The Man from the Bitter Roots

by Lockhart, Caroline

  Bruce answered simply:

  “That lets me out again, I’ve no silver tongue. I’ve talked with too few people to have much fluency.”

  The clerk did not contradict him though he was thinking that Bruce could thank his personality for the time he was giving him and the pains he was taking to help him.

  “Here,” handing Bruce a hastily written list. “You needn’t tell them I sent you for it wouldn’t do any good. Some of them come in here often but they look upon me as an office fixture—like this mahogany desk, or that Oriental rug.”

  “This is mighty good of you,” said Bruce, as grateful as though he had written special letters of endorsement for him to all his friends. “Say,” with his impulsive hospitality, “I wish you could come out and visit me. Couldn’t you get away the end of August when the bull-trout and the redsides are biting good?”

  “Me?” The clerk started, then he murmured wistfully: “When the bull-trout and the redsides are biting good! Gee! I like the way that sounds! Then,” with a resigned gesture, “I was never farther west than South Bethlehem; I never expect to have the price.”

  He looked so efficient and well dressed that Bruce had thought he must receive a large salary and he felt badly to learn that the prosperity of such a nice chap was only clothes deep. He promised to look in on him before he left the city and tell him how he had gotten on; then he took his list and went back to the hotel prepared to spend some anxious hours in the time which must intervene before he could expect to hear from his night telegram. He hoped the answer would come in the morning, for disappointments, he had learned, were easier to bear when the sun shone.

  The telegram was awaiting him when he returned from an excursion to a department store which had been fraught with considerable excitement. A majestic blonde had assumed a kind of protectorate over him and dissuaded him from his original intention of buying thirty yards of ruching for Ma Snow with a firmness that approached a refusal to sell him anything so old-fashioned, although he protested that it had looked beautiful in the neck and sleeves of his mother’s gowns some fifteen years before. Neglecting to explain that his gift was for a woman all of fifty, a pink crepe-de-chine garment was held alluringly before his embarrassed eyes and a filmy petticoat, from beneath which, in his mind’s eye, Bruce could see Pa Snow’s carpet-slippers, in which Ma Snow “eased her feet,” peeping in and out. In the end he fought his way out—through more women than he had seen together in all his life—with a box of silk hose in appallingly vivid colors and a beaded bag which, he had it on the saleslady’s honor, was “all the rage.”

  Bruce took the yellow envelope which the desk-clerk handed him and looked at it with a feeling of dread. He had counted the hours until it should come and now he was afraid to open it. It meant so much to him—everything in fact—the moment was a crisis but he managed to tear the envelope across with no outward indication of his dread.

  He took in the contents at a glance and there was such relief, such renewed hope in his radiant face that the desk-clerk was moved to observe smilingly: “Good news, I gather.” And Bruce was so glad, so happy, that for the moment he could think of nothing more brilliant to answer than—“Well I should say so! I should say so!”

  * * *

  XIV

  His Only Asset

  It would be a pleasure to record that Capital found Bruce’s personality so irresistible that his need of funds met with instant response, that the dashing picturesqueness of his appearance and charm of his unconventional speech and manner was so fascinating that Capital violated all the rules observed by experienced investors and handed out its checks with the cheery “God bless you m’ boy!” which warms the heart toward Capital in fiction. Such, however, was not the case.

  It took only one interview to disabuse Bruce’s mind of any faint, sneaking idea he may have had that he was doing Capital a favor for which it would duly thank him. The person whom he honored with his first call strongly conveyed the impression after he had stated his case that he considered that he, Bruce, had obtained valuable time under false pretenses. Certainly the last emotion which he seemed to entertain for the opportunity given him was gratitude, and his refusal to be interested amounted to a curt dismissal.

  The second interview, during which Bruce was cross-examined by a cold-eyed gentleman with a cool, impersonal voice, was sufficient to make him realize with tolerable clearness his total unpreparedness. What engineer of recognized standing had reported upon the ground? None! To what extent, then, had the ground been sampled? How many test-pits had been sunk, and how far to bed-rock? What was the yardage? Where were his certified assay sheets, and his engineer’s estimate for hydro-electric installation? What transportation facilities?

  Bruce, still dazed by the onslaught, had turned and looked at the door which had closed behind him with a briskness which seemed to say “Good riddance,” and muttered, thinking of the clerk’s one sanguine suggestion: “Personality! I might as well be a hop-toad.”

  But in his chagrin he went to extremes in his contemptuous estimate of himself, for there was that about him which generally got him a hearing and a longer one than would have been accorded the average “promoter” with nothing more tangible upon which to raise money than his unsupported word. His Western phraseology and sometimes humorous similes, his unexpected whimsicalities and a certain naïveté secretly amused many of those whom he approached, though they took the best of care not to show it lest he mistake their interest in himself for interest in his proposition.

  One or two went so far as to pass him on by giving him the name of a friend, but, mostly, they listened coldly, critically, and refused with some faint excuse or none. There was no harder task that Bruce could have set himself than applying to such men for financial help for, underneath, he was still the sensitive boy who had bolted from the dinner-table in tears and anger to escape his father’s ridicule, and, furthermore, he was accustomed to the friendly spirit and manner of the far West.

