The Project Gutenberg eBook of Joan of Arc of the North Woods, by Holman Day

“That’s about enough of that!” warned Flagg, sourly. “Kyle, get up onto your feet where you belong.”

But the spirit of jest made the boss reckless and willfully disobedient. He insisted doggedly on his rôle as a balky ox and scowled at the teamster. “If you want a job you’ll have to show me!”

The teamster adjured Mr. Kyle in very polite language, and did not bring the swishing goad within two feet of the scornful nose; the candidate wanted a job and was not in a mood to antagonize a prospective boss.

“You’re a hell of a teamster!” yapped Kyle. “What’s your system? Do you get action by feeding an ox lollypops, kissing him on the nose and saying, ’Please,’ and ’Beg your pardon’?”

The big chap began to show some spirit of his own under the lash of the laughter that was encouraging Kyle.

“I ain’t getting a square deal, mister. That post wa’n’t an ox; you ain’t an ox.”

“That’s what!” Mr. Kyle was receiving the plaudits and encouragement of all his friends who enjoyed a joke, and was certain in his mind that he had that bashful stutterer sized up as a quitter. Flagg folded his arms and narrowed his eyes—his was the air of one who was allowing fate to deal with a fool who tempted it.

The candidate did not hurry matters. He spat meditatively into first one fist and then into the other. He grasped the goad in both hands. He looked calculatingly at Mr. Kyle, who was on his hands and knees, and was cocking an arch and provocative look upward, approving the grins of the men near him.

When the teamster did snap into action his manner indicated that he knew how to handle balky oxen. First he cracked Mr. Kyle smartly over the bridge of the nose. “Wo haw up!” was a command which Kyle tried to obey in a flame of ire, but a swifter and more violent blow across the nose sent him back on his heels, his eyes shut in his agony.

“Gee up into the yoke, you crumpled-horn hyampus!” The teamster welted the goad across Kyle’s haunches and further encouraged the putative ox by a thrust of a full inch of the brad.

When the boss came onto his feet with a berserker howl of fury and started to attack, the ox expert yelled, “Dat rat ye, don’t ye try to hook your horns into me!” Then he flailed the stick once more across Kyle’s nose with a force that knocked the boss flat on his back.

Echford Flagg stepped forward and stood between the two men when Kyle struggled to his feet and started toward the teamster with the mania of blood lust in his red eyes. The master put forth a hand and thrust back the raging mate. Flagg said something, but for a time he could not be heard above the tempest of howling laughter.

It was riotous abandonment to mirth. Men hung helplessly to other men or flapped their hands and staggered about, choking with their merriment. The savageness of the punishment administered to the boastful Kyle might have shocked persons with squeamish dispositions; it was wildly humorous in the estimation of those men o’ the forest. They were used to having their jokes served raw.

The roar that fairly put into the background the riot of the falling waters of the Noda was what all the region recognized as the ruination of a man’s authority in the north country; it was the Big Laugh.

Flagg, when he could make himself heard by his boss, holding Kyle in his mighty grip, made mention of the Big Laugh, too. “Kyle, you’ve got it at last by your damn folly. You’re licked forever in these parts. I warned you. You went ahead against my word to you. You’re no good to me after this.” He yanked the list of names from Kyle’s jacket pocket.

“You’re going to walk out—and away! You’re done. You’re fired. You can’t boss men after this. A boss, are you?” he demanded, with bitter irony. “All up and down this river, if you tried to boss men, they’d give you the grin and call you ’Co Boss’. They’d moo after you. Look at ’em now. Listen to ’em. Get out of my sight. I don’t forgive any man who goes against my word to him and then gets into trouble.” He thrust Kyle away with a force that sent the man staggering. He turned to the bashful chap, who had resumed his former demeanor of deprecation. “You’re hired. You’ve showed that you can drive oxen and I reckon you can drive logs.”

The teamster was too thoroughly bulwarked by admirers to allow the rampant Kyle an opportunity to get at him. And there was Flagg to reckon with if violence should be attempted. The deposed first mate slunk away.

“That, my men,” proclaimed the master, “is what the Big Laugh can do to a boss. No man can be a boss for me after he gets that laugh. I reckon I’ve hired my crew,” he went on, looking them over critically. “Stand by to follow me north in the morning.”

CHAPTER SIX

Flagg looked Latisan up and down and showed no enthusiasm. “Yes, I heard that you and your father had let the Three C’s slam you flat. And what makes you think I want that kind of a quitter in my crew?”

Ward met the disparaging stare with a return display of undaunted challenge. “Because I belong in the crew of a man who is proposing to fight the Three C’s.”

Latisan kept on. “You have been hiring men because they have been parading a lot of little grouches against the Comas folks. You need a man who has a real reason for going up against that outfit. And I’m the man.”

“What you think about yourself and what I may think about you are two different things,” retorted Flagg, with insolence. “Looks to me like you had got the Big Laugh over in your section. You have probably noticed what I just did in a case of that sort.”

“They are not laughing with us or against us over in the Tomah, Mr. Flagg. They all know what happened, and that we fought the Comas fair and square as long as we could keep on our feet. It was a trick that licked us. Craig held out the Walpole heir on us.”

“I know about it; I manage to get most of the news.” Flagg started to go on his way, but Ward put his clutch on the autocrat’s arm.

“Pardon me, Mr. Flagg, but you’re going to hear what I have to ask of you.”

Mere apologetic suit would not have served with Flagg. He found this bold young man patterning after the Flagg methods in dealings with men. The boldness of the grip on his arm gained more effectively than pleading.

“You needn’t be, sir. I’m a Latisan and I have bossed our drives. I have brought along a bunch of my own men who have bucked white water with me and are with me now in standing up for the principle of the independents. Allow me to say that luck is with you. Here’s your chance to get hold of a man who can put heart and soul into this fight you’re going to make.”

“And now go on and tell me how much you admire me,” suggested Flagg, sarcastically.

