The Man from the Bitter Roots. Caroline Lockhart
bank. He was conscious, too, of a curious sensation in his spine—a feeling as though some invisible power were pulling backward, backward until it hurt. He wanted to scream, to hear his own voice once more, but his vocal cords would not respond; he could not make a sound.
Griswold was shouting something; it did not matter what. He heard it faintly above the clatter of the rocks. He must be close to the edge now—Bartlesville—the Commercial Club—Abe Cone—and then Mr. Sprudell hit something with a bump! He had a sensation as of a hatpin—many hatpins—penetrating his tender flesh, but that was nothing compared to the fact that he had stopped, while the slide of shale was rushing by. He was not dead! but he was too astonished and relieved to immediately wonder why.
Then he weakly raised his head and looked cautiously over his shoulder lest the slightest movement start him travelling again. What miracle had saved his life? The answer was before him. When he came down the slide in the fortunate attitude of a clothespin, the Fates, who had other plans for him, it seemed, steered him for a small tree of the stout mountain mahogany, which has a way of pushing up in most surprising places.
“Don’t move!” called Griswold. “I’ll come and get ye!”
Unnecessary admonition. Although Sprudell was impaled on the thick, sharp thorns like a naturalist’s captive butterfly, he scarcely breathed, much less attempted to get up.
“Bill, I was near the gates,” said Sprudell solemnly when Griswold, at no small risk to himself, had snaked him back to solid ground. “Fortuna audaces juvat!”
“If that’s Siwash for ‘close squeak,’ it were; and,” with an anxious glance at the ominous sky, “ ’tain’t over.”
IV
Self-Defence
When Bruce came out of the cañon, where he had a wider view of the sky, he saw that wicked-looking clouds were piling thick upon one another in the northeast, and he wondered whether the month was the first of November or late October, as Slim insisted. They had lost track somehow, and of the day of the week they had not the faintest notion.
There was always the first big snowstorm to be counted on in the Bitter Root Mountains, after which it sometimes cleared and was open weather for weeks. But this was when it came early in September; the snow that fell now would in all probability lie until spring.
At any rate, there was wood to be cut, enough to last out a week’s storm. But, first, Bruce told himself, he must clean up the rocker, else he would lose nearly the entire proceeds of his day’s work. The gold was so light that much of it floated and went off with the water when the sand was wet again, after it had once dried upon the apron.
Bruce placed a gold pan at the end of the rocker, and, with a clean scrubbing brush, carefully worked the sand over the Brussels-carpet apron, pouring water into the grizzly the while.
“That trip up the cañon cost me half a day’s wages,” he thought as he saw the thin yellow scum floating on the top of the pan.
Sitting on his heel by the river’s edge, where he had made a quiet pool by building a breakwater of pebbles, he agitated and swirled the sand in the gold pan until only a small quantity remained, and while he watched carefully lest some of the precious specks and flakes which followed in a thick, yellow string behind the sand slip around the corners and over the edge, he also cast frequent glances at the peaks that became each moment more densely enveloped in the clouds.
“When she cuts loose she’s going to be a twister,” and he added grimly, as instinctively his eyes sought the saddleback or pass over which the ancient trail of the Sheep-eater Indians ran: “Those game hogs better pull their freight if they count on going out as they came in.”
His fingers were numb when he stood up and shook the cold river water from them, turning now to look across for a sight of Slim.
“I’ve cut his share of wood all summer, so I guess there’s no use quitting now. Turning pancakes is about the hardest work he’s done since we landed on the bar. Oh, well”—he raised one big shoulder in a shrug of resignation—“we’ll split this partnership when we get out of here. By rights I ought to dig out now.”
The chips flew as he swung the ax with blows that tested the tough oak handle. Bruce Burt was a giant in his strength, and as unconscious of the greatness of it as a bear. He could not remember that he had ever fully tried it. He never had lifted a weight when he had not known that, if necessary, he could lift a little more. His physique had fulfilled the promise of his sturdy youth, and he was as little aware that it, too, was remarkable as he was of the fact that men and women turned in admiration to look again at his dark, unsmiling face upon the rare occasions when he had walked the streets of the towns.
He was as splendid a specimen of his kind as Old Felix, as primitive nearly, and as shy. His tastes had led him into the wilderness, and he had followed the gold strikes and the rumors of gold strikes from Sonora, in Old Mexico, to the Siberian coast, on Behring Sea, in search of a new Klondike. He had lived hard, endured much in the adventurous life of which he seldom talked. His few intimates had been men like himself—the miners and prospectors who built their cabins in the fastnesses with Hope their one companion, to eat and sleep and work with. He was self-educated and well informed along such lines as his tastes led him. He read voraciously all that pertained to Nature, to her rocks and minerals, and he knew the habits of wild animals as he knew his own. Of the people and that vague place they called “the outside,” he knew little or nothing.
He had acquaintances and he had enemies in the mining camps which necessity compelled him to visit at long intervals for the purchase of supplies. Agreeable and ingratiating storekeepers who sold him groceries, picks, shovels, powder, drills, at fifty per cent. profit, neat, smooth-shaven gamblers, bartenders, who welcomed him with boisterous camaraderie, tired and respectable women who “run” boarding houses, painted, highly-perfumed ladies of the dance hall, enigmatic Chinamen, all were types with which he was familiar. But he called none of them “friend.” Their tastes, their interests, their standards of conduct were different from his own. They had nothing in common, yet he could not have explained exactly why. He told himself vaguely that he did not “cotton” to them, and thought the fault was with himself.
Bruce was twenty-seven, and his mother was still his ideal of womanhood. He doubted if there were another like her in all the world. Certainly he never had seen one who in the least approached her. He remembered her vividly, the grave, gray, comprehending eyes, the long braids of hair which lay like thick new hempen rope upon the white counterpane.
His lack of a substantial education—a college education—was a sore spot with him which did not become less sore with time. If she had lived he was sure it would have been different. With his mother to intercede for him he knew that he would have had it. After her death his father grew more taciturn, more impatient, more bent on preparing him to follow in his footsteps, regardless of his inclinations. The “lickings” became more frequent, for he seemed only to see his mistakes and childish faults.
The culmination had come when he had asked to be allowed to leave the country school where he rode daily, and attend the better one in the nearest village, which necessitated boarding. After nerving himself for days to ask permission, he had been refused flatly.
“What do you think I’m made of—money?” his father had demanded. “You’ll stay where you are until you’ve learned to read, and write, and figure: then you’ll help me with the cattle. Next thing you’ll be wantin’ to play a flute or the piano.”
He thought of his father always with hardness and unforgiveness, for he realized now, as he had not at the time he ran away from home, what the thousands of acres, the great herd of sleek cattle, meant—the fortune that they represented.
“He could have so well afforded it,” Bruce often mused bitterly. “And it’s all I would have asked of him. I didn’t come into the world because I wanted to come, and he owed it to me—my chance!”
The flakes of snow which fell at first and clung tenaciously to Bruce’s dark-blue flannel shirt were