VIThe Returned Hero
VIThe 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 andfigures 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 cortège 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.
But when Sprudell closed his office door, he locked this adamantine, quibbling, frankly penurious, tyrannical man of business inside, and the chameleon does not change its color with greater ease than Sprudell took on another and distinct personality. On the instant he became the “good fellow,” his pink face and beaming eyes radiating affability, conviviality, an all-embracing fondness for mankind, also a susceptible Don Juan keenly on the alert for adventure of a sentimental nature.
In appearance, too, he was a credit to the Bartlesville Commercial Club, when, with his pink face glowing above a glimpse of crimson neck scarf, dressed in pearl-gray spats, gray topcoat, gray business clothes indistinctly barred with black, and suède gloves of London smoke, he bounded up the clubhouse steps with the elasticity of well-preserved fifty, lightly swinging a slender stick. His jauntily-placed hat was a trifle, a mere suspicion, too small, and always he wore a dewy boutonnière of violets, while his thick, gray hair had a slight part behind which it pleased him to think gave the touch of distinction and originality he coveted.
This was the lighter side of T. Victor Sprudell.The side of himself which he took most seriously was his intellectual side. When he was the scholar, the scientist, the philosopher, he demanded and received the strictest attention and consideration from his immediate coterie of friends. So long as he was merelyle bon diable, the jovial clubman, it was safe to banter and even to contradict him; but when the conversation drifted into the higher realms of thought, it was tacitly understood that the privileges of friendship were revoked. At such moments it was as though the oracle of Delphi spoke.
This ambition to shine as a man of learning was the natural outcome of his disproportionate vanity, his abnormal egotism, his craving for prominence and power. Sprudell was a man who had had meager youthful advantages, but through life he had observed the tremendous impression which scholarly attainments made upon the superficially educated—which they made upon him.
So he set about acquiring knowledge.
He dabbled in the languages, and a few useful words and phrases stuck. He plunged into the sciences, and arose from the immersion dripping with a smattering of astronomy, chemistry, biology, archæology, and what not. The occult was to him an open book, and he was wont temporarily to paralyze the small talk of social gatherings with dissertations upon the teachings of the ancients which he had swallowed at a gulp. He criticised the schools of modern painting in impressive art terms, while he himself dashed off half-column poems at a sitting for theCourier, in which he had acquired controlling stock.
In other words, by a certain amount of industry, T. Victor Sprudell had become a walking encyclopædiaof misinformation with small danger of being found out so long as he stayed in Bartlesville.
Certainly Abe Cone—born Cohen—who had made his “barrel” in ready-made clothing, felt in no position to contradict him when he stated his belief in the theory of transmigration as expounded by Pythagoras, and expressed the opinion that by chance the soul of Cleopatra might be occupying the graceful body of the club cat. Abe was not acquainted with the doctrine of Pythagoras, though he had heard somewhere that the lady was a huzzy; so he discreetly kept his mouth closed and avoided the cat. Intellectually Sprudell’s other associates were of Abe’s caliber, so he shone among them, the one bright, particular star—too vain, too fundamentally deficient to know how little he really knew.
Nevertheless he was the most thoroughly detested, the most hated man in Bartlesville. And those who hated feared him as they hated and feared the incendiary, the creeping thief, the midnight assassin; for he used their methods to attain his ends, along with a despot’s power.
No man or woman who pricked his vanity, who incurred his displeasure, was safe from his vengeance. No person who wounded his self-esteem was too obscure to escape his vindictive malice, and no means that he could employ, providing it was legally safe, was too unscrupulous, too petty, to use to punish the offender. Hounding somebody was his recreation, his one extravagance. He exhumed the buried pasts of political candidates who had crossed him; he rattled family skeletons in revenge for social slights; he published musty prison records, and over night blasted reputations which had been years in the building.His enmity cost salaried men positions through pressure which sooner or later he always found the way to bring to bear, and even mere “day’s jobs” were not beneath his notice. Yet his triumphs cost him dear. Merry groups had a way of dissolving at his coming. He read dislike in many a hostess’s eye, and, save for the small coterie of inferior satellites, Sprudell in his own club was as lonely as a leper. But so strong was this dominating trait that he preferred the sweetness of revenge to any tie of fellowship or hope of popularity. The ivy of friendship did not grow for him.
By a secret ballot, Sprudell in his own town could not have been elected dog-catcher, yet his money and his newspaper made him dangerous and a power.
When he regaled his fellow members with the dramatic story of his sufferings, he said nothing of Bruce Burt. Bruce Burt was dead, of that he had not the faintest doubt. He intended to keep the promise he had made to hunt the Naudain fellow’s relatives, but for the present he felt that his frosted feet were paramount.
