Part 2

“I didn’t expect you would--after what you have been telling me. But we needn’t quarrel about it,” he went on good-naturedly. “I suppose you would call your family patrician and mine plebeian--which it doubtless is; at any rate, it is farmer stock on both sides as far back as I know anything about it, people who worked with their hands, and----”

“It was no disgrace for them to work with their hands; that isn’t at all what I meant. It is something much bigger than that.”

“Well, what is it, then? A clean family record?”

“Honor above everything: not being willing--not being able to stoop to anything low or mean or----”

“Exactly,” said Philip. “I guess we’re not so very far apart, after all; though I doubt if I could tell you the Christian name of any one of my four great-grandfathers--to say nothing of the great-grandmothers. But look out of the window! Houses, if my eyes don’t deceive me. This must be Denver that we’re coming to.”

Rounding a curve so long and gentle as to make the changing direction approximate the slow inching of a clock’s minute-hand, the train was beginning to pass signs of human occupancy, or of former occupancy; on the right a collection of empty, tumble-down shacks and the ruin of what seemed to be a smelting works. A little farther along, the fringe of the inhabited town was passed, and the clanking of switch frogs under the wheels signalled the approach to the freight yards. Over a swelling hill to the northward the mountains came into view in peaks and masses against which the plain seemed to end with startling abruptness.

When the brakes began to grind, Philip excused himself and went to get his hand luggage out of the rack over the seat he had formerly occupied.

“If I can be of any assistance?” he offered when he came back.

“Oh, I think we can manage, thank you; there are so many of us to carry things,” the young woman replied. “Besides, we’ll have to take a carriage--on the Captain’s account.”

With his attention thus drawn again to the invalid, Philip had a sharp recurrence of the doubt as to whether the change of climate had been determined upon soon enough to warrant any hope of recovery for the hollow-eyed man in the seat ahead. For the past half-hour the sick man had been coughing unobtrusively, and he seemed to have increasing difficulty in breathing. Since Kansas City was the gateway for westbound invalids, as well as for the mineral-mad treasure-seekers, Philip had heard stories of the marvelous cures effected by the Colorado climate; also he had heard that those who went too late were apt to die very quickly, the swift railroad flight from an altitude of a few hundred feet to that of a mile high proving too sudden a change for the weakened lungs.

Acting wholly upon an impulse which he did not stop to define, or to square with the New England reticences, Philip bent to speak to the card-playing giant who had freed the young woman of her persecutor.

“Have you much hand baggage to take care of?” he asked.

“Nothin’ on top of earth but my gun and my blankets. Why?”

“If you wouldn’t mind taking my satchel and dropping it off outside?” Philip went on, “I want to help the sick man.”

“Right you are, cully,” returned the giant heartily. “Reckon yuh can handle him alone? Because if yuh can’t, we’ll chuck the plunder out o’ the window and both of us’ll tackle him.”

“Oh, I think I can do it all right. Maybe he won’t need any help, but I thought he might.”

“Look’s if he’d need all he can get; ’s if it wouldn’t take much of a breeze to blow him away. Shouldn’t wonder if he’d put it off too long--this yere trailin’ out to the tall hills. Well, this is the dee-po: leave me yer grip and jump in.”

Philip turned quickly to the group in the double seat and again offered his help in the matter of debarking. This time it was accepted gratefully. Picking up one of the Dabney valises, he gave an arm to the sick man. The progress through the crowded aisle to the car platform was irritatingly slow and fatiguing, and before the door was reached the invalid was seized with another coughing fit. Through the open car door the thin, keen wind of the April evening blew in the faces of the outgoing passengers, and even Philip, who was as fit and vigorous as an indoor man ever gets to be, found himself breathing deeply to take in enough of the curiously attenuated air to supply his need.

In due time the descent of the car steps was accomplished, but the exhausting coughing fit persisted, and Philip felt the invalid leaning more and more heavily upon him. It was some little distance from the tracks over to the line of waiting busses and hacks, and before it was covered the oldest daughter gave her hand luggage to one of her sisters and came back to help Philip with his charge. Philip was prodigiously thankful. The painful cough had become almost a paroxysm, and he was shocked to see that the handkerchief the sick man was holding to his mouth was flecked with bright red spots.

“Just a little way farther, now, Captain, dearest!” Philip heard the low-toned words of encouragement, and was overwhelmed with an unnerving fear that the man would die before he could be taken to wherever it was that the family was going. But with the fear, and presently overriding it, was a kindling admiration for the daughter. She knew what the red-flecked handkerchief meant, but she was not letting the frightful possibility submerge her.

The hack rank was reached at last, and with the driver of the chosen vehicle to help, the sick man was lifted into his place. While the mother and the younger daughters were getting in, Philip spoke to his late seat-sharer.

“Have you friends in Denver?” he asked.

