King Spruce Part 51

"Mr. Britt," returned Ide, his tones quivering with pa.s.sion, "two men in each bateau crew can shove those booms down with pick-poles and let a bateau over without wasting a minute's time. You've brought those bateaux over all your own sheer-booms below here--you've got your own booms above. You've been riding over 'em for thirty years. Now be reasonable."

"You run back down there to your store and get onto your job of sellin'

kerosene and crackers," advised the Honorable Pulaski, sarcastically.

"Don't you undertake to tell me my business. As river-master, I say those logs obstruct navigation, and what I say on this river goes!"

"You talk, Britt, as though a t.i.tle that you've grabbed onto, the same as you have everything else along this river, amounted to anything in law," objected the magnate of Castonia. "I own the land that those booms are hitched to, and you're not goin' to bluff me by any of your obstruction-to-navigation talk. You've managed to get most things along this river this spring your own way, but I reckon I know when you've gone about far enough. Don't try to rub it in!"

Mr. Britt, serene in his autocracy as drive-master, was in no mood to bandy arguments nor waste time on such as Rodburd Ide.

He whirled away, lifted a wooden box from one of the wagons, and set it down gingerly.

"MacLeod!" he called. The boss came away from the river-bank, where he was superintending stowing of supplies. "Unpack this dynamite, and blow d.a.m.nation out of those booms--the sortin'-gap first!"

The man twisted his face in a queer grimace.

"I don't think I'll do it, Mr. Britt," he said, curtly.

He looked away from Britt when the tyrant began to storm at him, and fixed his eyes on Wade's face with an expression there was no reading.

"No, I ain't no coward, either," he said, at last, interrupting his employer's flow of invective. "But dynamitin' other folks' booms with the folks lookin' at you ain't laid down in a river-driver's job; and I ain't got any relish for nailin' boot-heels all next summer in a jail workshop."

"I'll take the responsibility of this!" shouted Britt.

"Then you'd better do the job, sir," suggested MacLeod, firmly. "Law has queer quirks, and I don't propose to get mixed into it."

There was no gainsaying the logic of the boss's position. The Honorable Pulaski noted that the men had overheard. He noted also that there were no signs of any volunteers coming from the ranks. And so, with the impetuosity of his temper, when the eyes of men were upon him, he set his own hand to the job. With a cant-dog peak he began to pry at the box-cover.

And Colin MacLeod, hesitating a moment, walked straight up to Dwight Wade--to that young man's discomposure, it must be confessed. Wade set his muscles to meet attack. But MacLeod halted opposite him, folded his arms, and gazed at him with something of appeal in his frank, gray eyes.

There was candor in his look. In their other meetings Wade had only seen blind hate and unreasoning pa.s.sion.

"Maybe you've got an idea that I'm a pretty cheap skate, Mr. Wade," he blurted. "Maybe I am, but it ain't been so between me and men unless there was women mixed in. My head ain't strong where women is mixed in.

You hold on and let me talk!" he cried, putting up his big hand. "I've got eleven hundred dollars in the bank that I've saved, my two hands, and a reputation of bein' square between men. That's all I've got, and I want to keep all three. I had you sized up wrong at the start. I mixed women in without any right to. I misjudged the cards as they laid. I used you dirty, and I got what was comin' to me. Now I've found out. I know how things stand with you all along the line, from there"--he pointed south towards the outside world that held Elva Barrett--"to there on Enchanted. And I'm sorry! I'm sorry I ever got mistaken, and made things harder for a square man. You heard what I just said to Mr.

Britt. I wanted you to hear it. All is, I'd like to shake hands with you and start fresh. It may have to be man to man between us yet on this river, but, by ----, for myself I want it man-fashion."

He cast a glance behind him. Britt had the box open, and had dug out of the sawdust some cylinders in brown-paper wrappings. When MacLeod whirled again to face Wade the latter put out his hand without reservation in face or gesture. Months before, such amazing repentance and conversion might have astonished him, but now he understood the real ingenuousness of the woods. Pulaski Britt, hardened by avarice and outside a.s.sociations, was not of the true life of the woods. This impulsive boy, with his mighty muscles and his tender heart, was of the woods, and only the woods.

MacLeod came one step nearer to Rodburd Ide, and pulled off his hat.

"If it ain't too much trouble, Mr. Ide, I wish you'd tell Miss Nina that I've done it square and righted it fair. And don't scowl at me that way, Mr. Ide! It was a dream--and I've woke up! It was a pretty wild dream--and a man does queer things in his sleep. Your girl ain't for me or my kind, and I know it, now that I've woke up. I'd like to tell her so, and explain, but I don't know how to do it, Mr. Ide. You do it for me. I ask you man-fashion!"

He started away from them hastily, strode back to the bateaux, and began to swear at the men who had stopped work to gaze on the Honorable Pulaski. The latter had already embarked in a bateau, carrying several of those ominous sticks wrapped in their brown-paper cases.

"Britt," shrieked Ide, "we've been to law with you to find out our rights! Ain't you willin' to take your own medicine?"

"h.e.l.l on your law!" blazed the drive-master, contemptuously.

