King Spruce, A Novel
by Holman Day · English · Gutenberg #34948 · 640,319 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: King Spruce, A Novel
Author: Holman Day
Illustrator: E. Roscoe Shrader
Release date: January 13, 2011 [eBook #34948]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34948
Credits: Produced by Audrey Longhurst, D Alexander and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KING SPRUCE, A NOVEL ***
Produced by Audrey Longhurst, D Alexander and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)
KING SPRUCE
A NOVEL
BY
HOLMAN DAY
AUTHOR OF
"SQUIRE PHIN" "UP IN MAINE"
"KIN O' KTAADN" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
E. ROSCOE SHRADER
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1908, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published April, 1908.
[Illustration: "'I KNOW YOUR HEART'" [_See p. 289_]
TO
A. B. D.
MY COMRADE OF
TRAIL AND CAMP
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. UP IN "CASTLE CUT 'EM" 1
II. THE HEIRESS OF "OAKLANDS" 17
III. THE MAKING OF A "CHANEY MAN" 27
IV. THE BOSS OF THE "BUSTERS" 35
V. DURING THE PUGWASH HANG-UP 55
VI. AS FOUGHT BEFORE THE "IT-'LL-GIT-YE CLUB" 62
VII. ON MISERY GORE 78
VIII. THE TORCH, AND THE LIGHTING OF IT 92
IX. BY ORDER OF PULASKI D. BRITT 104
X. "LADDER" LANE'S SOIREE 114
XI. IN THE BARONY OF "STUMPAGE JOHN" 127
XII. THE CODE OF LARRIGAN-LAND 142
XIII. THE RED THROAT OF POGEY 153
XIV. THE MESSAGE OF "PROPHET ELI" 164
XV. BETWEEN TWO ON JERUSALEM 174
XVI. IN THE PATH OF THE BIG WIND 181
XVII. THE AFFAIR AT DURFY'S CAMP 198
XVIII. THE OLD SOUBUNGO TRAIL 217
XIX. THE HOME-MAKERS OF ENCHANTED 230
XX. THE HA'NT OF THE UMCOLCUS 241
XXI. THE MAN WHO CAME FROM NOWHERE 256
XXII. THE HOSTAGE OF THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE 270
XXIII. IN THE MATTER OF JOHN BARRETT'S DAUGHTER 278
XXIV. THE CHEESE RIND THAT NEEDED SHARP TEETH 293
XXV. SHARPENING TEETH ON PULASKI BRITT'S WHETSTONE 303
XXVI. THE DEVIL OF THE HEMPEN STRANDS 312
XXVII. THE "CANNED THUNDER" OF CASTONIA 324
XXVIII. "'TWAS DONE BY TOMMY THUNDER" 341
XXIX. THE PARADE PAST RODBURD IDE'S PLATFORM 352
XXX. THE PACT WITH KING SPRUCE 361
ILLUSTRATIONS
"'I KNOW YOUR HEART'" _Frontispiece_
"WADE STOOD ABOVE THE FALLEN FOE" _Facing p._ 70
"WRITHING AT HIS BONDS, HIS CONTORTED FACE
TOWARDS THE RED FLAMES GALLOPING UP THE
VALLEY" " 172
"'WHAT I SAY ON THIS RIVER GOES!'" " 334
NOTE
When the trees have been cut and trimmed in the winter's work in the
woods the logs are hauled in great loads to be piled at "landing-places"
on the frozen streams, so that the spring floods will move them. Most of
the streams have a succession of dams. On the spring drive the logs are
floated to the dams, and then the gates are raised and the logs are
"sluiced" through with a head of water behind them to carry them
down-stream. Thus the drive is lifted along in sections from one dam to
another. It will be seen that Pulaski D. Britt's series of dams on
Jerusalem constituted a valuable holding, and enabled him to control the
water and leave the logs of rivals stranded if he wished. The collection
of water and quick work in "sluicing" are most important, for the
streams give down only about so much water in the spring.
When a load of logs is suddenly set free from the cable holding it back
on a steep descent, as in Chapter XXVI., it is said to be "sluiced."
When there is a jam of entangled logs as they are swept down-stream, if
it is impossible to find and pry loose the "key-log," it is sometimes
necessary to blow up the restraining logs with dynamite.
When the floating logs are caught upon rocks, and the men are prying
them loose, they are said to be "carding" the ledges.
A "jill-poke," a pet aversion of drivers, is a log with one end lodged
on the bank and the other thrust out into the stream.
The "cant-dog" is illustrated on the cover of the book.
The "peavy" is the Maine name for a slightly different variety of
"cant-dog," which takes its title from its maker in Old Town.
The "pick-pole" is an ashen pole ten to twelve feet long, shod with an
iron point with a screw-tip, which enables a driver to pull a log
towards him or to push it away.
KING SPRUCE
CHAPTER I
UP IN "CASTLE CUT 'EM"
"Oh, the road to 'Castle Cut 'Em' is mostly all uphill.
You can dance along all cheerful to the sing-song of a mill;
King Cole he wanted fiddles, and so does old King Spruce,
But it's only gashin'-fiddles that he finds of any use.
"Oh, come along, good lumbermen, oh, come along I say!
Come up to 'Castle Cut 'Em,' and pull your wads and pay.
King Cole he liked his bitters, and so does old King Spruce,
But the only kind he hankers for is old spondulix-juice."
--From song by Larry Gorman, "Woods Poet."
The young man on his way to "Castle Cut 'Em" was a clean-cut picture of
self-reliant youth. But he was not walking as one who goes to a welcome
task. He saw two men ahead of him who walked with as little display of
eagerness; men whose shoulders were stooped and whose hands swung
listlessly as do hands that are astonished at finding themselves idle.
A row of mills that squatted along the bank of the canal sent after them
a medley of howls from band-saws and circulars. The young man, with the
memory of his college classics sufficiently fresh to make him fanciful,
found suggestion of chained monsters in the aspect of those shrieking
mills, with slip-openings like huge mouths.
That same imagery invested the big building on the hill with attributes
that were not reassuring. But he went on up the street in the sunshine,
his eyes on the broad backs of the plodders ahead.
King Spruce was in official session.
Men who were big, men who were brawny, yet meek and apologetic, were
daily climbing the hill or waiting in the big building to have word
with the Honorable John Davis Barrett, who was King Spruce's high
chamberlain. Dwight Wade found half a dozen ahead of him when he came
into the general office. They sat, balancing their hats on their knees,
and each face wore the anxious expectancy that characterized those who
waited to see John Barrett.
Wade had lived long enough in Stillwater to know the type of men who
came to the throne-room of King Spruce in midsummer. These were stumpage
buyers from the north woods, down to make another season's contract with
the lord of a million acres of timber land. Their faces were brown,
their hands were knotted, and when one, in his turn, went into the inner
office he moved awkwardly across the level tiles, as though he missed
the familiar inequalities of the forest's floor.
The others droned on with their subdued mumble about saw-logs, sleeper
contracts, and "popple" peeling. The young man who had just entered was
so plainly not of themselves or their interests that they paid no
attention to him.
This was the first time Wade had been inside the doors of "Castle Cut
'Em," the name the humorists of Stillwater had given the dominating
block on the main street of the little city. The up-country men, with
the bitterness of experience, and moved by somewhat fantastic
imaginings, said it was "King Spruce's castle."
In the north woods one heard men talk of King Spruce as though this
potentate were a real and vital personality. To be sure, his power was
real, and power is the principal manifestation of the tyrant who is
incarnate. Invisibility usually makes the tyranny more potent. King
Spruce, vast association of timber interests, was visible only through
the affairs of his court administered by his officers to whom power had
been delegated. And, viewed by what he exacted and performed, King
Spruce lived and reigned--still lives and reigns.
Wade, not wholly at ease in the presence, for he had come with a
petition like the others, gazed about the reception-room of the Umcolcus
Lumbering and Log-driving Association, the incorporators' more decorous
title for King Spruce. It occurred to him that the wall-adornments
were not reassuring. A brightly polished circular-saw hung between two
windows. It was crossed by two axes, and a double-handled saw was the
base for this suggestive coat of arms. The framed photographs displayed
loaded log-sleds and piles of logs heaped at landings and similar
portraiture of destruction in the woods. Everything seemed to accentuate
the dominion of the edge of steel. The other wall-decorations were the
heads of moose and deer, further suggestion of slaughter in the forest.
A stuffed porcupine on the mantel above the great fireplace mutely
suggested that the timber-owners would brook no rivalry in their
campaign against the forest; they had asked the State to offer a bounty
for the slaughter of this tree-girdler, and a card propped against the
"quill-pig" instructed the reader that the State had already spent more
than fifty thousand dollars in bounties.
The deification of the cutting-edge appealed to Wade's abundant fancy.
He had noticed, when he came past the windows of the lumber company's
outfitting store on the first floor of the building, that the window
displays consisted mostly of cutting tools.
When the door of the inner office opened and one of those big and
awkward giants came out, Wade discovered that King Spruce had evidently
placed in the hands of the Honorable John Davis Barrett something sharp
with which to slash human feelings, also. The man's face was flushed and
his teeth were set down over his lower lip with manifest effort to dam
back language.
"Didn't he renew?" inquired one of the waiting group, solicitously.
"He turned me down!" muttered the other, scarcely releasing the clutch
on his lip. "I've wondered sometimes why 'Stumpage John' hasn't been
over his own timber lands in all these years. If he has backed many out
of that office feelin' like I do, I reckon there's a good reason why he
doesn't trust himself up in the woods." He struck his soft hat across
his palm. He did not raise his voice. But the venom in his tone was
convincing. "By God, I'd relish bein' the man that mistook him for a
bear!"
"Give any good reason for not renewin'?" asked a man whose face showed
his anxiety for himself.
"Any one who has been over my operation on Lunksoos," declared the
lumberman, answering the question in his own way--"any fair man knows I
haven't devilled: I've left short stumps and I 'ain't topped off under
eight inches, though you all know that their damnable scale-system puts
a man to the bad when he's square on tops. But I 'ain't left tops to rot
on the ground. I've been square!"
Wade did not understand clearly, but the sincerity of the man's distress
appealed to him.
One of the little group darted an uneasy look towards the door of the
inner office. It was closed tightly. But for all that he spoke in a
husky whisper.
"It must be that you didn't fix with What's-his-name last spring--I
heard you and he had trouble."
The angry operator dared to speak now. He looked towards the door as
though he hoped his voice would penetrate to King Spruce's throne-room.
"Trouble!" he cried. "Who wouldn't have trouble? I made up my mind I had
divided my profits with John Barrett's blackmailin' thieves of agents
for the last time. I lumbered square. And the agent was mad because I
wasn't crooked and didn't have hush-money for him. And he spiked me with
John Barrett; but you fellows, and all the rest that are willin' to
whack up and steal in company, will get your contracts all right. And
I'm froze out, with camps all built and five thousand dollars' worth of
supplies in my depot-camp."
"Hold on!" protested several of the men, in chorus, crowding close to
this dangerous tale-teller. "You ain't tryin' to sluice the rest of us,
are you, just because you've gone to work and got your own load busted
on the ramdown?"
"I'd like to see the whole infernal game of graft, gamble, and
woods-gashin' showed up. Let John Barrett go up and look at his woods
and he'll see what you are doin' to 'em--you and his agents! And the man
that lumbers square, and remembers that there are folks comin' after us
that will need trees, gets what I've just got!" He shook his crumpled
hat in their faces. "And I'm just good and ripe for trouble, and a lot
of it."
"Here, you let me talk with you," interposed a man who had said nothing
before, and he took the recalcitrant by the arm, led him away to a
corner, and they entered into earnest conference. At the end of it the
destructionist drove his hat on with a smack of his big palm and strode
out, sullen but plainly convinced.
The other man returned to the group and spoke cautiously low, but in
that big, bare room with its resonant emptiness even whispers travelled
far.
"I'll take a double contract and sublet to him," he explained. "Barrett
won't know, and after this Dave will come back into line and handle the
agent. I reckon he's got well converted from honesty in a lumberin'
deal. It's what we're up against, gents, in this business; the patterns
are handed to us and we've got to cut our conduct accordin' to other
men's measurements. Barrett gets _his_ first; the agent gets _his_; we
get what we can squeeze out of a narrow margin--and the woods get hell."
A man came out of the inner office stroking the folds of a stumpage
permit preparatory to stuffing it into his wallet, and the peacemaker
departed promptly, for it was now his turn to pay his respects to King
Spruce.
In what he had seen and what he had heard, Dwight Wade found food for
thought. The men so manifestly had accepted the stranger as some one
utterly removed from comprehension of their affairs or interest in their
talk that they had not been discreet. It occurred to him that his own
present business with John Barrett would be decidedly furthered were he
to utilize that indiscretion.
This thought occurred to him not because he intended for one instant to
use his information, but because he saw now that his business with John
Barrett was more to John Barrett's personal advantage than that
gentleman realized. This knowledge gave him more confidence. He was
proposing something to the Honorable John Barrett that the latter, for
his own good, ought to be pressed into accepting.
The earlier reflection which had made him uneasy, that a millionaire
timber baron would not listen patiently to suggestions about his own
business offered by the principal of the Stillwater high-school, had
now been modified by circumstances. Even that lurking fear, that awe of
John Barrett which he had his peculiar and private reason for feeling
and hiding, was not quite so nerve-racking.
Barrett left it to his clients to manage the order of precedence in the
outer office. It was only necessary for the awaiting suppliant to note
his place between those already there and those who came in after him;
and Wade was prompt to accept his turn.
He knew the Honorable John Barrett. As mayor that gentleman had
distributed the diplomas at the June graduation. And Mr. Barrett, after
one first, sharp, scowling glance over his nose-glasses, hooking his
chin to one side as he gazed, rose and greeted the young man cordially.
Then he wheeled his chair away from his desk to the window and sat down
where he could feel the breeze.
Looking past him Wade saw the Stillwater saw-mills. There were five of
them in a row along the canal. Each had a slip-opening in the end and it
yawned wide like a mouth that stretched for prey.
The two windows pinched together in each gable gave to the end of the
building likeness to a hideous face. From his seat Wade heard the
screech of the band-saws. The sounds came out of those open mouths. The
dripping logs went up the slips and into those mouths, like morsels
sliding along a slavering tongue. Mingled with the fierce scream of the
band-saws there were the wailings of the lath and clapboard saws. In
that medley of sound the imagination heard monster and victims mingling
howl of triumph and despairing cry.
The breeze that ruffled the awnings stirred the thin, gray hair of John
Barrett, brought fresh scents of sawdust and sweeter fragrance of
seasoning lumber. And fainter yet came the whiff of resinous balsam
from the vast fields of logs that crowded the booms.
With that picture backing him in the frame of the open window--mutilated
trees, and mills yowling in chorus, and with the scent of the riven logs
bathing him--the timber baron politely waited for the young man to
speak. He had put off the brusqueness of his business demeanor, for it
had not occurred to him that the principal of the Stillwater high school
could have any financial errand. He played a little tattoo with his
eye-glasses' rim upon the second button of his frock-coat. One touch of
sunshine on Barrett's cheek showed up striated markings and the faint
purpling that indulgence paints upon the skin. The way in which the
shoulders were set back under the tightly buttoned frock-coat, the
flashing of the keen eyes, and even the cock of the bristly gray
mustache that crossed the face in a straight line showed that John
Barrett had enjoyed the best that life had to offer him.
"I'll make my errand a short one, Mr. Barrett," began Wade, "for I see
that others are waiting."
"They're only men who want to buy something," said the baron,
reassuringly--"men who have come, the whole of them, with the same growl
and whine. It's a relief to be rid of them for a few moments."
Frankly showing that he welcomed the respite, and serenely indifferent
to those who waited, he brought a box of cigars from the desk, and the
young man accepted one nervously.
"I think I have noticed you about the city since your school closed,"
Mr. Barrett proceeded. And without special interest he asked, whirling
his chair and gazing out of the window at the mills: "How do you happen
to be staying here in Stillwater this summer? I supposed pedagogues in
vacation-time ran away from their schools as fast as they could."
If John Barrett had not been staring at the mills he would have seen the
flush that blazed on the young man's cheeks at this sudden, blunt demand
for the reasons why he stayed in town.
"If I had a home I should probably go there," answered Wade; "but my
parents died while I was in college--and--and high-school principals do
not usually find summer resorts and European trips agreeing with the
size of their purses."
"Probably not," assented the millionaire, calmly. A sudden recollection
seemed to strike him. "Say, speaking of college--you're the Burton
centre, aren't you--or you were? I was there a year ago when Burton
clinched the championship. I liked your game! I meant to have said as
much to you, but I didn't get a chance, for you know what the push is on
a ball-ground. I'm a Burton man, you know. I never miss a game. I'm glad
to have such a chap as you at the head of our school. These pale fellows
with specs aren't my style!"
He turned and ran an approving gaze over Wade's six feet of sturdy young
manhood. With his keen eye for lines that revealed breeding and
training, Barrett usually turned once to look after a handsome woman and
twice to stare at a blooded horse. Men interested him, too--men who
appealed to his sportsman sense. This young man, with the glamour of the
football victories still upon him, was a particularly attractive object
at that moment. He stared into Wade's flushed face, evidently accepting
the color as the signal that gratified pride had set upon the cheeks.
"You'll weigh in at about one hundred and eighty-five," commented the
millionaire. It seemed to Wade that his tone was that of a judge
appraising the points of a race-horse, and for an instant he resented
the fact that Barrett was sizing him less as a man than as a gladiator.
"Old Dame Nature put you up solid, Mr. Wade, and gave you the face to go
with the rest. I wish I were as young--and as free!" He gave another
look at the mills and scowled when he heard the mumble of men's voices
in the outer room. "When a man is past sixty, money doesn't buy the
things for him that he really wants." It was the familiar cant of the
man rich enough to affect disdain for money, and Wade was not impressed.
"I'd like to take my daughter across the big pond this summer," the land
baron grumbled, discontentedly, "but I never was tied down so in my
life. I am directing-manager of the Umcolcus Association, and I've got
all my own lands to handle besides, and with matters in the lumbering
business as they are just now there are some things that you can't
delegate to agents, Mr. Wade."
This man, confiding his troubles, did not seem the ogre he had been
painted.
The young man had flushed still more deeply at mention of Barrett's
daughter, but Barrett was again looking at his squalling mills.
The pause seemed a fair opportunity for the errand. The mention of
agents revived the recollection that he was proposing something to John
Barrett's advantage.
"Mr. Barrett, you know it is pretty hard for any one to live in
Stillwater and not take an interest in the lumbering business. I'll
confess that I've taken such interest myself. A few of my older boys
have asked me to secure books on the science of forestry and help them
study it."
"A man would have pretty hard work to convince me that it is a science,"
broke in Barrett, with some contempt. "As near as I can find out, it's
mostly guesswork, and poor guesswork at that."
"Well, the fact remains," hastened Wade, a little nettled by the
curtness that had succeeded the timber baron's rather sentimental
courtesy, "my boys have been studying forestry, and I have been keeping
a bit ahead of them and helping them as I could. Now they need a little
practical experience. But they are boys who are working their way
through school, and as I had to do the same thing I'm taking an especial
interest in them. They have been in your mills two summers."
"Why isn't it a good place for them to stay?" demanded Barrett. "They're
learning a side of forestry there that amounts to something."
"The side that they want to learn is the side of the standing trees,"
persisted Wade, patiently. "I thought I could talk it over with you a
little better than they. I hoped that such a large owner of timber land
had begun to take interest in forestry and would, for experiment's sake,
put these young men upon a section of timber land this summer and let
them work up a map and a report that you could use as a basis for later
comparison, if nothing else."
"What do you mean, that I'm going to hire them to do it--pay them
money?" demanded the timber baron, fixing upon the young man that stare
that always disconcerted petitioners. At that moment Wade realized why
those men whom he had seen waiting in the outer office were gazing at
the door of the inner room with such anxiety.
"The young men will be performing a real service, for they will plot a
square mile and--"
"If there's any pay to it, I'd rather pay them to keep off my lands,"
broke in Barrett. "Forestry--"
He in turn was interrupted. The man who came in entered with manifest
belief in his right to interrupt.
"Forestry!" he cried, taking the word off Barrett's lips--"forestry is
getting your men into the woods, getting grub to 'em, hiring bosses that
can whale spryness into human jill-pokes, and can get the logs down to
Pea Cove sortin'-boom before the drought strikes. That's forestry!
That's my kind. It's the kind I've made my money on. It's the kind John
Barrett made his on. What are you doin', John--hirin' a perfesser?" The
new arrival asked this in a tone and with a glance up and down Wade that
left no doubt as to his opinion of "perfessers." "Are you one of these
newfangled fellers that's been studyin' in a book how to make trees
grow?" he demanded.
Wade had only a limited acquaintance with the notables of the State, but
he knew this man. He had seen him in Stillwater frequently, and his
down-river office was in "Castle Cut 'Em." He was the Honorable Pulaski
D. Britt. He had acquired that title--mostly for newspaper use--by
serving many years in the State senate from Umcolcus County.
Wade gazed at the puffy red face, the bristle of gray beard, the hard
little eyes--pupils of dull gray set in yellow eyeballs--and remembered
the stories he had heard about this man who yelped his words with canine
abruptness of utterance, who waved his big, hairy hands about his head
as he talked, and with every gesture, every glance, every word revealed
himself as a driver of men, grown arrogant and cruel by possession of
power.
