"Never saw or heard anything more of Jeffard, did you?" he said, pitching the conversational quoit toward a known peg of common interest, and taking it for granted that Lansdale, like Connie, had not read the proletary's name into the newspaper misspellings. "Not a thing. And I have often wondered what happened." "Then Connie hasn't told you?" "Miss Elliott? No; I didn't know she knew him." "She met him a time or two; which is another way of saying that she knows him better than we do. She's a whole assay outfit when it comes to sizing people up." "What was her opinion of Jeffard?" Lansdale was curious to know if it confirmed his own. "Oh, she thinks he is a grand rascal, of course,--as everybody does." "Naturally," said Lansdale, having in mind the proletary's later reincarnations as vagrant and starveling. "You didn't see much of him after he got fairly into the toboggan and on the steeper grades, did you?" "Here in Denver?--no. But what I did see was enough to show that he was pretty badly tiger-bitten. You told me afterward that he took the post-graduate course in his particular specialty." "He did; sunk his shaft, as you mining folk would say, straight on down to the chaotic substrata; pawned himself piecemeal to feed the animals, and went hungry between times by way of contrast." "Poor devil!" said Bartrow, speaking in the past tense. "Yes, in all conscience; but not so much for what he suffered as for what he was." The distinction was a little abstruse for a man whose nayword was obviousness, but for the better part of a year Bartrow had been borrowing of Miss Van Vetter; among other things some transplantings of subtlety. "That's where we come apart," he objected, with amiable obstinacy. "You think the root of the thing is in the man,--has been in him all along, and only waiting for a chance to sprout. Now I don't. I think it's in the atmosphere; in the--the"-- "Environment?" suggested Lansdale. "Yes, I guess that's the word; something outside of the man; something that he didn't make, and isn't altogether to blame for, and can't always control." The man with a moiety of the seer's gift suffered his eyebrows to arch query-wise. "Doesn't that ask for a remodeling of the accepted theory of good and evil?" "No, you don't!" laughed Bartrow. "You are not going to pull me in over my head, if I know it. But I'll wrestle with you from now till midnight on my own ground. You take the best fellow in the world, brought up on good wholesome bread and meat and the like, and stop his rations for awhile. Then, when he is hungry enough, you give him a rag to chew, and he'll proceed to chew it,--not necessarily because he likes the taste of the rag, or because he was born with the rag-chewing appetite, but simply for the reason that you have put it in his mouth, and, being hungry, he's got to chew something. Jeffard is a case in point."