E-text prepared by
Suzanne Lybarger, Brian Janes, Jacqueline Jeremy,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)

JOAN OF ARC
OF THE NORTH WOODS

CONTENTS

Books By
HOLMAN DAY

Joan of Arc of the North Woods
When Egypt Went Broke
All-wool Morrison
The Rider of the King Log
The Skipper and the Skipped
The Red Lane
The Ramrodders
The Landloper
Where Your Treasure Is
Squire Phin
Blow the Man Down

Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London

Joan of Arc
of the North Woods
By
HOLMAN DAY
Author of
“THE RIDER OF THE KING LOG,” “WHEN
EGYPT WENT BROKE,” ETC.

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

Joan of Arc of the North Woods

Copyright, 1922
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U.S.A.

First Edition
H–W

Joan of Arc
of the North Woods

CHAPTER ONE

THE timber situation in the Tomah country was surcharged.

When Ward Latisan came upon Rufus Craig, one afternoon in autumn, steel struck flint and trouble’s fuse was lighted.

Their meeting was on the Holeb tote road just below Hagas Falls.

Young Ward was the grandson of old John, a pioneer who was in his day a saw-log baron of the times of pumpkin pine; by heredity Ward was the foremost champion in the cause of the modern independent operators.

In his own way, Craig, the field director of the Comas Consolidated Paper Company, was the chief gladiator for an invading corporation which demanded monopoly of the Tomah timber by absorption of the independents.

Latisan tramped down the tote road from the shoulder of Holeb Mountain, where he had been cruising alone for a week on the Walpole tract, blazing timber for the choppers, marking out twitch roads and haul-downs, locating yards; his short-handled ax was in his belt, his lank haversack flapped on his back; he carried his calipers in one hand; with the other hand he fed himself raisins from his trousers pocket, munching as he went along. He had eaten the last of his scanty supply of biscuits and bacon; but, like other timber cruisers—all of them must travel light—he had his raisins to fall back on, doling them one by one, masticating them thoroughly and finding the nourishment adequate.

He had been on the go every day from sunup till dark; nights he cinched his belted jacket closely and slept as best he could, his back against a tree; he had cruised into every nook and corner of the tract, spending strength prodigally, but when he strode down the tote road his vitality enabled him to hit it off at a brisk gait; his belt was a few holes tighter, yet his fasting made him keenly awake; he was more alert to the joy of being alive in the glory of the crisp day; his cap was in his pocket, his tousled brown hair was rampant; and he welcomed the flood of sunshine on his bronzed face.

Craig was making his way along the tote road in a buckboard, with a driver. The road bristled with rocks and was pitted with hollows; the fat horses dragged their feet at a slow walk. Craig was a big man, a bit paunchy, and he grunted while he was bounced. He wore his city hard hat as if he wished by his headgear to distinguish himself from the herd of woodsmen whom he bossed.

Latisan overtook the toiling buckboard, and his stride was taking him past when Craig hailed.

“Ride?”

“No—thank you!” The negative was sharp. Privation and toil had put an edge on the young man’s temper, and the temper was not amiable where Craig was concerned.

“I’ve got some business to talk with you, Latisan.”

“If that’s so I can listen while I walk alongside.”

But Craig ordered the driver to halt. Then the Comas director swung around and faced Latisan. “I’m putting it up to you again—will you and your father sell to the Comas?”

“No, sir!”

“What is it going to be—a fight to a finish?”

“If you keep your hands off us saw-log fellows, Mr. Craig, there’ll be no fight. We were here first, you know!”

“That’s got nothing to do with the present situation, Latisan. We’ve built a million-dollar paper mill on the Toban, and it’s up to me to feed it with pulp stuff. We can’t lug our plant off in a shawl strap if supply fails.”

“Nor can the folks who have built villages around the sawmills lug away their houses if the mills are closed.”

“Paper dominates in this valley nowadays, instead of lumber. Latisan, you’re old-fashioned!”

The young man, feeling his temper flame, lighted his pipe, avoiding too quick retort.

“You stand to lose money in the lumber market, with conditions as they are,” proceeded Craig, loftily counseling another man about his own business. The Comas director, intent on consolidation, had persistently failed to understand the loyalty, half romantic, which was actuating the old-line employers to protect faithful householders. “Let the workers move down the river to our model town.”

“And live in those beehives of yours, paying big rent, competing with the riffraff help you hire from employment agencies? We can’t see it that way, Mr. Craig!”

“Look here! I’ve got some news for you. I’ve just pulled five of the independents in with us—Gibson, Sprague, Tolman, Brinton, and Bodwell. The Comas now controls the timber market on the Toban. How about logs for your mills?”

Craig believed he was hitting Latisan five solid jolts to the jaw when he named the recreant operators.

However, the young man had heard rumors of what the bludgeoning methods of the Comas had accomplished; he surveyed Craig resolutely through the pipe smoke.

He had come down from the Walpole tract that day in a spirit of new confidence which put away all weariness from him. He was armed with a powerful weapon. In his exultation, fired by youth’s natural hankering to vaunt success in an undertaking where his elders had failed, he was willing to flourish the weapon.

Craig waggled a thick forefinger. “What are you going to saw, Latisan?”

“Two million feet from the Walpole tract—where no ax has chipped a tree for twenty-five years.”

It was a return jolt and it made the Comas man blink. “But nobody can buy the right to cut there.”

“I have bought the right, Mr. Craig. An air-tight stumpage contract—passed on by the best lawyer in this county—a clear title.”

“Latisan, the Comas has never been able to round up those heirs—and what we can’t do with all our resources can’t be done by you.”

“The Latisans know this region better than the Comas folks know it, sir. Five cousins by hard hunting—two gravestones by good luck! All heirs located! Why don’t you congratulate me?”

Just then the Comas director was thinking instead of talking.

In his operations he was a cocksure individual, Mr. Craig was! In his hands, by his suggestion, his New York superiors had placed all the details of business in the field of the north country. He had promised consolidation with full belief in his ability to perform; one explicit promise had been that this season would mark the end of the opposition by the independents; the Comas would secure complete control of the Toban timber and fix prices. But here were the ringleader Latisans in a way to smash the corner which Craig had manipulated by bulldozing and bribery! In the past Craig had not bothered headquarters with any minute explanations of how he accomplished results. This crusher which threatened all his plans and promises would make a monkey of him in New York, he reflected.

“I want to say a last word to you, Mr. Craig,” continued Latisan, stiffly. “Probably we are now in for that fight on which you’ve been insisting. I don’t want to fight, but I’m ready for a fair stand-up. Just a moment, please!” Craig had barked a few oaths preliminary to an outpouring of his feelings. “I’m warning you to let up on those guerrilla tactics of yours. I propose to find out whether your big men in New York are backing you. I’m telling you now to your face, so you can’t accuse me later of carrying tales behind your back, of my intention to go to New York and report conditions to the president of the Comas.”

“Don’t you dare!”

“I do dare. I’m going. I expect you to run in ahead of me, but no matter. And speaking of tales behind a man’s back——”

Craig was having difficulty in finding speech for retort; Latisan was rushing the affair. Again Craig blustered, “Don’t you dare!”

“Yes, I do dare. When I went away last summer I had good reasons for keeping my plans to myself. I got back to the Toban and found slander accusing me of sporting in the city, deviling around with liquor and women. That’s a damnable lie!”

Latisan delivered the accusation hotly; there was unmistakable challenge in his demeanor. “You yourself have handed around some of that slander, Mr. Craig. I get it straight from men whose word is good!”

“I only said what others were saying.”

“I don’t know, of course, who started those stories, but I do know that they have been used against me. They have helped you, it seems! I wanted to keep my plans under cover—but I’ve got to protect myself with the truth, even if the truth gives you a tip. I went away to take a special course in hydraulic engineering, so as to know more about protecting the common rights in the flowage of this river.” He swung his hand to indicate the thundering falls of Hagas. “You have used your tongue to hurt my standing with some of the independents—they distrust my reliability and good faith—you have pulled in a few of them. The others will stand by me. Frankly, Mr. Craig, I don’t like your style! It’ll be a good thing for both of us if we have no more talk after this.” He walked rapidly down the tote road, not turning his head when Craig called furiously after him.

“Pretty uppish, ain’t he?” ventured the driver, touching the horses with the whip.

Craig, bouncing alone on the middle seat of the buckboard, grunted.

“Excuse me, Mr. Craig, but that’s some news—what he said about getting aholt of the old Walpole tract.”

The Comas boss did not comment.

The driver said nothing more for some time; he was a slouchy woodsman of numb wits; he chewed tobacco constantly with the slow jaw motion of a ruminating steer, and he looked straight ahead between the ears of the nigh horse, going through mental processes of a certain sort. “Now ’t I think of it, I wish I’d grabbed in with a question to young Latisan. But he doesn’t give anybody much of a chance to grab in when he’s talking. Still, I’d have liked to ask him something.” He maundered on in that strain for several minutes.

“Ask him what?” snapped Craig, tired of the monologue.

“Whuther he’s talked with my old aunt Dorcas about the heir who went off into the West somewheres. Grandson of the old sir who was the first Walpole of the Toban—real heir, if he’s still alive! My aunt Dorcas had letters about him, or from him, or something like that, only a few years ago.”

“Look here!” stormed Craig. “Why haven’t you said something about such letters or such an heir?”

“Nobody has ever asked me. And he’s prob’ly dead, anyway. Them lawyers know everything. And he’s a roving character, as I remember what my aunt said. No use o’ telling anybody about him—it would cost too much to find him.”

“Cost too much!” snarled the Comas director. “Oh, you——” But he choked back what he wanted to say about the man’s intellect. Craig pulled out notebook and pencil and began to fire questions.

Latisan was headed for home, the old family mansion in the village of Toban Deadwater where Ward and his widowed father kept bachelor’s hall, with a veteran woods cook to tend and do for them. The male cook was Ward’s idea. The young man had lived much in the woods, and the ways of women about the house annoyed him; a bit of clutter was more comfortable.

It was a long tramp to the Deadwater, but he knew the blazed-trail short cuts and took advantage of the light of the full moon for the last stage of the journey. He was eager to report progress and prospects to his father.

Ward was not anticipating much in the way of practical counsel from Garry Latisan.

Old John had been a Tartar, a blustering baron of the timberlands.

Garry, his son, had taken to books and study. He was slow and mild, deprecatory and forgiving. Ward Latisan had those saving qualities in a measure, but he was conscious in himself of the avatar of old John’s righteous belligerency when occasion prompted.

Ward, as he was trudging home, was trying to keep anger from clouding his judgment. When he felt old John stirring in him, young Latisan sought the mild counsel of Garry, and then went ahead on a line of action of his own; he was steering a safe course, he felt, by keeping about halfway between John’s violence in performance and Garry’s toleration.

Ward was the executive of the Latisan business and liked the job; his youth and vigor found zest in the adventures of the open. Old John’s timber man’s spirit had been handed along to the grandson. Ward finished his education at a seminary—and called it enough. His father urged him to go to college, but he went into the woods and was glad to be there, at the head of affairs.

The operations on the old tracts, thinned by many cuttings, had been keeping him closely on the job, because there were problems to be solved if profits were to be handled.

His stroke in getting hold of the Walpole tract promised profits without problems; there were just so many trees to cut down—and the river was handy!

In spite of his weariness, Ward sat till midnight on the porch with his father, going over their plans. The young man surveyed the Latisan mill and the houses of the village while he talked; the moon lighted all and the mill loomed importantly, reflected in the still water of the pond. If Craig prevailed, the mill and the homes must be left to rot, empty, idle, and worthless. As Ward viewed it, the honor of the Latisans was at stake; the spirit of old John blazed in the grandson; but he declared his intention to fight man fashion, if the fight were forced on him. He would go to the Comas headquarters in New York, he said, not to ask for odds or beg for favors, but to explain the situation and to demand that Craig be required to confine himself to the tactics of square business rivalry.

“And my course in engineering was a good investment; I can talk turkey to them about our dams and the flowage rights. I don’t believe they’re backing up Craig’s piracy!”

Garry Latisan agreed fully with his son and expressed the wistful wish, as he did regularly in their conferences, that he could be of more real help.

“Your sympathy and your praise are help enough, father,” Ward declared, with enthusiasm. “We’re sure of our cut; all I’m asking from the Comas is gangway for our logs. There must be square men at the head of that big corporation!”

CHAPTER TWO

IN New York young Latisan plunged straight at his business.

The home office of the Comas Consolidated Company was in a towering structure in the metropolis’s financial district. On the translucent glass of many doors there was a big C with two smaller C’s nested. In the north country everybody called the corporation The Three C’s.

After a fashion, the sight of the portentous monogram made Ward feel more at home. Up where he lived the letters were familiar. Those nested C’s stood for wide-flung ownership along the rivers of the north. The monogram was daubed in blue paint on the ends of countless logs; it marked the boxes and barrels and sacks of mountains of supplies along the tote roads; it designated as the property of the Comas Company all sorts of possessions from log camps down to the cant dog in the hands of the humblest Polack toiler. Those nested C’s were dominant, assertive, and the folks of the north were awed by the everlasting reduplication along the rivers and in the forests.

Ward, indignantly seeking justice, resolved not to be awed in the castle of the giant. He presented himself at a gate and asked to see the president. The president could not be seen except by appointment, Latisan learned.

What was the caller’s business? Latisan attempted to explain, but he was halted by the declaration that all details in the timber country were left to Rufus Craig, field manager!

When Ward insisted that his previous talks with Craig had only made matters worse for all concerned, and when he pleaded for an opportunity to talk with somebody—anybody—at headquarters, he finally won his way to the presence of a sallow man who filmed his hard eyes and listened with an air of silent protest. He also referred Latisan back to Craig. “We don’t interfere with his management of details in the north.”

Evidently Mr. Craig had been attending to his defenses in the home office.

Ward’s temper was touched by the listener’s slighting apathy. “I’ve come here to protest against unfair methods. Our men are tampered with—told that the Latisans are on their last legs. We are losing from our crews right along. We have been able to hire more men to take the places of those who have been taken away from us. But right now we are up against persistent reports that we shall not be able to get down our cut in the spring. Sawmill owners are demanding bonds from us to assure delivery; otherwise they will cancel their orders.”

“Do you know any good reason why you can’t deliver?” probed the Comas man, showing a bit of interest.

“Your Mr. Craig seems to know. I blame him for these stories.”

“I’m afraid you’re laboring under a delusion, Mr. Latisan. Why don’t you sell out to our company? Most of the other independents have found it to their advantage—seen it in the right light.”

“Mr. Craig’s tactics have driven some small concerns to see it that way, sir. But my grandfather was operating in the north and supplying the sawmills with timber before the paper mills began to grab off every tree big enough to prop a spruce bud. Villages have been built up around the sawmills. If the paper folks get hold of everything those villages will die; all the logs will be run down to the paper mills.”

“Naturally,” said the sallow man. “Paper is king these days.”

Then he received a handful of documents from a clerk who entered, again referred Ward to Mr. Craig, advised him to treat with the latter in the field, where the business belonged, and hunched a dismissing shoulder toward the caller.

Ward had not been asked to sit down; he swung on his heel, but he stopped and turned. “As to selling out, even if we can bring ourselves to that! Mr. Craig has beaten independents to their knees and has made them accept his price. It’s not much else than ruin when a man sells to him.”

“Persecutional mania is a dangerous hallucination,” stated the sallow man. “Mr. Craig has accomplished certain definite results in the north country. We have used the word Consolidated in our corporation name with full knowledge of what we are after. We assure stable conditions in the timber industry. You must move with the trend of the times.”

Latisan had been revolving in his mind certain statements which he proposed to make to the big men of the Comas. He had assorted and classified those statements before he entered the castle of the great corporation. With youth’s optimism he had anticipated a certain measure of sympathy—had in some degree pictured at least one kindly man in the Comas outfit who would listen to a young chap’s troubles.

Walking to the door, standing with his hand on the knob, he knew he must go back to the woods with the dolorous prospect of being obliged to fight to hold together the remnants of the Latisan business. He set his teeth and opened the door. He would have gone without further words, but the sallow man snapped a half threat which brought Ward around on his heels.

“Mr. Latisan, I hope you will carry away with you the conviction that fighting the Comas company will not get you anything.”

Ward choked for a moment. Old John was stirring in him. A fettered yelp was bulging in his throat, and the skin of the back of his head tingled as if the hair were rising. But he spoke quietly when he allowed his voice to squeeze past the repressed impulse. “There’s a real fight ready to break in the north country, sir.”

“Do you propose to be captain?”

“I have no such ambition. But your Mr. Craig is forcing the issue. No company is big enough to buck the law in our state.”

“Look here, my good fellow!” The sallow man came around in his chair. Ward immediately was more fully informed as to the personage’s status. “I am one of the attorneys of this corporation. I have been attending to the special acts your legislature has passed in our behalf. We are fully protected by law.”

“The question is how much you’ll be protected after facts are brought out by a fight,” replied Ward, stoutly. “I know the men who have been sent down to the legislature from our parts and how they were elected. But even such men get cold feet after the public gets wise.”

“That’ll be enough!” snapped the attorney. He turned to his desk again.

“Yes, it looks like it,” agreed young Latisan; he did not bang the door after him; he closed it softly.

The attorney was obliged to look around to assure himself that his caller was not in the room. Then he pushed a button and commanded a clerk to ask if Mr. Craig was still in the president’s office. Informed that Mr. Craig was there, the attorney went thither.

“I have just been bothered by that young chap, Latisan, from the Tomah region,” reported Dawes, the attorney. “He threatens a fight which will rip the cover off affairs in the north country. How about what’s underneath, provided the cover is ripped off, Craig?”

“Everything sweet as a nut! Any other kind of talk is bluff and blackmail. So that’s young Latisan’s latest move, eh?” he ejaculated, squinting appraisingly at Dawes and turning full gaze of candor’s fine assumption on Horatio Marlow, the president.

“Just who is this young Latisan?” inquired Marlow.

“Oh, only the son of one of the independents who are sticking out on a hold-up against us. Did he name his price, Dawes?”

“He didn’t try to sell anything,” acknowledged the attorney. “Craig, let me ask you, are you moving along the lines of the law we have behind us in those special acts I steered through?”

“Sure thing!” asserted the field director, boldly.

“We’ve got to ask for more from the next legislature,” stated the lawyer.

The president came in with a warning. “Credit is touchy these days, Mr. Craig. We’re going into the market for big money for further development. It’s easy for reports to be made very hurtful.”

“I’m achieving results up there,” insisted Craig, doggedly.

“We’re very much pleased with conditions,” agreed the president. “We’re able to show capital a constantly widening control of properties and natural advantages. But remember Achilles’s heel, Mr. Craig.”

“I haven’t been able to fight ’em with feathers all the time,” confessed the field director. “There wasn’t much law operating up there when I grabbed in. I have done the best I could, and if I have been obliged to use a club once in a while I have made the fight turn something for the corporation.” He exhibited the pride of the man who had accomplished.

The attorney warned Craig again. “We can’t afford to have any uproar started till we get our legislation properly cinched. Tomah seems to be attended to. But we need some pretty drastic special acts before we can go over the watershed and control the Noda waters and pull old Flagg into line. He’s the last, isn’t he?—the king-pin, according to what I hear.”

“I’ll attend to his case all right,” declared Craig, with confidence. “I’ll tackle the Noda basin next. Flagg must be licked before he’ll sell. He’s that sort. A half lunatic on this independent thing. I reckon you’ll leave it to me, won’t you?”

“We’ll leave all the details of operation in the field to you, Craig,” promised the president. “But you must play safe.”

“I’ll take full responsibility,” affirmed Craig, whose pride had been touched.

“Then we shall continue to value you as our right bower in the north,” said Marlow. “The man on the ground understands the details. We don’t try to follow them here in the home office.”

Craig walked out with Dawes.

“That talk has put the thing up to you square-edged, Craig.”

Craig had been heartened and fortified by the president’s compliments. “Leave it to me!”

CHAPTER THREE

LATISAN had eaten his breakfast in the grill of a big hotel with a vague idea that such an environment would tune him up to meet the magnates of the Comas company.

In his present and humbler state of mind, hungry again, he went into a cafeteria.

Waiting at the counter for his meat stew and tea—familiar woods provender which appealed to his homesickness—he became aware of a young woman at his elbow; she was having difficulty in managing her tray and her belongings. There was an autumn drizzle outside and Ward had stalked along unprotected, with a woodman’s stoicism in regard to wetness. The young woman had her umbrella, a small bag, and a parcel, and she was clinging to all of them, impressed by the “Not Responsible” signs which sprinkled the walls of the place. When her tray tipped at an alarming slant, as she elbowed her way from the crowded counter, Ward caught at its edge and saved a spill.

The girl smiled gratefully.

“If you don’t mind,” he apologized; his own tray was ready. He took that in his free hand. He gently pulled her tray from her unsteady grasp. “I’ll carry it to a table.”

The table section was as crowded as the counter space. He did not offer to sit opposite her at the one vacant table he found; he lingered, however, casting about himself for another seat.

“May I not exchange my hospitality for your courtesy?” inquired the girl. She nodded toward the unoccupied chair and he sat down and thanked her.

She was an extremely self-possessed young woman, who surveyed him frankly with level gaze from her gray eyes.

“You performed very nicely, getting through that crush as you did without spilling anything,” she commended.

“I’ve had plenty of practice.”

She opened her eyes on him by way of a question. “Not as a waiter,” he proceeded. “But with those trays in my hand it was like being on the drive, ramming my way through the gang that was charging the cook tent.”

“The drive!” she repeated. He was surprised by the sudden interest he roused in her. “Are you from the north country?” Her color heightened with her interest. She leaned forward.

