The Helpers

"Did, eh? It's a pity; he's a good blacksmith if he'd only let whiskey alone. Try him in the morning next time, and maybe you'll catch him sober."

"Don't make any dif'rence 'bout the time o' day with him. He's full all the time, he is."

Bartrow's curiosity was beginning to bestir itself, but he put it under foot till he had climbed to the three-roomed cabin on the bench above the tunnel-opening. Wun Ling was laying the table for supper, and the master of the mine sat down on the porch to read his letter. It was from Miss Van Vetter; and the glow on Bartrow's sunburned face as he read it was not altogether the ruddy reflection from the piled-up masses of sunset crimson in the western sky.

"Dear Mr. Bartrow," she wrote: "Mr. Lansdale has just been here, and we made him tell us about your trouble, though he tried very hard not to. From which we infer that you didn't want us to know, – and that was wrong. If one cannot go to one's friends at such times, it is surely a very thankless world.

"Constance told me some time ago that you might not be able to go on with the Little Myriad without the investment of more capital, and I have written about it to a friend of mine in the East who has money to invest. You may call it a most unwarrantable impertinence if you please, but I'm not going to apologize for it, – not here. If you would really like to humble me, I'll give you plenary indulgence when you come to see us.

"I inclose my friend's Philadelphia address, and I may say with confidence that I am quite sure he will help you if you will write him.

"We have abundant faith in you and in the Little Myriad. Don't think of giving up, and please don't evade us when you are next in Denver."

Bartrow absorbed it by littles, and sat fingering the slip of paper with the Philadelphia address on it, quite unheedful of Wun Ling's thrice-repeated announcement that supper was ready. It was his first letter from her, and the fact was easily subversive of presence of mind. Not until the lilt of it had a little outworn itself could he bring himself down to any fair-minded consideration of the offer of help. But when it finally came to that, he put the letter in his pocket and went in to supper, smiling ineffably and shaking his head as one who has set his face flintwise against temptation.

An hour later, however, when he was smoking his pipe on the porch step, the temptation beset him afresh. His faith in the ultimate success of the mine had never wavered. It was unshaken even now, when he was at the end of his resources, and a thing had happened which threatened to demand a costly change in the method of exploiting the lode. But to be confident for himself and for those who, knowing the hazard, had helped him hitherto, was one thing; and to take a stranger's money was quite another. And when the stranger chanced to be the friend of the woman he loved, a person who would invest in the Little Myriad solely on the ground of Miss Van Vetter's recommendation, the difference magnified itself until it took the shape of a prohibition.

The light had faded out of the western sky, and the peaks of the main range stood out in shadowy relief against the star-dusted background. The homely noises in Wun Ling's sanctum had ceased, and silence begirt the great mountain. Bartrow tossed the extinct pipe through an open window, and began to pace the length of the slab-floored porch. It was not in him to give up without another struggle; a final struggle, he called it, though none knew better that there is no final struggle for a strong man save that which crowns perseverance with the chaplet of fruition. The temptation to grasp the hand held out to him was very subtle. If Miss Van Vetter could have been eliminated – if only the proposal had come direct from the Philadelphia capitalist, instead of through her.

The sound of footsteps on the gravel at the tunnel's mouth broke into his reverie, and the figure of a man loomed dimly in the darkness at the foot of the path leading up to the cabin. It was McMurtrie, the mining engineer in charge of the Big Bonanza at Alta Vista. Bartrow called down to him.

"Is that you, Mac? Don't come up; I'll be with you in a second."

The engineer sat down on a tool-box and waited.

"I'm a little late," he said, when Bartrow came down the path. "It's pay-day at the Bonanza. Get a lamp and let's go in and have a look at your new grief."

"You didn't need to tramp up here in the dark," Bartrow rejoined, feeling in a niche in the timbering for a miner's lamp. "I'd given you up for to-night."

"Oh, I said I'd come, and I'm here. I know how it feels to be on the ragged edge, – been there myself. Is that the best lamp you could find? It isn't much better than a white bean. Pick it up a little higher so I can see the wet spots. It's too chilly to go in swimming to-night."

They were picking their way through the damp tunnel, Bartrow ahead with the lamp held high. The "new grief" was an apparent change in the direction of the ore-bearing crevice from its slight inclination upward to a sharp pitch downward; and Bartrow had asked McMurtrie to come up and look at it.

