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The Helpers

by Francis Lynde · English · Gutenberg #45133 · 576,560 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Helpers

Author: Francis Lynde


        
Release date: March 14, 2014 [eBook #45133]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HELPERS ***

THE HELPERS


BY FRANCIS LYNDE


[Illustration: Tout bien ou rien

The Riverside Press]

    BOSTON AND NEW YORK
    HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
    The Riverside Press, Cambridge
    1899


    COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY FRANCIS LYNDE
    ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




_TO THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE GUILD COMPASSIONATE, GREETING:_


_Forasmuch as it hath seemed good in the eyes of many to write of those
things which make for the disheartening of all humankind, these things
are written in the hope that the God-gift of loving-kindness, shared
alike by saint and sinner, may in some poor measure be given its due._

                                                       _The Author._




THE HELPERS

CHAPTER I


THE curtain had gone down on the first act of the opera, and Jeffard
found his hat and rose to go out. His place was the fourth from the
aisle, and after an ineffectual attempt to make a passageway for him
without rising, the two young women and the elderly man stood up and
folded their opera chairs. Being driven to think pointedly of something
else, Jeffard neglected to acknowledge the courtesy; and the two young
women balanced the account by discussing him after he had passed out of
hearing.

"I think he might at least have said 'Thank you,'" protested the one
in the black-plumed picture-hat, preening herself after the manner
of ruffled birds and disturbed womankind. "I'm in love with your
mountains, and your climate, and your end-of-the-century impetus, but I
can't say that I particularly admire Denver manners."

The clear-eyed young woman in the modest toque laughed joyously.

"Go on, Myra dear; don't mind me. It's so refreshing to hear an
out-of-church opinion on one's self. I know our manners are perfectly
primitive, but what can you expect when every train from the East
brings us a new lot of people to civilize? When you are tempted to
groan over our shortcomings it'll comfort you wonderfully if you will
just stop long enough to remember that a good many of us are the newest
of new tenderfoots!"

"Tenderfoots! What an expression!"

"It's good English, though we did use to say 'tenderfeet' before the
'Century Dictionary' set us right. And it calls the turn, as poppa
would say."

She of the far-reaching plumes bent her eyebrows in severe deprecation.

"Connie, your slang is simply vicious. Will you be good enough to tell
me what 'calls the turn' means?"

"Ask poppa."

Appealed to by the censorious one, the elderly man stopped twiddling
the bit of gold quartz on his watch-guard long enough to explain. He
did it with a little hesitancy, picking his way among the words as one
might handle broken glass, or the edged tools of an unfamiliar trade.
He was a plain man, and he stood in considerable awe of the picture-hat
and its wearer. When he had finished, the toque made honorable amends.

"I beg your pardon, Myra. Really, I didn't know it had anything to
do with gambling. But to go back to our manners: I'll give you the
ponies and the phaeton if I don't convince you that the absent-minded
gentleman on our left here is the tenderest of tenderfoots--most
probably from Philadelphia, too," she added, in mischievous
afterthought.

"You wouldn't dare!"

"You think not? Just wait and you'll see. Oh, cousin mine, you've a lot
to learn about your kind, yet. If you stay out here six months or a
year, you will begin to think your philosophy hasn't been half dreamful
enough."

"How absurd you are, Constance. If I didn't know you to be"--

"Wait a minute; let me start you off right: good, and sensible, and
modest, and unassuming, and dutiful, and brimful of fads"--she checked
the attributes off on her fingers. "You see I have them all by heart."

The little cloud of dust puffing from beneath the drop-curtain began to
subside, and the thumping and rumbling on the stage died away what time
the musicians were clambering back to their places in the orchestra.
Miss Van Vetter swept the aisles and the standing-room with her
opera-glass.

"You will not have a chance to prove it, Connie. He isn't coming back."

"Don't you believe it. I am quite sure he is a gentleman who always
gets the worth of his money."

"What makes you say that?"

"Oh, I don't know; intuition, I suppose. That's what they call it in a
woman, though I think it would be called good judgment in a man."

Taking him at his worst, Miss Elliott's terse characterization of
Henry Jeffard was not altogether inaccurate, though, in the present
instance, he would not have gone back to the theatre if he had known
what else to do with himself. Indeed, he was minded not to go back, but
a turn in the open air made him think better of it, and he strolled in
as the curtain was rising. Whereupon the elderly man and the two young
women had to stand again while he edged past them to his chair.

This time he remembered, and said something about being sorry to
trouble them. Miss Elliott's chair was next to his, and she smiled and
nodded reassuringly. Jeffard was moody and disheartened, and the nod
and the smile went near to the better part of him. He kept his seat
during the next intermission, and ventured a civil commonplace about
the opera. The young woman replied in kind, and the wheel thus set in
motion soon rolled away from the beaten track of trivialities into a
path leading straight to the fulfillment of Miss Elliott's promise to
her cousin.

"Then you haven't been long in Denver," she hazarded on the strength of
a remark which betrayed his unfamiliarity with Colorado.

"Only a few weeks."

"And you like it? Every one does, you know."

Jeffard tried to look decorously acquiescent and made a failure of it.

"I suppose I ought to be polite and say yes; but for once in a way, I'm
going to be sincere and say no."

"You surprise me! I thought everybody, and especially new-comers, liked
Denver; enthusiastically at first, and rather more than less afterward."

"Perhaps I am the exception," he suggested, willing to concede
something. "I fancy it depends very much upon the point of view. To be
brutally frank about it, I came here--like some few hundreds of others,
I presume--to make my fortune; and I think I would better have stayed
at home. I seem to have arrived a decade or two after the fact."

The young woman never swerved from her intention by a hair's-breadth.

"Yes?" she queried. "It's too true that these are not the palmy days of
the 'Matchless' and the 'Little Pittsburg,' notwithstanding Creede and
Cripple Creek. And yet it would seem that even now our Colorado is a
fairer field for ambition and energy than"--

She paused, and Jeffard, with an unanalyzed impression that it was
both very singular and very pleasant to be talking thus freely with a
self-contained young woman whose serenity was apparently undisturbed
by any notions of conventionality, said, "Than a city of the fifth
class in New England, let us say. Yes, I concede that, if you include
ambition; but when it comes to a plain question of earning a living"--

"Oh, as to that," she rejoined, quite willing to argue with him now
that her point was gained, "if it is merely a question of getting
enough to eat and drink I suppose that can be answered anywhere. Even
the Utes managed to answer it here before the Government began feeding
them."

He regarded her curiously, trying to determine her social point of
view by the many little outward signs of prosperity which tasteful
simplicity, unhampered by a lean purse, may exhibit.

"I wonder if you know anything at all about it," he said, half musingly.

"About getting something to eat?" Her laugh was a ripple of pure joy
that had the tonic of the altitudes in it. "I dare say I don't--not in
any practical way; though I do go about among our poor people. That is
what makes me uncharitable. I can't help knowing why so many people
have to go hungry."

Jeffard winced as if the uncharity had a personal application.

"We were speaking of fortunes," he corrected, calmly ignoring the fact
that his own remark had brought up the question of the struggle for
existence. "I think my own case is a fair example of what comes of
chasing ambitious phantoms. I gave up a modest certainty at home to
come here, and"--The musicians were taking their places again, and he
stopped abruptly.

"And now?" The words uttered themselves, and she was sorry for them
when they were beyond recall.

His gesture was expressive of disgust, but there was no resentment in
his reply.

"That was some time ago, as I have intimated; and I am still here and
beginning to wish very heartily that I had never come. I presume you
can infer the rest."

The leader lifted his baton, and the curtain rose on the third act
of the opera. At the same moment the curtain of unacquaintance,
drawn aside a hand's-breadth by the young woman's curiosity, fell
between these two who knew not so much as each other's names, and who
assumed--if either of them thought anything about it--that the wave of
chance which had tossed them together would presently sweep them apart
again.

After the opera the ebbing tide of humanity did so separate them; but
when the man had melted into the crowd in the foyer, the young woman
had a curious little thrill of regret; a twinge of remorse born of
the recollection that she had made him open the book of his life to a
stranger for the satisfying of a mere whim of curiosity.

Miss Van Vetter was ominously silent on the way home, but she made it
a point of conscience to go to Constance's room before her cousin had
gone to bed.

"Connie Elliott," she began, "you deserve to be shaken! How did you
dare to talk with that young man without knowing the first syllable
about him?"

Constance sat down on the edge of the bed and laughed till the tears
came.

"Oh, Myra dear," she gasped, "it's worth any amount of disgrace to see
you ruffle your feathers so beautifully. Don't you see that I talked to
him just because I didn't know any of the syllables? And he told me a
lot of them."

"I should think he did. I suppose he will call on you next."

Connie the unconventional became Miss Elliott in the smallest
appreciable lapse of time. "Indeed, he will not. He knows better than
to do that, even if he is a ten--"

But Miss Van Vetter was gone.




CHAPTER II


WHEN Jeffard left the theatre he went to his room; but not directly. He
made a detour of a few squares which took him down Sixteenth Street to
Larimer, and so on around to his lodging, which was in the neighborhood
of the St. James hotel.

After the manner of those whose goings and comings have reached the
accusative point, he took the trouble to assure himself that the
burning of a cigar in the open air was the excuse for the roundabout
walk; but the real reason showed its head for a moment or two when he
slackened his pace at one point in the circuit and glanced furtively up
at a row of carefully shaded windows in the second story of a building
on the opposite side of the street.

The lower part of the building was dark and deserted; but in the alley
there was a small hallway screened by a pair of swing doors with glass
eyes in them, and at the end of the hallway a carpeted stair leading up
to the lighted room above. It was to keep from climbing this stair that
Jeffard had gone to the theatre earlier in the evening.

Opposite the alley he stopped and made as if he would cross the street,
but the impulse seemed to expend itself in the moment of hesitation,
and he went on again, slowly, as one to whom dubiety has lent its
leaden-soled shoes. Reaching his room he lighted the gas and dropped
into a chair, his hands deep-buried in his pockets, and a look of
something like desperation in his eyes.

The suggestive outline of his Western experience sketched between the
acts of the opera for the young woman with the reassuring smile was
made up of half-truths, as such confidences are wont to be. It was true
that he had come to Colorado to seek his fortune, and that thus far
the quest had been bootless. But it was also true that he had begun by
persuading himself that he must first study his environment; and that
the curriculum which he had chosen was comprehensive, exhaustive, and
costly enough to speedily absorb the few thousand dollars which were to
have been his lure for success.

His walk in life hitherto had been decently irreproachable, hedged in
on either hand by such good habits as may be formed by the attrition
of a moral community; but since these were more the attributes of time
and place than of the man, and were unconsciously left behind in the
leave-takings, a species of insanity, known only to those who have
habitually worn the harness of self-restraint, had come upon him in the
new environment. At first it had been but a vagrant impulse, and as
such he had suffered it to put a bandage on the eyes of reason. Later,
when he would fain have removed the bandage, he found it tied in a hard
knot.

For the hundredth time within a month he was once more tugging at the
knot. To give himself the benefit of an object-lesson, he turned his
pockets inside out, throwing together a small heap of loose silver and
crumpled bank-notes on the table. After which he made a deliberate
accounting, smoothing the creases out of the bills, and building an
accurate little pillar with the coins. The exact sum ascertained, he
sat back and regarded the money reflectively.

"Ninety-five dollars and forty-five cents. That's what there is left
out of the nest-egg; and I've been here rather less than four months.
At that rate I've averaged, let me see"--he knitted his brows and made
an approximate calculation--"say, fifty dollars a day. Consequently,
the mill will run out of grist in less than two days, or it would if
the law of averages held good--which it doesn't, in this case. Taking
the last fortnight as a basis, I'm capitalized for just about one hour
longer."

He looked at his watch and got up wearily. "It's Kismet," he mused.
"I might as well take my hour now, and be done with it." Whereupon he
rolled the money into a compact little bundle, turned off the gas, and
felt his way down the dark stair to the street.

At the corner he ran against a stalwart young fellow, gloved and
overcoated, and carrying a valise.

"Why, hello, Jeffard, old man," said the traveler heartily, stopping to
shake hands. "Doing time on the street at midnight, as usual, aren't
you? When do you ever catch up on your sleep?"

Jeffard's laugh was perfunctory. "I don't have much to do but eat and
sleep," he replied. "Have you been somewhere?"

"Yes; just got down from the mine--train was late. Same old story with
you, I suppose? Haven't found the barrel of money rolling up hill yet?"

Jeffard shook his head.

"Jeff, you're an ass--that's what you are; a humpbacked burro of the
Saguache, at that! You come out here in the morning of a bad year with
a piece of sheepskin in your grip, and the Lord knows what little
pickings of civil engineering in your head, and camp down in Denver
expecting your lucky day to come along and slap you in the face. Why
don't you come up on the range and take hold with your hands?"

"Perhaps I'll have to before I get through," Jeffard admitted; and
then: "Don't abuse me to-night, Bartrow. I've about all I can carry."

The stalwart one put his free arm about his friend and swung him around
to the light.

"And that isn't the worst of it," he went on, ignoring Jeffard's
protest. "You've been monkeying with the fire and getting your fingers
burned; and, as a matter of course, making ducks and drakes of your
little stake. Drop it all, Jeffard, and come across to the St. James
and smoke a cigar with me."

"I can't to-night, Bartrow. I'm in a blue funk, and I've got to walk it
off."

"Blue nothing! You'll walk about two blocks, more or less, and then
you'll pull up a chair and proceed to burn your fingers some more. Oh,
I know the symptoms like a book."

Jeffard summoned his dignity, and found some few shreds and patches of
it left. "Bartrow, there is such a thing as overdrawing one's account
with a friend," he returned stiffly. "I don't want to quarrel with you.
Good-night."

Three minutes later the goggle-eyed swing doors opened and engulfed
him. At the top of the carpeted stair he met a hard-faced man who was
doubling a thick sheaf of bank-notes into portable shape. The outgoer
nodded, and tapped the roll significantly. "Go in and break 'em," he
rasped. "The bank's out o' luck to-night, and it's our rake-off. I win
all I can stand."

Jeffard pushed through another swing door and went to the faro-table.
Counting his money he dropped the odd change back into his pocket and
handed the bills to the banker.

"Ninety-five?" queried the man; and when Jeffard nodded, he pushed the
requisite number of blue, red, and white counters across the table.
Jeffard arranged them in a symmetrical row in front of him, and began
to play with the singleness of purpose which is the characteristic of
that particular form of dementia.

It was the old story with the usual variations. He lost, won, and then
lost again until he could reckon his counters by units. After which the
tide turned once more, and the roar of its flood dinned in his ears
like the drumming of a tornado in a forest. His capital grew by leaps
and bounds, doubling, trebling, and finally quadrupling the sum he had
handed the banker. Then his hands began to shake, and the man on his
right paused in his own play long enough to say, "Now's yer time to
cash in, pardner. Yer nerve's a-flickerin'."

The prudent advice fell upon deaf ears. Jeffard's soul was Berserk
in the fierce battle with chance, and he began placing the counters
upon certain of the inlaid cards before him, stopping only when he had
staked his last dollar. Five minutes afterward he was standing on the
sidewalk again, drawing in deep breaths of the keen morning air, and
wondering if it were only the possession of the thing called money that
kept one's head from buzzing ordinarily. In the midst of the unspoken
query the shuffling figure of a night tramp sidled up to him, and he
heard imperfectly the stereotyped appeal.

"Hungry, you say? Perhaps I'll be that, myself, before long. Here you
are."

The odd change jingled into the outstretched palm of the vagrant, and
for the first time in a fairly industrious life Jeffard knew what it
felt like to be quite without money.

"That is, I think I do, but I don't," he mused, walking slowly in the
direction of his room. "It isn't breakfast-time yet; and by the same
token, it isn't going to be for a good while. I believe I can sleep the
clock around, now that I've reached the bottom."




CHAPTER III


WHEN one has sown the wind, and the whirlwind harvest is begun, it
is easy to imagine that the first few strokes of the sickle have
gathered in all the bitterness there is in the crop. Some such illusory
assumption lent itself to Jeffard's mood when he assured himself that
he had finally reached the bottom; but the light of a new day, and a
habit of early rising which was not to be broken at such short notice,
brought a clearer perspective.

In lieu of breakfast he walked up one street and down another,
carefully avoiding the vicinity of the St. James for fear Bartrow might
offer him hospitality, and dodging the haunts of his few acquaintances
in the downtown thoroughfares for the same reason. This drove him to
the residence district; and out in Colfax Avenue he met the elderly man
whom he had taken to be the father of the young woman with the kindly
nod and smile.

Seeing him in daylight, Jeffard recognized a familiar figure of the
Mining Exchange and the brokers' offices, and thought it not unlikely
that he might presently stumble upon the home of the young woman. He
found it a square or two farther out, identifying it by a glimpse
of the young woman herself, who was on the veranda, looping up the
tendrils of a climbing rose.

At sight of her Jeffard forgot his penalties for the moment, and the
early morning sunshine seemed to take on a kindlier glow. She was
standing on the arm of a clumsy veranda-chair, trying vainly to reach
the higher branches of the rose, and Jeffard remarked that she was
small almost to girlishness. But the suggestion of immaturity paused
with her stature. The rounded arms discovered by the loose sleeves
of her belted house-gown; the firm, full outline of her figure; the
crowning glory of red-brown hair with the heart of the sunlight in it;
the self-contained poise on the arm of the great chair; these were all
womanly, and the glimpse stirred the waters of a neglected pool in
Jeffard's past as he went on his aimless way along the avenue.

There was a closely written leaf in the book of memory which he had
sought to tear out and destroy; but the sight of the graceful figure
poised on the arm of the big chair opened the record at the forbidden
page, and the imagined personality of the sweet-faced young woman with
the red-brown hair and sympathetic eyes set itself antithetically over
against the self-seeking ambition of the girl who had written her own
epitaph in the book of his remembrance. He gave place to the sharply
defined contrast for a time, indulging it as one who plunges not
unwillingly into the past for the sake of escaping the present, and
banishing it only when his shortening shadow gave token that the chance
of a breakfast invitation was no longer to be apprehended.

But when he turned his face cityward it was with a conscious avoidance
of the route which would lead him past the house with a climbing
rose on one of its veranda pillars. For what had a man to whom the
proletary's highway was already opening up its cheerless vista to do
with love, and dalliance, and heaven-suggestive pictures of domestic
beatitude?

Once more in Sixteenth Street, the moneyless reality thrust itself
upon him with renewed insistence, and he turned a corner abruptly to
escape an acquaintance who was crossing the street. The shame of it was
too new to strike hands with dissimulation as yet, and companionship
was least of all things to be desired. If he could but win back to
his room unaccosted and lock himself in until the sharpness of hunger
should have exorcised the devil of humiliation, he might hope to be
able to face an accusing world with such equanimity as may be born of
desperation.

But fate willed otherwise. As he was passing a deep-set doorway giving
on the sidewalk, a friendly arm shot out and barred the way. Jeffard
looked up with an unspoken malediction on his tongue. It was Bartrow.
In his haste to gain his lodging the shamed one had forgotten the
proximity of the St. James hotel.

"You're a chump!" declared the broad-shouldered young miner, backing
Jeffard against the wall and pinning him fast with one finger. "You're
no man's man, and you're not fit to live in a man's town. Why didn't
you come around to breakfast this morning, like decent people?"

"I'm not boarding at the St. James now." Jeffard tried to say it
naturally, but the evasion was palpable enough.

"What of that? Couldn't you afford to be sociable once in a way?"

Jeffard prevaricated, and since he was but a clumsy liar, contrived to
fall into a snare of his own setting.

"I was up too early for you, I guess. When I came by, the clerk told me
you weren't down yet."

Bartrow shook his head and appeared to be much moved.

"What an abnormal liar that clerk must be," he commented reflectively.
"I asked him five minutes ago if any one had inquired for me, and he
said no."

Jeffard hung his head and would have tried to break away; but Bartrow
locked arms with him and dragged him whither he would.

"I'll forgive you this time," he went on, laughing at Jeffard's
discomfiture. "I suppose you had your reasons for dodging, and while
it's ten to one they were no good, that leaves one chance in your
favor. Have a smoke?"

Now Jeffard's poverty-pride was fire-new as yet, and though the smell
of Bartrow's cigar made him faint with desire, he refused the gift.

"Haven't quit, have you?" Bartrow demanded.

"No--yes; that is, I have for the present. I'm not feeling very well
this morning."

"You look it; every inch of it. Let's go around and see what the money
people are doing. Maybe that'll chirk you up a bit."

Jeffard yielded, partly because Bartrow's impetus was always of the
irresistible sort, and partly because he could think of no plausible
objection on the spur of the moment. Bartrow talked cheerily all the
way around to the Mining Exchange, telling of his claims and prospects
in Chaffee County, and warming to his subject as only a seasoned
Coloradoan can when the talk is of "mineral" and mining. Jeffard, being
hungry, and sick with a fierce longing for tobacco, said little, and
was duly thankful that Bartrow required no more than a word now and
then to keep him going. None the less he watched narrowly for a chance
to escape, and was visibly depressed when none offered.

