At the station Philip again glanced at his watch. There was still time enough, and he took the girl to the depot restaurant, tipped a waiter for a rush order, and told her she must eat. While she was at supper he bought a ticket and a sleeping-car berth and checked the shabby little trunk. Afterward, he went to sit with her until she finished eating, telling her to take her time; that he would see to it that she did not miss her train. Now that she had bathed her face and eyes and made herself presentable, he saw that she was, not pretty, perhaps, but wholesomely comely; and though she did not talk, the look in the big blue eyes that were evidently an inheritance from her Swedish or Danish ancestry was almost dog-like in its affection and gratitude.
When he took her out to the waiting eastbound train, the Denver & Rio Grande express from Pueblo and Colorado Springs had just pulled in, and if he had looked aside he would have seen Bromley welcoming a group of debarking travellers, with Stephen Drew carrying a hand-bag for one of them—a very beautiful and statuesque young woman with a peach-blow complexion and hair like spun gold. Also, he might have seen that, in the procession of the group toward the station egress, Bromley lagged behind, with an eye for himself and the girl standing at the steps of the eastbound sleeper.
“You will find some money in this envelope with the tickets,” he was saying to the girl, “and there is no string tied to it. Just go back to your people and thank God you’ve got the best part of your life before you yet.”
It was then that Harry Bromley, glancing back over his shoulder, saw a thing that he immediately wished he had not seen. The girl had tucked the ticket envelope into her bosom and put up her arms. “I wish you’d let me kiss you, just once,” she said chokingly. “I never knew there was ever such a man as you on top of God’s green earth!”
“There isn’t—not the way you mean it,” Philip denied quickly. “You mustn’t trust any of us—not even me.” Then he took her round face between his hands and kissed her and put her aboard her train; and Bromley, having witnessed the parting, plodded on after the Follansbee group, shaking his head and muttering to himself. He had been hoping that Philip’s plunge into the depths had stopped with the whiskey bottle and the gaming tables, but here was proof positive that it hadn’t. It was a man-killing world, this world of the unfettered West, and the trail of the serpent was over it all.
It was perhaps five minutes after the eastbound train had clanked out over the station switches when Philip lounged into Reddick’s office to lean upon the counter rail and watch the passenger agent as he fingered the keys of one of the lately introduced writing machines. Reddick stopped his two-finger performance and looked up to say, “Back again, are you?”
“Yes,” said the lounger, “but not to stay; just to ease your mind. The girl you were telling me about: she is on her way back to her folks in Iowa, on the train that has just pulled out. I don’t believe you will have to check her trunk again.”
“You went up to the Goguette’s and got her out?”
“Yes.”
Reddick thrust a hand over the railing. “Shake!” he said. “I wish there were more good devils like you in this rotten world—good devils with money to burn. I’d have done it myself, if I’d had the wherewithal. But it was too near pay-day for me.”