"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.