Kitabı oku: «The Helpers», sayfa 6

CHAPTER XI

After toiling all night through black gorges and over unspeakable mountain passes, the narrow-gauge train from Denver, headed by two pygmy locomotives, came out into daylight, sunshine, and wider horizons at Alta Vista. In the sleeping-car three sections had been transformed by the drowsy porter into daytime smugness, and three persons – two of them in deference to the enthusiasm of the third – were up and dressed.

"Isn't it all perfectly indescribable?" Myra was saying, when the engineer of one of the pygmies sounded the whistle for the station. "Do you know, I couldn't go to sleep for hours last night, late as it was. I put up the window curtain and piled the pillows in the corner so I could look out. The sky was like a great inverted bowl lined with black velvet and spangled with diamonds, circling around us as we darted around the curves. And in the open places there was always a solemn procession of cliffs and peaks, marching with us sometimes, and then turning to slip past again when the bowl whirled the other way. Oh, but it was grand!"

"I'm glad it lays hold of you," said Connie, who was loyally jealous for the scenic renown of her native Colorado. "Now you know why I wouldn't let you go on any of those breathless little one-day excursions from Denver. They just take you up in a balloon, give you a glimpse while you gasp, and drop you without a parachute. The tourist people all make them, you know, – it's in the itinerary, with a coupon in the cute little morocco-bound book of tickets, – and they come back wild-eyed and desperate, and go without their suppers to scribble incoherent notes about the 'Cache la Platte' and 'Clear Poudre Canyon,' and other ridiculous things. It would be funny if it wasn't so exasperating."

Myra nodded. "I'm beginning to 'savez,' as Mr. Bartrow would say. By the way, isn't this the place where he was to meet us? – Why, yes; there he is now!" She waved her hand and struggled with the window-latch as the train drew up to the platform.

He was with them in a moment, carrying a towel-covered basket, and a tin coffee-pot which he waved gingerly by way of salutation.

"The top o' the morning to you all," he said, beaming genially. "I was afraid you wouldn't be up, and then my hot coffee would be cold coffee, and I'd get myself disliked." Then to the drowsy porter: "John, you scoundrel, get us a table before I break you in two and throw you out of the window."

The table was promptly forthcoming, and Myra made room in the narrow seat for Bartrow.

"Excuse me," he begged, laughing, "I'd like to, but I can't. Somebody's got to stand up and do the swing-rack act with this coffee-pot. Just unload that basket, will you, Elliott, and I'll play head waiter while you set the table."

The breakfast was good, and there was a most astonishing variety. Moreover the coffee rose to a degree of excellence which more than atoned for the admixture of condensed milk in lieu of cream, and for the slight resinous taste imparted by the new tin cups. Bartrow apologized for the cups.

"You see, I left the mine rather middling early this morning, and packed things in a hurry. When I was making the coffee over Jim Bryant's stove here at Alta Vista, it struck me all at once that I'd forgotten the cups. The train was in sight, and Jim had only one, and that hadn't been washed for a month of Sundays. Maybe you think I wasn't stampeded for about a minute."

Connie laughed. "I suppose you went out and robbed somebody."

"That's what I did; made a break for the store, and found it locked up, of course. I had to smash a window to get what I wanted."

"Why, you lawless man!" protested Myra, trying to make room on the narrow table for the contents of the inexhaustible basket. "Where in the world did you get such a variety of things?"

"Canned goods," Connie cut in maliciously; "all canned goods, put out in dishes so you won't be reminded of the tinny taste. Everybody lives on canned goods in the mountains."

"Connie, you make me tired," Bartrow retorted, bracing himself as the train whisked around a sharp curve. "Just dig a little deeper and get out that platter of trout; they've never seen the inside of a can."

"Never mind what Connie says; she isn't responsible," said Myra. "The breakfast is just as good as it can be. Besides, you know you promised us that we should live just as you do if we'd visit the Little Myriad. I wish you'd put that coffee-pot on the floor and sit down with us."

Bartrow tried it, and found it possible; after which the talk became general and cheerful over the resinous coffee cups and the lurching dishes. In a lull Elliott asked how the Little Myriad was going on.

"Good enough for anybody," rejoined Bartrow, with enthusiasm alert. "Lead opens out better every day, and we're in only about seventy-five feet."

"No pay-dirt yet, of course," said the older man.

