It was Connie herself who met him at the door and would hear no more than his name until he was established in her father's easy-chair before the cheerful fire in the library. Her welcome was hospitably cordial; and Lansdale, who had fondly imagined embarrassment to be one of the foibles most deeply buried under the débris of the disillusioning years, found himself struggling with an attack of tongue-tied abashment which is like to be the penalty exacted of any hermit who refuses to mix and mingle with his kind.
"I came to see you at the request of a friend of yours, and of mine, Miss Elliott," he began formally, fumbling in his pocket for the telegram. "I have a message from Mr. Richard Bartrow which – will – explain" —
The search and the sentence raveled out together in the discovery that the telegram which was to have been his introduction had been left on the writing-table in his room. Connie saw consternation in his face and made haste to help him.
"From Mr. Bartrow? We have just returned from a visit to his mine up in Chaffee County. Did he forget something that he wanted to tell us, at the last moment?"
"Really, I – I can't say," stammered Lansdale, to whom the loss of the telegram was the dragging of the last anchor of equanimity. "It appears that I was thoughtless enough to leave the telegram in my room. Will you excuse me until I can go back and fetch it?"
"Is it necessary?" Connie queried. "Can't you tell me what he says?"
Lansdale pulled himself together and gave her the gist of Bartrow's mandate. Miss Elliott's laugh made him forget his embarrassment.
"That is just like Dick," she said. "He offered to come down with us last night, but I wouldn't let him. You know Mr. Bartrow quite well, do you not?"
"Very well, indeed."
"Then you know how anxious he always is to help his friends."
"No one has better cause to know; he is one of the finest fellows in the world," Lansdale rejoined warmly.
"Thank you, for Dick's sake," said Connie; "now we shall get on nicely. But to go back a little: a young woman whom I have been trying to help is in some trouble, and Dick thought he might be needed. It was out of the goodness of his heart. I really don't need any help – at least, not more than my father's check-book can answer for."
"Are you quite sure? You must remember that I am Richard Bartrow's substitute, and make use of me accordingly. May I know the circumstances?"
Constance related them, telling him Margaret Gannon's story as only a sister of mercy could tell it; without extenuation or censure, and also without embarrassment. Lansdale listened absorbedly, with the literary instinct dominant. It was Margaret Gannon's story, but Constance Elliott was the heroine; a heroine worthy the pen of a master craftsman, he thought, while the creative part of him was busy with the pulling and hauling and scene-shifting which the discovery of a Heaven-born central figure sets in motion. But in the midst of it the man got the better of the craftsman. He foresaw with sudden clarity of insight that Miss Elliott would presently be of the inner circle of those out of whom the most hardened votary of the pen cannot make copy; those whose personality is sacred because it is no longer a thing apart to be dispassionately analyzed.
When she made an end, he sat looking at her so intently and so long that she grew nervous. The light in his eyes made her feel as if she were focused under the object glass of a microscope. He saw the enthusiasm die out of her face and give place to discomposure, and made eager apologies.
"Forgive me, Miss Elliott; I didn't mean to be rude. But I have never looked upon your like before, – a woman in whom the quality of mercy is not strained; whose charity is compassionate enough to reach out to the unfortunate of her own sex."
Connie was too simple-hearted to be self-conscious under commendation.
"That is because your opportunities have been unkind, I fancy. A few years ago your criticism would have been very just; but nowadays much of the rescue work is done by women, as it should be."
"Much of the organized work, yes. But your own story proves that it has not become individualized."
"That may well be the fault of the advocate in Margaret's case," returned Connie, whose charity was not circumscribed. "If any one of the many good women I have tried to enlist in this young woman's cause had been the one to discover her, I should doubtless have the same story to tell, and quite possibly with a better sequel. But now you understand why I don't need help. Tommie – he's my newsboy henchman, you know – has been here this morning to make his report. It seems that when Margaret was taken sick she was in debt to this man Grim for costumes, or railway fare, or something, and he has taken her sewing-machine to satisfy the claim."
The hectic flush in Lansdale's thin cheek began to define itself, with a little pulse throbbing in the centre of it.
