Part 3

“Oh, but I am, I assure you. I’ve been kicked out of two respectable colleges, dropped from the home club for conduct unbecoming a gentleman, and finally turned out of house and home by a justifiably irate father. Can I say more?”

“What are you doing in Denver?”

“You saw what I was trying to do a few minutes ago. The outcome dovetails accurately with everything else I have attempted since I parted with the final dollar of the even thousand with which I was disinherited. Failure seems to be my baptismal name.”

“What is your name?”

“Henry Wigglesworth Bromley. Please don’t smile at the middle third of it. That is a family heirloom--worse luck. But to the matter in hand: I’m afraid I’m detaining you. Shall I--‘mog,’ is the proper frontier word, I believe--shall I mog along down-town and surrender myself to the police?”

“Would you do that if I should tell you to?”

“Why not, if you require it? You are the victor, and to the victors belong the spoils--such as they are. If you hunger for vengeance, you shall have it. Only I warn you in advance that it won’t be complete. If the police lock me up, they will probably feed me, so you won’t be punishing me very savagely.”

For once in a way Philip yielded to an impulse, a prompting that he was never afterward able to trace to any satisfactory source. Dropping the captured revolver into his coat pocket, he pressed a gold piece into the hand of the amateur hold-up.

“Say that I’ve bought your gun and go get you a square meal,” he said, trying to say it gruffly. “Afterward, if you feel like it, go and sit in the lobby of the American House for your after-dinner smoke. I’m not making it mandatory. If you’re not there when I get back, it will be all right.”

“Thank you; while I’m eating I’ll think about that potential appointment. If I can sufficiently forget the Wigglesworth in my name I may keep the tryst, but don’t bank on it. I may--with a full-fed stomach--have a resurgence of the Wigglesworth family pride, and in that case----”

“Good-night,” said Philip abruptly, and went his way toward the tent colony in the next open square, wondering again where the impulse to brother this impish but curiously engaging highwayman came from.

III

IN circumstances in which it would have been easy enough to fail, Philip found the family he was looking for almost at once; and it was the young woman with the dark eyes and hair and the enticing Southland voice and accent who slipped between the flaps of the lighted tent when he made his presence known.

“Oh, Mr. Trask--is it you?” she exclaimed, as the dim lamplight filtering through the canvas enabled her to recognize him. “This is kind of you, I’m sure. We’ve been wondering if we should ever see you again. I can’t imagine how you were ever able to find us.”

Philip, rejoicing in the softly smothered “r’s” of her speech, explained soberly. It was not so difficult. He had gone first to the hotel; and once in the tented square, a few inquiries had sufficed.

“I’m sorry I can’t ask you in,” she hastened to say. “You see, there isn’t so awfully much room in a tent, and--and the children are just going to bed. Would you mind sitting out here?”

There was a bench on the board platform that served as a dooryard for the tent, and they sat together on that. For the first few minutes Philip had an attack of self-consciousness that made him boil inwardly with suppressed rage. His human contacts for the past few weeks--or months, for that matter--had been strictly masculine, and he had never been wholly at ease with women, save those of his own family. Stilted inquiries as to how the sick Captain was getting along, and how they all liked Denver and the West, and how they thought the climate and the high altitude were going to agree with them, were as far as he got before a low laugh, with enough mockery in it to prick him sharply, interrupted him.

“Excuse me,” she murmured, “but it’s so deliciously funny to see you make such hard work of it. Are there no girls in the part of Yankeeland you come from?”

“Plenty of them,” he admitted; “but they are not like you.”

“Oh!” she laughed. “Is that a compliment, or the other thing?”

“It is just the plain truth. But the trouble isn’t with girls--it’s with me. I guess I’m not much of a ladies’ man.”

“I’m glad you’re not; I can’t imagine anything more deadly. Are you still working for the railroad?”

“Just at present, yes. But I’ll be quitting in a few days. I’m going to try my luck in the mountains--prospecting.”

“But--I thought you said you wouldn’t!”

“I did; but I was younger then than I am now.”

She laughed again. “All of six weeks younger. But I’m glad you are going. If the Captain could get well, and I were a man, I’d go, too.”

Philip was on the point of saying that he wished she were a man and would go with him; but upon second thought he concluded he didn’t wish it. Before he could straighten out the tangle of the first and second thoughts she was asking him if he knew anything about minerals and mining.

“Nothing at all. But others who don’t know any more than I do are going, and some of them are finding what they hoped to find.”

“It’s in the air,” she said. “You hear nothing but ‘strikes’ and ‘leads’ and ‘mother veins’ and ‘bonanzas.’ Lots of the people in these tents around us are here because some member of the family is sick, but they all talk excitedly about the big fortunes that are being made, and how Tom or Dick or Harry has just come in with a haversack full of ‘the pure quill,’ whatever that may mean.”

