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 ofits 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 hehad 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.
Garvincame 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 bethat 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 beforeyou 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 wasunder 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 ofindifference. 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.
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 Bartrowwas 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 and made haste to help him.
"From Mr. Bartrow? We have just returned from a visit to his mine up in Chaffee County. Did he forget something that he wanted to tell us, at the last moment?"
"Really, I—I can't say," stammered Lansdale, to whom the loss of the telegram was the dragging of the last anchor of equanimity. "It appears that I was thoughtless enough to leave the telegram in my room. Will you excuse me until I can go back and fetch it?"
"Is it necessary?" Connie queried. "Can't you tell me what he says?"
Lansdale pulled himself together and gave her the gist of Bartrow's mandate. Miss Elliott's laugh made him forget his embarrassment.
"That is just like Dick," she said. "He offered to come down with us last night, but I wouldn't let him. You know Mr. Bartrow quite well, do you not?"
"Very well, indeed."
"Then you know how anxious he always is to help his friends."
"No one has better cause to know; he is one of the finest fellows in the world," Lansdale rejoined warmly.
"Thank you, for Dick's sake," said Connie; "now we shall get on nicely. But to go back a little: a young woman whom I have been trying to help is in some trouble, and Dick thought he might be needed. It was out of the goodness of his heart. I really don't need any help—at least, not more than my father's check-book can answer for."
"Are you quite sure? You must remember that I am Richard Bartrow's substitute, and make use of me accordingly. May I know the circumstances?"
Constance related them, telling him Margaret Gannon's story as only a sister of mercy could tell it; without extenuation or censure, and also without embarrassment. Lansdale listened absorbedly, with the literary instinct dominant. It was Margaret Gannon's story, but Constance Elliott was the heroine; a heroine worthy the pen of a master craftsman, he thought, while the creative part of him was busy with the pulling and hauling and scene-shifting which the discovery of a Heaven-born central figure sets in motion. But in the midst of it the man got the better of the craftsman. He foresaw with sudden clarity of insight that Miss Elliott would presently be of the inner circle of those out of whom the most hardened votary of the pen cannot make copy; those whose personality is sacred because it is no longer a thing apart to be dispassionately analyzed.
When she made an end, he sat looking at her so intently and so long that she grew nervous. The light in his eyes made her feel as if she were focused under the object glass of a microscope. He saw the enthusiasm die out of her face and give place to discomposure, and made eager apologies.
"Forgive me, Miss Elliott; I didn't mean to be rude. But I have never looked upon your like before,—a woman in whom the quality of mercy is not strained; whose charity is compassionate enough to reach out to the unfortunate of her own sex."
Connie was too simple-hearted to be self-conscious under commendation.
"That is because your opportunities have been unkind, I fancy. A few years ago your criticism would have been very just; but nowadays much of the rescue work is done by women, as it should be."
"Much of the organized work, yes. But your own story proves that it has not become individualized."
"That may well be the fault of the advocate in Margaret's case," returned Connie, whose charity was not circumscribed. "If any one of the many good women I have tried to enlist in this young woman's cause had been the one to discover her, I should doubtless have the same story to tell, and quite possibly with a better sequel. But now you understand why I don't need help. Tommie—he's my newsboy henchman, you know—has been here this morning to make his report. It seems that when Margaret was taken sick she was in debt to this man Grim for costumes, or railway fare, or something, and he has taken her sewing-machine to satisfy the claim."
The hectic flush in Lansdale's thin cheek began to define itself, with a little pulse throbbing in the centre of it.
"He is an iniquitous scoundrel, and he ought to be prosecuted," he declared. "Don't you see?—but of course you don't; you are too charitable to suspect his real object, which is to drive the young woman back into the service of his master, the devil. He had no more legal right to take her sewing-machine than he would have to attach the tools of a mechanic. Is there any law in Colorado?"
"Plenty of it," Connie rejoined; adding, with unconscious sarcasm, "but I think it is chiefly concerned with disputes about mining claims."
"Let us hope there is a statute or two over and above, for the protection of ordinary mortals," said Lansdale, rising and finding his hat. "I presume you meant to buy Margaret another sewing-machine. You mustn't encourage buccaneering in any such way. Let me go and try my powers of persuasion on Mr. Peter Grim."
But Connie was not unmindful of what Bartrow had told them about Lansdale's ill health, and she promptly disapproved.
"No, indeed, you mustn't, Mr. Lansdale; you mustn't think of doing any such thing. You don't know the man. He is a 'hold-over' desperado from the stage-line days. Even Dick admits that he is a person to be feared and avoided. And, besides, you're not strong, you know."
Lansdale smiled down upon her from his gaunt height, and his heart warmed to her in a way which was not to be accounted for by the simple rule of the humanities.
"Dick told you that, too, did he? I am sorry."
"Why?"
"Because it involves your sympathy, and sympathy is much too precious to be wasted upon such flotsam as I. But I am quite robust enough to see justice done in this young woman's case. You must promise me not to move in it until you hear from me."
Connie promised and let him go. But in the stronger light of the hall she saw how really ill he looked, and was remorsefully repentant, after her kind.