“I can’t do that, sir. I’m going to tell you frankly I don’t relish what I have heard about you. It’s for no love of you that I’m asking for a chance to go up against the Comas people. It’s because you’re hard—hard enough to suit me—hard enough to let me go to it and show the Three C’s they can’t get away with what they’re trying to do up here through Rufus Craig.”

Latisan was not astonished by this precipitate come-about. He was prepared for Flagg’s tactics by what he had set himself to learn about the autocrat’s nature—quick to adjudge, tenacious in his grudges, inflexible in his opinion, bitterly ruthless when he had set himself in the way his prejudices selected.

“You have seen what happened to Kyle. Can you govern yourself accordingly?” Flagg in his turn had set his grip on Ward’s arm.

“I’ll kick you out just as sudden as I kicked him if anything happens to make men give you the grin. Can you start north with me in the morning?”

Flagg shifted his hand from Ward’s arm to the young man’s shoulder and propelled him back a few paces toward the crowd in front of the tavern. “Listen, one and all! Here’s my drive boss. He’s old John Latisan’s grandson. If that isn’t introduction enough, ask questions about old John from those who remember him; this chap is like his grandfather.”

Latisan went into the tavern after Flagg had marched away to the big house on the ledges. The crowd made way for the new drive boss; those in his path stared at him with interest; mumble of comment followed as the men closed in behind him. When he sat down in a corner of the tavern office and lighted his pipe his subalterns showed him deference by leaving him to himself. That isolation gave Landlord Brophy his opportunity to indulge his bent in gossip unheard by interlopers.

Brophy plucked a cigar from a box in the little case on the desk and sat down beside Ward. “I sympathize with you,” he said by way of backhanded congratulation.

“I was born in this tavern; my father built it and run it before me,” said Brophy, tucking his cigar through the shrubbery of his gray mustache. “And so I’ve had the chance to know Ech Flagg a good many years. He’s a turk.”

“He has always had a razor edge to his temper. Maybe you know what put the wire edge onto it?” It was query with the cock of an eyebrow accompanying.

“What I know about Mr. Flagg is only a general reputation of being a hard man. I can say that much to you because I told him the same thing. And that’s as far as I care to gossip about an employer,” stated Ward, stiffly.

“That’s a safe stand,” said Brophy, unperturbed. “Keep to it and they can’t be running to him with stories about what you have said. But he don’t pay me wages and I can say what I feel like saying. A new boss ought to know a few things about the man who hires him. It’s my disposition to set a good chap on the right road with a tip. Whatever you may say to Flagg in the way of chat, don’t you ever try to bring up the subject of his family affairs.”

“Oh, such a subject is easy out when folks get to going confidential,” pursued the persistent Brophy. The suggestion that he would ever be on confidential terms with Flagg provoked an ill-tempered rebuke from Ward, but Brophy paid no attention.

“If you lose your job with him, as you probably will, Latisan, let it be in the straight way of business, as he conducts it, instead of being by some fool slip of your tongue about family matters.” He puffed at his cigar complacently and still was giving no heed to Ward’s manifest repugnance at being made the repository of gossip.

“Eck’s wife died when the daughter Sylvia was small, and he sent the girl off to school somewheres when she was big enough to be sent. And she fell in with a dude kind of a fellow and came back home married to him. She was so much in love that she dared to do a thing like that with Eck Flagg—and that’s being in love a whole lot, I’ll say. Well, none of us knew what was said back and forth in the family circle, but we figured that the new husband’s cheeks didn’t tingle with any kisses that Eck gave him. At any rate, Eck set Kennard to work—that was the name, Alfred Kennard. Eck was never much good at ciphering. Office had been in his hip pocket, where he carried his timebook and his scale sheet. Kennard had an education and it came about that Eck let Alf do the ciphering; then he let him keep the books; then he let him handle contracts and the money; then he gave him power of attorney so that Alf wouldn’t be hampered whilst Eck was away in the woods. Just handed everything over for the first and the only time in his life, figuring that it was all in the family. I guess that Alf went to figuring the same way, seeing that he was good at figures; felt that what was Eck’s was his, or would be later—and Alf proceeded to cash in. Stole right and left, that was the amount of it. Prob’ly reckoned he’d rather have a sore conscience than have his feelings all ripped to pieces when he asked Eck for money.

“We all knew when Eck found out that he had been properly trimmed by the only man he had ever trusted.

“It happened in the dooryard of the big house up there, when Eck came home, wised up, and tackled Alf. Eck felt that the inside of the house might get mussed up by his language, so he stood in the yard and hollered for Alf to come out. We all went up and stood around; it seemed to be a free show, all welcome. We got the full facts in the case from Eck.

“Sylvia came out on the heels of Alf, and she had with her the little Lida, Eck’s granddaughter. And after Eck had had his say to Alf and had thrown him over the fence, he gave Sylvia her choice—stay with her father or go away with Alf. Well, she had loved Alf well enough to come home and face Eck with him; she loved Alf enough to turn her back on Eck and face the world with her husband. Natural, of course! Eck tried to grab the little girl away—to save his own from the thieves, so he said. Sylvia fought him off and hung to the girl. It was a tough sight, Latisan! And he stood there and shook his fists and cast ’em all off for ever and aye. That’s his nature—no allowance made if anybody does him dirt.

“I’ll admit that Eck did make an allowance later, after Alf died and the news of it got back here to Adonia. Lida was grown up to around sixteen by that time. I got this from Rickety Dick. Know him?”

“Well, you soon will. He cooks and waits and tends on Eck. Looks up to Eck. Loves Eck—and that’s going some! Dick told me about the allowance Eck made for once in his life after I had touched Dick up by telling him that Eck Flagg never made an allowance to anybody. Eck allowed to Dick that Lida was too young to choose the right way that day in the yard. When she had grown up Eck sent old Dick to hunt for her in the city, to tell her she could come back to him, now that she was old enough to make her choice. Said Sylvia couldn’t come back. Now that was a devil of a position to put a girl in. What? Hey?”

