THE Denver to which Philip and Harry Bromley returned, after their year
in the mountain half of Colorado, had undergone many changes in the
twelve-month; was still undergoing them. Developing under the double
stimulus of the unabated rush of treasure--and health-seekers from the
East and the marvelous and increasing flow of wealth from the mines,
the city was growing like a juggler’s rose. In the business district
the one- and two-storied makeshifts of pioneer days were rapidly giving
place to statelier structures; a handsome railroad passenger terminal
had been completed at the foot of Seventeenth Street; horse-car lines
were extending in all directions; new hotels had sprung up; and the
theater which was to rival in magnificence, if not in actual size, the
Paris Opéra, was under construction.
Unlike that of other western communities owing their prosperity to a
mining boom, the city’s growth was notably substantial. With eastern
and Pacific Coast lumber at a high freight rate premium, brick and
the easily worked lava stone of the hogbacks were the chosen building
materials. In the outlying residence districts the empty squares were
filling with rows of brick cottages absurdly restricted in width by
the limitations of the standard twenty-five-foot lots, but making up
for the lack of breadth in slender length; and other streets besides
Larimer were acquiring massive steel bridges over the bisecting Cherry
Creek which, from being a mere moist sand bed in most seasons of
the year, could--and did upon occasion--become a raging cloud-burst
torrent, sweeping all before it.
After quarters had been secured in the new St. James Hotel in Curtis
Street, Philip left Bromley reading the morning papers in the lobby
and went around to the building in Lawrence Street where he had served
his brief apprenticeship in the auditor’s office of the narrow-gauge
railroad. Here he learned that the mountain road had been absorbed by
the Union Pacific, that its office force had been scattered, but that
Middleton, his former desk-mate, could be found at the car-record desk
in the Union Station. When he walked in upon the former tonnage clerk a
little later, Middleton’s greeting was salted with a bantering grin.
“Well, well, well; so the cat came back, did it? No, wait--let me say
it: you’ve had your fill of the tall hills and want a railroad job
again. Do I call the turn?”
“Not exactly,” Philip returned, seating himself at the desk end. “I
have looked you up to see if, by any chance, you have any mail for me.”
“Sure! There’s a bunch of it. You didn’t seem to think it worth your
while to send in any forwarding address, so we’ve been holding your
letters on the chance that you’d turn up sometime and somewhere. Wait a
minute and I’ll go get ’em for you.”
When the packet of mail came, Philip went through it leisurely. Most
of the letters were from his sisters in New Hampshire, the later
ones reminding him rather acidly that a correspondence was ordinarily
supposed to be two-sided. These, and two or three from former
classmates and friends, made up the accumulation.
“There was nothing else?” he asked, with a shade of disappointment.
“That’s the crop, I believe. Ought there to be more?”
“One more, at least.”
“Let me think,” said Middleton. “I believe all your mail was brought to
me while we were in the old Lawrence Street office. I kept the letters
in my desk for a long time, but after the consolidation I turned them
over to Baldwin in the superintendent’s office, thinking I might not be
here when you sent or came for them.” As he spoke, he opened a drawer
and rummaged in it, saying: “They were stacked here in this corner, and
... why, yes; here _is_ another. Don’t see how I came to miss it.”
Philip glanced at the envelope of the newly found letter. It bore the
Denver postmark, and the date was barely two weeks later than that upon
which the prospecting trip had been begun. The enclosure was merely a
note, but it was easy to read the heartbreak between the lines.
Dear Mr. Trask:
The Captain left us three days ago. We waited too long before
bringing him here. I am writing because you asked me to, though I
don’t know whether or not this will find you. The end came very
suddenly at the last; but you will be glad to know that it was
peaceful--that there wasn’t unbearable suffering.
I don’t know yet what we shall do, or where we shall go; or if,
indeed, we shall go anywhere. There is nothing to go back to
Mississippi for, even if we could afford it; and there ought to be
something for us--or for me--to do here in Denver. I shall try to
find something, anyway.
Mother wishes to be kindly remembered to you, and so do the children.
You were friendly to us at a time when we needed friendship; and, as
I once told you, we do not forget.
