King Spruce, A Novel

When the timber barons came in sight of the camp at noon, Tommy Eye, returned emissary, was seated on the edge of the wangan platform with attitude and countenance of alarmed expectancy. By his side was old Christopher Straight, the guide who had accompanied Dwight Wade from Castonia settlement.

“I done it—I said as you said for me to say,” Tommy began, eagerly, “and Mr. Straight here will tell you the same. I said it first to old Noah up there, and he was startin’ off with his animiles like as they done with the ark stranded, and he swore me up hill and down, and—”

“Shut up!” barked the Honorable Pulaski, in a perfectly fiendish temper after the sights of that forenoon. “Did you bring that girl? And if you didn’t, why not?”

“I can tell you better, perhaps, Mr. Britt,” broke in old Christopher, calmly. “She has been left on Mr. Wade’s hands, and Mr. Wade feels that he ought to be careful. Warden Lane, who had charge of her, seems to have lost his wits. All last night—it was an awful night, gentlemen, on Jerusalem—he was out on the ledges raving and howling. I think that a matter that Mr. Barrett will understand was troubling up his conscience, if that’s the word for it. This mornin’ he seemed to be clean out of his head. He knocked the saplin’s off his cages and let out the animals, and they followed him off down into the woods—”

“Moose, bobcat, fisher-cat—” But Tommy ceased his enumeration to dodge a vicious sweep of Britt’s palm.

“I guess he left the place for good, seeing he took his rifle and his pack,” continued the guide. “I thought the timber owners might like to know that their fire station is abandoned. As for the girl,” he hastened to add, “Mr. Wade told me to say that for reasons that Mr. Britt would understand he didn’t think she ought to come here.”

“Because she’s lost her head over my boss, MacLeod, eh?” demanded Britt.

“You saw yourself that the girl wasn’t to be controlled easily when the young man was present,” said Christopher, mildly. “So he believes if there is business to be talked to her and about her it will be better to meet somewhere else.”

“The blasted coward is afraid to come with her or let her come,” sneered the Honorable Pulaski. “Well, we’ll go up there; and we’ll take a few men along and find out who’s runnin’ this thing—a college dude or the men who own these timber lands.” Mr. Barrett would have advised more pacificatory talk. But Mr. Britt was in a mood too generally unamiable that day to heed prudence and wise counsel.

“You’ll have only your own trouble for your trip,” remarked Straight. “This man here said that Mr. Barrett was all ready to leave the woods. Mr. Wade has left the top of the mountain with the girl, and will meet Mr. Barrett to the south of Pogey Notch. You’ll not have to go out of your way, sir,” he explained.

“Well, where?” snapped Britt.

“I’m here prepared to lead Mr. Barrett to the place, and I suggest that if he’s ready we’ll be on our way. You’ll probably want to fetch the Half-way House at nightfall, sir.”

This patent distrust of Pulaski Britt and his designs angered that gentleman quite beyond the power of even his profanity. But he knew Christopher Straight too well to attempt to bulldoze that hard-eyed old woodsman.

“Is this select assembly too good to have me come along?” he inquired, his thick lips curling under his beard.

“I think Mr. Wade will be glad to have you there,” said Christopher, mildly. “He didn’t say anything to the contrary. He expects Mr. Barrett to have some one to keep him company as far as the stage road, though he thought it probably would be a woodsman. But Mr. Wade gave particular instructions about any crowd comin’ along, and he’ll not meet any one if your boss MacLeod is in the party. That’s straight talk. He’s had all the trouble with your boss that he cares for.”

After a withering survey of Straight, which the old guide endured with much composure, Britt beckoned Barrett away with a jerk of his head, and the two strolled behind the horse-hovel.

“There you have it, John,” he snarled, more ireful as a champion than the unhappy principal. “It’s a put-up job. He’s goin’ to plaster the girl onto you. It’s his play. He’s goin’ to use it for all it’s worth.”

“It will be better for me to take her out than to have him chase along after me with the girl and the story—if that’s the way he feels; and it’s plain that he means to make trouble,” said Barrett, moodily. “I can put her away somewhere in a boarding-school, and—”

The Honorable Pulaski broke upon this doleful capitulation with contemptuous brusqueness.

“You talk like a fool, John! Take that girl outside these woods and give her an education? File her teeth so that she can set ’em into your throat? You teach her to read and to write and to know things, and that’s what it will amount to in the end. The girl has got to stay here!” He embraced the big woods in a vigorous gesture. “She belongs here! And the only way to keep her here is to put her in the hands of a man that—”

Colin MacLeod had followed them to their retreat behind the hovel, and was standing at a little distance, looking at them.

“Come here, Colin!” And Britt advanced to meet him and clutched his arm, the arm that Dwight Wade had dislocated in that memorable battle in Castonia. “Boy, if you are a coward, now is your time to own it. Old Straight has come down here to tell us that Wade has that girl in his hands. He knows what she’s worth. He wants to meet Barrett and myself. You can guess why. He proposes to get hold of that money. He knows we control it. We can’t help ourselves if she chooses to stay with him.”

The able old liar of the Umcolcus knew his man as the harper knows his instrument. He felt the muscles ridge under his clutch.

