THE Bartrows, with Stephen Elliott to expedite their outsetting,
caught their train with nothing to spare; and while the goggle-eyed
switch-lamps were still flashing past the windows of the sleeping-car,
Myra settled herself comfortably in her corner of the section and
demanded the day's accounting.
Bartrow was rummaging in the hand-bag for his traveling-cap, and he
looked up with a most transparent affectation of surprise.
"Hah? Wasn't I supposed to be chasing around all day trying to buy a
rock-drill?"
Myra ignored the skilless parry and thrust home. "Don't tease," she
said. "You did beautifully at the supper-table, and I am quite sure
Connie didn't suspect. But I want to know what has happened."
Bartrow laughed good-naturedly. "Same old window-pane for you to look
through, am I not? It's lucky for me that I'm a rattling good fellow,
with nothing particular inside of me to be ashamed of." He was thumbing
a collection of pocket-worn papers, and presently handed her a crisp
bill of exchange for five hundred and forty-five dollars. "What do you
think of that for one of the happenings!"
She read the figure of it and the date. "I don't understand," she said.
"Where did you get it?"
"You wouldn't guess in a thousand years. It's the money I borrowed for
Jeffard one fine morning last fall, with bank interest to date."
"Then you have seen him?"
"Saw him, felt of his hand, and went to luncheon with him."
"Dick! And you really had the courage to ask him for this?"
Bartrow's smile was a grimace. "Don't you sit there and tempt me to
lie about it. You know what a fool I am with a debtor. Fortunately,
I didn't have to ask; it came about as most things do in this
world--click! buzz! boom! and your infernal machine has exploded. We
cannoned against each other as I was going into the bank to get the
money for the machinery man. After we'd said 'Hello,' and shook hands,
Jeffard went in with me. On the way out the cashier stopped us. 'Mr.
Jeffard,' says he, 'your personal account has a credit of five hundred
dollars which doesn't appear in the deposits. If you'll let me have
your book I'll enter it.' 'A credit?--of five hundred dollars? I don't
understand,' says Jeffard. 'It's all right,' says the cashier. 'It came
from the Carbonate City National, in Leadville. Didn't they notify
you?' 'No,' says Jeffard; 'it must be a mistake. I had no credit in
Leadville.' All this time the cashier was digging into his pigeonholes.
'You must have had,' says he. 'I can't put my hand on their letter,
but as I recall it, they said the money was a remittance made by you
sometime last year to cover a promissory note. When it reached them
the note had matured and had been lifted. They have kept your money a
good while, but they claim not to have known your address.'"
Myra was listening with something more than curiosity.
"What did Mr. Jeffard say?" she asked.
"He looked a good deal more than he said; and what he said was rather
queer. When he had pulled me a little aside, he lit a cigar and offered
me one, as cool as ice. 'Of course, you'll understand that this was all
prearranged between Mr. Holburn and myself,' says he. 'It would be too
great a tax upon your credulity to ask you to believe that it is merely
a coincidence; that I really did send the money to the Leadville bank
to lift that note months ago.' I said No, and meant it; and he went
over to the exchange window and made out a check and bought that draft.
But afterward I could have kicked him for making that suggestion.
I couldn't break away from it to save my life, and it stuck to me
straight through to the finish."
"But you went to luncheon with him afterward. Didn't he explain?"
"Not a word. I tried my level best to pull the thing out of the hole
two or three times, but it was buried too deep for me. And somehow that
idiotic sneer of his seemed to color everything he said. He seemed to
take it for granted that I'd been setting him down all these months
for a scalawag, and everything I could say got twisted into a slap.
We worried through the meal, and the cigars after it, in some sort of
thankless fashion; but I wouldn't do it again for a farm."
Myra became reflectively thoughtful, and with the jarring of the car
the bit of money paper fell to the floor. Dick recovered it, put it
away, and waited patiently for her comment. When it came it was no more
than a leading question.
"What do you make of it, Dick?"
"I don't know what to make of it. If I could break away from all the
things I used to know about him, I should say he acts like a man who
has done something to make him declare war upon himself, and--as a
natural consequence--upon everybody else. He seems to be ready to fight
at the drop of the hat, and that's a bad symptom."
"It is a symptom of a guilty conscience, isn't it?"
