King Spruce, A Novel

MacLeod got a tap that made his eyes shut like the snap of a patent cigar-cutter.

“Chorus!” exhorted the lyrist. And they bellowed jovially:

Larry leaped back, whirled his stick so rapidly that its bright peeled surface seemed to spit sparks, and again got over the boss’s indifferent guard with a whack that echoed hollowly.

MacLeod was too angry to retreat. He was too angry to see clearly, and his brain rang dizzily with the blows he had received. His injured shoulder ached with the violence of his exertions. But his pride kept him up, and forced him to meet the fresh attack that Gorman made—an attack in which that master seemed to be fencing mostly to mark the time of his jeering song:

The blow that time staggered MacLeod.

“Chorus!” called “Poet” Larry. But before he could rap his antagonist at the end of that roaring iteration the Honorable Pulaski was between them, having at last contrived to fight his way through the ranks of the crowding men. He narrowly missed getting the blow intended for the boss. He yanked the sled-stake out of the nerveless grasp of the sweating and discomfited MacLeod, and raised it.

“Be careful, Mr. Britt,” yelped Gorman. His mien changed from gay insouciance to bitter fury. “You’ve struck me once in my life, and I took it and went on my way, because I was getting your grub and your pay. You strike me to-day, and I’ll split your head open like a rotten punkin!”

Britt had begun to rant that he could thrash the whole Enchanted crew single-handed. He was maddened by the lamblike demeanor of his own men. But he knew a desperate and dangerous man when he saw him. At that moment Larry Gorman was dangerous. The tyrant lowered his club and backed away, muttering some wordless recrimination at which the poet curled his lip. Seeing his chance, Tommy Eye hooked his legs about the uprights and slid down the ladder with one dizzy plunge, struck the ground in squatting fashion, and shot head-first into the ranks of his protectors.

But after that masterly raillery of Gorman’s there was no fight left in the “Busters.” And his vengeful bearding of the Honorable Pulaski left the autocrat himself speechless and helpless.

Tommy Eye’s trembling hand fingered his chin, his wistful eyes peered over the shoulders of his new friends, and he knew he was safe. The “Busters,” nudging each other and growling half-humorous comment, began to sift out of the yard of the Durfy hovel, and lounge back along the trail towards the Jerusalem camp.

“D—n ye for cowards!” yelled the Honorable Pulaski, viciously flinging the ash sled-stake after them.

“Oh, but they’re not cowards!” cried Larry. In his bushman’s soul he realized that even now a chance taunt, a random prick of word, might start the fight afresh. “Every man-jack there is known to me of old, and the good, brave boys they are! But your money ain’t greasy enough, Mr. Britt, to make good men as them fight to take away a comrade’s man-rights.”

The “Busters” nodded affirmation and kept on. One man stepped back and hallooed: “Right ye are, Larry Gorman! And when ye try to get your Enchanted logs first through the Hulling Machine next spring, ye’ll find that we’re the kind of gristle that can’t be chawed. That’ll be man’s business, and no Teamster Tommy Eye to stub a toe over!”

There was a grin on the man’s face, but none the less it was a challenge, and Larry accepted it.

“Sure, and we’ll be there!” he called. “We’ll be there with hair a foot long, pick-pole[3] in one hand, peavy-stick[4] in the other, ready for a game of jack-straws in the white water and a fist-jig on the bank!”

“And will ye write it all into a song, Larry Gorman?”

“All into a song it shall go!”

And roaring a good-natured cheer over their shoulders, the “Busters” filed away into the mouth of Pogey Notch.

“You may as well move, boys,” ordered Rodburd Ide. “This business here isn’t swampin’ yards nor buildin’ camps!”

The men for Enchanted cheerfully shouldered dunnage-sacks, and in their turn set off up the Notch.

“Here’s Tommy Eye’s bill of his time, Mr. Britt,” said Gorman, holding out a crumpled paper to the choking tyrant. Tommy himself had prudently departed, bulwarked by his new comrades.

“I’ll not pay it!” blustered Britt. “He broke the contract!”

“No more does he want you to pay it,” replied Larry, serenely, speaking in behalf of the amiable prodigal. “He says to credit it on that one drink of whiskey he took out of your bottle, and when he earns more money workin’ for honest men he’ll pay ye the rest.”

He tore the paper across and across, snapped the bits in Britt’s face, turned, and followed the crew.

CHAPTER XIX

But the baron was anxious to placate. He began guarded explanations, to which Ide was listening intently, but Wade cut them short with a scorn there was no mistaking.

“The only sort of interest I took in that unfortunate girl has been maliciously misinterpreted, Mr. Barrett. She was thrown on my hands in a way that you thoroughly understand. Mr. Ide, as a plantation officer, has relieved me of the responsibility. You can talk with him hereafter.”

“But what—what are you going to say to him?” faltered Barrett, forced to show his anxious fear, since Wade was moving away.