Lansdale left the house in Colfax Avenue with an unanalyzed sense of levitation, which made him feel as though he were walking upon air; but when he had accounted for the phenomenon he came to earth again with disheartening celerity. What had a man in whose daily walk death was a visible presence to do with the tumult of gladsome suggestion evoked by a few words of sympathy from a compassionate young woman with a winsome face and innocent eyes? Nothing; clearly, nothing whatever. Lansdale set his teeth upon the word, and drove the suggestion forth with sudden bitterness. His part in the little drama growing out of Miss Elliott's deed of mercy was at best but that of a supernumerary. When he should have made his entrance and exit, he must go the way of other supernumeraries, and be presently forgotten of the real actors.
So ran the wise conclusion; but the event leagued itself with unwisdom, and the prudent forecasting gave place to the apparent necessities. The preliminary interview with Grim was wholly abortive. The man of vice not only refused point blank to make restitution, but evinced a readiness to take the matter into the courts which was most disconcerting to Margaret Gannon's moneyless advocate. Thereupon ensued other visits to the house in Colfax Avenue, and a growing and confidential intimacywith Constance, and the enlisting of Stephen Elliott in the cause of justice, and many other things not prefigured in Lansdale's itinerary.
And at the end of it all it was Stephen Elliott's check-book, and not an appeal to the majesty of the law, which rescued Margaret Gannon's sewing-machine; and the man of vice pocketed the amount of his extortionate claim, and gave a receipt in full therefor, biding his time, and bidding an obsequious Son of Ahriman—the same whom Jeffard had smitten aforetime—keep an eye on Margaret Gannon against the day when she should be sufficiently unbefriended to warrant a recasting of the net.
And when these things had come to pass, Robert Lansdale was of all men the most miserable. From much dabbling in the trickling rill of fictional sentiment, he had come to disbelieve the existence of any deep river of passion; but now he found himself upon the brink of such a river and was forbidden to plunge therein. Nay, more; he must turn away from it, parched and thirsty as any wayworn pilgrim of the world-desert, without so much as lifting a palmful of its healing waters to his lips.
He postponed the turning away from day to day, weakly promising himself that each visit to the house in Colfax Avenue should be the last, and as weakly yielding when a day or two of abstinence had enhanced his soul-hunger until it became a restless agony, mocking his most strenuous effort to drown it in a sea of work.
Failing himself utterly, he fell to watching Connie'sface for some token of the hopelessness of his passion, telling himself that he should find strength to stay away when he should read his sentence in the calm gray eyes. But Connie's eyes were as yet no more than frankly sympathetic. And because he was far from home, and seemingly friendless, and fighting the last grim battle with an incurable malady, she made him welcome and yet more welcome, until finally, the optimistic insanity of the consumptive came upon him, assuring him that he should live and not die, and pointing him hopefully down a dim vista of years,—a shining way wherein they two might walk hand in hand till they should come to the gate of the House Beautiful whose chatelaine is Fame.
Theline of retreat from the valley, called by Jeffard "of dry bones," to the possible land of promise in the Mosquito, lay through Leadville; not the teeming, ebullient, pandemoniac mining-camp of the early carbonate era, but its less crowded, less effervescent, though no less strenuous successor of the present.
On the march across the sky-pitched mountains it had been agreed between them that there should be one bivouac in the city of the bleak altitudes. That is to say, Garvin proposed it, and Jeffard assented, though not without a premonition that the halt would be fatal to the proposed Mosquito sequel to the campaign in the Saguache. He knew at least one of Garvin's weaknesses, and that it was akin to his own. There were the beast of burden and the dispensable moiety of the camping outfit to sell, and provision to buy; and Jeffard weighed his companion in the balances of his own shortcomings. He was well assured that he could not trust himself with money in his hand in any such city of chanceful opportunity as the great carbonate camp; and arraigning Garvin at the bar of the same tribunal, he judged him before the fact.
It was a measure of the apathetic indifference which possessed Jeffard that the premonition gave him scant concern. He marveled inwardly when the fact of indifference defined itself. Aside from any promptings of common human gratitude evolving themselves into friendly solicitude for the man who had twice saved his life,—promptings which he found dead because he looked to find them dead,—there was this: If his companion should stumble and spill the scanty residue in the common purse the wolf-pack of famine and distress would be at their heels in a single sweep of the clock-hands. And yet the fact remained.
Jeffard was cogitating vaguely this curious manifestation of mental and moral inertia when the city of the altitudes came into view over the crest of the final ascent in the toilsome journey. The smoke from the smelters was trailing lazily toward the distant Mosquito, and a shifting cumulus of steam marked the snail-like advance of a railway train up the steep grade from Malta. California Gulch and the older town were hidden behind the mountain of approach; but the upper town and its western environs lay stark in the hazeless atmosphere, with the snow-splotched background of the nearer range, uptilted and immense, dwarfing the houses into hutch-like insignificance. Dreary as is this first view of the Mecca of wealth-seekers, it has quickened the pulse and brightened the eye of many a wayworn pilgrim of the mountain desert; but Jeffard's thought was in his question to Garvin.
"Is it as near as it looks? or is it as far away as this cursed no-atmosphere removes everything?"
"It's a good ten mile 'r so, yet. If we get a move on, we'll make it by sundown, maybe."
