"It was."
"Then, to put it plainly, you are the aggressor, after all. You have really jumped your partner's claim."
The promoter stopped and faced his man, and theskulker at the tunnel's mouth crept nearer, as a listener who may not miss a word.
"That is what men will say, I suppose; and I shall not contradict them. He has forfeited his right." Jeffard said it with eyes downcast, but there was no incertitude in the words.
"Forfeited his right? How? By shooting at you in a very natural fit of frenzied rage? I can't believe that you realize the enormity of this thing, Mr. Jeffard. You are new to the West. It is true that the law can't touch you, but public opinion, the sentiment of a mining region, will brand you as the basest of thieves."
"That is the public's privilege. I shall not attempt to defend myself—to you, or to any one. The consequences are mine to suffer or to ignore."
"You can't ignore them. Your best friends will turn upon you, and mining-camp justice will not only acquit the man who tried to kill you—it will fight for him and condemn you."
"But yesterday you said it would have given me the benefit of the doubt and lynched him. I can fight my own battle."
"Yes, I did say so; and, lacking your own evidence against yourself, it will condemn him yet. Had you thought of that?"
"Mr. Denby, I have answered your questions because you had a right to ask them. To the public I shall neither deny nor affirm."
"Then you'll have the choice of posing as a scoundrel on the one hand, or of consenting to thedeath or imprisonment of a measurably innocent man on the other. I don't envy you."
"It is my own affair, as you were good enough to say yesterday. Do you wish to withdraw your proposal?"
Denby took time to think about it, pacing out his decision what time the moon was beginning to silver the western snow-caps.
"No; as I have made it and you have accepted it, the proposal is merely a matter of service to be rendered and paid for; I furnish the capital to work the mine for a year for a certain portion of the output. But if you had taken me up on the original proposition, I should beg to be excused. Under the circumstances, I shouldn't care to be a joint owner with you."
"You couldn't be," said Jeffard briefly; "you, nor any one else."
"Well, we are agreed as to that. Shall we go now? Donald is waiting, and the moon will be up by the time we strike the trail."
"One moment; I have left something in the tunnel."
Jeffard turned back toward the timbered archway, and the promoter went with him. In the act a shadowy figure darted into the mouth of gloom and was seen by Denby.
"What was that?"
"I didn't see anything."
Denby stumbled over the remains of the barricade. "That must have been what I saw," he said. "Butat the moment I could have sworn it was a man dodging into the tunnel."
A few feet from the entrance Jeffard felt along the wall for the crevice, found it, and presently thrust the note-book into Denby's hands.
"You may remember that I told you I should leave my will here against a contingency which seemed altogether probable. In view of what has since passed between us, I sha'n't hold you to your promise to act as my executor; but if anything happens to me I shall be glad if you will send that book under seal to Dick Bartrow. You will do that much for me, won't you?"
"Yes."
"That is all; now I am at your service."
A few minutes later the cabin and the bit of dry sward in front of it were deserted, and the whispering firs had swallowed up the last faint echoes of minishing hoof-beats. Not until the silence was unbroken did the shadowy figure venture out of its hiding in the tunnel to stumble blindly down the dump, across the foot-log, and so to the cabin door. Here it went down on hands and knees to quarter the ground like a hungry animal in search of food. Unhappily, the simile is no simile. It was James Garvin, who, for the better part of two days, had not tasted food. And when finally the patient search was rewarded by the retrieval of a few scraps of bacon and pan-bread, the broken meats of Donald's supper-table, the starving fugitive fell upon them with a beastlike growl of triumph. But in themidst of the scanty feast he dropped the bread and meat to cover his face with his hands, rocking back and forth in his misery and sobbing like a child.
"Oh, my Gawd!—ef I hadn't hearn it out'n his own mouth ... and me a-lovin' him thess like he'd been blood-kin to me! Oh, my Gawd!"
Itwas rather late in the autumn, too late to admit of a rush of prospectors to the shut-in valley, when the fame of the new gold-bearing district in the Elk Mountains began to be noised about. As bonanza fame is like to be, the earlier bruitings of it were as nebulous as the later and more detailed accounts were fabulous. Some garbled story of the fight for possession found its way into the newspapers; and since this had its starting-point in the resentment of the Aspen newsgatherer who had been so curtly sent to the right-about by Jeffard, it became the basis of an accusation, which was scathing and fearless, or covert and retractable, in just proportion to the obsequiousness of the journalistic accusers.
In its most favorable rendering this story was an ugly one; but here again chance, in the form of reportorial inaccuracy, was kind to Jeffard. From his boyhood people had been stumbling over his name; and with ample facilities for verifying the spelling of it the reporters began, continued, and ended by making it "Jeffers," "Jeffreys," and in one instance even "Jefferson." Hence, with Bartrow as the single exception, no one who knew Jeffard identified him with the man who had figured as the putative villain-hero in the fight for possession.
Bartrow read the account of the race, the shooting affray, and the subsequent details of the capitalizing of the Midas, with Denby as its promoter and Jeffard as sole owner, with judgment suspended. It was not in him to condemn any man unheard; and Jeffard had put himself safely out of reach of queryings, friendly or otherwise, by burying himself for the winter with the development force which the promoter had hurried across the range before the snows isolated the shut-in valley. Later, when he had to pay the note in the Leadville bank, Bartrow had a twinge of dismay; but again invincible fairness came to the rescue, and he lifted the dishonored paper at a time when he could ill afford to, promising himself that this, too, should be held in solution; should not even be precipitated in confidence with any one.
This promise he kept until Constance Elliott plumbed the depths of him, as she was prone to do when he gave evidence of having anything to conceal. The occasion was the midwinter ball of the First Families of Colorado; and having more than one score to settle with the young miner, who had lately been conspicuous only by his absence, Connie had arbitrarily revised Bartrow's programme,—which contemplated a monopoly of all the dances Miss Van Vetter would give him.
"Well, catalogue 'em—what have I done?" demanded the unabashed one, when she had marched him into that particular alcove of the great hotel dining-room which did temporary duty as a conservatory.
"Several things." Stephen Elliott's daughter was in the mood called pertness in disagreeable young women. "Have you quite forgotten that I standin loco parentisto the giddy and irresponsible young person whose card you have covered with your scrawly autographs?"
The idea was immensely entertaining to the young miner, who laughed so heartily that a sentimental couple billing and cooing behind the fan-palms took wing immediately. "You? you chaperoning Myr—Miss Van Vetter? That's a good one!"