“He has sent word that he won’t have you at the meeting. Ask Straight! He’ll give you the message. The dude knows he wouldn’t stand the show of a snowball in tophet with you there where the girl could see you. If you’re a coward, say so, and we’ll look further.”

“By ——, I’m no coward, and you know it!” growled the boss.

“He’s licked you once and cut you out with one girl,” persisted Britt. “The whole Umcolcus knows that! When they find out that he’s got away with a girl that has been in love with you, and with ten thousand dollars in the bargain, why, boy, even Tommy Eye will dare to put up his fists to you!”

In MacLeod’s tumultuous mind it was no longer love’s choice between Nina Ide and Kate Arden; it was the hard, bitter passion of the primitive man—the instinct to grasp what a foe is coveting for the sake of humiliating that foe. Again MacLeod felt himself thrust forth by circumstances to be the champion of his kind. That man from the city was of the other sort.

“Mr. Britt,” he choked, “let me at him once more!”

“Oh, that will be all right!” said the baron; “but we’re not pulling off a prize-fight, MacLeod. Scraps are interestin’ enough when there isn’t more important business on hand. There happens to be business just now. The whole idea is, are you ready to marry the girl?”

MacLeod had approached them grimly resolved to be defiant on that point. The flicker in his eyes now was the shadow of that resolution departing.

“If it’s him against me again,” he snarled, “I’ll marry a quill-pig and ask no questions.”

“Not exactly cheerful talk to hear from a prospective bridegroom marryin’ money and good looks,” commented the Honorable Pulaski, dryly; “but a promise is a promise, MacLeod, and I never knew you to break one you made me. Shake!”

By the way in which both Barrett and MacLeod turned inquiring gaze on him, the Umcolcus baron understood that he was tacitly elected autocrat of the situation, and he proceeded about his task with the briskness characteristic of his habit of command.

“John, you get your dinner, bid us an affectionate farewell, and go along with old Straight. Go alone. Tell him you left all your duffel at Withee’s camp and don’t need any guide. I’ll look after the rest of it. Chris Straight can hide his dude and the girl, but he can’t pull up the ground behind him.”

They started off promptly after the noon snack, the taciturn Christopher offering no comment on Mr. Barrett’s amiable compliance, and apparently blandly unsuspicious that the Honorable Pulaski concealed guile under a demeanor which had suddenly become pacific.

Men who had made their warfare more by craft and less by brute strength would have been more wily. John Barrett and Pulaski Britt had always been too confident of their own power to think subterfuge necessary. Barrett, especially, as he strode along at the heels of old Christopher, was so well content with his own first essay in duplicity that his taking-down was correspondingly humiliating. They were resting, he and the old guide, after a tough scramble around a blowdown that they had encountered a mile or so from Britt’s camps.

With a jerk of his chin Christopher indicated a far-off sound on the back trail.

“Pretty busy, that woodpecker is, Mr. Barrett!”

“Stumpage John” assented, wondering at the same time how such an old woodsman could misinterpret that chip-chop. “The fool Indian ought to make allowance for a blowdown,” he reflected, angrily. “He’s following too close.”

“In this world you expect cheap men to lie and cheat,” remarked Christopher, serenely. “But you don’t hardly expect State senators and candidates for governor to be that sort.”

“What the devil do you mean?” demanded Barrett, with heat.

“I mean that Britt’s Indian, Newell Sockbeson, is following us and makin’ a double-blaze for—well, I suppose it’s so that Pulaski Britt and his men can chase us up. As to why, you probably know better than I do, Mr. Barrett.”

The timber baron stared at this disconcerting old plain-speaker without finding fit words for reply.

“It can hardly be that he’s goin’ to all that trouble simply to get the girl. Mr. Wade is ready to turn the girl over to you, Mr. Barrett. Why is it that men ain’t willin’ to play fair in this world? What does Pulaski Britt want to meddle in this thing for?”

“I think you’re wrong about the Indian following us,” paltered the millionaire. “You’re only guessin’ about that, Straight.”

“When I see Pulaski Britt talk to an Indian, when I see that Indian pack a lunch, take a camp-axe, and hide at the mouth of the trail, I don’t have to guess, Mr. Barrett. Some of us old fellows of the woods see a whole lot of things without seemin’ to take much notice.” He got up off the tree-trunk where he had been sitting and made ready to take the trail again, swinging his pack to his shoulders.

“There wouldn’t have been any misunderstanding if Wade had sent the girl back by the messenger,” protested Barrett. “And if he didn’t have something up his sleeve he would have done so. The girl is nothing to him, and he’s meddling in affairs that are none of his business.”

“You’d better save that talk and tell it to him,” said the old guide, grimly. “I’m going to take you to where we arranged to meet if every man that Britt can rake and scrape on his ten townships comes followin’ at my back. I’ve thought it over, and the more witnesses there are to some things the better it is for all concerned—or the worse!”

And reflecting on what these words might mean, and now a little dubious as to the sagacity of Pulaski Britt in handling delicate negotiations, “Stumpage John” plodded on with less content in his heart.

Two miles farther down the trail, at a place that Barrett recognized as the old Durfy camps, Straight signalled by discharging his rifle, and Dwight Wade came into sight with the girl. Foolish Abe of the Skeets followed far behind like a sheepish dog, uncertain whether to expect kick or caress.

