Part 21

“How did you know that I was tired enough to fairly long for a half-holiday?” she asked, as the little mare whisked them over the long Platte River bridge in a direction they had once before driven, toward the Highlands.

“How does anybody know anything?” he returned, smiling and adding: “I flatter myself that there is not much about you that I don’t know, Jeanie, dear.”

“I wonder?” she said soberly; then: “You have been a good brother to me this summer, Harry.”

“I hope I have been something more than a brother. Brothers are not exactly my idea of a hilariously good time. Shall we drive on up to our little lake?”

“Anywhere you please. It is such a joy to be out of the shop and outdoors on a day like this that places don’t matter in the least.”

Accordingly, he repeated the programme of the former excursion, hitching the mare among the cottonwoods on the shore of the tiny highland lake, and spreading the lap-robe on the hillside where they had sat once before to revel in the glorious view of sky-pitched mountains and swelling plain. For a time they spoke of nothing but the view; but that was only because Bromley was waiting for his opening. It came when Jean said:

“The other time we sat here it was to talk about Philip. Do you see much of him now?”

“Not very much.” Then he took his courage firmly in hand: “I am afraid we shall have to forget Philip, in a way, Jean. Do you think you can do that?”

“Why should we forget him?”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“You can’t always forget people just because you might want--because it might be best to forget them.”

“But--what if they deliberately walk out of the picture?”

She looked up quickly, and in the pools of the dark eyes there was the shock of a fear realized.

“Philip has done that?” she asked.

He nodded sorrowfully.

“That is what it amounts to. You remember what you once said: that he might do the irrevocable thing that would cut him off from us for good and all?”

“I remember.”

“Well, it is done; or the same as done.”

She drew a quick breath. “Tell me, Harry.”

“I will, but only because you’d have to know it anyhow, a little later. This morning he took out a marriage license for himself and a--a--I can’t name the woman for you, Jean. I suppose they are married by this time. Will you believe me when I say that I did everything I could think of to prevent it?”

There was no answer to this, and when he looked aside at her again he saw that she was crying quietly, and his heart grew hot.

“Don’t cry,” he broke out almost roughly. “He isn’t worth it, Jean.”

“Yes, he is,” she faltered. “You don’t know him as I do, Harry; though you have been more to him and closer to him than I ever could be. _I_ know why he has done this.”

“Well, I guess I do, too,” he admitted grudgingly. “I must talk plainly to you this once, Jean, if I never do again. The woman is--oh, well, we’ll say she is pretty nearly everything she ought not to be; and Philip thinks and says that he can go no lower than he has already gone. What he said to me when I wrestled with him was this: ‘I’m merely trying to give another human being, to whose plane I have sunk myself, a chance for the only redemption that can ever come to her--in this life.’ And I’ll do him this much justice: he didn’t know--because I couldn’t tell him--how much it was going to hurt you.”

A cool breeze swept across the plain from the mountain rampart in the west, and the yellow leaves of the cottonwoods sifted down upon them in a golden shower. Over in the Clear Creek valley a freight train inched its way along toward Denver like a monstrous caterpillar. In the transparent atmosphere of the perfect autumn day Long’s Peak stood out as clearly as if its vast bulk rose from just behind the nearest swelling of the foot-hills. When the silence grew over-long, the play-boy spoke again.

“Philip didn’t know--doesn’t know; but I have known all along. You love him, Jean. It is nothing to be ashamed of,” he hastened to add. “It is just something to be sorry for, now. I know well enough you can never give another man what you have given him ... but I want the right to stand by you--to comfort you. I’m asking you to marry me, Jean, dear.”

The shock of a fear realized had gone out of her eyes when she turned to him, and in its place there was something almost like adoration.

“You’d make sacrifices, too, wouldn’t you?” she said, very gently. Then: “Are you forgetting Miss Follansbee?”

“Oh, no; Eugie is going to marry Stephen Drew. I meant to have told you. It is to be next month, I believe.”

Another speechless moment while a second shower of the yellow leaves came circling down. Then she spoke again, still more gently.

“I think you are one of God’s gentlemen, Harry; I shall always think so. But there are two good reasons why we can’t marry. One is----”

“I know what you are going to say,” he interrupted: “that I don’t love you at all--in a marrying way; that I am only sorry for you. But let that go. Suppose there isn’t any marrying love on either side. You remember what you said the evening when I told you about Eugie; that people might marry and be a comfort to each other without that kind of love. Besides, when you come right down to it, what is marrying love, anyway?”

