King Spruce Part 6

"And is every one in Castonia all right?"

"You can ask them when you get there," she replied, a bit ungraciously.

"I tell you, I was pretty surprised to see you get aboard the train down here at Bomazeen. I--"

She canted her head suddenly, and looked sidewise at him with an expression half satiric, half indignant.

"Do you think that all the folks who ever go anywhere in this world are river drivers and"--she shot a quick and disparaging glance at the still glowering Wade--"drummers?"

MacLeod noticed the look and its scorn with delight, and grasped at this opportunity to get outside the plat.i.tudes of conversation. But in his eagerness to be news-monger he did not soften his "out-door voice,"

deepened by many years of bellowing above the roar of white water.

"Oh, that ain't a drummer! That's Britt's new chaney man--the time-keeper and the w.a.n.gan store clerk." MacLeod knew that a girl born and bred in Castonia settlement, on the edge of the great forest, needed no explanation of "chaney man," the only man in a logging crew who could sleep till daylight, and didn't come out in the spring with callous marks on his hands as big as dimes. But he seemed to be hungry for an excuse to stay beside her, where he could gaze down on the brown hair looped over her forehead and her radiantly fair face, and could catch a glimpse of the white teeth. "Britt was tellin' me on the side that he's been teachin' school or something like that, and--say, you've heard of old Barrett, who controls all the stumpage on the Chamberlain waters--that rich old feller? Well, Britt, being hitched up with Barrett more or less, and knowin' all about it--"

Wade was now upright in his seat, but the absorbed foreman, catching at last a gleam of interest in the gray eyes upraised to his, did not notice.

"--Britt says that Mister School-teacher there went to work and fell in love with Barrett's girl, and now she's goin' to marry a rich feller in the lumberin' line that her dad picked out for her, and instead of goin'

to war or to sea, like--"

Wade, maddened, sick at heart, furious at the old tattler who had thus canva.s.sed his poor secret with his boss, had tried twice to cry an interruption. But his voice stuck in his throat.

Now he leaped up, leaned far over the seat-back in front of him, and shouted, with face flushed and eyes like shining steel:

"That's enough of that, you pup!"

In the sudden, astonished silence the old man dragged his fingers through his grizzled whiskers and whined plaintively:

"Ain't he peppery, though, about anybody talking? He shet me up, too!"

"It's my business you're talking!" shouted Wade, beating time with clinched fist. "Drop it."

MacLeod, primordial in his instincts, lost sight of the provocation, and felt only the rebuff in the presence of the girl he was seeking to attract. He had no apology on his tongue or in his heart.

"It will take a better man than you to trig talk that I'm makin'," he retorted. "This isn't a district school, where you are licked if you whisper!" He sneered as he said it, and took one step up the aisle.

With the bitter anger that had been burning in him for many days now fanned into the white-heat of Berserker rage, Wade leaped out of his seat. Between them sat the girl, looking from one to the other, her cheeks paling, her lips apart.

At the moment, with a drunken man's instinctive knowledge of ripe occasions, Tommy Eye lurched out once more on the smoker platform and began to carol the lay that had consoled him on so many trips from town:

"Oh, there ain't no girl, no pretty little girl, That I have left behind me."

There sounded the clang of the engine bell far to the front. There was the premonitory and approaching jangle of shacklings, as car after car took up its slack.

"Look after your man there, MacLeod!" cried the girl. "The yank will throw him off."

"Let him go, then!" gritted the foreman. The flame in Wade's eyes was like the red torch of battle to him. Not for years had a man dared to give him that look.

Suddenly the car sprang forward under their feet as the last shackle snapped taut. The boss was driven towards Wade, and let himself be driven. The other braced himself, blind in his fury, realizing at last the nature of the blood l.u.s.t.

A squall, fairly demoniac in intensity, stopped them. MacLeod recognized the voice, and even his pa.s.sion for battle yielded. When the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt, baron of the Umcolcus, yelled in that fashion it meant obedience, and on this occasion the squall was reinforced by a shriek from the girl. And MacLeod whirled, dropping his fists.