VIISprudell Goes East
VIISprudell Goes East
With an air of being late for many important engagements, T. Victor Sprudell bustled into the Hotel Strathmore in the Eastern city that had been Slim’s home and inscribed his artistic signature upon the register; and as a consequence Peters, city editor of theEvening Dispatch, while glancing casually over the proofs that had just come from the composing room, some hours later, paused at the name of T. Victor Sprudell, Bartlesville, Indiana, among the list of hotel arrivals.
Mr. Peters shoved back his green shade, closed one eye, and with the other stared fixedly at the ceiling. One of the chief reasons why he occupied the particular chair in which he sat was because he had a memory like an Edison record, and now he asked himself where and in what connection he had seen this name in print before.
Who was this Sprudell? What had he done? Had he run away with somebody, embezzled, explored—explored, that was more like it! Ah, now he remembered—Sprudell was a hero. Two “sticks” in the Associated Press had informed the world how nobly he had saved somebody from something.
Peters scanned the city room. The bright young cub who leaps to fame in a single story was not present. The city editor had no hallucinations regarding such members of his staff as he saw at leisure, but thought again, as he had often thought before, that the world had lost some good plumbers and gasfitterswhen they turned to newspaper work. He said abruptly to the office boy:
“Tell Miss Dunbar to come here.”
In a general way, Mr. Peters did not approve of women in journalism, but he did disapprove very particularly of making any distinction between the sexes in the office. Yet frequently he found himself gripping the chair arm to prevent himself from rising when she entered; and in his secret soul he knew that he looked out of the window to note the weather before giving her an out-of-town assignment. When she came into the city room now he conquered this annoying impulse of politeness by not immediately looking up.
“You sent for me?”
“Go up to the hotel and see this man” (he underscored the name and handed her the proof); “there might be a story in him. He saved somebody’s life out West—his guide’s, as I recall it. Noble-hero story—brave tenderfoot rescuing seasoned Westerner—reversal of the usual picture. Might use his photograph.”
“I’ll try,” as she took the slip. It was characteristic of her not to ask questions, which was one of the several reasons why the city editor approved of her.
“In that event I know we can count on it.” Mr. Peters waited expectantly and was not disappointed.
She was walking away but turned her head and looked back at him over her shoulder. The sudden, sparkling smile changed her face like some wizard’s magic from that of a sober young woman very much in earnest to a laughing, rather mischievous looking little girl of ten or twelve.
There are a few women who even at middle-age have moments when it seems as though the inexorable hand of Time were forced back to childhood by the youthfulness of their spirit. For a minute, or perhaps a second merely, the observer receives a vivid impression of them as they looked before the anxieties and sorrows which come with living had left their imprint.
Helen Dunbar had this trick of expression to a marked degree and for a fleeting second she always looked like a little girl in shoe-top frocks and pigtails. Mr. Peters had noticed it often, and as a student of physiognomy he had found the transformation so fascinating that he had not only watched for it but sometimes endeavored to provoke it. He also reflected now as he looked after her, that her appearance was a credit to the sheet—a comment he was not always able to make upon the transitory ladies of his staff.
The unconscious object of the newspaper’s attention was seated at a desk in the sitting-room of his suite in the Hotel Strathmore, alternately frowning and smiling in the effort of composition.
Mr. Sprudell had a jaunty, colloquial style when he stooped to prose.
“Easy of access, pay dirt from the grass roots, and a cinch to save,” he was writing, when a knock upon the door interrupted him.
“Come in!” He scowled at the uniformed intruder.
“A card, sir.” It was Miss Dunbar’s, of theEvening Dispatch.
“What the dickens!” Mr. Sprudell looked puzzled. “Ah yes, of course!” For a second, an instant merely,Mr. Sprudell had quite forgotten that he was a hero.
“These peoplewillfind you out.” His tone was bored. “Tell her I’ll be down presently.”
When the door closed, he walked to the glass.
He twitched at his crimson neck scarf and whisked his pearl-gray spats; he made a pass or two with his military brushes at his cherished part, and took his violets from a glass of water to squeeze them dry on a towel. While he adjusted his boutonnière, he gazed at his smiling image and twisted his neck to look for wrinkles in his coat. “T. Victor Sprudell, Wealthy Sportsman and Hero, Reluctantly Consents to Be Interviewed” was a headline which occurred to him as he went down in the elevator.
The girl from theDispatchawaited him in the parlor. Mr. Sprudell’s genial countenance glowed as he advanced with outstretched hand.
Miss Dunbar noted that the hand was warm and soft and chubby; nor was this dapper, middle-aged beau exactly the man she had pictured as the hero of a thrilling rescue. He looked too self-satisfied and fat.
“Now what can I do for you, my dear young lady?” Mr. Sprudell drew up a chair with amiable alacrity.
