SETTING THE STAGE
There are two interviews which should be mentioned here, if for no
other reason then merely because they were both so entirely the outcome
of Miss Sarah's Christmas party. Neither of them were long; the last
one which took place between Wickersham and the girl he was to marry
was the briefer of the two. But her prettily serious argument that the
first of May was too early a date for their wedding, in view of the
work which he had to do and her own state of unpreparedness, left him
so white of face that she felt guiltily sorry for him for many days to
follow--felt guiltier still at the relief she experienced when she had
established that reprieve. The other interview was longer, and took
place days earlier, but it was no more of a delight to Archibald
Wickersham.
Dexter Allison had returned home almost a week in advance of his
daughter, pleading stress of business, but in spite of the demands upon
his time and attention, he had found it impossible to forget the night
of the dinner, when he had watched his daughter's eyes upon Stephen
O'Mara's face.
Allison had never professed a knowledge of women. Like her mother,
Barbara had been many, many times an enigma which he who had often
taken men's souls apart had not dared even to try to solve. Partly
because of that, partly because his observation in other quarters had
taught him the dangerous futility of it, he had lifted his voice
neither in encouragement nor protest of Archibald Wickersham. The two
had grown up from childhood together--Barbara and the man whom she was
engaged to marry--and more than once her father had assured himself
that at least there was a long knowledge of each other's shortcomings
to make for safety in the long run.
His own dislike for Wickersham he had never allowed to sway his middle
course of non-interference. And he had never liked the boy; never
learned to like the man he had grown to be. Underneath Dexter
Allison's jovial exterior there was a cynicism which for hardness would
have made Garry Devereau's worst moments seem mere childish fits of
spleen. Men do not watch other men whimper and beg for mercy--little
rascals who have been nipped in a greater schemer's trap--without
beginning to wonder, soon or late, how much of man is warped and
twisted; and he had been watching Archie Wickersham now for months. He
believed that men's men were not women's men, the oft-repeated epigram
to the contrary. He had eaten too many dinners at which the lion of
the evening who sat on the charming hostess's right hand, was a man of
rank and a thing of ranker repute. But after his first shock at the
realization that his baby was a woman grown, he had promised himself
that her engagement and Wickersham's should be a long one; promised
that the man into whose keeping she was given should have earned the
title in full.
Wickersham's code, in many respects, was above reproach. Allison had
taken pains to ascertain that. But beyond that he did not let himself
go; he neither allowed himself to wonder at, nor regret, her choice.
He was too honest to decry in another much which he knew would not
measure up to Golden Rule standards in himself. And he had a really
great man's unshakable faith in his own flesh and blood.
Yet he had been troubled more than a little since his Christmas trip to
Morrison. When he turned a page he turned it for all time, but in the
last day or two he had caught himself surrepticiously trying to steal a
glance at some which had only just rustled into place. Dexter Allison
had left brilliant men of cross-examination panting impotently at the
barrenness of their efforts; he had known it and enjoyed it to the
full. But he knew, too, that he could never face, jauntily or
otherwise, one reproach in the dusky eyes of the girl with whom he had
more than once played truant, to breakfast with Caleb and Miss Sarah.
And he was facing that thought, nearer to panic than he had ever been
before, the night before New Year's, when Wickersham was announced at
nine. He was thinking of Barbara's mother when he beckoned his guest
to a chair, shook his head over his red cheeks, and offered a cigar.
"Devilish cold weather," he grunted, none too graciously, for he had
not wanted to be disturbed just then.
The younger man admitted that it was. His mind, plainly, was not upon
the weather, but he found difficulty in introducing a topic of his own
choosing. Outspokenness had never been one of Archie Wickersham's
boldest characteristics, so Allison assisted him now. Allison liked a
man to be outspoken.
"Well," he demanded, "let's hear it. What's on your mind?"
There are times when hatred will betray 'most any man. Hatred now led
Wickersham to speak not wisely but with venom.
"I want you to refuse to renew your name on the East Coast notes," he
said. "They are due on the second."
Few men had ever said "I want you to" to Dexter Allison and, as he put
it, "gotten away with it to any great extent." And of all nights this
one in particular was the least likely to prove propitious for such an
attempt. That was Wickersham's oversight.
"So!" said Dexter, "so! Well, now for your reason."
Wickersham had not learned until after Barbara's departure that she was
spending the holidays in Morrison, for he had himself expected to be
away. And it is only fair to the girl to say that she had honestly
forgotten to apprise him of her plan, in her real excitement at going.
But finding it out for himself had not made the fact any pleasanter to
Wickersham.
"It should be clear enough without explanation," he enunciated each
word nicely, "if you want that road they are building."
Allison glanced up, surprised at the tone employed.
"Meaning of course I do," he mused. "And yet--and yet, I don't know!"
Fear burned in the tall, thin man's eyes that night--fear that made his
hatred for the absent man who was teaching him fear anything but a
pretty thing to watch.
