King Spruce, A Novel

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:

“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 retroussé), 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:

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

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

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.