In his physical weakness, in the illness that was sapping his nerve, he became wistfully paltering.

“Nothing,” replied the young man, curtly, but with a decisiveness there was no misunderstanding. “The matter has ceased to be any business of mine. My business hereafter—and I say this to my partner—is concerned wholly and entirely with certain lumbering operations on Enchanted township.”

He went away, following the crew. Rodburd Ide, eager to be gone, and seeing in the affair thus flatly dropped by Wade only a phase of the older animosity between Britt and the young man—a quarrel that might seek any avenue for expression, even a State pauper—demanded of Barrett:

“Do you lay any special claim to the girl?” His tone was that of an official only.

“Of course he doesn’t,” broke in Britt, seeing that his associate was groping for a reply. “We did think of trying to help her, but what’s the use? There isn’t any more gratitude in that sculch than there is in a pine knot. Send her back to the tribe.”

The little Castonia magnate looked relieved.

“She’s all right with my girl till I get home,” he said. “Then the affair will take care of itself, like all those things do.”

Barrett had picked up one of the discarded bludgeons and was supporting himself on it. His legs trembled visibly when he walked to Ide’s side.

“Rodburd,” he said, appealingly, “I can see that you think this thing strange. I don’t want you to have wrong ideas. You and I have known each other too long to get into quarrels. You have seen that I have been trying to smooth matters here to-day. I can’t talk it over with you now. I’m sick—I’m a sick man, Rodburd! I’ve been through a dreadful experience up here.”

“You don’t look well,” returned Ide, solicitously, his ever-ready sympathy enlisted.

Barrett’s face was haggard and his eyes were bloodshot. He wavered on his feet, tipping from heel to toe like a drunken man.

“You ought to get out of these woods as quick as you can,” the Castonia man went on.

Even Britt saw now that his associate was in a bad way. He gave a keen glance at him, and shouted to MacLeod, who was waiting at the edge of the woods, “Send back four of my men!”

“I feel dreadfully,” mourned Barrett. His grit and his excitement had been keeping him up. Now, like most strong men who have to confess that they are conquered, he gave way to his illness with utter abandonment of courage.

“Mr. Barrett,” said Ide, surveying him pityingly, “I can see that you’re a sick man. I don’t want to say that to frighten you, but because you ought to know it. You’d better only try to make Castonia, and have a doctor sent there. My girl will be there as soon as you are. You go to my house, and get doctored up before you tackle the trip down-river. That buckboard ride will kill you if you try it in the shape you’re in now.”

“You’d better do as he says, John,” advised Britt, checking the timber baron’s feeble protests. “I’m going to have these four men make a litter for you and lug you. You can stand that sort of ridin’, but unless you are in better shape when you get to Castonia you wouldn’t be good for that stage ride. Use common-sense, and rest up at Rodburd’s house.”

“Give the men their orders,” whispered the little Castonia magnate in an aside to Britt. “It’s fever, and a bad one if I ain’t mistaken. By the time he’s got to my place he’ll probably be too sick to give any orders of his own. I never saw a man grow sick so fast. Tell the men to leave him there.” He talked impatiently, for his crew had disappeared up the trail. “I’ve got to be hurryin’,” he added. “Mr. Barrett, make my home yours!” he cried over his shoulder, as he trotted off. “I’ll be back in a few days—as soon as I get this crew of mine located.”

The four men were already at work securing poles and boughs for the litter.

Barrett sat down upon a tussock, and held his throbbing head in his hands. He began weakly to complain that Britt had made a mistake in bringing his men and insisting on possession of the girl.

The Honorable Pulaski promptly checked the incoherent expostulations of the stumpage baron.

“No, I haven’t committed you, either,” he blurted. “Bluff it out! It’s the only way to do. It’s the way I advised you to do in the first place. The thing looks big to you here in the woods. You’re down on the level with it. Get back into the city, and get your tail-coat on and your dignity, and sit up on top of that governor’s boom of yours, and the story will only be political blackmail if they try it on you. But they won’t. That Wade fellow is one of those righteous sort of asses that like to read moral lessons to other people, and especially to you, so he can work out his grudge. But he’s all done. I know the sort. The thing began to scorch his fingers and he chucked it. He’s got enough to attend to in these woods. Don’t you worry.”

“But I do worry,” mourned Barrett. “And there’s the girl to consider. God save me, Pulaski, she’s mine! Her looks show it. I can’t sleep nights after this, unless she is taken care of in a decent way.”

“There’ll be a dozen methods of doin’ it when the time is ripe,” urged the other, consolingly. “As it is now, you get out of these woods and stay out, and attend to your business—which is my business, too, when it comes to the governor matter. By ——, you’ve seen enough in this trip to understand that we haven’t got any too safe timber laws as it is. If the farmers get control next trip it means trouble for such of us as take to the tall timber. Buck up, man! Don’t believe for a minute that we’re goin’ to let a college dude and a State pauper queer you. The thing will work itself out.”