"I've tried to buy off their men." He was holding himself with an
effort that made him tremble. "I've held up their supplies on every
track that we control, but they've had the luck with them. They've
made up lost time by working day and night. I've----"
"You've set a drunken fool to steal his plans," drawled the other with
deadly sarcasm, "like a second-rate, one-night-stand villain. Don't
forget to mention that, too!"
In many ways it resembled an earlier conference which they had shared
together; in many points it differed from it. For if Allison had
goaded the other man, on that former occasion, largely from a malicious
delight in stirring him to verbal violence, such a thought was farthest
from his mind now. Allison was talking from a new angle. If a turned
page was a turned page to him, at least his memory was good. His
lounging body shifted a little.
"Archie, do you remember what I told you about that woods-rat, as you
called him once? Did I tell you that he would fight? Well, listen and
listen closely while I repeat it for you. He hasn't even warmed to it
yet!"
Wickersham went yellow at that, but his icy self-control held firm. He
did not break into vituperation this night; he smiled, though his voice
was only a whisper.
"Men have dropped out of sight before now, in those woods," he husked.
"I'll win, or I'll see that he lies and rots in one of his own
sink-holes."
A big voice is a wonderful weapon at times. Allison's booming bass
made Wickersham's threat seem only mean and hollow when the heavy man
leaped to his feet and shook a finger under that high-bridged nose.
"No you won't!" he snapped. "No you won't! And if I didn't know,
after hearing you talk, that you haven't stuff enough in you to be
dangerous, I'd fix you so you'd be in no condition to bushwhack anybody
for the next six months. I'm in a bad mood to-night. Drop out of
sight, eh? You'll play this fair--fair at least as I see it by my
standards, and they are better standards than yours. You've come
dictating to me, ordering me to slip a knife into their backs. Are you
that kind of a sneak? Did you think I was? Now listen again, and
listen well, for I mean what I say!
"I want that railroad, if the man who is building it is too weak to
keep me from taking it away from him. But if I don't get it on such a
basis, I'll know that there is a man at the head of it who is big
enough to take care of my share of it. Have you got that? Very well.
And now go back to your melodrama, if you want to. Steal his men, if
he will let you; fight him every inch of his construction--that is your
job--and I'll still insist that it is his fault if he is tardy on the
first of May. But it's you and O'Mara from now on, Archie. I'll be a
spectator now! And, by Gad, don't you ever come near me again with a
request that I . . . don't you ever let me hear you threaten that
you----"
Allison's face was suffused before he finished, and Wickersham,
astounded past utterance, slid from his chair away from that
flourishing hand which had become a fist. It was no scene to take
place between a man and his prospective son-in-law. Realizing that
Allison tried to laugh, deprecatingly, at his temper.
"Go out and get him, Archie," he invited. "I'll be watching, don't
doubt that. And I know how much you want to win. It's a bigger stake
than most folks realize!"
Like Barbara he tried to make his side of the interview kindly at the
end, but he sent the other man away wondering whether he had understood
that last remark, and afraid to think that he had. And two other
things Allison had done. For once he had started to pay hush money to
his conscience. Once and for all, like Fat Joe, he had registered at
last a refusal to interfere in any way that might spoil the climax of
the "big show" for which Fate or Chance or Destiny, or whatever men may
call it, was setting the stage, with an unhurried calm that contrasted,
ironically, with the mad haste of her actors.
But he watched, as he had promised he would. The same day that more
than half of O'Mara's men went on strike and deserted to the Reserve
Company's payroll, the news reached him that a trainload of laborers
had been shot in to take their places--those very types of laborers
which Steve himself had warned Elliott would not last an hour, in the
event of trouble. For a week Allison wondered that there was no clash
between the displaced men who believed that the river was theirs alone
and this new corps which Garry Devereau was handling at the lower end
of construction, not by physical prowress, as Fat Joe had ruled, but
just as surely and all because, as Joe himself put it, he could damn a
man merely by bidding him good-morning.
"Honey crossed north to-day to have a look at his winter cut," Joe
would observe to his chief at supper at Thirty-Mile; and before the
night was many hours older Allison too, in Manhattan, would have
learned by wire in less picturesque phraseology, that Archie Wickersham
was missing no chances.
"They have now finished hauling their logs to the river," Joe told
Steve one night after a prolonged scouting trip. "They are turning
their attention to their float dams, now!"
And when that news was relayed to the big man who never ceased to watch
he understood why there had been no violence when the rivermen went on
strike.
With a clumsiness that shamed him Allison contrived to pass on to his
daughter all such bits of gossip which dribbled down to him; that is,
all which appertained strictly to Stephen O'Mara's race against time,
and not to the opposition which he was meeting. Her excitement was a
bubbling thing, innocent of suspicion or premonition, but he was like a
war-worn veteran who stands watching column after column wheel into
position, waiting the word to go in, and knows he cannot respond.
Many times Barbara tried to write to Steve in those days and each time
destroyed the badly scored sheet, either in dismay at the wilful
intimacy of her pen or disgusted with its stilted aloofness. She saw
less and less of Wickersham that winter, partly because his affairs
were monopolizing all his time, partly because she managed to spend
most of her waking hours with Miriam Burrell or her father, who
appeared doubly, humbly glad of her companionship. Always she insisted
that Stephen O'Mara would win through; she made happy, petty wagers
with both of them, in anticipation of their journey north, against the
first of May. But there was one bit of news which her father had not
been able to pass on to her. For Dexter Allison had had no way of
learning of a night when the man who was most in their thoughts had
finally lifted a bleak face from his arms, in his cabin up-river, and
forced himself, hard-eyed, to acknowledge one defeat.
