“Pity about Jim,” said the promoter. “At bottom he’s a man, right; but he can’t let liquor and the paste-boards alone. He has been moderately well-fixed at least three times, to my certain knowledge, and each time he has blown it all; gambled it and given it away—or so much of it as he didn’t pass across the bar.”
Philip was conscious of a curious little shock when he realized that this cataloguing of Garth’s weaknesses now stirred no resentful or condemnatory emotion in him.
“Perhaps that is the way in which he gets the most out of life,” he offered colorlessly. “There is no accounting for the difference in tastes.”
“No; but Big Jim is really worth saving, if somebody would take the trouble,” Drew put in, adding: “I don’t suppose anybody has ever cared enough for him to try to brace him up—at least, nobody since his wife died.”
“He was married?” Philip queried. “I worked beside him all winter and never knew that.”
“It was one of those cases you read about—and seldom see in real life,” Drew went on reminiscently. “It happened in one of the intervals when Jim was on top, financially. A gambler, whose name I have forgotten, brought a girl here from the East—a ‘chippy,’ I suppose you’d call her—abused her shamefully, made her support him for a time and then abandoned her. Jim heard about it, and after marrying the girl off-hand, hunted up the gambler and shot him within an inch of his life. The girl turned out to be a jewel as Jim’s wife; stuck to him through thick and thin, and actually got him to stop drinking and gambling. Then the altitude, and the hard life she had lived before she met Jim, grabbed her and she died. Naturally, poor old Jim went all to pieces again.”
“Naturally,” Philip agreed. His eyes were narrowed and he was conscious of a curious deadening of the heart. The story of Garth’s tragedy did not move him as it would have moved him no longer ago than yesterday. Instead, he was asking himself why Garth shouldn’t take to drink and dissipation to drown his grief? For that matter, why shouldn’t any man, if he happened to lean that way?
Drew looked at his watch and rose.
“I have an appointment that I was about to forget,” he said. “Intending to stop over with us for a while?”
“Perhaps. I haven’t made any plans.”