He uttered a sudden snort of disgust, gazing over Barrett’s shoulder.

“Foolish Abe” of the Skeets had edged out of the bush, the silence after the uproar of voices and conflict encouraging him. He seemed pitifully bewildered. An instinct almost canine prompted him to take the trail to the south, for his only friend, the girl of the tribe, had gone that way. But a strange female had gone with her, and of strange females he entertained unspeakable fear.

“Here, you cross-eyed baboon,” called the Honorable Pulaski, “go! Scoot!” He pointed north in the direction in which the Enchanted crew had disappeared. “Young man want you. Follow him. Stay with him. Run!” He picked up his discarded sled-stake, and the fool hurried away towards the Notch. “I’d like to see that human nail-keg plastered onto the Enchanted crew for the winter,” remarked Britt, with malice. “There’s no fillin’ him up. He’ll eat as much as three men, and that Wade is just enough of a soft thing not to turn him out. If I can’t bore an enemy with a pod-auger, John, I’ll do it with a gimlet—a gimlet will let more or less blood.”

Five minutes later Barrett was borne on his way south, his courage braced by some final arguments from his iron associate, his mind made up to adopt the course of indignant bluff suggested by the belligerent Britt.

And Britt was stumping north, driving the blubbering Abe before him with sundry hoots and missiles.

When the poor creature came crawling to the fire on hands and knees at dusk that evening, hairy, pitiable, and drooling with hunger, Rodburd Ide accepted him with resignation, though he recognized Britt’s petty malice; for unless he were driven, Abe Skeet would never have come past a well-stocked lumber-camp to follow wanderers into the wilderness.

That night the Enchanted crew camped on Attean Stream, a short day’s journey from their destination. The tired men snatched supper from their packs and fell back snoring, their heads on their dunnage-bags.

They were away in the first flush of the morning, Rodburd Ide leading with his partner. Wade welcomed the little man’s absorbed interest in the business ahead of them. Ide asked no questions about the incident at Durfy’s. Wade put the hideous topic as far behind other thoughts as he could, and soon other thoughts crowded it out.

As they passed from the zone of striped maple, round-wood, witch-hobble, and mountain holly that Mother Nature had drawn across her naked breast after the rude hand of Pulaski Britt had stripped the virgin growth, his heart lifted. Under the great spruces of Enchanted the town’s bricks, streets, and human passions seemed very far away.

Before he slept that night he had had an experience that thrilled the sense of the primitive self hidden within him, as it is hidden in all men, and covered by conventions.

He had staked the metes and bounds, the corners, the frontage, all the dimensions of a new home, where no roof except the crowns of trees had ever shut sunlight off the earth.

Mankind in general opens eyes within walls that the hands of those coming before have built.

Many have no occasion to seek ever for other quarters than those their fathers have given them. With most the limit of exploration is the quest for a new rental. Mankind who build, build along settled streets, first taking note that sewers and water systems have been installed.

Even in the woods most crews come up to find that the advance skirmishers have builded main camp, meal camp, horse-hovels, and wangan. Owing to the sudden forming of Rodburd Ide’s partnership with the young man whom Fate threw in his way, and his equally sudden determination to operate on virgin Enchanted, there had been no time for preliminaries. Even the tote teams with the first of the winter’s supplies were miles away down the trail, for in the woods the human two-foot outclasses the equine four-foot.

Therefore, Wade, perspiring in the forefront of the toilers, saw the first tree topple, heard it crash outward from the site of the camp, and tugged with the others when it was set into place as the sill. When he stood back and wiped his forehead and gazed on that one lonesome log it made roofless out-doors seem bigger and more threatening. The rain was pattering from a cold sky. The thrall of centuries of housed ancestors was on him. Roof and walls had attached themselves to his sentiency, even as the shell of the snail is attached to its pulp.

But the next moment Larry Gorman started a song, and the rollicking hundred men about him took it up and toiled with merry thoughtlessness of all except that God’s good greenwood was about them and God’s sky above them, and Wade bent again to labor, ashamed that he had counted shingles and plaster as standing for so much.

They put up eight-log walls for the main camp, notching the ends. A hundred willing men made the buildings grow like toadstools. While the walls were going up men laid floors of poles shaved flat on one side. Others brought moss and chinked the spaces between the logs of the walls. The first team up brought tarred paper and the few boards needed for tables and like uses. The tarred paper and cedar splints roofed all comfortably.

The second team brought stove, tin dishes, and raw staples—and cook and cookee walked behind.

And when old Christopher Straight came at the tail of the procession as fast as he could hurry back from Castonia settlement, the camps stood nearly complete under the frown of Enchanted Mountain, Enchanted Stream gurgling over brown rocks at the door.

The distant whick-whack of axes told where the swampers were clearing the way, and the tearing crash of trees punctuated the ceaseless “ur-r rick-raw!” of the cross-cut saws. The only axe scarf on Ide’s trees was the nick necessary to direct their fall. They were felled by the saw.