They tramped on in silence, the singing silence of the crystalline heights, measuring mile after mile at the heels of the patient burro, and reaching the scattering outposts of the western suburb while yet the sun hung hesitant above the peaks of the main range. The nearer aspect of the great mining-camp was inexpressibly depressive to Jeffard. The weathered buildings, frankly utilitarian and correspondingly unbeautiful; the harsh sterility of the rocky soil; the ruthless subordination of all things to the sordid purposes of money-getting; these were the stage-settings of a scene which moved him curiously, like the fumes of a mingled cup, intoxicating, but soul-nauseating, withal. The nausea was a consequent of the changed point of view, and he knew it; but it was no whit less grievous. Wherefore he groped in the pool of indifference until he found a small stone of protest.
"Let us do what we have to do and get away from here quickly, Garvin," he said, flinging the stone with what precision there was in him.
They had turned into the principal street, and the burro became reluctant. Garvin smote the beast from behind, and took a turn of the halter around its jaw.
"Goin' to gig back for the crowd, ain't you?" he growled, apostrophizing the jack; and then to Jeffard:"Makes you sort o' town-sick, I reckon. I know the feel of it; used to catch it, reg'lar, ever' time I'd get in from the range. It'll wear off after a day 'r so; but, as you say, the quick way to do it up is to light out ag'in, suddint."
"The sooner the better," said Jeffard. "The atmosphere of the place is maddening."
Garvin took the word literally and laughed. "'T ain't got no atmosphere to speak of,—that's what's the matter with it; too blame' high up for any use."
They were in the thick of the street traffic by this time, and it required their united malisons joined to what of energy and determination the long day's march had left them to keep the ass from planting itself monument-wise in the middle of the street.
"Dad burn a canary, anyhow!" grumbled the man of the wilderness, when they were resting a moment in front of a shackly building on the corner of a cross street. "For ornerary, simon-pure, b'iled-down, soul-killin'"—His vocabulary of objurgatory expletives ran short, and he wrought out the remainder of the malediction with a dumb show of violence.
Jeffard smiled in spite of his mood, which was anything but farcical, and pointed to the haversack of specimens dangling from the loosened pack.
"We're about to lose the samples," he said.
Garvin regained his wonted good-humor at a plunge.
"That'd be too blame' bad, wouldn't it, now;they're so blazin' precious! S'pose you lug 'em acrost yonder to that there assay-shop whilst I toll the canary down to the corral. When you get shut o' the rocks, come on round to the boardin'-house,—'Miner's Rest,'—a block furder along and two to your right. I'll meet you there bime-by, if there's anything left o' me after I get through with this dad-burned, lop-eared totin'-machine."
Jeffard shouldered the bag of samples, but before he could reply the opportunity fled clamorous. The lop-eared one, finding itself free for the moment, gave heed to a foolish bee buzzing in its atomic brain, and went racing down the cross street, with the big miner in hot pursuit.
"Exit James Garvin," quoth Jeffard, moved to smile again; and he crossed the avenue to the shackly building with the sign of the assayer besprent upon the windows.
When he tried the door and found it locked, and the littered room beyond it empty, he was minded to go on to the rendezvous while daylight served. But when he reflected that Garvin would be sure to await an assayer's verdict on the samples, and so prolong their stay in the city of banality, he decided to conclude the business affair first. So he went up and down and around and about, and found all the assay offices closed for the day save one, whose occupant, a round-bodied little German, with the face of a cherub, martialized by the huge mustachios of a cuirassier, was still at his bench. Jeffard guessed at the little man's nationality, and made a shrewd bid for celerity.
"Guten abend, mein Herr," he said, unslinging his haversack.
The cherubic face of the expatriated one responded quickly to the greeting in the loved mother-tongue.
"Wie geht's, wie geht's, mein guter Herr," he rejoined; and then in broken English: "I haf not dot Cherman before heard spoken in dis Gott-forsaken blaces. You haf some samblesgebracht?"
"Ja, mein Herr."
"Gut!I vill of dem de tests maig.Nicht wahr?"
"Gefälligst, mein lieber Herr;" and quickly,—"we must go on our way again to-morrow."
"So qvick?Ach! das ist nicht sehr gut.You vill der poor olt assay-meister maig to vork on der nide. But because you haf der goot Cherman in your moud I vill it do. Vat you haf?"
Jeffard unwrapped the samples one by one, and the assayer examined them with many dubious head-shakings. The amateur made haste to anticipate the preliminary verdict.
"I know they're valueless," he admitted, "but I have a partner who will require your certificate before he will be convinced. Can you let us know to-morrow?"
"Because you haf der Cherman, yes. But it vill be no goot; der silwer iss not dere"—including the various specimens in a comprehensive gesture.
Jeffard turned to go, slinging the lightened haversack over his shoulder. At the door he bethought him of the curious fragment of quartz picked up onthe dump of the abandoned tunnel. It was in his pocket, and he rummaged till he found it.
"Can you tell me anything about this?" he asked. "It seems to be a decomposed quartzite, matted on a base of some sort,—a metal, I should say."
The little German snatched the bit of quartz, and ogled it eagerly through his eye-glass.
"Mein Gott im Himmel!" he cried; and the eye-glass fell to the floor and rolled under the bench. "Iss it possible dot you know him not? Dot iss golt,mein lieber freund,—vire golt, reech, reech! Vere you got him? Haf you got some morevondis?"
Jeffard took it in vaguely, and tried to remember what he had done with the handful of similar fragments gathered at the same time. It came to him presently. He had emptied his pocket into the haversack on the morning of the departure from the valley what time Garvin was seeking the strayed burro.
