"What all the world knows--and a little more. Of course you have read what the newspapers had to say?" "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." "But you know the facts; or at least, more of them than the newspapers told. Did the claim really belong to him, or to James Garvin?" Bartrow crossed his legs, uncrossed them, and again had recourse to his watch. "I wish you'd leave the whole business up in the air, Connie, the way I'm trying to. It doesn't seem quite fair, somehow, to condemn him behind his back." "But the facts," she insisted. "You know them, don't you?" "Yes; and they're against him." Bartrow confessed it in sheer desperation. "The claim was Garvin's; Jeffard not only admitted it, but he started out on the chase with the declared determination of standing between Garvin and those two blacklegs who were trying to plunder him. That's all; that's as far as my facts go. Beyond that you--and the newspapers--know as much as I do." "Not quite all, Dick. You say you helped him; that means that you lent him money, or borrowed it for him. Did he ever pay it back?" Bartrow got upon his feet at that and glowered down upon her with mingled chagrin and awe in gaze and answer. "Say, Connie, you come precious near to being uncanny at times, don't you know it? That was the one thing I didn't mean to tell any one. Yes, I borrowed for him; and no, he didn't pay it back. That's all--all of the all. If you put me in a stamp-mill you couldn't pound out anything else. Now, for pity's sake, let me get back to Miss Van Vetter before I fall in with the notion that I'm too transparent to be visible to the naked eye." She rose and took his arm.