“And Sylvia right then was in bed with her never-get-over, so Dick told me. Of course Lida wouldn’t come back. And she was working her fingers to the bone to take care of her mother. Old Dick cried like a baby when he was telling me. He cries pretty easy, anyway. He never dared to give to Eck the word that Lida sent back. She’s got the spirit of the Flaggs, so I judge from what Dick told me. She wouldn’t even take the eggs and the truck Dick lugged down, though Dick had bought ’em with his own money; she thought the stuff came from her grandfather. Dick had to hide ’em under the table when he came away. And so Eck has crossed Lida off for ever and aye. Now that’s some story, ain’t it?”

“Prob’ly not. I wasn’t telling it thinking you’d give three cheers when I finished. But I’ve been warning you not to make a foolish break by stubbing your toe over the family topic. I’ve heard what has happened to the Latisans over Tomah way. You’re our real sort, and I’m blasted sorry for you. I reckon you need a job and I’m trying to help you hold it. I like your looks, young Latisan. I hate the Comas crowd. Craig has never set down to my table but what he has growled about the grub. The cheap rowdies he hires for his operations on these waters come through here with bootleg booze and try to wreck my house. I’d like to be friends with you, young Latisan, and if you feel that way about it, put it there!”

“In my position I hear all the news,” stated the landlord. “I’ll sift the wheat out of the chaff and hand you what’s for your own good. And now you’ll have to excuse me whilst I go and pound steak and dish up dinner and wait on the table. That’s the trouble with running a tavern up here in the woods. I can’t keep help of the girl kind. They either get homesick or get married.”

Brophy swore roundly and extricated his rotund haunches from the arms of his chair. “There goes Dirty-Shirt Sam! I have to double him as hostler and waiter. He’d smash the feed pails in the stable if they wasn’t galvanized iron.”

He pounded with heavy gait across the office and flung open the dining-room door, disclosing a lop-sided youth who was listlessly kicking broken dishes into a pile.

“You’re fourteen dollars behind your wages, already, with dishes you’ve dropped and smashed,” shouted Brophy. “I’d give a thousand dollars for the right kind of a girl to stay here and wait on tables if she wouldn’t get married or homesick. I’ll make it a standing offer.” He cuffed the youth in a circle around the heap of broken crockery and went on his way to the kitchen.

Latisan smoked and reflected on the nature of Echford Flagg as Brophy had exposed it from the family standpoint.

Then he looked at the sullen youth who was sweeping up the fragments of the dishes. The whimsical notion occurred to Ward that he might post Brophy on the advantages of a cafeteria plan of operating his hostelry. But he had by these thoughts summoned the memory of one certain cafeteria, and of a handsome girl who sat across from him and who had so suddenly been swallowed up in the vortex of the city throngs—gone forever—only a memory that troubled him so much and so often that he was glad when his own Tomah men appeared to him, asking for commands and taking his mind off a constantly nagging regret.

CHAPTER SEVEN

There were choruses of old river chanteys while the men waited for the sleds. A devil-may-care spirit had taken possession of the crew. Latisan began to feel like the brigand chief of bravos.

He was jubilantly informed by one enthusiast that they were all in luck—that Larry O’Gorman, the woods poet, had picked that crew as his own for that season on the river.

The songs of Larry O’Gorman are sung from the Mirimichi to the Megantic. He is analyst as well as bard. He makes it a point—and he still lives and sings—to attach himself only to forces which can inspire his lyre.

It was conveyed to the new boss that already was Larry busy on a new song. Ward, his attention directed, beheld the lyricist seated on the edge of the tavern porch, absorbed in composition, writing slowly on the planed side of a bit of board, licking the end of a stubby pencil, rolling his eyes as he sought inspiration.

Come, all ye bold and bully boys—come lis-sun unto me!
’Tis all abowit young Latis-an, a riverman so free.
White water, wet water, he never minds its roar,
’Cause he’ll take and he’ll kick a bubble up and ride all safe to shore.
Come, all, and riffle the ledges! Come, all, and bust the jam!
And for all o’ the bluff o’ the Comas crowd we don’t give one good—
Hoot, toot, and a hoorah!
We don’t give a tinker’s dam.

They were singing when Echford Flagg appeared to them. He was riding on a jumper, with runners under it, and he was galloping his strapping bay horses down from the big house on the ledges. On the bare ground the runners shrieked, and he snapped his whip over the heads of the horses.

“The sleds have just come, sir,” explained Latisan, who had been marshaling the conveyances.

“Listen, all ye!” shouted Flagg. “Nothing but dunnage bags go on those sleds till the runners hit the woods tote road and there’s good slipping on the snow. The man who doesn’t hoof it till then hears from me.”

He ordered Latisan to get onto the jumper seat beside him, slashed his horses with the whip, and led the way toward the north.

Near noon they arrived at a wayside baiting place, a log house in a clearing. They ate there and the horses were fed. There was plenty of snow in the woods and the first rains of April had iced the surface so that the slipping had been good.

As if the chewing of food had unlocked Flagg’s close-set jaws, he talked a bit to Latisan after the meal and while the horses were put to the jumper.

“I’m going to swing off here and ride down to Skulltree dam. I’m hearing reports of something going on there.”

They heard something very definite in the way of reports before they reached Skulltree. The sound of explosions came booming through the trees. It was dynamite. Its down-thrusting thud on the frozen ground was unmistakable.

“I knew that all those boxes of canned thunder that have been going through Adonia, with the Three C’s on the lid, weren’t intended to blow up log jams,” vouchsafed Flagg, after a few oaths to spice his opinion of the Comas company.

Latisan knew something about the lay of the land at Skulltree, himself. When he was a young chap the Latisans had operated in a small way as a side-line on the Noda waters. There was a rift in the watershed near Skulltree. There was a cañon leading down to the Tomah end, and the waters of the gorge were fed by a chain of ponds whose master source was near the Noda. The Latisans had hauled over to the pond from the Noda Valley.