"It's a bad one, where you are concerned. What do you mean by such an inconsistent breach of the proprieties?"
"Inconsistent? I'm afraid I don't quite catch on."
"Yes, inconsistent. You bury yourself for months on end in that powder-smelly old tunnel of yours, and about the time we've comfortably forgotten you, you straggle in with a dress-coat on your arm and proceed to monopolize one of us. What do you take us for?"
It was on the tip of Bartrow's tongue to retort that he would very much like to take Miss Van Vetter for better or worse, but he had not the courage of his convictions. So he kept well in the middle of the road, and made the smoke-blackened tunnel his excuse for the inconsistency.
"It isn't 'months,' Connie; or at least it's only two of them. You know I'd be glad enough to chase myself into Denver every other day if I could.But it is coming down to brass tacks with us in the Little Myriad, and I've just got to keep my eye on the gun."
Whereupon pertness, or the Constance Elliott transmutation of it, vanished, and she made him sit down.
"Tell me all about the Little Myriad, Dick. Is it going to keep its promise?"
The Little Myriad's owner sought and found a handkerchief, using it mopwise. Curious questions touching the prospects of his venture on Topeka Mountain were beginning to have a perspiratory effect upon him.
"I wish I could know for sure, Connie. Sometimes I think it will; and some other times I should think it means to go back on me,—if I dared to."
"Isn't the lead still well-defined?" Constance dropped into the mining technicalities with the easy familiarity of one born in the metalliferous West.
"It is now; but two months ago, or thereabouts, it pinched out entirely. That is why I hibernated."
"Was the last mill-run encouraging?"
"N-no, I can't say that it was. The ore—what little there is of it—seems to grade rather lower as we go in. But it's a true fissure, and it must begin to go the other way when we get deep enough."
For a half-score of fan-sweeps Connie was silent. Then: "Is the purse growing light, Dickie? Because if it is, poppa's is still comfortably fat."
Bartrow laughed in a way to indicate that the strain was lessened for the moment. "I believeyou and your father would give away the last dollar you have in the world. But it hasn't come to a fresh loan with me yet."
"When it does, you know where to float it."
"When it does, I sha'n't rob my best friends. If I have to borrow more money for development, I'm afraid the loan will be classed as 'extra hazardous.' But you said there were several things. What else have I done?"
"The next is something you haven't done. You haven't written a line to Mr. Lansdale in all these weeks,—not even to thank him for taking your foolish telegram about the Margaret Gannon crisis seriously. And he tells me he has written you twice."
"I'm a miserable sinner, and letter writing isn't in me. Is Lansdale here? I'll go and square myself in the most abject formula you can suggest."
"He isn't here. He is out at Bennett on a ranch."
"On a ranch in midwinter? Who on top of earth told him to do that?"
"One of the doctors. I wanted to dissuade him, but I hadn't the heart to try. He is so anxious to live."
"Naturally." Bartrow eyed his companion in a way which was meant to be a measure of the things he knew and would by no means tell, but Constance was opening and shutting her fan with inthought paramount, and saw it not. Whereat Bartrow was brutal enough to say: "Is he going to make a go of it?"
"Oh, I hope so, Dick! It is such a pathetic struggle. And he is like all the others who are best worth keeping alive: he won't let any one help him. Just fancy him working for his board on a dreary prairie ranch! The monotony of it is enough to kill him."
"I should say so. Lamb ranch, I suppose?"
"Yes."
"Then I can imagine the hilarity of it. Up at all sorts of hours and in all weathers feeding and watering. That isn't what he needs. A wagon trip in summer, with good company, lots of outdoors, and nothing to do but eat and sleep, would be more like it. If he pulls through to spring, and the Myriad will let up on me for a month or two, I don't know but I shall be tempted to make him try it."
"Oh, Dick! would you?" There was a quick upflash of wistful emotion in the calm gray eyes. Bartrow set it down to a fresh growth in perspicacity on his own part that he was able to interpret it—or thought he was. But the little upflash went out like a taper in the dark with the added afterthought. "It's no use, Dick. The Myriad won't let you."
"Perhaps it will; though I'm bound to admit that it doesn't look that way at present. Now, if Jef—"
From what has gone before it will be understood that any mention of Jeffard for good or ill was the one thing which Bartrow had promised himself toavoid at all hazards; wherefore he broke the name in the midst, coughed, dragged out his watch,—in short, did what manlike untactfulness may do to create a diversion, and at the end of it found the unafraid eyes fixed upon him with mandatory orders in them.
"Go on," she said calmly. "If Mr. Jeffard"—
"Really, Connie, I must break it off short; my time's up. Don't you hear the orchestra? Miss Van Vetter will"—
But Connie was not to be turned aside by any consideration for Bartrow's engagements or her own; nor yet by the inflow into the alcove-conservatory of sundry other fanning couples lately freed from the hop-and-slide of the two-step. Nor yet again by the appearance of young Mr. Theodore Calmaine, who came up behind Bartrow and was straightway transfixed and driven forth with pantomimic cut and thrust.
"Myra will have no difficulty in finding a partner. Don't be foolish, Dick. I have known all along that you have learned something about Mr. Jeffard which you wouldn't tell me. You may remember that you have persistently ignored my questions in your answers to my letters,—and I paid you back by telling you little or nothing about Myra. Now what were you going to say?"
"I was going to say that if Jeffard were like what he used to be, he would do for Lansdale what I shall probably not be able to do."
"What do you know about Mr. Jeffard?"
"What all the world knows—and a little more. Of course you have read what the newspapers had to say?"
"I have never seen a mention of his name."
"Why, you must have; they were full of it a month or two ago, and will be again as soon as the range opens and we find out what the big bonanza has been doing through the winter. You don't mean to say that you didn't read about the free-gold strike in the Elk Mountains, and the locomotive race, and the shooting scrape in the hotel at Aspen, and all that?"
The steady eyes were veiled and Connie's breath came in nervous little gasps. Any man save downright Richard Bartrow would have made a swift diversion, were it only to an open window or back to the ballroom. But he sat stocklike and silent, letting her win through the speechlessness of it to the faltered reply.
"I—I saw it; yes. But the name of that man was—was not Jeffard."
"No, it was Jeffers, or anything that came handy in the newspaper accounts. But that was a reporter's mistake."
"Dick,"—the steadfast eyes were transfixing him again,—"are you quite sure of that?"