“No; we shall go to a hotel for the present--to the American House.”

“Shall I go with you and try to find a doctor?”

“There will probably be a doctor in the hotel; anyway, we’ve no right to trouble you any further. But I--we don’t forget. And I’m sorry I said things about Yankees and the Philips, and about--about your waking up. It was mean and unfriendly, and I’m sorry. Good-by--and thank you so much for helping us. And please try not to remember the meannesses. Good-by.”

Philip watched the laden hack as it was driven away and wondered if he would ever see the black-eyed little Mississippian with the heroic nerves again. He was still wondering when the good-natured giant came along and gave him his valise.

“Got the little gal and her hull kit and caboodle on their way, did yuh?” said the big one, with a fierce grin which was meant to be altogether friendly.

“Yes,” said Philip. Then he picked up his valise and trudged off in search of a horse-car that would take him to his own temporary destination, a modest hotel on the west side of the town, to which a travelled fellow clerk in the Kansas City railroad office had directed him.

II

BRIGHT and early on the morning following his arrival in Denver, Philip presented himself at the general offices of the narrow-gauge mountain railroad to the officials of which he had been recommended by his late employers in Kansas City, and was promptly given a desk in the accounting department; the department head, whose thin, sandy hair, straggling gray beard and protuberant eyes gave him the aspect of a weird but benevolent pre-Adamite bird, asking but a single question.

“Not thinking of going prospecting right away, are you?”

“No,” said Philip, wondering what there might be in his appearance to suggest any such thing.

“All right; the bookkeeper will show you where to hang your coat.”

The employment footing made good, the newcomer’s spare time for the first few days was spent looking for a boarding place, the West Denver hotel, regarded from the thrifty New England point of view, proving far too expensive. The after-hours’ search gave him his earliest impressions of a city at the moment figuring as a Mecca, not only for eager fortune seekers of all ranks and castes, but also for mining-rush camp followers of every description. With the railroads daily pouring new throngs into the city, housing was at a fantastic premium, and many of the open squares were covered with the tents of those for whom there was no shelter otherwise. Having certain well-defined notions of what a self-respecting bachelor’s quarters should be, Philip searched in vain, and was finally constrained to accept the invitation of a fellow clerk in the railroad office to take him as a room-mate--this though the acceptance involved a rather rude shattering of the traditions. Instead of figuring as a paying guest in a home-like private house--no small children--with at least two of the daily meals at the family table, he found himself sharing dingy sleeping quarters on the third floor of a down-town business block, with the option of eating as he could in the turmoil of the dairy lunches and restaurants or going hungry.

“No home-sheltered coddling for you in this live man’s burg. The quicker you get over your tenderfoot flinchings, the happier you’ll be,” advised Middleton, with whom the down-town refuge was shared, and who, by virtue of a six-weeks’ longer Western residence than Philip’s, postured, in his own estimation at least, as an “old-timer.” “‘When you’re in Rome’--you know the rest of it. And let me tell you: you’ll have to chase your feet to keep up with the procession here, Philly, my boy. These particular Romans are a pretty swift lot, if you’ll let me tell it.”

Philip winced a little at the familiar “Philly.” He had known Middleton less than a week and was still calling him “Mister.” But familiarity of the nick-naming and back-slapping variety seemed to be the order of the day; a boisterous, hail-fellow-well-met freedom breezily brushing aside the conventional preliminaries to acquaintanceship. It was universal and one had to tolerate it; but Philip told himself that toleration need not go the length of imitation or approval.

Work, often stretching into many hours of overtime, filled the first few weeks for the tenderfoot from New Hampshire. The narrow-gauge railroad reaching out toward Leadville was taxed to its capacity and beyond, and there was little rest and less leisure for the office force. Still, Philip was able now and again to catch an appraisive glimpse of what was now becoming a thrilling and spectacular scene in the great American drama of development,--a headling, migratory irruption which had had its prototypes in the rush of the ’49-ers to the California gold fields, the wagon-train dash for Pike’s Peak, and the now waning invasion of the Black Hills by the gold seekers, but which differed from them all in being facilitated and tremendously augmented by a swift and easy railroad approach. Vaguely at first, but later with quickening pulses, Philip came to realize that the moment was epochal; that he was a passive participant in a spectacle which was marking one of the mighty human surges by which the wilderness barriers are broken down and the waste places occupied.