"Mr. Britt is executive officer for the lumber company in the north
country," explained Barrett, dryly. "We are all associated more or less
closely, though many of our holdings are separate. We think it is quite
essential to confer together when undertaking any important step." His
satiric dwelling on the word "important" was exasperating. "This young
gentleman is the principal of our high-school, Pulaski, and he wants me
to put a bunch of high-school boys in my woods as foresters--and pay 'em
for it. You came in just as I was going to give him my opinion. But it
may be more proper for you to do it, for you are the woods executive,
and are better posted on conditions up there than I am." His drawled
irony was biting.
The Honorable John Barrett enjoyed sport of all kinds, including
badger-baiting. Now he leaned back in his swivel-chair with the air of a
man about to enjoy the spectacle of a lively affair. But Wade, glancing
from Barrett to Britt, was in no humor to be the butt of the
millionaire.
"I don't think I care to listen to Mr. Britt's opinions," he said,
rising hastily.
"Why? Don't you think I know what I'm talking about?" demanded the
lumberman. He had missed the point of Barrett's satire, being himself a
man of the bludgeon instead of the rapier.
"I'm quite sure you know, Mr. Britt," said the young man, bowing to
Barrett and starting away.
"I've hired more men than any ten operators on the Umcolcus, put 'em all
together," declared Britt, following him, "and I'd ought to know
something about whether a man is worth anything on a job or not. And
rather than have any one of those squirt-gun foresters cuttin' and
caliperin' over my lands, I'd--"
Wade shut the door behind him, strode through the outer office, and
hurried down-stairs, his face very red and his teeth shut very tight.
He realized that he had left the presence of King Spruce in most
discourteous haste, but the look in John Barrett's eyes when he had
leaned back and "sicked on" that old railer of the rasping voice had
been too much for Wade's nerves. To be made an object of ridicule by
_her_ father was bitter, with the bitterness of banished hope that had
sprung into blossom for just one encouraging moment.
When he came out into the sunlight he threw down the fat cigar--plump
with a suggestion of the rich man's opulence--and ground it under his
heel. In the anxiety of his intimate hopes, in the first cordiality of
their interview, it had seemed as though the millionaire had chosen to
meet him upon that common level of gentle society where consideration of
money is banished. Now, in the passion of his disappointment, Wade
realized that he had served merely as a diversion, as a prize pup or a
game-cock would have served, had either been brought to "Castle Cut 'Em"
for inspection.
Walking--seeking the open country and the comforting breath of the
flowers--away from that sickly scent of the sawdust, his cheeks burned
when he remembered that at first he had fearfully, yet hopefully,
believed that John Barrett knew the secret that he and Elva Barrett were
keeping.
Hastening away from his humiliation, he confessed to himself that in
his optimism of love he had been dreaming a beautiful but particularly
foolish dream; but having realized the blessed hope that had once
seemed so visionary--having won Elva Barrett's love--the winning of
even John Barrett had not seemed an impossible task. The millionaire's
frank greeting had held a warmth that Wade had grasped at as vague
encouragement. But now the clairvoyancy of his sensitiveness enabled him
to understand John Barrett's nature and his own pitiful position in that
great affair of the heart; he had not dared to look at that affair too
closely till now.
So he hurried on, seeking the open country, obsessed by the strange
fancy that there was something in his soul that he wanted to take out
and scrutinize, alone, away from curious eyes.
The Honorable Pulaski D. Britt had watched that hasty exit with sudden
ire that promptly changed to amusement. He turned slowly and gazed at
the timber baron with that amusement plainly showing--amusement spiced
with a bit of malice. The reverse of Britt's hard character as bully
and tyrant was an insatiate curiosity as to the little affairs of the
people he knew and a desire to retail those matters in gossip when he
could wound feelings or stir mischief. If one with a gift of prophecy
had told him that his next words would mark the beginning of the crisis
of his life, Pulaski Britt would have professed his profane incredulity
in his own vigorous fashion. All that he said was, "Well, John, your
girl has picked out quite a rugged-lookin' feller, even if he ain't much
inclined to listen to good advice on forestry."
Confirmed gossips are like connoisseurs of cheese: the stuff they relish
must be stout. It gratified Britt to see that he had "jumped" his
friend.
"I didn't know but you had him in here to sign partnership papers,"
Britt continued, helping himself to a cigar. "I wouldn't blame you much
for annexin' him. You need a chap of his size to go in on your lands and
straighten out your bushwhackin' thieves with a club, seein' that you
don't go yourself. As for me, I don't need to delegate clubbers; I can
attend to it myself. It's the way I take exercise."
"Look here, Pulaski," Barrett replied, angrily, "a joke is all right
between friends, but hitching up my daughter Elva's name with a beggar
of a school-master isn't humorous."
Britt gnawed off the end of the cigar, and spat the fragment of tobacco
into a far corner.
"Then if you don't see any humor in it, why don't you stop the
courtin'?"
"There isn't any courting."
"I say there is, and if the girl's mother was alive, or you 'tending out
at home as sharp as you ought to, your family would have had a stir-up
long ago. If you ain't quite ready for a son-in-law, and don't want that
young man, you'd better grab in and issue a family bulletin to that
effect."
"Damn such foolishness! I don't believe it," stormed Barrett, pulling
his chair back to the desk; "but if you knew it, why didn't you say
something before?"
"Oh, I'm no gossip," returned Britt, serenely. "I've got something to do
besides watch courtin' scrapes. But I don't have to watch this one in
_your_ family. I know it's on."
Barrett hooked his glasses on his nose with an angry gesture, and began
to fuss with the papers on his desk. But in spite of his professed
scepticism and his suspicion of Pulaski Britt's ingenuousness, it was
plain that his mind was not on the papers.
He whirled away suddenly and faced Britt. That gentleman was pulling
packets of other papers from his pocket.
"Look here, Britt, about this lying scandal that seems to be snaking
around, seeing that it has come to your ears, I--"
"What I'm here for is to go over these drivin' tolls so that they can be
passed on to the book-keepers," announced Mr. Britt, with a fine and
brisk business air. He had shot his shaft of gossip, had "jumped" his
man, and the affair of John Barrett's daughter had no further interest
for him. "You go ahead and run your family affairs to suit yourself. As
to these things you are runnin' with me, let's get at 'em."
In this manner, unwittingly, did Pulaski D. Britt light the fuse that
connected with his own magazine; in this fashion, too, did he turn his
back upon it.
CHAPTER II
THE HEIRESS OF "OAKLANDS"
"Pete Lebree had money and land, Paul of Olamon had none,
Only his peavy and driving pole, his birch canoe and his gun.
But to Paul Nicola, lithe and tall, son of a Tarratine,
Had gone the heart of the governor's child, Molly the island's
queen."
--_Old Town Ballads._
The coachman usually drove into town from the "Oaklands" to bring John
Barrett home from his office, for Barrett liked the spirited rush of his
blooded horses.
But when his daughter occasionally anticipated the coachman, he resigned
himself to a ride in her phaeton with only a sleepy pony to draw them.
Once more absorbed in his affairs, after the departure of Pulaski Britt,
Barrett had forgotten the unpleasant morsel of gossip that Britt had
brought to spice his interview.
But a familiar trilling call that came up to him stirred that unpleasant
thing in his mind. When Barrett walked to the window and signalled to
her that he had heard and would come, his expression was not exactly
that of the fond father who welcomes his only child. It was not the
expression that the bright face peering from under the phaeton's parasol
invited. And as he wore his look of uneasiness and discontent when he
took his seat beside her, her face became grave also.
"Is it the business or the politics, father?" she asked, solicitously.
"I'm jealous of both if they take away the smiles and bring the tired
lines. If it's business, let's make believe we've got money enough.
Haven't we--for only us two? If it's politics--well, when I'm a
governor's daughter I'll be only an unhappy slave to the women, and you
a servant of the men."
But he did not respond to her rallying.
"I can't get away from work this summer, Elva," he said, with something
of the curtness of his business tone. "I mean I can't get away to go
with you."
"But I don't want you to go anywhere, father," protested the girl.
She was so earnest that he glanced sidewise at her. His air was that of
one who is trying a subtle test.
"I feel that I must go north for a visit to my timber lands," he went
on; "I have not been over them for years. I've had pretty good proof
that I am being robbed by men I trusted. I propose to go up there and
make a few wholesome examples."
He was accustomed to talk his business affairs with her. She always
received them with a grave understanding that pleased him. Her dark eyes
now met him frankly and interestedly. Looking at her as he did, with his
strange thrill of suspicion that another man wanted her and that she
loved the man, he saw that his daughter was beautiful, with the
brilliancy of type that transcends prettiness. He realized that she had
the wit and spirit which make beauty potent, and her eyes and bearing
showed poise and self-reliance. Such was John Barrett's appraisal, and
John Barrett's business was to appraise humankind. But perhaps he did
not fully realize that she was a woman with a woman's heart.
The pony was ambling along lazily under the elms, and the reflective
lord of lands was silent awhile, glancing at his daughter occasionally
from the corner of his eye. He noted, with fresh interest, that she had
greeting for all she met--as gracious a word for the tattered man from
the mill as for the youth who slowed his automobile to speak to her.
"These gossips have misunderstood her graciousness," he mused, the
thought giving him comfort.
But he was still grimly intent upon his trial of her.
"Because I cannot go with you, and because I shall be away in the woods,
Elva," he said, after a time, "I am going to send you to the shore with
the Dustins."
There was sudden fire in her dark eyes.
"I do not care to go anywhere with the Dustins," she said, with
decision. "I do not care to go anywhere at all this summer. Father!"
There was a volume of protest in the intonation of the word. She had the
bluntness of his business air when she was aroused. "I would be blind
and a fool not to understand why you are so determined to throw me in
with the Dustins. You want me to marry that bland and blessed son and
heir. But I'll not do any such thing."
"You are jumping at conclusions, Elva," he returned, feeling that he
himself had suddenly become the hunted.
"I've got enough of your wit, father, to know what's in a barrel when
there's a knot-hole for me to peep through."
"Now that you have brought up the subject, what reason is there for your
not wanting to marry Weston Dustin? He's--"
"I know all about him," she interrupted. "There is no earthly need for
you and me to get into a snarl of words about him, dadah! He isn't the
man I want for a husband; and when John Barrett's only daughter tells
him that with all her heart and soul, I don't believe John Barrett is
going to argue the question or ask for further reasons or give any
orders."
He bridled in turn.
"But I'm going to tell you, for my part, that I want you to marry Weston
Dustin! It has been my wish for a long time, though I have not wanted to
hurry you."
She urged on the pony, as though anxious to end a _tete-a-tete_ that was
becoming embarrassing.
"It might be well to save our discussion of Mr. Dustin until that
impetuous suitor has shown that he wants to marry me," she remarked,
with a little acid in her tone.
"He has come to me like a gentleman, told me what he wants, and asked my
permission," stated Mr. Barrett.
"Following a strictly business rule characteristic of Mr. Dustin--'Will
you marry your timber lands to my saw-mill, Mr. John Barrett, one
daughter thrown in?'"
"At least he didn't come sneaking around by the back door!" cried her
father, jarred out of his earlier determination to probe the matter
craftily.
"Intimating thereby that I have an affair of the heart with the iceman
or the grocery boy?" she inquired, tartly.
She was looking full at him now with all the Barrett resoluteness
shining in her eyes. And he, with only the vague and malicious
promptings of Pulaski Britt for his credentials, had not the courage to
make the charge that was on his tongue, for his heart rejected it now
that he was looking into her face.
"In the old times stern parents married off daughters as they would
dispose of farm stock," she said, whipping her pony with a little
unnecessary vigor. "But I had never learned that the custom had obtained
in the Barrett family. Therefore, father, we will talk about something
more profitable than Mr. Dustin."
Outside the city, in the valley where the road curved to enter the gates
of "Oaklands," they met Dwight Wade returning, chastened by
self-communion.
Barrett did not look at the young man. He kept his eyes on his
daughter's face as she returned Wade's bow. He saw what he feared. The
fires of indignation quickly left the dark eyes. There was the softness
of a caress in her gaze. Love displayed his crimson flag on her cheeks.
She spoke in answer to Wade's salutation, and even cast one shy look
after him when he had passed. When she took her eyes from him she found
her father's hard gaze fronting her.
"Do you know that fellow?" he demanded, brusquely.
"Yes," she said, her composure not yet regained; "when he was a student
at Burton and I was at the academy I met him often at receptions."
"What is that academy, a sort of matrimonial bureau?" His tone was
rough.
"It is not a nunnery," she retorted, with spirit. "The ordinary rules of
society govern there as they do here in Stillwater."
"Elva," he said, emotion in his tones, "since your mother died you have
been mistress of the house and of your own actions, mostly. Has that
fellow there been calling on you?"
"He has called on me, certainly. Many of my school friends have called.
Since he has been principal of the high-school I have invited him to
'Oaklands.'"
"You needn't invite him again. I do not want him to call on you."
"For what reason, father?" She was looking straight ahead now, and her
voice was even with the evenness of contemplated rebellion.
"As your father, I am not obliged to give reasons for all my commands."
"You are obliged to give me a reason when you deny a young gentleman of
good standing in this city our house. An unreasonable order like that
reflects on my character or my judgment. I am the mistress of our home,
as well as your daughter."
"It's making gossip," he floundered, dimly feeling the unwisdom of
quoting Pulaski Britt.
"Who is gossiping, and what is the gossip?" she insisted.
"I don't care to go into the matter," he declared, desperately. "If the
young man is nothing to you except an acquaintance, and I have reasons
of my own for not wanting him to call at my house, I expect you to do as
I say, seeing that his exclusion will not mean any sacrifice for you."
He was dealing craftily. She knew it, and resented it.
"I do not propose to sacrifice any of my friends for a whim, father. If
your reasons have anything to do with my personal side of this matter, I
must have them. If they are purely your own and do not concern me, I
must consider them your whim, unless you convince me to the contrary,
and I shall not be governed in my choice of friends. That may sound
rebellious, but a father should not provoke a daughter to rebellion. You
ought to know me too well for that."
They were at the house, and he threw himself out of the phaeton and
tramped in without reply. During their supper he preserved a resentful
silence, and at the end went up-stairs to his den to think over the
whole matter. It had suddenly assumed a seriousness that puzzled and
frightened him. He had been routed in the first encounter. He resolved
to make sure of his ground and his facts--and win.
Usually he did not notice who came or who went at his house. The still
waters of his confidence in his daughter had never been troubled until
the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt had breathed upon them.
This evening, when he heard a caller announced, he tiptoed to the head
of the stairs and listened.
It was Dwight Wade, and at sight of him his pride took alarm, his anger
flared. After the afternoon's exasperating talk, this seemed like open
and insulting contempt for his authority. It was as though the man were
plotting with a disobedient daughter to flout him as a father. His
purpose of calm thought was swept away by an unreasoning wrath.
Muttering venomous oaths, he stamped down the stairs, whose carpet made
his approach stealthy, though he did not intend it, and he came upon the
two as Wade, his great love spurred by the day's opposition, despondent
in the present, fearing for the future, reached out his longing arms and
took her to his heart.
They faced him as he stood and glowered upon them, a pathetic pair,
clinging to each other.
"You sneaking thief!" roared Barrett.
The girl did not draw away. Wade felt her trembling hands seeking his,
and he pressed them and kept her in the circle of his arm.
"I don't care to advertise this," Barrett went on, choking with his
rage, "but there's just one way to treat you, you thief, and that's to
have you kicked out of the house. Elva, up-stairs with you!"
She gently put away her lover's arm, but she remained beside him, strong
in her woman's courage.
"I have always been proud of my father as a gentleman," she said. "It
hurts my faith to have you say such things under your own roof."
"That pup has come under my roof to steal," raged the millionaire, "and
he's got to take the consequences. Don't you read me my duty, girl!"
Even Barrett in his wrath had to acknowledge that simple manliness has
potency against pride of wealth. Wade took two steps towards him, the
instinctive movement of the male that protects his mate.
"Mr. Barrett," he said, gravely, "give me credit for honest intentions.
If it is a fault to love your daughter with all my heart and soul, I
have committed that fault. For me it's a privilege--an honor that you
can't prevent."
"What! I can't regulate my own daughter's marriage, you young hound?"
"You misunderstand me, Mr. Barrett. You cannot prevent me from loving
her, even though I may never see nor speak to her again."
And Elva, blushing, tremulous, yet determined, looked straight in her
father's eyes, saying, "And I love him."
Barrett realized that his anger was making a sorry figure compared with
this young man's resolute calmness. With an effort he held himself in
check.
"We won't argue the love side of this thing," he said, grimly. "I
haven't any notion of doing that with a nineteen-year-old girl and a
pauper. But I want to inform you, young man, that the marriage of John
Barrett's only child and heir is a matter for my judgment to control.
I'm taking it for granted that you are not sneak enough to run away with
her, even if you have stolen her affections."
The millionaire understood his man. He had calculated the effect of the
sneer. He knew how New England pride may be spurred to conquer passion.
"These are wicked insults, sir," said the young man, his face rigid and
pale, "but I don't deserve them."
"I tell you here before my daughter that I have plans for her future
that you shall not interfere with. This is no country school-ma'am, down
on your plane of life--this is Elva Barrett, of 'Oaklands,' a girl who
has temporarily lost her good sense, but who is nevertheless my daughter
and my heiress. She will remember that in a little while. Take yourself
out of the way, young man!"
The girl's eyes blazed. Her face was transfigured with grief and love.
She was about to speak, but Wade hastened to her and took her hand.
"Good-night, Elva."
She understood him. His eyes and the quiver in his voice spoke to her
heart. She clung to his hands when he would have withdrawn them. The
look she gave her father checked that gentleman's contemptuous
mutterings.
"I am ashamed of my father, Mr. Wade," she said, passionately. "I offer
you the apologies of our home."
"Say, look here!" snarled Barrett, this scornful rebelliousness putting
his wits to flight, "if that's the way you feel about me, put on your
hat and go with him. I'll be d--d if I don't mean it! Go and starve."
He realized the folly of his outburst as he returned their gaze. But he
persisted in his puerile attack.
"Oh, you don't want her that way, do you?" he sneered. "You want her to
bring the dollars that go along with her!"
Then Wade forgot himself.
He wrested one hand from the gentle clasp that entreated him, and would
have struck the mouth that uttered the wretched insult. The girl
prevented an act that would have been an enormity. She caught his wrist,
and when his arm relaxed he did not dare, at first, to look at her. Then
he gave her one quick stare of horror and looked at his hand, dazed and
ashamed.
Barrett, strangely enough, was jarred back to equanimity by the threat
of that blow. He folded his arms, drew himself up, and stood there, the
outraged master of the mansion restored to command, silent, cold, rigid,
his whole attitude of indignant reproach more effective than all the
curses in Satan's lexicon.
Talk could not help that distressing situation. The young man's white
lips tried to frame the words "I apologize," but even in his anguish the
grim humor of this reciprocation of apology rose before his dizzy
consciousness.
"Good-night!" he gasped.
Then he left her and went into the hall, John Barrett close on his
heels. The millionaire watched him take his hat, followed him out upon
the broad porch, and halted him at the edge of the steps.
"Mr. Wade," he said, "you'd rather resign your position than be kicked
out, I presume?"
"You mean that it is your wish that I should go away from Stillwater?"
"That is exactly what I mean. You resign, or I will have your
resignation demanded by the school board."
"I think my school relations are entirely my own business," retorted the
young man, fighting back his mounting wrath.
"I'll make it mine, and have you kicked out of this town like a cur."
Wade remembered at that instant the face of the man whom he had seen
leave John Barrett's office that morning. He recollected his words--"I'd
relish bein' the man that mistook him for a bear!" He knew now how that
man felt. And feeling the lust of killing rise in his own soul for the
first time, he clinched his fists, set his teeth, and strode away into
the night.
CHAPTER III
THE MAKING OF A "CHANEY MAN"
"We're bound for the choppin's at Chamberlain Lake,
And we're lookin' for trouble and suthin' to take.
We reckon we'll manage this end of the train,
And we'll leave a red streak up the centre of Maine."
--Murphy's "Come-all-ye."
A company of reserves posted in a thicket, after valiantly withstanding
the hammering of a battery, were suddenly routed by wasps. They broke
and ran like the veriest knaves.
Dwight Wade had determined to face John Barrett's battery of
persecution. But at the end of a week he realized that the little city
of Stillwater was looking askance at him. He knew that gossip attended
his steps and stood ever at his shoulders, as one from the tail of the
eye sees shadowy visions and, turning suddenly, finds them gone.
That John Barrett would deliberately start stories in which his
daughter's affairs were concerned seemed incredible to the lover who,
for the sake of her fair fame and her peace of mind, had resolved to
make fetish of duty, realizing even better than she herself that Elva
Barrett's sense of justice would weigh well her duties as daughter
before she could be won to the duties of wife.
Yet Wade could hardly tell why he determined to stay in Stillwater. He
wanted to console himself with the belief that a sudden departure would
give gossip the proof it wanted. For gossip, as he caught its vague
whispers, said that John Barrett had kicked--actually and violently
kicked--the principal of the Stillwater high-school out of his mansion.
Wade did not like to think that Barrett, by himself or a servant,
started that story. Yet the thought made Wade suspect that the
bitterness of the night at "Oaklands" still rankled, and that he was
remaining in Stillwater for the sake of defying John Barrett, and was
not simply crucifying his spirit for the sake of the peace of John
Barrett's daughter.