"I ought to be. I was the man who helped him out at the pinch and got him started on the locomotive chase."
"You helped him?—then all those things they said about him were true?"
It was Bartrow's turn to hesitate. "I—I'm trying not to believe that, Connie."
"But you know the facts; or at least, more of them than the newspapers told. Did the claim really belong to him, or to James Garvin?"
Bartrow crossed his legs, uncrossed them, and again had recourse to his watch.
"I wish you'd leave the whole business up in the air, Connie, the way I'm trying to. It doesn't seem quite fair, somehow, to condemn him behind his back."
"But the facts," she insisted. "You know them, don't you?"
"Yes; and they're against him." Bartrow confessed it in sheer desperation. "The claim was Garvin's; Jeffard not only admitted it, but he started out on the chase with the declared determination of standing between Garvin and those two blacklegs who were trying to plunder him. That's all; that's as far as my facts go. Beyond that you—and the newspapers—know as much as I do."
"Not quite all, Dick. You say you helped him; that means that you lent him money, or borrowed it for him. Did he ever pay it back?"
Bartrow got upon his feet at that and glowered down upon her with mingled chagrin and awe in gaze and answer.
"Say, Connie, you come precious near to being uncanny at times, don't you know it? That was the one thing I didn't mean to tell any one. Yes, I borrowed for him; and no, he didn't pay it back.That's all—all of the all. If you put me in a stamp-mill you couldn't pound out anything else. Now, for pity's sake, let me get back to Miss Van Vetter before I fall in with the notion that I'm too transparent to be visible to the naked eye."
She rose and took his arm.
"You're good, Dickie," she said softly; "much too good for this world. I'm sorry for you, because it earns you so many buffetings."
"And you think I'm in for another on Jeffard's account."
"I am sure you are—now. The last time I saw him he wore a mask; a horrible mask of willful degradation and cynicism and self-loathing; but I saw behind it."
They were making a slow circuit of the ballroom in search of Connie's cousin, and the throng and the music isolated them.
"What did you see?"
"I saw the making of a strong man; strong for good or for evil; a man who could compel the world-attitudes that most of us have to sue for, or who would be strong enough on the evil side to flout and ignore them. I thought then that he was at the parting of the ways, but it seems I was mistaken,—that the real balancing moment came with what poppa calls the 'high-mountain bribe,'—Satan's offer of the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them."
Now, a thronged ballroom is scarcely a fit place for heart-to-heart outreachings; but there be loyal hearts who are not constrained by their encompassments,and Bartrow was of that brotherhood. They had attained a corner where one might swing a short-sword without fear of beheading the nearest of the dancers or out-sitters, and he faced about and took both of Connie's hands in his.
"Do you know, little sister, I'm awfully glad you're able to talk that way about him. There was a time when I began to be afraid—for your sake first, and afterward for"—
It is conceivable that the frankest of young women may have some reserves of time and place, if not of subjects, and before honest Dick could finish, Constance had freed herself and was reproaching young Calmaine for not seeking her out for the dance in process,—which was his.
Teddy's apology had in it the flavor of long acquaintance and the insolence thereof. "You're a cool one," he said, when they had left Bartrow behind. "As if I didn't stand for five good minutes at the door of that conservatory place, with you eye-pistoling and daggering me to make me go away!"
Thinking about it afterward, Bartrow wondered a little that Connie seemed bent on ignoring him through the remainder of the functional hours, large and small, but so it was. And when finally he was constrained to put Miss Van Vetter in the carriage, Connie's good-night and good-by were of the briefest. Miss Van Vetter, too, was silent on the homeward drive, and this Connie remarked, charging it openly to Dick's account when they were before the fire in Myra's room contemplating the necessity of going to bed.
"No, Mr. Bartrow was all that the most exacting person could demand,—and more," said Miss Van Vetter, going to the mirror to begin the relaxing process. "It was something he told me."
"About Mr. Jeffard?"
"Yes; how did you know?"
"I didn't know—I guessed."
"Isn't it dreadful!"
"No. Some of the other things he did might have been that; but this is unspeakable."
Myra turned her back upon the mirror and came to stand behind Connie's chair with her arms about her cousin's neck.
"Connie, dear, do you know that one time I was almost afraid that you,—but now I am glad,—glad that your point of view is—is quite extrinsic, you know."
Connie's gaze was upon the fire in the grate, fresh-stirred and glowing, a circumstance which may have accounted for the sudden trembling of the eyelids and the upwelling of tears in the steadfast eyes. And as for the nervous little quaver in her voice, there was fatigue to answer for that.
"I—I'm so glad you all take that for granted," she said. "I don't know what I should do if you didn't."
And a little later Myra went to bed and to sleep, wondering if, after all, there were not secret places in the heart of her transparent kinswoman which evaded the search-warrant of cousinly disinterest.
Theobsequious waiter had cleared the table and brought in the dessert, and was hovering in the middle distance with two cigars in a whiskey glass. The persiflant young people at the other end of the table rose and went away, leaving a grateful silence behind them; and the clerical gentleman at Lansdale's right folded his napkin in absent-minded deference to home habit, and slipped sidewise out of his chair as if reluctant to mar the new-born hush.
Bartrow was down from the mine on the ostensible business of restocking the commissariat department of the Little Myriad,—a business which, prior to Miss Van Vetter's Denver year, had transacted itself indifferently well by letter,—and Lansdale was dining with him at the hotel by hospitable appointment. There were months between this and their last meeting, an entire winter, in point of fact; but it is one of the compensations of man-to-man friendships that they ignore absences and bridge intervals smoothly, uncoupling and upcoupling again with small jar of accountings for the incidents of the lacuna.
Because of the persiflant young people, the fire of query and rejoinder had been the merest shelling of the woods on either side; but with the advent ofquiet Bartrow said: "Your winter on the lamb-ranch didn't do you much good, did it?"
"Think not?" Lansdale looked up quickly, with a pathetic plea for heartening in the deep-set eyes of him. "I was hoping you'd say it had. I feel stronger—at times."
Bartrow saw the plea and the pathos of it, and added one more to the innumerable contemnings of his own maladroitness. He was quite sure of his postulate, however,—as sure as he was of the unnecessary cruelty of setting it in words. Lansdale was visibly failing. The clean-shaven face was thin to gauntness, and the dark eyes were unnaturally bright and wistful. Bartrow bribed the ubiquitous waiter to remove himself, making the incident an excuse for changing the subject.
