THOUGH it was now well into the summer edge of spring for the lower
altitudes, a late snow had fallen during the night, and the Continental
Divide, framed in the window where Philip was sitting, was clothed in
virgin white. In the street below, the snow had already been trampled
into a grimy batter by the hoofs and wheels of laboring streams of
traffic. Philip looked down upon the busy street scene, trying vainly
to realize that this teeming, throbbing, palpitant mining-camp city
of thirty-five or forty thousand souls was less than three years old;
that, only three backward turnings of the calendar in the past, the
marvelous treasure beds in its swelling hills were barely getting
themselves discovered.
From such contemplation of the material marvel his thoughts turned
inward. For the better part of a year, and with only the brief autumn
visit to the great wonder camp to break the wilderness monotonies, he
had been an exile with all the familiar human contacts dissevered;
it had been a period during which, for him and Bromley, the moving
world had ceased to exist. He was just now beginning to apprehend
the complete totality of the time eclipse. In the lost interval an
exciting national political campaign had run its course, Garfield had
been elected president, and his inauguration had taken place; all this
without disturbing, by so much as the turning of a leaf, the cosmic
procession of the weeks and months in the mountain fastnesses, or
recording itself in any way upon the pages of great Nature’s book of
the unpeopled immensities.
In the more intimate and personal relations there had been a
corresponding break. Never more than a desultory letter-writer, he had
sent a card to his mother and sisters in New Hampshire on the occasion
of his former trip to Leadville, telling them not to write again until
they should hear from him--that he expected to be out of reach of the
mails for the duration of the winter. Hence, there had been no home
letters awaiting him when he emerged from the western wilderness;
nothing to help bridge the separating chasm of the months.
In the few days that had elapsed since his return to Leadville he
had been making determined but futile efforts to close the gap;
to regard the year of exile as an incident, and to take up the
normal thread of life where he had dropped it the preceding spring.
The discovery that this could not be done--that the change from
flannel shirt, corduroys and miner’s boots to civilized clothes, and
from a log cabin in the wilds to a comfortable hotel in the great
mining-camp, wrought no miracle of readjustment--was confusing. Was
the curious inner consciousness of a changed point of view merely a
step forward in character development? Or had the step been taken
in the opposite direction--into the region of things primitive and
baldly disillusioning? He could not tell; and the inability to make
the distinction was strangely disturbing. When the attempt to account
for his present mental attitude became a fatiguing strain, he twisted
his chair from the window to make it face the scene in the handsomely
furnished business office.
At a table in the middle of the room, Bromley, garmented as a
gentleman of leisure and wearing his good clothes with an easy and
accustomed grace that Philip envied, was talking in low tones with
a stockily built man whose dark eyes, heavy brows and aquiline nose
gave his features a Jewish cast. Half absently Philip, compared the
two faces: Bromley’s high-bred, animated, impishly youthful; Stephen
Drew’s strong, kindly--the face of a man whose generous dealings with
his friends and business associates had given him a notability as
marked as that of the lavish spenders who were making the name of the
Colorado “lucky-strike” miner a synonym for all that was fantastic and
extravagant.
The moment, as Philip tried, rather ineffectually, to realize, was
epochal. Drew and his party of experts had spent a fortnight at the
“Little Jean,” exploring, testing, estimating the probable extent of
the ore body and preparing samples for additional assays. And now,
as the net result, at the farther end of the business office Drew’s
attorney was dictating to a young clerk whose pen was flying rapidly
over the pages of legal cap paper--using the pen, though one of the new
writing machines lately come into use stood on its iron-legged table
within easy reach.
After a time the lawyer came to the table in the middle of the room
with the finished document in his hands and ran through its provisions
with his client and Bromley. Drew nodded and dipped a pen, looking up
to say to Philip: “All right, Mr. Trask; if you’ll come and look this
over----”
Philip dragged his chair to the table and read the paper Drew passed
to him. It was an agreement defining the duties, responsibilities,
undertakings and emoluments of the three principals in the “Little
Jean”; namely, the two discoverers and the man who was furnishing the
working capital; and its provisions were simple and straightforward.
On his part the promoter undertook to develop the mine, paying an
equitable royalty to the discoverers, the royalty provision including a
liberal cash advance.
“I think that is about as we talked,” Drew said. “If you and Mr.
Bromley are agreeable, we may as well sign up and call it a deal.”
With a hand that shook a little in spite of his best effort to hold it
steady, Philip signed and passed the papers and pen to Bromley.
