Joan of Arc of the North Woods Part 40

"Wait till Craig comes to!" protested Mern. "He may want us to hush the thing. He has been hollering for soft pedal all the time. He seems bad!

Get a doctor!"

The physician who came confirmed Mern's opinion as to the condition of the field director; Craig himself was querulously emphatic on the point when he had been brought to consciousness. But he insisted on postponing consideration of the proper action to take in Latisan's case until he had time to forget his aches and compose his thoughts.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Early the next morning glaziers, carpenters, and telephone repair men monopolized the Vose-Mern offices to the exclusion of regular business.

The chief had told his office force to stay away for the day.

He had found one chair that was whole, and he sat and watched the "after the storm" effect gradually disappear.

Mern's thoughts were as much in disorder as the interior he was surveying.

Instead of feeling lively enmity in the case of Latisan, he was admitting to himself that he rather admired the young wildcat from the woods. At any rate, Latisan had accepted at face value Mern's repeated dictum that if the other fellow could get Mern while Mern was set on getting the fellow, there would be no grudges. Latisan's come-back, the chief reflected, was crude work, but it was characteristically after the style of the men of the open; and the wreck of an office was less disastrous than the wreck of a man's prospects and his very soul. Mern was not a bit of a sentimentalist, but he could see the situation vaguely from Latisan's standpoint. And he realized that there was still something behind it all which he had not come at.

He was roused from his ponderings by the crunching of feet on broken gla.s.s, and looked up and beheld Latisan. Halted just inside the door of the main office was a policeman in uniform. And the officer, well known by Mern, caught the chief's eye and winked.

Mern jumped to his feet; he was much astonished and glanced to see whether Latisan's fists were doubled.

"Good morning, sir!" said the caller, politely. "I have come around early to let you know that I'm not the kind of a man who does a thing and runs away from the responsibility of it."

With prolonged scrutiny--stares which crossed like fencing blades--the two princ.i.p.als mutely questioned each other. Latisan displayed the most composure. He had not the same reason as had Mern to be surprised; it was immediately made plain that Latisan had devoted some thought to preparations for the interview. He stepped closer. Even though his smile seemed to be meant as an a.s.surance of amity, Mern flinched; he remembered that the woodsman had begun the battle the day before after a remark in a most placid tone.

Latisan tipped his head to indicate the waiting policeman. "I brought him along. I asked him to come up from the street. He doesn't know what for."

"Nor I, either!" blurted Mern.

"I thought you might want me arrested on sight, and I remember what I did to your telephones, and I figured I'd save you the trouble of sending out."

There was no mistaking the drive master's new mood. He was polite; he was contrite. The picturesque touch furnished by supplying a policeman suggested the Vose-Mern "antic.i.p.atory system" and appealed to the chief's grim sense of humor. Also, Mern was moved by that consciousness which warms real men, when it's a mutual acknowledgment, "He's a good sport."

Mern waved his hand to the policeman, putting into that gesture a meaning which the officer understood; the officer started for the outer door.

"Just a second!" called Latisan. He pulled out a roll of money and gave the policeman a bill. "You can use that to pay your fare down in the elevator."

Latisan held the roll in sight until he and Mern were alone. "While the cash is out, I may as well inquire what the bill is."

"For what?"

"For this." The woodsman swung the hand which held the money, making a wide sweep to take in all the wreck.

"No bill, Latisan! You can't pay a cent. I think we'll call it natural wear and tear in the course of business."

The chief was sitting in the chair which had escaped damage. He insisted on the caller taking that chair; Mern sat on a carpenter's sawhorse.

"Perhaps I had you going yesterday, Chief Mern, but to-day it's you who have got me going!" admitted Latisan, frankly mystified by this forbearance.

"I'm only backing up the talk I have always made about giving the other fellow his innings if he wants to take 'em and has the grit to put it over. Look here, Latisan, two men are never really well acquainted till they've had a good run-in with their fists. You and I have been standing each other off on facts. Let's get down to cases. How did it happen that you fell for Lida Kennard so suddenly?"

