King Spruce, A Novel

CHAPTER XII

“Here’s the warden from Jerusalem, Mr. Barrett. I done the honors of camp the best I could, seein’ that you and Mr. Withee wa’n’t here.” In mentioning honors, the cook had one lingering hope that the stumpage-king would share his flask with a State employé, and that he himself might participate as one present and one willing.

But the timber baron did not turn his head. He stirred sugar in his whiskey and growled.

“Do fire wardens up this way earn their pay, sleeping, like cats, in the daytime?”

Lane had stepped just inside the door, his moccasins noiseless on the shaved poles.

“How near is that fire to the black growth, and how are they fighting it?” demanded Barrett.

“It started on Misery”—Lane began, in the same tone that had characterized his former reports.

But at his first word Barrett jerked his head around, stared wildly, stood up, and then sat down astride the wooden bench. With his eyes still on the man at the door, he fumbled for the pannikin of whiskey and gulped it down. Lane went on talking.

“And if they can get enough men ahead of it perhaps they can stop it in Pogey Notch,” Lane concluded.

The hands that clutched the gun trembled, but his eyes were steady, with a red sparkle in them. The lumber king endured that stare for a few moments, like one writhing under the torture of a focussed sun-glass. He glanced to right and left, as though seeking a chance for flight. The only exit was the door, and the tall, grim man stood there with his rifle across his arm.

“Say it, Lane! Say it!” hoarsely cried Barrett, at last, unable to endure the silence and the doubt.

“I have nothing to say—not now,” said Lane. “I’ll wait here until you eat your supper. My lantern is hanging on the nail there, cook. Will you fill it and light it?”

There was a subtle, strange menace in his bearing that the cook and Withee, staring, their mouths gaping, could not understand. But it was plain that the man at the table understood all too well.

“Why didn’t you take it when I sent you the offer?” asked Barrett, his voice beginning to tremble. “I wanted to settle. It was up to me to settle. It was a bad business, Lane, but I—”

“It’s a private matter you’re opening up here before listeners, Mr. Barrett,” broke in Lane. “It’s my business with you, and you haven’t got the right to do it. Just now you go ahead and eat your supper. You’ll need it, for you’re going to take a walk with me.”

In his perturbation, forced to eat, as it seemed, by the quiet insistence of the warden, Barrett swallowed a few mouthfuls of food. But he cowered, with side glances at the grim man by the door. Then he pushed his plate away, choking. Maddened by the silent watchfulness, he stood up.

“I’ll see you in the office,” he muttered. “I’ll tell you now and before witnesses that I’m ready to settle. I’ve always been ready to settle. It would have been settled long ago if you had let my man talk with you. Now, let’s not have any trouble, Lane, over what’s past and gone. I’ll do anything that’s reasonable.”

He shot an appealing glance at Withee.

“We’ll take Withee with us,” he declared. “We’ll talk in the office.”

“We’ll talk under no roof of yours and on no land belonging to you,” answered Lane, firmly. “We’ll talk private matters before no third party. If you’re done your supper, Mr. Barrett, you’ll come with me where we can stand out man to man in God’s open country with no peekers and listeners—and that’s more for your sake than it is for mine. I’ve done nothing in this life that I’m ashamed of.”

“Do you take me for a fool?” roared the land baron, hiding fear under an assumption of his usual manner. “Do you think I’m going into the woods alone with you?”

“You are, Mr. Barrett.”

“By ——, I won’t!”

“I’m no hand for a threat,” grated Lane, in a low, strange voice, “but you’ll come with me. You know why you’ll come with me, because you know what I’m likely to do to you if you don’t come.”

Barrett looked past the man at the door. The dingle was full of crowding faces, for the altercation had called every man out. There was some consolation for Barrett in the spectacle of this silent, wondering mob. After all, he was on his own land, and these men must acknowledge him as their master.

“Here! a hundred dollars apiece to the men who grab that lunatic and take that rifle away from him!” he shouted, darting a quivering finger at the warden. But before any one made a move Withee stepped forward into the lamplight. With open, waving palm he imposed non-interference on his crew.

“Hold on, Mr. Barrett,” said he. “Before we run into trouble by arresting a man that’s an officer, we want to know whys and wherefores.”

“Don’t you know why he wants to make me go away into the woods?” bawled the lumber king.