"Never saw or heard anything more of Jeffard, did you?" he said, pitching the conversational quoit toward a known peg of common interest, and taking it for granted that Lansdale, like Connie, had not read the proletary's name into the newspaper misspellings.
"Not a thing. And I have often wondered what happened."
"Then Connie hasn't told you?"
"Miss Elliott? No; I didn't know she knew him."
"She met him a time or two; which is another way of saying that she knows him better than we do. She's a whole assay outfit when it comes to sizing people up."
"What was her opinion of Jeffard?" Lansdale was curious to know if it confirmed his own.
"Oh, she thinks he is a grand rascal, of course,—as everybody does."
"Naturally," said Lansdale, having in mind the proletary's later reincarnations as vagrant and starveling. "You didn't see much of him after he got fairly into the toboggan and on the steeper grades, did you?"
"Here in Denver?—no. But what I did see was enough to show that he was pretty badly tiger-bitten. You told me afterward that he took the post-graduate course in his particular specialty."
"He did; sunk his shaft, as you mining folk would say, straight on down to the chaotic substrata; pawned himself piecemeal to feed the animals, and went hungry between times by way of contrast."
"Poor devil!" said Bartrow, speaking in the past tense.
"Yes, in all conscience; but not so much for what he suffered as for what he was."
The distinction was a little abstruse for a man whose nayword was obviousness, but for the better part of a year Bartrow had been borrowing of Miss Van Vetter; among other things some transplantings of subtlety.
"That's where we come apart," he objected, with amiable obstinacy. "You think the root of the thing is in the man,—has been in him all along, and only waiting for a chance to sprout. Now I don't. I think it's in the atmosphere; in the—the"—
"Environment?" suggested Lansdale.
"Yes, I guess that's the word; something outside of the man; something that he didn't make, and isn't altogether to blame for, and can't always control."
The man with a moiety of the seer's gift suffered his eyebrows to arch query-wise. "Doesn't that ask for a remodeling of the accepted theory of good and evil?"
"No, you don't!" laughed Bartrow. "You are not going to pull me in over my head, if I know it. But I'll wrestle with you from now till midnight on my own ground. You take the best fellow in the world, brought up on good wholesome bread and meat and the like, and stop his rations for awhile. Then, when he is hungry enough, you give him a rag to chew, and he'll proceed to chew it,—not necessarily because he likes the taste of the rag, or because he was born with the rag-chewing appetite, but simply for the reason that you have put it in his mouth, and, being hungry, he's got to chew something. Jeffard is a case in point."
"Let us leave Jeffard and the personal point of view out of the question and stand it upon its own feet," rejoined Lansdale, warming to the fray. "Doubtless Jeffard's problem is divisible by the common human factor, whatever that may be, but your theory makes it too easy for the evil-doer. Consequently I can't admit it,—not even in Jeffard's case."
"I could make you admit it," retorted Bartrow,with generous warmth, forgetting the dishonored note in the Leadville bank, and remembering only the year agone partnership in brother-keeping. "You can size people up ten times to my once,—you ought to; it's right in your line,—but I know Jeffard worlds better than you do, and I could tell you things about him that would make you weep. Since he did those things I've had a rattling good chance to change my mind about him, but I'm not going to do it till I have to. I'm going to keep on believing that away down deep under this devil's-drift of—what was it you called it?—environment, there's a streak of good clean ore. It may take the stamp-mill or the smelter to get it out, but it's there all the same. He may fall down on you and me and all of his friends at any one of a dozen pinches,—he has fallen down on me, and pretty middling hard, too,—but there will come a pinch sometime that will pull him up short, and then you'll see what is in the lower levels of him,—what was there all the time, waiting for somebody to sink a shaft deep enough to tap it."
Lansdale took the cigar Bartrow was proffering and clipped the end of it, reflectively deliberate. He was silent so long that Bartrow said: "Well? you don't believe it, eh?"
"I wouldn't say that," Lansdale rejoined abstractedly; "anyway, not of Jeffard. Perhaps you are right. He has given me the same impression at times, but he was always saying or doing something immediately afterward to obliterate it. But I waswondering why you prophesy so confidently about a man who, for aught we know, took himself out of the world the better part of a year ago."
"Suicided?—not much! He's alive all right; very much alive and very much on top, as far as money is concerned. You don't read the papers, I take it?"
Lansdale's smile was of weariness. "Being at present a reporter on one of them I read them as little as may be. What should I have read that I didn't?"
"To begin back a piece, you should have read last fall about the big free-gold strike in the Elk Mountains, and an exciting little scrap between two men to get the first location on it."
"I remember that."
"Well, one of the men—the successful one—was Jeffard; our Jeffard. Your newspaper accomplices didn't spell his name right,—won't spell it right yet,—but it's Henry Jeffard, and yesterday's 'Coloradoan' says he's on his way to Denver to play leading man in the bonanza show."
Lansdale went silent what time it took to splice out the past with the present. After which he said: "I understand now why Miss Elliott condemns him, but not quite clearly why you defend him. As I remember it, the man who got possession of the Midas posed as a highwayman of the sort that the law can't punish. What has he to say for himself?"
Bartrow shook his head. "I don't know. Ihaven't seen him since one day last fall; the day of the locomotive chase."
"Did you know then that he was going to steal his partner's mine?"
"No. I thought then that he was going to do the other thing. And I'll not believe yet that he hasn't done the other thing. It's the finish I'm betting on. He may have flown the track at all the turns,—at this last turn as well as the others,—but when it comes to the home stretch, you watch him put his shoulder into the collar and remember what I said. I hope we'll both be there to see."
"So be it," Lansdale acquiesced. "It isn't in me to smash any man's ideal. And if anything could make me have faith in my kind, I think your belief in the inherent virtue of the race would work the miracle."
Bartrow laughed again, and pushed back his chair.
"It does you a whole lot of good to play at being a cold-blooded man-hater, doesn't it? But it's no go. Your practice doesn't gee with your preaching. Let's go out on the porch and smoke, if it won't be too cool for you."
They left the dining-room together and strolled out through the crowded lobby, lighting their cigars at the news-stand in passing. There was a convention of some sort in progress, and a sprinkling of the delegates, with red silk badges displayed, was scattered among the chairs on the veranda. Bartrow found two chairs a little apart from the decorated ones,faced them, and tilted his own against the railing. When his cigar was well alight he bethought him of a neglected duty.
