THE TENDERFOOTS
THE TENDERFOOTS
THE TENDERFOOTSI
THE TENDERFOOTS
Fromwhere he sat in the crowded day-coach, Philip Trask’s outlook was bounded by the backward-wheeling plain of eastern Colorado on one hand, and on the other by the scarcely less uninteresting cross-section of humanity filling the car to its seating capacity. Much earlier in the day he had exhausted the possibilities of the view from the car window. Shack-built prairie towns, steadily lessening in size and importance with the westward flight, had later given place to widely separated sod houses, the outworks of a slowly advancing army of pioneer homesteaders. Now even these had been left behind and there was nothing but the treeless, limitless plain, with only an occasional prairie-dog town or, more rarely, a flying herd of antelope, their fawn-colored bodies fading to invisibility in the fallow-dun distances, to break the monotony.
New England born and bred, provincial, and just now with a touch of belated homesickness acute enough to make him contrast all things primitive with the particular sort of civilization he had left behind, Philip owned to no kindling enthusiasm for the region which the school books were still teaching children to call the Great American Desert. A student by choice, with anunfinished college course for his keenest regret, he had left New Hampshire six months earlier on a plain quest of bread. Though the migrating moment was late in the year 1879, the aftermath of the panic of ’73 still lingered in the East; and while there was work to be had for immigrant brawn, there was little enough for native brain.
At this crisis, an uncle of one of his college classmates, a large shareholder in Kansas Pacific railway stocks, had come to the rescue by securing a clerkship for him in the company’s general offices in Kansas City. Here, after an uneventful half-year spent at an auditing desk—a period which had left his New England prejudices and prepossessions practically untouched—consolidation, the pursuing fate of the railroad clerk in the ’70’s and ’80’s, overtook him. But in the labor-saving shake-up he had drawn a lucky number. Being by this time a fairly efficient juggler of figures, he was offered a choice of going to Omaha with the consolidated offices, or of taking a clerkship with another and newer railroad in Denver.
For no very robust reason, but rather for a very slender one, Denver had won the toss. Four years previous to the enforced breaking of Philip’s college course the elder Trask had disappeared from New Hampshire under a cloud. A defalcation in the Concord bank, in which he was one of the tellers, was threatening to involve him, and between two days John Trask had vanished, leaving no trace. Alone in the family connection, which was large, the son had stubbornly continued to believe in his father’s innocence; and since the West was ever the port of missing men,it was in a vague hope of coming upon some trace of the missing man that Philip had refused the Omaha alternative and turned his face toward the farther West.
It was not until he had tried unavailingly to obtain sleeping-car accommodations, at the outsetting from the Missouri city, that he was made to realize that Colorado had suddenly become a Mecca of some sort toward which a horde of ardent pilgrims was hastening. True, there had been perfervid accounts in the Kansas City newspapers of a great silver discovery at a place called Leadville, somewhere in the Colorado mountains; but in his leisure, which was scanty, Philip—or, for that matter, the Trasks as a family—read books rather than newspapers. Hence the scene at the Kansas City Union Depot, when he went to take his departure, was a revelation. Trains over the various lines from the East were arriving, and excited mobs were pouring out of them to scramble wildly for seats in the waiting Overland which, in less time than it took him to grasp the situation, was in process of being jammed to overflowing.
Fighting with the mob as best he could—and with every immiscible fibre of him protesting that it was a most barbarous thing to do—he finally secured a seat in one of the day-coaches; and here, save for the three intervening stops at the meal stations, he had been wedged in, powerless to do anything but to endure the banalities and discomforts, wholly out of sympathy with the riant, free-and-easy treasure-seekers crowding the car and the train, and anxious only to reach his destination and be quit of the alien contacts.
