Pardners

"Slim'll cross in that water-coffin once too often," he muttered, and Bruce himself was the best boatman the length of the dangerous river.

There were times when he felt that he almost hated Slim Naudain, and this was one of them, yet fine lines of anxiety drew about his eyes as he watched the first lolling tongue of the rapids reach for the tiny boat. If it filled, Slim was gone, for no human being could swim in the roaring, white stretch where the great, green river reared, curled back, and broke into iridescent foam. The boat went out of sight, rose, bobbed for an instant on a crest, then disappeared.

Bruce said finally, in relief: "He's made it again."

He watched Slim make a noose in the painter, throw it over a bowlder, wipe the water from his rifle with his shirt sleeve, and start to scramble up the steep mountainside.

"The runt of something good--that feller," Bruce added, with somber eyes. "I ought to pull out of here. It's no use, we can't hit it off any more."

He closed the cabin door against thieving pack rats, and went down to the river, where his old-fashioned California rocker stood at the water's edge. He started to work, still thinking of Slim.

Invariably he injected the same comment into his speculations regarding his partner: "The runt of something good." It was the "something good" in Slim, the ear-marks of good breeding, and the peculiar fascination of blue blood run riot, which had first attracted him in Meadows, the mountain town one hundred and fifty miles above. This prospecting trip had been Bruce's own proposal, and he tried to remember this when the friction was greatest.