“Wigglesworth?” the promoter queried, when the papers came back to him
with Bromley’s signature. “Is that a family name?”
“Very much so,” admitted the play-boy, with a grin.
“I used to know some Wigglesworths in Philadelphia. Relations of yours?”
“They are, indeed. My mother was a Wigglesworth.”
Stephen Drew signed as lessee of the “Little Jean” with the intricate
pen flourish familiar to every bank teller in Leadville and Denver,
and the young clerk attested the signatures as notary. The formalities
concluded, Drew spoke of the practical details.
“We’ll go in as soon as we can get in with the machinery for a mill.
We’ll have to have our own mill, of course. Freighting the machinery
over the range will be a costly job, but there is no way to avoid it.
Rich as the ore is, it wouldn’t pay to jack freight it out over the
mountains. However, you have ore enough on the dump to take care of the
overhead.”
“I’m not sure that we don’t owe you an apology for not discovering
our mine in some place nearer the broad highways,” Bromley put
in whimsically. “It is due to us to say that we did try, pretty
faithfully, to do that very thing, before we crossed over to the
Western slope, but we couldn’t make it.”
Drew smiled. “Any old miner will tell you that the gold is where you
find it, and not anywhere else. Fortunately for all of us, the ‘Little
Jean’ is rich enough to warrant the building of a small mill, even at
the high cost of taking the machinery over the range piecemeal--rich
enough and with an ore body large enough. But I take it you two are
not very pointedly interested in the operating details, so long as the
dividends are forthcoming. Have you made any plans for the summer?--for
yourselves, I mean?”
Philip denied for himself.
“I think we have been merely living from day to day for the past few
weeks. I haven’t any plans reaching beyond Denver, at present. And you
haven’t, either, have you, Harry?”
Bromley shook his head. “Not the ghost of a plan.”
“Good,” said the promoter; “then we can keep in touch, more or less,
during the make-ready. I am back and forth between the mountains and
Denver every week or so. Now if you will come around to the bank with
me, I’ll deposit those cash advances to your credit and you’ll be
footloose to do as you please.”
The bank visited, and arrangements made for the transfer of the better
part of their fortune-earnest to a bank in Denver, the two who, a few
months before, had been merely marching privates in the eager army of
prospectors, shook hands with their lessee and fared forth into the
streets of Leadville as men of solid substance.
“Well?” said Bromley, after they had walked in silence for something
more than half the distance from the bank to their hotel--which, it is
needless to say, was not the second-rate tavern at which they had put
up on the occasion of their former visit.
“Say it,” Philip invited.
“I was just wondering where you were ‘at’; whether you were here in the
flesh, or a thousand miles away in the spirit.”
“I am trying to get my feet on the ground,” was the sober answer.
“Still seems like a pipe-dream, does it?”
“More than ever.”
Bromley laughed. “A little chunk of solitude is what you need--time off
in which to get used to it. Here is our bunk house. Capture a quiet
corner in the lobby, if you can find one, light your pipe and have it
out with yourself. I’m going to do a bit of shopping; buy me a bag and
a few more articles of glad raiment.”
Philip halted on the hotel steps to frown down upon his late camp-mate.
“You’ve been your own man for nearly a full year, Harry. Don’t go and
lie down now and roll your pack off like a fool jackass.”
This time Bromley’s laugh was a shout.
“So the good old New England conscience comes up smiling, after all,
does it?” he chuckled. “Give it a pat on the back and tell it to go to
sleep again, so far as I am concerned. I’m merely going to buy a bag
and something to put in it, and I’ll promise you to come back sober as
a judge. Want me to swear it?” and he held up his hand.
“I’d hate to see you ditch yourself now,” said Philip gravely; and with
that he went in and found the quiet corner and sat down to fill and
light his pipe.
An hour later he was still sitting in the corner of the writing-room
alcove, with the cold pipe between his teeth, as oblivious of his
surroundings as if he had been alone on a desert island. Realization
was slowly coming. He was no longer a striving unit in the vast army of
day-to-day bread-winners. Wealth, to which all things must bow and pay
tribute, was his. Twice, and yet once again, he found himself taking
the crisp bit of bank paper from his pocket to stare at it, to pass it
through his fingers so that he might hear the reassuring crackle of it.
To the possessor of that slip of paper, and of the treasure store of
which it was assumptively only an infinitesimal fraction, all things
humanly possible were as good as facts accomplished.
