The Helpers
"I don't think he would have gone with you," Lansdale ventured.
"Wouldn't, eh? If I can find him I'll take him by the neck and make him go; savez? How do you put it up? Runaway? or a pile of bones out on the prairie somewhere?"
"It's hard to say. Jeffard's a queer combination of good and not so good, – like a few others of us, – and just now the negative part is on top. He was pretty low the night we were together, though when we separated I thought he was taking himself a little less seriously."
"Didn't talk about getting the drop on himself, or anything like that?"
"N – no, not in a way to leave the impression that he was in any immediate danger of doing such a thing."
Bartrow chewed the end of his cigar reflectively. "Hasn't taken to quizzing the world through the bottom of a whiskey-glass?"
"No, I should say not. Thus far, I think he has but the one devil."
"And that's the 'tiger,' of course. I knew about that; I've known it all along. The Lord forgive me! I don't know but I was the ring-master in that show. You know we chased around a good deal together, along at the first, and it's as likely as not I showed him a whole lot of things he'd better not have seen."
The half-cynical smile lightened upon Lansdale's grave face. "That is one of my criticisms of Western manners," he commented. "When you get hold of a stranger, you welcome him with open arms – and proceed to regale him with a near-hand view of the back yards and cesspools. And then you swear piteously when he goes back East and tells his friends what an abandoned lot you are."
Bartrow took the thrust good-naturedly, as he did most of his chastenings. "That's right; that's just about what we do. But you've been here long enough now to know that it's meant for hospitality. It's a way we've got into of taking it for granted that people come out here more to see the sights than for any other purpose."
"Oh, it's good of you – I don't deny that; only it's a little rough on the new-comer, sometimes. Take Jeffard's case, for example. He came to Denver with good introductions; I know, for I saw some of them. But a man in a strange city doesn't often go about presenting his social credentials. What he does is to make a few haphazard acquaintances, and let them set the pace for him. That is what Jeffard did, and I'll venture to say there have been nine evil doors open to him to one good one. You've known him longer than any one else – how many times have you invited him to spend a rational evening with you in the company of respectable people?"
"Good Lord, Lansdale; for Heaven's sake don't begin to open up that lead! We're all miserable sinners, and I'm the medicine-man of the tribe. I never asked the poor devil to go visiting with me but once, and that was after he was down."
"And then he wouldn't go, as a matter of course. But that is neither here nor there. I'll find him for you, if I can, and leave word for you at the St. James."
"You're a brick, Lansdale; that's about what you are. I'll get square with you some day. By the way, can't you come up to Steve Elliott's with me this evening and meet some good people?"
Lansdale laughed outright. "You're a good fellow, Bartrow, but you're no diplomat. When I go a-fishing into your mentality you'll never see the hook. Make my apologies to your friends, and tell them I'm an invalid."
And Bartrow, being densely practical, and so proof against irony of whatsoever calibre, actually did so that evening when he called upon Miss Elliott and her cousin.
"But your friend wasn't promised to us, Mr. Bartrow," objected Miss Van Vetter. "Why should he send excuses?"
"I'm blessed if I know," said honest Dick, looking innocently from one to the other of them. "But that's what he told me to do, and I've done it."
Constance laughed softly. "You're too good for any use, Dick. He was making game of you. Tell us how he came to say it."
Bartrow did that, also; and the two young women laughed in chorus.
"After you've had your fun out of it I wish you'd tell me, so I can laugh too," he said. "I can't see where the joke comes in, myself."
Constance enlightened him. "There isn't any joke – only this: he had just been scolding you about your inhospitality, and then you turn on him and ask him to go calling with you. Of course, he couldn't accept, then; it would have been like inviting himself."
"Well, what of it? I don't see why he shouldn't invite himself, if he felt like it. He's a rattling good fellow." And from thence the talk drifted easily to Jeffard, who was, or who had been, another good fellow.
At the mention of Jeffard's name, Constance borrowed the mask of disinterest, and laid her commands on Bartrow. "Tell us about him," she said.
"There isn't much to tell. He came here from somewhere back East, got into bad company, lost his money, and now he's disappeared."
"How did he lose his money?" Constance would have asked the question, but her cousin forestalled her.
"Gambled it," quoth Bartrow placidly.
