The idea was immensely entertaining to the young miner, who laughed so heartily that a sentimental couple billing and cooing behind the fan-palms took wing immediately. "You? you chaperoning Myr – Miss Van Vetter? That's a good one!"
"It's a bad one, where you are concerned. What do you mean by such an inconsistent breach of the proprieties?"
"Inconsistent? I'm afraid I don't quite catch on."
"Yes, inconsistent. You bury yourself for months on end in that powder-smelly old tunnel of yours, and about the time we've comfortably forgotten you, you straggle in with a dress-coat on your arm and proceed to monopolize one of us. What do you take us for?"
It was on the tip of Bartrow's tongue to retort that he would very much like to take Miss Van Vetter for better or worse, but he had not the courage of his convictions. So he kept well in the middle of the road, and made the smoke-blackened tunnel his excuse for the inconsistency.
"It isn't 'months,' Connie; or at least it's only two of them. You know I'd be glad enough to chase myself into Denver every other day if I could. But it is coming down to brass tacks with us in the Little Myriad, and I've just got to keep my eye on the gun."
Whereupon pertness, or the Constance Elliott transmutation of it, vanished, and she made him sit down.
"Tell me all about the Little Myriad, Dick. Is it going to keep its promise?"
The Little Myriad's owner sought and found a handkerchief, using it mopwise. Curious questions touching the prospects of his venture on Topeka Mountain were beginning to have a perspiratory effect upon him.
"I wish I could know for sure, Connie. Sometimes I think it will; and some other times I should think it means to go back on me, – if I dared to."
"Isn't the lead still well-defined?" Constance dropped into the mining technicalities with the easy familiarity of one born in the metalliferous West.
"It is now; but two months ago, or thereabouts, it pinched out entirely. That is why I hibernated."
"Was the last mill-run encouraging?"
"N-no, I can't say that it was. The ore – what little there is of it – seems to grade rather lower as we go in. But it's a true fissure, and it must begin to go the other way when we get deep enough."
For a half-score of fan-sweeps Connie was silent. Then: "Is the purse growing light, Dickie? Because if it is, poppa's is still comfortably fat."
Bartrow laughed in a way to indicate that the strain was lessened for the moment. "I believe you and your father would give away the last dollar you have in the world. But it hasn't come to a fresh loan with me yet."
"When it does, you know where to float it."
"When it does, I sha'n't rob my best friends. If I have to borrow more money for development, I'm afraid the loan will be classed as 'extra hazardous.' But you said there were several things. What else have I done?"
"The next is something you haven't done. You haven't written a line to Mr. Lansdale in all these weeks, – not even to thank him for taking your foolish telegram about the Margaret Gannon crisis seriously. And he tells me he has written you twice."
"I'm a miserable sinner, and letter writing isn't in me. Is Lansdale here? I'll go and square myself in the most abject formula you can suggest."
"He isn't here. He is out at Bennett on a ranch."
"On a ranch in midwinter? Who on top of earth told him to do that?"
"One of the doctors. I wanted to dissuade him, but I hadn't the heart to try. He is so anxious to live."
"Naturally." Bartrow eyed his companion in a way which was meant to be a measure of the things he knew and would by no means tell, but Constance was opening and shutting her fan with inthought paramount, and saw it not. Whereat Bartrow was brutal enough to say: "Is he going to make a go of it?"
"Oh, I hope so, Dick! It is such a pathetic struggle. And he is like all the others who are best worth keeping alive: he won't let any one help him. Just fancy him working for his board on a dreary prairie ranch! The monotony of it is enough to kill him."
"I should say so. Lamb ranch, I suppose?"
"Yes."
"Then I can imagine the hilarity of it. Up at all sorts of hours and in all weathers feeding and watering. That isn't what he needs. A wagon trip in summer, with good company, lots of outdoors, and nothing to do but eat and sleep, would be more like it. If he pulls through to spring, and the Myriad will let up on me for a month or two, I don't know but I shall be tempted to make him try it."
"Oh, Dick! would you?" There was a quick upflash of wistful emotion in the calm gray eyes. Bartrow set it down to a fresh growth in perspicacity on his own part that he was able to interpret it – or thought he was. But the little upflash went out like a taper in the dark with the added afterthought. "It's no use, Dick. The Myriad won't let you."