“We have heard of you, you know,” she began smilingly.
“Oh, really!” Mr. Sprudell lifted one astonished brow. “I cannot imagine——” He was thinking that Miss Dunbar had remarkably good teeth.
“And we want you to tell us something of your adventure in the West.”
“Which one?”
“Er—thelastone.”
“Oh, that little affair of the blizzard?” Mr. Sprudelllaughed inconsequently. “Tut, tut! There’s really nothing to tell.”
“Weknow better than that.” She looked at him archly.
It was then he discovered that she had especially fine eyes.
“I couldn’t have done less than I did, under the circumstances.” Mr. Sprudell closed a hand and regarded the polished nails modestly. “But—er—frankly, I would rather not talk for publication.”
“People who have actually done something worth telling will never talk,” declared Miss Dunbar, in mock despair, “while those——”
“But you can understand,” interrupted Mr. Sprudell, with a gesture of depreciation, “how a man feels to seem to”—he all but achieved a blush—“to toot his own horn.”
“I can understand your reluctance perfectly” Miss Dunbar admitted sympathetically, and it was then he noticed how low and pleasant her voice was. She felt that she did understand perfectly—she had a notion that nothing short of total paralysis of the vocal cords would stop him after he had gone through the “modest hero’s” usual preamble.
“But,” she urged, “there is so much crime and cowardice, so many dreadful things, printed, that I think stories of self-sacrifice and brave deeds like yours should be given the widest publicity—a kind of antidote—you know what I mean?”
“Exactly,” Mr. Sprudell acquiesced eagerly. “Moral effect upon the youth of the land. Establishes standards of conduct, raises high ideals in the mind of the reader. Of course, looking at it from thatpoint of view——” Obviously Mr. Sprudell was weakening.
“That’s the view you must take of it,” insisted Miss Dunbar sweetly.
Mr. Sprudell regarded his toe. Charming as she was, he wondered if she could do the interview—him—justice. A hint of his interesting personality would make an effective preface, he thought, and a short sketch of his childhood culminating in his successful business career.
“Out there in the silences, where the peaks pierce the blue——” began Mr. Sprudell dreamily.
“Where?” Miss Dunbar felt for a pencil.
“Er—Bitter Root Mountains.” The business-like question and tone disconcerted him slightly.
Mr. Sprudell backed up and started again:
“Out there in the silence, where the peaks pierce the blue, we pitched our tents in the wilderness—in the forest primeval. We pillowed our heads upon nature’s heart, and lay at night watching the cold stars shivering in their firmament.” That was good! Mr. Sprudell wondered if it was original or had he read it somewhere? “By day, like primordial man, we crept around beetling crags and scaled inaccessible peaks in pursuit of the wild things——”
“Who crept with you?” inquired Miss Dunbar prosaically. “How far were you from a railroad?”
A shade of irritation replaced the look of poetic exaltation upon Sprudell’s face. It would have been far better if they had sent a man. A man would undoubtedly have taken the interview verbatim.
“An old prospector and mountain man named Griswold—Uncle Bill they call him—was my guide,and we were—let me see—yes, all of a hundred miles from a railroad.”
“What you were saying was—a—beautiful,” declared Miss Dunbar, noting his injured tone, “but, you see, unfortunately in a newspaper we must have facts. Besides”—she glanced at the wrist watch beneath the frill of her coat sleeve—“the first edition goes to press at eleven-forty-five, and I would like to have time to do your story justice.”
Mr. Sprudell reluctantly folded his oratorical pinions and dived to earth.
Beginning with the moment when he had emerged from the cañon where he had done some remarkable shooting at a band of mountain sheep—he doubted if ever he would be able to repeat the performance—and first sensed danger in the leaden clouds, to the last desperate struggle through the snowdrifts in the paralyzing cold of forty below, with poor old Uncle Bill Griswold on his back, he told the story graphically, with great minuteness of detail. And when divine Providence led him at last to the lonely miner’s cabin on the wild tributary of the Snake, and he had sunk, fainting and exhausted, to the floor with his inert burden on his back, Mr. Sprudell’s eyes filled, touched to tears by the story of his own bravery.
Miss Dunbar’s wide, intent eyes and parted lips inspired him to go further. Under the stimulus of her flattering attention and the thought that through her he was talking to an audience of at least two hundred thousand people, he forgot the caution which was always stronger than any rash impulse. The circulation of theDispatchwas local; and besides, Bruce Burt was dead, he reasoned swiftly.
He told her of the tragedy in the lonely cabin, anddescribed to her the scene into which he had stumbled, getting into the telling something of his own feeling of shock. In imagination she could see the big, silent, black-browed miner cooking, baking, deftly doing a woman’s work, scrubbing at the stains on logs and flooring, wiping away the black splashes like a tidy housewife. “Thisis my story,” she thought.