Two days of exploration on the spruce benches straight back from the stream showed up several million feet of black growth easily available for a first season’s operation.

Ide, Wade, and old Christopher cruised, pacing parallels and counting trees. And when they sat down on an outcropping of ledge the young man made so many sagacious observations that Ide’s eyes opened in amazement.

“Where did you learn lumberin’?” he demanded.

“I wasn’t aware that I knew it—not as it is viewed from a practical stand-point,” replied Wade, humbly. “I was going to ask you in a moment if you wouldn’t like to have me keep still so that you and Christopher could talk sense.”

“I never heard better opinions on a stand of timber and a lay of land,” affirmed his partner. “It looks as though you’d been holdin’ out on me,” he added, with a grim smile.

The young man smiled back. There was a certain grateful pride in his expression.

“I know how old woodsmen look at book-learned chaps, Mr. Ide. Pulaski Britt told me once. I was simply trying on you a bit of an experiment with my little knowledge of books. I was waiting to have you and Christopher pull me up short. I’m rather surprised to find that you think what I said was good sense. But after a book-fellow has bumped against practical men like—like Mr. Britt for a time, he begins to distrust his books. It’s simply this way, Mr. Ide: I had a few young men in my high-school who were interested in forestry of the modern sort, and I worked with them to encourage them as much as I could. It is almost impossible for a reading-man in these days not to take an interest in the protection of our forests, for the folks at Washington are making it the great topic of the times.”

“Well,” remarked Ide, with a sigh of appreciation, “I never read a book on forestry in my life, and I never heard of a lumberman in these parts who ever had. But if you can get facts like those you’ve stated out of books, I reckon some of us better spend our winter evenin’s readin’ instead of playin’ pitch pede.” He got up and gave the young man a complimenting palm. “Wade,” he said, earnestly, “I’ll own up that I’ve been a little prejudiced against book-fellows myself. Instead of givin’ an ignorant man the contents of the book—the juice of it, as you might say—-in a way that won’t hurt, they are so anxious to have him know that it’s book-learnin’ they’ve got, they’ll bang him across the face with it, book-covers and all. I like your knowledge, because it’s goin’ to help us in handlin’ this thing we’ve bit off up here. But I’ll be blamed if I don’t like your modesty best of all.”

He picked up his calipers, stuck them under his arm, and started for camp with a haste that showed full confidence in his partner’s ability.

And the next morning he buttoned the camp letters in his coat, and started south for Castonia with the outgoing tote team.

“I don’t worry about this end,” he said, at parting, “and you needn’t worry about mine. Don’t be afraid of going hungry. There’s nothin’ like full stomachs to make axes and saws run well. It will have to be hand-to-mouth till snow flies, then I’ll slip you in stores enough to fill that wangan to the roof. Good heart, my boy! We’re goin’ to make some money.”

Wade followed him to the edge of the clearing with his first sense of loneliness tugging within him.

“Safe home to you, Mr. Ide,” he said, “and my respectful regards to Miss Nina, if you will take them. I suppose—she will—probably—the girl she took away—” he stammered.

“By thunder mighty!” cried the Castonia magnate, whirling on him, “I’d forgotten all about that Skeet girl, or Arden girl, or whatever they call her.”

He eyed the young man with a dawning of his old curiosity, but Wade met his gaze frankly.

“The affair of the girl is not mine at all,” he said. “Simply because she seemed superior to the tribe she was with, I hoped Mr. Barrett would do as he partly promised—use a few dollars of his money to help her from the muck. Such cases appeal to me, because I’m not accustomed to seeing them, perhaps.”

“If my girl is interested in that poor little wildcat, you needn’t think twice about her bein’ taken good care of,” cried the admiring father.

And gazing into the wholesome eyes and candid face of the little man, Wade reflected that perhaps Fate had handled a problem better for John Barrett’s abandoned daughter than he himself, in his resentful zeal, had planned.

He shook Ide’s hand hard, and, with the picture of John Barrett’s other daughter in his dimming eyes and the love of John Barrett’s other daughter burning in his lonely heart, he turned back towards the woods, whose fronded arms, tossing in the October wind, beckoned him to his duty.

CHAPTER XX

But Winter proceeded about his business with majestic deliberateness. He patted down the duff under the big trees with beating, sleety rains; and when the ground was ready for the sowing of the mighty crop, he piled his banks of clouds up from the south, and, though he gave the coast folk rain, he brought the men of the north woods what they were longing for—snow a-plenty; snow that heaped the arms of the spruces, filled all the air with smothering clouds, and blanketed the ground.

Wade, blinking the big flakes out of his eyes as he breasted the swirling storm, came across to the main camp from the wangan, his pipe and tobacco-pouch in hand. He rejoiced in his heart to see the snow driving so thickly that the camp window was only a blur of yellow light smudging the whiteness. This first real storm of the winter promised two feet on a level, and guaranteed the slipping on ram-downs and twitch-roads.