He unslung the canvas bag and poured the handful of gravel on the bench. The assayer, trembling now with repressed excitement, examined the snuff-colored quartz, bit by bit, with a guttural ejaculation for each. "Donnerwetter!He gifs me feerst der vorthless stones to maig of dem de assay, und den he vill ask me von leedle qvestion about dis—dis maknificend bonansa!Ach! mein freund!haf you gotvielof dis precious qvartz?"
"Why, yes; there's a good bit of it, I believe,"replied Jeffard, still unawake to the magnitude of the discovery.
"Und you can find der blaces again? Dink aboud it now—dink hardt!"
Jeffard smiled. "Don't get excited,mein Herr. I know the place very well, indeed; I left it only three days since."
"Gut; sehr gut!Now go you; go und leef me tomeinvork. Come you back in dermorgen, und I vill tell you dot you are reech, reech! Go,mein freund, mit der goot Cherman in your moud—und Gott go mit you."
Jeffard felt his way down the dark stair, and so on out into the lighted street, still only in the middle ground between realization and the bare knowledge of the fact. He was conscious of some vague recurrent effort to surround the incredible thing; and conscious, too, that it grew and spread with each succeeding attempt to measure it until no mere human arms could girdle it.
Not yet did it occur to him to place himself at the nodus of discovery and possession. The miraculous thing was for him quite a thing apart; and when he had advanced far enough into the open country of realization to look a little about him, his thought was wholly for Garvin and the effect upon him of this sudden projection into the infinite. He tried to imagine the simple-hearted prospector as a man of affluence, and laughed aloud at the grotesque figure conjured up by the thought. What would Garvin do with his money? Squander it royally,like a loyal son of fortune, and think the world well lost, Jeffard decided.
The hissing gasoline torch of a street fakir flared gustily in the keen night wind sweeping down from the Mosquito, and the scintillant arc-stars at the corners began to take on frosty aureoles of prismatic hues. The crowds on the resonant plank sidewalks streamed boisterous and masterful, as if the plangent spirit of time and place were abroad. Jeffard came to earth again in the rude jostling of the throng. While he speculated, Garvin—Garvin the inexpectant—was doubtless awaiting him at the place appointed. He must hasten thither to be the bearer of the good news to the unspoiled one.
Looking about him to get his bearings, he found himself in front of the deserted assay office on the spot where he had parted from Garvin. "One square down and two to the right," he said, repeating Garvin's directions; and he set out to trudge them doggedly, lagging a little from honest leg-weariness. In the last half of the third square there was a screened doorway, and the click of celluloid counters came to his ears from the brilliantly lighted room beyond. At the sound the embers of the fire kindled months before glowed afresh and made his heart hot.
"Ah, you're there yet, are you?" he said, speaking to the stirring passion as if it were a sentient entity within him. "Well, you'll have to lie down again; there's no meat on the bone."
At the designated corner he found the rendezvous.It was a hostelry of the baser sort, with a bar-room dominant, and eating and sleeping conveniences—or inconveniences—subsidiary. The clatter of knives and forks on ironstone china came from the ill-smelling dining-room in the rear, and the bar-room held but one occupant. It was Garvin; he was sitting at one of the card-tables with his head in his arms. He looked up when Jeffard entered, and his smile was of fatigue.
"Hello, there; thought you'd gone and got lost in the shuffle. Get shut of 'em?"
Jeffard nodded.
"No good, I reckon?"
"No; nothing that we've found this summer. But you're a rich man, just the same, Garvin."
"Yes; I've cashed in on the outfit, and I've got twenty dollars in my inside pocket. Let's go in and chew before them fellers eat it all up."
"Don't be in a hurry; the kind of supper we'll get here can wait. I said you are a rich man, and I meant it. You remember the old hole up in the hillside above the camp,—the one you struck a 'dike' in two years ago?"
"Reckon I ain't likely to forget it."
"Well, that 'dike' was decomposed quartz carrying free gold. I was curious enough to put a handful of the stuff into my pocket and bring it out. The assayer's at work on it now, and he says it'll run high—up into the hundreds, I imagine. Is there much of it?"
The effect of the announcement on the unspoiledone was like that of an electric shock. He staggered to his feet, went white under the bronze, and flung his arms about Jeffard.
"Hooray!" he shouted; "that old hole—that same derned old hole 'at I've cussed out more'n a million times! Damn my fool soul, but I knew you was a Mascot—knew it right from the jump! Come on—let's irrigate it right now, 'fore it's a minute older!"
It was out of the depth of pure good-fellowship that Jeffard went to the bar with the fortune-daft miner. Not all the vicissitudes of the breathless rush down the inclined plane had been sufficient to slay the epicure in him; and the untidy bar reeked malodorous. But the occasion was its own excuse.
Garvin beat upon the bar with his fist, and the roar of his summons drowned the clatter of knives and forks in the adjacent dining-room. The bartender came out, wiping his lips on the back of his hand.
"What'll it be, gents?"
"The best you've got ain't good enough," said Garvin, with unwitting sarcasm. "Trot her out—three of a kind. It's on me, and the house is in it."
The man spun two glasses across the bar, and set out a black bottle of dubious aspect. Knowing his own stock in trade, he drew himself a glass of Apollinaris water.
Jeffard sniffed at the black bottle and christened his glass sparingly. The bouquet of the liquor wasan entire round of dissipation with the subsequent headache thrown in. Garvin tilted the bottle with trembling hand, and filled his glass to the brim. The object-lesson was not thrown away upon the epicure.
