The Man from the Bitter Roots Part 22

Bruce's eyes opened and he stared for the fraction of a second at the rudeness of the question, then they flashed as he answered shortly.

"I'm not peddling wild-cats, or selling mining stock to widows and orphans--if you happen to be either."

Capital is not accustomed to tart answers to its humor caustic, from persons in need of financial a.s.sistance for their enterprises. Harrah raised his toothbrush eyebrows and once more he favored Bruce with a sweeping glance of interest, which Bruce, in his sensitive pride, resented.

"Who sent you?" Harrah demanded roughly.

"Never mind who sent me," Bruce answered in the same tone, reaching for his hat which he had laid on the floor beside him, "but he had his dog-gone nerve directing me to an ill-mannered four-flusher like you."

The color flamed to Harrah's cheek bones and over his high, white forehead.

"You've got a curious way of trying to raise money," he observed. "I suppose," dryly, "that's what you're here for?"

"You suppose right," Bruce answered hotly as he stood up, "but I'm no d.a.m.n pauper. And get it out of your head," he went on as the acc.u.mulated wrath of weeks swept over him, "that you're talking to the office boy.

I've found somebody at last that's big enough to stand up to and tell 'em to go to h.e.l.l! Sabe? You needn't touch my proposition, you needn't even listen to it, but, hear me, you talk civil!"

As Harrah arose Bruce took a step closer and looked at him squarely.

A lurking imp sprang to life in Harrah's vivid eyes, a dare-devil look which found its counterpart in Bruce's own.

"I believe you think you're a better man than I am."

"I can lick you any jump in the road," Bruce answered promptly.

Harrah looked at him speculatively, without resentment, then his lips parted in a grin which showed two sharp, white, prominent front teeth.

"On the square," eagerly, "do you think you can down me?"

"I know it," curtly--"any old time or place. _Now_, if it suits you."

To Bruce's amazement Harrah took his hand and shook it joyfully.

"I wouldn't be surprised if you could! You look as hard as nails. Do you box or wrestle?"

Bruce wondered if he was crazy.

He answered shortly: "Some."

"Bully!" excitedly. "The best luck ever! We'll have a try-out in private and if you're the moose I think you are you can break him in two!"

"Break who in two?"

"The Spanish Bull-dog! Eureka!" he chuckled gleefully. "I'll back you to the limit!"

"What's the matter with you?" Bruce demanded. "Are you loco?"

"Close to it!" the eccentric capitalist cried gaily,--"with joy! He bested me proper the other night at the Athletic Club--he dusted the mat with me--and I want to play even." Seeing that Bruce's face did not lose its look of mystification he curbed his exuberance: "You see I've got some little reputation as a wrestler so when Billy Harper ran across this fellow in Central America he imported him on purpose to reduce the swelling in my head, he said, and he did it, for while the chap hasn't much science he's so powerful I couldn't hold him. But you, by George!

wait till I spring _you_ on him!"

"Say," Bruce answered resentfully, "I came East to raise money for a hydro-electric power plant, not to go into the ring. It looks as if you're taking a good deal for granted."

"That's all right," Harrah answered easily. "How much do you want? What you got? Where is it?"

Bruce told him briefly.

Harrah heard him through attentively and when he was done Harrah said candidly:

"Perhaps you've been told before that without a qualified engineer's report it isn't much of a business proposition to appeal to a business man."

"Once or twice," Bruce answered dryly.

"Nevertheless," Harrah continued, "I'm willing to take a chance on you--not on the proposition as you've put it up to me but on you personally, because I like you. I'll head your inscription list with $5000 and introduce you to some men that will probably take a 'flyer' on my say-so. If you're still short of what you think you'll need I'll make up the remainder, all providing"--with a quick grin--"that you go in and wallop that Greaser!"

Bruce's expression was a mixture of many.

Finally he replied slowly:

"Well, it isn't just the way I'd figured out to interest Capital and I reckon the method is unique in mine promotion, but as I'm at the end of my rope and have no choice, one more meal of 'crow' won't kill me." He went on with a tinge of bitterness, thinking of Sprudell: "Since muscle is my only a.s.set I'll have to realize on it." Then his dark face lighted with one of the slow, whimsical smiles that transformed it--"Unchain the 'Spanish Bull-dog,' feller!"

Harrah rang for the office boy and reached for his hat.

"William," he said sternly when the quaking youth stood before him, "tell those people outside not to wait. I'm called away on business--urgent, important business and I can't say when I'll be back."

XV

MILLIONS!

Would the car never come--would it never come! Helen walked once more to the corner from the shelter of a building in one of the outlying mill districts where an a.s.signment had taken her.

The day was bitterly cold with a wind blowing which went through her coat and skirt as though they were light-weight summer clothing. She held her m.u.f.f against her cheek and she peered up the street and the dark background accentuated the drawn whiteness of her face with the pinched, blue look about her mouth and nostrils. The girl was really suffering terribly. She had pa.s.sed the chattering stage and was enduring dumbly, wondering how much longer she could stand it, knowing all the time that she must stand it as there was no place to go inside and missing the car which ran at half hour intervals meant missing the edition. She was _paid_ to stand it, she told herself, as she stamped her feet which were almost without feeling. The doctor's emphatic warning came to her mind with each icy blast that made her shrink and huddle closer to the wall of the big storage building. Exposure, wet feet, were as suicidal in her condition as poison, he had told her. She could guard against the latter but there was no escape from the former if she would do her work conscientiously for long, cold rides and waits on street corners were a recognized part of it.

She could not afford even to dress warmly. There was absolutely nothing but fur that would keep out such penetrating wind and cold as this, and anything at all presentable was beyond her means.

"And they tell us, these smug, unctuous preachers warming their shins before their study fires, that living is a privilege, and we should be grateful to the Almighty for being allowed to go through things like this! I can't see it!" she declared to herself in angry rebellion. "I haven't one thing on earth to look forward to--unless--" her hand tightened on a letter inside her m.u.f.f--"unless I take a way out which, in the end, might be worse."

Sprudell's note had come by special delivery from the Hotel Strathmore just as she was leaving the office, so she had not stopped to answer it.

He had made several trips from Bartlesville since their first meeting, under the pretext of business, but it did not require any great ac.u.men to discover that he came chiefly to see her.

Now, thinking that it might divert her mind from her misery, Helen turned her back to the wind and drew out his note for a second reading.

One would scarcely have gathered from her expression as she turned the pages that she was reading a cordial dinner invitation.

Everything about it grated upon her--and the note was so eminently characteristic. She observed critically the "My dear Miss Dunbar," which he considered more intimate than "Dear Miss Dunbar." She disliked the round vowels formed with such care that they looked piffling, and the elaborately shaded consonants. The stiffness, the triteness of his phraseology, and his utter lack of humor, made his letters dull reading but most of all his inexact use of words irritated her--it made him seem so hopeless--far more so than bad spelling. She even detested the glazed note paper which she was sure was a "broken lot" bought at a bargain in a department store.

"To-night I have a matter of supreme importance to impart," she read, "make every effort to join me. The evening may prove as eventful to you as to me, so do not disappoint me, Mignonne."