Constance looked sorry, and Miss Van Vetter was plainly shocked. "How very dreadful!" said the latter. "Did he lose much?"
"Oh, no; you couldn't call it much – only a few thousands, I believe. But then, you see, it was his stake; it was all he had, and he couldn't afford to give it up. And now he has gone and hid out somewhere just when I have found a place for him. It makes me very weary."
"Can't you find any trace of him?" queried Constance. "That is singular. I should think he would have left his address."
Bartrow grinned. "Well, hardly. Man don't leave his address when he wants to drop out. That's the one thing he's pretty sure to take with him. But we'll run him down yet, if he's on top of earth. Lansdale has seen more of him lately than I have, and he is taking a hand. He and Jeffard used to flock together a good deal when the shoe was on the other foot."
Miss Van Vetter looked mystified; and Bartrow deemed it a matter for self-congratulation that he was able to comprehend the query in her eyes without having it hurled at him in so many words.
"That was while Jeffard had money, and Lansdale was trying to starve himself to death," he explained. "You see, Lansdale is a queer fish in some ways. When he's down he won't let anybody touch him on his money side, so we used to work all kinds of schemes to keep him going. Jeffard would study them up, and I'd help him steer them."
This was practical benevolence, and Connie's interest bestirred itself in its charitable part. "What were some of the schemes?" she asked.
"Oh, there were a lot of them. Lansdale can see farther into a millstone than most people, and we had to invent new ones as we went along. One time, Jeffard bought a common, every-day sort of a pocketbook, and rumpled it up and tramped on it till it looked as if it might have come across the plains in Fifty-nine. Then he put a twenty-dollar bill and some loose silver in it, and dropped it on the sidewalk where I was walking Lansdale up and down for his health. After a while, when he'd actually stumbled over it four or five times, Lansdale saw the wallet and picked it up. Right there the scheme nearly fell down. You see, he was going to make me take charge of it while he advertised it. I got out of it, somehow, but I don't believe he used a nickel of the money for a month."
Connie clapped her hands softly. "That was fine! Tell us some more."
"The next one was better, and it worked like a charm. Lansdale writes things for the papers, only the editors here wouldn't buy any of his work" —
"Why not?" interrupted Miss Van Vetter.
"I don't know; because it was too good, I guess. Anyway, they wouldn't buy it, so Jeffard went to work on that lead. I took him around and introduced him to Kershaw of the 'Coloradoan,' and he made Kershaw take fifty dollars on deposit, and got him to promise to accept some of Lansdale's stories. Kershaw kicked like the deu – like the mischief, and didn't want to do it; but we bullied him, and then I got Lansdale to send him some stuff."
"Mr. Jeffard is an artist in schemes, and I envy him," said Connie. "What happened to that one?"
"Kershaw upset it by not printing the stuff. Of course, Lansdale watched the 'Coloradoan,' and when he found he wasn't in it, he wouldn't send any more. We caught him the next time, though, for something worth while."
"How was that?" It was Miss Van Vetter who asked the question; and Bartrow made a strenuous effort to evade the frontier idiom which stood ready to trip him at every turn when Myra Van Vetter's poiseful gaze rested upon him.
"Why, I happen to have a played-out – er – that is, a sort of no-account mine up in Clear Creek, and I made Lansdale believe I was the resident agent for the property, authorized to get up a descriptive prospectus. He took the job of writing it, and never once tumbled to the racket – that is, he never suspected that we were working him for a – oh, good Lord, why can't I talk plain English! – you know what I mean; he thought it was all straight. Well, he turned in the copy, and we paid him as much as he'd stand; but he has just about worried the life out of me ever since, trying to get to read proof on that prospectus. That one was Jeffard's idea, too, but I made him let me in on the assessment."
Before Miss Van Vetter could inquire what the "assessment" was, Stephen Elliott came in and the talk became general. An hour later, when Bartrow took his leave, Constance went to the door with him.
"Don't you really know where Mr. Jeffard is, Dick?" she asked.
Something in her tone set him upon the right track. "No; do you?"
"I know that he left Denver quite a while ago; about the time you were down last."
"How do you know it?"
"He told me he was going."
"The mischief he did! Where did you get acquainted with him?"
