ON the long day-ride from Alta Vista to Denver, Bartrow dwelt upon
Myra's letter until the hopefulness of it took possession of him,
urging him to reconsider his determination to give up the fight on
the Little Myriad. That which seems to have fortified itself beyond
peradventure of doubt in the night season is prone to open the door
to dubiety in the morning; and the hope which McMurtrie's verdict had
quenched came to life again, setting the mill of retrieval agrind,
though, apart from the suggestion in Myra's letter, there was little
enough for grist.
From admitting the hope to considering ways and means was but a step in
the march of returning confidence; and, setting aside Myra's proposal
as an alternative which would bring victory at the expense of the cause
in which the battle was fought, he was moved to break his promise to
himself and to ask help of Stephen Elliott. This decision was not
reached without a day-long struggle, in which pride and generosity
fought shoulder to shoulder against the apparent necessity. The pioneer
had more than once offered to back the promise of the Little Myriad;
but Bartrow, knowing Elliott's weakness in the matter of money keeping,
had steadily refused to open another door of risk to the old man
who had fathered him from boyhood, and whose major infirmity was an
open-handed willingness to lend to any borrower.
But the necessity was most urgent. Bartrow rehearsed the condoning
facts and set them over against his promise to himself. If he should
give up the fight the Little Myriad would be lost, he would be left
hopelessly in debt, and the beatific vision, with Miss Van Vetter
for its central figure, vanished at once into the limbo of things
unrealizable. Moreover, the investment would be less hazardous for
the pioneer than at any previous time in the history of the mine.
Notwithstanding the discouragements, it was a heartening fact that the
ore-bearing vein was steadily widening; and the last mill-run assay,
made a week before, had shown a cheering increase in value.
Bartrow weighed the pros and cons for the twentieth time while the
train was speeding over the ultimate mile of the long run, and finally
yielded to the importunate urgings of the necessity. The first step was
to take Connie into his confidence; and when the train reached Denver
he hurried to the hotel, full of the new hope and eager to begin the
campaign of retrieval. While he was inscribing his name in the register
the clerk asked a question.
"Just come down from the range, Mr. Bartrow?"
"Yes. Can you give me my old room?"
"Certainly." The clerk wrote the number opposite the name. "What do
they say up in the carbonate camp about the Lodestar business?"
"The Lodestar? I don't know. I haven't been in Leadville. I came down
from the Bonanza district on the other line. Anything broke loose?"
"Haven't you heard? The big producer is played out."
"What!"
"Fact; struck a 'lime horse' two weeks ago, and they've been keeping it
dark and unloading the stock right and left. You are not in it, I hope?"
Bartrow was not, but he knew that Elliott was; knew, too, that in any
unloading _sauve qui peut_ the old pioneer would most likely be one of
those found dead in the deserted trenches. Wherefore he slurred his
supper and hastened out to the house in Colfax Avenue, not to ask help,
as he had prefigured, but to ascertain if there were not some way in
which a broken man might tender it.
There was a light in the library and none in the parlor; and Bartrow,
being rather more a brevet member of Stephen Elliott's family than a
visitor, nodded to the servant who admitted him, hung up his coat and
hat, and walked unannounced into the lighted room. When he discovered
that the library held but one occupant, that the shapely head bending
over a book in the cone of light beneath the reading-lamp was not
Connie's, he realized the magnitude of Connie's duplicity, and
equanimity forsook him.
Miss Van Vetter shut her finger in her book and smiled as if his sudden
appearance were quite a matter of course.
"I hoped you would come," she said. "Have you been to dinner?"
The prosaic question might have enabled a less ingenuous man to cover
his discomposure with some poor verbal mantle of commonplace or what
not; but Bartrow could only murmur "Good Lord!" sinking therewith into
the hollow of the nearest chair because his emotion was too great to be
borne standing.
Since she was not a party to Connie's small plot, Myra was left to
infer that her visitor was ill, and she rose in sympathetic concern.
"Why, Mr. Bartrow! is anything the matter? Shall I get you something? a
glass of wine, or"--
Bartrow shook his head and besought her with both hands to sit down
again. "No, nothing, thank you; it's miles past that sort of mending.
Do you--do you happen to know where your cousin is?"
"Why, yes; she has gone to Boulder with Uncle Stephen."
"I--I thought you were going," Bartrow stammered.
It did not occur to Miss Van Vetter to wonder why he should have
thought anything about it.
"I thought so myself, up to the last moment," she rejoined.
Bartrow leaned forward with his hands on his knees.
"Miss Myra, would you--do you mind telling me why you didn't go?" He
said it with reproachful gravity.
Miss Van Vetter's poise was an inheritance which had lost nothing in
transmission, but the unconscious reproach in his appeal overset it.
