AFTER he had rued his bargain with the Jew second-hand man--paying
a stiff forfeit for the privilege--and had reëstablished himself in
his rooms in the Alamo, Philip slipped back into the drifting current
which had been only momentarily arrested by the Mona Connaghey episode,
turning day into night and night into day, gambling a little, drinking
a little, assiduously avoiding the few daylight friends he had made,
and adding nightly to a different and more numerous collection, some of
whom were grateful for the largesse he scattered, while others regarded
him only as a soft-hearted fool to be played upon and cozened out of
his money as occasion might offer.
It was at this time that Middleton, the fat-faced railroad clerk,
appealed to him for help, and Philip heard the appeal with the
tolerant, half-amused smile which aptly mirrored his changed point of
view. A younger brother of Middleton’s had recently joined the rush to
the golden West, and Middleton had secured him a railroad clerkship
in the freight station. So far, so good; but almost immediately,
it seemed, the boy had been caught in the wide-spreading net of
dissipation and was in a fair way to be ruined.
“It is only gambling, for a beginning; but since he is in the cashier’s
office, handling company money, that is bad enough,” Middleton said.
“It won’t take him very long to find out that his salary won’t be a
drop in the bucket when it comes to going up against the skin games.”
“Well, why don’t you take him in hand?” Philip asked, the thin-lipped
smile accentuating itself.
Middleton flushed uncomfortably.
“I was expecting you’d say that. But you know how a kid bucks at taking
anything from an older brother. Besides, I can’t say that I’ve been
setting him any too good an example.”
“No; I guess you haven’t. But what makes you think I might set him a
better one?”
“I don’t. Just the same, he’d take a jacking-up from you as coming from
a--er--a sort of case-hardened rounder, you know. That’s what you’ve
got the name of being, now, Philly--if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“No, I don’t mind. If I come across your brother, I’ll try to choke him
off.”
This conditional promise was made in the afternoon of the second day
after he had agreed to the costly compromise with the Jew furniture
man; and late in the evening of that day he caught a glimpse of young
Jack Middleton, hands buried in pockets and head down, turning a corner
and hurrying toward the Corinthian. As Philip chanced to know, it was
the railroad pay-day, and it was a fair assumption that the boy had his
month’s salary in his pocket.
Entering the game room of the Corinthian a few steps behind young
Middleton, Philip waited only long enough to see the boy plunge into
play with all the crass ignorance and recklessness of a beginner,
before he intervened. Standing at the youth’s elbow while he was
staking and losing five-dollar gold pieces in swift succession at one
of the roulette wheels, he said, in a tone audible only to the ear it
was intended for: “Whose money is that you’re losing, Jackie?”
The boy jumped as if he had been shot. Then he saw who it was who had
spoken to him and began to beg:
“You--you mustn’t stop me, Mr. Trask! I’ve _got_ to win--I tell you,
I’ve just _got_ to!”
Philip drew him aside.
“Just how bad is it, Jack?” he asked. “I mean, how much are you short
in the office?”
“Oh, my God!--how did you know?” gasped the boy.
“Never mind about that. How much is it?”
“It’s--it’s over a hundred dollars.”
“Well, don’t you know you haven’t a dog’s chance of getting it back in
a place like this?”
“But some of them win,” was the desperate plea.
“Yes, and a great many more of them lose. When did you take the money
from the office?”
“L-last week.”
“You called it borrowing, I suppose. But when you got your pay to-day,
why didn’t you put it back?”
“I don’t get enough; they’re only paying me seventy-five a month. I
lost the money here, and I _had_ to come and try to get it back. The
travelling auditor will be at the office in the morning to check us up,
and then----”
“I see. Jackie, there is nothing in this dizzy whirl for you or for
anybody; I know, because I’m in it myself. I’ll make a bargain with
you. How much did you say you are short?”
“I--I took six twenties.”
Philip drew a handful of yellow coins from his pocket.
“This is the bargain, Jack. I’ll lend you the six twenties if you will
promise me to quit this business for good and all. How about it? Is it
a go?”
The boy’s gratitude was almost dog-like in its frantic extravagance.
“Will I promise? My God, if you only knew how I’ve suffered! I didn’t
sleep a wink last night. And I’ll never forget this, the longest day I
live, Mr. Trask! I didn’t mean to be a thief, but--”
Philip saw Sheeny Mike, one of the game room spotter hawks, watching
them narrowly.
“Chase your feet out of this, Jack, and remember your promise,” he
said; but the hawk had seen the passing of the gold pieces and he
started in pursuit of the boy. Philip detained him with a hand on his
shoulder.
“Not this time, Mike; the kid is a friend of mine.”
“To hell with you! That don’t get the house anything!”
“Maybe not; just the same, it goes as it lies. You ought to know me by
this time. Keep your hands where I can see them--it’s safer, because I
can always beat you to the draw. Now listen: if you had the brain of a
louse, Sheeny--which you haven’t--you’d know that I am worth more to
the house in a month than a little one-horse railroad clerk would be in
a year.” And to show his good will, he turned to the nearest roulette
wheel and took his place in the circle of players.
