Reflecting upon it afterward, he thought it a most curious coincidence that the night chill should have awakened him just at this time, and that the momentary stop of the opposing train should place the one pair of lighted windows in its single Pullman opposite his own darkened one. While one might have counted ten he sat staring, wide-eyed, across the little space separating the two standing trains. The lighted windows opposite were those in the smoking compartment of the eastbound sleeper. Around the little table bracketed between the seats sat three men with cards in their hands and stacks of red, white and blue counters before them. Though two of the men were unknown to the play-boy, he was able instantly to label them as birds of prey. The third man was Philip; a Philip so changed and wasted by two weeks of unrestraint as to be scarcely recognizable. As Bromley looked he saw one of the birds of prey pass a flat pocket bottle across the table; and his final glimpse through the lighted window as the down train slid away showed him Philip with his head thrown back and the tilted bottle at his lips. “Good Lord!” groaned the play-boy, falling back upon his pillows, “Drew didn’t stretch it an inch! Those two blacklegs will strip Phil to the skin before they let go of him and before they will let him get sober enough to realize what they’re doing to him! And I’ve got to go through to Leadville and come all the way back before I can get a chance to stick my oar in!” At the word the westbound train began to move, and he pulled the blankets up to his ears, muttering again: “There’s only one ray of comfort in the whole desperate business, and that is that Jean isn’t going to break her heart over this diabolic blow-up of Philip’s. I’m glad I took the trouble to make sure of that, anyhow.” But if, at this precise moment of midnight, he could have looked into the bed-room next to his own in the West Denver cottage, the room occupied by Jean and her sister Mysie, the comforting reflection might have lost something of its force. The younger sister was sleeping peacefully, but the elder had slipped quietly out of bed to kneel at the open, westward-fronting window with her shoulders shaking and her face buried in the crook of a bare white arm. XIX 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.