“You may as well know first as last that the whole pack is followin’ a little way behind,” snorted old Christopher, in disgust. “Britt sent an Indian to snuff the trail and blaze the way. I did your errand, that’s all. You’ve got time to get away. You may want to keep on tryin’ to do business with a crowd that ain’t square. I don’t!” He turned and walked away, sat down, and filled his pipe.

“I had Straight explain to you why it was better to meet privately here,” declared Wade, with honest resentment glowing in his eyes. “But I’m not going to run. I’ve had hard work to get this young woman to consider your proposition to educate her, Mr. Barrett.” He held her by the hand, and spoke out with a candor that convinced the lumberman that here there was neither reservation nor complicity. The girl eyed him sulkily, without interest, as she looked at all outsiders. “I have told this young woman that you, as a timber-land owner, are sorry for all the troubles that the Skeets and Bushees have had in years past, and want to make up in some way. I’ve told her you’re ready to send her to some good boarding-school. As she can’t read or write, she doesn’t know what this means, and she can’t express her thanks. But I’m sure that later she’ll understand your kindness and generosity. The girl is untrained, and she knows it. I hope you’ll overlook any lack of gratitude, Mr. Barrett. She’ll know how to express it some day.”

John Barrett, looking into a face which recalled the face of the daughter whom he loved and cherished in his city home, felt one throb of strange emotion, and then realized in all his selfish nature that affection is more a matter of habit and cultivation than an affair of instinct. After one thrill his soul shrank from her. He had not expected the girl to be so like. He caught himself wishing that he had not made the compact with the inexorable Britt, and listened for the noise of the men-pack with shame and some regret. On the other hand, this girl, unkempt for all her beauty, insolent with the insolence of ignorance, staring at him from under her knitted brows, was impossible, he reflected, as an asset of a man with a reputation to preserve and an ambition to fulfil. Instead of feeling the instinct of tenderness, he looked at this wild young thing of the woods with uneasy fear in his shifting eyes.

With honest resentment, Wade noted the baron’s reluctance to make his word good.

“You think I’m a meddler, Mr. Barrett,” he said, coming close to the other, “but don’t think that I’m satisfying any personal grudge when I ask that you care for this poor girl! Perhaps you would have done so anyway, without my suggestion. I hope so.”

“I think I could arrange my own business without any outside help,” said Barrett, dryly. He began to feel that he could get out of the situation better if he aroused his own resentment.

“Mr. Barrett, it was chance that put the girl in my way and taught me her story. I’ve been Don Quixote enough to see her through this thing. I’m sorry it happens to be you on the other side. I’m afraid you don’t give me credit for unselfishness.”

“I’ll allow you all the credit you deserve,” said “Stumpage John,” sullenly. “I understand, without your telling me, that you are gentleman enough to keep this matter behind your teeth on account of my family. I thank you, Wade. I’ll take charge of the girl from now on.”

He looked back up the trail anxiously, and the young man’s gaze followed. A man loafed into sight from among stubs blackened by fire.

“There’s Newell Sockbeson,” remarked old Christopher. “I heard him making his last blaze a few minutes ago.”

“I don’t know just what your plan is, Mr. Barrett,” said Wade, the red in his cheeks. “I’ve been hoping that you trusted me to act the gentleman, even if I couldn’t act the friend. Mr. Straight and I stand here as witnesses that you have taken charge of this girl.” He now spoke low. “But you haven’t told me that you indorse the little plan I adopted to relieve you from any explanations and to make the thing seem natural to her.”

Wade’s face showed that he expected a frank promise.

“Mr. Straight will go to the stage road with you,” added the young man. At this hint of watchfulness the face of Barrett darkened. “As a school-teacher, I know something of the boarding-schools of the State, and I’ll—” The timber baron’s temper flamed at this plain intent to advise.

“I’ve taken charge of the girl, I say! Your responsibility ends. You were apologizing a moment ago for meddling. Now, don’t go to—”

“I didn’t apologize,” replied Wade, with decision. “And I don’t intend to. And my responsibility ends only when I know that this unfortunate creature is placed in a good school to get the advantages that she has been robbed of all these years.”

The hot retort from Barrett ended in his throat with a cluck. “The devil!” he blurted, staring down the trail.

Dwight Wade, whirling to look to the south, could not indorse that sentiment. Close at hand was Nina Ide, riding a horse with the grace of a boy, whose attire she had adopted with a woods girl’s scorn of conventions. Wade hurried to meet her, cap in hand and eager questions on his lips. The color mounted to her face, and she shook out the folds of a poncho, looped across the saddle, and draped it over her knees.

“No, it’s not strange, either,” she broke in to say. “Your partner—and that’s father—had to come up here on business, and I’ve come along with him, just as I always do when he comes here in the partridge season.” She patted a gun-butt. “But I didn’t expect to find fire and smoke and lightning and rain and tornadoes up here, any more than I looked for you at Pogey Notch when you were supposed to be exploring for a winter’s operation on Enchanted. Now you will have to explain to your partner here!” And he turned from her smiling face to shake hands with Rodburd Ide.

