The Helpers

The mere suggestion was perspiratory, and the traveling man mopped his face. But there are occasions when one must talk or burst, and presently he began again.

"Say, I suppose they'll lynch that fellow if they catch him, won't they?"

The badgered one came to attention with a fine-lined frown of annoyance radiating fan-like above his eyes. He was of the stuff of which man-masters are made; a well-knit figure of a man, rather under than over the average of height and breadth, but so fairly proportioned as to give the impression of unmeasured strength in reserve, – the strength of steel under silk. His face was bronzed with the sun-stain of the altitudes, but it was as smooth as a child's, and beardless, with thin lips and masterful eyes of the sort that can look unmoved upon things unnamable.

"Lynch him? Oh, no; you do us an injustice," he said, and the tone was quite as level as the eye-volley. "We don't lynch people out here for shooting, – only for talking too much."

Whereat one may picture unacclimated loquacity gasping and silenced, with the owner of the "Chincapin" and other listed properties going on to read his letters and telegrams in peace. The process furthered itself in the sequence of well-ordered dispatch until a message, damp from the copying-press and dated at Leadville, came to the surface. It covered two of the yellow sheets in the spacious handwriting of the receiving operator, and Denby read it twice, and yet once again, before laying it aside. Whatever it was, it was not suffered to interrupt the orderly sequence of things; and Denby had read the last of the letters before he held up a summoning finger for a bell-boy.

"Go and ask the clerk the name of the man who was shot, will you?"

The information came in two words, and the querist gathered up his papers and sent the boy for his room key. At the stairhead he met the surgeon and stopped him to ask about the wounded man.

"How are you, Doctor? What is the verdict? Is there a fighting chance for him?"

"Oh, yes; much more than that. It isn't as bad as it might have been; the skull isn't fractured. But it was enough to knock him out under the circumstances. He had skipped two or three meals, he tells me, and was under a pretty tense strain of excitement."

"Then he is conscious?"

The physician laughed. "Very much so. He is sitting up to take my prescription, – which was a square meal. Whatever the strain was, it isn't off yet. He insists that he must mount and ride this afternoon if he has to be lashed in the saddle; has already ordered a horse, in fact. He is plucky."

"Then he is able to talk business, I suppose."

"Able, yes; but if you can get anything out of him, you'll do better than I could. He won't talk, – won't even tell what the row was about."

"Won't he?" The man of affairs crossed the corridor and tapped on the door of Number Nineteen. There was no response, and he turned the knob and entered. The shades were drawn and there was a cleanly odor of aseptics in the air of the darkened room. The wounded man was propped among pillows on the bed, with a well-furnished tea-tray on his knees. He gave prompt evidence of his ability to talk.

"Back again, are you? I told you I had nothing to say for publication, and I meant it." This wrathfully; then he discovered his mistake, but the tone of the careless apology was scarcely more conciliatory. "Oh – excuse me. I thought it was the reporter."

Bartrow's correspondent found a chair and introduced himself with charitable directness. "My name is Denby. I am here because Mr. Richard Bartrow wires me to look you up."

Jeffard delayed the knife and fork play long enough to say: "Denby? – oh, yes; I remember. Thank you," and there the interview bade fair to die of inanition. Jeffard went on with his dinner as one who eats to live; and Denby tilted his chair gently and studied his man as well as he might in the twilight of the drawn shades. After a time, he said: —

"Bartrow bespeaks my help for you. He says your affair may need expediting: does it?"

Jeffard's rejoinder was almost antagonistic. "How much do you know of the affair?"

"What the whole town knows by this time – added to what little Bartrow tells me in his wire. You or your partner have stumbled upon an abandoned claim which promises to be a bonanza. One of you – public rumor is a little uncertain as to which one – tried to euchre the other; and it seems that you have won in the race to the Recorder's office, and have come out of it alive. Is that the summary?"

He called it public rumor, but it was rather a shrewd guess. Jeffard did not hasten to confirm it. On the contrary, his reply was evasive.

"You may call it an hypothesis – a working hypothesis, if you choose. What then?"

The promoter was not of those who swerve from conclusions. "It follows that you are a stout fighter, and a man to be helped, or a very great rascal," he said coolly.

Again the knife and fork paused, and the wounded man's gaze was at least as steady as that of his conditional accuser. "It may simplify matters, Mr. Denby, if I say that I expect nothing from public rumor."

The mine-owner shrugged his shoulders as an unwilling arbiter who would fain wash his hands of the ethical entanglement if he could.

"It's your own affair, of course, – the public opinion part of it. But it may prove to be worth your while not to ignore the suffrages of those who make and unmake reputations."

"Why?"

"Because you will need capital, – honest capital, – and" —

He left the sentence in the air, and Jeffard brought it down with a cynical stonecast.

"And, under the circumstances, an honest capitalist might hesitate, you would say. Possibly; but capital, as I know it, is not so discriminating when the legal requirements are satisfied. There will be no question of ownership involved in the development of the 'Midas.'"

"Legal ownership, you mean?"

"Legal or otherwise. When the time for investment comes, I shall be abundantly able to assure the capitalist."

"To guarantee the investment: doubtless. But capital is not always as unscrupulous as you seem to think."

"No?" – the tilt of the negative was almost aggressive. "There are borrowers and borrowers, Mr. Denby. It's the man without collateral who is constrained to make a confidant of his banker."

The blue-gray eyes of the master of men looked their levelest, and the clean-shaven face was shrewdly inscrutable. "Pardon me, Mr. Jeffard, but there are men who couldn't borrow with the Orizaba behind them."

Jeffard parried the eye-thrust, and brushed the generalities aside in a sentence.

"All of which is beside the mark, and I have neither the strength nor the inclination to flail it out with you. As you say, I shall need capital – yours or another's. State the case – yours, or mine, – in so many words, if you please."

"Briefly, then: the equity in this affair lies between you and the man who tried to kill you. I mean by this that the bonanza is either yours or his. If it were a partnership discovery there would have been no chance for one of you to overreach the other. You'll hardly deny that there was a sharp fight for possession: you both advertised that fact pretty liberally."

Jeffard was listening with indifference, real or feigned, and he neither denied nor affirmed. "Go on."

"From the point of view of an unprejudiced observer the evidence is against your partner. He comes here drunk and abusive, in company with two men whose faces would condemn them anywhere, and squanders his lead in the race in a supplementary carouse. And a little later, when he finds that you have outclassed him, he shoots you down like a dog in a fit of drunken fury. To an impartial onlooker the inference is fairly obvious."

"And that is?" —

"That your partner is the scoundrel; that the discovery is yours, and that he and his accomplices were trying to rob you. I don't mind saying that this is my own inference, but I shall be glad to have it confirmed."

Jeffard looked up quickly. "Then Bartrow hasn't told you" —

"Bartrow's message was merely introductory; two pages of eulogy, in fact, as any friendly office of Dick's is bound to be. He doesn't go into details."

Jeffard put the tea-tray aside and with it the air of abstraction, and in a better light his interlocutor would not have failed to remark the swift change from dubiety to assurance.

"Will you bear with me, Mr. Denby, if I say that your methods are a little indirect? You say that the evidence is against James Garvin, and yet you give me to understand that it will be well if I can clear myself."

"Exactly; a word of assurance is sometimes worth many deductions."

"But if, for reasons of my own, I refuse to say the word?"

The promoter's shrug was barely perceptible. "I don't see why you should refuse."

Jeffard went silent at that, lying back with closed eyes and no more than a twitching of the lips to show that he was not asleep. After what seemed an interminable interval to the mine-owner, he said: —