"By the way, old man, I've never had the grace to say 'much obliged' for your neatness and dispatch in carrying out my wire order. I suppose you've forgotten it months ago, but I haven't. It was good of you. Connie wrote me about it at the time, and she said a whole lot of pretty things about the way you climbed into the breach."
"Did she?" Lansdale's habitual reserve fell away from him like a cast garment, and if Bartrow had been less oblivious to face readings he might have seen that which would have made his heart ache. But he saw nothing and went on, following his own lead.
"Yes; she said you took hold like a good fellow, and hung on like a dog to a root,—that is, she didn't say that, of course, but that was the sense of it. I'm obliged, a whole lot."
"You needn't be. The obligation is on my side. It was a pleasure to try to help Miss Elliott, even if I wasn't able to accomplish anything worth mentioning."
"Yes. She's good people; there's no discount on that. But say, you didn't size up Pete Grim any better than you had to. A good stiff bluff is about the only thing he can appreciate."
"If you had heard me talk to him you would have admitted that I was trying to bluff him the best I knew how," said Lansdale.
Bartrow laughed unfeelingly. "Tried to scare him with a lawsuit, didn't you? What do you suppose a man like Grim cares for the law? Why, bless your innocent soul, he can buy all the law he needs six days in the week and get it gratis on the seventh. But you might have fetched him down with a gun."
Lansdale tried to imagine himself attempting such a thing and failed. "I'm afraid I couldn't have done that—successfully. It asks for a little practice, doesn't it? and from what I have learned of Mr. Peter Grim in my small dealings with him, I fancy he wouldn't make a very tractable lay-figure for a beginner to experiment on. But we worried the thing through after a fashion, and recovered the young woman's sewing-machine finally."
"Bought Grim off, didn't you?"
"That was what it amounted to. Miss Elliott's father came to the rescue."
"There's a man for you!" declared Bartrow. "Built from the ground up, and white all the way through. And Connie's just like him. She's first cousin to the angels when she isn't making game of you. But I suppose you don't need to have anybody sing her praises to you at this late day."
"No; that is why I say the obligation is on my side. I am indebted to your 'wire order' for more things than I could well catalogue."
Bartrow rocked gently on the hinder legs of his chair, assuring himself that one of the things needed not to be listed. After which he became diplomatically abstruse on his own account. Two of thedecorated ones came by, promenading arm in arm, and he waited until they were out of hearing.
"Found them good people to know, didn't you?Bueno!You used to hibernate a heap too much." Then, with labored indifference: "What do you think of Miss Van Vetter?"
Lansdale laughed.
"Whatever you would like to have me think, my dear boy. Shall I say that she is the quintessence of all the virtuous graces and the graceful virtues?—a paragon of para—"
"Oh, come off!" growled the abstruse one. "You've been taking lessons of Connie. You know what I mean. Do I—that is—er—do you think I stand a ghost of a show there? Honest, now."
"My dear Richard, if I could look into the heart of a young woman and read what is therein written, I could pass poverty in the street with a nod contemptuous. I'd be a made man."
"Oh, you be hanged, will you? You're a wild ass of the lamb-ranches, and wisdom has shook you," Bartrow rejoined, relapsing into vituperation. "Why can't you quit braying for a minute or so and be serious? It's a serious world, for the bigger part."
"Do you find it so? with a Miss Van Vetter for an eye-piece to your telescope? I am astonished."
Bartrow pulled his hat over his eyes and enveloped himself in a cloud of smoke. "When you're ready to fold up your ears and be human people again, just let me know, will you?" This from the midst of the smoke-cloud.
"Don't sulk, my Achilles; you shall have your Briseis,—if you can get her," laughed Lansdale. "Miss Van Vetter hasn't made a confidant of me, but I'll tell you a lot of encouraging little fibs, if that will help you."
Bartrow fanned an opening in the tobacco-nimbus. "What do you think about it?"
"I think I should find out for myself, if I were you," said Lansdale, with becoming gravity.
"I don't believe you would."
"Why?"
"Miss Van Vetter is rich."
"And Mr. Richard Bartrow is only potentially so. That is a most excellent reason, but I shouldn't let it overweigh common sense. From what Miss Elliott has said I infer that her cousin's fortune is not large enough to overawe the owner of a promising mine."
Bartrow's chair righted itself with a crash.
"That's the devil of it, Lansdale; that's just what scares me out. I've been pecking away in the Myriad for a year and a half now, and we're in something over four hundred feet—in rock, not ore. If we don't strike pay in the immediate hence I'm a ruined community. I've borrowed right and left, and piled up debt enough to keep me in a cold sweat for the next ten years. That's the chilly fact, and I leave it to you if I hadn't better take the night train and skip out for Topeka Mountain without going near Steve Elliott's."
The red-badges were passing again, and Lansdaletook time to consider it. The appeal threw a new side-light on the character of the young miner, and Lansdale made mental apologies for having misjudged him. When he replied it was out of the heart of sincerity.
"It's a hard thing to say, but if you have stated the case impartially, I don't know but you would better do just that, Dick. From what I have seen of Miss Van Vetter, I should hazard a guess that the success or failure of the Little Myriad wouldn't move her a hair's-breadth, but that isn't what you have to consider."
"No." Bartrow said it from the teeth outward, looking at his watch. "It's tough, but I guess you're right. I can just about make it if I get a quick move. Will you go down to the train with me?"
Lansdale assented, and they walked the few squares to the Union Depot in silence. The narrow-gauge train was coupled and ready to leave, and Bartrow tossed his handbag to the porter of the sleeping-car.
"You're a cold-blooded beggar, do you know it?" he said, turning upon Lansdale with as near an approach to petulance as his invincible good-nature would sanction. "Here I've lost a whole day and ridden a hundred and fifty miles just to get a sight of her, and now you won't let me have it."
Lansdale laughed and promptly evaded the responsibility. "Don't lay it on my shoulders; I have sins enough of my own to answer for. It's alittle hard, as you say, but it is your own suggestion."
"Is it? I don't know about that. It has been with me for a good while, but it never knocked me quite out until I began to wonder what you'd do in my place. That settled it. And you're not out of it by a large majority. What are you going to tell them up at Elliott's?—about me, I mean."
"Why should I tell them anything?"
"Because you can't help yourself. Elliott knows I'm in town,—knows we were going to eat together. I met him on the way up to dinner."