Bartrow did not answer at once. To speak by the fact was to admit that
all his loyal upholdings of Jeffard had been spent upon an unworthy
object, and he was reluctant in just proportion to his loyalty. But the
fact was large--too large to be overleaped.
"It is a symptom, yes; and I'm beginning to be afraid it's a true one
in Jeffard's case. I didn't find a soft spot in him anywhere till we
came to speak of Lansdale."
"They are still friends?"
"Y--es, in a way; a sort of give-and-take way. Lansdale is cool and
pretty well-calculated in his friendships as in everything else; and I
imagine he forgathers with Jeffard without prejudice to his own private
convictions in the Garvin affair. It's a bit odd, but Jeffard seems to
have most of the remembrances on his side."
"The kindly ones, you mean?"
"Yes. I hadn't seen Lansdale yet, and I asked Jeffard how he was
looking. He wagged his head, and there was a look in his eyes that I'd
seen there more than once in the old days. 'Unless there is something
to be done more than has been tried, it's only a question of weeks,'
said he; and then he went back to something I had said that morning in
Leadville just before he climbed the engine for the race to Aspen."
Myra's eyebrows arched a query, and he elucidated.
"Didn't I tell you? We had been talking about Connie, and I had hinted
that she'd be willing to buy health for Lansdale at a price; and he"--
Myra cut in swiftly. "Has she told you that, Dick?"
"Hardly; but I've eyes, haven't I? Well, as I was saying, Jeffard went
back to that, and asked if Lansdale's recovery still meant as much to
Connie. I told him I thought it meant rather more than less; and then
he went into his shell, and when he came out it was on the human side.
Said he had money to burn now, and asked if there was anything anybody
could do to give Lansdale a better show for his white alley. I told
him what I'd do if I could break away from the Myriad."
"I remember; you said you would take him afield."
"Yes. Rig up a team and a camping outfit, and chase him out into the
mountains. Make him live outdoors for a month or two, and belt him over
the head if I ever caught him sharpening a lead pencil. He's grinding
away with Kershaw nights and Sundays, and trying to write a novel
between times. It's a clear case of work-to-death."
Myra nodded. "I think so; I have thought so all along. But he wouldn't
go with Mr. Jeffard."
"That's what I thought, and what I told Jeffard when he hinted at the
thing. But we were both off; and that brings me to the other happening.
After we'd smoked over it--Jeffard and I--we went around and hunted
up Lansdale's doctor. The medicine-man agreed with me that it was the
only chance, but he didn't give us much encouragement. Said it was
a forlorn hope, with the odds against Lansdale; that he'd die if he
didn't go, and would probably die if he did. Jeffard had been in and
out of his shell two or three times since the beginning of it, but he
came out again at that and stayed out. Said he owed Lansdale, and that
would be a good way to wipe out the account. I told him that wouldn't
go; that if he wanted to do Lansdale a good turn, he'd have to do it on
its merits. 'I sha'n't be such a fool as to tell Lansdale I'm trying to
square up with him,' says he. 'You go and persuade him.'"
Myra's hand was on his knee. "You poor boy!" she said; "they always
unload the thankless things on you, don't they? Did you try?"
"Sure. If I'd felt like hanging back, a sight of Lansdale would have
done the business for me. It's awful, little woman. I've seen dead
men, and men that were going to die, but never a dying one that wanted
so hard to live. Of course, he kicked clear over the traces when I
proposed it, though I lied like a whitehead, and tried to make him
believe it was my scheme to help Jeffard get cured of his case of
mental and moral 'jimmies.' When that failed, I dug right down to
hard-pan. 'You want to live, don't you?' said I, and when he admitted
it, I biffed him square on the point of the jaw. Says I, 'Then it's a
question of your stiff-necked New England pride against your love for a
little girl who would give her right hand to see you well and strong,
is it? You're not as good a man as I thought you were.'"
Myra was moved to protest. "Oh, Dick! I do hope you haven't taken too
much for granted! But go on; what did he say?"
"I thought he'd rise up and fall on me at first; but he didn't. He
mumbled something about the 'precious balms of a friend breaking his
head,' and said I was altogether mistaken; that Connie was only an
angel of mercy, one of God's little ones, and a few other things of
that sort."
"'Only'!" laughed Myra.
