WHEN one has sown the wind, and the whirlwind harvest is begun, it
is easy to imagine that the first few strokes of the sickle have
gathered in all the bitterness there is in the crop. Some such illusory
assumption lent itself to Jeffard's mood when he assured himself that
he had finally reached the bottom; but the light of a new day, and a
habit of early rising which was not to be broken at such short notice,
brought a clearer perspective.
In lieu of breakfast he walked up one street and down another,
carefully avoiding the vicinity of the St. James for fear Bartrow might
offer him hospitality, and dodging the haunts of his few acquaintances
in the downtown thoroughfares for the same reason. This drove him to
the residence district; and out in Colfax Avenue he met the elderly man
whom he had taken to be the father of the young woman with the kindly
nod and smile.
Seeing him in daylight, Jeffard recognized a familiar figure of the
Mining Exchange and the brokers' offices, and thought it not unlikely
that he might presently stumble upon the home of the young woman. He
found it a square or two farther out, identifying it by a glimpse
of the young woman herself, who was on the veranda, looping up the
tendrils of a climbing rose.
At sight of her Jeffard forgot his penalties for the moment, and the
early morning sunshine seemed to take on a kindlier glow. She was
standing on the arm of a clumsy veranda-chair, trying vainly to reach
the higher branches of the rose, and Jeffard remarked that she was
small almost to girlishness. But the suggestion of immaturity paused
with her stature. The rounded arms discovered by the loose sleeves
of her belted house-gown; the firm, full outline of her figure; the
crowning glory of red-brown hair with the heart of the sunlight in it;
the self-contained poise on the arm of the great chair; these were all
womanly, and the glimpse stirred the waters of a neglected pool in
Jeffard's past as he went on his aimless way along the avenue.
There was a closely written leaf in the book of memory which he had
sought to tear out and destroy; but the sight of the graceful figure
poised on the arm of the big chair opened the record at the forbidden
page, and the imagined personality of the sweet-faced young woman with
the red-brown hair and sympathetic eyes set itself antithetically over
against the self-seeking ambition of the girl who had written her own
epitaph in the book of his remembrance. He gave place to the sharply
defined contrast for a time, indulging it as one who plunges not
unwillingly into the past for the sake of escaping the present, and
banishing it only when his shortening shadow gave token that the chance
of a breakfast invitation was no longer to be apprehended.
But when he turned his face cityward it was with a conscious avoidance
of the route which would lead him past the house with a climbing
rose on one of its veranda pillars. For what had a man to whom the
proletary's highway was already opening up its cheerless vista to do
with love, and dalliance, and heaven-suggestive pictures of domestic
beatitude?
Once more in Sixteenth Street, the moneyless reality thrust itself
upon him with renewed insistence, and he turned a corner abruptly to
escape an acquaintance who was crossing the street. The shame of it was
too new to strike hands with dissimulation as yet, and companionship
was least of all things to be desired. If he could but win back to
his room unaccosted and lock himself in until the sharpness of hunger
should have exorcised the devil of humiliation, he might hope to be
able to face an accusing world with such equanimity as may be born of
desperation.
But fate willed otherwise. As he was passing a deep-set doorway giving
on the sidewalk, a friendly arm shot out and barred the way. Jeffard
looked up with an unspoken malediction on his tongue. It was Bartrow.
In his haste to gain his lodging the shamed one had forgotten the
proximity of the St. James hotel.
"You're a chump!" declared the broad-shouldered young miner, backing
Jeffard against the wall and pinning him fast with one finger. "You're
no man's man, and you're not fit to live in a man's town. Why didn't
you come around to breakfast this morning, like decent people?"
"I'm not boarding at the St. James now." Jeffard tried to say it
naturally, but the evasion was palpable enough.
"What of that? Couldn't you afford to be sociable once in a way?"
Jeffard prevaricated, and since he was but a clumsy liar, contrived to
fall into a snare of his own setting.
"I was up too early for you, I guess. When I came by, the clerk told me
you weren't down yet."
Bartrow shook his head and appeared to be much moved.
"What an abnormal liar that clerk must be," he commented reflectively.