"Perhaps it will; though I'm bound to admit that it doesn't look that way at present. Now, if Jef – "
From what has gone before it will be understood that any mention of Jeffard for good or ill was the one thing which Bartrow had promised himself to avoid at all hazards; wherefore he broke the name in the midst, coughed, dragged out his watch, – in short, did what manlike untactfulness may do to create a diversion, and at the end of it found the unafraid eyes fixed upon him with mandatory orders in them.
"Go on," she said calmly. "If Mr. Jeffard" —
"Really, Connie, I must break it off short; my time's up. Don't you hear the orchestra? Miss Van Vetter will" —
But Connie was not to be turned aside by any consideration for Bartrow's engagements or her own; nor yet by the inflow into the alcove-conservatory of sundry other fanning couples lately freed from the hop-and-slide of the two-step. Nor yet again by the appearance of young Mr. Theodore Calmaine, who came up behind Bartrow and was straightway transfixed and driven forth with pantomimic cut and thrust.
"Myra will have no difficulty in finding a partner. Don't be foolish, Dick. I have known all along that you have learned something about Mr. Jeffard which you wouldn't tell me. You may remember that you have persistently ignored my questions in your answers to my letters, – and I paid you back by telling you little or nothing about Myra. Now what were you going to say?"
"I was going to say that if Jeffard were like what he used to be, he would do for Lansdale what I shall probably not be able to do."
"What do you know about Mr. Jeffard?"
"What all the world knows – and a little more. Of course you have read what the newspapers had to say?"
"I have never seen a mention of his name."
"Why, you must have; they were full of it a month or two ago, and will be again as soon as the range opens and we find out what the big bonanza has been doing through the winter. You don't mean to say that you didn't read about the free-gold strike in the Elk Mountains, and the locomotive race, and the shooting scrape in the hotel at Aspen, and all that?"
The steady eyes were veiled and Connie's breath came in nervous little gasps. Any man save downright Richard Bartrow would have made a swift diversion, were it only to an open window or back to the ballroom. But he sat stocklike and silent, letting her win through the speechlessness of it to the faltered reply.
"I – I saw it; yes. But the name of that man was – was not Jeffard."
"No, it was Jeffers, or anything that came handy in the newspaper accounts. But that was a reporter's mistake."
"Dick," – the steadfast eyes were transfixing him again, – "are you quite sure of that?"
"I ought to be. I was the man who helped him out at the pinch and got him started on the locomotive chase."
"You helped him? – then all those things they said about him were true?"
It was Bartrow's turn to hesitate. "I – I'm trying not to believe that, Connie."
"But you know the facts; or at least, more of them than the newspapers told. Did the claim really belong to him, or to James Garvin?"
Bartrow crossed his legs, uncrossed them, and again had recourse to his watch.
"I wish you'd leave the whole business up in the air, Connie, the way I'm trying to. It doesn't seem quite fair, somehow, to condemn him behind his back."
"But the facts," she insisted. "You know them, don't you?"
"Yes; and they're against him." Bartrow confessed it in sheer desperation. "The claim was Garvin's; Jeffard not only admitted it, but he started out on the chase with the declared determination of standing between Garvin and those two blacklegs who were trying to plunder him. That's all; that's as far as my facts go. Beyond that you – and the newspapers – know as much as I do."
"Not quite all, Dick. You say you helped him; that means that you lent him money, or borrowed it for him. Did he ever pay it back?"
Bartrow got upon his feet at that and glowered down upon her with mingled chagrin and awe in gaze and answer.
"Say, Connie, you come precious near to being uncanny at times, don't you know it? That was the one thing I didn't mean to tell any one. Yes, I borrowed for him; and no, he didn't pay it back. That's all – all of the all. If you put me in a stamp-mill you couldn't pound out anything else. Now, for pity's sake, let me get back to Miss Van Vetter before I fall in with the notion that I'm too transparent to be visible to the naked eye."
She rose and took his arm.
"You're good, Dickie," she said softly; "much too good for this world. I'm sorry for you, because it earns you so many buffetings."
"And you think I'm in for another on Jeffard's account."
"I am sure you are – now. The last time I saw him he wore a mask; a horrible mask of willful degradation and cynicism and self-loathing; but I saw behind it."