"Yes, 'only.' But I could see that my shoulder-blow had knocked him
out. He switched the talk to Jeffard, and pretty soon he was asking
me if I really thought he could do any good in that quarter; or if
my saying so was merely a lie cut out of whole cloth. I was soaked
through by that time, and another plunge more or less didn't cut any
figure, so I told him it wasn't a lie; that there was still hope for
Jeffard if any one would lay hold of him and stick to him. 'What kind
of hope, Dick?' says he. And I said, 'The only kind that counts; the
kind that'll make him all through what he is in part.' He shook his
head at that, and said, 'I don't know. That would mean repentance and
restitution,--and the money's got its teeth into him now.' I'll have to
admit that I was arguing dead against the probabilities, and I knew it;
but I wouldn't let go."
Myra's smile was tempered with affectionate pride. "You never do let
go. Did he finally listen to reason?"
"Yes, at the end of it. But if it were six for himself and Connie,
it was a good half-dozen for Jeffard. 'I'll go, Dick,' said he. 'I'm
afraid your assumptions are all good-hearted wishes, but I'll go.
Perhaps, if it comes to the worst, God will give me a man for my
leave-taking.' That was a new side of him, to me; the Puritan side,
isn't it?"
"The human side," she amended. "It is merely crusted a little thicker
in the Puritan family."
"But it's there, all the same. Out here, where the horizons and other
things are pretty wide open, we're apt to say what we think, and
pretty much all of it; but Lansdale and his kind think a good bit more
and keep it to themselves. He's all right. I only wish his getting well
were as sure as the goodness of him. Are you getting sleepy? Want your
berth made down?"
"Presently." Myra was gazing out at the night-wall slipping past the
car windows, and for her the thick blackness mirrored a picture of a
sweet-faced young woman sitting on a denim-covered lounge, with her
hands tight clasped over one knee and her eyes alight with a soft
starglow of compassion. And because of the picture, she said: "I'm
afraid you didn't take too much for granted, Dick; and I could almost
wish it were otherwise. It is heart-breaking to think of it."
Dick went over to a seat beside her, and tried to put himself as nearly
as possible at her point of view.
"Let's not try to cross their bridges for them beforehand, little
woman," he said, with his lips at her ear. "Life is pretty middling
full for all of us,--for us two, at any rate."
It was five minutes later, and the train had stopped for orders at the
canyon gateway, when she turned to him to say: "What do you think about
Mr. Jeffard now, Dick? Are we all mistaken? or is he the hardened cynic
he seems to be?"
Bartrow did not reply on the spur of the moment, as was his custom.
When he had reasoned it out, he said:--
"I think we ought to break away from the notion that a man has got to
be either all angel or all devil. Jeffard's a human man, like the rest
of us. He's done some good things that I know of,--and one pretty bad
one; and it's the bad one that is setting the pace for him just now.
But, as I once said to Lansdale, I'm betting on the finish. One bad
curve needn't spoil a whole railroad."
Myra's hand sought and found his under cover of her wrap. "You are
loyalty itself, Dick, and I can't help loving you for it. But you say
'one bad one.' Have you forgotten the Irish girl?"
Dick set his jaw at that, and the big hand closed firmly over the small
one.
"When I have to believe that of him, Myra, my faith in my kind will
drop back more notches than one. That would make him all devil, don't
you see?"
But her charity outran his. "No, Dick; I don't quite see it. It is just
one more coil in the puzzle-tangle of good and evil that you spoke of.
Connie knows it, and if she can find it in her heart to forgive him"--
There was reverent awe in Bartrow's rejoinder. "Do you mean to say
she'd forgive him--_that_?"
The intermittent clatter and roar of the canyon climb had begun, and in
one of the breathing spaces Myra made answer.
"She is one of God's little ones, as Mr. Lansdale said. I think she
would forgive him even that." And in the next gap in the clamor, "Did
you tell him about Garvin?"
Dick shook his head. "No, I didn't dare to. It's a hard thing to say,
but I'm not sure he wouldn't prosecute Jim for the attempt to kill.
There's no such vindictiveness in the world as that which dates back
to benefits forgot. But I told Lansdale, and gave him leave to make
use of it if the time should ever come when he could do it without
jeopardizing Garvin."
At which Myra's charity stumbled and fell and ran no more.
"That time will never come, Dick. Mr. Jeffard has a double feud with
Garvin,--he is Garvin's debtor for benefits forgot, as you say; and he
has done Garvin an injury. I am glad you didn't tell him."