THE next morning at breakfast, with the midnight reaction still
daggering him, Philip was shamefacedly reticent until after he found
that Bromley, charitably or otherwise, was completely ignoring the
Corinthian episode. Though he was far from being capable of banishing
it himself, he contrived to push it aside sufficiently to enable him to
carry his part in the table talk.
“No, I hadn’t thought of camping down in a hotel,” was his reply to
Bromley’s question as to his plans for the summer. “Comfortable as this
place is, it isn’t quite my idea of living: too monotonous. What I’m
thinking of is a bachelor apartment in one of the down-town buildings,
with meals wherever the eating is best; something of that sort for the
present, at least. How about you?”
“To tell the truth, I haven’t been thinking much more than a minute
or so ahead,” the play-boy confessed, with his disarming smile at
its attractive best. “This sudden cataracting of filthy lucre has a
tendency to make me lightheaded--that is, more lightheaded than usual,
which you will say is gilding the lily. I did have some vague notion of
taking a trip back home and astonishing the natives. It would astonish
them, you know.”
“To see you back again?”
“To see me come back with money in my purse--and more of it to follow.
They’d think the world was coming to an end. But, on second thought,
I guess it wouldn’t do. I shouldn’t care to give any of them heart
failure.”
“But if you don’t go home?” Philip queried.
“In that event your bachelor apartment idea has an irresistible appeal.
Unless you particularly long for complete solitude, I’d be glad to
join you. Say a couple of bed-rooms, a bath and perhaps a common
sitting-room?”
“Done,” said Philip shortly. “What next?”
“For me?--oh, confound your picture! You are bound and determined to
make me think more than one day ahead, in spite of everything, aren’t
you? All right, if I must. After we are settled, perhaps I shall look
around and try to find some safe investment niches into which I can
dribble my share of the golden showers from the ‘Little Jean’ as they
come in.”
“Good. That is the most sensible thing I’ve heard you say in a week
of Sundays!” said the one in whom the reaction to the New England
normalities had by this time wrought its perfect work.
“And the least expected, you would add--if you were not too
soft-hearted. That, too, is all right; I wasn’t expecting it myself.
Nothing has ever been farther from my promptings heretofore, I can
solemnly assure you.”
Philip became banal. “It is never too late to mend. I’ve been
hoping----”
“You mustn’t hope too violently, Philip mine. I am a creature of
impulse, and just now the spirit moves me to become a money grubber;
to hang on to what I have, and to plant it and watch it grow like
Jack’s beanstalk. Past that, the same spirit is moving me to get
acquainted with some really good people; if there be any such in this
infatuated town.”
“Don’t be snobbish. There are plenty of them, no doubt.”
“You don’t happen to know any of them yourself, do you?”
“Not socially; I wasn’t here long enough last spring to go about
any, though I did meet some of the solider citizens in the railroad
connection: Governor Evans, ‘Uncle Johnny’ Smith,--he owns the American
House, you know,--Colonel Eicholtz, Mr. Walter Cheesman, the Barth
brothers, Kountze, president of the Colorado National; men like that,
most of them old residents.”
“The ‘First Families,’” Bromley mused. “Of course there would be some
dating back to the ’sixties and the ox-team and ‘Pike’s-Peak-or-bust’
days; not so very ancient, at that, but still with the distinguishing
hallmark of the pioneers. We’ll fish around for some introductions.”
Philip sat back in his chair, shaking his head.
“I’m not at all sure that I want to go in for the social whirl just
yet, Harry,” he deprecated. “I want to find the Dabneys first, if I
can; and after that ... perhaps you may remember that I once told you
what my principal object was in heading for the west?”
“About your father; yes, I remember. You said at the time that you had
no definite clue to his whereabouts. Has anything come to light since?”
“No; nothing.”
“Going to be a rather blind job, looking for him, isn’t it?”
“Utterly blind. It will be only by chance, if I find him.”
“Any notion of how to go about the search?”
“No very clear idea, as yet. But now that I have money and leisure--can
go where I please and stay as long as I please--well, to begin with, I
had thought of making a round of the different towns and mining-camps.
Of course, I’m not at all certain that he is in Colorado. The Black
Hills rush was the big excitement when he dis--when he left home.”
“I see,” Bromley nodded; and, forbearing to add any word either of
curious questioning or of discouragement: “Have you finished your
coffee?”
“The coffee, yes,” Philip assented hesitantly. “But there is a thing
we’ve both been dodging, and we may as well have it out here and now.
