The Tenderfoots by Francis Lynde

IT was on one of these matchless September nights, when the stars were blazing in the black bowl of the heavens with a lustrous brilliancy that shamed the flaring gas street-lamps of the city of the plain, that the younger son of an English lord, who was supposed to be learning cattle ranching at first-hand on a range in Middle Park, wound up a day of gaudy dissipation in Denver by galloping his bronco down Holladay Street, yelling like a madman and firing his pistols right and left in true Wild West fashion.

To escape the flying bullets, the few late-hour pedestrians dodged for shelter as best they might, darting into alleyways or disappearing through doors that were always open after candle-lighting. As on a certain other epoch-marking night, Philip found his door of refuge opening for him apparently of its own accord, and when it was quickly closed behind him a pair of silken-soft arms went about his neck, and a voice that he had recalled many times in the past few weeks said, "Gee, Mr. Prince-man! It took you a fine long time to remember where I lived, didn't it? But I knew you'd come, some time. That shooting fool didn't hit you, did he?"

Philip unwound the clinging arms from his neck, but he did it gently.

"No, I'm not hurt," he answered. "I was on my way here, and all he did was to hurry me a little. Were you expecting anybody else?"

"Not me. I'd just come down when I heard the racket in the street and was opening the door to see what had broke loose. Want to go in the parlor with the bunch for a while?"

"No; we'll go up to your room. I want to talk to you."

She slipped an arm around him as they went up the stairs together, saying: "This is like old times, only the other time you was too parboiled to know where you was going. You ain't been drinking to-night, have you?"

"Not enough to amount to anything. I am as nearly sober as I ever get to be, nowadays."

In the room above a gas jet was burning low, and the girl turned it on full. Philip took off his hat and coat and threw them on the bed.

"I don't want to drink any more to-night, and I don't want you to drink," he said. "But I'll pay my way, just the same. " He handed her a twenty-dollar gold piece: "Take this down to Madam Blanche and tell her your friend is buying her best for the house, and that it is the price he is paying to be let alone."

While she was gone, he made a slow circuit of the room, alert to all the small details of his surroundings. By this time he knew the household routine of such places -- that each woman took care of her own room. There were little hints of personality that were not lost upon him: a single late-blooming rose in a tiny vase on the dresser, placed exactly in the middle of the freshly laundered linen cover; the girl's comb and brush and toilet appliances as clean and shining as if they had just come from the shop; spotless cleanliness everywhere. He pulled the dresser drawers open, one by one; here, too, there were decent orderliness and the smell of fresh laundering.

She came in just as he was closing the drawers and laughed good-naturedly.

"Didn't find anything to bite you, did you? " she asked. Then: "Blanche says the house is yours. She'll turn everybody else out in the street, if you say so."

"I don't want any part of the house but this," he returned. Then he reminded her of an omission: "When I was here before, you didn't tell me your name."

"A name's nothing. They call me ‘Little Irish' here, and I've never told 'em the name my mother gave me."

"But you will tell me, won't you?"

"If you care enough for me to want to know. It's Mona -- Mona Connaghey is the whole of it."

Philip sat down, and immediately she came and perched on his knee. Almost roughly he caught her up and planted her in a chair.

"I want to talk sense to you, Mona, and I can't do it if you stir up the devil in me," he told her soberly.

"Is it the devil you're calling it? " she laughed.