In the crowded Exchange the poverty-pride began to lose the fine
keenness of its edge. The atmosphere of the room was pungent with cigar
smoke, and the tobacco craving rose up in its might and smote down
Jeffard's self-respect.

"If you'll excuse me a minute, Dick, I believe I'll go out and get a
cigar as a measure of self-defense," he said; and Bartrow supplied
his need, as a matter of course. It was a shameful subterfuge, and he
loathed himself for having descended to it. Nevertheless, he took the
cigar which Bartrow made haste to offer, and lighted it. The first few
whiffs made him dizzy, but afterward he was better company for the
enthusiast.

While they were talking, the elderly man with the bit of quartz on his
watch-chain came in, and Jeffard inquired if Bartrow knew him.

"Know Steve Elliott? I should say I do. Everybody knows him, barring
now and then a tenderfoot like yourself. Besides being one of the most
lovable old infants on top of earth, he's one of Denver's picturesques.
That old man has had more ups and downs than any three men in Colorado;
and that's saying a good deal."

"In what way?"

"Oh, every way. He's a Fifty-niner, to begin with; came across the
plains in a bull-train to hunt for mineral. He found it--Steve would
find it if anybody could--but some sharp rascal euchred him out of it,
and he's been finding it and losing it at regular intervals ever since."

Jeffard blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, and took in the
outward presentment of the pioneer in an appraisive eye-sweep. "This is
one of the finding intervals, I take it."

"Sure. He's on top just now,--rather more so than usual, I
believe,--but the 'pioneer's luck' will catch him again some day, and
just as likely as not he'll be hustling around for a grub-stake."

"Man of family?" queried Jeffard.

"Yes, if a daughter's a family. His wife died in one of the lean years
a long time ago. But say, Jeffard, you ought to know the daughter.
She's as pretty as a peach, and as bright as a new nickel. She's had
her share of the ups and downs, and they've made a queer little medley
of her. Trap and tandem and a big house on Capitol Hill one month, and
as like as not two rooms in a block and a ride in the street-cars
the next. That's about the way Connie Elliott's had it all her life,
and it's made her as wide awake as a frosty morning, and as good as a
Sister of Charity."

"I can believe all that," Jeffard admitted, meaning more than he said.

"Yes, you're safe in believing all the good things you hear about Steve
Elliott and his daughter. They're good people. By the way, why can't
you come up to the house with me some evening and get acquainted?
They've a Philadelphia cousin staying with them now, and you might
compare notes on the 'wild and woolly' with her."

Jeffard had a string of excuses ready, ending with, "Besides, there
are particular reasons why I don't wish to meet Miss Elliott just
now--reasons that I can't explain."

"Reasons be hanged! Just you stand still a minute while I go get the
old man and introduce you. You'll like him a whole lot."

Bartrow did his part, but by the time he had pulled Elliott out of the
throng in front of the quotation board, Jeffard was two squares away,
headed once more for the suburbs. This time he crossed the river and
tramped for hours in the Highlands. He told himself he was killing time
and keeping out of the way of the luncheon hour; but in reality he was
fighting a desperate battle with pride, or self-respect, or whatever
it is that makes a man who is not a born vagrant shrink from that
species of cannibalism which begins with the eating of one's personal
possessions.

It was an unequal fight at best, since hunger was the besieger, but
Jeffard made shift to prolong it until the long day of fasting was
drawing to its close. He yielded at last, as needs must when famine
drives, but the capitulation was upon conditions, and his heart
was soft with repentant kneadings. Since one must eat to live, the
pride-quenching thing must come to pass; but the doing of it should
be the pivot upon which he would turn back to sanity and industrious
thrift. The loss of his small patrimony and the hard-earned savings
by which it had been fairly doubled was shrewd upon him, but he told
himself that the consequences of his folly must be set over against the
experience; that he must be content to begin again at the bottom, as
his father had before him, thankful for the youth and strength which
made such a beginning possible.

From the preliminary survey of penitence to plotting out the map of
good intentions is an easy stage, and Jeffard beguiled the long tramp
townward by building air-castles spacious and many-storied, with the
new resolutions for their foundations. But when the sidewalks of the
streets were once more under his feet, the pride-quenching necessity
urged itself afresh, plying the lash of shame until he was driven to
tramp yet other squares before he could attain to the plunging point.

He was passing the Albany when the climax was reached, and he turned
aside to get a light for the carefully economized stump of Bartrow's
cigar before setting out to find a pawnshop where his pride might
suffer least. At the cigar counter in the rotunda a giant in rough
tweeds, with an unshorn beard and the fine bronze of the grazing plains
on face and hands, was filling his case with high-priced Cubans from an
open box. At sight of Jeffard he dropped the cigar-case and roared out
a mighty welcome.

"Well, I'll be ----! Jeffard, my boy, where under the canopy did you
drop from? If I haven't had a search-warrant out for you all day, I'm
a liar and the truth has shook me. Been to dinner?--but of course you
haven't; or if you have, you are going to eat another with me right
now. How've you been? and where in Tophet have you been hiding out?"

Jeffard smiled. "That's the place--in Tophet and elsewhere; but I
haven't been out of town since you were here last."

"The devil you haven't! Then what did that muley maverick at the hotel
mean when he said you were gone?"

"Gone from the hotel, I guess he meant. I've been 'eating around,' as
we used to say back in the Berkshire Hills."

"Have, eh? Well, you're going to 'eat around' with me to-night, savez?
I was just going to swear a few lines and go up and eat by myself. Come
on; let's get a move. I've got a train-load of steers on the iron,
and I'm due to chase 'em at eight-thirty. But before I forget it,
here"--the big man found a compact little wad of bank-notes in his vest
pocket and thrust it into Jeffard's hand. "I counted that out the next
morning and meant to give it back to you, but the thing got away from
me slick and clean."

"Give it back to me?" queried Jeffard, with a sudden swelling of the
throat that made his voice husky and tremulous, "what is it?"

"Why, it's the hundred I borrowed of you the last time we took in the
menagerie together. What's the matter with you? Don't tell me you
don't remember it, or I shall go kick myself around the block for an
over-honest idiot!"

Jeffard did not remember it; could but dimly recall the circumstances
now that he was reminded of them. The lending had been in a moment of
supreme excitement in the midst of a feverish attack of the dementia;
the loan was in celluloid counters, in fact, and not in legal tender at
all. And having been made, it was swiftly lost sight of in the varying
fortunes of the sitting. None the less, the return of it at the precise
moment when it was most needed drove the thankfulness to his eyes, and
the lights of the great rotunda swam in a misty haze when he thought of
the humiliating thing from which the small Providence had saved him.

"Pettigrew," he said, when he could trust himself to speak, "you're
an honest man, and that's the worst that can be said of you. I had
forgotten it long ago. Take me in and fill me up. I've been tramping
all day, and it runs in my mind that I've skipped a meal or two."




CHAPTER IV


THE dancing party at the Calmaines' was a crush, as Mrs. Calmaine's
social enlargements were wont to be. For an hour or more the avenue
had been a-rumble with carriages coming and going, and a trickling
stream of bidden ones flowed steadily inward under the electric-lighted
awning, which extended the welcome of the hospitable house to the very
curb.

Thanks to Myra Van Vetter, whose tiring was always of the most
leisurely, the Elliotts were fashionably late; and the elderly man,
with the hesitant air accentuated by the unwonted dress-coat, had much
ado to win through the throng in the drawing-rooms with his charges.
His greeting to the hostess was sincere rather than well-turned in its
phrasing; but Mrs. Calmaine was sweetly gracious.

"_So_ glad to see you, Stephen," she protested; "the old friends can
never be spared, you know." She shook hands with unaffected cordiality,
and her tactful use of the elderly man's Christian name went far toward
effacing the afflictive dress-coat. "Miss Van Vetter, you are quite
radiant to-night. You spoil all one's ideals of Quaker demureness."

"Oh, Myra's demure enough, only you have to be her country cousin to
find it out," put in Connie maliciously; and when her father and Miss
Van Vetter had made room for later comers, she waited for another word
with the hostess.

"Just a hint, before I'm submerged," she began, when her opportunity
came. "I'm unattached, and particularly good-natured and docile
to-night. Make use of me just as you would of Delia or Bessie. You've
everybody here, as usual, and if I can help you amuse people"--

"Thank you, Connie, dear; that is very sweet of you. There are people
here to-night who seem not to belong to any one. Here comes one of them
now."

Constance looked and saw a young man making his way toward them; a
soldierly figure, with square shoulders and the easy bearing of one who
has lived much in the open; but with a face which was rather thoughtful
than strong, though its lines were well masked under a close-trimmed
beard and virile mustaches. She recognized her unintroduced
acquaintance of the theatre; and a minute or two afterward, when
Mrs. Calmaine would have presented the new-comer, Miss Elliott had
disappeared.

"Let's sit down here, Teddy; this is as good a place as any. You poor
boy! it bores you dreadfully, doesn't it? How trying it must be to be
_blasé_ at--shall I say twenty? or is it twenty-one?"

The dancing was two hours old, and Connie and the smooth-faced boy
who stood for the hopes of the house of Calmaine were sitting out the
intermission on a broad step of the main stair.

"Oh, I'm young, but I'll outgrow that," rejoined the youth tolerantly.
"All the same, you needn't bully me because you've a month or two the
advantage. Shall I go and get you something to eat, or drink?"

"No, thank you, Teddy; I'm neither hungry nor thirsty. But you might
give me the recipe for being good-natured when people make game of you."

"Yes; I think I see myself giving you points on that," said the boy,
with frank admiration in his eyes. "I'm not running an angel-school
just at present."

Connie's blush was reproachful. "You ridiculous boy!" she retorted.
"You'll be making love to me next, just the same as if we hadn't known
each other all our lives. Do you talk that way to other girls? or are
you only practicing on me so that you can?"

Teddy Calmaine shook his head. "There isn't anybody else," he asserted,
with mock earnestness. "My celestial acquaintance is too limited. When
the goddess goes, there are no half-goddesses to take her place."

Connie sniffed sympathetically, and then laughed at him. "You ought to
have seen me yesterday, when poppa brought old Jack Hawley home with
him. Poppa and Jack were partners in the 'Vesta,' and Mr. Hawley hadn't
seen me since I was in pinafores. He called me 'little girl,' and
wanted to know if I went to school, and how I was getting along!"

Young Calmaine made a dumb show of applause. "_O umbræ Pygmæorum!_ Why
wasn't I there to see! But you mustn't be too hard on old Jack. Half
the people here who don't know you think you're an escaped schoolgirl;
I've heard 'em. That's why I took pity on you and"--

"Teddy Calmaine, go away and find me somebody to talk to; a grown man,
if you please. You make me tired."

The boy got up with a quizzical grin on his smooth face. "I'll do it,"
he assented affably; "I'm no end good-natured, as you remarked a few
minutes ago."

When he was gone Connie forgot him, and fell into a muse, with the
sights and sounds of the crush for its motive. From her perch on the
stair she could look down on the shifting scene in the wide entrance
hall, and through the archway beyond she had a glimpse of the circling
figures in the ball-room swaying rhythmically to the music. It was all
very delightful and joyous, and she enjoyed it with a zest which was
yet undulled by satiety. None the less, the lavishness of it oppressed
her, and a vague protest, born of other sights and scenes sharply
contrasted but no less familiar to the daughter of Stephen Elliott,
began to shape itself in her heart. How much suffering a bare tithe
of the wealth blazing here in jewels on fair hands and arms and necks
would alleviate. And how many hungry mouths might be filled from the
groaning tables in the supper-room.

Miss Elliott came out of her reverie reluctantly at the bidding of her
late companion. Teddy Calmaine had obeyed her literally; and when she
turned he was presenting the soldierly young man with the pointed beard
and curling mustaches.

"Miss Elliott, this is Mr. Jeffard. You said you wanted a"--

"An ice, Teddy," she cut in, with a look which was meant to be
obliterative. "But you needn't mind it now. Will you have half a
stair-step, Mr. Jeffard?"

She made room for him, but he was mindful of his obligations.

"Not if you will give me this waltz."

She glanced at her card and looked up at him with a smile which was
half pleading and half quizzical. "Must I?"

He laughed and sat down beside her. "There is no 'must' about it. I was
hoping you would refuse."

"Oh, thank you."

"For your sake rather than my own," he hastened to add. "I am a
wretched dancer."

"What a damaging admission!"

"Is it? Do you know, I had hoped you wouldn't take that view of it."

"I don't," she admitted, quite frankly. "We take it seriously,
as we do most of our amusements, but it's a relic of barbarism.
Once, when I was a very little girl, my father took me to see a
Ute scalp-dance,--without the scalps, of course,--and--well, first
impressions are apt to be lasting. I never see a ball-room in action
without thinking of Fire-in-the-Snow and his capering braves."

Jeffard smiled at the conceit, but he spoke to the truism.

"I hope your first impressions of me won't be lasting," he ventured. "I
think I was more than usually churlish last night."

She glanced up quickly. "There should be no 'last night' for us," she
averred.

"Forgive me; you are quite right. But no matter what happens there
always will be."

Her gaze lost itself among the circling figures beyond the archway, and
the truth of the assertion drove itself home with a twinge of something
like regret. But when she turned to him again there was unashamed
frankness in the clear gray eyes.

"What poor minions the conventions have made us," she said. "Let us be
primitive and admit that our acquaintance began last night. Does that
help you?"

"It will help me very much, if you will let me try to efface the first
impression."

"Does it need effacing?"

"I think it must. I was moody and half desperate."

He stopped, and she knew that he was waiting for some sign of
encouragement. She looked away again, meaning not to give it. It is one
of the little martyrdoms of sympathetic souls to invite confidences and
thereby to suffer vicariously for the misdoings of the erring majority,
and her burdens in this wise were many and heavy. Why should she go out
of her way to add to them those of this man who ought to be abundantly
able to carry his own? Thus the unspoken question, and the answer came
close upon the heels of it. But for her own curiosity,--impertinence,
she had begun to call it,--the occasion would never have arisen.

"I am listening," she said, giving him his sign.

Being permitted to speak freely, Jeffard found himself suddenly
tongue-tied. "I don't know what I ought to say,--if, indeed, I ought to
say anything at all," he began. "I think I gave you to understand that
the world had been using me rather hardly."

"And if you did?"

A palpitant couple, free of the waltz, came up the stair, and Jeffard
rose to make way. When the breathless ones perched themselves on the
landing above, he went on, standing on the step below her and leaning
against the baluster.

"If I did, it was an implied untruth. It's a trite saying that the
world is what we make it, and I am quite sure now that I have been
making my part of it since I came to Denver. I'm not going to afflict
you with the formula, but I shall feel better for having told you that
I have torn it up and thrown it away."

"And you will write out another?"

"Beginning with to-morrow. I leave Denver in the morning."

"You are not going back?" She said it with a little tang of deprecation
in the words.

His heart warmed to the small flash of friendly interest, and he
smiled and shook his head. "No, that would never do--without the
fortune, you know. I'm going to the mountains; with pick and shovel,
if need be. I should have started to-night if I hadn't found Mrs.
Calmaine's invitation. She has been very good to me in a social way,
and I could do no less than come." He said it apologetically, as if the
dip into the social pool on the eve of the new setting forth demanded
an explanation.

She smiled up at him. "Does it need an apology? Are you sorry you came?"

"Sorry? It's the one wise thing I've done these four months. I shall
always be glad--and thankful." It was on his tongue to say more; to
dig the pit of confession still deeper, as one who, finding himself
at the shrine of compassionate purity, would be assoilzied for all
the wrong-doings and follies and stumblings of a misguided past; to
say many things for which he had no shadow of warrant, and to which
the self-contained young woman on the step before him could make no
possible rejoinder; but the upcoming of the man whose name stood next
on Connie's card saved him. A moment later he was taking his leave.

"Not going to break away now, are you, Jeffard?" said the fortunate
one, helping Connie to rise.

"Yes; I must cut it short. I leave town in the morning. Miss Elliott,
will you bid me Godspeed?"

She put her hand in his and said what was meet; and to the man who
stood beside her the parting appeared to be neither more nor less than
conventionally formal. But when Jeffard was free of the house and
swinging along on his way cityward, the spirit of it made itself a name
to live; and out of the God-speed and the kindly phrase of leavetaking
the new-blown fire of good intention distilled a subtle liqueur of
jubilance which sang in his veins like the true wine of rejuvenescence;
so nearly may the alchemy of pure womanhood transmute sounding brass,
or still baser metal, into the semblance of virgin gold.

So Jeffard went his way reflective, and while he mused the fire burned
and he saw himself in his recent stumblings in the valley of dry bones
as a thing apart. From the saner point of view it seemed incredible
that he could ever have been the thrall of such an ignoble passion
as that which had so lately despoiled him and sent him to tramp the
streets like a hungry vagrant. As yet the lesson was but a few hours
old, but the barrier it had thrown up between the insensate yesterday
and the rational to-day seemed safely impassable. In the strength of
reinstated reason, confidence returned; and close upon the heels of
confidence, temerity. His reverie had led him past the corner where
he should have turned westward, and when he took cognizance of his
surroundings he was standing opposite the alley-way of the glass-eyed
doors. He glanced at his watch. It was midnight. Twenty-four hours
before, almost to the minute, he had been dragged irresistibly across
the street and up the carpeted stair to the lair of the dementia-demon.

He looked up at the carefully shaded windows, and a sudden desire to
prove himself came upon him. Not once since the first hot flashes of
the fever had begun to quicken his pulse, had he been able to go and
look on and return scathless. But was he not sane now? and was not the
barrier well builded? If it were not--if it stood only upon the lack of
opportunity--

He crossed the street and threaded the narrow alley, tramping steadily
as one who goes into battle,--a battle which may be postponed, but
which may by no means be evaded. The swing doors gave back under his
hand, and a minute later he stood beside the table with the inlaid
cards in its centre, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, and his
breath coming in sharp little gasps.

It was a perilous moment for any son of Adam who has been once bitten
by the dog of avarice gone mad. The run of luck was against the bank,
and the piles of counters under the hands of the haggard ones girdling
the table grew and multiplied with every turn of the cards. Jeffard's
lips began to twitch, and the pupils of his eyes narrowed to two
scintillant points. Slowly, and by almost imperceptible advances, his
right hand crept from its covert, the fingers tightly clenched upon
the small roll of bank-notes,--the Providential windfall which must
provision any future argosy of endeavor.

The dealer ran the cards with monotonous precision, his hands moving
like the pieces of a nicely adjusted mechanism. Jeffard's fingers
unclosed and he stood staring down at the money in his palm as if the
sight of it fascinated him. Then he turned quickly and tossed it across
to the banker. "Reds and whites," he said; and the sound of his own
voice jarred upon his nerves like the rasping of files in a saw-pit.

Two hours later, he was again standing on the narrow footway in the
alley, with the swing doors winging to rest behind him. Two hours of
frenzied excitement in the dubious battle with chance, and the day of
penitence and its hopeful promise for the future were as if they had
not been. Halfway across the street he turned and flung his clenched
fist up at the shaded windows, but his tongue clave to his teeth and
the curse turned to a groan with a sob at the end of it. And as he went
his way, sodden with weariness, the words of a long-forgotten allegory
were ringing knell-like in his ears:--

"When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh in dry places
seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my
house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty
and swept and garnished. Then goeth he and taketh with him seven other
spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there;
and the last state of that man is worse than the first."




CHAPTER V


IT was on the day following the dancing party at the Calmaines' that
Constance Elliott arrayed herself in a modest street dress, and ran
down to the library where Miss Van Vetter was writing letters.

"You'd better change your mind, Myra, and come along with me. It'll do
you good to see how the other half lives," she said coaxingly.

Miss Van Vetter calmly finished her sentence before she replied.

"Thank you, Connie; but I believe not. I know it is the proper fad
nowadays to go slumming, but I can't do it; it's a matter of principle
with me."

Connie's eyebrows arched in mild surprise. "That's a new one," she
commented. "I've heard all kinds of excuses, but never that. How do you
diagram it?"

"It is simple enough. One sees plenty of misery in the ordinary course
of things without making a specialty of looking for it; and when you've
done everything that your money and sympathy can do, it is only a
single drop in the great ocean of human wretchedness, after all. More
than that, you have added to the sum total of the world's suffering
by just so much as the miseries of the others hurt you through your
compassion."

"Myra, dear, if I didn't know that you are better than your theories, I
should try to humble you. What will you do if the evil day ever comes
to you?"

"Unload my woes upon some such angelic and charitable sister of mercy
as you are, I suppose," rejoined Miss Van Vetter complacently. "But
that doesn't make it necessary for me to go about and shed literal
tears with those who weep, now. I prefer to do it by proxy." She took
a gold piece from her purse and offered it to Constance. "Take this,
and make some poor wretch comfortable for ten or fifteen minutes on my
account."

Miss Elliott was not yet canonized, and she refused the contribution
with an indignant little stamp of her foot. "Myra Van Vetter, you're
worse than a heathen! I wouldn't touch your money with the tip of
my finger; I'd be afraid it would burn me. I hope you'll learn for
yourself some day what the cold shoulder of charity is--there!" And she
swept out of the room with as much dignity as five-feet-one-and-a-half
may compass upon extraordinary occasions.