When Flagg pulled his horses to a halt on the edge of a cliff which commanded a view of the Skulltree and its purlieus, he sat in silence for five minutes until he had taken in every detail of what was going on there.

Every little while there was an explosion across the river among the trees, and clotted frozen earth and rocks shot up into the air. When the horses leaped in fright Flagg slashed them and swore. It was plain that his ire was mounting as he made sure of what was taking place.

They were blasting a rude canal from the Noda across the low horseback which divided the Noda waters from Tomah ponds. It meant the diversion of flowage. It was contemptuous disregard of the Noda rights in favor of the million-dollar paper mill of the Three C’s on the Tomah lower waters. Rufus Craig had said something to young Latisan about the inexpediency of picking up a million-dollar paper mill and lugging it off in a shawl strap. It would be easier to blow a hole through the earth and feed in the logs from the Noda.

“By the red-hot hinges of Tophet!” bawled Flagg, having made sure that the enormity he was viewing was not a dream. He cut his whip under the bellies of his horses, one stroke to right and the other to left, and the animals went over the cliff and down the sharp slope, skating and floundering through the snow. The descent at that place would have been impossible for horses except for the snow which trigged feet and runners in some degree; it was damp and heavy; but the frantic threshing of the plunging beasts kicked up a smother of snow none the less. It was like a thunderbolt in a nimbus—the rush of Flagg down the mountain.

Rufus Craig was in the shack at the end of Skulltree dam—his makeshift office. Somebody called to him, and from his door he beheld the last stages of Flagg’s harebrained exploit, a veritable touch-and-go with death.

“There ain’t much doubt about who it is that’s coming for a social call,” said the understrapper who had summoned the field director. “And the question is whether he’s bound for hell or Skulltree.”

Craig did not comment; he had the air of one who had been expecting a visitor of this sort and was not especially astonished by the mode of getting there suddenly, considering the spur for action.

Tempestuous was the rush of the horses across the narrow flats between the cliff and the end of the dam. So violently did Flagg jerk them to a standstill in front of the shack, one horse fell and dragged down the other in a tangle of harness. Flagg left them to struggle to their feet as best they were able. He leaped off the jumper and thrust with the handle of his whip in the direction of the dynamite operations.

The old man’s features were contorted into an arabesque—a pattern of maniacal rage. His face was purple and its hue was deepened because it was set off against the snow which crusted his garments after his descent through the drifts. Knotted veins stood out on his forehead. There was no coherence in the noises he was making in his effort to speak words. He kept jabbing with his whip handle.

Evidently Craig’s first thought was that the menace of the whip was for him; he half put up a curved arm to ward off blows. In spite of his attention to Flagg he surveyed Latisan with considerable astonishment.

Ward had not recovered his poise. A passenger is usually more perturbed than a driver in desperate situations. That crazy dash down the cliff had frightened him into speechless and numb passivity. He still clung to the jumper seat with his stiffened fingers.

“Before you do anything you’ll be sorry for, Mr. Flagg, let me assure you that we have the law behind us in what we’re doing,” suggested Craig, with nervous haste. “The legislature extended our charter for development purposes and a special act protects us.”

Flagg strode away a dozen paces and then came back with better command over his faculties of speech. “Damn your legislature! What right has it got to tamper with a landbreak that God Almighty has put between waters?”

“The act was passed, Mr. Flagg. There was an advertised hearing. If you were interested you should have been there.”

“What does a legislature know about conditions up here?” demanded Flagg, with fury. “They loaf around in swing chairs and hearken to the first one who gets to ’em. They pass laws with a joker here and a trick there, and they don’t know what the law is really about. You’re stealing my water. By the gods! there’s no law that allows a thief to operate. And if you’ve got a law that helps you steal I’ll take my chance on keeping my own in spite of your pet and private law.”

“Go ahead, Flagg,” said Craig, impudently, no longer apprehensive about the whip. “I’m not your guardian to save you from trouble. There’s water enough for all of us.”

“You have swept the slopes so clean for your cursed pulp-wood slivers that you have dried up the brooks, and there isn’t enough water any more, and you know it. Your damnation canal will suck the life out of the Noda.”

“You listen to me, Flagg!” adjured Craig, getting back all his confidence as the executive of a powerful corporation. “Another special act allows us to raise this dam and conserve the water so that there’ll be plenty after we use our share for the canal. You’re safe and——”

“Safe!” raged the old man, and again the veins knotted on his forehead and he panted for breath. Latisan wanted to urge him to be careful. Flagg was exhibiting the dread symptoms of apoplexy. “Safe! I’ll be locked into this dam by you, with sluiceway refused to me—that’s what it will come to—you offering me a cut price for the logs I can’t get down to the Adonia sawmills. If you can’t kill one way, as you killed off the Latisans, you’ll kill in another way. You’re a devilish thief, Craig. I wonder if the men who hire you know what you are. Special acts, hey? That legislature has given a robber a loaded gun without knowing it. By the bald-headed jeesicks! I’ve got a drive coming down this river! And for fifty years, every spring, it has gone through. It’s going through this year, too, and if you’re underfoot here you’ll be walked on. And that’s just as good as your trumped-up law; it’s better—it’s justice.”

Flagg acted like a man who did not dare to remain longer in the presence of such an enemy; his big hands were doubling into hard fists; he was shaking in all his muscles. He leaped back onto the seat of his jumper, swung his team and sent his horses leaping up a whiplash road which traversed the cliff—a road he had disdained in his wild impatience to meet his foe.

When they reached the level of the wooded country Flagg had something to say about his abrupt departure from Craig, as if the master feared that his employe might suspect that there was an element of flight in the going-away. “There’s a law against killing a man, and I’ve got to respect that law even if I do spit on special acts that those gum-shoers have put through. I didn’t go down to their legislature and fight special acts, Latisan. I found these waters running downhill as God Almighty had set ’em to running. I have used ’em for my logs. And if any man tries now to steal my water at Skulltree, or block me with a raised dam, there’s going to be one devil of a fight at Skulltree and I’ll be there in the middle of it. What I wanted to do to Craig to-day can well wait till then when the doing can count for full value.”

