“How about bumping him on his soft spot?”

Craig asked questions with his eyes, blinking away the perspiration.

“With a girl,” Mern explained. “With one who looks as if she had been picked right out of the rosy middle of the big bouquet he was attracted by in the city. With the background of the woods, a single bloomer will surely hold his attention.”

Craig showed interest; he had been obliged to pass up violence, bribery, bluster. This new plan promised subtlety and subterfuge that would let out the Three C’s. “Got her?”

“Call Miss Elsham on the phone, Miss Kennard! You may do it from the other room. Ask her to hurry down.”

The girl, her face hidden from them, paused at the door. “Are there more notes? Shall I come back?” She was having difficulty with her voice, but the men were now talking eagerly about the new plan, and her discomposure was not remarked.

“I think not,” said Mern. “Write out what you have. Make especially full characterizations of Flagg and Latisan as you have gathered facts about them from our talk.” He had found Miss Kennard to be especially apt in that work. Not only did she deduce character from descriptions, but she worked in many valuable suggestions as to how men of a certain nature should be handled. She seemed to understand the vagaries of men’s dispositions very well indeed.

“What’s the matter with Ken?” muttered Miss Javotte, nudging the bookkeeper.

Lida had flung her arms across the frame of her typewriter and had hidden her face in her hands.

“Headache,” returned Miss Leigh, sapiently. “That toque has struck into the brain. No girl ought to take chances that way.”

CHAPTER TEN

She took her seat sideways on the edge of Mern’s desk, thus testifying to her sure standing in the establishment, her tightly drawn skirt displaying an attractive contour. For a fleeting moment—hating Latisan so venomously—Craig rather envied Latisan his prospects as a victim.

Miss Elsham produced a silver cigarette case, lighted up, and exhaled twin streams of smoke from a shapely nose. “Shoot!” she counseled.

Mern, after his slow fashion, fumbled with the sheets of Miss Kennard’s manuscript.

Miss Elsham thriftily utilized the moments allowed her by Mern’s hesitation. She always tried to impress a client favorably. “I don’t presume to pick and choose when it comes to cases,” she informed Craig. “I’m an All-for-the-good-cause Anne! But I hope—I’m allowed to hope, I suppose—I do hope that my next one is going to remember some of the lessons he learned at mother’s knee. The last one had forgotten everything. I was dragged through cafés till at the present time a red-shaded table lamp and a menu card make me want to bite holes in any man with a napkin over his arm. I’ve danced to jazz and listened to cabaret——”

Mern was trying to say something, but she rattled on: “And that flask on his hip—he must have done all his breathing while he was asleep; he never allowed time enough between drinks while he was awake.”

“The next one is different,” stated Mern.

“Much obliged! But of course it’s cafés again and——”

Mern sliced off her complaints, chopping his flat hand to and fro in the air. “Nothing to it, sis! It’s a tall-timber job, this time.”

“In the woods—the real woods,” supplemented Craig.

“Great!” indorsed Miss Elsham, accustomed to meeting all phases of action with agility. “I’ve just seen a movie with that kind of a girl in it. Leggings and knicks. I can see myself. Great!”

Director Craig surveyed her and nodded approvingly.

“We’ll decide on what part you’ll play before we measure you for a rig,” objected the chief, with his official caution. “Listen to the size-up of your man.” He began to read from Miss Kennard’s manuscript. “‘Ward Latisan. Young woodsman. Has lived and worked among rough men and has no particular amount of moral stamina, a fact shown by his desertion of his father in time of need in order to indulge in orgies in the city.’”

“Oh, it’s to go and set my hook and fish him out of the woods, and then he and I lean on our elbows across from each other—the cafés some more,” said Miss Elsham, pouting.

Mern suspended, for a moment, his reading and addressed Craig. “Miss Kennard, of course, is sizing up according to what you have said of Latisan. You’re sure about his weakness for dames, are you? We don’t want to give Miss Elsham any wrong tips.”

Craig hung tenaciously to his estimate of Latisan, in no mood to uproot the opinion which gossip had implanted and hatred had watered. And at the end of his arraignment he attempted an awkward compliment. “And even if he could have stood out against the Queen of Sheba up till now, I’ll say he’ll——” Craig gazed with humid indorsement of Miss Elsham’s attractions and waved his hand in the way of a mute completion of the sentence.

Miss Elsham smiled broadly and patted together her manicured thumbnails. “Loud applause!” she cried. “Pardon me if I don’t blush, sir. I have used up my stock. The last case was oozing with flattery—after the flask had got in its work.”

Mern went on with his reading, portraying the character of Latisan as Miss Kennard had gathered and assimilated data. She had even gone to the extent of giving Latisan a black mustache and evil eyes.

“Hold on,” objected Craig. “Nothing was said about his looks. She’s picking that up because I was strong on how he had acted. He doesn’t look as savage as he is; he fools a lot of folks that way,” stated Craig, in surly tones.

“Well, how will I know when I meet up with him in the woods?”

“You go to the Adonia tavern and make your headquarters, and you won’t miss him. How does the thing look to you as a proposition?” demanded Craig, solicitously. “You ought to know pretty well what you can do with men, by this time.”

Miss Elsham tossed away her cigarette butt and referred mutely to Mern by a wave of her hand.

“She always gets ’em—gets the better of the best of ’em. Rest easy,” said the chief.

“And it must be worked easy,” warned Craig, catching at the word. “That’s why you’re in it, Miss Elsham, instead of its being a man’s fight up there. We can’t afford to let Latisan slam that drive down through our logs, as he threatens to do. If he does it—if we turn on Flagg and sue for damages, as we can do, of course—court action will only bring out a lot of stuff that better be kept covered. I want the agency to understand fully, Mern!”

“We’re on.”