Once on the other side of the library door, she laughed softly to
herself and was instantly Connie the serene again.

"It does me a whole lot of good to boil over once in a while," she
said, going out on the veranda. "Myra serves one beneficent end in the
cosmogony in spite of herself: she's a perfect safety-valve for me.
Tommie-e-e-e! O Tom! Are you out there?"

A ragged boy, sitting on the curb and shaking dice with a pair of
pebbles, sprang up and ran to the gate. When the latch baffled him, as
it usually did from the outside, he vaulted the fence and stood before
her.

"Prompt as usual, aren't you, Tommie?"

"Ain't got nothin' else to do but to be promp'. Is it a baskit, dis
time, 'r wot?"

"It's a basket, and you'll find it in the kitchen."

Five minutes later the dwellers in the avenue might have seen a small
procession headed townwards. Its component parts were a dainty little
lady, walking very straight with her hands in the pockets of her
jacket, and a ragged urchin bent sidewise against the weight of a
capacious basket.

The street-car line was convenient, but Constance walked in deference
to Tommie's convictions,--he objected to the car on the score of
economy. "Wot's the use o' givin' a bloated corp'ration a nickel w'en
a feller can mog along on his feets?" he had demanded, one day; and
thereafter they walked.

What profits it to set down in measured phrase at what numbers in
what streets the basket cover was lifted that afternoon? Doubtless,
in that great day when the books shall be opened, it will be found
that a faithful record has been kept, not only of the tumbler of jelly
left with bedridden Mother M'Garrihan, the bottle of wine put into the
hands of gaunt Tom Devins, who was slowly dying of lead-poisoning, and
the more substantial viands spread out before the hungry children in
drunken Owen David's shanty, but of all the other deeds of mercy that
left a trail of thankful benisons in the wake of the small procession.
Be it sufficient to say that the round was a long one, and that
Constance spared neither herself nor her father's bank-account where
she found misery with uplifted hands.

The basket had grown appreciably lighter, and Tommie's body was once
more approaching the perpendicular, when the procession paused before
an unswept stairway leading to the second story of a building fronting
on one of the lower cross streets. Constance held out her hand for the
basket, but the boy put it behind him.

"Wot's the matter with me?" he demanded.

"Nothing at all, Tommie. I only meant to save you a climb. The basket
isn't heavy now, you know."

"S'posin' it ain't; ain't I hired to run this end o' the show? You jes'
tell me where you want it put, an' that's right where I'm goin' to put
it, an' not nowheres else."

She smiled and let him lead the way up the dusty stair. At a certain
door near the end of the long upper corridor she signed to him to give
her the basket. "Go to the head of the stairs and wait," she whispered.
"I may want you."

When he was out of hearing she tapped on the door and went in. It was
the interior of all others that made Constance want to cry. There was a
sufficiency of garish furniture and tawdry knickknacks scattered about
to show that it was not the dwelling-place of the desperately poor; but
these were only the accessories to the picture of desolation and utter
neglect having for its central figure the woman stretched out upon the
bed. She was asleep, and her face was turned toward the light which
struggled feebly through the unwashed window. Beauty there had been,
and might be again, but not even the flush of health would efface the
marks of Margaret Gannon's latest plunge into the chilling depths of
human indifference. Connie tiptoed to the bedside and looked, and her
heart swelled within her.

It had fallen out in this wise. On the Monday night Mademoiselle
Angeline--known to her intimates as Mag Gannon--saw fuzzy little
circles expand and contract around the gas-jets in the Bijou Theatre
while she was walking through her part in the farce. Tuesday night the
fuzzy circles became blurs; and the stage manager swore audibly when
she faltered and missed the step in her specialty. On the Wednesday
Mademoiselle Angeline disappeared from the Bijou altogether; and for
three days she had lain helpless and suffering, seeing no human face
until Constance came and ministered to her. And the pity of it was that
while the fever wrought its torturous will upon her, delirium would not
come to help her to forget that she was forgotten.

Constance had pieced out the pitiful story by fragments while she was
dragging the woman back from the brink of the pit; and when all was
said, she began to understand that a sick soul demands other remedies
than drugs and dainties. Just what they were, or how they were to be
applied, was another matter; but Constance grappled with the problem as
ardently as if no one had ever before attacked it. In her later visits
she always brought the conversation around to Margaret's future; and on
the afternoon of the basket-procession, after she had made her patient
eat and drink, she essayed once again to enlist the woman's will in her
own behalf.

"It's no use of me trying, Miss Constance; I've got to go back when I'm
fit. There ain't nothing else for the likes of me to do."

"How can you tell till you try? O Margaret, I wish you would try!"

A smile of hard-earned wisdom flitted across the face of the woman.
"You know more than most of 'em," she said, "but you don't know it all.
You can't, you see; you're so good the world puts on its gloves before
it touches you. But for the likes of me, we get the bare hand, and
we're playing in luck if it ain't made into a fist."

"You poor girl! It makes my heart ache to think what you must have gone
through before you could learn to say a thing like that. But you must
try; I can't let you go back to that awful place after what you've told
me about it."

"Supposing I did try; there's only the one thing on earth I know how to
do,--that's trim hats. Suppose you run your pretty feet off till you
found me a place where I could work right. How long would it be before
somebody would go to the missis, or the boss, or whoever it might be,
and say, 'See here; you've got one of Pete Grim's Bijou women in there.
That won't do.' And the night after, I'd be doing my specialty again,
if I was that lucky to get on."

"But you could learn to do housework, or something of that kind, so you
could keep out of the way of people who would remember you. You must
have had some experience."

The invalid rocked her head on the pillow. "That'd be worse than the
other. Somebody'd be dead sure to find out and tell; and then I'd be
lucky if I got off without going to jail. And for the experience,--a
minute ago you called me a girl, but I know you didn't mean it. How old
do you think I am?"

Constance looked at the fever-burned face, and tried to make allowances
for the ravages of disease. "I should say twenty-five," she replied,
"only you talk as if you might be older."

"I'll be eighteen next June, if I'd happen to live that long," said
Margaret; and Constance went home a few minutes later with a new pain
in her heart, born of the simple statement.

At the gate she took the empty basket and paid the boy. "That's all
for to-day, but I want to give you some more work," she said. "Every
morning, and every noon, and every night, until I tell you to stop, I
want you to go up to that last place and ask Margaret Gannon if there
is anything you can do for her. And if she says yes, you do it; and if
it's too big for you to do, you come right up here after me. Will you
do all that?"

"Will I? Will a yaller dorg eat his supper w'en he's hungry? You're
jes' dead right I'll do it. An' I'll be yere to-morrer afternoon,
promp'."

All of which was well enough in its way, but the problem was yet
unsolved, and Constance had to draw heavily on her reserves of
cheerfulness to be able to make an accordant one of four when Richard
Bartrow called that evening after dinner.




CHAPTER VI


DURING the week following the day of repentance and backsliding,
Jeffard's regression down the inclined plane became an accelerated
rush. In that interval he parted with his watch and his surveying
instruments, and made a beginning on his surplus clothing. It was a
measure of the velocity of the descent that the watch, with the transit
and level, brought him no more than seven knife-and-fork meals and an
occasional luncheon. But the clothing being transmutable in smaller
installments, did rather better.

Before the week was out, a bachelor's apartment in a respectable
locality became an incongruous superfluity; and having by no means
reached the philosophical level in his descent, he hid himself from all
comers in a dubious neighborhood below Larimer Street.

The second week brought sharper misery than the first, since it
enforced the pitiful shifts of vagrancy before he could acquire the
spirit-breaking experience which makes them tolerable. But before many
days the poor remnants of pride and self-respect gave up the unequal
struggle, leaving him to his own devices; after which he soon learned
how to keep an open and unbalanced meal-and-cigar account with his few
unmercenary friends.

In a short time, however, the friendly tables began to grow scarce.
Bartrow went back to his mine, and with his going the doors of the St.
James's dining-room opened no more to the proletary. Then came the
return of John Pettigrew, whose hospitality was as boundless as the
range whereon his herds grazed, and who claimed kinship with Jeffard
because both chanced to be transplanted New Englanders. While Pettigrew
stayed in Denver, Jeffard lived on the fat of the land, eating at his
friend's table at the Albany, and gambling with the ranchman's money
at odd hours of the day and night. But after Pettigrew left there was
another lean interval, and Jeffard grew haggard and ran his weight down
at the rate of a pound a day.

In the midst of this came a spasm of the reformative sort, born of a
passing glimpse of Stephen Elliott's daughter on one of her charitable
expeditions. The incident brought him face to face with a fact which
had been unconsciously lending desperation to despair. Now that the
discovery could be no more than an added twist of the thumbscrew, he
began to realize that he had found in the person of the sweet-faced
young woman with the far-seeing eyes the Heaven-born alchemist who
could, if she so willed, transmute the flinty perverseness of him
into plastic wax, shaping it after her own ideals; that it was the
unacknowledged beginning of love which had found wings for the
short-lived flight of higher hopes and more worthy aspirations. The
day of fasting and penitence had set his feet in the way leading to
reinstatement in his own good opinion; but the meeting with Constance
was answerable for a worthier prompting,--a perfervid determination to
fight his way back to better things for righteousness' sake, knowing
that no otherwise could he hope to stand with her on the Mount of
Benediction.

It was against this anointing of grace that he had sinned; and it
was in remorseful memory of it that he brushed his clothes, put on
an ill-fitting air of respectability, and tramped the streets in a
fruitless search for employment until he was ready to drop from fatigue
and hunger. Nothing came of it. The great public, and notably the
employing minority of it, is no mean physiognomist; and the gambler
carries his hall-mark no less than the profligate or the drunkard.

At the close of one of these days of disheartenment, a day wherein a
single cup of coffee had been made to stand sponsor for breakfast,
luncheon, and dinner, Jeffard saw a familiar figure standing at the
counter in one of the newspaper offices. Knowing his man, Jeffard
stopped on the sidewalk and waited. If Lansdale had but the price of a
single meal in his pocket, two men would share that meal that night.

There were two entrances to the newspaper office, and Jeffard watched
beaglewise lest his chance of breaking his fast should vanish while he
tarried. Presently Lansdale came out, and Jeffard fell upon him before
he could latch the door.

"Salaam! Jeffard, my son," said the outcomer. "I saw you waiting for
me. How goes the world-old struggle for existence?"

"Don't remind me of it, Lansdale; do you happen to have the price of a
meal about you?"

Lansdale smiled, and gravely tucking Jeffard's arm under his own,
steered diagonally across the street toward the open doors of a café.

"Now that is what our forefathers called Providence, and what we, being
so much wiser in our own generation, call luck," he declared. "I had
just got a check out of the post-office for a bit of work sent months
ago to an editor whose name is unhasting. When you saw me I was closing
a negotiation, by the terms of which the cashier of the 'Coloradoan'
becomes my banker. Behold, now, the mysteries of--shall we say
Providence? At any time within the six months I would have sworn that
the opportune moment for the arrival of this bit of money-paper had
come; nevertheless Providence, and the slow-geared editor, get it here
just in time to save two men from going to bed supperless. Why don't
you say something?"

They were at the door of the café, and Jeffard gripped his companion's
arm and thrust him in. "Can't you see that I'm too damned hungry to
talk?" he demanded savagely; and Lansdale wisely held his peace until
the barbarian in his guest had been appeased.

When the soup and fish had disappeared, Jeffard was ashamed of himself,
and said as much.

"You mustn't mind what I said," he began, by way of making amends.
"I used to think I was a civilized being, but, God help me, Lansdale,
I'm not! When I've gone without food for twenty-four hours on end, I'm
nothing more or less than a hungry savage."

Lansdale smiled intelligence. "I know the taste of it, and it's bad
medicine--for the soul as well as for the body," he rejoined. "There is
reason to suspect that Shakespeare never went hungry, else he wouldn't
have said, 'Sweet are the uses of adversity.' They're not sweet;
they're damnably bitter. A man may come forth of the winepress with
bones unbroken and insight sharpened to the puncturing point; but his
capacity for evil will be increased in just proportion."

"I don't want to believe that," said Jeffard, whose despair was not yet
proof against a good meal in good company.

"You needn't, but it's true. The necessities breed a certain
familiarity with evil. Moral metes and bounds have a trick of
disappearing in the day of physical dearth. When hunger has driven a
man over the ethical boundary a few times, the crossing becomes easy;
and when hunger drops the whip, inclination is very likely to take it
up."

Jeffard laughed. "'The words of Agur the son of Jakeh,'" he quoted. "I
believe you'd moralize if you were going to be hanged, Lansdale."

"Perhaps I should. What possible contingency could offer better
opportunities? And am I not going to be hanged--or choked, which
amounts to the same thing?"

Jeffard looked up quickly and saw what the myopia of hunger had
hitherto obscured: that his companion's smooth-shaven face seemed
gaunter than usual, and that his hands were unsteady when he lifted the
knife and fork.

"Colorado isn't helping you, then," he said.

"No; but it isn't altogether Colorado's fault. The Boston medicine man
said change of climate, plenty of outdoor indolence, nutritious food
at stated intervals. I have all any one could ask of the first, and as
little of either of the others as may be."

"But you do good work, Lansdale. I've always believed you could make it
win, in time. Hasn't the time come yet?"

"No. What I can do easiest would bring bread and meat, if I could sell
it; but a literary hack-writer has no business in Colorado--or anywhere
else outside of the literary centres. In Boston I could always find an
odd job of reviewing, or space-writing, or something that would serve
to keep body and soul together; but here they won't have me even in the
newspapers."

"Overcrowded, I suppose, like everything else in this cursed country."

"That's the alleged reason; but the fact is that I'm not a journalist.
Your thoroughbred newspaper man has more or less contempt for a fellow
who can't or won't write journalese."

They had attained to the dessert, and the waiter was opening a modest
bottle of claret for them. Jeffard turned his wineglass down.

"What! Is that the way you flout a man's hospitality?" demanded
Lansdale, in mock displeasure.

"No; I don't mean to do that. But I'm drunken with feasting now, and if
I put wine into me I shall pawn the coat off my back before midnight
for a stake to play with."

Lansdale smiled. "I'll see that you don't have to. Turn up your glass."

But Jeffard was obstinate, and sat munching raisins while Lansdale
sipped his wine. When the waiter brought the cigars he came out of his
reverie to say, "You want to live, don't you, Lansdale?"

The potential man of letters took time to think about it. "I suppose
I do; else I shouldn't be starving to death in Denver," he admitted
finally.

"And there is nothing but the lack of a little ready money that keeps
you from giving the Boston doctor's prescription a fair trial. If I had
the money I believe I'd change places with you; that is, I'd give you
the money in exchange for your good chance of being able to shuffle off
mortality without the help of extraneous means. I think I've had enough
of it."

"Do you? That proves how little a man has learned when he thinks he has
arrived. Now pull yourself together, and tell me what you really would
do if you became suddenly rich."

"How rich?"

"Oh, make it a comfortable figure; say eight or ten thousand a month
for an income."

"I'd do what I said I should,--change places with you; only I suppose
that wouldn't be possible. Failing that"--He pondered over it for a
moment, balancing his fork on the edge of his plate the while. "A few
weeks ago I should have mapped out a future worth talking about. I had
a lucid day, in which the things that make for ambition of the better
sort had their inning. If you had asked me such a question then, I
should doubtless have told you that I should try to realize the ideals
of other days; to walk uprightly, and to hold great wealth as it should
be held--in trust for the good of one's kind; to win the love of the
ideal woman, perhaps; and, having won it, to sit at her feet until I
had learned how to be God's almoner."

Lansdale's smile was not wholly cynical. "But now?" he queried.

"But now I know my own limitations. I think I should go back to the old
farm in the Berkshire Hills, and try to make it earn me bread and meat."

"But you couldn't spend ten thousand a month on an abandoned farm,
though I grant you it would be a pretty expensive luxury. What would
you do with the lave of it?"

Jeffard's lips tightened, and his face was not pleasant to look upon.
"I'd let it go on accumulating, piling up and up till there was no
shadow of possibility that I should ever again come to know what it
means to be without money. And even then I should know I could never
get enough," he added.

This time Lansdale's smile was of incredulity. "Let me prophesy," he
suggested. "When your lucky day overtakes you, you will do none of
these things. Jeffard the fool may be heard of wherever the Associated
Press has a wire or a correspondent; but Jeffard the miser will never
exist outside of your own unbalanced imagination. Let's go out and
walk. It's fervidly close in here."

Arm in arm they paced the streets until nearly midnight, talking of
things practical and impracticable, and keeping well out of the present
in either the past or the future. When Lansdale said good-night, he
stuffed a bank-note into Jeffard's pocket.

"It's only a loan," he protested, when Jeffard would have made him take
it back. "And there are no conditions. You can go and play with it, if
that's what you'd rather do."

The suggestion was unfortunate, though possibly the result would have
been the same in any event. Five minutes after parting from Lansdale,
Jeffard had taken his place in the silent group around the table in the
upper room; and by the time the pile of counters under his hand had
increased to double the amount of Lansdale's gift, he was oblivious to
everything save the one potent fact--that after so many reverses his
luck had turned at last.

Five hundred and odd dollars he had at one time in that eventful
sitting, and his neighbor across the corner of the table, a grizzled
miner with the jaw of a pugilist and eyes that had a trick of softening
like a woman's, had warned him by winks, nods, and sundry kicks under
the table to stop. Jeffard scowled his resentment of the interference
and played on, losing steadily until his capital had shrunk to fifty
dollars. Then the miner rose up in his place, reached across, and gave
Jeffard an open-handed buffet that nearly knocked him out of his chair.

"Dad blame you!" he roared; "I'll learn you how to spile my play! Stan'
up and fight it out like a man!"

The game stopped at once. The dealer held his hand, and the banker
reached for his revolver.

"You two gen'lemen cash in and get out o' here," he commanded. "This is
a gen'leman's game, and we don't run no shootin'-gallery--leastwise,
not unless _I_ have to take a hand in it. Pass in your chips."

They both obeyed; the miner with maledictory reluctance, and Jeffard
in a tremulous frenzy of wrath. When they reached the sidewalk,
Jeffard flung himself savagely upon his assailant, only to learn that
abstinence is a poor trainer, and that he was little better than a
lay-figure in the grasp of the square-jawed one with the melting eyes.
The big man thrust him into a corner and held him there until he
listened to reason.

"You blamed idjit! you hain't got sense enough to go in when it rains!
Hold still, 'r I'll bump your head ag'inst the wall! As I was sayin',
you don't know enough to pound sand. Every single time I've been in
this dive, you've been here, too, a-blowin' yourself like you had a
wad as big as a feather bed, and you know danged well you hain't got
nothin'. And you wouldn't 'a' kep' a dern cent to-night, if I hadn't
thumped you and raised a row. Now you go and hunt you a place to sleep
while you've got dust enough to pay for it; and don't you come round
here ag'in till you've put a whole grub-stake inside of you. Savez?"




CHAPTER VII


FROM the beginning of the cannibalistic stage of the journey down
the inclined plane, Jeffard had determined that, come what might, he
would keep enough of his wardrobe to enable him to present an outward
appearance of respectability. With a vague premonition of the not
improbable end of the journey he recoiled at the thought of figuring
before a coroner's jury as a common vagrant.

This resolution, however, like all others of a prideful nature, went
down before the renewed assaults of the allies, hunger and dementia.
Whereby it speedily came to pass that he retained only the garments he
stood in, and these soon became shabby and wayworn. Since, in his own
estimation, if not in that of others, the clothes do make the man to a
very considerable extent, Jeffard gradually withdrew from his former
lounging-places, confining himself to the less critical region below
Larimer Street during the day, and avoiding as much as possible the
haunts of his former associates at all hours.

It was for this cause that Bartrow, on his return from Chaffee County,
was unable to find Jeffard. Meeting Lansdale when the search had become
unhopeful, the large-hearted man of the altitudes lamented his failure
after his own peculiar fashion.

"When was it you saw him last?" he inquired of the transplanted
Bostonian.

"It was about a week ago. To be exact, it was a week Tuesday. I
remember because we dined together that evening."

"Now doesn't that beat the band? Here I've gone and got him a soft snap
up on the range--good pay, and little or nothing to do--and he's got to
go and drop out like a monte man's little joker. It's enough to make a
man swear continuous!"

"I don't think he would have gone with you," Lansdale ventured.

"Wouldn't, eh? If I can find him I'll take him by the neck and make him
go; savez? How do you put it up? Runaway? or a pile of bones out on the
prairie somewhere?"

"It's hard to say. Jeffard's a queer combination of good and not so
good,--like a few others of us,--and just now the negative part is
on top. He was pretty low the night we were together, though when we
separated I thought he was taking himself a little less seriously."

"Didn't talk about getting the drop on himself, or anything like that?"

"N--no, not in a way to leave the impression that he was in any
immediate danger of doing such a thing."

