BY FRANCIS LYNDE

NOVELS

THE TENDERFOOTS
MELLOWING MONEY
THE FIGHT ON THE STANDING STONE
PIRATES’ HOPE
THE FIRE BRINGERS
THE GIRL, A HORSE, AND A DOG
THE WRECKERS
DAVID VALLORY
BRANDED
STRANDED IN ARCADY
AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN
THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS
THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGEBRUSH
THE PRICE
A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT

BOYS’ BOOKS

THE CRUISE OF THE CUTTLEFISH
THE GOLDEN SPIDER
DICK AND LARRY, FRESHMEN
THE DONOVAN CHANCE

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

THE TENDERFOOTS

THE TENDERFOOTS

BY
FRANCIS LYNDE

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1926

Copyright, 1926, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Copyright, 1925, by STREET & SMITH, INC., under the title
“The Prisoner and the Play-Boy”
Printed in the United States of America

TO
MARY ANTOINETTE LYNDE
THE SAME SMALL PERSON TO WHOM MY FIRST
BOOK WAS DEDICATED MANY YEARS AGO, AND
WHOSE MEMORIES ARE CLOSELY LINKED WITH
MINE IN THESE PAGES, THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY
INSCRIBED

THE TENDERFOOTS

THE TENDERFOOTS

I

From where 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 an unfinished 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 jerking him 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 like you might 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 sidelong glance 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 buffalo were 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 shower of 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 invalid father; 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 switch frogs 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 giant who 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 breathing deeply 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.

II

Bright and early on the morning following his arrival in Denver, Philip presented himself at the general offices of the narrow-gauge mountain railroad to the officials of which he had been recommended by his late employers in Kansas City, and was promptly given a desk in the accounting department; the department head, whose thin, sandy hair, straggling gray beard and protuberant eyes gave him the aspect of a weird but benevolent pre-Adamite bird, asking but a single question.

“Not thinking of going prospecting right away, are you?”

“No,” said Philip, wondering what there might be in his appearance to suggest any such thing.

“All right; the bookkeeper will show you where to hang your coat.”

The employment footing made good, the newcomer’s spare time for the first few days was spent looking for a boarding place, the West Denver hotel, regarded from the thrifty New England point of view, proving far too expensive. The after-hours’ search gave him his earliest impressions of a city at the moment figuring as a Mecca, not only for eager fortune seekers of all ranks and castes, but also for mining-rush camp followers of every description. With the railroads daily pouring new throngs into the city, housing was at a fantastic premium, and many of the open squares were covered with the tents of those for whom there was no shelter otherwise. Having certain well-defined notions of what a self-respecting bachelor’s quarters should be, Philip searched in vain, and was finally constrained to accept the invitation of a fellow clerk in the railroad office to take him as a room-mate—this though the acceptance involved a rather rude shattering of the traditions. Instead of figuring as a paying guest in a home-like private house—no small children—with at least two of the daily meals at the family table, he found himself sharing dingy sleeping quarters on the third floor of a down-town business block, with the option of eating as he could in the turmoil of the dairy lunches and restaurants or going hungry.

“No home-sheltered coddling for you in this live man’s burg. The quicker you get over your tenderfoot flinchings, the happier you’ll be,” advised Middleton, with whom the down-town refuge was shared, and who, by virtue of a six-weeks’ longer Western residence than Philip’s, postured, in his own estimation at least, as an “old-timer.” “‘When you’re in Rome’—you know the rest of it. And let me tell you: you’ll have to chase your feet to keep up with the procession here, Philly, my boy. These particular Romans are a pretty swift lot, if you’ll let me tell it.”

Philip winced a little at the familiar “Philly.” He had known Middleton less than a week and was still calling him “Mister.” But familiarity of the nick-naming and back-slapping variety seemed to be the order of the day; a boisterous, hail-fellow-well-met freedom breezily brushing aside the conventional preliminaries to acquaintanceship. It was universal and one had to tolerate it; but Philip told himself that toleration need not go the length of imitation or approval.