Sincerely and sorrowfully,
Jean Dabney.
Philip returned the letter to its envelope and put it in his pocket.
“Bad news?” Middleton asked.
Philip was of no mind to share personal confidences with his former
desk-mate. “Sad for the writer,” he replied. “It is a note telling of
the death of a poor consumptive who was on the train with me coming out
from Kansas City last spring.”
This casual explanation side-tracked the matter, as he hoped it might;
and Middleton went on to say: “So you haven’t come to look for a job?
Perhaps you have a better one. You seem to be wearing pretty good
clothes.”
“The clothes are paid for,” said Philip with a close-lipped smile; and
then, the reticent traditions taking a fresh hold: “I have a fairly
good job at present, keeping personal books for a fellow who owns a
half-interest in a mine over on the other side of the Divide.”
“Pay better than the railroad?”
“M-m--some better; yes.”
“Had your pick-and-shovel summer for nothing, of course, like hundreds
of other tenderfoots, I take it?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that: I had a decently good time and picked up
some little experience. For one thing, I got better acquainted with
the fellow whose books I am keeping.”
“You knew him before you went prospecting?”
“Slightly; yes.”
“Is he here in Denver now?”
Philip smiled again. “If he weren’t here, I shouldn’t be here.” Then:
“Anything new with you? Haven’t made that marrying trip to Ohio yet,
have you?”
The fat-faced ex-tonnage clerk shook his head and looked as if Philip’s
question were more or less embarrassing.
“No; not yet.”
Philip got up to go. “Much obliged to you for keeping my letters for
me. If any more should come before I can let people know where to reach
me, just have the carrier bring them around to the St James.”
“Oho!” said Middleton, with his nickering laugh; “so we live in a
first-class hotel now, do we?”
“We do,” Philip admitted; and with that he took his leave.
Though he had carried it off casually for Middleton’s benefit, the
reading of Jean Dabney’s pathetic little note had moved him profoundly,
and he was disappointed at not finding some later word from her,
telling what course had been decided upon, and giving an address by
means of which he might communicate with her. Was the family still in
Denver? And, if so, how was it contriving to live? He had seen genteel
poverty at home at sufficiently short range to be able to recognize the
signs of it, and he wondered how much, if anything, had been left for
the widow and her three girls after the funeral expenses had been paid.
Then, too, Jean’s intimation that she would try to find work in Denver
stirred a deep pool of compassion in him. With the northern man’s
preconception of southern women it was difficult to envisage her as
the bread-winner for a family of four; but that it must have come to
this in the end he was fairly well assured. His single contact with the
Mississippi family as a whole had given him the impression that the
mother was devoted but not particularly resourceful in any practical
way; “do-less” would be the harsh New England word, but with a feeling
that large allowances should be made for any woman who had grown up in
the slave-served South, he did not apply it.
Eliminating the mother as a possible earner, the burden must have
fallen upon the eldest daughter, and he tried to picture Jean looking
for work in a city which was already boasting that it had a population
of over thirty thousand young men in addition to its familied quota.
There must have been difficulties insurmountable. Places ordinarily
given to women in the East were almost exclusively filled by men in the
Denver of the moment, even to clerkships at the ribbon counters. “Good
Lord!” he exclaimed, suddenly realizing that nearly a year had elapsed
since the writing of the sorrowful little death notice. “Why, all four
of them may have starved to death long before this!”
What to do about it was the burning question, and he went about the
doing promptly, first writing a note and addressing it to “Miss Jean
Dabney, General Delivery,” and next making a pilgrimage to the tent
colony where he had found the Dabneys on the eve of his departure for
the mountains. Nothing came of the pilgrimage. The tents were still
there, but the people occupying them were all newcomers; a shifting
population coming and going from day to day. Nobody knew anything of a
family of two women, two little girls and a sick man who had died.
Later in the day he went in search of the American House clerk who had
directed him in the former instance; but here, again, the kaleidoscopic
population-shifting baffled him. The clerk, whom he was able to
identify in his inquiry by the date of his employment at the hotel, had
left Denver--for Pueblo, so his informant thought; at least, that had
been his mail forwarding address for a time.