Bartrow chewed the end of his cigar reflectively. "Hasn't taken to
quizzing the world through the bottom of a whiskey-glass?"

"No, I should say not. Thus far, I think he has but the one devil."

"And that's the 'tiger,' of course. I knew about that; I've known it
all along. The Lord forgive me! I don't know but I was the ring-master
in that show. You know we chased around a good deal together, along at
the first, and it's as likely as not I showed him a whole lot of things
he'd better not have seen."

The half-cynical smile lightened upon Lansdale's grave face. "That is
one of my criticisms of Western manners," he commented. "When you get
hold of a stranger, you welcome him with open arms--and proceed to
regale him with a near-hand view of the back yards and cesspools. And
then you swear piteously when he goes back East and tells his friends
what an abandoned lot you are."

Bartrow took the thrust good-naturedly, as he did most of his
chastenings. "That's right; that's just about what we do. But you've
been here long enough now to know that it's meant for hospitality. It's
a way we've got into of taking it for granted that people come out here
more to see the sights than for any other purpose."

"Oh, it's good of you--I don't deny that; only it's a little rough on
the new-comer, sometimes. Take Jeffard's case, for example. He came to
Denver with good introductions; I know, for I saw some of them. But
a man in a strange city doesn't often go about presenting his social
credentials. What he does is to make a few haphazard acquaintances,
and let them set the pace for him. That is what Jeffard did, and I'll
venture to say there have been nine evil doors open to him to one good
one. You've known him longer than any one else--how many times have
you invited him to spend a rational evening with you in the company of
respectable people?"

"Good Lord, Lansdale; for Heaven's sake don't begin to open up that
lead! We're all miserable sinners, and I'm the medicine-man of the
tribe. I never asked the poor devil to go visiting with me but once,
and that was after he was down."

"And then he wouldn't go, as a matter of course. But that is neither
here nor there. I'll find him for you, if I can, and leave word for you
at the St. James."

"You're a brick, Lansdale; that's about what you are. I'll get square
with you some day. By the way, can't you come up to Steve Elliott's
with me this evening and meet some good people?"

Lansdale laughed outright. "You're a good fellow, Bartrow, but you're
no diplomat. When I go a-fishing into your mentality you'll never see
the hook. Make my apologies to your friends, and tell them I'm an
invalid."

And Bartrow, being densely practical, and so proof against irony of
whatsoever calibre, actually did so that evening when he called upon
Miss Elliott and her cousin.

"But your friend wasn't promised to us, Mr. Bartrow," objected Miss Van
Vetter. "Why should he send excuses?"

"I'm blessed if I know," said honest Dick, looking innocently from one
to the other of them. "But that's what he told me to do, and I've done
it."

Constance laughed softly. "You're too good for any use, Dick. He was
making game of you. Tell us how he came to say it."

Bartrow did that, also; and the two young women laughed in chorus.

"After you've had your fun out of it I wish you'd tell me, so I can
laugh too," he said. "I can't see where the joke comes in, myself."

Constance enlightened him. "There isn't any joke--only this: he had
just been scolding you about your inhospitality, and then you turn on
him and ask him to go calling with you. Of course, he couldn't accept,
then; it would have been like inviting himself."

"Well, what of it? I don't see why he shouldn't invite himself, if he
felt like it. He's a rattling good fellow." And from thence the talk
drifted easily to Jeffard, who was, or who had been, another good
fellow.

At the mention of Jeffard's name, Constance borrowed the mask of
disinterest, and laid her commands on Bartrow. "Tell us about him," she
said.

"There isn't much to tell. He came here from somewhere back East, got
into bad company, lost his money, and now he's disappeared."

"How did he lose his money?" Constance would have asked the question,
but her cousin forestalled her.

"Gambled it," quoth Bartrow placidly.

Constance looked sorry, and Miss Van Vetter was plainly shocked. "How
very dreadful!" said the latter. "Did he lose much?"

"Oh, no; you couldn't call it much--only a few thousands, I believe.
But then, you see, it was his stake; it was all he had, and he couldn't
afford to give it up. And now he has gone and hid out somewhere just
when I have found a place for him. It makes me very weary."

"Can't you find any trace of him?" queried Constance. "That is
singular. I should think he would have left his address."

Bartrow grinned. "Well, hardly. Man don't leave his address when he
wants to drop out. That's the one thing he's pretty sure to take with
him. But we'll run him down yet, if he's on top of earth. Lansdale has
seen more of him lately than I have, and he is taking a hand. He and
Jeffard used to flock together a good deal when the shoe was on the
other foot."

Miss Van Vetter looked mystified; and Bartrow deemed it a matter for
self-congratulation that he was able to comprehend the query in her
eyes without having it hurled at him in so many words.

"That was while Jeffard had money, and Lansdale was trying to starve
himself to death," he explained. "You see, Lansdale is a queer fish
in some ways. When he's down he won't let anybody touch him on his
money side, so we used to work all kinds of schemes to keep him going.
Jeffard would study them up, and I'd help him steer them."

This was practical benevolence, and Connie's interest bestirred itself
in its charitable part. "What were some of the schemes?" she asked.

"Oh, there were a lot of them. Lansdale can see farther into a
millstone than most people, and we had to invent new ones as we
went along. One time, Jeffard bought a common, every-day sort of a
pocketbook, and rumpled it up and tramped on it till it looked as
if it might have come across the plains in Fifty-nine. Then he put
a twenty-dollar bill and some loose silver in it, and dropped it on
the sidewalk where I was walking Lansdale up and down for his health.
After a while, when he'd actually stumbled over it four or five times,
Lansdale saw the wallet and picked it up. Right there the scheme nearly
fell down. You see, he was going to make me take charge of it while he
advertised it. I got out of it, somehow, but I don't believe he used a
nickel of the money for a month."

Connie clapped her hands softly. "That was fine! Tell us some more."

"The next one was better, and it worked like a charm. Lansdale writes
things for the papers, only the editors here wouldn't buy any of his
work"--

"Why not?" interrupted Miss Van Vetter.

"I don't know; because it was too good, I guess. Anyway, they wouldn't
buy it, so Jeffard went to work on that lead. I took him around and
introduced him to Kershaw of the 'Coloradoan,' and he made Kershaw take
fifty dollars on deposit, and got him to promise to accept some of
Lansdale's stories. Kershaw kicked like the deu--like the mischief,
and didn't want to do it; but we bullied him, and then I got Lansdale
to send him some stuff."

"Mr. Jeffard is an artist in schemes, and I envy him," said Connie.
"What happened to that one?"

"Kershaw upset it by not printing the stuff. Of course, Lansdale
watched the 'Coloradoan,' and when he found he wasn't in it, he
wouldn't send any more. We caught him the next time, though, for
something worth while."

"How was that?" It was Miss Van Vetter who asked the question; and
Bartrow made a strenuous effort to evade the frontier idiom which stood
ready to trip him at every turn when Myra Van Vetter's poiseful gaze
rested upon him.

"Why, I happen to have a played-out--er--that is, a sort of no-account
mine up in Clear Creek, and I made Lansdale believe I was the resident
agent for the property, authorized to get up a descriptive prospectus.
He took the job of writing it, and never once tumbled to the
racket--that is, he never suspected that we were working him for a--oh,
good Lord, why can't I talk plain English!--you know what I mean; he
thought it was all straight. Well, he turned in the copy, and we paid
him as much as he'd stand; but he has just about worried the life out
of me ever since, trying to get to read proof on that prospectus.
That one was Jeffard's idea, too, but I made him let me in on the
assessment."

Before Miss Van Vetter could inquire what the "assessment" was,
Stephen Elliott came in and the talk became general. An hour later,
when Bartrow took his leave, Constance went to the door with him.

"Don't you really know where Mr. Jeffard is, Dick?" she asked.

Something in her tone set him upon the right track. "No; do you?"

"I know that he left Denver quite a while ago; about the time you were
down last."

"How do you know it?"

"He told me he was going."

"The mischief he did! Where did you get acquainted with him?"

"At Mrs. Calmaine's."

Honest Dick ground his heel into the door-mat and thrust his hands deep
into the pockets of his overcoat. What was in his mind came out shorn
of euphemism.

"Say, Connie, do you care anything about him?"

"What a question!" she retorted, not pretending to misunderstand its
pointing. "I've met him only once--or twice, I should say, though I
didn't even know his name the first time."

"What did he tell you? about his going away, I mean."

"He said--but you've no right to ask me, Dick. It wasn't exactly a
confidence, but"--

"Yes, I have a right to ask; he was my friend a good while before he
was yours. Tell me what he said."

"He gave me to understand that things hadn't been going quite right
with him, and he said he was going to the mountains to--to try to make
another start."

Bartrow tucked Connie's arm under his own and walked her up and down
the long veranda twice before he could bring himself to say the thing
that was.

"He didn't go, Connie; he's here now, if he hasn't gone out on the
prairie somewhere and taken a pot shot at himself. Lansdale saw him
only a week or so ago."

"Oh, Dick!"

"It's tough, isn't it?" He stood on the step and buttoned his coat.
"But I'm glad you know him--or at least, know who he is. If you should
happen to run across him in any of your charity trips, just set Tommie
on him and wire me if you find out where he burrows."

"You said you had found a place for him. Will it keep?"

"I'll try to hold it open for him, and if you wire, I'll come down and
tackle him. He's too good a fellow to turn down in his little day of
witlessness. Good-night; and good-by--for a week or so. I've got to go
back on the morning train."




CHAPTER VIII


CONTRARY to the doctor's prophecy, Margaret Gannon's progress
toward recovery was slow and rather uncertain. Constance professed
to be sorry, but in her heart she was thankful, since the hesitant
convalescence gave her time to try many expedients pointing toward
the moral rehabilitation of her protégée. Ignoring Margaret's bodeful
prediction, Constance coursed far and wide, quartering the domestic
field diligently; but inasmuch as she was careful in each instance
to state the exact truth, each endeavor was but the introduction to
another failure.

"Why, Constance Elliott! The idea of your proposing such a thing to
me!" said Mrs. Calmaine, upon whose motherly good sense Connie had
leaned from childhood. "That is what comes of a girl growing up as
you have without a mother to watch over her. Can't you understand how
dreadful it is for you to mix up in such things? You can't touch pitch
and not be defiled."

Connie was moved, first to tears, and presently to indignation.

"No, I can't understand anything of the kind," she retorted. "It's your
privilege not to take Margaret if you don't want her; but it's mine
to help her, if I can. And I mean to do it in spite of all the cruel
prejudice in the world!"

"You talk like a foolish child, Connie. I can tell you beforehand that
you won't succeed in getting the woman into any respectable household
in Denver, unless you do it under false pretenses."

"So much the worse for our Christianity, then," Connie asserted
stoutly. "If people won't help, they'll have it to answer to One who
wasn't afraid to take a much worse woman by the hand. That's all I have
to say about it."

Mrs. Calmaine smiled benignantly. She had daughters of her own, and
knew how to make allowances for youthful enthusiasm.

"You will get over it, after a while, and then you'll see how foolish
it is to try to reform the world single-handed," she rejoined. "You
might as well try to move Pike's Peak as to think you can remodel
society after your own enthusiastic notions. And when the reflective
after-time comes, you'll be glad that society didn't let you make a
martyr of yourself at its expense.

"And, Connie, dear; there is another side of the question which you
should consider," she continued, going to the door with her visitor.
"It's this: since society as a unit insists upon having this particular
kind of reformative work turned over to organizations designed for the
purpose, there must be a sufficient reason for it. You are not wiser
than the aggregated wisdom of the civilized centuries."

Constance went her way, silenced, but by no means convinced; and
she added three more failures to her long list before going home to
luncheon. In the afternoon, she laid hold of her courage yet once
again, and went to her minister, good Dr. Launceston, pastor of St.
Cyril's-in-the-Desert. Here, indeed, she found sympathy without stint,
but it was hopelessly void of practical suggestion.

"It is certainly most pitiful, Miss Elliott, pitiful to a degree; but
I really don't see what is to be done. Had you any plan in view that,
ah"--

"It is because all my plans have come to grief that I am here," said
Connie.

"Dear, dear! and those cases are so very hard to deal with. Now, if it
were a question of money, I dare say we could manage it quite easily."

Constance had some very clear ideas on reformative subjects, and one of
them was that it was not less culpable to pauperize than to ignore.

"It isn't that," she made haste to say. "I could get money easily
enough, but Margaret wouldn't take it. If she would, I should have
small hopes for her."

"No," rejoined the clergyman reflectively; "you are quite right. It is
not a problem to be solved by money. The young woman must be given a
chance to win her way back to respectability by her own efforts. Do I
understand that she is willing to try if the opportunity should present
itself?"

"I'm afraid I can't say that she is--not without reservation," Connie
admitted. "You see, she knows the cruel side of the world; and she
is quite sure that any effort she might make would end in defeat and
deeper disgrace."

"A very natural apprehension, and one for which there are only too
good grounds," said the clergyman sadly. "We are compassionate and
charitable in the aggregate, but as individuals I fear we are very
unmerciful. Had you thought of trying to send her to one of our
institutional homes in the East? I might possibly be able to make such
representations as would"--

Constance shook her head. "Margaret is a Roman Catholic, and I
suggested the House of the Good Shepherd in one of our earlier talks.
She fought the idea desperately, and I don't know that I blame her.
She is just a woman like other women, and I believe she would gladly
undertake an honest woman's work in the world; but that isn't saying
she'd be willing to become a lay-sister."

"No, I suppose not; I quite agree with you. But what else can you do
for her?"

"I don't know, Doctor Launceston,--oh, I don't know! But I'll never
give up till I've done something."

In the momentary afflatus of which fine determination Constance went
her way again, not wholly comfortless this time, but apparently quite
as far from the solution of the problem as when she had latched Mrs.
Calmaine's gate behind her.

As for the clergyman, the precious fervor of the young enthusiast
left a spark in his heart which burst into flame on the following
Sunday morning, when he preached a stirring sermon from the text, "Who
is my neighbor?" to the decorous and well-fed congregation of St.
Cyril's-in-the-Desert.

Leaving the rectory, Constance postponed the quest for that afternoon
and went to pay her daily visit to Margaret. On the way downtown a
happy thought came to her, and she welcomed it as an inspiration,
setting it to work as soon as she had put the convalescent's room in
order.

"You are feeling better to-day, aren't you, Margaret?" she began.

"Yes. I'm thinking I'll be able to go to work again before long; only
Pete Grim mightn't have no use for me."

Constance brought the hair-brush, and letting Margaret's luxuriant hair
fall in heavy masses over the back of the chair, began another of her
ministries of service.

"Do you really want to go back to the Bijou?" she asked, knowing well
enough what the answer would be.

"You know you needn't to ask that; it's just Pete Grim's place or
something worse. I can't do no different"--she paused and the fingers
of her clasped hands worked nervously--"and you can't help it, Miss
Constance. I know you've been trying and worrying; but it ain't no use."

Connie did not find words to reply at once, but after a little she
said: "Tell me more about your old home, Margaret."

"I've told you all there was to tell, many's the time since you found
me with the fever."

"Let me see if I can remember it. You said your father was the village
blacksmith, and that you used to sit in the shop and watch the sparks
fly from the anvil as he worked. And when his day's work was done, he
would take you on his shoulder and carry you home to your mother, who
called you her pretty colleen, and loved you because you were the only
girl. And then"--

"Oh, _don't_!" There was sharp anguish in the cry, and Margaret covered
her eyes with her hands as if to shut out the picture. Constance waited
until she thought she had given the seed time to germinate. Then she
went on.

"And when you left home they mourned for you, not as one dead, but as
one living and still beloved; and as long as they could keep track of
you they begged you to come back to them. Margaret, won't you go?"

Margaret shook her head in passionate negation. "I can't--_I can't!_
that's the one thing I can't do! Didn't I bring them shame enough and
misery enough in the one day? and will I be going back to stir it all
up again? having the people say, 'There's Pat Gannon's girl come back;
she that went to the bad and broke her mother's heart.' Indeed, I'll
not do that, Miss Constance, though the saints and the holy angels'll
tell you I'd do anything else you'd ask."

This was Connie's happy thought; to induce Margaret to go back to her
parents. When it proved to be but another rope of sand, she allowed it
one sigh and changed front so cheerfully that Margaret never knew the
cost of the effort.

"Then we must try something else," she insisted. "I'll never let you go
back to the theatre--that's settled. You told me once you could trim
hats. Have you ever done any other kind of sewing?"

Margaret knelt before her trunk and threw out an armful of her stage
finery. "I made them," she said.

Constance examined the work critically. It was good, and she took
courage. "That is our way out of the trouble, Margaret. Why didn't
we think of it before? When you are well enough, I'll get you a
sewing-machine and find you all the work you can do."

Margaret went to the window and stood there so long that Constance
began to tremble lest the battle were going evilward at the last
moment. The fear was groundless, as she found out when the girl came
back to kneel and cry silently with her face in Connie's lap.

"It isn't so much the love of you," she sobbed; "it's the knowing that
somebody cares whether the likes of me goes straight to the devil or
not. And never so much as a word about behaving myself, or confessing
to the priest, or anything. Miss Constance,"--this with uplifted
face, grown suddenly beautiful and glorified in the outshining of
penitence,--"the devil may fly away with me,--he did that same one
day,--but if he does, I'll not live to leave him have the good of it. I
promise you that."

"I can trust you," said Constance; and she took her leave presently,
wondering how the many-sided world could so unify itself in its
merciless condemnation of the Magdalenes.

When she had closed Margaret's door behind her and was halfway to
the stair, she heard sounds as of a scuffle coming from a corridor
intersecting the main hallway at the landing. Her first impulse was to
retreat to Margaret Gannon's room; but when she recognized Tommie's
voice uplifted in alternate plea and imprecation, she went forward
quickly. At the turn she met a gaunt, unshaven man leading Tommie by
the ear, and her indignation slipped the leash without a thought of
consequences.

"Aren't you ashamed of yourself to abuse a child like that!" she began;
and then two things happened: Jeffard released the boy, and Constance
recognized in the gaunt figure the wreck of the man whom she had bidden
God-speed on the stair at the Calmaine dancing party.

Jeffard flattened himself against the wall, bowed low, and was about to
apologize, when Tommie, scenting an accusation, proceeded to vindicate
himself by exploding a veritable bomb of consternation between the two.

"I warn't doin' ary single thing, Miss Constance, 'ceptin' jest wot you
telled me to do. I caught on to his nibs down on de street an' follered
him up yere; an' w'en I was takin' a squint t'rough de keyhole, jest to
make sure, he outs an' nabs me."

For one dreadful instant Connie thought she must scream and run away.
Then her wits came back, and she saw that deliverance could come only
through swift confession.

"Tommie," she said hastily, "run down and wait for me on the sidewalk."
And then to Jeffard: "The poor boy wasn't to blame; he was doing just
what he had been told to do, and you have a right to ask--to--to
know"--She stopped in pitiable embarrassment, and Jeffard flung himself
into the breach with chivalric tact.

"Not another word, Miss Elliott, I implore you. It isn't the first time
I have been taken for my double, and in broad daylight at that. May I
go down and make my peace with the boy?"

Constance was too greatly perturbed not to catch gratefully at the
chance to escape, and she made use of it while Jeffard was talking to
Tommie at the foot of the stair. Taking Constance's nod and smile in
passing as tokens of amity, the urchin allowed himself to be placated;
and when Jeffard went back to his room he knew all that Tommie could
tell him about Miss Elliott and her deeds of mercy.

That night, before he went out to tramp himself weary, Jeffard did a
characteristic thing. He wrapped his last five-dollar note around a
bit of plaster dug from the wall, and creeping through the corridor in
his stocking feet, tossed the pellet over the transom into Margaret
Gannon's room.




CHAPTER IX


AT the breakfast-table the next morning, Constance had a shock that set
her nerves a-jangle and banished her appetite. The exciting cause was a
paragraph in the morning "Coloradoan" which her father had been reading
between the fruit and the cereals.

"I wonder if that isn't the fellow Dick was looking for and couldn't
find," he queried, passing the paper across the table with his finger
on the suggestive paragraph.

It was a custom-hardened account of a commonplace tragedy. A man whose
name was given as George Jeffrey had shot himself an hour before
midnight on one of the bridges spanning Cherry Creek. Constance read
the story of the tragedy with her father's remark in abeyance, and the
shock came with the conviction that the self-slain one was Jeffard,
whose name might easily become Jeffrey in the hurried notes of a
news-gatherer. The meagre particulars tallied accurately with Bartrow's
terse account of Jeffard's sociological experiment. The suicide was a
late-comer from the farther East; he had spent his money in riotous
living; and he had latterly been lost to those who knew him best.

It was characteristic of Stephen Elliott's daughter that she passed the
paper back to her father without comment, and that she preserved an
outward presentment of cheerfulness during the remainder of the meal.
But when she was free she ran up to her room and was seen no more of
her father or her cousin until the latter went upstairs an hour later
to see if Connie were ready for her morning walk.

"Why, Connie, dear! What is the matter?"

Since her tap at the door went unanswered, Myra had turned the knob and
entered. Connie was lying in a dejected little heap on the floor before
the fireless grate. She shook her head in dumb protest at her cousin's
question; but when Myra knelt beside her it all came out brokenly.