"Give us time to get an injunction before you destroy our good property," demanded the little man, choking with his ire.

For answer Britt shook one of the dynamite sticks above his head without even turning to look back. His men crowded the boat over the boom at the sorting-gap, and Britt lighted the fuse and tossed the explosive upon the anch.o.r.ed log platform.

"Oh, if our men were only here instead of at Enchanted!" mourned Ide.

"They're just where we ought to have them, Mr. Ide," the young man growled.

Britt was safely away up-river when the dynamite did its work; his men had rowed like fiends. It was a beautiful job, viewed from the stand-point of destruction. The downward thrust of the mighty force splintered the platform into toothpicks and let the booms adrift.

The partners of Enchanted did not exchange comments. They gazed after the destroyer. Taking his time, as though to prolong their distress, Britt dynamited the booms above, and then stood up and jerked his arm as a signal for his crew to follow. They went splashing up the river, six oars to a bateau, and disappeared, one boat after the other, bound for the mouth of Jerusalem Stream. Already the jaws of the Hulling Machine were gulping down the gobbets of splintered logs.

"How soon can you replace those booms, Mr. Ide?" Wade edged the words through his teeth, as a man stricken with lockjaw might have spoken. And without waiting for reply, he hurried on. "Put 'em in, Mr. Ide, because you're going to need 'em. And put along this sh.o.r.e all the men in Castonia who can handle guns. Winchesters and dynamite, with 'h.e.l.l on law' for a battle-cry! That's what he's given us. It's good enough for me. Will you put those booms in, Mr. Ide?"

"I'll put 'em in, and I'll protect 'em after they're put in," declared the little man, stoutly. The fighting spirit was in him again.

They looked at each other a moment, and turned and hurried back towards the settlement. Neither man seemed to feel that words could help that situation nor emphasize determination.

Prophet Eli was in front of Ide's store with his little white stallion when the two arrived there. The old man surveyed Wade shrewdly when he hastened to Nina Ide, who was waiting for a word with him.

"Boy! boy!" whispered the girl, clasping his tanned hand in both of hers, "I don't like to see your eyes shine so! They're hard. But I know how to soften them. I have a letter for you from the one woman of all the world. Come with me and get it."

"Keep it for me," he muttered--"keep it until I come for it. I'm not fit to touch it now. It might make a decent man of me, and--and--I don't want to be--not just yet, Miss Nina." He whirled away, climbed upon his jumper, and lashed his horse back along the trail towards Enchanted. The words of that half-jeering ditty of Prophet Eli's followed him, as they had on that memorable first day at Castonia, and grotesque as the lilt was, it seemed to express the young man's flaming resolution:

"Oh, the little brown bull came down from the mountains, Shang, ro-ango, whango-whey!

And as he was feelin' salutatious, Chased old Pratt a mile, by gracious, Licked old Shep and two dog Towsers, Then marched back home with old Pratt's trousers."

CHAPTER XXVIII

"'TWAS DONE BY TOMMY THUNDER"

"Twenty a month for daring death--or fighting from dawn to dark-- Twenty and grub and a place to sleep in G.o.d's great public park.

We roofless go, with the cook's bateau to follow our hungry crew-- A billion of spruce and h.e.l.l turned loose when the Allegash drive goes through."

--Ballad of the Drive.

Wade's poor beast was staggering when at last he topped the horseback overlooking Enchanted valley. He himself plodded behind the jumper, clinging to it, walking to keep awake. He had started in the dusk, he had been nearly twenty-four hours on the road from Castonia, and it was growing dusk again. He was too utterly weary to be surprised when Tommy Eye came hurrying down from a knoll that commanded a long view of the tote road. The light of a little camp-fire glowed on the knoll, and he saw that a horse was tethered there.

"I'm gettin' to be a worse outlaw than ever, Mr. Wade," declared the teamster. "I've stole one of your hosses, and grub and hay from the store camp, and I'm livin' here in the woods. I've been waitin' for you," he added, wistfully. "I might have slept a little last night when I didn't know, but I reckon I didn't. I figgered you'd come. I've been waitin' for you. They can't say I'm one of your men, Mr. Wade. I'm livin' here in the woods."

"Look here, Eye," blurted his employer, roughly, "I haven't any time nor taste for fool talk just now. You take the horse back to camp and get on your job." He started on.

"You don't sound as though you'd got what you went after," cried Tommy, unabashed. He came trotting behind. "You didn't get satisfaction, then, Mr. Wade! Injunction still there, hey? You didn't get--"

"What did you suppose I'd get from Pulaski Britt, you infernal fool?"

His own brutality towards the faithful servitor made him ashamed. But the spirit of evil that had taken possession of him was speaking through lips that he surrendered in weariness of body and bitterness of soul.

And when a shade of repentance smote him at sight of Tommy trotting sorrowfully at his side, he gasped out of his woe. "He has dynamited our booms, Tommy. Did it with his own hands. And now"--he threw up his arms towards Blunder Lake--"wait till to-morrow!"

Tommy Eye stopped without a word and let Wade go on.