FOR a week after the arrival of his visitors, Bartrow had scant
time and less inclination for troublement about such purely mundane
affairs as the driving of tunnels and the incidental acquisition of
wealth thereby. There were burro journeys to the top of the pass, and
to the sheer cliff known to the prosaic frontiersmen as the devil's
jumping-off-place; excursions afoot down the mountain to the cool
depths of Chipeta Canyon, and to Silver Lake beyond the shrugged
shoulder of Lost Creek Mountain; and finally there was a breath-cutting
climb to the snow-patched summit of El Reposo, undertaken for the
express purpose of enabling Myra Van Vetter to say that she had been
where there was reason to presume that no human being had preceded her.
These things three of them did, leaving Stephen Elliott to his own
devices, in accordance with the set terms upon which he had consented
to father the _parti carré_. "Go on and climb your mountains and just
leave me out," he would say, when the preparations were making for the
day's jaunt. "I've had my share of it, off and on, while I was hunting
for something I hadn't lost. Dick, here, hasn't any better sense than
to humor you; but you'd tramp mighty little if I had to go along."
Whereupon he would plant his chair for the day upon the slab-floored
porch of the cabin, tilt it to a comfortable angle against the wall,
and while away the hours smoking a mellow pipe and reading the day-old
Denver paper painstakingly, from the top of the title page to the
bottom of the last want column.
Thus the crystalline autumn days winged their flight, and Bartrow
squired the two young women hither and yon, and finally to the top of
El Reposo, as recorded. This excursion was the climax, from a scenic
point of view; and Myra, having long since exhausted her vocabulary of
superlatives, was unusually silent.
"What's come over you? are you gorged with mountains?" queried Connie
sympathetically, slipping her arm around her cousin's waist.
"It isn't that; it's just that I'm too full for utterance, I think;
or perhaps I should say too empty of words to do it justice. How
flippantly trivial everything human seems in the face of such a
landscape! Here are we, three inconsequent atoms, standing brazenly
in the face of great nature, and trying to gather some notion of the
infinite into our finite little souls. It's sheer impertinence."
"They won't mind," rejoined Bartrow, with a comprehensive gesture,
meant to include the mountains, singular and collective; "they're used
to it--the impertinence, I mean. What you see is the face of nature,
as you say, and man doesn't seem to be in it. Just the same, there is
a small army of men scattered among these overgrown hills, each with
an inquisitive pick and shovel, backed by hardihood enough to dare
anything for the sake of adding something to the wealth of the world."
Myra turned her back on the prospect and searched Bartrow's eyes in
a way to make him wonder what was wrong with his well-turned little
speech.
"That is the first insincere thing I ever heard you say," she asserted.
"As if you didn't know that not one of these men ever wastes a second
thought upon the world or the people in it, or upon anything outside of
his own little circle of ambitions and cravings!"
"You're quite right," admitted Bartrow, abashed and more than willing
to stand corrected in any field entered by Miss Van Vetter; but
Constance took up the cudgels on the other side.
"You make me exceedingly weary, you two," she said, with seraphic
sweetness. "Neither of you knows what you are talking about half the
time, and when you do, it isn't worth telling. Now listen to me while
I show you how ridiculous you are,"--Bartrow sat down on a flat-topped
boulder, and made a dumb show of stopping his ears,--"I contend that
nearly every one of these poor prospectors you've been maligning is
a perfect monument of unselfishness. He is working and starving and
hoping and enduring for somebody else in nine cases out of ten. It's a
wife, or a family, or an old father or mother, or the mortgage on the
farm, or some other good thing."
Myra made a snowball and threw it at Connie the eloquent. "I think El
Reposo is misnamed," she contended. "It ought to be called the Mount of
Perversity. Mr. Bartrow, you are sitting upon the table, which is very
undignified. Please move and let us see what Wun Ling has stowed away
in the haversack."
They spread their luncheon on the flat-topped boulder, and fell upon it
like the hungry wayfarers that they were, calling it a sky banquet, and
drinking Wun Ling's health in a bottle of cold tea. With satiety came
thoughts of the descent, and Myra pleaded piteously for a change of
route.
"I shall never get down the way we came up in the wide, wide
world,--not alive," she asserted. "With the view in prospect, I believe
I could climb the Matterhorn; but getting down is quite another matter.
Can't we go around some other way?"
Bartrow thought it possible; but since Miss Van Vetter had particularly
desired to stand upon the summit of a hitherto unexplored peak, he was
not sure.