“Every man who can handle brush and mattock is expected to be at the head of a fire in time of trouble!” chirped the “Mayor of Castonia.” He tipped back his head to beam amiably on his partner. “Did it get through onto us, Wade?”

“The rain stopped it half-way up Pogey.”

“Then God was good to us! Isn’t that so, Mr. Barrett?” And the cheerful little man trotted along to grip the hand of “Stumpage John.” That gentleman glowered sullenly, and tried to explain his gloom by muttering about “blowdowns” being worse than fires. He looked ill. As he came down the trail a fever had been rising in his blood. He went away by himself, and sat down feeling faint and weak.

“Old Enchanted is all right,” said Ide. “There’s a thousand acres of black growth there, every tree standin’ with its arm about its brother. You mustn’t let ’em devil you, Mr. Barrett!” he called.

Mr. Barrett, his lowering gaze on Wade, agreed mentally.

“Well, this is certainly a convention of the timber interests!” cried the brisk little autocrat of Castonia. He pointed up the trail, where the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt was advancing alone.

Wade withdrew unobstrusively, and stood beside Nina Ide. Perhaps he hoped that her talk might bring some word of Elva Barrett.

But at last even Rodburd Ide’s cheery consciousness became impressed by the fact that neither Britt nor Barrett seemed to relish any chat on timber topics. And he broke upon a constrained silence to suggest to Wade that they proceed—taking it for granted that now his partner’s way lay to the north, along with his own.

“There’s—there’s—” Wade stammered, and now for the first time Ide and his daughter marked the girl of the Skeet settlement leaning moodily against the side of the Durfy hovel, the unkempt Abe hovering apprehensively in the background.

“Ah ha!” piped Ide. “There are the remnants, eh? We met the rest of the colony hiperin’ out of the woods. They’ve gone to Little Lobster, girl, and the old woman is worryin’ about you.”

Wade stared straight at Barrett. The timber baron understood the challenge of his eyes. He was commanded to declare his intentions. In spite of himself, he scowled. It was a scowl of recalcitrancy. And the young man, angered by the presence of Britt and the evident appearance of treachery, shot his bolt.

“There is a piece of good-fortune for this poor girl, Mr. Ide. Mr. Barrett proposes to educate her, and he’s going to take her with him out of the woods.”

“She has been gettin’ a lot of attention lately,” blurted the Honorable Pulaski, with malice and derision. “For the past three or four days, Rodburd, your young partner here has been her steady company. They have just come strollin’ alone together down the Lovers’ Lane from Jerusalem Knob.” He fixed his keen eyes on the astonished face of Nina Ide. His narrow nature believed that, like other girls, she could be stirred to quick jealousy. And knowing her influence over her father, he foresaw trouble ahead for the partnership between Ide and Wade. “Seems to be in the air up this way now for the young men to gallivant through the woods with the Skeet girl. Wade here seems to have cut out Colin MacLeod.” Then the coarse old jester sneered into the indignant face Wade turned to him.

“It will be a good thing for her to go to school,” said Ide, a little puzzled by the evident antagonism of these men. “It will be kind of you, Mr. Barrett.”

“Say, look here, Ide,” cried Britt, in his irritation suddenly deciding to play the strong hand with this young interloper, “your friend Wade here, being a school-teacher, seems to have school on the brain. He also seems to be full of ready-made plans for men older and better than he is. From things that come to me, he has picked up a lot of foolishness about these Skeets and Bushees and this girl since he’s been cruisin’ round these woods. Mr. Barrett and myself have made arrangements to take care of the rest of that pauper settlement, and the Skeets probably told you so when you met them.”

Ide nodded acknowledgment.

“We’ll look after the girl, too.” He walked up to Wade and snapped his fingers, unable to resist his desire to bully. “Now, young fellow, you’ve been stickin’ your nose pretty deep into other men’s business. Take it out, or I’ll twist it off your face. Any one would think that this girl matter was runnin’ the world in these parts. There’s been too much talk about what’s of no consequence. Go along with your partner. You’re on my land. Keep movin’.”

But all of Dwight Wade’s stubborn obstinacy rose in his breast; all his youthful chivalry flamed in his face.

“I’ve no more business with you, Britt!” he said, significantly; and Britt’s face flamed with the remembrance of a certain knock-down blow. “My business is with you, Mr. Barrett, and you know what it is. You keep the word that you’ve given me about this girl, or I’ll set you before the people of this State in your right colors—and you needn’t croak blackmail to me, for you can’t frighten me.”

“I—I—don’t see that it’s any business of yours—of yours, Wade,” stammered the pacificatory Ide, catching the courage of protest from the rather indignant face his daughter turned on the young man.

“And I don’t see that it is the business of any of you!” stormed Kate Arden. She came close to the group of men and stood with brown hands propped on her hips, her head thrown back, and the insolent stare of her black eyes seeking face after face. “I’ll be passed about from hand to hand no longer. I don’t want any old purple-faced fool to send me to school.” Barrett winced. “And as for you,” she sneered, turning on Wade, “you attend to your own business until I ask you to help me in mine.”

The Honorable Pulaski saw his opportunity.

“Colin MacLeod!” he bawled.