Under less trying conditions her laugh would have emancipated him; but
being still in the bonds of unreadiness, he could only glower at her
in a way which lacked nothing of hostility save intention, and say, "I
should think you might tell me what you're laughing at!"
"Oh, nothing--nothing at all. Only one would think you were sorry I
didn't go. Are you?"
"You know well enough I'm not." This time the reproach was not
unconscious. "But you haven't answered my question. I have a horrible
suspicion, and I want to know."
"It was Connie's mistake. I was to meet them at the station at half
past four--I am sure she said half past four--and when I went down I
found the train had been gone an hour. Did you ever hear of such a
thing?"
Miss Van Vetter did not know that the small arch-plotter had
exhausted her ingenuity trying to devise some less primitive means of
accomplishing her purpose; but Bartrow gave Connie full credit for act
and intention.
"She'd do worse things than that; she wouldn't stick at anything to
carry her point," he said unguardedly.
Myra laughed again. "I hope you don't ask me to believe that she did it
purposely," she said.
"Oh, no; of course not. I don't ask you to believe anything--except
that I'm foolishly glad you missed the train," rejoined the downright
one, beginning to find himself.
"Are you, really? I was almost ready to doubt it."
Bartrow was not yet fit to measure swords of repartee with any one,
least of all with Miss Van Vetter, and the quicksand of speechlessness
engulfed him. His helplessness was so palpable that it presently
became infectious, and Myra was dismayed to find herself growing
sympathetically self-conscious. Her letter lay between their last
meeting and this, and she began to wonder if that were the barrier.
When the silence became portentous, Bartrow gathered himself for
another dash toward enlargement. It was that or asphyxia. The very air
of the room was heavy with the narcosis of embarrassment.
"Your letter came yesterday," he began abruptly.
"Did it? And you have come to tell me to--to tell me to mind my own
business? as I said you might?"
"No, indeed, I haven't. But I can't do it, all the same--drag your
friend in on the Myriad."
"Was Mr. Lansdale mistaken? Don't you need more capital to go on with?"
"Need it?--well, yes; rather. But I can't take your Mr. Grimsby's
money."
"Why not?"
"Because"--the low-pitched hollow of the big lounging-chair seemed to
put him at a disadvantage, and he struggled up out of it to tramp back
and forth before her--"well, in the first place, because he _is_ your
friend; and if he wasn't, I have no security to offer him--collateral,
I suppose he'd call it."
"He is not exactly my friend, within your meaning of the word; and he
will not ask you to secure him."
He stopped and looked down upon her. She was shading her eyes from the
sheen of the reading-lamp and turning the leaves of the book.
"What does he know about the Little Myriad? anything more than you have
told him?"
"No."
"And yet you say he is willing to put up money on it?"
"He is ready to help you--yes."
Bartrow's brows went together in a frown of perplexity. "As long as I'm
not going to let him, I suppose I haven't any right to ask questions,
but"--
She put the book on the table and looked up at him with something of
Connie's steadfastness in her eyes.
"Perhaps I was foolish to try to make even such a small mystery of it;
but I thought--I was so anxious to--to put it in such a way as to"--
The words would not discover themselves; and Bartrow, to whom the
mystery was now no mystery, helped her over the obstruction.
"As to make it easy for me. I think I catch on, after so long a time.
Mr. Grimsby is your business manager, isn't he?"
"My solicitor; yes."
"That's what I meant. And it was going to be your own money?"
"Yes."
He met her gaze with a smile of mingled triumph and admiration.
"It was a close call, and you'll never know how near I came to falling
down," he said. "It was a fearful temptation."
The pencilled brows went up with a little arch of interrogation between
them.
"A temptation? Why do you call it that?"
Bartrow was slowly coming to his own in the matter of unconstraint.
"If you had ever dabbled in mineral, you'd know. When a fellow gets in
about so deep, he'd foreclose the mortgage on his grandfather's farm
to get money to go on with. I didn't read between the lines in your
letter. I thought the Philadelphia man was some friend of yours who was
interested in a general way, and the temptation to fall on his neck and
weep was almost too much for me."
"You still call it a temptation."
"It was just that, and nothing less. I had the toughest kind of a fight
with myself before I could say no, and mean it."
"But why should you say no? You believe in the Little Myriad, don't
you?"
"Sure. But that's for myself--and for a few people who knew the size of
the risk when they staked me. So far as I've gone with it, it's only
a big game of chance; and I wouldn't let you put your money into it
unless I knew it was the surest kind of a sure thing."