For he confessed that his stay there would be martyrdom. He had resolved
that he would not try to see her; that would only mean grief for her and
humiliation for him. He was proud of his love for Elva Barrett, in spite
of her father's contempt and insults. He found no reproach for himself
because he had loved her and had told her so. But for the role of a
Lochinvar his New England nature had no taste. He realized, without
arguing the question with himself, that Elva Barrett was not to be won
by the impetuous folly that demanded blind sacrifice of name and
position and father and friends.
There was no cowardice in this realization. It was rather a pathetic
sacrifice on the part of simple loyalty and a love that was absolute
devotion. In deciding to remain in Stillwater he kept his love alight
like a flame before a shrine. But beyond his daily work and the
unflinching purpose of his great love he could not see his way.
It was because his way was so obscure that the wasps found him an easier
victim.
He heard the buzzings at street corners as he passed. There were stings
of glances and of half-heard words.
Like the pastor of a church in a small place, the principal of
a high-school is one in whom the community feels a sense of
proprietorship, with full right to canvass his goings and comings
and liberty to circumscribe and control. For is he not the one that
should "set example"?
The wasps would not accept his silent surrender. They suspected
something hidden, and their imaginings saw the worst. They buzzed more
busily every day. That they would not allow him the peace and the
pathetic liberty of renunciation drove Wade frantic. With all the
courage of his conscience, he still faced John Barrett's battery. But
the wasps he could not face.
And he fled. In the end it was nothing but that--he was put to flight!
The people of Stillwater accepted it as flight, for he placed his
resignation in the hands of the school board barely a week before the
date for the opening of the autumn term. And on the train on which he
fled was the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt, still unconscious that the word
of gossip he had dropped was the match that lighted a fuse, and that the
fuse was briskly burning.
Above the rumble of the starting car-wheels Wade heard the mills of
Stillwater screaming their farewell taunt at him.
Then the Honorable Pulaski Britt came and sat down in his seat, penning
him next to the window.
"Yes, sir," said Britt, with keen memory as to where he had left off in
his previous conversation and with dogged determination to have his say
out, "a man that reads a book written by a perfesser that don't know the
difference between a ramdown and a dose of catnip tea, and then thinks
he understands forestry of the kind that there's a dollar in, needs to
have his head examined for hollows. Do you find anything in them books
about how to get the best figgers on dressed beef?--and when you are
buyin' it in fifty-ton lots for a dozen camps a half a cent on a pound
means something! Is there anything about hirin' men and makin' 'em stay
and work, gettin' cooks and saw-filers that know their business, chasin'
thieves away from depot-camps, keepin' crews from losin' half the
tools? Forestry! Making trees grow! Gawd-amighty, young man, Nature will
attend to the tree-growin'. That's all Nature has got to do. She was
doin' it before we got here, and doin' it well, and do you reckon we
have any right to set up and tell Nature her business? I've got
something else to think of besides tellin' Nature how to run her end.
I'd like to know how to grow men instead of trees. My Jerusalem boss,
MacLeod, writes me he has been two weeks getting together his hundred
men for that operation. He'll meet me at the Umcolcus junction, up the
line here a hundred miles. And I've been tryin' most of that time to get
hold of the right sort of a 'chaney man.'"
Wade, in his resentment at Britt's intrusion on his thoughts, was in no
mood for philological research, but sudden and rather idle curiosity
impelled him to ask what a "chaney man" was.
"Why, a clerk--a camp clerk, time-keeper, wangan store overseer, supply
accountant, and all that," snapped Britt, with small patience for the
young man's ignorance.
At that instant it came more plainly to Wade that he was a fugitive.
When he had left Elva Barrett behind he had let go the strongest cable
of hope. A day before--the day after--his manly spirit probably would
not have allowed him to become a clerk for Pulaski Britt. This day the
impetuous desire to hide in the woods, to escape the wasps of humanity,
to be in some place where sneers and false pity and taunt could not
reach him--that desire was coined into performance.
"Wouldn't I fit into a job of that sort, Mr. Britt?" he asked, blurting
the question. And when the lumberman stared at him with as much
astonishment as Pulaski Britt ever allowed himself to display, Wade
added, "I have given up school-teaching because--well, I want to get
into the woods for my health!"
"It will be healthy, all right, but it won't be dude work," said Britt.
"You'll have to hump 'round on snow-shoes or a jumper to five camps.
Board and thirty-five a month! What's the particular ailment with you?"
he demanded, rather suspiciously. "You look rugged enough."
The young man did not reply, and the Honorable Pulaski stared at him,
his eyes narrowing shrewdly. Mr. Britt had no very delicate notions of
repressing an idea when it occurred to him "Say, look here, young man,"
he cried, "I reckon I understand! The Barrett girl, hey? And John got
after you! Well, he can make it hot for any one he takes a niff at."
"Can't I have that job, Mr. Britt, without a general discussion of my
affairs?" asked Wade, with temper.
"You're hired!" There was the click of business in Britt's tone, but his
gossip's nature showed itself in the somewhat humorous drawl in which he
added: "I'm glad to know that it's only love that ails you. Outside of
that, you strike me as bein' a pretty rugged chap, and it's rugged chaps
we're lookin' for in 'Britt's Busters.' If it's only love that ails you,
I reckon we won't have any trouble about sendin' you out cured in the
spring."
But noting the glitter in Wade's eyes, Mr. Britt chuckled amiably and
took himself off down the car to talk business with a man.
During the long ride to Umcolcus Junction, Wade sat revelling in the
bitterness of his thoughts. He was not disturbed because he had given up
his school. There was a relief in escaping from meddlesome backbiters.
The school had been only a means to an end: it afforded revenue to
attain certain cherished professional plans that loomed large in Wade's
prospects. Money earned honorably in any other fashion would count for
as much. But the fact remained that he was fleeing, was hiding. Britt's
rough and somewhat contemptuous proprietorship, so instantly displayed,
wounded his pride. When he had passed the station to which he had
purchased his ticket before he met Britt, he offered more pay to the
conductor. He had seen Britt talking with the conductor a moment before,
brandishing a hairy hand in his direction.
"It's all settled by Mr. Britt," the train officer stated, passing on.
"You're one of his men, he says."
He growled under his breath as he accepted that label--"One of Britt's
men."
There were one hundred more waiting for them at Umcolcus Junction, where
they changed to the spur line that ran north.
Most of the men were in a state of social inebriety. A few fighters
were sitting apart on their dunnage-bags, nursing bruises and grudges.
Mindful of the State law that forbade the wearing of calked boots on
board a railroad train, the men who owned only that sort of footgear
were in their stocking feet. They carried their boots strung about
their necks by lacings. Many were bareheaded, having thrown away their
hats in their enthusiasm. Wade was not in a frame of mind to see any
picturesqueness in that frowsy crowd. He was one of them; he walked
dutifully behind his master, the Honorable Pulaski Britt.
A little man, with neck wattled blue and red with queer suggestion of
a turkey's characteristics, lurched out of a group and came at Pulaski
Britt with a meek and watery smile of welcome. His knees doubled with
a drunkard's limpness, and he had to run to keep from falling. Britt
evidently did not propose to serve as dock for this human derelict. He
stepped to one side with an oath, and the man made a dizzy whirl and
dove headforemost under the train on the main track, and at that moment
the train started. The man rolled over twice, and lay, serenely
indifferent to death, on the outer rail.
* * * * *
After it was all over Wade sourly told himself that he acted as he did
simply to avoid witnessing a hideous spectacle.
For, in spite of Britt's yells of protest, he went under the car, missed
the grinding wheels by an inch, and rolled out on the other side with
the drunken man in his arms.
And when the train had drawn out of the station he came back across the
track, lugging the little man as he would carry a gripsack, tossed him
into the open door of the baggage-car of the waiting train, spatted the
dust off his own clothes, and went into the coach, casting surly looks
at the sputtering inebriates who attempted to shake hands with him.
When the train started Britt came again and penned the young man in his
seat against the window-casing.
"You've started in makin' yourself worth while, even if you are only the
chaney man," vouchsafed his employer. "You did an infernal fool trick,
but you've saved me Tommy Eye, the best teamster on the Umcolcus waters.
As he lies there now he ain't worth half a cent a pound to feed to cats;
when he's on a load with the webbin's in his hands I wouldn't take ten
thousand dollars for him."
"Is he a sort of personal property of yours?" asked Wade, sullenly. He
was venting his own resentment at Pulaski Britt's airs of general
proprietorship over men.
"Just the same as that," replied Britt, complacently. "I've had him more
than twenty years, and I'd like to see him try to go to work for any one
else, or any one else try to hire him away." He struck his hand on the
young man's knee. "Up this way, if you don't make men know you own 'em,
you're missin' one of the main points of forestry!" He sneered this
word every time he used it in his talk with Wade. The new chaney man
began to wonder how much longer he could endure the Honorable Pulaski D.
Britt without rising and cuffing those puffy cheeks.
CHAPTER IV
THE BOSS OF THE "BUSTERS"
"If you don't like our looks nor ain't stuck on our kind,
Git back with the dames in the next car behind."
On and on went the yelping staccato of the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt.
The Honorable Pulaski D. was discoursing on his favorite topic, and his
voice was heard above the rattle and jangle of the shaky old
passenger-coach that jolted behind some freight-cars.
"Forty years ago I rolled nigh onto a million feet into that brook
there!" shouted the lumber baron of the Umcolcus. His knotted, hairy
fist wagged under the young man's nose as he pointed at the car
window, his unwholesome breath fanned warmly on Wade's cheek, and
when he crowded over to look into the summer-dried stream his bristly
chin-whiskers tickled his seat-mate's ear. The September day was muggy
and human contact disquieting. Wade shrank nearer the open window. The
Honorable Pulaski did not notice the shrinking. He was accustomed to
crowd folks. His self-assertiveness expected them to get out of the way.
"Yes, sir, nigh onto a million in one spring, and half of it 'down pine'
and sounder'n a hound's tooth. Nothing here now but sleeper stuff. It's
a good many miles to the nearest saw-log, and that's where I'm cutting
on Jerusalem. I tell you, I've peeled some territory in forty years,
young man."
Wade looked at the red tongue licking lustfully between blue lips, and
then gazed on the ragged, bush-grown wastes on either side. While he had
been crowding men the Honorable Pulaski had been just as industriously
crowding the forest off God's acres. The "chock" of the axe sounded in
his abrupt sentences, the rasp of saws in his voice.
"We left big stumps those days." The hairy fist indicated the rotten
monuments of moss-covered punk shouldering over the dwarfed bushes.
"There was a lot of it ahead of us. Didn't have to be economical. Get
it down and yanked to the landings--that was the game! We're cutting
as small as eight-inch spruce at Jerusalem. Ain't a mouthful for a
gang-saw, but they taste good to pulp-grinders."
The train began to groan and jerk to a stand-still, and the old man
dove out of his seat and staggered down the aisle, holding to the
backs of the seats. At the last station he had spent ten minutes of
hand-brandishing colloquy on the platform with a shingle-mill boss
whom he had summoned to the train by wire. He was to meet a birch-mill
foreman here. Wade looked out at the struggling cedars and the white
birches, "the ladies of the forest," pathetic aftermath which was now
falling victim to axe and saw, and wondered with a flicker of grim humor
in his thoughts why the Honorable Pulaski did not set crews at work
cutting the bushes for hoop-poles and then clean up the last remnant
into toothpicks.
"He's a driver, ain't he?" sounded a voice in his ear. An old man
behind him hung his grizzled whiskers over the seat-back and pointed
an admiring finger at the retreating back of the lumber baron.
Wade wished that people would let him alone. He had some thoughts--some
very bitter thoughts--to think alone, and the world jarred on him. The
yelp of the Honorable Pulaski's monologue, that everlasting, insistent
bellow of voices in the smoking-car ahead, where the ingoing crew of
Britt's hundred men were trying to sing with drunken lustiness, and now
this amiable old fool of the grizzled whiskers, stung the dull pain of
his resentment at deeper troubles into sudden and almost childish anger.
"Once when I was swamping for him on Telos stream, he says to me, 'Man,'
he says, 'remember that the time that's lost when an axe is slicin' air
ain't helping me to pay you day's wages!' And I says to him, 'Mister
Britt,' says I--"
Dwight Wade, college graduate, former high-school principal, and at all
times in the past a cultured and courteous young gentleman, did the
first really rude and unpardonable act of his life. He twisted his chin
over his shoulder, scowled into the mild, dim, and watery eyes of his
interlocutor, and growled:
"Oh, cut it short! What in--" He checked the expletive, and snapped
himself up and across the aisle, and slammed down into another seat. The
red came over his face. He did not dare to look back at the old man. He
hearkened to the rip-roaring chorus in the smoking-car, and reflected
that as the new time-keeper he was now one of "Britt's Busters," and
that the demoralizing license of the great north woods must have entered
into his nature thus early. He grunted his disgust at himself under his
breath, and hunched his head down between his shoulders.
In his nasty state of mind he glowered at a passenger who came into the
car at the front. It was a girl, and a pretty girl at that. She nodded a
cheery greeting to the old man of the grizzled whiskers, and with a
smile still dimpling her cheeks flashed one glance at Wade. It was not
a bold look, and yet there was the least bit of challenge in it. The
sudden pout on her lips might have been at thought of confiding her
fresh, crisp skirts to the dusty seat; and yet, when she turned and shot
one more quick glance at the young man's sour countenance, the pout
curled into something like disdain, and a little shrug of her shoulders
hinted that she had not met the response that she was accustomed to find
on the faces of young men who saw her for the first time.
While Wade was gazing gloomily and abstractedly at the fair profile
and the nose, tip-tilted a wee bit above the big white bow of her veil
tied under her chin, one of the crew lurched from the door of the
smoking-car, caught off his hat, and bowed extravagantly. It was Tommy
Eye. He had to clutch the brake-wheel to keep himself from falling. But
his voice was still his own. He broke out lustily:
"Oh, there ain't no girl, no pretty little girl,
That I have left behind me.
I'm all cut loose for to wrassle with the spruce,
Way up where she can't find me.
Oh, there ain't no--"
An angry face appeared over his shoulder in the door of the smoker, two
big hands clutched his throat, jammed the melody into a hoarse squawk,
and then the songster went tumbling backward into the car and out of
sight.
Almost immediately his muscular suppressor crossed the platform and came
into the coach, snatching the little round hat off the back of his head
as he entered. Wade knew him. His employer had introduced them at the
junction as two who should know each other. It was Colin MacLeod, the
"boss."
"And Prince Edward's Island never turned out a smarter," the Honorable
Pulaski had said, not deigning to make an aside of his remarks. "Landed
four million of the Umcolcus logs on the ice this spring, busted her
with dynamite, let hell and the drive loose, licked every pulp-wood boss
that got in his way with their kindlings, and was the first into Pea
Cove boom with every log on the scale-sheet. That's this boy!" And he
fondled the young giant's arm like a butcher appraising beef.
Wade paid little attention to him then. With his ridged jaw muscles, his
hard gray eyes, and the bullying cock of his head, he was only a part of
the ruthlessness of the woods.
But now, as he came up the car aisle, his face flushed, his eyes eager,
his embarrassment wrinkling on his forehead, Wade looked at him with the
sudden thought that the boss of the "Busters" was merely a boy, after
all.
"It was only Tommy Eye, Miss Nina," explained MacLeod, his voice
trembling, his abashed admiration shining in his face. "He's just
out of jail, you know." He looked at Wade and then at the old man
of the grizzled whiskers, and raised his voice as though to gain a
self-possession he did not feel. "Tommy always gets into jail after
the drive is down. He's spent seventeen summers in jail, and is
proud of it."
"But there ain't no better teamster ever pushed on the webbin's," said
the old man, admiration for all the folks of the woods still unflagging.
The girl did not display the same enthusiasm, either for Tommy Eye's
mishaps or for the bashful giant who stood shifting from foot to foot
beside her seat.
"Crews going into the woods ought to be nailed up in box-cars, that's
what father says. And when they go through Castonia settlement I wish
they were in crates, the same as they ship bears."
"How is your father since spring?" asked the young boss, stammeringly,
trying to appear unconscious of her scorn.
"Oh, he's all right," she returned, carelessly, patting her hand on her
lips to repress a yawn.
"And is every one in Castonia all right?"
"You can ask them when you get there," she replied, a bit ungraciously.
"I tell you, I was pretty surprised to see you get aboard the train down
here at Bomazeen. I--"
She canted her head suddenly, and looked sidewise at him with an
expression half satiric, half indignant.
"Do you think that all the folks who ever go anywhere in this world are
river drivers and"--she shot a quick and disparaging glance at the still
glowering Wade--"drummers?"
MacLeod noticed the look and its scorn with delight, and grasped at this
opportunity to get outside the platitudes of conversation. But in his
eagerness to be news-monger he did not soften his "out-door voice,"
deepened by many years of bellowing above the roar of white water.
"Oh, that ain't a drummer! That's Britt's new chaney man--the
time-keeper and the wangan store clerk." MacLeod knew that a girl born
and bred in Castonia settlement, on the edge of the great forest, needed
no explanation of "chaney man," the only man in a logging crew who could
sleep till daylight, and didn't come out in the spring with callous
marks on his hands as big as dimes. But he seemed to be hungry for an
excuse to stay beside her, where he could gaze down on the brown hair
looped over her forehead and her radiantly fair face, and could catch
a glimpse of the white teeth. "Britt was tellin' me on the side that
he's been teachin' school or something like that, and--say, you've
heard of old Barrett, who controls all the stumpage on the Chamberlain
waters--that rich old feller? Well, Britt, being hitched up with
Barrett more or less, and knowin' all about it--"
Wade was now upright in his seat, but the absorbed foreman, catching at
last a gleam of interest in the gray eyes upraised to his, did not
notice.
"--Britt says that Mister School-teacher there went to work and fell in
love with Barrett's girl, and now she's goin' to marry a rich feller in
the lumberin' line that her dad picked out for her, and instead of goin'
to war or to sea, like--"
Wade, maddened, sick at heart, furious at the old tattler who had thus
canvassed his poor secret with his boss, had tried twice to cry an
interruption. But his voice stuck in his throat.
Now he leaped up, leaned far over the seat-back in front of him, and
shouted, with face flushed and eyes like shining steel:
"That's enough of that, you pup!"
In the sudden, astonished silence the old man dragged his fingers
through his grizzled whiskers and whined plaintively:
"Ain't he peppery, though, about anybody talking? He shet me up, too!"
"It's my business you're talking!" shouted Wade, beating time with
clinched fist. "Drop it."
MacLeod, primordial in his instincts, lost sight of the provocation, and
felt only the rebuff in the presence of the girl he was seeking to
attract. He had no apology on his tongue or in his heart.
"It will take a better man than you to trig talk that I'm makin'," he
retorted. "This isn't a district school, where you are licked if you
whisper!" He sneered as he said it, and took one step up the aisle.
With the bitter anger that had been burning in him for many days now
fanned into the white-heat of Berserker rage, Wade leaped out of his
seat. Between them sat the girl, looking from one to the other, her
cheeks paling, her lips apart.
At the moment, with a drunken man's instinctive knowledge of ripe
occasions, Tommy Eye lurched out once more on the smoker platform and
began to carol the lay that had consoled him on so many trips from town:
"Oh, there ain't no girl, no pretty little girl,
That I have left behind me."
There sounded the clang of the engine bell far to the front. There was
the premonitory and approaching jangle of shacklings, as car after car
took up its slack.
"Look after your man there, MacLeod!" cried the girl. "The yank will
throw him off."
"Let him go, then!" gritted the foreman. The flame in Wade's eyes was
like the red torch of battle to him. Not for years had a man dared to
give him that look.
Suddenly the car sprang forward under their feet as the last shackle
snapped taut. The boss was driven towards Wade, and let himself be
driven. The other braced himself, blind in his fury, realizing at last
the nature of the blood lust.
A squall, fairly demoniac in intensity, stopped them. MacLeod recognized
the voice, and even his passion for battle yielded. When the Honorable
Pulaski D. Britt, baron of the Umcolcus, yelled in that fashion it meant
obedience, and on this occasion the squall was reinforced by a shriek
from the girl. And MacLeod whirled, dropping his fists.
There on the platform stood Britt, clutching the limp and soggy Tommy
Eye by the slack of his jacket. The Honorable Pulaski, jealous of every
second of time, had remained in conversation to the last with his birch
foreman. He stepped aboard just as Tommy, jarred from his feet, was
pitching off the other side of the platform. The Honorable Pulaski
snatched for him and held on, at the imminent risk of his own life.
Already both of them were leaning far out, for Tommy Eye, in the
blissful calm of his spirit, was making no effort to help himself.
In an instant MacLeod was down the car aisle and had pulled both back to
safety.
"Why in blastnation ain't you staying in this hog-car here, where you
belong, you long-legged P.I. steer?" roared the old man, his anger ready
the moment his fright subsided. "What do I hire you for? You came near
letting me lose the best teamster in my whole crew. Now get into that
car and stay in that car till we get to the end of this railroad."
He put his hands against MacLeod's breast and shoved him backward into
the door, where Tommy Eye, grinning in fatuous ignorance of the danger
he had passed through, had just disappeared ahead of him. The angry
shame of a man cruelly humiliated twisted MacLeod's features, but he
allowed his imperious despot to push him into the car, casting a last
appealing look at the girl. Britt slammed the door and stood on the
platform, bracing himself by a hand on either side the casing, and
peered through the dingy glass to make sure that his crew was now under
proper discipline.