“You haven’t been hearing any more of it than I have,” said Philip. “Not as much, I think. The town is mad with the mining fever. I’m only waiting until I can find a suitable partner.”

“That ought not to be very hard--with everybody wanting to go.”

Philip shook his head. “I guess I’m not built right for mixing with people. I can’t seem to chum in with just anybody that comes along.”

“You oughtn’t to,” she returned decisively. Then, again with the mocking note in her voice: “They say the prospectors often have to fight to hold their claims after they have found them: you ought to pick out some big, strong fighting man for a partner, don’t you think?”

Philip was glad the canvas-filtered lamplight was too dim to let her see the flush her words evoked.

“You are thinking of that day on the train, and how I let the husky miner take your part when I should have done it myself? I’m not such a coward as that. I was trying to get out of my seat when the miner man got ahead of me. I want you to believe that.”

“Of course I’ll believe it.” Then, quite penitently: “You must forgive me for being rude again: I simply can’t help saying the meanest things, sometimes. Still, you know, I can’t imagine you as a fighter, really.”

“Can’t you?” said Philip; and then he boasted: “I had a fight with a hold-up on the way out here this evening--and got the best of him, too.” Whereupon he described with dry humor Henry Wigglesworth Bromley’s attempt to raise the price of a square meal; the brief battle and its outcome.

“You haven’t told all of it,” she suggested, when he paused with his refusal to accept Bromley’s offer to arrest himself on a charge of attempted highway robbery.

“What part have I left out?”

“Just the last of it, I think. You gave the robber some money to buy the square meal--I’m sure you did.”

“You are a witch!” Philip laughed. “That is exactly what I did do. I don’t know why I did it, but I did.”

“_I_ know why,” was the prompt reply. “It was because you couldn’t help it. The poor boy’s desperation appealed to you--it appeals to me just in your telling of it. He isn’t bad; he is merely good stock gone to seed. Couldn’t you see that?”

“Not as clearly as you seem to. But he did appear to be worth helping a bit.”

“Ah; that is the chord I was trying to touch. You ought to help him some more, Mr. Trask. Don’t you reckon so?”

“‘Mr. Trask’ wouldn’t, but perhaps ‘Philip’ would,” he suggested mildly.

“Well, ‘Philip,’ then. Don’t you see how brave he is?--to laugh at himself and all his misfortunes, the hardships his wildness has brought upon him? You say you are looking for a prospecting partner; why don’t you take him?”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Certainly I mean it. It might result in two good things. If you could get him off in the mountains by himself, and live with him, and make him work hard, you might make a real man of him.”

“Yes?” said Philip. “That is one of the two good things. What is the other?”

“The other is what it might do for you. Or am I wrong about that?”

“No,” he said, after a little pause. “I still think you are a witch. You’ve found out that I live in a shell, and it’s so. I guess I was born that way. You think the shell would crack if I should take hold of a man like this Bromley and try to brother him?”

“I am sure it would,” she replied gravely. “It couldn’t help cracking.” Then, as a low-toned call came from the inside of the tent: “Yes, mummie, dear,--I’m coming.”

Philip got up and held out his hand.

“I am sorry I’m going away, because I’d like to be within call if you should need me. If you should move into a house, or leave Denver, will you let me know? A note addressed to me in care of the railroad office will be either forwarded or held until I come back.”

“I’ll write,” she promised, and the quick veiling of the dark eyes told him that she knew very well what he meant by her possible need.

“And about this young scapegrace who tried to hold me up: what you have suggested never occurred to me until you spoke of it. But if you think I ought to offer to take him along into the mountains, I don’t know but I’ll do it. It wouldn’t be any crazier than the things a lot of other people are doing in this mining-mad corner of the world just now.”

“Oh, you mustn’t take me too seriously. I have no right to tell you what you should do. But I did have a glimpse of what it might mean. I’m going to wish you good luck--the very best of luck. If you really want to be rich, I hope you’ll find one of these beautiful ‘bonanzas’ people are talking about; find it and live happily ever after. Good-by.”

“Good-by,” said Philip; and when she disappeared behind the tent flap, he picked his way out of the campers’ square and turned his steps townward.

It was after he had walked the five squares westward on Champa and the six northward down Seventeenth, and was turning into Blake, with the American House only a block distant, that a girlish figure slipped out of a doorway shadow, caught step with him, and slid a caressing arm under his with a murmured, “You look lonesome, baby, and I’m lonesome, too. Take me around to Min’s and stake me to a bottle of wine. I’m so thirsty I don’t know where I’m going to sleep to-night.”