"You didn't see what poppa gave me to read: it was an account of a
suicide. Mr. Jeffard has killed himself, and--and, oh, Myra! it's all
my fault!"

"Mr. Jeffard? Oh, I remember now,--Mr. Bartrow's friend. But I don't
understand; how could it have been your fault?"

"It was, it was! Don't you remember what Dick said? that Mr. Jeffard
was in trouble, and that he had a place for him? I saw him yesterday,
and I--_I didn't tell him!_"

"But, Connie, dear, how could you? You didn't know him." Getting no
more than a smothered sob in reply to this, Myra asked for particulars,
and Connie gave them sparingly.

"You say the name was George Jeffrey? Why do you think it was Mr.
Jeffard? I can't for the life of me see how you are to blame, in the
remotest sense; but if you are, it's foolish to grieve over it until
you are quite sure of the identities. Isn't there any way you can find
out?"

Connie sat up at that, but she refused to be comforted.

"There is a way, and I'll try it; but it's no use, Myra. I'm just as
sure as if I had stood beside him when he did it. And I shall never,
_never_ forgive myself!"

She got up and bathed her eyes, and when she had made herself ready to
go out, she refused Myra's proffer of company.

"No, dear; thank you, but I'd rather go alone," she objected; "I'll
share the misery of it with you by and by, perhaps, but I can't just
yet."

Her plan for making sure was a simple one. Tommie Reagan had known
Jeffard living, and he would know him dead. Putting it in train, she
found her small henchman selling papers on his regular beat in front of
the Opera House; and inasmuch as he was crying the principal fact of
the tragedy, she was spared the necessity of entering into details.

"Tommie, have you--did you go to see the man who killed himself last
night?" she questioned.

"Nope; der ain't no morbid cur'osity inside o' me."

"Would you go?--if I asked you to?"

"W'y, cert; I'd take a squint at de old feller wid de hoofs an' horns
if it'd do you any good."

"Then I'll tell you why I want you to go. I am afraid it is the man we
were going to try to help."

The boy shut one eye and whistled softly. "My gosh! but dat's tough,
ain't it now! An' jest w'en I'd got 'quainted with him an' was a-fixin'
to give him a lift! Dat's wot I call hard luck!"

Constance felt that the uncertainty was no longer to be borne. "Go
quickly, Tommie," she directed; "and hurry back as soon as you can.
I'll wait for you in the drug store across the street."

The coroner's office was not far to seek, and the small scout was back
in a few minutes.

"Dey wouldn't lemme look," he reported, "but I skinned round to where I
could see de top o' his head. It's his nibs, right 'nough."

"Tommie! Are you quite sure?"

"Nope; feller ain't sure o' nothin' in dis world, 'ceptin' death an' de
penitenchry," amended Tommie, doing violence to his convictions when he
saw that his patron saint was sorely in need of comfort. "Maybe 'tain't
him, after all. You jest loaf 'round yere a couple o' shakes while I
skip down to his hotel an' see wot I can dig up."

The boy was gone less than a quarter of an hour, but to Constance the
minutes marched leaden-footed. When Tommie returned, his face signaled
discomfiture.

"I didn't send me card up," he explained, with impish gravity; "I jest
went right up to his nibsey's room an' mogged in, a-thinkin' I'd offer
him a paper if he happened to be there and kicked. Say, Miss Constance;
'tain't a-goin' ter do no good to cry about it. He ain't there, an' he
ain't been there, 'nless he slep' in a chair."

Constance went home with a lump in her throat and her trouble writ
large on her face, and Myra needed not to ask the result of the
investigation. Miss Van Vetter was not less curious than she should
have been, but something in Connie's eyes forestalled inquiry, and Myra
held her peace.

Connie wore out the day as best she might, widening the rift of sorrow
until it bade fair to become an abyss of remorse. When evening came,
and with it a telegram from Bartrow, asking if she had yet learned
Jeffard's whereabouts, it was too much, and she shared the misery
with her cousin, as she had promised to, making a clean breast of it
from the beginning. Something to her surprise, Myra heard her through
without a word of condemnation or reproach.

"Now that is something I can understand," said Myra, when the tale
was told. "The most of your charity work seems to me to be pitifully
commonplace and inconsequent; but here was a mission which asked for
all sorts of heroism, for which it promised to pay the highest of all
prices, namely, the possibility of saving a man worth the trouble."

Now Connie was well assured that her love for her neighbor was no
respecter of persons, and she made answer accordingly.

"I can't agree with you there, Myra. Mr. Jeffard's possible worth had
nothing to do with it. I wanted to help him because--well, because it
was mean in me to make him talk about himself that night at the opera.
And besides, when I met him the next evening at Mrs. Calmaine's, he
told me enough to make me quite sure that he needed all the help and
encouragement he could get. Of course, he didn't say anything like
that, you know; but I knew."

Myra's eyes promised sympathy, and Connie went on.

"Then, when I came upon him yesterday I was angry because he was
hurting Tommie. And afterward, when I tried to explain, he made me
understand that I mustn't reach down to him; and--and I didn't know any
other way to go about it."

"That was a situation in which I should probably have horrified you,"
said Myra decisively. "I shouldn't have noticed or known anything about
him at first, as you did; but in your place yesterday, and with your
knowledge of the circumstances, I should have said my say whether he
wanted to hear it or not. And I'd have made him listen to reason, too."

"You don't quite understand, Myra. It seemed altogether impossible;
though if I had known what was in his mind I should have spoken at any
cost."

Twenty times the pendulum of the chalet clock on the wall beat the
seconds, and Myra was silent; then she crossed over to Connie's chair
and sat upon the arm of it.

"Connie, dear, you're crying again,"--this with her arm around her
cousin's neck. "Are you quite sure you haven't been telling me
half-truths? Wasn't there the least little bit of a feeling warmer than
charity in your heart for this poor fellow?"

Constance shook her head, but the denial did not set itself in words.
"He was Dick's friend, and that was enough," she replied.

Miss Van Vetter's lips brushed her cousin's cheek, and Constance felt a
warm tear plash on her hand. This was quite another Myra from the one
she thought she knew, and she said as much.

"We're all puzzles, Connie dear, and the answers to most of us have
been lost; but, do you know, I can't help crying a little with you for
this poor fellow. Just to think of him lying there with no one within
a thousand miles to care the least little bit about it. And if you are
right--if it is Mr. Bartrow's friend--it's so much the more pitiful.
The world is poorer when such men leave it."

"Why, Myra! What do you know about him?"

"Nothing more than you do--or as much. But surely you haven't forgotten
what Mr. Bartrow told us."

"About his helping Mr. Lansdale?"

"Yes."

"No, I hadn't forgotten."

"It was very noble; and so delicately chivalrous. It seems as if
one who did such things would surely be helped in his own day of
misfortune. But that doesn't often happen, I'm afraid."

"No," Constance assented, with a sigh; and Myra went back to the
question of identity.

"I suppose there is no possible chance that Tommie may have been
mistaken?"

Constance shook her head. "I think not; he saw that I was troubled
about it, and he would have strained a point to comfort me if the
facts had given him leave. But I shall be quite sure before I answer
Dick's message."

With that thought in mind, and with no hope behind it, Constance
waylaid her father in the hall the next morning as he was about to go
out.

"Poppa, I want you to do something for me; no, not that"--the elderly
man was feeling in his pockets for his check-book--"it is something
very different, this time; different and--and rather dreadful. You
remember the suicide you read about, yesterday morning?"

"Did I read about one? Oh, yes; the man that shot himself down on the
Platte, or was it Cherry Creek? The fellow I thought might be Dick's
friend. What about it?"

"It's that. We ought to make sure of it for Dick's sake, you know.
Won't you go to the coroner's office and see if it is Mr. Jeffard? It's
a horrible thing to ask you to do, but"--

There was grim reminiscence in the old pioneer's smile. "It won't be
the first one I've seen that died with his boots on. I'll go and locate
your claim for you."

She kissed him good-by, but he came back from the gate to say: "Hold
on, here; I don't know your Mr. Jeffard from a side of sole leather.
How am I going to identify him?"

"You've seen him once," she explained. "Do you remember the man who sat
next to me the night we went to hear 'The Bohemian Girl'?"

"The thirsty one that you and Myra made a bet on? Yes, I recollect him."

"I don't think he was thirsty. Would you know him if you were to see
him again?"

"I guess maybe I would; I've seen him half a dozen times since,--met
him out here on the sidewalk the next morning. Is that your man?"

"That was Mr. Jeffard," she affirmed, turning away that he might not
see the tears that welled up unbidden.

"All right; I'll go and identify him for you."

So he said, and so he meant to do; but it proved to be a rather
exciting day at the Mining Exchange, and he forgot the commission until
he was about to board a homeward-bound car in the evening. Then he
found that he was too late. The body of the suicide had been shipped
East in accordance with telegraphic instructions received at noon. When
he made his report to Constance, she fell back upon Tommie's assurance,
and sent the delayed answer to Bartrow's message, telling him that his
friend was dead.

Having sorrowfully recorded all these things in the book of facts
accomplished, it was not wonderful that Constance, coming out of
Margaret Gannon's room late the following afternoon, should cover her
face and cry out in something akin to terror when she cannoned against
Jeffard at the turn in the dingy hallway. Neither was it remarkable
that her strength should forsake her for the moment; nor that Jeffard,
seeing her plight, should forget his degradation and give her timely
help by leading her to a seat in the dusty window embrasure. At that
the conventionalities, or such shreds of them as might still have bound
either of them, parted asunder in the midst, and for the time being
they were but a man and a woman, as God had created them.

"Oh, I'm so glad!" were her first words. "I--I thought you were dead!"

"I ought to be," was his comment. "But what made you think that?"

"It was in the newspaper--about the man who shot himself. I was afraid
it was you, and when Tommie had been to see we were sure of it."

"In the newspaper?" he queried; and then, with a ghost of a smile which
was mirthless: "It was a little previous, but so justifiable that I
really ought to take the hint. Can't you tell me more? I'm immensely
interested."

She told him everything from the beginning, concluding with a pathetic
little appeal for forgiveness if she had done wrong in taking too much
for granted.

"You couldn't well do that," he hastened to say. "And you mustn't ask
forgiveness for motives which an angel might envy. But it is casting
pearls before swine in my case, Miss Elliott. I have sown the wind,
deliberately and with malice aforethought, and now I am reaping the
whirlwind, and regretting day by day that it doesn't develop sufficient
violence to finish that which it has begun."

"Please don't say that," she pleaded. "There are always hands
stretched out to help us, if we could but see and lay hold of them. Why
won't you let Dick help you when he is so anxious to do it? You will,
now that you know about it, won't you?"

"I knew about it before. Lansdale told me, but I made him promise to
drop it. It isn't that I wouldn't accept help from Bartrow as willingly
as I would from any one in the world; it is simply that I don't care to
take the chance of adding ingratitude to my other ill-doings."

"Ingratitude?"

"Yes. The man who allows his friend to help him in any crisis of his
own making should at least be able to give bond for his good behavior.
I can't do that now. I wouldn't trust myself to go across the street. I
know my own potentiality for evil too well."

"But potentiality isn't evil," she protested. "It's only the power to
do things, good or bad. And if one have that there is always hope."

"Not for me," he said shortly. "I have sinned against grace."

"Who hasn't?" Constance rejoined. "But grace doesn't die because it's
sinned against."

He smiled again at that. "I think my particular allotment of grace is
dead beyond the hope of resurrection."

"How can that be?"

He put his back to the window so that he had not to look in her eyes.

"Grace for most men takes the form of an ideal. So long as the
condition to be attained is ahead there is hope, but when one has
turned his back upon it"--

Indirection fences badly with open-eyed sincerity, and he did not
finish. But the door was open now, and Constance meant to do her whole
duty.

"I think I understand," she assented; "but I wish you would be quite
frank with me. In a way, I am Mr. Bartrow's deputy, and if I have to
tell him you refuse to let him help you, I shall have to give him a
better reason than you have given me."

"You are inexorable," he said, and there was love in his eyes, despite
his efforts reasonward. "I wish I dared tell you the whole miserable
truth."

"And why may you not?"

"Because it concerns--a woman."

She shrank back a little at that, and he saw that she had
misunderstood. Wherefore he plunged recklessly into the pool of
frankness.

"The woman is a good woman," he went on quickly, "and one day not so
very long ago I loved her well enough to believe that I could win my
way back to decency and uprightness for her sake. It was a mistake. I
had fallen lower than I knew, and the devil came in for his own."

Here was something tangible to lay hold of at last, and Connie made
instant use of it.

"Does she know?" she asked.

The mirthless smile came and went again. "She thinks she does."

"But you haven't told her all; is that it?"

"I have tried to, but, being a good woman, she can't understand. I
think I didn't fully understand, myself; but I do now."

"Is it so far beyond reparation?"

"It is indeed. If the devil's emissary who has brought me to this pass
could be exorcised this moment I should never recover the lost ground
of self-respect. There is nothing to go back to. If I had not to be
despicable from necessity, I should doubtless be so from choice."

"I think you are harder with yourself than you would be with another.
Can't you begin to believe in yourself again? _I_ believe in you."

"You!--but you don't know what you are saying, Miss Elliott. See!"--his
coat was buttoned to the chin, tramp-wise, and he tore it open to show
her the rags that underlay it--"do you understand now? I have pawned
the shirt off my back--not to satisfy the cravings of hunger, but to
feed a baser passion than that of the most avaricious miser that ever
lived. Do I make it plain that I am not worthy of your sympathy, or of
Richard Bartrow's?"

For once the clear gray eyes were veiled, and her chin quivered a
little when she spoke. "You hurt me more than I can tell," she said.

The dull rage of self-abasement in him flamed into passion at the sight
of what he had done, but the bitter speech of it tarried at the sound
of a heavy step on the stair. Constance rose from her seat in the
window embrasure with a nervous thrill of embarrassment, but Jeffard
relieved her at once. There was a vacant room on the opposite side of
the corridor, and when the intruder appeared at the stair-head, Miss
Elliott was alone.

She glanced at the man as he passed, and Jeffard, from his place
behind the half-closed door of the vacant room, saw her draw back,
and clenched his hands and swore softly, because, forsooth, she had
for some fleeting pulse-beat of time to breathe the same air with the
intruder. For he knew the man as a purveyor for Peter Grim's house of
dishonor; a base thing for which wholesome speech has no name.

What followed was without sequence. Almost at the same instant the
footsteps of the man ceased to echo in the empty corridor, there was
a cry half angry and half of terror from Margaret Gannon's room, and
Miss Elliott disappeared from Jeffard's limited field of vision. In the
turning of a leaf Jeffard was at the door of the room in the end of
the corridor. What he saw and heard made a man of him for the moment.
Margaret Gannon had evidently been surprised at her sewing-machine; the
work was still under the needle, and the chair was overturned. Margaret
was crouching in the farthest corner of the room, with Miss Elliott
standing over her like a small guardian angel at bay. The nameless one
had his back to the door, and Jeffard heard only the conclusion of a
jeering insult which included both of the women.

Now Jeffard had fasted for twenty-four hours, and the quick dash to
the end of the corridor made him dizzy and faint; but red wrath, so
it be fierce enough, is its own elixir. Thinking of nothing but that
he should acquit himself as a man before the woman he loved, he flung
himself upon the contemner of women with the vigor of a righteous cause
singing in his veins like the wine of new life.

The struggle was short and decisive. In his college days Jeffard had
been a man of his hands, and the fierce onset proved to be the better
half of the battle. Constance caught her breath and cowered in the
corner with Margaret when the two men went down together, but she gave
a glad little cry when she saw that Jeffard had won the fall; that
he had wrenched the drawn pistol from the other's grasp and flung it
harmless across the room. Then there was another and a fiercer grapple
on the floor, and Jeffard's fist rose and fell like a blacksmith's
hammer with the dodging head of his antagonist for its anvil.

The end of it was as abrupt as the beginning. In the midst of another
wrestling bout the beaten one freed himself, bounded to his feet, and
darted into the corridor with Jeffard at his heels. There was a sharp
scurry of racing feet in the hall, a prolonged crash as of a heavy body
falling down the stair, and Jeffard was back again, panting with the
violence of it, but with eyes alight and an apology on his lips.

Constance ran to meet him and cut the apology short.

"The idea!" she protested; "when it was for Margaret's sake and mine!
Are you sure you're not hurt?"

Jeffard's knuckles were cut and bleeding, but he kept that hand behind
him.

"It's the other fellow who is hurt, I hope." Then to Margaret: "Do you
know him? Are you afraid of him?"

Margaret glanced at Constance and hesitated. "He'll not be troubling me
any more, I'm thinking. It's Pete Grim that sent him; and he was at me
before I knew."

Jeffard picked up the captured weapon and put it on the sewing-machine.

"Take that to him if he comes again when you are alone. Miss Elliott,
please stay here a moment until I can go down and see that the way is
clear."

He was gone at the word, but he had barely reached the window with the
dusty embrasure when she overtook him. There was a sweet shyness in
her manner now, and he trembled as he had not in any stage of the late
encounter.

"Mr. Jeffard," she began, "will you forgive me if I say that you have
disproved all the hard things you were trying to say of yourself?
You'll let me wire Dick, now, won't you?"

He shook his head because he was afraid to trust himself to speak. As
between an abject appeal with his hopeless passion for its motive, and
a plunge back into the abyss of degradation which would efface the
temptation, there was nothing to choose.

"You will at least promise me that you will consider it," she went on.
"I can't ask less."

If he did not reply immediately it was because he was trying to fix
her image so that he should always be able to think of her just as she
stood, with the afternoon sunlight falling upon her face, irradiating
it and making a shimmering halo of the red-brown hair and deep wells
of the clear gray eyes. A vagrant thought came to him: that it was
worth a descent into the nether depths to have such a woman seek him
out and plead with him for his soul's sake. He put it aside to deny her
entreaty.

"I can't promise even that."

She was silent for a moment, and embarrassment came back and fought for
holding-ground when she tried to bring herself to do the thing which
compassion suggested. But compassion won; and Jeffard looked on with a
half-cynical smile when she took a gold coin from her purse and offered
it to him.

"Just for the present," she begged, with a beseeching look which might
have melted a worse man.

He took the money, and the smile ended in an unpleasant laugh.

"You think I ought to refuse, and so I ought; as any man would who had
a spark of manhood left in him. But that is why I take it; I have been
trying to make you understand that I am not worth saving. Do I make it
plain to you?"

"You make me very sorry," she quavered; and because her sorrow
throttled speech, she turned and left him.




CHAPTER X


AFTER Constance had gone, Jeffard had an exceedingly bad half-hour. For
a time he tramped up and down the deserted corridor, calling himself
hard names and likening his latest obliquity to whatsoever unpardonable
sin has been recorded against the most incorrigible of mankind. Love
had its word, also--outraged love, acknowledged only to be openly
flouted and spat upon; for one may neither do violence to a worthy
passion, nor give rein to an unworthy, without paying for it, blow for
blow. What would she think of him? What could she think, save that she
had wasted her sympathy on a shameless vagabond who had sought to palm
himself off on her and her friends as a gentleman?

The thought of it was stifling. The air of the musty hallway seemed
suddenly to grow suffocating, and the muffled drumming of the
sewing-machine in Margaret Gannon's room jarred upon him until it drove
him forth to wander hot-hearted and desperate in the streets.

Without remembering that he had crossed the viaduct or ascended the
hill, he finally found himself wandering in the Highlands. Drifting
aimlessly on beyond the fringe of suburban houses, he came to the
borders of a shallow pond what time the sun was poising for its plunge
behind the upreared mountain background in the west. It was here, when
he had flung himself down upon the warm brown earth in utter weariness
of soul and body, that his good angel came once more and wrestled with
him.

Looking backward he saw that the angle of the inclined plane had grown
suddenly precipitous within a fortnight. Since the night of his quarrel
with the well-meaning miner, the baize door at the head of the carpeted
stair had been closed to him. In consequence he had been driven to the
lair of a less carefully groomed but more rapacious wild beast whose
keeper offered his patrons a choice between the more serious business
of the gaming-tables, and the lighter diversions of a variety theatre.
Jeffard had seen the interior of the Bijou on the earliest of his
investigative expeditions in Denver, and had gone away sick at heart
at the sight of it. Wherefore it was a measure of the depths to which
he had descended that he could become an habitue of the place, caring
nothing for the misery and depravity which locked arms with all who
breathed its tainted atmosphere.

It was at the Bijou that he had lost the better part of the winnings
rescued by the miner's bit of charitable by-play; and it was there,
also, that he had thrown away the major portion of a second gift from
Lansdale. For two nights in succession the lack of money had kept him
away.

He took out Connie's offering and stared at it with lack-lustre eyes.
With heedful manipulation here was the fuel to feed the fire of
his besetting passion for some hours. Having permitted her to give
and himself to take it, why should he quibble at the manner of its
spending? When he saw that hesitancy implied another attempt to turn
back at the eleventh hour, he felt that this was no longer possible.
Try as he might, the shame of this last infamous thing would reach out
and drag him back into the mire.