Work, often stretching into many hours of overtime, filled the first few weeks for the tenderfoot from New Hampshire. The narrow-gauge railroad reaching out toward Leadville was taxed to its capacity and beyond, and there was little rest and less leisure for the office force. Still, Philip was able now and again to catch an appraisive glimpse of what was now becoming a thrilling and spectacular scene in the great American drama of development,—a headling, migratory irruption which had had its prototypes in the rush of the ’49-ers to the California gold fields, the wagon-train dash for Pike’s Peak, and the now waning invasion of the Black Hills by the gold seekers, but which differed from them all in being facilitated and tremendously augmented by a swift and easy railroad approach. Vaguely at first, but later with quickening pulses, Philip came to realize that the moment was epochal; that he was a passive participant in a spectacle which was marking one of the mighty human surges by which the wilderness barriers are broken down and the waste places occupied.

With a prophetic premonition that this might well be the last and perhaps the greatest of the surges, Philip was conscious of a growing and militant desire to be not only in it, but of it. The very air he breathed was intoxicating with the spirit of avid and eager activity and excitement, and the rush to the mountains increased as the season advanced. The labor turn-over in the railroad office grew to be a hampering burden, and now Philip understood why the auditor had asked him if he were a potential treasure hunter. Almost every day saw a new clerk installed to take the place of a fresh deserter. After the lapse of a short month, Philip, Middleton and Baxter, the head bookkeeper, were the three oldest employees, in point of time served, in the auditing department. Two railroads, the South Park and the Denver & Rio Grande, were building at frantic speed toward Leadville, racing each other to be first at the goal; and from the daily advancing end-of-track of each a stage line hurried the mixed mob of treasure-seekers and birds of prey of both sexes on to their destination in the great carbonate camp at the head of California Gulch. To sit calmly at a desk adding columns of figures while all this was going on became at first onerous, and later a daily fight for the needful concentration upon the adding monotonies.

By this time some of the first fruits of the carbonate harvest reaped and reaping in the sunset shadow of Mount Massive were beginning to make themselves manifest in the return to Denver of sundry lucky Argonauts whose royal spendings urged the plangencies to a quickened and more sonorous wave-beat. One victorious grub-staker was said to be burdened with an income of a quarter of a million a month from a single mine, and was sorely perplexed to find ways in which to spend it. A number of fortunate ones were buying up city lots at unheard-of prices; one was building a palatial hotel; another was planning a theater which was to rival the Opéra in Paris in costly magnificence.

These were substantials, and there were jocose extravagances to chorus them. One heard of a pair of cuff-links, diamond and emerald studded, purchased to order at the price of a king’s ransom; of a sybaritic Fortunatus who reveled luxuriously in night-shirts at three thousand dollars a dozen; of men who scorned the humble “chip” in the crowded gaming rooms and played with twenty-dollar gold pieces for counters.

Philip saw and heard and was conscious of penetrating inward stirrings. Was the totting-up of figures all he was good for? True, there were money-making opportunities even at the railroad desk; chances to lend his thrifty savings at usurious interest to potential prospectors; chances to make quick turn-overs on small margins, and with certain profits, in real-estate; invitations to get in on “ground floors” in many promising enterprises, not excepting the carefully guarded inside stock pool of the railroad company he was working for. But the inward stirrings were not for these ventures in the commonplace; they were even scornful of them. Money-lending, trading, stockjobbing—these were for the timid. For the venturer unafraid there was a braver and a richer field.

“How much experience does a fellow have to have to go prospecting?” he asked of Middleton, one day when the figure-adding had grown to be an anæsthetizing monotony hard to be borne.

Middleton grinned mockingly. “Hello!” he said. “It’s got you at last, has it?”

“I asked a plain question. What’s the answer?—if you know it.”

“Experience? Nine-tenths of the fools who are chasing into the hills don’t know free gold from iron pyrites, or carbonates from any other kind of black sand. It’s mostly bull luck when they find anything.”

“Yet they are finding it,” Philip put in.

“You hear of those who find it. The Lord knows, they make racket enough spending the proceeds. But you never hear much about the ninety-nine in a hundred who don’t find it.”

“Just the same, according to your tell, one man’s chance seems to be about as good as another’s. I believe I’d like to have a try at it, Middleton. Want to go along?”

“Not in a thousand years!” was the laughing refusal. “I’ll take mine straight, and in the peopled cities. I’ve got a girl back in Ohio, and I’m going after her one of these days—after this wild town settles down and quits being so rude and boisterous.”

