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 canyon 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.

"Why did they quarrel?"

"It began with a row over pancakes, and wound up with a fight over
salt."

She stared incredulously.

"Fact--he said so."

"And what was the brute's name?"

He answered, not too readily:

"Why--Bruce Burt."

"And the man he murdered?"

"They called him Slim Naudain."

"Naudain!" Her startled cry made him look at her in wonder. "Naudain!
What