The Man From The Bitter Roots

Would the car never come--would it never come! Helen walked once more to the corner from the shelter of a building in one of the outlying mill districts where an assignment had taken her.

The day was bitterly cold with a wind blowing which went through her coat and skirt as though they were light-weight summer clothing. She held her muff against her cheek and she peered up the street and the dark background accentuated the drawn whiteness of her face with the pinched, blue look about her mouth and nostrils. The girl was really suffering terribly. She had passed the chattering stage and was enduring dumbly, wondering how much longer she could stand it, knowing all the time that she must stand it as there was no place to go inside and missing the car which ran at half hour intervals meant missing the edition. She was paid to stand it, she told herself, as she stamped her feet which were almost without feeling. The doctor's emphatic warning came to her mind with each icy blast that made her shrink and huddle closer to the wall of the big storage building. Exposure, wet feet, were as suicidal in her condition as poison, he had told her. She could guard against the latter but there was no escape from the former if she would do her work conscientiously for long, cold rides and waits on street corners were a recognized part of it.

She could not afford even to dress warmly. There was absolutely nothing but fur that would keep out such penetrating wind and cold as this, and anything at all presentable was beyond her means.

"And they tell us, these smug, unctuous preachers warming their shins before their study fires, that living is a privilege, and we should be grateful to the Almighty for being allowed to go through things like this! I can't see it!" she declared to herself in angry rebellion. "I haven't one thing on earth to look forward to--unless--" her hand tightened on a letter inside her muff--"unless I take a way out which, in the end, might be worse."

Sprudell's note had come by special delivery from the Hotel Strathmore just as she was leaving the office, so she had not stopped to answer it. He had made several trips from Bartlesville since their first meeting, under the pretext of business, but it did not require any great acumen to discover that he came chiefly to see her.

Now, thinking that it might divert her mind from her misery, Helen turned her back to the wind and drew out his note for a second reading. One would scarcely have gathered from her expression as she turned the pages that she was reading a cordial dinner invitation.