Philip looked his desk-mate accusingly in the eye.

“It’s an even bet that you don’t,” he said calmly.

“Why won’t I?”

“I saw you last night-down at the corner of Holladay and Seventeenth.”

Middleton, lately a country-town bank clerk in his native Ohio, but who was now beginning to answer the invitation of a pair of rather moist eyes and lips that were a trifle too full, tried to laugh it off.

“You mean the ‘chippy’ I was with? I’m no monk, Philly; never set up to be. Besides, I’m willing to admit that I may have had one too many whiskey sours last night. Cheese it, and tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I’ve already told you. I think I’ll try my luck in the hills, if I can find a partner.”

“Good-by,” grunted Middleton, turning back to his tonnage sheet. “As for the partner part, all you have to do is to chase down to the station and shoot your invitation at the first likely looking fellow who gets off the next incoming train. He’ll be a rank tenderfoot, of course, but that won’t make any difference: there’ll be a pair of you—both innocents. Why, say, Philly; I’ll bet you’ve still got your first drink of red liquor waiting for you! Come, now—own up; haven’t you?”

“I should hope so,” said Philip austerely. “I didn’t come all the way out here to make a fool of myself.”

This time Middleton’s grin was openly derisive.

“My, my!” he jeered. “The spirit moves me to prophesy. I know your kind, Philly—up one side and down the other. When you let go, I hope I’ll be there to see. It’ll be better than a three-ring circus. Wine, women and song, and all the rest of it. Speaking of women——”

“You needn’t,” Philip cut in shortly; and he got up to answer the auditor’s desk bell.

The process of securing a partner for a prospecting trip was scarcely the simple matter that Middleton’s gibing suggestion had made it. Though there were many haphazard matings achieved hastily at the outfitting moment, a goodly proportion of the treasure hunters were coming in pairs and trios hailing from a common starting point in the east. In spite of the free-and-easy levelling of the conventions, Philip found it difficult to make acquaintances, his shell of provincial reserve remaining unchipped, though he tried hard enough to break it. Besides, he felt that he was justified in trying to choose judiciously. He could conceive of no experience more devastating than to be isolated in the wilderness for weeks and perhaps months with an ill-chosen partner for his only companion. The very intimacy of such an association would make it unbearable.

It was while he was still hesitating that a small duty urged itself upon him. It concerned the Mississippi family with the death-threatened husband and father. In a city where all were strangers he had fully intended keeping in touch with the Dabneys, if only to be ready to offer what small help a passing acquaintance might in case the threatened catastrophe should climax. Since he would shortly be leaving Denver, the duty pressed again, and he set apart an evening for the tracing of the Mississippians, going first to the American House to make inquiries.

Fortunately for his purpose, one of the hotel clerks, himself a Southerner, remembered the Dabneys. They had remained but a few days in the hotel; were now, so the clerk believed, camping in one of the tent colonies out on California or Stout Streets somewhere between Twentieth and Twenty-third. Yes, Captain Dabney had been in pretty bad shape, but it was to be assumed that he was still living. The clerk had been sufficiently interested to keep track of the obituary notices in the newspapers, and the Dabney name had not appeared in any of them. Inquiry among the tenters would probably enable Philip to find them.

Reproaching himself for his prolonged negligence, Philip set out to extend his search to the tent colonies. It was after he had reached the more sparsely built-up district, and was crossing a vacant square beyond the better-lighted streets, that a slender figure, seemingly materializing out of the ground at his feet, rose up to confront him, a pistol was thrust into his face, and he heard the familiar formula: “Hands up—and be quick about it!”

It is probably a fact that the element of shocked surprise, no less than the natural instinct of self-preservation, accounts for the easy success of the majority of hold-ups. Sudden impulse automatically prompts obedience, and the chance of making any resistance is lost. But impulsiveness was an inconsequent part of Philip’s equipment. Quite coolly measuring his chances, and well assured that he had a considerable advantage in avoirdupois, he knocked the threatening weapon aside and closed in a quick grapple with the highwayman. He was not greatly surprised when he found that his antagonist, though slightly built, was as wiry and supple as a trained acrobat; but in the clinching struggle it was weight that counted, and when the brief wrestling match ended in a fall, the hold-up man was disarmed and spread-eagled on the ground and Philip was sitting on him.