"He's a driver and a master," piped up Grizzly Whiskers, with the
appositeness of a Greek chorus.
"There's the song about him, ye know:
"Oh, the night that I was married,
The night that I was wed,
Up there come Pulaski Britt
And stood at my bed-head.
Said he, 'Arise, young married man,
And come along with me.
Where the waters of Umcolcus
They do roar along so free.'"
"I'll bet he went, at that," volunteered a man farther back in the car.
"When Britt is after men he gits' em, and when he gits 'em he uses 'em."
"Mr. Britt," he shouted down the car aisle as the old man entered, "that
was brave work you done in savin' Tommy's life!"
"Go to the devil with your compliments!" snapped Britt. "If it wasn't
that I was losing my best teamster I wouldn't have put out my little
finger to save him from mince-meat."
He saw the girl, turned over a seat to face her, and began to fire rapid
questions at her regarding her father and mother and the latest news of
Castonia settlement. When the conversation languished, as it did soon on
account of the inattention of the young woman, the Honorable Pulaski
caught the still flaming eye of Dwight Wade, and crooked his finger to
summon him. Wade merely scowled the deeper. The Honorable Pulaski
serenely disregarded this malevolence as a probable optical illusion,
and when Wade did not start beckoned again.
"Come here, you!" he bellowed. "Can't you see that I want you?"
With new accession of fury at being thus baited, the young man started
up, resolved to take his employer aside and free his mind on that matter
of news-mongering. But the bluff and busy tyrant was first, as he always
was in his dealings with men.
"Here, Wade," he shouted, "you shake hands with the prettiest girl
in the north country! This is Miss Nina Ide, and this is my new
time-keeper, Dwight Wade. He's going to find that there's more in
lumbering than there is in being a college dude or teaching a school.
Sit down, Wade."
He pulled the young man into the seat.
"Entertain this young lady," he commanded. "She don't want to talk with
old chaps like me. Her father--well, I reckon you know her father! Oh,
you don't? Well, he's first assessor of Castonia settlement, runs the
roads, the schools, and the town, has the general store and post-office,
and this pretty daughter that all the boys are in love with."
And at the end of this delicate introduction he pushed brusquely between
them, and went back to talk with his elderly admirer in the rear of the
car.
Wade looked into the gray eyes of the girl sullenly. There was an angry
sparkle in her gaze.
"Well, Mr. Wade, you may think from what that old fool said that I'm
suffering to be entertained. If you think any such thing you can change
your mind and go back."
She had not a city-bred woman's self-poise, he thought. Her manner was
that of the country belle, spoiled the least bit by flattery and
attention. And yet, as he looked at her, he thought that he had never
seen fairer skin to set off the flush of angry beauty. For others there
was something alluring in the absolute whiteness of her teeth, peeping
under the curve of her lip, in the nose (the least bit _retrousse_), in
the looped locks of brown hair crossing her temples. Yet there was no
admiration in his eyes.
"I hope you won't hold me guilty of being the intruder," he said,
coldly.
"Not if you move your brogans over to some seat where there is more room
for them," she returned, with a click of her white teeth that showed
mild savagery. This young man who was in love with some one else, and
who had scowled at her, was decidedly not to her liking, she thought, in
spite of his regular features, his firm chin, his clean-cut mouth
unhidden by beard, and his brown eyes.
Wade flushed, rose, bowed with hat lifted to a rather ironical height,
and took his seat alone, well to the front of the car. He saw MacLeod's
baleful face framed in the little window of the smoking-car's door. For
mile after mile, as the train jangled on, it remained there.
The menace of the expression, the challenge in the attitude, and this
insolent espionage, all following the insults of his gossiping tongue,
wrought upon the young man's feelings like a file on metal. As his
resentment gnawed, it was in his mind to go and smash his fist through
the little window into the middle of that lowering countenance.
To him came the Honorable Pulaski, bristling and bustling.
"They're telling me back there, young man, that you and Colin came near
to having some sort of rumpus a little while ago. Now, I can't have
anything of that sort going on among my men. You mind _your_ business.
I'll make _him_ mind _his_. But what's it all about, anyway? Why were
you going to fight like roosters at sight?"
Wade looked at his pompous red face and into his eyes with their
yellowish sclerotic, and choked back the recrimination he had intended.
The thought of opening his heart's poor secret by bandying words with
this man made him quiver.
"As well to talk to a Durham bull," he reflected.
"Why, you poor college dude," went on his employer, scornfully, "Colin
MacLeod would break you in two and use you to taller his boots, a piece
in each hand. You're hired to keep books and peddle wangan stuff
according to the prices marked! Keep your place, where you belong. Don't
go to stacking muscle against the boss of the Busters."
The former centre of Burton College's football eleven stiffened his
muscles and set his nails into his palms to keep from hot retort. What
was the use? What did college training avail if it didn't help a
gentleman to hold his tongue at the right time?
"Now, remember what I've told you," ordered Britt, "and I'll go and set
MacLeod to the right-about, so that you won't have to be afraid of him
if you mind your own business."
He went away into the smoking-car. Between the opening and the closing
of the door there puffed out a louder jargon from the orgy. It then
settled into its dull diapason of maudlin voices.
For the rest of the journey, to the end of the forest railroad spur,
Wade sat and looked out into the hopeless and ragged ruin left by the
axes. The sight fitted with his mood. Britt, back from his interview
with MacLeod, and serene in the power of the conscious autocrat, sat by
himself and figured endlessly with a stubby lead-pencil. Wade looked
around only once at the girl. When he did he caught her looking at him,
and she immediately snapped her eyes away indignantly.
At last the engine gave a long shriek that wailed away in echoes among
the stumps. It was a different note from its careless yelps at the
infrequent crossings.
"Here we are!" bellowed Britt, cheerfully, stuffing away his papers and
coming up the car for his little bag. He stopped opposite Wade.
"Remember what I told you about minding your business," he commanded,
brusquely. "You may be a college graduate, but MacLeod is your boss. He
won't hurt you if you keep your place!"
In medicine there are cumulative poisons--the effect of small doses at
intervals amounting in the end to a single large dose.
In matters of heart, temper, and moral restraint there are cumulative
poisons, too. Dwight Wade, struggling up as the train jolted to a halt,
felt that this last insult, coming as it did out of that brusque,
rough-sneering, culture-despising spirit of the woods, exemplified in
Pulaski D. Britt, had put an end to self-restraint.
It was the same brusque, money-worshipping, intolerant spirit of the
woods that sounded in John Barrett's voice when he had sneered at Wade's
pretensions to his daughter's hand. There it was now in those roaring
voices in the smoking-car. And yet he had come to it--hating it--fleeing
from the sight of men of his kind when his little temple of love seemed
closed to him, and the world had jeered at him behind his back! He
looked through the dirty car windows at the little shacks of the
railroad terminus, heard the bellow of voices, gritted his teeth in
ungovernable rage at Britt's last words, and determined to--well, he
hardly knew what he did propose to do.
But it should be something to show them all that he could no longer be
bossed and insulted and jeered at--all in that bumptious, braggadocio,
bucko spirit of the woods!
Both platforms of the cars were swarming with men--men rigged in queer
garb: wool leggings, wool jackets striped off in bizarre colors or
checked like crazy horse-blankets. Each man in sight carried his heavy
brogan shoes hung about his neck.
They were singing in fairly good time, and Wade listened to the words
despite himself:
"Oh, here I come from the Kay-ni-beck,
With my old calk boots slung round my neck
Here we come--yas, a-here we come--
A hundred men and a jug of rum.
WHOOP-fa-dingo!
Old Prong Jones!"
The girl passed Wade, going down the aisle before he left his seat. He
came behind her. But they were obliged to wait at the door. The men
crowded close upon both platforms. Each man had a meal-sack stuffed with
his possessions. They were all elbowing each other, and the result was a
congestion that the kicks of the Honorable Pulaski and the cuffings of
Colin MacLeod did little to break.
The boss of the Busters kept stealing glances at the girl, as though to
challenge her notice, and perhaps her admiration, as she saw him thus a
master of men.
It was then that the spirit of anger and rebellion seething in Dwight
Wade--the cumulative poison of his many insults--stirred him to bitter
provocation in his own turn.
The girl carried a heavy leather suit-case, and now, waiting for the
press of men to escape from the car, she rested it against a seat, and
sighed in weariness and vexation.
With quiet masterfulness Wade took it from her hand and smiled into the
astonished gray eyes that flashed back over her shoulder at him. It was
a smile that not even a maiden, offended as she had been, could resist.
"I will assist you to--to--I believe it is a stage-coach that takes us
on," he said. "Let me do this, so that you won't remember me simply as a
man whose own troubles made him a boor."
MacLeod's look of fury as he saw the act fell full upon them both, and
the girl resented it.
"I thank you," she returned, smiling at her squire with a little
exaggeration of cordiality. And when at last the platforms were cleared
they stepped out, still talking.
All about them men were kneeling, fastening the latchets of their
spike-sole shoes.
"Rod Ide's gal has got a new mash!" hiccoughed one burly chap, leering
at them as they passed. At the instant MacLeod, at their heels, struck
the man brutally across the mouth, shouldered Wade roughly, and spoke
to the girl, his round hat crumpled in his big fist.
"Miss Nina," he stammered, "I'm--I'm sorry for forgetting that you were
in that car awhile back. But you know I ain't used to takin' talk of
that sort. So, let me see you safe aboard the stage, like an old friend
should."
"This gentleman will look after me," said the girl. She tried to be
calm, but her voice trembled. A city woman, confident of the regard due
to woman, would not have feared so acutely. But Nina Ide, bred on the
edge of the forest, was accustomed to see the brute in man spurn
restraint. The passions flaming in the eyes of these two were familiar
to her. She expected little more from the gentleman in the way of
consideration for her feelings than she did from the lumber-jack. "You
go along about your business, Colin," she said, hastily. "I can attend
to mine."
"Give me that!" snarled the boss, his eyes red under their meeting
brows. In his rage he forgot the deference due the woman.
"See if you can take it!" growled back the other. With him the girl was
only the means to the end that his whole nature now lusted for. He
forgot her.
Wade looked for the young giant to strike. But the woods duello has its
vagaries.
MacLeod lifted one heavy shoe and drove its spiked sole down upon Wade's
foot, the brads puncturing the thin leather. With his foe thus anchored,
he clutched for the valise. But ere his victim had time to strike, the
furious, flaming, bristling face of the Honorable Pulaski was between
them, and his elbows, hard as pine knots, drove them apart with wicked
thrustings. As they staggered back the old lumber baron, used to playing
the tyrant mediator, grabbed an axe from the nearest man of the crew.
"I'll brain the one that lifts a finger!" he howled. "What did I tell
you about this? Who is running this crew? Whose money is paying you? Get
back, you hounds!"
Once more, though he gasped in the pure madness of his rage, MacLeod was
cowed by his despot. He turned and began marshalling the crew aboard
great wagons that were waiting at the station.
"You take your seat in that wagon, young man!" roared Britt, shaking
that hateful, hairy fist under Wade's nose. "We'll see about all this
later! Get onto that wagon!"
At the opposite side of the station was the mail-stage, a dusty, rusty
conveyance with a lurching canopy of cracked leather above its four
seats, and four doleful horses waiting the snap of the driver's whip.
Without a word to Britt, Wade led the way to the coach, and set the
suit-case between the seats. He limped as he walked, and his teeth were
set in pain.
He gave his hand to the girl, and she silently accepted the assistance
and took her place in the coach.
Then he turned to meet the fiery gaze of the Honorable Pulaski, who had
followed close on their heels, choking with expletives.
"I reckon I see through this now," he growled. "Tryin' to cut out the
cleanest feller in the Umcolcus with your dude airs! But Rod Ide's girl
ain't to be fooled by city notions. She knows a man when she sees him."
He chucked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of MacLeod, busy
with the laggard men. "Go aboard, and let this be an end of your
meddling, young man."
"You just speak for yourself and attend to your business, Mr. Britt!"
cried the girl, with a spirit that cowed even the tyrant's bluster.
"'Rod Ide's girl,' as you call her, can choose all her own affairs, and
you needn't scowl at me, for I'm not on your pay-roll and I'm not
afraid of you!"
She turned to Wade with real gentleness in her tones.
"I'm afraid he hurt you. It's a rough country up here. If you hadn't
been trying to help me it wouldn't have happened. He had no right to--"
She checked herself suddenly, and her cheeks flamed.
"That wasn't a fair twit about my sticking my nose into your affairs,
Miss Nina," protested Britt, and turning from her he visited his rage
vicariously on his time-keeper, taking him by the arm and starting to
drag him. "I told you to get aboard!" he rasped. "And when my men that I
hire don't do as I tell 'em to do, I kick 'em aboard--and a time-keeper
is no better than a swamper with me when he leaves this railroad. You
want to understand those things and save lots of trouble."
"You take your hand off my arm, Mr. Britt," said the young man. He did
not speak loudly, but there was something in his voice that impressed
the Honorable Pulaski, who knew men.
"Now," resumed Wade, "for reasons of my own and that I don't propose to
explain, I am going to ride to Castonia settlement on this mail-stage."
"It's safe to go on the wagon," persisted Britt, more mildly. "I tell
you, if you mind your own business, I won't let him lick you."
With face gray and rigid at an insult that the old man couldn't
understand, Wade opened his mouth, then shut it, turned his back, and
climbed aboard the coach. The girl moved along to the farther end, and
gropingly and blindly, without thought as to where he was sitting, he
took the place beside her.
He remembered that as they drove away Britt shook that hairy fist at
him, and that some rude roisterer on the wagons lilted some doggerel
about "the chaney man." And through a sort of red mist he saw the face
of Colin MacLeod.
They were miles along the rough road before he looked at the girl. At
the movement of his head she turned her own, and in the piquant face
above the big white bow of the veil he saw real sympathy.
He did not speak, but he looked into her clear eyes--eyes that had the
country girl's spirit and a resourcefulness beyond her years--and from
them he drew a certain comfort.
"Mr. Wade," she said, at last, "I'm only nineteen years old, but up in
Castonia settlement we see what men are without the wrappings on them. I
don't know much about real society, but I've read about it, and I guess
society women get sort of dazzled by the outside polish and don't see
things very clear. But up our way, with what they see of men, girls get
to be women young. You are a college graduate and a school-teacher and
all that, and I'm only nineteen, but--well, it just seems to me I can't
help reaching over like this--"
She patted his arm.
"--And what I feel like saying is, 'Poor boy!'"
There was such vibrant sympathy in her voice that though he set his
teeth, clinched his hands, and summoned all his resolution, his nervous
strain slackened and the tears came into his eyes--tears that had been
slowly welling ever since he had turned from John Barrett's door.
It was woman's attempt at consolation that broke through his restraint.
"I don't blame you much for squizzlin' a little," broke in the
stage-driver, who saw this emotion without catching the conversation.
"He did bring his huck down solid when he stamped. But I've been calked
myself, and a tobacker poultice allus does the business for me--northin'
better for p'isen in a wound."
The chaney man reached his hand to the girl under the shelter of the
seat-back.
"Shake!" he said, simply. "I've come up here to stay awhile, and it's
good to feel that I've got one friend that's--that's a woman."
"And you--" She faltered and paused to listen, lips apart.
"I've come to stay," he repeated, grimly.
He listened too.
Far behind them they heard the dull rumble of the heavy wagons over the
ledges. The raucous howling of the revellers had something wolf-like
about it. It seemed to close the line of retreat. Ahead were the big
woods, looming darkly on the mountain ridges--that vast region of man to
man, and the devil take the weak.
And again he said, not boastingly, but with a quiet setting of his tense
jaw muscles:
"I've come to stay."
CHAPTER V
DURING THE PUGWASH HANG-UP
"With eddies and rapids it's middlin' tough,
To worry a log-drive through.
But to manage a woman is more than enough
For a West Branch driving crew."
--Leeboomook Song.
Just how Tommy Eye escaped so nimbly from the ruck of the fight at the
foot of Pugwash Hill he never knew nor understood, his wits not being of
the clearest that day--and the others being too busy to notice.
But he did escape. One open-handed buffet sent him reeling into and
through some wayside bushes. He sat on his haunches on the other side a
moment like a jack-rabbit and surveyed the stirring scene, and then made
for higher ground. At the end of an enervating sixty-days' sentence in
the county jail--his seventeenth summer "on the bricks" for the same old
bibulous cause; second offence, and no money left to pay the fine--Tommy
did not feel fit for the fray.
He sat on a bowlder at the top of the rise for a little while and gazed
down on them--the hundred men of "Britt's Busters," bound in for the
winter cutting on Umcolcus waters. They were fighting aimlessly, "mixing
it up" without any special vindictiveness, and Tommy, an expert in
inebriety, sagely concluded that they were too drunk to furnish
amusement. So he rolled over the bowlder and nestled down to ease his
headache, knowing, as a teamster should know, that Britt's tote wagons
were to hold up at the Pugwash for a half-hour's rest and bait.
For that matter, a fight at the Pugwash was no novel incident--not for
Tommy Eye, at least, veteran of many a woods campaign.
The hang-up at the hill is a teamster's rule as ancient as the tote
road.
And the fight of the ingoing crew is as regular as the halt. All the way
from the end of the railroad the men have been crowded on the wagons,
with nothing to do but express personal differences of opinion. Every
other man is a stranger to his neighbor, for employment offices do not
make a specialty of introductions. As the principal matter of argument
on the tote wagons is which is the best man, the Pugwash Hill wait,
where there is soft ground and elbow-room, makes a most inviting
opportunity to settle disputes and establish an _entente cordiale_ that
will last through all the winter.
Two other men--two men who had been on the outskirts of the fray from
its beginning--came leisurely up the hill, and sat down on the bowlder
behind which was couched Tommy Eye.
One was the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt; the other was Colin MacLeod.
The Honorable Pulaski tucked the end of a big cigar into the opening in
his bristly gray beard where his mouth was hidden, and lighted it. As an
after-thought he offered one to MacLeod. The young man, his elbows on
his knees, his flushed face turned aside, shook his head sullenly.
"Well, you're having a run of cuss-foolishness that even our champion
fool, Tommy Eye himself, couldn't match," snorted the old man, rolling
his tongue around his cigar.
Tommy, behind the rock, tipped one ear up out of the moss.
"Here you go pouncing into that car to-day, where my new time-keeper
was, and go to picking a fuss with him, and--"
"He was the one that started it, Mr. Britt," said the boss, in the dull
monotone of one who has said the same thing many times before.
"Don't bluff me!" snapped the Honorable Pulaski. "You were gossiping
over a lot of his private business with that Ide girl--and bringing me
into it, too. You can't fool me! Old Jeff back in the car heard it all.
The young feller had a right to put in an oar to stop you, and he did
it, and I'll back him in it."
"Yes, and you went and introduced him to Miss Ide--that's some more of
your backin'," said MacLeod, bitterly.
"Just common politeness--just common politeness!" cried Britt, waving
his cigar impatiently. "That girl hasn't said she'd marry you, has she?
No! I knew she hadn't. Well, she's got a right to talk with nice young
men that I introduce to her, and there's nothing to it to make a fuss
over, MacLeod--only common politeness. You're making a fool of yourself,
and setting the girl herself against you by acting jealous like that
before the face and eyes of every one. That's enough time and talk
wasted on girls. Now, quit it, and get your mind on your work. You
understand that I won't have any more of this scrapping in my crew."
With a blissful disregard of consistency, he gazed through smoke-clouds
down at the men below, who were listlessly exchanging blows or rolling
on the ground, locked in close embrace.
MacLeod stood up, and tugged the collar of his wool jacket away from his
throat.
"I ain't much of a man to talk my business over with any one, Mr.
Britt," he said. "But you are putting this thing on a business basis,
and you don't have the right to do it. I ain't engaged to Nina Ide, and
I 'ain't asked her to be engaged to me, for the time 'ain't come right
yet. But there ain't nobody else in God's world goin' to have her but
me. She ain't too good for me, even if her father is old Rod Ide. I'll
have money some day myself. I've got some now. I can buy the clothes
when I need 'em, if that's all that a girl likes. But it ain't all they
like--not the kind of a girl like Nina Ide is. She knows a man when she
sees him. She knows that I'm a man, square and straight, and one that
loves her well enough to let her walk on him, and that's the kind of a
man for a girl born and bred on the edge of the woods."
He drew up his lithe, tall body, and snapped his head to one side with
almost a click of the rigid neck.
"Along comes that college dude," he snarled, "just thrown over by a city
girl and lookin' for some one else to make love to, and he cuts in"--his
voice broke--"you see what he done, Mr. Britt! He helped her off the
train before I could get there. He put her on the stage, and rode away
with her while you were makin' me handle the men. And he's ridin' with
her now, damn him, and he's a-talkin' with her and laughin' at me behind
my back!" He shook both fists at the road to Castonia settlement,
winding over the hill, and there were tears on his cheeks.
"He probably isn't laughing very much," replied Britt, dryly. "Not since
you plugged that spike boot of yours down on his foot there on the depot
platform. A nasty trick, MacLeod, that was."
"I wish I'd 'a' ground it off," muttered the boss. He struck his spikes
against the bowlder with such force that a stream of fire followed the
kick.
"He can't do it--he can't do it, Mr. Britt! He can't steal her! I've
loved her too long, and I'll have her. You just gave off your orders to
me about fighting. You don't say anything to those cattle down there
fighting about nothin'. You let them settle their troubles. Here I am!"
