The Helpers

"Oh! the money again. Can't we put it aside, once for all? There isn't so much of it as you may imagine."

Bartrow overleaped the barrier at a bound.

"Then let's make it noon to-morrow. If we are going to push the Myriad I ought to go back to-morrow night."

She tried to scoff at him, but there was love in her eyes.

"Connie said once that you were Young-man-afraid-of-his-horses, but she doesn't know you. I believe you more than half mean it."

"I do mean it. If I sit here and look at you much longer I shall be begging you to make it nine o'clock instead of twelve. Don't ask me to wait very long. It'll be hard enough to go off and leave you afterward. It's a good bit more than a hundred miles in a straight line from Denver to Topeka Mountain."

"I'm going with you," she said calmly.

"You? – to live in a wicky-up on the side of a bald mountain? But you know what it is; you've been there. You'd die of the blues in a week."

"Would I?" She rose and stood beside his chair. "You don't know much about me, yet, do you? If the 'wicky-up' is good enough for you, it is good enough for me. I am going with you, and I'm going to make that dear little log cabin a place that you will always be glad to remember, – if I can."

He drew her down on the arm of the chair.

"Don't talk to me that way, Myra, – you mustn't, you know. I'm not used to it, and it breaks me all up. If you say another word I shall want to make it seven o'clock in the morning instead of nine."

"Can you wait a month?"

"No."

"Three weeks?"

"No."

She gave up in despair. "You are dreadfully unreasonable."

"I know it; I was born that way and I can't help it. I sha'n't insist on to-morrow, because I'm not sure that Wun Ling has anything for us to eat; but one week from to-morrow, when I've had time to stock up and straighten up a bit, is going to be the limit. Can you make it?"

"What if I say no?"

"I shall come anyway."

She bent over until her lips touched his forehead.

"That is your answer, only you don't deserve it. And now will you answer my question? I asked you when you came in if you had been to dinner, and you said 'Good Lord!'"

"Did I? I think I must have been a bit rattled. You see, I'd just heard some bad news, and I was expecting to find Connie, and wasn't expecting to find you."

"Did Connie write you she would meet you?"

He had one hand free to fish out the day-old telegram and give it to her. She read it with a swift blush crimsoning cheek and neck.

"The unscrupulous little tyke!" she said; and then, with self-defensive tact: "But you said you had bad news."

"Yes. A mine that our good old Uncle Steve is pretty deeply into has gone dry."

"Failed, you mean?"

"Yes, that's it. I wish you'd teach me how to talk English, – good clean English, like yours. Connie has tried it, but pshaw! she's worse than I am. But about the Lodestar: I don't know how deep the old man is in; he's such an innocent old infant about putting up money that I'm awfully afraid they have salted him. You must pump Connie and find out. I'll be in Leadville to-morrow night, and if there is anything to be done on the ground I'll do it. The old man has been a second father to me."

Myra promised, and went back once more to the unanswered dinner query.

"Now you remind me of it, I believe I haven't been to dinner," he admitted. "But that's nothing; a meal or two more or less isn't to be mentioned at such a time as this."

"I am going to get you something."

"No, don't; I'm too happy to eat."

But she insisted, and when she came back with a dainty luncheon on a tea-tray he did ample justice to it, if for no better reason than that she sat on the other side of the small reading-table and made tea for him.

Afterward, when the time drew near for the Elliotts' return, he took his leave, though it was yet early.

"They are the best friends I have on earth," he said, when Myra went to the door with him, "but somehow, I feel as if I didn't want to meet anybody I know, – not to-night. I want to have it all to myself for a few hours."

She laughed at that; a laugh with an upbubbling of content and pure happiness in it; and sent him off with his heart afire. When he was halfway down the walk she recalled him. He came back obediently.

"It will cost you something every time you do that," he protested, exacting the penalty. "Was that what you wanted?"

"Of course not! I merely wanted to ask you what it is to 'owl' a person. You said I 'owled' you."

"Did I? Well, you don't; you never can. That is the best definition I can think of: something you can never do to me. May I say good-night again? the way I did a minute ago?"

The glare of the arc-light swinging between its poles across the avenue was quite ruthless, and there were passers-by in straggling procession on the sidewalk. But at the critical instant the kindly incandescence burned blue, clicked, fizzed, and died down to a red spot in the darkness. For which cause Bartrow presently went his way, with the heart-fire upblazing afresh; and when Myra won back to the library and the cosy depths of the great chair, the color scheme of fair neck and cheek and brow was not altogether the reflection from the crimson shade of the reading-lamp.

CHAPTER XXVII

CONSTANCE TO MYRA

My dear Lady Bountiful: Your letter – the ridiculous one – came yesterday. The idea of your proposing in the very morning of your honey-month to take the Colfax Avenue house and turn it into a home for indigent relatives! As Tommie would put it, "Wot are you givin' us!"

But seriously, cuzzy dear, it's quite out of the question. Papa wouldn't hear to it, and besides, we are getting along very cosily now, re-learning a good many lessons that prosperity makes one forget. One of them is that gratitude isn't quite like the dodo, – gone into fossilistic extinction, you know.

Margaret Gannon is one of the instances. She has taken a room in our block, and there is no limit to her great Irish tender-heartedness. If I'd let her, she would make me sit down and hold my hands while she does the housework of our three rooms. In spite of all I can say or do, she does do a great deal of it; and I can hear her sewing-machine buzzing deep into the night to pay for it.

Tommie is another. The day we moved down here from the old home in Colfax Avenue that "irreclaimable little savage," as you once called him, brought me his surplus of a dollar and something and asked me to "blow it in" for him. Think of it and weep, you luxury-spoiled darling! I could have hugged him, dirt and all. And since that day he has been my Ariel, in more ways than you would think possible. He is so sharp and keen-witted; and his philanthropy has developed into a passion.

Mr. Lansdale has been most kind. That is the proper phrase, I believe, but now that I have written it down it seems trite and meaningless. If I say that he has fairly earned the right to sign himself "Robert Lansdale, Gentleman," you will understand. The change in our circumstances has been a test that he alone of all our friends has been able to endure unmoved. I don't say that others are not kind and sympathetic, but they are – well, they are different. Now that I can say it without hurting you, I'll admit that I've always had a good bit of contempt for culture of the imported variety (I think I have been spelling it "culchah"), but Mr. Lansdale has converted me. It is worth something to be able to rise superior to circumstances, – the circumstances of others, I mean, – and, between us two, it's a virtue to which we new people haven't quite attained.

I presume you read the Denver papers, and if you do you know all I could tell you about the person whom you once said was better worth saving than other people. Mr. Lansdale, who was one of the original trio, you remember, talks very sparingly of Mr. Jeffard; from which I infer that there isn't much to be said, – in mixed company. The newly arrived one lives in an apartment building, and papa says they are beginning to call him a miser on the street. They'd say that of any capitalist who wouldn't invest in at least one "ground-floor" a day; but I think you will agree with me that they can't say anything worse than the truth about him. I haven't had the ill-chance to meet him yet (I hope I'll be spared that), but I am afraid Tommie has been spying upon him, – for reasons of his own which he won't explain. I happened to overhear the final volley of a small battle royal between my Ariel and Margaret the other day, which had in it a hint of an unnamable thing, – a thing which involves Margaret and the unworthy one. You may remember that he once posed as her deus ex machina. And she has grown dangerously beautiful in her year of uprightness.

When you write, tell me all about your plans for the summer; and believe me always

Your cousin-content,