Ward had been casting solicitous side glances at the empurpled face and the swollen veins. He did not dare to counsel Flagg as to his motions or his emotions. But he felt sure that an old man could not indulge in such transports without danger. He knew something about the effects of an embolism. His violent grandfather had been a victim of a fit of flaming anger in his old age.

“I’ll be in the middle of it, a club in each hand,” promised Flagg. And his molten ponderings kept alight the fires in his face.

They halted for the night at one of the Flagg store depots and were lodged in the office camp, reserved sacred to the master and his boss.

Flagg had been silent all the evening, poring over the accounts that the storekeeper had turned over.

He sighed frequently; he seemed to be weary. After a time he kicked off his larrigans and rolled into his bunk, ready dressed as he had stood. He seemed to lack the volition to remove his clothing.

Sometime in the night the young man awoke. The sounds which he heard below him were not the snores of a man who was sleeping peacefully. There was something ominous about the spasmodic and stertorous breathing.

Latisan slipped to the floor and lighted a lamp. He found the wide eyes of Flagg staring from the gloom of the bunk.

Flagg slowly reached with his left hand, picked up his right hand, and when he released it the hand fell as helplessly as so much dead flesh. “That’s it,” he said, without apparent emotion. “It’s a shock.” He employed the colloquial name for a stroke of paralysis. “My mother was that way. I’ve been afraid of it—have expected it, as you might say. Mother lived ten years after her shock. I hope to God I won’t. For it has taken me just when I’m ready to put up my best fight—and it’s my good right hand, Latisan, my right hand!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“I’ll do it for you, sir,” insisted Ward, determinedly. “It’s right in line with my plans. I’ll take your orders. I’ll come to you regularly at Adonia. You shall know every move. I’ll be merely your right hand to do what you want done.”

“I’m a hard man with my help, Latisan. You have agreed with me on that point. I shall be ugly when I’m chained up. I shall say something to you, and then you’ll quit.”

Latisan had been looking the situation squarely in the eye on his own account. He was confronted by something wholly outside all his calculations. He had enlisted merely as a lieutenant and had never considered that he would be called on to assume authority as chief in the field. He had been led to serve with Flagg because the old man was the personification of permanency in the north country—seemed to be something that could not be shaken by the assaults of the Comas—a man who impressed all as being above the hazards of death and accident. Somehow, after all the years and because he had been there as a fixture through so many changes, Echford Flagg was viewed as something perennial—as sure as sunrise, as solid and everlasting as the peak of Jerusalem Knob, which overshadowed the big house on the ledges at Adonia; he was a reality to tie to in a fight against a common foe.

But right then he was a whimpering old man who plucked and fumbled at a dead right hand.

He was as helpless as a little man whom Latisan had plucked from a brutal clutch of an assailant in front of a bulletin board. Craig was still able enough. Craig was man size. Craig would be even more vicious when the news of Flagg’s condition reached him; he would perceive his opportunity.

“It’s sort of the code up where I come from. There’s no objection to a clean fight. But if you don’t pick your bigness you must expect that your bigness will offer himself mighty sudden.” Latisan was not recollecting what he had said to the chaps of Tech; he was putting before his mind one of his fundamental principles as he listened to the laments of the stricken giant and urged the horses down the tote road. Craig would keep on fighting; but Flagg was no longer of Craig’s bigness. There was only one thing for Latisan to do—so that was why he put so much of determination and warmth into his pledges to a man whom he did not like from a personal standpoint. Flagg could not understand why this stranger should be loyal; the old man’s wits were numbed along with his body.

“I’ll be ripping at you with my tongue, because it’s been my style—and I’ll be worse when I’m penned up.” Flagg could not seem to hope for any reform in himself. He was accepting his nature as something forged permanently in the fires of his experience, not to be remolded.

“I’m not thin-skinned, sir. If you can’t keep from abusing me about business details, go ahead and abuse. It will ease your feelings and the abuse will not hurt me, because I don’t propose to do anything knowingly to justify abuse. Twitting on real facts is what hurts. You hired me because you knew I had good reasons for fighting the Comas on account of the principle involved in the stand of the independents; you know that I still have the reasons, no matter how much your tongue may run away with you about foolish details.”

He was looking forward to an opportunity to place himself even more definitely on record in the hearing of Flagg. After the sun was up Latisan expected to be able to grasp that opportunity at almost any turn of the tote road. He knew he would meet the upcoming crew. Flagg’s horses on the trip north had made twice the speed of the plodding woods teams, and the crew had been ordered to spend the night at any camp where darkness overtook them.

Latisan heard, long before he came in sight of them, the shrill yells with which sled load interchanged repartee with sled load; everlastingly there was the monotone of the singers. It was plain that the same spirit of gay adventure was inspiring the men.

The tote road was a one-track thoroughfare; Latisan picked a cleared knoll at one side for his turnout switch and swung his horses up there in order to give the heavy sleds passage.

There were half a dozen sleds in close procession, and Ward’s upflung hand halted them when the leading sled came abreast.

By his own efforts Flagg propped himself into a sitting posture, braced by his left arm.

Men leaped off the sleds and crowded forward in a phalanx, cupping with their ranks the sledge where their master was couched. Voices were hushed and eyes were wide.

“I’ve been hit a wallop, boys,” quavered the old man. “Overnight it has hit me. Shock. It ain’t surprising at my age. Mother had the same.”

For that moment Flagg had put aside the shell of his nature; he found instant sympathy in the gaze which rough men of the forest bestowed on a stricken one of their ilk. He was responding to that sympathy. There were tears in his eyes.

“Men, I’m hurrying Mr. Flagg home where he can be looked after by the doctors. I’m sure he’ll soon be all right again,” Latisan assured them, lying for the good of the cause. “In the meantime I’m saying to him for myself that I’m standing by for every ounce that’s in me. What do you say to him?”