"I asked him five minutes ago if any one had inquired for me, and he
said no."
Jeffard hung his head and would have tried to break away; but Bartrow
locked arms with him and dragged him whither he would.
"I'll forgive you this time," he went on, laughing at Jeffard's
discomfiture. "I suppose you had your reasons for dodging, and while
it's ten to one they were no good, that leaves one chance in your
favor. Have a smoke?"
Now Jeffard's poverty-pride was fire-new as yet, and though the smell
of Bartrow's cigar made him faint with desire, he refused the gift.
"Haven't quit, have you?" Bartrow demanded.
"No--yes; that is, I have for the present. I'm not feeling very well
this morning."
"You look it; every inch of it. Let's go around and see what the money
people are doing. Maybe that'll chirk you up a bit."
Jeffard yielded, partly because Bartrow's impetus was always of the
irresistible sort, and partly because he could think of no plausible
objection on the spur of the moment. Bartrow talked cheerily all the
way around to the Mining Exchange, telling of his claims and prospects
in Chaffee County, and warming to his subject as only a seasoned
Coloradoan can when the talk is of "mineral" and mining. Jeffard, being
hungry, and sick with a fierce longing for tobacco, said little, and
was duly thankful that Bartrow required no more than a word now and
then to keep him going. None the less he watched narrowly for a chance
to escape, and was visibly depressed when none offered.
In the crowded Exchange the poverty-pride began to lose the fine
keenness of its edge. The atmosphere of the room was pungent with cigar
smoke, and the tobacco craving rose up in its might and smote down
Jeffard's self-respect.
"If you'll excuse me a minute, Dick, I believe I'll go out and get a
cigar as a measure of self-defense," he said; and Bartrow supplied
his need, as a matter of course. It was a shameful subterfuge, and he
loathed himself for having descended to it. Nevertheless, he took the
cigar which Bartrow made haste to offer, and lighted it. The first few
whiffs made him dizzy, but afterward he was better company for the
enthusiast.
While they were talking, the elderly man with the bit of quartz on his
watch-chain came in, and Jeffard inquired if Bartrow knew him.
"Know Steve Elliott? I should say I do. Everybody knows him, barring
now and then a tenderfoot like yourself. Besides being one of the most
lovable old infants on top of earth, he's one of Denver's picturesques.
That old man has had more ups and downs than any three men in Colorado;
and that's saying a good deal."
"In what way?"
"Oh, every way. He's a Fifty-niner, to begin with; came across the
plains in a bull-train to hunt for mineral. He found it--Steve would
find it if anybody could--but some sharp rascal euchred him out of it,
and he's been finding it and losing it at regular intervals ever since."
Jeffard blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, and took in the
outward presentment of the pioneer in an appraisive eye-sweep. "This is
one of the finding intervals, I take it."
"Sure. He's on top just now,--rather more so than usual, I
believe,--but the 'pioneer's luck' will catch him again some day, and
just as likely as not he'll be hustling around for a grub-stake."
"Man of family?" queried Jeffard.
"Yes, if a daughter's a family. His wife died in one of the lean years
a long time ago. But say, Jeffard, you ought to know the daughter.
She's as pretty as a peach, and as bright as a new nickel. She's had
her share of the ups and downs, and they've made a queer little medley
of her. Trap and tandem and a big house on Capitol Hill one month, and
as like as not two rooms in a block and a ride in the street-cars
the next. That's about the way Connie Elliott's had it all her life,
and it's made her as wide awake as a frosty morning, and as good as a
Sister of Charity."
"I can believe all that," Jeffard admitted, meaning more than he said.
"Yes, you're safe in believing all the good things you hear about Steve
Elliott and his daughter. They're good people. By the way, why can't
you come up to the house with me some evening and get acquainted?
They've a Philadelphia cousin staying with them now, and you might
compare notes on the 'wild and woolly' with her."
Jeffard had a string of excuses ready, ending with, "Besides, there
are particular reasons why I don't wish to meet Miss Elliott just
now--reasons that I can't explain."
"Reasons be hanged! Just you stand still a minute while I go get the
old man and introduce you. You'll like him a whole lot."