And with a rush that betrayed his impatience, the boss of the Busters came out of his hiding-place up the trail.

The girl gave a sharp cry of joy at sight of him.

But MacLeod, half-way to them, saw the girl on the horse and stopped as suddenly as he had started. Even at that distance they noted that his face worked with piteous embarrassment.

“You’ve given in your promise, MacLeod! Don’t forget that!” roared Britt. “There’s the boy for you, my girl! He wants to marry you. Go with him!”

“And you’ll be a fool of a gir-rl if ye do!” squalled a voice. It was Tommy Eye, yelling from the top of the Durfy hovel, to which he had clambered unobserved. “I know I’m a drunk. I know I ain’t worth anything to anybody!” he gabbled. “But ye saved my life once, Mr. Wade, when I didn’t know it!” He flapped entreating hands at Wade, and that young man stepped in front of the furious Britt with such determination on his face that the woods tyrant halted. “But ye’ll be a fool gir-rl, I say! I was under the bunk last night when they planned it. He don’t love ye! I heard him say so. He called you names! Colin MacLeod, ye ain’t the liar enough to stand out here and say ye didn’t.”

MacLeod, his adoring eyes on Nina Ide, had no word to say. The features of Kate Arden, who stared at him with her heart in her eyes, twisted with a promise of bitter tears. This, then, was the girl of Castonia, with whom they had taunted her!

“It’s only for grudge and money he’s goin’ to marry you!” persisted Tommy. “May I rest forever in purgatory with no masses for my soul if that ain’t the truth!”

With the instinct of the animal repulsed, the girl read more in the face of MacLeod than she understood from the declaration of Tommy Eye.

She looked from face to face again, but the flame was gone from her eyes. There they stood, the silent, hostile, bitter phalanx from outside—oppressors and scorners. There she stood—alone!

And she fell face down upon the ground—the only mother she had ever known—a heart-broken, weary, lonely, sobbing child.

Nina Ide reached her before the others moved. Twice the girl fought her way out of her arms. Twice the sympathetic little mother-heart of the Castonia beauty conquered the rebel and retook her, whispering to her eagerly. And she held her tear-streaked face close to her shoulder, and patted the grimy little fingers between which tears were trickling. There was something inexpressibly pathetic even in the unkemptness of the stricken girl, in her torn dress and the brown skin of face and hands, touched here and there by the stain of exposure to the blackened forest. And in her loneliness, feeling for the first time in her life real sympathy from one of her sex, gathering with grateful nostrils the faint perfume that whispered of the refinement and comfort that her heart had sought almost unconsciously and had never found, at last the girl ceased her struggles and clung to her new friend. The waif’s true instinct was proving this friend’s sincerity more surely than the whispered assurances proved it. And Nina Ide bent to her ear, and murmured:

“We will hate him together, poor little girl! He is not a good man to have a girl’s love.”

“When the hysterics are all over,” remarked the Honorable Pulaski, sarcastically, “we’ll take the young woman off your hands.”

“You’ll not take her off my hands!” retorted Nina, with spirit. “She’s going back home with me.”

“You haven’t got any rights over her!” barked Britt.

“Perhaps, then, Mr. Barrett is ready to stand up and say what his rights are,” suggested Wade, with bitter hint of retaliation in his tones.

Barrett, pale with the illness that was seizing him, grew paler yet with anger and terror, for he feared exposure.

The Honorable Pulaski picked up the gage of battle with all the alacrity of his irascible nature.

“For a dog-fight, that girl will be as good a bone as anything else!” he growled, under his breath. And then he whirled on his heel and bellowed:

“Wake up there, MacLeod! If you can’t make love to the girl you are goin’ to marry, I reckon you can at least fight a little to get her! Call in the crew!”

He walked up to Ide. “Better call off your girl, Rod,” he advised, bluffly. “This isn’t any of her business, or yours either.”

“I figure that a Skeet girl belongs as much to us as to you,” snapped the doughty little man from Castonia. “If my girl takes interest enough in her to invite her home, I think you’d better let her go.”

“Well, I’ve got a crew of a hundred men posted back here a few rods in the woods to back me up when I say she stays right where she belongs.” His tone was offensive, and Rodburd Ide’s anger flared.

“My business just now in here, Britt, is to bring a hundred men for our Enchanted operation. They’re down there by the brook eating lunch. I don’t want any trouble over this, but there’s some nasty reason back of this girl matter, and I won’t stand for any persecution of a helpless creature. My men back me when I say she goes home with my girl. Hello, men for the Enchanted! Up this way in a hurry!”

The look that Nina flashed at her father was inspiration for him!

As his men came into sight over the bank the crew of Britt tramped towards them down the trail.

“Nina,” said Ide, “you’ll have to go back now. Chris Straight will go with you. Take the girl on the horse with you, and let Chris lead by the headstall. You’ll go all safe. Hurry away from here! But after you get started, take your time to the Half-way House. There’s no one going to get past down this trail to chase you and bother you.”

There was determination in the voice of the little man, and his daughter kissed him at the same time that Dwight Wade was patting his shoulder.

Wade ran along by the side of the horse for a little way, and, when he turned, eagerly kissed Nina Ide’s gloved hand.