“Fact is,” went on Ward, as spokesman for all, “to make up for your not being with us, Mr. Flagg, we’ve got to put in twice as many licks because you’re not on the job, and you can depend on us. What, boys?”

“Get along to headwaters and start to rolling the jackstraws onto the ice,” shouted Latisan. “Have the dynamite warmed when I get back there. If we have to do it, well beat the April rains to the job.”

“You’ve heard us. It ought to help some,” stated Ward, urging his team along toward Adonia.

“The songs of the angels never will sound any better, and the angels will never look any better than those men did just now,” declared the old man, still in his softened mood.

“I know what you mean,” averred Flagg. “Of course I know. I was after pirates and I’ve got the toughest gang in the north country. Feed ’em raw meat, Latisan!”

Over the snow, which was slushy under the April sun of midday, and finally into Adonia over the rutted grit that the evening chill had frozen, the baron of the Noda was driven to the door of his mansion on the ledges.

A hail brought out a little old man whose white, close beard and fluffy hair gave his face the appearance of a likeness set into a frame of cotton batting. It was Rickety Dick; Brophy had told Latisan about him. He flung his hands above his head; it was his involuntary action when deep emotion stirred him; and his customary ejaculation was, “Praise the Lord!” It was possible that he would have shouted those words even then without regard to their irrelevance; but he was not able to utter a sound when Brophy and Latisan and the other men came bearing Flagg into the house.

The master stoutly refused to be laid in his bed. There was his big armchair in the middle of the sitting room; he commanded that he be placed there. “I can’t fight lying down. If I can’t stand up, I can sit up.”

“Praise the Lord!” cried old Dick, finding an opportunity to interject his thanksgiving phrase.

“I’ll come to you often, Mr. Flagg,” promised Ward, taking leave. “I’ll not neglect matters up the river, of course. But I want you to feel that I’m merely your right hand, moving according to your orders.”

He went away with a thrill of sympathy inspiring his new resolution in behalf of the master’s interests. The spectacle that he closed the door on had pathos in it. The tyrant of the Noda was shut away from the woods where he had ruled—away from the rush of white water under the prow of his great bateau; he could hear only the tantalizing summons of the cataract whose thunder boomed above the village of Adonia.

Latisan had promised to send for the best doctors in the city—he had a messenger already on the way. But he knew well enough that Echford Flagg, if he lived, was doomed to sit in that big chair and wield his scepter vicariously. And Latisan knew, too, what sort of the torments of perdition Flagg would endure on that account.

In the office of Brophy’s tavern Rufus Craig, apparently a casual wayfarer, was sitting when Latisan entered after leaving the big house on the ledges.

Craig either felt or assumed contrite concern. “Excuse me, Latisan, but is it true that Mr. Flagg has suffered a stroke of paralysis?”

“I’m sorry. I’m not on pleasant terms with him, or with you, for that matter. But I hate to see a good fighter struck down.”

Latisan went to the desk and wrote his name on a leaf of the dog-eared register. He proposed to stay the night at Brophy’s and start north in the morning.

“Go up and take Number Ten,” said Brophy, who had been called as a helper and who had walked down from the mansion with Latisan.

When Craig plodded heavily along the upper corridor, on his way to bed a little later, the door of Number Ten was open for ventilation; Latisan was smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper which he had picked up in the tavern office. His stare, directed at Craig over the top of the newspaper, was inhospitable when the Comas man stopped and leaned against the door jamb.

“Latisan, I’m presuming on that frankness of yours; you have bragged about it in the past.”

“That was before my experience with you in the Walpole matter, sir. But go ahead! What do you want?”

“You’re over here in the Noda region, according to your threat. You may be willing to inform me as to your status in the Flagg proposition, now the old man is on his back.”

“There ought to be an opportunity to compromise, now that he’s down and out.”

“I just left Mr. Flagg sitting in his chair, and he says he intends to keep sitting there. Therefore, he isn’t down.”

Craig tipped his hat and scratched the side of his head. “Then I’m afraid there isn’t much use in my going to him to talk compromise,” he confessed.

“And if he gives his orders to blow hell out of the bottom of the river, I suppose you’ll obey, eh?”

“He has ordered me to bring his logs into the hold-boom here at Adonia. I have promised to do so. I see no need of going into details of how I’m to do it.” Latisan raised the shield of his newspaper in front of his face.

But Craig persisted. He had promised the Noda to his superiors; he had not been sure how he could maneuver to deliver, but his past success had impelled him to go on with his cocksure pledges of performance; he was spurred by a hint of a raise in salary, a gift of Comas common stock; he had depended on the situation at Skulltree as his principal weapon, if bravado backed the special legislative act. But that act had been juggled, just as Echford Flagg had asserted. The thing was ticklish, and Craig knew it. Anger and apprehensiveness were working twin leverage on the Comas executive.

“Latisan, by coming over here into the Noda and grabbing in where you have no timber interests of your own, you have shown your animus. You have made it a personal matter between you and me.”

“There’s a lot of truth in what you say,” admitted Ward, lowering his shield. “Let’s exchange accusations! You held that Walpole heir up your sleeve till we had our cut on the landings. If you had worked such a trick on my grandfather he wouldn’t be sitting on this chair, as I’m doing. He’d be kicking you around this tavern. I’ll save my strength for the Flagg drive.”

“I’ve got some frankness of my own, Latisan. I’m at a point where my future with the Comas is in the balance, and I’m going to fight for that future. I’m not asking you to lie down. But you have it in your power—the circumstances being as they are—to swing the Flagg interests in with ours to mutual advantage. Why isn’t that better than a fight?”

But Latisan added: “For your interests! You’re afraid of a fight—at Skulltree!”

“Yes, I am,” blurted Craig, trying candor. “Let’s arrange a hitch-up!”

