The Man from the Bitter Roots Part 8

When Sprudell stretched his stiff muscles and turned his head upon the bear-gra.s.s pillow at daybreak, Bruce was writing a letter on the corner of the table and Uncle Bill was stowing away provisions in a small canvas sack. He gathered, from the signs of preparation, that the miner was going to try and find the Chinaman. Outside, the wind was still sweeping the stinging snow before it like powder-driven shot. What a fool he was to attempt it--to risk his life--and for what?

It was with immeasurable satisfaction that Sprudell told himself that but for his initiative they would have been there yet. These fellows needed a leader, a strong man--the ignorant always did. His eyes caught the suggestive outlines of the blanket on the floor, and, with a start, he remembered what was under it. They had no sensibilities, these Westerners--they lacked fineness; certainly no one would suspect from the matter-of-factness of their manner that they were rooming with a corpse. For himself, he doubted if he could even eat.

"Oh, you awake?" Uncle Bill glanced at him casually.

"My feet hurt."

Uncle Bill ignored his plaintive tone.

"They're good and froze. They'll itch like forty thousand fleabites atter while--like as not you'll haf to have them took off. Lay still and don't clutter up the cabin till Burt gits gone. I'll cook you somethin'

bimeby."

Sprudell writhed under the indifferent familiarity of his tone. He wished old Griswold had a wife and ten small children and was on the pay roll of the Bartlesville Tool Works some hard winter. He'd----Sprudell's resentment found an outlet in devising a variety of situations conducive to the disciplining of Uncle Bill.

Bruce finished his letter and re-read it, revising a little here and there. He looked at Sprudell while he folded it reflectively, as though he were weighing something pro and con.

Sprudell was conscious that he was being measured, and, egotist though he was, he was equally aware that Bruce's observations still left him in some doubt.

Bruce walked to the window undecidedly, and then seemed finally to make up his mind.

"I'm going to ask you to do me a favor, stranger, but only in case I don't come back. I intend to, but"--he glanced instinctively out of the window--"it's no sure thing I will.

"My partner has a mother and a sister--here's the address, though it's twelve years old. If anything happens to me, I want you to promise that you'll hunt them up. Give them this old letter and the picture and this letter, here, of mine. This is half the gold dust--our season's work."

He placed a heavy canvas sample sack in Sprudell's hand. "Say that Slim sent it; that although they might not think it because he did not write, that just the same he thought an awful lot of them.

"I've told them in my letter about the placer here--it's theirs, the whole of it, if I don't come back. See that it's recorded; women don't understand about such things. And be sure the a.s.sessment work's kept up.

In the letter, there, I've given them my figures as to how the samples run. Some day there'll be found a way to work it on a big scale, and it'll pay them to hold on. That's all, I guess." He looked deep into Sprudell's eyes. "You'll do it?"

"As soon as I get out."

"I'd just about come back and haunt you if you lied."

There were no heroics when he left them; he simply fastened on his pack and went.

"Don't try to hunt me if I stay too long," was all he said to Uncle Bill at parting. "If there's any way of getting there, I can make it just as well alone."

It was disappointing to Sprudell--nothing like the Western plays at tragic moments; no long handshakes and heart-breaking speeches of farewell from the "rough diamonds."

"S' long," said Uncle Bill.

He polished a place on the window-pane with his elbow and watched Burt's struggle with the cold and wind and snow begin.

"Pure grit, that feller," when, working like a snowplow, Bruce had disappeared. "He's man all through." The old voice trembled. "Say!" He turned ferociously. "Git up and eat!"

Uncle Bill grew older, grayer, grimmer in the days of waiting, days which he spent princ.i.p.ally moving between window and door, watching, listening, saying to himself monotonously: It _can't_ storm forever; some time it's _got_ to stop.

But in this he seemed mistaken, for the snow fell with only brief cessation, and in such intervals the curious fog hung over the silent mountains with the malignant persistency of an evil spirit.

He sc.r.a.ped the snow away from beside the cabin, and Sprudell helped him bury Slim. Then, against the day of their going, he fas.h.i.+oned crude snow-shoes of material he found about the cabin and built a rough hand sled.

"If only 'twould thaw a little, and come a crust, he'd stand a whole lot better show of gittin' down." Uncle Bill scanned the sky regularly for a break somewhere each noon.

"Lord, yes, if it only would!" Sprudell always answered fretfully.

"There are business reasons why I ought to be at home."

The day came when the old man calculated that even with the utmost economy Bruce must have been two days without food. He looked pinched and shrivelled as he stared vacantly at the mouth of the canon into which Bruce had disappeared.

"He might kill somethin', if 'twould lift a little, but there's nothin'

stirrin' in such a storm as this. I feel like a murderer settin' here."

Sprudell watched him fearfully lest the irresolution he read in his face change to resolve, and urged:

"There's nothing we can do but wait."

Days after the most sanguine would have abandoned hope, Uncle Bill hung on. Sprudell paced the cabin like a captive panther, and his broad hints became demands.

"A month of this, and there would be another killin'; I aches to choke the windpipe off that dude," the old man told himself, and ignored the peremptory commands.

The crust that he prayed for came at last, but no sign of Bruce; then a gale blowing down the river swept it fairly clear of snow.

"Git ready!" Griswold said one morning. "We'll start." And Sprudell jumped on his frosted feet for joy. "We'll take it on the ice to Long's Crossin'," he vouchsafed shortly. "Ore City's closest, but I've no heart to pack you up that hill."

He left a note on the kitchen table, though he had the sensation of writing to the dead; and when he closed the door he did so reverently, as he would have left a mausoleum. Then, dragging blankets and provision behind them on the sled, they started for the river, past the broken snow and the shallow grave where the dead madman lay, past the clump of snow-laden willows where the starving horses that had worked their way down huddled for shelter, too weak to move. Leaden-hearted, Uncle Bill went with reluctant feet. Before a bend of the river shut from sight the white-roofed cabin from which a tiny thread of smoke still rose, he looked over his shoulder, wagging his head.

"I don't feel right about goin'. I sh.o.r.ely don't."

VI

THE RETURNED HERO

It is said that no two persons see another in exactly the same light. Be that as it may, it is extremely doubtful if Uncle Bill Griswold would have immediately recognized in the debonair raconteur who held a circle breathless in the Bartlesville Commercial Club the saffron-colored, wild-eyed dude whom he had fished off the slide rock with a pair of "galluses" attached to a stout pole.

The account of Sprudell's adventure had leaked out and even gotten into print, but it was not until some time after that his special cronies succeeded in getting the story from his own lips.

There was not a dry eye when he was done. That touch about thinking of them and the Yawning Jaws, and grappling hand to hand with The White Death--why, the man was a poet, no matter what his enemies said; and, as though to prove it, Abe Cone sniffled so everybody looked at him.

"We're proud of you! But you musn't take such a chance again, old man."

A chorus echoed Y. Fred Smart's friendly protest. "'Tain't right to tempt Providence."

But Sprudell laughed lightly, and they regarded him in admiration--danger was the breath of life to some.

But this reckless, peril-courting side was only one side of the many-sided T. Victor Sprudell. From nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, he was the man of business, occupied with facts and figures and the ever-interesting problem of how to extract the maximum of labor for the minimum of wage. That "there is no sentiment in business" is a doctrine he practised to the letter. He was hard, uncompromising, exact.

Rather than the gratifying cortege which he pictured in his dreams, a hansom cab or a motorcycle could quite easily have conveyed all the sorrowing employees of the Bartlesville Tool Works who voluntarily would have followed its president to his grave.