When he could get his breath the vanquished one laughed.

“Made a complete, beautiful and finished fizzle of it, d-didn’t I?” he gasped. “Let me tell you, my friend, it isn’t half so easy as it is made to appear in the yellow-back novels.”

“What the devil do you mean—trying to hold me up with a gun?” Philip demanded angrily.

“Why—if you must know, I meant to rob you; to take and appropriate to my own base uses that which I have not, and which you presumably have. Not having had the practice which makes perfect, I seem to have fallen down. Would you mind sitting a little farther back on me? I could breathe much better if you would.”

Philip got up and picked up the dropped weapon.

“I suppose I ought to shoot you with your own gun,” he snapped; and the reply to that was another chuckling laugh.

“You couldn’t, you know,” said the highwayman, sitting up. “It’s perfectly harmless—empty, as you may see for yourself if you’ll break it. You were quite safe in ignoring it.”

Philip regarded him curiously.

“What kind of a hold-up are you, anyway?” he asked.

“The rottenest of amateurs, as you have just proved upon my poor body. I thank you for the demonstration. It decides a nice question for me. I hesitated quite some time before I could tip the balance between this, and going into a restaurant, ordering and consuming a full meal, and being kicked out ignominiously for non-payment afterward. This seemed the more decent thing to do, but it is pretty evident that I lack something in the way of technique. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“I should say that you are either a fool or crazy,” said Philip bluntly.

“Wrong, both ways from the middle,” was the jocular retort. “At the present moment I am merely an empty stomach; and empty stomachs, as you may have observed, are notoriously lacking in any moral sense. May I get up?”

“Yes,” said Philip; and when the man was afoot: “Now walk ahead of me to that street lamp on the corner. I want to have a look at you.”

What the street lamp revealed was what he was rather expecting to see; a handsome, boyish face a trifle thin and haggard, eyes that were sunken a little, but with an unextinguished smile in them, a fairly good chin and jaw, a mouth just now wreathing itself in an impish grin under his captor’s frowning scrutiny.

“Umph!—you don’t look like a very hard case,” Philip decided.

“Oh, but I am, I assure you. I’ve been kicked out of two respectable colleges, dropped from the home club for conduct unbecoming a gentleman, and finally turned out of house and home by a justifiably irate father. Can I say more?”

“What are you doing in Denver?”

“You saw what I was trying to do a few minutes ago. The outcome dovetails accurately with everything else I have attempted since I parted with the final dollar of the even thousand with which I was disinherited. Failure seems to be my baptismal name.”

“What is your name?”

“Henry Wigglesworth Bromley. Please don’t smile at the middle third of it. That is a family heirloom—worse luck. But to the matter in hand: I’m afraid I’m detaining you. Shall I—‘mog,’ is the proper frontier word, I believe—shall I mog along down-town and surrender myself to the police?”

“Would you do that if I should tell you to?”

“Why not, if you require it? You are the victor, and to the victors belong the spoils—such as they are. If you hunger for vengeance, you shall have it. Only I warn you in advance that it won’t be complete. If the police lock me up, they will probably feed me, so you won’t be punishing me very savagely.”

For once in a way Philip yielded to an impulse, a prompting that he was never afterward able to trace to any satisfactory source. Dropping the captured revolver into his coat pocket, he pressed a gold piece into the hand of the amateur hold-up.

“Say that I’ve bought your gun and go get you a square meal,” he said, trying to say it gruffly. “Afterward, if you feel like it, go and sit in the lobby of the American House for your after-dinner smoke. I’m not making it mandatory. If you’re not there when I get back, it will be all right.”

“Thank you; while I’m eating I’ll think about that potential appointment. If I can sufficiently forget the Wigglesworth in my name I may keep the tryst, but don’t bank on it. I may—with a full-fed stomach—have a resurgence of the Wigglesworth family pride, and in that case——”

“Good-night,” said Philip abruptly, and went his way toward the tent colony in the next open square, wondering again where the impulse to brother this impish but curiously engaging highwayman came from.

III

In circumstances in which it would have been easy enough to fail, Philip found the family he was looking for almost at once; and it was the young woman with the dark eyes and hair and the enticing Southland voice and accent who slipped between the flaps of the lighted tent when he made his presence known.

