sidewalk in front of the house you live in is as near as he will permit himself to approach the old relations. I’m going to bed. For heaven’s sake, don’t sit up and work yourself blind over that hat after you’ve already put in a long day at the shop! Good-night.”

XXII

IT was on the second evening after he had walked up-town with Harry Bromley that Reddick, the railroad passenger agent, squared himself at his desk in the Union Depot office to scowl discontentedly at a basket of freshly opened mail. Though the redheaded young man boasted that he was case-hardened and had no nerves, he had the quick sympathies of his temperament, and he had lately figured in a business episode the effect of which had been to leave him chafing and ashamed and ready to quarrel with his job. While he was absently fingering the letters in the “Unanswered” basket, the door was opened and Philip drifted in.

“Loafing around down below, I saw your office lighted and thought I’d climb up and smoke a pipe,” was his greeting to Reddick. “If you are busy, go on with your job and don’t mind me. I shan’t talk.”

The redheaded one tilted back in his pivot chair and frowned.

“I can’t seem to get down to the job to-night, Phil. I’ve just been a party to something that makes me sick and disgusted with the railroad business and everything connected with it in this blasted, rotten-egg town!”

“Turn it loose if you feel like it,” said the smoker. “I’m a good listener.”

“It isn’t fit to talk about, but I’ll tell you and get it off my chest. You may not know it, but women--of a certain sort--are shipped into this over-manned town like so much freight--prepaid freight, at that. The landlady deposits the passage money with me, and has me wire our agent in New York, or wherever it happens to be, to deliver the ticket, check the woman’s trunk, and send the check to me by mail. In that way the woman lands in Denver in debt for her railroad fare, and with her clothes in hock to secure the debt. You can see how it works. It is slavery, pure and simple. Once in the toils, the poor girl never has a chance to get out, no matter how badly she may want to. She is shipped from place to place, and always in debt; is kept that way purposely.”

Philip swore softly. “You’re telling me that the railroad companies accept that sort of blood money?”

Reddick shrugged.

“If you had worked in the traffic department instead of the accounting, you’d know that the railroad, like most corporations, doesn’t look for the finger-prints on the money it takes in. My orders are to get business. I got into this at first through playing square--through the boss-women finding out that I didn’t graft on them by overcharging--as nearly everybody else does; and now the dirty business chases me--hunts me up.”

“You have had that kind of a job to-day?” Philip asked.

“To-day it was a straight-out, bloody crime, Phil; I’m confident of it. When I get to thinking about my part in it, I want to go hang myself. Of course, this traffic, most of it, is in women who know perfectly well what they are doing; but now and then there are exceptions--some careless or ignorant girl who is tolled along by rosy promises of an easy job in the wild West. I had such a case as that this evening, and it made me want to throw the whole cursed business of railroading into the discard and go buy me a pick and shovel.”

“Let’s have it,” said Philip shortly.

“The girl who came in this evening was ticketed from Des Moines, but her folks--so she told me--live on a farm somewhere north of the Iowa capital. I had the check for her trunk, and I took her and her baggage out to Madam Goguette’s, the place she was booked for. Philip, as long as I live I shall never forget the look in that girl’s eyes when she found out what she was in for; the look and the way she burst out crying and flung herself on the floor when she was told that she couldn’t run away--that she’d have to stay and work out her debt.”

“Pretty tough,” said the pipe smoker evenly. “But, as you say, business is business.”

“I didn’t say any such damned thing!” Reddick broke out hotly. Then: “You’ve come to be a devilish cold sort of fish since you struck it rich, Phil. A year ago a story like this I’ve just told you would have made you rush off and get a lawyer to swear out a writ of _habeas corpus_, or something of that sort. But now you merely say, ‘Pretty tough,’ and go on smoking your rotten pipe!”

Philip smiled. “You get hot under the collar rather easily, don’t you, Reddick? It is a good fault, and sometimes I wish my own hair were a little nearer the color of yours. I’ll quit you and let you get down to work. You won’t get anything done so long as you have somebody around to beef at. Good-night.”

He was about to let himself out when Reddick halted him.

“Hold up a minute, Phil. I’m no spoil-sport, or I don’t mean to be, but while we’re talking about the things that are and ought not to be, I want to make a little roar for the underdog. You’ve been up here evenings playing poker in the car-record office with Middleton and some more of the clerks, off and on, haven’t you?”

“Now and again, yes. What about it?”

“Two things. While pretty nearly everything goes in this wild and woolly neck of woods, it is still barely possible that the Old Man might object to having the car-record, or any other of his offices, turned into a gambling shop. I have a horrible suspicion that he’ll make it hot for somebody, when he finds out. That is one thing, and the other is this: you oughtn’t to gamble with those boys, Phil. They’re not in your class. You carry too long a purse; you know you do. They have nothing but their salaries.”

Philip’s smile was grim.

“I didn’t ask to be let in. I guess some of them thought, because I happen to own a share in a gold mine, I might be good picking. But you are right. I shan’t rob them any more. Anything else on your mind?”

“No. You are a pretty reasonable sort of devil, after all, Phil. Are you going? Well, so long.”

Gaining the street level, the reasonable devil refilled his pipe, lighted it, and set off briskly townward. A square short of Larimer Street he turned to the left past the house where he had once spent a drunkenly unconscious night and went on to another of the same character in the square beyond. The woman who admitted him in answer to his double knock was of the type of her class: large, shapeless, hard-eyed, painted and garishly bejeweled. “Mother Goguette” was the name she went by, but there was little that was motherly about her.

Philip slipped out of his light overcoat and hung it and his hat upon the hall rack as one who knew what was expected of him.

“Reddick, the railroad man, tells me you took in a new girl this evening,” he announced brusquely. “She is the one I want to see.”

“And a lotta good it’ll do you!” was the snapped out reply. “The little fool’s up in her room, cryin’ her eyes out and tryin’ to make me believe she didn’t know where she was comin’ to! She’s no fit comp’ny for a gentleman like you. What she needs is somebody that’ll knock a little sense into her.”

Philip felt in his pocket and put a gold coin into the bejeweled hands.

“I’ll take a chance,” he said. “Which is her room?”

“First one to the right at the head o’ the stairs. You’ll hear her snifflin’, most likely. Sure you wouldn’t rather see one of the other girls?”

“Quite sure,” said Philip, and he ran up the carpeted stair.

On the upper landing he had no difficulty in finding the right door. It opened into a room lighted by a single singing gas jet. Lying face downward on the bed was a girl, “little” only by comparison with the gross-bodied woman down-stairs who had used the word. He had a glimpse of a swollen, tear-stained face, the face of a frightened animal, lifted at the moment of his entrance, only to be buried in the pillows again when she saw him. He closed the door noiselessly and drew up a chair.

“You needn’t be afraid of me,” he began. “I haven’t come here to make things worse for you. I’m here to help you, if you want to be helped.”

The girl turned her face to the wall and sobbed afresh.