It was something like an hour later, and after he had consistently and
painstakingly lost considerably more than the sum he had given young
Middleton, that he drifted aimlessly out of the game room and across
the stair-head landing into the open space serving as the back gallery
of the varieties theater. A dancing girl in chalk-white tights had just
finished her turn, and men in the crowded lower part of the theater
were pitching silver dollars onto the stage in lieu of bouquets,
stamping their applause with booted feet. Philip, looking down upon the
scene in a saddened reverie from the gallery height, saw the beginning
of a drunken fight in the pit. Two shirt-sleeved men from the third
row of seats in the orchestra struggled up, went into a fierce clinch
and stumbled into the aisle in a pummelling wrestle. Before any of the
aproned bar-servers could drop their trays and intervene, the wrestlers
fell apart and there was the sharp report of a pistol to dominate the
clamor of stamping feet--the crack of a pistol and a woman’s scream.
The gurgling scream came from one of the gallery boxes on the left, and
Philip whipped out of his sober reverie with a bound and ran. Half-way
down the passageway behind the row of cell-like boxes he collided with
a red-faced man racing to escape. “They’ve shot the woman!” he gasped,
struggling to free himself from Philip’s detaining grasp. “Lemme get
out of here--I ain’t in it!”
Philip let the craven go and hurried on. In the box of tragedy the
curtain had been drawn and two women were kneeling over a third who
was lying on the floor. One of the women sprang to her feet as he
entered and her eyes were blazing.
“That pie-eyed ---- ---- ---- down there shot at nothin’ and got Lola!”
she raged. “Don’t let her die in this hell-hole! Get help to carry her
over to her room! It’s just across the street.”
In a trice Philip had captured two of the gallery drink servers, and
the victim of the wild shot was quickly carried out and down the stairs
and across to the darkened building opposite, the two women following.
At the foot of the unlighted stairway where Jean Dabney had more than
once turned him back, Philip found himself in the clutch of the woman
with the blazing eyes.
“Wait,” she panted. “There’s enough of ’em to carry her up and to run
for a doctor and her man. What she’s needin’ is a priest, but she ain’t
a Catholic, and none o’ the others’d dirty their hands with the likes
of us.”
“You are mistaken,” said Philip evenly. “I know of one, at least, who
will go where he is needed.”
“Then get him quick, for God’s sake! She’s dyin’; the bullet went clean
through and come out at her back!”
“Go on and keep her alive if you can,” Philip urged. “I’ll hurry.”
Luckily, he found an idle two-horse hack standing in front of the
American House, and he sprang in and gave his order, bidding high for
haste. After a reckless race of a dozen blocks the hack halted in front
of a house yarded in the same enclosure with a small brick church
carrying a gilt cross on its gable; and Philip was relieved to see
that, late as it was, there was still a light burning in the minister’s
study. A heavy-set, fair-haired young man with the face of a wise and
compassionate saint answered his ring.
“I have come again, Father Goodwin,” he began hurriedly. “It’s a
tragedy, this time. A woman has just been accidentally shot in the
Corinthian theater, and I think she is dying. Can you come?”
“She is not a Catholic?”
“No.”
“I’ll be with you in a moment.”
On the galloping race to the appointed destination the young clergyman
put an arm across Philip’s shoulders in the darkness of the hack’s
interior.
“Tell me, Philip: how long are you going to go on throwing yourself
away? The other time you came to me from a woman dying in a brothel;
and this time you come from the Corinthian. Doesn’t your life mean
anything more to you than a wallowing in the mud?”
“It did, once,” was the low-toned response. “But I have found out that
it is one thing to knock the barriers down, and another to try to build
them up again. As long as I hadn’t wallowed, it was easy not to. But
one night the props went out all at once, and--well, I can’t seem to
set them back again.”
“They were not the right kind of props, Philip; you may be sure of
that. Won’t you come and talk to me like a man, some time?”
“Maybe,” said Philip; and then the hack was pulled up at the doorway of
the darkened stairway.
Philip led the way up the stairs and around the gallery-like upper
corridor to a lighted room with an open door. The scene that revealed
itself as he entered and stood aside to make way for the clergyman
stunned him. The bed upon which the victim of the drunken miner’s
chance bullet lay had been drawn out from the wall, and on one side of
it a doctor, with Jean Dabney standing by to help as she could, was
trying to determine the seriousness of the wound. On the other side of
the bed knelt a man with graying hair, cold eyes and a hard-lined face
which was now drawn and pinched and haggard as he stared at the still
figure over which the doctor was working. Bromley caught Philip’s arm
and took him apart from the others.
“Jean knows, and I know,” he explained in a low whisper. “We had come
down to see the sick old lady on the other side of the building. When
they told me who this woman was, I went after your father. Don’t do
anything to make it harder for him, Phil.”
For a long minute Philip stood looking down at the face of the woman
who had supplanted his mother. It was the wreck of a face that had once
been attractive, perhaps even beautiful with a wild, gypsy allure.
While he looked, the dark eyelids fluttered and opened, and the
carmined lips framed a single word, “_John!_”
The doctor straightened up and drew Jean away, shaking his head to
signal that the end had come. The clergyman knelt beside the dying
woman and began to speak in low tones. Bromley followed the doctor and
Jean into the corridor, and at the door he looked back. He saw Philip
hesitate, somber-eyed, but only for an instant. Then the son went to
kneel, with bowed head, beside his father.