The Helpers

"Yes."

"And that your silence makes it rather hard for your friends?"

"I have no friends, Lansdale."

"Oh, yes, you have; or you would have if you would take the trouble to set yourself aright."

"What if I cannot set myself aright?"

"I should be sorry to believe that, – more than sorry to be driven to admit the alternative."

"What is the alternative?"

Lansdale hesitated, as one who has his point at his adversary's breast and is loath to drive it in. "I don't quite like to put it in words, Jeffard; the English is a bit harsh. But you will understand that it is the smiting of a friend. So long as you refuse to say you didn't, the supposition is that you have robbed a man to whom you were under rather heavy obligations."

"Is that Bartrow's supposition?"

"He says it isn't, but I'm afraid the wish is the father to the thought: in his case as in – as in that of others." Lansdale added the inclusive in the hope that the wound would be the better for probing.

Jeffard's laugh was altogether bitter. "'Give a dog a bad name,'" he quoted. "Do you know, I fancied Dick would be obstinate enough to stand out against the apparent fact?"

"That is precisely what he has done, and with less reason than the most devoted partisan might demand. You know you told him that the claim was Garvin's. He wouldn't believe the newspaper story; he insisted that you would be able to 'square' yourself, as he phrased it, when you came out."

Jeffard was looking past his interlocutor, out and beyond to where the farther tables were emptying themselves of the late diners.

"Yet it is his supposition; and your own, you were going to say. Is it Miss Elliott's also?"

Lansdale resisted the impulse to rummage again, and said: "I don't know that – how should I know? But rumor has made the charge, and you have not denied it."

"I don't mean to deny it – not even to her. But neither have I admitted it."

"My dear Jeffard! aren't the facts an admission? – at least, so long as they stand uncontradicted."

"Everybody seems to think so, – and I can afford to be indifferent."

"Having the money, you mean? – possibly. Am I to take that as an admission of the facts?"

"Facts are fixtures, aren't they? things not to be set up or set aside by admissions or denials. But you may take it as you please."

Lansdale shook his head as one whose deprecation is too large for speech. "I can't begin to understand it, Jeffard, – the motive which could impel a man of your convictions, I mean."

Jeffard broke forth in revilings. "What do you know about my convictions? What do you know about anything in the heart of man? You have a set of formulas which you call types, and into which you try to fit all human beings arbitrarily, each after his kind. It's the merest child's-play; a fallacy based on an assumption. No two men can be squared by the same rule; no two will do the same things under exactly similar conditions. Character-study is your specialty, I believe; but you have yet to learn that the human atom is an irresponsible individuality."

"Oh, no, I haven't; I grant you that. But logically" —

"Logic has nothing whatever to do with it. It's ego, pure and unstrained, in most of us; a sluggish river of self, with a quicksand of evil for its bottom."

Lansdale borrowed a gun of his antagonist, and sighted it accurately.

"What do you know about humanity as a whole? What do you know about any part of it save your own infinitesimal fraction? – which seems to be a rather unfair sample."

Jeffard confessed judgment and paid the costs. "I don't know very much about the sample, Lansdale. One time – it was in the sophomore year, I believe – I thought I knew my own potentialities. But I didn't. If any one had prophesied then that I had it in me to do what I have done, I should have demanded a miracle to confirm it."

"But you must justify yourself to yourself," Lansdale persisted.

"Why must I? That is another of your cut-and-dried formulas. So far from recognizing any such obligation, I may say that I gave up trying to account for myself a long time ago. And if I have found it impossible, it isn't worth while for you to try."

Lansdale was not the man to bruise his hands with much beating upon the barred doors of any one's confidence. So he said, "I'm done. It's between you and your conscience, – if you haven't eliminated that with the other things. But I had hoped you'd see fit to defend yourself. The eternal query is sharp enough without the pointing of particular instances."

Jeffard squared himself, with his elbows on the table.