Latisan, in his infrequent experiences, had never been at ease in the presence of pretty girls, even when their notice of him was merely cursory. In the region where he had toiled there were few females, and those were spouses and helpers of woods cooks, mostly.

Here was a maid of the big city showing an interest disquietingly acute—her glowing eyes and parted lips revealed her emotions. At the moment he was not able to separate himself, as a personality, from the subject which he had brought up. Just what there was about him or the subject to arouse her so strangely he did not pause to inquire of himself, for his thoughts were not coherent just then; he, too, was stirred by her nearer propinquity as she leaned forward, questioning him eagerly.

He replied, telling what he was but not who he was; he felt a twinge of disappointment because she did not venture to probe into his identity. Her questions were concerned with the north country as a region. At first her quizzing was of a general nature. Then she narrowed the field of inquiry.

“You say the Tomah waters are parallel with the Noda basin! Do you know many folks over in the Noda region?”

“Very few. I have kept pretty closely on my own side of the watershed.”

“Isn’t there a village in the Noda called Adonia?”

“Oh yes! It’s the jumping-off place—the end of a narrow-gauge railroad.”

“You have been in Adonia?”

“A few times.”

“I had—there were friends of mine—they were friends of a man in Adonia. His name was—let’s see!” He wondered whether the faint wrinkle of a frown under the bronze-flecked hair on her forehead was as much the expression of puzzled memory as she was trying to make it seem; there did appear something not wholly ingenuous in her looks just then. “Oh, his name is Flagg.”

“Echford Flagg?”

“Yes, that’s it. My friends were very friendly with him, and I’d like to be able to tell them——” She hesitated.

“You have given me some news,” he declared, bluntly; in his mood of the day he was finding no good qualities in mankind. “I never heard of Eck Flagg having any friends. Well, I’ll take that back! I believe he’s ace high among the Tarratine Indians up our way; they have made him an honorary chief. But it’s no particular compliment to a white man’s disposition to be able to qualify as an Indian, as I look at it.”

This time he was not in doubt about the expression on her face; a sudden grimace like grief wreathed the red lips and there was more than a suspicion of tears in her eyes. He stared at her, frankly amazed.

“If I have stepped on toes I am sorry. I never did know how to talk to young ladies without making a mess sooner or later.”

She returned no reply, and he went on with his food to cover his embarrassment.

“Do you know Mr. Flagg?” she asked, after the silence had been prolonged.

“Not very well. But I know about him.”

“What especially?”

“That he’s a hard man. He never forgets or forgives an injury. Perhaps that’s why he qualified so well as an Indian.”

She straightened in her chair and narrowed those gray eyes. “Couldn’t there have been another reason why he was chosen for such an honor?”

“I beg your pardon for passing along to you the slurs of the north country, miss——” he paused but she did not help him with her name. “It’s mostly slurs up there,” he went on, with bitterness, “and I get into the habit, myself. The Indians did have a good reason for giving Flagg that honor. He is the only one in the north who has respected the Indians’ riparian rights, given by treaty and then stolen back. He pays them for hold-boom privileges when his logs are on their shores. They are free to come and go on his lands for birch bark and basket stuff—he’s the only one who respects the old treaties. That’s well known about Flagg in the north country. It’s a good streak in any man, no matter what folks say about his general disposition.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that much!”

She pushed back her chair slightly and began to take stock of her possessions. A sort of a panic came upon him. There were a lot of things he wanted to say, and he could not seem to lay a tongue to one of them. He stammered something about the wet day and wondered whether it would be considered impudence if he offered to escort her, holding over her the umbrella or carrying her parcel. He had crude ideas about the matter of squiring dames. He wanted to ask her not to hurry away. “Do you live here in New York—handy by?”

The cafeteria was just off lower Broadway, and she smiled. He realized the idiocy of the question.

“I work near here! You are going home to the north soon?” The polite query was in a tone which checked all his new impulses in regard to her.

“I’m headed north right now. If there’s any information I can send you——”

She shook her head slowly, but even the negative was marked by an indecisive quality, as if she were repressing some importunate desire.

“I wish you a pleasant journey, sir.” All her belongings were in her hands.

“It’s queer—it’s almost more than queer how we happened to meet—both interested in the north country,” he stuttered, wanting to detain her.

He was hoping she would make something of the matter.

But she merely acknowledged the truth of his statement, adding, “There would be more such coincidences in life if folks took the trouble to interest themselves a bit in one another and compare notes.”

She started to walk away; then she whirled and came back to the table and leaned over it. Her soul of longing was in her eyes—they were filled with tears. “You’re going back there,” she whispered. “God bless the north country! Give a friendly pat to one of the big trees for me and say you found a girl in New York who is homesick.”

She turned from him before he could summon words.

He wanted to call after her—to find out more about her. He saw her gathering up her change at the cashier’s wicket. The spectacle reminded him of his own check. Even love at first sight, if such could be the strange new emotion struggling within him, could not enable him to leap the barrier of the cashier’s cold stare and rush away without paying scot. He hunted for his punched check. He pawed all over the marble top of the table, rattling the dishes.

A check—it was surely all of that!

The search for it checked him till the girl was gone, mingled with the street crowds. He found the little devil of a delayer in the paper napkin which he had nervously wadded and dropped on the floor. He shoved money to the cashier and did not wait for his change. He rushed out on the street and stretched up his six stalwart feet and craned his neck and hunted for the little green toque with the white quill.

It was a vain quest.

He did not know just what the matter was with him all of a sudden. He had never had any personal experience with that which he had vaguely understood was love; he had merely viewed it from a standpoint of a disinterested observer, in the case of other men. He hated to admit, as he stood there in the drizzle, his defeat by a cafeteria check.

He remained in New York for another night, his emotions aggravatingly complex. He tried to convince his soul that he had a business reason for staying. He lied to himself and said he would make another desperate sortie on the castle of the Comas company. But he did not go there the next day. Near noon he set himself to watch the entrance of the cafeteria. When he saw a table vacant near the door he went in, secured food, and posted himself where he could view all comers.

The girl did not come.

At two o’clock, after eating three meals, he did not dare to brave the evident suspicions of that baleful cashier any longer. Undoubtedly the girl had been a casual customer like himself. He gave it up and started for the north.

CHAPTER FOUR

WHEN Ward Latisan was home again and had laced his high boots and buttoned his belted jacket, he was wondering, in the midst of his other troubles, why he allowed the matter of a chance-met girl to play so big a part in his thoughts. The exasperating climax of his adventure with the girl, his failure to ask her name frankly, his folly of bashful backwardness in putting questions when she was at arm’s length from him, his mournful certainty that he would never see her again—all conspired curiously to make her an obsession rather than a mere memory.

He had never bothered with mental analysis; his effort to untangle his ideas in this case merely added to his puzzlement; it was like one of those patent trick things which he had picked up in idle moments, allowing the puzzle to bedevil attention and time, intriguing his interest, to his disgust. He had felt particularly lonely and helpless when he came away from Comas headquarters; instinctively he was seeking friendly companionship—opening his heart; he had caught something, just as a man with open pores catches cold. He found the notion grimly humorous! But Latisan was not ready to own up that what he had contracted was a case of love, though young men had related to him their experiences along such lines.

He went into the woods and put himself at the head of the crews. He had the ability to inspire zeal and loyalty.

In the snowy avenues of the Walpole tract sounded the rick-tack of busy axes, the yawk of saws, and the crash of falling timber. The twitch roads, narrow trails which converged to centers like the strands of a cobweb, led to the yards where the logs were piled for the sleds; and from the yards, after the snows were deep and had been iced by watering tanks on sleds, huge loads were eased down the slopes to the landings close to the frozen Tomah.

Ward Latisan was not merely a sauntering boss, inspecting operations. He went out in the gray mornings with an ax in his hand. He understood the value of personal and active leadership. He was one with his men. They put forth extra effort because he was with them.

Therefore, when the April rains began to soften the March snow crusts and the spring flood sounded its first murmur under the blackening ice of Tomah, the Latisan logs were ready to be rolled into the river.

And then something happened!

That contract with the Walpole second cousins—pronounced an air-tight contract by the lawyer—was pricked, popped, and became nothing.

An heir appeared and proved his rights. He was the only grandson of old Isaac. The cousins did not count in the face of the grandson’s claims.

In the past, in the Tomah region, there had been fictitious heirs who had worked blackmail on operators who took a chance with putative heirs and tax titles. But the Latisans were faced with proofs that this heir was real and right.

Why had he waited until the cut was landed?

The Latisans pressed him with desperate questions, trying to find a way out of their trouble.

He was a sullen and noncommunicative person and intimated that he had suited his own convenience in coming on from the West.

The Latisans, when the heir appeared, were crippled for ready cash, after settling with the cousin heirs for stumpage and paying the winter’s costs of operating. Those cousins were needy folks and had spent the money paid to them; there was no hope of recovering any considerable portion of the amounts.

The true heir attached the logs as they lay, and a court injunction prevented the Latisans from moving a stick. The heir showed a somewhat singular disinclination to have any dealings with the Latisans. He refused their offer to share profits with him; he persistently returned an exasperating reply: he did not care to do business with men who had tried to steal his property. He said he had already traded with responsible parties. Comas surveyors came and scaled the logs and nested C’s were painted on the ends of the timber.

The Latisans had “gone bump” the word went up and down the Tomah.

“Well, go ahead and say it!” suggested Rufus Craig when he had set himself in the path of Ward Latisan, who was coming away from a last, and profitless, interview with the obstinate heir.

“I have nothing to say, sir.”

Craig calculatingly chose the moment for this meeting, desiring to carry on with the policy which he had adopted. By his system the Comas had maneuvered after the python method—it crushed, it smeared, it swallowed.

The Latisans had been crushed—Craig quieted his conscience with the arguments of business necessity; he had a big salary to safeguard; he had promised boldly to deliver the goods in the north country. Though his conscience was dormant, his fears were awake. He was not relishing Latisan’s manner. The repression worried him. The grandson had plenty of old John in his nature, and Craig knew it!

Craig tried to smear!

“Latisan, I’ll give you a position with the Comas, and a good one.”

“And the conditions are?”

“That you’ll turn over your operating equipment to us at a fair price and sign a ten-year contract.”

“I knew you’d name those conditions. I refuse.”

“You’re making a fool of yourself—and what for?”

“For a principle! I’ve explained it to you.”

“And I’ve explained how our consolidated plan butts against your old-fashioned principle. Do you think for one minute you can stop the Comas development?”

“I’m still with the independents. We’ll see what can be done.”

“You’re licked in the Toban.”

“There’s still good fighting ground over in the Noda Valley—and some fighters are left there.”

Craig squinted irefully at the presumptuous rebel.

Latisan hid much behind a smile. “You see, Mr. Craig, I’m just as frank as I was when I said I was going to New York. You may find me in the Noda when you get there with your consolidation plans.”

“Another case of David and Goliath, eh?”

“Perhaps! I’ll hunt around and see what I can find in the way of a sling and pebble.”

CHAPTER FIVE

A SUMMONS sent forth by Echford Flagg, the last of the giants among the independent operators on the Noda waters, had made that day in early April a sort of gala affair in the village of Adonia.

Men by the hundred were crowded into the one street, which stretched along the river bank in front of the tavern and the stores. The narrow-gauge train from downcountry had brought many. Others had come from the woods in sledges; there was still plenty of snow in the woods; but in the village the runner irons squalled over the bare spots. Men came trudging from the mouths of trails and tote roads, their duffel in meal bags slung from their shoulders.

An observer, looking on, listening, would have discovered that a suppressed spirit of jest kept flashing across the earnestness of the occasion—grins lighting up sharp retort—just as the radiant sunshine of the day shuttled through the intermittent snow squalls which dusted the shoulders of the thronging men.

There was a dominant monotone above all the talk and the cackle of laughter; ears were dinned everlastingly by the thunder of the cataract near the village. The Noda waters break their winter fetters first of all at Adonia, where the river leaps from the cliffs into the whirlpool. The roar of the falls is a trumpet call for the starting of the drive, though the upper waters may be ice-bound; but when the falls shout their call the rivermen must be started north toward the landings where logs are piled on the rotting ice.

On that day Echford Flagg proposed to pick his crew.

To be sure, he had picked a crew every year in early April, but the hiring had been done in a more or less matter-of-fact manner.

This year the summons had a suggestion of portent. It went by word o’ mouth from man to man all through the north country. It hinted at an opportunity for adventure outside of wading in shallows, carding ledges of jillpoked logs, and the bone-breaking toil of rolling timber and riffling jams.

“Eck Flagg wants roosters this year,” had gone the word. Spurred roosters! Fighting gamecocks! One spur for a log and one for any hellion who should get in the way of an honest drive!

The talk among the men who shouldered one another in the street and swapped grins and gab revealed that not all of them were ready to volunteer as spurred roosters, ready for hazard. It was evident that there were as many mere spectators as there were actual candidates for jobs. Above all, ardent curiosity prevailed; in that region where events marshaled themselves slowly and sparsely men did not balk at riding or hoofing it a dozen miles or more in order to get first-hand information in regard to anything novel or worth while.

Finally, Echford Flagg stalked down the hill from his big, square house—its weather-beaten grayness matching the ledges on which it was propped. His beard and hair were the color of the ledges, too, and the seams in his hard face were like ledgerifts. His belted jacket was stone gray and it was buttoned over the torso of a man who was six feet tall—yes, a bit over that height. He was straight and vigorous in spite of the age revealed in his features. He carried a cant dog over his shoulder; the swinging iron tongue of it clanked as he strode along.

The handle of the tool was curiously striped with colors. There was no other cant dog like it all up and down the Noda waters. Carved into the wood was an emblem—it was the totem mark of the Tarratines—the sign manual by Sachem Nicola of Flagg’s honorary membership in the tribe.

He was no popular hero in that section—it was easy to gather that much from the expressions of the men who looked at him when he marched through the crowd. There was no acclaim, only a grunt or a sniff. Too many of them had worked for him in days past and had felt the weight of his broad palm and the slash of his sharp tongue. Ward Latisan had truthfully expressed the Noda’s opinion of Flagg in the talk with the girl in the cafeteria.

The unroofed porch of the tavern served Flagg for a rostrum that day. He mounted the porch, faced the throng, and drove down the steel-shod point of his cant dog into the splintering wood, swinging the staff out to arm’s length.

“I’m hiring a driving crew to-day,” he shouted. “As for men——”

“Here’s one,” broke in a volunteer, thrusting himself forward with scant respect for the orator’s exordium.

Flagg bent forward and peered down into the face uplifted hopefully.

“I said men,” he roared. “You’re Larsen. You went to sleep on the Lotan ledges——”

“I had been there alone for forty-eight hours, carding ’em, and the logs——”

“You went to sleep on the Lotan ledges, I say, and let a jam get tangled, and it took twenty of my men two days to pull the snarl loose.”

The man was close to the edge of the porch. Flagg set his boot suddenly against Larsen’s breast and drove him away so viciously that the victim fell on his back among the legs of the crowd, ten feet from the porch.

“I never forget and I never forgive—and that’s the word that’s out about me, and I’m proud of the reputation,” declared Flagg. “I don’t propose to smirch it at this late day. And now I look into your faces and realize that what I have just said and done adds to the bunch that has come here to-day to listen and look on instead of hiring out. I’m glad I’m sorting out the sheep from the goats at the outset. It happens that I want goats—goats with horns and sharp hoofs and——”

“The word was you wanted roosters,” cried somebody from the outskirts of the crowd.

There was laughter, seeking even that small excuse for vent; the hilarity was as expressive as a viva voce vote, and its volume suggested that there were more against Flagg than there were for him.

He did not lower his crest. “You all know what is happening this season. You know why I have sent out for men. The Three C’s crowd has started stealing from my crews. I want men who have a grudge against the Three C’s. I want men who will fight the Three C’s. Rufe Craig proposes to steal the Noda as he has stolen the Tomah. He has been making his brags of what he’ll do to me. He won’t do it, even if I have to make a special trip to hell and hire a crew of devils. Now let me test out this crowd.” He was searching faces with a keen gaze. “All proper men to the front ranks! Let me look at you!”

A slow movement began in the throng; men were pushing forward.

“Lively on the foot!” yelled Flagg. “I’m standing here judging you by the way you break this jam of the jillpokes. Walk over the cowards, you real men! Come on, you bully chaps! Come running! Hi yoop! Underfoot with ’em!”

He swung his cant dog and kept on adjuring.

The real adventurers, the excitement seekers, the scrappers, drove into the press of those who were in the way. The field became a scene of riot. The bullies were called on to qualify under the eyes of the master. There were fisticuffs aplenty because husky men who might not care to enlist with old Eck Flagg were sufficiently muscular and ugly to strike back at attackers who stamped on their feet and drove fists into their backs.

Flagg, on the porch, followed all phases of the scattered conflict, estimated men by the manner in which they went at what he had set them to do, and he surveyed them with favor when they crowded close to the edge of his rostrum, dwelling with particular interest on the faces which especially revealed that they had been up against the real thing in the way of a fight. Behind and around the gladiators who had won to the porch pressed the cordon of malcontents who cursed and threatened.

“Much obliged for favor of prompt reply to mine of day and date,” said Flagg, with his grim humor. He drove his cant-dog point into the floor of the porch and left the tool waggling slowly to and fro. He leaped down among the men. He did not waste time with words. He went among them, gripping their arms to estimate the biceps, holding them off at arm’s length to judge their height and weight. He also looked at their teeth, rolling up their lips, horse-trader fashion. The drive provender did not consist of tender tidbits; a river jack must be able to chew tough meat, and the man in the wilderness with a toothache would have poor grit for work in bone-chilling water after a sleepless night.

Flagg carried a piece of chalk in his right hand. When he accepted a man he autographed the initials “E F” on the back of the fellow’s shirt or jacket, in characteristic handwriting. “Show your back as you go north,” he proclaimed for the benefit of the strangers to his custom. “My initials are good for stage team, tote team, lodging, and meals—the bills are sent to Flagg. The sooner you start the sooner you’ll get to headwaters.”

A big chap followed at Flagg’s back as the despot moved among the men. He was Ben Kyle, Flagg’s drive boss, the first mate of the Flagg ship of state. He was writing down the names of the men as they were hired. Occasionally the master called on the mate to give in an opinion when a candidate ran close to the line between acceptance or rejection.

Flagg began to show good humor beyond his usual wont. He was finding men who suited him. Many of them growled anathema against the Three C’s. They had worked for that corporation. They had been obliged to herd with roughscuff from the city employment agencies, unskilled men who were all the time coming and going and were mostly underfoot when they were on the job. One humorist averred that the Three C’s had three complete sets of crews—one working, one coming in, and one going out.

Kyle began to loosen up and copy some of Flagg’s good humor.

He encouraged the wag who had described the three shifts to say more about the Comas crews; he had some witticisms of his own to offer.

And so it came to pass that when he tackled one hulking and bashful sort of a chap who stuttered, Kyle was in most excellent mood to have a little fun with a butt. Even Echford Flagg ceased operations to listen, for the humor seemed to be sharp-edged enough to suit his satiric taste.

“You say you’re an ox teamster!” bawled the boss. “Well, well! That’s good. Reckon we’ll put some oxen onto the drive this spring so as to give you a job. How much do you know about teaming oxen?”

After a great deal of mirth-provoking difficulty with b and g, the man meekly explained that he did know the butt end of a gad from the brad end.

“Who in the crowd has got an ox or two in his pocket?” queried Kyle. “We can’t hire an ox teamster for the drive”—he dwelt on oxen for the drive with much humorous effect—“without being sure that he can drive oxen. It would be blasted aggravating to have our drive hung up and the oxen all willing enough to pull it along, and then find out that the teamster was no good.”

Martin Brophy, tavernkeeper, was on the porch, enjoying the events that were staged in front of his place that day.

“Hey, Martin, isn’t there a gad in the cultch under your office desk?”

“Most everything has been left there, from an umbrella to a clap o’ thunder,” admitted Brophy. “I’ll look and see.”

“Better not go to fooling too much, Ben,” warned the master. “I’ve seen fooling spoil good business a lot of times.”

It was rebuke in the hearing of many men who were showing keen zest in what might be going to happen; it was treating a right-hand man like a child. Kyle resented it and his tone was sharp when he replied that he knew what he was doing. He turned away from the glaring eyes of the master and took in his hand the goad which Brophy brought.

There was a sudden tautness in the situation between Flagg and Kyle, and the crowd noted it. The master was not used to having his suggestions flouted.

The boss thrust the goad into the hand of the bashful fellow. “There’s a hitchpost right side of you, my man. Make believe it’s a yoke of oxen. What are your motions and your style of language in getting a start. Go to it!”

The teamster swished the goad in beckoning fashion after he had rapped it against the post in imitation of knocking on an ox’s nose to summon attention. His efforts to vault lingually over the first “double-u” excited much mirth. Even the corners of Flagg’s mouth twitched.

“Wo, wo hysh! Gee up, Bright! Wo haw, Star!” Such was the opening command.

“They don’t hear you,” declared Kyle. “Whoop ’er up!”

The teamster did make a desperate effort to drive his imaginary yoke of oxen. He danced and yelled and brandished the goad as a crazy director might slash with his baton. He used up all his drive words and invective.

Kyle could not let the joke stop there after the man had thrown down the goad, wiped his forehead, and declared that it wasn’t fair, trying to make him start a hitching post.

“Pick up your gad,” commanded the boss. He dropped on his hands and knees. “Now you show us what you can do. I’m a yoke of oxen.”

“You ain’t.”

“I tell you I am. Get busy. Start your team.”

