The Helpers

"Oh, you be hanged, will you? You're a wild ass of the lamb-ranches, and wisdom has shook you," Bartrow rejoined, relapsing into vituperation. "Why can't you quit braying for a minute or so and be serious? It's a serious world, for the bigger part."

"Do you find it so? with a Miss Van Vetter for an eye-piece to your telescope? I am astonished."

Bartrow pulled his hat over his eyes and enveloped himself in a cloud of smoke. "When you're ready to fold up your ears and be human people again, just let me know, will you?" This from the midst of the smoke-cloud.

"Don't sulk, my Achilles; you shall have your Briseis, – if you can get her," laughed Lansdale. "Miss Van Vetter hasn't made a confidant of me, but I'll tell you a lot of encouraging little fibs, if that will help you."

Bartrow fanned an opening in the tobacco-nimbus. "What do you think about it?"

"I think I should find out for myself, if I were you," said Lansdale, with becoming gravity.

"I don't believe you would."

"Why?"

"Miss Van Vetter is rich."

"And Mr. Richard Bartrow is only potentially so. That is a most excellent reason, but I shouldn't let it overweigh common sense. From what Miss Elliott has said I infer that her cousin's fortune is not large enough to overawe the owner of a promising mine."

Bartrow's chair righted itself with a crash.

"That's the devil of it, Lansdale; that's just what scares me out. I've been pecking away in the Myriad for a year and a half now, and we're in something over four hundred feet – in rock, not ore. If we don't strike pay in the immediate hence I'm a ruined community. I've borrowed right and left, and piled up debt enough to keep me in a cold sweat for the next ten years. That's the chilly fact, and I leave it to you if I hadn't better take the night train and skip out for Topeka Mountain without going near Steve Elliott's."

The red-badges were passing again, and Lansdale took time to consider it. The appeal threw a new side-light on the character of the young miner, and Lansdale made mental apologies for having misjudged him. When he replied it was out of the heart of sincerity.

"It's a hard thing to say, but if you have stated the case impartially, I don't know but you would better do just that, Dick. From what I have seen of Miss Van Vetter, I should hazard a guess that the success or failure of the Little Myriad wouldn't move her a hair's-breadth, but that isn't what you have to consider."

"No." Bartrow said it from the teeth outward, looking at his watch. "It's tough, but I guess you're right. I can just about make it if I get a quick move. Will you go down to the train with me?"

Lansdale assented, and they walked the few squares to the Union Depot in silence. The narrow-gauge train was coupled and ready to leave, and Bartrow tossed his handbag to the porter of the sleeping-car.

"You're a cold-blooded beggar, do you know it?" he said, turning upon Lansdale with as near an approach to petulance as his invincible good-nature would sanction. "Here I've lost a whole day and ridden a hundred and fifty miles just to get a sight of her, and now you won't let me have it."

Lansdale laughed and promptly evaded the responsibility. "Don't lay it on my shoulders; I have sins enough of my own to answer for. It's a little hard, as you say, but it is your own suggestion."

"Is it? I don't know about that. It has been with me for a good while, but it never knocked me quite out until I began to wonder what you'd do in my place. That settled it. And you're not out of it by a large majority. What are you going to tell them up at Elliott's? – about me, I mean."

"Why should I tell them anything?"

"Because you can't help yourself. Elliott knows I'm in town, – knows we were going to eat together. I met him on the way up to dinner."

"Oh, I'll tell them anything you say."

"Thanks. Fix it up to suit yourself, – wired to come back on first train, or something of that sort. Anything'll do; anything but the truth."

Lansdale's smile was inscrutable. He was thinking how impossible it would be for the most accomplished dissembler to tell aught but the truth with Constance Elliott's calm gray eyes upon him.

"I am afraid I shall make a mess of it."

"If you do, I'll come back and murder you. It's bad enough as it is. I've got a few days to go on, and I don't want them to know that the jig is definitely up until it can't be helped."

"Then you'd better write a note and do your own lying," said Lansdale. "I can spin fetching little fictions on paper and sign my name to them, but I'm no good at the other kind."

The engine-bell clanged, putting the alternative out of the question.

"That lets me out," Bartrow said. "You go up there and square it right for me; savez? And say, Lansdale, old man; don't work yourself too hard. In spite of the lamb-ranch, you look thinner than usual, and that's needless. Good-by."

Bartrow wrung his friend's hand from the steps of the Pullman, and Lansdale laughed quite cheerfully.

"Don't you waste any sympathy on me," he said. "I'm going to disappoint you all and get well. Good-night; and success to the Little Myriad."

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."