The Helpers

"Of course we'll stay," she assented. "You go with Connie and help make the tea, Dick. I haven't begun to have a visit with Uncle Stephen yet."

Bartrow gave up the fight and was led captive of the small one to the room across the corridor which served as a kitchen. Left alone with his sister's daughter, Stephen Elliott had a sudden return of the haltingnesses which the Philadelphia niece, newly arrived, used to inspire; but Myra asked only for an acquiescent listener.

"Uncle Stephen," she began, pinning him in the lounge-corner from which there was no possibility of escape, "I've been wanting to get at you all day, and I was afraid you weren't going to give me a chance. You have 'grub-staked' a lot of people, first and last, haven't you?"

The old man eyed her suspiciously for a moment, and then evidently banished the suspicion as a thing unworthy.

"Why, yes; I have staked a good few of them, first and last, as you say."

"I knew it, and I wanted to ask a question. How much money did you usually give them?"

The suspicion was well lulled by this; and finding himself upon familiar ground, the pioneer went into details.

"That depended a good deal upon the other fellow. Some of them – most of 'em, I was going to say – couldn't be trusted with money at all, and I'd go buy them an outfit and stay with them till they got out o' range of the saloons and green tables."

"But when you found one whom you could trust, how much money did you give him? I'm not idly curious; I know a man who wants to go prospecting, and I have promised to 'stake' him."

The suspicion raised its head again, and was promptly clubbed into submission. Some one of the Myriad men wanted to try his luck, and he had "braced" the wife rather than the husband. So thought the pioneer, and made answer accordingly.

"I wouldn't monkey with it, if I were you, Myra; leastwise, not without letting Dick into it. He's right on the ground, and he'll tell you how much you'd ought to put up; or – what's more likely – if you oughtn't to tell the fellow to stick to his day-pay in the mine."

"Dick knows," said Myra, anticipating the exact truth by some brief hour or so, "and he's quite willing. But you know Dick; if I should leave it with him he would give the man all he had and go and borrow for himself. I want a good sober conservative opinion, – not too conservative, you know, but just about what you would need if you were going out yourself."

Elliott became dubitantly reflective, being divided between a desire to spare Myra's purse and a disposition born of fellow-feelings to make it as easy as might be for the unknown beneficiary.

"Oh, I don't know," he said, at length. "If the fellow is going by himself, he won't need much; but if he takes a partner it'll just about double the stake. Is he going to play it alone?"

Myra could see through the open door into the adjoining room, and she saw Connie bringing in the tea. Time was growing precious, if the conclusion were not to be tripped up by an interruption.

"I suppose he'll take a partner; they always do, don't they? Anyway, I want to make it enough so that he can if he chooses. Please tell me how much."

"Well, if he knows how to cut the corners and how to outfit so as to make the most of what he has, he'd ought to be able to do it on a couple of hundred or so. But I don't know if that ain't pretty liberal," he added, as if upon second thought.

Myra went quickly to the table under the lamp, and wrote upon a slip of paper. Elliott thought she was making a note of her information; and when she put the check into his hands he took it mechanically. But her hurried explanation drove the firing-pin of intelligence.

"It's for you – you are the man, Uncle Stephen; and if it isn't enough, it's your own fault." She said it with one eye on the two in the next room, and with nerves taut-braced for the shock of refusal. The shock came promptly.

"Oh – say – here! Myra, girl; I can't take this from you!" He was on his feet, trying to give back the check; and as she eluded him he followed her about the room, protesting as he went. "It's just like you to offer it, but I can't, don't you see? I'll rope somebody else in; somebody that knows the chances. Here, take it back, – I'm getting pretty old, and just as like as not I won't find anything worth assaying. Come, now; you be a good girl, and" —

He had driven her into a corner, and it was time for the coup de main. So she put her arms about his neck and her face on his shoulder, and if the attack pathetic were no more than a clever bit of feigning, Stephen Elliott was none the wiser.

"I – I'd like to know what I have done!" she quavered. "You'd take it from a stranger – you said you would – and you've made me just the same as your own daughter, and now you wo – won't let me do the first little thing I've ever had a chance to do!"

There were more strong solvents of a similar nature in reserve, but they were not needed. The good old man was helplessly soluble in any woman's tears, real or invented; and his fine resolution melted and the bones of it became as water.

