“What’s Toy got to do with it?” He looked intently at Sprudell’s small round eyes—hard as agate—at his selfish, Cupid’s mouth. “You don’t think I’d quit him, do you, when he’s sick—leave him here to die alone?” Griswold flopped a pancake in the skillet and added, in a somewhat milder voice: “I’ve no special love for Chinks, but I’ve known Toy since ’79. He wouldn’t pull out and leave me if I was down.”
“But what about me?” Sprudell demanded furiously.
“You’ll have to take your chances along with us. It may let up in a day or two, and then again it mayn’t. Anyway, the game goes; we stop eatin’ altogether before to-morry night.”
“You got me into this fix! And what am I paying you five dollars a day for, except to get me out and do as you are told?”
“I got you into this fix? I did?” The stove lids danced with the vigor with which Uncle Bill banged down the frying pan. The mild old man was stirred at last. “I sure like your nerve! And, say, when you talk to me, jest try and remember that I don’t wear brass buttons and a uniform.” His blue eyes blazed. “It’s your infernal meanness that’s to blame, and nothin’ else. I warned you—I told you half a dozen times that you wasn’t gittin’ grub enough to come into the hills this time of year. But you was so afraid of havin’ six bits’ worth left over that you wouldn’t listen to what I said. I don’t like you anyhow. You’re the kind of galoot that ought never to git out of sight of a railroad. Now, blast you—you starve!”
Incredible as the sensation was, Sprudell felt small. He had to remind himself repeatedly who he was before he quite got back his poise, and no suitable retort came to him, for his guide had told the truth. But the thought that blanched his pink face until it was only a shade less white than his thick, white hair was that he, T. Victor Sprudell, president of the Bartlesville Tool Works, of Bartlesville, Indiana, was going to starve! To freeze! To die in the pitiless hills like any penniless prospector! His check-book was as useless as a bent weapon in his hand, and his importance in the world counted for no more than that of the Chinaman, by his side. Mr. Sprudell lay down again, weak from an overwhelming sense of helplessness.
Sprudell had not realized it before; but now he knew that always in the back of his head there had been a picture of an imposing cortège, blocks long, following a wreath-covered coffin in which he reposed. And later, an afternoon extra in which his demise was featured and his delicate, unostentatious charities described—not that he could think of any, but he presumed that that was the usual thing.
But this—this miserable finality! Unconsciously Sprudell groaned. To die bravely in the sight of a crowd was sublime; but to perish alone, unnoted, side by side with the Chinese cook and chiefly for want of trousers in which to escape, was ignominious. He snatched his cold feet from the middle of the cook’s back.
Another wretched day passed, the event of which was the uncovering of Sprudell’s fine field boots in a drift outside. That night he did not close his eyes. His nervousness became panic, and his panic like unto hysteria. He ached with cold and his cramped position, and he was now getting in earnest the gnawing pangs of hunger. What was a Chinaman’s life compared to his? There were millions like him left—and there was only one Sprudell! In the faint, gray light of the fourth day, Griswold felt him crawling out.
Griswold watched him while he kneaded the hard leather of his boots to soften it, and listened to the chattering of his teeth while he went through the Chinaman’s war bag for an extra pair of socks.