  The chilling stiffness, the skepticism and suspicion, the curtness which was close to rudeness, at first bewildered, then hurt and humiliated him, finally filling him with a resentment which was rapidly reaching a point where it needed only an uncivil word or act too much to produce an explosion.

  But if he was like that boy of other days in his quick pride, neither had he lost the tenacity of purpose which had kept him dragging one sore, bare foot after the other to get to his mother when the gulches he had to pass were black and full of ghostly, fearsome things that the hired man had seen when staying out late o’ nights. This trait now kept him trudging grimly from one office to another, offering himself a target for rebuffs that to him had the sting of insults.

  He had come to know so well what to expect that he shrank painfully from each interview. It required a strong effort of will to turn in at the given number and ask for the man he had come to see, and when he saw him it required all his courage to explain the purpose of his call. Bruce understood fully now how he was handicapped by the lack of data and the fact that he was utterly unknown, but so long as there was one glimmer of hope that someone would believe him, would see the possibilities in his proposition as he saw them, and investigate for himself Bruce would not quit. The list of names the clerk had given him and many others had long since been exhausted. Looking back it seemed to him that he was a babe in swaddling clothes when he started out with his telegram and his addresses, so full of high hopes and the roseate expectations of inexperience.

  Day after day he plodded, his dark face set in grim lines of purpose, following up clews leading to possible investors which he obtained here and there, and always with the one result. What credentials had he? To what past successes could he point? None? Ah, good-day.

  One morning Bruce opened his eyes and the conviction that he had failed leaped into his mind as though it had been waiting like a cat at a mouse hole to pounce upon him the instant of his return to consciousness.

  “You have failed! You have got to
give up! You are done!” The words pounding into his brain affected him like hammer blows over the heart. He laid motionless, inert, his face grown sallow upon the pillow, and he thought that the feelings of a condemned man listening to the building of his gallows must be something like his own.

  Those who have struggled for something, tried with all their heart and soul, fought to the last atom of their strength, and failed, know something of the sickening heaviness, the dull, aching depression which takes the vitality and seems actually to slow up the beating of the heart.

  Out in the world, he told himself, where men won things by their brains, he had failed like any pitiable weakling; that he had been handicapped by unpreparedness was no palliation of the crime of failure. Ignorance was no excuse. In humiliation and chagrin he attributed the mistakes of inexperience to lack of intelligence. His mother had over-estimated him, he had over-estimated himself. It was presumption to have supposed he was fitted for anything but manual labor. Sprudell had been right, he thought bitterly, when he had sneered that muscle was his only asset.

  He could see himself loading his belongings into Slim’s old boat, his blankets and the tattered soogan and bobbing through the rapids with the blackened coffee-pot, the frying pan, and lard cans jingling in the bottom, while Sprudell, with his hateful, womanish smile, watched his ignominious departure. Bruce drew his sleeve across his damp forehead. If there was any one thing which could goad him to further action it was this picture.

  He arose and dressed slowly. Bruce had known fatigue, the weakness of hunger, but never anything like the leaden, heavy-footed depression which comes from intense despondency and hopelessness.

  As his finances had gone down he had gone up, until he was now located permanently on the top floor of the hotel where the hall carpets and furniture were given their final try-out before going into the discards. The only thing which stopped him from going further was the roof. He had no means of judging what the original colors in his rug had been save by an inch or two close to the wall, and every brass handle on the drawers of his dresser came out at the touch. The lone faucet of cold water dripped constantly and he had to stand on a chair each time he raised the split green shade. When he wiped his face he fell through the hole in the towel; he could never get over a feeling of surprise at meeting his hands in the middle, and the patched sheets on his bed looked like city plots laid out in squares.

  He loathed the shabbiness of it, and the suggestion of germs, decay, down-at-the-heel poverty added to his depression. He never had any such feelings about his rough bunk filled with cedar boughs and his pine table as he had about this iron bed, with its scratched enamel and tin knobs, which deceived nobody into thinking them brass, or the wobbly dresser that he swore at heartily each time he turned back a fingernail trying to claw a drawer open.

  Bruce had vowed that so long as a stone remained unturned he would stay and turn it, but—he had run out of stones. Three untried addresses were left in his note-book and he looked at them as he ate his frugal breakfast speculating as to which was nearest.

  “If I’d eaten as much beef as I have crow since I came to this man’s town,” he meditated as he dragged his unwilling feet up the street, “I’d be a ‘shipper’ in prime A1 condition. I’ve a notion I haven’t put on much weight since it became the chief article of my diet. If thirty days of quail will stall a man what will six weeks of crow do to him? I doubt if I will ever entirely get my self-respect back unless,” he added with the glimmer of a smile, “I go around and lick some of them before I leave.”

  “I suppose,” his thoughts ran on, “that it’s a part of the scheme of life that a person must eat his share of crow before he gets in a position to make some one else eat it, but dog-gone!” with a wry face, “I’ve sure swallowed a double portion.” Then he fell to wondering if—he consulted his note-book—J. Winfield Harrah had specialized at all upon his method of serving up this game-bird which knows no closed season?