“That’s about enough of that!” warned Flagg, sourly. “Kyle, get up onto your feet where you belong.”

But the spirit of jest made the boss reckless and willfully disobedient. He insisted doggedly on his rôle as a balky ox and scowled at the teamster. “If you want a job you’ll have to show me!”

The teamster adjured Mr. Kyle in very polite language, and did not bring the swishing goad within two feet of the scornful nose; the candidate wanted a job and was not in a mood to antagonize a prospective boss.

“You’re a hell of a teamster!” yapped Kyle. “What’s your system? Do you get action by feeding an ox lollypops, kissing him on the nose and saying, ’Please,’ and ’Beg your pardon’?”

The big chap began to show some spirit of his own under the lash of the laughter that was encouraging Kyle.

“I ain’t getting a square deal, mister. That post wa’n’t an ox; you ain’t an ox.”

“I am, I tell you! Start me.”

“You vow and declare that you’re an ox, do you, before all in hearing?”

“That’s what!” Mr. Kyle was receiving the plaudits and encouragement of all his friends who enjoyed a joke, and was certain in his mind that he had that bashful stutterer sized up as a quitter. Flagg folded his arms and narrowed his eyes—his was the air of one who was allowing fate to deal with a fool who tempted it.

The candidate did not hurry matters. He spat meditatively into first one fist and then into the other. He grasped the goad in both hands. He looked calculatingly at Mr. Kyle, who was on his hands and knees, and was cocking an arch and provocative look upward, approving the grins of the men near him.

When the teamster did snap into action his manner indicated that he knew how to handle balky oxen. First he cracked Mr. Kyle smartly over the bridge of the nose. “Wo haw up!” was a command which Kyle tried to obey in a flame of ire, but a swifter and more violent blow across the nose sent him back on his heels, his eyes shut in his agony.

“Gee up into the yoke, you crumpled-horn hyampus!” The teamster welted the goad across Kyle’s haunches and further encouraged the putative ox by a thrust of a full inch of the brad.

When the boss came onto his feet with a berserker howl of fury and started to attack, the ox expert yelled, “Dat rat ye, don’t ye try to hook your horns into me!” Then he flailed the stick once more across Kyle’s nose with a force that knocked the boss flat on his back.

Echford Flagg stepped forward and stood between the two men when Kyle struggled to his feet and started toward the teamster with the mania of blood lust in his red eyes. The master put forth a hand and thrust back the raging mate. Flagg said something, but for a time he could not be heard above the tempest of howling laughter.

It was riotous abandonment to mirth. Men hung helplessly to other men or flapped their hands and staggered about, choking with their merriment. The savageness of the punishment administered to the boastful Kyle might have shocked persons with squeamish dispositions; it was wildly humorous in the estimation of those men o’ the forest. They were used to having their jokes served raw.

The roar that fairly put into the background the riot of the falling waters of the Noda was what all the region recognized as the ruination of a man’s authority in the north country; it was the Big Laugh.

Flagg, when he could make himself heard by his boss, holding Kyle in his mighty grip, made mention of the Big Laugh, too. “Kyle, you’ve got it at last by your damn folly. You’re licked forever in these parts. I warned you. You went ahead against my word to you. You’re no good to me after this.” He yanked the list of names from Kyle’s jacket pocket.

“Let me loose! I’m going to kill that——”

“You’re going to walk out—and away! You’re done. You’re fired. You can’t boss men after this. A boss, are you?” he demanded, with bitter irony. “All up and down this river, if you tried to boss men, they’d give you the grin and call you ’Co Boss’. They’d moo after you. Look at ’em now. Listen to ’em. Get out of my sight. I don’t forgive any man who goes against my word to him and then gets into trouble.” He thrust Kyle away with a force that sent the man staggering. He turned to the bashful chap, who had resumed his former demeanor of deprecation. “You’re hired. You’ve showed that you can drive oxen and I reckon you can drive logs.”

The teamster was too thoroughly bulwarked by admirers to allow the rampant Kyle an opportunity to get at him. And there was Flagg to reckon with if violence should be attempted. The deposed first mate slunk away.

“That, my men,” proclaimed the master, “is what the Big Laugh can do to a boss. No man can be a boss for me after he gets that laugh. I reckon I’ve hired my crew,” he went on, looking them over critically. “Stand by to follow me north in the morning.”

CHAPTER SIX

WHEN the autocrat of the Noda strode away, a stalwart young man instantly obeyed Flagg’s command—seizing the occasion to follow then and there. He had been standing on the outskirts of the throng, surveying the happenings with great interest. The men who were in his immediate vicinity, lumberjacks who were strangers in the Noda region, were plainly of his appanage and had obeyed his advice to keep out of the mêlée that had been provoked by Flagg’s methods of selection.

When the big fellow hurried in pursuit of Flagg a bystander put a question to one of the strangers.

“You ought to know who he is,” returned the questioned. “That’s Ward Latisan.”

And just then, apart from the crowd, having overtaken the autocrat, the young man was informing Flagg to that same effect.

Flagg halted, swung around, and rammed his cant dog into the ground. “You’ve changed from a sapling into fair-sized timber since I saw you last. You look like old John, and that’s compliment enough, I reckon. How do you happen to be over in the Noda country?”

“I don’t happen! I heard of the word you sent out. I came here on purpose, sir.”

“What for?”

“To hire with you.”

Flagg looked Latisan up and down and showed no enthusiasm. “Yes, I heard that you and your father had let the Three C’s slam you flat. And what makes you think I want that kind of a quitter in my crew?”

Ward met the disparaging stare with a return display of undaunted challenge. “Because I belong in the crew of a man who is proposing to fight the Three C’s.”

Flagg grunted.

Latisan kept on. “You have been hiring men because they have been parading a lot of little grouches against the Comas folks. You need a man who has a real reason for going up against that outfit. And I’m the man.”

“What you think about yourself and what I may think about you are two different things,” retorted Flagg, with insolence. “Looks to me like you had got the Big Laugh over in your section. You have probably noticed what I just did in a case of that sort.”

“I took it all in, sir.”

“Well, what then?”

“They are not laughing with us or against us over in the Tomah, Mr. Flagg. They all know what happened, and that we fought the Comas fair and square as long as we could keep on our feet. It was a trick that licked us. Craig held out the Walpole heir on us.”

“I know about it; I manage to get most of the news.” Flagg started to go on his way, but Ward put his clutch on the autocrat’s arm.

“Pardon me, Mr. Flagg, but you’re going to hear what I have to ask of you.”

Mere apologetic suit would not have served with Flagg. He found this bold young man patterning after the Flagg methods in dealings with men. The boldness of the grip on his arm gained more effectively than pleading.

“Ask it. I’m in a hurry.”

“You have fired Kyle. I want his place.”

“Well, I’ll be——”

“You needn’t be, sir. I’m a Latisan and I have bossed our drives. I have brought along a bunch of my own men who have bucked white water with me and are with me now in standing up for the principle of the independents. Allow me to say that luck is with you. Here’s your chance to get hold of a man who can put heart and soul into this fight you’re going to make.”

“And now go on and tell me how much you admire me,” suggested Flagg, sarcastically.

“I can’t do that, sir. I’m going to tell you frankly I don’t relish what I have heard about you. It’s for no love of you that I’m asking for a chance to go up against the Comas people. It’s because you’re hard—hard enough to suit me—hard enough to let me go to it and show the Three C’s they can’t get away with what they’re trying to do up here through Rufus Craig.”

“All right. You’re hired. You’ve got Ben Kyle’s job,” stated Flagg.

Latisan was not astonished by this precipitate come-about. He was prepared for Flagg’s tactics by what he had set himself to learn about the autocrat’s nature—quick to adjudge, tenacious in his grudges, inflexible in his opinion, bitterly ruthless when he had set himself in the way his prejudices selected.

“You have seen what happened to Kyle. Can you govern yourself accordingly?” Flagg in his turn had set his grip on Ward’s arm.

“Yes, sir!”

“I’ll kick you out just as sudden as I kicked him if anything happens to make men give you the grin. Can you start north with me in the morning?”

“Now or in the morning; it makes no difference to me, sir.”

Flagg shifted his hand from Ward’s arm to the young man’s shoulder and propelled him back a few paces toward the crowd in front of the tavern. “Listen, one and all! Here’s my drive boss. He’s old John Latisan’s grandson. If that isn’t introduction enough, ask questions about old John from those who remember him; this chap is like his grandfather.”

Latisan went into the tavern after Flagg had marched away to the big house on the ledges. The crowd made way for the new drive boss; those in his path stared at him with interest; mumble of comment followed as the men closed in behind him. When he sat down in a corner of the tavern office and lighted his pipe his subalterns showed him deference by leaving him to himself. That isolation gave Landlord Brophy his opportunity to indulge his bent in gossip unheard by interlopers.

Brophy plucked a cigar from a box in the little case on the desk and sat down beside Ward. “I sympathize with you,” he said by way of backhanded congratulation.

“Thank you.”

“I was born in this tavern; my father built it and run it before me,” said Brophy, tucking his cigar through the shrubbery of his gray mustache. “And so I’ve had the chance to know Ech Flagg a good many years. He’s a turk.”

“I have heard so.”

“He has always had a razor edge to his temper. Maybe you know what put the wire edge onto it?” It was query with the cock of an eyebrow accompanying.

“What I know about Mr. Flagg is only a general reputation of being a hard man. I can say that much to you because I told him the same thing. And that’s as far as I care to gossip about an employer,” stated Ward, stiffly.

“That’s a safe stand,” said Brophy, unperturbed. “Keep to it and they can’t be running to him with stories about what you have said. But he don’t pay me wages and I can say what I feel like saying. A new boss ought to know a few things about the man who hires him. It’s my disposition to set a good chap on the right road with a tip. Whatever you may say to Flagg in the way of chat, don’t you ever try to bring up the subject of his family affairs.”

“I’m not at all likely to,” snapped Latisan, with asperity.

“Oh, such a subject is easy out when folks get to going confidential,” pursued the persistent Brophy. The suggestion that he would ever be on confidential terms with Flagg provoked an ill-tempered rebuke from Ward, but Brophy paid no attention.

“If you lose your job with him, as you probably will, Latisan, let it be in the straight way of business, as he conducts it, instead of being by some fool slip of your tongue about family matters.” He puffed at his cigar complacently and still was giving no heed to Ward’s manifest repugnance at being made the repository of gossip.

“Eck’s wife died when the daughter Sylvia was small, and he sent the girl off to school somewheres when she was big enough to be sent. And she fell in with a dude kind of a fellow and came back home married to him. She was so much in love that she dared to do a thing like that with Eck Flagg—and that’s being in love a whole lot, I’ll say. Well, none of us knew what was said back and forth in the family circle, but we figured that the new husband’s cheeks didn’t tingle with any kisses that Eck gave him. At any rate, Eck set Kennard to work—that was the name, Alfred Kennard. Eck was never much good at ciphering. Office had been in his hip pocket, where he carried his timebook and his scale sheet. Kennard had an education and it came about that Eck let Alf do the ciphering; then he let him keep the books; then he let him handle contracts and the money; then he gave him power of attorney so that Alf wouldn’t be hampered whilst Eck was away in the woods. Just handed everything over for the first and the only time in his life, figuring that it was all in the family. I guess that Alf went to figuring the same way, seeing that he was good at figures; felt that what was Eck’s was his, or would be later—and Alf proceeded to cash in. Stole right and left, that was the amount of it. Prob’ly reckoned he’d rather have a sore conscience than have his feelings all ripped to pieces when he asked Eck for money.

“We all knew when Eck found out that he had been properly trimmed by the only man he had ever trusted.

“It happened in the dooryard of the big house up there, when Eck came home, wised up, and tackled Alf. Eck felt that the inside of the house might get mussed up by his language, so he stood in the yard and hollered for Alf to come out. We all went up and stood around; it seemed to be a free show, all welcome. We got the full facts in the case from Eck.

“Sylvia came out on the heels of Alf, and she had with her the little Lida, Eck’s granddaughter. And after Eck had had his say to Alf and had thrown him over the fence, he gave Sylvia her choice—stay with her father or go away with Alf. Well, she had loved Alf well enough to come home and face Eck with him; she loved Alf enough to turn her back on Eck and face the world with her husband. Natural, of course! Eck tried to grab the little girl away—to save his own from the thieves, so he said. Sylvia fought him off and hung to the girl. It was a tough sight, Latisan! And he stood there and shook his fists and cast ’em all off for ever and aye. That’s his nature—no allowance made if anybody does him dirt.

“I’ll admit that Eck did make an allowance later, after Alf died and the news of it got back here to Adonia. Lida was grown up to around sixteen by that time. I got this from Rickety Dick. Know him?”

Latisan, relighting his pipe, shook his head with an indifferent wag.

“Well, you soon will. He cooks and waits and tends on Eck. Looks up to Eck. Loves Eck—and that’s going some! Dick told me about the allowance Eck made for once in his life after I had touched Dick up by telling him that Eck Flagg never made an allowance to anybody. Eck allowed to Dick that Lida was too young to choose the right way that day in the yard. When she had grown up Eck sent old Dick to hunt for her in the city, to tell her she could come back to him, now that she was old enough to make her choice. Said Sylvia couldn’t come back. Now that was a devil of a position to put a girl in. What? Hey?”

Latisan nodded, displaying faint interest.

“And Sylvia right then was in bed with her never-get-over, so Dick told me. Of course Lida wouldn’t come back. And she was working her fingers to the bone to take care of her mother. Old Dick cried like a baby when he was telling me. He cries pretty easy, anyway. He never dared to give to Eck the word that Lida sent back. She’s got the spirit of the Flaggs, so I judge from what Dick told me. She wouldn’t even take the eggs and the truck Dick lugged down, though Dick had bought ’em with his own money; she thought the stuff came from her grandfather. Dick had to hide ’em under the table when he came away. And so Eck has crossed Lida off for ever and aye. Now that’s some story, ain’t it?”

“I haven’t enjoyed it,” said Ward, brusquely.

“Prob’ly not. I wasn’t telling it thinking you’d give three cheers when I finished. But I’ve been warning you not to make a foolish break by stubbing your toe over the family topic. I’ve heard what has happened to the Latisans over Tomah way. You’re our real sort, and I’m blasted sorry for you. I reckon you need a job and I’m trying to help you hold it. I like your looks, young Latisan. I hate the Comas crowd. Craig has never set down to my table but what he has growled about the grub. The cheap rowdies he hires for his operations on these waters come through here with bootleg booze and try to wreck my house. I’d like to be friends with you, young Latisan, and if you feel that way about it, put it there!”

Brophy held out a fat hand and Latisan grasped it cordially.

“In my position I hear all the news,” stated the landlord. “I’ll sift the wheat out of the chaff and hand you what’s for your own good. And now you’ll have to excuse me whilst I go and pound steak and dish up dinner and wait on the table. That’s the trouble with running a tavern up here in the woods. I can’t keep help of the girl kind. They either get homesick or get married.”

There was an ominous crash in the dining room.

Brophy swore roundly and extricated his rotund haunches from the arms of his chair. “There goes Dirty-Shirt Sam! I have to double him as hostler and waiter. He’d smash the feed pails in the stable if they wasn’t galvanized iron.”

He pounded with heavy gait across the office and flung open the dining-room door, disclosing a lop-sided youth who was listlessly kicking broken dishes into a pile.

“You’re fourteen dollars behind your wages, already, with dishes you’ve dropped and smashed,” shouted Brophy. “I’d give a thousand dollars for the right kind of a girl to stay here and wait on tables if she wouldn’t get married or homesick. I’ll make it a standing offer.” He cuffed the youth in a circle around the heap of broken crockery and went on his way to the kitchen.

Latisan smoked and reflected on the nature of Echford Flagg as Brophy had exposed it from the family standpoint.

Then he looked at the sullen youth who was sweeping up the fragments of the dishes. The whimsical notion occurred to Ward that he might post Brophy on the advantages of a cafeteria plan of operating his hostelry. But he had by these thoughts summoned the memory of one certain cafeteria, and of a handsome girl who sat across from him and who had so suddenly been swallowed up in the vortex of the city throngs—gone forever—only a memory that troubled him so much and so often that he was glad when his own Tomah men appeared to him, asking for commands and taking his mind off a constantly nagging regret.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE set-off of the Flagg expedition in the gray of early dawn had an element of picaresque adventure about it.

Latisan was making an estimate of his crew while he mixed with the men, checking them up, as they assembled again in front of the tavern of Adonia. Old Cap’n Blackbeard would have cheerfully certified to the eminent fitness of many of them for conscienceless deeds of derring-do. The nature of Flagg’s wide-flung summons and his provocative method of selection must needs bring into one band most of the toughest nuts of the region, Latisan reflected, and he had brought no milk-and-water chaps from the Tomah. He had come prepared for what was to face him. He had led his willing men in more or less desperate adventures in his own region; his clan had been busy passing the word among the strangers that old John Latisan’s grandson was a chief who had the real and the right stuff in him. It was plain that all the men of the crew were receiving the information with enthusiasm. Some of them ventured to pat him on the shoulder and volunteered profane promises to go with him to the limit. They did not voice any loyalty to Flagg. Flagg was not a man to inspire anything except perfunctory willingness to earn wages. The men saw real adventure ahead if they followed at the back of a heroic youth who was avenging the wrongs dealt to his family fortunes.

There were choruses of old river chanteys while the men waited for the sleds. A devil-may-care spirit had taken possession of the crew. Latisan began to feel like the brigand chief of bravos.

He was jubilantly informed by one enthusiast that they were all in luck—that Larry O’Gorman, the woods poet, had picked that crew as his own for that season on the river.

The songs of Larry O’Gorman are sung from the Mirimichi to the Megantic. He is analyst as well as bard. He makes it a point—and he still lives and sings—to attach himself only to forces which can inspire his lyre.

It was conveyed to the new boss that already was Larry busy on a new song. Ward, his attention directed, beheld the lyricist seated on the edge of the tavern porch, absorbed in composition, writing slowly on the planed side of a bit of board, licking the end of a stubby pencil, rolling his eyes as he sought inspiration.

A bit later Larry rehearsed his choristers and Latisan heard the song.

Come, all ye bold and bully boys—come lis-sun unto me!
’Tis all abowit young Latis-an, a riverman so free.
White water, wet water, he never minds its roar,
’Cause he’ll take and he’ll kick a bubble up and ride all safe to shore.
Come, all, and riffle the ledges! Come, all, and bust the jam!
And for all o’ the bluff o’ the Comas crowd we don’t give one good—
Hoot, toot, and a hoorah!
We don’t give a tinker’s dam.

Every man in the crowd was able to come in on the simple chorus.

They were singing when Echford Flagg appeared to them. He was riding on a jumper, with runners under it, and he was galloping his strapping bay horses down from the big house on the ledges. On the bare ground the runners shrieked, and he snapped his whip over the heads of the horses.

“What is this, a singing school or a driving crew?” he demanded, raucously.

“The sleds have just come, sir,” explained Latisan, who had been marshaling the conveyances.

“Listen, all ye!” shouted Flagg. “Nothing but dunnage bags go on those sleds till the runners hit the woods tote road and there’s good slipping on the snow. The man who doesn’t hoof it till then hears from me.”

He ordered Latisan to get onto the jumper seat beside him, slashed his horses with the whip, and led the way toward the north.

There was no word between the two for many a mile.

Near noon they arrived at a wayside baiting place, a log house in a clearing. They ate there and the horses were fed. There was plenty of snow in the woods and the first rains of April had iced the surface so that the slipping had been good.

As if the chewing of food had unlocked Flagg’s close-set jaws, he talked a bit to Latisan after the meal and while the horses were put to the jumper.

“I’m going to swing off here and ride down to Skulltree dam. I’m hearing reports of something going on there.”

They heard something very definite in the way of reports before they reached Skulltree. The sound of explosions came booming through the trees. It was dynamite. Its down-thrusting thud on the frozen ground was unmistakable.

“I knew that all those boxes of canned thunder that have been going through Adonia, with the Three C’s on the lid, weren’t intended to blow up log jams,” vouchsafed Flagg, after a few oaths to spice his opinion of the Comas company.

Latisan knew something about the lay of the land at Skulltree, himself. When he was a young chap the Latisans had operated in a small way as a side-line on the Noda waters. There was a rift in the watershed near Skulltree. There was a cañon leading down to the Tomah end, and the waters of the gorge were fed by a chain of ponds whose master source was near the Noda. The Latisans had hauled over to the pond from the Noda Valley.

When Flagg pulled his horses to a halt on the edge of a cliff which commanded a view of the Skulltree and its purlieus, he sat in silence for five minutes until he had taken in every detail of what was going on there.

Every little while there was an explosion across the river among the trees, and clotted frozen earth and rocks shot up into the air. When the horses leaped in fright Flagg slashed them and swore. It was plain that his ire was mounting as he made sure of what was taking place.

They were blasting a rude canal from the Noda across the low horseback which divided the Noda waters from Tomah ponds. It meant the diversion of flowage. It was contemptuous disregard of the Noda rights in favor of the million-dollar paper mill of the Three C’s on the Tomah lower waters. Rufus Craig had said something to young Latisan about the inexpediency of picking up a million-dollar paper mill and lugging it off in a shawl strap. It would be easier to blow a hole through the earth and feed in the logs from the Noda.

“By the red-hot hinges of Tophet!” bawled Flagg, having made sure that the enormity he was viewing was not a dream. He cut his whip under the bellies of his horses, one stroke to right and the other to left, and the animals went over the cliff and down the sharp slope, skating and floundering through the snow. The descent at that place would have been impossible for horses except for the snow which trigged feet and runners in some degree; it was damp and heavy; but the frantic threshing of the plunging beasts kicked up a smother of snow none the less. It was like a thunderbolt in a nimbus—the rush of Flagg down the mountain.