“Now the trouble with that plan is this,” returned Latisan, quietly, slowly. “It can’t be done, not with a man like you’ve shown yourself to be. Hold in your temper, Mr. Craig! You’re coming round now to ask square men to deal with you. You can’t appeal on the ground of friendship—you haven’t tried to make any friends up here. You have played too many tricks. We’re all doubtful in regard to your good faith, no matter what the proposition may be. We can’t deal with you. It’s all your own doing. You are paying the penalty.”

“I could say a lot more, but it wouldn’t amount to anything in your case.”

“You have accused me of playing tricks!” Craig’s rage burst bounds. “You young hick, you have never seen real tricks yet! You don’t think I’m coming after you with fists or a cant dog, do you?”

“I’m from the city. In the city we use our brains. Latisan, I have tried to show you in the past that the Comas means business. If you’ll go back to the Toban, where you belong, I’ll do something for you on that Walpole matter, now that I’ve taught you a lesson.”

“You’re out after punishment—a damnation good smashing, personally, and you’re going to get it!”

Latisan leaped from his chair and slammed the door suddenly and violently; expecting an attack. Craig leaped back and saved his fingers from a jamming.

From behind his curtain in the morning he saw Latisan drive the Flagg team into the tavern yard.

“I’ll be coming down often, Brophy, to see Mr. Flagg. I’ll depend on you to save out a room for me.”

Craig grunted with the satisfaction of one who had received interesting information; knowledge that Latisan would be regularly in Adonia helped some plans which the director had been revolving.

Craig took the forenoon train down over the narrow-gauge, headed for New York. He was seeking that aid of which he had boasted—city brains. In handling certain affairs of his in the past he had found the Vose-Mern Detective Agency both crafty and active—and the roundabout method of craft, he decided, was the proper way to get at Latisan, without involving the Comas folks in any scandal.

CHAPTER NINE

It was quite natural for Miss Leigh to speak of fingerprints. She was an employe in the Vose-Mern offices. “Vose-Mern Bureau of Investigation” was the designation on the street corridor directory board of a building in the purlieus of New York City Hall. On the same board other parties frankly advertised themselves as detectives. The Vose-Mern agency called its men and women by the name of operatives. The scope of its activities was unlimited. It broke strikes, put secret agents into manufacturing concerns to stimulate efficiency, or calculatingly and in cold blood put other agents in to wreck a concern in the interests of a rival. It was a matter of fees. Mern could defend the ethics of such procedure with interesting arguments; he had been an inspector of police and held ironic views of human nature; he had invented an anticipatory system, so he called it, by which he “hothoused” criminal proclivities in a person in order to show the person’s latent possibilities up to an employer before damage had been wrought to the employer’s business or funds. That is to say—and this for the proper understanding of Mr. Mern’s code in his operations as he moved in the special matters of which this tale treats—his agency deliberately set women of the type well hit off by the name “vamps” “sicked” those women onto bank clerks and others who could get a hand into a till, and if the women were able to cajole the victim to the point of stealing or of grabbing in order to make a get-away to foreign parts with the temptress, the trick was considered legitimate work of the “anticipatory” sort. The operative would order the treasure cached, would appoint the day and hour for the get-away—and a plain-clothes man would be waiting at the cache! The Vose-Mern system thus nabbed the culprit, who had revealed his lack of moral fiber by reason of the hothouse forcing of the situation; Mern insisted that if the germ were there it should be forced. By his plan the loot was pulled back and returned to the owner.

Mern had broken the big paper-mill strike for the Comas Consolidated; he calmly assured his clients that he could furnish a thousand men as well as one. When he did a thing it was expensive—for he had bands of picked men always on call, and the men must be paid during their loafing intervals, waiting for other strikes.

Craig had been close to Mern during the strike. Mern stated that the ethics of the law allowed a lawyer to defend and extricate, if he could, a criminal whom he knew was hideously guilty; the lawyer’s smartness was applauded if he won by law against justice. Mern excused on the same lines his willingness to accept any sort of a commission. It was a heartless attitude—Mern admitted that it was and said that he didn’t pose as a demon. He seemed to get a lot of comfort out of declaring that if the fellow he was chasing had the grit and smartness to turn around and do Mern up, Mern would heartily give the fellow three cheers. Thus did Mern put his remarkable business on the plane of a man-to-man fight by his argument, not admitting that there was any baseness in his plots and his persecution.

Miss Lida Kennard, as confidential stenographer, was deep into the methods of Mern. It was Mern’s unvarying custom to have Miss Kennard in to listen to and take down all that a client had to state. She was extremely shocked in the first stages of her association with the Vose-Mern agency by the nature of the commissions undertaken. But it was the best position she had secured, after climbing the ladder through the offices of more or less impecunious attorneys. She needed the good pay because her mother was an invalid; she continued to need the pay after her mother died. There were bills to be settled. She had grown used to setting the installments on those bills ahead of new hats, and the cameo ring which had been her mother’s keepsake was for the sake of memory, not adornment.

By dint of usage, the Vose-Mern business had come to seem to her like a real business. Certainly some big men came and solicited Mern’s aid and appeared to think that his methods were proper. In course of time, listening to Mern’s ethics, she came to accept matters at their practical value and ceased to analyze them for the sake of seeking for nice balances of right and wrong. She was in and of the Vose-Mern organization! She sat in on conferences, wrote down placidly plots for doing up men who had not had the foresight to hire Mern—Vose had been merely an old detective, and he was dead—and she sometimes entertained a vague ambition to be an operative herself. She liked pretty hats and handsome rings—though she was scornfully averse to the Leigh-Javotte system as she was acquainted with it by the chance remarks the associates dropped. As to operatives—Miss Kennard had heard—well, she had heard Miss Elsham, for instance, a crack operative, reveal what the rewards of the regular work were; and, the way Miss Elsham looked at it, a girl did not have to lower her self-respect.

In the midst of these thoughts, getting a side glance at the new hat which Miss Leigh was showing to Miss Javotte, Miss Kennard was called to conference; the buzzer summoned her.