"Here's to the derned old hole with a cold million in it," said the miner, naming the toast and draining his glass in the same breath. And then: "Come again, barkeep'; drink water yourself, if you want to, but the red likker's good enough for us. What do ye say, pardner? We're in it at last, plum up to the neck, and all on account o' that derned old hole 'at I've cussed out a mil— Here's lookin' at ye."
Jeffard merely moistened his lips the second time, and the object-lesson exemplified itself. Garvin had brimmed his glass again, and the contents of the black bottle were adulterant poisons. Wherefore he cut in quickly when Garvin would have ordered again.
"That'll do, old man; a little at a time and often, if you must, but not on an empty stomach. Let's get the money before we spend it."
The latter part of the warning had special significance for the bartender, who scowled ominously.
"Lemme see the color o' yer money," he commanded. "If youse fellies are runnin' futures on me"—
Now Garvin had been living the life of an anchoret for many weeks, and the fumes of the fiery liquor were already mounting to his brain. For whichcause the bartender's insinuation was as spark to tow.
"Futures?" he yelled, throwing down a ten-dollar bill with a mighty buffet on the bar; "them's the kind o' futures we're drinkin' on right now! Why, you thick-lipped, mealy-mouthed white nigger, you, I'll come down here some day and buy the floor out from in under your feet; see? Come on, pardner; let's mog along out o' here 'fore I'm tempted to mop up his greasy floor with this here"—
There was hot wrath in the bartender's eyes, and Jeffard hustled the abusive one out of the place lest a worse thing should follow. On the sidewalk he remembered what Garvin had already forgotten, and went back for the change out of the ten-dollar bill, dropping it into his pocket and rejoining his companion before the latter had missed him. Thereupon ensued a war of words. The newly belted knight of fortune was for making a night of it; and when Jeffard would by no means consent to this, Garvin insisted upon going to the best hotel in the city, where they might live at large as prospective millionaires should.
Jeffard accepted the alternative, and constituted himself bearward in ordinary to the half-crazed son of the wilderness. He saw difficulties ahead, and the event proved that he did not overestimate them. What a half-intoxicated man, bent upon becoming wholly intoxicated, may do to make thorny the path of a self-constituted guardian Garvin did that night. At the hotel he scandalized the not too curious clerk,and became the centre of an appreciative group in the rotunda what time Jeffard was pleading the mitigating circumstances with the hesitant deputy proprietor. In the midst of the plea, when Jeffard had consented to assume all responsibility for his companion's vagaries, Garvin broke cover in the direction of the bar-room, followed by a tail of thirsty ones.
"You say you know him?" said the clerk tentatively.
"Know him? Why, yes; he is my partner. We are just in from the range, and he has struck it rich. It's a little too much for him just now, but he'll quiet down after a bit. He is one of the best fellows alive, when he's sober; and this is the first time I've ever seen him in liquor. Two drinks of bad whiskey did it."
"Two drinks and a surfeit of good luck," laughed the clerk. "Well, we'll take him; but you must keep him out of the way. He'll be crazy drunk in less than an hour. Been to supper?"
"No."
"Better have it sent to your room. He isn't fit to go to the dining-room."
"All right; have a bell-boy ready, and I'll knock him down and drag him out, if I can."
That was easier said than done. Jeffard found the foolish one in the bar-room, drinkingad libitum, and holding forth to a circle of interested hearers. Garvin had evidently been recounting the history of the abandoned claim, and one of the listeners, ahawk-faced man, with shifty black eyes, was endeavoring to draw him aside. He succeeded just as Jeffard thrust his way into the circle, and the self-elected bearwarden caught the whispered question and its answer.
"You say you located her two years ago?" queried the hawk-faced one.
"No; that's the joke o' the whole shootin'-match,—thess like I was a-tellin' ye." Garvin's speech ran back to its native Tennessee idiom at the bidding of intoxication. "She ain't nev' been locatedyit; and if it hadn't 'a' been for that derned little sharp-eyed pardner o' mine"—
The questioner turned quickly to the bar.
"Drinks all round, gentlemen—on me." Then to Garvin in the cautious undertone: "You said she was over in Stray Horse Valley, didn't you?"
Garvin fell into the trap headlong. "Not much I didn't! She's a-snugglin' down under one o' the bigges' peaks in the Saguache, right whar she can listen to the purlin' o' the big creek that heads in"—
There was no time for diplomatic interference. Jeffard locked his arm about Garvin's head, and dragged the big man bodily out of the circle.
"You fool!" he hissed. "Will you pitch it into the hands of the first man that asks for it? Come along out of this!"
Garvin stood dazed, and a murmur of disapproval ran through the group of thirsters. The hand of the hawk-faced one stole by imperceptible degreestoward his hip pocket. Jeffard stopped it with a look.
"You have had fun enough with my partner for one evening, gentlemen," he said sternly. "Come on, Jim; let's go to supper."
And the thirsters saw them no more.
Itwas midnight and worse before the lately belted knight of fortune had outworn the hilarious and entered upon the somnolent stage of the little journey insensate, and when the thing could be done, Jeffard put him to bed with a pæan of thanksgiving which was none the less heartfelt for being unvocalized.
