ine--a feeling as though some invisible power
were pulling backward, backward until it hurt. He wanted to scream, to
hear his own voice once more, but his vocal cords would not respond; he
could not make a sound.

Griswold was shouting something; it did not matter what. He heard it
faintly above the clatter of the rocks. He must be close to the edge
now--Bartlesville--the Commercial Club--Abe Cone--and then Mr. Sprudell
hit something with a bump! He had a sensation as of a hatpin--many
hatpins--penetrating his tender flesh, but that was nothing compared to
the fact that he had stopped, while the slide of shale was rushing by.
He was not dead! but he was too astonished and relieved to immediately
wonder why.

Then he weakly raised his head and looked cautiously over his shoulder
lest the slightest movement start him travelling again. What miracle had
saved his life? The answer was before him. When he came down the slide
in the fortunate attitude of a clothespin, the Fates, who had other
plans for him, it seemed, steered him for a small tree of the stout
mountain mahogany, which has a way of pushing up in most surprising
places.

"Don't move!" called Griswold. "I'll come and get ye!"

Unnecessary admonition. Although Sprudell was impaled on the thick,
sharp thorns like a naturalist's captive butterfly, he scarcely
breathed, much less attempted to get up.

"Bill, I was near the gates," said Sprudell solemnly when Griswold, at
no small risk to himself, had snaked him back to solid ground. "_Fortuna
audaces juvat!_"

"If that's Siwash for 'close squeak,' it were; and," with an anxious
glance at the ominous sky, "'tain't over."

IV

SELF-DEFENCE

When Bruce came out of the canyon, where he had a wider view of the sky,
he saw that wicked-looking clouds were piling thick upon one another in
the northeast, and he wondered whether the month was the first of
November or late October, as Slim insisted. They had lost track somehow,
and of the day of the week they had not the faintest notion.

There was always the first big snowstorm to be counted on in the Bitter
Root Mountains, after which it sometimes cleared and was open weather
for weeks. But this was when it came early in September; the snow that
fell now would in all probability lie until spring.

At any rate, there was wood to be cut, enough to last out a week's
storm. But, first, Bruce told himself, he must clean up the rocker, else
he would lose nearl