The Helpers

"Miss Elliott? No; I didn't know she knew him."

"She met him a time or two; which is another way of saying that she knows him better than we do. She's a whole assay outfit when it comes to sizing people up."

"What was her opinion of Jeffard?" Lansdale was curious to know if it confirmed his own.

"Oh, she thinks he is a grand rascal, of course, – as everybody does."

"Naturally," said Lansdale, having in mind the proletary's later reincarnations as vagrant and starveling. "You didn't see much of him after he got fairly into the toboggan and on the steeper grades, did you?"

"Here in Denver? – no. But what I did see was enough to show that he was pretty badly tiger-bitten. You told me afterward that he took the post-graduate course in his particular specialty."

"He did; sunk his shaft, as you mining folk would say, straight on down to the chaotic substrata; pawned himself piecemeal to feed the animals, and went hungry between times by way of contrast."

"Poor devil!" said Bartrow, speaking in the past tense.

"Yes, in all conscience; but not so much for what he suffered as for what he was."

The distinction was a little abstruse for a man whose nayword was obviousness, but for the better part of a year Bartrow had been borrowing of Miss Van Vetter; among other things some transplantings of subtlety.

"That's where we come apart," he objected, with amiable obstinacy. "You think the root of the thing is in the man, – has been in him all along, and only waiting for a chance to sprout. Now I don't. I think it's in the atmosphere; in the – the" —

"Environment?" suggested Lansdale.

"Yes, I guess that's the word; something outside of the man; something that he didn't make, and isn't altogether to blame for, and can't always control."

The man with a moiety of the seer's gift suffered his eyebrows to arch query-wise. "Doesn't that ask for a remodeling of the accepted theory of good and evil?"

"No, you don't!" laughed Bartrow. "You are not going to pull me in over my head, if I know it. But I'll wrestle with you from now till midnight on my own ground. You take the best fellow in the world, brought up on good wholesome bread and meat and the like, and stop his rations for awhile. Then, when he is hungry enough, you give him a rag to chew, and he'll proceed to chew it, – not necessarily because he likes the taste of the rag, or because he was born with the rag-chewing appetite, but simply for the reason that you have put it in his mouth, and, being hungry, he's got to chew something. Jeffard is a case in point."

"Let us leave Jeffard and the personal point of view out of the question and stand it upon its own feet," rejoined Lansdale, warming to the fray. "Doubtless Jeffard's problem is divisible by the common human factor, whatever that may be, but your theory makes it too easy for the evil-doer. Consequently I can't admit it, – not even in Jeffard's case."

"I could make you admit it," retorted Bartrow, with generous warmth, forgetting the dishonored note in the Leadville bank, and remembering only the year agone partnership in brother-keeping. "You can size people up ten times to my once, – you ought to; it's right in your line, – but I know Jeffard worlds better than you do, and I could tell you things about him that would make you weep. Since he did those things I've had a rattling good chance to change my mind about him, but I'm not going to do it till I have to. I'm going to keep on believing that away down deep under this devil's-drift of – what was it you called it? – environment, there's a streak of good clean ore. It may take the stamp-mill or the smelter to get it out, but it's there all the same. He may fall down on you and me and all of his friends at any one of a dozen pinches, – he has fallen down on me, and pretty middling hard, too, – but there will come a pinch sometime that will pull him up short, and then you'll see what is in the lower levels of him, – what was there all the time, waiting for somebody to sink a shaft deep enough to tap it."

Lansdale took the cigar Bartrow was proffering and clipped the end of it, reflectively deliberate. He was silent so long that Bartrow said: "Well? you don't believe it, eh?"

"I wouldn't say that," Lansdale rejoined abstractedly; "anyway, not of Jeffard. Perhaps you are right. He has given me the same impression at times, but he was always saying or doing something immediately afterward to obliterate it. But I was wondering why you prophesy so confidently about a man who, for aught we know, took himself out of the world the better part of a year ago."

"Suicided? – not much! He's alive all right; very much alive and very much on top, as far as money is concerned. You don't read the papers, I take it?"

Lansdale's smile was of weariness. "Being at present a reporter on one of them I read them as little as may be. What should I have read that I didn't?"

"To begin back a piece, you should have read last fall about the big free-gold strike in the Elk Mountains, and an exciting little scrap between two men to get the first location on it."

"I remember that."

"Well, one of the men – the successful one – was Jeffard; our Jeffard. Your newspaper accomplices didn't spell his name right, – won't spell it right yet, – but it's Henry Jeffard, and yesterday's 'Coloradoan' says he's on his way to Denver to play leading man in the bonanza show."

