The Tenderfoots by Francis Lynde

WHEN Bromley came in at half-past eleven, glowing from his brisk walk in the cool night air from the Demming house in upper Fourteenth Street, he found that Philip had not yet gone to bed; was sitting with his hands locked over a knee and an extinct pipe between his teeth, his face the face of a man frowningly at odds with himself and his world.

"Heavens, Phil! " was the play-boy's greeting, "You look as if you had lost every friend you ever had and never expected to find another. What's gnawing you now?"

"I suppose you would call it nothing," returned the loser moodily. "I've merely been finding out that I can be still another and different kind of a crazy fool."

Bromley grinned. "You have been to the Corinthian again?"

"Oh, hell -- no! I said a different kind of a fool. Drop it, Harry. I don't want to talk about it."

Thus extinguished, Bromley slipped out of his overcoat, struggled into a smoking jacket, and filled and lighted his pipe; all this in comradely silence. After a time the mere fact of his presence seemed to exert a mollifying effect, for when Philip spoke again it was to say, less irritably: "I have found the Dabney family, at last."

"Good! " exclaimed the play-boy. "Nothing so very foolish about that. How did it eventuate?"

In clipped sentences Philip told of the accidental street meeting with Jean, and of the dinner _à deux_ at Charpiot's, winding up with: "It fairly gave me a heartache to see how hungry she was. She said she hadn't had time to go out to luncheon, but I am morally certain that was only half of the truth. The other half was that she couldn't afford to feed herself in the middle of the day."

Bromley whistled softly.

"Say, Philip, that is tough! I know, because I have been there myself. What else did you find out?"

"After dinner I walked home with her, though she didn't want me to. When we reached the place I saw why she had tried to shake me. They are living in a shabby tenement block down there within a stone's throw of the Corinthian. She apologized for not being able to ask me in."

"Suffering Scott! -- in _that_ neighborhood? Wasn't there anybody to tell them what they were getting into down there?"

"She gave me to understand that there was no choice; that they were obliged to take shelter where they could find it -- and afford it. They know -- or at least she does -- what sort of people they are mixing with. She says they are kind to her and her mother and the children."

Bromley nodded slowly. "People of that sort would be -- to hard-luck people of her sort. That is one of the queer things in this mixed-up world of ours. So far as sheer safety is concerned, she is probably just as safe in that tenement dive as she would be in the most respectable mansion in Denver. All the same, we ought to get them out of there. Have you thought of anything?"

"No; I can't think. I had a crazy fit just after she left me, and I haven't been able to think of much else since."

"Suppose you unload on me and get it off your chest," Bromley suggested.

"I will, because you ought to know. If you are to go on living in the same apartment with a howling maniac -- -- "

"All right; tell me what the maniac has been doing."

"You have heard me speak of Middleton, the fat-faced railroad clerk I was rooming with when you first met me?"

"Yes."