The contacts, as he had marked at the outsetting, were chiefly masculine. Though his coach was the one next to the sleeping-cars, there were not more than a dozen women and children in it; and the men, for the greater part, were, in New England phrase, an outlandish company. His seatmate, to whom he gave all the room possible, was a roughly dressed man of uncertain age, bearded to the eyes and smelling strongly of liquor. Philip forgave him much because he slept most of the time, and in his waking intervals did not try to make conversation. Across the aisle a poker game with matches for chips was in progress, and a few seats forward there was another. Now and again pocket bottles were passed from hand to hand, and men drank openly with the bald freedom of those who are far from home and its restraints and so are at liberty to flout the nicer proprieties.
Philip pitied the few women who were forced by the travel exigencies into such rude companionship; particularly he was sorry for a family three seats ahead on his own side of the car. There were five of them in all; a father, mother and three girls; and Philip assured himself that they had nothing remotely in common with the boisterous majority. In the scramble for seats at the Kansas City terminal the family had been divided; the father and mother and the two younger girls occupying two seats facing each other, and the older girl—Philip thought she would be about his own age—sharing the seat next in the rear with an elderly man, a Catholic priest by the cut of his clothes and the shape of his hat.
Before the long day’s run was many hours old,Philip had accounted for the family to his own satisfaction. The fame of Colorado as a health resort had already penetrated to the East, and the colorless face and sunken eyes of the father only too plainly advertised his malady. Philip knew the marks of the white plague when he saw them; they were all too common in his own homeland; and he found himself wondering sympathetically if the flight to the high and dry altitudes had not been determined upon too late to help the hollow-eyed man in the seat ahead.
It was not until the middle of the afternoon that Philip’s attention was drawn more pointedly to the family three seats removed. In the day-long journeying there had been no shifting of places among its members; but at the last water-tank station passed, the priest, who had been studiously reading his breviary for the better part of the day, had left the train, and the place beside the oldest girl had been taken by a man whose evil face immediately awakened a curious thrill of antagonism in Philip.
In a little time he saw that this man was trying to make the girl talk; also, that she was seeking, ineffectually, to ignore him. Philip had had little to do with women other than those of his own family, and he hailed from a civilization in which the primitive passions were decently held in leash by the conventions. Yet he could feel his pulses quickening and a most unaccustomed prompting to violence taking possession of him when he realized that a call for some manly intervention was urging itself upon him.
In a fit of perturbation that was almost boyish, and with a prescriptive experience that offered no precedent,he was still hesitating when he saw the girl lean forward and speak to her father. The sick man twisted himself in his seat and there was a low-toned colloquy between him and the offender. Philip could not hear what was said, but he could easily imagine that the father was protesting, and that the offender was probably adding insult to injury, noting, as a coward would, that he had nothing to fear from a sick man. In the midst of things the invalid made as if he would rise to exchange seats with his daughter, but the girl, with a hand on his shoulder, made him sit down again.
After this, nothing happened for a few minutes. Then Philip saw the man slide an arm along the seat behind the girl’s shoulders so that she could not lean back without yielding to a half embrace, and again his blood boiled and his temples began to throb. Clearly, something ought to be done ... if he only knew how to go about it. He was half rising when he saw the crowning insult offered. The man had drawn a flat bottle, whiskey-filled, from his pocket and was offering it to the girl.
Quite beside himself now, Philip struggled to his feet; but another was before him. Across the aisle one of the poker players, a bearded giant in a flannel shirt and with his belted trousers tucked into his boot-tops, faced his cards down upon the board that served as a gaming table and rose up with a roar that brought an instant craning of necks all over the car.
“Say! I been keepin’ cases on yuh, yuh dern’ son of a sea cook!” he bellowed, laying a pair of ham-like hands upon the man in the opposite seat and jerkinghim to his feet in the aisle. Then: “Oh—yuh would, would yuh!”
Philip, half-dazed by this sudden ebullition of violence, caught his breath in a gasp when he saw the flash of a bowie-knife in the hand of the smaller man. There was a momentary struggle in which the knife was sent flying through an open window, harsh oaths from the onlookers, cries of “Pitch him out after his toad-sticker!” and then a Gargantuan burst of laughter as the giant pinned both hands of his antagonist in one of his own and cuffed him into whimpering subjection with the other. The next thing Philip knew, the big man, still with his captive hand-manacled and helpless, was singling him out and bawling at him.