"There, there, little girl, don't you take on like that. I'll keep it. See? I've chucked it right down into the bottom of my pocket" – he was stroking her hair and otherwise gentling her as if she were a hurt child. "Don't you fret a little bit. I'll spend it – every last cent of it – just the way you want me to. You mustn't cry another tear; Dick'll think I've been abusing you, and he'll fire the old uncle out of one of these high windows. Haven't you got any handkerchief?"

Connie and Dick were at the door, announcing the bread and butter and tea, and Myra's handkerchief became a convenient mask for the moment. A less simple-hearted man than the old pioneer might have suspected the sincerity of such tears as may be wiped away at a word, leaving no trace behind them; but Elliott was too child-like to know aught of the fine art of dissimulation, and he took Myra's sudden return to cheerfulness as a tribute to his own astuteness in yielding a point at the critical moment.

At the tea-table they were all more or less hilarious, each having somewhat to conceal from the others; and even Bartrow was made to feel the thinness of the ice upon which the trivialities were skating. Much to Connie's surprise, the tactless one developed unsuspected resources of adroitness in keeping the table-talk at concert-pitch of levity; and she forgave him when he was brutal enough to make a jest of the simple meal, giving the bread and butter a new name with each asking, and accusing her of being in league with the commissary department of the sleeping-car company. It spoke volumes for Dick's growth in perspicacity that he was able to discern the keen edge of the crisis without having actually seen the stone upon which it had been whetted; and in the midst of her own fencings with the tensities, Constance found time to wonder how Myra had wrought even the beginning of such a miracle in the downright one.

In such resolute ignorings of the moving realities the supper interval was safely outworn; but when, at the end of it, Dick dragged out his watch and called "time," Constance found her tea too hot, and the drinking of it brought tears to her eyes. Whereupon the brutal one made an exaggerated pretense of sympathy, offering her a handkerchief; and the laugh saved them all until the good-bys were said, and the guests, with Elliott to speed their parting, had gone to the station.

Constance stood in the empty corridor until the farther stair ceased to echo their footsteps. The day-long strain was off at last, and she meant to go quickly and clear off the table and wash the supper dishes, to the end that the reaction might not overwhelm her. But on the way she stopped at the little square table in the larger room and took a letter from its hiding place at the back of a framed photograph. It was a double inclosure in an outside envelope which bore the business card of a well known legal firm; and the wrapping of the inner envelope was a note on the firm's letter-head, stating in terse phrase that the inclosed letter had been found under the door of an unoccupied house in Colfax Avenue by the writer in the early summer of the previous year; that it had been mislaid; and that it was now forwarded with many regrets for its unintentional suppression.

Constance read the note mechanically, as she had read it the day before when the postman had brought it. It explained nothing more than the mere fact of delay, but she understood. The writer of the lost letter, or his messenger, had thrust it under the door of the wrong house.

She laid the note aside and tilted the envelope to let a coin fall into her palm. It was a double-eagle piece, little worn, but the memories which clustered about its giving and taking seemed to dull the lustre of the yellow metal. It was the price of sorrowful humiliation, no whit less to the man who had taken than to the woman who had given it. She put it that way in an inflexible determination to be just. Truly, his acceptance of it was a thing to be remembered with cheek-burnings of shame; but she would not hold herself blameless. In the light of that which his letter disclosed, her charitable impulse became a sword to slay the last remnant of manly pride and self-respect – if any remnant there were.

She opened the letter and re-read it to the end, going back from the scarcely legible signature to a paragraph in the midst of it that bade fair to grave itself ineffaceably upon her heart.

"You may remember that I said I couldn't tell you the truth, because it concerns a woman. When I add that the woman is yourself, you will understand. I love you; I think I have been loving you ever since that evening which you said we were to forget – the evening at the theatre. Strangely enough, my love for you isn't strong in the strength which saves. I went from you that night when you had bidden me God-speed at Mrs. Calmaine's, and within the hour I was once more a penniless vagabond.

"When you were trying to help me this afternoon, I was trying to keep from saying that which I could never have a right to say. You pressed me very hard in your sweet innocence"…

She sat down and the letter slipped from her fingers. The hurt was a year in the past, but time had not yet dulled the pain of it. Not to any human soul, nor yet to her own heart, had she admitted the one living fact which stood unshaken; which would stand, like some polished corner-stone of a ruined temple, when all else should have crumbled into dust. For which cause she sat with clasped hands and eyes that saw not; eyes that were still deep wells and clear, but brimming with the bitter waters of a fountain which flows only for those whose loss is irreparable. And while she wept, the sorrowful under-thought slipped into speech.

