Part 29 (1/2)

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?”