B UD PHILLIPS says The Boy is going to the devil,” announced Stebbins, as he strolled into the smoking room at the Sherwood Club, after beating Perkins three games of billiards.
“Well, Bud is certainly in a position to be accurately informed on that subject,” answered the Colonel; and the truth of his reply was so apparent, that everyone smiled.
Bud was night clerk at the Algonquin, the hotel where The Boy had a suite. So he had a chance to see at what hour and how the guests came home. He also knew just how many times a week The Boy’s rooms were a rendezvous for the young subalterns from Fort Blair, who came into town every time they could get leave, to gamble away their month’s scanty pay.
But as Bud Phillips also said, The Boy wasn’t[128] entirely to blame, for he had never had a mother’s care; and, though no one in Preston City except the Colonel and I knew the facts of his early life, everyone had a good word for him, and was inclined to overlook many indiscretions on the part of popular Billy Richards, The Boy.
Colonel Wade and I could remember the day when Stewart Sloan shocked the good people back in Sioux City by bringing home for a wife La Petite Mabelle, skirt dancer from a vaudeville theatre in Des Moines. The predictions of the sewing-club gossips were more than fulfilled, for La Petite Mabelle ran away one fine day before the year was up, leaving Sloan with a two-months-old baby boy, and a little note of farewell. La Petite Mabelle told him in melodramatic sentences, covering two sheets of note paper, that the attractions of the old life, with its cheap finery and grease paint, were too strong for her. She could never remain in Sioux City, where nobody called on her, Stewart himself seemed ashamed of her, and where there was nothing going on. She said further, that he mustn’t think too badly of her, and that he ought to try and forget her.
This Sloan had certainly tried hard enough to do. That fall he secured a divorce, and when the legislature convened in Des Moines next year, he had the name that La Petite Mabelle had disgraced changed to Richards, his mother’s maiden name. So young William Richards, as[129] Sloan rechristened the boy, grew up to manhood, never knowing the tragedy of his father’s early life, and never having felt the softening influence of a mother’s love.
His father died when the lad was twelve, naming as his son’s guardian Colonel Wade, who looked after him as well as an old bachelor of fifty, loaded down with business cares, could be expected to look after a growing and spirited youth.
When Billy attained his majority, and had finished his college days, bluff old Colonel Wade took him aside as gently as a warm-hearted old man could do, told him the story of his first appearance on the stage of life, turned over to him a property more than sufficient for every reasonable need, and sent him out in the world which still called him The Boy, a nickname he had acquired in college. The Boy pondered over his early history for a few days, and then apparently forgot that any such unpleasant thing as history existed, concerning himself wholly with the present, which may be history, though at the time not recognized as such.
Lately The Boy had been drinking and doing some other things more than was good for him; but when the Colonel remonstrated in a fatherly way, he promised to “take a brace,” the same as he would have promised back in his college days, when he was under the discipline of the old professors. Stebbins’s remark, therefore,[130] that The Boy was going to the devil, was rather a surprise to me, for I knew that he usually kept his word.
“Did any of you see the fairy that came in on the express this afternoon?” asked Perkins a little later, and as no one answered, he proceeded to explain:
“I went down to the three o’clock to meet Kitty, who came in from Denver to-day; and the first person who stepped off the train was the d——st looking female you ever saw. She must have been forty-five; but she had locks as golden as a maid of fifteen, and actually, I believe there was half a box of rouge on her cheeks. She had a little woolly dog in her arms, so covered with ribbons that I don’t believe it could walk alone. Kitty said she was flirting with the conductor all the way down from Butte, and some one on the train christened her ‘The Painted Lady.’”
“Where’s she stopping?” asked the Colonel, and I knew what was in his mind.
“She rode up town on the same ’bus with Kitty and me, and got out at the Algonquin,” answered Perkins. “You’d better look out for that protégé of yours, Colonel, he may be doing something rash. The Boy appears to be partial to blondes.”
The next day as I was coming down town I nearly upset a woman hurrying in the opposite direction. I picked up the parasol which I had[131] knocked out of her hand, and as I glanced at her, I knew from Perkins’s description that she was The Painted Lady.
She probably wasn’t more than thirty-seven or thirty-eight, but there were deep lines about her eyes and the corners of the mouth which ought not to be in the face of a woman of sixty. Her hair, under the stimulating influence of peroxide, was a bright yellow, and her ............