"He is an iniquitous scoundrel, and he ought to be prosecuted," he declared. "Don't you see? – but of course you don't; you are too charitable to suspect his real object, which is to drive the young woman back into the service of his master, the devil. He had no more legal right to take her sewing-machine than he would have to attach the tools of a mechanic. Is there any law in Colorado?"
"Plenty of it," Connie rejoined; adding, with unconscious sarcasm, "but I think it is chiefly concerned with disputes about mining claims."
"Let us hope there is a statute or two over and above, for the protection of ordinary mortals," said Lansdale, rising and finding his hat. "I presume you meant to buy Margaret another sewing-machine. You mustn't encourage buccaneering in any such way. Let me go and try my powers of persuasion on Mr. Peter Grim."
But Connie was not unmindful of what Bartrow had told them about Lansdale's ill health, and she promptly disapproved.
"No, indeed, you mustn't, Mr. Lansdale; you mustn't think of doing any such thing. You don't know the man. He is a 'hold-over' desperado from the stage-line days. Even Dick admits that he is a person to be feared and avoided. And, besides, you're not strong, you know."
Lansdale smiled down upon her from his gaunt height, and his heart warmed to her in a way which was not to be accounted for by the simple rule of the humanities.
"Dick told you that, too, did he? I am sorry."
"Why?"
"Because it involves your sympathy, and sympathy is much too precious to be wasted upon such flotsam as I. But I am quite robust enough to see justice done in this young woman's case. You must promise me not to move in it until you hear from me."
Connie promised and let him go. But in the stronger light of the hall she saw how really ill he looked, and was remorsefully repentant, after her kind.
Lansdale left the house in Colfax Avenue with an unanalyzed sense of levitation, which made him feel as though he were walking upon air; but when he had accounted for the phenomenon he came to earth again with disheartening celerity. What had a man in whose daily walk death was a visible presence to do with the tumult of gladsome suggestion evoked by a few words of sympathy from a compassionate young woman with a winsome face and innocent eyes? Nothing; clearly, nothing whatever. Lansdale set his teeth upon the word, and drove the suggestion forth with sudden bitterness. His part in the little drama growing out of Miss Elliott's deed of mercy was at best but that of a supernumerary. When he should have made his entrance and exit, he must go the way of other supernumeraries, and be presently forgotten of the real actors.
So ran the wise conclusion; but the event leagued itself with unwisdom, and the prudent forecasting gave place to the apparent necessities. The preliminary interview with Grim was wholly abortive. The man of vice not only refused point blank to make restitution, but evinced a readiness to take the matter into the courts which was most disconcerting to Margaret Gannon's moneyless advocate. Thereupon ensued other visits to the house in Colfax Avenue, and a growing and confidential intimacy with Constance, and the enlisting of Stephen Elliott in the cause of justice, and many other things not prefigured in Lansdale's itinerary.
And at the end of it all it was Stephen Elliott's check-book, and not an appeal to the majesty of the law, which rescued Margaret Gannon's sewing-machine; and the man of vice pocketed the amount of his extortionate claim, and gave a receipt in full therefor, biding his time, and bidding an obsequious Son of Ahriman – the same whom Jeffard had smitten aforetime – keep an eye on Margaret Gannon against the day when she should be sufficiently unbefriended to warrant a recasting of the net.
And when these things had come to pass, Robert Lansdale was of all men the most miserable. From much dabbling in the trickling rill of fictional sentiment, he had come to disbelieve the existence of any deep river of passion; but now he found himself upon the brink of such a river and was forbidden to plunge therein. Nay, more; he must turn away from it, parched and thirsty as any wayworn pilgrim of the world-desert, without so much as lifting a palmful of its healing waters to his lips.
He postponed the turning away from day to day, weakly promising himself that each visit to the house in Colfax Avenue should be the last, and as weakly yielding when a day or two of abstinence had enhanced his soul-hunger until it became a restless agony, mocking his most strenuous effort to drown it in a sea of work.
Failing himself utterly, he fell to watching Connie's face for some token of the hopelessness of his passion, telling himself that he should find strength to stay away when he should read his sentence in the calm gray eyes. But Connie's eyes were as yet no more than frankly sympathetic. And because he was far from home, and seemingly friendless, and fighting the last grim battle with an incurable malady, she made him welcome and yet more welcome, until finally, the optimistic insanity of the consumptive came upon him, assuring him that he should live and not die, and pointing him hopefully down a dim vista of years, – a shining way wherein they two might walk hand in hand till they should come to the gate of the House Beautiful whose chatelaine is Fame.