"At Mrs. Calmaine's."
Honest Dick ground his heel into the door-mat and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat. What was in his mind came out shorn of euphemism.
"Say, Connie, do you care anything about him?"
"What a question!" she retorted, not pretending to misunderstand its pointing. "I've met him only once – or twice, I should say, though I didn't even know his name the first time."
"What did he tell you? about his going away, I mean."
"He said – but you've no right to ask me, Dick. It wasn't exactly a confidence, but" —
"Yes, I have a right to ask; he was my friend a good while before he was yours. Tell me what he said."
"He gave me to understand that things hadn't been going quite right with him, and he said he was going to the mountains to – to try to make another start."
Bartrow tucked Connie's arm under his own and walked her up and down the long veranda twice before he could bring himself to say the thing that was.
"He didn't go, Connie; he's here now, if he hasn't gone out on the prairie somewhere and taken a pot shot at himself. Lansdale saw him only a week or so ago."
"Oh, Dick!"
"It's tough, isn't it?" He stood on the step and buttoned his coat. "But I'm glad you know him – or at least, know who he is. If you should happen to run across him in any of your charity trips, just set Tommie on him and wire me if you find out where he burrows."
"You said you had found a place for him. Will it keep?"
"I'll try to hold it open for him, and if you wire, I'll come down and tackle him. He's too good a fellow to turn down in his little day of witlessness. Good-night; and good-by – for a week or so. I've got to go back on the morning train."
CHAPTER VIII
Contrary to the doctor's prophecy, Margaret Gannon's progress toward recovery was slow and rather uncertain. Constance professed to be sorry, but in her heart she was thankful, since the hesitant convalescence gave her time to try many expedients pointing toward the moral rehabilitation of her protégée. Ignoring Margaret's bodeful prediction, Constance coursed far and wide, quartering the domestic field diligently; but inasmuch as she was careful in each instance to state the exact truth, each endeavor was but the introduction to another failure.
"Why, Constance Elliott! The idea of your proposing such a thing to me!" said Mrs. Calmaine, upon whose motherly good sense Connie had leaned from childhood. "That is what comes of a girl growing up as you have without a mother to watch over her. Can't you understand how dreadful it is for you to mix up in such things? You can't touch pitch and not be defiled."
Connie was moved, first to tears, and presently to indignation.
"No, I can't understand anything of the kind," she retorted. "It's your privilege not to take Margaret if you don't want her; but it's mine to help her, if I can. And I mean to do it in spite of all the cruel prejudice in the world!"
"You talk like a foolish child, Connie. I can tell you beforehand that you won't succeed in getting the woman into any respectable household in Denver, unless you do it under false pretenses."
"So much the worse for our Christianity, then," Connie asserted stoutly. "If people won't help, they'll have it to answer to One who wasn't afraid to take a much worse woman by the hand. That's all I have to say about it."
Mrs. Calmaine smiled benignantly. She had daughters of her own, and knew how to make allowances for youthful enthusiasm.
"You will get over it, after a while, and then you'll see how foolish it is to try to reform the world single-handed," she rejoined. "You might as well try to move Pike's Peak as to think you can remodel society after your own enthusiastic notions. And when the reflective after-time comes, you'll be glad that society didn't let you make a martyr of yourself at its expense.
"And, Connie, dear; there is another side of the question which you should consider," she continued, going to the door with her visitor. "It's this: since society as a unit insists upon having this particular kind of reformative work turned over to organizations designed for the purpose, there must be a sufficient reason for it. You are not wiser than the aggregated wisdom of the civilized centuries."
Constance went her way, silenced, but by no means convinced; and she added three more failures to her long list before going home to luncheon. In the afternoon, she laid hold of her courage yet once again, and went to her minister, good Dr. Launceston, pastor of St. Cyril's-in-the-Desert. Here, indeed, she found sympathy without stint, but it was hopelessly void of practical suggestion.
"It is certainly most pitiful, Miss Elliott, pitiful to a degree; but I really don't see what is to be done. Had you any plan in view that, ah" —
"It is because all my plans have come to grief that I am here," said Connie.
"Dear, dear! and those cases are so very hard to deal with. Now, if it were a question of money, I dare say we could manage it quite easily."
