PASSING out through the hotel office with one thought effacing all
others, namely, that companionship of any sort was not to be endured,
Philip, a prey to the instinctive urge that drives the wounded animal
to seek a hiding place, pulled his hat over his eyes, signalled to a
passing cab and got in, telling the driver to take him to the Alamo
Building.
Reaching his rooms, he scribbled a note for Bromley, merely saying
that he was going out of town, filled a travelling-bag, jamming things
into it with little regard for long-established habits of care and
orderliness, and was presently on his way to the Union Depot, urging
the cab driver to haste and still more haste. By a margin of seconds
he caught the South Park train for Leadville; and as the short string
of top-heavy, narrow-gauge cars went swaying and lurching out over the
switches in the West Denver yard, he was choosing an isolated seat in
the chair-car where he could settle himself to look the catastrophic
revelation of the night fairly in the face.
With the scene of the revelation actually withdrawing into the
distance, a vast incredulity seized him. Could it be possible that
he had grown up in daily association with his father without so much
as suspecting the existence of the iron-hard, desperate underman
biding its time beneath an exterior so like that of other men in his
walk of life as to be wholly unremarkable? It seemed fantastically
unbelievable. Yet, in looking back upon the conventional New England
home life he saw how it might be so.
The atmosphere of the home, as he had always known it, had been one
of silent restraint, and there had been nothing like man-to-man
comradeship between his father and himself. Not that this was at all
singular. He had known many other households in the homeland in which
the same spirit of reticence and aloofness, the same repression of
all the emotions, were the natural order of things. The attitude was
ingrained in the bone and blood; a heritage which, as he now realized,
was his and his forebears’; the bequeathing of the stern stock which
had fled from tyranny in England only to set up a repressive tyranny of
its own in the new land beyond the sea.
But such reflections as these did not serve to lessen the completeness,
the crushing completeness, of the blow that had fallen. Where was now
that righteous pride of race he had paraded before Jean Dabney, the
boast of honest and upright ancestors he had so confidently made?--he,
the son of a thief, a gambler, a hardened breaker of the laws of God
and man. Of what use to him now was the growing hoard of gold in the
Denver bank, since it could never buy back that which was irretrievably
lost? How could he go on living from day to day with the knowledge that
the accident of any day might give some sensation-mongering newspaper
reporter the chance to write up Lucky-strike Trask of the “Little Jean”
as the son of a well-known local faro-dealer and sporting man? In his
mind’s eye he could visualize the mocking headlines, and a wave of
impotent rage, the agony of a tortured ego, swept over him.
He had no desire to eat when the train halted at the midday dinner
station and did not leave his place in the chair-car. Later, through
the long afternoon, he looked out, with eyes that saw without
perceiving, upon the passing panorama of canyon cliffs and forested
mountain slopes, of undulating distances in the South Park and the
uplifted peaks of the Mosquito Range, deep in the misery of his
wounding; aghast at the prospect of the future. It was with an added
degree of wretchedness that he realized that his love for Jean Dabney,
restrained and calmly calculated hitherto, seemed to have been set free
in the chaotic crash of things, blazing up in passionate intensity
now that its object was, as he told himself bitterly, snatched out of
reach. That he could never go to her with the story of his humiliating
discovery was the first sickening conclusion that had burned itself
into his consciousness; and now this was followed by the appalling
after-conclusion that he could not go to her at all; that the discovery
in the gambling hell had cut him off at once and irrevocably from all
association with her.
It was only natural that the thought of his own lapse, the fact that he
had taken his first drink and in the drunkenness of it had spent the
night in a brothel, seemed of small account in the general wreck. With
the family honor already dragged so deeply in the mire of disgrace and
criminality, what he might or might not do made little difference one
way or the other. Not that he cherished as yet any desperate or boyish
determination to take a fool’s revenge by plunging into dissipation.
There was only a dull indifference. Pride was dead and the barriers of
self-control had been broken down, but life still had to be lived, in
some fashion.
Upon arriving in Leadville he had himself driven to the hotel where he
and Bromley had put up after they had come out of the mountains with
Drew in the spring. Still having no desire to eat, he tried to smoke;
and when the pipe, on an empty stomach, nauseated him, he went to the
bar and called for a drink. As in the morning, the swallow or two of
whiskey wrought a miracle and he sought the dining-room and ate a
hearty meal. Afterward, with a mild cigar that had none of the dizzying
effects of the empty-stomach pipe, he sat in the lobby, and it was
there that Drew ran across him.
“Back with us again, are you?” was the genial promoter’s greeting as
he drew up a chair and planted himself in it for his own after-dinner
smoke. “When did you reach?”
“Just an hour or so ago,” Philip answered, surprised to find himself
able to tolerate and even to welcome the companionship of the older
man. “I came up on the South Park day train.”
“And how is Henry Wigglesworth? Still making a quiet joke of the world
at large?”
“Harry is all right. Good luck hasn’t spoiled him, as I was afraid it
might.”
“Inclined to be a little wild, was he?” Drew remarked.
“When I first met him, yes. And I was foolish enough to think that
I had to brother him. Queer what notions a man gets into his head,
sometimes.”
Though he did not look aside, he knew that Drew was regarding him
curiously.
“You come of brothering stock, don’t you, Trask?”
“At one time I was ass enough to think so. That was another of the
queer notions. How is the ‘Little Jean’ coming along?”
“Splendidly. The vein values are increasing as we drive in on the lode.