CHAPTER XVI
The line of retreat from the valley, called by Jeffard "of dry bones," to the possible land of promise in the Mosquito, lay through Leadville; not the teeming, ebullient, pandemoniac mining-camp of the early carbonate era, but its less crowded, less effervescent, though no less strenuous successor of the present.
On the march across the sky-pitched mountains it had been agreed between them that there should be one bivouac in the city of the bleak altitudes. That is to say, Garvin proposed it, and Jeffard assented, though not without a premonition that the halt would be fatal to the proposed Mosquito sequel to the campaign in the Saguache. He knew at least one of Garvin's weaknesses, and that it was akin to his own. There were the beast of burden and the dispensable moiety of the camping outfit to sell, and provision to buy; and Jeffard weighed his companion in the balances of his own shortcomings. He was well assured that he could not trust himself with money in his hand in any such city of chanceful opportunity as the great carbonate camp; and arraigning Garvin at the bar of the same tribunal, he judged him before the fact.
It was a measure of the apathetic indifference which possessed Jeffard that the premonition gave him scant concern. He marveled inwardly when the fact of indifference defined itself. Aside from any promptings of common human gratitude evolving themselves into friendly solicitude for the man who had twice saved his life, – promptings which he found dead because he looked to find them dead, – there was this: If his companion should stumble and spill the scanty residue in the common purse the wolf-pack of famine and distress would be at their heels in a single sweep of the clock-hands. And yet the fact remained.
Jeffard was cogitating vaguely this curious manifestation of mental and moral inertia when the city of the altitudes came into view over the crest of the final ascent in the toilsome journey. The smoke from the smelters was trailing lazily toward the distant Mosquito, and a shifting cumulus of steam marked the snail-like advance of a railway train up the steep grade from Malta. California Gulch and the older town were hidden behind the mountain of approach; but the upper town and its western environs lay stark in the hazeless atmosphere, with the snow-splotched background of the nearer range, uptilted and immense, dwarfing the houses into hutch-like insignificance. Dreary as is this first view of the Mecca of wealth-seekers, it has quickened the pulse and brightened the eye of many a wayworn pilgrim of the mountain desert; but Jeffard's thought was in his question to Garvin.
"Is it as near as it looks? or is it as far away as this cursed no-atmosphere removes everything?"
"It's a good ten mile 'r so, yet. If we get a move on, we'll make it by sundown, maybe."
They tramped on in silence, the singing silence of the crystalline heights, measuring mile after mile at the heels of the patient burro, and reaching the scattering outposts of the western suburb while yet the sun hung hesitant above the peaks of the main range. The nearer aspect of the great mining-camp was inexpressibly depressive to Jeffard. The weathered buildings, frankly utilitarian and correspondingly unbeautiful; the harsh sterility of the rocky soil; the ruthless subordination of all things to the sordid purposes of money-getting; these were the stage-settings of a scene which moved him curiously, like the fumes of a mingled cup, intoxicating, but soul-nauseating, withal. The nausea was a consequent of the changed point of view, and he knew it; but it was no whit less grievous. Wherefore he groped in the pool of indifference until he found a small stone of protest.
"Let us do what we have to do and get away from here quickly, Garvin," he said, flinging the stone with what precision there was in him.
They had turned into the principal street, and the burro became reluctant. Garvin smote the beast from behind, and took a turn of the halter around its jaw.
"Goin' to gig back for the crowd, ain't you?" he growled, apostrophizing the jack; and then to Jeffard: "Makes you sort o' town-sick, I reckon. I know the feel of it; used to catch it, reg'lar, ever' time I'd get in from the range. It'll wear off after a day 'r so; but, as you say, the quick way to do it up is to light out ag'in, suddint."
"The sooner the better," said Jeffard. "The atmosphere of the place is maddening."
Garvin took the word literally and laughed. "'T ain't got no atmosphere to speak of, – that's what's the matter with it; too blame' high up for any use."