“We can’t very well know without bein’ told,” replied Withee, and an answering grumble from his men indorsed him.

“He wants to murder me—murder me in cold blood!” Barrett fairly screamed this. “I know what his reason is,” he added, seeing that their faces showed no conviction.

“I’ve known Linus Lane ever since he came into this region,” said Withee, breaking the awed hush that followed the baron’s startling words. “I never knew him to be anything but peaceable and square. A little speck odd, maybe, but quiet and peaceable and square. Most of the men here know him that way, too.”

Another answering mumble of assent.

“Odd!” echoed Barrett, grasping at the suggestion. “You’ve said it. He’s a lunatic. He will kill me.”

“What for?” called the chopping-boss, bluntly. His natural desire to get at the meat of things quickly was stimulated by ardent curiosity.

“You are all sticking your noses into a matter that doesn’t belong to you!” cried Lane, his well-known crustiness showing itself, though it was evident that he was hiding some deeper emotion. “I want this man to go with me. It’s business. And he’s going!” His voice was almost a snarl, but there was a resoluteness in the tone that awed them more than violence would have done.

“Are you going to give me up to a murderer?” bleated Barrett, for his study of the faces in the lamplight did not reassure him.

“Hadn’t you better let us step out, and you talk your business over with him right here, Linus?” inquired Withee, conciliatingly.

“He’s going with me, and he’s going now!” shouted Lane, his repression breaking. “The man that gets in our way will get hurt.”

He banged his rifle-butt on the floor, and those who looked on him shrank before his awful rage.

“Put on your hat, Barrett, and walk out!” he shrilled. “Make way, there! This is my man, by —— and he knows in his dirty heart why he’s mine.”

But Barnum Withee’s quiet woodsman’s soul was not of a nature to be intimidated, and his instincts of fairness, when it was between man and man, had been made acute by many years of woods adjudication.

“Hold on a minute, Linus!” he entreated, stepping between the two men with upraised hand. “You are both under my roof, and you’ve both eaten my bread to-day. I never got between men in a fair, square quarrel. I won’t now. But you’ve got a gun, and he hasn’t. I don’t want to know your business. But if there’s trouble between you it’s got to be settled fair. You can’t drag a man out of my camp to do him dirty—and it would be the same if it was only young Harry there that you were tryin’ to take.”

“Good talk!” yelled the boss.

“I’ll give a hundred dollars—” began Barrett, seeing the advantage swinging his way; but Withee broke in with indignation.

“No more of that talk, Mr. Barrett!” he cried. “I’ll run my own crew when it comes to pay or to orders. Now, Warden Lane, what are you going to do with this man when you get him where you want to take him?”

“I don’t know!” snapped Lane, to the amazement of his listeners. And he added, enigmatically, “I can tell better after I’ve asked him some questions.”

“Ain’t you ready to tell us that you’ll use him man-fashion?” persisted Withee.

The deep emotion which “Ladder” Lane had been trying to hide whetted the bitterness of his usual attitude towards mankind.

“I’m not ready to let any fool mix himself into my affairs. We’ve argued this question long enough, John Barrett. Now you—step—out!” He leaped aside from the door, cocked the rifle, and motioned angrily with its muzzle.

“Stay right where you are, Mr. Barrett,” said the old operator, resolutely. “I’ll stand for fair play.”

“And you’ll get your pay for it, Withee, my friend!” stuttered his creditor, eagerly. “I don’t forget favors. You stand by me, and you’ll get your pay.”

“I haven’t anything to sell, Mr. Barrett,” said Withee, doggedly.

“But I’ve got something to give you,” persisted the frightened magnate, edging near him, and striving to hint confidentially. “You stand by me, and when it comes to contracts—”

“I’m not buyin’ anything, Mr. Barrett!” He signalled the lumber king back with protesting palm. “I’m simply tellin’ Lane that he can’t take a man out of my camp to do him dirty. And in that there’s no fear and no favor!”

Lane gazed at the determined face of the operator and at the massing men who crowded at the door, and whose nods gave emphatic approval of Withee’s dictum. No one knew better than he the code of the woods; no one understood more thoroughly the quixotic prejudices and simple impulses which moved the isolated communities of the camps. Just then they would not have surrendered Barrett to an army, and Lane realized it.