It was the bitterest January that the hill country had known in twenty
years; but mile by mile that month the twin lines of steel crept
steadily into the north under the urgings of Garry's smooth voice. The
snowfall for February broke all records for half that period; but
Steve, with his handful of men at Thirty-Mile, put his piling down.
And then it rained--it rained until small brooks ran torrents and the
river tumbled white and thunderous its entire length.
The snow went off the last of March that spring and the gorges could
not carry away the water. The sun turned summer hot; it burned the
higher ridges dry while the valleys still lay hidden in flood. It was
August temperature, the third Sunday in April, when Stephen O'Mara
stood and watched, beneath the glare of kerosene torches, his bridge at
Thirty-Mile go into position between dark and dawn.
There was no man among them that day who did not show upon his face the
strain they had been under. They were few, they were unshaven and
dirty and lean as hungry hounds; but they were the men whom Steve had
once bidden Hardwick Elliott to watch, once they had begun to scent
combat. Fat Joe was no longer plump. Steve was worn down to actual
thinness. And it would have taken a careful eye to have selected the
chief from their ranks that Sunday.
The huge timbers had dropped into place like bits of jig-sawed puzzle.
At three in the afternoon, too tired both in body and soul for elation,
Steve watched them drive home the last spike and heard their hoarse
effort at a cheer. He had turned to start toward his shack, not like a
man who knows that the end of a well-nigh hopeless task is in sight,
but like a beaten man. The first of May meant more to Steve than any
clause of the East Coast Company's contract could convey. He had not
had even one letter since he put her upon her train. Wickersham's
appearance on horseback, at the head of the valley, picking his way
around the flooded meadow, halted him in his heavy-footed climb. A
whistle shrilled, far to the south of them, down the completed track.
And then, after ten years and more, they were face to face again.
"That bridge will have to go down!" Wickersham was breathing hard, for
all that he had been riding. "I'm going through with my drive to-day!"
He had dismounted. Steve smiled at him.
"You're a whole week previous, Wickersham," he said, wearily. "I'll be
signaling for your first load of logs in less than sixty hours."
Archibald Wickersham wished that he could have believed it impossible,
for it would have given him courage and lent conviction to his stand.
But he knew just how fast those few remaining miles of open roadbed
would be spanned. His eyes were furtive; there was no body to his
voice.
"My men are on the banks," he blustered. "My first head of logs has
started down. It's too late to argue now--too late for your promises
that none but fools ever believed!" The sure irrevocability of what he
was saying blanched his cheeks. "I cannot wait for a miracle to be
performed. My timber must come out on this flood."
Stephen O'Mara had whipped him once, but men had interfered. This day
Chance or Destiny or Fate--whatever you may choose to call it--saved
him from destruction. The lean and weary man who had not been out of
his clothes for three days and three nights, save for a plunge in the
icy river, had taken his first step forward, when the whistle screamed
a nearer warning.
She had told him that she would come to see the finish of his race, but
he had long since stopped believing that. And now when she stood and
waved her hand at him from the brass-railed observation platform of
Allison's private car which a switch engine, out of patience with the
grade, was shunting across the lower end of the clearing, he could only
stand and stare dully, no faith in his eyes.
The loud plaid of her father's garb flashed behind her in the doorway.
Hardwick Elliott's fine face peered over his shoulder. And Wickersham,
who had not seen his fiance in a month, had started toward them,
stiffly erect in his immaculate whipcord habit. Wickersham was
smiling; Wickersham was safe again. For Fate or Chance or Destiny who
had been setting the stage was bringing on her principals. She would
brook no _ad lib_ now.
A low mutter in the north became an ominous murmur while Steve was
following slowly in Wickersham's steps, and he realized what it meant.
He stopped to stare at his handful of men, rearing their heads to
listen, too. Steve had been all winter alone with the puzzle of his
own inferiority which he could never understand. And a minute later,
when he had reached out to help to the ground a little blue clad figure
with fur at throat and wrists, she drew the be-furred edge of her skirt
about her ankles and laughingly refused his assistance, and jumped to
the ground unaided. She was far too excited to know what she was
doing; she hardly saw him at all in that first moment, but the act
spelled much to him. His hands were grimy, his face stubbly and
streaked with sweat and mud, and he had been months alone with his
too-sensitive spirit.
"You should not be here," was all he said to her. "This is no place
for you."
He shook hands with the men, mechanically--Allison quizzical, Elliott
concerned. He went back to his bridge. The water had come up a half
foot in the last few minutes some one--Fat Joe, perhaps--told him; it
was sucking greedily at the piles. And in the north the ominous murmur
had become a rhythmic roar.
Wickersham's men were driving the river. They were singing "Harrigan,
That's Me!"