In the heading the engineer took the lamp and made a careful examination of the rock face of the cutting, tracing the outline of the vein with the flame of the lamp, and picking off bits of the shattered rock to determine the lines of cleavage. Bartrow stood aside and waited for the verdict; waited with a tense thrill of nervousness which was quite new to him; and the monotonous drip-drip of the water percolating through the tunnel roof magnified itself into a din like the ringing of hammers upon an anvil.

"Well, what do you say?" he queried, when the engineer made an end and began to fill his pipe.

"You're in for it, Dick, – here, hold this lamp a minute, will you? It's a pretty well-defined dip in the formation, and I'm afraid it has come to stay. That means an incline."

The echo took up Bartrow's ironical laugh and gave it back in mocking reiteration.

"Yes; an incline at the end of a four-hundred-and-forty-foot tunnel, and a steam hoist, and a pumping outfit, and a few other little knickknacks. Say a couple of thousand dollars or so before I can turn a wheel."

McMurtrie bent to light his pipe at the flame of the lamp. "That's about the size of it. Hold that lamp still, can't you?"

"Hold it yourself," retorted Bartrow; and he took a turn in the darkness to steady his nerves. When he stumbled back into the dim nimbus of lamplight he had fought and won his small battle.

"Don't lay it up against me, Mac," he said, in blunt contrition. "It knocked me out for a minute. You know I've been backing my luck here for all I'm worth."

"Yes, I know that. What will you do now?"

"Quit; come off the perch; shut up shop and pull down the blinds. It's all there is to do."

"And give it up?"

"And give it up. Bank's broke; or at least it will be when I've paid the men another time or two."

McMurtrie had Scotch blood in his veins, and was cannily chary of offering unasked advice. None the less, he did it.

"I'd borrow a little more nerve and go on, if it were mine."

"So would I if I could."

"Can't you?"

Bartrow said "no," changed it to "yes," and then qualified the assent until it, too, became a negation.

"It's a pity," was the engineer's comment. "I believe another hundred feet would let you in for a decently good thing."

"So do I. But it might as well be a thousand. I know when I'm downed."

McMurtrie scoffed openly at that, taking his pipe from his mouth to say: "That's the one thing you don't know. You'll chew on it a while and go to Denver; and in a day or so your men will get orders to go on. I've seen you downed before. Why don't you go back East and marry a rich girl? That's the way to develop a mine."

It was a random shot, but it went so near the mark that Bartrow winced, and was thankful that the flaring miner's lamp was not an arc-light. And his rejoinder ignored the matrimonial suggestion.

"You're off wrong this time, Mac. I wish you didn't have to be. But it's no use. I'm in debt till I can't see out over the top of it, and I couldn't raise another thousand on the Myriad if I should try, – that is, not in Colorado. If I go to Denver it'll be to turn over my collateral and let everybody down as easy as I can."

"Then don't go yet a while."

Bartrow took the lamp and led the way out of the tunnel.

"I did mean to stand it off to the last minute," he said, when they were once more under the stars, "but I don't know as it's worth while now. Will you come up to the shack and smoke a few lines? No? Then wait till I get my coat and I'll walk down to camp with you. I want to do a little wiring before I turn in."

They parted at the railway station above the camp at the foot of Bonanza Mountain, and Bartrow went in to send his message. In the hour of defeat he yearned, manlike, for sympathy; and it was to Connie that his cry went out. Notwithstanding the earnestness of it, the appeal was consistently characteristic in its wording.

"I'm hunting sympathy. Can you give me a lonesome hour or two if I come down? Answer while I wait."

He asked the night operator to rush it, and sat down with his feet on the window-sill to smoke out the interval. A half-hour later, when the operator was jogging Denver for a reply to his "rush," the din of an affray floated up to the open window from the camp in the gulch. The operator came to the window and looked down upon the twinkling lights of the town.

"That's the blacksmith again," he said. "He's been on a steady bat for two weeks, and the camp isn't big enough to hold him."

"He'll kill himself, if he don't mind," Bartrow prophesied. "He's raw yet, and hasn't found out that a man can't stand the drink up here that he could in the valley."

"No. Doc said he had a touch of the jimmies last night. He yelled for his daughter till they heard him up at the shaft-house of the Bonanza. McMurtrie said" – But what the engineer's commentary had been was lost to Bartrow, since the clicking sounder was snipping out the reply to the "rush" message.

The operator wrote it out and handed it to Bartrow. The answer was as characteristic as the appeal.

"Two of the three of us go to Boulder to-morrow to return by the late train. The other one is most sympathetic. Come.