"But we can try," said Myra. "At the worst we can come back and creep
down the way we came up."
Bartrow glanced at his watch, and focused the field-glass on a
diaphanous cloud slipping stealthily across the serrated summits of the
main range away to the westward.
"Yes, we can do that, if we have time," he assented. "But I'm a little
afraid of the weather. That cloud may miss us by twenty miles; and
then again, it may take a straight shoot across the valley and make us
very wet and uncomfortable."
Constance came to the rescue with a compromise.
"You go and prospect for a new trail, Dick, and we'll stay here. If you
find one you can come back for us, and if you don't we'll be fresh for
the scramble down the other way."
Bartrow said it was well, and immediately set about putting the
suggestion into effect. When he was fairly out of sight over the
curvature of El Reposo's mighty shoulder, Myra said:--
"He's good, isn't he?"
"He is a man among men, Myra; a man to tie to, as we say here in
Colorado."
They were sitting together on the flat boulder, and Miss Van Vetter
stole a side glance at her cousin's profile. "You have known him a long
time, haven't you, Connie?"
"Almost ever since I can remember. I'm Colorado-born, you know, and he
isn't; but he came across the plains in the days of the ox-teams, when
he was a little fellow, and the first work he ever did was for poppa,
when we lived on the ranch below Golden."
"He is a self-made man, isn't he?"
"Don't say that, Myra, please. I hate the word. God makes us, and
circumstances or our own foolishness mar us. But Dick is self-educated,
so far as he is educated at all. He was a homeless waif when he first
saw the Rockies. His father died in the middle of the trip across the
plains, and his mother lived only long enough to have her grave dug
some two hundred miles farther west. The others took care of Dick and
brought him along with them to Colorado because there wasn't anything
else to do; and since, Dick has made his own way, doing any honest
thing that came to his hand."
"He couldn't do the other kind," Myra averred. "But you spoke of
his education as if he hadn't any. I suppose that was one of your
'exuberances,' as Uncle Stephen calls them. Mr. Bartrow is certainly
anything but illiterate."
"No, he isn't that, though he has no education of the kind you effete
people have in mind when you spell the word with a capital--the kind
with a Greek-letter-badge and college-yell attachment. If you should
tell him you had been to Bryn Mawr, he would probably take it to be
some summer resort he hadn't heard of. But that isn't saying he is
stupid. He could give the man with the yell a lot of information on a
good many subjects. Poppa says he was always an earnest little lad;
always reading everything he could get hold of--which wasn't very much
in the early days, as you may imagine."
"Nevertheless, he seems to be getting on in the world," said Miss Van
Vetter. "Your father says the Little Myriad is a promising mine."
There was more pathos than mirth in the smile which flitted across
Connie's face.
"You're new among us yet, Myra. Everything with mineral in it is
promising to us; we are cranks pure and simple, on that subject. The
Little Myriad is promising, of course,--there isn't an unpromising mine
in the State, for that matter,--but it's only a promise, as yet. If
Dick should reach the end of his hundred and fifty feet of development
without striking pay, he would be a ruined man."
"Why couldn't he keep on until he should strike it?"
"For the very simple reason that he is working on borrowed capital; and
I happen to know that he has borrowed about all he can."
"But he believes in the success of the venture, absolutely."
"Of course he does; that is one of the conditions. It's merely a
question of credit with him. If any one would lend, Dick would go on
borrowing and digging until he struck pay-ore or came out on the other
side of the mountain--and then he'd think he hadn't gone deep enough.
That is the pathetic side of his character; he never knows when he's
beaten."
"I should call it the heroic side."
"It is heroic, but it is pathetic, too. It is sure to bring him
trouble, sooner or later, and Dick isn't one to take trouble lightly.
He'll go on fighting and struggling long after the battle has become
hopeless, and that makes the sting of defeat so much sharper. It makes
me want to cry when I think what a terrible thing it would be for him
if the Little Myriad should go back on its promise."
Miss Van Vetter took the field-glass and stood up to watch the storm
cloud which was now spreading gradually and creeping slowly down the
slopes of the divide. "You think a great deal of Mr. Bartrow, don't
you, Connie?"
"Indeed I do; he comes next to poppa with me."
For so long a time as one might take in saying a little prayer at a
needful crisis, Myra gave her undivided attention to the fleecy blur
slipping down the side of the main range. Then the strain on her eyes
filled them with tears, and she put the glass back into its case.
