"Almost ever since I can remember. I'm Colorado-born, you know, and he isn't; but he came across the plains in the days of the ox-teams, when he was a little fellow, and the first work he ever did was for poppa, when we lived on the ranch below Golden." "He is a self-made man, isn't he?" "Don't say that, Myra, please. I hate the word. God makes us, and circumstances or our own foolishness mar us. But Dick is self-educated, so far as he is educated at all. He was a homeless waif when he first saw the Rockies. His father died in the middle of the trip across the plains, and his mother lived only long enough to have her grave dug some two hundred miles farther west. The others took care of Dick and brought him along with them to Colorado because there wasn't anything else to do; and since, Dick has made his own way, doing any honest thing that came to his hand." "He couldn't do the other kind," Myra averred. "But you spoke of his education as if he hadn't any. I suppose that was one of your 'exuberances,' as Uncle Stephen calls them. Mr. Bartrow is certainly anything but illiterate." "No, he isn't that, though he has no education of the kind you effete people have in mind when you spell the word with a capital--the kind with a Greek-letter-badge and college-yell attachment. If you should tell him you had been to Bryn Mawr, he would probably take it to be some summer resort he hadn't heard of. But that isn't saying he is stupid. He could give the man with the yell a lot of information on a good many subjects. Poppa says he was always an earnest little lad; always reading everything he could get hold of--which wasn't very much in the early days, as you may imagine." "Nevertheless, he seems to be getting on in the world," said Miss Van Vetter. "Your father says the Little Myriad is a promising mine." There was more pathos than mirth in the smile which flitted across Connie's face. "You're new among us yet, Myra. Everything with mineral in it is promising to us; we are cranks pure and simple, on that subject. The Little Myriad is promising, of course,--there isn't an unpromising mine in the State, for that matter,--but it's only a promise, as yet. If Dick should reach the end of his hundred and fifty feet of development without striking pay, he would be a ruined man." "Why couldn't he keep on until he should strike it?" "For the very simple reason that he is working on borrowed capital; and I happen to know that he has borrowed about all he can." "But he believes in the success of the venture, absolutely." "Of course he does; that is one of the conditions. It's merely a question of credit with him. If any one would lend, Dick would go on borrowing and digging until he struck pay-ore or came out on the other side of the mountain--and then he'd think he hadn't gone deep enough. That is the pathetic side of his character; he never knows when he's beaten." "I should call it the heroic side."