The alternative disposed of, the matter simplified itself. He had only
to determine whether he should end it all before or after he had flung
away this bit of yellow metal. The decision was so nicely balanced
that he let it turn upon the flipping of the coin--heads for a sudden
plunge into the pond, tails for a final bout with chance and the plunge
afterward.

He spun the gold piece, and went down on his hands and knees to read
the oracle in the fading light. It was the misshapen eagle that stared
back at him from the face of the coin, and he took his reprieve
sullenly, calling his evil genius a usurer.

He got upon his feet stiffly and turned his face toward the city. Then
it occurred to him that it would be well to make his preparations while
he could see. There was a house building on the little knoll above the
pond; a brick and the binding-string from a bundle of lath would serve;
and when he had secured them he sounded the pond around the edges with
a stick. It was too shallow; but from a plank thrown across to the head
of the drainage flume it proved deep enough, and here he left the brick
and the bit of tarred twine.

Half an hour later he entered the Bijou. On the threshold he met the
proprietor; and when he would have passed with a nod, Grim barred the
way.

"Been layin' for you," announced the man of vice, sententiously. "Come
into the box-office."

Jeffard obeyed mechanically. He was in the semi-stupor which
anticipates the delirium of the gaming fever, and the man's voice
sounded afar off. Grim led the way behind the bar to a windowless den
furnished with a roll-top desk and two chairs. Closing the door, he
waved Jeffard to a seat.

"Been sort o' sizin' you up lately, and I put it up that you're out o'
luck. Does that call the turn?"

"I don't know how that concerns you," said Jeffard, with a sudden
access of dull resentment.

"No more do I; but that's neither here nor yonder. You're down on your
luck, ain't you?"

Jeffard nodded. "Call it that, if you like."

"Thought so. Broke most of the time, I reckon?"

"Yes; most of the time."

"Jes' so. Well, I'm goin' to put you on to a soft snap. I know all
about you--who you are, where you come from, and all the rest. You've
been playin' to lose right along, and now I'm goin' to give you a tip
so you can play to win ever' time. See?"

Jeffard came out of his abstraction sufficiently to wonder what the
man was driving at. "Make it short," he rejoined curtly.

Grim leaned back in his pivot-chair, and his hard face wrinkled under
an evil smile.

"Don't be in a rush. Game runs all night, and you'll have plenty of
time to go and blow in whatever you've got after I get through with
you. Or, if you can't wait, go and blow it first, and we'll talk
business afterwards."

"No," Jeffard objected sullenly. "If you have anything to say to me,
say it now."

"Business before pleasure, eh? All right; here's the lay-out. I'm goin'
to stake you with a suit o' good clothes, pay your board at the Albany
or the Brown, whichever you like, and give you a roll to flash up
that'll make you feel flush ever' time you look at it. Then"--

Jeffard's gesture was of impatience.

"Never mind about the details. What is the price of all this?"

"Mighty nigh nothin' at all. You had plenty o' friends a while back,
and you'll have 'em again, as soon as you're flush. And when any of 'em
feel like proddin' the tagger, why--you know where he's kep'; that's
all."

While one might draw a breath there was murder in Jeffard's heart; in
his weakness a rage that was childish in its vehemence took possession
of him, and he covered his face with his hands to crush back the hot
tears of impotence which sprang up and blinded him. Grim looked on
unpityingly, waiting for what he conceived to be the inevitable. When
Jeffard struggled to his feet, his face was white and he had to steady
himself by the back of the chair.

"I thought I'd got to the bottom when I came here to-night," he began
unsteadily, "but you've shown me my mistake. Thank God, I can yet say
No to you, low as I am. Let me get out of here."

Knowing the strength of the gambler's chain, as well as the length
thereof, Grim held his peace; and Jeffard pushed past the bar-tender
and went out through the small door at the end of the bar. On the
sidewalk a crowd beset the theatre entrance, and out of the midst of it
came two men, striking and clutching at each other as they fought their
way into the clear. Within arm's-length of Jeffard they separated. He
saw the sheen of the electric light on a weapon, and darted between
them in time to spoil the aim of the man who drew first. There was a
flash and a report, a rush on the part of the crowd, and Jeffard found
himself dodging and doubling swiftly through dark alleys and crooked
covered ways, following the lead of the man whose life he had saved.
After a time they came out in a silent street where there was light.

"Didn't know me, did you, pardner?" quoth the fugitive, relaxing his
grasp on Jeffard's wrist. "Like as not you wouldn't 'a' done it if you
had, but that don't saw no wood with me. That greaser had the drop on
me, sure's yer born."

Whereupon Jeffard looked again, and recognizing his friendly enemy of
the winning night, was glad, inasmuch as he had been able to cancel an
obligation. None the less, his reply was ungracious enough.

"Oh, it's you, is it? Well, we're quits now. Good-night."

He turned and walked away, but at the corner the man overtook him.
"Not that-a-way," he forbade, pointing up the street. "Somebody in the
crowd'll be sure to know you, and you'll walk slap back into trouble
after I done drug you out. The p'lice are there by this time, an' they
don't care who, so they get a man 'r two to lock up."

Jeffard nodded, and made a circuit of the dangerous locality with his
head up and the light of a steadfast purpose in his eyes. Whatever
of vacillation there was in him an hour earlier had been thoroughly
flailed out in the brief interview with Peter Grim. He knew now what he
had to do, and the precise manner of its doing.

Keeping to the quieter streets, he came out in front of the St. James;
and dodging the crowded lobby, made his way to the writing-room. Since
he dare not go to the clerk for stationery, he was compelled to wait
until some one left what he required. The chance befell presently,
but when he came to write his note to Constance Elliott the thing was
harder to do than he had prefigured it. What he finally wrote, after he
had spoiled two of the three sheets of paper left by his predecessor in
the chair at the writing-table, was this:--

"After what happened this afternoon, you will not think worse of me if
I ask you to let me try to explain what must seem to you too despicable
to be remembered. I can't hope to make you understand without being
frank, and when, at some future time, you may learn the circumstances
under which this is written, I shall hope for forgiveness.

"You may remember that I said I couldn't tell you the truth, because
it concerns a woman. When I add that the woman is yourself, you will
understand. I love you; I think I have been loving you ever since that
evening which you said we were to forget--the evening at the theatre.
Strangely enough, my love for you isn't strong in the strength which
saves. I went from you that night when you had bidden me God-speed
at Mrs. Calmaine's, and within the hour I was once more a penniless
vagabond.

"When you were trying to help me this afternoon, I was trying to keep
from saying that which I could never have a right to say. You pressed
me very hard in your sweet innocence and loving sympathy,--you see,
I am quite frank,--and when you finally gave me a chance to make the
impossible thing that I longed to say still more impossible, I took it
in sheer desperation. Nay, more; I purposed in my heart to so desecrate
your gift as to make the thought of my love for you an unhallowed
memory.

"That is all, I think, save, when it came to the brink, I found that
there was still a deeper depth which was yet unplumbed, and which I
trust I shall have the courage to leave unexplored."

When it was finished he wrapped the gold piece in a bit of paper, and,
putting it in the envelope with the note, set out to find the house in
Colfax Avenue. Having seen it but once, and that in daylight, it was
not singular that it eluded him in the night; but it was surely the
very irony of chance which led him to slip the envelope under the front
door of a house two squares beyond that occupied by the Elliotts, and
which kept him from noticing the placard "For Rent" nailed upon the
very door under which he thrust his message to Constance.

This single preliminary set in order, he faced once more toward the
Highlands, lagging a little from sheer weariness as he went, but
finding comfort in the thought that there would be infinite surcease
from hunger and exhaustion at the end of this last pilgrimage.

There was time for reflection on the way, and he marvelled that
his thoughts dwelt so persistently upon the trivial details of the
thing he was about to do. He was a practiced swimmer; would the
weight of a single brick be sufficient to overcome the instinct of
self-preservation which might assert itself at the last moment?
Probably, since he was weak from fasting, and would be encumbered with
his clothing. Then another suggestion came to torment him: If he should
tie the brick to his feet, as he had thought to, the water might not
be deep enough, after all. Consequently, he must fasten it about his
neck. And thereupon he had a fit of creeping horror at the thought of
drowning with his face dragged down into the ooze and slime of the
bottom.

Oddly enough, when he came to the brink of the pool these things ceased
to trouble him; though even there it was impossible to turn the current
of thought into a reflective channel. He made the effort for decency's
sake. It was not meet that a thinking being should go out of life like
the brutes that perish; without a thought for the past with its lacks
and havings, or the future with its untried possibilities. But the
effort returned to him void, and presently he stumbled upon the reason:
the premeditated fact of self-murder shut him off alike from repentance
for what had gone before, and from hope in what should come after.

Very good, he said; and flung himself down to make the most of the
present. He was faint and weary, and it would be ill to drown a tired
body. There was no moon, but the midsummer night was clear and still.
The stars burned steadily overhead, and there was a soft light abroad
which seemed to be a part of the atmosphere. Over in the west the black
bulk of the range rose up to meet the sky; and poised above one of the
highest peaks the planet Mars swung to its setting. Jeffard marked it,
saying it should be his executioner; that when the rosy point of light
should touch the black sky-line, he would rise up and go to his place.

Meanwhile it was soothing to lie stretched out upon the warm earth
with no human future to prefigure, and no past insistent enough to
disturb one with its annals. And there was still the present, with its
soft light and its dim hemisphere of sky; its balmy air and its vague
and shadowy horizon. It was good to be alone with nature in these last
few moments; to have done with the tiresome world of man's marring; to
be quit of man's presence.

The thought had scarcely shaped itself when it was made of none effect
by the appearance of a man at the top of the little knoll. The intruder
came straight on, as if in no doubt as to his purpose, and sitting down
on the end of the plank bridge, proceeded to fill and light his pipe
without saying a word. Jeffard caught a glimpse of a bearded face by
the flare of the match, and said, "Oh, it's you again, is it?"

"Right you are, pardner. Hope I ain't intrudin'."

"I suppose you have as good a right here as I have. But I might suggest
that the night is fine and the world large, and that there are times
when a man has no use for his fellows."

The new-comer smoked in silence for a full minute before he removed his
pipe to say:--

"That's a sort of a gilt-edged invitation for me to mog off, ain't it?
All right; I'll go pretty middlin' quick; but I've been fool enough to
tramp somewheres nigh ten mile behind you to-night for to get a show
to say what's on my mind; wher'fore, I'll say it first and vamoose
afte'wards."

Jeffard gave him leave, watching the narrowing margin between the star
and the mountain-top.

"Well, b'iled down, it's just about this: I know what you're out yere
for,--seen it in your eye back yonder on the street corner,--but I
says to myself, 'Jim Garvin, you go kinder slow; it ain't none o' your
business. When a man takes a mill-run o' hisself and finds out the
claim ain't worth workin' no longer, w'y, it's his funeral, and none
o' yourn.' And then again I says to myself, 'Maybe that there feller
hain't got nary 'nother claim--leastwise, not as he knows of,' and so I
follered you, all over the blame' town and out yere."

Jeffard made no reply, and the intruder went on.

"'Course, you understand I ain't a-mixin' up any in your business, not
if I know it. You just listen at what I'm goin' to say, and then if you
want to go ahead, w'y, all right, do it; and I'll loan you my gun so 't
you won't have to get yourself wet in cold water. Is that about right?"

"Go on," said Jeffard.

"Well, it's this-a-way; I'm off on a prospectin' tower to-morrow.
Blowed in ever' last thing I had, and took a grub-stake, same as
heretofore. Now the old man that puts up the grub-stake, he says,
says he, 'Jim, you'll want a pardner. It's gettin' pretty late in the
season, and you won't stand no kind of a chance goin' alone.' 'Right
you are,' says I,' and I'll pick up some feller on the range as I go
in.' 'Good enough,' says he. 'I'll make this here order big enough
to stake the two of you.' That's the whole lay-out, and you're the
pardner, if you say the word. You don't know beans about me, and I
don't know you from Adam's off ox, so that's a stand-off. What do you
say?"

Jeffard did not answer until there was but a bare thread of sky between
the star and the peak. Then he said: "Do you happen to have a coin of
any kind about you?"

Garvin tossed a dollar across to him, and Jeffard spun it. Then he
found that he had no match, and asked the miner to give him one. Garvin
watched him curiously as he bent over the coin and struck the match.

"The luck's against me--it's heads," he announced gravely. "I'll go
with you."

Garvin rose and stretched himself stiffly.

"You're a cool one," he commented. "What if it'd been tails?"

Jeffard got up and kicked the brick into the pond. "In that case I
should have been obliged to ask you to lend me your pistol. Let's go
back to town and get something to eat with that dollar. I haven't had
anything since last night."




CHAPTER XI


AFTER toiling all night through black gorges and over unspeakable
mountain passes, the narrow-gauge train from Denver, headed by two
pygmy locomotives, came out into daylight, sunshine, and wider horizons
at Alta Vista. In the sleeping-car three sections had been transformed
by the drowsy porter into daytime smugness, and three persons--two of
them in deference to the enthusiasm of the third--were up and dressed.

"Isn't it all perfectly indescribable?" Myra was saying, when the
engineer of one of the pygmies sounded the whistle for the station. "Do
you know, I couldn't go to sleep for hours last night, late as it was.
I put up the window curtain and piled the pillows in the corner so I
could look out. The sky was like a great inverted bowl lined with black
velvet and spangled with diamonds, circling around us as we darted
around the curves. And in the open places there was always a solemn
procession of cliffs and peaks, marching with us sometimes, and then
turning to slip past again when the bowl whirled the other way. Oh, but
it was grand!"

"I'm glad it lays hold of you," said Connie, who was loyally jealous
for the scenic renown of her native Colorado. "Now you know why
I wouldn't let you go on any of those breathless little one-day
excursions from Denver. They just take you up in a balloon, give
you a glimpse while you gasp, and drop you without a parachute. The
tourist people all make them, you know,--it's in the itinerary, with
a coupon in the cute little morocco-bound book of tickets,--and they
come back wild-eyed and desperate, and go without their suppers to
scribble incoherent notes about the 'Cache la Platte' and 'Clear Poudre
Canyon,' and other ridiculous things. It would be funny if it wasn't so
exasperating."

Myra nodded. "I'm beginning to 'savez,' as Mr. Bartrow would say. By
the way, isn't this the place where he was to meet us?--Why, yes; there
he is now!" She waved her hand and struggled with the window-latch as
the train drew up to the platform.

He was with them in a moment, carrying a towel-covered basket, and a
tin coffee-pot which he waved gingerly by way of salutation.

"The top o' the morning to you all," he said, beaming genially. "I was
afraid you wouldn't be up, and then my hot coffee would be cold coffee,
and I'd get myself disliked." Then to the drowsy porter: "John, you
scoundrel, get us a table before I break you in two and throw you out
of the window."

The table was promptly forthcoming, and Myra made room in the narrow
seat for Bartrow.

"Excuse me," he begged, laughing, "I'd like to, but I can't. Somebody's
got to stand up and do the swing-rack act with this coffee-pot. Just
unload that basket, will you, Elliott, and I'll play head waiter while
you set the table."

The breakfast was good, and there was a most astonishing variety.
Moreover the coffee rose to a degree of excellence which more than
atoned for the admixture of condensed milk in lieu of cream, and
for the slight resinous taste imparted by the new tin cups. Bartrow
apologized for the cups.

"You see, I left the mine rather middling early this morning, and
packed things in a hurry. When I was making the coffee over Jim
Bryant's stove here at Alta Vista, it struck me all at once that I'd
forgotten the cups. The train was in sight, and Jim had only one, and
that hadn't been washed for a month of Sundays. Maybe you think I
wasn't stampeded for about a minute."

Connie laughed. "I suppose you went out and robbed somebody."

"That's what I did; made a break for the store, and found it locked up,
of course. I had to smash a window to get what I wanted."

"Why, you lawless man!" protested Myra, trying to make room on the
narrow table for the contents of the inexhaustible basket. "Where in
the world did you get such a variety of things?"

"Canned goods," Connie cut in maliciously; "all canned goods, put out
in dishes so you won't be reminded of the tinny taste. Everybody lives
on canned goods in the mountains."

"Connie, you make me tired," Bartrow retorted, bracing himself as the
train whisked around a sharp curve. "Just dig a little deeper and get
out that platter of trout; they've never seen the inside of a can."

"Never mind what Connie says; she isn't responsible," said Myra. "The
breakfast is just as good as it can be. Besides, you know you promised
us that we should live just as you do if we'd visit the Little Myriad.
I wish you'd put that coffee-pot on the floor and sit down with us."

Bartrow tried it, and found it possible; after which the talk became
general and cheerful over the resinous coffee cups and the lurching
dishes. In a lull Elliott asked how the Little Myriad was going on.

"Good enough for anybody," rejoined Bartrow, with enthusiasm alert.
"Lead opens out better every day, and we're in only about seventy-five
feet."

"No pay-dirt yet, of course," said the older man.

"Well, hardly; not yet. I'm figuring on a hundred and fifty feet of
development work at the very least before we begin to take out pay."

"Mr. Bartrow, don't you remember that another thing you promised was
that you wouldn't talk mineral-English before me without explaining
it?" Myra broke in. "I want to know"--An unexpected plunge of the car
made her grasp at the coffee cup, and Connie slipped deftly into the
break.

"And it shall know, bless its inquisitive little soul! It shall be
stuffed with information like a fat little pillow with feathers. But
not here, cuzzy dear. Wait till we're on the ground, and then I'll go
off out of hearing, and Dick may turn himself into a glossary, or an
intelligence office, or a personal conductor, or anything else you'd
like to have him."

Bartrow looked unspeakable things, and put down his knife and fork to
say, "Connie, you're a--a"--

"Brute, Dickie; say it right out, and don't spare me on Myra's account.
She rather enjoys it; she loves to hear people abuse me."

"Connie, you are perfectly incorrigible," said Myra severely. "With
your poor people you are an angel of light, but with your friends"--

"I'm an angel of darkness. That's right, cuzzy dear; pile it on, I'm
young and strong. Poppa, can't you think of something mean to say about
me? Do try, please."

Bartrow grinned; and Elliott, who knew his daughter's vagaries and
delighted in them, laughed outright. Constance made a face across the
table at her cousin, and said, "Now talk mines, if you can."

"I shall," asserted Myra calmly. "Mr. Bartrow, how did you ever come to
call your mine the 'Little Myriad'?"

If the bottom had suddenly dropped out of his coffee cup, Bartrow could
not have been more disconcerted. Constance, who was in his secret,
laughed gleefully, and clapped her hands.

"Tell her, Dick; tell her all about it. If you don't I shall."

Bartrow stammered and stumbled until Connie went into ecstasies of
mischievous delight. After two or three helpless beginnings, he said,
rather tamely, "I thought it was a pretty name."

"But it's so odd; a myriad is many, and a mine is only one."

"Oh, the meaning didn't have anything to do with it," rejoined Bartrow,
going straight to his own discomfiture with refreshing candor. "It was
the--the suggestion; the similarity; the--By Jove! we're there at last;
this is the mine switch."

The exclamation was a heartfelt thanksgiving, and in the confusion of
debarking the perilous topic was safely eluded. It was a sharp climb
of some distance from the railway track to the mine, and Elliott
developed unsuspected reserves of tact by leading the way with Miss
Van Vetter, leaving Bartrow to follow with Constance. When they had
lagged sufficiently behind the others, and were yet out of earshot of
the men who were following with the luggage, Bartrow went back to the
unexploded petard.

"Connie, you've just got to help me out now," he declared. "What shall
I tell her if she tackles me again?"

"Tell her the truth."

"I don't dare to."

"Then tell her a fib. But no--on second thought I shouldn't do that, if
I were you; you'd only make a mess of it. I'll tell you what to do:
just fight shy of it till I can get her to myself. I promise you she'll
never ask you about the Little Myriad's christening again as long as
she lives."

"Thank you," said Bartrow, with the air of a reprieved criminal; and
then dubiously: "See here, Connie, how are you going to do it? No
monkey business, you know."

"Not a single, solitary monkey," she answered so soberly that Bartrow
forgot his suspicions, and plunged into another subject which was also
near to his heart.

"About Jeffard; how did you come to think he had shot himself?"

"It was only one of those suppositions you think you have verified when
you've only been playing blind-man's bluff with it. The similarity of
names misled me at first."

"But afterward you merely wired that you were mistaken. Was that
another supposition?"

"Oh, no; I saw him and talked with him."

"The mischief you did! What did he have to say for himself?"

"Not much that will bear repeating. I'm too sorry for him to want to
talk about it, Dick."

Bartrow wondered, and kept his wonder to himself. What he said was in
the nature of worldly wisdom.

"Jeffard'll come out all right in the end. He's as obstinate as a pig,
but that's the only swinish thing about him. I'm afraid he'll have to
go through the stamp-mill and get himself pulverized; but when it
comes to the clean-up there'll be more good metal than tailings. Don't
you think so?"

"How should I know?" queried Constance.

"I didn't ask you what you know; I asked what you thought about it."