The eyes focussed on him saw the tense ridges of his seamed face tighten and the gray of an awful passion settle there.

“After all the rest of it, you’re forcing me to stand here and put it in words, are you, you sneak?” he yelped, thrusting that boding visage towards the timber baron. “You’re hiding behind these men! Well, let’s see how long they’ll stand in front of you! You’ve got to have ’em hear it, eh? Then you listen to it, woodsmen!” His voice broke suddenly into a frightful yell. “He stole my wife! He stole her! I say he stole her! That’s what I want of him, now that he’s here where I can meet him in God’s open country, plain man to plain man!”

“He’s lying to you,” quavered Barrett. But his eyes shifted, and the keen and candid gaze of the woodsmen detected his paltering.

“I was away earning an honest living, and he came along with his airs and his money and fooled her and stole her—stole her and threw her away. It was play for him; it was death for her, and damnation for me. I ain’t blaming her, men”—his voice had a sob in it—“she was too young for me. I ought to have known better. Our little house was on his land that he had stolen from the people of this State. Then he came and stole her!”

He was now close to Barrett, his bony fist slashing the air over the baron’s shrinking head.

“It wasn’t that way,” stammered Barrett. “I was up there with some friends fishing and exploring on my lands. It was years ago. The young woman cooked meals for us. I went farther north to some other townships of mine, and she went along to take care of camp. That’s all there was to it, men!” He spread out his palms and tried to smile.

“You stole her!” iterated Lane. “I came home, men, and she was gone out of our little house. I found just four walls, cold and empty, the key under the rug, and a letter on the table—and I’ve got that letter, John Barrett! And when you were tired of her up there in the woods you tossed her away like you tossed the lemon-skins out of your whiskey-glass. You didn’t wait to see where she fell—she and your child—your child! Curse you, Barrett, I’ve never wanted to meet you! I sent word to you to keep out of these woods. I sent that word by the man you asked to bribe me—as though your money could do everything for you in this world! You thought you could sneak in here after all these years, because I was tied on the top of Jerusalem. But I’m here! What do you think, men? The fire that is roaring up from Misery township was set by this man’s own daughter—the child that he tossed away in the woods. You that know the Skeets and Bushees know her. She set the fire! That’s why I’m here. It’s his child—his and hers. I don’t know whether heaven or hell planned it, but now that I’ve met you, Barrett, you’re going with me!”

He strode back to the door and stood there, the rifle again across the hook of his arm. His flaming eyes swept the faces in the dingle. Their eyes gave him a message that his woodsman’s soul interpreted.

“There’s the truth for you, men, since you had to have it!” he shouted. “Once more I’m going to say to John Barrett—‘Step out.’ And if there’s still a man among you that wants to keep that hound in this camp I’d like to have that man stand out and say why.”

There was not a whisper from the throng. They stood gazing into the door with lips apart. Silently they crowded back, as though to afford free passage.

Barrett noted the movement and wailed his terror.

“It means trouble for you, Withee, if you let him take me.”

The old operator surveyed him with a lowering and disgusted stare.

“Mr. Barrett,” he said, “I’ve told you that I have nothing to sell. All that I want to buy of you is stumpage, and I’ve got your figures on that and your opinion of me. I don’t ask you to change anything.” He turned away, muttering, “He’ll have to think pretty hard if he can do anything more to me than what he’s already threatened to do.”

Calm once more, and inexorable as fate, Lane motioned towards the door.

“My final word, Barrett: March!”

As he gazed into the faces about him, not one gleam of friendliness anywhere, desperation or a flicker of courage spurred the magnate. In that moment John Barrett had none of the adventitious aids of his autocracy—none of the bulwarks of “Castle Cut ’Em.” He was only a man among them—fairly demanded by another man to settle a matter of the sort where primordial instinct prompts a universal code. He drove his hat on his head and strode through the door, his head bent.

Lane took his lighted lantern from the cook’s hand and followed. He had his teeth set tight, as though resolved to say no more. But at the edge of the camp’s lamplight he whirled and faced the crew. Barrett halted, too, as though hoping for some intervention.

