“Lemme be!” The words came thickly, and Sprudell did not lift his eyes.
“He’s goin’ to freeze on me sure!” Uncle Bill tried to lift him, to carry him, to drag him somehow—a dead weight—farther down the cañon.
It was hopeless. He let him fall and yelled. Again and again he yelled into the empty world about him. Not so much that he expected an answer as to give vent to his despair. There was not a chance in a million that the miner in the cabin would hear him, even if he were there. But he kept on yelling, whooping, yodling with all his might.
His heart leaped, and he stopped in the midst of a breath. He listened, with his mouth wide open. Surely he heard an answering cry! Faint it was—far off—as though it came through thicknesses of blankets—but it was a cry! A human voice!
“Hello! Hello!”
He was not mistaken. From somewhere in the white world of desolation, the answer came again:
“Hello! Hello!”
Uncle Bill was not much given to religious allusions except as a matter of emphasis, but he told himself that that far-off cry of reassurance sounded like the voice of God.
“Help!” he called desperately, sunk to his armpits in the snow. “Help! Come quick!”
Night was so near that it had just about closed down when Bruce came fighting his way up the cañon through the drifts to Griswold’s side. They wasted no time in words, but between them dragged and carried the unresisting sportsman to the cabin.
The lethargy which had been so nearly fatal was without sensation, but after an hour or so of work his saviors had the satisfaction of hearing him begin to groan with the pain of returning circulation.
“Git up and stomp around!” Uncle Bill advised, when Sprudell could stand. “But,” sharply, as he stumbled, “look where you’re goin’—that’s a corp’ over there.”
The admonition revived Sprudell as applications of snow and ice water had not done. He looked in wide-mouthed inquiry at Bruce.
Bruce’s somber eyes darkened as he explained briefly:
“We had a fuss, and he went crazy. He tried to get me with the ax.”
There was no need to warn Sprudell again to “look where he was goin’,” as he existed from that moment with his gaze alternating between the gruesome bundle and the gloomy face of his black-browed host. Incredulity and suspicion shone plainly in his eyes. Sprudell’s imagination was a winged thing, and now it spread its startled pinions. Penned up with a murderer—what a tale to tell in Bartlesville, if by chance he returned alive! The fellow had him at his mercy, and what, after all, did he know of Uncle Bill? Even fairly honest men sometimes took desperate chances for so fat a purse as his.
Sprudell saw to it that neither of them got behind him as they moved about the room.
Casting surreptitious glances at the bookshelf, where he looked to see the life of Jesse James, he was astonished and somewhat reassured to discover a title like “Fossil Fishes of the Old Red Sandstone of the British Isles.” It was unlikely, he reasoned, that a man who voluntarily read, for instance, “Contributions to the Natural History of the United States,” would split his skull when his back was turned. Yet they smacked of affectation to Sprudell, who associated good reading with good clothes.
“These are your books—you read them?” There was skepticism, a covert sneer in Sprudell’s tone.
“I’d hardly pack them into a place like this if I didn’t,” Bruce answered curtly.
“I suppose not,” he hastened to admit, and added, patronizingly; “Who is this fellow Agassiz?”
Bruce turned as sharply as if he had attacked a personal friend. The famous, many-sided scientist was his hero, occupying a pedestal that no other celebrity approached. Sprudell had touched him on a tender spot.
“That ‘fellow Agassiz,’ ” he answered in cold mimicry, “was one of the greatest men who ever lived. Where do you stop when you’re home that you never heard of Alexander Agassiz? I’d rather have been Alexander Agassiz than the richest man in America—than any king. He was a great scientist, a great mining engineer, a successful business man. He developed and put the Calumet and Hecla on a paying basis. He made the University Museum in Cambridge what it is. He knew more about sea urchins and coral reefs than men who specialize, and they were only side issues with him. I met him once when I was a kid, in Old Mexico; he talked to me a little, and it was the honor of my life. I’d rather walk behind and pack his suitcase like a porter than ride with the president of the road!”
“Is that so?” Sprudell murmured, temporarily abashed.
“Great cats!” ejaculated Uncle Bill, with bulging eyes. “My head would git a hot-box if I knowed jest half of that.”
When Sprudell stretched his stiff muscles and turned his head upon the bear-grass pillow at daybreak, Bruce was writing a letter on the corner of the table and Uncle Bill was stowing away provisions in a small canvas sack. He gathered, from the signs of preparation, that the miner was going to try and find the Chinaman. Outside, the wind was still sweeping the stinging snow before it like powder-driven shot. What a fool he was to attempt it—to risk his life—and for what?
It was with immeasurable satisfaction that Sprudell told himself that but for his initiative they would have been there yet. These fellows needed a leader, a strong man—the ignorant always did. His eyes caught the suggestive outlines of the blanket on the floor, and, with a start, he remembered what was under it. They had no sensibilities, these Westerners—they lacked fineness; certainly no one would suspect from the matter-of-factness of their manner that they were rooming with a corpse. For himself, he doubted if he could even eat.
“Oh, you awake?” Uncle Bill glanced at him casually.
“My feet hurt.”
Uncle Bill ignored his plaintive tone.
“They’re good and froze. They’ll itch like forty thousand fleabites atter while—like as not you’ll haf to have them took off. Lay still and don’t clutter up the cabin till Burt gits gone. I’ll cook you somethin’ bimeby.”
Sprudell writhed under the indifferent familiarity of his tone. He wished old Griswold had a wife and ten small children and was on the pay roll of the Bartlesville Tool Works some hard winter. He’d——Sprudell’s resentment found an outlet in devising a variety of situations conducive to the disciplining of Uncle Bill.
Bruce finished his letter and re-read it, revising a little here and there. He looked at Sprudell while he folded it reflectively, as though he were weighing something pro and con.
Sprudell was conscious that he was being measured, and, egotist though he was, he was equally aware that Bruce’s observations still left him in some doubt.
Bruce walked to the window undecidedly, and then seemed finally to make up his mind.
“I’m going to ask you to do me a favor, stranger, but only in case I don’t come back. I intend to, but”—he glanced instinctively out of the window—“it’s no sure thing I will.
“My partner has a mother and a sister—here’s the address, though it’s twelve years old. If anything happens to me, I want you to promise that you’ll hunt them up. Give them this old letter and the picture and this letter, here, of mine. This is half the gold dust—our season’s work.” He placed a heavy canvas sample sack in Sprudell’s hand. “Say that Slim sent it; that although they might not think it because he did not write, that just the same he thought an awful lot of them.
“I’ve told them in my letter about the placer here—it’s theirs, the whole of it, if I don’t come back. See that it’s recorded; women don’t understand about such things. And be sure the assessment work’s kept up. In the