"You forget that we've met only two or three times."

"I don't forget anything. But I know you can size a man up while the
rest of us are trying to get acquainted with him. Don't you believe
that Jeffard will come out all right in the end?"

She was silent for a minute or two, and when she answered there was a
tremulous note in her voice which was new to Bartrow.

"I'm afraid he has made that and everything else impossible, Dick. I
told you I had seen him and talked with him; that was the day after I
telegraphed you about the suicide, nearly two months ago. From that day
to this he has not been seen or heard of in Denver, so far as Tommie
can find out."

"Pshaw! Then you think he has taken the short cut out of it, after all?"

"I don't know what to think," said Constance; and as they were at the
top of the steep trail, the subject was dropped.

On the whole, Connie's apprehensions that her cousin's urban upbringing
might make her a difficult guest for the young miner were apparently
groundless. Miss Van Vetter rhapsodized over the scenery; waded
cheerfully through the dripping tunnel of the Little Myriad to the
very heading, in order to see with her own eyes the vein of mineral;
thought Bartrow's three-room log cabin was good enough for any one; and
ate the dishes of Wun Ling's preparing as though a Chinese cook were a
necessary adjunct to every well regulated household. When the first day
of exhilarating sight-seeing came to an end, and the two young women
were together in their room, Connie bethought her of her promise to
Bartrow.

"By the way, Myra, did you find out how the Little Myriad came by its
name?" she asked.

"No; I forgot to ask Mr. Bartrow again."

"I can tell you, if you'd really like to know."

"Well?"

"He was going to call it the 'Myra,' and he asked me if I thought you'd
object. I told him you would,--most emphatically. Then he said he would
call it the 'Myriad,' because that was the only word he could think of
that was anything like Myra."

Miss Van Vetter was arranging her hair before the small mirror at the
other end of the room, and Constance waited long for her rejoinder.
When it came it was rather irrelevant.

"I've heard of people who could read your thoughts better than you
could think them," she said; and Connie was too sleepy to strike back.




CHAPTER XII


FOR a week after the arrival of his visitors, Bartrow had scant
time and less inclination for troublement about such purely mundane
affairs as the driving of tunnels and the incidental acquisition of
wealth thereby. There were burro journeys to the top of the pass, and
to the sheer cliff known to the prosaic frontiersmen as the devil's
jumping-off-place; excursions afoot down the mountain to the cool
depths of Chipeta Canyon, and to Silver Lake beyond the shrugged
shoulder of Lost Creek Mountain; and finally there was a breath-cutting
climb to the snow-patched summit of El Reposo, undertaken for the
express purpose of enabling Myra Van Vetter to say that she had been
where there was reason to presume that no human being had preceded her.

These things three of them did, leaving Stephen Elliott to his own
devices, in accordance with the set terms upon which he had consented
to father the _parti carré_. "Go on and climb your mountains and just
leave me out," he would say, when the preparations were making for the
day's jaunt. "I've had my share of it, off and on, while I was hunting
for something I hadn't lost. Dick, here, hasn't any better sense than
to humor you; but you'd tramp mighty little if I had to go along."

Whereupon he would plant his chair for the day upon the slab-floored
porch of the cabin, tilt it to a comfortable angle against the wall,
and while away the hours smoking a mellow pipe and reading the day-old
Denver paper painstakingly, from the top of the title page to the
bottom of the last want column.

Thus the crystalline autumn days winged their flight, and Bartrow
squired the two young women hither and yon, and finally to the top of
El Reposo, as recorded. This excursion was the climax, from a scenic
point of view; and Myra, having long since exhausted her vocabulary of
superlatives, was unusually silent.

"What's come over you? are you gorged with mountains?" queried Connie
sympathetically, slipping her arm around her cousin's waist.

"It isn't that; it's just that I'm too full for utterance, I think;
or perhaps I should say too empty of words to do it justice. How
flippantly trivial everything human seems in the face of such a
landscape! Here are we, three inconsequent atoms, standing brazenly
in the face of great nature, and trying to gather some notion of the
infinite into our finite little souls. It's sheer impertinence."

"They won't mind," rejoined Bartrow, with a comprehensive gesture,
meant to include the mountains, singular and collective; "they're used
to it--the impertinence, I mean. What you see is the face of nature,
as you say, and man doesn't seem to be in it. Just the same, there is
a small army of men scattered among these overgrown hills, each with
an inquisitive pick and shovel, backed by hardihood enough to dare
anything for the sake of adding something to the wealth of the world."

Myra turned her back on the prospect and searched Bartrow's eyes in
a way to make him wonder what was wrong with his well-turned little
speech.

"That is the first insincere thing I ever heard you say," she asserted.
"As if you didn't know that not one of these men ever wastes a second
thought upon the world or the people in it, or upon anything outside of
his own little circle of ambitions and cravings!"

"You're quite right," admitted Bartrow, abashed and more than willing
to stand corrected in any field entered by Miss Van Vetter; but
Constance took up the cudgels on the other side.

"You make me exceedingly weary, you two," she said, with seraphic
sweetness. "Neither of you knows what you are talking about half the
time, and when you do, it isn't worth telling. Now listen to me while
I show you how ridiculous you are,"--Bartrow sat down on a flat-topped
boulder, and made a dumb show of stopping his ears,--"I contend that
nearly every one of these poor prospectors you've been maligning is
a perfect monument of unselfishness. He is working and starving and
hoping and enduring for somebody else in nine cases out of ten. It's a
wife, or a family, or an old father or mother, or the mortgage on the
farm, or some other good thing."

Myra made a snowball and threw it at Connie the eloquent. "I think El
Reposo is misnamed," she contended. "It ought to be called the Mount of
Perversity. Mr. Bartrow, you are sitting upon the table, which is very
undignified. Please move and let us see what Wun Ling has stowed away
in the haversack."

They spread their luncheon on the flat-topped boulder, and fell upon it
like the hungry wayfarers that they were, calling it a sky banquet, and
drinking Wun Ling's health in a bottle of cold tea. With satiety came
thoughts of the descent, and Myra pleaded piteously for a change of
route.

"I shall never get down the way we came up in the wide, wide
world,--not alive," she asserted. "With the view in prospect, I believe
I could climb the Matterhorn; but getting down is quite another matter.
Can't we go around some other way?"

Bartrow thought it possible; but since Miss Van Vetter had particularly
desired to stand upon the summit of a hitherto unexplored peak, he was
not sure.

"But we can try," said Myra. "At the worst we can come back and creep
down the way we came up."

Bartrow glanced at his watch, and focused the field-glass on a
diaphanous cloud slipping stealthily across the serrated summits of the
main range away to the westward.

"Yes, we can do that, if we have time," he assented. "But I'm a little
afraid of the weather. That cloud may miss us by twenty miles; and
then again, it may take a straight shoot across the valley and make us
very wet and uncomfortable."

Constance came to the rescue with a compromise.

"You go and prospect for a new trail, Dick, and we'll stay here. If you
find one you can come back for us, and if you don't we'll be fresh for
the scramble down the other way."

Bartrow said it was well, and immediately set about putting the
suggestion into effect. When he was fairly out of sight over the
curvature of El Reposo's mighty shoulder, Myra said:--

"He's good, isn't he?"

"He is a man among men, Myra; a man to tie to, as we say here in
Colorado."

They were sitting together on the flat boulder, and Miss Van Vetter
stole a side glance at her cousin's profile. "You have known him a long
time, haven't you, Connie?"

"Almost ever since I can remember. I'm Colorado-born, you know, and he
isn't; but he came across the plains in the days of the ox-teams, when
he was a little fellow, and the first work he ever did was for poppa,
when we lived on the ranch below Golden."

"He is a self-made man, isn't he?"

"Don't say that, Myra, please. I hate the word. God makes us, and
circumstances or our own foolishness mar us. But Dick is self-educated,
so far as he is educated at all. He was a homeless waif when he first
saw the Rockies. His father died in the middle of the trip across the
plains, and his mother lived only long enough to have her grave dug
some two hundred miles farther west. The others took care of Dick and
brought him along with them to Colorado because there wasn't anything
else to do; and since, Dick has made his own way, doing any honest
thing that came to his hand."

"He couldn't do the other kind," Myra averred. "But you spoke of
his education as if he hadn't any. I suppose that was one of your
'exuberances,' as Uncle Stephen calls them. Mr. Bartrow is certainly
anything but illiterate."

"No, he isn't that, though he has no education of the kind you effete
people have in mind when you spell the word with a capital--the kind
with a Greek-letter-badge and college-yell attachment. If you should
tell him you had been to Bryn Mawr, he would probably take it to be
some summer resort he hadn't heard of. But that isn't saying he is
stupid. He could give the man with the yell a lot of information on a
good many subjects. Poppa says he was always an earnest little lad;
always reading everything he could get hold of--which wasn't very much
in the early days, as you may imagine."

"Nevertheless, he seems to be getting on in the world," said Miss Van
Vetter. "Your father says the Little Myriad is a promising mine."

There was more pathos than mirth in the smile which flitted across
Connie's face.

"You're new among us yet, Myra. Everything with mineral in it is
promising to us; we are cranks pure and simple, on that subject. The
Little Myriad is promising, of course,--there isn't an unpromising mine
in the State, for that matter,--but it's only a promise, as yet. If
Dick should reach the end of his hundred and fifty feet of development
without striking pay, he would be a ruined man."

"Why couldn't he keep on until he should strike it?"

"For the very simple reason that he is working on borrowed capital; and
I happen to know that he has borrowed about all he can."

"But he believes in the success of the venture, absolutely."

"Of course he does; that is one of the conditions. It's merely a
question of credit with him. If any one would lend, Dick would go on
borrowing and digging until he struck pay-ore or came out on the other
side of the mountain--and then he'd think he hadn't gone deep enough.
That is the pathetic side of his character; he never knows when he's
beaten."

"I should call it the heroic side."

"It is heroic, but it is pathetic, too. It is sure to bring him
trouble, sooner or later, and Dick isn't one to take trouble lightly.
He'll go on fighting and struggling long after the battle has become
hopeless, and that makes the sting of defeat so much sharper. It makes
me want to cry when I think what a terrible thing it would be for him
if the Little Myriad should go back on its promise."

Miss Van Vetter took the field-glass and stood up to watch the storm
cloud which was now spreading gradually and creeping slowly down the
slopes of the divide. "You think a great deal of Mr. Bartrow, don't
you, Connie?"

"Indeed I do; he comes next to poppa with me."

For so long a time as one might take in saying a little prayer at a
needful crisis, Myra gave her undivided attention to the fleecy blur
slipping down the side of the main range. Then the strain on her eyes
filled them with tears, and she put the glass back into its case.
Constance saw the tears.

"Why, Myra! you're crying. What is the matter?"

"I'm lonesome and homesick, and I long for the flesh-pots of Denver;
but it was the glass that made me cry. Connie, dear, don't you think
we'd better be going back to town?"

"Why, yes; if you are quite ready. But it will be a disappointment for
Dick. He is counting on another week, at least."

"Yes, I know; and that is why I think we ought to go. We are keeping
him from his work in the mine, and his time is precious."

"Rather more so than he gives us to understand, I fancy," Constance
assented. "I suppose you are right, Myra,--we ought not to stay; but
you'll have to tax your ingenuity to find an excuse that will hold
water. Dick won't be satisfied with a P. P. C. card."

"Perhaps the chapter of accidents will help us. If it doesn't, you must
make your father remember that he has urgent business in Denver which
won't wait. Can't you manage it that way?"

"If I can't, I'll ring you in. Poppa would take passage for Honolulu
to-morrow if he had an idea that you'd like to see the Kanakas ride
surf-boards."

"I should much rather not appear in it," said Myra; and then, with
truly feminine inconsistency, "I don't know why I say that. On the
whole, perhaps you'd better say that it's my proposal. Then Mr. Bartrow
will set it down to the vagaries of a flighty migrant, and he won't
hold spite against his old friends."

Connie the wise began to wonder if there were unplumbed depths in her
cousin,--depths which Bartrow's defenseless obviousness had stirred to
his sparing; but she drove the thought out as unworthy. Myra had been
kind to Dick, certainly, but she had never encouraged him. There might
well be an accepted lover in the dim Philadelphia background for aught
Myra had said or done to evince the contrary. In which case--Connie the
wise became Connie the pitiful in the turning of a leaf--poor Dick! At
that moment, as if the sympathetic thought had evoked him, Bartrow came
in sight on the lower slope of the summit. He was breathing hard when
he reached them.

"We can make it all right," he said, slinging the glass and the
haversack, "but it'll add three or four miles. It's a roundabout way,
and it will take us into the head of Little Myriad Gulch. If you're
ready we'll get a quick move. That storm is heading straight for us,
and we'll be in luck if we don't come in for a soaking."

El Reposo is a bald mountain, and its tonsure is fringed with a heavy
forest growth which stops abruptly at timber-line. Halfway to the head
of the gulch the new trail ended in a tangle of fallen trees,--the
débris of an ancient snowslide,--and much valuable time was lost in
skirting the obstacle. Bartrow glanced over his shoulder from time to
time, and finally said, "There it comes, with a vengeance!"

The exclamation was ill-timed. Myra turned and stopped to watch the
fleecy curtain of vapor shrouding the great bald summit they had just
quitted. Bartrow sought to possess his soul in patience.

"Isn't it grand!" she said, with kindling enthusiasm.

"Yes; grand and wet. If you'll excuse me, Miss Myra, I think we'd
better run for it."

They ran for it accordingly, Connie in the lead like the free-limbed
daughter of the altitudes that she was, and Bartrow and Miss Van Vetter
hand in hand like joyous children for whom self-consciousness is not.
From the beginning of the wild race down the slopes the wetting seemed
momentarily imminent; none the less, they managed to reach the gulch
dryshod. Inasmuch as their course down the ravine was in a direction
nearly opposite to the sweep of the wind, it soon took them beyond the
storm zone, and they stopped to listen to the echoes of nature's battle
reverberating from the crags of the higher levels. The writhing of
the great firs in the grasp of the wind came to their ears like the
clashing of miniature breakers on a tideless shore; and the booming of
the thunder was minified by the rare atmosphere into a sound not unlike
the distant firing of cannon. While they paused, Myra climbed to the
top of a water-worn boulder in the bed of the ravine to get a better
point of view, and from this elevation she could see the forest at the
head of the gulch.

"Oh, Connie!" she cried, "climb up here, quick! It's a cyclone!"

Bartrow threw up his head like a startled animal. There was a steady
roar in the air which was not of the thunder.

"Cyclone nothing!" he yelled. "It's a cloud-burst! Stay where you are,
for your life, Miss Myra!"

Even as he spoke the roar deepened until the vibration of it shook the
solid earth, and a dark mass of water, turbid and débris-laden, shot
from the head of the gulch and swept down the ravine. Bartrow lived an
anguished lifetime in an instant of hesitation. To save the woman he
loved was to sacrifice Constance. To help Connie first was to take the
desperate chance that Myra would be safe till he could reach her.

There was no time for the nice weighing of possibilities; and Richard
Bartrow was a man of action before all else. Winding an arm about
Constance, he dashed out of the ravine with her, getting back to Myra
three seconds in advance of the boulder-laden flood. There was time
enough, but none to spare. A tree gave him an anchorage on the bank
above her; she sprang toward him at the word of command; and he plucked
her up out of the reach of the foaming torrent which snapped at her and
overturned the great rock upon which she had been standing.

After which narrow escape they sat together on the slope of safety and
watched the subsiding flood, laughing over the "stampede," as Connie
called it, with all the reckless hardihood of youth and good spirits.

"I wouldn't have missed seeing it for anything in the world," declared
the enthusiast. "I had plenty of time to get out of the way, but I
couldn't help waiting to see how it would look, coming over that last
cliff up there."

"Dick didn't give me a chance to see anything," Connie complained. "He
whisked me out of the way as if I'd been a naughty little girl caught
playing with the fire."

Bartrow examined the field-glass to see if it had suffered in the
scramble. It was unbroken, and he put it back into the case with a sigh
of relief.

"If you two had smashed that glass between you, I don't know what I
should have done," he said; whereat they all laughed again and took up
the line of march for the mine.

That evening, after supper, the four of them were on the porch of the
three-roomed cabin, enjoying the sunset. Constance had spoken to her
father about the return to Denver, and Stephen Elliott was racking his
brain for some excuse reasonable enough to satisfy Bartrow, when a man
came up the trail from the direction of Alta Vista. It was Bryant,
the station agent; and he was the bearer of a telegram addressed to
Constance. She read it and gave it to Bartrow. The operator had taken
it literally, and it was a small study in phonetics.

    "Shees gaun an got inter trubbel. P. Grims swipt her
    masheen. Wot shel I do.

                                             "T. REAGAN."

Bartrow smiled and handed the message back. "That's Tommie, I take it.
What's it about?"

"It's a young woman I've been trying to help. They are persecuting her
again, and I'll have to go back as quickly as I can."

"That's bad," said Bartrow; but Connie's father looked greatly
relieved, and, filling his pipe, began to burn incense to the kindly
god of chance.

After a time, Bartrow asked, "When?"

Connie's gaze was on the sunset, but her thoughts were miles away in a
humble cottage in West Denver where she had thought Margaret would be
safely hidden from the spoiler.

"I think we'd better go now--to-night. You can flag the train at the
mine switch, can't you?"

"Yes."

"And you can get ready, can't you, Myra?"

"Certainly; it won't take me long to pack. If you'll excuse me I'll go
and do it now, and get it off my mind."

When Myra had gone in, Bartrow took the message and read it again.
"This is no woman's job," he objected. "Let me go down with you and
straighten it out."

"No, you mustn't, Dick; you have lost a clear week as it is."

She rose and went to the end of the porch, whither he presently
followed her. "You'll need a man," he insisted.

"I shall have poppa."

"Yes, but he's no good--only to pay the bills."

"No matter; I shall get along all right."

"That's straight, is it?"

"Yes, I mean it."

"All right; you're the doctor. But you must wire me if you need me."

An hour later the visitors had said good-by to Bartrow and the Little
Myriad, and were on their way down the canyon in the miniature
sleeping-car. Myra pleaded weariness and had her berth made down early.
Nevertheless, she lay awake far into the night gazing out at the
rotating heavens and the silent procession of peaks and precipices.
For a background the shifting scene held two irrelevant pictures; one,
freshly etched, reproducing the little drama of the cloud-burst; the
other a memory of something she had read,--a story in which a man,
two women, an overturned boat, and a storm-lashed lake figured as the
persons and properties.

"He knew which he loved--which to save first--when the crux came," she
said softly to her pillow, "and the other girl was fortunate not to
have drowned." And at that moment a certain well-to-do gentleman of
middle age in a far-away city on the Atlantic seaboard was nearer the
goal of his wishes than he had ever been before.

In the mean time, Bartrow had an inspiration which was importunate
enough to send him afoot to Alta Vista in the wake of the swinging
passenger train. It found voice in a mandatory telegram to Lansdale,
telling him to call at once upon Miss Constance Elliott, to present the
message as his credential, and to place himself at her service in any
required capacity, from man-at-arms to attorney-at-law.




CHAPTER XIII


IN his westward sweep over the Titanic playground of farther Colorado,
the sun looks down into a narrow valley through which tumbles a
brawling stream whose waters, snow-born within rifle-shot, go to
swell the canyoned flood of the Gunnison River. Fir-clad mountains,
sombre green to timber-line and fallow dun or dazzling white above
it, according to the season, stand like a cordon of mighty sentinels
around and about; and the foot of civilized man treading the sward of
the park-like valley must first have measured many weary miles of the
mountain wilderness.

Notwithstanding its apparent inaccessibility, and its remoteness from
any hoof-worn trail, the valley had once been inhabited. The evidences
were a rude log cabin, with its slab door hanging by a single leathern
hinge, buttressing a weathered cliff on the western bank of the stream;
and, in the opposing mountain slope, a timbered opening bearded with a
gray dump of débris, marking the entrance to a prospect tunnel.

Cabin and tunnel were both the handiwork of James Garvin. On one of his
many prospecting tours he had penetrated to the shut-in valley; and
finding a promise of mineral deposits in the slopes of the sentinel
mountains, had gone into permanent camp and driven the prospect tunnel
into the rocky hillside. When he had done something more than the
development work necessary to hold the claim, two things conspired
to drive him forth of the valley. His provisions ran low; and the
indications in the tunnel, which had pointed to a silver-bearing lode
of graphic tellurium, changed suddenly at a "dike" in the strata, and
disappeared altogether.

Garvin was a stubborn man, and the toxin of the prospector's fever was
in his blood. Wherefore he put himself upon siege rations and delved
against time. When he had baked his last skillet of panbread and
fired his last charge of dynamite in the heading, the dike was still
unpenetrated. After that, there was nothing for it but retreat; and he
reluctantly broke camp and left the valley, meaning to return when he
could.

Two years elapsed and the opportunity still tarried; but Garvin kept
the shut-in valley in mind, and it was thitherward he turned his face
when Stephen Elliott's liberal "grub-stake," and the hastily formed
partnership with Jeffard, provided the means and the help necessary to
sink a shaft.

