I returned to Mr. Filmore’s office to leave a note with him for Parsons, and he told me all about K. The fellow is a thorough scamp and all his faults are aggravated by his smooth and oily hypocrisy. It is true he has a family here, as I mentioned yesterday, and that he maintains them in a show of comfort and respectability; but his wife is a broken-hearted, dispirited creature, whom he married at the muzzle of a frantic father’s gun. He drags her to church to keep up appearances; but that is all the respect or civility he shows her. When he was rich here, he kept a blonde angel of the demi-monde in swell style, with her carriage and all that, while his wife was left to stump around on foot, with an occasional excursion in company with the hired girl and the baby on the street-cars of a Sunday afternoon. Filmore says the wretch has ruined four or five poor girls in succession, who came to work in his office, and started them out on a sea of sin.
I hope Parsons has gone to Colorado, so that he may know just where his daughter is. I intended to give him my opinion of the matter very plainly, if I had found him.
You must keep a kindly eye on the poor child, Cy, and help her if you can. Roast that scoundrel and show up his rotten record and his swindling scheme, if he gives you half a chance to open on him. Jump him anyway, and don’t wait for a special provocation.
Filmore’s address—Stanley R. Filmore—is room 199 Marine Building, Chicago, and he will willingly supply you with facts enough from the man’s nefarious record to drive him out of Colorado with his swindling mining schemes. It ought to be done—of course only if the mine is a fake—for that sort of scamps and swindlers are the ones who are bringing mining propositions into disrepute in the East and making it almost impossible to raise money for legitimate enterprises. But I must close. Can you read this wild scrawl?
Yours,
Fitz-Mac.
VII.
Creede, Colo., April 13, ’93.
Dear Fitz:—Your letter of the 9th, in which you hasten to undo what you did for Ketchum in the preceding letter, if it had no other purpose, was unnecessary. You can never make me believe that a man who eats mashed potatoes with a knife, dips his soup toward him and lets his trousers trail in the mud, has been brought up in respectable society. If anything more was needed to convince me that Ketchum was a shark, it was supplied by him when he told Wygant that he regarded “advertising as unprofessional and unnecessary.” The newspapers, he said, did more harm than good. Now, when you hear a man talk that way, you can gamble that he is working the shells and that his game won’t stand airing.
In speaking of the embarrassment of becoming very poor after having been very rich, you amuse me, by praying to be delivered from that awful condition. Rest easy, my good fellow. If you follow your chosen path, that of mixing literature with mining, you will doubtless be independently poor the balance of your days.
Well, Miss Parsons is here. She is boarding at the Albany. The Albany is all right. It is the best place in the gulch; but, of course, you never know who is going to occupy the next seat. Last night, at dinner, the Rev. Tom Uzzell, the city editor and Soapy sat at one table; a murderer, a gambler, a hand-painted skirt-dancer and a Catholic priest held another, while Miss Parsons, Billy Woods, the prize-fighter, English Harry and I, ate wild duck at a large table near the stove. I introduced Harry, who is an estimable young man, belonging to one of the best families in Denver, with the hope that Miss Parsons might have an opportunity to see the difference between a real gentleman and that social leper, Ketchum. After dinner I told Harry that I wanted him to make love to Miss Parsons.