“I’m achieving results without showing all the details to the home office. And I’m not a pirate. You spoke of kicking a cripple, Mern. We’ll take over Flagg’s logs as soon as he gets reasonable. His fight is only an old notion about the independents sticking on. Sawmills are in our way these days. Flagg is done, anyway. He ought to be saved from himself. I’m after Latisan. He’s ready to fight and to ruin Flagg,” declared Mr. Craig, with a fine assumption of righteous desire to aid a fallen foe, “just to carry out his grudge against me—using Flagg’s property as his tool. It’ll be too bad. So get busy, Miss Elsham—and keep him busy—off the drive.”

“Read on, Chief,” she implored Mern. “I’m seeing as quick as this just how I’ll do it.”

The conference continued.

When Miss Elsham departed she stopped in the main office on her way out. “Good-by, girls! I’m off for the big sticks. I’ll bring each of you a tree.”

She went to a mirror, taking out her vanity case. Beside the mirror were hooks for hats and outer garments. “Perfect dream!” she commented, examining a hat. “Whose?”

“Mine,” said Miss Leigh.

Miss Elsham took the hat in admiring hands, dislodging a green toque, which fell upon the floor. She did not notice the mishap to the toque and left it where it had fallen. She touched up her countenance and went away.

“Your hat is on the floor,” Miss Leigh informed Miss Kennard. The girl did not reply; she was looking down upon the keys of her typewriter, and her demeanor suggested that her heart was on the floor, too.

When Lida sat by the open window of her room that evening her depression had become doleful to the point of despair.

The night was unseasonably warm with enervating humidity; in that atmosphere the dormant germs of the girl’s general disgust with the metropolis and all its affairs were incubated. Breathing the heavy air which sulked at the window, she pondered on the hale refreshment of the northern forests. But it seemed to her that there was no honesty in the woods any more. That day, fate searching her out at last, she had been dragged in as a party in a plot against her stricken grandfather. She indulged her repugnance to her employment; it had become hateful beyond all endurance. Her association with the cynical business of the agency and her knowledge of the ethics of Mern had been undermining the foundations of her own innate sense of what was inherently right, she reflected, taking account of stock.

Dispassionately considered, it was not right for her to use her acquired knowledge of the plot against Echford Flagg in order to circumvent the plans of an employer who trusted her. But after a while she resolutely broke away from the petty business of weighing the right and the wrong against each other; she was bold enough to term it petty business in her thoughts and realized fully, when she did so, that her Vose-Mern occupation had damaged her natural rectitude more than she had apprehended.

But there was something more subtle, on that miasmatic metropolitan night, something farther back than the new determination to break away from Mern and all his works of mischief. It was not merely a call of family loyalty, a resolve to stand by the grandfather who had disowned his kin. She was not sure how much she did care for the hard old man of the woods. But right then, without her complete realization of what the subtle feeling was, the avatar of the spirit of the Open Places was rising in her. She longed avidly for the sight and the sound of many soughing trees. She was urged to go to her own in some far place where her feet could touch the honest earth instead of being insulated by the pavements which were stropped glossy by the hurry of the multitude.

That urge really was just as insistent as consideration of the personal elements involved, though she did not admit it, not being able to analyze her emotions very keenly right then. Family affection needs propinquity and service to develop it. Her sentiments in regard to Echford Flagg were vague. This Latisan, whoever he was, was plainly a rough character with doubtful morals who was loyal to a grudge instead of to her grandfather. She knew what the Elsham girl had been able to with other men, in the blasé city; it stood to reason that in the woods, having no rivals to divert the attentions of a victim, Elsham would be still more effective.

At last, having kept her thoughts away from an especial topic because of the shame that still dwelt with her, Lida faced what she knew was the real and greater reason for her growing determination to step between Echford Flagg and his enemies. Alfred Kennard had stolen money from Echford Flagg. Sylvia Kennard had grieved her heart out over the thing. There were the bitter letters which Lida had found among her mother’s papers after Sylvia died. The mother had torn the name from the bottoms of those letters; it was as if she had endeavored to shield Echford Flagg from the signed proof of utter heartlessness.

The debt to Echford Flagg had not been canceled. Could the daughter of Alfred Kennard repay in some degree for the sake of the father? That sense of duty surmounted all qualms involved in the betrayal of an employer, if it could be called betrayal, considering the ethics that had been adopted and preached by Mern.

It was midnight when she reached her firm decision. She would go to the north country. She would do her best, single-handed, as opportunity might present itself. She would fight without allowing her grandfather to know her identity. Perhaps she might tell him when it was all over, if she won. The debt was owed by the father; it might help if it was known that the daughter had paid. Then she would go away; it was not in her mind to gain any favor for herself. If she merely ran to him, tattling an exposure of the plot, Echford Flagg, if her well-grounded estimate of his character were correct, might repudiate her as a mere tale-bearer; she remembered enough to know that he was a square fighter. She felt that she had some of the Flagg spirit of that sort in her. She had been fighting her battle with the world without asking odds of anybody or seeking favors from her only kin.

She would go north and do her best, for her own, according to the code she had laid down.

She was conscious then, having made up her mind, of the subtle longing that was back of the fierce impatience to repay her father’s debt: the woods of the north and the hale spirit of the Open Places were calling her home again.

She would not admit to herself that she was engaged in a quixotic enterprise, and in order to keep herself from making that admission she resolutely turned her thoughts away from plans. To ponder on plans would surely sap her courage. She could not foresee what would confront her in the north country and she was glad because her ideas on that point were hazy. It was not in her mind to hide herself from the other operatives of the Vose-Mern agency when she was at the scene; her experience had acquainted her with the efficacy of guile in working with human nature, and she was well aware that her bold presence where the operatives were making their campaign would prove such a mixture of honesty and guile that Miss Elsham and Crowley, and even Mern, himself, when he learned, would be obliged to expend a portion of their energy on guessing.

She did not know how or whether one girl could prevail against the organization threatening her grandfather and Latisan, but she was fully determined to find out.

She served the agency dutifully for one more day. She learned that the two operatives had started for the north.

A day later she departed from New York on their trail. She did not inform Chief Mern that she was leaving.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Our super. He was acting under orders from higher up. There was a special officer on hand to see that the orders were obeyed. Law says that explosives shall not be conveyed on a mixed train.”