They were in the thick of the street traffic by this time, and it required their united malisons joined to what of energy and determination the long day's march had left them to keep the ass from planting itself monument-wise in the middle of the street.
"Dad burn a canary, anyhow!" grumbled the man of the wilderness, when they were resting a moment in front of a shackly building on the corner of a cross street. "For ornerary, simon-pure, b'iled-down, soul-killin'" – His vocabulary of objurgatory expletives ran short, and he wrought out the remainder of the malediction with a dumb show of violence.
Jeffard smiled in spite of his mood, which was anything but farcical, and pointed to the haversack of specimens dangling from the loosened pack.
"We're about to lose the samples," he said.
Garvin regained his wonted good-humor at a plunge.
"That'd be too blame' bad, wouldn't it, now; they're so blazin' precious! S'pose you lug 'em acrost yonder to that there assay-shop whilst I toll the canary down to the corral. When you get shut o' the rocks, come on round to the boardin'-house, – 'Miner's Rest,' – a block furder along and two to your right. I'll meet you there bime-by, if there's anything left o' me after I get through with this dad-burned, lop-eared totin'-machine."
Jeffard shouldered the bag of samples, but before he could reply the opportunity fled clamorous. The lop-eared one, finding itself free for the moment, gave heed to a foolish bee buzzing in its atomic brain, and went racing down the cross street, with the big miner in hot pursuit.
"Exit James Garvin," quoth Jeffard, moved to smile again; and he crossed the avenue to the shackly building with the sign of the assayer besprent upon the windows.
When he tried the door and found it locked, and the littered room beyond it empty, he was minded to go on to the rendezvous while daylight served. But when he reflected that Garvin would be sure to await an assayer's verdict on the samples, and so prolong their stay in the city of banality, he decided to conclude the business affair first. So he went up and down and around and about, and found all the assay offices closed for the day save one, whose occupant, a round-bodied little German, with the face of a cherub, martialized by the huge mustachios of a cuirassier, was still at his bench. Jeffard guessed at the little man's nationality, and made a shrewd bid for celerity.
"Guten abend, mein Herr," he said, unslinging his haversack.
The cherubic face of the expatriated one responded quickly to the greeting in the loved mother-tongue.
"Wie geht's, wie geht's, mein guter Herr," he rejoined; and then in broken English: "I haf not dot Cherman before heard spoken in dis Gott-forsaken blaces. You haf some sambles gebracht?"
"Ja, mein Herr."
"Gut! I vill of dem de tests maig. Nicht wahr?"
"Gefälligst, mein lieber Herr;" and quickly, – "we must go on our way again to-morrow."
"So qvick? Ach! das ist nicht sehr gut. You vill der poor olt assay-meister maig to vork on der nide. But because you haf der goot Cherman in your moud I vill it do. Vat you haf?"
Jeffard unwrapped the samples one by one, and the assayer examined them with many dubious head-shakings. The amateur made haste to anticipate the preliminary verdict.
"I know they're valueless," he admitted, "but I have a partner who will require your certificate before he will be convinced. Can you let us know to-morrow?"
"Because you haf der Cherman, yes. But it vill be no goot; der silwer iss not dere" – including the various specimens in a comprehensive gesture.
Jeffard turned to go, slinging the lightened haversack over his shoulder. At the door he bethought him of the curious fragment of quartz picked up on the dump of the abandoned tunnel. It was in his pocket, and he rummaged till he found it.
"Can you tell me anything about this?" he asked. "It seems to be a decomposed quartzite, matted on a base of some sort, – a metal, I should say."
The little German snatched the bit of quartz, and ogled it eagerly through his eye-glass.
"Mein Gott im Himmel!" he cried; and the eye-glass fell to the floor and rolled under the bench. "Iss it possible dot you know him not? Dot iss golt, mein lieber freund, – vire golt, reech, reech! Vere you got him? Haf you got some more von dis?"
Jeffard took it in vaguely, and tried to remember what he had done with the handful of similar fragments gathered at the same time. It came to him presently. He had emptied his pocket into the haversack on the morning of the departure from the valley what time Garvin was seeking the strayed burro.
