The Man From The Bitter Roots

"Looks like you'd say somethin' about them pancakes instead of settin' there shovelin'."

"Haven't I told you regular every morning for six months that they was great pancakes? Couldn't you let me off for once?"

The two partners glared at each other across the clumsy table of hewn pine. They looked like two wild men, as black eyes flashed anger, even hate, into black eyes. Their hair was long and uneven, their features disguised by black beards of many weeks' growth. Their miners' boots were but ludicrous remnants tied on with buckskin thongs. Their clothes hung in rags, and they ate with the animal-like haste and carelessness of those who live alone.

The smaller of the two men rose abruptly, and, with a vicious kick at the box upon which he had been sitting, landed it halfway across the room. His cheeks and nose were pallid above his beard, his thin nostrils dilated, and his hand shook as he reached for his rifle in the gun rack made of deer horns nailed above the kitchen door. He was slender and wiry of build, quick and nervous in his movements, yet they were almost noiseless, and he walked with the padded soft-footedness of the preying animal.

Bruce Burt lounged to the cabin door and looked after "Slim" Naudain as he went to the river. Then he stepped outside, stooping to avoid striking his head. He leaned his broad shoulder against the door jamb and watched "Slim" bail the leaky boat and untie it from the willows. While he filled and lighted his pipe, Bruce's eyes followed his partner as he seated himself upon the rotten thwart and shoved into the river with home-made oars that were little more than paddles. The river caught him with the strength of a hundred eager hands, and whirled him, paddling like a madman, broadside to the current. It bore him swiftly to the roaring white rapids some fifty yards below, and the fire died in Bruce's pipe as, breathless, he watched the bobbing boat.

"Slim'll cross in that water-coffin once too often," he muttered, and Bruce himself was the best boatman the length of the dangerous river.

There were times when he felt that he almost hated Slim Naudain, and this was one of them, yet fine lines of anxiety drew about his eyes as he watched the first lolling tongue of the rapids reach for the tiny boat. If it filled, Slim was gone, for no human being could swim in the roaring, white stretch where the great, green river reared, curled back, and broke into iridescent foam. The boat went out of sight, rose, bobbed for an instant on a crest, then disappeared.