Mr. Sprudell backed up and started again: "Out there in the silence, where the peaks pierce the blue, we pitched our tents in the wilderness--in the forest primeval. We pillowed our heads upon nature's heart, and lay at night watching the cold stars shivering in their firmament." That was good! Mr. Sprudell wondered if it was original or had he read it somewhere? "By day, like primordial man, we crept around beetling crags and scaled inaccessible peaks in pursuit of the wild things----"
"Who crept with you?" inquired Miss Dunbar prosaically. "How far were you from a railroad?"
A shade of irritation replaced the look of poetic exaltation upon Sprudell's face. It would have been far better if they had sent a man. A man would undoubtedly have taken the interview verbatim.
"An old prospector and mountain man named Griswold--Uncle Bill they call him--was my guide, and we were--let me see--yes, all of a hundred miles from a railroad."
"What you were saying was--a--beautiful," declared Miss Dunbar, noting his injured tone, "but, you see, unfortunately in a newspaper we must have facts. Besides"--she glanced at the wrist watch beneath the frill of her coat sleeve--"the first edition goes to press at eleven-forty-five, and I would like to have time to do your story justice."
Mr. Sprudell reluctantly folded his oratorical pinions and dived to earth.
Beginning with the moment when he had emerged from the cañon where he had done some remarkable shooting at a band of mountain sheep--he doubted if ever he would be able to repeat the performance--and first sensed danger in the leaden clouds, to the last desperate struggle through the snowdrifts in the paralyzing cold of forty below, with poor old Uncle Bill Griswold on his back, he told the story graphically, with great minuteness of detail. And when divine Providence led him at last to the lonely miner's cabin on the wild tributary of the Snake, and he had sunk, fainting and exhausted, to the floor with his inert burden on his back, Mr. Sprudell's eyes filled, touched to tears by the story of his own bravery.
Miss Dunbar's wide, intent eyes and parted lips inspired him to go further. Under the stimulus of her flattering attention and the thought that through her he was talking to an audience of at least two hundred thousand people, he forgot the caution which was always stronger than any rash impulse. The circulation of the Dispatch was local; and besides, Bruce Burt was dead, he reasoned swiftly.
He told her of the tragedy in the lonely cabin, and described to her the scene into which he had stumbled, getting into the telling something of his own feeling of shock. In imagination she could see the big, silent, black-browed miner cooking, baking, deftly doing a woman's work, scrubbing at the stains on logs and flooring, wiping away the black splashes like a tidy housewife. "This is my story," she thought.