With the vanishing of this, the only other possible clue he could think
of, Philip spent the remainder of the day in aimless wanderings in the
streets, passing the sidewalk throngs in review in some vague hope that
he might thus stumble upon Jean or her mother. When the hope refused to
materialize, he returned to the St. James in time to join Bromley at
dinner, and for the first half of the meal was but a poor table-mate
for his lighthearted partner.
“What is the matter with you, Phil? Is the rich man’s burden crushing
you this early in the game?” Bromley inquired quizzically, after
a number of fruitless attempts to break through the barrier of
abstraction behind which his table companion had retreated.
“No, I guess not,” was the half-absent reply. “I haven’t been thinking
much about the money.”
“Well, what have you been doing with yourself all day?”
“I have been looking for somebody that I couldn’t find.”
“Ah!” said the play-boy with his teasing smile. “The angelic person,
for a guess. Am I right?”
“It’s no joke,” Philip returned soberly. “I found a note from her in my
mail at the railroad office. It is nearly a year old. Her father died a
few days after we left Denver last spring.”
Bromley became instantly sympathetic. “And you don’t know what has
become of her?”
“No; I can’t find a trace.”
“She was left alone after her father’s death?”
“Oh, no; there is a family--a mother and two younger girls.”
“Migrants, like all the rest of us, I suppose?”
“Yes; from Mississippi. They came out for the father’s health--and came
too late. He was an ex-rebel soldier.”
“Perhaps they have gone back to the South.”
Philip shook his head. “I hardly think so; I doubt if they had the
means. The war had left them poor.”
“Tell me more,” Bromley urged.
“I can’t tell you much more, only I suspect the burden of the family
support has been dumped upon the shoulders of the oldest daughter. And
I don’t know how she would be able to carry it in this man-ridden town.”
“The mother?” Bromley suggested.
“A dear lady, I should say, from what little I saw of her, but
helpless.”
“I understand; a woman who has never had to do for herself anything
that black servants could do for her.”
“Something of that sort,” said Philip.
“Tell me what you’ve done toward locating them.”
Philip briefed the story of the day’s efforts, and Bromley held his
peace while the waiter was clearing the table for the dessert. But
afterward he said: “Your note may bring the required information; but
if it doesn’t, we’ve got to think up some other way. Miss Jean and her
family must be found, if they are still in Denver.”
Philip looked up quickly. “How did you know her name?” he demanded; and
Bromley laughed.
“Didn’t you christen the ‘Little Jean’?” he asked. “It didn’t require
any great amount of clairvoyance to figure out where the name came
from. What is the rest of it?”
“Dabney.”
“A good old Southern name; they used to be D’Aubignys in Colonial
times.”
“What do you know about them?”
“Nothing, excepting what little leaked into me out of the history books
in school: French, of course, and Huguenots. Settled first in Virginia,
I believe. But that’s not to the point. As I say, we’ve got to find
Miss Jean.”
“‘We’?” Philip queried.
“That is what I said. Your relations with the young woman are your own,
and I’m not messing in on them. Mine are in the nature of a debt.”
“But you don’t know her!” Philip protested.
“No more I don’t; but the debt remains. Tell me baldly, Phil: would
you ever have thought of taking me on the prospecting trip, if she
hadn’t suggested it?”
“Since you put it that way, I might not have.”
“Very well, then. In that case I owe her my stake in the game, whatever
it is, or whatever it may eventually amount to. We must find this
shipwrecked family.”
Philip shook his head in discouragement.
“If she doesn’t get my note and answer it, it will be much like looking
for a needle in a haystack. You see what this town has grown to in a
single year. Besides, if we should find the Dabneys, I can assure you
in advance that they are not the kind of people you can give money to.”
“Trust me for that part of it,” Bromley said. “There are more ways
of killing a cat than by choking it to death with thick cream. If
you are through, let’s go out and see what this money-mad city looks
like by lamplight in the spring of a new year. I have a fairly
vivid recollection of its appearance under such conditions a short
twelve-month ago.”