She got up and shook the fallen leaves from her lap.

“You have given one of the reasons, Harry; and some day, when you are not expecting it, I may hold a looking-glass before you and show you the other. You ask me what marrying love is: it is what I have seen, more than once, in your eyes ... and you were not looking at me. Let us get in and drive somewhere else. I don’t believe I shall ever want to come back to this place again.”

As it chanced, it was at the precise moment when Bromley was putting his companion into the buggy preparatory to continuing the afternoon drive, that Philip was descending from a hired hack before a door that was seldom opened for callers in the daytime. It was Madam Blanche herself, a woman who still retained much of what had once been the beauty and charm of a riant, joyous girlhood, who admitted him. He stated his errand briefly.

“I have come for Mona--the girl you call ‘Little Irish.’ Is she ready to go with me?”

“Ready? Why, she’s gone!”

“Gone?--gone where?”

“She wouldn’t tell me where she was going; wouldn’t give me even a hint. But I guess she took one of the morning trains. She left early enough to catch any one of ’em. She said you’d given her the money to go with.”

“No,” he denied soberly; “I gave her money so that she could pay you whatever she might be owing you, and get ready to marry me.”

The woman collapsed into the nearest chair.

“Marry you? Why, my dear man! What do you think she’s made of? She’s too good a girl to do anything like that!”

“Too good?” he queried vaguely.

“Sure! She’d know too well what it would do to you on the day you’d want to turn your back on the sporting life. She cried when she went, but she wouldn’t tell me what for: she said I’d know some time to-day. And I do know now. She went to keep you from doing the craziest thing a man of your kind ever does. Some day maybe you’ll know what she’s done for you, and what it cost the poor little soul to do it.”

Philip found his hat and moved toward the door.

“I think I know it now,” he returned half absently; and after he had paid and dismissed the hackman, he went in search of the Jew second-hand man to stop the dismantling of his rooms which had already begun, tearing a small legal document, which he took from his pocket, into tiny squares and scattering them in the street as he hurried along.

Two days later, Reddick, who had dropped into the Curtis Street chop house for a midday bite, found himself seated opposite Bromley.

“Well,” he observed, “it proved to be a false alarm, after all, didn’t it?”

“I suppose it was, if you say so,” replied the play-boy with his good-tempered grin; “only I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“You don’t? Haven’t you seen Phil?”

“Not since day before yesterday when I bade him good-by.”

“Gosh! Then it’s all new to you, is it? He is still here--in his old diggings in the Alamo. It was a flash in the pan--that marriage of his. The girl saved his bacon by skipping out.”

“Um,” said Bromley curiously. “She must have hated him good and hard to run away from half a gold mine.”

“Hate nothing! It was exactly the other way around. She thought too much of him to let him ruin himself for life. Madam Blanche was in the office yesterday, and she told me about it. A mighty fine thing for the little outcast to do, it strikes me. This is a queer old round world, and you can’t most always sometimes tell what’s going to happen in it next.”

“Amen,” chanted the play-boy; and his appetite, which had been capricious for a pair of days, began to return with gratifying zest.

During the afternoon, which dragged interminably, he changed his mind a dozen times as to the advisability of telling Jean the newest news. On one hand, it seemed to be a plain duty; but there was also something to be said in rebuttal. Jean had already been given the deepest wound she could suffer, and he hoped it was beginning to heal--a little. Was it any part of kindness to reopen it? True, she might learn any day for herself that Philip had not left Denver; but every day’s delay was something gained for the healing process.

About the time when, still undetermined as to which course to pursue, he was on his way to Madame Marchande’s to walk home with Jean, he suddenly remembered that he had a dinner engagement with the Follansbees. Telling himself that this postponed the decision for the time, at least, he hailed a passing hack, made a swift change to dinner clothes in his West Denver room, and kept his engagement at the house in Champa Street.

It was three hours later when he had himself driven home from the rather dull dinner and its still duller aftermath. Entering the cottage living-room, he found Jean in hat and coat, as if she had just come in or was just going out, and there was a napkin-covered basket on the table beside her.

“I was hoping you would come before it got too late,” she said. “Are you too tired to walk a few blocks with me?”

“Never too tired when I can be of any use to you--you know that,” he answered cheerfully. “Where to?”

“You remember the poor old lady who had the room next to ours in the Whittle Building, don’t you?”