Constance had some very clear ideas on reformative subjects, and one of them was that it was not less culpable to pauperize than to ignore.
"It isn't that," she made haste to say. "I could get money easily enough, but Margaret wouldn't take it. If she would, I should have small hopes for her."
"No," rejoined the clergyman reflectively; "you are quite right. It is not a problem to be solved by money. The young woman must be given a chance to win her way back to respectability by her own efforts. Do I understand that she is willing to try if the opportunity should present itself?"
"I'm afraid I can't say that she is – not without reservation," Connie admitted. "You see, she knows the cruel side of the world; and she is quite sure that any effort she might make would end in defeat and deeper disgrace."
"A very natural apprehension, and one for which there are only too good grounds," said the clergyman sadly. "We are compassionate and charitable in the aggregate, but as individuals I fear we are very unmerciful. Had you thought of trying to send her to one of our institutional homes in the East? I might possibly be able to make such representations as would" —
Constance shook her head. "Margaret is a Roman Catholic, and I suggested the House of the Good Shepherd in one of our earlier talks. She fought the idea desperately, and I don't know that I blame her. She is just a woman like other women, and I believe she would gladly undertake an honest woman's work in the world; but that isn't saying she'd be willing to become a lay-sister."
"No, I suppose not; I quite agree with you. But what else can you do for her?"
"I don't know, Doctor Launceston, – oh, I don't know! But I'll never give up till I've done something."
In the momentary afflatus of which fine determination Constance went her way again, not wholly comfortless this time, but apparently quite as far from the solution of the problem as when she had latched Mrs. Calmaine's gate behind her.
As for the clergyman, the precious fervor of the young enthusiast left a spark in his heart which burst into flame on the following Sunday morning, when he preached a stirring sermon from the text, "Who is my neighbor?" to the decorous and well-fed congregation of St. Cyril's-in-the-Desert.
Leaving the rectory, Constance postponed the quest for that afternoon and went to pay her daily visit to Margaret. On the way downtown a happy thought came to her, and she welcomed it as an inspiration, setting it to work as soon as she had put the convalescent's room in order.
"You are feeling better to-day, aren't you, Margaret?" she began.
"Yes. I'm thinking I'll be able to go to work again before long; only Pete Grim mightn't have no use for me."
Constance brought the hair-brush, and letting Margaret's luxuriant hair fall in heavy masses over the back of the chair, began another of her ministries of service.
"Do you really want to go back to the Bijou?" she asked, knowing well enough what the answer would be.
"You know you needn't to ask that; it's just Pete Grim's place or something worse. I can't do no different" – she paused and the fingers of her clasped hands worked nervously – "and you can't help it, Miss Constance. I know you've been trying and worrying; but it ain't no use."
Connie did not find words to reply at once, but after a little she said: "Tell me more about your old home, Margaret."
"I've told you all there was to tell, many's the time since you found me with the fever."
"Let me see if I can remember it. You said your father was the village blacksmith, and that you used to sit in the shop and watch the sparks fly from the anvil as he worked. And when his day's work was done, he would take you on his shoulder and carry you home to your mother, who called you her pretty colleen, and loved you because you were the only girl. And then" —
"Oh, don't!" There was sharp anguish in the cry, and Margaret covered her eyes with her hands as if to shut out the picture. Constance waited until she thought she had given the seed time to germinate. Then she went on.
"And when you left home they mourned for you, not as one dead, but as one living and still beloved; and as long as they could keep track of you they begged you to come back to them. Margaret, won't you go?"
Margaret shook her head in passionate negation. "I can't —I can't! that's the one thing I can't do! Didn't I bring them shame enough and misery enough in the one day? and will I be going back to stir it all up again? having the people say, 'There's Pat Gannon's girl come back; she that went to the bad and broke her mother's heart.' Indeed, I'll not do that, Miss Constance, though the saints and the holy angels'll tell you I'd do anything else you'd ask."
This was Connie's happy thought; to induce Margaret to go back to her parents. When it proved to be but another rope of sand, she allowed it one sigh and changed front so cheerfully that Margaret never knew the cost of the effort.
"Then we must try something else," she insisted. "I'll never let you go back to the theatre – that's settled. You told me once you could trim hats. Have you ever done any other kind of sewing?"