“Why did they quarrel?”
“It began with a row over pancakes, and wound up with a fight over salt.”
She stared incredulously.
“Fact—he said so.”
“And what was the brute’s name?”
He answered, not too readily:
“Why—Bruce Burt.”
“And the man he murdered?”
“They called him Slim Naudain.”
“Naudain!” Her startled cry made him look at her in wonder. “Naudain! What did they call him beside Slim?”
“Frederick was his given name.”
“Freddie!” she whispered, aghast.
Sprudell stared at her, puzzled.
“Itmustbe! The name is too uncommon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He must have been my brother—my half-brother—my mother was married twice. It is too dreadful!” She stared at Sprudell with wide, shocked eyes.
Sprudell was staring, too, but he seemed more disconcerted than amazed.
“It’s hardly likely,” he said, reassuringly. “When did you hear from him last?”
“It has been all of twelve years since we heard from him even indirectly. I wrote to him in SilverCity, New Mexico, where we were told he was working in a mine. Perhaps he did not get my letter; at least I’ve tried to think so, for he did not answer.”
Indecision, uncertainty, were uppermost among the expressions on Sprudell’s face, but the girl did not see them, for her downcast eyes were filled with tears. Finally he said slowly and in a voice curiously restrained.
“Yes, he did receive it and I have it here. It’s a very strange coincidence, Miss Dunbar, the most remarkable I have ever known; you will agree when I tell you that my object in coming East was to find you and your mother for the purpose of turning over his belongings—this letter you mention, an old photograph of you and some five hundred dollars in money he left.”
“It’s something to remember, that at least he kept my letter and my picture.” She swallowed hard and bit her lips for self-control. “He was not a good son or a good brother, Mr. Sprudell,” she continued with an effort, “but since my father and mother died he’s been all I had. And I’ve made myself believe that at heart he was all right and that when he was older he would think enough of us some time to come home. I’ve counted on it—on him—more than I realized until now. It is”—she clenched her hands tightly and swallowed hard again—“a blow.”
Sprudell replied soothingly
“This fellow Burt said his partner thought a lot of you.”
“It’s strange,” Helen looked up reflectively, “that a cold-blooded murderer like that would have turnedover my brother’s things—would have sent anything back at all.”
“Imadehim,” said Sprudell.
“I’m too shocked yet to thank you properly,” she said, rising and giving him her hand, “but, believe me, I do appreciate your disinterested kindness in making this long trip from Bartlesville, and for total strangers, too.”
“Tut! tut!” Mr. Sprudell interrupted. “It’s nothing—nothing at all; and now I wish you’d promise to dine with me this evening. I’ll call for you if I may and bring the money and the letter and picture. From now on I want you to feel that I am a friend who is always at your service. Tut! tut! don’t embarrass me with thanks.”
He accompanied her to the door, then stepped back into the parlor to watch her pass the window and cross the street. He liked her brisk, alert step, her erect carriage, and the straight lines of the dark clothes she wore mightily became her slender figure. “Wouldn’t a girl like that”—his full, red lips puckered in a whistle—“wouldn’tshemake a stir in Bartlesville!”
Sprudell returned to his task, but with abated enthusiasm. A vague uneasiness, which may have been his conscience, disturbed him. He would write furiously, then stop and read what he had written with an expression of dissatisfaction.
“Hang it all.” He threw his work down finally, and, thrusting his hands in the pockets of his trousers, paced up and down the floor to “have it out.” What could the girl do with the place if she had it? It was a property which required money and experience and brains to handle. Besides, he had committedhimself to his friends, talked of it, promoted it partially, and they shared his enthusiasm. It was something which appealed intensely to the strong vein of sensationalism in him. What a pill it would be for his enemies to swallow if he went West and made another fortune! They might hate him, but they would have to admit his brains. To emerge, Midaslike, from the romantic West with bags of yellow gold was the one touch needed to make him an envied, a unique and picturesque, figure. Hecould notgive it up. He meant to be honest—hewouldbe honest—but in his own way.
He would see that the girl profited by the development of the ground. He would find a way. Already there was a hazy purpose in his head which, if it crystallized, would prove a most satisfactory way. Sprudell sat down again and wrote until the prospectus of the Bitter Root Placer Mining Company was ready for the printer.
VIIIUncle Bill Finds News in the “Try-Bune”
VIIIUncle Bill Finds News in the “Try-Bune”
When anybody remained in Ore City through the winter it was a tacit confession that he had not money enough to get away; and this winter the unfortunates were somewhat more numerous than usual. Those who remained complained that they saw the sun so seldom that when it did come out it hurt their eyes, and certain it is that owing to the altitude there were always two months more of winter in Ore City than in any other camp in the State.