“Oh, Mr. Trask—is it you?” she exclaimed, as the dim lamplight filtering through the canvas enabled her to recognize him. “This is kind of you, I’m sure. We’ve been wondering if we should ever see you again. I can’t imagine how you were ever able to find us.”

Philip, rejoicing in the softly smothered “r’s” of her speech, explained soberly. It was not so difficult. He had gone first to the hotel; and once in the tented square, a few inquiries had sufficed.

“I’m sorry I can’t ask you in,” she hastened to say. “You see, there isn’t so awfully much room in a tent, and—and the children are just going to bed. Would you mind sitting out here?”

There was a bench on the board platform that served as a dooryard for the tent, and they sat together on that. For the first few minutes Philip had an attack of self-consciousness that made him boil inwardly with suppressed rage. His human contacts for the past few weeks—or months, for that matter—had been strictly masculine, and he had never been wholly at ease with women, save those of his own family. Stilted inquiries as to how the sick Captain was getting along, and how they all liked Denver and the West, and how they thought the climate and the high altitude were going to agree with them, were as far as he got before a low laugh, with enough mockery in it to prick him sharply, interrupted him.

“Excuse me,” she murmured, “but it’s so deliciously funny to see you make such hard work of it. Are there no girls in the part of Yankeeland you come from?”

“Plenty of them,” he admitted; “but they are not like you.”

“Oh!” she laughed. “Is that a compliment, or the other thing?”

“It is just the plain truth. But the trouble isn’t with girls—it’s with me. I guess I’m not much of a ladies’ man.”

“I’m glad you’re not; I can’t imagine anything more deadly. Are you still working for the railroad?”

“Just at present, yes. But I’ll be quitting in a few days. I’m going to try my luck in the mountains—prospecting.”

“But—I thought you said you wouldn’t!”

“I did; but I was younger then than I am now.”

She laughed again. “All of six weeks younger. But I’m glad you are going. If the Captain could get well, and I were a man, I’d go, too.”

Philip was on the point of saying that he wished she were a man and would go with him; but upon second thought he concluded he didn’t wish it. Before he could straighten out the tangle of the first and second thoughts she was asking him if he knew anything about minerals and mining.

“Nothing at all. But others who don’t know any more than I do are going, and some of them are finding what they hoped to find.”

“It’s in the air,” she said. “You hear nothing but ‘strikes’ and ‘leads’ and ‘mother veins’ and ‘bonanzas.’ Lots of the people in these tents around us are here because some member of the family is sick, but they all talk excitedly about the big fortunes that are being made, and how Tom or Dick or Harry has just come in with a haversack full of ‘the pure quill,’ whatever that may mean.”

“You haven’t been hearing any more of it than I have,” said Philip. “Not as much, I think. The town is mad with the mining fever. I’m only waiting until I can find a suitable partner.”

“That ought not to be very hard—with everybody wanting to go.”

Philip shook his head. “I guess I’m not built right for mixing with people. I can’t seem to chum in with just anybody that comes along.”

“You oughtn’t to,” she returned decisively. Then, again with the mocking note in her voice: “They say the prospectors often have to fight to hold their claims after they have found them: you ought to pick out some big, strong fighting man for a partner, don’t you think?”

Philip was glad the canvas-filtered lamplight was too dim to let her see the flush her words evoked.

“You are thinking of that day on the train, and how I let the husky miner take your part when I should have done it myself? I’m not such a coward as that. I was trying to get out of my seat when the miner man got ahead of me. I want you to believe that.”

“Of course I’ll believe it.” Then, quite penitently: “You must forgive me for being rude again: I simply can’t help saying the meanest things, sometimes. Still, you know, I can’t imagine you as a fighter, really.”

“Can’t you?” said Philip; and then he boasted: “I had a fight with a hold-up on the way out here this evening—and got the best of him, too.” Whereupon he described with dry humor Henry Wigglesworth Bromley’s attempt to raise the price of a square meal; the brief battle and its outcome.

“You haven’t told all of it,” she suggested, when he paused with his refusal to accept Bromley’s offer to arrest himself on a charge of attempted highway robbery.

“What part have I left out?”