What to do with all this wealth? For an illuminating instant he was
able to appreciate the embarrassment of those other lucky ones who,
from having nothing but eager hopes, found themselves suddenly in
possession of more money than they knew how to dispense. Desires,
legitimate or the other kind, do not come into being in the turning of
a leaf. They must have time in which to germinate and burgeon. Philip
saw how easy it would be for the spendthrifts of luck to give free
rein to the impulses of the moment, however grotesque or extravagant;
more, for a passing breath he was conscious of the unfathered birth
in himself of just such impulses. But the traditions quickly asserted
their supremacy. It was not to breed a prodigal that his Trask and
Sanborn forebears had dug a frugal living out of the reluctant New
England soil. Whatever else might happen, there should be none of the
antics of the mad and extravagant wasters.
It was thus that Bromley found him at the early dinner hour;
still isolated in the quiet corner, and still with the
long-since-extinguished pipe clamped between his teeth.
“Back again, are you, Harry?” he said, hoisting himself with an effort
out of the deep gulf of the reveries.
“Same day; same afternoon. And I’ve made a discovery. The railroads,
two of them, have been creeping up since we were here before. There are
night trains. What do you say to ordering an early dinner and shaking
the slush of this metropolis from our muddy feet?”
“It suits me perfectly. There are sleeping-cars?”
“There are; and I have engaged a couple of berths. I’m beginning to
long for the flesh-pots; otherwise the comforts of a not-too-crowded
Denver hotel. Shall we go and eat a pasty or so and gird ourselves for
the flitting? Or has the piece of money paper you got a while back
killed your appetite?”
Philip did not reply until they were entering the dining-room together.
Then he said, quite as if there had been no interval between question
and answer: “It runs in my mind that money breeds many more appetites
than it kills. You ought to paste that saying in your hat, Harry.”
“I?” laughed the play-boy. “What about yourself?”
“I told you once that I hadn’t come to Colorado to make a fool of
myself.”
Bromley laughed again.
“If all mankind were only as virtuous and impeccable as you think you
are, Philip, what a Paradise we’d be living in! Let’s take that table
for two over in the alcove; then we won’t have to mix and mingle with
the plebeian crowd and run the risk of having some of the virtues
rubbed off of us.”
The dinner which was presently served was too appetizing to encourage
any more than desultory conversation, and it was not until after the
black coffee had been brought in that Bromley said: “By the way, I
wonder what has become of Big Jim?”
Philip looked up with a small frown creasing itself between his eyes.
“Garth? I haven’t seen him since the night after we reached town. He is
somewhere in the dives, blowing his winter’s wages, I suppose.”
Bromley’s eyes narrowed.
“And you don’t care a whoop. Is that the part of it you left unsaid?”
Philip’s answer was indirect, but none the less explicit.
“I haven’t much use for a man who begins to wallow as soon as he comes
to the first available mud-puddle; and you know that is what Garth did.
He was tanked full before we’d been six hours in Leadville.”
Bromley looked away and was silent for a time. When he spoke again
it was to say: “It’s a convenient thing to have a good, workable
forgettery, Phil. For my part, you know, I can’t help fancying that we
wouldn’t be here sipping this excellent black coffee to-night if Jim
Garth were taken out of the picture. However, that is probably only one
of my foolish hallucinations. I’m subject to them at times. If you are
quite through, suppose we call it a day and see if we can’t charter a
hack to take us to the railroad. The Denver train is due to leave in
less than half an hour; both of them, in fact--one over each of the two
roads.”
“Which one do we take?” Philip asked, rising and feeling for his pipe.
“The one whose brass collar you were wearing a year ago,” said Bromley
with a grin.
Philip took out his pocketbook and extracted from it the return portion
of an employee’s pass issued to him nearly a year before, the “going”
part of which he had used to the end of track at the beginning of the
prospecting trip; and New England thrift was seated firmly in the
saddle when he said: “Pshaw! why didn’t I think of it! I might have got
this renewed and so saved my fare to Denver!”
Harry Bromley’s laugh made the other diners look around to see what was
happening.
“What a pity you didn’t think of it!” he chuckled. “All that good money
that I paid for your ticket wasted--thrown away--tossed to the dogs!
And you with no resources whatever excepting the undivided half of a
bonanza gold mine. Come on; let’s remove ourselves from the scene of
such a crushing discovery.”
“Oh, let up!” said Philip sourly; but as they were leaving the
dining-room together he put the worn piece of a free pass carefully
back into his pocketbook.