Joan of Arc of the North Woods Part 33

"It's--it's the honeymoon," she stammered. "It will be taking you away from your wife."

"She's my girl," put in Nicola. "She tells him to go."

Father Leroque perceived Lida's distressful inability to pull herself together at that moment, and he employed his ready tact, giving her time for thought. "It's quite a natural thing, this taking away of the new bridegroom for the service of the Flaggs," he declared with a chuckle.

"There's even a song--I think it was written by Poet O'Gorman. Do you know it, Felix? I can see by your grin that you do. Very well. Let's have it. As I remember it, it states the case according to the Flagg methods."

Lapierre pulled off his cap; his eyes were alight with merriment; he sang gayly:

The night that I was married--the night that I was wed-- Up there came old Echford Flagg and rapped on my bed head.

Said he, "Arise, young married man, and come along with me, Where the waters of the Noda they do roar along so free."

"You see!" suggested the priest, archly, smiling, palms spread. "When Flagg calls, the honeymoon must wait. It promises good adventure, and Felix would be sorry if he were not in it."

Cap in hand, Lapierre swept his arm in a broad gesture of respectful devotion. It was a touch of gallantry which raised the affair above the prosaic details of mere business and which made the relations closer than those of employer and employed.

In Lida grat.i.tude was succeeding amazement, and the glow of that grat.i.tude was warming her courage into life again. When she had stepped from Nicola's door a few moments before she felt bitterly alone and helpless and she had no eye for the glory of the day. Suddenly the sunshine seemed transcendently cheery. All the aspects of the case were changed. Now she could go on to the drive as one of the Flaggs should go--with loyal men at her back to replace those who had deserted. She could hearten a broken crew with men, not merely with a strange girl's plaintive story and appeal.

"We're ready, mam'selle," said Felix.

The women of the community were gathered in front of the sachem's house.

Lapierre went smiling to his bride and put his arm about her; but when he started to draw her toward Lida the latter antic.i.p.ated the coming by running to meet them. She took the little bride in her arms.

The priest, Felix, and the governor swapped looks and nods which indorsed an understanding that was wordless between the young women.

When Lida turned from the governor's daughter she saw the governor himself coming toward her. He held out the cant dog; it lay across his palms and he tendered it respectfully.

She winked the mist of tears from her eyes and struggled with a hysterical desire to babble many words.

"Hush!" warned the priest. "We all know!"

There, in a golden silence, she realized how cheap and base was the clinking metal of speech that had been the currency of herself and others in the crowded town.

The river, slowed by the deadwater, was mute, though its foam streaks showed where it had crashed through the gorges above. A few chickadees chirruped bravely. There were no other sounds while the girl took the Flagg scepter in her own hands.

She walked with Felix to the sh.o.r.e, where the flotilla of canoes lay upturned at the pull-out place. Again the Oronos were a.s.signed to her, and she was comforted much because they no longer seemed like strangers.

"Au revoir!" called Father Leroque when the canoes were afloat on the brown flood. "I'm making haste to the Tomah, mam'selle, to keep my promise!"

He had already accomplished so much for her! In her new thanksgiving spirit she was finding it easy to believe that he could bring about what her self-acknowledged love for Latisan so earnestly desired.

In single file, holding close to the sh.o.r.e, the canoes went toward the north. There was no talk between those who paddled; against the brown sh.o.r.e the canoes were merely moving smudges.

Rufus Craig, coming down the middle of the deadwater in one of the great bateaus of the Comas company, paid no attention to the smudges.

The bateau rode high and rapidly on the flood that moved down the channel. Craig was writing in his notebook and four oarsmen were obeying his command to dip deep and pull strong.

Craig had met Ben Kyle by appointment at the foot of the Oxbow portage and he had found Kyle to be particularly malevolent and entirely willing--and Kyle had gone north to the Flagg drive in the pay of the Three C's.

It had been a profitable interview, as Director Craig viewed it.

Now he was chasing along the trail of rumor to Adonia; the rumor was encouraging. If Latisan really had been pried out of the section, Craig saw an opportunity to run back to New York to make a private settlement with Mern and enjoy a little relaxation before the pressing matters of the drive in full swing claimed all his attention. Right then, according to all appearances, the Comas business up-country was doing very well in the hands of the understrapper bosses. Therefore, Director Craig smiled over the pages of his notebook.