Having thus set his hand to Garvin's plough, there was no alternative but to turn the furrow to the end; wherefore, to guard against surprises, he hid the boots of the bottle-mad one, barricaded the door with his own bed, and lay down to doze with eyelids ajar. At least that was the alert determination; but the event proved that he was weary enough to sleep soundly and late, and it was seven o'clock, and the breakfast caller was hammering on the door, when he opened his eyes on the new day. Naturally, his first thought was for his companion, and the sight of the empty bed in the farther corner of the room brought him broad awake and afoot at the same saltatory moment. The son of fortune was gone, and an open door into the adjoining room accounted for the manner of his going.
Five minutes later, picture an anxious brother-keeper making pointed inquiries of the day-clerkbelow stairs. Instant question and answer fly back and forth shuttle-wise, one may suppose, weaving suspicion into a firm fabric of fact. Two men whose names, or whose latest aliases, were Howard and Lantermann, had occupied the room next to Jeffard's,—quite chancefully, the clerk thinks. They had left at an early hour; their call was for—one moment, and he (the clerk) will ascertain the exact time.
Whereupon one may fancy an exasperated bearwarden cursing exactnesses and beating with impatient fist upon the counter for the major fact. The fact, extorted at length, is simple and conclusive. The two men had come down some time between five and six o'clock, with a third as a middle link in a chain of locked arms. One of the two had paid the bill, and they had all departed; by way of the bar-room and the side entrance, as the clerk remembers.
Whereat Jeffard is moved to swear strange oaths; is swearing them, in point of fact, when the omnibus from an early train shunts its cargo of arrivals into the main entrance. Among the incomers is a big fellow with a drooping mustache and square-set shoulders, who forthwith drops his handbag and pounces upon Jeffard with greetings boisterous.
"Well, I'll be shot!—or words to that effect" (hand-wringings and shoulder-clappings). "Now where on top of God's green earth did you tumble from? Begin away back yonder and give an account of yourself; or, hold on,—let me write myname in the book and then you can tell me while we eat. By Jove, old man! I'm foolishly glad to see you!"
Jeffard cut in quickly between the large-hearted protest and the signing of the register.
"Just a second, Bartrow; let the breakfast wait, and listen to me. I'm in no end of a tangle, and you're the man of all others to help me out if any one can. Do you happen to know a fellow named Garvin?"
"Don't I? 'Tennessee Jim, P. P.,'—that stands for perennial prospector, you know. Sure. He's of the salt of the earth; rock salt, but full flavored. I know him like a book, though I hadn't seen him for a dog's-age until—but go on."
Jeffard did go on, making the occasion one of the few which seemed to justify the setting aside of indirection.
"We were partners; we have been out together all summer. He has struck it rich, and has gone clean daft in the lilt of it. I can't get him sober long enough to do what may be necessary to secure the claim. The sharks are after him hot foot, and if they can succeed in soaking the data out of him, they will jump the claim before he can get it located and recorded."
Bartrow laughed. "That's just like Jim: ordinarily, he doesn't drink as much whiskey in a year as most men do in a week. But if that's your only grief you can come to breakfast with me and take your time about it. Later on, when we've smokeda few lines and brought up the arrears of gossip, we'll hold a council of war and see what you're to do about the potential bonanza."
"But I can't do anything; it's Garvin's, I tell you."
"Well, you are partners in it, aren't you?"
Jeffard had another fight with an ingrained reserve which was always blocking the way to directness and prompting him to leave the major fact unstated.
"We are not partners in this particular claim. It's an old discovery of Garvin's. He drove the tunnel on it two years ago and then abandoned it. He was looking for tellurides and opened a vein of free-gold quartz without knowing what he had found."
"Then it's nobody's claim, as it stands; or rather I should say it's anybody's. You—or rather Garvin—will have to begin at the beginning, just as if it were a new deal; go back and post a notice on the ground and then come out and record it. And if it's Garvin's claim, as you say, he's got to do this in person. Nobody can do it for him. You can't turn a wheel till you get hold of Jim, and that's what makes me say what I 'does.' Let's go in and eat."
"But, Dick; you don't understand"—
"Yes, I do; and I happen to know a thing or two about this deal that you don't. You've got the whole forenoon before you; you are as safe as a house up to twelve o'clock. Come on."
"I say you don't understand. You called it a'potential bonanza' just now, meaning that it wouldn't make so very much difference if it were never recorded. But it's a bonanza in fact. If Rittenberger knows what he is talking about, it is the biggest strike of the year, by long odds. I don't know much about such things, but it seems to me it ought to be secured at once and at all hazards."
"Rittenberger, you say?—the little Dutchman? You can bank on what he tells you, every time. I didn't know you'd been to an assayer. What is the figure?"
"I don't know that. I left the sample with him last night, and was to call this morning for the certificate. But the little man bubbled over at the mere sight of it."
"Good for old Jim! So much the better. Nevertheless, as I say, you've an easy half-hour in which to square yourself with me over the ham and eggs and what-not, and plenty of time to do what there is to be done afterward. You can't do anything but wait."
"Yes, I can; I can find Garvin and make sure of him. Don't you see"—
"I see that I'll have to tell you all I know—and that's something you never do for anybody—before you'll be reasonable. Listen, then: I saw your chump of a partner less than an hour ago. He was with two of his old cronies, and all three of them were pretty well in the push, for this early in the morning. They boarded the train I came up on, and that is why I say you're safe till noon. Thereis no train from the west till twelve-seven. I know Jim pretty well, and at his foolishest he never quite loses his grip. He had it in mind that he ought to fight shy of something or somebody, and he's given you the slip, dodged the enemy, and gone off on a three-handed spree all in a bunch. There now, does that clear up the mystery?"