After the first few falls of snow a transcontinental aeroplane might have crossed the clearing in the thick timber without suspecting any settlement there, unless perchance the aeronaut was flying low enough to see the tunnels which led like the spokes of a wheel from the snow-buried cabins to the front door of the Hinds House.
When the rigid cold of forty below froze everything that would freeze, and the wind drove the powdery snow up and down the Main street, there would not be a single sign of life for hours; but at the least cessation the inhabitants came out like prairie dogs from their holes and scuttled through their tunnels, generally on borrowing expeditions: that is, if they were not engaged at the time in conversation, cribbage, piute or poker in the comfortable office of the Hinds House. In which event they all came out together.
In winter the chief topic was a continual wonder as to whether the stage would be able to get in, andin summer as to whether when it did get in it would bring a “live one.” No one ever looked for a “live one” later than September or earlier than June.
There had been a time when the hotel was full of “live ones,” and nearly every mine owner had one of his own in tow, but this was when the Mascot was working three shifts and a big California outfit had bonded the Goldbug.
But a “fault” had come into the vein on the Mascot and they had never been able to pick up the ore-shoot again. So the grass grew ankle-deep on the Mascot hill because there were no longer three shifts of hob-nailed boots to keep it down. The California outfit dropped the Goldbug as though it had been stung, and a one-lunger stamp-mill chugged where the camp had dreamed of forty.
In the halcyon days, the sound that issued from “The Bucket o’ Blood” suggested wild animals at feeding time; but the nightly roar from the saloon even in summer had sunk to a plaintive whine and ceased altogether in winter. Machinery rusted and timbers rotted while the roof of the Hinds House sagged like a sway-backed horse; so did the beds, so also did “Old Man” Hinds’ spirits, and there was a hole in the dining-room floor where the unwary sometimes dropped to their hip-joints.
But the Hinds House continued to be, as it always had been, the social centre, the news bureau, the scene where large deals were constantly being conceived and promulgated—although they got no further. Each inhabitant of Ore City had his set time for arriving and departing, and he abided as closely by his schedule as though he kept office hours.
There was a generous box of saw-dust near theround sheet-iron stove which set in the middle of the office, and there were many straight-backed wooden chairs whose legs were steadied with baling wire and whose seats had been highly polished by the overalls of countless embryo mining magnates. On one side of the room was a small pine table where Old Man Hinds walloped himself at solitaire, and on the other side of the room was a larger table, felt-covered, kept sacred to the games of piute and poker, where as much as three dollars sometimes changed hands in a single night.
At the extreme end of the long office was a plush barber chair, and a row of gilt mugs beneath a gilt mirror gave the place a metropolitan air, although there was little doing in winter when whiskers and long hair became assets.
Selected samples of ore laid in rows on the window-sills; there were neat piles heaped in the corners, along the walls, and on every shelf, while the cabinet-organ, of Jersey manufacture, with its ornamental rows of false stops and keys, which was the distinguishing feature of the office, had “spec’mins” on the bristling array of stands which stood out from it in unexpected places like wooden stalagmites.
The cabinet-organ setting “catty-cornered” beside the roller-towel indicated the presence of womankind, and it indicated correctly, for out in the kitchen was Mrs. Alonzo Snow, and elsewhere about the hotel were her two lovely daughters, the Misses Violet and Rosie Snow,—facetiously known as “the Snowbirds.”
Second to the stove in the office, the Snow family was the attraction in the Hinds House, for the entertainment they frequently furnished was as free asthe wood that thehabituésfed so liberally to the sheet-iron stove.
A psychological writer has asserted that when an extremely sensitive person meets for the first time one who is to figure prominently in his life, he experiences an inward tremor. Whether it was that Old Man Hinds was not sufficiently sensitive or was too busy at the time to be cognizant of inward tremors, the fact is he was not conscious of any such sensation when the “Musical Snows” alighted stiffly from the Beaver Creek stage; yet they were to fill not only his best rooms but his whole horizon.
“Nightingales and Prodigies,” the handbills said, and after the concert nobody questioned their claims. The “Musical Snows” liked the people, the food, the scenery—and the climate which was doing Mr. Snow such a lot of good—so well that they stayed on. There were so many of them and they rested so long that their board-bill became too hopelessly large to pay, so they did not dishearten themselves by trying.
Then while freight was seven cents a pound from the railroad terminus and Old Man Hinds was staring at the ceiling in the tortured watches of the night trying to figure out how he could make three hams last until another wagon got in, a solution came to him which seemed the answer to all his problems. He would turn the hotel over to the “Musical Snows” and board with them! It was the only way he could ever hope to catch up. To board them meant ruin.
So the Snow family abandoned their musical careers and consented to assume the responsibility temporarily—at least while Pa was “poahly.” This was four years ago, and “Pa” was still poahly.
