Flowers? How extraordinary--perhaps Peters; no, not Peters, as she read the name of a side street florist on the box, he was not to be suspected of any such economy as that. Roses--a dozen--a little too full blown to last very long but lovely. T. Victor Sprudell's card fell out as she took them from the box. XIII "OFF HIS RANGE" Bruce stood before the blackboard in the Bartlesville station studying the schedule. A train went west at 11.45. The first train went east at 11.10. He hesitated a moment, then the expression of uncertainty upon his face hardened into decision. He turned quickly and bought a ticket east. If Sprudell had lied he was going to find it out. As he sat by the car window watching the smug, white farm-houses and big red barns of the middle west fly by, their dull respectability, their commonplace prosperity vaguely depressed him. What if he should be sentenced for life to walk up to his front door between two rows of whitewashed rocks, to live surrounded by a picket fence, and to die behind a pair of neat green blinds? But mostly his thoughts were a jumble of Sprudell, of his insincere cordiality and the unexpected denouement when Abe Cone's call had forced his hand; of Dill and his mission, and disgust at his own carelessness in failing to record his claims. They concentrated finally upon the work which lay before him once he had demonstrated the truth or falsity of Sprudell's assertion that Slim's family were not to be found. He turned the situation over and over in his mind and always it resolved itself into the same thing, namely, his lack of money. That obstacle confronted him at every turn and yet in spite of it, in spite of the doubts and fears which reason and caution together thrust into his mind, his determination to win, to outwit Sprudell, to make good his boast, grew stronger with every turn of the car wheels. Ambition was already awake within him; but it needed Sprudell's sneers to sting his pride, Sprudell's ingratitude and arrogant assumption of success in whatever it pleased him to undertake, to arouse in Bruce that stubborn, dogged, half-sullen obstinacy which his father had called mulishness but which the farmer's wife with her surer woman's intuition had recognized as one of the traits which make for achievement. It is a quality which stands those who have it in good stead when failure stares them in the face. It did not take Bruce long to discover that in whatever else Sprudell had prevaricated he at least had told the truth when he said that the Naudain family had disappeared. They might never have existed, for all the trace he could find of them in the city of a million.