"Oh, I'll tell them anything you say."
"Thanks. Fix it up to suit yourself,—wired to come back on first train, or something of that sort. Anything'll do; anything but the truth."
Lansdale's smile was inscrutable. He was thinking how impossible it would be for the most accomplished dissembler to tell aught but the truth with Constance Elliott's calm gray eyes upon him.
"I am afraid I shall make a mess of it."
"If you do, I'll come back and murder you. It's bad enough as it is. I've got a few days to go on, and I don't want them to know that the jig is definitely up until it can't be helped."
"Then you'd better write a note and do your own lying," said Lansdale. "I can spin fetching little fictions on paper and sign my name to them, but I'm no good at the other kind."
The engine-bell clanged, putting the alternative out of the question.
"That lets me out," Bartrow said. "You go up there and square it right for me; savez? And say, Lansdale, old man; don't work yourself too hard. In spite of the lamb-ranch, you look thinner than usual, and that's needless. Good-by."
Bartrow wrung his friend's hand from the steps of the Pullman, and Lansdale laughed quite cheerfully.
"Don't you waste any sympathy on me," he said. "I'm going to disappoint you all and get well. Good-night; and success to the Little Myriad."
Lansdalestood watching the two red eyes on the rear platform of the sleeping-car until the curve on the farther side of the viaduct blotted them out; after which he fell in with the tide of humanity ebbing cityward through the great arch of the station, and set out to do Bartrow's errand at the house in Colfax Avenue.
On the way he found time to admire Bartrow's manliness. The little deed of self-effacement promised a much keener sense of the eternal fitness of things than he had expected to come upon, in the young miner, or in any son of the untempered wilderness. Not that the wilderness was more mercenary than the less strenuous world of an older civilization—rather the contrary; but if it gave generously it was also prone to take freely. Lansdale wrought out the antithesis as a small concession to his own point of view, and was glad to set Bartrow's self-abnegation over against it. Assuredly he would do what a friendly man might toward making good the excuses of the magnanimous one.
It was Miss Van Vetter who met him at the door, and he thought he surprised a shadow of disappointment in her eyes when she welcomed him. But itwas Constance who said, "Come in, Mr. Lansdale. Where is Dick?"
She was holding the portière aside for him, and he made sure of his ingress before replying. Being of two minds whether to deny all previous knowledge of such a person as Richard Bartrow, or to commit himself recklessly to the hazards of equivocal explanations, he steered a middle course.
"Am I my brother's keeper?" he demanded, dropping into the easy-chair which had come to be called his by right of frequent occupancy.
"Oh, I hope you haven't murdered him!" said Connie, with a show of trepidation. "That's a terribly suggestive quotation."
"So it is. But are not my hands clean?" He held them up for inspection. "How are you both this evening?"
Connie's eyes danced. "Mr. Lansdale, do you happen to know anything about the habits of the ostrich?"
Lansdale acknowledged defeat, extending his hands in mock desperation. "Put the thumbikins on if you must," he said, "but don't screw them down too hard. I couldn't tell anything but the truth if I should try."
"What have you done with Dick?"
"I have murdered him, as you suggested, and put his remains in a trunk and shipped them East."
Miss Van Vetter looked horrified, but whether at his flippancy or at the hideous possibility, Lansdale could not determine.
"But, really," Connie persisted, with a look in her eyes which would have exorcised any demon of brazenness; "you dined with him, you know."
"So I did; but he had to go back to his mine on the night train. I saw him off, and he made me promise to come here and—and"—
"Square it?" Connie suggested.
"That is precisely the word,—his word. And you will both bear me witness that I have done it, won't you?"
Miss Van Vetter was cutting the leaves of a magazine, and she looked up to say: "That is one of the explanations which doesn't explain, isn't it?"
Lansdale collapsed in the depths of the chair. "'I'm a poor unfort'net as don't know nothink,'" he quoted. "Tell me what you'd like to have me say and I'll say it."
"Why did Mr. Bartrow have to go back so unexpectedly?" asked Myra. "He told Uncle Stephen he would be in Denver two or three days."
Lansdale was not under bonds to keep the truthful peace at the behest of any eyes save those of Constance Elliott; wherefore he drew upon his imagination promptly, and, as it chanced, rather unfortunately.
"He had a telegram from his foreman about a—a strike, I think he called it."
"A strike in the Little Myriad!" This from both of the young women in chorus. Then Connie thankfully: "Oh, I'm so glad!" and Myra vindictively: "I hope he'll never give in to them!"
Lansdale collapsed again. "What have I done!" he exclaimed.
Constance set her cousin right, or tried to.
"It isn't a strike of the men; it's pay-ore—isn't it, Mr. Lansdale?"
"Now how should I know?" protested the amateur apologist. "A strike is a strike, isn't it? But I don't believe it was the good kind. He wasn't at all enthusiastic about it."
"That will do," said Connie. "Poor Dick!" And Miss Van Vetter, who was not of the stony-hearted, rose and went to the piano that she might not advertise her emotion.
Lansdale picked himself up out of the ruins of his attempt to do Bartrow a good turn, and hoped the worst was over. It was for the time; but later in the evening, when Myra had gone to the library for a book they had been talking about, Connie returned to the unfinished inquisition.
"You know more than you have told us about Dick's trouble," she said gravely. "Is it very serious?"
"Yes, rather." Lansdale made a sudden resolve to cleave to the facts in the case, telling as few of them as he might.
"It wasn't a strike at all, was it?"
"No; that was a little figure of speech. It is rather the lack of a strike—of the kind you meant."
"Poor boy! I don't wonder that it made him want to run away. He has worked so hard and so long, and his faith in the Little Myriad has been unbounded. What will he do?"
"I don't know that. In fact, I think he is not quite at the brink of things yet. But he is afraid it is coming to that."
"How did he talk? Is he very much discouraged? But of course he isn't; nothing discourages him."
Lansdale was looking into the compelling eyes and he forgot his rôle,—forgot that he had been giving Constance to understand that the prospective failure of the mine was the only cloud in Bartrow's sky.
"I'm sorry I can't confirm that." He spoke hurriedly, hearing the rustle of Miss Van Vetter's skirts in the hall. "He decided rather suddenly,—to go back, you know. He intended coming here with me this evening. I don't think he had ever considered all the possibilities and consequences; and we were talking it over. Then he decided not to come. He is the soul of honor."