Mern introduced her to the client of the day; the chief made that his custom; it always seemed to put the client more at his ease because an introduction made her an important member of the party—and Mern stressed the “confidential secretary” thing.

He rose with a haste which betrayed a natural susceptibility to the charms of pretty women. He cooed at her rather than spoke, altering his natural tone, smoothing out all the harshness; it was that clumsy gallantry by which coarse men strive to pay court to charm.

The girl warranted the approving gaze which Mr. Craig gave to her. He looked from her frank eyes to her copper-bronze hair, which seemed to have a glint of sunshine in its waves. He liked the uplift of that round chin—he remembered that it had seemed to indicate spirit—and he liked spunk in a girl. He had enjoyed the conferences of the days of the strike-breaking when he could survey her profile as she busied herself with her writing, admiring the beauty curve of her lips.

Now he was thrilled by her manner of recognition; he had not expected that much.

“I remember you, Mr. Craig,” she assured the big man, her fingers as firm in the grip as were his. “You were in here so much on the strike matter two years ago.”

“That’s a long time for a New York young lady to remember a man from the north woods.”

“To save myself from seeming like a flatterer, I must say it’s because of the woods feature that I remember you so well. The forest interests me. I’m afraid I’m inclined to be very foolish about the woods. Why, in a cafeteria—last fall—there was——”

But she checked herself and flushed. She turned to Mern. “I beg your pardon. I’m ready.” She sat down and opened her notebook.

“A mere chance meeting with a man from the north country. I really don’t understand why I mentioned it. My interest in the woods—the thought of the woods—tripped my tongue.” She nodded to the stolid Mern as if to remind him of the business in hand, and Mern ducked his square head at Craig.

It was the habit of Mern to go thoroughly over a case with a client before calling in Miss Kennard. At the second going-over in her presence the topic was better shaken down, was in a more solidified form for her notebook. The Comas director had already told his story once to the chief.

Craig leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the ceiling, again collecting his data in his mind. He had dictated before to Miss Kennard and knew how Mern wanted his names and his facts. “Subject, the spring drives on the Noda water. Object, hanging up or blocking the independent drive of Echford Flagg and——”

Miss Kennard’s pencil slipped somehow. It fell from her fingers, bounced from the floor on its rubber tip, and ticked off the sharpened lead when it hit the floor again.

Lida darted for it, picked it up, and ran out of the room. “I’m going for another,” she explained.

She was gone for some time. Craig glanced out of the window into the slaty sky, from which rain was falling. It was a day unseasonably warm and humid for early spring. “I hope it’s raining in the Noda. But it’s just as liable to be snow. Latisan can’t do much yet awhile.” He looked at his watch as if starting the Noda drives was a matter of minutes. He was showing some impatience when Miss Kennard returned. She went to the window, and sat in a chair there, her face turned from them. “If you don’t mind,” she apologized. “It’s on account of the light. I can hear perfectly from here.”

She heard then that the Comas wanted to put Echford Flagg down and out as an operator, now that paralysis had stricken him. She had Craig’s assurance delivered to Mern that, without a certain Ward Latisan old Flagg would not be able to bring his drive down. The Comas director declared that an ordinary boss could never get along with the devils who made up the crew. He declared further that Latisan was of a sort to suit desperadoes and had put into the crew some kind of fire which made the men dangerous to vested interests on the river. He devoted himself to Latisan with subdued profanity, despite the presence of the young woman. He averred that Latisan himself had no love for Flagg—nobody up-country gave a tinker’s hoot for Flagg, anyway. He insisted, desperate in spite of certain modifying private convictions, that Latisan could be pried off the job if some kind of a tricky influence could be brought to bear or if his interest in the fight, as just a fight, could be dulled or shifted to something else or side-tracked by a ruse. He pictured Flagg as a man for whom nobody would stand up in his present state, now that he was sick and out of the game.

“I hate to kick a cripple, even in my business,” demurred Mern. “I have flashes of decency,” he continued, dryly. “You seem to be particularly set on getting to the lumberjack, Latisan. Can’t you do him up, and then let Flagg have half a show for this season—probably his last?”

“Let the plug-ugly have what he seems to be looking for,” advised Mern. “That is, if I get it straight from you what his nature is.”

“He’s all of that—what I have said,” reaffirmed Craig, venomously. “But look here, Mern, you can’t go up into that region, where everything is wide open to all men, and kill a man or abduct him. I’m obliged to gum-shoe. I have to keep my own executive details away from the home office, even. We’re waiting on the courts for law and on the legislature for more favors.” Craig was sweating copiously, and he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “It’s touchy business. If I can pull old Flagg into camp, it’s my biggest stroke outside of nailing the Latisans in the Tomah. A monopoly will give us settled prices and control of the flowage. But I insist on doing the job through Latisan. I’m after him! Now do some thinking for me. No violence, however—nothing which can be traced to the Three C’s.”

He told her. “First name Ward. He’s the grandson of old John of the Tomah.”

“I’m trying to get the facts straight for Mr. Mern. Do I understand you to say that the Latisans have failed in their business?”

“They’re down and out. I gave the young fool a good tip to save the remnants, but he wouldn’t take it. The only thing I’ll give him after this is poison—if it can’t be traced to me or my company.”

Mern had swung about in his chair, his vacant stare on the murky sky, doing the thinking to which he had been exhorted by his client. “Suppose I slip a picked crowd of my operatives into his crew?”

“He’s too wise to take on strangers. And while he’s on the job with the crew the men are so full of that hell-whoop spirit that they can’t be tampered with. Mern, he’s got to be cut out of the herd.”

Craig, if his sour rage against Latisan had been less intense, might have been less ready to believe that Latisan had taken several months off as a prodigal son. But Craig wanted to believe that the young man had been doing what scandal said he had done. That belief strengthened Craig’s hopes. He affected to believe in the reports. He told Mern that Latisan had been leading a sporting life in the city until the family money gave out.