Francis Lynde

“ Philip agreed; and for a time before they extinguished the fire and recrossed the river to roll up in their blankets in the box canyon where the animals were grazing, they discussed the pressing matter of trail effacement without reaching any practical solution of the problem.
The next morning they were up and on their way in the earliest dawn twilight. As yet, there were no signs of the pursuit. The mountain silences were undisturbed save by the drumming thunder of the swift little river and the soft sighing of the dawn precursor breeze in the firs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was in the long winter evenings before the hearth fire in the half-buried cabin that he began to understand that Bromley was humanly and socially the better man; that there was in him a fine strain of gentle breeding which not only enabled him to rise superior to environment and association, but also gave him an outlook upon life unattainable by the under-gifted. From the beginning the play-boy had struck up a friendship, or rather an affectionate comradeship, with Garth that he, Philip, could not bring himself to share, try as he might. ”

“ The trail was blind and the snow was fetlock deep for the animals. The led horse was stubborn and hung back; and wherever a widening of the trail permitted, the jacks strayed and scattered. Philip’s temper grew short, and by the time he had reached the high, wind-blown, boulder-strewn notch which served as the pass over the spur range, he was cursing the scattering burros fluently and fingering the butt of the big revolver in an itching desire to bullet all three of them. ”

“ Philip rapped the ashes from his pipe and refilled it. From the very beginning of the summer Bromley had been offering a series of grateful surprises: dogged endurance, cheerfulness under privations, willingness to share hard labor—a loyal partner in all that the word implied. Slow to admit any one to the inner intimacies of friendship, as his Puritan heritage constrained him to be, Philip had weighed and measured the play-boy coldly, impartially, and before they had been many weeks together he was honest enough to admit that Bromley was as tempered steel to his own roughly forged iron ”

“ Being fresh from a very human contact with a young woman of another sort, this appeal of the street-girl was like a stumbling plunge into muddy water. Backing away from the temptation which, he told himself hotly, was no temptation at all, he walked on quickly, and had scarcely recovered his balance when he entered the lobby of the hotel. Almost immediately he found Bromley, sprawled in one of the lounging chairs, deep in the enjoyment of a cigar which he waved airily as he caught sight of Philip.
“Benedicite, good wrestler! Pull up a chair and rest your face and hands,” he invited. ”

“ Philip looked up with narrowed eyes. “Would you fight for this chance of ours if we’re pushed to it, Harry?”
Bromley laughed.
“I’ll shoot any man’s sheep that’ll try to bite me. Have you ever doubted it?”
“I didn’t know.”
“How about you?”
“I have never fired a rifle in my life; not at anything—much less at a man. But if I had to——”
“I know,” said Bromley with a grin. “You’re a chip off the old Puritan block. If the occasion should arise, you’d tell your New England conscience to look the other way, take cold-blooded aim, pull trigger and let the natural law of expanding gases take its course. ”

“ Until the menace of the overhanging avalanche should be removed, it would be a mere flirting with death to try to relieve the cabin roof of its buckling burden. In a few minutes Garth became a shapeless, climbing blot in the moonlight on the bare slope, the muffling deerskin making him look like a clumsy animal. That he could reach the critical point, impeded as he was by the awkward foot-rigging, seemed incredible to the anxious watchers below. Yet without the skis to support his weight, he could have done nothing. ”

“ Philip grunted. “Are you trying to tell me that I am hidebound?”
“Call it that, if you like. Life is little to you yet; some day you will see how wide the horizons really are. But, as I say, you are likely to pay for the privilege—pay in advance. It’s coming to you.”
Silence for a few moments while the smoke curled upward in delicate little rings from Bromley’s pipe. Then Philip said soberly: “You spoke a while back of reversion to type. I don’t know what type it is that I am reverting to. My people are all decent and well behaved, as far back as I know anything about them.” ”

“ Upon leaving the hotel, Bromley led the way down Harrison Avenue toward a restaurant not far from the stable where their outfit waited for them. With the mining excitement now at its most populous height, and the sidewalks filled with restless throngs of men, there was curiously little street disorder; this though the saloons, dance-halls and gaming rooms of a wide-open mining-camp city were running full blast, their garishly lighted entrances lacking even the customary slatted swing doors of concealment. ”