“God bless you for a little saint!” he gasped. “You’ll understand this some day, perhaps.”

“I understand that she is alone and needs a friend,” she responded—“just as you needed a friend when you were only Britt’s ‘chaney man.’” She smiled archly at him and passed out of sight, old Christopher tugging at the bits of the horse.

Wade went back in the forefront of the thronging crew of the men for Enchanted.

“As I said, Britt, I don’t want trouble,” repeated Rodburd Ide, “but you’ll please remember that the lower corner of your township is here at Durfy’s camp. I reckon the men for the Enchanted will camp right here on the trail for a few hours. The man that tries to push past to trouble my daughter or her friend will get hurt.”

“They are goin’ past just the same!” shouted Britt, fiercely.

“My God, Pulaski, think of consequences!” pleaded “Stumpage John,” in low tones. He arose with difficulty and staggered to Britt’s side. His tones quavered with weakness. “I’d be ruined by the story of what it was all about. I’m sick. I only want to get home. I don’t want to see trouble here.”

Britt glared at his associate, at Wade, Ide, and at last at Colin MacLeod, who was staring in the direction of Nina Ide.

The tyrant snorted his disgust.

“Take the combination of a candidate for governor, some fool women, crazy men, love-sick idiots, and”—his eyes swept the scene in vain search for Tommy Eye—“a pooch-mouthed blabber, and it’s enough to trig any decent, honest, sensible woods fight ever yarded down. Barrett, you’re right! You’d better get home and get on your long-tailed coat and plug hat as soon as you can. You and your private”—he sneered the word—“business don’t seem to fit in up here.”

He folded his arms and, with his men behind him, stood looking over the crew for the Enchanted, who, cheerfully and without question, stood blocking the way.

“It may not happen just now,” he grunted, “but it’s on my mind to say that some day these two gangs will get together when there isn’t a governor’s boom to step on, nor women to get mussed up.”

And the gaze of fury that he bent on Dwight Wade was returned with interest.

An imaginative man might have seen the new spirit of the woods facing the old.

But there was no imaginative man there—there were only men who chewed tobacco and wondered what it all meant.

CHAPTER XVIII

When Rodburd Ide’s hundred men “met up” with the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt’s hundred men at the foot of Pogey Notch, Larry Gorman displayed a true poet’s obliviousness to the details of the wrangle between principals. He didn’t understand why Pulaski Britt, blue with anger above his grizzled beard, and “Stumpage John” Barrett, mottled with rage, should object so furiously when Rodburd Ide’s girl took away the tatterdemalion maid of the Skeets, nor did Larry ask any questions. If this be the attitude of a true poet, there was evidently considerable true poetry in both crews, for no one appeared to be especially curious as to the why of the quarrel. However, the imminence of a quarrel was a matter demanding woodsmen’s attention. It might have been noted that Poet Gorman cut the biggest shillalah of any of them. And while he rounded its end and waited for more formal declaration of hostilities, he lustily sang the solo part of “The Old Soubungo Trail,” with a hundred hearty voices to help him on the chorus:

Spirit rather than melody characterized the efforts of these wildwood songsters. The Honorable Pulaski Britt, who didn’t like music anyway, and was trying to talk in an undertone to timber baron Barrett, swore a deep bass obligato.

He did not take his baleful gaze from Dwight Wade, who had gone apart, and was leaning against the mouldering walls of the Durfy hovel.

“You had your chance to block their game, and you didn’t do it, John. You make me sick!” muttered the belligerent Britt. “You’ve let that college dude scare you with threats, and old Ide champ his false teeth at you and back you down. You don’t get any of my sympathy from now on. I had a good plan framed. You knocked it galley-west by poking yourself into the way. They’ve got the girl. They’ll use her against you. You can fight it yourself after this.”

Barrett stared uneasily from one crew to the other.

“It would have been too tough a story to go out of these woods,” he faltered. “Two crews ste’boyed together by us to capture a State pauper.”

“A story of a woods rough-and-tumble, that’s all!” snorted Britt. “And these dogs wouldn’t have known what they were fightin’ about—and would have cared less. And while they were at it I could have taken the girl out of sight! You spoiled it! Now, don’t talk to me! You go ahead and see if you can do any better.” He tossed his big hand into the air and whirled away, snuffling his disgust.

Larry Gorman, having peeled a hand-hold on his bludgeon, was moved to sing another verse:

Sturdy little Rodburd Ide, magnate of Castonia, bestrode in the middle of the trail to the south. His head was thrown back, and his mat of whiskers jutted forward with an air of challenge. To be sure, he did not exactly understand as yet the full animus of the quarrel. He had heard his partner, Dwight Wade, announce on behalf of Honorable John Barrett that the latter proposed to educate the girl protégée of the Skeets’ tribe. He had noted that the timber baron did not warm to the announcement in a way that might be expected of the true philanthropist.

Tommy Eye’s astonishing declaration from the house-top that the timber magnates of Jerusalem townships were proposing to marry the girl off to Colin MacLeod, boss of “Britt’s Busters,” and that, too, in spite of MacLeod’s lack of affection, had some effect in enlisting Ide’s sympathies and interference. But his daughter’s spirited championship of the poor girl was really the influence that clinched matters with the puzzled Mr. Ide.