Rufus Craig was in the shack at the end of Skulltree dam—his makeshift office. Somebody called to him, and from his door he beheld the last stages of Flagg’s harebrained exploit, a veritable touch-and-go with death.

“There ain’t much doubt about who it is that’s coming for a social call,” said the understrapper who had summoned the field director. “And the question is whether he’s bound for hell or Skulltree.”

Craig did not comment; he had the air of one who had been expecting a visitor of this sort and was not especially astonished by the mode of getting there suddenly, considering the spur for action.

Tempestuous was the rush of the horses across the narrow flats between the cliff and the end of the dam. So violently did Flagg jerk them to a standstill in front of the shack, one horse fell and dragged down the other in a tangle of harness. Flagg left them to struggle to their feet as best they were able. He leaped off the jumper and thrust with the handle of his whip in the direction of the dynamite operations.

The old man’s features were contorted into an arabesque—a pattern of maniacal rage. His face was purple and its hue was deepened because it was set off against the snow which crusted his garments after his descent through the drifts. Knotted veins stood out on his forehead. There was no coherence in the noises he was making in his effort to speak words. He kept jabbing with his whip handle.

Evidently Craig’s first thought was that the menace of the whip was for him; he half put up a curved arm to ward off blows. In spite of his attention to Flagg he surveyed Latisan with considerable astonishment.

Ward had not recovered his poise. A passenger is usually more perturbed than a driver in desperate situations. That crazy dash down the cliff had frightened him into speechless and numb passivity. He still clung to the jumper seat with his stiffened fingers.

“Before you do anything you’ll be sorry for, Mr. Flagg, let me assure you that we have the law behind us in what we’re doing,” suggested Craig, with nervous haste. “The legislature extended our charter for development purposes and a special act protects us.”

Flagg strode away a dozen paces and then came back with better command over his faculties of speech. “Damn your legislature! What right has it got to tamper with a landbreak that God Almighty has put between waters?”

“The act was passed, Mr. Flagg. There was an advertised hearing. If you were interested you should have been there.”

“What does a legislature know about conditions up here?” demanded Flagg, with fury. “They loaf around in swing chairs and hearken to the first one who gets to ’em. They pass laws with a joker here and a trick there, and they don’t know what the law is really about. You’re stealing my water. By the gods! there’s no law that allows a thief to operate. And if you’ve got a law that helps you steal I’ll take my chance on keeping my own in spite of your pet and private law.”

“Go ahead, Flagg,” said Craig, impudently, no longer apprehensive about the whip. “I’m not your guardian to save you from trouble. There’s water enough for all of us.”

“You have swept the slopes so clean for your cursed pulp-wood slivers that you have dried up the brooks, and there isn’t enough water any more, and you know it. Your damnation canal will suck the life out of the Noda.”

“You listen to me, Flagg!” adjured Craig, getting back all his confidence as the executive of a powerful corporation. “Another special act allows us to raise this dam and conserve the water so that there’ll be plenty after we use our share for the canal. You’re safe and——”

“Safe!” raged the old man, and again the veins knotted on his forehead and he panted for breath. Latisan wanted to urge him to be careful. Flagg was exhibiting the dread symptoms of apoplexy. “Safe! I’ll be locked into this dam by you, with sluiceway refused to me—that’s what it will come to—you offering me a cut price for the logs I can’t get down to the Adonia sawmills. If you can’t kill one way, as you killed off the Latisans, you’ll kill in another way. You’re a devilish thief, Craig. I wonder if the men who hire you know what you are. Special acts, hey? That legislature has given a robber a loaded gun without knowing it. By the bald-headed jeesicks! I’ve got a drive coming down this river! And for fifty years, every spring, it has gone through. It’s going through this year, too, and if you’re underfoot here you’ll be walked on. And that’s just as good as your trumped-up law; it’s better—it’s justice.”

Flagg acted like a man who did not dare to remain longer in the presence of such an enemy; his big hands were doubling into hard fists; he was shaking in all his muscles. He leaped back onto the seat of his jumper, swung his team and sent his horses leaping up a whiplash road which traversed the cliff—a road he had disdained in his wild impatience to meet his foe.

When they reached the level of the wooded country Flagg had something to say about his abrupt departure from Craig, as if the master feared that his employe might suspect that there was an element of flight in the going-away. “There’s a law against killing a man, and I’ve got to respect that law even if I do spit on special acts that those gum-shoers have put through. I didn’t go down to their legislature and fight special acts, Latisan. I found these waters running downhill as God Almighty had set ’em to running. I have used ’em for my logs. And if any man tries now to steal my water at Skulltree, or block me with a raised dam, there’s going to be one devil of a fight at Skulltree and I’ll be there in the middle of it. What I wanted to do to Craig to-day can well wait till then when the doing can count for full value.”

Ward had been casting solicitous side glances at the empurpled face and the swollen veins. He did not dare to counsel Flagg as to his motions or his emotions. But he felt sure that an old man could not indulge in such transports without danger. He knew something about the effects of an embolism. His violent grandfather had been a victim of a fit of flaming anger in his old age.

“I’ll be in the middle of it, a club in each hand,” promised Flagg. And his molten ponderings kept alight the fires in his face.

They halted for the night at one of the Flagg store depots and were lodged in the office camp, reserved sacred to the master and his boss.

Latisan slept in the bunk above the master.

Flagg had been silent all the evening, poring over the accounts that the storekeeper had turned over.

He sighed frequently; he seemed to be weary. After a time he kicked off his larrigans and rolled into his bunk, ready dressed as he had stood. He seemed to lack the volition to remove his clothing.

He was snoring calmly when Latisan went to sleep.

Sometime in the night the young man awoke. The sounds which he heard below him were not the snores of a man who was sleeping peacefully. There was something ominous about the spasmodic and stertorous breathing.

Latisan slipped to the floor and lighted a lamp. He found the wide eyes of Flagg staring from the gloom of the bunk.

“What is it, Mr. Flagg? What is the matter?” he asked, with solicitude.

Flagg slowly reached with his left hand, picked up his right hand, and when he released it the hand fell as helplessly as so much dead flesh. “That’s it,” he said, without apparent emotion. “It’s a shock.” He employed the colloquial name for a stroke of paralysis. “My mother was that way. I’ve been afraid of it—have expected it, as you might say. Mother lived ten years after her shock. I hope to God I won’t. For it has taken me just when I’m ready to put up my best fight—and it’s my good right hand, Latisan, my right hand!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

THAT was Flagg’s reiterated lament on the journey back to Adonia. “It’s my right hand, Latisan!”

Ward had insisted on being the charioteer for the stricken master, promising to rush back to headwaters and take charge of the crew. He tried to console the old man by urging that getting in touch as soon as possible with capable doctors might restore his strength. “It may be only a clot in the brain, sir. Such cases have been helped.”

“It’s my right hand. It’s like my mother’s. She never could lift it again.”

They had started before dawn; a gibbous moon shed enough light on the tote road to serve Latisan. Flagg was couched on a sled, his blanket propped up by hay. His scepter, the curiously marked cant dog, lay beside him. He had made sure of that before he allowed the team to start.

“I propose to be your right hand in so far as I’m able, Mr. Flagg,” declared Latisan, at last, pricked by the repeatedly iterated plaint. “You can depend on me just as far as I can stretch my ability.”

“But you told me you didn’t like me for myself. You said you were joining drives with me because I was proposing to fight. Now I can’t fight. No man will do my fighting for me unless he likes me for myself.”

“I’ll do it for you, sir,” insisted Ward, determinedly. “It’s right in line with my plans. I’ll take your orders. I’ll come to you regularly at Adonia. You shall know every move. I’ll be merely your right hand to do what you want done.”

“I’m a hard man with my help, Latisan. You have agreed with me on that point. I shall be ugly when I’m chained up. I shall say something to you, and then you’ll quit.”

Latisan had been looking the situation squarely in the eye on his own account. He was confronted by something wholly outside all his calculations. He had enlisted merely as a lieutenant and had never considered that he would be called on to assume authority as chief in the field. He had been led to serve with Flagg because the old man was the personification of permanency in the north country—seemed to be something that could not be shaken by the assaults of the Comas—a man who impressed all as being above the hazards of death and accident. Somehow, after all the years and because he had been there as a fixture through so many changes, Echford Flagg was viewed as something perennial—as sure as sunrise, as solid and everlasting as the peak of Jerusalem Knob, which overshadowed the big house on the ledges at Adonia; he was a reality to tie to in a fight against a common foe.

But right then he was a whimpering old man who plucked and fumbled at a dead right hand.

He was as helpless as a little man whom Latisan had plucked from a brutal clutch of an assailant in front of a bulletin board. Craig was still able enough. Craig was man size. Craig would be even more vicious when the news of Flagg’s condition reached him; he would perceive his opportunity.

“It’s sort of the code up where I come from. There’s no objection to a clean fight. But if you don’t pick your bigness you must expect that your bigness will offer himself mighty sudden.” Latisan was not recollecting what he had said to the chaps of Tech; he was putting before his mind one of his fundamental principles as he listened to the laments of the stricken giant and urged the horses down the tote road. Craig would keep on fighting; but Flagg was no longer of Craig’s bigness. There was only one thing for Latisan to do—so that was why he put so much of determination and warmth into his pledges to a man whom he did not like from a personal standpoint. Flagg could not understand why this stranger should be loyal; the old man’s wits were numbed along with his body.

“I’ll be ripping at you with my tongue, because it’s been my style—and I’ll be worse when I’m penned up.” Flagg could not seem to hope for any reform in himself. He was accepting his nature as something forged permanently in the fires of his experience, not to be remolded.

“I’m not thin-skinned, sir. If you can’t keep from abusing me about business details, go ahead and abuse. It will ease your feelings and the abuse will not hurt me, because I don’t propose to do anything knowingly to justify abuse. Twitting on real facts is what hurts. You hired me because you knew I had good reasons for fighting the Comas on account of the principle involved in the stand of the independents; you know that I still have the reasons, no matter how much your tongue may run away with you about foolish details.”

He was looking forward to an opportunity to place himself even more definitely on record in the hearing of Flagg. After the sun was up Latisan expected to be able to grasp that opportunity at almost any turn of the tote road. He knew he would meet the upcoming crew. Flagg’s horses on the trip north had made twice the speed of the plodding woods teams, and the crew had been ordered to spend the night at any camp where darkness overtook them.

Latisan heard, long before he came in sight of them, the shrill yells with which sled load interchanged repartee with sled load; everlastingly there was the monotone of the singers. It was plain that the same spirit of gay adventure was inspiring the men.

The tote road was a one-track thoroughfare; Latisan picked a cleared knoll at one side for his turnout switch and swung his horses up there in order to give the heavy sleds passage.

“How the hell can they come singing? Stop ’em,” moaned Flagg.

There were half a dozen sleds in close procession, and Ward’s upflung hand halted them when the leading sled came abreast.

By his own efforts Flagg propped himself into a sitting posture, braced by his left arm.

Men leaped off the sleds and crowded forward in a phalanx, cupping with their ranks the sledge where their master was couched. Voices were hushed and eyes were wide.

“I’ve been hit a wallop, boys,” quavered the old man. “Overnight it has hit me. Shock. It ain’t surprising at my age. Mother had the same.”

For that moment Flagg had put aside the shell of his nature; he found instant sympathy in the gaze which rough men of the forest bestowed on a stricken one of their ilk. He was responding to that sympathy. There were tears in his eyes.

“Men, I’m hurrying Mr. Flagg home where he can be looked after by the doctors. I’m sure he’ll soon be all right again,” Latisan assured them, lying for the good of the cause. “In the meantime I’m saying to him for myself that I’m standing by for every ounce that’s in me. What do you say to him?”

“The same!” they yelled, in a ragged chorus.

“Fact is,” went on Ward, as spokesman for all, “to make up for your not being with us, Mr. Flagg, we’ve got to put in twice as many licks because you’re not on the job, and you can depend on us. What, boys?”

They bellowed promises and shrieked a pledge.

“Get along to headwaters and start to rolling the jackstraws onto the ice,” shouted Latisan. “Have the dynamite warmed when I get back there. If we have to do it, well beat the April rains to the job.”

They went on their way, cheering.

“You’ve heard us. It ought to help some,” stated Ward, urging his team along toward Adonia.

“The songs of the angels never will sound any better, and the angels will never look any better than those men did just now,” declared the old man, still in his softened mood.

Latisan turned about and grinned at the master.

“I know what you mean,” averred Flagg. “Of course I know. I was after pirates and I’ve got the toughest gang in the north country. Feed ’em raw meat, Latisan!”

Over the snow, which was slushy under the April sun of midday, and finally into Adonia over the rutted grit that the evening chill had frozen, the baron of the Noda was driven to the door of his mansion on the ledges.

Latisan had picked up men at the tavern as helpers.

A hail brought out a little old man whose white, close beard and fluffy hair gave his face the appearance of a likeness set into a frame of cotton batting. It was Rickety Dick; Brophy had told Latisan about him. He flung his hands above his head; it was his involuntary action when deep emotion stirred him; and his customary ejaculation was, “Praise the Lord!” It was possible that he would have shouted those words even then without regard to their irrelevance; but he was not able to utter a sound when Brophy and Latisan and the other men came bearing Flagg into the house.

The master stoutly refused to be laid in his bed. There was his big armchair in the middle of the sitting room; he commanded that he be placed there. “I can’t fight lying down. If I can’t stand up, I can sit up.”

“Praise the Lord!” cried old Dick, finding an opportunity to interject his thanksgiving phrase.

“I’ll come to you often, Mr. Flagg,” promised Ward, taking leave. “I’ll not neglect matters up the river, of course. But I want you to feel that I’m merely your right hand, moving according to your orders.”

He went away with a thrill of sympathy inspiring his new resolution in behalf of the master’s interests. The spectacle that he closed the door on had pathos in it. The tyrant of the Noda was shut away from the woods where he had ruled—away from the rush of white water under the prow of his great bateau; he could hear only the tantalizing summons of the cataract whose thunder boomed above the village of Adonia.

Latisan had promised to send for the best doctors in the city—he had a messenger already on the way. But he knew well enough that Echford Flagg, if he lived, was doomed to sit in that big chair and wield his scepter vicariously. And Latisan knew, too, what sort of the torments of perdition Flagg would endure on that account.

In the office of Brophy’s tavern Rufus Craig, apparently a casual wayfarer, was sitting when Latisan entered after leaving the big house on the ledges.

Craig either felt or assumed contrite concern. “Excuse me, Latisan, but is it true that Mr. Flagg has suffered a stroke of paralysis?”

“It is true, sir.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not on pleasant terms with him, or with you, for that matter. But I hate to see a good fighter struck down.”

Latisan went to the desk and wrote his name on a leaf of the dog-eared register. He proposed to stay the night at Brophy’s and start north in the morning.

“Go up and take Number Ten,” said Brophy, who had been called as a helper and who had walked down from the mansion with Latisan.

When Craig plodded heavily along the upper corridor, on his way to bed a little later, the door of Number Ten was open for ventilation; Latisan was smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper which he had picked up in the tavern office. His stare, directed at Craig over the top of the newspaper, was inhospitable when the Comas man stopped and leaned against the door jamb.

“Latisan, I’m presuming on that frankness of yours; you have bragged about it in the past.”

“That was before my experience with you in the Walpole matter, sir. But go ahead! What do you want?”

“You’re over here in the Noda region, according to your threat. You may be willing to inform me as to your status in the Flagg proposition, now the old man is on his back.”

“Mr. Flagg has put me in full charge of his drive.”

“Has he delegated to you any authority to compromise?”

“No, sir!”

“There ought to be an opportunity to compromise, now that he’s down and out.”

“I just left Mr. Flagg sitting in his chair, and he says he intends to keep sitting there. Therefore, he isn’t down.”

“Is his mind clear for business?”

“I should say so—yes!”

Craig tipped his hat and scratched the side of his head. “Then I’m afraid there isn’t much use in my going to him to talk compromise,” he confessed.

“That’s your affair, Mr. Craig.”

“And your affair—where he’s concerned——”

“Is to bring down his drive.”

“He has threatened a big fight at Skulltree. You heard him.”

“Yes.”

“And if he gives his orders to blow hell out of the bottom of the river, I suppose you’ll obey, eh?”

“He has ordered me to bring his logs into the hold-boom here at Adonia. I have promised to do so. I see no need of going into details of how I’m to do it.” Latisan raised the shield of his newspaper in front of his face.

But Craig persisted. He had promised the Noda to his superiors; he had not been sure how he could maneuver to deliver, but his past success had impelled him to go on with his cocksure pledges of performance; he was spurred by a hint of a raise in salary, a gift of Comas common stock; he had depended on the situation at Skulltree as his principal weapon, if bravado backed the special legislative act. But that act had been juggled, just as Echford Flagg had asserted. The thing was ticklish, and Craig knew it. Anger and apprehensiveness were working twin leverage on the Comas executive.

“Latisan, by coming over here into the Noda and grabbing in where you have no timber interests of your own, you have shown your animus. You have made it a personal matter between you and me.”

“There’s a lot of truth in what you say,” admitted Ward, lowering his shield. “Let’s exchange accusations! You held that Walpole heir up your sleeve till we had our cut on the landings. If you had worked such a trick on my grandfather he wouldn’t be sitting on this chair, as I’m doing. He’d be kicking you around this tavern. I’ll save my strength for the Flagg drive.”

“I’ve got some frankness of my own, Latisan. I’m at a point where my future with the Comas is in the balance, and I’m going to fight for that future. I’m not asking you to lie down. But you have it in your power—the circumstances being as they are—to swing the Flagg interests in with ours to mutual advantage. Why isn’t that better than a fight?”

“It would be better!”

Craig brightened.

But Latisan added: “For your interests! You’re afraid of a fight—at Skulltree!”

“Yes, I am,” blurted Craig, trying candor. “Let’s arrange a hitch-up!”

“Now the trouble with that plan is this,” returned Latisan, quietly, slowly. “It can’t be done, not with a man like you’ve shown yourself to be. Hold in your temper, Mr. Craig! You’re coming round now to ask square men to deal with you. You can’t appeal on the ground of friendship—you haven’t tried to make any friends up here. You have played too many tricks. We’re all doubtful in regard to your good faith, no matter what the proposition may be. We can’t deal with you. It’s all your own doing. You are paying the penalty.”

“Much obliged for the sermon!”

“I could say a lot more, but it wouldn’t amount to anything in your case.”

“Then it has settled into a personal fight between you and me, has it?”

“Bluntly speaking, yes!”

“You have accused me of playing tricks!” Craig’s rage burst bounds. “You young hick, you have never seen real tricks yet! You don’t think I’m coming after you with fists or a cant dog, do you?”

“I wish you were younger and would try it!”

“I’m from the city. In the city we use our brains. Latisan, I have tried to show you in the past that the Comas means business. If you’ll go back to the Toban, where you belong, I’ll do something for you on that Walpole matter, now that I’ve taught you a lesson.”

“The Latisans are not out after charity, Mr. Craig.”

“You’re out after punishment—a damnation good smashing, personally, and you’re going to get it!”

Latisan leaped from his chair and slammed the door suddenly and violently; expecting an attack. Craig leaped back and saved his fingers from a jamming.

From behind his curtain in the morning he saw Latisan drive the Flagg team into the tavern yard.

“I’ll be coming down often, Brophy, to see Mr. Flagg. I’ll depend on you to save out a room for me.”

“Number Ten is yours if it suits.”

Craig grunted with the satisfaction of one who had received interesting information; knowledge that Latisan would be regularly in Adonia helped some plans which the director had been revolving.

Latisan lashed his horses away toward the north.

Craig took the forenoon train down over the narrow-gauge, headed for New York. He was seeking that aid of which he had boasted—city brains. In handling certain affairs of his in the past he had found the Vose-Mern Detective Agency both crafty and active—and the roundabout method of craft, he decided, was the proper way to get at Latisan, without involving the Comas folks in any scandal.

CHAPTER NINE

NOT cattishly, but with patronizing pity, Miss Leigh, bookkeeper, remarked to Miss Javotte, filing clerk, that if Miss Kennard did not change that green toque with the white quill to something else pretty soon, she could be identified by her hat better than by her fingerprints.

Miss Leigh had been showing one of her new spring hats to Miss Javotte; she was able to express a sotto voce opinion about Miss Kennard’s toque because Miss Kennard, stenographer, was rattling her typewriter full tilt. Miss Javotte agreed, spreading her fingers fan shape and inspecting certain rings with calm satisfaction. “And not even a rock—only that same old-fashioned cameo thing—speaking of fingers.”

“I was speaking of fingerprints,” said Miss Leigh, tartly, frowning at the display of rings, perfectly well aware that they were not bought on the installment plan out of a filing clerk’s wages.