“ He knew the house. It was one that Middleton had pointed out to him a year in the past as one of the few places of the sort where, as the fat-faced tonnage clerk had phrased it, “a man needn’t carry a burglar-proof safe with him to be sure of finding his wallet when he wakes up in the morning.”
Philip looked at his watch. It had run down and he swore at it under his breath. The aftermath of the single gluttonous drink was still with him in the shape of a parched throat, a dry tongue, a fiercely aching head and a set of jangled nerves. ”

“ In his mad haste he failed to hold the gunstock firmly against his shoulder, and at the trigger-pulling the kick of the weapon slewed him around with a jerk that snapped his head against the rock behind him. For a brief instant the black bowl of the heavens was illuminated by a burst of fiery stars, and after that he knew nothing more until he opened his aching eyes upon a graying dawn to find Garth kneeling beside him, unbuttoning his shirt to search for the presumptive effacing wound.
At the touch of the big man’s cold hands he sat up, with the buzzing of many bees in his brain. ”

“ Philip’s reply was an emphatic negative. “We can make it; we’ve got to make it,” he declared. “If those people are chasing us, they can’t be very far behind, and if we stop here they’ll catch up with us. And if we let them do that, we’d never be able to shake them off.”
“As you like,” Bromley yielded, and the precipitous ascent was begun.
With anything less than tenderfoot inexperience for the driving power, and the luck of the novice for a guardian angel, the perilous climb over a trail that was all but invisible in the darkness would never have been made without disaster. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Like the drilling and blasting, axe work and cabin building were unfamiliar crafts, to be learned only at a round price paid in the coin of aching backs, stiffened muscles and blistered palms. Nevertheless, at the end of a toiling fortnight they had a one-room cabin roofed in, chimneyed and chinked with clay, a rude stone forge built for the drill sharpening and tempering, and a charcoal pit dug, filled and fired to provide the forge fuel. ”

“ I have shut myself out of the world of decent people, and I’ve only decency enough left in me to know that I shall never be able to look a pure woman in the face again. I have only one comfort now, Harry, and that is that I have never given Jean any reason to believe that I was in love with her. ”

“ With the instinctive antagonism to prompt it, there was a sharp reply on the end of Philip’s tongue. But he suppressed it.
“I like to ramble around a little now and then in the evenings,” he substituted; and Middleton laughed.
“You don’t mean to say that you’ve become human enough to do a little ‘chasing’ for yourself?”
Philip did not affect to misunderstand. With the curious inner voice whispering that this was the proper time to answer a fool according to his folly, he said mildly: “Weren’t you continually setting me the example last year?” ”

“ Am I such an object of pity as that, Trask?”
Philip forgot his New England insularity for a moment and put his hand on the play-boy’s knee.
“It was angelic pity, Bromley. Surely that needn’t hurt your pride.”
“Angels,” was the half-musing reply. “They can rise so much, so infinitely much, higher than a man when they hold on, and sink so much lower when they let go. This angel you speak of—is she yours, Trask?” ”

“ Philip said to me once that whatever you had done, you had kept your soul clean.”
“He did, eh? He said the same thing to me, no longer ago than last night. That’s all either of you know about it. A year ago I wasn’t worth the powder it would have taken to blow me up, Jean; that is the plain, unvarnished fact. I’m not right sure that I am any better now; not in Philip’s definition of goodness. Thanks to you and to him, I’ve got a pot of money; and money brings responsibility; and responsibility bespeaks some little effort at decent living. ”

“ Nothing is more certain than that the inhibitions are dependent, more often than not, upon purely extraneous circumstances: environment, the mental attitude of the moment, even such trivial influences as the cut of one’s clothes and the obligations imposed thereby. Clad in a flannel shirt, baggy trousers and miner’s boots, Philip had thought nothing of the civilized restraints when he had flung himself, tooth and nail, upon the drunken bully who was menacing Bromley in the bar-room of the Leadville hotel. ”

