"Let us leave Jeffard and the personal point of view out of the question and stand it upon its own feet," rejoined Lansdale, warming to the fray. "Doubtless Jeffard's problem is divisible by the common human factor, whatever that may be, but your theory makes it too easy for the evil-doer. Consequently I can't admit it,--not even in Jeffard's case." "I could make you admit it," retorted Bartrow, with generous warmth, forgetting the dishonored note in the Leadville bank, and remembering only the year agone partnership in brother-keeping. "You can size people up ten times to my once,--you ought to; it's right in your line,--but I know Jeffard worlds better than you do, and I could tell you things about him that would make you weep. Since he did those things I've had a rattling good chance to change my mind about him, but I'm not going to do it till I have to. I'm going to keep on believing that away down deep under this devil's-drift of--what was it you called it?--environment, there's a streak of good clean ore. It may take the stamp-mill or the smelter to get it out, but it's there all the same. He may fall down on you and me and all of his friends at any one of a dozen pinches,--he has fallen down on me, and pretty middling hard, too,--but there will come a pinch sometime that will pull him up short, and then you'll see what is in the lower levels of him,--what was there all the time, waiting for somebody to sink a shaft deep enough to tap it." Lansdale took the cigar Bartrow was proffering and clipped the end of it, reflectively deliberate. He was silent so long that Bartrow said: "Well? you don't believe it, eh?" "I wouldn't say that," Lansdale rejoined abstractedly; "anyway, not of Jeffard. Perhaps you are right. He has given me the same impression at times, but he was always saying or doing something immediately afterward to obliterate it. But I was wondering why you prophesy so confidently about a man who, for aught we know, took himself out of the world the better part of a year ago." "Suicided?--not much! He's alive all right; very much alive and very much on top, as far as money is concerned. You don't read the papers, I take it?" Lansdale's smile was of weariness. "Being at present a reporter on one of them I read them as little as may be. What should I have read that I didn't?" "To begin back a piece, you should have read last fall about the big free-gold strike in the Elk Mountains, and an exciting little scrap between two men to get the first location on it." "I remember that." "Well, one of the men--the successful one--was Jeffard; our Jeffard. Your newspaper accomplices didn't spell his name right,--won't spell it right yet,--but it's Henry Jeffard, and yesterday's 'Coloradoan' says he's on his way to Denver to play leading man in the bonanza show."