XXVIII
“I don’tbelieve I can climb any higher, Harry; the air up here is so frightfully thin. You and Mysie go on if you want to. I’ll sit down and wait for you. I wouldn’t ask for any grander view than this is, right here from this rock.”
Spring had come again for the altitudes, and though the higher peaks of the Continental Divide were still heavily blanketed with snow, the gulches were free and the mountain streams were running bank full. Bromley, with an ulterior motive that he was still carefully concealing, had won Mrs. Dabney’s consent to take Jean and Mysie on a flying trip to the summit of the Great Divide, saying it was a shame that, after a residence of two years in Denver, the girls had not yet seen any more of the mountain grandeurs than could be glimpsed from a car window on a Sunday excursion up one of the canyons.
Making Leadville only a halting point, they had come on up the railroad to a flag-station hamlet high in the backbone range. By making a few judicious inquiries in the hamlet, Bromley had learned what he wanted to know, and which trail to take. In one of the gulches far above the railroad, the gray, beard-like dump of a mine or prospect tunnel could be seen, with the help of the field-glasses, and it was on the steeptrail toward this that he was leading his breathless charges.
“Well wait until you get your breath,” he offered, in answer to Jean’s protest. “There is no hurry. It will be hours before we can get the return train.”
As he spoke, he was sweeping the upper reaches of the trail with the glass. On one of the nearer loopings a man was descending. Bromley readjusted the focus of the binocular and fixed the descending mountaineer fairly in its field. What he saw made him stultify himself immediately and shamelessly.
“If you really don’t care to go any farther, Jean,” he said hastily, “Mysie and I will climb up to that monument rock over there on the other spur. You won’t mind? We’ll be in plain sight nearly all the way.”
“Of course I won’t mind. I could sit here and enjoy this magnificent view all day. Run along.”
Philip Trask, no longer crippled in body, mind or vision, saw the three human dots on the trail below him; saw two of them separate from the third and move away to the left toward a hunched shoulder of the mountain with a curiously shaped pinnacle rock at its summit. “Tenderfoots,” he said to himself, “and one of them is already out of breath.” He looked again, squinting his eyes against the hard light of the forenoon sun. “Humph!—skirts. I wonder who was fool enough to drag a couple of women eleven thousand feet up in the air? No wonder one of them has pegged out.”
A turn in the trail hid the motionless figure at the halting place for the time, though he could still seethe others making their toilful way onward and upward over the rock-strewn talus. As he drew nearer to the one who had been left behind, the rock, upon one of the lower shelf-like ledges of which she was sitting, kept him from getting a fair sight of her, and it was not until he was about to go on past her that he saw who she was and stopped short.
“Jean!” he gasped.
She stood up and held out both hands to him, and what she said appeared to take no account of anything that had intervened, save the lapse of time.
“You, Philip? I wonder if I’m dreaming? Is it really you—after all these months? Where did you come from?”
“Out of a pretty mucky hole in the ground, as you’d imagine,” he grinned, looking down at his earth-stained corduroys and boots. “But tell me: how under the canopy did you get here?”
“‘Canopy,’” she smiled; “that is New England, isn’t it? We came on the train. Harry brought us—Mysie and me—just for a little outing. We left Leadville this morning. But I hadn’t the slightest idea that we’d find you up here.”
“Just one of Harry’s little jokes, I suppose. I think he meant it to be a surprise, all around. I wrote him last week and told him where we were—Big Jim Garth and I—and how we could be reached, now that the snows have melted. I thought perhaps he might care to run up and have a look at Jim’s prospect. It isn’t a bonanza, but Jim can probably sell it for enough, with the development work we’ve done, to take care of him in his old age.”
“You have been working with him all winter?”
“Yes. We were snowed in most of the time, but that didn’t matter. We had plenty to eat. But this morning we found that the tobacco was all gone, and at that, of course, everything had to stop dead until one of us could go down to the railroad and get some. No tobacco, no work.”
She sat down again on the rock ledge and made room for him beside her.
“As I say, I hadn’t the remotest idea we were going to find you up here. Harry never gave us the least little hint—which was just like him. What a perfectly glorious view there is from here!”
Her enthusiastic exclamation was well warranted. The atmosphere was crystal clear, and across a mountain-studded interval of nearly two hundred miles of sheer distance earth and sky met on the remote horizon formed by the serrated summits of a blue range in eastern Utah. Philip pointed out and named some of the eye-filling grandeurs: White Mountain, Shingle Peak, the rampart buttressings of the White River Plateau, and beyond these the Book or Roan Mountains, too distant to show the striated colorings of their majestic cliffs, and in the southwest, the far-away bulwark of the Uncompahgres.