"Well, hardly; not yet. I'm figuring on a hundred and fifty feet of development work at the very least before we begin to take out pay."

"Mr. Bartrow, don't you remember that another thing you promised was that you wouldn't talk mineral-English before me without explaining it?" Myra broke in. "I want to know" – An unexpected plunge of the car made her grasp at the coffee cup, and Connie slipped deftly into the break.

"And it shall know, bless its inquisitive little soul! It shall be stuffed with information like a fat little pillow with feathers. But not here, cuzzy dear. Wait till we're on the ground, and then I'll go off out of hearing, and Dick may turn himself into a glossary, or an intelligence office, or a personal conductor, or anything else you'd like to have him."

Bartrow looked unspeakable things, and put down his knife and fork to say, "Connie, you're a – a" —

"Brute, Dickie; say it right out, and don't spare me on Myra's account. She rather enjoys it; she loves to hear people abuse me."

"Connie, you are perfectly incorrigible," said Myra severely. "With your poor people you are an angel of light, but with your friends" —

"I'm an angel of darkness. That's right, cuzzy dear; pile it on, I'm young and strong. Poppa, can't you think of something mean to say about me? Do try, please."

Bartrow grinned; and Elliott, who knew his daughter's vagaries and delighted in them, laughed outright. Constance made a face across the table at her cousin, and said, "Now talk mines, if you can."

"I shall," asserted Myra calmly. "Mr. Bartrow, how did you ever come to call your mine the 'Little Myriad'?"

If the bottom had suddenly dropped out of his coffee cup, Bartrow could not have been more disconcerted. Constance, who was in his secret, laughed gleefully, and clapped her hands.

"Tell her, Dick; tell her all about it. If you don't I shall."

Bartrow stammered and stumbled until Connie went into ecstasies of mischievous delight. After two or three helpless beginnings, he said, rather tamely, "I thought it was a pretty name."

"But it's so odd; a myriad is many, and a mine is only one."

"Oh, the meaning didn't have anything to do with it," rejoined Bartrow, going straight to his own discomfiture with refreshing candor. "It was the – the suggestion; the similarity; the – By Jove! we're there at last; this is the mine switch."

The exclamation was a heartfelt thanksgiving, and in the confusion of debarking the perilous topic was safely eluded. It was a sharp climb of some distance from the railway track to the mine, and Elliott developed unsuspected reserves of tact by leading the way with Miss Van Vetter, leaving Bartrow to follow with Constance. When they had lagged sufficiently behind the others, and were yet out of earshot of the men who were following with the luggage, Bartrow went back to the unexploded petard.

"Connie, you've just got to help me out now," he declared. "What shall I tell her if she tackles me again?"

"Tell her the truth."

"I don't dare to."

"Then tell her a fib. But no – on second thought I shouldn't do that, if I were you; you'd only make a mess of it. I'll tell you what to do: just fight shy of it till I can get her to myself. I promise you she'll never ask you about the Little Myriad's christening again as long as she lives."

"Thank you," said Bartrow, with the air of a reprieved criminal; and then dubiously: "See here, Connie, how are you going to do it? No monkey business, you know."

"Not a single, solitary monkey," she answered so soberly that Bartrow forgot his suspicions, and plunged into another subject which was also near to his heart.

"About Jeffard; how did you come to think he had shot himself?"

"It was only one of those suppositions you think you have verified when you've only been playing blind-man's bluff with it. The similarity of names misled me at first."

"But afterward you merely wired that you were mistaken. Was that another supposition?"

"Oh, no; I saw him and talked with him."

"The mischief you did! What did he have to say for himself?"

"Not much that will bear repeating. I'm too sorry for him to want to talk about it, Dick."

Bartrow wondered, and kept his wonder to himself. What he said was in the nature of worldly wisdom.

"Jeffard'll come out all right in the end. He's as obstinate as a pig, but that's the only swinish thing about him. I'm afraid he'll have to go through the stamp-mill and get himself pulverized; but when it comes to the clean-up there'll be more good metal than tailings. Don't you think so?"

"How should I know?" queried Constance.

"I didn't ask you what you know; I asked what you thought about it."

"You forget that we've met only two or three times."

"I don't forget anything. But I know you can size a man up while the rest of us are trying to get acquainted with him. Don't you believe that Jeffard will come out all right in the end?"

She was silent for a minute or two, and when she answered there was a tremulous note in her voice which was new to Bartrow.

