“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 that point 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 the Dispatch was local; and besides, Bruce Burt was dead, he reasoned swiftly.
He told her of the tragedy in the lonely cabin, and described 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. “This is 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.
“It must be! 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 Silver City, 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 turned over my brother’s things—would have sent anything back at all.”
“I made him,” 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’t she make 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 committed himself 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. He could not give it up. He meant to be honest—he would be 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.
* * *
VIII
Uncle 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, and in 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 the round 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 as the wood that the habitués fed 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 upstairs by 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 t
alk 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 only girls 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.”
The Man from the Bitter Roots Page 7