The man who checks trunks at one of the biggest transfer companies confessed that he was an exile, too.
"Came out here a dozen years ago with a busted lung," he admitted with a quizzical smile. "Guess I'll stay for a while longer. But I want to go back to Baltimore. Before I am done with it I am going back to Baltimore. I'm going to walk down Charles street once again and breathe the fragrance of the flowers in the gardens, if it kills me."
A girl in a boarding house leaned up against the wall of the broad and shady piazza and said she liked Denver "really, truly, immensely."
"Honestly," she drawled gravely. "God knows, I've got to. I'm a lunger, although they don't know it here. I've only got one lung, but it's a good lung," she ended with a little hysterical laugh.
Another exile. The American Siberia, in truth, save that this Siberia is a near Paradise--a kingdom for exiles where the grass is as green as it is back in the old East, where the trees cast welcome shade and the strange new flowers blossom out smiles of hope. But a Siberia none the less. The big sanitariums all about the city tell that. The keeper of the Denver Morgue will tell it, too. The suicide rate in Denver runs high. Desperate folk go out to Colorado to shut the door in the face of death--and go too late. They are far from home, alone, friendless, penniless in despair--the figures of the statisticians cannot lie.
The East has this as a debt to pay Denver, and generally she pays it royally. Denver does not forget the times when the Atlantic seaboard has come to her assistance--despite the troubles of David H. Moffat in raising capital for his railroad. Once in a business council there while the East was getting some rather hard knocks for its "fool conservatism"--perhaps it had been refusing to buy the bonds of the mountain-climbing railroad--a big Denver banker got the floor. He was a man who could demand attention--and receive it.
"I want you to remember one thing," he said; "fifteen years ago we were laying out and selling town-lots for a dozen miles east of Denver; we were selling them to Easterners--for their good money. When they came out and looked for their land what did they see? They saw plains--mile after mile of plains--peopled by what? They were peopled by jackrabbits, and the jackrabbits were bald from bumping their heads against the surveyors' stakes. Until we have redeemed those lots and built our city out to them and upon them, gentlemen, we have not redeemed our promise to the East."