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."

Bartrow's brows went together in a frown of perplexity. "As long as I'm not going to let him, I suppose I haven't any right to ask questions, but"—

She put the book on the table and looked up at him with something of Connie's steadfastness in her eyes.

"Perhaps I was foolish to try to make even such a small mystery of it; but I thought—I was so anxious to—to put it in such a way as to"—

The words would not discover themselves; and Bartrow, to whom the mystery was now no mystery, helped her over the obstruction.

"As to make it easy for me. I think I catch on, after so long a time. Mr. Grimsby is your business manager, isn't he?"

"My solicitor; yes."

"That's what I meant. And it was going to be your own money?"

"Yes."

He met her gaze with a smile of mingled triumph and admiration.

"It was a close call, and you'll never know how near I came to falling down," he said. "It was a fearful temptation."

The pencilled brows went up with a little arch of interrogation between them.

"A temptation? Why do you call it that?"

Bartrow was slowly coming to his own in the matter of unconstraint. "If you had ever dabbled in mineral, you'd know. When a fellow gets in about so deep, he'd foreclose the mortgage on his grandfather's farm to get money to go on with. I didn't read between the lines in your letter. I thought the Philadelphia man was some friend of yours who was interested in a general way, and the temptation to fall on his neck and weep was almost too much for me."

"You still call it a temptation."

"It was just that, and nothing less. I had the toughest kind of a fight with myself before I could say no, and mean it."

"But why should you say no? You believe in the Little Myriad, don't you?"

"Sure. But that's for myself—and for a few people who knew the size of the risk when they staked me. So far as I've gone with it, it's only a big game of chance; and I wouldn't let you put your money into it unless I knew it was the surest kind of a sure thing."

"Not if I believe in it, too? Not if I am willing to take the chances that you and the others have taken?" Myra conceived that her mistake lay in putting it upon the ground of a purely business transaction, and changed front with truly feminine adroitness. "Won't you let me have just a tiny share of it? Enough so that when I go back to Philadelphia I can say that I am interested in a mine? I should think you might. I'll promise to be the most tractable and obedient stockholder you have."

She made the plea like a spoiled child begging for a toy, but there was no mistaking the earnestness of it. Bartrow felt his fine determination oozing, and was moved to tramp again, making a circuit of the entire room this time, and saying to himself with many emphatic repetitions that it could not be possible,—that her motive was only charitable,—that he was nothing more to her than Connie's friend. When he spoke again his circlings had brought him to the back of her chair.

"You're making it fearfully hard for me, and the worst of it is that you don't seem to know it. You think I am a mining crank, like all the rest of them, and so I am; but there was method in my madness. I never cared overmuch for money until I came to know what it is to love a woman who has too much of it."

There was manifestly no reply to be made to such a pointless speech as this, and when he resumed his circumambulatory march she began to turn the leaves of the book again. When it became evident that he was not going to elucidate, she said, "Meaning Connie?"

"No, not meaning Connie." He had drifted around to the back of her chair again. "I wish you'd put that book away for a few minutes. It owls me."

"I will, if you will stop circling about and talking down on me from the ceiling. It's dreadfully distressing."

He laughed and drew up a chair facing her; drew it up until the arm of it touched hers.

"It's a stand-off," he said, with cheerful effrontery; "only I didn't mean my part of it. Let's see, where were we? You said, 'Meaning Connie,' and I said, 'No, not meaning Connie.' I meant some one else. Until I met her, the Little Myriad was merely a hole in the ground, not so very different from other holes in the ground except that it was mine—and it wasn't the Little Myriad then, either. After that, it got its name changed, and its mission, too. From that day its business was to make it possible for me to go to her and say, 'I love you; you, yourself, and not your money. I've money enough of my own.'"

She heard him through with the face of a graven image. "And now?"

"And now I can't do it; I can never do it, I'm afraid. The Little Myriad has gone back on me, and I'm nearer flat broke to-day than I've ever been."

"But this unfortunate young person who has too much money—she is young, isn't she?—has she nothing to say about it?"

Bartrow answered his own thought rather than her question. "She couldn't be happy with everybody saying she'd staked her husband."

"Has she told you that?"

"No; but it's so,—you know it's so."

Bartrow was no juggler in figures of speech, and his fictitious third person threatened to become unmanageable.

Her smile was good to look upon. "I don't know anything of the kind. I think she would be very foolish to let such an absurd thing make her unhappy—supposing any one should be unkind enough to say it."

"They would say it, and I'd hear of it; and then there'd be trouble."

"But you say you love her; isn't your love strong enough to rise above such things? You think the sacrifice would be hers, but it wouldn't; it would be yours."

"I don't see how you make that out."

Myra's heart sank within her. It hurt her immeasurably to be driven to plead her own cause, but the money-fact was inexorable; and the look in Bartrow's eyes was her warrant when she dared to read it.

"Oh, can't you see?" The words wrought themselves into a plea, though she strove to say them dispassionately. "If it touch your self-respect ever so little, the sacrifice is all yours."

That point of view was quite new to Bartrow. He took time to think it out, but when the truth clinched itself he went straight to the mark.

"I never saw that side of it before—don't quite see it now. But if you do, that's different. It's you, little woman; and I do love you—you, yourself, and not your money. I wish I could go on and say the rest of it, but I can't. Will you take me for better or for worse—with an even chance that it's going to be all worse and no better?"

Her eyes filled with quick tears, and her voice was tremulous. "It would serve you right if I should say no; you've fairly made me beg you to ask me!"

