Home > Authors Index > Caroline Lockhart > Man from the Bitter Roots > This page
The Man from the Bitter Roots, a novel by Caroline Lockhart |
||
Chapter 7. Sprudell Goes East |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER 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 violets from a glass of water to squeeze them dry on a towel. While he adjusted his boutonniere, 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." "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 canyon 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. _ |
||