THE Denver to which Philip and Harry Bromley returned, after their year in the mountain half of Colorado, had undergone many changes in the twelve-month; was still undergoing them. Developing under the double stimulus of the unabated rush of treasure--and health-seekers from the East and the marvelous and increasing flow of wealth from the mines, the city was growing like a juggler’s rose. In the business district the one- and two-storied makeshifts of pioneer days were rapidly giving place to statelier structures; a handsome railroad passenger terminal had been completed at the foot of Seventeenth Street; horse-car lines were extending in all directions; new hotels had sprung up; and the theater which was to rival in magnificence, if not in actual size, the Paris Opéra, was under construction. Unlike that of other western communities owing their prosperity to a mining boom, the city’s growth was notably substantial. With eastern and Pacific Coast lumber at a high freight rate premium, brick and the easily worked lava stone of the hogbacks were the chosen building materials. In the outlying residence districts the empty squares were filling with rows of brick cottages absurdly restricted in width by the limitations of the standard twenty-five-foot lots, but making up for the lack of breadth in slender length; and other streets besides Larimer were acquiring massive steel bridges over the bisecting Cherry Creek which, from being a mere moist sand bed in most seasons of the year, could--and did upon occasion--become a raging cloud-burst torrent, sweeping all before it. After quarters had been secured in the new St. James Hotel in Curtis Street, Philip left Bromley reading the morning papers in the lobby and went around to the building in Lawrence Street where he had served his brief apprenticeship in the auditor’s office of the narrow-gauge railroad. Here he learned that the mountain road had been absorbed by the Union Pacific, that its office force had been scattered, but that Middleton, his former desk-mate, could be found at the car-record desk in the Union Station. When he walked in upon the former tonnage clerk a little later, Middleton’s greeting was salted with a bantering grin. “Well, well, well; so the cat came back, did it? No, wait--let me say it: you’ve had your fill of the tall hills and want a railroad job again. Do I call the turn?” “Not exactly,” Philip returned, seating himself at the desk end. “I have looked you up to see if, by any chance, you have any mail for me.” “Sure! There’s a bunch of it. You didn’t seem to think it worth your while to send in any forwarding address, so we’ve been holding your letters on the chance that you’d turn up sometime and somewhere. Wait a minute and I’ll go get ’em for you.”