Ward flushed. It was a sacred subject, but he resolved to be frank with Mern, searching for the truth. "It was not sudden. I met her here in the city by accident months ago--and I must have fallen in love with her then. I've been admitting that I did, though I did not know her real name till yesterday. And I did not know she was a detective, set on my trail. And even now----"

"You don't believe it, eh? Let me say it to you, Latisan--and get me right! You're a square chap and I can afford to be square, now that the job is done and paid for. The girl never was an operative. She was my confidential secretary, and the best one I ever had. Working hard here to pay up the debts she had incurred on account of her mother. As clean as a whistle, Latisan! She never told me she was going north. That letter you brought is one I wrote after Crowley reported that she was there--and I wanted to know why she was there."

"I can tell you why. She is Echford Flagg's granddaughter."

Mern leaped up and kicked the carpenter's bench away from him. Latisan rose, too, as if prepared to resent any detracting speech.

"Don't trouble yourself," snapped Mern. "I'm not saying a word against her for what she was doing up there. I trained her myself in what she called the ethics of this business, and she had been practicing what I have preached. It's all right, Latisan."

"The thing cleared itself up pretty quickly for me yesterday when I found out her name. But now that I know who she is I'm in h.e.l.l. I ran away! I have left that drive----"

"Aw, to blazes with your drive!" yelped Mern, with scorn. "Only logs!

But what I want to know is this, does the girl love you?"

"She told me so, but how can she have any affection for such a man as I have shown myself to be? I think she was sacrificing herself because she believed I was the one who could bring down the Flagg drive."

Mern surveyed him cynically. "Say, Latisan, I hope you're not the kind who would bite a gold coin stolen from a dead man's eye. You woods fellows have too much time for joint debates with your own selves. Go find that girl and square yourself. I want her to have what she wants, if she is in love with you. That's the kind of a friend I am to her. I can't tell you where she is. I haven't heard from her since she walked out of this office. But let me say something to you! My kind of work has wised me up to what folks are likely to do! I'll bet a thousand dollars the girl hasn't run very far away from the north country, even if you did think it was too hot to hold you."

Latisan shook his head slowly. Confidence was still chilled in him; the memory of what had happened was a forbidding barrier; in her case, at the thought of thrusting himself back into her presence, he was as timid to an extreme as he had been fearless in his dealings with men in the Vose-Mern offices.

While he was wrestling with his thoughts, delivery men were wrestling with furniture, bringing it in through the door from the corridor, blocking the pa.s.sage.

Mern snapped his attention from Latisan, then he pushed the latter out of the range of vision from the corridor door.

Craig was out in the corridor, cursing the furniture and the men who were obstructing the doorway. Craig was in a hurry and in a state of mind; his language revealed his feelings.

"It won't do--it won't do!" insisted Mern when Latisan protested at being shoved behind the part.i.tion. "He mustn't see you. Hear him rave!

I'm not staging another fight to-day. Stay in there! Crouch down! Keep out of sight."

When Craig won his way past the blocking furniture he stormed to Mern, stamping across the gla.s.s-strewn floor, shaking his fists and jabbering.

He was in a horrible state of rage. His face was so apoplectically purple that the bruises on his patched-up countenance were subdued somewhat by lack of contrast.

"Look at me! Called down to the home office just now, looking like this.

Lying like blazes about an automobile accident! That's what your invitation to view the tame tiger has done for me. But that isn't what I'm here for, you d.a.m.nation, four-flushing double-crosser." He continued to berate the chief.

"Say, you hold on there!" barked Mern, managing a few oaths of his own after struggling out of the amazement stirred by this ferocious attack.

"If you're here to do business or to complain about the business that has been done, you'll have to be decent, or I'll run you out." Mern jutted his jaw and took two steps in Craig's direction--and Craig had suffered violence too recently to persist in inviting more.

But he was still as acrimonious as he dared to be. Behind his rage there was the bitterness of a man who had been tricked out of money--betrayed shamefully--but Craig was so precipitate, breathless, violent, so provokingly vague with his tumbling words and his broken sentences, that Mern ceased to be angry in return and was merely bewildered.

The Comas field director shook under Mern's nose a sheet of paper. He kept referring to the writing on the paper and vouchsafed information that the writing was made up of notes of a long-distance conversation between the woods and the New York offices of the Comas company.

After a time Mern suggested with acerbity that Craig was incoherent.