What did you think of me last night, Harry?”
Bromley smiled. “I thought you were completely human; a fact I have at
times been somewhat inclined to doubt.”
Philip shook his head in reproachful deprecation.
“Do you make a joke out of everything?” he asked.
“Oh, no. But in this transitory scheme which we call Life, spelling
it with a capital letter, I try to give things their relative
value--that’s all.”
Again Philip shook his head.
“Can a man touch pitch and not be defiled? I wasn’t human, Harry; for
the time being I was just a brute beast.”
“Oh, good heavens! Are you going to let that bit of commonplace
asininity worry you for the rest of your life? Let it slide and forget
it. You didn’t do that painted and powdered Jezebel any harm--you
couldn’t.”
“Perhaps not: the harm I did was to myself.... It was the first time,
Harry. I wish I could make you believe that it will also be the last.”
Bromley pushed his chair back and got up, laughing quietly.
“What your conscience needs, Philip, is a rain-coat. You’re out for a
lot of trouble if you let such things soak in and make you soggy and
uncomfortable, and you’d find the rain-coat a profitable acquisition.
Let’s go get some cigars.”
Not knowing anything further to be done in the way of tracing the lost
Dabney family beyond waiting hopefully for an answer to his note,
Philip joined Bromley in making a round of the rental agencies; and,
when a suitable double apartment was found, in selecting their joint
stock of furnishings. This done, a period of inaction followed which
was more trying than the hardest labor he had ever performed. Under
the goading of unwonted idleness he grew moody and at times almost
irritable; a frame of mind that acquired an added touch of moroseness
when his note to Jean Dabney was returned to him from the post-office
with “Uncalled for” rubber-stamped across the face of the envelope.
Bromley had made a few social acquaintances and was constantly making
more; but his efforts to drag Philip out of the rut into which he had
fallen went for nothing.
“No, no--I wish you’d let up, Harry!” he would say, when Bromley
sought to include him in the invitations which were coming in
increasing numbers to the breezy young Philadelphian. “I can’t talk
silly nothings, I don’t dance, and I hardly know one card from another.
Your new friends wouldn’t have any use for me.”
“Or you for them, you might add,” retorted the play-boy. “As a social
animal you’re pretty nearly a total loss, Philip. Keep it up, and
in time you’ll be able to give cards, spades and little casino to
the sourest monk of the desert and beat him blind at his own game.
Incidentally, you are headed right to join the procession of the
unattached and unfettered in this hurrah city of the plain--the big
bunch of fellows who are finding all the bad doors wide open, and who
won’t take the trouble to knock at any of the decent ones.”
“You are preaching?--at me?” said Philip, with a sober smile.
“Call it what you please. I’ve been all the gaits and know what I’m
talking about. You’ll get dry rot, and that’s worse than the other kind
because it doesn’t show on the outside. You won’t think better of it
and go to Mrs. Demming’s little dinner-and-after with me?”
“Not to-night; I’m pretty comfortable as I am. Chase along and have a
good time in your own fashion. As you say, I’m more or less hopeless on
the social side.”
With Bromley gone, he drew the deepest of the easy-chairs up to the
table, lighted the gas reading-lamp and tried to lose himself in
Howells’s _The Lady of the Aroostook_, just out in book form; this
until it should be time to go out for his dinner in one of the hotels
or restaurants. The book failed to hold him, and he threw it aside,
struggled into the light overcoat demanded by the night breeze sweeping
down from the Snowy Range, and took to the streets.
Since it was still early in the evening the night life of the city
had scarcely begun. In Sixteenth Street the horse-cars made cheerful
music on the crisp evening air with their jingling bells, and at each
corner a group of homing workers waited under the gas street-light to
board them. Philip drifted northward in the sidewalk throng, absently
oblivious of his surroundings and curiously dissatisfied with himself
and the new outlook upon life engendered by the possession of money.
The free, hard-working, outdoor year, followed by the golden flood
which had swept away the necessity for work of any kind, had broken
orderly habit, and a sort of deadening _ennui_ was the result. With
all the healthy incentives to effort drowned in the flood, he could
settle upon no object that seemed worth while. Upon the first day of
his return to Denver he had sent his mother and sisters a sum which,
as he knew, would postulate riches to the family of plain-living New
England women; but with this dutiful channel filled--choked, for the
time being, at least, by the generous stream he had poured into it--he
had found no other reasonable use to which the golden surfeit could be
put.