“I can never look at it without being made to feel my own, and all human, littleness,” he said. “And, after all, tremendous as it is, this is only a dot, a vanishing point, in a universe too vast to be even faintly comprehended by our little insect minds.”
She stole a glance aside at him. Lean, wind-tanned, athletic, with work-hardened hands and knottedmuscles, there was little to remind her of the neatly groomed, reserved young railroad clerk who had sat beside her in the Kansas Pacific day-coach two years earlier; the “damn Yankee” she had told him she had been taught to call him and his kind. Even his speech was different now.
“This is a country of big things—this Colorado of ours,” he went on, “and we little human insects have to grow and expand to fit it—do that, or be blotted out and lost in the shuffle. Doesn’t it make you feel that way?”
She nodded. Though she was far from realizing it, or had been, up to this moment, her two years of burden-carrying in Denver had changed her quite as much as his varied experiences and the breaking down of the barriers had changed him. Then, with a smile: “We were terrible tenderfoots two years ago, weren’t we?”
“It was a country of tenderfoots then; it still is, in a great measure. What a world of meaning there is crammed into that one coined word! We call this a new country; in reality, it is old—very old and wise and shrewdly discriminating. It sifts the grain from the chaff without mercy; and equally without mercy the chaff is scattered to the four winds. We are the new things; we who call ourselves the lords of creation! Most of us were mere babes in the wood when we came here—tenderfoots in all that the word implies. At least, I am sure I was. You were different.”
“Not so very different,” she disagreed. “I remember how sneery and unmannerly I was the day we met on the train ... how I made fun of the ‘Philips,’and told you you’d never go to the mountains. I don’t believe you ever quite forgave me for that.”
“The Philip you knew then was quite capable of holding it against you,” he admitted, with a reminiscent smile. “In fact, if I remember right, I believe he did cherish some boyish notion of showing you, some time, how completely mistaken you were; how far superior he was to your prejudiced opinion of him.”
She looked around at him with a flash of the old-time mockery in her eyes.
“Does he feel that way now?” she asked.
“Ah!” he returned quickly, “I think you know very well how he feels now. Harry has told you everything there was to tell, hasn’t he?”
She made the sign of assent, adding: “But only as a loyal friend, you may be sure.”
“Of course. Harry is incapable of disloyalty. What I am afraid of is that he was too loyal; that he hasn’t stood the thing upon its rightful feet. It wasn’t the finding of my father as—well, as I did find him, that smashed me, Jean.”
“What was it, then?”
“Just my own miserable pride and Phariseeism—and weakness. There was no excuse; none whatever. I didn’t have to go to the devil merely because my father had chosen to do so. On the other hand, it was up to me to make the name honorable again, if I could. But I didn’t stop to think of that.”
“How curiously things turn out,” she mused. “We lived almost next door to your father in the Whittle Block. I saw him nearly every day; he would be coming in in the morning just about the time I wouldbe going to work. And we—that is, I—knew his—the woman, a little. She was not all bad, Philip; she was human and kind-hearted. When Mummie was sick——”
“I know,” he interposed. “There is no shadow of bitterness in me now, Jean; and I thank God there is none of the old narrowness left—or I hope there isn’t. It is a thousand pities that some of us have to go through hell to find out that there is no such thing as a hopelessly lost soul.”
“Have you found that out, at last?” she asked softly.
“I think so; I hope so. And God knows, the price I am paying for the knowledge is heavy enough.”
“What is the price, Philip?”
He hesitated for the fraction of a second. Then he turned to her impulsively, hungrily, and held out his arms.
“It is the knowledge that I can’t come to you with clean hands and heart and soul, Jean. Isn’t that enough?”
The dark eyes met his gray ones fairly and there were quick-springing tears in them.
“Ah, Philip, dear ... it’s been such a long time! And it might be enough to come between us—what you have done; perhaps it would be, if—if I didn’t love you so!”
On the pinnacle rock of the western shoulder of the great mountain Bromley had been keeping his companion interested in the wide-flung view; also, he had been stealing a glance now and again through the field-glasses, as he stood behind Mysie, at the twofigures sitting side by side on a ledge of rock over on the distant trail. It was not until after he had seen the two figures melt into one that he said:
“If you have looked your fill, Mysie, mine, perhaps we’d better be getting back to Jeanie. Shouldn’t you think she’d be missing us horribly by this time? Let me climb down first; then I can catch you as you jump.”
(THE END)