“Rodburd,” declared the Honorable Pulaski, approaching him on the contemptuous retreat from Barrett, “you’ve gone to work and stuck your nose into matters that don’t concern you. Your man Wade there, instead of attending to your operation on Enchanted, has been spending his time beauing that girl around these woods and stirring up a blackmail scheme. I’m telling you as a friend that you’d better ship him. He’s going to make more trouble for you than he has yet. He isn’t fit for the woods. I found it out and fired him. Do the same yourself, or you’ll never get your logs down and through the Hulling Machine.”

“Do you mean that you’re going to fight him on the drive on account of your grudge?” demanded Ide.

“I don’t mean that,” blustered Britt. “It’s the man himself who’ll queer you.”

“I don’t believe it,” replied Ide, stoutly. “There are some things goin’ on here that I don’t understand the inside of up to now; but as for that young man, I picked him for square the first time I laid my eyes on him at Castonia. I’ve had him looked up by friends of mine outside, and now I know he’s square. You can’t break up our partnership by that kind of talk, Britt. Now own up! What’s the nigger in the woodpile here, anyway?” The little man was still unbending, but his eyes snapped with curiosity.

But the Honorable Pulaski’s shifty eyes dodged the inquiring stare of the Castonia man. The view down the tote road in the direction in which Nina Ide and Kate Arden had disappeared under convoy of Christopher Straight seemed to be a more welcome prospect than that frankly inquisitive face. And the view down the trail also suggested a safer topic for conversation.

“I believe in indulgin’ a girl’s whims, Rod, but this is a time when you’ve let yourself go too far. That lucivee[2] kitten that your daughter has lugged off home set this fire that we’ve been fightin’ up here. She set it maliciously, in the face and eyes of Sheriff Rodliff and myself. She’s the worst one of the whole lot, and as a plantation officer you know the Skeets and Bushees pretty well. Are you goin’ to let your girl take a critter like that back home with her?” He noted a flicker of consternation in the little man’s eyes. “Now, don’t be a fool in this thing. Let a half-dozen men run after that girl and fetch her back. She don’t belong in any decent home. John Barrett and I have arranged a plan to take care of her and keep her out of mischief.”

But again the timber magnate’s eyes failed to meet the test of Ide’s frank stare.

“I’ve known you a good many years, Pulaski,” said he. “I’ve done a lot of business with you, and you can’t fool me for a minute. You’ve been into a milk-pan, for I can see cream on your whiskers.”

“I’m only warnin’ you not to harbor such a criminal!” stormed the other. His wrath slipped its leash once more. The presence of Dwight Wade, his very silence, seemed tacit proclamation of victory and the boast of it. “The girl belongs back here, and we’re goin’ to have her back. If your men don’t fetch her, mine will.”

But Ide set his short legs astride a little more solidly.

“As first assessor of the nearest plantation, I can handle the State pauper business of these parts, and do it without help,” he said.

“You mean that meddlin’ girl of yours is runnin’ it,” taunted Britt.

In his heart the fond father realized the force of the taunt, and knew why he was blocking that trail so resolutely. A mother bear would have shown no more determination in closing the retreat of her cubs.

“If for any reason that I don’t understand as yet you want the guardianship of that girl, Britt,” he declared, “come down any time you want to and get your rights legally. But just now I’m tellin’ you again that you and your men can’t get past here. And if you do, you’ll go with cracked heads.”

And once more Pulaski D. Britt substituted oaths for action.

Stamping back towards his men, he saw Tommy Eye squatting like a jack-rabbit on the top of the Durfy camp. That guileless marplot offered a fair target for his rage against the world in general.

“MacLeod,” bawled Britt to the boss, who had not yet pulled himself together after that final flash of scorn from the eyes of Nina Ide, “pull that drunken loafer off that roof and yard the men back to camp!”

“I’m discharged out of your crew, Mr. Britt,” squealed Tommy, a quaver of apprehensiveness in his voice. “I’ve discharged myself. I’ve told the truth about what you was tryin’ to do. So I ain’t fit for you to hire.”

It was not the unconscious satire of the statement that put a wire edge on the Honorable Pulaski’s temper. It was Tommy Eye’s rebelliousness, displayed for the first time in a long life of utter subservience.

“You won’t be fit for anything but bait for a bear-trap ten minutes after I get you back to camp,” bellowed the tyrant. “MacLeod, get that man down!”

“Don’t you want to hire a teamster, Mr. Ide?” bleated Tommy, crawfishing to the peak of the low roof. “You know what I be on twitchro’d, ramdown, or in a yard. You don’t find my hosses calked or shoulder-galled.” He hastened in nervous entreaty: “You hire me, Mr. Ide. I never had a team sluiced yet. You know what I can do in the woods.”

The plaintiveness of the frightened man’s appeal touched Wade. He realized the weight of misery this pathetic turncoat might expect thereafter at the hands of Britt and his crew of “Busters.” MacLeod was advancing towards the ladder that conducted to the roof, his sullen face lighting with a certain amount of satisfaction. Wade put himself before the ladder.

“Hirin’ men out from under isn’t square woods style, Tommy,” said Ide, shaking his head.

