_The Clerk_, mindful of his superior's moods, and reflectively dubitant: "I'm afraid I haven't the authority. You will have to wait and see the superintendent. He'll be down at nine." _Bartrow_: "Make it a dollar a mile." _The Clerk_: "Can't be done; or, at least, I can't do it. We're short of motive power. There isn't an engine fit for the run at this end of the division." _Bartrow_: "Say a hundred and fifty for the trip." _The Clerk_: "I'm afraid we couldn't make it, anyhow. We'd have to send a caller after a crew, and"-- _Bartrow_, sticking to his single text like a phonograph set to repeat: "Call it a hundred and seventy-five." _The Clerk_, in a desperate aside: "Heavens! I wish the old man would come!"--and aloud--"Say, I don't believe we could better the passenger schedule, even with a light engine. It's fast--four hours and twenty-five"-- _Bartrow_: "Make it two hundred." Jeffard counted out the money while the office operator was calling the engine-dispatcher; and at eight-twenty they were pacing the station platform, waiting for the ordered special. Bartrow looked at his watch. "If you get away from here at eight-thirty, you'll have three hours and thirty-five minutes for the run, which is just fifty minutes better than the regular schedule. It'll be nip and tuck, but if your engineer is any good he'll make it. Do you know what to do when you reach Aspen?" "Why, yes; I'll meet Garvin when his train arrives, cut him out of the tangle with the sharks, get him on a horse and ride for life across the range." "That's the scheme. But what if the other fellows object?" Jeffard straightened himself unconsciously. "I'm not uncertain on that side; I can fight for it, if that is what you mean." Bartrow looked him up and down with a smile which was grimly approbative. "Your summer's done you a whole lot of good, Jeffard. You look like a grown man." "As I didn't when you last saw me. But I'm afraid I am neither better nor worse, Dick,--morally." "Nonsense! You can't help being one or the other. And that reminds me: you haven't accounted for yourself yet. Can you do it in the hollow of a minute?" "Just about. Garvin picked me out of the gutter and took me with him on this prospecting trip. That's all." "But you ought to have left word with somebody. It was rough on your friends to drop out as if you'd dodged the undertaker." "Who was there to care?" "Well, I cared, for one; and then there is Lansdale, and--and"-- "I know," said Jeffard humbly. He was hungry for news, but he went fasting on the thinnest paring of inquiry. "Does she remember me yet?" Bartrow nodded. "She's not of the forgetting kind. I never go to Denver that she doesn't ask me if I've heard of you. But that's Connie Elliott, every day in the week. She's got a heartful of her own just now, too, I take it, but that doesn't make any difference. She's everybody's sister, just the same."