The cheer of the storm permeated all the camp on Enchanted. The cook beamed on Wade with floury face. The bare ground had meant bare shelves. He predicted the first supply-team for the morrow. He had been thriftily “making a mitten out of a mouse’s ear” for several weeks. Tommy Eye, ploughing back from his good-night visit to the horse-hovel, proclaimed his general pleasure for two reasons: No more bare-ground dragging for the bob-sleds; no more too liberal dosing of bread dough with soap to make the flour “spend” in lighter loaves. “Eats like wind and tastes like a laundry,” Tommy had grumbled.

The boss of the choppers moved along to give Wade the end of the “deacon seat,” and grinned amiably.

“That’s a cheerful old song she’s singing overhead to-night,” he remarked.

It needed a lumberman’s interpretation to give it cheer.

There were far groanings, there were near sighs; there were silences, when the soft rustle of the snow against the window-glass made all the sound; there were sudden, tempestuous descents of the wind that rattled the panes and made the throat of the open stove “whummle” like a neighing horse.

Wade lighted his pipe with deep content. He enjoyed the rude fraternity of the big camp. There was but little garrulity. Those who talked did so in a drawling monotone that was keyed properly to the monotone of the soughing trees outside—elbows on knees and eyes on the pole floor. Clamor would not have suited that little patch of light niched in the black, brooding night of the forest. But there was comfort within. The blue smoke from pipe bowls curled up and mingled with the shadows dancing against the low roof. The woollens, hung to dry on the long poles, draped the dim openings of the bunks. The “spruce feathers” within were still fresh, and resinous odors struggled against the more athletic fragrance of the pipes.

Most of the men loafed along the “deacon seat,” relaxed in the luxury of laziness for that precious three hours between supper and nine o’clock. A few, bending forward to catch the light from the bracket-lamp, whittled patiently at what lumbermen call “doodahs”—odd little toys destined for some best girl or admiring youngster at home. “Windy” McPheters regaled those with an ear for music by cheerful efforts on his mouth-harp, coming out strong on the tremolo, and jigging the heel of his moccasined foot for time. And when “Windy” had no more breath left, “Hitchbiddy” Wagg sang, after protracted persuasion, the only song he knew—though one song of that character ought to suffice for any man’s musical attainments.

Its length may be understood when it is stated that it detailed all the campaigns of the first Napoleon, and “Hitchbiddy” sang it doubled forward, his elbows on his crossed knees, and the toe of his moccasin flapping for the beat. He came down “the stretch” on the last verse with vigor and expression:

To signal that the song was done, “Hitchbiddy” dropped the tune on the last line, and in calm, direct, matter-of-fact recitative announced that “the grand Conversation of Napoleon arose.” In the fifty years during which that song has been sung in the Maine lumber-camps, no one has ever displayed the least curiosity as to that last line. Away back, somewhere, a singer twisted a nice, fat word of the original song, and it has stayed twisted, and no one has tried to trouble it by idle questions.

“Hitchbiddy’s” most rapt listener was Foolish Abe of the Skeets. The shaggy giant squatted behind the stove beside the pile of shavings he was everlastingly whittling for the cook-fire. It was the only task that Abe’s poor wits could master, and he toiled at it unceasingly, paying thus and by a sort of canine gratitude for the food he received and the cast-off clothes tossed to him.

A mumbled chorus of commendation followed the song. But the chopping-boss, his humorous gaze on the witling, remarked:

“I reckon I’ll have to rule that song out, after this, ‘Hitchbiddy.’”

“What for?” demanded the amazed songster.

“It seems to have a damaging and cavascacious effect on the giant intellect of Perfessor Skeet,” remarked the boss, with irony. “Look at him!”

Abe was on his knees, stretching up his neck and twitching his head from side to side with the air of an agitated fowl.

“We’ll make it a rule after this to have only common songs, like Larry Gorman’s,” continued the boss, with a quizzical glance at the woodsman poet. “These high operas are too thrillin’.”

But those who stared at Abe promptly saw that his attention was not fixed on matters within, but without.

“He heard something,” muttered one of the men. “He’s got ears like a cat, anyway.”

If the giant had heard something it was plain that he heard it again, for he dropped his knife and scrambled to his feet.

“Me go! Yes!” he roared, gutturally; and, obeying some mysterious summons, his haste showing its authority, he ran out of the camp.

“Catch that fool!” yelled the boss. But the first of those who tumbled out into the dingle after him were not quick enough. The night and the swirling storm had swallowed him. A few zealous pursuers ran a little way, trying to follow his tracks, lost them, and then came back for lanterns.

“It’s no use, Mr. Wade,” advised the boss. “He’s got the strength of a mule and the legs of an ostrich. The men will only be takin’ chances for nothin’. He’s gone clean out of his head, and there’s no tellin’ when he’ll stop.”

