But bless my stars, how my anxiety for you has drawn me into digression? I started to tell you what happened at the gun-store. You know it’s a place where some clever men drop in and lounge a bit and swap sporting stories and smoke a friendly cigar. I heard some one call me to the rear, and going back, I found Belford and their reverences, Tom Uzzell and Myron Reed—God bless their manly souls—and one or two others I did not know. And your friend, the Reverend Myron, was reading aloud to the crowd that fanciful little jingle you had in yesterday’s Times about the beautiful but willful maid who wandered down to the shore of sin and got snatched back by some compunctious Joseph before the undertow caught her, or language to that general effect;—forgive me, I haven’t been able to read it myself and cannot recall a line of it although I recognized it as a gem.
Well, you could see the little crowd was being affected, for Mr. Reed was delivering it with exquisite feeling, and when he had finished, there was a general glance of admiration all round; and Mr. Uzzell remarked that there was a fine sermon—I think, on reflection, that he said a fine, strong sermon—in the verses; and your friend Reed smiled. Then Belford, in a characteristic burst of rhetoric, declared that “The Muses must have kissed in his cradle, the fellow who wrote those lines.” And your friend, the Reverend Myron, smiled out loud, and Belford glanced around the crowd for approval.
I shouldn’t consider that fraternal magnanimity required me to repeat these flattering expressions to you, Cy, only that I feel your doom draws nigh. It is borne in upon me with all the psychic force of a prophecy that you are fated to perish by the ignominious hand of our own and only Soapy, if you persist in starting that daily. You can’t run a daily without saying something, and you can’t say anything that ought to be said without giving mortal offense to the toughs who are running that camp, and you can’t give offense to them without getting shot. It is an ancient saying that “a word to the wise is sufficient”; but it were better to say, as experience proves, that a word to the wise is generally superfluous. Be wise, Cyrus, in your day and generation. Seek fame in other fields. Open a boarding-house or an undertaker’s shop, or both. This will give you a chance to study human nature in all its phases. It is the school for a poet and philosopher. Don’t miss the opportunity. Don’t waste your promising young life writing poetry or running a daily paper to reform the morals of a mining camp. Either is sure to bring you to an ignominious grave. But if, in spite of my prayers and tears, you will persist, send me your paper. I shall have a curiosity to see what sort of a stagger you make at moulding the protoplasm of public opinion into a cellular structure of moral impulse. Send me the paper, sure. So-long. God protect you.
Always,
Fitz-Mac.
P. S.—Now, may confusion take my muddled brains, but I have overlooked the very thing I started to write you about.
The inclosed letter of introduction will make you acquainted with Miss Polly Parsons, a young girl whom I have known from childhood, and in whose welfare I take a serious interest. She is a bright and beautiful girl—and a thoroughly good girl, let me remark—and I want her to know you and feel that she has a friend in you on whom she can call for counsel and protection if need be.
She is under the necessity, not only of making her own living, but of contributing to the support of her father’s family. Her mother and little brother are here, living in two rooms, but her father is in Chicago. I knew the family there years ago when they were very rich, and surrounded by every luxury—fine home on Michigan avenue, carriages and footman and all that. But Parsons went broke a few years ago on grain speculations, and the worst of it is, he lost his courage with his money and is now a broken-spirited man, doing the leg work for brokers and leaving his family to shift for themselves, or pretty nearly so. I suppose it is really impossible for the poor fellow to help them very much or he would, for he loved his wife and children. Polly had every advantage that money could purchase till the old man failed, and she is finely educated. She is a girl of great courage and has an ambition to make a business woman of herself and help her father onto his feet again. She has some of his genius for bold, speculative action, and has taken up stenography and typewriting—not as an end but only as a means.
I am very much afraid she has made a serious misstep in going to Creede and that she will get herself hopelessly compromised before she is done with it.
She has gone down with that Sure Thing Mining Company outfit and I suspect they are a bad lot; but some of them knew her father in the past, and thus gained her confidence. She is too pretty a girl and too inexperienced to be exposed to the associations of a mining camp like Creede, where there are so few decent women, without great danger. She has got courage and an earnest purpose, and those qualities are a woman’s best safeguard; but still, she is only a girl of nineteen or twenty and she doesn’t realize what a delicate thing a woman’s reputation is. It was sheer recklessness for her to go down there; but I didn’t know it till after she was off. Her mother got anxious after she had let her go and came to see me about it. I believe—without positively knowing—that the outfit she has gone to are right-down scamps. They seem to have plenty of money and they have opened a grand office here, but they strike me as bad eggs. A very suspicious circumstance in regard to their motives toward her—to my mind at least—is that they have promised her a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a month. That is simply preposterous. (You know that they can get an army of competent stenographers and typewriters at one hundred dollars a month, or even less.) I don’t like the looks of it a bit. I suspect they—or one of them—have designs against the girl.
