“Not until after it has beautifully spoiled a lot of us fellows who would have been at least half-way decent, normally. Just in my limited little circle I can point you to dozens of young fellows who never had any leanings toward the toboggan till they came West, but they are on it now. I’m one of ’em, and your partner’s another; only, as I told him last night, he can still be a pretty good sort of devil when the fit strikes him.”
“Last night?” echoed the play-boy. “What, in particular, happened last night?”
Briefly but succinctly Reddick told the story of the assault upon the Goguette stronghold and its outcome.
“Ah!” said Bromley at the finish; “I’m mighty glad you told me that, Reddick. I saw him putting the girl on the train and was by way of doing him a rank injustice. Afterward, I offered him his chance to tell me about it, but of course he wouldn’t take it; he isn’t built that way.”
“You’ve hit the nail on the head, Harry. In some ways, Phil is as queer as they make ’em. He has developed into an all-night rounder, all right; don’t make any mistake about that; but in spots he is as soft nowadays as he used to be high-headed and flinty when I first knew him a year ago. They tell me he has his hand in his pocket for the down-and-out every minute of the day. I’d like to know what hit him. It must have been something pretty solid to give him the jolt he’s had.”
“It was,” Bromley confirmed; but he added nothing to the bare admission.
“Some girl go back on him?”
“No; for a man of his make-up it was something even worse than that. I can’t tell you what it was, because, thus far, it is his own secret—or he believes it is.”
“I’ve quit,” said the passenger agent; and so the subject died.
After this explanation of the girl-at-the-train incident, Bromley breathed freer; and though he saw less and less of Philip as time passed, he continued to hope for the best, the hope founding itself upon nothing better, however, than an illogical theory of reactions good, bad and indifferent—swings of the pendulum, he called them. When Philip should see the ghastly emptiness of the life he was living—and he was too intelligent not to see it, in time—he would pick himself up out of the mire into which the blow to his pride had buffeted him and be the better and broader man for the humbling experience.