It was quite natural for Miss Leigh to speak of fingerprints. She was an employe in the Vose-Mern offices. “Vose-Mern Bureau of Investigation” was the designation on the street corridor directory board of a building in the purlieus of New York City Hall. On the same board other parties frankly advertised themselves as detectives. The Vose-Mern agency called its men and women by the name of operatives. The scope of its activities was unlimited. It broke strikes, put secret agents into manufacturing concerns to stimulate efficiency, or calculatingly and in cold blood put other agents in to wreck a concern in the interests of a rival. It was a matter of fees. Mern could defend the ethics of such procedure with interesting arguments; he had been an inspector of police and held ironic views of human nature; he had invented an anticipatory system, so he called it, by which he “hothoused” criminal proclivities in a person in order to show the person’s latent possibilities up to an employer before damage had been wrought to the employer’s business or funds. That is to say—and this for the proper understanding of Mr. Mern’s code in his operations as he moved in the special matters of which this tale treats—his agency deliberately set women of the type well hit off by the name “vamps” “sicked” those women onto bank clerks and others who could get a hand into a till, and if the women were able to cajole the victim to the point of stealing or of grabbing in order to make a get-away to foreign parts with the temptress, the trick was considered legitimate work of the “anticipatory” sort. The operative would order the treasure cached, would appoint the day and hour for the get-away—and a plain-clothes man would be waiting at the cache! The Vose-Mern system thus nabbed the culprit, who had revealed his lack of moral fiber by reason of the hothouse forcing of the situation; Mern insisted that if the germ were there it should be forced. By his plan the loot was pulled back and returned to the owner.

Mern had broken the big paper-mill strike for the Comas Consolidated; he calmly assured his clients that he could furnish a thousand men as well as one. When he did a thing it was expensive—for he had bands of picked men always on call, and the men must be paid during their loafing intervals, waiting for other strikes.

Craig had been close to Mern during the strike. Mern stated that the ethics of the law allowed a lawyer to defend and extricate, if he could, a criminal whom he knew was hideously guilty; the lawyer’s smartness was applauded if he won by law against justice. Mern excused on the same lines his willingness to accept any sort of a commission. It was a heartless attitude—Mern admitted that it was and said that he didn’t pose as a demon. He seemed to get a lot of comfort out of declaring that if the fellow he was chasing had the grit and smartness to turn around and do Mern up, Mern would heartily give the fellow three cheers. Thus did Mern put his remarkable business on the plane of a man-to-man fight by his argument, not admitting that there was any baseness in his plots and his persecution.

Miss Lida Kennard, as confidential stenographer, was deep into the methods of Mern. It was Mern’s unvarying custom to have Miss Kennard in to listen to and take down all that a client had to state. She was extremely shocked in the first stages of her association with the Vose-Mern agency by the nature of the commissions undertaken. But it was the best position she had secured, after climbing the ladder through the offices of more or less impecunious attorneys. She needed the good pay because her mother was an invalid; she continued to need the pay after her mother died. There were bills to be settled. She had grown used to setting the installments on those bills ahead of new hats, and the cameo ring which had been her mother’s keepsake was for the sake of memory, not adornment.

By dint of usage, the Vose-Mern business had come to seem to her like a real business. Certainly some big men came and solicited Mern’s aid and appeared to think that his methods were proper. In course of time, listening to Mern’s ethics, she came to accept matters at their practical value and ceased to analyze them for the sake of seeking for nice balances of right and wrong. She was in and of the Vose-Mern organization! She sat in on conferences, wrote down placidly plots for doing up men who had not had the foresight to hire Mern—Vose had been merely an old detective, and he was dead—and she sometimes entertained a vague ambition to be an operative herself. She liked pretty hats and handsome rings—though she was scornfully averse to the Leigh-Javotte system as she was acquainted with it by the chance remarks the associates dropped. As to operatives—Miss Kennard had heard—well, she had heard Miss Elsham, for instance, a crack operative, reveal what the rewards of the regular work were; and, the way Miss Elsham looked at it, a girl did not have to lower her self-respect.

In the midst of these thoughts, getting a side glance at the new hat which Miss Leigh was showing to Miss Javotte, Miss Kennard was called to conference; the buzzer summoned her.

Mern introduced her to the client of the day; the chief made that his custom; it always seemed to put the client more at his ease because an introduction made her an important member of the party—and Mern stressed the “confidential secretary” thing.

The client was Director Craig of the Comas company.

He rose with a haste which betrayed a natural susceptibility to the charms of pretty women. He cooed at her rather than spoke, altering his natural tone, smoothing out all the harshness; it was that clumsy gallantry by which coarse men strive to pay court to charm.

The girl warranted the approving gaze which Mr. Craig gave to her. He looked from her frank eyes to her copper-bronze hair, which seemed to have a glint of sunshine in its waves. He liked the uplift of that round chin—he remembered that it had seemed to indicate spirit—and he liked spunk in a girl. He had enjoyed the conferences of the days of the strike-breaking when he could survey her profile as she busied herself with her writing, admiring the beauty curve of her lips.

Now he was thrilled by her manner of recognition; he had not expected that much.

“I remember you, Mr. Craig,” she assured the big man, her fingers as firm in the grip as were his. “You were in here so much on the strike matter two years ago.”

“That’s a long time for a New York young lady to remember a man from the north woods.”

“To save myself from seeming like a flatterer, I must say it’s because of the woods feature that I remember you so well. The forest interests me. I’m afraid I’m inclined to be very foolish about the woods. Why, in a cafeteria—last fall—there was——”

But she checked herself and flushed. She turned to Mern. “I beg your pardon. I’m ready.” She sat down and opened her notebook.

“But what about it?” quizzed Craig.

“A mere chance meeting with a man from the north country. I really don’t understand why I mentioned it. My interest in the woods—the thought of the woods—tripped my tongue.” She nodded to the stolid Mern as if to remind him of the business in hand, and Mern ducked his square head at Craig.

It was the habit of Mern to go thoroughly over a case with a client before calling in Miss Kennard. At the second going-over in her presence the topic was better shaken down, was in a more solidified form for her notebook. The Comas director had already told his story once to the chief.

Craig leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the ceiling, again collecting his data in his mind. He had dictated before to Miss Kennard and knew how Mern wanted his names and his facts. “Subject, the spring drives on the Noda water. Object, hanging up or blocking the independent drive of Echford Flagg and——”

Miss Kennard’s pencil slipped somehow. It fell from her fingers, bounced from the floor on its rubber tip, and ticked off the sharpened lead when it hit the floor again.

Lida darted for it, picked it up, and ran out of the room. “I’m going for another,” she explained.

She was gone for some time. Craig glanced out of the window into the slaty sky, from which rain was falling. It was a day unseasonably warm and humid for early spring. “I hope it’s raining in the Noda. But it’s just as liable to be snow. Latisan can’t do much yet awhile.” He looked at his watch as if starting the Noda drives was a matter of minutes. He was showing some impatience when Miss Kennard returned. She went to the window, and sat in a chair there, her face turned from them. “If you don’t mind,” she apologized. “It’s on account of the light. I can hear perfectly from here.”

She heard then that the Comas wanted to put Echford Flagg down and out as an operator, now that paralysis had stricken him. She had Craig’s assurance delivered to Mern that, without a certain Ward Latisan old Flagg would not be able to bring his drive down. The Comas director declared that an ordinary boss could never get along with the devils who made up the crew. He declared further that Latisan was of a sort to suit desperadoes and had put into the crew some kind of fire which made the men dangerous to vested interests on the river. He devoted himself to Latisan with subdued profanity, despite the presence of the young woman. He averred that Latisan himself had no love for Flagg—nobody up-country gave a tinker’s hoot for Flagg, anyway. He insisted, desperate in spite of certain modifying private convictions, that Latisan could be pried off the job if some kind of a tricky influence could be brought to bear or if his interest in the fight, as just a fight, could be dulled or shifted to something else or side-tracked by a ruse. He pictured Flagg as a man for whom nobody would stand up in his present state, now that he was sick and out of the game.

“I hate to kick a cripple, even in my business,” demurred Mern. “I have flashes of decency,” he continued, dryly. “You seem to be particularly set on getting to the lumberjack, Latisan. Can’t you do him up, and then let Flagg have half a show for this season—probably his last?”

“Now you’re talking of violence to Latisan, aren’t you?”

“Let the plug-ugly have what he seems to be looking for,” advised Mern. “That is, if I get it straight from you what his nature is.”

“He’s all of that—what I have said,” reaffirmed Craig, venomously. “But look here, Mern, you can’t go up into that region, where everything is wide open to all men, and kill a man or abduct him. I’m obliged to gum-shoe. I have to keep my own executive details away from the home office, even. We’re waiting on the courts for law and on the legislature for more favors.” Craig was sweating copiously, and he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “It’s touchy business. If I can pull old Flagg into camp, it’s my biggest stroke outside of nailing the Latisans in the Tomah. A monopoly will give us settled prices and control of the flowage. But I insist on doing the job through Latisan. I’m after him! Now do some thinking for me. No violence, however—nothing which can be traced to the Three C’s.”

In the silence Miss Kennard asked, “How do you spell Latisan, Mr. Craig?”

He told her. “First name Ward. He’s the grandson of old John of the Tomah.”

“I’m trying to get the facts straight for Mr. Mern. Do I understand you to say that the Latisans have failed in their business?”

“They’re down and out. I gave the young fool a good tip to save the remnants, but he wouldn’t take it. The only thing I’ll give him after this is poison—if it can’t be traced to me or my company.”

Mern had swung about in his chair, his vacant stare on the murky sky, doing the thinking to which he had been exhorted by his client. “Suppose I slip a picked crowd of my operatives into his crew?”

“He’s too wise to take on strangers. And while he’s on the job with the crew the men are so full of that hell-whoop spirit that they can’t be tampered with. Mern, he’s got to be cut out of the herd.”

“What’s his particular failing?”

Craig, if his sour rage against Latisan had been less intense, might have been less ready to believe that Latisan had taken several months off as a prodigal son. But Craig wanted to believe that the young man had been doing what scandal said he had done. That belief strengthened Craig’s hopes. He affected to believe in the reports. He told Mern that Latisan had been leading a sporting life in the city until the family money gave out.

“How about bumping him on his soft spot?”

Craig asked questions with his eyes, blinking away the perspiration.

“With a girl,” Mern explained. “With one who looks as if she had been picked right out of the rosy middle of the big bouquet he was attracted by in the city. With the background of the woods, a single bloomer will surely hold his attention.”

Craig showed interest; he had been obliged to pass up violence, bribery, bluster. This new plan promised subtlety and subterfuge that would let out the Three C’s. “Got her?”

“Call Miss Elsham on the phone, Miss Kennard! You may do it from the other room. Ask her to hurry down.”

The girl, her face hidden from them, paused at the door. “Are there more notes? Shall I come back?” She was having difficulty with her voice, but the men were now talking eagerly about the new plan, and her discomposure was not remarked.

“I think not,” said Mern. “Write out what you have. Make especially full characterizations of Flagg and Latisan as you have gathered facts about them from our talk.” He had found Miss Kennard to be especially apt in that work. Not only did she deduce character from descriptions, but she worked in many valuable suggestions as to how men of a certain nature should be handled. She seemed to understand the vagaries of men’s dispositions very well indeed.

“What’s the matter with Ken?” muttered Miss Javotte, nudging the bookkeeper.

Lida had flung her arms across the frame of her typewriter and had hidden her face in her hands.

“Headache,” returned Miss Leigh, sapiently. “That toque has struck into the brain. No girl ought to take chances that way.”

CHAPTER TEN

HOWEVER, by the time Miss Marguerite Elsham—having given full attention to her person and attire—arrived at the office, Miss Kennard had completed her manuscript and the sheets were lying at Mern’s elbow on his desk.

In order to bridge a part of the gap of waiting Mern had given his client some information about Miss Elsham and her ability.

“Very competent on the coax, Mr. Craig. Last job was a paying teller. He had twenty thousand in his jeans when he stepped out of the taxi that had taken him and Elsham to the steamer dock. Tickets for Rio! Crowley, our pinch artist, nabbed him and bawled out Elsham, who was weeping in the cab. Crowley and Elsham work well together. You understand that if she goes to the woods Crowley must go along on the side. They won’t appear as knowing each other. But Crowley may be called on to shove his mitt between Elsham and trouble.”

“I don’t care how many are on pay—if you achieve results,” said Craig.

The field director, introduced to Miss Elsham when she entered breezily, termed her in his thoughts as being at least a 1925 model. He wondered just what words he would find in the way of advice about toning down her style for north country operations.

She took her seat sideways on the edge of Mern’s desk, thus testifying to her sure standing in the establishment, her tightly drawn skirt displaying an attractive contour. For a fleeting moment—hating Latisan so venomously—Craig rather envied Latisan his prospects as a victim.

Miss Elsham produced a silver cigarette case, lighted up, and exhaled twin streams of smoke from a shapely nose. “Shoot!” she counseled.

Mern, after his slow fashion, fumbled with the sheets of Miss Kennard’s manuscript.

Miss Elsham thriftily utilized the moments allowed her by Mern’s hesitation. She always tried to impress a client favorably. “I don’t presume to pick and choose when it comes to cases,” she informed Craig. “I’m an All-for-the-good-cause Anne! But I hope—I’m allowed to hope, I suppose—I do hope that my next one is going to remember some of the lessons he learned at mother’s knee. The last one had forgotten everything. I was dragged through cafés till at the present time a red-shaded table lamp and a menu card make me want to bite holes in any man with a napkin over his arm. I’ve danced to jazz and listened to cabaret——”

Mern was trying to say something, but she rattled on: “And that flask on his hip—he must have done all his breathing while he was asleep; he never allowed time enough between drinks while he was awake.”

“The next one is different,” stated Mern.

“Much obliged! But of course it’s cafés again and——”

Mern sliced off her complaints, chopping his flat hand to and fro in the air. “Nothing to it, sis! It’s a tall-timber job, this time.”

“In the woods—the real woods,” supplemented Craig.

“Great!” indorsed Miss Elsham, accustomed to meeting all phases of action with agility. “I’ve just seen a movie with that kind of a girl in it. Leggings and knicks. I can see myself. Great!”

Director Craig surveyed her and nodded approvingly.

“We’ll decide on what part you’ll play before we measure you for a rig,” objected the chief, with his official caution. “Listen to the size-up of your man.” He began to read from Miss Kennard’s manuscript. “‘Ward Latisan. Young woodsman. Has lived and worked among rough men and has no particular amount of moral stamina, a fact shown by his desertion of his father in time of need in order to indulge in orgies in the city.’”

“Oh, it’s to go and set my hook and fish him out of the woods, and then he and I lean on our elbows across from each other—the cafés some more,” said Miss Elsham, pouting.

Mern suspended, for a moment, his reading and addressed Craig. “Miss Kennard, of course, is sizing up according to what you have said of Latisan. You’re sure about his weakness for dames, are you? We don’t want to give Miss Elsham any wrong tips.”

Craig hung tenaciously to his estimate of Latisan, in no mood to uproot the opinion which gossip had implanted and hatred had watered. And at the end of his arraignment he attempted an awkward compliment. “And even if he could have stood out against the Queen of Sheba up till now, I’ll say he’ll——” Craig gazed with humid indorsement of Miss Elsham’s attractions and waved his hand in the way of a mute completion of the sentence.

Miss Elsham smiled broadly and patted together her manicured thumbnails. “Loud applause!” she cried. “Pardon me if I don’t blush, sir. I have used up my stock. The last case was oozing with flattery—after the flask had got in its work.”

Mern went on with his reading, portraying the character of Latisan as Miss Kennard had gathered and assimilated data. She had even gone to the extent of giving Latisan a black mustache and evil eyes.

“Hold on,” objected Craig. “Nothing was said about his looks. She’s picking that up because I was strong on how he had acted. He doesn’t look as savage as he is; he fools a lot of folks that way,” stated Craig, in surly tones.

“Well, how will I know when I meet up with him in the woods?”

“You go to the Adonia tavern and make your headquarters, and you won’t miss him. How does the thing look to you as a proposition?” demanded Craig, solicitously. “You ought to know pretty well what you can do with men, by this time.”

Miss Elsham tossed away her cigarette butt and referred mutely to Mern by a wave of her hand.

“She always gets ’em—gets the better of the best of ’em. Rest easy,” said the chief.

“And it must be worked easy,” warned Craig, catching at the word. “That’s why you’re in it, Miss Elsham, instead of its being a man’s fight up there. We can’t afford to let Latisan slam that drive down through our logs, as he threatens to do. If he does it—if we turn on Flagg and sue for damages, as we can do, of course—court action will only bring out a lot of stuff that better be kept covered. I want the agency to understand fully, Mern!”

“We’re on.”

“I’m achieving results without showing all the details to the home office. And I’m not a pirate. You spoke of kicking a cripple, Mern. We’ll take over Flagg’s logs as soon as he gets reasonable. His fight is only an old notion about the independents sticking on. Sawmills are in our way these days. Flagg is done, anyway. He ought to be saved from himself. I’m after Latisan. He’s ready to fight and to ruin Flagg,” declared Mr. Craig, with a fine assumption of righteous desire to aid a fallen foe, “just to carry out his grudge against me—using Flagg’s property as his tool. It’ll be too bad. So get busy, Miss Elsham—and keep him busy—off the drive.”

“Read on, Chief,” she implored Mern. “I’m seeing as quick as this just how I’ll do it.”

The conference continued.

When Miss Elsham departed she stopped in the main office on her way out. “Good-by, girls! I’m off for the big sticks. I’ll bring each of you a tree.”

She went to a mirror, taking out her vanity case. Beside the mirror were hooks for hats and outer garments. “Perfect dream!” she commented, examining a hat. “Whose?”

“Mine,” said Miss Leigh.

Miss Elsham took the hat in admiring hands, dislodging a green toque, which fell upon the floor. She did not notice the mishap to the toque and left it where it had fallen. She touched up her countenance and went away.

“Your hat is on the floor,” Miss Leigh informed Miss Kennard. The girl did not reply; she was looking down upon the keys of her typewriter, and her demeanor suggested that her heart was on the floor, too.

When Lida sat by the open window of her room that evening her depression had become doleful to the point of despair.

The night was unseasonably warm with enervating humidity; in that atmosphere the dormant germs of the girl’s general disgust with the metropolis and all its affairs were incubated. Breathing the heavy air which sulked at the window, she pondered on the hale refreshment of the northern forests. But it seemed to her that there was no honesty in the woods any more. That day, fate searching her out at last, she had been dragged in as a party in a plot against her stricken grandfather. She indulged her repugnance to her employment; it had become hateful beyond all endurance. Her association with the cynical business of the agency and her knowledge of the ethics of Mern had been undermining the foundations of her own innate sense of what was inherently right, she reflected, taking account of stock.

Dispassionately considered, it was not right for her to use her acquired knowledge of the plot against Echford Flagg in order to circumvent the plans of an employer who trusted her. But after a while she resolutely broke away from the petty business of weighing the right and the wrong against each other; she was bold enough to term it petty business in her thoughts and realized fully, when she did so, that her Vose-Mern occupation had damaged her natural rectitude more than she had apprehended.

But there was something more subtle, on that miasmatic metropolitan night, something farther back than the new determination to break away from Mern and all his works of mischief. It was not merely a call of family loyalty, a resolve to stand by the grandfather who had disowned his kin. She was not sure how much she did care for the hard old man of the woods. But right then, without her complete realization of what the subtle feeling was, the avatar of the spirit of the Open Places was rising in her. She longed avidly for the sight and the sound of many soughing trees. She was urged to go to her own in some far place where her feet could touch the honest earth instead of being insulated by the pavements which were stropped glossy by the hurry of the multitude.

That urge really was just as insistent as consideration of the personal elements involved, though she did not admit it, not being able to analyze her emotions very keenly right then. Family affection needs propinquity and service to develop it. Her sentiments in regard to Echford Flagg were vague. This Latisan, whoever he was, was plainly a rough character with doubtful morals who was loyal to a grudge instead of to her grandfather. She knew what the Elsham girl had been able to with other men, in the blasé city; it stood to reason that in the woods, having no rivals to divert the attentions of a victim, Elsham would be still more effective.

At last, having kept her thoughts away from an especial topic because of the shame that still dwelt with her, Lida faced what she knew was the real and greater reason for her growing determination to step between Echford Flagg and his enemies. Alfred Kennard had stolen money from Echford Flagg. Sylvia Kennard had grieved her heart out over the thing. There were the bitter letters which Lida had found among her mother’s papers after Sylvia died. The mother had torn the name from the bottoms of those letters; it was as if she had endeavored to shield Echford Flagg from the signed proof of utter heartlessness.

The debt to Echford Flagg had not been canceled. Could the daughter of Alfred Kennard repay in some degree for the sake of the father? That sense of duty surmounted all qualms involved in the betrayal of an employer, if it could be called betrayal, considering the ethics that had been adopted and preached by Mern.

It was midnight when she reached her firm decision. She would go to the north country. She would do her best, single-handed, as opportunity might present itself. She would fight without allowing her grandfather to know her identity. Perhaps she might tell him when it was all over, if she won. The debt was owed by the father; it might help if it was known that the daughter had paid. Then she would go away; it was not in her mind to gain any favor for herself. If she merely ran to him, tattling an exposure of the plot, Echford Flagg, if her well-grounded estimate of his character were correct, might repudiate her as a mere tale-bearer; she remembered enough to know that he was a square fighter. She felt that she had some of the Flagg spirit of that sort in her. She had been fighting her battle with the world without asking odds of anybody or seeking favors from her only kin.

She would go north and do her best, for her own, according to the code she had laid down.

She was conscious then, having made up her mind, of the subtle longing that was back of the fierce impatience to repay her father’s debt: the woods of the north and the hale spirit of the Open Places were calling her home again.

She would not admit to herself that she was engaged in a quixotic enterprise, and in order to keep herself from making that admission she resolutely turned her thoughts away from plans. To ponder on plans would surely sap her courage. She could not foresee what would confront her in the north country and she was glad because her ideas on that point were hazy. It was not in her mind to hide herself from the other operatives of the Vose-Mern agency when she was at the scene; her experience had acquainted her with the efficacy of guile in working with human nature, and she was well aware that her bold presence where the operatives were making their campaign would prove such a mixture of honesty and guile that Miss Elsham and Crowley, and even Mern, himself, when he learned, would be obliged to expend a portion of their energy on guessing.

