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CHAPTER XXIV

Lansdale stood watching the two red eyes on the rear platform of the sleeping-car until the curve on the farther side of the viaduct blotted them out; after which he fell in with the tide of humanity ebbing cityward through the great arch of the station, and set out to do Bartrow's errand at the house in Colfax Avenue.

On the way he found time to admire Bartrow's manliness. The little deed of self-effacement promised a much keener sense of the eternal fitness of things than he had expected to come upon, in the young miner, or in any son of the untempered wilderness. Not that the wilderness was more mercenary than the less strenuous world of an older civilization – rather the contrary; but if it gave generously it was also prone to take freely. Lansdale wrought out the antithesis as a small concession to his own point of view, and was glad to set Bartrow's self-abnegation over against it. Assuredly he would do what a friendly man might toward making good the excuses of the magnanimous one.

It was Miss Van Vetter who met him at the door, and he thought he surprised a shadow of disappointment in her eyes when she welcomed him. But it was Constance who said, "Come in, Mr. Lansdale. Where is Dick?"

She was holding the portière aside for him, and he made sure of his ingress before replying. Being of two minds whether to deny all previous knowledge of such a person as Richard Bartrow, or to commit himself recklessly to the hazards of equivocal explanations, he steered a middle course.

"Am I my brother's keeper?" he demanded, dropping into the easy-chair which had come to be called his by right of frequent occupancy.

"Oh, I hope you haven't murdered him!" said Connie, with a show of trepidation. "That's a terribly suggestive quotation."

"So it is. But are not my hands clean?" He held them up for inspection. "How are you both this evening?"

Connie's eyes danced. "Mr. Lansdale, do you happen to know anything about the habits of the ostrich?"

Lansdale acknowledged defeat, extending his hands in mock desperation. "Put the thumbikins on if you must," he said, "but don't screw them down too hard. I couldn't tell anything but the truth if I should try."

"What have you done with Dick?"

"I have murdered him, as you suggested, and put his remains in a trunk and shipped them East."

Miss Van Vetter looked horrified, but whether at his flippancy or at the hideous possibility, Lansdale could not determine.

"But, really," Connie persisted, with a look in her eyes which would have exorcised any demon of brazenness; "you dined with him, you know."

"So I did; but he had to go back to his mine on the night train. I saw him off, and he made me promise to come here and – and" —

"Square it?" Connie suggested.

"That is precisely the word, – his word. And you will both bear me witness that I have done it, won't you?"

Miss Van Vetter was cutting the leaves of a magazine, and she looked up to say: "That is one of the explanations which doesn't explain, isn't it?"

Lansdale collapsed in the depths of the chair. "'I'm a poor unfort'net as don't know nothink,'" he quoted. "Tell me what you'd like to have me say and I'll say it."

"Why did Mr. Bartrow have to go back so unexpectedly?" asked Myra. "He told Uncle Stephen he would be in Denver two or three days."

Lansdale was not under bonds to keep the truthful peace at the behest of any eyes save those of Constance Elliott; wherefore he drew upon his imagination promptly, and, as it chanced, rather unfortunately.

"He had a telegram from his foreman about a – a strike, I think he called it."

"A strike in the Little Myriad!" This from both of the young women in chorus. Then Connie thankfully: "Oh, I'm so glad!" and Myra vindictively: "I hope he'll never give in to them!"

Lansdale collapsed again. "What have I done!" he exclaimed.

Constance set her cousin right, or tried to.

"It isn't a strike of the men; it's pay-ore – isn't it, Mr. Lansdale?"

"Now how should I know?" protested the amateur apologist. "A strike is a strike, isn't it? But I don't believe it was the good kind. He wasn't at all enthusiastic about it."

"That will do," said Connie. "Poor Dick!" And Miss Van Vetter, who was not of the stony-hearted, rose and went to the piano that she might not advertise her emotion.

Lansdale picked himself up out of the ruins of his attempt to do Bartrow a good turn, and hoped the worst was over. It was for the time; but later in the evening, when Myra had gone to the library for a book they had been talking about, Connie returned to the unfinished inquisition.

"You know more than you have told us about Dick's trouble," she said gravely. "Is it very serious?"

"Yes, rather." Lansdale made a sudden resolve to cleave to the facts in the case, telling as few of them as he might.