He spent most of his time in a rocking chair upstairsby the stove-pipe hole where he could hear conveniently. When the stove-pipe parted at the joint, as it sometimes did, those below knew that Mr. Snow had inadvertently clasped the stove-pipe too tightly between his stockinged feet, though there were those who held that it happened because he did not like the turn the talk was taking. At any rate the Snow family spread themselves around most advantageously. Mr. Will Snow, the tenor of the “Plantation Quartette,” appeared behind the office desk, while Mr. Claude Snow, the baritone, turned hostler for the stage-line and sold oats to the freighters. And “Ma” Snow developed such a taste for discipline and executive ability that while she was only five feet four and her outline had the gentle outward slope of a churn, Ore City spoke of her fearfully as “She.”
Her shoulders were narrow, her chest was flat, and the corrugated puffs under her eyes with which she arose each morning looked like the half-shell of an English walnut. By noon these puffs had sunk as far the other way, so it was almost possible to tell the time of day by Ma Snow’s eyes; but she could beat the world on “The Last Rose of Summer,” and she still took high C.
Regular food and four years in the mountain air had done wonders for “The Infant Prodigies,” Miss Rosie and Miss Vi, who now weighed close to two hundred pounds, tempting an ungallant freighter to observe that they must be “throw-backs” to Percheron stock and adding that “they ought to work great on the wheel.” Their hips stood out like well-filled saddle pockets and they still wore their hair down their backs in thin braids, but, as the onlygirls within fifty miles, the “Prodigies” were undisputed belles.
One dull day in early December, when the sky had not lightened even at noon, a monotonous day in the Hinds House, since there had been no impromptu concert and the cards had been running with unsensational evenness, while every thread-bare topic seemed completely talked out, Uncle Bill walked restlessly to the window and by the waning light turned a bit of “rock” over in his hand.
The sight was too much for Yankee Sam, who hastily joined him.
“Think you got anything, Bill?”
“I got a hell-uv-a-lot of somethin’ or a hell-uv-a-lot of nothin’. It’s forty feet across the face.”
“Shoo!” Sam took it from him and picked at it with a knife-point, screwing a glass into his eye to inspect the particle which he laid out carefully in his palm.
“Looks like somethin’ good.”
“When I run a fifty foot tunnel into a ledge of antimony over on the Skookumchuck itlookedlike somethin’ good.” Uncle Bill added drily: “I ain’t excited.”
“It might be one of them rar’ minerals.” Yankee Sam hefted it judicially. “What do you hold it at?”
“Anything I can git.”
“You ought to git ten thousand dollars easy when Capital takes holt.”
“I’d take a hundred and think I’d stuck the feller, if I could git cash.”
“A hundred!” Yankee Sam flared up in instantwrath. “It’s cheap fellers like you that’s killin’ this camp!”
“Mortification had set in on this camp ’fore I ever saw it, Samuel,” replied Uncle Bill calmly. “I was over in the Buffalo Hump Country doin’ assessment work fifteen hundred feet above timber-line when the last Live One pulled out of Ore City. They ain’t been one in since to my knowledge. The town’s so quiet you can hear the fish come up to breathe in Lemon Crick and I ain’t lookin’ for a change soon.”
“You wait till spring.”
“I wore out the bosoms of two pair of Levi Strauss’s every winter since 1910 waitin’ for spring, and I ain’t seen nothin’ yet except Capital makin’ wide circles around Ore City. This here camp’s got a black eye.”
“And who give it a black eye?” demanded Yankee Sam wrathfully. “Who done it but knockers like you? I ’spose if Capital was settin’ right alongside you’d up and tell ’em you never saw a ledge yet in this camp hold out below a hundred feet?”
Uncle Bill replied tranquilly:
“Would if they ast me.”
“You’d rather see us all starve than boost.”
“Jest as lief as to lie.”
“Well, that’s what we’re goin’ to do if somethin’ don’t happen this spring.She’llown this camp. Porcupine Jim turned over ‘The Underdog’ yesterday and Lannigan’s finished eatin’ on ‘The Gold-dust Twins’.” He moved away disconsolately. “Lord, I wish the stage would get in.”
At this juncture Judge George Petty turned in from the street, hitting both sides of the snow tunnel as he came. He fumbled at the door-knob in asuspicious manner and then stumbled joyously inside.
“Boys,” he announced exuberantly, “I think I heerd the stage.”
The group about the red-hot stove regarded him coldly and no one moved. It was like him, the ingrate, to get drunk alone. When he tried to wedge a chair into the circle they made no effort to give him room.
“You don’t believe me!” The Judge’s mouth, which had been upturned at the corners like a “dry” new moon, as promptly became a “wet” one and drooped as far the other way.