And Wade regretfully gave orders to abandon the chase. He and the others stood for a time gazing about them into the storm, now sifting thicker and swirling more wildly. He was oppressed by the happening, as though he had seen some one leap to death. What else could a human being hope for in that waste?

“He’s as tough as a bull moose, and just as used to bein’ out-doors,” remarked the boss, consolingly. “When he’s had his run he’ll smell his way back.”

Teamster Tommy Eye was the most persistent pursuer. He came in, stamping the snow, after all the others had reassembled in the camp to talk the matter over.

“Did ye hear it?” demanded Tommy. “I did, and I run like a tiger so I could say that at last I’d seen one. But I didn’t see it. I only heard it.”

“What?” asked Wade, amazed.

“The ha’nt,” said Tommy. “I’ve always wanted to see one. I was first out, and I heard it.”

“What did it sound like?” gasped one of the men, his superstition glowing in his eyes.

“It’s bad luck forever to try to make a noise like a ha’nt,” said Tommy, with decision. “Nor will I meddle with its business—no, s’r. ’Twould come for me. Take a lucivee, an Injun devil, a bob-sled runner on grit, and the gabble of a loon, mix ’em together, and set ’em, and skim off the cream of the noise, and it would be something like the loo-hoo of a ha’nt. It’s awful on the nerves. I reckon I’ll take a pull at the old T. D.” He rammed his pipe bowl with a finger that trembled visibly.

“I’ve seen one,” declared, positively, the man who had inquired in regard to the sound. “I’ve seen one, but I never heard one holler. I didn’t know it was a ha’nt till I’d seen it half a dozen times.”

“Good eye!” sneered Tommy. “What! did it have to come up and introduce itself, and say, ‘Please, Mister MacIntosh, I’m a ha’nt’?”

“I’ve seen one,” insisted the man, sullenly. “I was teamin’ for the Blaisdell Brothers on their Telos operation, and I see it every day for most a week. It walked ahead of my team close to the bushes, side of the road, and it was like a man, and it always turned off at the same place and went into the woods.”

“Do you call that a ha’nt—a man walkin’ ’longside the road in daylight—some hump-backed old spruce-gum picker?” demanded Tommy.

“The last time I see it I noticed that it didn’t leave any tracks,” declared the narrator. “It walked right along on the light snow, and didn’t leave any tracks. Funny I didn’t notice that before, but I didn’t.”

“You sartinly ain’t what the dictionary would set down as a hawk-eyed critter,” remarked Tommy, maliciously. “It must have been kind of discouragin’, ha’ntin’ you.”

“It was a ha’nt,” insisted the man, with the same doggedness. “I got off’n my team right then and there, and got a bill of my time and left, and the man that took my place got sluiced by the snub-line bustin’, and about three thousand feet of spruce mellered the eternal daylights out of him. Say what you’re a mind to—I saw a thing that walked on light snow and didn’t make tracks, and I left, and that feller got sluiced—everybody in these woods knows that a feller got killed on Telos two winters ago.”

“Oh, there’s ha’nts,” agreed Tommy, earnestly. “Mebbe you saw one; only you got at your story kind of back-ended.”

The old teamster had been watching incredulity settle on the face of Dwight Wade, and this heresy in one to whom his affections had attached touched his sensitiveness.

“You’re probably thinkin’ what most of the city folks say out loud to us, Mr. Wade,” he went on, humbly. “They say there ain’t any such things as ha’nts in the woods. It would be easy to say there ain’t any bull moose up here because they ain’t also seen walkin’ down a city street and lookin’ into store windows. But I’d like to see one of those city folks try to sleep in the camp that’s built over old Jumper Joe’s grave north of Sourdnaheunk.”

There was a general mumble of indorsement. It became evident to Wade that the crew of the Enchanted were pretty stanch adherents of the supernatural.

“Hitchbiddy” Wagg cleared his throat and sang, for the sake of verification:

“They can’t use that place for anything but a depot-camp now,” stated Tommy; “and it’s a wonder to me that they can even get pressed hay to stay there overnight.”

“Well, from what I know of human nature,” smiled Wade, “I should think that hay and provisions would stay better overnight in a haunted camp than in one without protection.”

He rapped out his pipe ashes on the hearth of the stove and rose to go.

“And don’t you believe that it was a ha’nt that called out Foolish Abe?” asked Tommy, eager to make a convert. “You saw that for yourself, Mr. Wade.”

“I am afraid to think of what may have happened to that poor creature,” replied Wade, earnestly, looking into the black night through the door that he had opened. He heard the chopping-boss call: “Nine! Turn in!” as he strove with the storm between the main camp and the wangan, and when he stamped into his own shelter the yellow smudge winked out behind him—such is the alacrity of a sleepy woods crew when it has a boss who blows out the big lamp on the dot of the hour. He shuddered as he shut out the blackness. He had no superstitions, but the unaccountable flight of the witling, and the eerie tales offered in explanation and the mystic night of storm in that wild forest waste unstrung him. He went to sleep, finding comfort in the dull glow of the lantern that he left lighted.

