Eliminating the mother as a possible earner, the burden must have fallen upon the eldest daughter, and he tried to picture Jean looking for work in a city which was already boasting that it had a population of over thirty thousand young men in addition to its familied quota. There must have been difficulties insurmountable. Places ordinarily given to women in the East were almost exclusively filled by men in the Denver of the moment, even to clerkships at the ribbon counters. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed, suddenly realizing that nearly a year had elapsed since the writing of the sorrowful little death notice. “Why, all four of them may have starved to death long before this!” What to do about it was the burning question, and he went about the doing promptly, first writing a note and addressing it to “Miss Jean Dabney, General Delivery,” and next making a pilgrimage to the tent colony where he had found the Dabneys on the eve of his departure for the mountains. Nothing came of the pilgrimage. The tents were still there, but the people occupying them were all newcomers; a shifting population coming and going from day to day. Nobody knew anything of a family of two women, two little girls and a sick man who had died. Later in the day he went in search of the American House clerk who had directed him in the former instance; but here, again, the kaleidoscopic population-shifting baffled him. The clerk, whom he was able to identify in his inquiry by the date of his employment at the hotel, had left Denver--for Pueblo, so his informant thought; at least, that had been his mail forwarding address for a time. 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?” Bromley inquired quizzically, after a number of fruitless attempts to break through the barrier of abstraction behind which his table companion had retreated. “No, I guess not,” was the half-absent reply. “I haven’t been thinking much about the money.” “Well, what have you been doing with yourself all day?” “I have been looking for somebody that I couldn’t find.” “Ah!” said the play-boy with his teasing smile. “The angelic person, for a guess. Am I right?” “It’s no joke,” Philip returned soberly. “I found a note from her in my mail at the railroad office. It is nearly a year old. Her father died a few days after we left Denver last spring.” Bromley became instantly sympathetic. “And you don’t know what has become of her?” “No; I can’t find a trace.”