"Not if I believe in it, too? Not if I am willing to take the chances
that you and the others have taken?" Myra conceived that her mistake
lay in putting it upon the ground of a purely business transaction, and
changed front with truly feminine adroitness. "Won't you let me have
just a tiny share of it? Enough so that when I go back to Philadelphia
I can say that I am interested in a mine? I should think you might.
I'll promise to be the most tractable and obedient stockholder you
have."
She made the plea like a spoiled child begging for a toy, but there
was no mistaking the earnestness of it. Bartrow felt his fine
determination oozing, and was moved to tramp again, making a circuit
of the entire room this time, and saying to himself with many emphatic
repetitions that it could not be possible,--that her motive was only
charitable,--that he was nothing more to her than Connie's friend. When
he spoke again his circlings had brought him to the back of her chair.
"You're making it fearfully hard for me, and the worst of it is that
you don't seem to know it. You think I am a mining crank, like all the
rest of them, and so I am; but there was method in my madness. I never
cared overmuch for money until I came to know what it is to love a
woman who has too much of it."
There was manifestly no reply to be made to such a pointless speech as
this, and when he resumed his circumambulatory march she began to turn
the leaves of the book again. When it became evident that he was not
going to elucidate, she said, "Meaning Connie?"
"No, not meaning Connie." He had drifted around to the back of her
chair again. "I wish you'd put that book away for a few minutes. It
owls me."
"I will, if you will stop circling about and talking down on me from
the ceiling. It's dreadfully distressing."
He laughed and drew up a chair facing her; drew it up until the arm of
it touched hers.
"It's a stand-off," he said, with cheerful effrontery; "only I didn't
mean my part of it. Let's see, where were we? You said, 'Meaning
Connie,' and I said, 'No, not meaning Connie.' I meant some one else.
Until I met her, the Little Myriad was merely a hole in the ground,
not so very different from other holes in the ground except that it
was mine--and it wasn't the Little Myriad then, either. After that, it
got its name changed, and its mission, too. From that day its business
was to make it possible for me to go to her and say, 'I love you; you,
yourself, and not your money. I've money enough of my own.'"
She heard him through with the face of a graven image. "And now?"
"And now I can't do it; I can never do it, I'm afraid. The Little
Myriad has gone back on me, and I'm nearer flat broke to-day than I've
ever been."
"But this unfortunate young person who has too much money--she is
young, isn't she?--has she nothing to say about it?"
Bartrow answered his own thought rather than her question. "She
couldn't be happy with everybody saying she'd staked her husband."
"Has she told you that?"
"No; but it's so,--you know it's so."
Bartrow was no juggler in figures of speech, and his fictitious third
person threatened to become unmanageable.
Her smile was good to look upon. "I don't know anything of the kind. I
think she would be very foolish to let such an absurd thing make her
unhappy--supposing any one should be unkind enough to say it."
"They would say it, and I'd hear of it; and then there'd be trouble."
"But you say you love her; isn't your love strong enough to rise above
such things? You think the sacrifice would be hers, but it wouldn't; it
would be yours."
"I don't see how you make that out."
Myra's heart sank within her. It hurt her immeasurably to be driven to
plead her own cause, but the money-fact was inexorable; and the look in
Bartrow's eyes was her warrant when she dared to read it.
"Oh, can't you see?" The words wrought themselves into a plea, though
she strove to say them dispassionately. "If it touch your self-respect
ever so little, the sacrifice is all yours."
That point of view was quite new to Bartrow. He took time to think it
out, but when the truth clinched itself he went straight to the mark.
"I never saw that side of it before--don't quite see it now. But if you
do, that's different. It's you, little woman; and I do love you--you,
yourself, and not your money. I wish I could go on and say the rest of
it, but I can't. Will you take me for better or for worse--with an even
chance that it's going to be all worse and no better?"
Her eyes filled with quick tears, and her voice was tremulous. "It
would serve you right if I should say no; you've fairly made me beg you
to ask me!"
Her hand was on the arm of the chair, and he possessed himself of it
and raised it to his lips with gentle reverence.
"You'll have to begin making allowances for me right at the start," he
said humbly. "When I make any bad breaks you must remember it's because
I don't know any better, and that away down deep under it all I love
you well enough to--to go to jail for you. Will you wait for me while I
skirmish around and try to get on my feet again?"
"No"--with sweet petulance.
"There it is, you see; another bad break right on top of the first.
Suppose you talk a while and let me listen. I'm good at listening."
"I'll wait, if you want me to,--and if you will let me help you to go
on with the Little Myriad."
Bartrow's laugh had a ring of boyish joy in it.
"Back to the old cross-roads, aren't we? I'll let you in on it now; but
if you take the mine you'll have to take the man along with the other
incumbrances,--simultaneously, so to speak."
"I thought you were anxious to wait."
"If you were as poor as I am, I'd ask you to make it high noon
to-morrow."