Its glimmer in his eyes when the cook called shrilly in the gray dawn, “Grub on ta-a-abe!” sent his first thoughts to the wretch who had abandoned himself to the storm. He hoped to find Abe whittling shavings in the cook-house.

“No, s’r, no sign of him, hide nor hair,” said the cook, shaking his head. “Reckon the ha’nt flew high with him.”

The snow still sifted through the trees—a windless storm now. The forest was trackless.

“For a man to start out in the woods in that storm was like jumpin’ into a hole and pullin’ the hole in after him,” observed the chopping-boss. That remark might have served as the obituary of poor Abe Skeet. The swampers, the choppers, the sled-tenders, the teamsters, trudging away to their work, had their minds full of their duties and their mouths full of other topics during the day.

And all day the cook bleated his cheerful little prophecy in the ears of the cookee: “The tote team will be in by night.” That morning, with his rolling-pin, he had pounded “hungryman’s ratty-too” on the bottom of the last flour-barrel to shake out enough for his batch of biscuits, and he burned up the barrel, even though the pessimistic cookee predicted that “the human nail-kags” would eat both kitchen mechanics if the food gave out.

Dwight Wade, at nightfall, surveyed the bare shelves of the cook camp with some misgivings.

“Don’t you worry,” advised the master of that domain. “Rod Ide ain’t waitin’ three weeks for good slippin’ jest for the sake of settin’ in his store window and singin’ ‘Beautiful snow’! He sure got a load of supplies started on that first skim o’ snow, and they’re due here to-night—” The cook paused, kicked at the cookee for slamming the stove-cover at that crucial moment of listening, and shrilled, “There she blows!”

Wade heard the jangle of bells, and hastened to meet the dim bulk of the loaded sled. The driver did not reply to his delighted hail, but before he had time to wonder at that silence some one struggled out of the folds of a shrouding blanket and sprang from the sled. It was a woman; and while he stood and stared at her, she ran to him and grasped his hands and clung to him in pitiful abandonment of grief.

It was Nina Ide. In the dim light Wade could see tears and heart-broken woe on her face. He had had some experience with the self-poise of the daughter of Rodburd Ide. This emotion, which checked with sobs the words in her throat, frightened him.

“It’s a terrible thing, and I don’t understand it, Mr. Wade,” quavered the driver. He slipped down from the load and came and stood beside them. “We was in Pogey Notch, and the wind was blowin’ pretty hard there, and I told the young ladies they’d better cover their heads with the blankets. And I pulled the canvas over me, ’cause the snow stung so, and I didn’t see it when it happened—and I don’t understand it.”

“When what happened?” Wade gasped.

“They took her—whatever they was,” stated the driver, in awed tones. “I didn’t see ’em or hear ’em take her. And I don’t know jest where we was when they took her. I went back and hunted, but it wasn’t any use. They was gone, and her with ’em. They wasn’t humans, Mr. Wade. It was black art, that’s what it was.”

“Probably,” said Tommy Eye, with deep conviction. He had led the group that came out of the camp to greet the tote team. “There were ha’nts here last night. They got Foolish Abe.”

“They sartinly seem to mean the Skeet family this time,” said the driver. “It was that Skeet girl—the pretty one that’s called Kate—that they got off’n my team.”

The men of the camp, surrounding the new arrivals, surveyed Nina Ide with respectful but eager curiosity.

“If I was a ha’nt,” growled the chopping-boss, “and had my pick, I reckon I’d have shown better judgment.” His remark was under his breath, and the girl did not hear it. She clung to Wade. Her agitation communicated itself to him. A sense of calamity told him that there was trouble deeper than the disappearance of the waif of the Skeet tribe.

Her words confirmed his suspicion. “My God, what are we going to do, Mr. Wade?” she sobbed. “I planned it; I encouraged her. It was wild, imprudent, reckless. I ought to have realized it. But I knew how you felt towards her. I wanted to help her and—and you!”

Something in the horror of her wide-open eyes told him plainly now that this could not be merely the question of the loss of one of the Skeets. And with that conviction growing out of bewildered doubt, he went with her when she led him away towards the office camp. A suspicion wild as a nightmare flashed into his mind. In the wangan she faced him, as woe-stricken, as piteously afraid, as though she were confessing a crime against him.

“It was John Barrett’s daughter Elva on that team with me,” she choked. “She wanted to come—but I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Wade. She wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t encouraged her—yes, put the idea into her head and the means into her hands. I’ve been a fool, Mr. Wade, but I’ll not be a coward and lie about my responsibility.”

He gazed at her, his face ghastly white in the lantern-light.

“She wanted to—she was coming here—she is lost?” he mumbled, as though trying to fathom a mystery.