“Just the last of it, I think. You gave the robber some money to buy the square meal—I’m sure you did.”

“You are a witch!” Philip laughed. “That is exactly what I did do. I don’t know why I did it, but I did.”

“I know why,” was the prompt reply. “It was because you couldn’t help it. The poor boy’s desperation appealed to you—it appeals to me just in your telling of it. He isn’t bad; he is merely good stock gone to seed. Couldn’t you see that?”

“Not as clearly as you seem to. But he did appear to be worth helping a bit.”

“Ah; that is the chord I was trying to touch. You ought to help him some more, Mr. Trask. Don’t you reckon so?”

“‘Mr. Trask’ wouldn’t, but perhaps ‘Philip’ would,” he suggested mildly.

“Well, ‘Philip,’ then. Don’t you see how brave he is?—to laugh at himself and all his misfortunes, the hardships his wildness has brought upon him? You say you are looking for a prospecting partner; why don’t you take him?”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Certainly I mean it. It might result in two good things. If you could get him off in the mountains by himself, and live with him, and make him work hard, you might make a real man of him.”

“Yes?” said Philip. “That is one of the two good things. What is the other?”

“The other is what it might do for you. Or am I wrong about that?”

“No,” he said, after a little pause. “I still think you are a witch. You’ve found out that I live in a shell, and it’s so. I guess I was born that way. You think the shell would crack if I should take hold of a man like this Bromley and try to brother him?”

“I am sure it would,” she replied gravely. “It couldn’t help cracking.” Then, as a low-toned call came from the inside of the tent: “Yes, mummie, dear,—I’m coming.”

Philip got up and held out his hand.

“I am sorry I’m going away, because I’d like to be within call if you should need me. If you should move into a house, or leave Denver, will you let me know? A note addressed to me in care of the railroad office will be either forwarded or held until I come back.”

“I’ll write,” she promised, and the quick veiling of the dark eyes told him that she knew very well what he meant by her possible need.

“And about this young scapegrace who tried to hold me up: what you have suggested never occurred to me until you spoke of it. But if you think I ought to offer to take him along into the mountains, I don’t know but I’ll do it. It wouldn’t be any crazier than the things a lot of other people are doing in this mining-mad corner of the world just now.”

“Oh, you mustn’t take me too seriously. I have no right to tell you what you should do. But I did have a glimpse of what it might mean. I’m going to wish you good luck—the very best of luck. If you really want to be rich, I hope you’ll find one of these beautiful ‘bonanzas’ people are talking about; find it and live happily ever after. Good-by.”

“Good-by,” said Philip; and when she disappeared behind the tent flap, he picked his way out of the campers’ square and turned his steps townward.

It was after he had walked the five squares westward on Champa and the six northward down Seventeenth, and was turning into Blake, with the American House only a block distant, that a girlish figure slipped out of a doorway shadow, caught step with him, and slid a caressing arm under his with a murmured, “You look lonesome, baby, and I’m lonesome, too. Take me around to Min’s and stake me to a bottle of wine. I’m so thirsty I don’t know where I’m going to sleep to-night.”

Philip freed himself with a twist that had in it all the fierce virtue of his Puritan ancestry. Being fresh from a very human contact with a young woman of another sort, this appeal of the street-girl was like a stumbling plunge into muddy water. Backing away from the temptation which, he told himself hotly, was no temptation at all, he walked on quickly, and had scarcely recovered his balance when he entered the lobby of the hotel. Almost immediately he found Bromley, sprawled in one of the lounging chairs, deep in the enjoyment of a cigar which he waved airily as he caught sight of Philip.

“Benedicite, good wrestler! Pull up a chair and rest your face and hands,” he invited. Then, with a cheerful smile: “Why the pallid countenance? You look as though you’d just seen a ghost. Did some other fellow try to hold you up?”

Philip’s answering smile was a twisted grimace. “No; it was a woman, this time.”

“Worse and more of it. Lots of little devils in skirts chivvying around this town. Too many men fools roaming the streets with money in their pockets. ‘Wheresoever the body is, there will the eagles be gathered together’—only they’re not exactly eagles; they are birds of another feather. I know, because they clawed me a bit before my wallet went dry.”

“You were one of the fools?” said Philip sourly.