"I'm afraid he has made that and everything else impossible, Dick. I told you I had seen him and talked with him; that was the day after I telegraphed you about the suicide, nearly two months ago. From that day to this he has not been seen or heard of in Denver, so far as Tommie can find out."

"Pshaw! Then you think he has taken the short cut out of it, after all?"

"I don't know what to think," said Constance; and as they were at the top of the steep trail, the subject was dropped.

On the whole, Connie's apprehensions that her cousin's urban upbringing might make her a difficult guest for the young miner were apparently groundless. Miss Van Vetter rhapsodized over the scenery; waded cheerfully through the dripping tunnel of the Little Myriad to the very heading, in order to see with her own eyes the vein of mineral; thought Bartrow's three-room log cabin was good enough for any one; and ate the dishes of Wun Ling's preparing as though a Chinese cook were a necessary adjunct to every well regulated household. When the first day of exhilarating sight-seeing came to an end, and the two young women were together in their room, Connie bethought her of her promise to Bartrow.

"By the way, Myra, did you find out how the Little Myriad came by its name?" she asked.

"No; I forgot to ask Mr. Bartrow again."

"I can tell you, if you'd really like to know."

"Well?"

"He was going to call it the 'Myra,' and he asked me if I thought you'd object. I told him you would, – most emphatically. Then he said he would call it the 'Myriad,' because that was the only word he could think of that was anything like Myra."

Miss Van Vetter was arranging her hair before the small mirror at the other end of the room, and Constance waited long for her rejoinder. When it came it was rather irrelevant.

"I've heard of people who could read your thoughts better than you could think them," she said; and Connie was too sleepy to strike back.

CHAPTER XII

For a week after the arrival of his visitors, Bartrow had scant time and less inclination for troublement about such purely mundane affairs as the driving of tunnels and the incidental acquisition of wealth thereby. There were burro journeys to the top of the pass, and to the sheer cliff known to the prosaic frontiersmen as the devil's jumping-off-place; excursions afoot down the mountain to the cool depths of Chipeta Canyon, and to Silver Lake beyond the shrugged shoulder of Lost Creek Mountain; and finally there was a breath-cutting climb to the snow-patched summit of El Reposo, undertaken for the express purpose of enabling Myra Van Vetter to say that she had been where there was reason to presume that no human being had preceded her.

These things three of them did, leaving Stephen Elliott to his own devices, in accordance with the set terms upon which he had consented to father the parti carré. "Go on and climb your mountains and just leave me out," he would say, when the preparations were making for the day's jaunt. "I've had my share of it, off and on, while I was hunting for something I hadn't lost. Dick, here, hasn't any better sense than to humor you; but you'd tramp mighty little if I had to go along."

Whereupon he would plant his chair for the day upon the slab-floored porch of the cabin, tilt it to a comfortable angle against the wall, and while away the hours smoking a mellow pipe and reading the day-old Denver paper painstakingly, from the top of the title page to the bottom of the last want column.

Thus the crystalline autumn days winged their flight, and Bartrow squired the two young women hither and yon, and finally to the top of El Reposo, as recorded. This excursion was the climax, from a scenic point of view; and Myra, having long since exhausted her vocabulary of superlatives, was unusually silent.

"What's come over you? are you gorged with mountains?" queried Connie sympathetically, slipping her arm around her cousin's waist.

"It isn't that; it's just that I'm too full for utterance, I think; or perhaps I should say too empty of words to do it justice. How flippantly trivial everything human seems in the face of such a landscape! Here are we, three inconsequent atoms, standing brazenly in the face of great nature, and trying to gather some notion of the infinite into our finite little souls. It's sheer impertinence."

"They won't mind," rejoined Bartrow, with a comprehensive gesture, meant to include the mountains, singular and collective; "they're used to it – the impertinence, I mean. What you see is the face of nature, as you say, and man doesn't seem to be in it. Just the same, there is a small army of men scattered among these overgrown hills, each with an inquisitive pick and shovel, backed by hardihood enough to dare anything for the sake of adding something to the wealth of the world."

Myra turned her back on the prospect and searched Bartrow's eyes in a way to make him wonder what was wrong with his well-turned little speech.

"That is the first insincere thing I ever heard you say," she asserted. "As if you didn't know that not one of these men ever wastes a second thought upon the world or the people in it, or upon anything outside of his own little circle of ambitions and cravings!"

