XII
TheDenver 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 otherstreets 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 sistersin 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; hereisanother. 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.
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 onething, 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 ofthe 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 dofor 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 mebaldly, 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 andgoing 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 oneof 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!”