While he was still drifting and trying aimlessly to decide where he
should go for his solitary dinner, he stepped aside to make room for
a group of women workers coming out of a millinery shop. As he did
so, two things occurred in swift sequence: he collided violently
with a heavy-set man hurrying in the opposite direction, and in the
rebound from the collision he found himself clasping a young woman in
his arms to keep from knocking her down. Recovering his balance, he
was beginning to apologize when the young woman gave a little cry of
surprise and called him by name. Then he saw that chance had succeeded
where directed effort had failed; that the young woman he had so
hastily embraced was Jean Dabney.
It was reticent habit, no less than the lapse of a year, that tied his
tongue and made his greeting awkwardly formal; and the inability to be
instantly at ease made him rage inwardly. But the young woman helped
him out.
“I have wondered, so many times, if we should ever meet again,” she was
saying; and by this time he had clubbed his inherited pauciloquy into
subjection sufficiently to say:
“I had almost given up the hope. I have been trying all sorts of ways
to find out what had become of you.”
“You have? That was kind, and--and neighborly. And I don’t wonder that
you couldn’t find us. It has been nearly a year, and everything changes
so quickly out here.”
“It does,” he agreed; and then: “Where were you going when I came so
near knocking you down?”
“Home--to give the family a surprise. I don’t usually get off before
eight or nine at this season of the year.”
“Get off?” he queried.
“Get out of the shop, I mean. You didn’t know I could be right
industrious and useful, did you? I’m trimming hats here in Madame
Marchande’s.”
Once more Philip struggled with inborn constraint and made himself say:
“You said the family wouldn’t be expecting you this early. I haven’t
been to dinner--I was just on my way. Won’t you go along and have a
bite with me?”
She hesitated, but only for a moment.
“I don’t know why I shouldn’t, if you want me to.” Then, as he drew her
arm under his own and steered her toward the Larimer Street corner;
“You got the note I wrote you last spring?”
“Not until just the other day, when I came back from my year in the
mountains. When I went away last spring I didn’t leave any forwarding
address; I couldn’t, very well, because I hadn’t the remotest idea
where I was going to be from week to week. So my mail was held here
in the railroad office. Since I read your note, I’ve been trying to
find out what had become of you and your mother and the girls, but I
couldn’t get even a starting point. You have been in Denver all the
time?”
“Yes; there was nothing to do but to stay here.” Then, as they turned
west on Larimer: “Where are you taking me?”
“I thought we would go around to Charpiot’s--unless you would rather
make it the Windsor or the St. James.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t do anything like that!” she protested quickly.
“They are all three too horribly expensive.”
He smiled under cover of the darkness, saying: “I guess we can stand
the expense, for once in a way. We will go to Charpiot’s. Bero always
has good cooks; imports them from New Orleans, so they say.” Then,
in a gratulatory outburst as foreign to his later moods--and to the
New England traditions--as was his praise of French cooks: “You can’t
imagine what a comfort it is to be with you again. I was beginning to
be afraid I had lost you for good and all.”
She acknowledged the outburst with a friendly little pressure of his
arm.
“It is nice to know that you hadn’t forgotten us. How long did you say
you have been back?”
“Only a few days; less than three weeks, to be exact.”
“And you are working in the railroad office again?” He did not answer
because they were entering the hotel and M’sieu Bero, successor to the
man who had made Charpiot’s the Delmonico’s of Denver, was bustling
forward to welcome them.
“Delight’ to see you, M’sieu Trask; _et vous_, Ma’mselle--or is it the
Madame?”
Philip flushed like an embarrassed boy and hastened to stand his
companion’s identity upon its proper feet. “Miss Dabney,” he said. “She
is from the South and knows your New Orleans cooking. Can you put us
where we will be by ourselves?”
“But, yes! A private room up-stairs, maybe?”
“Oh, no; not that,” Philip broke in, flushing again at the too plain
implication; “just a corner in the public room where we can have a
table together.”
“I fix you,” was the reply; and the table for two was secured, where
Philip, sitting opposite his guest, had his first good look at her in a
strong light.
She was thinner than she had been a year earlier, and the dark eyes
had candlelight shadows under them; still, the eyes were very much
alive, and the thinness had not marred the perfect oval of her face.
There was a lack of color in the pretty lips; that and a translucency
of skin hinting at confining work and long hours, and, quite likely,
he imagined, at sterner privations. The thought of the privations
stirred him deeply. She was too fine and precious to be thrown into the
grinding mill of a struggle for existence. Without doubt that was what
had happened. She was carrying the burden for the family of four, and
was, by her own admission, working all sorts of hours doing it.