“Here, you young feller; climb out o’ that and make room fer this yere skunk! Yuh look likeyoumight sit alongside of a perfect lady without makin’ a dern’ hyena o’ yerself. Step it!”
More to forestall further horrors of embarrassment than for any other reason, Philip stumbled out over the knees of his sleeping partner and slipped into the indicated seat beside the girl. Whereupon the giant shoved his subdued quarry into the place thus made vacant and went back to his seat to take up his hand of cards quite as if the late encounter were a mere incident in the day’s faring.
Scarcely less embarrassed by having been singled out as a model of decency than he had been by his inability to think quickly enough in the crisis, Philip sat in bottled-up silence for the space of the clicking of many rail-lengths under the drumming wheels, carefully refraining from venturing even a sidelongglance at his new seatmate. Not that the glance was needful. The day was no longer young, and he had had ample time in which to visualize the piquantly attractive face of the girl beside him. Its perfect oval was of a type with which he was not familiar, and at first he had thought it must be foreign. But there was no suggestion of the alien in the other members of the family. In sharp contrast to the clear olive skin and jet-black hair and eyes of the eldest sister, the two younger girls were fair, and so was the mother. As for the father, there was little save the cut of his beard to distinguish him. In a period when the few were clean shaven and the many let the beard grow as it would, the invalid reminded Philip of the pictures he had seen of the third Napoleon, though, to be sure, the likeness was chiefly in the heavy graying mustaches and goatee.
Philip thought it must have been somewhere about the hundredth rail-click that he heard a low voice beside him say, in a soft drawl that was as far as possible removed from the clipped speech of his homeland: “Ought I to say, ‘Thank you, kindly, sir’?”
Philip put his foot resolutely through the crust of New England reserve, as one breaks the ice of set purpose.
“I guess I’m the one to be thankful,” he returned, “since I’ve been sitting all day with a drunken man. But you’d better not make me talk. I don’t want to be dragged out by the collar and have my ears boxed.”
His reply brought the smile that he hoped it would, and he thought he had never seen a set of prettier, whiter, evener teeth.
“Oh, I don’t reckon the big gentleman would hurt you.”
“Gentleman?” said Philip.
“Yes; don’t you think he earned the name?”
Philip nodded slowly. But he qualified his assent. “He might have done it a little more quietly, don’t you think?”
This time the smile grew into a silvery laugh.
“You mean he made you too conspicuous?”
“No,” said Philip; “I wasn’t thinking of myself.” Then: “You are from the South?”
“We are from Mississippi, yes. But how could you tell?”
“You said, ‘I don’t reckon.’”
“Where you would have said—?”
Philip permitted himself a grim little smile. “Where my grandfather might have said, ‘I don’t calculate.’”
“Oh; then you are a Yankee?”
“I suppose that is what I should be called—in Mississippi. My home is in New Hampshire.”
“I softened it some,” said the girl half mockingly. “When I was small, I used to hear it always as ‘damn’ Yankee,’ and for the longest time I supposed it was just one word. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Why should I mind? The war has been over for quite a long time.”
“Not so very long; and it will be still longer before it is over for us of the South. We were whipped, you know.” Then, turning to the car window: “Oh, look! See the deer!”
“Antelope,” Philip corrected gravely. “They told me in Kansas City that only a few years ago the buffalowere so thick out here that sometimes the trains had to be stopped to let the herd go by.”
“You never saw them?”
“Oh, no; I’m new—like everything else out here.”
“I suppose you are going to this place called Leadville to make your fortune digging gold?—or is it silver? I never can remember.”
“Not at all,” he hastened to assure her. “I expect to go to work in a railroad office in Denver.”
“We are going to Denver, too,” she volunteered. “The Captain isn’t well, and we are hoping the climate will help him.”