“Look here, men,” said Lane, “I want to thank you for being men in this thing. And seeing that you’ve been square with me I don’t want to go away from here leaving any wrong idea behind me. I don’t know just what’s going to happen between this man and me, for a good deal depends on him. But you’ve known me long enough to know that I’m not the crust-hunting kind that cuts a deer’s throat when he’s helpless. You put your confidence in me when you put this man in my hands. And I’ll say to you, I’ll do the best I know!”

“We ain’t givin’ any advice to you that knows your business better’n we do,” called out the boss of the choppers. “But let it be man to man—good woods style!”

“Good woods style!” echoed the crew, in hoarse chorus. It was plain that their minds were dwelling on only one solution of the difficulty.

Lane stepped back and set the rifle against the log wall. “I was near forgetting,” he said, apologetically. “I’m so used to carrying a rifle. This belongs here.”

“Take it,” suggested Withee, with a touch of grimness in his tones.

“I don’t need it,” Lane answered, quietly. He whirled and started away, and Barrett sullenly preceded him. They clambered up the valley wall, the pale lantern-light tossing against the hemlock boughs. The crew of “Lazy Tom” watched in silence until the last flicker vanished among the trees of the Jerusalem trail.

“Well,” said the chopping-boss, drawing a long breath, “it appears to me that there are some things that money can’t do for old ‘Stumpage John,’ big as he is in this world! One is, he’s found he can’t buy up the ‘Lazy Tom’ crew to back him in a dirty job of woman-stealin’.”

“I’d like to be there when it happens,” panted “Dirty-apron Harry,” excitedly.

“When what happens?” demanded the boss.

“Well—well—I—I dunno!” confessed Harry.

“Umph!” snorted the boss, “now you’re talkin’ as though you know ‘Ladder’ Lane as well as I know him. The man who can stand here and tell what old Lane is goin’ to do next can prophesy earthquakes and have ’em happen.”

He pulled out his watch.

“Nine o’clock!” he roared. “Lights out and turn in!”

CHAPTER XIII

When he faced once more the smother of the smoke and the man who stood over him, he seemed to have a flash of new courage. His eyes blazed again, his rumpled gray hair seemed to bristle.

But his defiance was only the desperation of the coward at bay.

“You’ve teamed me all night, Lane—from Withee’s camp to here. I have asked questions, and you haven’t answered me; but now, by ——, say what you want of me, and let’s have this thing over!”

It was an air that would have cowed an inferior in John Barrett’s office in the city, where tyranny swelled the folds of a frock-coat and was framed in the door of a money vault.

But this weary man in knickerbockers, his puffy face mottled by the hues of self-indulgence and haggard after a night of ceaseless tramping along a woods trail, was not an object of awe as he squatted beside the pool like a giant frog.

The woodsman who stood over him, his gaunt face seamed and brown, his bony frame erect to the height that had won him the sobriquet of “Ladder” Lane, seemed now the man of dignity and authority. He was of the woods. He was in the woods. Two nights without sleep, miles of bitter struggle through the forest to report that conflagration roaring north to Misery township, and now puffing its stifling breath upon them, and the agony of recollection that John Barrett’s crossing his path had dragged out—all these gave no sign in “Ladder” Lane’s features and mien. Even his voice was steady with a repression almost humble.

What John Barrett did not know was that this humbleness was that of one who stood in the presence of a mighty problem, awed by it. In the long hours of self-communion, as he had plodded on, driving the timber baron before him, he had pondered that problem until his weary brain reeled. Introspection had always made his simple nature dizzy.

Now the tumult and torment in his soul frightened him. Over and over again in the darkness of the night, as he had followed at the heels of Barrett, he had whispered, in a half-frightened manner, to himself: “I told him to keep away! And now he’s here!”

He had looked at the back of the man, stumbling ahead of him in the lantern-light, and had pitied him in a sort of dull, wondering fashion. He had pitied him because he knew that Barrett, despoiler of his home, seducer of his wife, was helpless in his hands. And because “Ladder” Lane realized that grief and isolation had made him over into such a one as sane men flout or fear, he was afraid of himself.

“This here is as good a place as any, Mr. Barrett,” he said.

By striving to be calm, even to the point of being humble, Lane tried to tame the dreadful beast that he knew his inner being had become. But Barrett, pricking his ears at this humbleness, was too foolish to understand. In the mystery of the night he had feared cruelly. With day to reinforce his prestige, it occurred to him that the man was cowed by his presence and by the reflection that a person of influence cannot be kidnapped with impunity.