Constance nodded intelligence, and made the proper diversion when her cousin came in with the book. But Miss Van Vetter had overheard the final sentence, and she put it away for future reference.
Lansdale said good-night a little later, and they both went to the door with him. When he was gone Myra drew Connie into the library and made her sit down where the light from the shaded chandelier fell full upon her.
"Connie, dear," she began, fixing her cousin with an inquisitorial eye, "who is 'the soul of honor'?"
"It isn't nice to overhear things," said Connie pertly.
"I might retort that it isn't nice to have confidences with a gentleman the moment your cousin's back is turned, but I sha'n't. Will you tell me what I want to know?"
"We were talking about Dick."
Myra's hands were clasped over her knee, and one daintily shod foot was tapping a tattoo on the rug. "Was it anything that I ought not to know?"
Connie's pertness vanished, and the steadfast gray eyes brightened with quick upwellings of sympathy. "No, dear; it will doubtless be in everybody's mouth before many days. You remember what I told you once about Dick's prospects?—that day we were on top of El Reposo?"
"Yes."
"Well, I think the Little Myriad isn't going to keep its promise; Dick thinks so."
Myra sat quietly under it for a little while, and then got up to go to the window. When she spoke she did not turn her head.
"He will be ruined, you said. What will you do, Connie?"
"I? What can I do? Poppa would lend him more money, but he wouldn't take it,—not from us."
Silence while the bronze-figured clock on the mantel measured a full minute. Then:—
"There is one way you can make him take it."
"How?"
Myra gave a quick glance over her shoulder, as if to make sure that her cousin was still sitting under the chandelier.
"He believes—and so does your father—that it is only a question of time and more money. He couldn't refuse to take his wife's money."
Miss Van Vetter heard a little gasp, which, to her strained sense, seemed to be more than half a sob, and the arc-light swinging from its wire across the avenue was blurred for her. Then Connie's voice, soft and low-pitched in the silence of the book-lined room, came to her as from a great distance.
"You are quite mistaken, Myra, dear; mistaken and—and very blind. Dick is my good brother,—the only one I ever had; not my father's son, but yet my brother. There has been no thought of anything else between us. Besides"—
Myra heard light footfalls and the rustle of drapery, and stole another quick glance over her shoulder. The big pivot-chair under the chandelier was empty. The door into the hall was ajar, and Connie's face, piquant with suppressed rapture, was framed in the aperture.
"Besides, you good, dense, impracticable cuzzy, dear,—are you listening?—Dick is head over ears in love with—you."
The door slammed softly on the final word, and there was a quick patter of flying feet on the stairs. Myra kept her place at the window; but when the arc-light had parted with its blurring aureole she drew the big pivot-chair to the desk and sat down to write.
What she had in mind seemed not to say itself readily, and there was quite a pyramid of waste paper in the basket before she had finished her two letters. She left them on the hall table when she went up to her room, and Connie found them in the morning on her way to the breakfast-room to pour her father's coffee.
"I wish I might read them," she said, with the mischievous light dancing in her eyes. "It's deliciously suspicious; a letter to Dick, and one to her man of business, all in a breath, and right on the heels of my little bomb-shell. If she ever tries to discipline me again,—well, she'd better not, that's all."
Twodays after his return to the mine on Topeka Mountain, Bartrow received a letter. It came up from Alta Vista by the hands of one of the workmen who had been down to the camp blacksmith shop with the day's gathering of dulled tools, and was considerably the worse for handling when it reached its destination. Connie's monogram was on the flap of the envelope, but the address was not in Connie's handwriting. So much Bartrow remarked while he was questioning the tool-carrier.
"Took you a good while, didn't it? Was Pat sober to-day?"
"Naw; swimmin' full, same as usual."
"Spoil anything?"
"Burnt up a drill 'r two, spite of all I could do. Laid off to lick me when he got through, but I lit out 'fore he got round to it."
"Did, eh? It's a pity; he's a good blacksmith if he'd only let whiskey alone. Try him in the morning next time, and maybe you'll catch him sober."
"Don't make any dif'rence 'bout the time o' day with him. He's full all the time, he is."
Bartrow's curiosity was beginning to bestir itself, but he put it under foot till he had climbed to thethree-roomed cabin on the bench above the tunnel-opening. Wun Ling was laying the table for supper, and the master of the mine sat down on the porch to read his letter. It was from Miss Van Vetter; and the glow on Bartrow's sunburned face as he read it was not altogether the ruddy reflection from the piled-up masses of sunset crimson in the western sky.
"Dear Mr. Bartrow," she wrote: "Mr. Lansdale has just been here, and we made him tell us about your trouble, though he tried very hard not to. From which we infer that you didn't want us to know,—and that was wrong. If one cannot go to one's friends at such times, it is surely a very thankless world.
"Constance told me some time ago that you might not be able to go on with the Little Myriad without the investment of more capital, and I have written about it to a friend of mine in the East who has money to invest. You may call it a most unwarrantable impertinence if you please, but I'm not going to apologize for it,—not here. If you would really like to humble me, I'll give you plenary indulgence when you come to see us.
"I inclose my friend's Philadelphia address, and I may say with confidence that I am quite sure he will help you if you will write him.
"We have abundant faith in you and in the Little Myriad. Don't think of giving up, and please don't evade us when you are next in Denver."
Bartrow absorbed it by littles, and sat fingeringthe slip of paper with the Philadelphia address on it, quite unheedful of Wun Ling's thrice-repeated announcement that supper was ready. It was his first letter from her, and the fact was easily subversive of presence of mind. Not until the lilt of it had a little outworn itself could he bring himself down to any fair-minded consideration of the offer of help. But when it finally came to that, he put the letter in his pocket and went in to supper, smiling ineffably and shaking his head as one who has set his face flintwise against temptation.
An hour later, however, when he was smoking his pipe on the porch step, the temptation beset him afresh. His faith in the ultimate success of the mine had never wavered. It was unshaken even now, when he was at the end of his resources, and a thing had happened which threatened to demand a costly change in the method of exploiting the lode. But to be confident for himself and for those who, knowing the hazard, had helped him hitherto, was one thing; and to take a stranger's money was quite another. And when the stranger chanced to be the friend of the woman he loved, a person who would invest in the Little Myriad solely on the ground of Miss Van Vetter's recommendation, the difference magnified itself until it took the shape of a prohibition.