The dining-room was warm, and when she slipped out of her coat he went
around to hang it up for her. With the coat in his hands he decided at
once that it was too thin for a Denver evening wrap. Also, he noted
that the collar and cuffs had been carefully turned and darned; and
the same observation went for the tight-fitting basque with its bit of
lace at the throat and the unmistakable signs of wear on the sleeves.
Philip was not unfamiliar with the pinchings and makeshifts of economy;
he had known them at home. But the signs of them here and now moved him
strangely, as if life, which had lightly tossed Bromley and himself an
incredible fortune, were bitterly unfair to the weak and more deserving.
Going back to his place, he picked up the menu card and asked her what
she would like to eat.
“After a day’s work everything tastes good to me,” she answered, with
the quick-flashing smile that carried him instantly back to a double
seat in the Kansas Pacific day-coach and the spring-time afternoon when
they had shared it together. “Won’t you order for both?”
He gave the dinner order, making it commensurate with the healthy
appetite he had brought back from the mountains. After the waiter had
left them, he said: “You asked me as we were coming in if I had gone
back to work in the railroad office. I haven’t--as yet.”
“But you are meaning to?”
“Not exactly. You see, I have another job now. I am keeping personal
books for a chap who owns a half-interest in a new mine on the other
side of the main range.”
She was not so easily misled as Middleton had been.
“Oh!” she said, with a little gasp; “then you _did_ find a mine?”
“Yes; after so long a time--after we had knocked about digging foolish
holes in the hills nearly all summer.”
“‘We,’ you say. Did you really take the wild young man with you? I have
thought about him so often.”
“You mean Bromley?--the fellow who tried to hold me up the night I went
out to the tent colony to see you?”
“Yes. You told me about him, you remember.”
He nodded. “Yes; he was the other half of the ‘we.’ He was my partner:
he still is.”
“And did he--was he----”
A lack of loyalty was not one of Philip’s failings.
“You may remember what you said of him that night a year ago. Your
intuition hit the mark. Harry Bromley has a heart of gold. He is a much
better man than I am.”
“A better man? In what way?”
“Well, for one thing, he has a much better sense of values--the life
values, you know. And for another, he isn’t burdened with a New England
conscience. But I am forgetting. You don’t know anything about New
England and its conscience.”
“You shouldn’t throw my ignorance up at me,” she bantered. “Where is
Mr. Bromley now?”
“He is here in Denver; we have rooms together in the Alamo Building.
Just at this present moment he is dining out with some new society
friends he has been acquiring--at a Mrs. Demming’s, I think he told me.”
“Oh,” she said; “the Demmings are rich people. I know, because I
trimmed a hat for the daughter last week. But then, I suppose you and
Mr. Bromley are both rich, too, now.”
Philip smiled. “Not offensively so, yet; though we both have money in
the bank; rather more of it than we know what to do with. But most of
the riches are still in the rough, as you might say. We have leased our
mine, and it won’t begin to pan out the real thing until later in the
summer.”
“You don’t know how glad I am!” she exclaimed, and her eyes were
shining.
“Glad for Harry, or for me?”
“For both of you, of course. I think it is perfectly splendid--to go
out into the wilderness that way and make it give you something that
makes you richer and doesn’t make anybody any poorer. I suppose you
will go back to Yankeeland now and live happily ever after?”
“If I ran true to form, I imagine that is precisely what I should do,”
Philip admitted soberly. “But I’m afraid I am not running true to form
any more. This country out here has done something to me. I don’t know
what it is, but I know that I don’t care to go back east to live. Are
you homesick for Mississippi?”
Her eyelids drooped, and he found himself wondering why he hadn’t
remembered how pretty and curved and long her eyelashes were.
“Sometimes I am,” she confessed, with a deeper note in her voice. “You
see, it’s this way: when you leave a place that has been home for you
as far back as you can remember.... But that is all over, now; there is
nothing for us to go back to.”
Her use of the plural reminded him that he had not yet asked about the
other members of the family. He hastened to atone for the neglect.
“Mummie isn’t at all well; she has never been very strong, you know.
And Mysie and Mary Louise are in school. We are keeping house, after a
fashion.” This was the brief reply his inquiry elicited; and then the
dinner began to come on.
