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Updated: May 31, 2025
"I'm too shocked yet to thank you properly," she said, rising and giving him her hand, "but, believe me, I do appreciate your disinterested kindness in making this long trip from Bartlesville, and for total strangers, too." "Tut! tut!" Mr. Sprudell interrupted. "It's nothing nothing at all; and now I wish you'd promise to dine with me this evening.
Every time I gits about three fingers of 'cyanide' from the Bucket o' Blood under my belt I sees pictures of myself gittin' money enough together to go back to Bartlesville, Indianny, and lick him every day, reg'lar, or jest as often as I kin pay my fine, git washed up, and locate him agin."
In other words, by a certain amount of industry, T. Victor Sprudell had become a walking encyclopædia of misinformation with small danger of being found out so long as he stayed in Bartlesville.
Immediately when he saw Bruce he guessed his purpose and the full significance of a meeting between them rushed upon him. He was bent desperately upon preventing it. Sprudell took the initiative and advanced to meet him. "If you've anything to say to me, Bruce, I'll meet you to-morrow." "I've nothing at all to say to you except to repeat what I said to you in Bartlesville.
He liked her brisk, alert step, her erect carriage, and the straight lines of the dark clothes she wore mightily became her slender figure. "Wouldn't a girl like that" his full, red lips puckered in a whistle "wouldn't she make a stir in Bartlesville!" Sprudell returned to his task, but with abated enthusiasm. A vague uneasiness, which may have been his conscience, disturbed him.
"You'll hardly be startin' back to-morrow, will you, Burt?" "To-morrow? No, nor the next day." There was a hard ring in Bruce's voice. "I've changed my mind. I'm going outside! I'm going to Bartlesville, Indiana, to see Sprudell!" "Good!" enthusiastically. "And if you has cause to lick that pole kitty hit him one for me."
Penned up with a murderer what a tale to tell in Bartlesville, if by chance he returned alive! The fellow had him at his mercy, and what, after all, did he know of Uncle Bill? Even fairly honest men sometimes took desperate chances for so fat a purse as his. Sprudell saw to it that neither of them got behind him as they moved about the room.
Nevertheless he was the most thoroughly detested, the most hated man in Bartlesville. And those who hated feared him as they hated and feared the incendiary, the creeping thief, the midnight assassin; for he used their methods to attain his ends, along with a despot's power. No man or woman who pricked his vanity, who incurred his displeasure, was safe from his vengeance.
They crystallized finally into a definite resolve, and her lips set in a line of determination. "I don't know how much or how little I can do, but, T. Victor Sprudell," Helen clenched a small fist and shook it in the direction in which she imagined Bartlesville lay, "I'm going to fight!" If much of Helen's work was uncongenial it at least had the merit of developing useful traits.
He had seen enough of Bruce to guess something of his fixity of purpose when aroused and Dill's telegram confirmed it. But he had thought that, naturally, Bruce would return to the West at once from Bartlesville to try and hold his claims, from which, when he was ready, through a due process of law, if necessary, Sprudell would eject him.
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