  As he sat in Harrah’s outer office on a high-backed settee of teak-wood ornate with dragons and Chinese devils, with his feet on a rug which would have gone a long way toward installing a power-plant, looking at pictures of Jake Kilrain in pugilistic garb and pose, the racing yacht Shamrock under full sail, and Heatherbloom taking a record smashing jump, the spider-legged office boy came from inside endeavoring to hide some pleasurable excitement under a semblance of dignity and office reticence.

  “Mr. Harrah has been detained and won’t be here for perhaps an hour.”

  “I’ll wait,” Bruce replied laconically.

  The office boy lingered. He fancied Bruce because of his size and his hat and a resemblance that he thought he saw between him and his favorite western hero of the movies; besides, he was bursting with a proud secret. He hunched his shoulders and looked cautiously behind toward the inner offices. Between his palms he whispered:

  “He’s been arrested.”

  It delighted him that Bruce’s eyes widened.

  “Third time in a month—speedin’ in Jersey—his new machine is 80 horse-power—! A farmer put tacks in the road and tried to kill him wit’ a pitchfork. Say! my boss et him. I bet he’ll get fined the limit.” His red necktie swelled palpably and he swaggered proudly. “Pooh! he don’t care. My boss, he—”

  “Willie!”

  “Yes ma’am.” The stenographer’s call interrupted further confidences from Willie and he scuttled away, leaving Bruce with the impression that the boy’s admiration for his boss was not unmixed with apprehension.

  The hour had gone when the door opened and a huge, fiery-bearded, dynamic sort of person went swinging past Bruce without a glance and on to the inner offices. The office boy’s husky “That’s him!” was not needed to tell him that J. Winfield Harrah had arrived. The air suddenly seemed charged electrically. The stenographer speeded up and dapper young clerks and accountants bent to their work with a zeal and assiduity which merited immediate promotion, while “Willie,” Bruce noticed, came from a brief session in the private office with the dazed look of one who has just been through an experience.

  When Bruce’s turn came Harrah sat at his desk like an expectant ogre; there was that in his attitude which seemed to say: “Enter; I eat promoters.” His eyes measured Bruce from head to foot in a glance of appraisement, and Bruce on his part subjected Harrah to the same swift scrutiny.

  Without at all being able to explain it Bruce felt instantly at his ease, he experienced a kind of relief as does a stranger in a strange land when he discovers someone who speaks his tongue.

  Harrah appeared about Bruce’s age, perhaps a year or two older, and he was as tall, though lacking Bruce’s thickness and breadth of shoulder. His arms were long as a gorilla’s and he had huge white fists with freckles on the back that looked like ginger-snaps. Fiery red eyebrows as stiff as two toothbrushes bristled above a pair of vivid blue eyes, while his short beard resembled nothing so much as a neatly trimmed whisk broom, flaming in color. His skin was florid and his hair, which was of a darker shade than his beard, was brushed straight back from a high, white forehead. A tuft of hair stood up on his crown like the crest on a game-cock. Everything about him indicated volcanic temperament, virility, and impulsiveness which amounted to eccentricity.

  Harrah represented to Bruce practically his last chance, but there was nothing in Harrah’s veiled, non-committal eyes as he motioned Bruce to a chair and inquired brusquely: “Well—what kind of a wild-cat have you got?” which would have led an observer to wager any large amount that his last chance was a good one.

  Bruce’s eyes opened and he stared for the fraction of a second at the rudeness of the question, then they flashed as he answered shortly.

  “I’m not peddling wild-cats, or selling mining stock to widows and orphans—if you happen to be either.”

  Capital is not accustomed to tart answers to its humor caustic, from persons in need of financial assistance for their enterprises. Harrah raised his toothbrush eyebrows and once more he favored
Bruce with a sweeping glance of interest, which Bruce, in his sensitive pride, resented.

  “Who sent you?” Harrah demanded roughly.

  “Never mind who sent me,” Bruce answered in the same tone, reaching for his hat which he had laid on the floor beside him, “but he had his dog-gone nerve directing me to an ill-mannered four-flusher like you.”

  The color flamed to Harrah’s cheek bones and over his high, white forehead.

  “You’ve got a curious way of trying to raise money,” he observed. “I suppose,” dryly, “that’s what you’re here for?”

  “You suppose right,” Bruce answered hotly as he stood up, “but I’m no damn pauper. And get it out of your head,” he went on as the accumulated wrath of weeks swept over him, “that you’re talking to the office boy. I’ve found somebody at last that’s big enough to stand up to and tell ’em to go to hell! Sabe? You needn’t touch my proposition, you needn’t even listen to it, but, hear me, you talk civil!”

  As Harrah arose Bruce took a step closer and looked at him squarely.

  A lurking imp sprang to life in Harrah’s vivid eyes, a dare-devil look which found its counterpart in Bruce’s own.

  “I believe you think you’re a better man than I am.”

  “I can lick you any jump in the road,” Bruce answered promptly.