"I have never seen a mention of his name."
"Why, you must have; they were full of it a month or two ago, and will be again as soon as the range opens and we find out what the big bonanza has been doing through the winter. You don't mean to say that you didn't read about the free-gold strike in the Elk Mountains, and the locomotive race, and the shooting scrape in the hotel at Aspen, and all that?"
The steady eyes were veiled and Connie's breath came in nervous little gasps. Any man save downright Richard Bartrow would have made a swift diversion, were it only to an open window or back to the ballroom. But he sat stocklike and silent, letting her win through the speechlessness of it to the faltered reply.
"I—I saw it; yes. But the name of that man was—was not Jeffard."
"No, it was Jeffers, or anything that came handy in the newspaper accounts. But that was a reporter's mistake."
"Dick,"—the steadfast eyes were transfixing him again,—"are you quite sure of that?"
"I ought to be. I was the man who helped him out at the pinch and got him started on the locomotive chase."
"You helped him?—then all those things they said about him were true?"
It was Bartrow's turn to hesitate. "I—I'm trying not to believe that, Connie."