“I can make it hot for you, Lane, for dragging me out of camp and running me all over creation,” he blustered, grasping at what he considered his opportunity to regain mastery. “But I’m willing to settle and call quits. I’ve always been ready to settle. Now, out with it, man-fashion! How much will it take?”

Another of those red flashes from the sullen coals of many and long years’ hatred roared up in Lane like the torching of a pitch-tree. He had been trying for hours to beat those flashes down, for they made him afraid.

He trembled, blinking hard to see past the red. His hands fumbled nervously at his sides, as though seeking something that they could seize upon for steadiness. If the wind would only blow upon his face—a wind of the woods, clear, cool, and hale—he felt that he might get his grip on manhood once more.

But the woods sent up to him only the fire-breath. It whispered destruction.

If he only could look up to a bit of blue sky he felt that it might charm the red flare from his eyes.

But the yellow pall that masked the sky was the hue of combat, not peace.

All out-doors seemed full of menace. The nostrils found only bitter air. The smarting eyes saw only the sickly yellow. A normal man would have cursed at the oppression of it all, without exactly knowing why every nerve was on the rack. The recluse of Jerusalem Mountain, out of gear with all the world, with mind diseased by the chronic obsession of bitter injury, stood there under the glowering sky of that day of ravage and ruin, and felt himself becoming a madman. And yet he set a single idea before him for realization, and tried to keep his gaze on that alone, and to be calm. And the idea was an idea of forcing an atonement. How crudely conceived, Lane could not realize, for his mind was passing the stage of clear comprehension.

“I probably haven’t got enough money with me,” went on the timber baron, sullenly. “But my word is good in a matter like this. I don’t want it talked about—you don’t want it talked about. I’ll overlook—you’ll overlook! Give me your figures, and you’ll get every dollar.”

And still Lane was calm, and replied in a voice that quavered from an emotion that Barrett failed to understand.

“When you stole my wife away, Mr. Barrett, there were men that came to me and advised me what they would do if a rich man came along and took a woman from them, just to amuse himself for a little.”

“There are people trying to stick their noses into business that doesn’t concern them, Lane,” snorted the baron, regardless that one edge of this apothegm threatened himself.

“I’ve been alone a good deal since it happened,” went on Lane, in a curious, dull monotone, “and I’ve spent most of my time thinking what I’d say to you and do to you if you stood before me. I hoped it never would happen that you’d stand before me, man to man. I didn’t hunt you up to find out what I’d do or say, for I was afraid.”

He shivered, and Barrett, in his fool’s blindness, stiffened his shoulders with a sudden air of importance, and allowed himself to scowl with a suggestion that perhaps Lane was wise to avoid him.

“You see, I was always making it end up in my mind that I should kill you. There didn’t seem to be any other natural end to it. I had to kill you to square it. And that’s why I was afraid. It was always one way in my thoughts. I never could—never can plan out any other way to end it; and murder is an awful thing, sir.”

Barrett, who had been straightening, crouched farther back on his haunches and lost his important air.

“In my thoughts I always gave you half an hour to think it over, and stayed looking at you, and then killed you.” There was a sudden convulsion of Lane’s features, a smoulder in his eyes, that thrilled Barrett as though some one had whispered in his ear—“Lunatic.”

The warden’s groping hands had clutched the heavy lineman’s climbers dangling from his belt, and were now set about them so tightly that muscles were ridged on the bony surface. Barrett became gray with fear. But Lane’s ferocity disappeared as suddenly as it had flared.

“It all goes to show that in this world most men don’t do what they think they’ll do, when it comes to a big matter. I don’t want to kill you, now that I have you where I want you.” He looked down on the frightened man with a sort of pitying scorn. “It would be like batting a sheep to death. I don’t want even to talk about your taking her away. It—it chokes in my throat! She’s dead—and I guess she wanted to go away with you that time or she wouldn’t have gone. That’s just the way it seems to me now! And that’s why I don’t want to talk about it. It seems funny to feel that way, after all the thinking I’ve done about what I would do to you.”