“I know all about that law,” retorted Latisan. “But it has been eased up on in these parts because you pull a passenger coach on every train.”

“But law is law; it has been jammed down on us!”

“You mean that Craig has put the twist ring into your snout,” shouted the drive master. “And he’s leading your railroad by the nose like he’s leading a good many others in the Noda country.”

“I’m only a hired man——”

“And the Three C’s will have everybody in this section hired if the money holds out, and that’s the hell of it!”

“Look here, Latisan, you’re on railroad property, and that’s no kind of talk to have over in front of passengers.”

The train was at a standstill; the new arrivals were on the platform.

Latisan, well advertised by the name the conductor had bawled, glanced around and perceived that he was the center of observation. Especially was he concerned with the direct stare of a young woman; she continued to regard him steadfastly and he allowed his attention to be engaged with her for a moment.

Latisan had his own mental tags for womankind; this was “a lady.” He had set himself back to the plane of the woods and his rough associates. He felt a woodsman’s naïve embarrassment in the presence of a lady. Her survey of him was rebuke for his language, he was sure. There could be no other reason why “a lady” should look at a man who was fresh down from the drive, unshaven and roughly garbed. She was from town, he could see that. Those sparkling eyes seemed like something that was aimed at him; he was in a helpless, hands-up sort of mood!

He pulled off his cap. He had the courageous frankness of sincere manhood, at any rate. “I’m sorry! I was expecting dynamite. It didn’t come. I blew up just the same.”

The lady smiled.

Then she turned and started away.

A stout man had been standing close behind her. Nobody among the loungers at the railroad station entertained any doubt whatever as to just what this stranger was. His clothes, his sample case, his ogling eyes, his hat cockily perched on one side of his head proclaimed him “a fresh drummer,” according to Adonia estimates.

He leaped forward and caught step with the girl. “Pardon! But I’m going your way! Allow me!” He set his hand on her traveling case.

She halted and frowned. “I thank you. I can carry it myself!”

“But I heard you asking the conductor the way to the hotel. I’m going right there!”

“So am I, sir! But not in your company.”

“Oh, come on and be sociable! We’re the only two of our kind up among these bushwhackers.”

Miss Elsham’s fellow operative was stressing his play; he grabbed away her bag. “We may as well get a quick rise out of him,” muttered Crowley. It was a plan they had devised in case their man should help their luck by being at the railroad station.

“I’ll call an officer!” she threatened.

“You don’t need to,” Latisan informed her. He had followed the couple. “Besides, there isn’t any. The only place they need officers is in a city where a rab like this is let run loose.” He leaped to the stout chap and yanked away the girl’s bag. “I’ll carry it if you’re going to the tavern.”

She accepted his proffer with another smile—a smile into which she put a touch of understanding comradeship. They walked along together.

There was no conversation. The spring flood of the Noda tumbled past the village in a series of falls, and the earth was jarred, and there was an everlasting grumble in the air. The loungers stared with great interest when the drive master and the girl went picking their way along the muddy road.

The volunteer squire delivered the traveling bag into the hand of Martin Brophy, who was on the porch of the tavern, his eye cocked to see what guests the train had delivered into his net. Mr. Brophy handled the bag gingerly and was greatly flustered when the self-possessed young lady demanded a room with a bath.

Latisan did not wait to listen to Brophy’s apologies in behalf of his tavern’s facilities. He touched his cap to the discomposing stranger and marched up to the big house on the ledges; he was not approaching with alacrity what was ahead of him.

He had arrived in Adonia from headwaters the previous evening, and had spent as much of that evening as his endurance would allow, listening to Echford Flagg, sitting in his big chair and cursing the fetters of fate and paralysis. Unable to use his limbs, he exercised his tongue all the more.

That forenoon and again in the afternoon Latisan had gone to the big house and had submitted himself to unreasonable complaints when he reported on what was going forward at headwaters. He had ventured to expostulate when the master told him how the thing ought to be done.

“No two drive bosses operate the same, sir. And the whole situation is different this season.”

“It was your offer to be my right hand, young Latisan—and I’m drive boss still! You move as I order and command.”

Ward was wondering how long the Latisan temperament could be restrained. In the matter of Craig at the tavern the scion of old John had been afforded disquieting evidence that the temperament was not to be trusted too far.

He entered the mansion without knocking; it was the custom.

Flagg was reading aloud from a big Bible for which Rickety Dick had rigged props on the arm of the chair. Dick was sitting on a low stool, the sole auditor of the master’s declamation. The old servitor was peeling onions from a dish between his knees; therefore, his tears of the moment were of questionable nature.

The caller stood for a time outside the open door of the room, averse to tempting the hazard of Flagg’s temper by an interruption of what seemed to be absorbing all the attention of the old man.

“‘My flesh and my skin hath he made old; he hath broken my bones. He hath builded against me, and compassed me with gall and travail. He hath set me in dark places as they that be dead of old. He hath hedged me about, that I cannot get out: he hath made my chain heavy.’”

Flagg halted and looked up from the page. “Lamentations—lamentations, Dick! The best of ’em have whined when the smash came. It’s human nature to let out a holler. Jeremiah did it. I’m in good company; it ain’t crying baby; it’s putting up a real man holler. It’s——”

Latisan stepped through the doorway.

Flagg instantly grabbed at a wooden spill that made a marker in the volume and nipped back the pages. He shook aloft his clinched left hand. He raised his voice and boomed. “‘And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’”

Flagg beat his knotted fist on the open page. “Do you hear that, Latisan? That’s for you. I hunted it up. I haven’t had time till now to read the Bible like I should. Plenty of good stuff in it—but in the Old Testament, mind you! Too much turn-your-cheek stuff in the New Testament. ’Eye for an eye.’ Do you know who said that?”

“No, sir. I’m sorry to admit it, but——”

“God Almighty said it. Said it to Moses on the mount. First straight-arm orders from God to man. It ought to be good enough for you and me, hadn’t it? Take it for rule o’ conduct, and if Rufe Craig says anything to you on the drive refer him here—to headquarters!” Again he beat his fist on the page.