“Old Mrs. Grantham?--sure!”

“I found a note from her when I came home this evening. She is sick and she wants me to come and see her. It is late, but I think I ought to go. She is all alone, you know; no relatives or friends. That is the pitiful thing about so many people here in Denver.”

“I know. Let’s toddle along. I have been to a pretty stodgy dinner and the walk will do me good. No you don’t--I’ll carry that basket of goodies, if you please. What else am I good for, I’d like to know?”

All the way down Eleventh Street to Larimer, and over the Cherry Creek bridge to the cross street leading to the dubious district centered by the Corinthian varieties and gambling rooms, Bromley was trying once more to decide whether or not to say the word which, as he made sure, would reopen the grievous wound in the sore heart of his companion.

But when at last he took her arm to help her up the dark stair in the disreputable tenement opposite the Corinthian, the word was still unspoken. And the thing he was hoping for most devoutly was that they might be permitted to do their charitable errand and win back to better breathing air without running afoul of the man who, as he had ample reason to know, was now no stranger to the purlieus below Larimer Street.

XXVI

AFTER he had rued his bargain with the Jew second-hand man--paying a stiff forfeit for the privilege--and had reëstablished himself in his rooms in the Alamo, Philip slipped back into the drifting current which had been only momentarily arrested by the Mona Connaghey episode, turning day into night and night into day, gambling a little, drinking a little, assiduously avoiding the few daylight friends he had made, and adding nightly to a different and more numerous collection, some of whom were grateful for the largesse he scattered, while others regarded him only as a soft-hearted fool to be played upon and cozened out of his money as occasion might offer.

It was at this time that Middleton, the fat-faced railroad clerk, appealed to him for help, and Philip heard the appeal with the tolerant, half-amused smile which aptly mirrored his changed point of view. A younger brother of Middleton’s had recently joined the rush to the golden West, and Middleton had secured him a railroad clerkship in the freight station. So far, so good; but almost immediately, it seemed, the boy had been caught in the wide-spreading net of dissipation and was in a fair way to be ruined.

“It is only gambling, for a beginning; but since he is in the cashier’s office, handling company money, that is bad enough,” Middleton said. “It won’t take him very long to find out that his salary won’t be a drop in the bucket when it comes to going up against the skin games.”

“Well, why don’t you take him in hand?” Philip asked, the thin-lipped smile accentuating itself.

Middleton flushed uncomfortably.

“I was expecting you’d say that. But you know how a kid bucks at taking anything from an older brother. Besides, I can’t say that I’ve been setting him any too good an example.”

“No; I guess you haven’t. But what makes you think I might set him a better one?”

“I don’t. Just the same, he’d take a jacking-up from you as coming from a--er--a sort of case-hardened rounder, you know. That’s what you’ve got the name of being, now, Philly--if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“No, I don’t mind. If I come across your brother, I’ll try to choke him off.”

This conditional promise was made in the afternoon of the second day after he had agreed to the costly compromise with the Jew furniture man; and late in the evening of that day he caught a glimpse of young Jack Middleton, hands buried in pockets and head down, turning a corner and hurrying toward the Corinthian. As Philip chanced to know, it was the railroad pay-day, and it was a fair assumption that the boy had his month’s salary in his pocket.

Entering the game room of the Corinthian a few steps behind young Middleton, Philip waited only long enough to see the boy plunge into play with all the crass ignorance and recklessness of a beginner, before he intervened. Standing at the youth’s elbow while he was staking and losing five-dollar gold pieces in swift succession at one of the roulette wheels, he said, in a tone audible only to the ear it was intended for: “Whose money is that you’re losing, Jackie?”

The boy jumped as if he had been shot. Then he saw who it was who had spoken to him and began to beg:

“You--you mustn’t stop me, Mr. Trask! I’ve _got_ to win--I tell you, I’ve just _got_ to!”

Philip drew him aside.

“Just how bad is it, Jack?” he asked. “I mean, how much are you short in the office?”

“Oh, my God!--how did you know?” gasped the boy.

“Never mind about that. How much is it?”

“It’s--it’s over a hundred dollars.”

“Well, don’t you know you haven’t a dog’s chance of getting it back in a place like this?”

“But some of them win,” was the desperate plea.

“Yes, and a great many more of them lose. When did you take the money from the office?”

“L-last week.”

“You called it borrowing, I suppose. But when you got your pay to-day, why didn’t you put it back?”

“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.”