“You’d know it without my telling you. But to the law and the testimony. You see, the Wigglesworth family pride didn’t prevent me from keeping your kindly hint in mind—and I’ve obeyed it. Where do we begin?”

“Suppose we begin where we left off,” said Philip guardedly. “Is there any decent ambition left in you?”

Bromley took time to consider, and when he replied he was shaking his head doubtfully.

“To be perfectly frank about it, I’m not sure there has ever been anything worthy the high sounding name of ambition. You see, there is quite a lot of Bromley property scattered about in my home town—which is Philadelphia, if you care to know—and the income from it has heretofore proved fatal to anything like decent ambition on the part of a play-boy.”

“Your property?” Philip queried.

“Oh, dear, no; the governor’s. But he hasn’t kept too tight a hand on the purse strings; not tight enough, if we are to judge from the effects—the present horrible example being the most disastrous of the same. As I intimated on the scene of my latest fiasco, I stretched the rubber band once too often and it snapped back at me with a disinheriting thousand-dollar check attached. That, my dear benefactor, is my poor tale, poorly told. You see before you what might have been a man, but what probably—most probably—never will be a man.”

“Of course, if you are willing to let it go at that——” said Philip, leaving the sentence unfinished.

“You mean that I ought to pitch in and do something useful? My dear Mr. Good-wrestler——”

“My name is Trask,” Philip cut in shortly.

“Well, then, my dear Trask, I have never learned how to do useful things. One has to learn, I believe, if it’s only washing dishes in a cheap restaurant, or chopping wood. I should inevitably break the dishes, or let the axe slip and chop my foot.”

Philip made a gesture of impatience.

“I had a proposal to make to you, but it seems that it’s no use. I am about to strike out for the mountains, to try my luck prospecting. A friend of yours, whom you have never seen or even heard of, suggested that you might want to go along—as my partner.”

Bromley straightened himself in his chair and the mocking smile died out of his boyish eyes.

“A friend of mine, you say? I had some friends while my thousand lasted, but I haven’t any now.”

“Yes, you have at least one; though, as I have said, you have never seen or heard of her.”

The play-boy sank back into the depths of his chair.

“Ah, I see; a woman, and you told her about me. Am I such an object of pity as that, Trask?”

Philip forgot his New England insularity for a moment and put his hand on the play-boy’s knee.

“It was angelic pity, Bromley. Surely that needn’t hurt your pride.”

“Angels,” was the half-musing reply. “They can rise so much, so infinitely much, higher than a man when they hold on, and sink so much lower when they let go. This angel you speak of—is she yours, Trask?”

“No; only an acquaintance. I have met her only twice. But you haven’t said what you think of my proposal. It is made in good faith.”

“Don’t you see how impossible it is?”

“Why is it impossible?”

“A partnership presupposes mutual contributions. I have nothing to contribute; not even skill with a miner’s pick.”

“You have yourself and your two hands—which are probably not more unskilled than mine, for the kind of work we’d have to do.”

“But the outfit—the grub-stake?”

“I have money enough to carry the two of us through the summer. If we strike something, you can pay me back out of your half of the stake.”

For quite a long time Bromley sat with his head thrown back, and with the half-burned cigar, which had gone out and was cold and dead, clamped between his teeth. And his answer, when he made it, was strictly in character.

“What a hellish pity it is that I didn’t find you and try to hold you up weeks ago, Trask—while I had some few ravellings of the thousand left. Will you take a beggar with you on your quest of the golden fleece? Because, if you will, the beggar is yours. We mustn’t disappoint the angel.”

IV

The August sun had dropped behind a high-pitched horizon of saw-tooth peaks and broken ranges, leaving the upper air still shot through with a golden glow that was like the dome lighting of a vast celestial theater, by the time two young men, whose burro packs of camp equipment, supplies and digging tools marked them as prospectors, had picked their way down the last precipitous rock slide into a valley hemmed in by the broken ranges. At the close of a hard day’s march the straggling procession was heading for running water and a camp site; the water being a clear mountain stream brawling over its rocky bed in the valley bottom. Reaching the stream before the upper-air effulgencies had quite faded into the smoke-gray of twilight, a halt was made and preparations for a night camp briskly begun.

