The Helpers

    "Connie."

CHAPTER XXVI

On the long day-ride from Alta Vista to Denver, Bartrow dwelt upon Myra's letter until the hopefulness of it took possession of him, urging him to reconsider his determination to give up the fight on the Little Myriad. That which seems to have fortified itself beyond peradventure of doubt in the night season is prone to open the door to dubiety in the morning; and the hope which McMurtrie's verdict had quenched came to life again, setting the mill of retrieval agrind, though, apart from the suggestion in Myra's letter, there was little enough for grist.

From admitting the hope to considering ways and means was but a step in the march of returning confidence; and, setting aside Myra's proposal as an alternative which would bring victory at the expense of the cause in which the battle was fought, he was moved to break his promise to himself and to ask help of Stephen Elliott. This decision was not reached without a day-long struggle, in which pride and generosity fought shoulder to shoulder against the apparent necessity. The pioneer had more than once offered to back the promise of the Little Myriad; but Bartrow, knowing Elliott's weakness in the matter of money keeping, had steadily refused to open another door of risk to the old man who had fathered him from boyhood, and whose major infirmity was an open-handed willingness to lend to any borrower.

But the necessity was most urgent. Bartrow rehearsed the condoning facts and set them over against his promise to himself. If he should give up the fight the Little Myriad would be lost, he would be left hopelessly in debt, and the beatific vision, with Miss Van Vetter for its central figure, vanished at once into the limbo of things unrealizable. Moreover, the investment would be less hazardous for the pioneer than at any previous time in the history of the mine. Notwithstanding the discouragements, it was a heartening fact that the ore-bearing vein was steadily widening; and the last mill-run assay, made a week before, had shown a cheering increase in value.

Bartrow weighed the pros and cons for the twentieth time while the train was speeding over the ultimate mile of the long run, and finally yielded to the importunate urgings of the necessity. The first step was to take Connie into his confidence; and when the train reached Denver he hurried to the hotel, full of the new hope and eager to begin the campaign of retrieval. While he was inscribing his name in the register the clerk asked a question.

"Just come down from the range, Mr. Bartrow?"

"Yes. Can you give me my old room?"

"Certainly." The clerk wrote the number opposite the name. "What do they say up in the carbonate camp about the Lodestar business?"

"The Lodestar? I don't know. I haven't been in Leadville. I came down from the Bonanza district on the other line. Anything broke loose?"

"Haven't you heard? The big producer is played out."

"What!"

"Fact; struck a 'lime horse' two weeks ago, and they've been keeping it dark and unloading the stock right and left. You are not in it, I hope?"

Bartrow was not, but he knew that Elliott was; knew, too, that in any unloading sauve qui peut the old pioneer would most likely be one of those found dead in the deserted trenches. Wherefore he slurred his supper and hastened out to the house in Colfax Avenue, not to ask help, as he had prefigured, but to ascertain if there were not some way in which a broken man might tender it.

There was a light in the library and none in the parlor; and Bartrow, being rather more a brevet member of Stephen Elliott's family than a visitor, nodded to the servant who admitted him, hung up his coat and hat, and walked unannounced into the lighted room. When he discovered that the library held but one occupant, that the shapely head bending over a book in the cone of light beneath the reading-lamp was not Connie's, he realized the magnitude of Connie's duplicity, and equanimity forsook him.

Miss Van Vetter shut her finger in her book and smiled as if his sudden appearance were quite a matter of course.

"I hoped you would come," she said. "Have you been to dinner?"

The prosaic question might have enabled a less ingenuous man to cover his discomposure with some poor verbal mantle of commonplace or what not; but Bartrow could only murmur "Good Lord!" sinking therewith into the hollow of the nearest chair because his emotion was too great to be borne standing.

Since she was not a party to Connie's small plot, Myra was left to infer that her visitor was ill, and she rose in sympathetic concern.

"Why, Mr. Bartrow! is anything the matter? Shall I get you something? a glass of wine, or" —

Bartrow shook his head and besought her with both hands to sit down again. "No, nothing, thank you; it's miles past that sort of mending. Do you – do you happen to know where your cousin is?"

"Why, yes; she has gone to Boulder with Uncle Stephen."

"I – I thought you were going," Bartrow stammered.

It did not occur to Miss Van Vetter to wonder why he should have thought anything about it.

"I thought so myself, up to the last moment," she rejoined.

Bartrow leaned forward with his hands on his knees.

"Miss Myra, would you – do you mind telling me why you didn't go?" He said it with reproachful gravity.

Miss Van Vetter's poise was an inheritance which had lost nothing in transmission, but the unconscious reproach in his appeal overset it. Under less trying conditions her laugh would have emancipated him; but being still in the bonds of unreadiness, he could only glower at her in a way which lacked nothing of hostility save intention, and say, "I should think you might tell me what you're laughing at!"

"Oh, nothing – nothing at all. Only one would think you were sorry I didn't go. Are you?"

"You know well enough I'm not." This time the reproach was not unconscious. "But you haven't answered my question. I have a horrible suspicion, and I want to know."

"It was Connie's mistake. I was to meet them at the station at half past four – I am sure she said half past four – and when I went down I found the train had been gone an hour. Did you ever hear of such a thing?"

Miss Van Vetter did not know that the small arch-plotter had exhausted her ingenuity trying to devise some less primitive means of accomplishing her purpose; but Bartrow gave Connie full credit for act and intention.

"She'd do worse things than that; she wouldn't stick at anything to carry her point," he said unguardedly.

Myra laughed again. "I hope you don't ask me to believe that she did it purposely," she said.

"Oh, no; of course not. I don't ask you to believe anything – except that I'm foolishly glad you missed the train," rejoined the downright one, beginning to find himself.

"Are you, really? I was almost ready to doubt it."

Bartrow was not yet fit to measure swords of repartee with any one, least of all with Miss Van Vetter, and the quicksand of speechlessness engulfed him. His helplessness was so palpable that it presently became infectious, and Myra was dismayed to find herself growing sympathetically self-conscious. Her letter lay between their last meeting and this, and she began to wonder if that were the barrier. When the silence became portentous, Bartrow gathered himself for another dash toward enlargement. It was that or asphyxia. The very air of the room was heavy with the narcosis of embarrassment.

"Your letter came yesterday," he began abruptly.

"Did it? And you have come to tell me to – to tell me to mind my own business? as I said you might?"

"No, indeed, I haven't. But I can't do it, all the same – drag your friend in on the Myriad."

"Was Mr. Lansdale mistaken? Don't you need more capital to go on with?"

"Need it? – well, yes; rather. But I can't take your Mr. Grimsby's money."

"Why not?"

"Because" – the low-pitched hollow of the big lounging-chair seemed to put him at a disadvantage, and he struggled up out of it to tramp back and forth before her – "well, in the first place, because he is your friend; and if he wasn't, I have no security to offer him – collateral, I suppose he'd call it."

"He is not exactly my friend, within your meaning of the word; and he will not ask you to secure him."

He stopped and looked down upon her. She was shading her eyes from the sheen of the reading-lamp and turning the leaves of the book.

"What does he know about the Little Myriad? anything more than you have told him?"

"No."

"And yet you say he is willing to put up money on it?"

"He is ready to help you – yes."