Lansdale went silent what time it took to splice out the past with the present. After which he said: "I understand now why Miss Elliott condemns him, but not quite clearly why you defend him. As I remember it, the man who got possession of the Midas posed as a highwayman of the sort that the law can't punish. What has he to say for himself?"

Bartrow shook his head. "I don't know. I haven't seen him since one day last fall; the day of the locomotive chase."

"Did you know then that he was going to steal his partner's mine?"

"No. I thought then that he was going to do the other thing. And I'll not believe yet that he hasn't done the other thing. It's the finish I'm betting on. He may have flown the track at all the turns, – at this last turn as well as the others, – but when it comes to the home stretch, you watch him put his shoulder into the collar and remember what I said. I hope we'll both be there to see."

"So be it," Lansdale acquiesced. "It isn't in me to smash any man's ideal. And if anything could make me have faith in my kind, I think your belief in the inherent virtue of the race would work the miracle."

Bartrow laughed again, and pushed back his chair.

"It does you a whole lot of good to play at being a cold-blooded man-hater, doesn't it? But it's no go. Your practice doesn't gee with your preaching. Let's go out on the porch and smoke, if it won't be too cool for you."

They left the dining-room together and strolled out through the crowded lobby, lighting their cigars at the news-stand in passing. There was a convention of some sort in progress, and a sprinkling of the delegates, with red silk badges displayed, was scattered among the chairs on the veranda. Bartrow found two chairs a little apart from the decorated ones, faced them, and tilted his own against the railing. When his cigar was well alight he bethought him of a neglected duty.

"By the way, old man, I've never had the grace to say 'much obliged' for your neatness and dispatch in carrying out my wire order. I suppose you've forgotten it months ago, but I haven't. It was good of you. Connie wrote me about it at the time, and she said a whole lot of pretty things about the way you climbed into the breach."

"Did she?" Lansdale's habitual reserve fell away from him like a cast garment, and if Bartrow had been less oblivious to face readings he might have seen that which would have made his heart ache. But he saw nothing and went on, following his own lead.

"Yes; she said you took hold like a good fellow, and hung on like a dog to a root, – that is, she didn't say that, of course, but that was the sense of it. I'm obliged, a whole lot."

"You needn't be. The obligation is on my side. It was a pleasure to try to help Miss Elliott, even if I wasn't able to accomplish anything worth mentioning."

"Yes. She's good people; there's no discount on that. But say, you didn't size up Pete Grim any better than you had to. A good stiff bluff is about the only thing he can appreciate."

"If you had heard me talk to him you would have admitted that I was trying to bluff him the best I knew how," said Lansdale.

Bartrow laughed unfeelingly. "Tried to scare him with a lawsuit, didn't you? What do you suppose a man like Grim cares for the law? Why, bless your innocent soul, he can buy all the law he needs six days in the week and get it gratis on the seventh. But you might have fetched him down with a gun."

Lansdale tried to imagine himself attempting such a thing and failed. "I'm afraid I couldn't have done that – successfully. It asks for a little practice, doesn't it? and from what I have learned of Mr. Peter Grim in my small dealings with him, I fancy he wouldn't make a very tractable lay-figure for a beginner to experiment on. But we worried the thing through after a fashion, and recovered the young woman's sewing-machine finally."

"Bought Grim off, didn't you?"

"That was what it amounted to. Miss Elliott's father came to the rescue."

"There's a man for you!" declared Bartrow. "Built from the ground up, and white all the way through. And Connie's just like him. She's first cousin to the angels when she isn't making game of you. But I suppose you don't need to have anybody sing her praises to you at this late day."

"No; that is why I say the obligation is on my side. I am indebted to your 'wire order' for more things than I could well catalogue."

Bartrow rocked gently on the hinder legs of his chair, assuring himself that one of the things needed not to be listed. After which he became diplomatically abstruse on his own account. Two of the decorated ones came by, promenading arm in arm, and he waited until they were out of hearing.

"Found them good people to know, didn't you? Bueno! You used to hibernate a heap too much." Then, with labored indifference: "What do you think of Miss Van Vetter?"

Lansdale laughed.

"Whatever you would like to have me think, my dear boy. Shall I say that she is the quintessence of all the virtuous graces and the graceful virtues? – a paragon of para – "

"Oh, come off!" growled the abstruse one. "You've been taking lessons of Connie. You know what I mean. Do I – that is – er – do you think I stand a ghost of a show there? Honest, now."

"My dear Richard, if I could look into the heart of a young woman and read what is therein written, I could pass poverty in the street with a nod contemptuous. I'd be a made man."