In Philip’s acquiescence to this proposal there was a strong thread of
the brother-keeping weave, an inheritance from a long line of ancestors
who took their Bible literally. From the ancestral point of view,
Bromley was still figuring, in Philip’s estimation, as a brand snatched
from the burning. With the means now at his command to gratify the
worst impulses of the ne’er-do-well, could Bromley be trusted to walk
alone in the midst of temptations? Philip thought not; feared not, at
least. Therefore, the brotherly supervision must be maintained.
“Where to?” he asked, as they fared forth from the hotel.
“Oh, I don’t mind; anywhere you like,” was the careless reply. “The
theater, if that jumps with your notion.”
With the new opera house still figuring as an unfinished building, the
only legitimate theater was a remodeled billiard hall in Sixteenth
Street; and on this particular evening they found it dark.
“That puts it up to the varieties,” said Bromley. “Care to go down to
the Corinthian?”
It was a measure of the distance Philip had traversed in a year that
he did not immediately negative this proposal. He had known the
Corinthian--though only by repute--as a place sedulously to be avoided
by all self-respecting persons; a combined varieties theater, gambling
house and worse, catering only to the abandoned of both sexes. But now
an impulse which he was calling idle curiosity made him acquiesce. Why
shouldn’t a man go to such a place at least once in a way, if only to
see for himself and thus be able to condemn with knowledge, and not
merely from hearsay? And Bromley?--Bromley would be safe enough, with
somebody to look out for him and hold on to him. So he said: “I don’t
care--if you know the way around in such places. I’ve never been there.”
Bromley laughed.
“It will give you a vastly better opinion of the general run of
mankind--and womankind, I imagine,” he said half mockingly. “Come
along; I’ll chaperon you.”
Some hours later, when Philip wound his watch and put it under his
pillow, preparatory to undressing and going to bed, its hands were
pointing to midnight. With creeping shudders of repulsion he was
telling himself that in the time intervening between the half-hesitant
accession to Bromley’s suggestion and their return to the hotel he had
not only seen humanity at its lowest ebb, but had also besmeared his
own body and mind with the reeking mud of the tide flats.
A long, narrow, shop-like room, with a tawdry stage at one end, a
seated lower floor, and a row of curtained gallery boxes running along
both sides; on the main floor, filling the seats, a rough audience,
strictly masculine, uproariously applauding a painted woman on the
stage who was singing “Only a Pansy Blossom”: this was what they had
seen and heard upon making their way past the bar in the Corinthian.
For a time they had looked on from the rear of the lower floor, while
the five-piece orchestra blared and drummed and squeaked, and aproned
waiters came and went with liquor-bearing trays, and the air grew
foggy with tobacco smoke rising in a dim nimbus over the booted and
hatted crowd jamming the narrow room to suffocation. There had been
other numbers to follow that of the sentimental singer, most of them
suggestive, some of them baldly obscene. Then Bromley, with the impish
grin now in permanence, had proposed a retreat to the more select
surroundings of the gallery boxes, and they had gone up-stairs.
Philip, sitting on his bedside chair with one shoe off, was telling
himself, with a recurrence of the creeping shudder, that he should
never live long enough decently to efface the degrading experience of
the next hour. They had scarcely seated themselves in one of the boxes
before a woman came in--a woman without shame. Bromley, still grinning
amiably, had waved her aside, and had passed a friendly signal of
warning to him--Philip. But when the woman came to perch on his knee,
he did not know how to repulse her.
There was still a dingy smudge of rice powder on the breast of his
waistcoat, and he flung the garment across the room with an angry
curse. For the first time in his life he had held a wanton woman in
his arms, had talked to her, had yielded to her persuasions and bought
liquor for her. And it was small comfort now to remember that he had
refused to drink with her when the liquor came; or that--backed by
Bromley in this--he had refused to stay until the close of her working
day and go home with her.
“My God!” he exclaimed, as he turned off the gas and crept into bed
to lie wide-eyed and staring in the darkness: “My God! if I’d been
alone--if Bromley hadn’t been there to drag me out.... And all along
I’ve been calling myself a decent man and Harry’s keeper!”