The Man From The Bitter Roots

"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 assurance 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 fashion 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.