XXVI
Afterhe 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 himvery 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 heintervened. 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’vegotto win—I tell you, I’ve justgotto!”
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 Ihadto 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 itmyself. 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 nearestroulette 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 womenwere 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 smallbrick 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 thegallery-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.