The light had faded out of the western sky, and the peaks of the main range stood out in shadowy relief against the star-dusted background. The homely noises in Wun Ling's sanctum had ceased,and silence begirt the great mountain. Bartrow tossed the extinct pipe through an open window, and began to pace the length of the slab-floored porch. It was not in him to give up without another struggle; a final struggle, he called it, though none knew better that there is no final struggle for a strong man save that which crowns perseverance with the chaplet of fruition. The temptation to grasp the hand held out to him was very subtle. If Miss Van Vetter could have been eliminated—if only the proposal had come direct from the Philadelphia capitalist, instead of through her.
The sound of footsteps on the gravel at the tunnel's mouth broke into his reverie, and the figure of a man loomed dimly in the darkness at the foot of the path leading up to the cabin. It was McMurtrie, the mining engineer in charge of the Big Bonanza at Alta Vista. Bartrow called down to him.
"Is that you, Mac? Don't come up; I'll be with you in a second."
The engineer sat down on a tool-box and waited.
"I'm a little late," he said, when Bartrow came down the path. "It's pay-day at the Bonanza. Get a lamp and let's go in and have a look at your new grief."
"You didn't need to tramp up here in the dark," Bartrow rejoined, feeling in a niche in the timbering for a miner's lamp. "I'd given you up for to-night."
"Oh, I said I'd come, and I'm here. I knowhow it feels to be on the ragged edge,—been there myself. Is that the best lamp you could find? It isn't much better than a white bean. Pick it up a little higher so I can see the wet spots. It's too chilly to go in swimming to-night."
They were picking their way through the damp tunnel, Bartrow ahead with the lamp held high. The "new grief" was an apparent change in the direction of the ore-bearing crevice from its slight inclination upward to a sharp pitch downward; and Bartrow had asked McMurtrie to come up and look at it.
In the heading the engineer took the lamp and made a careful examination of the rock face of the cutting, tracing the outline of the vein with the flame of the lamp, and picking off bits of the shattered rock to determine the lines of cleavage. Bartrow stood aside and waited for the verdict; waited with a tense thrill of nervousness which was quite new to him; and the monotonous drip-drip of the water percolating through the tunnel roof magnified itself into a din like the ringing of hammers upon an anvil.
"Well, what do you say?" he queried, when the engineer made an end and began to fill his pipe.
"You're in for it, Dick,—here, hold this lamp a minute, will you? It's a pretty well-defined dip in the formation, and I'm afraid it has come to stay. That means an incline."
The echo took up Bartrow's ironical laugh and gave it back in mocking reiteration.
"Yes; an incline at the end of a four-hundred-and-forty-foot tunnel, and a steam hoist, and a pumping outfit, and a few other little knickknacks. Say a couple of thousand dollars or so before I can turn a wheel."
McMurtrie bent to light his pipe at the flame of the lamp. "That's about the size of it. Hold that lamp still, can't you?"
"Hold it yourself," retorted Bartrow; and he took a turn in the darkness to steady his nerves. When he stumbled back into the dim nimbus of lamplight he had fought and won his small battle.
"Don't lay it up against me, Mac," he said, in blunt contrition. "It knocked me out for a minute. You know I've been backing my luck here for all I'm worth."
"Yes, I know that. What will you do now?"
"Quit; come off the perch; shut up shop and pull down the blinds. It's all there is to do."
"And give it up?"
"And give it up. Bank's broke; or at least it will be when I've paid the men another time or two."
McMurtrie had Scotch blood in his veins, and was cannily chary of offering unasked advice. None the less, he did it.
"I'd borrow a little more nerve and go on, if it were mine."
"So would I if I could."
"Can't you?"
Bartrow said "no," changed it to "yes," andthen qualified the assent until it, too, became a negation.
"It's a pity," was the engineer's comment. "I believe another hundred feet would let you in for a decently good thing."
"So do I. But it might as well be a thousand. I know when I'm downed."
McMurtrie scoffed openly at that, taking his pipe from his mouth to say: "That's the one thing you don't know. You'll chew on it a while and go to Denver; and in a day or so your men will get orders to go on. I've seen you downed before. Why don't you go back East and marry a rich girl? That's the way to develop a mine."
It was a random shot, but it went so near the mark that Bartrow winced, and was thankful that the flaring miner's lamp was not an arc-light. And his rejoinder ignored the matrimonial suggestion.
"You're off wrong this time, Mac. I wish you didn't have to be. But it's no use. I'm in debt till I can't see out over the top of it, and I couldn't raise another thousand on the Myriad if I should try,—that is, not in Colorado. If I go to Denver it'll be to turn over my collateral and let everybody down as easy as I can."
"Then don't go yet a while."
Bartrow took the lamp and led the way out of the tunnel.
"I did mean to stand it off to the last minute," he said, when they were once more under the stars, "but I don't know as it's worth while now. Willyou come up to the shack and smoke a few lines? No? Then wait till I get my coat and I'll walk down to camp with you. I want to do a little wiring before I turn in."
They parted at the railway station above the camp at the foot of Bonanza Mountain, and Bartrow went in to send his message. In the hour of defeat he yearned, manlike, for sympathy; and it was to Connie that his cry went out. Notwithstanding the earnestness of it, the appeal was consistently characteristic in its wording.
"I'm hunting sympathy. Can you give me a lonesome hour or two if I come down? Answer while I wait."
He asked the night operator to rush it, and sat down with his feet on the window-sill to smoke out the interval. A half-hour later, when the operator was jogging Denver for a reply to his "rush," the din of an affray floated up to the open window from the camp in the gulch. The operator came to the window and looked down upon the twinkling lights of the town.
"That's the blacksmith again," he said. "He's been on a steady bat for two weeks, and the camp isn't big enough to hold him."
"He'll kill himself, if he don't mind," Bartrow prophesied. "He's raw yet, and hasn't found out that a man can't stand the drink up here that he could in the valley."
"No. Doc said he had a touch of the jimmies last night. He yelled for his daughter till they heardhim up at the shaft-house of the Bonanza. McMurtrie said"—But what the engineer's commentary had been was lost to Bartrow, since the clicking sounder was snipping out the reply to the "rush" message.
The operator wrote it out and handed it to Bartrow. The answer was as characteristic as the appeal.
"Two of the three of us go to Boulder to-morrow to return by the late train. The other one is most sympathetic. Come."Connie."
"Two of the three of us go to Boulder to-morrow to return by the late train. The other one is most sympathetic. Come.
"Connie."