The Helpers

"If the worst comes, you can't afford to pay that note, Bartrow; and my probability hangs on a hundred hazards. What if I fail?"

The cashier had unlocked the street door for them, and Bartrow ran the splitter of hairs out to the sidewalk.

"You're not going to fail if I can ever succeed in getting you in motion. Good Lord, man! can't you wake up and get a grip of the situation? It isn't the mere saving or losing of the bonanza; it's sheer life or death to Jim Garvin – and you say you owe him. Here, – this cab is as good as any. Midland office, my man; half time, double fare. Don't spare the leather."

At eight-ten to the minute they were negotiating with the superintendent's chief clerk for a special engine to Aspen. Whereupon, as is foreordained in such crises, difficulties multiplied themselves, while the office clock's decorous pendulum ticked off the precious margin of time. Bartrow fought this battle, fought it single-handed and won; but that was because his weapon was invincible. The preliminary passage at arms vocalized itself thus: —

The Clerk, mindful of his superior's moods, and reflectively dubitant: "I'm afraid I haven't the authority. You will have to wait and see the superintendent. He'll be down at nine."

Bartrow: "Make it a dollar a mile."

The Clerk: "Can't be done; or, at least, I can't do it. We're short of motive power. There isn't an engine fit for the run at this end of the division."

Bartrow: "Say a hundred and fifty for the trip."

The Clerk: "I'm afraid we couldn't make it, anyhow. We'd have to send a caller after a crew, and" —

Bartrow, sticking to his single text like a phonograph set to repeat: "Call it a hundred and seventy-five."

The Clerk, in a desperate aside: "Heavens! I wish the old man would come!" – and aloud – "Say, I don't believe we could better the passenger schedule, even with a light engine. It's fast – four hours and twenty-five" —

Bartrow: "Make it two hundred."

Jeffard counted out the money while the office operator was calling the engine-dispatcher; and at eight-twenty they were pacing the station platform, waiting for the ordered special. Bartrow looked at his watch.

"If you get away from here at eight-thirty, you'll have three hours and thirty-five minutes for the run, which is just fifty minutes better than the regular schedule. It'll be nip and tuck, but if your engineer is any good he'll make it. Do you know what to do when you reach Aspen?"

"Why, yes; I'll meet Garvin when his train arrives, cut him out of the tangle with the sharks, get him on a horse and ride for life across the range."

"That's the scheme. But what if the other fellows object?"

Jeffard straightened himself unconsciously. "I'm not uncertain on that side; I can fight for it, if that is what you mean."

Bartrow looked him up and down with a smile which was grimly approbative. "Your summer's done you a whole lot of good, Jeffard. You look like a grown man."

"As I didn't when you last saw me. But I'm afraid I am neither better nor worse, Dick, – morally."

"Nonsense! You can't help being one or the other. And that reminds me: you haven't accounted for yourself yet. Can you do it in the hollow of a minute?"

"Just about. Garvin picked me out of the gutter and took me with him on this prospecting trip. That's all."

"But you ought to have left word with somebody. It was rough on your friends to drop out as if you'd dodged the undertaker."

"Who was there to care?"

"Well, I cared, for one; and then there is Lansdale, and – and" —

"I know," said Jeffard humbly. He was hungry for news, but he went fasting on the thinnest paring of inquiry. "Does she remember me yet?"

Bartrow nodded. "She's not of the forgetting kind. I never go to Denver that she doesn't ask me if I've heard of you. But that's Connie Elliott, every day in the week. She's got a heartful of her own just now, too, I take it, but that doesn't make any difference. She's everybody's sister, just the same."

"A – a heartful of her own, you say? I don't quite understand." Jeffard was staring intently down the empty railway yard, and the glistening lines of steel were blurred for him.

It was a situation for a bit of merciful diplomacy, but Bartrow the tactless blundered on remorselessly.

"Why, yes, – with Lansdale, you know. I don't know just how far it has gone, but if I were going to put money on it, I'd say she would let her life be shortened year for year if his could be spun out in proportion."

Jeffard brought himself up with a savage turn. Who was he that he should be privileged as those who are slain in any honorable cause?

"Lansdale is no better, then?"

"I don't know. Sometimes he thinks he is. But I guess it's written in the book; and I'm sorry – for his sake and hers. There comes your automobile."

A big engine was clanking up through the yard, but Jeffard did not turn to look at it. He was wringing Bartrow's hand, and trying vainly to think of some message to send to the woman he loved. And at the end of it, it went unsaid. One of the clerks was waiting with the train-order when the engine steamed up; and Jeffard was fain to clamber to his place in the cab, full to the lips with tender embassies, which would by no means array themselves in words.

Bartrow waited till he could fling his God-speed up to the cab window. It took the form of a parting injunction, and neither of them suspected how much it would involve.