“The Captain?” Philip queried.
“My father,” she explained. Then, as if upon a sudden impulse: “Would you care to—may I?”
“I wish you would,” said Philip, adding: “My name is Trask.”
The easy, self-contained manner in which she compassed the introductions made him wonder if such gifts came naturally to young women of the South. He shook hands rather awkwardly over the back of the seat with Captain Dabney; tried to say the appropriate formality to the wife and mother; tried to make big-brotherly nods to the two younger girls who were named for him as Mysie and Mary Louise.
“Now then, since you know us all around, we can talk as much as we want to,” said the girl at his side.
“Not quite all around,” he ventured to point out.
“Oh, I don’t count; but I’m Jean—not the French way; just J-e-a-n.”
Philip smiled. “In that case, then, I’m Philip,” he said.
The eyes, that were so dark that in certain lights they seemed to be all pupil, grew thoughtful.
“I’ve always liked that name for a boy,” she asserted frankly. “And it fits you beautifully. Of course, you wouldn’t go and dig gold in the mountains.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” he demanded.
“Oh, just because the Philips don’t do such things.” And before he could think of the proper retort: “Why is everybody looking out of the windows on the other side of the car?”
“I’ll see,” he replied, and went to investigate. And when he returned: “We have come in sight of the mountains. Would you like to see them?”
“I’d love to!” was the eager response, and she got up and joined him in the aisle. But with more than half of the car’s complement crowding to the windows on the sight-seeing side there was no room for another pair of heads.
“Shall we go out to the platform?” he suggested, and at her nod he led the way to the swaying, racketing outdoor vantage where the car-wheel clamor made anything less than a shout inaudible, and the cinders showered them, and they had to cling to the hand-railings to keep from being flung into space.
But for any one with an eye for the grandeurs there was ample reward. Far away to the southwestward a great mountain, snow-white against the vivid blue, was lifting itself in dazzling majesty above the horizon, and on the hither side it was flanked by lesser elevations, purple or blue-black in their foresting of pine and fir. For so long as the whirling showerof cinders from the locomotive could be endured they clung and looked, and the girl would have stayed even longer if Philip, in his capacity of caretaker, had not drawn her back into the car and shut the door against the stinging downpour.
“It would only be a matter of a few minutes until you’d get your eyes full out there,” he said, in response to her protest. “Pike’s Peak won’t run away, you know; and they tell me you can see it any day and all day from Denver.”
“You don’t know what it means to flat-country people, as we are—our plantation, when we had one, was in the Yazoo delta. I thought I saw mountains as we came through Missouri day before yesterday, but they were nothing but little hills compared with that glorious thing out there. Isn’t it the finest sight you ever saw?”
Philip waited until they were back in their seat before he said: “Pretty fine—yes,” which was as far as his blood and breeding would let him agree with the superlatives.
A mocking little laugh greeted this guarded reply.
“Is that the best you can do for one of nature’s masterpieces?” she asked. Then, with more of the appalling frankness: “I wonder if your sort ever wakes up and lets itself go? I can hardly imagine it.”
“I guess I don’t know just what you mean,” said Philip; but he was smarting as if the wondering query had been the flick of a whip.
“No; you wouldn’t,” was the flippant retort. “Never mind. How much farther is it to Denver?”
Philip consulted the railroad folder with which he had supplied himself.
“We ought to be there in another hour. I suppose you’ll be glad. It’s a long journey from Mississippi.”
“We’ll all be glad—for the Captain’s sake. It has been hard for him.”
“Your father was a soldier in the war?”
“Of course,” she nodded. “He is a Mississippian.”
“Was he—was he wounded?” Philip ventured.
“Not with bullets. But he spent a year in a Northern prison.”
Philip, abashed by the implication conveyed in this, relapsed into silence. Libby Prison and Andersonville were still frightful realities in the New England mind, and the remembrance of them extinguished the fact that there had been war prisons in the North, as well.
