The Tenderfoots by Francis Lynde

THOUGH Bromley, swiftly changing from the up to the down train on the Sunday morning arrival in Leadville, should have won back to Denver at six o'clock Sunday evening, a freight wreck on the Kenosha Mountain grade held him up, and it was between nine and ten when, tired as he was by more than twenty-four hours of mountain railroad travel, he set out in search of Philip, making the rooms of the Alamo Building his starting point.

To his relief, the lighted transom assured him that the sitting-room was occupied; and when there was no answer to his knock, he opened the door noiselessly and entered. At first he thought the hunched figure in the hollowed-out easy chair beside the reading table was in a drunken stupor; but when he drew nearer he saw that the fancied stupor was merely a deep sleep of exhaustion. Silently placing a chair for himself on the other side of the table, he lighted his pipe and waited. After a time the sleeper in the hollowed chair stirred, stretched his arms over his head, and, at the smell of live tobacco smoke, opened his eyes and sat up with a jerk.

"You? " he muttered, blinking across the table at the play-boy.

"It's nobody else. Had a good nap?"

Philip's wordless response was to get up and reach for a half-emptied bottle standing on a bookcase; but Bromley stopped him.

"Let that alone, Phil -- for the moment, anyway; long enough to tell me what has hit you. You owe me that much, at least."

Philip sank back into the sleepy-hollow chair. "How much do you know? " he demanded sullenly.

"What Stephen Drew could tell me, added to what I happened to see at midnight last night when your train on the South Park met mine at the passing point in the mountains."

"You were going to Leadville to hunt me up?"

"Yes. Drew told me you needed to be knocked down and dragged out."

Philip's dull eyes glowed suddenly. "I ought to have had a gun last night! " he broke out savagely. "Those two tinhorns robbed me blind!"

"Of course they did. That is what they were out for. No, wait; I'm not going to preach. I grant you it's every man's privilege to go to the devil in his own fashion. Still, I'm a trifle curious."

Silence for the space of a long minute. Then: "You wouldn't understand, Harry; I couldn't make you understand if I should try. Say that the cursed atmosphere of this God-forsaken country got hold of me at last and that I stubbed my toe and fell down. That will cover it as well as anything."

"A good many of us fall down, but we get up again. Have you got to stay down?"

"It looks that way. I haven't anything to get up for."

"Why haven't you?"

"That question runs you up against a shut door, Harry; a door that I'll never open for anybody so long as I can keep it shut. Let that be understood, once for all."

"All right; we'll let it go at that, if you say so. Just the same -- -- "

"Well?"

"Oh, confound it -- you know what I want to say, and can't Phil! You've been more than a brother to me, ever since you picked me up out of the gutter a year ago and stood me on my two feet. Can't you see where this thing hits me?"