"You're quite right," admitted Bartrow, abashed and more than willing to stand corrected in any field entered by Miss Van Vetter; but Constance took up the cudgels on the other side.

"You make me exceedingly weary, you two," she said, with seraphic sweetness. "Neither of you knows what you are talking about half the time, and when you do, it isn't worth telling. Now listen to me while I show you how ridiculous you are," – Bartrow sat down on a flat-topped boulder, and made a dumb show of stopping his ears, – "I contend that nearly every one of these poor prospectors you've been maligning is a perfect monument of unselfishness. He is working and starving and hoping and enduring for somebody else in nine cases out of ten. It's a wife, or a family, or an old father or mother, or the mortgage on the farm, or some other good thing."

Myra made a snowball and threw it at Connie the eloquent. "I think El Reposo is misnamed," she contended. "It ought to be called the Mount of Perversity. Mr. Bartrow, you are sitting upon the table, which is very undignified. Please move and let us see what Wun Ling has stowed away in the haversack."

They spread their luncheon on the flat-topped boulder, and fell upon it like the hungry wayfarers that they were, calling it a sky banquet, and drinking Wun Ling's health in a bottle of cold tea. With satiety came thoughts of the descent, and Myra pleaded piteously for a change of route.

"I shall never get down the way we came up in the wide, wide world, – not alive," she asserted. "With the view in prospect, I believe I could climb the Matterhorn; but getting down is quite another matter. Can't we go around some other way?"

Bartrow thought it possible; but since Miss Van Vetter had particularly desired to stand upon the summit of a hitherto unexplored peak, he was not sure.

"But we can try," said Myra. "At the worst we can come back and creep down the way we came up."

Bartrow glanced at his watch, and focused the field-glass on a diaphanous cloud slipping stealthily across the serrated summits of the main range away to the westward.

"Yes, we can do that, if we have time," he assented. "But I'm a little afraid of the weather. That cloud may miss us by twenty miles; and then again, it may take a straight shoot across the valley and make us very wet and uncomfortable."

Constance came to the rescue with a compromise.

"You go and prospect for a new trail, Dick, and we'll stay here. If you find one you can come back for us, and if you don't we'll be fresh for the scramble down the other way."

Bartrow said it was well, and immediately set about putting the suggestion into effect. When he was fairly out of sight over the curvature of El Reposo's mighty shoulder, Myra said: —

"He's good, isn't he?"

"He is a man among men, Myra; a man to tie to, as we say here in Colorado."

They were sitting together on the flat boulder, and Miss Van Vetter stole a side glance at her cousin's profile. "You have known him a long time, haven't you, Connie?"

"Almost ever since I can remember. I'm Colorado-born, you know, and he isn't; but he came across the plains in the days of the ox-teams, when he was a little fellow, and the first work he ever did was for poppa, when we lived on the ranch below Golden."

"He is a self-made man, isn't he?"

"Don't say that, Myra, please. I hate the word. God makes us, and circumstances or our own foolishness mar us. But Dick is self-educated, so far as he is educated at all. He was a homeless waif when he first saw the Rockies. His father died in the middle of the trip across the plains, and his mother lived only long enough to have her grave dug some two hundred miles farther west. The others took care of Dick and brought him along with them to Colorado because there wasn't anything else to do; and since, Dick has made his own way, doing any honest thing that came to his hand."

"He couldn't do the other kind," Myra averred. "But you spoke of his education as if he hadn't any. I suppose that was one of your 'exuberances,' as Uncle Stephen calls them. Mr. Bartrow is certainly anything but illiterate."

"No, he isn't that, though he has no education of the kind you effete people have in mind when you spell the word with a capital – the kind with a Greek-letter-badge and college-yell attachment. If you should tell him you had been to Bryn Mawr, he would probably take it to be some summer resort he hadn't heard of. But that isn't saying he is stupid. He could give the man with the yell a lot of information on a good many subjects. Poppa says he was always an earnest little lad; always reading everything he could get hold of – which wasn't very much in the early days, as you may imagine."

"Nevertheless, he seems to be getting on in the world," said Miss Van Vetter. "Your father says the Little Myriad is a promising mine."

There was more pathos than mirth in the smile which flitted across Connie's face.