It was an excellent dinner, as Philip had predicted it would be,
beginning with olives and celery and rich chicken gumbo, and ending
with a brandy-sauced pudding for which Bero’s place was famous. Philip
was again touched sympathetically when he saw how his table companion
ate and when she broke into his story of the year afield to say,
with a quaint twist of the pretty lips: “You must think I’m a perfect
pig, eating the way I do; but I was awfully hungry. Some days when we
are rushed in the shop I don’t take time to go out at noon. I didn’t
to-day.”
He nodded understandingly, telling her to eat heartily and give the
house a good name; this by way of covering his dismay at the conditions
to which her admission pointed. It was even worse than he had
prefigured. He was confident that it was only to save her pride that
she had pleaded the lack of time for a midday meal. With three other
mouths to fill, she simply couldn’t afford a luncheon for herself--he
knew it. Not to be able to get enough to eat was horrible!
“How do you come to be trimming hats?” he asked, trying to push aside
the discomforting thoughts stirred up by her tacit divulgence of the
family poverty.
“It is my one little gift; and I didn’t know I had it. Oh, of course, I
have always trimmed my own--and Mummie’s and the girls’; but that was
nothing. I was so glad I could have cried when I found that somebody
was willing to pay me money--real money--for doing it.”
“Yes; and I’ll bet they are not paying you half enough,” he frowned.
“And keeping you on until eight or nine o’clock--that is a plain
outrage!”
“You mustn’t find fault with my job,” she protested laughingly. “I can
tell you I was glad enough to get it, in a city where almost all the
places to work are filled by men.”
Though he maneuvered cleverly to prolong it to the uttermost, the
excellent dinner came to an end all too soon; and when she asked him
what time it was, and he was obliged to tell her that it was a quarter
past eight, she rose in a little panic of haste, saying that she must
go home; that her mother would be worrying.
When he went around to help her into her coat he again felt the
lightness of it and swore inwardly at the conventions that kept him
from taking her out and buying her a better one. Why couldn’t he do
just that? There was no reason save the silly inhibitions which kept a
man from doing for a woman in need what he would be applauded for doing
if the woman were a man. He thought of Bromley and his saying about the
various ways of choking the cat. Would the play-boy be able to find
some way of helping this dear, brave girl without hurting her pride?
And if Bromley could do it, why couldn’t he--Philip--contrive to do it?
It was a muddled world!
When he had paid for the dinners and had gone with her to the sidewalk,
she gave him a small surprise by thanking him gratefully and trying to
bid him good-by.
“But, see here!” he objected. “It isn’t ‘good-by’ yet. Of course I am
going to see you safely home. Do you think I would turn you loose in
the streets at this time of night?”
“Perhaps you wouldn’t want to do it in Yankeeland, but you can do it
safely enough here,” she argued. “Haven’t you heard the Denver boast
that, for all it is such a ‘wide-open’ city, a woman who minds her own
affairs is safe in the streets at any time of the day or night? And it
is true, too--or almost true.”
“That may all be. Just the same, I am going to take you home,” Philip
insisted. “I owe it to my own self-respect, if I don’t owe it to you.
Do we walk or ride?”
“It is only a little way; and, really, Mr. Trask, I wish you wouldn’t!”
“It is ‘Mr. Trask’ now, but it was ‘Philip’ last spring,” he reminded
her.
“Well, then--Philip, won’t you let me run away by myself this time? We
mustn’t stand here cluttering up Mr. Charpiot’s sidewalk. Please!”
“Is there any really good reason why I shouldn’t see you home?”
“N-no; I don’t reckon there is any _reason_. Only----”
“Then that settles it. Come along,” and he made her take his arm.
In a very few minutes the truth of her saying that she had only a short
distance to go was rudely thrust upon him. A silent walk of two squares
down the nearest cross street toward the Platte ended at the stair
of a brick building dingy and old as age might be reckoned in this
Aladdin city of the plain; a building whose sidewalk-fronting windows
yawned into the empty darkness of a former storeroom. And the street
in which it stood was the street of the Corinthian plangencies. The
neighborhood, as all Denver knew, was not merely a shabby one; it was
disreputable.
“Good gracious!” he exclaimed, as they paused at the dark stairfoot.
“You don’t mean to tell me you are living here!”
“You would come,” she answered reproachfully; then: “We have rooms on
the second floor. I--I’m sorry I can’t ask you in.”
“But this neighborhood!” he expostulated, and the sternest of his
Puritan ancestors could not have crowded more deprecation into the
three words.
