The Man from the Bitter Roots

by Lockhart, Caroline

  “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 assessment 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 principally 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 scraped the snow away from beside the cabin, and Sprudell helped him bury Slim. Then, against the day of their going, he fashioned 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 cañon 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 shorely 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 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 merely le 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 superfi
cially 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 the Courier, in which he had acquired controlling stock.

  In other words, by a certain amount of industry, T. Victor Sprudell had become a walking encyclopædia of 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.

  * * *

  VII

  Sprudell 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 the Evening 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 gasfitters when 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 the Evening 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 people will find 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 viole
ts 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 the Dispatch awaited 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—the last one.”

  “Oh, that little affair of the blizzard?” Mr. Sprudell laughed inconsequently. “Tut, tut! There’s really nothing to tell.”

  “We know 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.”