The Helpers. Lynde Francis
have you – did you go to see the man who killed himself last night?" she questioned.
"Nope; der ain't no morbid cur'osity inside o' me."
"Would you go? – if I asked you to?"
"W'y, cert; I'd take a squint at de old feller wid de hoofs an' horns if it'd do you any good."
"Then I'll tell you why I want you to go. I am afraid it is the man we were going to try to help."
The boy shut one eye and whistled softly. "My gosh! but dat's tough, ain't it now! An' jest w'en I'd got 'quainted with him an' was a-fixin' to give him a lift! Dat's wot I call hard luck!"
Constance felt that the uncertainty was no longer to be borne. "Go quickly, Tommie," she directed; "and hurry back as soon as you can. I'll wait for you in the drug store across the street."
The coroner's office was not far to seek, and the small scout was back in a few minutes.
"Dey wouldn't lemme look," he reported, "but I skinned round to where I could see de top o' his head. It's his nibs, right 'nough."
"Tommie! Are you quite sure?"
"Nope; feller ain't sure o' nothin' in dis world, 'ceptin' death an' de penitenchry," amended Tommie, doing violence to his convictions when he saw that his patron saint was sorely in need of comfort. "Maybe 'tain't him, after all. You jest loaf 'round yere a couple o' shakes while I skip down to his hotel an' see wot I can dig up."
The boy was gone less than a quarter of an hour, but to Constance the minutes marched leaden-footed. When Tommie returned, his face signaled discomfiture.
"I didn't send me card up," he explained, with impish gravity; "I jest went right up to his nibsey's room an' mogged in, a-thinkin' I'd offer him a paper if he happened to be there and kicked. Say, Miss Constance; 'tain't a-goin' ter do no good to cry about it. He ain't there, an' he ain't been there, 'nless he slep' in a chair."
Constance went home with a lump in her throat and her trouble writ large on her face, and Myra needed not to ask the result of the investigation. Miss Van Vetter was not less curious than she should have been, but something in Connie's eyes forestalled inquiry, and Myra held her peace.
Connie wore out the day as best she might, widening the rift of sorrow until it bade fair to become an abyss of remorse. When evening came, and with it a telegram from Bartrow, asking if she had yet learned Jeffard's whereabouts, it was too much, and she shared the misery with her cousin, as she had promised to, making a clean breast of it from the beginning. Something to her surprise, Myra heard her through without a word of condemnation or reproach.
"Now that is something I can understand," said Myra, when the tale was told. "The most of your charity work seems to me to be pitifully commonplace and inconsequent; but here was a mission which asked for all sorts of heroism, for which it promised to pay the highest of all prices, namely, the possibility of saving a man worth the trouble."
Now Connie was well assured that her love for her neighbor was no respecter of persons, and she made answer accordingly.
"I can't agree with you there, Myra. Mr. Jeffard's possible worth had nothing to do with it. I wanted to help him because – well, because it was mean in me to make him talk about himself that night at the opera. And besides, when I met him the next evening at Mrs. Calmaine's, he told me enough to make me quite sure that he needed all the help and encouragement he could get. Of course, he didn't say anything like that, you know; but I knew."
Myra's eyes promised sympathy, and Connie went on.
"Then, when I came upon him yesterday I was angry because he was hurting Tommie. And afterward, when I tried to explain, he made me understand that I mustn't reach down to him; and – and I didn't know any other way to go about it."
"That was a situation in which I should probably have horrified you," said Myra decisively. "I shouldn't have noticed or known anything about him at first, as you did; but in your place yesterday, and with your knowledge of the circumstances, I should have said my say whether he wanted to hear it or not. And I'd have made him listen to reason, too."
"You don't quite understand, Myra. It seemed altogether impossible; though if I had known what was in his mind I should have spoken at any cost."
Twenty times the pendulum of the chalet clock on the wall beat the seconds, and Myra was silent; then she crossed over to Connie's chair and sat upon the arm of it.
"Connie, dear, you're crying again," – this with her arm around her cousin's neck. "Are you quite sure you haven't been telling me half-truths? Wasn't there the least little bit of a feeling warmer than charity in your heart for this poor fellow?"
Constance shook her head, but the denial did not set itself in words. "He was Dick's friend, and that was enough," she replied.
Miss Van Vetter's lips brushed her cousin's cheek, and Constance felt a warm tear plash on her hand. This was quite another Myra from the one she thought she knew, and she said as much.
"We're all puzzles, Connie dear, and the answers to most of us have been lost; but, do you know, I can't help crying a little with you for this poor fellow. Just to think of him lying there with no one within a thousand miles to care the least little bit about it. And if you are right – if it is Mr. Bartrow's friend – it's so much the more pitiful. The world is poorer when such men leave it."
"Why, Myra! What do you know about him?"
"Nothing more than you do – or as much. But surely you haven't forgotten what Mr. Bartrow told us."
"About his helping Mr. Lansdale?"
"Yes."
"No, I hadn't forgotten."
"It was very noble; and so delicately chivalrous. It seems as if one who did such things would surely be helped in his own day of misfortune. But that doesn't often happen, I'm afraid."
"No," Constance assented, with a sigh; and Myra went back to the question of identity.
"I suppose there is no possible chance that Tommie may have been mistaken?"
Constance shook her head. "I think not; he saw that I was troubled about it, and he would have strained a point to comfort me if the facts had given him leave. But I shall be quite sure before I answer Dick's message."
With that thought in mind, and with no hope behind it, Constance waylaid her father in the hall the next morning as he was about to go out.
"Poppa, I want you to do something for me; no, not that" – the elderly man was feeling in his pockets for his check-book – "it is something very different, this time; different and – and rather dreadful. You remember the suicide you read about, yesterday morning?"
"Did I read about one? Oh, yes; the man that shot himself down on the Platte, or was it Cherry Creek? The fellow I thought might be Dick's friend. What about it?"
"It's that. We ought to make sure of it for Dick's sake, you know. Won't you go to the coroner's office and see if it is Mr. Jeffard? It's a horrible thing to ask you to do, but" —
There was grim reminiscence in the old pioneer's smile. "It won't be the first one I've seen that died with his boots on. I'll go and locate your claim for you."
She kissed him good-by, but he came back from the gate to say: "Hold on, here; I don't know your Mr. Jeffard from a side of sole leather. How am I going to identify him?"
"You've seen him once," she explained. "Do you remember the man who sat next to me the night we went to hear 'The Bohemian Girl'?"
"The thirsty one that you and Myra made a bet on? Yes, I recollect him."
"I don't think he was thirsty. Would you know him if you were to see him again?"
"I guess maybe I would; I've seen him half a dozen times since, – met him out here on the sidewalk the next morning. Is that your man?"
"That was Mr. Jeffard," she affirmed, turning away that he might not see the tears that welled up unbidden.
"All right; I'll go and identify him for you."
So he said, and so he meant to do; but it proved to be a rather exciting