Bartrow did his part, but by the time he had pulled Elliott out of the
throng in front of the quotation board, Jeffard was two squares away,
headed once more for the suburbs. This time he crossed the river and
tramped for hours in the Highlands. He told himself he was killing time
and keeping out of the way of the luncheon hour; but in reality he was
fighting a desperate battle with pride, or self-respect, or whatever
it is that makes a man who is not a born vagrant shrink from that
species of cannibalism which begins with the eating of one's personal
possessions.
It was an unequal fight at best, since hunger was the besieger, but
Jeffard made shift to prolong it until the long day of fasting was
drawing to its close. He yielded at last, as needs must when famine
drives, but the capitulation was upon conditions, and his heart
was soft with repentant kneadings. Since one must eat to live, the
pride-quenching thing must come to pass; but the doing of it should
be the pivot upon which he would turn back to sanity and industrious
thrift. The loss of his small patrimony and the hard-earned savings
by which it had been fairly doubled was shrewd upon him, but he told
himself that the consequences of his folly must be set over against the
experience; that he must be content to begin again at the bottom, as
his father had before him, thankful for the youth and strength which
made such a beginning possible.
From the preliminary survey of penitence to plotting out the map of
good intentions is an easy stage, and Jeffard beguiled the long tramp
townward by building air-castles spacious and many-storied, with the
new resolutions for their foundations. But when the sidewalks of the
streets were once more under his feet, the pride-quenching necessity
urged itself afresh, plying the lash of shame until he was driven to
tramp yet other squares before he could attain to the plunging point.
He was passing the Albany when the climax was reached, and he turned
aside to get a light for the carefully economized stump of Bartrow's
cigar before setting out to find a pawnshop where his pride might
suffer least. At the cigar counter in the rotunda a giant in rough
tweeds, with an unshorn beard and the fine bronze of the grazing plains
on face and hands, was filling his case with high-priced Cubans from an
open box. At sight of Jeffard he dropped the cigar-case and roared out
a mighty welcome.
"Well, I'll be ----! Jeffard, my boy, where under the canopy did you
drop from? If I haven't had a search-warrant out for you all day, I'm
a liar and the truth has shook me. Been to dinner?--but of course you
haven't; or if you have, you are going to eat another with me right
now. How've you been? and where in Tophet have you been hiding out?"
Jeffard smiled. "That's the place--in Tophet and elsewhere; but I
haven't been out of town since you were here last."
"The devil you haven't! Then what did that muley maverick at the hotel
mean when he said you were gone?"
"Gone from the hotel, I guess he meant. I've been 'eating around,' as
we used to say back in the Berkshire Hills."
"Have, eh? Well, you're going to 'eat around' with me to-night, savez?
I was just going to swear a few lines and go up and eat by myself. Come
on; let's get a move. I've got a train-load of steers on the iron,
and I'm due to chase 'em at eight-thirty. But before I forget it,
here"--the big man found a compact little wad of bank-notes in his vest
pocket and thrust it into Jeffard's hand. "I counted that out the next
morning and meant to give it back to you, but the thing got away from
me slick and clean."
"Give it back to me?" queried Jeffard, with a sudden swelling of the
throat that made his voice husky and tremulous, "what is it?"
"Why, it's the hundred I borrowed of you the last time we took in the
menagerie together. What's the matter with you? Don't tell me you
don't remember it, or I shall go kick myself around the block for an
over-honest idiot!"
Jeffard did not remember it; could but dimly recall the circumstances
now that he was reminded of them. The lending had been in a moment of
supreme excitement in the midst of a feverish attack of the dementia;
the loan was in celluloid counters, in fact, and not in legal tender at
all. And having been made, it was swiftly lost sight of in the varying
fortunes of the sitting. None the less, the return of it at the precise
moment when it was most needed drove the thankfulness to his eyes, and
the lights of the great rotunda swam in a misty haze when he thought of
the humiliating thing from which the small Providence had saved him.
"Pettigrew," he said, when he could trust himself to speak, "you're
an honest man, and that's the worst that can be said of you. I had
forgotten it long ago. Take me in and fill me up. I've been tramping
all day, and it runs in my mind that I've skipped a meal or two."