He struck his breast. "For five years, first up in the dark of the
mornin', last to bed in the dark of the night. I've sweat and swore and
frozen in the slush and snow and sleet, driving your crew to make money
for you. And I've waded from April till September, I've broken jams and
taken the first chance in the white water, so that I could get your
drive down ahead of the rest. And now, when it comes to a matter of hell
and heaven for me, you tell me I can't stand like a man for my own. You
call it wastin' time!"
He bent over the Honorable Pulaski, his face purple, his eyes red. Britt
took out his cigar and held it aside to blink up at this disconcerting
young madman.
"I tell you, you are taking chances, Mr. Britt. You have bradded me on,
and told me that a man of the woods always gets what he wants if he goes
after it right. Twice to-day you have stood between me and what I want.
You've let a college dude take the sluice ahead of me. I know you pay me
my money, but don't you do that again. I'm going to have that girl, I
say! The man that steps in ahead of me, he's goin' to die, Mr. Britt,
and the man that steps between me and that man, when I'm after him, he
dies, too. And if that sounds like a bluff, then you haven't got Colin
MacLeod sized up right, that's all!"
The Honorable Pulaski winked rapidly under the other's savage regard. He
knew when to bluster and he knew when to palter.
"MacLeod," he said, at last, getting up off the rack with a grunt, "what
a man that works for me does in the girl line is none of my business.
But after that kind of brash talk I might suggest to you that a cell in
state-prison isn't going to be like God's out-doors that you're roaming
around in now."
The boss sneered contemptuously.
"Furthermore, this college dude, that you are talking about as though he
were a water-logged jill-poke, was something in the football line when
he was in college--I don't know what, for I don't know anything about
such foolishness--but, anyway, from what I hear, it was up to him to
break the most arms and legs, and he did it, I understand. This is only
in advice, MacLeod--only in advice," he cried, flapping a big hand to
check impatient interruption. "You saw when Tommy Eye, the drunken fool,
fell under the train at the junction to-day, as he is always doing, that
feller Wade picked him up with one hand and lugged him like a pound of
sausage-meat--saved the fool's life, and didn't turn a hair over it. So,
talk a little softer about killing, my boy, and, best of all, wait till
you find out that he wants the girl or the girl wants _you_!"
He walked down the hill.
"Go to blazes with your advice, you old fool!" growled MacLeod, under
his breath. "He's lookin' for it; he's achin' for it! He gave me a look
to-day that no man has given me in ten years and had eyes left open to
look a second time. He'll get it!"
As he turned to follow his employer he saw the recumbent Tommy, and went
out of his way far enough to give him a vicious kick.
"Get onto the wagons, you rum-keg, or you'll walk to Castonia!"
"Be jigged if I won't walk!" groaned Tommy, surveying the retreating
back of the boss with sudden weak hatred. "So there was a man who saved
my life to-day when I didn't know it! And there was another man who
kicked me when I did know it! It's the chaney man he's after, and the
chaney man was good to me! I'll make a fair fight of it if my legs hold
out, and that's all any man could do."
The horses were still munching fodder, and the gladiators, thankful for
an excuse to stop the fray, were stupidly listening to a harangue by the
Honorable Pulaski, who was explaining what would be allowed and what
would not be allowed in his camps.
Tommy Eye ducked around the bushes and took the road with a woodsman's
lope, his wobbly knees getting stronger as the exercise cleared his
brain.
A woodman's lope is not impressive, viewed with a sprinter's eye. Nor is
a camel's stride. But either is a great devourer of distance. So it
happened that Tommy Eye, sweat-streaked and breathing hard, caught up
with the sluggish Castonia stage while it was negotiating the last
rock-strewn hill a half-mile outside the settlement.
Dwight Wade, time-keeper of the Busters, heard the stertorous puffing,
and looked around to see Tommy Eye clinging to the muddy axle and towing
behind. Tommy divided an amiable and apologetic grin between Wade and
the girl beside him.
"I'm only--workin' out--the--the budge!" Tommy explained, between the
jerks of the wagon. "Don't mind me!"
Down the half-mile of dusty declivity into Castonia, the only smooth
road between the railroad and the settlement, the stage made its usual
gallant dash with chuckling axle-boxes and the spanking of splay hoofs.
And Tommy Eye came limply slamming on behind.
CHAPTER VI
AS FOUGHT BEFORE THE "IT-'LL-GIT-YE CLUB"
"We dug him out of his blankets, and hauled him out to the
light--
His eyes were red with the tears he had shed, but now he
wanted to fight.
And screaming a string of curses, he struck as he raved and
swore--
Floored Joe Lacrosse and the swamping boss and announced
he was ready for more."
--The Fight at Damphy's.
Civilization sets her last outpost at Castonia in the plate-glass
windows of Rodburd Ide's store. Civilization had some aggravating
experiences in doing this. Four times hairy iconoclasts from the deep
woods came down, gazed disdainfully at these windows as an effort to put
on airs, and smashed them with rocks dug out of the dusty road. Four
times Rodburd Ide collected damages and renewed the windows--and in the
end civilization won out.
Those experienced in such things can tell a Castonia man anywhere by the
pitch of his voice. Everlastingly, Umcolcus pours its window-jarring
white waters through the Hulling Machine's dripping ledges. Here enters
Ragmuff stream, bellowing down the side of Tumbledick, a mountain that
crowds Castonia close to the river. Most of the men of the settlement do
their talking on the platform of Ide's store, with the spray spitting
into their faces and the waters roaring at them. And go where he will, a
Castonia man carries that sound in his ears and talks like a fog-horn.
The satirists of the section call Ide's store platform "The Blowdown."
In the woods a blowdown is a wreck of trees. On Ide's platform the
loafers are the wrecks of men. Here at the edge of the woods, at the
jumping-off place, the forest sets out its grim exhibits and mutely
calls, "Beware!" There are men with one leg, men with one arm, men with
no arms at all; there are men with hands maimed by every vagary of
mischievous axe or saw. There are men with shanks like broomsticks--men
who survived the agonies of freezing. There is always a fresh
subscription-paper hung on the centre post in Ide's store, meekly
calling for "sums set against our names" to aid the latest victim.
Wade, looking at this pathetic array of cripples as he slowly swung
himself over the wheel of the stage, felt that he was in congenial
company; for the foot that MacLeod had so brutally jabbed with his
spikes had stiffened in its shoe. It ached with a dull, rancor-stirring
pain. When he limped across the platform into the store, carrying the
girl's valise, he hobbled ungracefully. The loungers looked after him
with fraternal sympathy.
"The boss spiked him down to the deepo," advised Tommy, slatting sweat
from his forehead with muddy forefinger. "He's the new time-keeper."
"Never heard of the boss calkin' the chaney man before," remarked Martin
McCrackin, rapping his pipe against his peg-leg to dislodge the dottle.
Tommy twisted his face into a prodigious wink, jabbed a thumb over his
shoulder towards the store door, and gazed archly around at the circle
of faces.
"He cut the boss out with the Ide girl!" He whispered this hoarsely.
The listeners looked at the door where Wade and the girl had
disappeared, and then stared at one another. They had viewed the arrival
of the stage with the dull lethargy of the hopelessly stranded. Now they
displayed a reviving interest in life.
"And that was all he done to him--step on his foot?" demanded a thin
man, impatiently twitching the stubs of two arms, off at the elbows.
"Old P'laski got in!" said Tommy, with meaning. "Used his old elbows for
pick-holes and fended Colin off."
"It will git him, though!" said another. He had shapeless stumps of legs
encased in boots like exaggerated whip-sockets.
"You bet it will git him!" agreed McCrackin.
Rodburd Ide, busy, chatty, accommodating little man, trotted out of the
store at this instant with a handful of mail to distribute among his
crippled patrons.
"That's what the river boys call this crowd here," he said, over his
shoulder, to Wade, who followed him. "The 'It-'ll-git-ye Club.' I guess
It _will_ get ye some time up in this section! Here's the last one, Mr.
Wade. Aholiah Belmore--that's the man with the hand done up. Shingle-saw
took half his fin. Well, 'Liah, don't mind! No one ever saw a whole
shingle-sawyer. It's lucky it wasn't a snub-line that got ye. There's
what a snub-line can do, Mr. Wade."
He pointed to the armless man and to the man with the shapeless legs.
"All done at the same time--bight took 'em and wound 'em round the
snub-post."
"And it's a pity it wa'n't our necks instead of our legs and arms,"
growled one of the men--"trimmed like a saw-log and no good to nobody!"
"Never say die--never say die!" chirruped the jovial "Mayor of
Castonia." He threw back his head in his favorite attitude, thrust out
his gray chin beard and tapped his pencil cheerily against the obtrusive
false teeth showing under his smoothly shaven upper lip. "Your
subscription-papers are growing right along, boys. The first thing you
know you'll have enough to buy artificial arms and legs, such as we were
looking at in the advertisements the other day. It beats all what they
can make nowadays--teeth, arms, legs, and everything."
"They can't make new heads, can they?" inquired Tommy Eye, whose mien
was that of a man who had something important to impart and was casting
about for a way to do it gracefully.
"Who needs a new head around here?" smilingly inquired the "mayor."
"Him," jerked out Tommy, pointing to Wade. "Leastwise, he will in about
ten minutes after the boss gits here." And having thus delicately opened
the subject, Tommy's tongue rushed on. "He was good to me when I didn't
know it!" His finger again indicated the time-keeper. "I ain't goin' to
see him done up any ways but in a fair fight. But _he's_ comin'. There's
blood in his eyes and hair on his teeth. I heard him a-talkin' it over
to himself--and he's goin' to kill the 'chaney man' for a-gittin' his
girl away from him. Now," concluded Tommy, with a hysterical catch in
his throat, "if it can be made a fair fight, knuckles up and man to man,
then, says I, here's your fair notice it's comin'. But there's a girl in
it, and girls don't belong in a fair fight--and I'm afeard--I'm afeard!
You'd better run, 'chaney man.'"
Nina Ide was in the door behind her father. Her face was crimson, and
she winked hard to keep the tears of vexed shame back--for the faces of
the loungers told her that Tommy had been imparting other confidences.
She did not dare to steal even a glance at Wade. She was suffering too
much herself from the brutal situation.
"'A girl!' 'His girl!'" repeated Ide, seeing there was something he did
not understand. "Whose--"
"Father!" cried his daughter. And when he would have continued to
question, snapping his sharp eyes from face to face, she stamped her
foot in passion and cried, "Father!" in a manner that checked him. He
stood surveying her with open mouth and staring eyes.
Dwight Wade had fully understood the quizzical glances that were
levelled at him. It was not a time--in this queer assemblage--for the
observance of the rigid social conventions. Taking the father aside
would be misconstrued--and slander would still pursue the girl.
"Mr. Ide," he cried, his eyes very bright and his cheeks flushing, "I
want you and the others to understand this thing. It's all a mistake.
Mr. Britt introduced me to your daughter, and I paid her a few
civilities, such as any young lady might expect to receive. But I seem
to have stirred up a pretty mess. It's a shameful insult to your
daughter--this--this--oh, that man MacLeod must be a fool!"
"He is!" said the girl, indignantly.
"And he's a fighter," muttered Tommy Eye.
Rodburd Ide clutched his beard and blinked his round eyes, much
perplexed.
"It isn't a very nice thing, any way you look at it--this having two
young men scrapping through this region about my girl. It isn't that I
don't expect her to get some attention, but this is carrying attention
too far." He took her by the arm and led her to one side. "Nina, there
is nothing between you and Colin MacLeod?"
"Nothing, father. We have danced together at the hall, and he has walked
home with me--and that's the only excuse he has for making a fool of
himself in this way."
"And--and this new man, here?"
"I never saw him till this very day! And he's in love with John
Barrett's daughter. Oh, what an idiot MacLeod is! This stranger will
think we're all fools up here!" Tears of rage and shame filled her eyes.
Ide's gaze, wandering from her face to Wade and then to the loafers, saw
one of Britt's great wagons topping the distant rise, and he heard a
wild chorus of hailing yells.
"You run up to the house, girl," he said.
"I'll not," she replied. And when he began to frown at her she clasped
his arm with both her hands and murmured: "He's a stranger and a
gentleman, father, and they're abusing him. He is nothing to me. He's in
love with another girl. It was through being obliging and kind to me
that this horrible mistake has been made. Now, I'll not run away and
leave him to suffer any more."
Rodburd Ide, an indulgent father, scratched his nose reflectively.
"It isn't the style of the Ide family to leave friends on the chips,
Nina," he said--"not even when they're brand new friends. We know what
an ingoing lumber crew is, and he probably doesn't, and it's the green
man that always gets the worst of it. So I'll tell you what to do:
Invite him up to the house, and you entertain him until P'laski and I
can get this thing smoothed over."
Tommy Eye, hovering near in piteous trepidation lest his kindly offices
should miscarry, overheard the invitation that father and daughter
extended to the young man, who was gloomily eying the approach of the
wagon.
"Yess'r, they've got the right of it," stammered Tommy, unluckily.
"You'll git it if ye don't--and the 'It-'ll-git-ye Club' will see ye git
it. Ye'd best run!"
Wade looked into the flushed face of the girl, at the officious father
of commiserating countenance, and at the loungers who had heard Tommy's
condescending counsel and were looking at him with a sort of scornful
pity.
Again that strange, sullen, gnawing rage at the general attitude of the
world seized upon him. He felt a bristling at the back of his neck and
in his hair--the primordial bristling of the beast's mane.
"It is kind of you to invite a stranger," he said, "but I fear that
among these peculiar people even that kindness would be misconstrued. I
belong with Britt's crew. I'll stay here."
There was that in his voice which checked further appeal. The girl stood
back against the wall of the store.
The Honorable Pulaski was the first off the wagon, and he greeted Ide
with rough cordiality. When the latter began to whisper rapidly in his
ear, he shook his head.
"I've wasted a good deal of valuable time and some temper holding those
two young fools apart to-day," he snapped. "The last thing MacLeod
wanted to do was to lick me. Now, I'm too old to be mixed up in love
scrapes. I'm going over to measure that spool stock, and the one that's
alive when I get back, I'll load him onto the wagon and we'll keep on up
the river." He strode away, leaving the "mayor" champing his false teeth
in resentful disappointment.
But the autocrat of Castonia had a courage of his own. He set back his
head and marched up to MacLeod, who was standing in the middle of the
road, his jacket thrown back, his thumbs in his belt.
"Colin," he demanded, indifferent as to listeners, "what's all this
about my girl? Can't she come along home, minding her own business like
the good girl that she is, without a fuss that has set all the section
wagging tongues? I thought you were a different chap from this!"
"He had his lie made up when he got here, did he?" growled MacLeod.
"I believe what my own girl says," the father retorted.
"So he's got as far as that, has he? I tell ye, Rod Ide, if you don't
know enough--don't care enough about your own daughter to keep her out
of the clutches of a cheap masher like that--the kind I've seen many a
time before--then--it's where I grab in. Ye'll live to thank me for it.
I say, ye will! You don't know what you're talking about now. But you'll
know your friends in the end."
He put up one arm, stiffened it against Ide's breast, and slowly but
relentlessly pushed him aside.
Viewed in the code of larrigan-land, the situation was one that didn't
admit of temporizing or mediation. The set faces of the men who looked
on showed that the trouble between these two, brooding through the hours
of that long day, was now to be settled. As for his men, Colin MacLeod
had his prestige to keep--and a man who had suffered a stranger to carry
off the girl he loved without fitting rebuke could have no prestige in a
lumber camp. And it was prestige that made him worth while, made him a
boss who could get work out of men.
The uncertain quantity in the situation was the stranger.
With one movement of heads, all eyes turned to him.
He was not a woodsman, and they expected from him something different
from the usual duello of the woods.
They got it!
For instead of waiting for the champion of the Umcolcus to take the
initiative, this city man calmly walked off the store platform at this
juncture and bearded the champion.
"And there ye have it--two bucks and one doe!" grunted old Martin. "The
same old woods wrassle."
The boss dropped his hands at his side as the time-keeper approached. He
grinned evilly when he noted the limp. Wade came close and spoke without
anger.
"I see you are still determined to be a fool, MacLeod. I want no trouble
with you. Aren't you willing to settle all this fuss like a man?"
"That's what I'm here for," replied the boss, with grim significance.
"Then go and offer an apology to that young lady. Do it, and I'll cancel
the one you owe to me."
If Wade had been seeking to provoke, he could have chosen no more
unfortunate words.
"Apology!" howled MacLeod. "Do ye hear it, boys? Talkin' to me like I
was a Micmac and didn't know manners! Here's an Umcolcus apology for ye,
ye putty-faced dude!"
His lunge was vicious, but in his contempt for his adversary it was
wholly unguarded. A woodsman's rules of battle are simple. They can be
reduced to the single precept: Do your man! Knuckles, butting head, a
kick like a game-cock with the spiked boots, grappling and choking--not
one is called unfair. MacLeod simply threw himself at his foe. It was
blood-lust panting for the clutch of him.
Those who told it afterwards always regretfully said it was not a
fight--not a fight as the woods looks at such diversions. No one who saw
it knew just how it happened. They simply saw that it had happened.
[Illustration: "WADE STOOD ABOVE THE FALLEN FOE"]
To the former football centre of Burton it was an opening simple as "the
fool's gambit" in chess. His tense arms shot forward, his hands clasped
the wrists of the flying giant with snaps like a steel trap's clutch,
his head hunched between his shoulders, he went down and forward,
tugging at the wrists, and by his own momentum MacLeod made his helpless
somersault over the college man's broad back.
And as he whirled, up lunged the shoulders in a mighty heave, and the
woodsman fell ten feet away--fell with the soggy, inert, bone-cracking
thud that brings a groan involuntarily from spectators. He lay where he
fell, quivered after a moment, rolled, and his right arm twisted under
his body in sickening fashion.
The girl gave a sharp cry, gathered her skirts about her, and ran away
up the street.
"He's got it!" said 'Liah Belmore, with the professional decisiveness of
the "It-'ll-git-ye Club."
"I've read about them things bein' done by the Dagoes in furrin' parts,"
remarked Martin McCrackin, gazing pensively on the prostrate boss, "but
I never expected to see it done in a woods fight."
There was silence then for a moment--a silence so profound that the
breathing of the spectators could be heard above the summer-quieted
murmur of the Hulling Machine. Wade walked over and stood above the
fallen foe. He was not gainsaid. Woods decorum forbids interference in a
fair fight.
As he stood there a rather tempestuous arrival broke the tenseness of
the situation. From the mouth of a woods road leading into the tangled
mat of forest at the foot of Tumbledick came a little white stallion
drawing a muddy gig.
Under the seat swung a battered tin pail in which smouldered dry fungi,
giving off a trail of smoke behind--the smudge pail designed to rout the
black-flies of summer and the "minges" of the later season.
An old man drove--an old man, whose long white hair fluttered from under
a tall, pointed, visorless wool cap with a knitted knob on its apex.
Whiskers, parted by his onrush, streamed past his ears.
He pulled up so suddenly in front of Ide's store that his little
stallion skated along in the dust.
"Hullo," he chirped, cocking his head to peer, "Cole MacLeod down!"
He whirled, leaped off the back of the seat, and ran nimbly to the
prostrate figure.
"Broken!" he jerked, fumbling the arm. "No--no! Out of joint!"
"Let the man alone," commanded Wade. "He'll need proper attendance."
"Proper attendance!" shrilled the little old man, with snapping eyes.
"Proper attendance! And I guess that you haven't travelled much that you
don't know me. Here, two of you, come and sit on this man! I'll have him
right in a jiffy. Don't know me, eh?" He again turned a scornful gaze on
the time-keeper. "Prophet Eli, the natural bone-setter, mediator between
the higher forces and man, disease eradicator, the 'charming man'--I
guess this is your first time out-doors! Here, two of you come and hold
Cole MacLeod!"
When Wade, knitting his brows, manifested further symptoms of
interference, Rodburd Ide took him by the arm and led him aside.
"Let the old man alone," he said. "He'll know what to do. A little
cracked, but he knows medicine better than half the doctors that ever
got up as far as this."
They heard behind them a dull snap and a howl of pain from MacLeod.
"There she goes back," said Ide. "He's lived alone on Tumbledick for
twenty years, and I suppose there's a story back of him, but we never
found it out this way. We just call him Prophet Eli and listen to his
predictions and drink his herb tea and let him set broken bones and
charm away disease--and there's no kick coming, for he will never take a
cent from any one."
Four men had carried MacLeod to the wagon. His forehead was bleeding but
he was conscious, for the sudden wrench and bitter pain of the
dislocated shoulder had stirred his faculties.
"Well, you've had it out, have you?" demanded the Honorable Pulaski,
coming around the corner of the store and taking in the scene. "What did
I tell you, MacLeod? Listen to me next time!"
"And you listen to me, too!" squalled MacLeod, his voice breaking like a
child's. "This thing ain't over! It's me or him, Mr. Britt. If he goes
in with your crew, I stay out. If you want him, you can have him, but
you can't have me. And you know what I've done with your crews!"
"You don't mean that, Colin," blustered Britt.
"God strike me dead for a liar if I don't."
"It's easier to get time-keepers than it is bosses," said the Honorable
Pulaski, with the brisk decision natural to him. He whirled on Wade.
"You'd better go home, young man. You're too much of a royal Bengal
tiger to fit a crew of mine." He turned his back and began to order his
men aboard the tote teams.