"It wasn't a strike at all, was it?"

"No; that was a little figure of speech. It is rather the lack of a strike – of the kind you meant."

"Poor boy! I don't wonder that it made him want to run away. He has worked so hard and so long, and his faith in the Little Myriad has been unbounded. What will he do?"

"I don't know that. In fact, I think he is not quite at the brink of things yet. But he is afraid it is coming to that."

"How did he talk? Is he very much discouraged? But of course he isn't; nothing discourages him."

Lansdale was looking into the compelling eyes and he forgot his rôle, – forgot that he had been giving Constance to understand that the prospective failure of the mine was the only cloud in Bartrow's sky.

"I'm sorry I can't confirm that." He spoke hurriedly, hearing the rustle of Miss Van Vetter's skirts in the hall. "He decided rather suddenly, – to go back, you know. He intended coming here with me this evening. I don't think he had ever considered all the possibilities and consequences; and we were talking it over. Then he decided not to come. He is the soul of honor."

Constance nodded intelligence, and made the proper diversion when her cousin came in with the book. But Miss Van Vetter had overheard the final sentence, and she put it away for future reference.

Lansdale said good-night a little later, and they both went to the door with him. When he was gone Myra drew Connie into the library and made her sit down where the light from the shaded chandelier fell full upon her.

"Connie, dear," she began, fixing her cousin with an inquisitorial eye, "who is 'the soul of honor'?"

"It isn't nice to overhear things," said Connie pertly.

"I might retort that it isn't nice to have confidences with a gentleman the moment your cousin's back is turned, but I sha'n't. Will you tell me what I want to know?"

"We were talking about Dick."

Myra's hands were clasped over her knee, and one daintily shod foot was tapping a tattoo on the rug. "Was it anything that I ought not to know?"

Connie's pertness vanished, and the steadfast gray eyes brightened with quick upwellings of sympathy. "No, dear; it will doubtless be in everybody's mouth before many days. You remember what I told you once about Dick's prospects? – that day we were on top of El Reposo?"

"Yes."

"Well, I think the Little Myriad isn't going to keep its promise; Dick thinks so."

Myra sat quietly under it for a little while, and then got up to go to the window. When she spoke she did not turn her head.

"He will be ruined, you said. What will you do, Connie?"

"I? What can I do? Poppa would lend him more money, but he wouldn't take it, – not from us."

Silence while the bronze-figured clock on the mantel measured a full minute. Then: —

"There is one way you can make him take it."

"How?"

Myra gave a quick glance over her shoulder, as if to make sure that her cousin was still sitting under the chandelier.

"He believes – and so does your father – that it is only a question of time and more money. He couldn't refuse to take his wife's money."

Miss Van Vetter heard a little gasp, which, to her strained sense, seemed to be more than half a sob, and the arc-light swinging from its wire across the avenue was blurred for her. Then Connie's voice, soft and low-pitched in the silence of the book-lined room, came to her as from a great distance.

"You are quite mistaken, Myra, dear; mistaken and – and very blind. Dick is my good brother, – the only one I ever had; not my father's son, but yet my brother. There has been no thought of anything else between us. Besides" —

Myra heard light footfalls and the rustle of drapery, and stole another quick glance over her shoulder. The big pivot-chair under the chandelier was empty. The door into the hall was ajar, and Connie's face, piquant with suppressed rapture, was framed in the aperture.

"Besides, you good, dense, impracticable cuzzy, dear, – are you listening? – Dick is head over ears in love with – you."

The door slammed softly on the final word, and there was a quick patter of flying feet on the stairs. Myra kept her place at the window; but when the arc-light had parted with its blurring aureole she drew the big pivot-chair to the desk and sat down to write.

What she had in mind seemed not to say itself readily, and there was quite a pyramid of waste paper in the basket before she had finished her two letters. She left them on the hall table when she went up to her room, and Connie found them in the morning on her way to the breakfast-room to pour her father's coffee.

"I wish I might read them," she said, with the mischievous light dancing in her eyes. "It's deliciously suspicious; a letter to Dick, and one to her man of business, all in a breath, and right on the heels of my little bomb-shell. If she ever tries to discipline me again, – well, she'd better not, that's all."

CHAPTER XXV

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.