He unslung the canvas bag and poured the handful of gravel on the bench. The assayer, trembling now with repressed excitement, examined the snuff-colored quartz, bit by bit, with a guttural ejaculation for each. "Donnerwetter! He gifs me feerst der vorthless stones to maig of dem de assay, und den he vill ask me von leedle qvestion about dis – dis maknificend bonansa! Ach! mein freund! haf you got viel of dis precious qvartz?"
"Why, yes; there's a good bit of it, I believe," replied Jeffard, still unawake to the magnitude of the discovery.
"Und you can find der blaces again? Dink aboud it now – dink hardt!"
Jeffard smiled. "Don't get excited, mein Herr. I know the place very well, indeed; I left it only three days since."
"Gut; sehr gut! Now go you; go und leef me to mein vork. Come you back in der morgen, und I vill tell you dot you are reech, reech! Go, mein freund, mit der goot Cherman in your moud – und Gott go mit you."
Jeffard felt his way down the dark stair, and so on out into the lighted street, still only in the middle ground between realization and the bare knowledge of the fact. He was conscious of some vague recurrent effort to surround the incredible thing; and conscious, too, that it grew and spread with each succeeding attempt to measure it until no mere human arms could girdle it.
Not yet did it occur to him to place himself at the nodus of discovery and possession. The miraculous thing was for him quite a thing apart; and when he had advanced far enough into the open country of realization to look a little about him, his thought was wholly for Garvin and the effect upon him of this sudden projection into the infinite. He tried to imagine the simple-hearted prospector as a man of affluence, and laughed aloud at the grotesque figure conjured up by the thought. What would Garvin do with his money? Squander it royally, like a loyal son of fortune, and think the world well lost, Jeffard decided.
The hissing gasoline torch of a street fakir flared gustily in the keen night wind sweeping down from the Mosquito, and the scintillant arc-stars at the corners began to take on frosty aureoles of prismatic hues. The crowds on the resonant plank sidewalks streamed boisterous and masterful, as if the plangent spirit of time and place were abroad. Jeffard came to earth again in the rude jostling of the throng. While he speculated, Garvin – Garvin the inexpectant – was doubtless awaiting him at the place appointed. He must hasten thither to be the bearer of the good news to the unspoiled one.
Looking about him to get his bearings, he found himself in front of the deserted assay office on the spot where he had parted from Garvin. "One square down and two to the right," he said, repeating Garvin's directions; and he set out to trudge them doggedly, lagging a little from honest leg-weariness. In the last half of the third square there was a screened doorway, and the click of celluloid counters came to his ears from the brilliantly lighted room beyond. At the sound the embers of the fire kindled months before glowed afresh and made his heart hot.
"Ah, you're there yet, are you?" he said, speaking to the stirring passion as if it were a sentient entity within him. "Well, you'll have to lie down again; there's no meat on the bone."
At the designated corner he found the rendezvous. It was a hostelry of the baser sort, with a bar-room dominant, and eating and sleeping conveniences – or inconveniences – subsidiary. The clatter of knives and forks on ironstone china came from the ill-smelling dining-room in the rear, and the bar-room held but one occupant. It was Garvin; he was sitting at one of the card-tables with his head in his arms. He looked up when Jeffard entered, and his smile was of fatigue.
"Hello, there; thought you'd gone and got lost in the shuffle. Get shut of 'em?"
Jeffard nodded.
"No good, I reckon?"
"No; nothing that we've found this summer. But you're a rich man, just the same, Garvin."
"Yes; I've cashed in on the outfit, and I've got twenty dollars in my inside pocket. Let's go in and chew before them fellers eat it all up."
"Don't be in a hurry; the kind of supper we'll get here can wait. I said you are a rich man, and I meant it. You remember the old hole up in the hillside above the camp, – the one you struck a 'dike' in two years ago?"
"Reckon I ain't likely to forget it."
"Well, that 'dike' was decomposed quartz carrying free gold. I was curious enough to put a handful of the stuff into my pocket and bring it out. The assayer's at work on it now, and he says it'll run high – up into the hundreds, I imagine. Is there much of it?"
The effect of the announcement on the unspoiled one was like that of an electric shock. He staggered to his feet, went white under the bronze, and flung his arms about Jeffard.