With a prophetic premonition that this might well be the last and perhaps the greatest of the surges, Philip was conscious of a growing and militant desire to be not only in it, but of it. The very air he breathed was intoxicating with the spirit of avid and eager activity and excitement, and the rush to the mountains increased as the season advanced. The labor turn-over in the railroad office grew to be a hampering burden, and now Philip understood why the auditor had asked him if he were a potential treasure hunter. Almost every day saw a new clerk installed to take the place of a fresh deserter. After the lapse of a short month, Philip, Middleton and Baxter, the head bookkeeper, were the three oldest employees, in point of time served, in the auditing department. Two railroads, the South Park and the Denver & Rio Grande, were building at frantic speed toward Leadville, racing each other to be first at the goal; and from the daily advancing end-of-track of each a stage line hurried the mixed mob of treasure-seekers and birds of prey of both sexes on to their destination in the great carbonate camp at the head of California Gulch. To sit calmly at a desk adding columns of figures while all this was going on became at first onerous, and later a daily fight for the needful concentration upon the adding monotonies.

By this time some of the first fruits of the carbonate harvest reaped and reaping in the sunset shadow of Mount Massive were beginning to make themselves manifest in the return to Denver of sundry lucky Argonauts whose royal spendings urged the plangencies to a quickened and more sonorous wave-beat. One victorious grub-staker was said to be burdened with an income of a quarter of a million a month from a single mine, and was sorely perplexed to find ways in which to spend it. A number of fortunate ones were buying up city lots at unheard-of prices; one was building a palatial hotel; another was planning a theater which was to rival the Opéra in Paris in costly magnificence.

These were substantials, and there were jocose extravagances to chorus them. One heard of a pair of cuff-links, diamond and emerald studded, purchased to order at the price of a king’s ransom; of a sybaritic Fortunatus who reveled luxuriously in night-shirts at three thousand dollars a dozen; of men who scorned the humble “chip” in the crowded gaming rooms and played with twenty-dollar gold pieces for counters.

Philip saw and heard and was conscious of penetrating inward stirrings. Was the totting-up of figures all he was good for? True, there were money-making opportunities even at the railroad desk; chances to lend his thrifty savings at usurious interest to potential prospectors; chances to make quick turn-overs on small margins, and with certain profits, in real-estate; invitations to get in on “ground floors” in many promising enterprises, not excepting the carefully guarded inside stock pool of the railroad company he was working for. But the inward stirrings were not for these ventures in the commonplace; they were even scornful of them. Money-lending, trading, stockjobbing--these were for the timid. For the venturer unafraid there was a braver and a richer field.

“How much experience does a fellow have to have to go prospecting?” he asked of Middleton, one day when the figure-adding had grown to be an anæsthetizing monotony hard to be borne.

Middleton grinned mockingly. “Hello!” he said. “It’s got you at last, has it?”

“I asked a plain question. What’s the answer?--if you know it.”

“Experience? Nine-tenths of the fools who are chasing into the hills don’t know free gold from iron pyrites, or carbonates from any other kind of black sand. It’s mostly bull luck when they find anything.”

“Yet they _are_ finding it,” Philip put in.

“You hear of those who find it. The Lord knows, they make racket enough spending the proceeds. But you never hear much about the ninety-nine in a hundred who don’t find it.”

“Just the same, according to your tell, one man’s chance seems to be about as good as another’s. I believe I’d like to have a try at it, Middleton. Want to go along?”

“Not in a thousand years!” was the laughing refusal. “I’ll take mine straight, and in the peopled cities. I’ve got a girl back in Ohio, and I’m going after her one of these days--after this wild town settles down and quits being so rude and boisterous.”

Philip looked his desk-mate accusingly in the eye.

“It’s an even bet that you don’t,” he said calmly.

“Why won’t I?”

“I saw you last night-down at the corner of Holladay and Seventeenth.”

Middleton, lately a country-town bank clerk in his native Ohio, but who was now beginning to answer the invitation of a pair of rather moist eyes and lips that were a trifle too full, tried to laugh it off.

“You mean the ‘chippy’ I was with? I’m no monk, Philly; never set up to be. Besides, I’m willing to admit that I may have had one too many whiskey sours last night. Cheese it, and tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I’ve already told you. I think I’ll try my luck in the hills, if I can find a partner.”

“Good-by,” grunted Middleton, turning back to his tonnage sheet. “As for the partner part, all you have to do is to chase down to the station and shoot your invitation at the first likely looking fellow who gets off the next incoming train. He’ll be a rank tenderfoot, of course, but that won’t make any difference: there’ll be a pair of you--both innocents. Why, say, Philly; I’ll bet you’ve still got your first drink of red liquor waiting for you! Come, now--own up; haven’t you?”

“I should hope so,” said Philip austerely. “I didn’t come all the way out here to make a fool of myself.”

This time Middleton’s grin was openly derisive.

“My, my!” he jeered. “The spirit moves me to prophesy. I know your kind, Philly--up one side and down the other. When you let go, I hope I’ll be there to see. It’ll be better than a three-ring circus. Wine, women and song, and all the rest of it. Speaking of women----”

“You needn’t,” Philip cut in shortly; and he got up to answer the auditor’s desk bell.