They were making a slow circuit of the ballroom in search of Connie's cousin, and the throng and the music isolated them.
"What did you see?"
"I saw the making of a strong man; strong for good or for evil; a man who could compel the world-attitudes that most of us have to sue for, or who would be strong enough on the evil side to flout and ignore them. I thought then that he was at the parting of the ways, but it seems I was mistaken, – that the real balancing moment came with what poppa calls the 'high-mountain bribe,' – Satan's offer of the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them."
Now, a thronged ballroom is scarcely a fit place for heart-to-heart outreachings; but there be loyal hearts who are not constrained by their encompassments, and Bartrow was of that brotherhood. They had attained a corner where one might swing a short-sword without fear of beheading the nearest of the dancers or out-sitters, and he faced about and took both of Connie's hands in his.
"Do you know, little sister, I'm awfully glad you're able to talk that way about him. There was a time when I began to be afraid – for your sake first, and afterward for" —
It is conceivable that the frankest of young women may have some reserves of time and place, if not of subjects, and before honest Dick could finish, Constance had freed herself and was reproaching young Calmaine for not seeking her out for the dance in process, – which was his.
Teddy's apology had in it the flavor of long acquaintance and the insolence thereof. "You're a cool one," he said, when they had left Bartrow behind. "As if I didn't stand for five good minutes at the door of that conservatory place, with you eye-pistoling and daggering me to make me go away!"
Thinking about it afterward, Bartrow wondered a little that Connie seemed bent on ignoring him through the remainder of the functional hours, large and small, but so it was. And when finally he was constrained to put Miss Van Vetter in the carriage, Connie's good-night and good-by were of the briefest. Miss Van Vetter, too, was silent on the homeward drive, and this Connie remarked, charging it openly to Dick's account when they were before the fire in Myra's room contemplating the necessity of going to bed.
"No, Mr. Bartrow was all that the most exacting person could demand, – and more," said Miss Van Vetter, going to the mirror to begin the relaxing process. "It was something he told me."
"About Mr. Jeffard?"
"Yes; how did you know?"
"I didn't know – I guessed."
"Isn't it dreadful!"
"No. Some of the other things he did might have been that; but this is unspeakable."
Myra turned her back upon the mirror and came to stand behind Connie's chair with her arms about her cousin's neck.
"Connie, dear, do you know that one time I was almost afraid that you, – but now I am glad, – glad that your point of view is – is quite extrinsic, you know."
Connie's gaze was upon the fire in the grate, fresh-stirred and glowing, a circumstance which may have accounted for the sudden trembling of the eyelids and the upwelling of tears in the steadfast eyes. And as for the nervous little quaver in her voice, there was fatigue to answer for that.
"I – I'm so glad you all take that for granted," she said. "I don't know what I should do if you didn't."
And a little later Myra went to bed and to sleep, wondering if, after all, there were not secret places in the heart of her transparent kinswoman which evaded the search-warrant of cousinly disinterest.
CHAPTER XXIII
The obsequious waiter had cleared the table and brought in the dessert, and was hovering in the middle distance with two cigars in a whiskey glass. The persiflant young people at the other end of the table rose and went away, leaving a grateful silence behind them; and the clerical gentleman at Lansdale's right folded his napkin in absent-minded deference to home habit, and slipped sidewise out of his chair as if reluctant to mar the new-born hush.
Bartrow was down from the mine on the ostensible business of restocking the commissariat department of the Little Myriad, – a business which, prior to Miss Van Vetter's Denver year, had transacted itself indifferently well by letter, – and Lansdale was dining with him at the hotel by hospitable appointment. There were months between this and their last meeting, an entire winter, in point of fact; but it is one of the compensations of man-to-man friendships that they ignore absences and bridge intervals smoothly, uncoupling and upcoupling again with small jar of accountings for the incidents of the lacuna.
Because of the persiflant young people, the fire of query and rejoinder had been the merest shelling of the woods on either side; but with the advent of quiet Bartrow said: "Your winter on the lamb-ranch didn't do you much good, did it?"
"Think not?" Lansdale looked up quickly, with a pathetic plea for heartening in the deep-set eyes of him. "I was hoping you'd say it had. I feel stronger – at times."
