TWO days 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 the three-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 fingering the 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 know how 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," and then 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. Will you 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 heard him 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."