The Tenderfoots by Francis Lynde

PASSING out through the hotel office with one thought effacing all others, namely, that companionship of any sort was not to be endured, Philip, a prey to the instinctive urge that drives the wounded animal to seek a hiding place, pulled his hat over his eyes, signalled to a passing cab and got in, telling the driver to take him to the Alamo Building.

Reaching his rooms, he scribbled a note for Bromley, merely saying that he was going out of town, filled a travelling-bag, jamming things into it with little regard for long-established habits of care and orderliness, and was presently on his way to the Union Depot, urging the cab driver to haste and still more haste. By a margin of seconds he caught the South Park train for Leadville; and as the short string of top-heavy, narrow-gauge cars went swaying and lurching out over the switches in the West Denver yard, he was choosing an isolated seat in the chair-car where he could settle himself to look the catastrophic revelation of the night fairly in the face.

With the scene of the revelation actually withdrawing into the distance, a vast incredulity seized him. Could it be possible that he had grown up in daily association with his father without so much as suspecting the existence of the iron-hard, desperate underman biding its time beneath an exterior so like that of other men in his walk of life as to be wholly unremarkable? It seemed fantastically unbelievable. Yet, in looking back upon the conventional New England home life he saw how it might be so.

The atmosphere of the home, as he had always known it, had been one of silent restraint, and there had been nothing like man-to-man comradeship between his father and himself. Not that this was at all singular. He had known many other households in the homeland in which the same spirit of reticence and aloofness, the same repression of all the emotions, were the natural order of things. The attitude was ingrained in the bone and blood; a heritage which, as he now realized, was his and his forebears'; the bequeathing of the stern stock which had fled from tyranny in England only to set up a repressive tyranny of its own in the new land beyond the sea.

But such reflections as these did not serve to lessen the completeness, the crushing completeness, of the blow that had fallen. Where was now that righteous pride of race he had paraded before Jean Dabney, the boast of honest and upright ancestors he had so confidently made? -- he, the son of a thief, a gambler, a hardened breaker of the laws of God and man. Of what use to him now was the growing hoard of gold in the Denver bank, since it could never buy back that which was irretrievably lost? How could he go on living from day to day with the knowledge that the accident of any day might give some sensation-mongering newspaper reporter the chance to write up Lucky-strike Trask of the "Little Jean" as the son of a well-known local faro-dealer and sporting man? In his mind's eye he could visualize the mocking headlines, and a wave of impotent rage, the agony of a tortured ego, swept over him.

He had no desire to eat when the train halted at the midday dinner station and did not leave his place in the chair-car. Later, through the long afternoon, he looked out, with eyes that saw without perceiving, upon the passing panorama of canyon cliffs and forested mountain slopes, of undulating distances in the South Park and the uplifted peaks of the Mosquito Range, deep in the misery of his wounding; aghast at the prospect of the future. It was with an added degree of wretchedness that he realized that his love for Jean Dabney, restrained and calmly calculated hitherto, seemed to have been set free in the chaotic crash of things, blazing up in passionate intensity now that its object was, as he told himself bitterly, snatched out of reach. That he could never go to her with the story of his humiliating discovery was the first sickening conclusion that had burned itself into his consciousness; and now this was followed by the appalling after-conclusion that he could not go to her at all; that the discovery in the gambling hell had cut him off at once and irrevocably from all association with her.

It was only natural that the thought of his own lapse, the fact that he had taken his first drink and in the drunkenness of it had spent the night in a brothel, seemed of small account in the general wreck. With the family honor already dragged so deeply in the mire of disgrace and criminality, what he might or might not do made little difference one way or the other. Not that he cherished as yet any desperate or boyish determination to take a fool's revenge by plunging into dissipation. There was only a dull indifference. Pride was dead and the barriers of self-control had been broken down, but life still had to be lived, in some fashion.

Upon arriving in Leadville he had himself driven to the hotel where he and Bromley had put up after they had come out of the mountains with Drew in the spring. Still having no desire to eat, he tried to smoke; and when the pipe, on an empty stomach, nauseated him, he went to the bar and called for a drink. As in the morning, the swallow or two of whiskey wrought a miracle and he sought the dining-room and ate a hearty meal. Afterward, with a mild cigar that had none of the dizzying effects of the empty-stomach pipe, he sat in the lobby, and it was there that Drew ran across him.

"Back with us again, are you? " was the genial promoter's greeting as he drew up a chair and planted himself in it for his own after-dinner smoke. "When did you reach?"

"Just an hour or so ago," Philip answered, surprised to find himself able to tolerate and even to welcome the companionship of the older man. "I came up on the South Park day train."

"And how is Henry Wigglesworth? Still making a quiet joke of the world at large?"

"Harry is all right. Good luck hasn't spoiled him, as I was afraid it might."

"Inclined to be a little wild, was he? " Drew remarked.