“War is a pretty dreadful thing,” he conceded; adding: “My father was wounded at Antietam.”
“Let’s not begin to talk about the war; we’ll be quarrelling in another minute or two if we do.”
“I don’t admit that,” Philip contended amicably. “As I said a little while ago, the war is over—it’s been over for fifteen years. But let it go and tell me about Mississippi. I’ve never been farther south than we are just now.”
“Dear old Mississippi!” she said softly. And after that the talk became a gentle monologue for the greater part, in which Philip heard the story duplicated so often south of Mason and Dixon’s line; of the hardships of the war, and the greater hardships of its aftermath; of ill health and property loss; of hope deferred and almost extinguished in the case of the invalidfather; of the final family council in which it had been determined to try the healing effect of the high and dry altitudes.
Philip listened and was moved, not only by sympathy, which—again in strict accordance with his blood and breeding—he was careful not to express, but also by a vast wonder. No young woman of his limited acquaintance in the homeland could ever have been induced to talk so frankly and freely to a comparative stranger. Yet there was also a proud reserve just behind the frankness, and after a time he came to understand that it was pride of birth. The Dabneys, as he gathered, were an ancient family, descended from the Huguenot D’Aubignys, and originally Virginians. As a Trask and a son of more or less hardy New England stock, family traditions meant little to him. But he was beginning to see that they meant very much indeed to the soft-speaking young woman beside him.
“It is evident that you believe in blue blood,” he ventured to say, after the Dabney lineage had been fairly traced for him. Then he added: “We don’t think so very much of that in New England.”
“Oh, I don’t see how you can help it,” was the astonished exclamation. “Don’t you believe in heredity?”
“Yes, I suppose I do, in a way,” he qualified. “We can’t expect to gather figs from thistles. Still, it is a long step from that admission to a belief in—well, in anything like an aristocracy of the blood.”
“You think there is no such thing as gentle blood?”
“Not in the sense that one person is intrinsically better than another. Unless all history is at fault,the ‘gentle blood’ you speak of is just as likely to go hideously wrong as any other.”
“I don’t agree with you at all,” was the prompt retort.
“I didn’t expect you would—after what you have been telling me. But we needn’t quarrel about it,” he went on good-naturedly. “I suppose you would call your family patrician and mine plebeian—which it doubtless is; at any rate, it is farmer stock on both sides as far back as I know anything about it, people who worked with their hands, and——”
“It was no disgrace for them to work with their hands; that isn’t at all what I meant. It is something much bigger than that.”
“Well, what is it, then? A clean family record?”
“Honor above everything: not being willing—not being able to stoop to anything low or mean or——”
“Exactly,” said Philip. “I guess we’re not so very far apart, after all; though I doubt if I could tell you the Christian name of any one of my four great-grandfathers—to say nothing of the great-grandmothers. But look out of the window! Houses, if my eyes don’t deceive me. This must be Denver that we’re coming to.”
Rounding a curve so long and gentle as to make the changing direction approximate the slow inching of a clock’s minute-hand, the train was beginning to pass signs of human occupancy, or of former occupancy; on the right a collection of empty, tumble-down shacks and the ruin of what seemed to be a smelting works. A little farther along, the fringe of the inhabited town was passed, and the clanking of switchfrogs under the wheels signalled the approach to the freight yards. Over a swelling hill to the northward the mountains came into view in peaks and masses against which the plain seemed to end with startling abruptness.
When the brakes began to grind, Philip excused himself and went to get his hand luggage out of the rack over the seat he had formerly occupied.
“If I can be of any assistance?” he offered when he came back.
“Oh, I think we can manage, thank you; there are so many of us to carry things,” the young woman replied. “Besides, we’ll have to take a carriage—on the Captain’s account.”