“ Bromley could bridge the social gap between himself and Garth apparently without effort; could and did. In the pipe-smoking hours before the cabin fire it was the play-boy and the bearded frontiersman who were companions, while Philip found himself sitting apart and brooding.
“How do you do it, Harry?” he asked, one evening when Garth, who thought he had seen deer tracks in the snow, had gone out to the water hole in the creek to try for a moonlight shot at more meat.
“Do what—chum in with Big Jim? Why shouldn’t I? He’s a man, isn’t he?” ”

“ It is a family tradition of ours that there was once a Wigglesworth who was a raw-head-and-bloody-bones pirate and wound up by getting himself hanged in chains. I shouldn’t worry, if I were you.”
“That is just the difference between us, Harry,” was the somber rejoinder. “You wouldn’t worry if you knew the world were coming to an end to-morrow. I don’t happen to be built that way. For a time this evening, while I was with Jean Dabney, I was able to recognize myself as the normal Philip Trask. ”

“ Philip shook his head in discouragement.
“If she doesn’t get my note and answer it, it will be much like looking for a needle in a haystack. You see what this town has grown to in a single year. Besides, if we should find the Dabneys, I can assure you in advance that they are not the kind of people you can give money to.”
“Trust me for that part of it,” Bromley said. “There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it to death with thick cream. If you are through, let’s go out and see what this money-mad city looks like by lamplight in the spring of a new year. ”

“ But the deepening drifts in the gulch were now threatening to bury the small cabin, chimney and all, and no little of their daylight time was spent in keeping the snow shovelled from the roof, and the paths open to the tunnel, to the woodpile and to the creek from which they were still obtaining their drinking water.
Life under such conditions—complete and unbreakable isolation, day-long toil, much of which must be squandered in a bare struggle for existence, and the constant and wearing demand upon fortitude and endurance—exacts penalties in whatever coin the debtor may be able to pay. ”

“ You are a cold-blooded fish, Philip, dear. But we were talking about futures. I take it the teaching job in a New England college doesn’t appeal to you now; or won’t if our mine keeps its promise?”
“Honestly, Harry, I can’t see very far ahead. I’m not at all sure that I want to go back and finish my college course. There is nothing truer than the saying we have hurled at us all the time out here—that the West lays hold of a man and refuses to let go; that you may be as homesick as the devil, but you’ll never go home to stay. ”

“ Does the foolish evil cancel all the wise good? When it comes to that, how many of us have a clean slate? I’m sure I haven’t, for one. How about you?”
Philip was silent for a time, and when he spoke again it was to say, rather complacently: “I think you have seen the worst of me, Harry.”
Bromley smiled again and shook his head. “I’ve seen the best of you, Phil. I’m only fearing the worst.” ”

“ There was only one fly in this precious pot of ointment: that saying of Jean’s scarcely an hour old: “I suppose I am like other women. When the time comes—if it ever does come—that I think enough of a man to marry him, I shan’t ask what he has been; only what he is and means to be.” Was she trying to tell him that Bromley was the man?
It was in that hour that the virtuous ego rose to its most self-satisfied height. ”

“ Granting that the ant may know well enough what she is about, according to her lights, you must admit that her apparently aimless and futile chasings to and fro—up one side of a blade of grass and down the other, over a pebble and then under it—don’t impress the human beholder as evidences of anything more than mere restlessness, a frantic urge to keep moving. I’ve often wondered if we human ants may not be giving the same impression to any Being intelligent enough to philosophize about us. ”

“ But Bromley, cheerful to the last, refused to be daunted. “While there’s life, there’s hope,” he insisted. “The snow is melting fast now.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to us how fast it melts; you and I will never leave this gulch alive, Harry. As I’ve said, neither one of us could tramp five miles in a day, even over a level trail. It’s the end.”
“You say ‘you and I’. Big Jim doesn’t complain much, but he is as badly off as either of us.”
Philip, propped in his bunk, rocked his head on the blanket pillow.
“I don’t trust Garth,” he muttered. ”

“ With the vanishing of this, the only other possible clue he could think of, Philip spent the remainder of the day in aimless wanderings in the streets, passing the sidewalk throngs in review in some vague hope that he might thus stumble upon Jean or her mother. When the hope refused to materialize, he returned to the St. James in time to join Bromley at dinner, and for the first half of the meal was but a poor table-mate for his lighthearted partner.
“What is the matter with you, Phil? Is the rich man’s burden crushing you this early in the game?” ”