She did not know how or whether one girl could prevail against the organization threatening her grandfather and Latisan, but she was fully determined to find out.

She served the agency dutifully for one more day. She learned that the two operatives had started for the north.

A day later she departed from New York on their trail. She did not inform Chief Mern that she was leaving.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ADONIA, terminus of the narrow-gauge, has one train arrival per day, in the late afternoon. That arrival always attracts the populace of the village. The train brings freight and mail and passengers.

Ward Latisan had come down from the headwaters of the Noda and was at the station, waiting for the train. He had ordered more dynamite for the drive and proposed to take especial charge of the consignment. The drive was starting off slowly. There was ice in the gorges; the first logs through would have the freshet head of water. Latisan had heard more threats and he had definitely detected the trigs which the river bosses of the Three C’s were laying—and he had ordered more dynamite!

The arriving train dragged slowly into the station and Latisan kept pace with the freight car which was attached next behind the locomotive.

The conductor swung off the steps of the coach before the train halted. He hailed Latisan, calling the name loudly. He beckoned with vigor and the drive master swung around and walked back to meet the trainman.

“I did my best, Latisan, to have your shipment loaded from the freight car on the main line, but they wouldn’t let me.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Our super. He was acting under orders from higher up. There was a special officer on hand to see that the orders were obeyed. Law says that explosives shall not be conveyed on a mixed train.”

“I know all about that law,” retorted Latisan. “But it has been eased up on in these parts because you pull a passenger coach on every train.”

“But law is law; it has been jammed down on us!”

“You mean that Craig has put the twist ring into your snout,” shouted the drive master. “And he’s leading your railroad by the nose like he’s leading a good many others in the Noda country.”

“I’m only a hired man——”

“And the Three C’s will have everybody in this section hired if the money holds out, and that’s the hell of it!”

“Look here, Latisan, you’re on railroad property, and that’s no kind of talk to have over in front of passengers.”

The train was at a standstill; the new arrivals were on the platform.

Latisan, well advertised by the name the conductor had bawled, glanced around and perceived that he was the center of observation. Especially was he concerned with the direct stare of a young woman; she continued to regard him steadfastly and he allowed his attention to be engaged with her for a moment.

Latisan had his own mental tags for womankind; this was “a lady.” He had set himself back to the plane of the woods and his rough associates. He felt a woodsman’s naïve embarrassment in the presence of a lady. Her survey of him was rebuke for his language, he was sure. There could be no other reason why “a lady” should look at a man who was fresh down from the drive, unshaven and roughly garbed. She was from town, he could see that. Those sparkling eyes seemed like something that was aimed at him; he was in a helpless, hands-up sort of mood!

He pulled off his cap. He had the courageous frankness of sincere manhood, at any rate. “I’m sorry! I was expecting dynamite. It didn’t come. I blew up just the same.”

The lady smiled.

Then she turned and started away.

A stout man had been standing close behind her. Nobody among the loungers at the railroad station entertained any doubt whatever as to just what this stranger was. His clothes, his sample case, his ogling eyes, his hat cockily perched on one side of his head proclaimed him “a fresh drummer,” according to Adonia estimates.

He leaped forward and caught step with the girl. “Pardon! But I’m going your way! Allow me!” He set his hand on her traveling case.

She halted and frowned. “I thank you. I can carry it myself!”

“But I heard you asking the conductor the way to the hotel. I’m going right there!”

“So am I, sir! But not in your company.”

“Oh, come on and be sociable! We’re the only two of our kind up among these bushwhackers.”

Miss Elsham’s fellow operative was stressing his play; he grabbed away her bag. “We may as well get a quick rise out of him,” muttered Crowley. It was a plan they had devised in case their man should help their luck by being at the railroad station.

“I’ll call an officer!” she threatened.

“You don’t need to,” Latisan informed her. He had followed the couple. “Besides, there isn’t any. The only place they need officers is in a city where a rab like this is let run loose.” He leaped to the stout chap and yanked away the girl’s bag. “I’ll carry it if you’re going to the tavern.”

She accepted his proffer with another smile—a smile into which she put a touch of understanding comradeship. They walked along together.

There was no conversation. The spring flood of the Noda tumbled past the village in a series of falls, and the earth was jarred, and there was an everlasting grumble in the air. The loungers stared with great interest when the drive master and the girl went picking their way along the muddy road.

The volunteer squire delivered the traveling bag into the hand of Martin Brophy, who was on the porch of the tavern, his eye cocked to see what guests the train had delivered into his net. Mr. Brophy handled the bag gingerly and was greatly flustered when the self-possessed young lady demanded a room with a bath.

Latisan did not wait to listen to Brophy’s apologies in behalf of his tavern’s facilities. He touched his cap to the discomposing stranger and marched up to the big house on the ledges; he was not approaching with alacrity what was ahead of him.

He had arrived in Adonia from headwaters the previous evening, and had spent as much of that evening as his endurance would allow, listening to Echford Flagg, sitting in his big chair and cursing the fetters of fate and paralysis. Unable to use his limbs, he exercised his tongue all the more.

That forenoon and again in the afternoon Latisan had gone to the big house and had submitted himself to unreasonable complaints when he reported on what was going forward at headwaters. He had ventured to expostulate when the master told him how the thing ought to be done.

“No two drive bosses operate the same, sir. And the whole situation is different this season.”

“It was your offer to be my right hand, young Latisan—and I’m drive boss still! You move as I order and command.”

Ward was wondering how long the Latisan temperament could be restrained. In the matter of Craig at the tavern the scion of old John had been afforded disquieting evidence that the temperament was not to be trusted too far.

He entered the mansion without knocking; it was the custom.

Flagg was reading aloud from a big Bible for which Rickety Dick had rigged props on the arm of the chair. Dick was sitting on a low stool, the sole auditor of the master’s declamation. The old servitor was peeling onions from a dish between his knees; therefore, his tears of the moment were of questionable nature.

The caller stood for a time outside the open door of the room, averse to tempting the hazard of Flagg’s temper by an interruption of what seemed to be absorbing all the attention of the old man.

“‘My flesh and my skin hath he made old; he hath broken my bones. He hath builded against me, and compassed me with gall and travail. He hath set me in dark places as they that be dead of old. He hath hedged me about, that I cannot get out: he hath made my chain heavy.’”

Flagg halted and looked up from the page. “Lamentations—lamentations, Dick! The best of ’em have whined when the smash came. It’s human nature to let out a holler. Jeremiah did it. I’m in good company; it ain’t crying baby; it’s putting up a real man holler. It’s——”

Latisan stepped through the doorway.

Flagg instantly grabbed at a wooden spill that made a marker in the volume and nipped back the pages. He shook aloft his clinched left hand. He raised his voice and boomed. “‘And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’”

Flagg beat his knotted fist on the open page. “Do you hear that, Latisan? That’s for you. I hunted it up. I haven’t had time till now to read the Bible like I should. Plenty of good stuff in it—but in the Old Testament, mind you! Too much turn-your-cheek stuff in the New Testament. ’Eye for an eye.’ Do you know who said that?”

“No, sir. I’m sorry to admit it, but——”

“God Almighty said it. Said it to Moses on the mount. First straight-arm orders from God to man. It ought to be good enough for you and me, hadn’t it? Take it for rule o’ conduct, and if Rufe Craig says anything to you on the drive refer him here—to headquarters!” Again he beat his fist on the page.

“I don’t know what part of the Bible Craig ought to study, sir, but some of it ought to be good for him. I’m just from the train. They wouldn’t load our dynamite at the junction. Craig is behind that!”

“Wouldn’t haul our dynamite?” raged Flagg. “And he has been shipping his canned thunder through here for Skulltree by the carload! Latisan, you’re falling down on the job. When I, myself, was attending to it, my dynamite was loaded for Adonia all right enough!”

The drive master did not reply to that amazing shifting of blame to him.

“Did you say what ought to be said to that conductor?”

“When I started to say something he bawled me out for using that kind of language on railroad property.”

Flagg lifted the useless right hand with his left, let it fall again, and groaned. “How many times, and where, did you hit him? And then what did you say?”

“I did not hit him, sir. I said nothing more. And there was a lady present.”

Flagg choked and struggled with words before he could speak. “Do you mean to tell me you’re allowing any ladee”—he put exquisite inflection of sarcasm on the word—“to stand betwixt you and your duty, when that duty is plain? Latisan, they tell me that you’re a sapgag where women are concerned. I’m told that you have been down to the city and——”

“Mr. Flagg, we’ll stick to the subject of the dynamite!” broke in the young man, sharply.

“Women are the same thing and belong in the talk.”

“Then we’ll stick to the dynamite that comes in boxes.” Latisan was just as peremptory as the master and was hurrying his business; he felt the dog of the Latisan temperament slipping neck from the leash. “You may have been able to make ’em haul dynamite for you, in spite of the law. I can’t make ’em, it seems. I’m here merely to report, and to say that I’ll have the dynamite up from the junction just the same.” He started for the door.

“By tote team—three times the cost! My Gawd! why ain’t I out and around?” lamented the Adonia Jeremiah.

Latisan wanted to say that he would pay the extra cost of transportation out of his own pocket, if that would save argument, but he did not dare to trust himself. He hurried out of the big house and slammed the door.

On his way down the hill he was obliged to marshal a small host of reasons for hanging on to his job; the desire to quit then and there was looming large, potent, imperative.

He was still scowling when he tramped into the office of the tavern where many loafers were assembled. Through the haze of tobacco smoke he saw Martin Brophy beckoning, and went to the desk. Brophy ran his smutted finger along under a name; “Mrs. Dana Haines Everett, New York City.”

“She has been asking for you. Matter o’ business, she says. I’ve had to give her the front parlor for her room. Say, she’s the kind that gets what she goes after, I reckon. Is eating her supper served in there private. Never was done in my tavern before.”

“Business—with me?” demanded Latisan. “Brophy, what’s her own business in these parts?”

“Can’t seem to find out,” admitted the landlord, and the young man bestowed on Brophy an expansive grin which was a comment on the latter’s well-known penchant for gimleting in search of information. “Will say, however, that she’s a widder—grass if I ain’t much mistook—believes that a woman is equal to a man and should have all a man’s privileges about going around by her lonesome if she so feels.”

“Well, you seem to have extracted a fair amount of information, considering that she’s hardly got her feet planted.”

“Oh,” confessed Brophy, “it came out because I made her mad when I hinted that it was kind of queer for a woman to be traveling around alone up here. Well, now that they’re voting, you can look for ’most anything. What shall I tell her from you when I take in her pie?”

“I’ll wait on the lady after I eat my supper.”

When the drive master was ushered into the parlor-presence by the landlord, the lady was sitting in front of an open Franklin stove, smoking a cigarette. She had made a change in attire since her arrival, the new garb suggesting that she proposed to suit herself to the nature of the region to which she had come. She was in knickerbocker costume, had tipped back her chair, one foot on the hearth and the other foot propped on her knee, and she asked Latisan to sit down, pointing to a chair beside her. She offered a cigarette with a real masculine offhandedness. The caller faltered something about a pipe. She insisted that he smoke his pipe. “It rather puts strangers at their ease, don’t you think, a little tobacco haze in the room?”

Latisan, packing the bowl of his briar, agreed.

“I take it that you’re well acquainted with this region?”

“Fairly so, though I know the Tomah country better.”

“You’re a guide, I understand.”

“I don’t understand where you got that information, madam,” replied the drive master, a bit pricked.

“I don’t remember that anybody did tell me that in so many words. Somehow it was my impression. But no matter. Please listen a moment.” She smiled on him, checking his attempt at a statement regarding himself; she had conned her little speech and used her best vocabulary to impress this woodsman. “No doubt you have something very important in the way of occupation. A man of your bearing is bound to. You needn’t thank me for a compliment—I’m very frank. That’s the way to get on and accomplish things quickly. So I’m frank enough to say it’s my habit to meet men on the plane of man to man. Please do not regard me as a woman—that sort of stuff is old-fashioned in these days. I vote and pay taxes. Yet if I were merely a woman you gave evidence on the station platform to-day that you know how to protect one from insults. I was attracted by that trait in you—and afterwards minded your own business quite after my heart. I need outdoor life. I’m up here early for the first fishing. I want to tour the woods. I may invest in timberlands. Putting out of your mind all this foolish sex matter—as I have explained my man-to-man theory—will you go with me? I’ll have a cook, of course. Pardon my sudden reference to pay—I’ll pay you twice what you’re getting now—providing you’re working for wages.”

“I am working for wages. And I can’t leave the work.”

“What is it?”

“I’m the master of the Flagg drive on these waters.”

“And you prefer to boss rough men and endure hardship rather than to come with me?”

The bitterness of the last interview with Flagg was still with Latisan. “If it was a matter of preference—but that isn’t the way of it!” He returned her gaze and flushed. In spite of his resolve to go on with the battle that was ahead, he was tempted, and acknowledged to himself the fact; but Flagg was trying him cruelly.

“You have been the drive master here for a long time—that’s why you cannot be spared?” She tossed away her cigarette and gave him earnest attention.

“I’m just beginning my work with Flagg.”

“Then of course you’re not vital. Let the man who used to be master——”

“That was Flagg, himself. He’s laid up with paralysis.”

“Oh!” she drawled, provokingly. “A matter of conscientiousness—loyal devotion—champion of the weak—or a young man’s opportunity to be lord of all for the future!”

“He’s an old devil to work for, and the job promises no future,” blurted Latisan, his manner leaving no doubt as to his feelings.

“Then come with me,” she invited. “If I get to own timberlands, who knows?”

He shook his head. “There are reasons why I can’t quit—not this season.”

“I hoped I’d seem to you like a good and sufficient reason,” she returned, insinuatingly; in her anxiety to make a quick job of it, in her cynical estimate of men as she had been finding them out in the city, she was venturing to employ her usual methods as a temptress, naturally falling into the habit of past procedure.

She found it difficult to interpret the sudden look he gave her, but her perspicacity warned her that she was on the wrong tack with this man of the north country.

“I’m afraid you’re finding me a peculiar person, Mr. Latisan,” she hastened to say. “I am. I’m quick to judge and quick to decide. Your gallantry at the railroad station influenced me in your behalf. I like your manners. And I know now what’s in your mind! You think it will be very easy for me to find somebody else as a guide—and you’re quite sure that you can’t give up your responsibility for a woman’s whim.”

The drive master owned to himself that she had called the turn.

“I’ll continue with my frankness, Mr. Latisan. It’s rather more than a guide I’m looking for on that man-to-man plane I have mentioned. You can readily understand. I need good advice about land. Therefore, mine is not exactly a whim, any more than your present determination to go on with your job is a whim. This matter has come to us very suddenly. Suppose we think it over. We’ll have another talk. At any rate, you can advise me in regard to other men.”

She rose and extended her hand. “We can be very good friends, I trust.”

He took her hand in a warm clasp. “I’ll do what I can—be sure of that.”

“I feel very much alone all of a sudden. I’m depending on you. You’re not going back to the drive right away, are you?” she asked, anxiously.

“I’ll be held here for a day or so.” The matter of the dynamite was on his mind.

“Good!” she said, and patted his arm when he turned to leave the room.

CHAPTER TWELVE

LATISAN took the forenoon train down from Adonia to the junction the next day. He was keeping his own counsel about his intent.

He had done some busy thinking during the evening after he left the new star boarder in her parlor. In spite of his efforts to confine his attention, in his thoughts, to business, he could not keep his mind wholly off her attractive personality and her peculiar proposition. He was obliged to whip up his wrath in order to get solidly down to the Flagg affairs.

By the time he went to sleep he knew that he was determinedly ugly. There was the slur of Flagg about his slack efficiency in meeting the schemes of Craig. There was the ireful consciousness that the narrow-gauge folks were giving him a raw deal on that dynamite matter. They had hauled plenty of explosive for the Comas—for Craig. To admit at the outset of his career on the Noda that he could not get what the Three C’s folks were getting—to advertise his impotency by making a twenty-mile tote trip over slushy and rutted roads—was a mighty poor send-off as a boss, he told himself. He knew what sort of tattle would pursue him.

The stout young man—that “drummer”—was at the station. Latisan was uncomfortably conscious that this person had been displaying more or less interest in him. In the dining room at breakfast, in the office among the loafers, and now at the railroad station the stranger kept his eyes on Latisan.

The drive master was just as ugly as he had been when he went to sleep. He was keeping his temper on a wire edge for the purposes of the job of that day, as he had planned the affair. He did not go up to the impertinent drummer and cuff his ears, but the stranger did not know how narrowly he escaped that visitation of resentment.

The fellow remained on the platform when the train pulled out; it occurred to Latisan that the fresh individual maybe wished to make sure of a clear field in order to pursue his crude tactics with the lady of the parlor.

After the arrival at the junction Latisan had matters which gave him no time to ponder on the possible plight of the lady.

As he had ascertained by cautious inquiry, the crew of the narrow-gauge train left it on its spur track unattended while they ate at a boarding house. There were workmen in the yard of a lumber mill near the station, loafing after they had eaten their lunches from their pails. The Flagg dynamite was in a side-tracked freight car of the standard gauge. Latisan promptly learned that the lumber-yard chaps were ready and willing to earn a bit of change during their nooning. He grabbed in with them; the boxes of dynamite were soon transferred to the freight car of the narrow-gauge and stacked in one end of the car. Latisan paid off his crew and posted himself on top of the dynamite. In one hand he held a coupling pin; prominently displayed in the other hand was a fuse.

“I’m in here—the dynamite is here,” he informed the conductor when that official appeared at the door of the car, red-faced after hearing the news of the transfer. “I’m only demanding the same deal you have given the Three C’s. You know you’re wrong. Damn the law! I’m riding to Adonia with this freight. What’s that? Go ahead and bring on your train crew.” He brandished coupling pin and fuse. “If you push me too far you’ll have a week’s job picking up the splinters of this train.”

Bravado was not doing all the work for Latisan in that emergency. The conductor’s conscience was not entirely easy; he had made an exception in the case of the Three C’s—and Craig, attending to the matter before he went to New York, had borne down hard on the need of soft-pedal tactics. The conductor was not prepared to risk things with canned thunder in boxes and an explosive young man whose possession just then was nine points and a considerable fraction.

Latisan was left to himself.

At last the train from downcountry rumbled in, halted briefly, and went on its way. From his place in the end of the freight car Latisan could command only a narrow slice of outdoors through the open side door. Persons paraded past on their way to the coach of the narrow-gauge. He could see their backs only. There had been a thrill for him in the job he had just performed; he promptly got a new and more lively thrill even though he ridiculed his sensations a moment later. Among the heads of the arrivals he got a glimpse of an object for which he had stretched his neck and strained his eyes—the anxious soul of him in his eyes—on the street in New York City. He saw a green toque with a white quill.

As though a girl—such a girl as he judged her to be—would still be wearing the same hat, all those months later! But that hat and the very cock of the angle of the quill formed, in a way, the one especially vivid memory of his life. However, he had a vague, bachelor notion that women’s hats resembled their whims—often changed and never twice alike, and he based no hopes on what he had seen.

Whoever she was, she was on the train. But there were stations between the junction and Adonia—not villages, but the mouths of roads which led far into remote regions where a green toque could not be traced readily. He acutely desired to inform himself regarding the face under that hat. But he had made possession the full ten points of his law, sitting on that load of dynamite. What if he should allow that train crew an opening and give Echford Flagg complete confirmation of the report that his drive master was a sapgag with women?

After the intenseness of the thrill died out of him he smiled at the idea that a chance meeting in New York could be followed up in this fashion in the north country. At any rate, he had something with which to busy his thoughts during the slow drag of the train up to Adonia, and he was able to forget in some measure that he was sitting on dynamite and would face even more menacing explosives of another kind when the drive was on its way.

He posted himself in the side door of the car when the train rolled along beside the platform at Adonia. He had ordered men of the Flagg outfit to be at the station with sleds, waiting for the train; they were on hand, and he shouted to them, commanding them to load the boxes and start north.

There was a man displaying a badge on the platform—a deputy sheriff who had his eye out for bootleggers headed toward the driving crews; the conductor ran to the officer and reported that Latisan had broken the law relating to the transportation of explosives; the trainman proposed to shift the responsibility, anticipating that the sheriff might give official attention to the cargo.

Just then Latisan spied the green toque; the face was concealed because the head was bowed to enable the toque’s wearer to pick her way down the steps of the coach.

The drive master leaped from the door of the car and his men scrambled past him to enter.

“About that dynamite——”

Latisan elbowed aside the questioning sheriff, and looked straight past the officer. “If you go after me on that point you’ll have to go after Craig and the Three C’s, too—and I’ll put the thing up to the county attorney myself. Right now I’m busy.”

The men were lugging out the boxes. “If anybody gets in your way, boys, drop a box on his toes,” he shouted, starting up the platform.

“Leave it to us, Mr. Latisan,” bawled one of the crew.

The drive master had his eyes on the girl who was walking ahead of him. He could hardly believe that the voicing of his name attracted her attention. She did not know his name! But she stopped and whirled about and stared at him.

It was surely the girl of the cafeteria!

She plainly shared Latisan’s amazement, but there was in her demeanor something more than the frank astonishment which was actuating him.

He pulled off his cap and hurried to her and put out his hand. “I saw you—I mean I saw your hat. I thought it might be you—but I looked for you in New York—for that hat——” He knew he was making a fool of himself by his excitement and incoherence. “I have been thinking about you——” He was able to check himself, for her eyes were showing surprise of another sort. Her manner suggested to Latisan that she, at any rate, had not been thinking especially about him during the months. She had recovered her composure.