“The idea is, you’re taking the sensible, business man’s view of it,” stammered Barrett. “I was young then, and up here in the woods, and—oh, as you say, it is better not to talk it over. We all make mistakes.” He was pulling his wallet out of his corduroy coat. He evidently felt that the sight of money would prolong this “sensible, business man’s view” of the situation. He did not want to take any more chances that the other and vengeful view would return, which had shown its flame in Lane’s contorted face. “Now, I’ve got here—”

“To hell with your dirty money!” shrieked the warden, in a frenzy that was a veritable explosion out of his calmness. He kicked the wallet from the hands of the amazed timber baron. And when Barrett tried to stammer something, Lane leaned down and yelled, cracking his fists in the other’s shrinking face:

“That’s the way you and your kind want to cure everything—a dollar bill greased with a grin and stuck onto the sore place! Put that kind of a plaster on your city sneaks if you want to. But do you think I want it—here?” He swung his arm in a huge gesture and embraced the woods. “Your money is no good, John Barrett—here!” Another sweep of the long arm. Then he stooped and scrabbled up a handful of dry leaves. He pushed them into Barrett’s face. “Here, sell me your soul and your decency for that! You won’t? Why not? You get your handfuls of greasy money just as easy! You only grab out and take! I don’t sell for any stuff that’s come at as easy as that.”

“Say what you want, Lane,” stuttered the timber baron, huddling back from this madman.

“You’ll pay in the way I’ll tell you to pay,” raged the creditor, thrusting his fierce face close. “You’ll pay out of your pride and your heart instead of your pocket. That’s the kind of coin you’ve stripped me of! You stole my wife. She’s dead. Settle your accounts with her in hell when you meet her there. But the girl—your young one—yours and hers—that you threw into the woods like you’d leave a blind kitten—”

“She was left with people who were paid well—” Barrett broke in, but Lane slapped him across the mouth.

“I know where she was left—left with a nest of skunks, so that you could hide your disgrace in the woods. I’ve watched her all these years. I’ve been waiting for the right time to come. It’s here. Your girl is up there on the top of Jerusalem Mountain in my camp, Barrett. An idiot—a dog on two legs—is guarding her. He’s the only friend she’s got. That’s your daughter. Now, you’re going to take her!”

“Take her?” echoed the cringing millionaire.

“Take her—that’s what I said. It belongs to her. Now give it to her.”

Barrett misinterpreted Lane’s interest. His face lighted with a sudden thought that to him seemed a happy one.

“Look here, Lane,” he said, eagerly, “I didn’t realize but what the girl was getting on all right. I ought to have inquired. But I didn’t dare to. A man in my position has to be careful. Now she needs some one to take care of her. I’ll admit it. I’m sorry it hasn’t been attended to before. Let this matter rest between us two without any stir. I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to act as the girl’s guardian. Take her out of these woods. And I’ll put ten thousand more at interest for her.”

“I take that spawn—I take her?” demanded Lane, beating his thin hand on his breast. “I’d as soon pick up a wood adder! Take her—the living reminder of what’s made me what I am? Do you suppose I hate you any worse than I hate her for being what she is?” But he checked himself; a sudden emotion—a strange emotion—mastered him, and he sobbed as he muttered, “Poor little girl!” Then his anger flamed again. “By ——, Barrett, I ought to kill you now, anyway!” He clutched the irons at his belt. But after a moment, with a wrench of his shoulders, he pulled himself out of his frenzy.

“You are going to take that girl to your home. You are going to acknowledge her as your daughter. You are going to give her what belongs to her.” He was grim now, not frenetic.

Barrett’s whole body quivered. His voice was husky with appeal.

“I want to talk to you, man to man. I’m going to show you that I have confidence in you, Lane. I’m not saying this to any one else—only to you. It’s a big matter, Lane. It will prove that I want to be square with you.”

“You’re going to take her, I say!”

“For ten years, Lane, the big lumber interests in this State have been trying to get the right man into the governor’s chair. You are interested in timber. You are a State employé. We all need certain things, and now we are in a way to get them. I’m going to be the next governor of this State, Lane. I’ve got the pledges, from the State committee down through the ranks. I’m going to be nominated in the next State convention. I’ve spent fifty thousand already. Now, you see, I’m being frank and honest with you.” His voice had a quaver. He was explaining as he would explain to a child. “All the timber interests are behind me. See what it means if I am turned down? A scandal would do it. It’s the petty scandal that kills a man in this State quicker than anything else—scandal or a laugh! I can’t carry that girl out of the woods and declare her to be my daughter. It would kill all my chances for nomination. The papers would be full of it. And think of my family!”