"He calls it love, but it couldn't have been that. He says it wasn't strong in the strength that saves; and love is always mighty to succor the weak-hearted. I would have believed in him – I did believe in him, only I didn't know how to help. But no one could help when he didn't believe in himself; and now he is just drifting, with the cruel sword of opportunity loose in its scabbard, and all the unspeakable things dragging him whithersoever they will… And he meant to end it all when he wrote this letter; I know he did. That would have been terrible; but it would have been braver than to go on to robbery, and unfaith, and – and now to this last pitiless iniquity. Oh, I can't let it go on to that! – not if I have to go and plead with him for the sake of that which he once thought was – love." She went down upon her knees with her face hidden in the chair-cushion, and the unconscious monologue became a passionate beseeching: "O God, help me to be strong and steadfast, that I may not fail when I come to stand between these two; for Thou knowest the secrets of the heart and all its weakness; and Thou knowest" —

CHAPTER XXX

The Bartrows, with Stephen Elliott to expedite their outsetting, caught their train with nothing to spare; and while the goggle-eyed switch-lamps were still flashing past the windows of the sleeping-car, Myra settled herself comfortably in her corner of the section and demanded the day's accounting.

Bartrow was rummaging in the hand-bag for his traveling-cap, and he looked up with a most transparent affectation of surprise.

"Hah? Wasn't I supposed to be chasing around all day trying to buy a rock-drill?"

Myra ignored the skilless parry and thrust home. "Don't tease," she said. "You did beautifully at the supper-table, and I am quite sure Connie didn't suspect. But I want to know what has happened."

Bartrow laughed good-naturedly. "Same old window-pane for you to look through, am I not? It's lucky for me that I'm a rattling good fellow, with nothing particular inside of me to be ashamed of." He was thumbing a collection of pocket-worn papers, and presently handed her a crisp bill of exchange for five hundred and forty-five dollars. "What do you think of that for one of the happenings!"

She read the figure of it and the date. "I don't understand," she said. "Where did you get it?"

"You wouldn't guess in a thousand years. It's the money I borrowed for Jeffard one fine morning last fall, with bank interest to date."

"Then you have seen him?"

"Saw him, felt of his hand, and went to luncheon with him."

"Dick! And you really had the courage to ask him for this?"

Bartrow's smile was a grimace. "Don't you sit there and tempt me to lie about it. You know what a fool I am with a debtor. Fortunately, I didn't have to ask; it came about as most things do in this world – click! buzz! boom! and your infernal machine has exploded. We cannoned against each other as I was going into the bank to get the money for the machinery man. After we'd said 'Hello,' and shook hands, Jeffard went in with me. On the way out the cashier stopped us. 'Mr. Jeffard,' says he, 'your personal account has a credit of five hundred dollars which doesn't appear in the deposits. If you'll let me have your book I'll enter it.' 'A credit? – of five hundred dollars? I don't understand,' says Jeffard. 'It's all right,' says the cashier. 'It came from the Carbonate City National, in Leadville. Didn't they notify you?' 'No,' says Jeffard; 'it must be a mistake. I had no credit in Leadville.' All this time the cashier was digging into his pigeonholes. 'You must have had,' says he. 'I can't put my hand on their letter, but as I recall it, they said the money was a remittance made by you sometime last year to cover a promissory note. When it reached them the note had matured and had been lifted. They have kept your money a good while, but they claim not to have known your address.'"

Myra was listening with something more than curiosity.

"What did Mr. Jeffard say?" she asked.

"He looked a good deal more than he said; and what he said was rather queer. When he had pulled me a little aside, he lit a cigar and offered me one, as cool as ice. 'Of course, you'll understand that this was all prearranged between Mr. Holburn and myself,' says he. 'It would be too great a tax upon your credulity to ask you to believe that it is merely a coincidence; that I really did send the money to the Leadville bank to lift that note months ago.' I said No, and meant it; and he went over to the exchange window and made out a check and bought that draft. But afterward I could have kicked him for making that suggestion. I couldn't break away from it to save my life, and it stuck to me straight through to the finish."