“Somethin’ you been takin’ must a quickened your hearin’,” said Yankee Sam sourly. “She’s an hour and a half yet from bein’ due.”
“’Twere nothin’,” he answered on the defensive, “but a few drops of vaniller and some arnicy left over from that sprain. You oughtn’t to feel hard toward me,” he quavered, wilting under the unfriendly eyes. “I’d a passed it if there’d been enough to go aroun’.”
“An’ after all we’ve done fer ye,” said Lannigan, “makin’ ye Jestice of the Peace to keep ye off the town.”
“Jedge,” said Uncle Bill deliberately, “you’re gittin’ almost no-account enough to be a Forest Ranger. I aims to write to Washington when your term is out and git you in the Service.”
The Judge jumped up as though he had been stung.
“Bill, we been friends for twenty year, an’ I’ll take considerable off you, but I want you to understan’ they’r alimit. You kin call me a wolf, er a Mormon, er a son-of-a-gun, but, Bill, you can’t callme no Forest Ranger! Bill,” pleadingly, and his face crumpled in sudden tears, “you didn’t mean that, did you? You wouldn’t insult an ol’, ol’ frien’?”
“You got the ear-marks,” Uncle Bill replied unmoved. “For a year now you’ve walked forty feet around that tree that fell across the trail to your cabin rather than stop and chop it out. You sleeps fourteen hours a day and eats the rest. The hardest work you ever do is to draw your money. Hell’s catoots! It’s a crime to keep a born Ranger like you off the Department’s pay-roll.”
“You think I’m drunk now and I’ll forgit. Well—I won’t.” The Judge shook a tremulous but belligerent fist. “I’ll remember what you said to me the longest day I live, and you’ve turned an ol’, ol’ frien’ into an enemy. Whur’s that waumbat coat what was hangin’ here day ’fore yistiday?”
In offended dignity the Judge took the waumbat coat and retreated to the furthermost end of the office, where he covered himself and went to sleep in the plush barber-chair.
In the silence which followed, Miss Vi doing belated chamberwork upstairs sounded like six on an ore-wagon as she walked up and down the uncarpeted hall.
“Wisht they’d sing somethin’,” said Porcupine Jim wistfully.
As though his desire had been communicated by mental telepathy Ma Snow’s soprano came faintly from the kitchen—“We all like she-e-e—p-.” Miss Rosie’s alto was heard above the clatter of the dishes she was placing on the table in the dining-room—“We all like she-e-e—p-.” Miss Vi’s throaty contralto was wafted down the stairs—“We all like she-e-e-p.”“Have gone” sang the tenor. “Have gone astray—astray”—Mr. Snow’s booming bass came through the stove-pipe hole. The baritone arrived from the stable in time to lend his voice as they all chorded.
“The stage’s comin’,” the musical hostler announced when the strains died away. The entranced audience dashed abruptly for the door.
A combination of arnica and vanilla seemed indeed to have sharpened the Judge’s hearing for the stage was fully an hour earlier than any one had reason to expect.
“Don’t see how he can make such good time over them roads loaded down like he is with Mungummery-Ward Catalogues and nails comin’ by passel post.” Yankee Sam turned up his coat collar and shivered.
“Them leaders is turrible good snow-horses; they sabe snow-shoes like a man.” Lannigan stretched his neck to catch a glimpse of them through the pines before they made the turn into the Main street.
There was a slightly acid edge to Uncle Bill’s tone as he observed:
“I ought to git my Try-bune to-night if the postmistress at Beaver Crick is done with it.”
“Git-ep! Eagle! Git-ep, Nig!” They could hear the stage driver urging his horses before they caught sight of the leader’s ears turning the corner.
Then Porcupine Jim, who had the physical endowment of being able to elongate his neck like a turtle, cried excitedly before anyone else could see the rear of the stage: “They’s somebudy on!”
A passenger? They looked at each other inquiringly. Who could be coming into Ore City at this time of year? But there he sat—a visible fact—in the back seat—wearing a coon-skin cap and snuggleddown into a coon-skin overcoat looking the embodiment of ready money! A Live One—in winter! They experienced something of the awe which the Children of Israel must have felt when manna fell in the wilderness. Even Uncle Bill tingled with curiosity.
When the steaming stage horses stopped before the snow tunnel, the population of Ore City was waiting like a reception committee, their attitudes of nonchalance belied by their gleaming, intent eyes.
The stranger was dark and hatchet-faced, with sharp, quick-moving eyes. He nodded curtly in a general way and throwing aside the robes sprang out nimbly.