Wade stood looking after them as the wagons "rucked" away, his face
working with an emotion he could not suppress.
"Well, that's Pulaski all over!" remarked Ide at his elbow. "He'll fell
a saw-log across a brook any time so as to get across without wetting
his feet, and then go off and leave the log there."
He stood back and looked the young man over from head to feet, with the
shrewd eye of one appraising goods.
"Mr. Wade," he said, at last, "will you step into my back office with me
a moment?"
When they were there, the store-keeper perched himself on a high stool,
hooked his toes under a round, thrust his face forward, and said:
"Here's my business, straight and to the point. I'm a little something
in the lumbering line up this way, myself. What with land, stumpage
rights, and tax titles I've got two townships, but they're off the main
river, and I haven't done much with 'em. I'm going to be honest, and
admit I can't do much with 'em so long as Britt and his gang control
roll-dams, flowage, and the water for the driving-pitch the way they do.
They haven't got the law with 'em, but that makes no difference to that
crowd, the way they run things. Now, you don't know the logging
business, but a bright chap like you can learn it mighty quick. And
you've shown to-day that there are some things you don't have to learn,
and that's how to handle men--and that's the big thing in this country
as things are now. What I want to ask you, fair and plain, is, do you
want a job?"
"What, as a prize-fighter?" asked the young man, surlily.
"No, s'r, but as a boss that can boss, and has got the courage to hold
up his end on this river! I know this all sounds as though I were
temporarily out of my head in a business way, but you've made a
reputation in the last half hour here that's worth ten thousand to the
man that hires you. There's money in the lumbering business, Mr. Wade.
The men that are in it right are getting rich. But you've got to get
into it picked end to. Here's the way you and I are fixed: you might
wait for ten years and not find the opportunity I'm offering you. I
might wait ten years and not find just the man I could afford to take in
with me. I've sized you. I know what sort your references will be when I
ask for 'em. You seem right. Are you interested enough to listen to
figures?"
And then Ide, accepting amazed silence as assent, rattled off into his
details. At the end of half an hour Wade was listening with a new gleam
of resolution in his eyes. At the end of an hour he was blotting his
signature at the bottom of a preliminary article of agreement that was
to serve until a lawyer could draw one more ample.
"And now," said Ide, slamming his safe door and whirling the knob,
"it's past supper-time and my folks are waitin'. And it's settled
that you stay. I say, it's settled! Where else would you stop in this
God-forsaken bunch of shacks? I've got a big house and something to eat.
Come along, Mr. Wade! I'm hungry, and we'll do the rest of our talkin'
on the road."
The young man followed him without a word. And thus entered Dwight Wade
into the life of Castonia, and into the battle of strong men in the
north woods.
In front of the store, as they issued, the "It-'ll-git-ye Club" was
still in session, as though waiting for something. They got what they
were waiting for.
"Boys," announced their satisfied "mayor," "I want to introduce to you
my new partner, Mr. Dwight Wade--though he don't really need any
introduction in this region after to-day. Bub!" he called to a
youngster, "get a wheelbarrow and carry Mr. Wade's duffle up to my
house." He pointed to the young man's meagre baggage that had been
thrown off the tote wagon.
As Wade turned away he caught the keen eye of Prophet Eli fixed on him.
The eye was a bit wild, but there was humor there, too. And the cracked
falsetto of the old man's voice followed him as he walked away beside
his new sponsor:
"Oh, the little brown bull came down from the mountain,
Shang, ro-ango, whango-wey!
And as he was feelin' salutatious,
Chased old Pratt a mile, by gracious,
Licked old Shep and two dog Towsers,
Then marched back home with old Pratt's trousers.
Whango-whey!"
"Yes, as I was tellin' you a spell ago--just a little cracked!"
apologized Ide. "There's my house, there! The one with the tower. It
would look better to me, Mr. Wade, if only my wife had lived to enjoy it
with me." But his eyes lighted at sight of his daughter. She was
standing at the gate waiting for them. "Her own mother over again, and
the best girl in the whole north country, sir! It was man's work you did
there to-day for the sake of my girl and her good name--I only wish her
father had the muscle to do as much for her." He stretched out his puny
arms and shook his head wistfully. "But there's one thing I can do, Mr.
Wade. It can't be said that Rod Ide stood by and saw you get thrown out
of a job for his daughter's sake, and didn't make it square with you!"
"Is that the reason you are offering this partnership to me?" inquired
the young man, his pride taking alarm.
"No, sir!" replied the little man, with emphasis. But he added, out of
his honesty: "It's straight business between us, sir, but it wouldn't be
human nature if your best recommendation to me wasn't the fact that
you've done for my girl the service that her father ought to have done,
and I'm not goin' to try to separate that from our business. But before
I get done talking with you, I'll show you that by the time you've
helped me to win out against Pulaski Britt and old King Spruce you'll
have earned your share in this partnership."
And then, with an air that was distinctly triumphant, he pushed Wade
ahead of him through the gate, chatting voluble explanation to a girl
who listened with a welcoming light in her gray eyes. It was a light
that cheered a roving young man who had acquired friends by such a
dizzying train of circumstances.
They talked until far into the night, he and Rodburd Ide.
The next day Christopher Straight was called into the conference.
"There ain't any part of the north country that Christopher don't know,"
eulogized Ide, caressing the woodsman's arm. "Forty years trapper,
guide, and explorer--that's his record."
Wade gazed into the quiet eyes of the veteran as he grasped his hand,
and needed no further recommendation than the look old Christopher
returned. There are few men in the world with such appealing qualities
as those who have passed their lives in the woods and know what the
woods mean. Wade realized now, after his talk with Ide, the nature of
the task that he faced. Knowing that Christopher Straight was to be his
companion and guide, he was heartened, having seen the man.
And with intense eagerness to be away, he completed his modest
preparations for the exploring trip, and set forth towards the great
unknown of the north. He had Rodburd Ide's parting hand-clasp for
reassurance, his daughter's sincere godspeed for his comfort, and the
chance to do battle for his love. And he walked with Christopher
Straight with head erect and a heart full of new hope.
CHAPTER VII
ON MISERY GORE
"I reckon if gab had been sprawl,
He'd have climb' to the very top notch.
As it was, though, he made just one crawl
To a perch in a next-the-ground crotch."
--The Pauper.
The two men "hopped" the broad expanse of Patch Dam heath, springing
from tussock to tussock of the sphagnum moss. In that mighty flat they
seemed as insignificant as frogs, and their progress suggested the
batrachian as they leaped and zigzagged.
Ahead bounced Christopher Straight, the few tins of his scanty
cooking-kit rattling in the meal-bag pack on his back.
At his heels came Dwight Wade, blanket-roll across his shoulders and
calipers and leather-sheathed axe in his hands. Sweat streamed into his
eyes, and, athlete though he was, his leg muscles ached cruelly. The
September sunshine shimmered hotly across the open, and the young man's
head swam.
Old Christopher's keen side glance noted this. With the veteran guide's
tactful courtesy towards tenderfeet, he halted on a mound and made
pretence of lighting his pipe. There was not even a bead of perspiration
on his face, and his crisp, gray beard seemed frosty.
"I'm ashamed of myself," blurted the young man in blunt outburst. His
knees trembled as he steadied himself after his last leap.
"It ain't exactly like strollin' down the shady lane, as the song says,"
replied old Christopher, with gentle satire. He looked away towards the
fringe of distant woods.
"We could have kept on around by the Tomah trail, Mr. Wade, but I reckon
you got as sick as I did of climbin' through old Britt's slash. And
until he operated there last winter it used to be one of the best trails
north of Castonia. I blazed it myself forty years ago."
"And just a little care in felling it would have left it open," cried
the young man, indignantly.
"There was orders from Britt to drop ev'ry top across that trail
that could be dropped there, Mr. Wade. So, unless they come in
flyin'-machines, there's been few fishermen and hunters up the Tomah
trail this season to build fires and cut tent-poles."
"Does the old hog begrudge that much from the acres he stole from the
people of the State?" demanded Wade.
"He'd ruther you'd pick your teeth with your knife-blade than pull even
a sliver out of a blow down," replied Christopher, mildly. He tossed his
brown hand to point his quiet satire, and Wade's eyes swept the vast
expanse of wood, from the nearest ridges to the dim blue of the
tree-spiked horizon.
Christopher put his hand to his forehead and gazed north.
"I can show you your first peek at it, Mr. Wade," he said, after a
moment. "That's old Enchanted--the blue sugar-loaf you see through Pogey
Notch there. Under that sugar-loaf is where we are bound, to Ide's
holdin's."
There was a thrill for the young man in the spectacle--in the blue
mountains swimming above the haze, and in the untried mystery of the
miles of forest that still lay between. Even the word "Enchanted"
vibrated with suggestion.
The zest of wander-lust came upon him later--a zest dulled at first by
two days of perspiring fatigue, uneasy slumbers under the stars,
breathless scrambles through undergrowth and up rocky slopes.
"That's Jerusalem Mountain, layin' a little to the right," went on
Christopher. "That's Britt's principal workin' on the east slope of that
this season. He'll yard along Attean and the other streams, and run his
drive into Jerusalem dead-water--and that's where you and Ide will have
a chore cut out for you." The old man wrinkled his brows a bit, but his
voice was still mild.
The romance oozed from Wade's thrill. The thrill became more like an
angry bristling along his spine. During the days of his preparation for
this trip into the north country, Rodburd Ide--suddenly become his
partner by an astonishing juncture of circumstances--had spent as much
time in setting forth the character of the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt as
he had in instructing his neophyte in the duties of a timber explorer.
As a matter of fact, Ide left it mostly to old Christopher to be mentor
and instructor in the art of "exploring," as search for timber in the
north woods is called. Ide was better posted on the acerbities and
sinuosities of Britt's character than he was on the values of standing
timber and the science of economical "twitch-roads," and, with sage
purpose, he had freely given of this information to his new partner.
"Don't worry about the explorin' part--not with Christopher postin'
you," Ide had cheerfully counselled, when he had shaken hands with them
at the edge of Castonia clearing. "You and he together will find enough
timber to be cut. But you can't get dollars for logs until they're
sorted and boomed--and that part means dividin' white water with Britt
next spring. So, don't spend all your time measuring trees, Wade.
Measure chances!"
Now, with his eyes on the promised field of battle, Wade growled under
his breath.
Britt!
For four days now he had struggled behind old Christopher through
tangled undergrowth of striped maple, witch hobble, and mountain
holly--Mother Nature's pathetic attempt to cover with ragged and stunted
growth the breast that the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt had stripped bare.
"He cut her three times," Christopher explained. "First time the virgin
black growth--and as handsome a stand of timber as ye ever put calipers
to; second time, the battens--all under eleven inches through; third
time, even the poles. That's forestry as he practises it! He's robbin'
the squirrels!"
Britt!
Wade had seen rotting tops that would have yielded logs--the refuse of
the first reckless and wasteful cutting. He had passed skidways and
toiled over corduroy in which thousands of feet of good spruce had been
left to decay. The deploring finger of the watchful Christopher pointed
out butts hacked off head high.
"The best timber in the log left standin' there, Mr. Wade. But Pulaski
Britt ain't lettin' his men stop to shovel snow away."
Britt behind him, in the tangled undergrowth! Britt about him, in the
straggle of trees on the hard-wood ridges! Britt ahead of him, where the
black growth shaded the mountains in the blue distance! The same Britt
who had so contemptuously tossed him aside as useless baggage when
Foreman Colin MacLeod had demanded his discharge!
Wade clutched calipers and axe, and went leaping after old Christopher
with new strength in his legs.
But in spite of the vigor that resentment lent him, he was glad when the
guide tossed off his pack beside a brook that trickled under mossy rocks
on the hard-wood slope. It was good to hear the tinkle of water, to feel
the solid ground after the weird wobbling of the sphagnum moss, and to
snuff the smoke of the handful of fire crackling under the tea-pail.
They were munching biscuits and bacon, nursing pannikins of tea between
their knees, when Christopher cocked an ear, darted a glance, and
mumbled a mild oath as savor to his mouthful of biscuit.
"Set to eat a snack within a mile of Misery Gore and one of them crows
will appear to ye. And that's the old he one of them all."
The old man who came shuffling slowly down the path was gaunt with the
leanness of want, and unkempt with the squalor of the hopelessly
pauperized.
"It's one of the Misery Gore squatters, Mr. Wade. All Skeets and
Bushees, and married back and forth and crossways and upside down till
ev'ry man is his own grandmother, if he only knew enough to figger
relationship. All State paupers, and no more sprawl to 'em than there is
to a fresh-water clam."
Old Christopher, with Yankee contempt of the thrifty for the willing
pauper, grumbled on in his scornful explanations after the old man sat
down opposite them. Wade, accustomed to politer usages, winced before
this brutal frankness. He plainly felt worse than the subject, who
looked from one to the other, his blue lips slavering at sight of the
food.
"It ain't no use to set there and drool like a hound pup, Jed," snapped
old Christopher, cutting another slice of bacon. "We're bound in for a
fortnit's explorin' trip, and we ain't got no grub to spare."
The patriarch of Misery Gore drew a greasy bit of brown paper from his
ragged vest, unfolded it, and took out what was apparently a long hair
from his grizzly beard. He pinched the thicker end between his dirty
thumb and forefinger, stroked the whisker upright, and held it before
his gaping mouth. The whisker slowly bent over towards Christopher.
"'Lectric!" announced the experimenter, in thick, stuffy tones, as
though he were talking through a cloth.
Again he gaped his toothless mouth, and the whisker bent towards the
uninviting opening.
"'Lectric!" He grinned at them, rolling his watery eyes from face to
face to seek appreciation. It was evident that he considered the feat
remarkable.
"Full of it! Er huh! Full of it!" He stroked his thin fingers down his
arm and slatted into the air. "Storms, huh? I know. Fair weather, huh? I
know. Things to happen, huh? I know. I can tell."
He hitched nearer, and looked hungrily at the bread and bacon which
Christopher immediately and ruthlessly began to wrap up.
"Them wireless-telegraph folks ought to know about you," grunted the
guide. "Don't pay any attention to the old fool, Mr. Wade. He don't have
to beg of us. Rod Ide furnishes supplies to these critters. Law says
that the assessor of the nearest plantation shall do it, and then Ide
puts in his bill to the State. You needn't worry about their starvin'."
"You'd all see us starve on Misery Gore," wailed the old man. "You'd all
see us starve!" His tone changed suddenly to weak anger. "Ide's an old
hog. No tea, no tobarker."
"Yes, and he ain't been so lib'ral with turkeys, plush furniture, and
champagne as he ought to be," growled Christopher, relishing his irony.
"If there's anything that you really need, Mr.--Mr.--"
"Skeet," snapped the guide.
"--Mr. Skeet, I'll speak to Mr. Ide about it when--"
"Mr. Wade," broke in Christopher, "what's the need of wastin' good
breath on that sculch? They get all they deserve to have. They're too
lazy to breathe unless it come automatic. They let their potatoes rot in
the ground, and complain about starvin'. They won't cut browse to bank
their shacks, and complain about freezin'. The only thing they can do to
the queen's taste is steal, and it's got so in this section that there
ain't a sportin'-camp nor a store wangan that it's safe to leave a thing
in."
He began to stuff tins into the mouth of the meal-sack, glowering at the
ancient pauper.
"They nigh put me out of bus'ness guidin' hereabouts. Stole everything
from my Attean camp that I left there--and it ain't no fun to tugger-lug
grub for sports on your back from Castonia."
When the last knot in the leather thong was twitched close and the
bountiful meal-bag was closed, old Jed abandoned hope and wheedling. He
brandished the whisker at Christopher, his moth-speckled hand quivering.
"Old butcherman!" he screamed. "'Twas my Jed. Off here!" He set the edge
of his palm against his arm.
Christopher's face grew hard under his frosty beard, but his cheeks
flushed when Wade gazed inquiringly at him.
"It's a thief's lookout when there's a spring-gun in a camp," he
muttered. "There was a sign on the door sayin' as much. It ain't my
fault if folks has been too busy stealin' to learn to read. If you ever
hear anything about it up this way, Mr. Wade, you needn't blame me. They
had their warnin' by word o' mouth. I'm sorry it happened, but--"
"What happened?"
"Young Jed Skeet joined the 'It-'ll-git-ye Club' a year ago with a fin
shot off at the elbow."
Christopher swung his pack to his back, thrust his arms through the
straps, and marched away. Wade followed with a new light on some of the
accepted ethics of human combat in the big woods. Old Jed shuffled
behind, a toothless Nemesis gasping maledictions in stuffy tones.
"We'll swing over the ridge and go through Misery Gore settlement, Mr.
Wade," said the old guide, after a time, divining the reason for his
companion's silence. "It may spoil your appetite for supper, but it'll
prob'ly straighten out some of your notions about me and that
spring-gun."
On the opposite slant of the ridge a ledge thrust above the hard-wood
growth, and Christopher led the way out upon this lookout.
"There! Ain't that a pictur' for a Sussex shote to look at, and then
take to the woods ag'in?" he inquired, with scornful disregard for any
civic pride the patriarch of Misery might have taken in his community.
The few miserable habitations of poles, mud, and tarred paper were
scattered around a tumble-down lumber camp, relic of the old days when
"punkin pine" turreted Misery Gore.
"I suppose the man who named it stood here and looked down," suggested
Wade.
"It was named Misery fifty years before this tribe ever came here. I
reckon they heard of it, and it sounded as though it might suit 'em.
They're a tribe by themselves, Mr. Wade. They've been driven off'n a
dozen townships that I know of. Land-owners keep 'em movin'. I reckon
this is their longest stop. This Gore is a surplus left in surveying
Range Nine. Sort of a no man's land. But they hadn't ought to be left
here."
There was so much conviction in the old guide's tone, and the contrast
of utter ruin below was so great, its last touch added by the pathetic
old figure in rags at the foot of the ledge, that the young man's temper
flamed. He had been pondering the spring-gun episode with no very
tolerant spirit.
"For God's sake, Straight, show some man-feeling. Is the selfishness of
the woods down to the point where you begrudge those poor devils that
wallow of stumps and rocks?"
Christopher received this outburst with his usual placidity--the
placidity that only woodsmen have cultivated in its most artistic sense.
"Look, Mr. Wade!" He swept his hand in the circuit that embraced the
panorama of ridges showing the first touches of frost, the hills still
darkling with black growth, the valleys and the shredded forest.
"There she lays before you, ten thousand acres like a tinder-box in this
weather, dry since middle August. You've seen some of the slash. But
you've seen only a little of it. Under those trees as far as eye can see
there's the slash of three cuttin's. Tops propped on their boughs like
wood in a fireplace. Draught like a furnace! It's bad enough now, with
the green leaves still on. It's like to be worse in May before the green
leaves start. And about all those dod-fired Diggers down there know or
care about property interests is that a burn makes blueberries grow, and
blueberries are worth six cents a quart! They have done it in other
places. They're inbred till they've got water for blood and sponges for
brains. When the hankerin' for blueberries catches 'em they'll put the
torch to that undergrowth and refuse, and if the wind helps and the rain
don't stop it they'll set a fire that will run to Pogey Notch like
racin' hosses, roar through there like blazin' tissue-paper in a chimbly
flue, and then where'll your black growth on Enchanted be--the growth
that's goin' to make money for you and Rod Ide? I tell ye, Mr. Wade,
there's more to woods life than roamin' through and cuttin' your gal's
name on the bark. There's more to loggin' than the chip-chop of a sharp
axe or the rick-raw of a double-handled gashin'-fiddle. And when it
comes down to profit, you can't be polite to a porcupine when he's
girdlin' your spruce-trees, nor practice society airs and Christian
charity with damn fools, whether they're dude fishermen tossin'
cigar-stubs or such spontaneously combustin' toadstools as them that
live down yonder eatin' the State's pork and flour. I'm up here with ye
to tell ye something about the woods, Mr. Wade. And it ain't all goin'
to be about calipers, the diffrunce between the Bangor and New Hampshire
scale, and how stumpage ain't profitable under nine inches top
measure--no, s'r, not by a blame sight!"
There was no passion in the old man's remonstrance, but there was an
earnestness that closed the young man's lips against argument. He
followed silently when Christopher led the way down towards the
settlement. Old Jed took up his position at the rear.
The first who accosted them was a slatternly woman, her short skirts
revealing men's long-legged boots. She rapped the bowl of a pipe smartly
in her palm, to show that it was empty, and demanded tobacco. She
scowled, and there was no hint of coaxing in her tones.
When Wade looked at her with an expression of shocked astonishment that
all his resolution could not modify, she sneered at him.
"Oh, you think we don't know northin' here--ain't wuth noticin' 'cause
we live in the woods, hey? Well, we do know something. Here, Ase, tell
this sport the months of the year, and then let's see if he's stingy
enough to keep his plug in his pocket."
Ase, plainly her son, lubberly and man-grown, roared without
bashfulness:
"Jan'warry, Feb'darry, Septober, Ockjuber, Fourth o' July, St. Padrick's
Day, and Cris'mus--gimme a chaw!"
Two or three men lounged out-of-doors--one with his arm significantly
off at the elbow. But there was not even a shadow on his vapid face when
he looked at Christopher, author of his misfortune.
"Ain't ye goin' to give me a piece of your plug, Chris?" he whined.
"Seem's if ye might. You 'n' me's square now--I got your pork and you
got my arm."