Two full months had elapsed since the partnership bargain had been struck in the lobby of the American House in Denver, and during the greater part of that interval Philip and the play-boy had prospected diligently in the foot-hills and eastern spurs of the Continental Divide, combing the gulches in the vicinity of Fair Play and Alma, and finding nothing more significant than an occasional abandoned tunnel or shaft, mute evidences that others had anticipated their own disappointment in this particular field. Drifting southwestward, past Mount Princeton, they had ascended Chalk Creek, crossed the range over a high pass into Taylor Park, and were now in new ground on the western side of the Divide.

“This side of the world looks better; or at least a little less shopworn,” Bromley remarked, after they had cooked and eaten their supper and were smoking bed-time pipes before the camp fire. “I think we have outrun the crowd, at last, and that is something to be thankful for.”

Philip opened his pocket knife and dug with the blade into the bowl of his pipe to make it draw better. The two months of outdoor life and hard manual labor had done for him what the treasure search was doing for many who had never before known what it was to lack a roof over their heads at night, or to live on a diet of pan-bread and bacon cooked over a camp fire. With the shedding of the white collar and its accompaniments and the donning of flannel shirt, belted trousers and top boots had come a gradual change in habits and outlook, and—surest distinguishing mark of the tenderfoot—a more or less unconscious aping of the “old-timer.” Since his razor had grown dull after the first week or two, he had let his beard grow; and for the single clerkly cigar smoked leisurely after the evening meal, he had substituted a manly pipe filled with shavings from a chewing plug.

Bromley had changed, too, though in a different way. Two months’ abstention from the hectic lights and their debilitating effects had put more flesh and better on his bones, a clearer light in his eyes and a springy alertness in his carriage; and though his clothes were as workmanlike as Philip’s, he contrived to wear them with a certain easy grace and freedom, and to look fit and trim in them. Also, though his razor was much duller than Philip’s, and their one scrap of looking-glass was broken, he continued to shave every second day.

“I’ve been wondering if a later crowd, with more ‘savvy’ than we have, perhaps, won’t go over the same ground that we have gone over and find a lot of stuff that we’ve missed,” said Philip, after the pipe-clearing pause.

“‘Savvy,’” Bromley chuckled. “When we started out I was moved to speculate upon what the wilderness might do to you, Phil; whether it would carve a lot of new hieroglyphs on you, or leave you unscarred in the security of your solid old Puritan shell. ‘Savvy’ is the answer.”

“Oh, go and hire a hall!” Philip grumbled good-naturedly. “Your vaporings make my back ache. Give us a rest!”

“There it is again,” laughed the play-boy. “Set the clock back six months or so and imagine yourself saying, ‘Go hire a hall,’ and ‘Give us a rest!’ to a group of the New England Trasks.”

“Humph! If it comes to that, you’ve changed some, too, in a couple of months,” Philip countered.

“Don’t I know it? Attrition—rubbing up against the right sort of thing—will occasionally work the miracle of making something out of nothing. You’ve rubbed off some of your New England virtues on me; I’m coming to be fairly plastered with them. There are even times when I can almost begin to look back with horror upon my young life wasted.”

“Keep it up, if you feel like it and it amuses you,” was the grunted comment. “I believe if you were dying, you’d joke about it.”

“Life, and death, too, are a joke, Philip, if you can get the right perspective on them. Have you ever, in an idle moment, observed the activities of the humble ant, whose ways we are so solemnly advised to consider for the acquiring of wisdom? Granting that the ant may know well enough what she is about, according to her lights, you must admit that her apparently aimless and futile chasings to and fro—up one side of a blade of grass and down the other, over a pebble and then under it—don’t impress the human beholder as evidences of anything more than mere restlessness, a frantic urge to keep moving. I’ve often wondered if we human ants may not be giving the same impression to any Being intelligent enough to philosophize about us.”

“This feverish mineral hunt, you mean?”

“Oh, that, and pretty nearly everything else we do. ‘Life’s fitful fever,’ Elizabethan Billy calls it—and he knew. But in one way we have the advantage of the ant; we can realize that our successive blades of grass and pebbles are all different.”

“How, different?”

“We put the day that is past behind us and step into another which is never the same. Or, if the day is the same, we are not. You’ll never be able to go back to the peace and quiet of a railroad desk, for example.”

“Maybe not. And you?”