“Not married?”
“Oh, I suppose not. People of his and her kind don’t bother about the little moral formalities. Going up-town? Wait a minute and I’ll walk with you. I’m about through here.”
It was on the way up Seventeenth Street that Reddick said: “Don’t see you and Phil Trask chasing around together so much as you used to”—and stopped short with that.
“No,” Bromley admitted. “I have the social bug, more or less, and Phil hasn’t.”
“Money doesn’t spoil some people,” remarked the railroad man cryptically.
“But it does others? Chuck it out, Reddick. What do you know about Phil?”
“Oh, I run across him here and there—in places that I didn’t think he’d consent to be found dead in. You see, I knew him when he was with the narrow-gauge a year ago, before he went prospecting. In those days all he needed to make him a saint was a halo; but now he gambles a little, takes a drink when he feels like it—does a lot of things you couldn’t have hired him to do when he first came to Denver.”
“I know,” said the play-boy easily. “I take a drink now and then, myself.”
“But I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars you don’t take it solo, and in the places where I’ve seen Phil. However, let’s forget it. It’s none of my business.”
At the corner of Curtis and Seventeenth, Bromley bade his walking companion good-night and turned westward. In the West Denver cottage he found that Jean was the only one sitting up; she was trimming a hat for herself.