The employment footing made good, the newcomer’s spare time for the first few days was spent looking for a boarding place, the West Denver hotel, regarded from the thrifty New England point of view, proving far too expensive. The after-hours’ search gave him his earliest impressions of a city at the moment figuring as a Mecca, not only for eager fortune seekers of all ranks and castes, but also for mining-rush camp followers of every description. With the railroads daily pouring new throngs into the city, housing was at a fantastic premium, and many of the open squares were covered with the tents of those for whom there was no shelter otherwise. Having certain well-defined notions of what a self-respecting bachelor’s quarters should be, Philip searched in vain, and was finally constrained to accept the invitation of a fellow clerk in the railroad office to take him as a room-mate—this though the acceptance involved a rather rude shattering of the traditions. Instead of figuring as a paying guest in a home-like private house—no small children—with at least two of the daily meals at the family table, he found himself sharing dingy sleeping quarters on the third floor of a down-town business block, with the option of eating as he could in the turmoil of the dairy lunches and restaurants or going hungry.
“No home-sheltered coddling for you in this live man’s burg. The quicker you get over your tenderfoot flinchings, the happier you’ll be,” advised Middleton, with whom the down-town refuge was shared, and who, by virtue of a six-weeks’ longer Western residence than Philip’s, postured, in his own estimation at least, as an “old-timer.” “‘When you’re in Rome’—you know the rest of it. And let me tell you: you’ll have to chase your feet to keep up with the procession here, Philly, my boy. These particular Romans are a pretty swift lot, if you’ll let me tell it.”
Philip winced a little at the familiar “Philly.” He had known Middleton less than a week and was still calling him “Mister.” But familiarity of the nick-naming and back-slapping variety seemed to be the order of the day; a boisterous, hail-fellow-well-met freedom breezily brushing aside the conventional preliminaries to acquaintanceship. It was universal and one had to tolerate it; but Philip told himself that toleration need not go the length of imitation or approval.
Work, often stretching into many hours of overtime, filled the first few weeks for the tenderfoot from New Hampshire. The narrow-gauge railroad reaching out toward Leadville was taxed to its capacity and beyond, and there was little rest and less leisure for the office force. Still, Philip was able now and again to catch an appraisive glimpse of what was now becoming a thrilling and spectacular scene in the great American drama of development,—a headling, migratory irruption which had had its prototypes in the rush of the ’49-ers to the California gold fields, the wagon-train dash for Pike’s Peak, and the now waning invasion of the Black Hills by the gold seekers, but which differed from them all in being facilitated and tremendously augmented by a swift and easy railroad approach. Vaguely at first, but later with quickening pulses, Philip came to realize that the moment was epochal; that he was a passive participant in a spectacle which was marking one of the mighty human surges by which the wilderness barriers are broken down and the waste places occupied.
With a prophetic premonition that this might well be the last and perhaps the greatest of the surges, Philip was conscious of a growing and militant desire to be not only in it, but of it. The very air he breathed was intoxicating with the spirit of avid and eager activity and excitement, and the rush to the mountains increased as the season advanced. The labor turn-over in the railroad office grew to be a hampering burden, and now Philip understood why the auditor had asked him if he were a potential treasure hunter. Almost every day saw a new clerk installed to take the place of a fresh deserter. After the lapse of a short month, Philip, Middleton and Baxter, the head bookkeeper, were the three oldest employees, in point of time served, in the auditing department. Two railroads, the South Park and the Denver & Rio Grande, were building at frantic speed toward Leadville, racing each other to be first at the goal; and from the daily advancing end-of-track of each a stage line hurried the mixed mob of treasure-seekers and birds of prey of both sexes on to their destination in the great carbonate camp at the head of California Gulch. To sit calmly at a desk adding columns of figures while all this was going on became at first onerous, and later a daily fight for the needful concentration upon the adding monotonies.
By this time some of the first fruits of the carbonate harvest reaped and reaping in the sunset shadow of Mount Massive were beginning to make themselves manifest in the return to Denver of sundry lucky Argonauts whose royal spendings urged the plangencies to a quickened and more sonorous wave-beat. One victorious grub-staker was said to be burdened with an income of a quarter of a million a month from a single mine, and was sorely perplexed to find ways in which to spend it. A number of fortunate ones were buying up city lots at unheard-of prices; one was building a palatial hotel; another was planning a theater which was to rival the Opéra in Paris in costly magnificence.
These were substantials, and there were jocose extravagances to chorus them. One heard of a pair of cuff-links, diamond and emerald studded, purchased to order at the price of a king’s ransom; of a sybaritic Fortunatus who reveled luxuriously in night-shirts at three thousand dollars a dozen; of men who scorned the humble “chip” in the crowded gaming rooms and played with twenty-dollar gold pieces for counters.
Philip saw and heard and was conscious of penetrating inward stirrings. Was the totting-up of figures all he was good for? True, there were money-making opportunities even at the railroad desk; chances to lend his thrifty savings at usurious interest to potential prospectors; chances to make quick turn-overs on small margins, and with certain profits, in real-estate; invitations to get in on “ground floors” in many promising enterprises, not excepting the carefully guarded inside stock pool of the railroad company he was working for. But the inward stirrings were not for these ventures in the commonplace; they were even scornful of them. Money-lending, trading, stockjobbing—these were for the timid. For the venturer unafraid there was a braver and a richer field.
“How much experience does a fellow have to have to go prospecting?” he asked of Middleton, one day when the figure-adding had grown to be an anæsthetizing monotony hard to be borne.
Middleton grinned mockingly. “Hello!” he said. “It’s got you at last, has it?”