The Man from the Bitter Roots

eturn

riswold would have immediately recognized in the debonair raconteur who held a circle breathless in the Bartlesville Commercial C

ten into print, but it was not until some time after that his s

Jaws, and grappling hand to hand with The White Death-why, the man was a poet, no matter wha

t you musn't take such

t's friendly protest. "'Tain

they regarded him in admiration-da

ernoon, he was the man of business, occupied with facts and figures and the ever-interesting problem of how to extract the maximum of labor f

a motorcycle could quite easily have conveyed all the sorrowing employees of the Bar

hange its color with greater ease than Sprudell took on another and distinct personality. On the instant he became the "good fellow," his pink face and beaming ey

tinctly barred with black, and suède gloves of London smoke, he bounded up the clubhouse steps with the elasticity of well-preserved fifty, lightly swinging a slender stick. His jauntily-placed hat was a trifle, a m

ceived the strictest attention and consideration from his immediate coterie of friends. So long as he was merely le bon diable, the jovial clubman, it was safe to banter and even to contradict him; bu

his craving for prominence and power. Sprudell was a man who had had meager youthful advantages, but through life he had o

out acquirin

and what not. The occult was to him an open book, and he was wont temporarily to paralyze the small talk of social gatherings with dissertations upon the teachings of the ancients which he had swallowe

ell had become a walking encyclop?dia of misinformation with sma

that by chance the soul of Cleopatra might be occupying the graceful body of the club cat. Abe was not acquainted with the doctrine of Pythagoras, though he had heard somewhere that the lady was a huzzy; so he discreetly kept hi

hose who hated feared him as they hated and feared the incendiary, the creeping thief, the

asts of political candidates who had crossed him; he rattled family skeletons in revenge for social slights; he published musty prison records, and over night blasted reputations which had been years in the building. His enmity cost salaried men positions through pressure which sooner or later he always found the way to bring to bear, and even mere "day's jobs" were not beneath his notice. Yet hi

d not have been elected dog-catcher, yet his mone

t. Bruce Burt was dead, of that he had not the faintest doubt. He intended to keep the promise he had made