Lane’s crude idea of an atonement was not so vague now. His brain whirled more dizzily, for the problem was bigger—and so was the revenge. He chuckled. It was the spirit of revenge, after all, that was driving him, and his madman’s soul now realized it and relished it. He looked up at the saffron sky and snuffed the scorching air. He felt the impulse seething up from the ruin of the forest, and with almost a sense of relief loosed the grip that had been holding him above the tide of his soul’s fire and blood.

He ran and recovered Barrett’s wallet from among the leaves, and searched it hastily. He found among the papers a few folded blank sheets bearing John Barrett’s name and monogram. There was a fountain-pen stuck in a loop. The paper and the pen he shoved into Barrett’s hands.

“Write it!” he screamed. “Write it that she is your daughter, and agree to take her and do right by her. Write it! I wouldn’t take your word. I want a paper. You’ve got to take her.”

Barrett went pale, but his thick lips pinched themselves in desperate resolve. With the aspiration of his life close to realization he knew all that such a document could do to him. He stood up and tossed the paper away.

“I’m willing to do right by the girl in the best way I can,” he said, firmly; “but as to cutting my throat for her, I won’t do it. You’ve got my word. That’s all I’ll do for you.”

“It’s all?” asked Lane, with bitter menace. “All, after what you’ve done to me?”

“I won’t do it,” he repeated, stiffly.

The next instant, and so quickly that a cat could not have dodged, Lane struck forward with one of the irons. Barrett saw the flash and felt the impact; his brain clanged once like a great bell, and he crumbled together rather than fell.

He was standing when he revived. But his hands were lashed by strips of his torn corduroy coat—drawn behind him around the trunk of a birch and tied securely. Other strips of the cloth bound legs and body close to the tree. Lane mouthed and leaped in front of him—a maniac.

“Enjoy it!” he screamed. “There’s a thousand-acre fire out in that level. Here’s its chimney-flue. It’s going through here on its way to Enchanted. It’s going fast when it comes along, and it will be your first taste of what’s laid up for you in eternity. Burn! And when you’re burning just remember that your daughter set it—set it because you left her to grow up a hyena instead of a woman.”

He whirled and started away at Barrett’s first wild appeal.

“I wouldn’t take your word! You wouldn’t write it! You didn’t intend to keep it!”

CHAPTER XIV

He came down the Pogey Notch on a ding-swingle. It was drawn by his little white stallion. A ding-swingle is the triangle of a trimmed tree-crotch, dragged apex forward, its limbs sprawling behind. With peak mounted on a sapling runner it is the woods vehicle that best conquers tote roads.

From under the prophet’s knitted woollen cap, with its red knob, his white hair trailed upon his shoulders. His white beard brushed the oddly checkered jacket, flamboyant with its bizarre colors.

“The Skeets and the Bushees are still running south,” he cried at the two men, in shrill tones. “But I’m around to the front of the trouble, as usual.”

He appeared to have no eyes for the plight of the trussed-up Barrett, who began to shout desperate appeals to him. He cocked shrewd eyes at “Ladder” Lane, who, with a muttered oath, started to scramble down the slope towards him. Perhaps he saw a threat in the madman’s face.

He glanced once more at Barrett, as though interested a bit in that miserable man’s frantic urgings, and piped this amazing query, “Don’t you think a stuttering man is an infernal fool to have a name like McKechnie Connick?”

Then he lashed his long reins against the side of his stallion and sped away down the valley.

Lane followed him, running.

They left an existent millionaire and a prospective governor helplessly grinding the skin from his shoulders against a birch-tree, and bellowing anathema on “lunatics.”

The Honorable Pulaski D. Britt, sweat pouring down his purple face as he raged from crew to crew on the fire-line, was not surprised to behold Prophet Eli emerge from the smoke, riding his ding-swingle. In twenty years Mr. Britt had often beheld the prophet at troublous junctures. In his present state of vehement anxiety the king of the Umcolcus felt his temper flare at sight of this herald of ill-omen.