Philip freed himself with a twist that had in it all the fierce virtue of his Puritan ancestry. Being fresh from a very human contact with a young woman of another sort, this appeal of the street-girl was like a stumbling plunge into muddy water. Backing away from the temptation which, he told himself hotly, was no temptation at all, he walked on quickly, and had scarcely recovered his balance when he entered the lobby of the hotel. Almost immediately he found Bromley, sprawled in one of the lounging chairs, deep in the enjoyment of a cigar which he waved airily as he caught sight of Philip.

“_Benedicite_, good wrestler! Pull up a chair and rest your face and hands,” he invited. Then, with a cheerful smile: “Why the pallid countenance? You look as though you’d just seen a ghost. Did some other fellow try to hold you up?”

Philip’s answering smile was a twisted grimace. “No; it was a woman, this time.”

“Worse and more of it. Lots of little devils in skirts chivvying around this town. Too many men fools roaming the streets with money in their pockets. ‘Wheresoever the body is, there will the eagles be gathered together’--only they’re not exactly eagles; they are birds of another feather. I know, because they clawed me a bit before my wallet went dry.”

“You were one of the fools?” said Philip sourly.

“You’d know it without my telling you. But to the law and the testimony. You see, the Wigglesworth family pride didn’t prevent me from keeping your kindly hint in mind--and I’ve obeyed it. Where do we begin?”

“Suppose we begin where we left off,” said Philip guardedly. “Is there any decent ambition left in you?”

Bromley took time to consider, and when he replied he was shaking his head doubtfully.

“To be perfectly frank about it, I’m not sure there has ever been anything worthy the high sounding name of ambition. You see, there is quite a lot of Bromley property scattered about in my home town--which is Philadelphia, if you care to know--and the income from it has heretofore proved fatal to anything like decent ambition on the part of a play-boy.”

“Your property?” Philip queried.

“Oh, dear, no; the governor’s. But he hasn’t kept too tight a hand on the purse strings; not tight enough, if we are to judge from the effects--the present horrible example being the most disastrous of the same. As I intimated on the scene of my latest fiasco, I stretched the rubber band once too often and it snapped back at me with a disinheriting thousand-dollar check attached. That, my dear benefactor, is my poor tale, poorly told. You see before you what might have been a man, but what probably--most probably--never will be a man.”

“Of course, if you are willing to let it go at that----” said Philip, leaving the sentence unfinished.

“You mean that I ought to pitch in and do something useful? My dear Mr. Good-wrestler----”

“My name is Trask,” Philip cut in shortly.

“Well, then, my dear Trask, I have never learned how to do useful things. One has to learn, I believe, if it’s only washing dishes in a cheap restaurant, or chopping wood. I should inevitably break the dishes, or let the axe slip and chop my foot.”

Philip made a gesture of impatience.

“I had a proposal to make to you, but it seems that it’s no use. I am about to strike out for the mountains, to try my luck prospecting. A friend of yours, whom you have never seen or even heard of, suggested that you might want to go along--as my partner.”

Bromley straightened himself in his chair and the mocking smile died out of his boyish eyes.

“A friend of mine, you say? I had some friends while my thousand lasted, but I haven’t any now.”

“Yes, you have at least one; though, as I have said, you have never seen or heard of her.”

The play-boy sank back into the depths of his chair.

“Ah, I see; a woman, and you told her about me. Am I such an object of pity as that, Trask?”

Philip forgot his New England insularity for a moment and put his hand on the play-boy’s knee.

“It was angelic pity, Bromley. Surely that needn’t hurt your pride.”

“Angels,” was the half-musing reply. “They can rise so much, so infinitely much, higher than a man when they hold on, and sink so much lower when they let go. This angel you speak of--is she yours, Trask?”

“No; only an acquaintance. I have met her only twice. But you haven’t said what you think of my proposal. It is made in good faith.”

“Don’t you see how impossible it is?”

“Why is it impossible?”

“A partnership presupposes mutual contributions. I have nothing to contribute; not even skill with a miner’s pick.”

“You have yourself and your two hands--which are probably not more unskilled than mine, for the kind of work we’d have to do.”

“But the outfit--the grub-stake?”

“I have money enough to carry the two of us through the summer. If we strike something, you can pay me back out of your half of the stake.”

For quite a long time Bromley sat with his head thrown back, and with the half-burned cigar, which had gone out and was cold and dead, clamped between his teeth. And his answer, when he made it, was strictly in character.

“What a hellish pity it is that I didn’t find you and try to hold you up weeks ago, Trask--while I had some few ravellings of the thousand left. Will you take a beggar with you on your quest of the golden fleece? Because, if you will, the beggar is yours. We mustn’t disappoint the angel.”

