Part 21 (2/2)

If there was any one thing which could goad him to further action it was this picture.

He arose and dressed slowly. Bruce had known fatigue, the weakness of hunger, but never anything like the leaden, heavy-footed depression which comes from intense despondency and hopelessness.

As his finances had gone down he had gone up, until he was now located permanently on the top floor of the hotel where the hall carpets and furniture were given their final try-out before going into the discards.

The only thing which stopped him from going further was the roof. He had no means of judging what the original colors in his rug had been save by an inch or two close to the wall, and every bra.s.s handle on the drawers of his dresser came out at the touch. The lone faucet of cold water dripped constantly and he had to stand on a chair each time he raised the split green shade. When he wiped his face he fell through the hole in the towel; he could never get over a feeling of surprise at meeting his hands in the middle, and the patched sheets on his bed looked like city plots laid out in squares.

He loathed the shabbiness of it, and the suggestion of germs, decay, down-at-the-heel poverty added to his depression. He never had any such feelings about his rough bunk filled with cedar boughs and his pine table as he had about this iron bed, with its scratched enamel and tin k.n.o.bs, which deceived n.o.body into thinking them bra.s.s, or the wobbly dresser that he swore at heartily each time he turned back a fingernail trying to claw a drawer open.

Bruce had vowed that so long as a stone remained unturned he would stay and turn it, but--he had run out of stones. Three untried addresses were left in his note-book and he looked at them as he ate his frugal breakfast speculating as to which was nearest.

”If I'd eaten as much beef as I have crow since I came to this man's town,” he meditated as he dragged his unwilling feet up the street, ”I'd be a 's.h.i.+pper' in prime A1 condition. I've a notion I haven't put on much weight since it became the chief article of my diet. If thirty days of quail will stall a man what will six weeks of crow do to him? I doubt if I will ever entirely get my self-respect back unless,” he added with the glimmer of a smile, ”I go around and lick some of them before I leave.”

”I suppose,” his thoughts ran on, ”that it's a part of the scheme of life that a person must eat his share of crow before he gets in a position to make some one else eat it, but dog-gone!” with a wry face, ”I've sure swallowed a double portion.” Then he fell to wondering if--he consulted his note-book--J. Winfield Harrah had specialized at all upon his method of serving up this game-bird which knows no closed season?

As he sat in Harrah's outer office on a high-backed settee of teak-wood ornate with dragons and Chinese devils, with his feet on a rug which would have gone a long way toward installing a power-plant, looking at pictures of Jake Kilrain in pugilistic garb and pose, the racing yacht Shamrock under full sail, and Heatherbloom taking a record smas.h.i.+ng jump, the spider-legged office boy came from inside endeavoring to hide some pleasurable excitement under a semblance of dignity and office reticence.

”Mr. Harrah has been detained and won't be here for perhaps an hour.”

”I'll wait,” Bruce replied laconically.

The office boy lingered. He fancied Bruce because of his size and his hat and a resemblance that he thought he saw between him and his favorite western hero of the movies; besides, he was bursting with a proud secret. He hunched his shoulders and looked cautiously behind toward the inner offices. Between his palms he whispered:

”He's been arrested.”

It delighted him that Bruce's eyes widened.

”Third time in a month--speedin' in Jersey--his new machine is 80 horse-power--! A farmer put tacks in the road and tried to kill him wit'

a pitchfork. Say! my boss _et_ him. I bet he'll get fined the limit.”

His red necktie swelled palpably and he swaggered proudly. ”Pooh! he don't care. My boss, he--”

”Willie!”

”Yes ma'am.” The stenographer's call interrupted further confidences from Willie and he scuttled away, leaving Bruce with the impression that the boy's admiration for his boss was not unmixed with apprehension.

The hour had gone when the door opened and a huge, fiery-bearded, dynamic sort of person went swinging past Bruce without a glance and on to the inner offices. The office boy's husky ”That's him!” was not needed to tell him that J. Winfield Harrah had arrived. The air suddenly seemed charged electrically. The stenographer speeded up and dapper young clerks and accountants bent to their work with a zeal and a.s.siduity which merited immediate promotion, while ”Willie,” Bruce noticed, came from a brief session in the private office with the dazed look of one who has just been through an experience.

When Bruce's turn came Harrah sat at his desk like an expectant ogre; there was that in his att.i.tude which seemed to say: ”Enter; I eat promoters.” His eyes measured Bruce from head to foot in a glance of apprais.e.m.e.nt, and Bruce on his part subjected Harrah to the same swift scrutiny.

Without at all being able to explain it Bruce felt instantly at his ease, he experienced a kind of relief as does a stranger in a strange land when he discovers someone who speaks his tongue.

Harrah appeared about Bruce's age, perhaps a year or two older, and he was as tall, though lacking Bruce's thickness and breadth of shoulder.

His arms were long as a gorilla's and he had huge white fists with freckles on the back that looked like ginger-snaps. Fiery red eyebrows as stiff as two toothbrushes bristled above a pair of vivid blue eyes, while his short beard resembled nothing so much as a neatly trimmed whisk broom, flaming in color. His skin was florid and his hair, which was of a darker shade than his beard, was brushed straight back from a high, white forehead. A tuft of hair stood up on his crown like the crest on a game-c.o.c.k. Everything about him indicated volcanic temperament, virility, and impulsiveness which amounted to eccentricity.

Harrah represented to Bruce practically his last chance, but there was nothing in Harrah's veiled, non-committal eyes as he motioned Bruce to a chair and inquired brusquely: ”Well--what kind of a wild-cat have _you_ got?” which would have led an observer to wager any large amount that his last chance was a good one.

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