Margaret knelt before her trunk and threw out an armful of her stage finery. "I made them," she said.
Constance examined the work critically. It was good, and she took courage. "That is our way out of the trouble, Margaret. Why didn't we think of it before? When you are well enough, I'll get you a sewing-machine and find you all the work you can do."
Margaret went to the window and stood there so long that Constance began to tremble lest the battle were going evilward at the last moment. The fear was groundless, as she found out when the girl came back to kneel and cry silently with her face in Connie's lap.
"It isn't so much the love of you," she sobbed; "it's the knowing that somebody cares whether the likes of me goes straight to the devil or not. And never so much as a word about behaving myself, or confessing to the priest, or anything. Miss Constance," – this with uplifted face, grown suddenly beautiful and glorified in the outshining of penitence, – "the devil may fly away with me, – he did that same one day, – but if he does, I'll not live to leave him have the good of it. I promise you that."
"I can trust you," said Constance; and she took her leave presently, wondering how the many-sided world could so unify itself in its merciless condemnation of the Magdalenes.
When she had closed Margaret's door behind her and was halfway to the stair, she heard sounds as of a scuffle coming from a corridor intersecting the main hallway at the landing. Her first impulse was to retreat to Margaret Gannon's room; but when she recognized Tommie's voice uplifted in alternate plea and imprecation, she went forward quickly. At the turn she met a gaunt, unshaven man leading Tommie by the ear, and her indignation slipped the leash without a thought of consequences.
"Aren't you ashamed of yourself to abuse a child like that!" she began; and then two things happened: Jeffard released the boy, and Constance recognized in the gaunt figure the wreck of the man whom she had bidden God-speed on the stair at the Calmaine dancing party.
Jeffard flattened himself against the wall, bowed low, and was about to apologize, when Tommie, scenting an accusation, proceeded to vindicate himself by exploding a veritable bomb of consternation between the two.
"I warn't doin' ary single thing, Miss Constance, 'ceptin' jest wot you telled me to do. I caught on to his nibs down on de street an' follered him up yere; an' w'en I was takin' a squint t'rough de keyhole, jest to make sure, he outs an' nabs me."
For one dreadful instant Connie thought she must scream and run away. Then her wits came back, and she saw that deliverance could come only through swift confession.
"Tommie," she said hastily, "run down and wait for me on the sidewalk." And then to Jeffard: "The poor boy wasn't to blame; he was doing just what he had been told to do, and you have a right to ask – to – to know" – She stopped in pitiable embarrassment, and Jeffard flung himself into the breach with chivalric tact.
"Not another word, Miss Elliott, I implore you. It isn't the first time I have been taken for my double, and in broad daylight at that. May I go down and make my peace with the boy?"
Constance was too greatly perturbed not to catch gratefully at the chance to escape, and she made use of it while Jeffard was talking to Tommie at the foot of the stair. Taking Constance's nod and smile in passing as tokens of amity, the urchin allowed himself to be placated; and when Jeffard went back to his room he knew all that Tommie could tell him about Miss Elliott and her deeds of mercy.
That night, before he went out to tramp himself weary, Jeffard did a characteristic thing. He wrapped his last five-dollar note around a bit of plaster dug from the wall, and creeping through the corridor in his stocking feet, tossed the pellet over the transom into Margaret Gannon's room.
CHAPTER IX
At the breakfast-table the next morning, Constance had a shock that set her nerves a-jangle and banished her appetite. The exciting cause was a paragraph in the morning "Coloradoan" which her father had been reading between the fruit and the cereals.
"I wonder if that isn't the fellow Dick was looking for and couldn't find," he queried, passing the paper across the table with his finger on the suggestive paragraph.
It was a custom-hardened account of a commonplace tragedy. A man whose name was given as George Jeffrey had shot himself an hour before midnight on one of the bridges spanning Cherry Creek. Constance read the story of the tragedy with her father's remark in abeyance, and the shock came with the conviction that the self-slain one was Jeffard, whose name might easily become Jeffrey in the hurried notes of a news-gatherer. The meagre particulars tallied accurately with Bartrow's terse account of Jeffard's sociological experiment. The suicide was a late-comer from the farther East; he had spent his money in riotous living; and he had latterly been lost to those who knew him best.