Constance saw the tears.
"Why, Myra! you're crying. What is the matter?"
"I'm lonesome and homesick, and I long for the flesh-pots of Denver;
but it was the glass that made me cry. Connie, dear, don't you think
we'd better be going back to town?"
"Why, yes; if you are quite ready. But it will be a disappointment for
Dick. He is counting on another week, at least."
"Yes, I know; and that is why I think we ought to go. We are keeping
him from his work in the mine, and his time is precious."
"Rather more so than he gives us to understand, I fancy," Constance
assented. "I suppose you are right, Myra,--we ought not to stay; but
you'll have to tax your ingenuity to find an excuse that will hold
water. Dick won't be satisfied with a P. P. C. card."
"Perhaps the chapter of accidents will help us. If it doesn't, you must
make your father remember that he has urgent business in Denver which
won't wait. Can't you manage it that way?"
"If I can't, I'll ring you in. Poppa would take passage for Honolulu
to-morrow if he had an idea that you'd like to see the Kanakas ride
surf-boards."
"I should much rather not appear in it," said Myra; and then, with
truly feminine inconsistency, "I don't know why I say that. On the
whole, perhaps you'd better say that it's my proposal. Then Mr. Bartrow
will set it down to the vagaries of a flighty migrant, and he won't
hold spite against his old friends."
Connie the wise began to wonder if there were unplumbed depths in her
cousin,--depths which Bartrow's defenseless obviousness had stirred to
his sparing; but she drove the thought out as unworthy. Myra had been
kind to Dick, certainly, but she had never encouraged him. There might
well be an accepted lover in the dim Philadelphia background for aught
Myra had said or done to evince the contrary. In which case--Connie the
wise became Connie the pitiful in the turning of a leaf--poor Dick! At
that moment, as if the sympathetic thought had evoked him, Bartrow came
in sight on the lower slope of the summit. He was breathing hard when
he reached them.
"We can make it all right," he said, slinging the glass and the
haversack, "but it'll add three or four miles. It's a roundabout way,
and it will take us into the head of Little Myriad Gulch. If you're
ready we'll get a quick move. That storm is heading straight for us,
and we'll be in luck if we don't come in for a soaking."
El Reposo is a bald mountain, and its tonsure is fringed with a heavy
forest growth which stops abruptly at timber-line. Halfway to the head
of the gulch the new trail ended in a tangle of fallen trees,--the
débris of an ancient snowslide,--and much valuable time was lost in
skirting the obstacle. Bartrow glanced over his shoulder from time to
time, and finally said, "There it comes, with a vengeance!"
The exclamation was ill-timed. Myra turned and stopped to watch the
fleecy curtain of vapor shrouding the great bald summit they had just
quitted. Bartrow sought to possess his soul in patience.
"Isn't it grand!" she said, with kindling enthusiasm.
"Yes; grand and wet. If you'll excuse me, Miss Myra, I think we'd
better run for it."
They ran for it accordingly, Connie in the lead like the free-limbed
daughter of the altitudes that she was, and Bartrow and Miss Van Vetter
hand in hand like joyous children for whom self-consciousness is not.
From the beginning of the wild race down the slopes the wetting seemed
momentarily imminent; none the less, they managed to reach the gulch
dryshod. Inasmuch as their course down the ravine was in a direction
nearly opposite to the sweep of the wind, it soon took them beyond the
storm zone, and they stopped to listen to the echoes of nature's battle
reverberating from the crags of the higher levels. The writhing of
the great firs in the grasp of the wind came to their ears like the
clashing of miniature breakers on a tideless shore; and the booming of
the thunder was minified by the rare atmosphere into a sound not unlike
the distant firing of cannon. While they paused, Myra climbed to the
top of a water-worn boulder in the bed of the ravine to get a better
point of view, and from this elevation she could see the forest at the
head of the gulch.
"Oh, Connie!" she cried, "climb up here, quick! It's a cyclone!"
Bartrow threw up his head like a startled animal. There was a steady
roar in the air which was not of the thunder.
"Cyclone nothing!" he yelled. "It's a cloud-burst! Stay where you are,
for your life, Miss Myra!"
Even as he spoke the roar deepened until the vibration of it shook the
solid earth, and a dark mass of water, turbid and débris-laden, shot
from the head of the gulch and swept down the ravine. Bartrow lived an
anguished lifetime in an instant of hesitation. To save the woman he
loved was to sacrifice Constance. To help Connie first was to take the
desperate chance that Myra would be safe till he could reach her.