Bartrow saw the plea and the pathos of it, and added one more to the innumerable contemnings of his own maladroitness. He was quite sure of his postulate, however, – as sure as he was of the unnecessary cruelty of setting it in words. Lansdale was visibly failing. The clean-shaven face was thin to gauntness, and the dark eyes were unnaturally bright and wistful. Bartrow bribed the ubiquitous waiter to remove himself, making the incident an excuse for changing the subject.
"Never saw or heard anything more of Jeffard, did you?" he said, pitching the conversational quoit toward a known peg of common interest, and taking it for granted that Lansdale, like Connie, had not read the proletary's name into the newspaper misspellings.
"Not a thing. And I have often wondered what happened."
"Then Connie hasn't told you?"
"Miss Elliott? No; I didn't know she knew him."
"She met him a time or two; which is another way of saying that she knows him better than we do. She's a whole assay outfit when it comes to sizing people up."
"What was her opinion of Jeffard?" Lansdale was curious to know if it confirmed his own.
"Oh, she thinks he is a grand rascal, of course, – as everybody does."
"Naturally," said Lansdale, having in mind the proletary's later reincarnations as vagrant and starveling. "You didn't see much of him after he got fairly into the toboggan and on the steeper grades, did you?"
"Here in Denver? – no. But what I did see was enough to show that he was pretty badly tiger-bitten. You told me afterward that he took the post-graduate course in his particular specialty."
"He did; sunk his shaft, as you mining folk would say, straight on down to the chaotic substrata; pawned himself piecemeal to feed the animals, and went hungry between times by way of contrast."
"Poor devil!" said Bartrow, speaking in the past tense.
"Yes, in all conscience; but not so much for what he suffered as for what he was."
The distinction was a little abstruse for a man whose nayword was obviousness, but for the better part of a year Bartrow had been borrowing of Miss Van Vetter; among other things some transplantings of subtlety.
"That's where we come apart," he objected, with amiable obstinacy. "You think the root of the thing is in the man, – has been in him all along, and only waiting for a chance to sprout. Now I don't. I think it's in the atmosphere; in the – the" —
"Environment?" suggested Lansdale.
"Yes, I guess that's the word; something outside of the man; something that he didn't make, and isn't altogether to blame for, and can't always control."
The man with a moiety of the seer's gift suffered his eyebrows to arch query-wise. "Doesn't that ask for a remodeling of the accepted theory of good and evil?"
"No, you don't!" laughed Bartrow. "You are not going to pull me in over my head, if I know it. But I'll wrestle with you from now till midnight on my own ground. You take the best fellow in the world, brought up on good wholesome bread and meat and the like, and stop his rations for awhile. Then, when he is hungry enough, you give him a rag to chew, and he'll proceed to chew it, – not necessarily because he likes the taste of the rag, or because he was born with the rag-chewing appetite, but simply for the reason that you have put it in his mouth, and, being hungry, he's got to chew something. Jeffard is a case in point."
"Let us leave Jeffard and the personal point of view out of the question and stand it upon its own feet," rejoined Lansdale, warming to the fray. "Doubtless Jeffard's problem is divisible by the common human factor, whatever that may be, but your theory makes it too easy for the evil-doer. Consequently I can't admit it, – not even in Jeffard's case."
"I could make you admit it," retorted Bartrow, with generous warmth, forgetting the dishonored note in the Leadville bank, and remembering only the year agone partnership in brother-keeping. "You can size people up ten times to my once, – you ought to; it's right in your line, – but I know Jeffard worlds better than you do, and I could tell you things about him that would make you weep. Since he did those things I've had a rattling good chance to change my mind about him, but I'm not going to do it till I have to. I'm going to keep on believing that away down deep under this devil's-drift of – what was it you called it? – environment, there's a streak of good clean ore. It may take the stamp-mill or the smelter to get it out, but it's there all the same. He may fall down on you and me and all of his friends at any one of a dozen pinches, – he has fallen down on me, and pretty middling hard, too, – but there will come a pinch sometime that will pull him up short, and then you'll see what is in the lower levels of him, – what was there all the time, waiting for somebody to sink a shaft deep enough to tap it."
Lansdale took the cigar Bartrow was proffering and clipped the end of it, reflectively deliberate. He was silent so long that Bartrow said: "Well? you don't believe it, eh?"