“I know,” she nodded. “But you remember the old saying--that beggars
mustn’t be choosers. We were glad enough to find shelter anywhere. And
the people ... they are not what they ought to be, perhaps; but they
are kind to us. Won’t you let me thank you again and say good-night?”
Since there was nothing else to be done, he did it; though he waited
until after she had disappeared up the unlighted stair before he
turned to walk away, still shocked and dismayed at the thought of two
unprotected women and two young girls living--being obliged to live--in
such surroundings. It shouldn’t be permitted; it must not be permitted.
Surely he and Bromley together could hatch up some plan by means of
which Jean and her family could be helped; some plan which they could
accept without becoming objects of charity.
It was at the Sixteenth Street corner that he came suddenly upon
Middleton. The former tonnage cleric, clean shaven as to the beard,
dapper and well fed, was standing in a dark doorway, fingering his
mustaches and apparently waiting for some one.
“Hello, Philly!” he called. “Little off your beat down here,--what?”
With no definite reason for so doing, Philip began to bristle inwardly.
Though he had worked with Middleton and roomed with him, he had never
been quite able to conquer an ingrained aversion to the man.
“It is a public street, isn’t it?” he suggested.
“That is the trouble with it; it is too public for a truly good young
man like yourself. Or perhaps you are not so truly good as you used to
be. How about it?”
With the instinctive antagonism to prompt it, there was a sharp reply
on the end of Philip’s tongue. But he suppressed it.
“I like to ramble around a little now and then in the evenings,” he
substituted; and Middleton laughed.
“You don’t mean to say that you’ve become human enough to do a little
‘chasing’ for yourself?”
Philip did not affect to misunderstand. With the curious inner voice
whispering that this was the proper time to answer a fool according
to his folly, he said mildly: “Weren’t you continually setting me the
example last year?”
The dapper one laughed again.
“You might go so far as to say that I am still setting it. I don’t
mind telling you that right now I’m camping on the trail of one of the
choicest little bits of womaninity you ever laid eyes on. If she shows
up, I shall promptly shoo you away.”
Philip’s lip curled. “One of the Corinthians?” he queried.
“Not on your sweet life; nothing like it. She’s a black-eyed,
black-haired little darling, all frost on the outside and fire on the
inside--works in a millinery shop and comes home about this time every
evening. She’s a little offish yet, but she’ll get over that pretty
soon.”
While one might count ten, the flaring gas street-lights turned
darkly red for Middleton’s listener. But his voice was low and quite
controlled when he said, “Of course you know her name?”
“Yep; she never would tell me, but I got it from one of the girls she
works with. It’s a boy’s name--Jean.”
Nothing is more certain than that the inhibitions are dependent, more
often than not, upon purely extraneous circumstances: environment, the
mental attitude of the moment, even such trivial influences as the cut
of one’s clothes and the obligations imposed thereby. Clad in a flannel
shirt, baggy trousers and miner’s boots, Philip had thought nothing of
the civilized restraints when he had flung himself, tooth and nail,
upon the drunken bully who was menacing Bromley in the bar-room of the
Leadville hotel. But now, with the mining-camp rawnesses put safely
behind him, the conventional fetterings were not so easily broken.
Middleton was a petty libertine, to be sure, but he knew that a few
straightforward words of explanation about the Dabney family and his
own connection with it would put an end to the ex-tonnage clerk’s
pursuit of the daughter.
But the cool words were not spoken. In the moment of hesitation the
curious inner voice prompted vengefully, “Will you stand for that?
Haven’t you found out yet that you are in love with Jean Dabney--the
girl to whom this fat rake is offering the bitterest insult a man of
his breed can offer to a woman of hers?” and at this flame-hot goading
the inhibitory bonds became as smoking flax and he lashed out with a
swift, fury-driven uppercut to the smooth-shaven jaw.
At the smacking impact of the totally unexpected blow the fat victim
gasped, gurgled, tried to duck aside and stumbled and fell on the
sidewalk. There were no passers-by to interfere, and for a single
instant Philip stood looking down upon his handiwork in a fit of
half-awed astonishment. Then the mad vengeance wave submerged him again
and he sprang upon the fallen man, beating him futilely and trying to
grind his face into the pavement. And at the last:
“Get up, you dirty hound!--get up and run if you want to go on living!
If you ever so much as look at that girl again, I’ll cut your rotten
heart out and feed it to the dogs in the street! Run! you damned----”