the ice to Long's
Crossin'," he vouchsafed shortly. "Ore City's closest, but I've no heart
to pack you up that hill."

He left a note on the kitchen table, though he had the sensation of
writing to the dead; and when he closed the door he did so reverently,
as he would have left a mausoleum. Then, dragging blankets and
provision behind them on the sled, they started for the river, past the
broken snow and the shallow grave where the dead madman lay, past the
clump of snow-laden willows where the starving horses that had worked
their way down huddled for shelter, too weak to move. Leaden-hearted,
Uncle Bill went with reluctant feet. Before a bend of the river shut
from sight the white-roofed cabin from which a tiny thread of smoke
still rose, he looked over his shoulder, wagging his head.

"I don't feel right about goin'. I shorely don't."

VI

THE RETURNED HERO

It is said that no two persons see another in exactly the same light. Be
that as it may, it is extremely doubtful if Uncle Bill Griswold would
have immediately recognized in the debonair raconteur who held a circle
breathless in the Bartlesville Commercial Club the saffron-colored,
wild-eyed dude whom he had fished off the slide rock with a pair of
"galluses" attached to a stout pole.

The account of Sprudell's adventure had leaked out and even gotten into
print, but it was not until some time after that his special cronies
succeeded in getting the story from his own lips.

There was not a dry eye when he was done. That touch about thinking of
them and the Yawning Jaws, and grappling hand to hand with The White
Death--why, the man was a poet, no matter what his enemies said; and, as
though to prove it, Abe Cone sniffled so everybody looked at him.

"We're proud of you! But you musn't take such a chance again, old man."

A chorus echoed Y. Fred Smart's friendly protest. "'Tain't right to
tempt Providence."

But Sprudell laughed lightly, and they regarded him in
admiration--danger was the breath of life to some.

But this reckless, peril-courting side was only one side of the
many-sided T. Victor Sprudell. From nine in the morning until four in
the afternoon, he was the man of business, occupied with facts and
figures and the ever-interesting problem of how to extract the maximum
of labor for the minimum of wage. That "there is no sentiment in
business" is a doctrine he practised to the letter. He was hard,
uncompromising, exact.

Rather t