King Spruce, A Novel

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:

“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

“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

“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.