"You're new among us yet, Myra. Everything with mineral in it is promising to us; we are cranks pure and simple, on that subject. The Little Myriad is promising, of course, – there isn't an unpromising mine in the State, for that matter, – but it's only a promise, as yet. If Dick should reach the end of his hundred and fifty feet of development without striking pay, he would be a ruined man."

"Why couldn't he keep on until he should strike it?"

"For the very simple reason that he is working on borrowed capital; and I happen to know that he has borrowed about all he can."

"But he believes in the success of the venture, absolutely."

"Of course he does; that is one of the conditions. It's merely a question of credit with him. If any one would lend, Dick would go on borrowing and digging until he struck pay-ore or came out on the other side of the mountain – and then he'd think he hadn't gone deep enough. That is the pathetic side of his character; he never knows when he's beaten."

"I should call it the heroic side."

"It is heroic, but it is pathetic, too. It is sure to bring him trouble, sooner or later, and Dick isn't one to take trouble lightly. He'll go on fighting and struggling long after the battle has become hopeless, and that makes the sting of defeat so much sharper. It makes me want to cry when I think what a terrible thing it would be for him if the Little Myriad should go back on its promise."

Miss Van Vetter took the field-glass and stood up to watch the storm cloud which was now spreading gradually and creeping slowly down the slopes of the divide. "You think a great deal of Mr. Bartrow, don't you, Connie?"

"Indeed I do; he comes next to poppa with me."

For so long a time as one might take in saying a little prayer at a needful crisis, Myra gave her undivided attention to the fleecy blur slipping down the side of the main range. Then the strain on her eyes filled them with tears, and she put the glass back into its case. Constance saw the tears.

"Why, Myra! you're crying. What is the matter?"

"I'm lonesome and homesick, and I long for the flesh-pots of Denver; but it was the glass that made me cry. Connie, dear, don't you think we'd better be going back to town?"

"Why, yes; if you are quite ready. But it will be a disappointment for Dick. He is counting on another week, at least."

"Yes, I know; and that is why I think we ought to go. We are keeping him from his work in the mine, and his time is precious."

"Rather more so than he gives us to understand, I fancy," Constance assented. "I suppose you are right, Myra, – we ought not to stay; but you'll have to tax your ingenuity to find an excuse that will hold water. Dick won't be satisfied with a P. P. C. card."

"Perhaps the chapter of accidents will help us. If it doesn't, you must make your father remember that he has urgent business in Denver which won't wait. Can't you manage it that way?"

"If I can't, I'll ring you in. Poppa would take passage for Honolulu to-morrow if he had an idea that you'd like to see the Kanakas ride surf-boards."

"I should much rather not appear in it," said Myra; and then, with truly feminine inconsistency, "I don't know why I say that. On the whole, perhaps you'd better say that it's my proposal. Then Mr. Bartrow will set it down to the vagaries of a flighty migrant, and he won't hold spite against his old friends."

Connie the wise began to wonder if there were unplumbed depths in her cousin, – depths which Bartrow's defenseless obviousness had stirred to his sparing; but she drove the thought out as unworthy. Myra had been kind to Dick, certainly, but she had never encouraged him. There might well be an accepted lover in the dim Philadelphia background for aught Myra had said or done to evince the contrary. In which case – Connie the wise became Connie the pitiful in the turning of a leaf – poor Dick! At that moment, as if the sympathetic thought had evoked him, Bartrow came in sight on the lower slope of the summit. He was breathing hard when he reached them.

"We can make it all right," he said, slinging the glass and the haversack, "but it'll add three or four miles. It's a roundabout way, and it will take us into the head of Little Myriad Gulch. If you're ready we'll get a quick move. That storm is heading straight for us, and we'll be in luck if we don't come in for a soaking."

El Reposo is a bald mountain, and its tonsure is fringed with a heavy forest growth which stops abruptly at timber-line. Halfway to the head of the gulch the new trail ended in a tangle of fallen trees, – the débris of an ancient snowslide, – and much valuable time was lost in skirting the obstacle. Bartrow glanced over his shoulder from time to time, and finally said, "There it comes, with a vengeance!"

The exclamation was ill-timed. Myra turned and stopped to watch the fleecy curtain of vapor shrouding the great bald summit they had just quitted. Bartrow sought to possess his soul in patience.

"Isn't it grand!" she said, with kindling enthusiasm.

"Yes; grand and wet. If you'll excuse me, Miss Myra, I think we'd better run for it."