“It is not surprising about the hat, Mr.—I believe I heard somebody call your name—Mr. Latisan?” There was an inflection of polite query, and he bowed. “My sarcastic friends are very explicit about this hat serving as my identifier.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t know anything about girls’ hats. But to see you away up here——”

She forced a flicker of a smile.

“It seems quite natural to find you here in the woods, though I believe you did tell me that your home is over Tomah way.”

He was not able to understand the strange expression on her countenance. And she, on her part, was not able to look at him with complete composure; she remembered the character given to this man by Craig, and she had ventured to give him something else in her report—the swagger of a roué and a black mustache!

There was an awkward moment and he put his cap back on his head. He looked about as if wondering if she expected friends. He had treasured every word of hers in the cafeteria. She had spoken of the woods as if her home had been there at one time.

“I’m not expecting anybody to meet me—here—to-day,” she informed him, understanding his side glances. She was showing incertitude, uneasiness—as if she were slipping back into a former mood after the prick of her surprise. “There’s a hotel here, I suppose.”

He took her traveling case from her hand, muttering a proffer to assist her. They walked away together. For the second time the loafers at Adonia saw Latisan escorting a strange woman along the street, and this one, also, was patently from the city, in spite of her modest attire.

“Seems to be doing quite a wholesale business, importing dynamite and wimmen,” observed a cynic.

“According to the stories in Tomah, he has put in quite a lot of time looking over the market in regard to that last-named,” agreed another detractor.

“And when Eck Flagg gets the news I’d rather take my chances with the dynamite than with the wimmen,” stated the cynic.

“I guess I talked to you like an idiot at first,” said Latisan, when he and his companion were apart from the persons on the station platform. “I’m getting control of my surprise. I remember you told me you were homesick for the woods. That’s why you’re up here, I suppose.”

“It’s one reason, Mr. Latisan.”

“I’m sorry it isn’t a better time of year. I’d like to—to—If you aren’t going to be tied up too much with friends, I could show you around a little. But right now I’m tied up, myself. I’m drive master for Echford Flagg—you remember about speaking of him.”

“Yes; but I shall not trouble Mr. Flagg,” she hastened to say. “He will not be interested in me simply on account of my friends. You are very busy on the drive, are you?” she questioned, earnestly.

“Oh yes. I’ve got to start for headwaters in the morning.” There was doleful regret in his tones.

He was rather surprised to find so much pleased animation in her face; truly, this girl from the city acted as if she were delighted by the news of his going away; she even seemed to be confessing it. “I’m glad!” she cried. Then she smoothed matters after a glance at his grieved and puzzled face. “I’m glad to hear a man say that he’s devoted to his work. So many these days don’t seem to take any interest in what they’re doing—they only talk wages. Yours must be a wonderful work—on the river—the excitement and all!”

“Yes,” he admitted, without enthusiasm.

The street was muddy and they went slowly; he hung back as if he wanted to drag out the moments of their new companionship.

He cast about for a topic; he did not feel like expatiating on the prospects ahead of him in his work. “If you’re going to make much of a stop here——”

She did not take advantage of his pause; he hoped she would indicate the proposed length of her stay, and he was worrying himself into a panic for fear she would not be in Adonia on his next visit to report to Flagg.

“I wish we had a better hotel here, so that you’d stay all contented for a time—and—and enjoy the country hereabouts.”

“Isn’t the hotel a fit place for a woman who is unaccompanied?”

“Oh, that isn’t it! It’s the slack way Brophy runs it. The help question! Martin does the best he knows how, but he finds it hard to keep table girls here in the woods. Has to keep falling back on his nephew, and the nephew isn’t interested in the waiter job. Wants to follow his regular line.”

“And what’s that?” she asked, holding to a safe topic.

“Running Dave’s stable. Nephew says the horses can’t talk back.”

She stopped and faced him. “Do you think the landlord would hire me as a waitress?” She had come to Adonia in haste, leaving her plans to hazard. Now she was obeying sudden inspiration.

If she had slapped him across the face she could not have provoked more astonishment and dismay than his countenance showed.

“I have done much waiting at tables.” She grimly reflected on the cafés where she had sought the most for her money. “I’m not ashamed to confess it.”

He stammered before he was able to control his voice. “It isn’t that. You ought to be proud to work. I mean I’m glad—no, what I mean is I don’t understand why—why——”

“Why I have come away up here for such a job?”

“I haven’t the grit to ask any questions of you!” he confessed, plaintively, his memory poignant on that point.

The stout “drummer” had been trailing them from the station. When they halted he passed them slowly, staring wide-eyed at the girl, asking her amazed questions with his gaze. She flung the Vose-Mern operative a look of real fury; she had come north in a fighting mood.

“I have left the city to escape just such men as that—men who aren’t willing to let a girl have a square chance. I lost my last position because I slapped a cheap insulter’s face in a hotel dining hall.” She looked over Latisan’s head when she twisted the truth. “I came north, to the woods, just as far as that railroad would take me. I hate a city!” Then she looked straight at him, and there was a ring of sincerity in her tone. “I’m glad to be where those are!” She pointed to the trees which thatched the slopes of the hills.

“You’re speaking of friends of mine!”

They had stopped, facing each other. Crowley, lashed by looks from the girl and Latisan, had hurried on toward the tavern.

Lida knew that the drive master was having hard work to digest the information she had given him.

“They are standing up straight and are honest old chaps,” he went on. He was looking into her eyes and his calm voice had a musing tone. “I like to call them my friends.”

He was trying hard to down the queer notions that were popping up. He would not admit that he was suspecting this girl of deceit. But she was so manifestly not what she claimed that she was! Still, there were reverses that might——

“I am alone in a strange land—nobody to back my word about myself. I must call on a reliable witness. You know the witness.” She put up her hand and touched her hat. Then came laughter—first from her and then from Latisan—to relieve the situation. “You saw me wearing it more than six months ago. What better proof of my humble position in life do you want?”

“I don’t dare to tell you what you ought to be, Miss——”

“Patsy Jones,” she returned, glibly; his quest for her name could not be disregarded.

“But what you are right now is good enough because it’s honest work.”

“Do you think I can get the job?”

“I am a witness of Martin Brophy’s standing offer to give one thousand dollars for a table girl who won’t get homesick or get married.”

“Take me in and collect the reward, Mr. Latisan. I’m a safe proposition, both ways.”

“I hope not!” he blurted—and then marched on with the red flooding beneath his tan.

And though he strove to put all his belief in her word about herself, he was conscious of a persistent doubt, and was angered by it.

“If you please, I’ll do the talking to Mr. Brophy—is that his name?—when we reach the hotel,” said the girl. “You really do not know me.” There was a flash of honesty, she felt, in that statement, and she wanted to be as honest as she could—not wholly a compound of lies in her new rôle. “It might seem queer, my presenting myself under your indorsement, as if we had been acquainted somewhere else. Gossip up here is easily started, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

He surrendered her bag to her at the porch, as if his services had been merely the cursory politeness of one who was traveling her way. It was in Latisan’s mind to go along to the big house on the ledges and inform Flagg what had been done that day, and glory in the boast that there was a new man in the region who could make a way for himself in spite of Flagg’s opinions as to the prowess of an old man.

Latisan was feeling strangely exhilarated. She had come there to stay! Martin Brophy was in the desperate state of need to chain a girl like that one to a table leg in his desire to keep her. And she had announced her own feelings in the matter! She was in the Noda—the girl who had stepped out of his life never to enter it again, so he had feared in his lonely ponderings. He was in the mood of a real man at last! He was resolved to take no more of Echford Flagg’s contumely. He was heartsick at the thought of starting north and leaving her in the tavern, to be the object of attentions such as that cheap drummer man bestowed when he passed them on the street.

The plea of the lady of the tavern parlor had made merely a ripple in his resolves. He had not thought of her or her proposition during that busy day.

Now he was wondering whether the fight for Flagg—the struggle against Craig, even for vengeance, was worth while.

Lida was having no difficulty in locating the landlord. He stood just beyond the dining-room door and was proclaiming that he was the boss and was shaking his fist under the nose of a surly youth who had allowed several dishes to slide off a tray and smash on the floor.

“Do you want to hire a waitress from the city?” she demanded.

“You bet a tin dipper I do,” snapped back Brophy.

“I’m ready to begin work at once. If you’ll show me my room——”

“You go up one flight, by them stairs there, and you pick out the best room you can find—the one that suits you! That’s how much I’m willing to cater to a city waitress. And you needn’t worry about wages.”

“I shall not worry, sir.” She hurried up the stairs.

The hostler-waiter slammed down the tray with an ejaculation of thankfulness. Brophy picked up the tray and banged it over the youth’s head. “You ain’t done with the hash-wrassling till she has got her feet placed. Sweep up that litter, stand by to do the heavy lugging, and take your orders from her and cater to her—cater!”

Latisan, lingering on the porch, had hearkened and observed. He caught a glimpse of himself in the dingy glass of the door. He scrubbed his hand doubtfully over his beard. Then he turned and hurried away.

The single barber shop of Adonia was only a few yards from the door of the tavern. There was one chair in the corner of a pool room.

Latisan overtook a man in the doorway and yanked him back and entered ahead.

“I’m next!” shouted the supplanted individual.

“Yes, after me!” declared Latisan, grimly. He threw himself into the chair. “Shave and trim! Quick!”

The barber propped his hands on his hips. “What’s the newfangled idea of shedding whiskers before the drive is down?”

“Shave!” roared Latisan. “And if you’re more than five minutes on the job I’ll carve my initials in you with your razor.”

So constantly did he apostrophize the barber to hurry, wagging a restless jaw, that blood oozed from several nicks when the beard had been removed.

“I’ve got a pride in my profession, just the same as you have in your job,” stormed the barber when Latisan refused to wait for treatment for the cuts. “And I don’t propose to have you racing out onto the streets——”

But the drive master was away, obsessed by visions of that fresh drummer presuming further in his tactics with the new waitress. The barber, stung to defense of his art, grabbed a towel and a piece of alum and pursued Latisan along the highway and into the tavern office, cornered the raging drive master, and insisted on removing the evidences which publicly discredited good workmanship. The affair was in the nature of a small riot.

The guests who were at table in the dining room stared through the doorway with interest. The new waitress, already on her job, gave the affair her amused attention. Especially absorbed was the sullen youth who halted in the middle of the room, holding a loaded tray above his head. In his abstraction he allowed the tray to tip, and the dishes rained down over Crowley, who was seated directly under the edge of the tray.

Latisan strode in and took his seat at the small table with the city stranger while Brophy was mopping the guest off; the city chap had received his food on his head and in his lap.

The waitress came and stood demurely at one side, meeting the flaming gaze of the Vose-Mern man with a look that eloquently expressed her emotions. “Shall I repeat the order?”

“Don’t be fresh!” snarled Crowley.

Latisan rapped his knuckles on the table warningly. “Be careful how you talk to this lady!”

“What have you got to say about it?” The stout chap started to rise.

But Latisan was up first. He leaned over and set his big hand, fingers outspread like stiff prongs, upon the man’s head, and twisted the caput to and fro; then he drove the operative down with a thump in his chair. “This is what I’ve got to say! Remember that she is a lady, and treat her accordingly, or I’ll twist off your head and take it downstreet and sell it to the bowling-alley man.”

It was plain that the girl was finding a piquant relish in the affair.

From the moment when she came down the stairs and took the white apron which Brophy handed to her she had ceased to be the city-wearied girl. It was homely adventure, to be sure, but the very plainness of it, in the free-and-easy environment of the north woods, appealed to her sense of novelty. There was especial zest for her in this bullyragging of Crowley by the man who was to be victim of the machinations by the Vose-Mern agency. Her eyes revealed her thoughts. The city man opened his mouth. He promptly shut it and turned sideways in his chair, his back to Latisan. Detective Crowley was enmeshed in a mystery which he could not solve just then. What was the confidential secretary doing up there?

The girl smiled down on her champion—an expansive, charming, warming smile. “I thank you! What will you have?”

She surveyed his face with concern; his countenance was working with emotion. In her new interest, she noted more particularly than in the New York cafeteria, that he apparently was, in spite of what Craig had said, a big, wholesome, naïve chap who confessed to her by his eyes, then and there, that he was honestly and respectfully surrendering his heart to her, short though the acquaintance had been, and she was thrilled by that knowledge. She was not responding to this new appeal, she was sure, but she was gratified because the man was showing her by his eyes that he was her slave, not merely a presumptuous conquest of the moment, after the precipitate manner of more sophisticated males.

She repeated her question.

It was evident enough what Latisan wanted at that moment, but he had not the courage to voice his wishes in regard to her; he had not enough self-possession left to state his actual desires as to food, even. There was one staple dish of the drive; he was heartily sick of that food, but he could not think of anything else right then.

“Bub—bub—beans!” he stuttered.

She hurried away.

When she returned with her tray she did not interrupt any conversation between the two men at the little table; the Vose-Mern man still had his back turned on Latisan; the drive master sat bolt upright in a prim attitude which suggested a sort of juvenile desire to mind his manners.

The girl’s eyes were still alight with the spirit of jest. She placed steak and potatoes and other edibles in front of Latisan. She gave the gentleman from the agency a big bowl of beans.

“I didn’t order those!”

“I’m sorry, sir. I must have got my orders mixed.”

“You have! You’ve given that”—he stopped short of applying any epithet to Latisan—“you’ve given him my order!”

“Won’t you try our beans—just once? The cook tells me they were baked in the ground, woodman style.”

“Then give ’em to the woodsmen—it’s the kind of fodder that’s fit for ’em.”

Latisan leaned across the table and tugged Crowley’s sleeve. “Look me in the eye, my friend!” The man who was exhorted found the narrowed, hard eyes very effective in a monitory way. “I don’t care what you eat, as a general thing. But you have just slurred woodsmen and have stuck up your nose at the main grub stand-by of the drive. You’re going to eat those beans this lady has very kindly brought. If you don’t eat ’em, starting in mighty sudden, I’ll pick up that bowl and tip it over and crown you with it, beans and all. Because I’m speaking low isn’t any sign I don’t mean what I say!”

The beans were steaming under the stout man’s nose. He decided that the heat would be better in his stomach than on the top of his head; he had just had one meal served that way. He devoured the beans and marched out of the dining room, his way taking him past the sideboard where the new waitress was skillfully arranging glasses after methods entirely different from those of the sullen youth.

“Don’t jazz the game any more—not with me,” growled Crowley, fury in his manner. “And I want to see you in private.”

She stiffened, facing him. She knew that Latisan’s earnest eyes were on her. She assumed the demeanor of a girl who was resentfully able to take care of herself, playing a part for the benefit of the drive master. “Attend strictly to your end of the program, Crowley!”

“What do you mean—my end?”

“Protecting me from insults by these rough woodsmen. I suppose you are doing the same for Miss Elsham.” Her irony was biting. He scowled and put his face close to hers.

“If you’re up here on the job—it’s not a lark. It’s a case of he-men in these parts. If you’re not careful you’ll start something you can’t stop.”

“Keep away from me. They’re watching us. You’re bungling your part wretchedly. Can’t you understand that I’m on the case, too?”

She had planned her action, forestalling possibilities as well as she was able. She was determined to be bold, trusting to events as they developed.

“You will kindly remember that I’m on this case along with you, and you can’t make me jump through hoops!” Crowley, fresh from the city, narrow in his urban conceit, was seeing red because of a petty humiliation he had suffered in public.

Another man was seeing red for a different reason. Latisan strode across the room, nabbed Crowley by the ear, and led him into the tavern office, where the aching ear was twisted until the city man subsided into a chair.

The girl appraised at its full value the rancor that was developing in the Vose-Mern operative; his glaring eyes were accusing her.

But the adoring eyes of Latisan promised really more complicated trouble for her.

It was borne in on her that there were dangerous possibilities in the frank atmosphere of the north woods. Lida had the poignant feeling of being very much alone just then—and she was afraid!

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SUPPERS were always over with early in Adonia. The red west was banded with half on hour’s April daylight when the new waitress finished her work. She hurried up to her room; she locked her door with the panic-stricken air of one who desires to shut out danger.

She was in no mood to question the worthiness of the impulse which had sent her into the north, but she was realizing in fuller measure the difficulties with which she must deal. In the dining room she had felt recklessly intrepid and the utter mystification of Buck Crowley had amused her. But she had had plenty of opportunity in her Vose-Mern work to know the nature of Crowley—he had the shell of an alligator and the scruples of a viper and would double-cross a twin brother if the project could help the fortunes of Buck himself.

Once more she admitted that she was afraid. It was if she had touched levers and had started machinery which she could not stop; she had launched two men at each other and had observed the first ominous clinches—and Crowley had warned her that she was in the region of “he-men.” But Crowley was not of a sort to use the manly weapons of the frank fighters of the north.

With the sense of hiding away from impending trouble, sorry for her share in starting it, she sat by the window, put her forehead on her arms, wept weakly, and told herself that she was a very poor article of a heroine.

However, the sunset soothed and invited her when she wiped her eyes. She beheld the honest outdoors of the forest country. She was hungry for those open places of earth. She knew that her resolution was ebbing the longer she hid herself in that hole of a room, like a terrified animal. She put on a hat and a wrap and started out.

She was perfectly well aware of the gantlet she must run.

Crowley was patrolling the porch; she issued from a side door of the tavern, but she was obliged to pass him in order to get into the street. His high sign to her was peremptory and unmistakable—Mr. Crowley had business with her! Right then, in spite of her planned intent to bluff out the situation just as long as she could at that distance from Mern, she was not in a state of mind to meet Crowley.

She heard steps behind her and was accosted, but her frown of apprehensiveness became a smile of welcome when she turned and beheld Latisan; the welcome was not so much from interest in Latisan as from the sense that she would have a respite from Crowley.

“If you’re going to look the place over, won’t you allow me to go along?” he pleaded. “I’ll follow behind like a terrier, if you tell me to. I want to keep you from being bothered by anybody.”

She showed concern and looked about her.

“Oh, by that cheap drummer, I mean. You needn’t ever be afraid of woodsmen up here. I was watching him when you came out. If it wasn’t for starting a lot of tattle I’d beat him up on the street.”

“Really, you’d better come along with me, Mr. Latisan, out of the reach of any such temptation.”

“Perhaps you’d like to get a view of the falls from the best point,” he suggested, as they walked on.

When they turned into a path and disappeared from Crowley’s ken the latter buttoned his coat and started leisurely on their trail.

On the edge of the gorge there was a niche in the cliff, a natural seat padded with moss. Latisan led her to the spot. He did not indulge his longing to sit beside her; he stood at a little distance, respectfully, and allowed her to think her thoughts. Those thoughts and her memories were very busy just then; she was glad because the everlasting diapason of the falls made conversation difficult.

Until then, in her reflections, she had been considering Ward Latisan merely as her stricken grandfather’s staff of hope, an aid so essential that the Comas had determined to eliminate him. She surveyed him as he stood there in his own and fitting milieu and found him reassuringly stalwart as a dependable champion.

Alone with him, making estimate with her eyes and her understanding, she was conscious that her first surprise at sight of the real Latisan was giving way to deepening interest.

She reflected again on the character which had been given this man by Rufus Craig, and remembered more vividly what she had written about him for the guidance of the Vose-Mern agency.

There must be something wrong in Craig’s estimate! She felt that she had an eye of her own for qualities in a man, and this man’s clean sincerity had impressed her in their first meeting in the New York cafeteria.

He turned from his survey of the waters and met her gaze. “I was pretty much flustered that day in New York, Miss Jones. I was more so to-day at the railroad station. I don’t know how to act with girls very well,” he confessed naïvely. “I want to say something right here and now. There are mean stories going the rounds about me up in this country. I’m afraid you’ll hear some of them. I don’t want you—I don’t want everybody to think I’m what they are trying to make out I am—they lied over Tomah way to hurt me in business. But perhaps you don’t care one way or the other,” he probed, wistfully.

He found encouragement in her expression and went on. “I was away at Tech, taking a special course, and they lied about me. I was trying to make something more of myself than just a lumberjack. And I thought there was a chance for me to help things on the Tomah after I learned something about engineering. I was doing my best, that’s all, and the liars saw their opening and took it. If you hear the stories I hope you won’t believe them.”

Hastily she looked away from his earnest and imploring eyes and gave her attention to the turbid freshet flood, shredded into a yellow and yeasty riot of waters.

Her recollection of childhood became clearer now that she was back beside the cataract which was linked with all her early memories. He did not venture to disturb her with more talk.

She remained there until the chill from the air and the mist from the falling waters and the growing dusk warned her.

They were back at the edge of the village street before he spoke again. “The falls are pretty wild now; they’re beautiful in the summer when the water is low. When I was a boy I footed it over here from the Tomah a few times and sat in that niche and listened to the song the waters seemed to sing. It was worth the long hike. Being there just now brought back something I’d almost forgotten. One day the waters sung me to sleep and when I woke up there was a little girl dancing in front of me and pointing her finger, and I looked at myself and saw she had made a chain of daisies and hung it around my neck and had stuck clover blooms all over me. And when she saw that I was awake she scampered off with some other children. Queer how the funny little thoughts like that pop up in a person’s mind!”

Fresh from the scene, softened by her ponderings, Lida felt the surge of an impulse to tell him that the same memory had come to her while she sat in the niche. She was the child who had made the daisy chain—who had been bolder than the other children in approaching the sleeping stranger. And she was not ready to agree with him that the memory was “queer.” She wished she could confess her identity to him right then, because the confession would enable her to bring up a topic which had been interesting her very much—how personalities, meeting as strangers, often prompt each other through subtle psychic qualities of past association; there were instances in the books she had read where persons claimed to have recognized each other from past incarnations; but Lida did not believe that stuff, she had told herself. As to the mutual remembrance of the daisy chain—that was different—it seemed quite natural. She could remember just how comically that boy’s nose twitched when she was waking him up with a buttercup blossom.