"Do you want an hypothesis, too? – as another man did? Take this, and make the most of it. You knew me and my lacks and havings. You knew that I had reached a point at which I would have pawned my soul for the wherewithal to purchase a short hour or two of forgetfulness. Hold that picture in your mind, and conceive that a summer of unsuccessful prospecting had not changed me for better or worse. Is the point of view unobstructed?"

"The point of view is your own, not mine," Lansdale objected. "And, moreover, the summer did change you, because advancement in some direction is an irrefrangible law. But go on."

"I will. This man whom you have in mind was suddenly brought face to face with a great temptation, – great and subtle. Garvin drove the tunnel on the Midas three years ago and abandoned it as worthless. It was my curiosity which led to the discovery of the gold. It was I who took the sample to the assayer and carried the news of the bonanza to Garvin. I might have kept the knowledge to myself, but I didn't. Why? do you ask? I don't know – perhaps because it didn't occur to me. What followed Bartrow has told you, but not all. Let us assume that the race to Aspen was made in good faith; that this man who had put honor and good report behind him really meant to stand between a drunken fool and the fate he was rushing upon. Can you go so far with me?"

Lansdale nodded. He was spellbound, but it was the artist in him and not the man who hung breathless upon the edge of expectancy.

"Very well; now for the crux. This man knelt behind a locked door and heard himself execrated by the man he was trying to save; heard the first kindly impulse he had yielded to in months distorted into a desperate plan to rob the cursing maniac. Is it past belief that he crept away from the locked door and sat down to ask himself in hot resentment why he should go on? Is it not conceivable that he should have begun to give ear to the plea of self-preservation? – to say to himself that if the maniac were no better than a lost man it was no reason that the treasure should be lost also?"

It was altogether conceivable, and Lansdale nodded again. Jeffard found a cigar and went on while he was clipping the end of it.

"But that was not all. Picture this man at the crumbling point of resolution tiptoeing to the door to listen again. He has heard enough to convince him that the miracle of fortune will be worse than wasted upon the drunken witling. Now he is to hear that the besotted fool has already transferred whatever right he had in the Midas to the two despoilers; signed a quitclaim, sold his miracle for a drink or two of whiskey, more or less. Are you listening?"

Lansdale moistened his lips with the lees of the tea in the empty cup, and said, "Yes; go on."

Jeffard sat back and lighted the cigar. "That's all," he said curtly. "It's enough, isn't it? You knew the man a year ago; you think you know him now. What would he do?"

If the hypothesis were intended to be a test of blind loyalty it missed the mark by just so much as the student of his kind must hold himself aloof from sympathetic entanglements. Lansdale weighed the evidence, not as a partisan, but rather as an onlooker whose point of view was wholly extrinsic.

"I understand," said he; "the man would do as you have done. It's your own affair. As I said a few minutes ago, it is between you and your private conscience. And I dare say if the facts were known the public conscience wouldn't condemn you. Don't you want to use the columns of the 'Coloradoan'?"

Jeffard's negative was explosive. "Do you write me down a fool as well as a knave? Damn the public conscience!"

"Don't swear; I was only offering to turn the stone for you if you've anything to grind."

"I haven't. If I wanted the consent of the majority I could buy it, – buy it if I had shot the maniac instead of letting him shoot me."

"Possibly; and yet you couldn't buy any fraction of it that is worth having," Lansdale asserted, with conviction. "There are a few people left who have not bowed the head in the house of Rimmon."

The cynical hardness went out of Jeffard's eye and lip, and for the first time since the proletary's reincarnation, Lansdale fancied he got a brief glimpse of the man he had known in the day of sincerity.

"A few, yes; the Elliotts, father and daughter, for two, you would say. I wonder if you could help me there."

"To their good opinion? – my dear Jeffard, I'm no professional conscience-keeper!"

"No, I didn't mean that. What I had in mind is a much simpler thing. A year ago Miss Elliott gave me of her abundance. She meant it as a gift, though I made it a loan and repaid the principal – when I was able to. But I am still in her debt. Measured by consequences, which are the only true interest-table, the earnings of her small investment are hardly to be computed in dollars and cents. Naturally, she won't take that view of it, but that does not cancel my obligation. Will you help me to discharge it? They need money."