IV

THE August sun had dropped behind a high-pitched horizon of saw-tooth peaks and broken ranges, leaving the upper air still shot through with a golden glow that was like the dome lighting of a vast celestial theater, by the time two young men, whose burro packs of camp equipment, supplies and digging tools marked them as prospectors, had picked their way down the last precipitous rock slide into a valley hemmed in by the broken ranges. At the close of a hard day’s march the straggling procession was heading for running water and a camp site; the water being a clear mountain stream brawling over its rocky bed in the valley bottom. Reaching the stream before the upper-air effulgencies had quite faded into the smoke-gray of twilight, a halt was made and preparations for a night camp briskly begun.

Two full months had elapsed since the partnership bargain had been struck in the lobby of the American House in Denver, and during the greater part of that interval Philip and the play-boy had prospected diligently in the foot-hills and eastern spurs of the Continental Divide, combing the gulches in the vicinity of Fair Play and Alma, and finding nothing more significant than an occasional abandoned tunnel or shaft, mute evidences that others had anticipated their own disappointment in this particular field. Drifting southwestward, past Mount Princeton, they had ascended Chalk Creek, crossed the range over a high pass into Taylor Park, and were now in new ground on the western side of the Divide.

“This side of the world looks better; or at least a little less shopworn,” Bromley remarked, after they had cooked and eaten their supper and were smoking bed-time pipes before the camp fire. “I think we have outrun the crowd, at last, and that is something to be thankful for.”

Philip opened his pocket knife and dug with the blade into the bowl of his pipe to make it draw better. The two months of outdoor life and hard manual labor had done for him what the treasure search was doing for many who had never before known what it was to lack a roof over their heads at night, or to live on a diet of pan-bread and bacon cooked over a camp fire. With the shedding of the white collar and its accompaniments and the donning of flannel shirt, belted trousers and top boots had come a gradual change in habits and outlook, and--surest distinguishing mark of the tenderfoot--a more or less unconscious aping of the “old-timer.” Since his razor had grown dull after the first week or two, he had let his beard grow; and for the single clerkly cigar smoked leisurely after the evening meal, he had substituted a manly pipe filled with shavings from a chewing plug.

Bromley had changed, too, though in a different way. Two months’ abstention from the hectic lights and their debilitating effects had put more flesh and better on his bones, a clearer light in his eyes and a springy alertness in his carriage; and though his clothes were as workmanlike as Philip’s, he contrived to wear them with a certain easy grace and freedom, and to look fit and trim in them. Also, though his razor was much duller than Philip’s, and their one scrap of looking-glass was broken, he continued to shave every second day.

“I’ve been wondering if a later crowd, with more ‘savvy’ than we have, perhaps, won’t go over the same ground that we have gone over and find a lot of stuff that we’ve missed,” said Philip, after the pipe-clearing pause.

“‘Savvy,’” Bromley chuckled. “When we started out I was moved to speculate upon what the wilderness might do to you, Phil; whether it would carve a lot of new hieroglyphs on you, or leave you unscarred in the security of your solid old Puritan shell. ‘Savvy’ is the answer.”

“Oh, go and hire a hall!” Philip grumbled good-naturedly. “Your vaporings make my back ache. Give us a rest!”

“There it is again,” laughed the play-boy. “Set the clock back six months or so and imagine yourself saying, ‘Go hire a hall,’ and ‘Give us a rest!’ to a group of the New England Trasks.”

“Humph! If it comes to that, you’ve changed some, too, in a couple of months,” Philip countered.

“Don’t I know it? Attrition--rubbing up against the right sort of thing--will occasionally work the miracle of making something out of nothing. You’ve rubbed off some of your New England virtues on me; I’m coming to be fairly plastered with them. There are even times when I can almost begin to look back with horror upon my young life wasted.”

“Keep it up, if you feel like it and it amuses you,” was the grunted comment. “I believe if you were dying, you’d joke about it.”

“Life, and death, too, are a joke, Philip, if you can get the right perspective on them. Have you ever, in an idle moment, observed the activities of the humble ant, whose ways we are so solemnly advised to consider for the acquiring of wisdom? Granting that the ant may know well enough what she is about, according to her lights, you must admit that her apparently aimless and futile chasings to and fro--up one side of a blade of grass and down the other, over a pebble and then under it--don’t impress the human beholder as evidences of anything more than mere restlessness, a frantic urge to keep moving. I’ve often wondered if we human ants may not be giving the same impression to any Being intelligent enough to philosophize about us.”

“This feverish mineral hunt, you mean?”

“Oh, that, and pretty nearly everything else we do. ‘Life’s fitful fever,’ Elizabethan Billy calls it--and he knew. But in one way we have the advantage of the ant; we can realize that our successive blades of grass and pebbles are all different.”

“How, different?”