The Man From The Bitter Roots

Bruce had formed the habit of wondering what she would think of this and that--of imagining how she would look--what she would say--and so all through the summer she had been associated with the work. He had anticipated the time when he should be showing her the rapids with the moonlight shining on the foam, the pink and amber sunsets behind the umbrella tree, and when the wind blew among the pines of listening with her to the sounds that were like Hawaiian music in the distance.

Now, try as he would, he could not rid himself of the habit, and, as he pushed his way among the dark underbrush of creeks, he was always thinking that she, too, would love that "woodsy" smell; that she, too, would find delight in the frozen waterfalls and the awesome stillness of the snow-laden pines.

But just so often as he allowed his imagination rein, just so often he came back to earth doubly heavy-hearted, for the chance that she would ever share his pleasure in these things seemed to grow more remote as the days went by.

Bruce had built himself a shelter at the end of his trap-line that consisted merely of poles and pine boughs leaned against a rim-rock. Under this poor protection, wrapped in a blanket, with his feet toward the fire at the entrance and his back against the wall, he spent many a wretched night. Sometimes he dozed a little, but mostly wide-eyed, he counted the endless hours waiting for the dawn.

During the summer when things had continually gone wrong Bruce had found some comfort in recounting the difficulties which his hero of the Calumet and Hecla had gone through in the initial stages of the development of that great mine. But that time had passed, for, while Alexander Agassiz had had his struggles, Bruce told himself with a shadowy smile, he never had been up against a deal like this! there was no record that he ever had had to lie out under a rim-rock when the thermometer stood twenty and twenty-five below.

In the long, soundless nights that had the cold stillness of infinite space, Bruce always had the sensation of being the only person in the universe. He felt alone upon the planet. Facts became hazy myths, truths merely hallucinations, nothing seemed real, actual, except that if he slept too long and the fire went out he would freeze to death under the rim-rock.

It was only when he dropped down from the peaks and ridges and began to follow his own steps back, that he returned to reality and things seemed as they are again. Then it was not so hard to believe that over beyond that high, white range there were other human beings--happy people, successful people, people with plenty to read and plenty to do, people who looked forward with pleasure, not dread, to the days as they came.