"There! Hear that?" growled Straight, in Wade's ear. "Put your
common-sense calipers on this stand of human timber and see what ye make
of it."
Wade, looking from face to face, as the frowsy population of Misery
lounged closer about him, half in indolence, half in the distrustful
shyness that the stupidly ignorant usually assume towards superior
strangers, noted that though the men displayed an almost canine desire
to fawn for favors, the women were sullen. The only exception was a very
old woman who hobbled close and entreated:
"Ain't you got northin' good for Abe, nice young gentleman? Poor Abe!
Hain't got no friend but his old mother." She hooked a hand as blue and
gaunt as a turkey's claw into Wade's belt and held up her spotted face
so close to his that he turned his head in uncontrollable disgust.
"Your hands off the gentleman, Jule," commanded Christopher, brusquely.
"It's old Jule, mate of the old he one that has been chasin' us," he
explained, with more of that blissful disregard for the feelings of his
subjects that had previously shocked the young man. "There's old Jed and
young Jed--old Jule and young Jule. They 'ain't even got gumption enough
here to change names. And that's Abe--the choice specimen that she's
beggin' for. Look at him and wish for a pictur'-machine, Mr. Wade!"
He had thought there could be no worse in human guise than those he had
seen. But this huge, hairy, shaggy, almost naked giant, cowering against
the side of a shack with all the timidity of a child, marked a climax
even to such degeneracy as he had quailed before.
"Mind in him about five years old, and will always stay five years old,"
said the guide, pointing to the wistful, simpering face. "Body speaks
for itself. Look at them muscles! I've seen him ploughin' hitched with
their cow. Clever as a mule. He's the old woman's hoss. Hauls her on a
jumper clear to Castonia settlement."
"An animal!" Wade gasped.
"Not much else. Afraid of the dark, of shadows, and women mostly.
Strange women! Once a woman scared him in Castonia and he ran away like
a hoss, draggin' the jumper. Old Jule hitched him to a post after that."
Cretinism in any form had always shocked Dwight Wade inexpressibly. He
turned away, but the old woman was in his path, begging.
The next moment a tall, lithe girl ran swiftly out of a hut, seized the
whimpering old woman, tossed her over her shoulder as a miller would
up-end a bag of meal, and staggered back into the hut, kicking the frail
door shut with angry heel. Wade got an astonished but a comprehensive
view of this "kidnapper." There was no vacuity in her face. It was
brilliant, with black eyes under a tangle of dark hair disordered but
not unkempt like that of the females he had seen in Misery. Her lips
were very red, and the color flamed on her cheeks above the brown of the
tan. In that compost heap of humanity the girl was a vision, and Wade
turned to old Christopher with unspoken questions on his parted lips.
"Don't know," said the guide, laconically, wagging his head. "No one
knows. She's with 'em. But you and me can see that she ain't one of 'em.
She's always been with 'em as fur back's I know of her--and that was
sixteen years ago, when she was in a holler log on rockers for a
cradle."
"Stolen!" suggested Wade, desperately. The thought had a morsel of
comfort in it. That a girl like that could belong by right of birth in
this tribe, that a girl with--ah, now he realized why his heart had
throbbed at sight of her--that a girl with Elva Barrett's hair and eyes
could be doomed to this existence was a knife-thrust in his
sensibilities.
And the toss of her head and the rebelliousness in the gesture--the
defiance in the upward flash of the sparkling eyes--subdued in Elva
Barrett's case by training--the mnemonics of love, whose suggestions are
so subtle, thrilled him at the sudden apparition of this forest beauty.
Reason angrily rebuked this unbidden comparison. He bit his lips, and
flushed as though his swift thought had wronged his love. Old
Christopher put into blunt woods phrase the pith of the thoughts that
struggled together in Wade's mind. The guide was looking at the closed
door.
"There's lots of folks, Mr. Wade, that don't recognize plain white birch
in some of the things that's polished and set up in city parlors. I've
wondered a good many times what a society cabinet-shop, as ye might say,
would do to that girl."
"They must have stolen her," repeated Wade.
Old Christopher tucked a sliver of plug into his cheek.
"That would sound well in a gypsy fairy-story, but it don't fit the
style of the Skeets and Bushees. They're too lazy to steal anything
that's alive. They want even a shote killed and dressed before they'll
touch it. Near's I can find out, the young one was handed to 'em, and
they was too dadblamed tired to wake up and ask where it came from.
They didn't even have sprawl enough to name her. I did that," he added,
calmly. "Yes," he proceeded, smiling at Wade's astonished glance; "I was
guidin' a sport down the West Branch just before they drove the tribe
out of the Sourdnaheunk country--under old Katahdin, you know! I see her
in that log cradle, and they was callin' her 'it.' So me 'n' the sport
got up a name for her--Kate Arden, for the mountain. 'Tain't a name for
a Maine girl to be ashamed of."
It suddenly occurred to Wade, gazing at the old man, that the quizzical
screwing-up of his eyes was hiding some deeper emotion; for
Christopher's voice had a quaver in it when he said:
"Poor little gaffer! Some one ought to have taken her away from 'em. But
it's hard to get folks interested in even a pretty posy when it grows in
a skunk-cabbage patch."
He looked away, embarrassed that any man should see emotion on his face,
and uttered a prompt exclamation.
Threading their way in single file among the blackened stumps that
bordered the Tomah trail to the north came a half-dozen men.
"That's Bennett Rodliff ahead, and he's the high sheriff of this
county," growled the old man. "There's two deputies and two game-wardens
with him--and old Pulaski Britt bringin' up in the rear. Knowin' them
pretty well, I should say that it spells t-r-u-b-l-e, in jest six
letters. I ain't a great hand to guess, Mr. Wade, but if some one was to
ask me quick, I should say it was the same old checker-game that the
Skeets and Bushees have been playin' for all these years, and that it's
their turn to move."
CHAPTER VIII
THE TORCH, AND THE LIGHTING OF IT
"We know how to riffle a log jam apart,
Though it's tangled and twisted and turned;
But the love of a woman and ways of the heart
Are things that we never learned."
--Leeboomook Song.
The sheriff and his men tramped into the little clearing and gave the
usual greeting of woods wayfarers--the nod and the almost voiceless
grunt. The Honorable Pulaski was a little more talkative. He was also in
excellent humor.
"Hear you and Rod Ide have hitched hosses, Wade!" he cried. "Sheriff
here was tellin' me. I'm mighty glad of it. That lets me out of thinkin'
I got you up here on a wild-goose chase. I was sorry to dump you, but it
would take nine time-keepers to make a foreman like Colin MacLeod, and
when he put it up to me you had to go. It was business, and business
beats fun up this way."
The young man did not reply. Words seemed useless just then.
The Honorable Pulaski turned from him briskly and ran an appraising eye
over the miserable huddle of huts. With the true scent of primitive
natures for impending trouble, the population of Misery edged around
this group of new arrivals--the men in advance and wistful, the women
behind and sullen.
"Well, boys," said the Honorable Pulaski, "it's just this way about it,
and we can all be reasonable and do business like business men." His air
was that of a man dealing with children or savages. "As far as I'm
personally concerned, I hate to bother you. But I represent the other
owners of this township, and the other owners aren't as reasonable about
some things as I am."
He paused to light a long cigar. No one spoke. He proffered one to Wade,
who shook his head with a little unnecessary vigor.
Britt talked as he puffed.
"Now--pup--pup--now, boys--pup--you know as well as I do that you've
squatted right in the middle of a lot of slash that we had to leave, and
it lays in a bad way for fire. You ain't so careful about fire as you
ought to be." He held up his cigar. "Here's my style. I don't smoke till
I'm out of the trail. I--pup--pup--own land, and that makes a
difference. You don't own land. I don't want to bring up old stories,
but you know and I know that the prospects of six cents a quart for
blueberries makes you forgetful about what's been said to you. You've
started some devilish big fires. Here's the September big winds about
due--and this one that's just springing up to-day is a fair sample--and
all is, the owners can't afford to run chances of a fire that will stop
God knows where if it gets running in this five thousand acres of dry
tops and slash.
"Here's Mr. Ide's representative," he continued, flapping a hand towards
Wade. "They've got black growth to the north, and he'll tell you just
the same thing."
"Well, Mister Mealy-mouth," sneered young Jule, over the heads of the
others, "git to where you're goin' to. We don't want no sermons. It's
move ag'in, hey?"
"It's move," snapped the Honorable Pulaski, his ready temper starting at
the woman's insolent tone, "and it's move damn sudden."
Whether it was a groan or growl that came from the wretched huddle,
Wade, looking on them with infinite pity, could not determine.
"I could put ye plumb square out of the county," roared Britt; "I've got
land jurisdiction enough to do it. But you be reasonable and I'll be
reasonable. I won't drive ye too far. I'll have four horses over from my
cedar operation to tote what duds you want to take and haul the old
women. Sheriff Rodliff and his men here will go along, and see that you
have grub and don't have to light fires. In fact, everything will be
arranged nice for you, and you'll like it when you get there."
"Where?" asked young Jed.
"On Little Lobster--the old Drake farm," said the Honorable Pulaski,
trying to speak enthusiastically and signally failing.
"O my Gawd!" moaned young Jed; "most twenty miles to hoof it, and when
ye git there no wood bigger'n alder-withes, and all the stones the devil
let drop when his puckerin'-string bruk! Hain't a berry. Hain't northin'
to earn a livin'."
"You never earned your living, and you don't want to earn your living,"
retorted Britt. "You just want to stay up here in the big timber and
start fires."
"No, Mr. Britt, we just want the chance to be human beings!" cried a
tense and piercing voice. The girl had reappeared in the door of the
hut. Above the meek lamentations of those about her, her voice was as
the scream of a young hawk above the baaing of sheep. She pushed her way
through them and stood before the Honorable Pulaski, palpitating,
glowing, splendid in her fury. But she propped her brown hands on her
hips--a woman of the mob--and Wade noted the attitude, and flushed at
the shamed thought of the likeness to Elva Barrett.
In this crisis, by right of her intelligence, her daring, her
superiority, the girl seemed to take her place at the head of the
pathetic herd.
"That's what we want, Mr. Britt. You're driving us down to the
settlements again. And then some bow-legged old farmer will lose a sheep
by bears or a hen by hawks, and we'll be set upon and driven back once
more to the woods. And then you'll come and huff and puff and blow our
house down and chase us away to the settlement. 'The law! The law!' you
keep braying like a mule. You kick us one way; the settlements kick us
another. Mr. Britt, I didn't ask to be put on this earth! But now that
I'm here I've a right to ground enough to set my feet on, and so have
these people. We are using no more of your stolen ground here than we'd
be using in another place, and here we stay!" She stamped her foot.
"You young whippet," snorted the Honorable Pulaski, "don't sneer to me
about the law when I've got eviction-papers in my pocket and the high
sheriff of this county at my back."
"How about the law that makes wild-land owners pay squatters for
improvements to land?" demanded the girl. "I know some law, too."
"Do you call those hog-pens improvements?" He swept his fat hand at the
huts.
"You may pay some one a dollar an acre for that blue sky above us and
claim that, too. You may claim all of God's open country here in the big
woods. But I know that you can't shut even paupers out from the lakes
and the streams any more than you can take away the sunlight from us."
"I don't know where you got your law, young woman, but I'd advise you to
get better posted on the difference between right of way to State
waters and squatting on private land. Now, I ain't got time to--"
"We'll not go back to the settlement--not one of us." She set her feet
apart and bent a fiery gaze on him.
Britt looked away from her to his circle of supporters. The deputies
stooped over their gun-barrels to hide furtive grins at sight of the
timber baron thus baited by a girl on his preserves. Even the broad face
of the sheriff was crinkled suspiciously. The tyrant flamed with the
quick passion for which he was noted in the north country.
"Look here, Rodliff!" His voice was like cracking twigs. "Pile the
dunnage out of those huts. If any one gets in your way drive a stake and
tie 'em to it." He thrust his bulgy nose into the air to sniff the
direction of the wind. "Then set fire to every d--n crib. The wind's all
right to carry it towards the bog."
"I don't believe you've got law enough in your pocket to do a thing like
that, Mr. Britt," broke in Wade, with heat.
"You don't, hey?"
"Not to throw old men and women and children out of their houses and
leave them shelterless a dozen miles from a building. There must be
another way of getting at this eviction matter, Mr. Britt--one that's
different from burning a hornet's nest."
"This don't happen to be any of your special business!" roared the
tyrant. "If it was, you'd stand by property interests instead of backing
State paupers."
"Mr. Sheriff, are you going to do that thing?"
"I'm here by order of the court, to do what Mr. Britt wants done to
protect his property," replied the officer. "I'm to execute, not to plan
nor ask questions."
"King Spruce runs this country up here, not human feelin's," muttered
old Christopher in Wade's ear. "You won't get any satisfaction by
buttin' in. I'm ready to move. I don't like to see such things done,
and I don't believe you do. Come on!" He swung his meal-bag upon his
shoulders.
But the young man lingered doggedly, his eyes on the face of the girl.
"Buckin' a high sheriff and his posse ain't ever been reckoned as a
profitable business speculation in these parts," mumbled the guide. "It
wouldn't amount to a hoorah in tophet, and you'd probably wind up in the
county jail."
The girl was gazing shrewdly at this sudden champion. There was no shade
of coquetry in her glance. It was the frank gaze of man to man.
"I protest, Mr. Britt!" cried Wade.
"And that's all the good it will do," snorted that angry master of the
situation. "Rodliff, you've got my orders!"
Young Jed, sidling near Britt, with the mien of a Judas and with
manifest intent to curry favor, whimpered:
"We don't back her up in all she says, Mr. Britt. We ain't got rights
and we know it, but we've got feelin's. Be ye goin' to do the us'al
thing about damages, Mr. Britt?"
"Why," roared the tyrant, bluffly, "ain't the land-owners always made it
worth your while to move? It's all business, boys! Don't let fools bust
in. We don't want fire here. Get to Little Lobster as quick as the
Lord'll let ye. We'll have six months' supply of pork, flour, and plug
tobacco there waitin' for ye--all with the land-owners' compliments.
We've always believed that the easiest way is the best way, but you
don't buy that way by buckin'. Buck, and the trade is all off--and you
get thrown into another county. Close your girl's mouth and keep it
shut."
"There!" grunted old Christopher, "if ye haven't got any more sympathy
to waste on critters like that"--a jab of his thumb at young Jed--"you'd
better come along."
But at sight of woe on the faces of the women, and mute entreaty in the
eyes of the girl, Wade still lingered.
"She's speakin' for herself," whispered young Jed, hoarsely. "She don't
want to leave the woods because your boss, Colin MacLeod, is courtin'
her, and she's waitin' to see him, now that he's back from
down-country."
Riotous laughter "guffled" in the throat of Pulaski Britt as he stared
from the scarlet face of the girl to Wade's confusion.
"Courtin' her, hey? Another case of it? I say, Rodliff, pretty soon
there won't be a whole arm or leg left on my boss if this young man here
keeps chasin' him round the country and breaks a bone on him for ev'ry
girl the two of 'em get against together."
He laughed to the full content of his soul, and then turned on the girl.
"Why, you ragged little fool, Colin MacLeod is crazier than a hornet in
a thrashin'-machine over Rod Ide's girl. He's up in camp now with an arm
in a sling to make him remember a fight he and this young dude here got
into over her. And he's up there beyond Pogey Notch sitting on a stump
swearing at the choppers and bragging with every other breath that he'll
kill the dude and marry the girl--and I don't reckon he's changed his
mind in two days since I saw him last."
"You lie!" screamed the girl.
"Hold on, there, Miss Spitfire," broke in the sheriff, himself highly
amused by the humor of the situation as it appeared to him, "there isn't
a man between Castonia and Blunder Lake but what is talking about it.
A hundred men saw the fight. I reckon five hundred have heard MacLeod
ravin' about how much he loves the Ide girl. So if he ever courted you
it must have been just for the sake of getting used to the game." Even
the fawning male citizens of Misery Gore cackled their little chorus in
the laughter that followed the high sheriff's jest.
She drew back slowly and gazed on them all, her lips rolled away from
her white teeth. Those jeering faces from "outside" represented
property, law, the smug self-satisfaction of all who despised Misery
Gore's squalid breed.
They stood there in the midst of the land they so arrogantly
claimed, ready to toss her away once more in the everlasting game
of battledore and shuttlecock. They were afraid for the dollars
that made them different from the wretches of Misery. They gloried
in their dollars--they mocked her in that moment, the bitterness of
which only her heart understood. Let them look out for their dollars,
then!
Up there where the blue hills divided was sitting Colin MacLeod calling
on the name of another woman and nursing a wound received for that
woman's sake. Let him look out for himself!
"We can make the Blake-cutting camps with you to-night," said Britt, his
mind on business once again. "We'll take good care of you, and you might
as well start one time as another. Out with the stuff and down with the
houses, Rodliff."
At the orders the men began to busy themselves, paying no further
attention to Misery's inhabitants.
The girl ran into the hut, lifted one of the cedar splints that made the
floor, and took out a section of iron gas-pipe--the most prized
possession of the tribe. It was their wand of plenty. It was Mother
Nature's crutch. Out of it flowed bounty.
Into the unplugged end she poured all the kerosene there was in a
battered can. Then she stuffed into the tube a mass of wicking.
It was a torch--the torch for the blueberry barrens. Dragged after one,
it left a blazing trail such as no other form of fire could produce.
There was a flicker of fire in the rusty stove. She thrust the wicking
into the coals, and on the iron stalk a flame-flower sprang into huge
blossom.
She burst through the hut's rear window and ran straight for the edge of
the clearing, towards the fuel piled high in the forest aisles.
In that moment of blind and desperate fury she realized that the wind
was swinging into the north. It was there that MacLeod was sitting at
the foot of Pogey Notch. Ah, what a furnace-flue that would make!
She did not pause to reason. Her single wild desire was to send the fire
leaping towards him.
The roar of voices behind--voices entreating, voices of
malediction--made her smile. Above all was the Honorable Pulaski's
bull roar. She began to drag the torch.
"Catch her! Damnation, catch that girl!" howled Britt.
She reached the edge of the distant woodland.
Immediately his cry changed to "Shoot her!" He did not mean it the first
time he cried it. He did mean it the second time. The deputies stared
after her and joggled their weapons on their arms.
"Shoot her, or fifty thousand acres of timber are gone!"
But that was quarry before which official guns quailed.
In his fury and his panic and his desperate fear for his fortune, Britt
seized a gun from the nearest deputy and aimed it.
Wade struck it up, muttering an indignant oath. Britt made as though to
club him out of the way. The young man clutched the gun and twisted it
from Britt's quivering clutch. When Britt lunged forward to seize
another rifle Wade struck him under the jaw, and he went down like a
felled ox.
The girl was out of sight in the woods, but yellow smoke shot with
bright flame marked her course.
"I could have told him," mused old Christopher, looking on the Honorable
Pulaski, struggling dizzily to his feet, "havin' watched her more or
less since I named her, that she wa'n't a real sociable kind of a girl
to joke with on matters that's as serious to women as love is."
Sheriff Bennett Rodliff spoke the prologue to that conflagration:
"There is h--l in the core of that fire," he said.
Sometimes a little mischief, started by chance down the slopes of
events, gathers like a rolling snowball into a vast bulk of evil. But
more often in matters of evil it is the intent of the impulse that
governs. It seems at such times as though inanimate nature were
responding to human malevolence.
The fire that started that day on Misery leaped to its grim business
with a spontaneity as fierce as the mad hate behind it.
One man acts in a crisis with more directness and efficiency than many
men, each of whom waits on the other. They had stood and stared after
the girl when she ran into the woods with the hissing fire streaming
behind her. The pursuers that finally did start stopped promptly to
witness the fight between the young man and the baron of the Umcolcus.
Human fists in play afford more of a spectacle than even an incipient
conflagration. When the man who goes down is a man who in the past has
always been aggressor and victor, interest is more acute.
Dwight Wade did not linger to prolong the conflict to which the furious
Britt invited him. Christopher Straight had started for the woods on
the track of the fugitive girl, and Wade ran after him, his knuckles
tingling gloriously. The thrill of that one moment, when his fist met
the flesh of the man who had insulted him, made him realize that when
one searches the depths of human nature hate, as well as love, has its
delights.
Pressing closely on the heels of Christopher, who had waited for him, he
dove into the yellow smoke.
"We've got to find that young she-devil!" gasped the old man. "It's
better for us to find her than for Britt to get hold of her."
But by that time the quest was an uncertain one.
There is craftiness in a woods fire when it is seeking to establish
itself.
The fire sent up first from the crackling slash thick, rolling, bitter
clouds of smoke to veil its beginnings. Running to the left, where the
fresher clouds seemed to be springing, the two men caught sight of the
girl. But she was already far to the right, running and leaping like a
deer, her hideous torch still flaming. Then the smoke shut down and she
was hidden.
A blazing mass of tops, twisted in a blowdown, fronted them, and they
were forced to make a long detour. They saw the wind wrench torches out
of the mass, torches that whirled aloft and went scaling away to the
north. Puffs of smoke showed where they had alighted. Here and there the
tops of little spruces and firs set a net for the torches, afforded
roosting-places for the flame birds that winged their red flight across
the sky. The flame did not merely burn these trees; the trees fairly
exploded; their resinous fronds and tassels were like powder grains.
A wind gust rent the smoke for an instant and showed the pursuers the
spread of the growing destruction. It already was sprinkled over acres.
"She's started fair, and the devil's helpin' her!" mourned the old man.