They ran for it accordingly, Connie in the lead like the free-limbed daughter of the altitudes that she was, and Bartrow and Miss Van Vetter hand in hand like joyous children for whom self-consciousness is not. From the beginning of the wild race down the slopes the wetting seemed momentarily imminent; none the less, they managed to reach the gulch dryshod. Inasmuch as their course down the ravine was in a direction nearly opposite to the sweep of the wind, it soon took them beyond the storm zone, and they stopped to listen to the echoes of nature's battle reverberating from the crags of the higher levels. The writhing of the great firs in the grasp of the wind came to their ears like the clashing of miniature breakers on a tideless shore; and the booming of the thunder was minified by the rare atmosphere into a sound not unlike the distant firing of cannon. While they paused, Myra climbed to the top of a water-worn boulder in the bed of the ravine to get a better point of view, and from this elevation she could see the forest at the head of the gulch.

"Oh, Connie!" she cried, "climb up here, quick! It's a cyclone!"

Bartrow threw up his head like a startled animal. There was a steady roar in the air which was not of the thunder.

"Cyclone nothing!" he yelled. "It's a cloud-burst! Stay where you are, for your life, Miss Myra!"

Even as he spoke the roar deepened until the vibration of it shook the solid earth, and a dark mass of water, turbid and débris-laden, shot from the head of the gulch and swept down the ravine. Bartrow lived an anguished lifetime in an instant of hesitation. To save the woman he loved was to sacrifice Constance. To help Connie first was to take the desperate chance that Myra would be safe till he could reach her.

There was no time for the nice weighing of possibilities; and Richard Bartrow was a man of action before all else. Winding an arm about Constance, he dashed out of the ravine with her, getting back to Myra three seconds in advance of the boulder-laden flood. There was time enough, but none to spare. A tree gave him an anchorage on the bank above her; she sprang toward him at the word of command; and he plucked her up out of the reach of the foaming torrent which snapped at her and overturned the great rock upon which she had been standing.

After which narrow escape they sat together on the slope of safety and watched the subsiding flood, laughing over the "stampede," as Connie called it, with all the reckless hardihood of youth and good spirits.

"I wouldn't have missed seeing it for anything in the world," declared the enthusiast. "I had plenty of time to get out of the way, but I couldn't help waiting to see how it would look, coming over that last cliff up there."

"Dick didn't give me a chance to see anything," Connie complained. "He whisked me out of the way as if I'd been a naughty little girl caught playing with the fire."

Bartrow examined the field-glass to see if it had suffered in the scramble. It was unbroken, and he put it back into the case with a sigh of relief.

"If you two had smashed that glass between you, I don't know what I should have done," he said; whereat they all laughed again and took up the line of march for the mine.

That evening, after supper, the four of them were on the porch of the three-roomed cabin, enjoying the sunset. Constance had spoken to her father about the return to Denver, and Stephen Elliott was racking his brain for some excuse reasonable enough to satisfy Bartrow, when a man came up the trail from the direction of Alta Vista. It was Bryant, the station agent; and he was the bearer of a telegram addressed to Constance. She read it and gave it to Bartrow. The operator had taken it literally, and it was a small study in phonetics.

"Shees gaun an got inter trubbel. P. Grims swipt her masheen. Wot shel I do.

"T. Reagan."

Bartrow smiled and handed the message back. "That's Tommie, I take it. What's it about?"

"It's a young woman I've been trying to help. They are persecuting her again, and I'll have to go back as quickly as I can."

"That's bad," said Bartrow; but Connie's father looked greatly relieved, and, filling his pipe, began to burn incense to the kindly god of chance.

After a time, Bartrow asked, "When?"

Connie's gaze was on the sunset, but her thoughts were miles away in a humble cottage in West Denver where she had thought Margaret would be safely hidden from the spoiler.

"I think we'd better go now – to-night. You can flag the train at the mine switch, can't you?"

"Yes."

"And you can get ready, can't you, Myra?"

"Certainly; it won't take me long to pack. If you'll excuse me I'll go and do it now, and get it off my mind."

When Myra had gone in, Bartrow took the message and read it again. "This is no woman's job," he objected. "Let me go down with you and straighten it out."

"No, you mustn't, Dick; you have lost a clear week as it is."

She rose and went to the end of the porch, whither he presently followed her. "You'll need a man," he insisted.