We are making another clean-up from the plates this week, and you’ll
get a dividend that will warm the cockles of your heart.”
“Money,” said Philip half contemptuously. “When you don’t have it, it’s
the most desirable thing in the world. And when you get it----” he
broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished.
The promoter smiled. “Money is only a means to an end, of course. If it
is not too personal a question, what are you doing with yours?”
“Nothing, as yet. Bromley is investing his share here and there,
setting me a good example. But I haven’t followed it.”
From that the talk went back to the gulch on the western slope, and
Drew told how the shut-in valley had been overrun by prospectors as
soon as the snow was off. A few small leads had been discovered higher
up the gulch, but nothing at all comparable with the “Little Jean.”
Reference to the hard winter the discoverers of the “Little Jean” had
put in led Drew to ask about Garth; and the mention of the big miner’s
name stabbingly reminded Philip of the chance incident in which
Garth had figured, and which had led up to the blotting out of all
recollection of him.
“Garth is in Denver; or he was yesterday,” he replied.
“Pity about Jim,” said the promoter. “At bottom he’s a man, right; but
he can’t let liquor and the paste-boards alone. He has been moderately
well-fixed at least three times, to my certain knowledge, and each time
he has blown it all; gambled it and given it away--or so much of it as
he didn’t pass across the bar.”
Philip was conscious of a curious little shock when he realized that
this cataloguing of Garth’s weaknesses now stirred no resentful or
condemnatory emotion in him.
“Perhaps that is the way in which he gets the most out of life,” he
offered colorlessly. “There is no accounting for the difference in
tastes.”
“No; but Big Jim is really worth saving, if somebody would take the
trouble,” Drew put in, adding: “I don’t suppose anybody has ever cared
enough for him to try to brace him up--at least, nobody since his wife
died.”
“He was married?” Philip queried. “I worked beside him all winter and
never knew that.”
“It was one of those cases you read about--and seldom see in real
life,” Drew went on reminiscently. “It happened in one of the intervals
when Jim was on top, financially. A gambler, whose name I have
forgotten, brought a girl here from the East--a ‘chippy,’ I suppose
you’d call her--abused her shamefully, made her support him for a time
and then abandoned her. Jim heard about it, and after marrying the
girl off-hand, hunted up the gambler and shot him within an inch of
his life. The girl turned out to be a jewel as Jim’s wife; stuck to
him through thick and thin, and actually got him to stop drinking and
gambling. Then the altitude, and the hard life she had lived before she
met Jim, grabbed her and she died. Naturally, poor old Jim went all to
pieces again.”
“Naturally,” Philip agreed. His eyes were narrowed and he was conscious
of a curious deadening of the heart. The story of Garth’s tragedy did
not move him as it would have moved him no longer ago than yesterday.
Instead, he was asking himself why Garth shouldn’t take to drink and
dissipation to drown his grief? For that matter, why shouldn’t any man,
if he happened to lean that way?
Drew looked at his watch and rose.
“I have an appointment that I was about to forget,” he said. “Intending
to stop over with us for a while?”
“Perhaps. I haven’t made any plans.”
“All right; we’ll get together again. While you are here, my office
is at your disposal, of course. Come around and make it your loafing
place.”
After Drew had left him, Philip lighted another of the mild cigars
and took to the streets, walking until he was sodden with weariness.
Again and again the meager details of Garth’s tragedy passed themselves
in review. So the big miner had once made his little gesture of
righteousness by marrying a woman of the class for which the world
has no place of repentance, had he? That was fine! How crassly he had
misjudged Garth. Bromley’s insight had been better. Was the play-boy’s
assumption that there was no hard-and-fast line to be drawn between the
sheep and the goats--that there was good in the worst and bad in the
best--the right one, after all?
Philip’s thoughts went back to the scene of the early morning when
he had awakened to find a girl with pencilled eyebrows and painted
lips sitting on the edge of his bed in the strange room. “Scum of the
earth,” he had been calling her and her kind; and yet she, and her
still more degraded house mistress, had taken him in and cared for him,
and had not robbed him and turned him helpless into the street, as
they might have done. He had a vivid picture of the girl sitting there
and laughing at him as he opened his eyes. She was pretty, in a way,
and her talk and manner had given him the impression of recklessness
and misguiding rather than hardness. Was she one of these who are more
sinned against than sinning? He wondered.
Tired out finally, he returned to the hotel and went to bed. In the
life which was already withdrawing into a far-away past he had always
been able to fall asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow; but
now, though it was past midnight and he was weary to utter exhaustion,
sleep would not come. Over and over the harrowing details of the
discovery of his father and the scene in the upper room over the
gambling den rehearsed themselves as he tossed and tumbled and tried to
banish them; and at last, in sheer desperation, he got up and dressed
and went down to the lobby floor. The bar-room was closed, and he
appealed to the night clerk, money in hand.
“I’m sick and can’t sleep,” he said. “Couldn’t you break in back there
and get me a drink? I don’t want to take to the streets at this time of
night.”
The clerk smiled knowingly. “Got a hang-over, have you? I guess I can
fix you.” He disappeared, to return presently with a pint bottle of
whiskey. “Think that will do the business for you?” he asked.
“Yes; thanks. Don’t bother about the change.”
Once more in his room, he slipped out of his clothes, took a stiff
drink, and stretched himself upon the bed. In a little time the curious
and altogether pleasant feeling of levitation came and he floated off
through a spacious region of dreams which grew vaguer and vaguer until
they vanished in an abyss of forgetfulness.