Latisan was conscious of a queer unwillingness to have her leave him. He wondered what excuse he could offer to prolong the companionship of the evening. He wanted to link up her affairs with his in some way, if he could—that there might be something in common between them. To solicit her aid—her counsel; it is the first hankering of a man in his striving toward a woman’s favor.

In this case, the drive master, desperately casting about for an excuse, was guilty of something like an enormity in venturesomeness. His own business was calling him to the big house on the ledges; in his new state of softened spirit he was dreading any run-in with Echford Flagg. Perhaps gossip had already carried to Flagg the reason why the drive master had not hastened to report about the dynamite victory. To exhibit the actual reason for the delay, in her own winning person, seemed a very proper thing to do according to Latisan’s clouded judgment of the moment.

“Let me tell you!” he urged. “I’ve got to run up to Flagg’s on business. You’ll have something to talk to him about—those friends——”

“No, no!” She hurried on toward the tavern.

He ventured to clasp her arm, detaining her. “He’s a poor, sick old man. A little talk with you will do him good.”

Her memory was vivid. “But you told me in New York that he won’t have a woman near his house.”

“He’s different nowadays,” persisted Latisan. “He’s sick and it will be a treat for him to have a girl say some kind words. I want him to meet you——”

But she shook off his hand and resolutely kept on her way. “I must go in. I’m tired after my long journey—and my work.” There were loafers in front of the tavern. “I’m very much obliged to you, Mr. Latisan,” she called so that all could hear, “for your kindness in showing me the way to the falls. Good night!” She disappeared.

There was nothing for Latisan to do but to brave the old tiger of the big house alone. Outside of his desire to keep her with him as long as possible, he had wanted her to go along into the presence of Flagg as a guaranty of the peace; he did not believe that Flagg would launch invective in the hearing of the girl; furthermore, Latisan was conscious of a proud anxiety to exhibit her.

Flagg tipped the shade of the lamp so that Latisan’s face was illuminated when the drive master was in the room.

“Shaved!” snorted the tyrant. “All duded up and beauing around a table girl. I know all about it. Latisan, you——”

“Just a moment, Mr. Flagg!”

“Shaved, right in the start of the driving season! Shut up! I can see what’s happening. I heard you had brought the dynamite. But somebody else told me. Yes, told me other news! I can’t depend on you any longer to bring me reports. But you’re planting something worse than dynamite under yourself. Parading a girl and keeping me waiting and——”

“Let me warn you, sir. Only my pride in doing a job I have set out to do is keeping me on with you. If you insult that young lady by another word I’ll quit you cold, here and now!”

There was a moment of silence.

Rickety Dick, sitting on his stool with a cat in his arms, wriggled as uneasily as did the cat, who had been alarmed by the high voices.

“Talk about dynamite being dangerous!” muttered Flagg. “There’s something else——”

But when he looked into Latisan’s countenance he lowered the shade of the lamp and did not state what the something else was.

“If you know about the dynamite, sir, there’s no need of my saying anything. It’s on its way north. I shall start for headwaters at daybreak. I’ll be down to report as soon as possible.”

“When you get up on the drive, you stay there, Latisan.”

“It’s my pledged word that I must report to you in person. You insisted on it. I don’t propose to give you any chance for come-backs. I shall report, Mr. Flagg.”

He walked out.

Soon he heard the pattering of feet behind him on the ledges and he was hailed cautiously by the quavering voice of old Dick.

“Who is she, Mr. Latisan? Who is that girl?” panted Dick; “I saw her when she walked with you. I was side of the road.”

“And ran and tattled to Flagg, eh?”

“No—no, sir! It was old Dempsey who came and gossiped. But what’s her name?”

“Patsy Jones.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure because she told me so,” retorted the drive master. “Her word goes with me.”

“But—but——”

“But what?” Latisan’s manner was ominous.

“Of course she knows who she is,” faltered old Dick. “And my eyesight ain’t clear—and it was a long time ago—and my memory ain’t good, of course, and——”

“And your wits don’t seem to be of the best, either,” snapped the young man. “You and Flagg better keep your tongues off that young lady. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mr. Latisan. Yes, sir!”

Latisan stepped back and took hold of Dick by the sleeve of the ragged jacket. “Who did you think she was?”

“I guess I didn’t really think—I only dreamed,” was the old man’s stammering reply. “If you say she’s Patsy Jones that’s enough for me.”

“She says that she is—and that makes it so.” Latisan strode on his way.

Rickety Dick lifted his arms, then he lowered them without his “Praise the Lord!”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CROWLEY, shrouded in the evening gloom, tapped on the parlor window the signal tattoo agreed upon between himself and Miss Elsham. The light in the parlor went out promptly and she came and replied to Crowley under the edge of the lifted sash. She had been apprised by her associate of the advent of Miss Kennard on the scene; Crowley had hastened to slip a note under her door.

“You saw ’em start for a walk, did you? Well, you saw me follow ’em, then. Chased ’em to the edge of the falls and hid.”

“What sort of talk is she giving him?”

“Talk! I couldn’t hear. I don’t like water, anyway. I like it less when it bangs down over rocks and stops me from hearing what I want to hear.”

“What does she tell you?”

“She has only shot a few words at me like beans out of an air gun. Claims she’s here on the case.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t dare to tell her that I don’t believe it—considering the way she stands in with Mern. It may be his afterthought—he’s a bird that flies funny sometimes, you know.”

“Leave her to me; I’ll dredge her to-morrow.”

“That’ll be good dope; she’ll have to bring in your meals as soon as you give orders to Brophy.”

“They’ll have to be snappy orders to make him stop bringing ’em himself,” said Miss Elsham. “The old fool stood around while I was eating supper and told me how much money he has saved and how lonesome he is since his wife died. I have told him to send Latisan to me this evening on a matter of business, no matter how late Latisan comes in. He’s too jealous to give the word, I do believe.”

“I can’t understand the hang of it—her grabbing him so quick,” lamented Crowley. “It’s a devil of a note when we have to take time off the main job to detect out a mystery right in our own concern! What are you going to say about her when you write up your report to-night?”

He was referring to the inviolable rule of the Vose-Mern office that a daily report must be made by each operative.

“Nothing, Buck. Let’s tread easy. We may seem to be trying to tell Mern his business. She’s here and he must be perfectly well aware that she’s here. Don’t you write anything in your report. Leave her to me.”

“All right! You handle it.”

Then Crowley departed and sat down in his room and put into his report a full statement about Miss Kennard’s arrival and actions and his own activity in regard to her. Crowley had elaborate ideas about the art of double-crossing everybody, even his associates in the agency. He figured that it could not hurt anything to give Mern a full report on all matters; and if there was anything peculiar in Kennard’s presence there, Crowley’s assiduity would contrast to his credit and shame Elsham’s negligence. He had frequently made good hits by cajoling fellow operatives to suppress certain matters which he had then reported to his advantage with Mern. And Elsham, in this case, was claiming to be in charge, making him only the watchdog of her safety.

Crowley growled derogatory comments on her temptress qualities when he peered past the edge of his curtain in the morning and looked down on Latisan mounting into his jumper seat. The young man did not seem to be in an amiable or a confident state of mind, and his plain dolor comforted Crowley somewhat, even though Latisan was going back to the drive.

The drive master had not been able to see Miss Patsy Jones that morning, as he had hoped; he had no excuse to hang around the tavern till she did appear. Brophy served the breakfast; he declared that he was going to hang on to that table girl if good treatment could prevail, and he was never going to ask her to wait on early breakfasters.

Crowley got additional comfort out of Latisan’s loud proclamation that he would be down in Adonia again very soon. The drive master seemed to be striving to draw somebody’s attention to that fact. He cast looks behind him at the upper windows of the tavern when he drove away.

That day, according to the plans he had made in New York, Mr. Crowley took pains to give himself an occupation in Adonia; loafers who were not bashful were quizzing him about the nature of his business up there.

The barber had one corner of the village pool room; Crowley made a trade to occupy another corner. He opened up a case of cheap jewelry and traded it by day and raffled it evenings; he was not molested in his sporting propositions, as he called the procedure, after he had arranged a private talk with the deputy sheriff. Crowley, with his fancy waistcoat and his tip-tilted hat, fitted the rôle he was playing. He was right in the path of all the gossip that traveled to and fro; therefore, the rôle suited his needs.

His nightly conferences with Miss Elsham at the parlor window were not pleasant; Miss Elsham was not in a state of mind which conduced to cordial relations.

She had not been able to “dredge” Miss Kennard. That young lady waited on Miss Elsham, but not with a tray. After a talk with Brophy, who agreed with her absolutely and placatingly, begging her to suit herself in all her acts provided she would stay on, Miss Kennard went into the parlor, closed the door carefully, and told Miss Elsham where that young woman got off as an exacting lady of leisure. “Mr. Mern would not allow it—one operative doing menial work for another. If you choose to come into the dining room, that’s different.”

Miss Kennard then turned and walked out. She refused to stay with Miss Elsham and have a talk. “We are ordered to be very careful up here,” she reminded the operative. Miss Elsham was impressed. It was as if Mern were sending new cautions by this latest arrival.

Miss Kennard, in her dabblings in psychoanalysis, had secured some concrete aids for action in addition to the vague abstractions which had come into her mind when Latisan had so naïvely confessed on the cliff above the cataract. She understood fully the potency of a suggestion which left a lot to the imagination of the other party; only a bit of a suggestion is needed—and it must be left to itself, like yeast, to induce fermentation. For that reason Miss Kennard abruptly walked out and left Miss Elsham alone to reflect—not running away, but retiring with the air of one who had said a sufficient number of words to the wise.

Miss Elsham, in her conference at the window with Crowley that evening, revealed how actively her batch of ponderings had been set to working by that bit of suggestion. Crowley, listening, wished privately that he could call back that report to Mern; Mern had repeatedly warned him to keep to his place as a strong-arm operative, bluntly bearing down on the fact that Crowley’s brains were not suited for the finer points of machination. According to Miss Elsham’s figuring—and Crowley acknowledged her innate brightness—the plot had thickened and Kennard, known to all operatives as Mern’s close confidant, was up there as chief performer.

Several days elapsed before Crowley—perspiring whenever his worries assailed him—got any word from Mern. The chief wrote guardedly, and Crowley read the letter over a dozen times without being exactly sure just what course he was to pursue. The truth was, Mr. Mern himself was doing so much guessing as to Miss Kennard that he was in no state of mind to give clean-cut commands.

Crowley’s letter was the first intimation to the chief of the whereabouts of his confidential secretary. She had not resigned, nor had she asked for a leave of absence, nor had she bothered to write or telephone; she did not show up at the office—that was all!

Lida, having discarded ethics, had decided to play her game from an ambuscade, just as the Vose-Mern agency did its business.

To give any information to the foes of Echford Flagg would be giving odds—and she was working single-handed and deserved odds for herself. She resolved to make her game as peculiar as possible—to keep all of them guessing—to oblige them to take the initiative against her if they should find out the secret of her strange actions. The element of time entered largely into her calculations: every day on which she stood between them and Ward Latisan—every day that he devoted to the drive—was a day to be charged to her side of the ledger; and there are not many days in the driving season when the waters are high and the river is rushing.

A keener mind than Crowley’s would have detected in Mern’s letter all the chief’s inability to understand. What Crowley did get from the letter was the conviction that Miss Kennard was not to be molested at that time. Mern made that clear, though he was vague on other points. The chief was wondering whether excess of zeal might be the reason for Miss Kennard’s amazing performance. He remembered certain hints which she had dropped as to her financial needs, and she had not seemed averse when he had told her on occasions that he thought of giving her a commission when the right kind of a case came along. To turn a trick for a rich corporation—working alone so that she might claim full credit—undoubtedly had appealed to her as her great opportunity, Mern reflected, and she had set off on her own hook, fearful that he would not alter the arrangements he had made. He was angry; he muttered oaths as he weighed the situation. But he did not put any of his anger into his letter to Crowley. Miss Kennard knew too much about the general inner workings of the agency! In this new case there was specifically a five-thousand-dollar net fee in case Latisan could be eliminated and his crew left to the mercies of Comas bluster and cash. Miss Kennard, if unduly molested, could say two words in the north country and put that contingent fee into limbo.

Therefore, Chief Mern was treading softly at first.

But from the letter which treated the general situation so gingerly the strong-arm operative extracted one solid and convincing command. He was to watch Miss Kennard. The command seemed entirely natural. Had he not been sent up there to watch—or watch over—no matter which—Miss Elsham? His instructions in regard to Miss Kennard seemed to make her a particularly valuable person in the Vose-Mern plans. He was not to allow anything to interfere with his watching of Miss Kennard, not even for the sake of Miss Elsham. He was to observe every movement, catch every word, if possible, mark every detail of Miss Kennard’s operations.

Crowley did not show the letter to Miss Elsham, nor did he speak of it. He would mortally offend her by revealing his double-crossing tactics; as a woman she would be more offended by being relegated to the background in favor of the newcomer.

Crowley found his espionage an easy job at first. All he had to report to Mern for three or four days was that “Patsy Jones” did her work in the hotel and remained in her room till after dark—and then went out and strolled aimlessly. She would not talk with Crowley when he grasped at opportunities to speak to her on her walks. She reminded him that fellow operatives must be careful; furthermore, scandal might oblige her to abandon her job; he would be responsible if he insisted on dogging her about the village.

However, Crowley was able, a few days later, to slip her a letter from Mern; the chief had inclosed it in a missive containing further instructions to the operative to make sure of every move of Lida. The inclosed letter was addressed to “Patsy Jones.”

Lida read it when she was back in her room. She noted with satisfaction that Chief Mern was still guessing and that his detective mind was unable to solve the mystery except on the ground that she was so loyal to the agency and so ambitious for herself that she had tackled the job as a speculation. He chided her because she had not reported her intention. He asked for a full statement.

She hid the letter carefully in her bureau. Having put it away for further reference in case she did make up her mind to answer the questions when forced to do so, she delayed replying. She did not want to lie needlessly to Mern—she was willing to let him do imagining, too, seeing how well it was working, to all appearances, in the cases of Elsham and Crowley.

She had her own reasons for keeping withindoors in the daytime. The matter of Rickety Dick was worrying her. He had seen her as a girl of sixteen, worn with her vigils beside a sick mother; the light through the area windows had been dim, and he had stumbled against chairs in the room as if his vision were poor.

However, she discovered at the outset of her stay in Adonia that she had become the object of old Dick’s intent regard whenever he found opportunity. He often trudged past the tavern on his errands; he dragged slow steps and squinted and peered. Once she caught him peeping at her through the open door of the dining room. She had feared some such closer inspection and had drawn back her hair and twisted its waviness into an unsightly pug; the moment she saw him she slipped into her mouth a piece of spruce gum which an admiring woodsman had presented, and then she chewed vigorously and slatted herself about in a tough manner. He sighed and went away muttering.

He ventured another and a last sortie, as if he wanted to make an end of his doubts. He also made a sensation.

Rickety Dick came to take dinner at the tavern!

He was in his best rig, with which he was accustomed to outfit himself for the funerals of his old friends. There was a faded tail coat which flapped against baggy gray trousers. A celluloid collar on a flannel shirt propped up his wrinkled chin.

Martin Brophy stared at old Dick and then cast a look up at the office clock, whose hands, like Dick’s in the moment of mental stress, were upraised on the stroke of twelve.

“Flagg dead?” inquired Brophy, unable otherwise to account for Dick’s absence from the big house at the dinner hour.

“No! Toothache! Can’t eat to-day. He let me off to go to a burying.”

“Whose?”

Old Dick shook his head and passed on into the dining room, peering hard into the face of the waitress as he plodded toward her. “Burying!” he muttered. “May as well make sure it’s dead—and put it away.”

Lida met him as she was meeting her other problems up there—boldly.

She leaned over him when he was seated and recited the daily bill of fare. He did not take his eyes off her face, now close to his.

“Lida Kennard,” he whispered, hoarsely, panting, pulling the hard collar away from his throat with trembling fingers, “why ain’t ye home with your poor old grandfather, where ye belong? Lida Kennard, why ain’t ye home?”

Her eyes did not waver. Brophy had followed, to be better informed as to the funeral, and stood in the doorway.

“Who’s the nut?” inquired Patsy Jones, acridly, turning her gaze to the landlord. “He’s calling me names.” Her hard tones made the old man wince.

“He’s all right—safe—only a little crazier than usual,” returned Brophy. “If you want to eat, Dick, go ahead and eat—but don’t bother Miss Jones. I don’t allow anybody to bother her. And where’s that funeral, I ask you again?”

“Here!” said the old man, rapping his knuckles on his breast. “It’s buried. I guess I am crazy. Oh yes, I’ll admit it. I see things that ain’t so.”

“Well, go ahead and eat,” commanded Brophy.

“I don’t want to eat—I can’t, now.” He pushed back his chair and rose.

“What names did he call you?” demanded the landlord, truculently. “I won’t have your feelings hurt, you know!”

“Oh, only made some funny noises,” retorted Miss Jones, flippantly. “Let him go. I don’t mind.”

Rickety Dick plodded out as he had plodded in; he was shaking his head, dismissing all his hopes and his dreams.

Miss Jones went to another guest. “The world is full of ’em,” she said. “We have lamb, beef, and pork.”

Brophy retired, entertaining no further curiosity.

The surge of homesickness that swept through the girl choked her—its spray blurred her eyes as she gazed after old Dick, pitying his bent shoulders under the sun-faded coat. But even in her sorrow, because she had been obliged to deny his wistful plaint so heartlessly, she was conscious of relief. She had been afraid of his recognition of her; after this she would be more free to come and go.

That evening at supper there was a guest who troubled her thoughts more than had Rickety Dick, but in another way. Ward Latisan was down again from the drive, still adoring her frankly and unabashed with his eyes, following all her movements; it was plain that he had taken counsel with himself while he had been away from her and that his love had been made acute by separation. She was of a mind to hide away from him in her room after her work was done. But there was the cultivation of his friendship to consider! She must keep up that friendship in order to be able to influence him.

Timorously, wondering what was to come from the coil of events as she saw them shaping in that region of barehanded conflict, she put on her hat and went forth. Latisan stepped off the porch and joined her, plainly no longer concerned with what the gossipers of Adonia might say or think.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

AS on a previous occasion, when the gloom of the night had settled, they were again at the side of the village street, at the mouth of the path by which they had returned from the cliff above the falls.

She had sought the falls that evening because the din of the waters would keep him from talking too much. She was afraid of the light in his eyes and of the repressed feeling in his tones. She knew that she must repulse him if he wooed. Her emotions were mixed, but she was sure there was no love in her heart—all her thoughts were concerned with her quest. If love should by any possibility develop in her and she should allow him to see it, what would become of his man’s appetite for fight and danger? She felt obliged to view surrender to him in that light. On the other hand, she could not afford to offend him deeply by allowing matters to come to a climax between them right then; the climax must disclose her lack of affection. She had been estimating that hale man of the woods—she was certain that what she felt toward him was only friendly respect for his character, and she could not lie to him or fawn falsely for her purposes.

“I must go up now and face the usual music,” he said, sourly. “I’m getting to be afraid of myself with Flagg.”

“I’ve heard he’s afflicted with the toothache to-day. You must make all allowances,” she entreated, with a dash of jest in her earnestness.

“Then I especially need a protector. I’m going to ask you again to go along with me. Really, you’re needed if I’m expected to stay on my job. Why,” he went on, jest mingling with seriousness in his own case, “if the Flagg drive comes down all right through my efforts, you can take the credit of the victory because you were present to-night and smoothed things; he’ll just have to be decent, with a strange young lady in the room.”

She was not ready with peremptory refusal, as she had been on the other occasion; she had met the bugbear of Rickety Dick and had prevailed over the old man’s suspicions. As Latisan averred, her presence might help matters; she would entertain strange and acute regrets if her absence should allow the split that Latisan seemed to apprehend.

He timidly put his hand on her arm. “Please!”

“I’ll be intruding on a business talk. I may make him all the more touchy.” She was hesitating, weighing the hazards of each plan—to go or to stay away.

“There’s no private business to be talked. I’m simply going to tell him that I have blown the ice and have the logs in the river and I want to have his orders about how many splash dams I can blow up if I need to do it for a head o’ water to beat the Three C’s drive to Skulltree. Really, he needs to talk with somebody who is gentle,” he went on, and she responded to the touch on her arm and walked slowly with him up the hill. “He sits there day by day and reads the tooth-for-tooth part of the Old Testament, and it keeps hardening his heart. I’ve thought of a plan. Suppose you get friendly with him! You can take some soothing books up to him in your off hours and read aloud. Let’s try to make a different man of Eck Flagg, you and I.”

So, over the ledges where her childish feet had stumbled, Lida Kennard, trembling, anxious, yearning for her kin, went again to the door of the big mansion on the hill.

Latisan’s words had opened a vista of hope to her; she might be able, after all, to render the service to which old Dick had exhorted her, hiding her identity behind a woman’s desire to cheer an invalid.

It was the same square, bleak house of her early memories, now dark except for a dim glow through two dingy windows in the lower part; the yee-yawed curtains were eloquent evidence of the housekeeping methods.

“He won’t have any women around, as I told you.” Latisan was not tactful in his excuse for the slack aspect of the house.

“I’m afraid it isn’t best for me to go in,” she said, making a final stand.