Infinite pity replaced the distraction in the girl’s face.

“Forgive me, Mr. Wade!” she cried. “Not for my folly—you can’t overlook that. Forgive me for wasting time. But I didn’t know how to say it to you.” She put her woman’s weakness from her, though the struggle was a mighty one, and her face showed it. “I won’t waste any more words, Mr. Wade. John Barrett has been at my father’s house for weeks. He has been near death—he is near death now, but the big doctors from the city say that he will get well. He must have been through some terrible trouble up here.”

She looked at him with questioning gaze, as though to ask how much he knew of the strain that had prostrated John Barrett, the stumpage king.

“He was in great danger—and his exposure—” stammered Wade.

But she went on, hurriedly:

“It was fever, and it went to his head, and he talked and raved. His daughter came from the city and nursed him, and she has heard him talking, talking, talking, all the time—talking about you, and how you saved him from the fire; talking about a woman who is dead and a man who is alive, and a girl—”

“Does Elva Barrett—know?” he demanded, hoarsely.

“It was too plain not to know—after she saw that girl, Mr. Wade. The girl was there at our house—she is there now. It isn’t all clear to us yet. We have only the ravings of a sick man—and the face of that girl. Father doesn’t understand all of it, either. But he knows that you do, although you haven’t told him.” She clutched her trembling hands to hold them steady. “And he has talked and talked of other things, Mr. Wade—the sick man has. He has said that you have his reputation, and his prospects, and the happiness of his family all in your hands, and that you are waiting to ruin him because he has abused you; and he has tossed in his bed and begged some one to come to you and promise you—buy you—coax you—”

“It’s a cursed lie—infernal, though a sick man babble it!” Wade cried, heart-brokenly. “It holds me up as a blackmailer, Miss Nina. It makes me seem a wretch in Elva’s eyes. And yet—was she—was she coming here thinking I was that kind—coming here to beg for her father?” he demanded.

“We—I—oh, I don’t like to tell you we believed that of you,” the girl sobbed. “No, I didn’t believe it. But if you had only heard him lying there talking, talking! And you were the one that he seemed to fear. And we thought if you knew of it you wouldn’t want him to worry that way. And if we could carry back some word of comfort from you to him—She wanted to come to you, Mr. Wade, and I encouraged her and helped her to come—because—because—” The girl caught her breath in a long sob, and cried: “She loves you, Mr. Wade! And I’ve pitied you and her ever since that day in the train when I found out about it.”

It was not a moment to analyze emotions. Nina Ide, in her ingenuous declaration of Elva Barrett’s motives in seeking him, had made his heart for an instant blaze with joy. For that instant he forgot the shame of the baseless babblings of the sick man, the awful mystery of Elva Barrett’s disappearance. The blow of it—that Elva Barrett was gone—that she was somewhere in those woods alone, or worse than alone, had stunned him at first. Groping out of that misery, striving to realize what it meant, he had faced first the hideous thought that she might believe him mean enough to seek revenge. Then came the dazzling hope that Elva Barrett so loved him that she adventured—imprudently and recklessly, but none the less bravely—in order to make her love known. Then over all swept the black bitterness of the calamity.

“But you must have some suspicion—some hint how she was taken or how she went!” he cried. “In Heaven’s name, Miss Nina, think! think! You heard some outcry! There was some hidden rock or stump to jar the sled! The man did not search along the road far enough! She must be lost—lost!” and his voice rose almost to a shriek.

“There was no cry, Mr. Wade. And I went back with the man. We searched; we called—we even went as far as the place where we covered ourselves with the blankets. We could find no track, and the snow was driving and sifting. The man does not know it was Elva Barrett,” she added.

He suddenly remembered the driver’s statement.

“She came in Kate Arden’s clothes,” confided the girl. “Those who saw her ride out of Castonia, Mr. Wade, thought it was Kate Arden. And Kate Arden, in Elva Barrett’s dress, is sitting now beside John Barrett, holding his hand, and his daughter’s face has soothed him. He thinks it is his daughter beside him. They are so like, Kate and Elva. We waited until we had made sure. It was my plan. And Kate obeyed me. I don’t know what she is thinking of. She is sullen and silent, but she took the place by his bed when I told her to. Then it could not be said that John Barrett’s daughter had come seeking Dwight Wade.”

Even in this stress he could still feel gratitude for the subterfuge that checked the tongues of gossip.

“I wish father had more authority over me,” sobbed the girl. “He wouldn’t have let us come on such a crazy errand if I hadn’t bossed him into it.” The lament was so guilelessly feminine that Wade put aside his own woe for the moment to think of the girl’s distress.

“This will be your home until I can send you back, Miss Nina,” he said, gently. “I will have old Christopher bring in your supper and mend your fire.”

“And about her, Mr. Wade?” she cried.

“I’m going,” he said, simply, but with such earnestness that her eyes flooded again with tears.

CHAPTER XXI