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?”