“Met the Skeets and the Bushees, and they’re still running south. Don’t you think a man with pumple-feet is an infernal fool to try to learn to skate?”

Britt, thrusting past through the underbrush of the tote road, whirled and poised his foot to kick the inoffensive stallion, as mute expression of his rage and contempt. But he withheld the kick at the apparition of “Ladder” Lane. The warden came running. He fairly burst out of the smoke.

That he was pursuing Prophet Eli for no good to the latter occurred to the Honorable Pulaski in one startled flash, as he looked at the warden’s savage face. He stepped between the men. But it was not to protect the prophet, whom he dismissed from his mind as utterly as though the forest sage were a fugitive rabbit. Mr. Britt had a pregnant question to ask of Lane on his own account, and he bellowed it at him, clutching at his arm.

“Where did you leave John Barrett?”

Lane halted at his touch, and glowered on him without reply.

“What’s the matter with you, Lane? You look like a crazy man. What did you want of Mr. Barrett, anyway? What did you drag him out of Barnum Withee’s camp for? Don’t try to bluff me. I know about it. Barnum got here with his crew at daylight to fight fire, and his men have been talking about it. What right have you got to be bothering John Barrett? I haven’t had time to get facts. I’ve got something else on my mind than other folk’s troubles. But I know you’ve picked trouble with Barrett. Why, great Judas, you long-shanked fool, that man is goin’ to be the next governor of this State! You must have heard of John Barrett! Trying to arrest John Barrett! What did you take him for—a game-poacher? Or have you gone clean out of your wits? What have you done with him?”

During the timber baron’s harangue Lane kept his eyes on the prophet, meeting the latter’s blinking regard with sullen threat in his eyes.

“Blast ye! Answer me!” roared the Honorable Pulaski. “Where is Mr. Barrett? I want to discuss this fire situation with him.”

“Then go find him,” growled the fire warden.

“Where is he?”

Lane raised his gaunt arm and swung it the circle of the horizon.

“There!” he snarled. He still kept his gaze on the prophet, as though to note the least intention to betray him. But it appeared that the sage of Tumbledick was in no mood for dangerous revelations. He thrust up one grimy finger.

“May be there!” he remarked. He pointed the finger straight down. “May be there!” He jumped his stallion ahead with a crack of his reins and disappeared in the smoke. Lane cast after him a look baleful, but relieved, and whirled and made away in the direction of Jerusalem.

“Me standing here wasting my time on a couple of whiffle-heads with that fire waltzing into my black growth!” Britt muttered, turning his wrath on himself, since there was no one else in sight. “It must be only some fool scare about Barrett. A man like him can take care of himself.”

He stumped on, turning to climb a spur of ledge from which, as commander-in-chief, he might take an observation. Less than a mile to the south, he spied the thing that he had been dreading.

The ground fire, lashed by the rising wind of the morning, had leaped off the earth and become a crown fire. It had entered the edge of the black growth.

One after the other the green tops of the hemlocks and spruces burst into the horrid bloom of conflagration. They flowered. They seeded. And the seeds were fire-brands that scaled down the wind, dropping, rooting instantly, and blossoming into new destruction.

“She can’t be stopped! She can’t be stopped!” moaned Britt. “She’s headed for the Notch, and then tophet’s let loose!”

But with the persistence of his nature he set off to rally the crew to a flank movement.

With the inadequate force it was rather a skirmish than a battle for those who fought in the face of the great fire.

Through the night, with shovels and green boughs they had attacked the conflagration’s outposts. The red army of destruction took this punishment sullenly. The main fire seemed to crouch and doze in the night, dulled by the condensation of dews and lacking the spur of the winds.

At daylight Barnum Withee had arrived with his men and set them to trenching along the tote road parallel with the advance of the fire. He had not reconsidered his bitterness against his tyrant John Barrett. But the unconquerable instinct of the veteran woodsman, anxious to save his forest, had driven him to the scene.

To Barnum Withee’s crew Dwight Wade and Christopher Straight attached themselves by entirely natural selection, having excellent personal reasons for avoiding the direct commands of the Honorable Pulaski Britt.

And to Wade, struggling with blistered hands to drive his mattock through roots and vegetable mould to the mineral earth, appeared Prophet Eli on his ding-swingle. The prophet surveyed him with almost arch look, and piped, in his shrill tones: