"Carry Connie off to her room and keep her busy with this while you and Uncle Stephen fight it out with the new millionaire," she said. "I don't envy you your part of it." Bartrow laughed, and the transplantings put forth a late shoot. "Come to think of it, I don't know as I envy you yours," he retorted. "She's all broke up about Uncle Steve's health and Lansdale's death now, and she'll have a fit when she finds out how she has been piling it on to Jeffard when he didn't deserve it." It was an hour later, and the day-men smoking on the porch of the boarding-house had gone to bed, when the husband and wife met again midway of the path leading up from the shaft-house of the Myriad to the metamorphosed cabin. Bartrow had walked down to the boarding-house with Garvin, and Myra's impatience had sent her down the path to meet him. Dick gave her his arm up the steep ascent, and drew her to a seat on the lowest of the porch steps. "Where is Connie?" he inquired, anticipating an avalanche of questions, out of which he would have to dig his way without fear of interruption. "She is with her father. Begin at the beginning, and tell me all about it. What did Garvin say? Is he going to be sensible?" "There isn't so much to tell as there might be," Dick said, smothering a mighty prompting to tell the major fact first. "Garvin took it very sensibly, though a body could see that the lamplight was a good bit too strong for his eyes. He had to try three or four times before he could speak, and then all he could say was 'Thirds, Steve, thirds.'" "'Thirds?' What did he mean by that?" Bartrow hesitated for a moment, as a gunner who would make sure of the priming before he jerks the lanyard. "Did it ever occur to you that any one else besides Garvin and Jeffard might be interested in the Midas?" "Why, no!" "It didn't to me. I don't know why, but I never thought of it, though I knew well enough that Jim never in all his life went prospecting on a grub-stake of his own providing. He didn't that summer three years ago when he drove the tunnel on the Midas." Myra's lips were dry, and she had to moisten them to say, "Who was it, Dick?" "Who should it be but our good old Uncle Steve? Of course, he'd forgotten all about it, and there he stood, wringing Garvin's hand and trying to congratulate him; and Jim hanging on to the back of his chair and saying, 'Thirds, Steve, I say thirds.' Garvin made him understand at last, and then the old man melted down into his chair and put his face in his hands. When he took it out again it was to look up and say, 'You're right, Jim; of course it's thirds,' and then he asked me where Jeffard was." Myra's voice was unsteady, but she made shift to say what there was to be said; and Bartrow went on.