"Hello, Mart!"

"Hello, Mag; what's doing?"

She was humped and bedraggled, and her face looked white in the
moonlight. "Nothing. Stake a fellow to a hot soup, won't you?"

"Sure thing, Mag." He handed her a five-dollar gold piece. "Is it as bad
as that? What's t' old man doin' these days?"

"Servin' time," she answered, bitterly.

"Oh, so he is!" replied Haney, hastily. "I'd forgotten. Well, take care
o' yourself," he added, genially, walking on in instant forgetfulness of
the woman's misery, for his mind was turned upon the talk which his
younger brother Charley had given him not long before in Denver.

It was not a cheerful conversation, for Charley flippantly confessed
that he didn't hold any family reunions, and that all he knew of his
brothers he gained by chance. "They're all great boozers," he said, in
summing them up. "Tim is a ward heeler in Buffalo--came to see me at the
stage-door loaded to the gunnels. Tom is a greasy, three-fingered
brakeman on the Central. Fannie married a carpenter and has about
seventeen young ones. Mary died, you know?"

"No, I didn't know."

"Yes, died about four years ago. She was like mother--a nice girl. Dad
sent me a paper with a notice of her death. He never writes, but now and
then, when Tim has a fight or Tom gets drunk and slips into the criminal
column, I hear of them."

Charles did not say so, but Mart knew that he was lumped among the other
poverty-stricken, worthless members of the family. He did not at the
time undeceive his brother, but now that he was no longer a gambler and
saloon-keeper, now that he was rich, he resolved not only to let his
father know of his good-fortune and his change of life, but also (and
this was due to Bertie's influence) he earnestly desired to help his
family out of their mire.

"We had good stuff in us," he said, "but we went wrong after the mother
left us."

As he walked on down the street a strange radiance came into the world.
The distant peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range rose in dim and shadowy
majesty to the south, and, wondering, astonished at the emotion stirring
in his heart, the regenerated desperado turned to see the moon lifting
above the crown of the great peak to the east. For the first time in
many years his heart was filled with a sense of the beauty of the world.

CHAPTER III

BERTHA YIELDS TO TEMPTATION

Bertie looked older and graver when Haney entered the Eagle Hotel, and
his heart expanded with