“All right; tell me what the maniac has been doing.”
“You have heard me speak of Middleton, the fat-faced railroad clerk I was rooming with when you first met me?”
“Yes.”
“He isn’t half a bad fellow in some ways, but, like a good many others in this demoralized town, he has a rotten streak in him. He is—or was—engaged to a girl back in Ohio; but that hasn’t kept him from chasing all sorts of women out here. To-night, after I left Jean, I found him loafing on the nearest street corner. He told me he was waiting for a girl; a girl who worked in a millinery shop. I led him on until he told me her name, which he had got from one of her girl workmates. He said it was a boy’s name—Jean.”
“You labored with him in good, old Puritan-dominie fashion?” said Bromley, with a crooked smile.
“You know mighty well I didn’t; though that would have been the sensible thing to do. He has an obscene twist in his brain, but for all that, I have no reason to believe that he hasn’t some decent limitations. If I had told him who the Dabneys are, and that they are friends of mine, that would have settled it. Instead of doing that, I went crazy mad—knocked him down and beat him—made a shouting ass of myself.”
Bromley laughed and thrust a hand across the reading table.
“Shake—you old fighting Roundhead!” he said. “Now I know you are all human! Is that what you were looking so glum about? You needn’t lose any sleep over such a little gust of righteous indignation as that. As a matter of fact, you ought to sleep the better for it.”
“Wait,” said Philip soberly. “It isn’t the mere fact that Middleton got what he was asking for; it is the other and bigger fact that I am no longer my own man, Harry. The frantic gold chase we have been through has done something to me; I don’t know what it is; but I do know I am not the man I was when I left New Hampshire a little more than eighteen months ago. I’m hag-ridden—possessed of a dumb devil. Every now and then I am made to realize that there are hellish possibilities in me that I never even dreamed of before I came out here.”
Bromley grew philosophical.