"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.
AfterConstance 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, hecame 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 aroundthe 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 towonder 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 recognizinghis 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 depthwhich 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 abouthis 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 outupon 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'sthe 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."
Aftertoiling 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'tlet 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 dothe 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 fatlittle 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'donly 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 gothrough 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.
Fora 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 theparti 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 aninquisitive 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 themiddle 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 crankspure 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 upto 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 rememberthat 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 headingstraight 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 thehigher 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, enjoyingthe 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."
"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.
Inhis 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 slopesof 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 therock-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 bydarting 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. Garvincursed 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 hecame 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.