"Well, you did it; but just the same, you might have passed the word to me. It wouldn't have gone any farther, and I should have felt a good bit easier in my mind."
"Perhaps; but you will pardon me if I say that I wasn't considering you in the matter. I knew better than to defeat my own end. If I had told you the truth at the time, you would not have believed it; you would have struck hands with your own theory that Garvin had attempted to rob me, and you would have talked and acted accordingly."
"What makes you say I wouldn't have believed the truth?"
"It would have been merely a declaration of intention at the time, and you would have said that it didn't square with human nature as you know it. Bartrow knew, and he went over to the majority. But that is neither here nor there. Will you draw up the writing?"
Denby goes to the desk and writes out the transfer, following Jeffard's dictation. When it is signed and acknowledged, Jeffard slips his final anchor.
"I presume you will want to make a new operating contract with the trustees, or with Garvin, and in that case you will want to cancel the old one. I haven't my copy of it with me, but I'll mail it to you when I get back to Denver."
Denby is making a pretense of rummaging in the pigeonholes of the desk to cover a small struggle which has nothing to do with the superintendent's files. When the struggle is fought to a finish, he turns suddenly and holds out his hand.
"Jeffard, that night when we wrangled it out up yonder on the old dump I said some things that I shouldn't have said if you had seen fit to be a little franker with me. Will you forget them?"
Jeffard takes the proffered hand and wrings it gratefully. "Thank you for that, Denby," he says; "it's timely. I feel as if I'd like to drop out and turn up on some other planet. This thing has cost me pretty dear, one way with another."
"It'll come out all right in the end," asserts the master; and then: "But you mustn't forget that the cost of it is partly of your own incurring. It's a rare failing, but there is such a thing as being too close-mouthed. You've made out your case, after a fashion, and I'm not going to appeal it; but your postulate was wrong. Human nature is not as incredulous of good intentions as the cynics would make it out to be. You might have told a few of us without imperilling Garvin."