THE obsequious 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 of quiet 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 was wondering 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. I haven'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 the decorated 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 Lansdale took 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 a
little 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."