Jeffard had caught at the counter-rail and was gradually petrifying. Here was the worst that could have befallen, and Bartrow had suspected nothing more than a drunken man's frolic.
"Gone?—with two men, you say? Can you describe them?"
"Roughly, yes; they were Jim's kind—miners or prospectors. One of them was tall and thin and black, and the other was rather thick-set and red. The red one was the drunkest of the three."
"Dressed like miners?" Jeffard had to fight for the "s's." His tongue was thick and his lips dry.
"Sure."
"That settles it, Dick, definitely. Last night those two fellows were dressed like men about town and wore diamonds. They've soaked their information out of Garvin, and they are on their way to locate that claim."
It was Bartrow's turn to gasp and stammer. "What?—locate the—Cæsar's ghost, man, you're daft! They wouldn't take Garvin with them!"
"They would do just that. In the first place, with the most accurate description of the locality that Garvin, drunk, could give them, there would bethe uncertainty of finding it without a guide. They know that they have left a sane man behind them who can find the way back to the claim; and their only chance was to take Garvin along, keeping him drunk enough to be unsuspicious, and not too drunk to pilot them. Once on the ground ahead of me, and with Garvin in their power, they can do the worst."
Bartrow came alive to the probabilities in the catching of a breath. "Which will be to kill Garvin safely out of the way, post the claim, and snap their fingers at the world. Good Lord!—and I let 'em knock him down and drag him out under my very eyes! I'd ought to be shot."
"It's not your fault, Dick; it's mine. I saw what was in the wind last night, and stuck to Garvin till I got him to bed. I was dog-tired,—we'd been tramping all day,—and I thought he was safe to sleep the clock around. I hid his boots, dragged my bed across the door, and went to sleep."
"You couldn't have done less—or more. What happened?"
"This. Those two fellows had the room next to us, and there was a door between. They slipped him out this morning before I was awake."
"Of course; all cut out and shaped up beforehand. But, thank the Lord, there's a ghost of a chance yet. Where is the claim?"
"It is three days' march a little to the south of west, on the headwaters of a stream which flows into the Gunnison River."
"And the nearest railroad point?"
"Is Aspen. If I remember correctly, Garvin said it was about twenty miles across the range."
"Good. That accounts for the beginning of the race; they'll go to Aspen and take horses from there. But I don't understand why they took the long line. There are two railroads to Aspen, and one of them is an hour and twenty minutes longer than the other. That's your chance, and the only one,—to beat 'em to the end of the railroad run. How are you fixed?"
"For money, you mean? I have the wreck of a ten-dollar note and a hotel bill to pay."
Bartrow spun around on his heel and shot a sudden question at the hotel clerk, the answer to which was inaudible to Jeffard. But Bartrow's rejoinder was explanatory.
"Rooms over the bank, you say? That's lucky." This to the clerk; and then to Jeffard: "Come along with me; this is no time to stick at trifles. You've got to have money, suddenly, and plenty of it."
But Jeffard hung back.
"What are you going to do, Dick?"
"Stake you and let you try for a special engine over the short line. Those fellows took the long way around, as I say,—why, I don't know, because both trains leave at the same time. The running time the way they have gone is five hours and forty-five minutes. By the other line it's only four hours and twenty-five minutes. Savez?"
"Yes, but"—
"Weed out the 'buts' and come along. We're due to rout a man out of bed and make him open a bank vault. I can't put my hand into my pocket for you, as I'd like to; but I know a banker, and my credit's good."
They found the cashier of the Carbonate City National in the midst of his toilet. He was an Eastern man of conservative habit, but he was sufficiently Occidentalized to grasp the main points in Bartrow's terse narrative, and to rise to the inexorable demands of the occasion.
"You know the rule, Mr. Bartrow,—two good names; and I don't know your friend. But this seems to be an eighteen-carat emergency. Take that key and go down the back way into the bank. You'll find blank notes on the public desk. Make out your paper for what Mr. Jeffard will need, and I'll be with you in half a minute."
They found the way and the blank, which latter Bartrow hastily filled out, indorsed, and handed to Jeffard for signature. It was for five hundred dollars, and the proletary's hand shook when he dipped the pen.
"It's too much," he protested; "I can't stand it, Dick. It is like putting a whetted sword into the hands of a madman."
That was his first reference to the past and its smirched record, and Bartrow promptly toppled it into the abyss of generalities.
"Same old hair-splitter, aren't you? What's the matter with you now?"
"You know—better than any one. I am not to be trusted with any such sum of money."
"Call it Garvin's, then. I don't know how you feel toward Jim, but I've always found him a man to tie to."
A woman would have said that Jeffard turned aside to hide an upflash of emotion, though a clot on the pen was the excuse. But it was the better part of him that made answer.
"I owe him my life—twice, Dick. By all the known hypotheses of honor and gratitude and common decency I ought to be true to him now, in this his day of helplessness. But when one has eaten and drunk and slept with infamy"—
The cashier's step was on the stair, and Bartrow cut in swiftly.
"Jeffard, you make me weary!—and, incidentally, you're killing precious time. Can't you see that trust isn't a matter of much or little? If you can't, why just name the amount for which you'd be tempted to drop Garvin, and we'll cut under it so as to be on the safe side."