"I wouldn't say that," Lansdale rejoined abstractedly; "anyway, not of Jeffard. Perhaps you are right. He has given me the same impression at times, but he was always saying or doing something immediately afterward to obliterate it. But I was wondering why you prophesy so confidently about a man who, for aught we know, took himself out of the world the better part of a year ago."
"Suicided? – not much! He's alive all right; very much alive and very much on top, as far as money is concerned. You don't read the papers, I take it?"
Lansdale's smile was of weariness. "Being at present a reporter on one of them I read them as little as may be. What should I have read that I didn't?"
"To begin back a piece, you should have read last fall about the big free-gold strike in the Elk Mountains, and an exciting little scrap between two men to get the first location on it."
"I remember that."
"Well, one of the men – the successful one – was Jeffard; our Jeffard. Your newspaper accomplices didn't spell his name right, – won't spell it right yet, – but it's Henry Jeffard, and yesterday's 'Coloradoan' says he's on his way to Denver to play leading man in the bonanza show."
Lansdale went silent what time it took to splice out the past with the present. After which he said: "I understand now why Miss Elliott condemns him, but not quite clearly why you defend him. As I remember it, the man who got possession of the Midas posed as a highwayman of the sort that the law can't punish. What has he to say for himself?"
Bartrow shook his head. "I don't know. I haven't seen him since one day last fall; the day of the locomotive chase."
"Did you know then that he was going to steal his partner's mine?"
"No. I thought then that he was going to do the other thing. And I'll not believe yet that he hasn't done the other thing. It's the finish I'm betting on. He may have flown the track at all the turns, – at this last turn as well as the others, – but when it comes to the home stretch, you watch him put his shoulder into the collar and remember what I said. I hope we'll both be there to see."
"So be it," Lansdale acquiesced. "It isn't in me to smash any man's ideal. And if anything could make me have faith in my kind, I think your belief in the inherent virtue of the race would work the miracle."
Bartrow laughed again, and pushed back his chair.
"It does you a whole lot of good to play at being a cold-blooded man-hater, doesn't it? But it's no go. Your practice doesn't gee with your preaching. Let's go out on the porch and smoke, if it won't be too cool for you."
They left the dining-room together and strolled out through the crowded lobby, lighting their cigars at the news-stand in passing. There was a convention of some sort in progress, and a sprinkling of the delegates, with red silk badges displayed, was scattered among the chairs on the veranda. Bartrow found two chairs a little apart from the decorated ones, faced them, and tilted his own against the railing. When his cigar was well alight he bethought him of a neglected duty.
"By the way, old man, I've never had the grace to say 'much obliged' for your neatness and dispatch in carrying out my wire order. I suppose you've forgotten it months ago, but I haven't. It was good of you. Connie wrote me about it at the time, and she said a whole lot of pretty things about the way you climbed into the breach."
"Did she?" Lansdale's habitual reserve fell away from him like a cast garment, and if Bartrow had been less oblivious to face readings he might have seen that which would have made his heart ache. But he saw nothing and went on, following his own lead.
"Yes; she said you took hold like a good fellow, and hung on like a dog to a root, – that is, she didn't say that, of course, but that was the sense of it. I'm obliged, a whole lot."
"You needn't be. The obligation is on my side. It was a pleasure to try to help Miss Elliott, even if I wasn't able to accomplish anything worth mentioning."
"Yes. She's good people; there's no discount on that. But say, you didn't size up Pete Grim any better than you had to. A good stiff bluff is about the only thing he can appreciate."
"If you had heard me talk to him you would have admitted that I was trying to bluff him the best I knew how," said Lansdale.
Bartrow laughed unfeelingly. "Tried to scare him with a lawsuit, didn't you? What do you suppose a man like Grim cares for the law? Why, bless your innocent soul, he can buy all the law he needs six days in the week and get it gratis on the seventh. But you might have fetched him down with a gun."
Lansdale tried to imagine himself attempting such a thing and failed. "I'm afraid I couldn't have done that – successfully. It asks for a little practice, doesn't it? and from what I have learned of Mr. Peter Grim in my small dealings with him, I fancy he wouldn't make a very tractable lay-figure for a beginner to experiment on. But we worried the thing through after a fashion, and recovered the young woman's sewing-machine finally."