"Oh! the money again. Can't we put it aside, once for all? There isn't
so much of it as you may imagine."
Bartrow overleaped the barrier at a bound.
"Then let's make it noon to-morrow. If we are going to push the Myriad
I ought to go back to-morrow night."
She tried to scoff at him, but there was love in her eyes.
"Connie said once that you were Young-man-afraid-of-his-horses, but she
doesn't know you. I believe you more than half mean it."
"I do mean it. If I sit here and look at you much longer I shall be
begging you to make it nine o'clock instead of twelve. Don't ask me to
wait very long. It'll be hard enough to go off and leave you afterward.
It's a good bit more than a hundred miles in a straight line from
Denver to Topeka Mountain."
"I'm going with you," she said calmly.
"You?--to live in a wicky-up on the side of a bald mountain? But you
know what it is; you've been there. You'd die of the blues in a week."
"Would I?" She rose and stood beside his chair. "You don't know much
about me, yet, do you? If the 'wicky-up' is good enough for you, it
is good enough for me. I am going with you, and I'm going to make
that dear little log cabin a place that you will always be glad to
remember,--if I can."
He drew her down on the arm of the chair.
"Don't talk to me that way, Myra,--you mustn't, you know. I'm not used
to it, and it breaks me all up. If you say another word I shall want to
make it seven o'clock in the morning instead of nine."
"Can you wait a month?"
"No."
"Three weeks?"
"No."
She gave up in despair. "You are dreadfully unreasonable."
"I know it; I was born that way and I can't help it. I sha'n't insist
on to-morrow, because I'm not sure that Wun Ling has anything for us to
eat; but one week from to-morrow, when I've had time to stock up and
straighten up a bit, is going to be the limit. Can you make it?"
"What if I say no?"
"I shall come anyway."
She bent over until her lips touched his forehead.
"That is your answer, only you don't deserve it. And now will you
answer my question? I asked you when you came in if you had been to
dinner, and you said 'Good Lord!'"
"Did I? I think I must have been a bit rattled. You see, I'd just heard
some bad news, and I was expecting to find Connie, and wasn't expecting
to find you."
"Did Connie write you she would meet you?"
He had one hand free to fish out the day-old telegram and give it to
her. She read it with a swift blush crimsoning cheek and neck.
"The unscrupulous little tyke!" she said; and then, with self-defensive
tact: "But you said you had bad news."
"Yes. A mine that our good old Uncle Steve is pretty deeply into has
gone dry."
"Failed, you mean?"
"Yes, that's it. I wish you'd teach me how to talk English,--good clean
English, like yours. Connie has tried it, but pshaw! she's worse than
I am. But about the Lodestar: I don't know how deep the old man is
in; he's such an innocent old infant about putting up money that I'm
awfully afraid they have salted him. You must pump Connie and find out.
I'll be in Leadville to-morrow night, and if there is anything to be
done on the ground I'll do it. The old man has been a second father to
me."
Myra promised, and went back once more to the unanswered dinner query.
"Now you remind me of it, I believe I haven't been to dinner," he
admitted. "But that's nothing; a meal or two more or less isn't to be
mentioned at such a time as this."
"I am going to get you something."
"No, don't; I'm too happy to eat."
But she insisted, and when she came back with a dainty luncheon on a
tea-tray he did ample justice to it, if for no better reason than that
she sat on the other side of the small reading-table and made tea for
him.
Afterward, when the time drew near for the Elliotts' return, he took
his leave, though it was yet early.
"They are the best friends I have on earth," he said, when Myra went
to the door with him, "but somehow, I feel as if I didn't want to meet
anybody I know,--not to-night. I want to have it all to myself for a
few hours."
She laughed at that; a laugh with an upbubbling of content and pure
happiness in it; and sent him off with his heart afire. When he was
halfway down the walk she recalled him. He came back obediently.
"It will cost you something every time you do that," he protested,
exacting the penalty. "Was that what you wanted?"
"Of course not! I merely wanted to ask you what it is to 'owl' a
person. You said I 'owled' you."
"Did I? Well, you don't; you never can. That is the best definition I
can think of: something you can never do to me. May I say good-night
again? the way I did a minute ago?"
The glare of the arc-light swinging between its poles across the avenue
was quite ruthless, and there were passers-by in straggling procession
on the sidewalk. But at the critical instant the kindly incandescence
burned blue, clicked, fizzed, and died down to a red spot in the
darkness. For which cause Bartrow presently went his way, with the
heart-fire upblazing afresh; and when Myra won back to the library and
the cosy depths of the great chair, the color scheme of fair neck and
cheek and brow was not altogether the reflection from the crimson shade
of the reading-lamp.