The Man from the Bitter Roots

by Lockhart, Caroline

  “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 it looked like 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 instant wrath. “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’ll own 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 a suspicious 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 a limit. You kin call me a wolf, er a Mormon, er a son-of-a-gun, but, Bill, you can’t call me 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 snuggled down 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 Guggenhei
mers”—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 thought she’d flag 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 GUIDE

  FROM DEATH IN BLIZZARD

  T. VICTOR SPRUDELL CARRIES EXHAUSTED OLD MAN

  THROUGH DEEP DRIFTS TO SAFETY

  A 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.

  * * *

  IX

  The Yellow-Leg

  While seated in the office of the Hinds House, with his eyes rolled to the ceiling, listening in well-feigned rapture to “Rippling Waves” on the cabinet organ, and other numbers rendered singly and ensemble by the Musical Snows, Mr. Dill in reality was wondering by what miracle he was going to carry out Sprudell’s specific instructions to keep his errand a secret.

  “The great, white light which plays upon a throne” is not more searching than that which follows the movements of a possible Live One in a moribund mining camp, and, in spite of his puttees, Ore City hoped against hope that some benefit might be derived from the stranger’s presence.

  Dill’s orders were to get upon the ground which had been worked in a primitive way by a fellow named Bruce Burt—now deceased he was told—and relocate it in Sprudell’s name together with seven other contiguous claims, using the name of dummy locators which would give Sprudell control of one hundred and sixty acres by doing the assessment work upon one. Also Dill was instructed to run preliminary survey lines if possible and lose no time in submitting estimates upon the most feasible means of washing the ground.

  Seated in his comfortable office in Spokane, Mr. Dill had foreseen no great difficulties in the way of earning his ample fee, but it seemed less ample after one hundred miles by stage over three summits, and a better understanding of conditions. Between the stage-driver’s sweeping denunciations of road-supervisors in general and long and picturesque castigations of the local road supervisor in particular, Mr. Dill had adroitly extracted the information that the twenty-mile trail to the river was the worst known, and snow-line blazes left by “Porcupine Jim” were, in summer, thirty feet in the air.

  Mr. Dill learned enough en route to satisfy himself that he was going to earn every dollar of his money, and when he reached Ore City he was sure of it. The problem before him was one to sleep on, or rather, thinking with forebodings of the clammy sheets upstairs, to lie awake on. However, something would perhaps suggest itself and Mr. Dill was resourceful as well as unhampered by any restrictions regarding the truth.

  The Snow family were at their best that evening, and Ma Snow’s rendition of “The Gypsy’s Warning” was received with such favor that she was forced to sing the six verses twice and for a third encore the entire family responded with “The Washington Post March” which enabled Mr. Snow, who had tottered down from his aerie, to again demonstrate his versatility by playing the concertina with long, yellow fingers, beating the cymbals and working the snare-drum with his feet.

  Ma Snow wore her coral-rose breast-pin, and a tortoise-shell comb thrust through her knob of ginger-colored hair added to her dignity and height; while Miss Vi and Miss Rosie Snow were buttoned into their stylish princess gowns, with large red bows sprouting back of each ear. In truth, the dress o
f each member of the family bore some little touch which hinted delicately at the fact that with them it had not been always thus.

  All Ore City was present. Those who “bached” had stacked their dishes and hurried from the supper-table to the Hinds House, where the regular boarders were already tilted on the rear legs of their chairs with their heads resting comfortably on the particular oily spot on the unbleached muslin sheeting, which each recognized as having been made by weeks of contact with his own back hair.

  A little apart and preoccupied sat Uncle Bill with the clipping in his wallet burning like a red-hot coal. He could have swallowed being “carried down the mountain side,” but the paragraph wherein “tears of gratitude rained down his withered cheeks” stuck, as he phrased it, in his craw. It set him thinking hard of Bruce Burt and the young fellow’s deliberate sacrifice of his life for one old “Chink.” Somehow he could not rid himself of blame that he had let him go alone. As soon as he could get back to Ore City he had headed a search party that had failed to locate even the tent under the unusual fall of snow. Well, if Burt had taken a life, even accidentally, he had in expiation given his own.

  As he brooded, occasionally the old man glanced at Wilbur Dill. He had seen him before—but where? The sharp-faced, sharp-eyed Yellow-Leg was associated in the older man’s mind with something shady, but what it was he could not for the time recall.

  “Rosie, perhaps Mr. Dill would like to hear ‘When the Robins Nest Again,’” Ma Snow suggested in the sweet, ingratiating tones of a mother with two unattached daughters.

  Mr. Dill declared that it was one of his favorite compositions, so Miss Rosie obligingly stood forth with the dog-eared music.

  “When the Robins Nest Again, and the flower-r-rs—” she was warbling, but they never bloomed, for Mrs. Snow started for the door, explaining: “I’m sure I heard a scrunching.” She threw it open and the yellow light fell upon a gaunt figure leaning against the entrance of the snow tunnel. The man was covered with frost and icicles where his breath had frozen on his cap and upturned collar, while it was obvious from his snow-caked knees and elbows that he had fallen often. He stood staring dumbly at the light and warmth and at Ma Snow, then he stooped and began fumbling clumsily at the strappings of his snow-shoes.