“Heaven knows; no longer than I can help, you may be sure. Good-by; take care of yourself, and don’t work too hard. If you want to do anything for me while I’m gone, just say a little prayer or two. It runs in my mind that I may need all the help I can get. Good-by.”
Having become, in a desultory way, a working capitalist, or at least an investing one, Bromley had a number of business matters to be despatched before he could leave town for an indefinite stay. None the less, out of a well-filled afternoon he clipped time enough to go around to the Colorado National Bank where Philip kept his account. Since he was known in the bank as Philip’s partner, he had no difficulty in finding out what he wished to learn. Philip had been drawing heavily on his checking account during the two weeks, and the drafts had all come through Leadville banks. Bromley asked for the approximate figure and gasped when he was told that the recent withdrawals totalled something over twenty thousand dollars.
Quartered in the sleeper for the night run to Leadville, Bromley, generously distressed, was still groping for some reasonable solution to the problem presented by Philip’s wild splash into the sea of dissipation—a plunge so wholly out of keeping with his character. Was Jean’s guess that he had found his father, and that the discovery had proved to be a calamity instead of a cause for rejoicing, the right one? If not, what other upsetting thing could have happened between half-past seven in the Monday evening, when he had left Philip in their common sitting-room in the Alamo Building, and the next morning when he had met him leaving the breakfast-table in Charpiot’s? Where had Philip spent the night? And what had occurred during those few unaccounted-for hours to put a look of morbid gloom in his eyes and to make him refuse, almost savagely, to become an inmate of the West Denver cottage?
“He’d had a knock-down fight of some sort with that strait-laced conscience of his, I suppose, and it must have been a bloody one to make him let go all holds like this,” the play-boy told himself, balancing on the edge of the made-down berth to take off his shoes as the train began its swaying, wheel-shrilling climb in the snake-like sinuosities of Platte Canyon. Then, as he drew the curtains and essayed the irritating task of undressing in the dark, cramped berth, with the car careening to right and left like a ship at sea: “He’ll find it bad medicine and bitter; but if it will only end by making a normal human man of him....”
It was deep in the night, and the train was halted at a mountain-side station, when Bromley awoke, shivering in the chill of the high altitude, and sat up to reach for the extra blanket at the foot of the berth. As he did so, a thunderous murmur in the air announced the approach of the Denver-bound train for which his own was side-tracked, and he ran a window shade up to look out just as the eastbound train, with its miniature locomotive and short string of cars, coasted down, with brake-shoes grinding, to the meeting-point stop.
Reflecting upon it afterward, he thought it a most curious coincidence that the night chill should have awakened him just at this time, and that the momentary stop of the opposing train should place the one pair of lighted windows in its single Pullman opposite his own darkened one. While one might have counted ten he sat staring, wide-eyed, across the little space separating the two standing trains. The lighted windows opposite were those in the smoking compartment of the eastbound sleeper. Around the little table bracketed between the seats sat three men with cards in their hands and stacks of red, white and blue counters before them. Though two of the men were unknown to the play-boy, he was able instantly to label them as birds of prey. The third man was Philip; a Philip so changed and wasted by two weeks of unrestraint as to be scarcely recognizable.
As Bromley looked he saw one of the birds of prey pass a flat pocket bottle across the table; and his final glimpse through the lighted window as the down train slid away showed him Philip with his head thrown back and the tilted bottle at his lips.
“Good Lord!” groaned the play-boy, falling back upon his pillows, “Drew didn’t stretch it an inch! Those two blacklegs will strip Phil to the skin before they let go of him and before they will let him get sober enough to realize what they’re doing to him! And I’ve got to go through to Leadville and come all the way back before I can get a chance to stick my oar in!” At the word the westbound train began to move, and he pulled the blankets up to his ears, muttering again: “There’s only one ray of comfort in the whole desperate business, and that is that Jean isn’t going to break her heart over this diabolic blow-up of Philip’s. I’m glad I took the trouble to make sure of that, anyhow.”
But if, at this precise moment of midnight, he could have looked into the bed-room next to his own in the West Denver cottage, the room occupied by Jean and her sister Mysie, the comforting reflection might have lost something of its force. The younger sister was sleeping peacefully, but the elder had slipped quietly out of bed to kneel at the open, westward-fronting window with her shoulders shaking and her face buried in the crook of a bare white arm.