The process of securing a partner for a prospecting trip was scarcely the simple matter that Middleton’s gibing suggestion had made it. Though there were many haphazard matings achieved hastily at the outfitting moment, a goodly proportion of the treasure hunters were coming in pairs and trios hailing from a common starting point in the east. In spite of the free-and-easy levelling of the conventions, Philip found it difficult to make acquaintances, his shell of provincial reserve remaining unchipped, though he tried hard enough to break it. Besides, he felt that he was justified in trying to choose judiciously. He could conceive of no experience more devastating than to be isolated in the wilderness for weeks and perhaps months with an ill-chosen partner for his only companion. The very intimacy of such an association would make it unbearable.

It was while he was still hesitating that a small duty urged itself upon him. It concerned the Mississippi family with the death-threatened husband and father. In a city where all were strangers he had fully intended keeping in touch with the Dabneys, if only to be ready to offer what small help a passing acquaintance might in case the threatened catastrophe should climax. Since he would shortly be leaving Denver, the duty pressed again, and he set apart an evening for the tracing of the Mississippians, going first to the American House to make inquiries.

Fortunately for his purpose, one of the hotel clerks, himself a Southerner, remembered the Dabneys. They had remained but a few days in the hotel; were now, so the clerk believed, camping in one of the tent colonies out on California or Stout Streets somewhere between Twentieth and Twenty-third. Yes, Captain Dabney had been in pretty bad shape, but it was to be assumed that he was still living. The clerk had been sufficiently interested to keep track of the obituary notices in the newspapers, and the Dabney name had not appeared in any of them. Inquiry among the tenters would probably enable Philip to find them.

Reproaching himself for his prolonged negligence, Philip set out to extend his search to the tent colonies. It was after he had reached the more sparsely built-up district, and was crossing a vacant square beyond the better-lighted streets, that a slender figure, seemingly materializing out of the ground at his feet, rose up to confront him, a pistol was thrust into his face, and he heard the familiar formula: “Hands up--and be quick about it!”

It is probably a fact that the element of shocked surprise, no less than the natural instinct of self-preservation, accounts for the easy success of the majority of hold-ups. Sudden impulse automatically prompts obedience, and the chance of making any resistance is lost. But impulsiveness was an inconsequent part of Philip’s equipment. Quite coolly measuring his chances, and well assured that he had a considerable advantage in avoirdupois, he knocked the threatening weapon aside and closed in a quick grapple with the highwayman. He was not greatly surprised when he found that his antagonist, though slightly built, was as wiry and supple as a trained acrobat; but in the clinching struggle it was weight that counted, and when the brief wrestling match ended in a fall, the hold-up man was disarmed and spread-eagled on the ground and Philip was sitting on him.

When he could get his breath the vanquished one laughed.

“Made a complete, beautiful and finished fizzle of it, d-didn’t I?” he gasped. “Let me tell you, my friend, it isn’t half so easy as it is made to appear in the yellow-back novels.”

“What the devil do you mean--trying to hold me up with a gun?” Philip demanded angrily.

“Why--if you must know, I meant to rob you; to take and appropriate to my own base uses that which I have not, and which you presumably have. Not having had the practice which makes perfect, I seem to have fallen down. Would you mind sitting a little farther back on me? I could breathe much better if you would.”

Philip got up and picked up the dropped weapon.

“I suppose I ought to shoot you with your own gun,” he snapped; and the reply to that was another chuckling laugh.

“You couldn’t, you know,” said the highwayman, sitting up. “It’s perfectly harmless--empty, as you may see for yourself if you’ll break it. You were quite safe in ignoring it.”

Philip regarded him curiously.

“What kind of a hold-up are you, anyway?” he asked.

“The rottenest of amateurs, as you have just proved upon my poor body. I thank you for the demonstration. It decides a nice question for me. I hesitated quite some time before I could tip the balance between this, and going into a restaurant, ordering and consuming a full meal, and being kicked out ignominiously for non-payment afterward. This seemed the more decent thing to do, but it is pretty evident that I lack something in the way of technique. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“I should say that you are either a fool or crazy,” said Philip bluntly.

“Wrong, both ways from the middle,” was the jocular retort. “At the present moment I am merely an empty stomach; and empty stomachs, as you may have observed, are notoriously lacking in any moral sense. May I get up?”

“Yes,” said Philip; and when the man was afoot: “Now walk ahead of me to that street lamp on the corner. I want to have a look at you.”

What the street lamp revealed was what he was rather expecting to see; a handsome, boyish face a trifle thin and haggard, eyes that were sunken a little, but with an unextinguished smile in them, a fairly good chin and jaw, a mouth just now wreathing itself in an impish grin under his captor’s frowning scrutiny.

“Umph!--you don’t look like a very hard case,” Philip decided.