There was no time for the nice weighing of possibilities; and Richard
Bartrow was a man of action before all else. Winding an arm about
Constance, he dashed out of the ravine with her, getting back to Myra
three seconds in advance of the boulder-laden flood. There was time
enough, but none to spare. A tree gave him an anchorage on the bank
above her; she sprang toward him at the word of command; and he plucked
her up out of the reach of the foaming torrent which snapped at her and
overturned the great rock upon which she had been standing.
After which narrow escape they sat together on the slope of safety and
watched the subsiding flood, laughing over the "stampede," as Connie
called it, with all the reckless hardihood of youth and good spirits.
"I wouldn't have missed seeing it for anything in the world," declared
the enthusiast. "I had plenty of time to get out of the way, but I
couldn't help waiting to see how it would look, coming over that last
cliff up there."
"Dick didn't give me a chance to see anything," Connie complained. "He
whisked me out of the way as if I'd been a naughty little girl caught
playing with the fire."
Bartrow examined the field-glass to see if it had suffered in the
scramble. It was unbroken, and he put it back into the case with a sigh
of relief.
"If you two had smashed that glass between you, I don't know what I
should have done," he said; whereat they all laughed again and took up
the line of march for the mine.
That evening, after supper, the four of them were on the porch of the
three-roomed cabin, enjoying the sunset. Constance had spoken to her
father about the return to Denver, and Stephen Elliott was racking his
brain for some excuse reasonable enough to satisfy Bartrow, when a man
came up the trail from the direction of Alta Vista. It was Bryant,
the station agent; and he was the bearer of a telegram addressed to
Constance. She read it and gave it to Bartrow. The operator had taken
it literally, and it was a small study in phonetics.
"Shees gaun an got inter trubbel. P. Grims swipt her
masheen. Wot shel I do.
"T. REAGAN."
Bartrow smiled and handed the message back. "That's Tommie, I take it.
What's it about?"
"It's a young woman I've been trying to help. They are persecuting her
again, and I'll have to go back as quickly as I can."
"That's bad," said Bartrow; but Connie's father looked greatly
relieved, and, filling his pipe, began to burn incense to the kindly
god of chance.
After a time, Bartrow asked, "When?"
Connie's gaze was on the sunset, but her thoughts were miles away in a
humble cottage in West Denver where she had thought Margaret would be
safely hidden from the spoiler.
"I think we'd better go now--to-night. You can flag the train at the
mine switch, can't you?"
"Yes."
"And you can get ready, can't you, Myra?"
"Certainly; it won't take me long to pack. If you'll excuse me I'll go
and do it now, and get it off my mind."
When Myra had gone in, Bartrow took the message and read it again.
"This is no woman's job," he objected. "Let me go down with you and
straighten it out."
"No, you mustn't, Dick; you have lost a clear week as it is."
She rose and went to the end of the porch, whither he presently
followed her. "You'll need a man," he insisted.
"I shall have poppa."
"Yes, but he's no good--only to pay the bills."
"No matter; I shall get along all right."
"That's straight, is it?"
"Yes, I mean it."
"All right; you're the doctor. But you must wire me if you need me."
An hour later the visitors had said good-by to Bartrow and the Little
Myriad, and were on their way down the canyon in the miniature
sleeping-car. Myra pleaded weariness and had her berth made down early.
Nevertheless, she lay awake far into the night gazing out at the
rotating heavens and the silent procession of peaks and precipices.
For a background the shifting scene held two irrelevant pictures; one,
freshly etched, reproducing the little drama of the cloud-burst; the
other a memory of something she had read,--a story in which a man,
two women, an overturned boat, and a storm-lashed lake figured as the
persons and properties.
"He knew which he loved--which to save first--when the crux came," she
said softly to her pillow, "and the other girl was fortunate not to
have drowned." And at that moment a certain well-to-do gentleman of
middle age in a far-away city on the Atlantic seaboard was nearer the
goal of his wishes than he had ever been before.
In the mean time, Bartrow had an inspiration which was importunate
enough to send him afoot to Alta Vista in the wake of the swinging
passenger train. It found voice in a mandatory telegram to Lansdale,
telling him to call at once upon Miss Constance Elliott, to present the
message as his credential, and to place himself at her service in any
required capacity, from man-at-arms to attorney-at-law.