At that moment the huge bulk of a man went lurching past them. It was
Abe, the foolish giant of the Skeets. In the glimpse they caught before
the smoke swallowed him, in his hairy nakedness, he seemed a gigantic
satyr; he leaped here and there to avoid the blazing patches in the leaf
litter and humus, and his movements seemed like a grotesque dance.
"The old woman has sent him after the girl," explained Christopher, with
quick comprehension. "Come on!"
Dodging, choking, crouching for air, they followed him. At last they
overtook the author of all the mischief. She threw away her torch when
they came upon her, and faced them without shame. She was panting in
utter exhaustion, and clung to a tree for support.
"Bring her, Abe!" commanded Christopher, in a tone that the giant
understood, and he took her up in his brawny arms despite her angry
struggles. "No, not that way!" shouted the old man, when Abe whirled to
make his way back through the fire zone. "It's spread too far," he
explained to Wade; "we've got to keep ahead of it." With a blow to
emphasize his order, he drove Abe ahead of him, and they hurried towards
the north, the conflagration at their heels.
Far ahead of them Jerusalem Mountain lifted the poll of its gray ledge.
It blocked the broad valley to the north. For those in the van of that
fire it was the rock of refuge. The tote road led that way. The
fugitives crashed through the undergrowth into the road. The fire had
already crossed it to the south of them. They took their way to the
north, their eyes on Jerusalem Mountain.
CHAPTER IX
BY ORDER OF PULASKI D. BRITT
"Twinkle, twinkle, 'Ladder' Lane,
With your wavin' winder-pane,
Up above the world so high,
Like a flash-bug in the sky."
The fire-lookout at the Attean station winked this ditty humorously with
playful heliograph to "Ladder" Lane, lookout on the high, bald poll of
old Jerusalem Knob. The Attean lookout got it by telephone from
Castonia. Lyrist unreported.
Jerusalem station is more serene in its isolation than the other five
lookouts on the mountains of the north country. It has no telephone.
Lane allowed to his lonely self that he got more news than he really
wanted, anyhow. And most of the news was of the sort that the humorous
Attean lookout, or the equally humorous Squaw Mountain man, considered
likely to tease the cranky solitary on the highest and farthest outpost
of the chain of lookouts. They whiled away their solitude by gossipy
chattings over the wire. Lane confined himself to terse winkings that
would have been gruff were it possible for a heliograph to be gruff. He
seemed to take a certain grim pride in the fact that he was a thousand
feet higher than any of them and commanded three hundred thousand acres.
Sitting now in the glare of the September sunshine on the flat roof of
his cabin, he gravely and stolidly scrawled down the words of the verse
as the Attean heliograph, blinking and glaring, spoke to him in the
Morse code.
"Huh!" he grunted, and went on writing with stubby pencil his
interrupted day's entry in his official diary. For the twenty-fifth time
he wrote:
"Clear, bright, and still dry."
He screwed his eyelids close to peer into the heavens bending over him,
hard as the bottom of a brass kettle. He took off his hat and held it
edgewise at his forehead while his gaze swept the mighty range of his
vision. An imaginative person might have smiled at the likeness between
his brown and bald poll, thrust above the straggle of hair, and the bare
and bald poll of old Jerusalem, rounding above the straggle of growth on
its lower slopes.
Some one bawled at him from the ground below. Lane did not start, though
that was the first human voice he had heard in two months.
The young man who stood there, and who had come across the gray ledges
from the edge of the timber growth, carried an arm in a sling.
"Do you ever look at anybody if they're nearer than ten miles away?"
inquired the visitor, with the teasing irony that it seemed popular in
the Umcolcus region to employ with "Ladder" Lane.
When the old man stood up the fitness of his sobriquet was apparent. He
unfolded himself, joint by joint, like a carpenter's rule, and stood
gaunt as a bean pole and well towards seven feet in height.
The name painted on the door of the photograph "saloon" that even now
lies rotting on the banks of Ragmuff in Castonia settlement is: "Linus
Lane. Tintypes and Views." No one in Castonia ever knew whither he had
come. Oxen or horses and a teamster hired for each trip had dragged the
rumbling van from settlement to settlement at the edge of the woods, and
finally to Castonia, where it arrived hobbling on three wheels, one
corner supported by a dragging sapling. Lane strode ahead, swearing over
his shoulder at the driver, and his ill-temper did not seem to leave him
even when he had opened his door for business. It is remembered that his
first customer was old Bailey, who was corresponding with an unknown
woman down-country, and who came for a tintype with hair and whiskers
colored to the hue of the raven's wing, evidently desiring to make an
impression on his correspondent. And when old Bailey, shocked and
disappointed at the painful verity of the tintype, had muttered that it
didn't seem to be a very pretty picture, Lane, who was doubled like a
jack-knife under the saloon's low roof, had yelled at him:
"Pretty picture! You come to me with a face like a scrambled egg dropped
into a bucket of soot and complain because you don't get a pretty
picture! Get out of here!"
And he stopped slicing up the sheet of tintypes, slammed it on the
floor, drove out old Bailey, nailed up the door of the saloon, and
started for the big woods with his few possessions on his back.
To those who remonstrated on behalf of the offended old Bailey, Lane
said he had been feeling like that for some time, and was taking to the
woods before he expressed his disgust by killing some one.
Therefore, the job on the top of Jerusalem that fell to him quite
naturally, after his many years' sojourn as a recluse at its foot, was a
job that fitted admirably with his scheme of life.
"And it looks up there like it must have looked when Noah said, 'All
ashore that's goin' ashore,' on Mount Ariat, or wherever 'twas he
throwed anchor," announced Tommy Eye, of Britt's crew, returning once
from a Sunday trip to the fire station.
For, painfully acquired, with gouges, clawings, and scratches to show
for it all, "Ladder" Lane had accumulated companions of his loneliness,
to wit:
One bull moose, captured in calfhood in deep snow; two bear cubs; a
raccoon; a three-legged bobcat, victim of an excited hunter; two horned
owls; and a fisher cat.
On this menagerie, variously tethered or crated in sapling cages, the
visitor with the disabled arm bestowed a contemptuous side glance while
he blinked at the tall figure on the cabin's flat roof.
Without haste Lane worked himself through the roof-scuttle like an
angle-worm drawing into his hole; without cordiality he appeared at the
cabin door, lounging out into the sunshine.
"I suppose you are still doing the second-hand swearing for Britt,
MacLeod," he suggested.
The young man grunted.
"How did ye hurt your arm? Britt chaw it?"
"Peavy-stick flipped on me," growled the young man, willing to hide his
humiliation from at least one person in the world--and the hermit of the
Jerusalem station seemed to be the only one sufficiently isolated.
"Huh! I thought his name was Wade." There was no spirit of jest in the
tone. The old man surveyed him sourly. "That's what the Attean helio
said."
"Is that what you use them things for--to pass gossip like an old maid's
quiltin'-bee?"
"There's a good deal in this world in letting a man place his own self
where he belongs," remarked Lane, with calm conviction. "I've let you
prove yourself a liar."
He turned and went into the cabin and back up the stairs to the roof,
picking up a huge telescope as he went. Something in the valley seemed
to have attracted his attention. MacLeod followed, his face red, oaths
clucking in his throat.
In the nearer middle ground of the great plat of country below Patch Dam
heath was set into the green of the forest like a medallion of rusty
tin. To the west of it smoke began to puff above the tree-tops.
"On Misery," mumbled Lane, his long arms steadying his instrument. Then,
with the caution of a man of method, he went into the scuttle-hole and
secured his range-finder.
"What's the good of tinker-fuddlin' with that thing?" demanded MacLeod;
"it's on Misery, as you said."
"Two hundred and fifty-nine degrees," muttered the fire-scout, booking
the figures in his dog's-eared diary.
"Say, about that fire, Mr. Lane," blurted MacLeod, nervously. "I'm up
here to-day by Mr. Britt's orders to tell you not to report it. It's on
Misery Gore, and he's there looking after it, and it ain't goin' to be
worth while to report. I know all about it, and that's the truth."
Lane, without bestowing a glance on the speaker, was setting up his
heliograph tripod. At the young man's last words he grunted over his
shoulder:
"So it was a peavy-stick! But they told me his name was Wade."
"Now you look here," stormed the timber baron's boss, "you can slur all
you want to about my lyin', but I tell you, Lane, this is straight
goods. You report that fire, after the orders you've got from Britt, and
you'll lose your job. I know what I'm talkin' about."
Lane kneeled, his thin trousers hanging over his slender shanks like
cloth over broomsticks. MacLeod stifled an inclination to take him in
one hand and snap him like a whip-lash. The old man was peering through
the centre hole in the sun-mirror, bringing his disks into alignment.
"Britt has got orders from the court, and he's there to put the Skeets
and Bushees out and torch off their shacks. That's all there is to that
fire, Lane, and Britt don't want a stir and hoorah made about it. He
told me to tell you that. He says the cussed newspapers get a word here
and a word there, and they're always ready to string out a lot of lies
about King Spruce and wild-landers, and how they abuse settlers, and all
that rot--and it hurts prominent men, like Mr. Britt and his associates,
because folks get wrong ideas from the papers. Now you know that! Don't
report that fire, Lane."
It was fulsome appeal and eager appeal, and MacLeod was apparently
obeying some very emphatic orders from his superior, who had supplied
language as well as directions of procedure.
But the old fire-warden kept on with his preparations, exact, careful,
without haste.
"He said you understood--Britt did," clamored MacLeod, hastening around
in front of the heliograph. "You know it ain't right to have those
people there in this dry time, with all that slash about 'em. Mr. Britt
will make it all right with them--the same as the land-owners always do.
It will be the papers that will lie and call the land-owners names for
the sake of stirrin' up a sensation about leadin' men--makin' politics
out of it, and gettin' the people prejudiced so as to put more taxes
onto wild lands." More of Britt's ammunition! "Mr. Britt said you'd
understand--and you do understand--and you can't report that fire."
Lane set his gaunt grasp about the handle of the screen, ready to tilt
it for the first flash.
"I understand just this, MacLeod--that I'm a fire-warden of the State,
sworn to do my duty as my duty is spread before me." He swept his left
arm in impressive gesture. "Look behind you! Do you see that?"
Smoke was ballooning from the notch of the woods below them. Round puffs
seemed to be dancing in fantastic ballet from tree-top to tree-top.
"That's a fire, MacLeod. I take no man's say-so as to what and why. That
may be Pulaski Britt smoking a cigar. It may be Jule Skeet's new spring
bonnet on fire. I don't care what it is. It's a fire, and it's going to
be reported. Stand out of range."
His code-card was in the top of his hat. He waved the headgear
impatiently at MacLeod, his right hand still on the handle of the
screen.
MacLeod knew what the orders of Pulaski D. Britt meant. Britt had not
hesitated to rely upon the loyalty of "Ladder" Lane, for Britt, when
State senator, had caused Lane to be appointed to the post on Jerusalem.
MacLeod reflected, with fury rising like flame from the steady glow of
his contemptuous resentment at this old recalcitrant, that Pulaski Britt
would never make allowance for failure under these circumstances. To be
sure, that fire yonder didn't look like a carefully conducted
incineration of the dwellings of Misery Gore, and it was a little ahead
of time--that time being set for the calm of early evening. But orders
from Britt were--to his men--orders from the supreme tribunal.
"Britt put you here!" stuttered MacLeod.
"I'm working for the State, not Pulaski D. Britt," replied the old man.
"And I'm working for Britt, and, by ---- he runs the State in these
parts! Him and you and the State can settle it between you later, but
just now"--he swung to one side, leaned back, and drove his foot with
all the venom of his repressed rage against the apparatus--"that fire
report don't go!"
"Ladder" Lane, serene in his proud conjuration, "The State," had
expected no such enormity. The heliograph skated on its spider legs,
went over the edge of the roof, and, after a hushed moment of drop,
crashed upon the ledge with shiver and tinkle of flying glass.
The boss of "Britt's Busters" turned and darted through the scuttle and
down the stairs, excusing this flight to himself on the ground of his
out-of-commission arm.
He leaped out into the sunshine and clattered away over the ledges, the
spikes in his shoes striking sparks.
He had made half a dozen rods when he heard the old man scream "Halt!"
MacLeod kept on, with a taunting wave of his well hand above his head.
The next moment a rifle barked, and the bullet chipped the ledge in
front of him.
"The next one bores you in the back, MacLeod!"
He stopped then, and whirled in his tracks.
Lane stood at the edge of his roof, his rifle-butt at his cheek.
"Come back here!"
"You ain't got the right to hold me up, Lane. I'll have the law on ye!"
"Come back here!"
There was a grate in the tone, a menace not to be braved.
The young man shuffled slowly towards the cabin, roaring oaths and
insults to which Lane deigned no reply.
MacLeod did not try to run when the warden disappeared for his trip to
the door. He waited sullenly.
Near the door was a good-sized, empty cage of strong saplings, built in
"Ladder" Lane's abundant leisure, for the reception of any new candidate
for the menagerie. The old man jerked his head sideways at it. There was
a gap of three saplings in the side, and the poles stood there ready to
be set in.
"I won't be penned that way!" yelled MacLeod. "I ain't no raccoon!"
But the bitter visage of the warden, the merciless flash of his gray
eyes, and the glint of the rifle-barrel, swinging into line with his
face, combined with the sudden remembrance that it was hinted that
"Ladder" Lane was not always right in his head, drove the stubborn
courage out of MacLeod. He slunk rather than walked into the cage with
the mien of a whipped beast. The old man set the saplings one by one
into place, and nailed them with vigorous hammer-blows.
"How long have I got to stay here, Lane?" he pleaded.
"Till I can turn you over to them who will put you where you belong for
destroying State's property and interfering with a State officer."
The old man turned away and gazed out over the forest stretches between
Jerusalem and Misery. MacLeod, clutching the bars of his cage with his
left hand, looked, too.
It was no puny torching of the Misery huts that he was looking on, and
he realized it with growing apprehensiveness as to his zeal in
suppressing news.
Vast volumes of yellow smoke volleyed up over the crowns of the green
growth. It was a racing fire--even those on Jerusalem could see that
much across the six miles between. Spirals waved ahead like banners of a
charging army. Its front broadened as the fire troops deployed to the
flanks. Ahead and ever ahead fresh smoke-puffings marked the advance of
the skirmish-line. Now here, now there, drove the cavalry charges of the
conflagration, following slash-strewn roads and cuttings, while the dun
smoke ripped the green of the maples and beeches.
"It's liable to interest Pulaski D. Britt somewhat when he finds out why
Jerusalem lookout ain't callin' for a fire-posse," Lane remarked,
bitterly.
The situation seemed to overwhelm the boss. He looked with straining
gaze at the rush of the conflagration, and had no word for reply.
"But it may not all be loss for you," the old man proceeded, grimly.
"Perhaps the girl will be burned up--perhaps that was in your trade with
Britt."
"I don't know what you mean about any girl," mumbled MacLeod, looking
away from the old man's boring eyes.
"You're a liar again as well as a dirty whelp of a sneak."
Lane spat the words over his shoulder, stumping away, the bristle of his
gray beard standing out like an angry porcupine's quills.
"I don't allow anybody to put them words on me!" roared MacLeod.
"You don't, heh?" Lane whirled and stumped back. He bent down and set
his face close to the saplings, his eyes narrowing like a cat's, his
nose wrinkling in mighty anger. "You can steal time paid for by Pulaski
D. Britt, and hang around Misery Gore, and coax on an ignorant girl into
a worse hell than she's living in now"--he pointed a quivering finger at
the smoke-wreathed valley--"when you know and I know, and everyone on
these mountain-tops of the Umcolcus knows and gossips it with the
settlements, that you've picked her up only to throw her farther into
the wallow where you found her. It's the Ide girl you're courtin'. It's
poor little Kate of Misery that you're killin'. There isn't another man
in the north woods mean enough to steal from a girl as poor as she
is--steal love and hope and faith. It's all she's got, MacLeod, and
you've taken all."
The young man grunted a sullen oath.
"There's a lot I could say to you," raged Lane, "but I ain't going to
waste time doing it. I'll simply express my opinion of you by--"
He spat squarely into the convulsed face of MacLeod, and went away into
his cabin.
CHAPTER X
"LADDER" LANE'S SOIREE
"And down from off the mountains in the shooting sheets of flame
The devils of Katahdin come to play their reg'lar game.
So 'tis: men hold tight! Pray for mornin' light!
Katahdin's caves are empty and hell's broke loose to-night!"
--Ha'nt of Pamola.
As the hours of the day went on, Colin MacLeod, caged, helpless, set
high on the bald brow of old Jerusalem, where every phase of the great
fire was spread before his eyes, found abundant opportunity to curse
himself for a fool. In time, of course, Attean or some other point would
realize the extent of the conflagration and call for help. But now,
hidden under Jerusalem and confined to the slash under the green trees,
it was a racing ground-fire that crouched and ran. It came rapidly, but
in a measure secretly. It showed a subtility of selection. It did not
waste time on the green forest of beeches and maples. It was hurrying
north towards its traditional prey. That prey was waiting for it, rooted
on the slopes of Jerusalem and the Umcolcus, on the Attean and the
Enchanted--the towering black growth of hemlock, pine, and spruce--the
apple of Pulaski Britt's commercial eye--the hope of his associates.
Once there, it would spring from its crouching race on the ground. It
would climb the resinous trunks and torch and flare and rage and roar
in the tinder-tops--a dreaded "crown-fire" that only the exhaustion of
fuel or the rains of God would stop.
Attean would see that fire leaping past Jerusalem, and would swear and
wonder and report too late.
Just now hours were as precious as days.
Men could do nothing at mid-day with the wind lashing behind. MacLeod
knew well how that fire should be fought. But with men on the way ready
to flank it at nightfall and work ahead of it with pick and shovel and
beating branches of green--the winds stilled and the dews condensing--it
could be conquered--it must be conquered then, if at all.
Woods fires sleep at night. The men who fight them may as well sleep at
mid-day.
With the dropping of the sun and the sinking of the winds the fires
drowse and flicker and smoulder. Then must one attack the monster; for
at daybreak he is up, ravening and roaring and hungry.
And now--not even Britt's own crew of loggers at the foot of Jerusalem
had word and warning. MacLeod bellowed appeals to be let out. He
besought Lane to hurry down the mountain to camp. He howled frightful
oaths and threats and abject promises.
At dusk the old man came out of his cabin, and brought bread and water
and bacon to his captive without a word. He fed him with as much
unconcern as he brought browse to the tethered bull moose and
distributed provender suited to the various tastes of his menagerie.
The darkness settled in the valleys first, and one by one fire-dottings
pricked out--blazing junipers and the stunted new growth of evergreen.
From Jerusalem the great expanse seemed like a mighty city, its windows
alight, its streets and avenues illuminated gloriously.
MacLeod, silenced except for an occasional hoarse quack of appeal, paced
his little cage, despairing.
"Ladder" Lane sat on the flat roof silent as a spectre. So the hours
dragged past.
"I thought so!" grunted the old man at last. "That's what I've been
sitting up for."
From his eyry he saw a light flickering in the stunted growth far down
Jerusalem, zigzagging nearer. At last it emerged and came across the
ledges--a flare of hissing birch bark stuck into a cleft stick. There
were several men hastening along in the circle of its radiance. Lane
could hear from afar their gruntings of exhaustion.
"If I ain't mistook, it's your friend Britt," remarked the old man,
maliciously, as he passed MacLeod's cage on his way to meet the
visitors.
And it was Britt--Britt with his hat in his hand, perspiration streaming
into his beard, his stertorous breath rumbling in his throat. Lane knew
the man who bore the torch as Bennett Rodliff, high sheriff of the
county.
"It's been--God!--awful work--but we've--come round the east--edge of
it, Lane," panted Britt. Commanding general in the grim conflict, he had
been willing to burst his heart in order to establish headquarters in
the one spot from which he could mobilize his forces and direct their
tactics. "How many men have you ordered in, Lane?"
"Not a man!"
"Not a--not a--you stand there and tell me you haven't reported and
called for every man that Attean and Squaw can reach!" He began to curse
shrilly.
"You'd better save your wire edge, Mr. Britt," counselled Lane. "You're
going to need it. Come here till I show you something."
One of the sheriff's men lighted a fresh sheet of bark at the dying
flare of the other, and Lane led the way to the cage, where MacLeod
peered desperately between the saplings.
"Just a moment, Mr. Britt!" broke in the warden, again checking the
lumber baron's fury. "This man came up here to-day with what he said
were your orders not to report that fire, and--"
"That fire!" roared Britt, fairly beside himself. "Why, you devilish,
infernal--"
"A moment, I say! When I set up my heliograph he kicked it off the roof.
There it lies just as it fell. You and he can settle your part of it! As
for my part of it, I have arrested him by my authority as a fire warden.
The sheriff, here, can take him whenever he gives me a receipt and makes
note of my complaint."
"I did what you told me to, Mr. Britt," protested MacLeod, his voice
breaking. "He was reportin' the first puff of smoke, and said that you
and your orders could go to thunder. He didn't pay any attention--and I
just did what you told me to. I--"
"Shut up!" The Honorable Pulaski, crimson with anger, fearful of his own
part in this conspiracy, and shamed by the exposure of his methods,
bellowed his order. "We'll settle this later. Knock away those saplings,
some one. MacLeod, get down this mountain, even if you break your neck
doing it, and get your crew to the front of that fire! I--I--h
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