The Man from the Bitter Roots Part 29

The telegram came finally, and Bruce's relief was so great that, as little as he liked him, he could almost have embraced Smaltz, the man who brought the news that the machinery was boxed and on its way to Meadows.

"Thank G.o.d, _that_ worry's over!" Bruce e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed as he read it, and Smaltz lingered. "I may get a night's sleep now instead of lying awake listening to the river."

"Oh, the machinery's started?"

Bruce had an impression that he already knew the contents of the telegram in spite of his air of innocence and his question.

"Yes," he nodded briefly.

"Say,--me and Porcupine Jim been talkin' it over and wonderin' if we'd pay our own way around so it wouldn't cost the Company nothin', if you'd let us come down with a boat from Meadows?"

"Can you handle a sweep?"

"Can I?" Smaltz sn.i.g.g.e.red. "Try me!"

Bruce looked at him a moment before he answered. He was wondering why the very sight of Smaltz irritated him. He was the only man of the crew that he disliked thoroughly. His boastful speech, his swaggering walk, a veiled insolence in his eyes and manner made Bruce itch to send him up the hill for good, but since Smaltz was unquestionably the best all-round man he had, he would not allow himself to be influenced by his personal prejudices. While he boasted he had yet to fail to make good his boastings and the tattered credentials he had displayed when he had asked for work were of the best. When he a.s.serted now that he could handle a sweep it was fairly certain that he could not only handle one but handle it well. Porcupine Jim, Bruce knew, had had some experience, so there was no good reason why he should not let them go since they were anxious.

"I've engaged the front sweepman for the other two boats," Bruce said finally, "but if you and Jim want to take a hind sweep each and will promise to obey orders I guess there's no objection."

"Surest thing you know," Smaltz answered in the fresh tone that rasped Bruce. "An' much obliged. Anything to git a chanst to shoot them rapids.

I'd do it if I wasn't gittin' nothin' out of it just for the fun of it."

"It won't look like fun to me with all I'll have at stake," said Bruce soberly.

"Aw--don't worry--we kin cut her." Smaltz tossed the a.s.surance back airily as he walked away, looking sharply to the right and left over his shoulder. It was a habit he had, Bruce often had noticed it, along with a fas.h.i.+on of stepping quickly around corners, peering and craning his neck as if perpetually on the alert for something or somebody. "You act like some feller that's 'done time'--or orter. I'll bet a hundred to one you know how to make horsehair bridles," Woods, the carpenter, had once told him pointedly, and the criticism had voiced Bruce's own thoughts.

In the mail which Smaltz had brought down from Ore City was a letter from Helen Dunbar. It was the second he had had and he told himself as he tore it open eagerly that it had come none too soon, for the first one was well nigh worn out. He could not get over the surprise of discovering how many readings three or four pages of scraggly handwriting will stand without loss of interest.

Now, as he tried to grasp it all in a glance, the friendliness of it, the confidence and encouragement it contained made him glow. But at the end there was a paragraph which startled him--always the fly in the ointment--that gave rise to a vague uneasiness he could not immediately shake off.

"I ran up to the city one day last week," the paragraph read, "and who do you suppose I saw with Winfield Harrah in the lobby of the Hotel Strathmore? You would never guess. None other than our versatile friend T. Victor Sprudell!"

How did they meet? For what purpose had Sprudell sought Harrah's acquaintance? It troubled as well as puzzled Bruce for he could not think the meeting an accident because even he could see that Harrah and Sprudell moved in widely different stratas of society.

XVIII

PROPHETS OF EVIL

The difference between success and failure is sometimes only a hair's breadth, the turning of a hand, and although the man who loses is frequently as deserving of commendation as the man who wins he seldom receives it, and Bruce knew that this would be particularly true of his attempt to shoot the dangerous rapids of the river with heavily loaded boats. If he accomplished the feat he would be lauded as a marvel of nerve and skill and shrewdness, if he failed he would be known in the terse language of Meadows as "One crazy d.a.m.n fool."

While the more conservative citizens of the mountain towns refrained from publicly expressing their thoughts, a coterie known as the "Old Timers" left him in no doubt as to their own opinion of the attempt.

Each day they came to the river bank as regularly as though they had office-hours and stationed themselves on a pile of lumber near where Bruce caulked and tarred the seams of the three boats which were to make the first trip through the rapids. They made Bruce think of so many ancient ravens, as they roosted in a row croaking disaster. By the time the machinery was due to arrive they spoke of the wreck of the boats as something foreordained and settled. They differed only as to where it would happen.

"I really doubts, Burt, if you so much as git through the Pine-Crick rapids."

"No?"

"I mind the time Jake Hazlett and his crew was drowned at the 'Wild Goose.' It seems the coroner was already there a settin' on a corp' that had come up in the eddy. 'Go on through, boys!' he hollers to 'em, 'I'll wait for you down below. It'll save me another trip from Medders'."

Bruce worked on, apparently unperturbed by these discouraging reminiscences.