“I don’t know what part of the Bible Craig ought to study, sir, but some of it ought to be good for him. I’m just from the train. They wouldn’t load our dynamite at the junction. Craig is behind that!”

“Wouldn’t haul our dynamite?” raged Flagg. “And he has been shipping his canned thunder through here for Skulltree by the carload! Latisan, you’re falling down on the job. When I, myself, was attending to it, my dynamite was loaded for Adonia all right enough!”

The drive master did not reply to that amazing shifting of blame to him.

“Did you say what ought to be said to that conductor?”

“When I started to say something he bawled me out for using that kind of language on railroad property.”

Flagg lifted the useless right hand with his left, let it fall again, and groaned. “How many times, and where, did you hit him? And then what did you say?”

“I did not hit him, sir. I said nothing more. And there was a lady present.”

Flagg choked and struggled with words before he could speak. “Do you mean to tell me you’re allowing any ladee”—he put exquisite inflection of sarcasm on the word—“to stand betwixt you and your duty, when that duty is plain? Latisan, they tell me that you’re a sapgag where women are concerned. I’m told that you have been down to the city and——”

“Mr. Flagg, we’ll stick to the subject of the dynamite!” broke in the young man, sharply.

“Women are the same thing and belong in the talk.”

“Then we’ll stick to the dynamite that comes in boxes.” Latisan was just as peremptory as the master and was hurrying his business; he felt the dog of the Latisan temperament slipping neck from the leash. “You may have been able to make ’em haul dynamite for you, in spite of the law. I can’t make ’em, it seems. I’m here merely to report, and to say that I’ll have the dynamite up from the junction just the same.” He started for the door.

“By tote team—three times the cost! My Gawd! why ain’t I out and around?” lamented the Adonia Jeremiah.

Latisan wanted to say that he would pay the extra cost of transportation out of his own pocket, if that would save argument, but he did not dare to trust himself. He hurried out of the big house and slammed the door.

On his way down the hill he was obliged to marshal a small host of reasons for hanging on to his job; the desire to quit then and there was looming large, potent, imperative.

He was still scowling when he tramped into the office of the tavern where many loafers were assembled. Through the haze of tobacco smoke he saw Martin Brophy beckoning, and went to the desk. Brophy ran his smutted finger along under a name; “Mrs. Dana Haines Everett, New York City.”

“She has been asking for you. Matter o’ business, she says. I’ve had to give her the front parlor for her room. Say, she’s the kind that gets what she goes after, I reckon. Is eating her supper served in there private. Never was done in my tavern before.”

“Business—with me?” demanded Latisan. “Brophy, what’s her own business in these parts?”

“Can’t seem to find out,” admitted the landlord, and the young man bestowed on Brophy an expansive grin which was a comment on the latter’s well-known penchant for gimleting in search of information. “Will say, however, that she’s a widder—grass if I ain’t much mistook—believes that a woman is equal to a man and should have all a man’s privileges about going around by her lonesome if she so feels.”

“Well, you seem to have extracted a fair amount of information, considering that she’s hardly got her feet planted.”

“Oh,” confessed Brophy, “it came out because I made her mad when I hinted that it was kind of queer for a woman to be traveling around alone up here. Well, now that they’re voting, you can look for ’most anything. What shall I tell her from you when I take in her pie?”

“I’ll wait on the lady after I eat my supper.”

When the drive master was ushered into the parlor-presence by the landlord, the lady was sitting in front of an open Franklin stove, smoking a cigarette. She had made a change in attire since her arrival, the new garb suggesting that she proposed to suit herself to the nature of the region to which she had come. She was in knickerbocker costume, had tipped back her chair, one foot on the hearth and the other foot propped on her knee, and she asked Latisan to sit down, pointing to a chair beside her. She offered a cigarette with a real masculine offhandedness. The caller faltered something about a pipe. She insisted that he smoke his pipe. “It rather puts strangers at their ease, don’t you think, a little tobacco haze in the room?”

Latisan, packing the bowl of his briar, agreed.

“I take it that you’re well acquainted with this region?”

“Fairly so, though I know the Tomah country better.”

“You’re a guide, I understand.”

“I don’t understand where you got that information, madam,” replied the drive master, a bit pricked.

“I don’t remember that anybody did tell me that in so many words. Somehow it was my impression. But no matter. Please listen a moment.” She smiled on him, checking his attempt at a statement regarding himself; she had conned her little speech and used her best vocabulary to impress this woodsman. “No doubt you have something very important in the way of occupation. A man of your bearing is bound to. You needn’t thank me for a compliment—I’m very frank. That’s the way to get on and accomplish things quickly. So I’m frank enough to say it’s my habit to meet men on the plane of man to man. Please do not regard me as a woman—that sort of stuff is old-fashioned in these days. I vote and pay taxes. Yet if I were merely a woman you gave evidence on the station platform to-day that you know how to protect one from insults. I was attracted by that trait in you—and afterwards minded your own business quite after my heart. I need outdoor life. I’m up here early for the first fishing. I want to tour the woods. I may invest in timberlands. Putting out of your mind all this foolish sex matter—as I have explained my man-to-man theory—will you go with me? I’ll have a cook, of course. Pardon my sudden reference to pay—I’ll pay you twice what you’re getting now—providing you’re working for wages.”

“I am working for wages. And I can’t leave the work.”

“What is it?”

“I’m the master of the Flagg drive on these waters.”

“And you prefer to boss rough men and endure hardship rather than to come with me?”

The bitterness of the last interview with Flagg was still with Latisan. “If it was a matter of preference—but that isn’t the way of it!” He returned her gaze and flushed. In spite of his resolve to go on with the battle that was ahead, he was tempted, and acknowledged to himself the fact; but Flagg was trying him cruelly.

“You have been the drive master here for a long time—that’s why you cannot be spared?” She tossed away her cigarette and gave him earnest attention.

“I’m just beginning my work with Flagg.”

“Then of course you’re not vital. Let the man who used to be master——”

“That was Flagg, himself. He’s laid up with paralysis.”

“Oh!” she drawled, provokingly. “A matter of conscientiousness—loyal devotion—champion of the weak—or a young man’s opportunity to be lord of all for the future!”

“He’s an old devil to work for, and the job promises no future,” blurted Latisan, his manner leaving no doubt as to his feelings.

“Then come with me,” she invited. “If I get to own timberlands, who knows?”

He shook his head. “There are reasons why I can’t quit—not this season.”

“I hoped I’d seem to you like a good and sufficient reason,” she returned, insinuatingly; in her anxiety to make a quick job of it, in her cynical estimate of men as she had been finding them out in the city, she was venturing to employ her usual methods as a temptress, naturally falling into the habit of past procedure.

She found it difficult to interpret the sudden look he gave her, but her perspicacity warned her that she was on the wrong tack with this man of the north country.

“I’m afraid you’re finding me a peculiar person, Mr. Latisan,” she hastened to say. “I am. I’m quick to judge and quick to decide. Your gallantry at the railroad station influenced me in your behalf. I like your manners. And I know now what’s in your mind! You think it will be very easy for me to find somebody else as a guide—and you’re quite sure that you can’t give up your responsibility for a woman’s whim.”

The drive master owned to himself that she had called the turn.

“I’ll continue with my frankness, Mr. Latisan. It’s rather more than a guide I’m looking for on that man-to-man plane I have mentioned. You can readily understand. I need good advice about land. Therefore, mine is not exactly a whim, any more than your present determination to go on with your job is a whim. This matter has come to us very suddenly. Suppose we think it over. We’ll have another talk. At any rate, you can advise me in regard to other men.”

She rose and extended her hand. “We can be very good friends, I trust.”

He took her hand in a warm clasp. “I’ll do what I can—be sure of that.”

“I feel very much alone all of a sudden. I’m depending on you. You’re not going back to the drive right away, are you?” she asked, anxiously.

“I’ll be held here for a day or so.” The matter of the dynamite was on his mind.

“Good!” she said, and patted his arm when he turned to leave the room.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The stout young man—that “drummer”—was at the station. Latisan was uncomfortably conscious that this person had been displaying more or less interest in him. In the dining room at breakfast, in the office among the loafers, and now at the railroad station the stranger kept his eyes on Latisan.

The drive master was just as ugly as he had been when he went to sleep. He was keeping his temper on a wire edge for the purposes of the job of that day, as he had planned the affair. He did not go up to the impertinent drummer and cuff his ears, but the stranger did not know how narrowly he escaped that visitation of resentment.

The fellow remained on the platform when the train pulled out; it occurred to Latisan that the fresh individual maybe wished to make sure of a clear field in order to pursue his crude tactics with the lady of the parlor.

After the arrival at the junction Latisan had matters which gave him no time to ponder on the possible plight of the lady.

As he had ascertained by cautious inquiry, the crew of the narrow-gauge train left it on its spur track unattended while they ate at a boarding house. There were workmen in the yard of a lumber mill near the station, loafing after they had eaten their lunches from their pails. The Flagg dynamite was in a side-tracked freight car of the standard gauge. Latisan promptly learned that the lumber-yard chaps were ready and willing to earn a bit of change during their nooning. He grabbed in with them; the boxes of dynamite were soon transferred to the freight car of the narrow-gauge and stacked in one end of the car. Latisan paid off his crew and posted himself on top of the dynamite. In one hand he held a coupling pin; prominently displayed in the other hand was a fuse.

“I’m in here—the dynamite is here,” he informed the conductor when that official appeared at the door of the car, red-faced after hearing the news of the transfer. “I’m only demanding the same deal you have given the Three C’s. You know you’re wrong. Damn the law! I’m riding to Adonia with this freight. What’s that? Go ahead and bring on your train crew.” He brandished coupling pin and fuse. “If you push me too far you’ll have a week’s job picking up the splinters of this train.”

Bravado was not doing all the work for Latisan in that emergency. The conductor’s conscience was not entirely easy; he had made an exception in the case of the Three C’s—and Craig, attending to the matter before he went to New York, had borne down hard on the need of soft-pedal tactics. The conductor was not prepared to risk things with canned thunder in boxes and an explosive young man whose possession just then was nine points and a considerable fraction.

Latisan was left to himself.

At last the train from downcountry rumbled in, halted briefly, and went on its way. From his place in the end of the freight car Latisan could command only a narrow slice of outdoors through the open side door. Persons paraded past on their way to the coach of the narrow-gauge. He could see their backs only. There had been a thrill for him in the job he had just performed; he promptly got a new and more lively thrill even though he ridiculed his sensations a moment later. Among the heads of the arrivals he got a glimpse of an object for which he had stretched his neck and strained his eyes—the anxious soul of him in his eyes—on the street in New York City. He saw a green toque with a white quill.

As though a girl—such a girl as he judged her to be—would still be wearing the same hat, all those months later! But that hat and the very cock of the angle of the quill formed, in a way, the one especially vivid memory of his life. However, he had a vague, bachelor notion that women’s hats resembled their whims—often changed and never twice alike, and he based no hopes on what he had seen.

Whoever she was, she was on the train. But there were stations between the junction and Adonia—not villages, but the mouths of roads which led far into remote regions where a green toque could not be traced readily. He acutely desired to inform himself regarding the face under that hat. But he had made possession the full ten points of his law, sitting on that load of dynamite. What if he should allow that train crew an opening and give Echford Flagg complete confirmation of the report that his drive master was a sapgag with women?

After the intenseness of the thrill died out of him he smiled at the idea that a chance meeting in New York could be followed up in this fashion in the north country. At any rate, he had something with which to busy his thoughts during the slow drag of the train up to Adonia, and he was able to forget in some measure that he was sitting on dynamite and would face even more menacing explosives of another kind when the drive was on its way.

He posted himself in the side door of the car when the train rolled along beside the platform at Adonia. He had ordered men of the Flagg outfit to be at the station with sleds, waiting for the train; they were on hand, and he shouted to them, commanding them to load the boxes and start north.

There was a man displaying a badge on the platform—a deputy sheriff who had his eye out for bootleggers headed toward the driving crews; the conductor ran to the officer and reported that Latisan had broken the law relating to the transportation of explosives; the trainman proposed to shift the responsibility, anticipating that the sheriff might give official attention to the cargo.

Just then Latisan spied the green toque; the face was concealed because the head was bowed to enable the toque’s wearer to pick her way down the steps of the coach.

The drive master leaped from the door of the car and his men scrambled past him to enter.

“About that dynamite——”

Latisan elbowed aside the questioning sheriff, and looked straight past the officer. “If you go after me on that point you’ll have to go after Craig and the Three C’s, too—and I’ll put the thing up to the county attorney myself. Right now I’m busy.”

The men were lugging out the boxes. “If anybody gets in your way, boys, drop a box on his toes,” he shouted, starting up the platform.

“Leave it to us, Mr. Latisan,” bawled one of the crew.

The drive master had his eyes on the girl who was walking ahead of him. He could hardly believe that the voicing of his name attracted her attention. She did not know his name! But she stopped and whirled about and stared at him.

It was surely the girl of the cafeteria!

She plainly shared Latisan’s amazement, but there was in her demeanor something more than the frank astonishment which was actuating him.

He pulled off his cap and hurried to her and put out his hand. “I saw you—I mean I saw your hat. I thought it might be you—but I looked for you in New York—for that hat——” He knew he was making a fool of himself by his excitement and incoherence. “I have been thinking about you——” He was able to check himself, for her eyes were showing surprise of another sort. Her manner suggested to Latisan that she, at any rate, had not been thinking especially about him during the months. She had recovered her composure.

“It is not surprising about the hat, Mr.—I believe I heard somebody call your name—Mr. Latisan?” There was an inflection of polite query, and he bowed. “My sarcastic friends are very explicit about this hat serving as my identifier.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t know anything about girls’ hats. But to see you away up here——”

She forced a flicker of a smile.

“It seems quite natural to find you here in the woods, though I believe you did tell me that your home is over Tomah way.”

He was not able to understand the strange expression on her countenance. And she, on her part, was not able to look at him with complete composure; she remembered the character given to this man by Craig, and she had ventured to give him something else in her report—the swagger of a roué and a black mustache!

There was an awkward moment and he put his cap back on his head. He looked about as if wondering if she expected friends. He had treasured every word of hers in the cafeteria. She had spoken of the woods as if her home had been there at one time.

“I’m not expecting anybody to meet me—here—to-day,” she informed him, understanding his side glances. She was showing incertitude, uneasiness—as if she were slipping back into a former mood after the prick of her surprise. “There’s a hotel here, I suppose.”

He took her traveling case from her hand, muttering a proffer to assist her. They walked away together. For the second time the loafers at Adonia saw Latisan escorting a strange woman along the street, and this one, also, was patently from the city, in spite of her modest attire.

“Seems to be doing quite a wholesale business, importing dynamite and wimmen,” observed a cynic.

“According to the stories in Tomah, he has put in quite a lot of time looking over the market in regard to that last-named,” agreed another detractor.

“And when Eck Flagg gets the news I’d rather take my chances with the dynamite than with the wimmen,” stated the cynic.

“I guess I talked to you like an idiot at first,” said Latisan, when he and his companion were apart from the persons on the station platform. “I’m getting control of my surprise. I remember you told me you were homesick for the woods. That’s why you’re up here, I suppose.”

“It’s one reason, Mr. Latisan.”

“I’m sorry it isn’t a better time of year. I’d like to—to—If you aren’t going to be tied up too much with friends, I could show you around a little. But right now I’m tied up, myself. I’m drive master for Echford Flagg—you remember about speaking of him.”

“Yes; but I shall not trouble Mr. Flagg,” she hastened to say. “He will not be interested in me simply on account of my friends. You are very busy on the drive, are you?” she questioned, earnestly.

“Oh yes. I’ve got to start for headwaters in the morning.” There was doleful regret in his tones.

He was rather surprised to find so much pleased animation in her face; truly, this girl from the city acted as if she were delighted by the news of his going away; she even seemed to be confessing it. “I’m glad!” she cried. Then she smoothed matters after a glance at his grieved and puzzled face. “I’m glad to hear a man say that he’s devoted to his work. So many these days don’t seem to take any interest in what they’re doing—they only talk wages. Yours must be a wonderful work—on the river—the excitement and all!”

“Yes,” he admitted, without enthusiasm.

The street was muddy and they went slowly; he hung back as if he wanted to drag out the moments of their new companionship.

He cast about for a topic; he did not feel like expatiating on the prospects ahead of him in his work. “If you’re going to make much of a stop here——”

She did not take advantage of his pause; he hoped she would indicate the proposed length of her stay, and he was worrying himself into a panic for fear she would not be in Adonia on his next visit to report to Flagg.

“I wish we had a better hotel here, so that you’d stay all contented for a time—and—and enjoy the country hereabouts.”

“Isn’t the hotel a fit place for a woman who is unaccompanied?”

“Oh, that isn’t it! It’s the slack way Brophy runs it. The help question! Martin does the best he knows how, but he finds it hard to keep table girls here in the woods. Has to keep falling back on his nephew, and the nephew isn’t interested in the waiter job. Wants to follow his regular line.”

“And what’s that?” she asked, holding to a safe topic.

“Running Dave’s stable. Nephew says the horses can’t talk back.”

She stopped and faced him. “Do you think the landlord would hire me as a waitress?” She had come to Adonia in haste, leaving her plans to hazard. Now she was obeying sudden inspiration.

If she had slapped him across the face she could not have provoked more astonishment and dismay than his countenance showed.

“I have done much waiting at tables.” She grimly reflected on the cafés where she had sought the most for her money. “I’m not ashamed to confess it.”

He stammered before he was able to control his voice. “It isn’t that. You ought to be proud to work. I mean I’m glad—no, what I mean is I don’t understand why—why——”

“Why I have come away up here for such a job?”

“I haven’t the grit to ask any questions of you!” he confessed, plaintively, his memory poignant on that point.

The stout “drummer” had been trailing them from the station. When they halted he passed them slowly, staring wide-eyed at the girl, asking her amazed questions with his gaze. She flung the Vose-Mern operative a look of real fury; she had come north in a fighting mood.

“I have left the city to escape just such men as that—men who aren’t willing to let a girl have a square chance. I lost my last position because I slapped a cheap insulter’s face in a hotel dining hall.” She looked over Latisan’s head when she twisted the truth. “I came north, to the woods, just as far as that railroad would take me. I hate a city!” Then she looked straight at him, and there was a ring of sincerity in her tone. “I’m glad to be where those are!” She pointed to the trees which thatched the slopes of the hills.

“You’re speaking of friends of mine!”

They had stopped, facing each other. Crowley, lashed by looks from the girl and Latisan, had hurried on toward the tavern.

Lida knew that the drive master was having hard work to digest the information she had given him.

“They are standing up straight and are honest old chaps,” he went on. He was looking into her eyes and his calm voice had a musing tone. “I like to call them my friends.”

He was trying hard to down the queer notions that were popping up. He would not admit that he was suspecting this girl of deceit. But she was so manifestly not what she claimed that she was! Still, there were reverses that might——

“I am alone in a strange land—nobody to back my word about myself. I must call on a reliable witness. You know the witness.” She put up her hand and touched her hat. Then came laughter—first from her and then from Latisan—to relieve the situation. “You saw me wearing it more than six months ago. What better proof of my humble position in life do you want?”

“I don’t dare to tell you what you ought to be, Miss——”

“Patsy Jones,” she returned, glibly; his quest for her name could not be disregarded.

“But what you are right now is good enough because it’s honest work.”

“Do you think I can get the job?”

“I am a witness of Martin Brophy’s standing offer to give one thousand dollars for a table girl who won’t get homesick or get married.”

“Take me in and collect the reward, Mr. Latisan. I’m a safe proposition, both ways.”

“I hope not!” he blurted—and then marched on with the red flooding beneath his tan.

And though he strove to put all his belief in her word about herself, he was conscious of a persistent doubt, and was angered by it.

“If you please, I’ll do the talking to Mr. Brophy—is that his name?—when we reach the hotel,” said the girl. “You really do not know me.” There was a flash of honesty, she felt, in that statement, and she wanted to be as honest as she could—not wholly a compound of lies in her new rôle. “It might seem queer, my presenting myself under your indorsement, as if we had been acquainted somewhere else. Gossip up here is easily started, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

He surrendered her bag to her at the porch, as if his services had been merely the cursory politeness of one who was traveling her way. It was in Latisan’s mind to go along to the big house on the ledges and inform Flagg what had been done that day, and glory in the boast that there was a new man in the region who could make a way for himself in spite of Flagg’s opinions as to the prowess of an old man.

Latisan was feeling strangely exhilarated. She had come there to stay! Martin Brophy was in the desperate state of need to chain a girl like that one to a table leg in his desire to keep her. And she had announced her own feelings in the matter! She was in the Noda—the girl who had stepped out of his life never to enter it again, so he had feared in his lonely ponderings. He was in the mood of a real man at last! He was resolved to take no more of Echford Flagg’s contumely. He was heartsick at the thought of starting north and leaving her in the tavern, to be the object of attentions such as that cheap drummer man bestowed when he passed them on the street.

The plea of the lady of the tavern parlor had made merely a ripple in his resolves. He had not thought of her or her proposition during that busy day.

Now he was wondering whether the fight for Flagg—the struggle against Craig, even for vengeance, was worth while.

Lida was having no difficulty in locating the landlord. He stood just beyond the dining-room door and was proclaiming that he was the boss and was shaking his fist under the nose of a surly youth who had allowed several dishes to slide off a tray and smash on the floor.

“Do you want to hire a waitress from the city?” she demanded.

“You bet a tin dipper I do,” snapped back Brophy.

“I’m ready to begin work at once. If you’ll show me my room——”

“You go up one flight, by them stairs there, and you pick out the best room you can find—the one that suits you! That’s how much I’m willing to cater to a city waitress. And you needn’t worry about wages.”

“I shall not worry, sir.” She hurried up the stairs.

The hostler-waiter slammed down the tray with an ejaculation of thankfulness. Brophy picked up the tray and banged it over the youth’s head. “You ain’t done with the hash-wrassling till she has got her feet placed. Sweep up that litter, stand by to do the heavy lugging, and take your orders from her and cater to her—cater!”

Latisan, lingering on the porch, had hearkened and observed. He caught a glimpse of himself in the dingy glass of the door. He scrubbed his hand doubtfully over his beard. Then he turned and hurried away.

The single barber shop of Adonia was only a few yards from the door of the tavern. There was one chair in the corner of a pool room.

Latisan overtook a man in the doorway and yanked him back and entered ahead.

“I’m next!” shouted the supplanted individual.

“Yes, after me!” declared Latisan, grimly. He threw himself into the chair. “Shave and trim! Quick!”

The barber propped his hands on his hips. “What’s the newfangled idea of shedding whiskers before the drive is down?”

“Shave!” roared Latisan. “And if you’re more than five minutes on the job I’ll carve my initials in you with your razor.”

So constantly did he apostrophize the barber to hurry, wagging a restless jaw, that blood oozed from several nicks when the beard had been removed.

“I’ve got a pride in my profession, just the same as you have in your job,” stormed the barber when Latisan refused to wait for treatment for the cuts. “And I don’t propose to have you racing out onto the streets——”

But the drive master was away, obsessed by visions of that fresh drummer presuming further in his tactics with the new waitress. The barber, stung to defense of his art, grabbed a towel and a piece of alum and pursued Latisan along the highway and into the tavern office, cornered the raging drive master, and insisted on removing the evidences which publicly discredited good workmanship. The affair was in the nature of a small riot.

The guests who were at table in the dining room stared through the doorway with interest. The new waitress, already on her job, gave the affair her amused attention. Especially absorbed was the sullen youth who halted in the middle of the room, holding a loaded tray above his head. In his abstraction he allowed the tray to tip, and the dishes rained down over Crowley, who was seated directly under the edge of the tray.

Latisan strode in and took his seat at the small table with the city stranger while Brophy was mopping the guest off; the city chap had received his food on his head and in his lap.

The waitress came and stood demurely at one side, meeting the flaming gaze of the Vose-Mern man with a look that eloquently expressed her emotions. “Shall I repeat the order?”

“Don’t be fresh!” snarled Crowley.

Latisan rapped his knuckles on the table warningly. “Be careful how you talk to this lady!”

“What have you got to say about it?” The stout chap started to rise.

But Latisan was up first. He leaned over and set his big hand, fingers outspread like stiff prongs, upon the man’s head, and twisted the caput to and fro; then he drove the operative down with a thump in his chair. “This is what I’ve got to say! Remember that she is a lady, and treat her accordingly, or I’ll twist off your head and take it downstreet and sell it to the bowling-alley man.”

It was plain that the girl was finding a piquant relish in the affair.

From the moment when she came down the stairs and took the white apron which Brophy handed to her she had ceased to be the city-wearied girl. It was homely adventure, to be sure, but the very plainness of it, in the free-and-easy environment of the north woods, appealed to her sense of novelty. There was especial zest for her in this bullyragging of Crowley by the man who was to be victim of the machinations by the Vose-Mern agency. Her eyes revealed her thoughts. The city man opened his mouth. He promptly shut it and turned sideways in his chair, his back to Latisan. Detective Crowley was enmeshed in a mystery which he could not solve just then. What was the confidential secretary doing up there?

The girl smiled down on her champion—an expansive, charming, warming smile. “I thank you! What will you have?”

She surveyed his face with concern; his countenance was working with emotion. In her new interest, she noted more particularly than in the New York cafeteria, that he apparently was, in spite of what Craig had said, a big, wholesome, naïve chap who confessed to her by his eyes, then and there, that he was honestly and respectfully surrendering his heart to her, short though the acquaintance had been, and she was thrilled by that knowledge. She was not responding to this new appeal, she was sure, but she was gratified because the man was showing her by his eyes that he was her slave, not merely a presumptuous conquest of the moment, after the precipitate manner of more sophisticated males.

She repeated her question.

It was evident enough what Latisan wanted at that moment, but he had not the courage to voice his wishes in regard to her; he had not enough self-possession left to state his actual desires as to food, even. There was one staple dish of the drive; he was heartily sick of that food, but he could not think of anything else right then.

“Bub—bub—beans!” he stuttered.

She hurried away.

When she returned with her tray she did not interrupt any conversation between the two men at the little table; the Vose-Mern man still had his back turned on Latisan; the drive master sat bolt upright in a prim attitude which suggested a sort of juvenile desire to mind his manners.

The girl’s eyes were still alight with the spirit of jest. She placed steak and potatoes and other edibles in front of Latisan. She gave the gentleman from the agency a big bowl of beans.

“I didn’t order those!”

“I’m sorry, sir. I must have got my orders mixed.”

“You have! You’ve given that”—he stopped short of applying any epithet to Latisan—“you’ve given him my order!”

“Won’t you try our beans—just once? The cook tells me they were baked in the ground, woodman style.”

“Then give ’em to the woodsmen—it’s the kind of fodder that’s fit for ’em.”

Latisan leaned across the table and tugged Crowley’s sleeve. “Look me in the eye, my friend!” The man who was exhorted found the narrowed, hard eyes very effective in a monitory way. “I don’t care what you eat, as a general thing. But you have just slurred woodsmen and have stuck up your nose at the main grub stand-by of the drive. You’re going to eat those beans this lady has very kindly brought. If you don’t eat ’em, starting in mighty sudden, I’ll pick up that bowl and tip it over and crown you with it, beans and all. Because I’m speaking low isn’t any sign I don’t mean what I say!”

The beans were steaming under the stout man’s nose. He decided that the heat would be better in his stomach than on the top of his head; he had just had one meal served that way. He devoured the beans and marched out of the dining room, his way taking him past the sideboard where the new waitress was skillfully arranging glasses after methods entirely different from those of the sullen youth.

“Don’t jazz the game any more—not with me,” growled Crowley, fury in his manner. “And I want to see you in private.”

She stiffened, facing him. She knew that Latisan’s earnest eyes were on her. She assumed the demeanor of a girl who was resentfully able to take care of herself, playing a part for the benefit of the drive master. “Attend strictly to your end of the program, Crowley!”

“What do you mean—my end?”

“Protecting me from insults by these rough woodsmen. I suppose you are doing the same for Miss Elsham.” Her irony was biting. He scowled and put his face close to hers.

“If you’re up here on the job—it’s not a lark. It’s a case of he-men in these parts. If you’re not careful you’ll start something you can’t stop.”

“Keep away from me. They’re watching us. You’re bungling your part wretchedly. Can’t you understand that I’m on the case, too?”

She had planned her action, forestalling possibilities as well as she was able. She was determined to be bold, trusting to events as they developed.

“You will kindly remember that I’m on this case along with you, and you can’t make me jump through hoops!” Crowley, fresh from the city, narrow in his urban conceit, was seeing red because of a petty humiliation he had suffered in public.

Another man was seeing red for a different reason. Latisan strode across the room, nabbed Crowley by the ear, and led him into the tavern office, where the aching ear was twisted until the city man subsided into a chair.

The girl appraised at its full value the rancor that was developing in the Vose-Mern operative; his glaring eyes were accusing her.

But the adoring eyes of Latisan promised really more complicated trouble for her.

It was borne in on her that there were dangerous possibilities in the frank atmosphere of the north woods. Lida had the poignant feeling of being very much alone just then—and she was afraid!