come none too soon, for the first
one was well nigh worn out. He could not get over the surprise of
discovering how many readings three or four pages of scraggly
handwriting will stand without loss of interest.

Now, as he tried to grasp it all in a glance, the friendliness of it,
the confidence and encouragement it contained made him glow. But at the
end there was a paragraph which startled him--always the fly in the
ointment--that gave rise to a vague uneasiness he could not immediately
shake off.

"I ran up to the city one day last week," the paragraph read, "and who
do you suppose I saw with Winfield Harrah in the lobby of the Hotel
Strathmore? You would never guess. None other than our versatile friend
T. Victor Sprudell!"

How did they meet? For what purpose had Sprudell sought Harrah's
acquaintance? It troubled as well as puzzled Bruce for he could not
think the meeting an accident because even he could see that Harrah and
Sprudell moved in widely different stratas of society.

XVIII

PROPHETS OF EVIL

The difference between success and failure is sometimes only a hair's
breadth, the turning of a hand, and although the man who loses is
frequently as deserving of commendation as the man who wins he seldom
receives it, and Bruce knew that this would be particularly true of his
attempt to shoot the dangerous rapids of the river with heavily loaded
boats. If he accomplished the feat he would be lauded as a marvel of
nerve and skill and shrewdness, if he failed he would be known in the
terse language of Meadows as "One crazy damn fool."

While the more conservative citizens of the mountain towns refrained
from publicly expressing their thoughts, a coterie known as the "Old
Timers" left him in no doubt as to their own opinion of the attempt.
Each day they came to the river bank as regularly as though they had
office-hours and stationed themselves on a pile of lumber near where
Bruce caulked and tarred the seams of the three boats which were to make
the first trip through the rapids. They made Bruce think of so many
ancient ravens, as they roosted in a row croaking disaster. By the time
the machinery was due to arrive they spoke of the wreck of the boats as
something foreordained and settled. They differed only as to where it
would happen.

"I really doubts, Burt, if you so much as git through the Pine-Crick
rapids."

"No?"

"I mind the time Jake Hazlett and his crew was drowned at the 'Wild
Goos