The brown smudges in single file went on and on. Noon at the foot of the portage at Oxbow! Lida sniffed the wood smoke of the cook fire and ate her lunch and drank her tea.

Up the narrow trail of the gorge she followed at the rear of her men; the canoes, upturned on their shoulders, glistened in the sparkling sunshine. She was bringing real aid in a time of stress, as one of the Flaggs should! More and more that consciousness heartened her.

Quiet water at the put-in, then rapids where the canoes were poled, the irons clinking on the rocks over which the turbid waters rolled; more calm stretches where haste was made.

A night in the open at a camping site where a couch of boughs was piled for her under a deftly contrived shelter of braided branches of hemlocks.

And on in the first flush of the morning toward the drive.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Ben Kyle made "his bigness" when he went into Flagg's crew on his mission for Craig. He was not admitting to himself or anybody else that he was traitor. He bl.u.s.tered and bullyragged; he had been their boss and he had been fired without cause, he insisted. Even the loyal men did not presume to answer back; he had been too recently their master and the aura of authority still persisted. He came with a white-hot grudge and with rumors which he embroidered to suit his needs. Kyle had been far on the edge of affairs, and only the ripples of the Adonia events reached him. But his statement that Latisan had run away with a girl seemed to be certified by the drive master's continued absence. And there were those stories of Latisan's former weakness in the city; they had been sleeping; they were not dead.

Kyle was hiring for the Comas company--unabashed, blatantly. He strode from man to man, banging heavy palm on shoulders. "Come with the real folks. What's old Eck Flagg to-day? You might as well be hired by a bottle-sucking brat in a baby carriage. Where's Latisan? You tell me his men went downriver to meet him; they've kept on going. He has hid away, dancing his doxy on his knee. Where's your pay coming from when Eck Flagg goes broke?"

Kyle waded in the shallows where men were rolling logs, shouting to be heard above the roar of the waters.

"We hired for a fight," said the men who hated the Comas. "But it doesn't look like one is going to be made."

"We've always stood behind Eck Flagg," said the old stand-bys of the crew. "But we ain't getting a square chance for honest work."

It was plain that the spirit was being beaten out of them under the hammer of Kyle's harangue--whether it was the adventurous spirit which craved fight or the honest spirit which had sent them north to the job.

When the night came down, after they had cleaned their pannikins of food, steaming hot, from the cook's kettles, while they smoked around the fire which drove away the evening chill, Kyle paced to and fro among the groups, declaiming, detracting, and urging. He knew that he was prevailing, though slowly. Woodsmen in shifting their allegiance are not swayed by sudden impulse. His voice rang among the trees in the silence of the evening.

"Latisan is a sneak--Latisan is a runaway! Eck Flagg is next to a dead man!" Over and over he made those declarations, battering discouragement into their slow comprehension in order to win them to the Comas company.

"And Latisan has thrown down real men for the sake of a girl! Do you want to get the Big Laugh when you show yourselves downriver?"

Voyagers who came from the southward, leaving their canoes below the falls, moved silently, after the fashion of the Tarratines. They halted on a shadowed slope within the range of Kyle's raucous voice, and Lida stepped forward to listen. The red flames lighted a circle among the trees, and she beheld the seated groups and saw the swaggering malcontent who paced to and fro.

"I'm with the Three C's now, first, last, and all the time! Their money is waiting for you, men. Come, with the real folks, I tell you!"

And again, with even more fantastic tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, he set forth the story of Latisan's flight with a girl who had seduced him from his duty in the north.

Lida s.n.a.t.c.hed the Flagg cant dog from the hands of Felix; he had been the bearer of her scepter. He blinked when he looked at her. The far-flung light of the camp fire, reflected in her eyes, had set veritable torches there. Her lips were apart and her white teeth were clenched and her face was ridged with resolution.

There was no mistaking the intention which righteous anger had stirred in her, but when she started down the slope Felix leaped and ventured to restrain her with a touch on her arm. "Is it well to let the Comas know that you are here or what you are going to do? Pardon, mam'selle, but think!"

"The lies! The lies!"

"Yes, mam'selle, but you can tell them the truth when he is not there to hear."