It was in the afternoon of a cloudless August day that Jeffard had his
first glimpse of the park-like valley lying in the lap of the sentinel
mountains. The air was crisp and thin-edged with the keen breath of the
altitudes, but the untempered heat of the sun beat pitilessly upon the
heads of the two men picking their laborious way over the rock-ribbed
shoulder of the least precipitous mountain.

"Well, pardner, we've riz the last o' the hills," quoth Garvin,
stepping aside to let the burro, with its jangling burden of camp
utensils and provisions, precede him. "How d'you stack up by this time?"

Jeffard's tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. Frantic plunges into
the nether depths are not conducive to good health, moral or physical,
and nature was exacting the inevitable penalty. For three days he had
been fighting a losing battle with an augmenting army of ills, and
but for the rough heartening of his companion he would have fallen by
the wayside more than once during the breath-cutting march over the
mountain passes. Wherefore his answer to Garvin's question was the
babblement of despair.

"I'm a dead man, Garvin. You'll only have me to bury if you persist in
dragging me any farther. I'm done, I tell you."

Garvin stroked his stubbly chin and hid his concern under a ferocious
scowl.

"No, you ain't done, not by a long shot. You needn't to think I'm goin'
to let you play off on me that-a-way--with the promised land cuddlin'
down yonder in that gulch a-waitin' for us. Not much, Mary Ann. You're
goin' to twist the crank o' that there win'lass a-many a time afore you
get shut o' me."

The burro wagged one ear and sat upon its haunches preparatory to
a perilous slide down a steep place in the trail. Garvin saved the
pack by darting forward and anchoring both beast and burden by main
strength. While the big man was wrestling with the burro, Jeffard
stumbled and fell, rose wavering to his knees and fell again, this time
with his teeth set to stifle a groan. Garvin threw the pack-animal with
dexterous twitch of its foreleg, and hoppled it with a turn of the
lariat before going back to Jeffard.

"Now then, up you come," he said, trying to stand Jeffard upon his
feet; but the sick man collapsed inertly and sank down again.

"Let me alone," he enjoined, in a sudden transport of feeble
truculence. "I told you I was done, and I am. Can't you go about your
business and leave a man to die in peace?"

"Oh, you be damned," retorted Garvin cheerfully. "All you need is a
little more sand. Get up and mog along now, 'fore I run shy o' patience
and thump the everlastin' daylights out o' you." And he stooped again
and slipped his arm under Jeffard's shoulders.

The sick man's head rocked from side to side. "Don't," he groaned,
this time in gentler protest. "I'd do it if I could--if only for your
sake. But it isn't in me; I've been dying on my feet for the last three
hours. I couldn't drag myself another step if the gates of Heaven stood
open down yonder and all hell were yapping at my heels. Go on and leave
me to fight it out. You can come back to-morrow and cover up what the
buzzards have left."

Garvin straightened up and drew the back of his hand across his eyes.

"Listen at him!" he broke out, in a fine frenzy of simulated rage.
"Just listen at the fool idjit talk, will you? And me standin' over him
a-pleadin' like a suckin' dove! By crucifer! if it wasn't for throwin'
away good ammynition, I'd plug him one just for his impidence--blame my
skin if I wouldn't!" And being frugal of his cartridges, Garvin flung
himself upon the prostrate burro, dragged it to its feet, cast the
jangling burden, pack-saddle and all, and lifted Jeffard astride of the
diminutive mount.

"There you are," he said, with gruff tenderness. "Now then, just lop
your head on my shoulder and lay back ag'inst my arm, and play you
was a-coastin' down the hill back o' the old schoolhouse on a greazed
streak o' lightnin', with your big brother a-holdin' you on. We'll make
it pretty middlin' quick, now, if the canary don't peg out." And thus
they made entrance into the shut-in valley, and won across it to the
log cabin whose door hung slantwise by the single hinge.

Then and there began a grim fight for the life of a man, with an
untutored son of the solitudes, lacking everything but the will to do,
pitted against a fierce attack of mountain fever which was aided and
abetted by the devitalizing effects of Jeffard's hard apprenticeship
to evil. In the end the indomitable will of the nurse, rather than
any conscious effort on the part of the patient, won the battle.
Garvin cursed his luck and swore pathetically as day after day of the
short mountain summer came and went unmarked by any pick-blow on the
slopes of the mountains of promise; but his care of the sick man was
unremitting, and he was brutally tender and wrathfully soft-hearted by
turns until Jeffard was well beyond the danger line.

It was a lambent evening in the final week of August when Garvin
carried the fever-wasted convalescent to the door of the cabin and
propped him in a rustic chair builded for the occasion.

"How's that?" he demanded, standing back to get the general effect of
man and chair. "Ain't I a jack-leg carpenter, all right? Now you just
brace up and swaller all the outdoors you can hold while I smoke me a
pipe."

He sat down on the doorstep and filled and lighted his pipe. After a
few deep-drawn whiffs, he said, "Don't tire you none to be a-settin'
up, does it?"

"No." Jeffard turned slowly and sniffed the pungent fragrance of the
burning tobacco with a vague return of the old craving. "Have you
another pipe?" he queried. "I believe I'd enjoy a whiff or two with
you."

"Now just listen at that, will you?" Garvin growled, masking his joy
under a transparent affectation of disgust. "Me takin' care of him like
he was a new-borned baby, and him a-settin' there, cool as a blizzard,
askin' for a pipe! If I wasn't a bloomin' angel, just waitin' for my
wings to sprout, I'd tell him to go to blazes, that's about what I'd
do."

None the less, he went in and found a clean corncob, filling it and
giving it to Jeffard with a lighted match. The convalescent smoked
tentatively for a few minutes, pausing longer between the whiffs until
the fire and the tobacco-hunger died out together. After which he said
what was in his mind.

"Garvin, old man, you must begin work to-morrow," he began. "I can take
care of myself now, and in a few days I hope I'll be able to take hold
with you. You've lost too much time tinkering with me. I'm not worth
it."

"We'll find out about that when we get you on to the crank o' that
win'lass," said Garvin sententiously. "Man's a good deal like a
horse,--vallyble accordin' to location. They tell me that back in God's
country, where I was raised, horses ain't worth their winter keep since
the 'lectric cars come in; but out yere I've seen the time when a
no-account, gristly little bronco, three parts wire and five parts pure
cussedness, 'u'd a-been worth his weight in bullion."

Jeffard picked the application out of the parable, and smiled.

"You've got your bronco," he asserted. "When you're a little better
acquainted with me you'll find your definition isn't far wrong. I used
to think I was a halfway decent sort of fellow, Garvin, but I believe
the last few months have flailed all the whole wheat out of me, leaving
nothing but the musty chaff."

"Oh, you be hanged!" laughed Garvin, with the emphasis heartening.
"You're off your feed a few lines yet and your blood needs thickenin',
that's all. I'll risk but what you'll assay up to grade in the
mill-run."

Silence came and sat between them for a little space, holding its own
until Jeffard's eye lighted upon the débris-bearded tunnel-opening in
the opposite hillside.

"What is that?" he asked, pointing the query with an emaciated finger.

"That's my old back number that I was tellin' you about on the way in,"
Garvin explained. "I thought I'd struck a lead o' tellurides up there,
sure, but it petered out on me."

"When was that?" Jeffard's recollection of all things connected with
the fever-haunted jornada across the ranges was misty and fragmentary.

"Two year ago this summer," rejoined the miner; and filling his pipe
afresh he retold the story of his earlier visit to the valley.

"It's a dead horse," he added, by way of conclusion. "I ought to knowed
better. I'm old enough at the business to savvy tellurides when I see
'em, and that lead never did look right from the start."

"Did you ever locate it?" asked Jeffard.

"Not much! I never got any furder along that-a-way than to stake it off
and make a map of it." Garvin found a pack of thumbed and grimy papers
in his pocket and worked his way through it till he came upon the map.
"You're an engineer," he said: "how's that for a jack-leg entry map?"

Jeffard examined the rude sketch and pronounced it good enough; after
which he folded the paper absently and put it in his pocket. Garvin did
not notice his failure to return it,--if, indeed, he thought or cared
anything further about it,--and went on talking of his own unwisdom in
driving a tunnel on a lode which did not "look right."

"We'll know better, this trip," he asserted, as somewhat of a salve to
the former hurt. "We'll go higher up the gulch and sink a shaft; that's
about what we'll do."

And this, in the fullness of time, was what they did. After a few days,
Jeffard was able to inch his way by easy stages to the new location;
and by the time Garvin had dug and blasted himself into a square pit
windlass-deep, the convalescent was strong enough to take his place at
the hoist.

From the very first, Jeffard was totally unable to share Garvin's
enthusiastic faith in the possibilities of the new cast for fortune.
Ignorant of the first principles of practical metal-digging, he was,
none the less, a fairly good laboratory metallurgist; while Garvin, on
the other hand, knew naught of man's, but much of nature's, book. Hence
there arose many discussions over the possibilities; Jeffard contending
that the silver-bearing lodes of the valley were not rich enough to
bear pack-train transportation to the nearest railway point; and Garvin
clinging tenaciously to the prospectors' theory that a "true-fissure"
vein must of necessity prove a very Golconda once you had gone deep
enough into its storehouse.

When all was said, the man of the laboratory won a barren victory. At
thirty feet the lode in the shaft had dwindled to a few knife-blade
seams, and the last shot fired in the bottom of the excavation put an
end to the work of exploitation by letting in a flood of water. Since
they had no means of draining the shaft so suddenly transformed into
a well, Garvin gave over, perforce, but proposed trying their luck
elsewhere in the valley before seeking a new field. Jeffard acquiesced,
with the suggestion that they save time by prospecting in different
directions; and this they did, Garvin taking the upper half of the
valley and Jeffard the lower. At the end of a week, Jeffard gave up
in disgust; and when his companion begged for yet one other day, was
minded to stay in camp and invite his soul in idleness until the
persevering one should be convinced.

As a matter of course, Garvin's day multiplied itself by three, and
Jeffard wore out the interval as best he might, tramping the hillsides
in the vicinity of the cabin to kill time, and smoking uncounted pipes
on the doorstep in the cool of the day while waiting for Garvin's
return.

It was in the pipe-smoking interregnum of the third day that the
abandoned tunnel in the opposite hillside beckoned to him. Oddly
enough, he thought, Garvin had never referred to it since the retelling
of its history in the reminiscent pauses of their first outdoor
evening together. Jeffard's eye measured the dump appraisively. It was
a monument to the heroic perseverance of the solitary prospector.

"That hole must be thirty or forty feet into the hill," he mused. "And
to think of his worrying it out alone!" Here idle curiosity nudged
him with its blunt elbow, and he rose and knocked the ashes from his
pipe. "I believe I'll go up and have a look at it. It'll kill another
half-hour or so, and they're beginning to die rather hard."

He crossed the stream on Garvin's ancient foot-log, and clambered
leisurely to the toe of the dump. The snows of two winters had washed
the detritus free of soil, and Jeffard bent, hand on knee, to look for
specimens of the ore-bearing rock.

"Gangue-rock, most of it, with a sprinkling of decomposed quartz along
at the last," he said reflectively. "The quartz was the dike he struck,
I suppose. He was wise to give it up. There's no silver in that stuff."

He picked up a bit of the snuff-colored rock and crumbled it in
his hand. It was quite friable, like weathered sandstone, but when
the fragment was crushed the particles still clung together as if
matted with invisible threads. Jeffard was too new to the business
of metal-hunting to suspect the tremendous significance of the small
phenomenon, but he was sufficiently curious to gather a double handful
of the fragments of quartz, meaning to ask Garvin if he had noticed the
peculiarity. And when he had climbed to the tunnel and explored it to
its rock-littered heading by the light of a sliver splintered from one
of the pitchy logs of the timbering, he sauntered back to the cabin
beneath the western cliff and made a fire over which to prepare supper
against Garvin's return.




CHAPTER XIV


GARVIN came into camp late, and Jeffard needed not to ask the result
of the day's quest. He had cooked the simple supper, and they ate it
together in silence--the big man too weary and dejected to talk, and
Jeffard holding his peace in deference to Garvin's mood. Over the pipes
on the doorstep Jeffard permitted himself a single query.

"No go?"

"Nary," was the laconic rejoinder.

Jeffard was the least demonstrative of men, but the occasion seemed to
ask for something more than sympathetic silence. So he said: "It's hard
luck; harder for you than for me, I imagine. Somehow, I haven't been
able to catch the inspiration of the mineral-hunt; but you have, and
you've worked hard and earned a better send-off."

"Huh! far as earnin' goes, I reckon it's a stand-off 'twixt the two of
us. You've certain'y done your share o' the pullin' and haulin', if you
have been sort o' like what the boys call a 'hoodoo.'"

Jeffard blew a cloud of smoke toward the gray rock-beard hanging
ghostly beneath the black mouth of the excavation in the opposite
hillside, and was far from taking offense. "Meaning that I haven't been
enthusiastic enough to fill the bill?" he asked.

"I guess that's about it. And it always seemed sort o' cur'ous to me.
Money'd do you a mighty sight more good than it would me."

Jeffard smoked his pipe out, debating with himself whether it was worth
while to try to explain his indifference to his companion. He did try,
finally, though more for the sake of putting the fact into words than
in any hope of making it understandable to Garvin.

"I'm afraid it isn't in me to care very much about anything," he said,
at the end of the reflective excursion. "Six months ago I could have
come out here with you and given you points on enthusiasm; but since
then I've lived two or three lifetimes. I'm a very old man, Garvin. One
day, not so very long ago, if you measure by weeks and months, I was
young and strong and hopeful, like other men; but instead of burning
the candle decently at the proper end, I made a bonfire of it. The fire
has gone out now, and I haven't any other candle."

The big prospector was good-naturedly incredulous. "You've had the
fever, and you're rattled, yet; that's all that's the matter with you.
You've been flat down on your luck, like one or two of the rest of us;
but that ain't any reason why you can't get up ag'in, is it?"

Jeffard despaired of making it clear to any simple-hearted son of the
wilderness, but he must needs try again.

"That is your view of the case, and it would be that of others who
knew the circumstances as well as you do. But it doesn't fit the
individual. David said he would wash his hands in innocency, and
perhaps he could, and did--though I doubt it. I can't. When you picked
me up that night on the shore of the pond, I'd been wandering around in
the bottomless pit and had lost my way. I knew then I shouldn't find it
again, and I haven't. I seem to have strayed into a region somewhere
beyond the place where the actual brimstone chokes you; but it's a
barren desert where nothing seems quite the same as it used to--where
nothing is the same, as a matter of fact. Do I make it plain?"

"You bet you don't," responded Garvin, out of the depths of cheerful
density. "You've been a mile or two out o' my reach for the last
half-hour 'r so. Ther' ain't no use a-cryin' over spilt milk, is what I
say; and when I go kerflummix, why, I just cuss a few lines and get up
and mog along, same as heretofore."

Jeffard laughed, but there was no mirth in him.

"I envy you; you are a lucky man to be able to do it. I wish in my soul
I could."

"What's the reason you can't?"

"That is precisely what I haven't been able to make you understand.
But the fact remains. The Henry Jeffard my mother knew is dead and
buried. In his place has arisen a man who is acquainted with evil, and
is skeptical about most other things. Garvin, if you knew me as well
as I know myself, you'd run me out of this valley with a gun before
you slept. I owe you as heavy a debt of gratitude as any one man ever
owed another, and yet if your welfare stood between the beginning and
the end of some devil's service in which I might be commissioned, you
wouldn't be safe to sleep in the same cabin with me."

"Oh, you be damned," said the big man, relapsing into a deeper depth of
incredulity. "You've got a devil 'r two, all right, maybe, but they're
the blue kind, and they'll soak out in the washin'. Fact o' the matter
is, our cussed luck in this yere hole in the ground has struck in on
you worse'n it has on me. You'll be all right when we get some place
else and strike it rich."

Jeffard refilled his pipe and gave over trying to define himself in
set terms. When next he broke silence it was to speak of the impending
migration.

"I suppose we pull out in the morning?" he said.

"Might as well. We've played the string out up yere. Besides, summer's
gone, and a month of fall, and the grub's runnin' shy."

"Where next?" inquired Jeffard.

"I dunno, hardly. 'Tain't worth while to strike furder in, this late in
the season. We've got to be makin' tracks along back t'wards the valley
afore the snow comes, and that'll be pretty quick now. What d' you say
to tryin' some o' the gulches o' the Mosquito?"

"Anywhere you say. I'm with you--if you care to take me after what I've
tried to tell you. But you'd much better go alone. You had it right a
while ago; you have yoked yourself to a Jonah."

"Jonah nothin'!" growled the soft-hearted giant. "Nex' time I set
out to devil you, I'll drill a hole aforehand and put in a pinch o'
dannymite along with the joke. Then when I tech it off, you'll know."

The moon was riding high in the black arch of the sky, and the gray
dump on the opposite mountain stood out in bold relief. Jeffard rose
and leaned against the doorpost.

"Garvin, you have never yet told me who staked us for this trip," he
said, broaching a subject which had more than once asked for speech.

The miner laughed. "You never asked. It's the same old man that staked
me when I was yere the first time."

"When you dug that hole up yonder in the hill?"

"Um--hm."

"Who is he?"

Garvin hesitated. "I had a fool notion I wouldn't tell you till we'd
struck somethin' worth while," he said finally. "If so be we've got
to go back with our fingers in our mouths, I put it up that maybe
you'd feel easier in your mind if you didn't know. You're so cussed
thin-skinned about some things that a feller has to watch out for you
continnyus."

Jeffard dug the kindly intention out of the upbraiding, and forebore to
press the question. After all, what did it matter? Whatever befell, he
was under no obligations to any one save Garvin. And in the itemizing
of that debt, an obligation which made him restive every time he
thought of it, he lost sight of the question he had intended asking
about the peculiarity of the snuff-colored rock in the abandoned tunnel.

A little later, Garvin got up with a mighty yawn, and said: "If we're
goin' to get out o' here afore noon to-morrer, I reckon we'd better be
huntin' us a little sleep."

"Turn in if you like; I'm not sleepy yet," said Jeffard; and when
Garvin was gone in, he fell to pacing up and down before the cabin door
with his hands behind him and the cold pipe between his teeth.

To what good end had he been preserved by Garvin's interference on
that night of despair two months before? Had the reprieve opened up
any practicable way out of the cynical labyrinth into which he had
wandered? Had his immense obligation to the prospector quickened any
fibre of the dead sense of human responsibility, or lighted any fire of
generous love for his kind?

He shook his head. To none of these questions could he honestly append
an affirmative. In the desolate wreck he had made of his life no good
thing had survived save his love for Constance Elliott. That, indeed,
was hopeless on the side of fruition; but he clung to it as the one
clue of promise, hoping, and yet not daring to hope, that it might
one day lead him out of the wilderness of indifference. While he
dwelt upon it, pacing back and forth in the moonlight, he recalled his
picture of her standing in the dust-filtered afternoon sunlight, with
the dim corridor for a background.

"God keep you, my darling. I may not look upon your face again, but
the memory of your loving kindness to one soul-sick castaway will live
while he lives."

He said it reverently, turning his face toward the far-away city
beyond the foot-hills; and there was no subtle sense of divination to
tell him that, at an unmapped side-track on the farther slope of the
southernmost sentinel mountain, Bartrow was at that moment handing
Constance Elliott up the steps of a diminutive sleeping-car which was
presently to go lurching and swaying on its way down the mountain in
the wake of a pygmy locomotive. Nor could he know that, a few hours
earlier, the far-seeing gray eyes, out of whose depths he had once
drawn courage and inspiration and the will to do good, had rested for a
moment on the shut-in valley.

For the southward sentinel mountain was known to the dwellers on its
farther slopes as El Reposo.




CHAPTER XV


ROBERT LANSDALE, literary starveling and doomed victim of an incurable
malady, was yet sufficiently unchastened to read Bartrow's telegram
with the nerves of reluctance sharp set. For what he persuaded himself
were good and defensible reasons, he had lived the life of an urban
hermit in Denver, arguing that a poverty-smitten crumb-gatherer with
one foot in the grave might properly refuse to be other than an
onlooker in any scene of the human comedy.

The prompting was not altogether unselfish. In common with other
craftsmen of his guild, Lansdale was blessed, or banned, with a moiety
of the seer's gift. For him, as for all who can discern the masks and
trappings and the sham stage-properties, the world-comedy had become
pitifully tragic; and he was by nature compassionate and sympathetic.
Wherefore he spared himself the personal point of view, cultivating
an aloofness which his few friends were prone to miscall cynicism and
exclusiveness.

Lansdale knew Miss Elliott by repute, and he shrewdly suspected that
she knew all Bartrow could tell her about a certain literary pretender
who had once been rude enough to send apologies to a hostess who had
not invited him. None the less Bartrow was too good a friend to be
ignored in the day of his asking; and Lansdale presented himself at
the door of the house in Colfax Avenue at an unfashionably early hour,
meaning to begin by making the tender of his services as nearly a
matter of business as might be.

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 a

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