The Man from the Bitter Roots Part 9

But when Sprudell closed his office door, he locked this adamantine, quibbling, frankly penurious, tyrannical man of business inside, and the chameleon does not change its color with greater ease than Sprudell took on another and distinct personality. On the instant he became the "good fellow," his pink face and beaming eyes radiating affability, conviviality, an all-embracing fondness for mankind, also a susceptible Don Juan keenly on the alert for adventure of a sentimental nature.

In appearance, too, he was a credit to the Bartlesville Commercial Club, when, with his pink face glowing above a glimpse of crimson neck scarf, dressed in pearl-gray spats, gray topcoat, gray business clothes indistinctly barred with black, and suede gloves of London smoke, he bounded up the clubhouse steps with the elasticity of well-preserved fifty, lightly swinging a slender stick. His jauntily-placed hat was a trifle, a mere suspicion, too small, and always he wore a dewy boutonniere of violets, while his thick, gray hair had a slight part behind which it pleased him to think gave the touch of distinction and originality he coveted.

This was the lighter side of T. Victor Sprudell. The side of himself which he took most seriously was his intellectual side. When he was the scholar, the scientist, the philosopher, he demanded and received the strictest attention and consideration from his immediate coterie of friends. So long as he was merely _le bon diable_, the jovial clubman, it was safe to banter and even to contradict him; but when the conversation drifted into the higher realms of thought, it was tacitly understood that the privileges of friendship were revoked. At such moments it was as though the oracle of Delphi spoke.

This ambition to shine as a man of learning was the natural outcome of his disproportionate vanity, his abnormal egotism, his craving for prominence and power. Sprudell was a man who had had meager youthful advantages, but through life he had observed the tremendous impression which scholarly attainments made upon the superficially educated--which they made upon him.

So he set about acquiring knowledge.

He dabbled in the languages, and a few useful words and phrases stuck.

He plunged into the sciences, and arose from the immersion dripping with a smattering of astronomy, chemistry, biology, archaeology, and what not.

The occult was to him an open book, and he was wont temporarily to paralyze the small talk of social gatherings with dissertations upon the teachings of the ancients which he had swallowed at a gulp. He criticised the schools of modern painting in impressive art terms, while he himself dashed off half-column poems at a sitting for the _Courier_, in which he had acquired controlling stock.

In other words, by a certain amount of industry, T. Victor Sprudell had become a walking encyclopaedia of misinformation with small danger of being found out so long as he stayed in Bartlesville.

Certainly Abe Cone--born Cohen--who had made his "barrel" in ready-made clothing, felt in no position to contradict him when he stated his belief in the theory of transmigration as expounded by Pythagoras, and expressed the opinion that by chance the soul of Cleopatra might be occupying the graceful body of the club cat. Abe was not acquainted with the doctrine of Pythagoras, though he had heard somewhere that the lady was a huzzy; so he discreetly kept his mouth closed and avoided the cat.

Intellectually Sprudell's other a.s.sociates were of Abe's caliber, so he shone among them, the one bright, particular star--too vain, too fundamentally deficient to know how little he really knew.

Nevertheless he was the most thoroughly detested, the most hated man in Bartlesville. And those who hated feared him as they hated and feared the incendiary, the creeping thief, the midnight a.s.sa.s.sin; for he used their methods to attain his ends, along with a despot's power.

No man or woman who p.r.i.c.ked his vanity, who incurred his displeasure, was safe from his vengeance. No person who wounded his self-esteem was too obscure to escape his vindictive malice, and no means that he could employ, providing it was legally safe, was too unscrupulous, too petty, to use to punish the offender. Hounding somebody was his recreation, his one extravagance. He exhumed the buried pasts of political candidates who had crossed him; he rattled family skeletons in revenge for social slights; he published musty prison records, and over night blasted reputations which had been years in the building. His enmity cost salaried men positions through pressure which sooner or later he always found the way to bring to bear, and even mere "day's jobs" were not beneath his notice. Yet his triumphs cost him dear. Merry groups had a way of dissolving at his coming. He read dislike in many a hostess's eye, and, save for the small coterie of inferior satellites, Sprudell in his own club was as lonely as a leper. But so strong was this dominating trait that he preferred the sweetness of revenge to any tie of fellowship or hope of popularity. The ivy of friendship did not grow for him.

By a secret ballot, Sprudell in his own town could not have been elected dog-catcher, yet his money and his newspaper made him dangerous and a power.

When he regaled his fellow members with the dramatic story of his sufferings, he said nothing of Bruce Burt. Bruce Burt was dead, of that he had not the faintest doubt. He intended to keep the promise he had made to hunt the Naudain fellow's relatives, but for the present he felt that his frosted feet were paramount.

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 a.s.sociated Press had informed the world how n.o.bly 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 s.e.xes 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 a.s.signment. 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. n.o.ble-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 gra.s.s 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 d.i.c.kens!" 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 gla.s.s.

He twitched at his crimson neck scarf and whisked his pearl-gray spats; he made a pa.s.s or two with his military brushes at his cherished part, and took his violets from a gla.s.s 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.