“That man isn’t a slave,” protested Wade. “He is the only man I’ve found in these woods with courage enough to stand up for what’s right, Mr. Ide. I don’t believe in leaving him to those who are going to make him suffer for it.”

“Up to now, you dude, you’ve done about everything that shouldn’t be done in the woods!” cried Britt. “But there’s one thing you can’t do, and that’s take a man out of my crew.”

“It’s an unwritten law, Wade,” protested his partner. “It isn’t square business to meddle with another operator’s crew.”

“When a case like this comes up, it’s time to change the law, then,” declared Wade, with savageness of his own, the menacing proximity of MacLeod acting on his anger like bellows on coals.

“I can’t afford to be mixed into anything of the sort,” persisted Ide.

“And nobody but a fool would try it, Rod. I’ve warned you to get rid of him. You can see for yourself now! He don’t fit. He’s protectin’ fire-bugs, standin’ out against timber-owners’ interests, and breaking every article in the code up here.”

“And I’m likely to keep on breaking the kind of code that seems to go north of Castonia!” cried the young iconoclast. For a moment his flaming eyes dwelt on the face of the Honorable John Barrett, and that gentleman, who had been wondering just what shaft his own recalcitrancy would next draw from this champion of the oppressed, looked greatly perturbed. “Mr. Ide, do you forbid me to hire this man?”

“N-no,” admitted his partner, rather grudgingly.

“Then you’re hired, Eye.” Wade looked up and answered the gratitude in Tommy’s eyes by a nod of encouragement. “Come down, my man, and get into our crew. You’ve acted man-fashion, and I’ll back you up in it.”

“Let it stand—let it stand as it is,” whispered Barrett, huskily, clutching at the arm of Britt as that furious gentleman surged past him. “If we tackle the young fool now he’s apt to blab all he knows about me. It’s a ticklish place. Handle it easy.”

“I’ll handle it to suit myself!” stormed Britt, yanking himself loose. “You set back there if you want to, and play dry nurse to your twins—your family scandal on one arm and your governor’s boom on the other. But when it comes to my own crew and my private business, by the Lord Harry, I’ll operate without your advice!”

He began to call on his men, rallying them with shrill cries. He ordered them to surround the camp and take the rebel. In the next breath he bade MacLeod to go up the ladder and pull Tommy down.

“Poet” Larry Gorman, who had been gradually edging near the spot which he had sagely picked as the probable core of conflict, set himself suddenly before Colin MacLeod as the boss advanced towards Wade with a look in his eye that was blood-lust. MacLeod had a weather-beaten ash sled-stake.

“Sure, and a gent like him don’t fight with clubs,” said Gorman. “We’ve all heard about his lickin’ ye once, and man-fashion, too! Now, go get your reputation. Start with me.” The redoubtable bard poked his shillalah into MacLeod’s breast and drove him suddenly back. At this overture of combat the men for Enchanted came up with a rush. They met the “Busters” face to face and eye to eye.

“We’re all axe-tossers together, boys!” cried Gorman. “Ye know me and you’ve sung my songs, and ye know there’s no truer woodsman than me ever chased beans round a tin plate. Now, Britt’s men, if ye want to fight to keep a free man a slave when he wants to chuck his job, then come and fight. But may the good saints put a cramp into the arm of the man that fights against the interests of woodsmen all together!”

Under most circumstances even such a cogent argument as this would not have stayed their hands. But coming from Larry Gorman, author of “Bushmen All,” it made even the “Busters” stop and think a moment. And when MacLeod was first and only in renewing hostilities—obeying Britt’s insistent commands—Gorman again held him off at the end of his bludgeon, and shouted:

“Oh, my cock partridge, you’re only brisk to get into the game because you’re daffy over a girl. You’d wipe your feet on Tommy Eye or any other honest woodsman to polish your shoes for the courtin’ of her.”

It was a taunt whose point the “Busters” realized and relished. It was even more forceful than Larry’s first appeal. Some of the men grinned. All held back. But for MacLeod it was the provocation unforgivable. He drew back his arm and swept his stake at Larry’s head. That master of stick-play warded and leaped back nimbly.

“Fair, now! Fair!” he cried. “They’re all lookin’ at us, and there can’t be dirty work.” Gorman’s face glowed, for he had won his point. His wit had balked a general combat. His massing fellows had tacitly selected him as their champion. He had put the thing on a plane where the “Busters” were a bit ashamed to take part. They turned their backs on Britt in order to watch the duellists more intently. They knew that Larry Gorman was vain of two things—his songs and his stick-swinging.

“What say ye to waitin’ till your shoulder ain’t so stiff?” he inquired, with pointed reference to the injury MacLeod had received at the hands of Wade. His mock condolence pricked Colin to frenzy. He drove so vicious a blow at the bard that when the latter side-stepped the boss staggered against the side of the camp.

“But sure I can make it even,” said Larry, facing him again without discomposure; “for I’ll sing a bit of song for you to dance by.”

The merry insolence of this brought a hoarse hoot of delight from both sides. And pressing upon his foe so actively that the crippled MacLeod was put to his utmost to ward thwacks off his head and shoulders, this sprightly Cyrano of the kingdom of spruce carolled after this fashion: