Joan of Arc of the North Woods Part 22

"You shall not walk away with me."

"I invited you to come up here. I shall see you to the door of that tavern. You may never speak to me again, but you won't be able to say about me that I deserted you in the dark night."

"Will you come back here after you have escorted me to the tavern?"

"No! It's settled into a stand-off between Flagg and me."

"Don't you want to please me?"

"Yes, even to lying down here in the mud and letting you walk on me," he declared, his fervor breaking from the repression he had been maintaining with difficulty. "And it's because he has insulted somebody that I feel like that toward--that's why I'm done with him. I'm not putting it very smoothly. But it's in here!" He pounded his fist on his breast.

"Mr. Latisan, this is folly. I'm only a waitress."

"I'm thanking G.o.d that you are and that you aren't too high above me, as I was afraid you were when I met you in New York. You're down where I can talk to you."

She started to walk away, but he leaped and seized both her arms. "This is going mighty fast," he gasped. "I never talked to a girl in this way in all my life. I'll probably never dare to talk to you if I wait for daylight to-morrow--I'll be too scared of my thoughts overnight."

She did not try to twist herself free from his grasp; she was more self-possessed than he was--he was trembling in all his frame.

"It's like dynamite," he stammered. "I reckon it was in me all the time!

The first flash of your eyes lighted the fuse! I've blown up." He pulled her close to him, flung his arms about her, and kissed her. But immediately he loosed her and stepped back. "I didn't intend to do that!

My feelings got away from me."

"And now may I go along?" she inquired, coldly, after he had remained silent for a time.

"I'm sorry I have made you angry. I don't know how to go at a thing like this one I'm tackling," he said contritely. "But I feel that talking out straight and man fashion is the only way. Will you marry me?"

"Certainly not, sir!"

He did not attempt to stay her when she walked on. He trod humbly by her side.

"I was afraid you wouldn't. But I couldn't keep back the asking any more than I can push back that flood you can hear down in the gorge. It just had to pour along, that asking!"

"Mr. Latisan, you astonish me. You desert your employer on account of a mere whim----"

"Don't you call my standing up for you any whim, if you please!" The change in his tone from humility to stern and masterful command caused her to catch her breath. She was not accustomed to dominance by men.

"At any rate, sir, you have proposed marriage to a stranger, a mere come-by-chance into this place, not knowing who or what I am. I have a right to be astonished."

"Probably! But you aren't any more so than I was in New York when I realized what had happened to me."

"So, now you can forget all about me and go back to your work on the drive!"

"You have said I did not know much about you. It's plain you don't know me! I have told Eck Flagg I am done. And I am! You don't understand. I'm a Latisan and----" he faltered then; it sounded like boyish boasting and he was a bit ashamed.

"Somehow that helpless old man has stirred all my sympathy. Why won't you do as I ask?"

"Because a girl who throws a man down as you have hasn't any right to ask him to do this or that."

They were near the tavern before either spoke again.

"I'm not saying that I'm not sorry for Eck Flagg," the drive master stated. "I don't want you to leave me to-night with the idea that I'm a quitter or a coward or a sneak about what's my duty. I'll be honest with you. You think I'm a fool because I've fallen in love with you so suddenly. A man who has tussled with drives and log jams for as many years as I have needs to think quickly, make up his mind about what it's right to do, and then stick to it. I'm not going to sacrifice myself for Flagg--a man with the hard heart that's in him." He caught his breath and plunged on: "You say to-night that you won't marry me. I'm going to stay close by and see if you won't change your mind. A roaring fire is in me right now!" His demeanor terrified her. The primitive man was blazing. "I don't dare to take the chances on what would be in me if I should go back to the drive and leave you here to be smirked at by every cheap man who comes along. I have dreamed too much about you!" He was wooing with the avatar of old John. "By the G.o.ds! you're my girl! I'm going to have you! I'll stay on that job!"

"I shall leave this place to-morrow. It will be very--well, very unwise for you to annoy me."

"I'm going to follow you."

"Mr. Latisan, I have listened to you; you shall listen to me!" She spoke sharply. Now she displayed the equipoise of one who had learned much from self-reliant contact with men. "I'll not argue with you about what you call love. But there's something which love must have, and that's self-respect. If your folly on account of me takes you away from your honest duty you'll despise me when you come to yourself. You have been honest with me. I'll be honest with you. I like you. I can see that you're a big, true man--much different from most of the men I have met before this. But I shall lose all my good opinion of you if you desert your job. And, as I have said, you'll hate me if I allow you to do so.

Can we afford to take chances?"

While he pondered she made hurried mental account of stock in her own case.

She was not admitting that she felt any especial consideration for this man as a lover; she was protecting her grandfather and striving for her own peace of mind as a payer of a debt of honor. He followed her when she walked on toward the tavern.

"May I ask what you mean by taking chances? Chances on being something more to each other than we are now?" he asked, wistfully.

"I think we have gone quite far enough for one evening, sir."

He pulled off his cap. "Before I go to sleep I shall say my little prayer. I shall ask that you won't be thinking I have gone too far. I'm sure it won't be a prayer to the G.o.d of the Old Testament, such as Eck Flagg was reading about. I'll whisper up to Mother Mary. She understands women. I don't."

He bowed in silence when she gave him a hasty "good night!"

Latisan whirled suddenly after the girl closed the door behind her--came about on his heels so quickly that he nearly b.u.mped into the a.s.siduous operative Crowley, who had been taking desperate chances that evening.

But Latisan's gaze was directed downward in deep thought as he walked slowly away, and he did not perceive the eavesdropper.

Mr. Crowley had heard aplenty, so he informed himself; he had followed them all the way from the big house down to the tavern, treading close behind, depending on their absorption in each other, his shoes in his hand, not minding the ledges and the mud; and he was in his mental stocking feet, too, treading on the bedrock of the obvious, as he figured on the proposition.

He had been told many times, Mr. Crowley had, that he possessed a single-track mind and was not fitted to deal with the subtleties of criminal investigation and had not the expansive wit to comprehend the roundabout ways of steering victims to their doom. But Mr. Crowley was indubitably fitted by training to write a handbook on the art of double-crossing--and he reckoned he knew an out-and-out job of that sort after what he had heard that evening. For his own peace of mind, and to save himself from going crazy by reason of any more puzzlement over Miss Kennard's alleged mysterious methods in her work, he kept insisting to himself that she was merely double-crossing the Vose-Mern agency in the good old-fashioned way. Not his the task to wonder why!

He rushed up to his room and started in on his report. It had stuck in Crowley's crop--seemed humiliating--to be made a subaltern in the case of women operatives. He believed that at last he was in right and proper on the grand opportunity of his career; he would come down from the bush with the bacon; Elsham had fallen down and Kennard was double-crossing--and Crowley, good old reliable Crowley, would show Chief Mern where the credit should go! He set his little, cheap typewriter on his st.u.r.dy knees and pecked away stolidly with his forefingers.

Latisan remained outdoors a long time, for the night matched the gloom of his thoughts. And once more, in spite of himself, his dark ponderings concerned themselves with suspicions as to what and who this girl really was.

In his early deference to her he had been ready and willing to believe all she said about herself, and his suspicion had seemed to be extinguished; he realized that it merely had been smoldering. Why would not a waitress marry him, one of the Latisans of the Tomah? Was he what old Flagg had so inelegantly stated--a sapgag where a girl was concerned? He began to distrust his strength as a man; he had wasted a day in New York; he was ready to give up his man's job on the Noda because he could not get his thoughts away from her and on his work. His last stay at headwaters had been hours of torture. He had gone to sleep dreaming of the girl instead of putting his attention on the problems of the morrow--and the details of the drive that spring needed all sorts of judgment and foresight.

While he was in that state of mind, trying to excuse defection, he told himself, as he trudged to and fro, that he was not a fit man for Flagg.

Nevertheless he cursed himself for being so weak. He had read stories of woman's subjugation of the famous and the strong and had wondered what sort of lunacy had overtaken such men. Here he was making an invalid's tantrums an excuse to give up his work and dangle at the skirts of an unknown girl; and he knew it was because of the mystery of her real ident.i.ty and because his jealousy was afire on account of an uncertainty which was now aggravated by her refusal to marry him.

Latisan had not been in the village ten minutes that afternoon before Gossip Dempsey had giggled and told him he'd better keep sharp watch on his girl, because the jewelry man was everlastingly after her like a puppy chasing the butcher's cart; the simile was not nice, but Latisan was impressed by its suggestion of a.s.siduity.

In the tumult of his thought, grudgingly conscious that he was ashamed of the real reason for giving up his work, Latisan evasively decided that the thing was now up to Echford Flagg. He had warned Flagg man fashion. He had given his word to Flagg as to what would happen if Flagg persisted in treating him like a lackey. Flagg had persisted. Latisan had kept his word. He could not retreat from that stand; he could not crawl back to Flagg and still maintain the self-respect that a drive master must have in the fight that was ahead.

Therefore, Latisan decided to stay in Adonia and let Flagg make overtures; for their future relations the drive master would be able to lay down some rules to govern Flagg's language and conduct. Under that decision persisted the nagging consciousness that he wanted to be with the girl instead of on the drive and he was more and more ashamed of the new weakness in his character. And he was also ashamed of the feeling that he wanted to find out more about her. In the past his manliness had despised prying and peering. He had been able to bl.u.s.ter loyally to old d.i.c.k; he was more truthful to himself. What was she, anyway? He would not admit that he had been so completely tipped upside down in all his hale resolves, aims, and objects by a mere nonent.i.ty who looked no higher than a job as waitress at Brophy's tavern.

Then he went into the tavern out of the darkness and blinked at the landlord, who called him to the desk and gave a letter into his hands.

It was sealed, but there was no stamp on it.