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, 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 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 cheeks had on them the bloom usually found on buxom Irish lasses, or in small, round boxes in a drug store. At the end of a silver chain, and covered with ribbons, was a diminutive French poodle.
She was stylishly dressed, and her figure, though making me wonder at the time (and strength) taken to produce it, was still quite pleasing to look upon in the final result. Her name, as I found out at the club that evening, was Madame Mabel Fortesque, and one of the evening papers stated that she was a young widow taking a western trip for her health. She had a suite at the Algonquin, and spent most of her time driving about the city, for she had sent to Denver for a showy turnout, and it was not long before it became a common sight to see her riding about with some one of the young officers from Fort Blair beside her.