With his attention thus drawn again to the invalid, Philip had a sharp recurrence of the doubt as to whether the change of climate had been determined upon soon enough to warrant any hope of recovery for the hollow-eyed man in the seat ahead. For the past half-hour the sick man had been coughing unobtrusively, and he seemed to have increasing difficulty in breathing. Since Kansas City was the gateway for westbound invalids, as well as for the mineral-mad treasure-seekers, Philip had heard stories of the marvelous cures effected by the Colorado climate; also he had heard that those who went too late were apt to die very quickly, the swift railroad flight from an altitude of a few hundred feet to that of a mile high proving too sudden a change for the weakened lungs.
Acting wholly upon an impulse which he did not stop to define, or to square with the New England reticences, Philip bent to speak to the card-playing giantwho had freed the young woman of her persecutor.
“Have you much hand baggage to take care of?” he asked.
“Nothin’ on top of earth but my gun and my blankets. Why?”
“If you wouldn’t mind taking my satchel and dropping it off outside?” Philip went on, “I want to help the sick man.”
“Right you are, cully,” returned the giant heartily. “Reckon yuh can handle him alone? Because if yuh can’t, we’ll chuck the plunder out o’ the window and both of us’ll tackle him.”
“Oh, I think I can do it all right. Maybe he won’t need any help, but I thought he might.”
“Look’s if he’d need all he can get; ’s if it wouldn’t take much of a breeze to blow him away. Shouldn’t wonder if he’d put it off too long—this yere trailin’ out to the tall hills. Well, this is the dee-po: leave me yer grip and jump in.”
Philip turned quickly to the group in the double seat and again offered his help in the matter of debarking. This time it was accepted gratefully. Picking up one of the Dabney valises, he gave an arm to the sick man. The progress through the crowded aisle to the car platform was irritatingly slow and fatiguing, and before the door was reached the invalid was seized with another coughing fit. Through the open car door the thin, keen wind of the April evening blew in the faces of the outgoing passengers, and even Philip, who was as fit and vigorous as an indoor man ever gets to be, found himself breathingdeeply to take in enough of the curiously attenuated air to supply his need.
In due time the descent of the car steps was accomplished, but the exhausting coughing fit persisted, and Philip felt the invalid leaning more and more heavily upon him. It was some little distance from the tracks over to the line of waiting busses and hacks, and before it was covered the oldest daughter gave her hand luggage to one of her sisters and came back to help Philip with his charge. Philip was prodigiously thankful. The painful cough had become almost a paroxysm, and he was shocked to see that the handkerchief the sick man was holding to his mouth was flecked with bright red spots.
“Just a little way farther, now, Captain, dearest!” Philip heard the low-toned words of encouragement, and was overwhelmed with an unnerving fear that the man would die before he could be taken to wherever it was that the family was going. But with the fear, and presently overriding it, was a kindling admiration for the daughter. She knew what the red-flecked handkerchief meant, but she was not letting the frightful possibility submerge her.
The hack rank was reached at last, and with the driver of the chosen vehicle to help, the sick man was lifted into his place. While the mother and the younger daughters were getting in, Philip spoke to his late seat-sharer.
“Have you friends in Denver?” he asked.
“No; we shall go to a hotel for the present—to the American House.”
“Shall I go with you and try to find a doctor?”
“There will probably be a doctor in the hotel; anyway, we’ve no right to trouble you any further. But I—we don’t forget. And I’m sorry I said things about Yankees and the Philips, and about—about your waking up. It was mean and unfriendly, and I’m sorry. Good-by—and thank you so much for helping us. And please try not to remember the meannesses. Good-by.”
Philip watched the laden hack as it was driven away and wondered if he would ever see the black-eyed little Mississippian with the heroic nerves again. He was still wondering when the good-natured giant came along and gave him his valise.
“Got the little gal and her hull kit and caboodle on their way, did yuh?” said the big one, with a fierce grin which was meant to be altogether friendly.
“Yes,” said Philip. Then he picked up his valise and trudged off in search of a horse-car that would take him to his own temporary destination, a modest hotel on the west side of the town, to which a travelled fellow clerk in the Kansas City railroad office had directed him.