"They say they's a place down there where the river's so narrow it's bent over," volunteered a third pessimist, as he cut an artistic initial in a plank with the skill of long practice. "And you'll go through the Black Canyon like a bat out o' h.e.l.l. But I has no notion whatsoever that you'll ever come up when you hits that waterfall on the other end. When her nose dips under, heavy-loaded like that, she'll sink and fill right thar. Why--"

"Do you rickolect," quavered a spry young cub of eighty-two who talked of the Civil War and the Nez Perce uprising as though they were the events of yesterday, "do you remember the time 'Death-on-the-Trail' lost his hull outfit tryin' to git through the 'Devil's Teeth'? The idee of an old feller like him startin' out alone! Why he was all of seventy."

"An' the time 'Starvation Bill' turned over at Proctors's Falls?"

chortled another. "Fritz Yandell said the river was full of grub--cracker cans, prunes and the like o' that, for clost to a week. I never grieved much to hear of an accident to him for we'd had a railroad in here twenty years ago if it hadn't been for Bill. The survey outfit took him along for helper and he et up all the grub, so the Injin guide quit 'em cold and they couldn't go on. I allus hoped he'd starve to death somm'eres, but after a spell of sickness from swallerin' a ham-bone, he died tryin' to eat six dozen aigs on a bet."

"Talkin' of Fritz Yandell--he told me he fished him a compa.s.s and transit out'n the river after them Governmint Yellow-Legs wrecked on Butcher's Bar." The speaker added cheerfully: "Since the Whites come into the country I reckon all told you could count the boats that's got through without trouble on the fingers of one hand. If these boats was goin' empty I'd say 'all right--you're liable to make it,' but sunk deep in the water with six or eight thousand pounds--Burt, you orter have your head examined."

But Bruce refused to let himself think of accident. He knew water, he could handle a sweep; he meant to take every precaution and he could, he _must_ get through.

The river was rising rapidly now, not an inch at a time but inches, for the days were warmer--warm enough to start rivulets running from sheltered s...o...b..nks in the mountains. Daily the distance increased from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e. Sprawling trees, driftwood, carca.s.ses, the year's rubbish from draws and gulches, swept by on the broad bosom of the yellow flood. The half-submerged willows were bending in the current and water-mark after water-mark disappeared on the bridge piles.

Bruce had not realized that the days of waiting had stretched his nerves to such a tension until he learned that the freight had really come. He felt for a moment as though the burdens of the world had been suddenly rolled from his shoulders. His relief was short-lived. It changed to consternation when he saw the last of the machinery piled upon the bank for loading. It weighed not fifty thousand pounds but all of ninety--nearer a hundred! Dumfounded for the moment, he did not see how he could take it. The saving that he had made on the purchase price was eaten up by the extra weight owing to the excessive freight rates from the coast and on the branch line to Meadows. More than that, Jennings had disobeyed his explicit orders to box the smaller parts of each machine together. All had been thrown in the car helter-skelter.

Not since he had raged at "Slim" had Bruce been so furious, but there was little time to indulge his temper for there was now an extra boat to build upon which he must trust Smaltz as front sweepman.

They all worked early and late, building the extra barge, dividing the weight and loading the unwieldy machinery, but the best they could do, counting four boats to a trip instead of three, each barge drew from eight to twelve inches of water.

Though he gave no outward sign and went on stubbornly, the undertaking under such conditions--even to Bruce--looked foolhardy, while the croakings of the "Old Timers" rose to a wail of lamentation.

The last nail was driven and the last piece loaded and Bruce and his boatmen stood on the banks at dusk looking at the four barges, securely tied with bow and stern lines riding on the rising flood. Thirty-seven feet long they were, five feet high, eight feet wide while the sweeps were of two young fir trees over six inches in diameter and twenty feet in length. A twelve foot plank formed the blade which was bolted obliquely to one end and the whole balanced on a pin. They were clumsy looking enough, these flat-bottomed barges, but the only type of boat that could ride the rough water and skim the rocks so menacingly close to the surface.

"There's nothin' left to do now but say our prayers." Smaltz's jocularity broke the silence.

"My wife hasn't quit snifflin' since she heard the weight I was goin' to take," said Saunders, the boatman upon whom Bruce counted most. "If I hadn't promised I don't know as I'd take the risk. I wouldn't, as it is, for anybody else, but I know what it means to you."

"And I sure hate to ask it," said Bruce answered gravely. "If anything happens I'll never forgive myself."

"Well--we can only do the best we can--and hope," said Saunders. "The water's as near right as it ever will be; and I wouldn't worry if it wasn't for the load."

"To-morrow at eight, boys, and be prompt. Every hour is counting from now on, with two more trips to make."

Bruce walked slowly up the street and went to his room, too tired and depressed for conversation down below. The weigh-bill from the station-agent was even worse than he had expected; and the question which he asked himself over and over was whether Jennings's under-estimation of the weight was deliberate misrepresentation or bad figuring? Whatever the cause the costly error had shaken his faith in Jennings.

Bruce was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. The last thing he remembered was Smaltz's raucous voice in the bar-room below boasting of the wicked rapids he had shot in the tumultuous "Colo-rady" and on the Stikine in the far north.

The noise of the bar-room ceased at an early hour and the little mountain town grew quiet but Bruce was not conscious of the change. It was midnight--and long past--well toward morning when in the sleep which had been so profound he heard his mother calling, calling in the same dear, sweet way that she used to call him when, tired out with following his father on long rides, he had overslept in the morning.

"Bruce! Bruce-boy! Up-adaisy!"

He stirred uneasily and imagined that he answered.