"But I sha'n't need a fifth of this," Jeffard objected, wavering.
"You are liable to need more. You must remember that ten minutes hence you'll be trying to subsidize a railroad company. Sign that note and quit quibbling about it."
The thing was done, but when the money had changed hands, Jeffard quibbled again.
"If the worst comes, you can't afford to pay thatnote, Bartrow; and my probability hangs on a hundred hazards. What if I fail?"
The cashier had unlocked the street door for them, and Bartrow ran the splitter of hairs out to the sidewalk.
"You're not going to fail if I can ever succeed in getting you in motion. Good Lord, man! can't you wake up and get a grip of the situation? It isn't the mere saving or losing of the bonanza; it's sheer life or death to Jim Garvin—and you say you owe him. Here,—this cab is as good as any. Midland office, my man; half time, double fare. Don't spare the leather."
At eight-ten to the minute they were negotiating with the superintendent's chief clerk for a special engine to Aspen. Whereupon, as is foreordained in such crises, difficulties multiplied themselves, while the office clock's decorous pendulum ticked off the precious margin of time. Bartrow fought this battle, fought it single-handed and won; but that was because his weapon was invincible. The preliminary passage at arms vocalized itself thus:—
The Clerk, mindful of his superior's moods, and reflectively dubitant: "I'm afraid I haven't the authority. You will have to wait and see the superintendent. He'll be down at nine."
Bartrow: "Make it a dollar a mile."
The Clerk: "Can't be done; or, at least, I can't do it. We're short of motive power. There isn't an engine fit for the run at this end of the division."
Bartrow: "Say a hundred and fifty for the trip."
The Clerk: "I'm afraid we couldn't make it, anyhow. We'd have to send a caller after a crew, and"—
Bartrow, sticking to his single text like a phonograph set to repeat: "Call it a hundred and seventy-five."
The Clerk, in a desperate aside: "Heavens! I wish the old man would come!"—and aloud—"Say, I don't believe we could better the passenger schedule, even with a light engine. It's fast—four hours and twenty-five"—
Bartrow: "Make it two hundred."
Jeffard counted out the money while the office operator was calling the engine-dispatcher; and at eight-twenty they were pacing the station platform, waiting for the ordered special. Bartrow looked at his watch.
"If you get away from here at eight-thirty, you'll have three hours and thirty-five minutes for the run, which is just fifty minutes better than the regular schedule. It'll be nip and tuck, but if your engineer is any good he'll make it. Do you know what to do when you reach Aspen?"
"Why, yes; I'll meet Garvin when his train arrives, cut him out of the tangle with the sharks, get him on a horse and ride for life across the range."
"That's the scheme. But what if the other fellows object?"
Jeffard straightened himself unconsciously. "I'm not uncertain on that side; I can fight for it, if that is what you mean."
Bartrow looked him up and down with a smile which was grimly approbative. "Your summer's done you a whole lot of good, Jeffard. You look like a grown man."
"As I didn't when you last saw me. But I'm afraid I am neither better nor worse, Dick,—morally."
"Nonsense! You can't help being one or the other. And that reminds me: you haven't accounted for yourself yet. Can you do it in the hollow of a minute?"
"Just about. Garvin picked me out of the gutter and took me with him on this prospecting trip. That's all."
"But you ought to have left word with somebody. It was rough on your friends to drop out as if you'd dodged the undertaker."
"Who was there to care?"
"Well, I cared, for one; and then there is Lansdale, and—and"—
"I know," said Jeffard humbly. He was hungry for news, but he went fasting on the thinnest paring of inquiry. "Does she remember me yet?"
Bartrow nodded. "She's not of the forgetting kind. I never go to Denver that she doesn't ask me if I've heard of you. But that's Connie Elliott, every day in the week. She's got a heartful of her own just now, too, I take it, but that doesn't make any difference. She's everybody's sister, just the same."
"A—a heartful of her own, you say? I don'tquite understand." Jeffard was staring intently down the empty railway yard, and the glistening lines of steel were blurred for him.
It was a situation for a bit of merciful diplomacy, but Bartrow the tactless blundered on remorselessly.
"Why, yes,—with Lansdale, you know. I don't know just how far it has gone, but if I were going to put money on it, I'd say she would let her life be shortened year for year if his could be spun out in proportion."
Jeffard brought himself up with a savage turn. Who was he that he should be privileged as those who are slain in any honorable cause?
"Lansdale is no better, then?"
"I don't know. Sometimes he thinks he is. But I guess it's written in the book; and I'm sorry—for his sake and hers. There comes your automobile."
A big engine was clanking up through the yard, but Jeffard did not turn to look at it. He was wringing Bartrow's hand, and trying vainly to think of some message to send to the woman he loved. And at the end of it, it went unsaid. One of the clerks was waiting with the train-order when the engine steamed up; and Jeffard was fain to clamber to his place in the cab, full to the lips with tender embassies, which would by no means array themselves in words.
Bartrow waited till he could fling his God-speed up to the cab window. It took the form of a parting injunction, and neither of them suspected how much it would involve.
"If you need backing in Aspen, look up Mark Denby. He's a good friend of mine; an all-around business man, and a guardian angel to fellows with holes in the ground and no ready money. Hunt him up. I'll wire your introduction and have it there ahead of you. Off you go—good luck to you!"