Her hand was on the arm of the chair, and he possessed himself of it and raised it to his lips with gentle reverence.

"You'll have to begin making allowances for me right at the start," he said humbly. "When I make any bad breaks you must remember it's because I don't know any better, and that away down deep under it all I love you well enough to—to go to jail for you. Will you wait for me while I skirmish around and try to get on my feet again?"

"No"—with sweet petulance.

"There it is, you see; another bad break right on top of the first. Suppose you talk a while and let me listen. I'm good at listening."

"I'll wait, if you want me to,—and if you will let me help you to go on with the Little Myriad."

Bartrow's laugh had a ring of boyish joy in it.

"Back to the old cross-roads, aren't we? I'll let you in on it now; but if you take the mine you'll have to take the man along with the other incumbrances,—simultaneously, so to speak."

"I thought you were anxious to wait."

"If you were as poor as I am, I'd ask you to make it high noon to-morrow."

"Oh! the money again. Can't we put it aside, once for all? There isn't so much of it as you may imagine."

Bartrow overleaped the barrier at a bound.

"Then let's make it noon to-morrow. If we are going to push the Myriad I ought to go back to-morrow night."

She tried to scoff at him, but there was love in her eyes.

"Connie said once that you were Young-man-afraid-of-his-horses, but she doesn't know you. I believe you more than half mean it."

"I do mean it. If I sit here and look at you much longer I shall be begging you to make it nine o'clock instead of twelve. Don't ask me to wait very long. It'll be hard enough to go off and leave you afterward. It's a good bit more than a hundred miles in a straight line from Denver to Topeka Mountain."

"I'm going with you," she said calmly.

"You?—to live in a wicky-up on the side of a bald mountain? But you know what it is; you've been there. You'd die of the blues in a week."

"Would I?" She rose and stood beside his chair. "You don't know much about me, yet, do you? If the 'wicky-up' is good enough for you, it is good enough for me. I am going with you, and I'm going to make that dear little log cabin a place that you will always be glad to remember,—if I can."

He drew her down on the arm of the chair.

"Don't talk to me that way, Myra,—you mustn't, you know. I'm not used to it, and it breaks me all up. If you say another word I shall want to make it seven o'clock in the morning instead of nine."

"Can you wait a month?"

"No."

"Three weeks?"

"No."

She gave up in despair. "You are dreadfully unreasonable."

"I know it; I was born that way and I can't help it. I sha'n't insist on to-morrow, because I'm not sure that Wun Ling has anything for us to eat; but one week from to-morrow, when I've had time to stock up and straighten up a bit, is going to be the limit. Can you make it?"

"What if I say no?"

"I shall come anyway."

She bent over until her lips touched his forehead.

"That is your answer, only you don't deserve it. And now will you answer my question? I asked you when you came in if you had been to dinner, and you said 'Good Lord!'"

"Did I? I think I must have been a bit rattled. You see, I'd just heard some bad news, and I was expecting to find Connie, and wasn't expecting to find you."

"Did Connie write you she would meet you?"

He had one hand free to fish out the day-old telegram and give it to her. She read it with a swift blush crimsoning cheek and neck.

"The unscrupulous little tyke!" she said; and then, with self-defensive tact: "But you said you had bad news."

"Yes. A mine that our good old Uncle Steve is pretty deeply into has gone dry."

"Failed, you mean?"

"Yes, that's it. I wish you'd teach me how to talk English,—good clean English, like yours. Connie has tried it, but pshaw! she's worse than I am. But about the Lodestar: I don't know how deep the old man is in; he's such an innocent old infant about putting up money that I'm awfully afraid they have salted him. You must pump Connie and find out. I'll be in Leadville to-morrow night, and if there is anything to be done on the ground I'll do it. The old man has been a second father to me."

Myra promised, and went back once more to the unanswered dinner query.

"Now you remind me of it, I believe I haven't been to dinner," he admitted. "But that's nothing; a meal or two more or less isn't to be mentioned at such a time as this."

"I am going to get you something."

"No, don't; I'm too happy to eat."

But she insisted, and when she came back with a dainty luncheon on a tea-tray he did ample justice to it, if for no better reason than that she sat on the other side of the small reading-table and made tea for him.

Afterward, when the time drew near for the Elliotts' return, he took his leave, though it was yet early.

"They are the best friends I have on earth," he said, when Myra went to the door with him, "but somehow, I feel as if I didn't want to meet anybody I know,—not to-night. I want to have it all to myself for a few hours."

She laughed at that; a laugh with an upbubbling of content and pure happiness in it; and sent him off with his heart afire. When he was halfway down the walk she recalled him. He came back obediently.

"It will cost you something every time you do that," he protested, exacting the penalty. "Was that what you wanted?"

"Of course not! I merely wanted to ask you what it is to 'owl' a person. You said I 'owled' you."

"Did I? Well, you don't; you never can. That is the best definition I can think of: something you can never do to me. May I say good-night again? the way I did a minute ago?"

The glare of the arc-light swinging between its poles across the avenue was quite ruthless, and there were passers-by in straggling procession on the sidewalk. But at the critical instant the kindly incandescence burned blue, clicked, fizzed, and died down to a red spot in the darkness. For which cause Bartrow presently went his way, with the heart-fire upblazing afresh; and when Myra won back to the library and the cosy depths of the great chair, the color scheme of fair neck and cheek and brow was not altogether the reflection from the crimson shade of the reading-lamp.