There on the platform stood Britt, clutching the limp and soggy Tommy Eye by the slack of his jacket. The Honorable Pulaski, jealous of every second of time, had remained in conversation to the last with his birch foreman. He stepped aboard just as Tommy, jarred from his feet, was pitching off the other side of the platform. The Honorable Pulaski s.n.a.t.c.hed for him and held on, at the imminent risk of his own life.

Already both of them were leaning far out, for Tommy Eye, in the blissful calm of his spirit, was making no effort to help himself.

In an instant MacLeod was down the car aisle and had pulled both back to safety.

"Why in blastnation ain't you staying in this hog-car here, where you belong, you long-legged P.I. steer?" roared the old man, his anger ready the moment his fright subsided. "What do I hire you for? You came near letting me lose the best teamster in my whole crew. Now get into that car and stay in that car till we get to the end of this railroad."

He put his hands against MacLeod's breast and shoved him backward into the door, where Tommy Eye, grinning in fatuous ignorance of the danger he had pa.s.sed through, had just disappeared ahead of him. The angry shame of a man cruelly humiliated twisted MacLeod's features, but he allowed his imperious despot to push him into the car, casting a last appealing look at the girl. Britt slammed the door and stood on the platform, bracing himself by a hand on either side the casing, and peered through the dingy gla.s.s to make sure that his crew was now under proper discipline.

"He's a driver and a master," piped up Grizzly Whiskers, with the appositeness of a Greek chorus.

"There's the song about him, ye know:

"Oh, the night that I was married, The night that I was wed, Up there come Pulaski Britt And stood at my bed-head.

Said he, 'Arise, young married man, And come along with me.

Where the waters of Umcolcus They do roar along so free.'"

"I'll bet he went, at that," volunteered a man farther back in the car.

"When Britt is after men he gits' em, and when he gits 'em he uses 'em."

"Mr. Britt," he shouted down the car aisle as the old man entered, "that was brave work you done in savin' Tommy's life!"

"Go to the devil with your compliments!" snapped Britt. "If it wasn't that I was losing my best teamster I wouldn't have put out my little finger to save him from mince-meat."

He saw the girl, turned over a seat to face her, and began to fire rapid questions at her regarding her father and mother and the latest news of Castonia settlement. When the conversation languished, as it did soon on account of the inattention of the young woman, the Honorable Pulaski caught the still flaming eye of Dwight Wade, and crooked his finger to summon him. Wade merely scowled the deeper. The Honorable Pulaski serenely disregarded this malevolence as a probable optical illusion, and when Wade did not start beckoned again.

"Come here, you!" he bellowed. "Can't you see that I want you?"

With new accession of fury at being thus baited, the young man started up, resolved to take his employer aside and free his mind on that matter of news-mongering. But the bluff and busy tyrant was first, as he always was in his dealings with men.

"Here, Wade," he shouted, "you shake hands with the prettiest girl in the north country! This is Miss Nina Ide, and this is my new time-keeper, Dwight Wade. He's going to find that there's more in lumbering than there is in being a college dude or teaching a school.

Sit down, Wade."

He pulled the young man into the seat.

"Entertain this young lady," he commanded. "She don't want to talk with old chaps like me. Her father--well, I reckon you know her father! Oh, you don't? Well, he's first a.s.sessor of Castonia settlement, runs the roads, the schools, and the town, has the general store and post-office, and this pretty daughter that all the boys are in love with."

And at the end of this delicate introduction he pushed brusquely between them, and went back to talk with his elderly admirer in the rear of the car.

Wade looked into the gray eyes of the girl sullenly. There was an angry sparkle in her gaze.

"Well, Mr. Wade, you may think from what that old fool said that I'm suffering to be entertained. If you think any such thing you can change your mind and go back."

She had not a city-bred woman's self-poise, he thought. Her manner was that of the country belle, spoiled the least bit by flattery and attention. And yet, as he looked at her, he thought that he had never seen fairer skin to set off the flush of angry beauty. For others there was something alluring in the absolute whiteness of her teeth, peeping under the curve of her lip, in the nose (the least bit _retrousse_), in the looped locks of brown hair crossing her temples. Yet there was no admiration in his eyes.

"I hope you won't hold me guilty of being the intruder," he said, coldly.