"If you need backing in Aspen, look up Mark Denby. He's a good friend of mine; an all-around business man, and a guardian angel to fellows with holes in the ground and no ready money. Hunt him up. I'll wire your introduction and have it there ahead of you. Off you go – good luck to you!"

And at the word the big engine lifted its voice with a shout and a bell-clang, and shook itself free for the race.

CHAPTER XVIII

From Leadville to the point in the sky-line of the Continental Divide where the southern shoulder of Mount Massive dips to Hagerman's Pass, the railway grade climbs with the old Glenwood trail; and when Malta was left behind and the ascent fairly begun, Jeffard had fleeting glimpses of the road over which he and Garvin and the patient burro had toiled eastward the day before. From outer curves and promontories doubled at storming speed the hoof-beaten trail flicked into view and disappeared; and at times the brief vistas framed a reminiscent picture of two foot-weary pilgrims plodding doggedly in the wake of a pack-laden ass.

It was impossible to conceive that these phantoms belonged to to-day's yesterday. The crowding events of a few hours had already pushed them into a far-away past; their entities were lost in the kaleidoscopic whirl which had transformed the two men no less than their prefigurings. What had the foolish witling raving yonder on his way to despoilment and death with the two plunderers in common with the self-contained son of the wilderness, who had but yesterday been his brother's keeper in a world of disheartenment? And this other; steam-hurrying on his way to the same goal, with set jaw and tight lips and resolute purpose in his eyes; by how much or little could he be identified with the undeterminate one, whose leaden-footed trudgings the storming locomotive was taking in reverse?

Through some such cycle the wheel of reflection rolled around to its starting point in things present, and Jeffard awoke to the moving realities of steep grades and breath-cutting curves, yawning abysses and hurtling cliffs, flitting backward to the cacophone obbligato of the exhaust and the clangorous cries of racking machinery. The engineer braced on his box was a muscular giant, with the jaw of a prizefighter, and steel-gray eyes that had long since looked death out of countenance. Jeffard took his measure in an appraisive glance. "If your engineer is good for anything," Bartrow had said; and the glance slew the conditional doubt. What a fearless driver of fast locomotives might do toward reversing the fate of the besotted one would be done.

In the mean time the race was to the judicious rather than to the swift. The interminable succession of grades and curves clogged the wheels, and the great engine snorted and wallowed on its upward way, slowing down at times until the throbbing puffs of the escaping steam seemed to beat no more than leisurely minuet-time. But the climbing miles to the summit of the pass were measured doggedly, if not with speed. No trifling advantage of tangent or "let-up" was passed without fresh spurrings of the throttle; and when the engine swept around the long curve which is the approach to the telegraph station at the summit tunnel, the engineer glanced at his watch and nodded across to his passenger.

"We're goin' to make it," he said, in answer to Jeffard's shouted inquiry. "It'll be a close call, but the old Ninety-seven's a bird."

At the station the operator tossed a telegram through the cab window. It was from Bartrow, and its major purpose was to give the figures of the assay, which he had obtained from the little German. They were sufficiently significant, and Bartrow's added urgings were unnecessary. "I'm standing over the train dispatcher here with a club," he wired. "Don't make any economical mistake at your end of the string."

The engineer had finished oiling around and had clambered back to his box. The water supply was replenished, and the fireman was uprearing the tank-spout. Jeffard crossed the footboard and thrust a little roll of bank notes between the fingers of the brawny hand on the throttle lever. The engineer smoothed the bills on his knee and wagged his head as one doubtful.

"That's pretty well up to a month's pay."

"Well, you are going to earn it."

"Better keep it till I do," said the stalwart one, offering it back.

"No; I'm not afraid to pay you in advance. You are going to do your best, and I am not trying to bribe you. It's yours, whether we make it or not."

The big man thrust the bills into his pocket and opened the throttle. "You go over there and sit down and hold your hair on," he commanded. "I'm goin' to break the record when we get out into daylight on the other side o' the mountain."

Jeffard was still groping for hand and foot holds on the fireman's seat when the locomotive rolled out of the western portal of the summit tunnel and the record-breaking began. Of the brain-benumbing rush down the gorges of the Frying Pan on a flying locomotive, one recalls but a confused memory; a phantasmagoric jumble of cliffs and chasms, backward-flitting forests and gyrating mountain peaks, trestles and culverts roaring beneath the drumming wheels, the shrieks of the whistle and the intermittent stridor of escaping steam in the iron throat of the safety-valve; a goblin dance of matter in motion to a war blast of chaotic uproar. One sets the teeth to endure, and comes back to the cosmic point of view with a deep-drawn sigh of relief when the goblin dance is over, and the engine halts at the junction where the Aspen branch leaves the main line and crosses the Frying Pan to begin the ascent of the Roaring Fork.