A pang so sharp and violent that it was nearly audible passed through the expectant group. Hope died a sudden death when they saw his legs. It vanished like the effervescence from charged water, likewise their smile. He wore puttees! He was the prospectors’ ancient enemy. He was a Yellow Leg! A mining expert—but who was he representing? Without knowing, they suspected “the Guggenheimers”—when in doubt they always suspected the Guggenheimers.
They stood aside to let him pass, their cold eyes following his legs down the tunnel, waiting in the freezing atmosphere to avoid the appearance of indecent haste, though they burned to make a bee-line for the register.
“Wilbur Dill,—Spokane” was the name he inscribed upon the spotless page with many curlicues, while Ma Snow waited with a graceful word of greeting, bringing with her the fragrant odors of the kitchen.
“Welcome to our mountain home.”
As Mr. Dill bowed gallantly over her extended hand he became aware that there was to be fried ham for supper.
He was shown to his room but came down again with considerable celerity, rubbing his knuckles, and breaking the highly charged silence of the office with a caustic comment upon the inconvenience of sleeping in cold storage.
There was a polite murmur of assent but nothing further, as his hearers knew what he did not—that Pa Snow upstairs was listening. Yankee Sam however tactfully diverted his thoughts to the weather, hoping thus indirectly to draw out his reason for undertaking the hardship of such a trip in winter. But whatever Mr. Dill’s business it appeared to be of a nature which would keep, although they sat expectantly till Miss Rosie coyly announced supper.
“Don’t you aim to set down, Uncle Bill?” she asked kindly as the rest filed in.
“Thanks, no, I et late and quite hearty, an’ I see the Try-bune’s come.”
“I should think you’d want to eat every chance you got after all you went through out hunting.”
“It’s that, I reckon, what’s took my appetite,” the old man answered soberly, as he produced his steel-rimmed spectacles and started to read what the Beaver Creek postmistress had left him of his newspaper.
Inside, Mr. Dill seated himself at the end of the long table which a placard braced against the castor proclaimed as sacred to the “transient.” A white tablecloth served as a kind of dead-line over which the most audacious regular dared not reach for special delicacies when Ma Snow hovered in the vicinity.
“Let me he’p yoah plate to some Oregon-grape jell,” Ma Snow was urging in her honied North Carolina accent, when, by that mysterious sixth sense which she seemed to possess, or the eye which it was believed she concealed by the arrangement of her back hair, she became suddenly aware of the condition of Mr. Lannigan’s hands.
She whirled upon him like a catamount and her weak blue eyes watered in a way they had when she was about to show the hardness of a Lucretia Borgia. Her voice, too, that quivered as though on the verge of tears, had a quality in it which sent shivers up and down the spines of those who were familiar with it.
“Lannigan, what did I tell you?”
It was obvious enough that Lannigan knew what she had told him for he immediately jerked his hands off the oilcloth, and hid them under the table.
He answered with a look of innocence:
“Why, I don’t know ma’am.”
“Go out and wash them hands!”
Hands, like murder, will out. Concealment was no longer possible, since it was a well-known fact that Lannigan had hands, so he held them in front of him and regarded them in well-feigned surprise.
“I declare I never noticed!”
It was difficult to imagine how such hands could have escaped observation, even by their owner, as they looked as though he had used them for scoops to remove soot from a choked chimney. Also the demarcation lines of various high tides were plainly visible on his wrists and well up his arms. He arose with a wistful look at the platter of ham which had started on its first and perhaps only lap around the table.
Uncle Bill glanced up and commented affably:
“You got ran out, I see. I thoughtshe’dflag them hands when I saw you goin’ in with ’em.”
Lannigan grunted as he splashed at the wash basin in the corner.
“I notice by the Try-bune,” went on Uncle Bill with a chuckle, “that one of them English suffragettes throwed flour on the Primeer and—” His mouth opened as a fresh headline caught his eye, and when he had finished perusing it his jaw had lengthened until it was resting well down the bosom of his flannel shirt . . . The headline read:
BRAVE TENDERFOOT SAVES HIS GUIDEFROM DEATH IN BLIZZARDT. VICTOR SPRUDELL CARRIES EXHAUSTED OLD MANTHROUGH DEEP DRIFTS TO SAFETYA MODEST HERO
Uncle Bill removed his spectacles and polished them deliberately. Then he readjusted them and read the last paragraph again:
“The rough old mountain man, Bill Griswold, grasped my hand at parting, and tears of gratitude rolled down his withered cheeks as he said good-bye. But, tut! tut!” declared Mr. Sprudell modestly: “I had done nothing.”
Uncle Bill made a sound that was somewhere between his favorite ejaculation and a gurgle, while his face wore an expression which was a droll mixture of amazement and wrath.
“Oh, Lannigan!” he called, then changed his mind and, instead, laid the paper on his knee and carefully cut out the story, which had been copied from an Eastern exchange, and placed it in his worn leather wallet.