THREAT OF SPIKES.
The music broke off in the middle of a run. The group at the bar
pressed forward, all eager to see how this strange outlaw, who had
dared them to collect the price on his head, would acquit himself
against a whisky-crazed lumberjack. Delores, her interest really
captured by the upstanding figure of the newcomer and clinched by
that livid horseshoe scar upon his high forehead, made faltering
effort to halt the trouble she had started.
"Back to your kennel, you yellow dog!" she ordered. "I'll dance with
you when you pull off them spiked boots. Be yourself and show some
sense."
She tried to throw herself in front of Childress and take the brunt
of the jealous rush. But Childress swept her to one side and behind
him.
The first blow of the contest momentarily stopped the adversary who
had thundered forward with huge hands outstretched in the obvious
intent to grip the sergeant's throat.
Slightly taller than Childress and much heavier, the Swede shook
himself. For a second his close-set, turquoise eyes blazed downward.
Then, with lowered head, he rushed again.
That Childress had not been in the path of the human steam roller,
that he had side-stepped and was urging Sven Larsen to wait a minute
and have his girl returned to him, appeared only to increase the
logger's fury. In the next few minutes the sergeant had no thoughts
to spare from his blows and footwork.
Larsen abandoned his futile rushing tactics and tried to connect with
mallet-like swings. Had one of them landed true, the innocent cause
of his jealous rage must have gone to sleep for an uncertain length
of time. Although strictly an amateur in all his sports, Childress
had developed considerable boxing skill in his barrack days at Regina
and by way of exercise in lonely posts from the Yukon to the Arctic;
yet, clumsy as was the woodsman's attack, its weight taxed him to
avoid being knocked out.
That Larsen shed his return attack as though it were from feather
pillows instead of reasonably seasoned fists was disconcerting. The
skin of the logger's face was doubtless tough as leather from years
of outdoor work in all sorts of weather; moreover, it was heavily
bearded and, as yet, showed no mark. Childress was already bleeding
in a couple of places from scraping blows which he had not been able
altogether to avoid.
The sergeant had no "war" with the Swede. Could he have ended the
futile contest by clinching and crying enough, he would have been
tempted to do so for the sake of his mission. But, remembering
Larsen's threat to finish him, he dared not risk putting himself
under such disadvantage.
In the early days of his service with the Scarlet, when on detachment
assignment with the end-of-rail crews that were building the Grand
Trunk Pacific through the forests of British Columbia, he had
witnessed rough-and-tumble bouts in logging camps, although this was
his most active participation in one. Always the uniform had
prevented his entry, even if he had been so inclined. Generally the
crowd stepped in before the last breath had been crushed from the
vanquished, and when the onlookers held back he had ordered
festivities to cease. Twice within his knowledge, when he had been
elsewhere, the crowd had waited too long and murder was the ugly
result. In this rough-shod mill, he could not interfere.
His best chance seemed to lie in wearing down the self-crazed giant,
then driving home a blow to chin or temple that would force a respite
in which he might explain that the black-eyed Delores was nothing of
interest in his clam-shell life. Childress began to spar with
caution, playing for the logger's wind whenever he was within reach,
but chiefly engaging himself in keeping out of the way.
As the minutes passed with no call of time, the sergeant's plan of
campaign seemed to be succeeding. Larsen's breathing sounded like
the wheeze of a bellows. If he knew anything of reserve, the logger
was too angry to apply the knowledge. Evidently feeling the pace
telling on him, he tore at the neck of his shirt with one hand,
ripping off the buttons until there was exposed a chest as hairy as
that of an ape. Then he rushed the harder. Long since he had
abandoned the invective of his adopted English for what were probably
more weighty curses in his mother tongue.
The sentiment of the onlookers at first had been with the Swede, but
this now showed division. The loggers, pressed against the wall of
the dance room that the fighters might have all the room they needed,
were still with Larsen. But the stranger's game battle against odds
of height, reach and weight was winning him supporters among the
outlaw group at the open doorway. They did not hesitate to ejaculate
pithy advice and encouragement.
Then suddenly, Larsen showed himself still capable of thought.
Having edged toward the on-lookers, he lurched and seized a stool
which had been vacated to give room. This he spun along the floor,
torn and splintered by the spikes of countless boots, toward his
advancing opponent. Catching Childress at the knees, it tripped him
to a heavy fall. Lunging toward him came the Swede.
Objection from the outlaw spectators showed in a forward press,
gasped invective and Bart Crowe's shouted warning:
"Look out there, he means to calk you!"
Already the angry jack's purpose showed in the lift of one spiked,
heavy boot. Childress realized that there was not a second to spare.
Larsen meant to calk him--the most dreaded punishment of the West
woods! In the thought flashes that come in moments of stress, he
remembered men who had suffered the torture and lived through its
years of after horror, with cheeks and forehead pitted as from
disease, noses flattened, lips punctured--even with eyes gouged out.
The spiked boot was above his head now, about to be ground down into
his face. He never had thought much of his looks, but he couldn't
endure to be a horror to all who, perforce, should have to notice him.
There entered in a determining thought-flash. Flame of Fire Weed was
the whole of it. All of a sudden he realized that he loved the ranch
girl. For her, whether he won or lost her, he must save such
personal appearance as he had. Thank Heaven that he had a gun--that,
although loath to draw it, never had he been beaten in point of time
thereto, once his mind was made up. It was now--for Flame!
All in the same flash with his realizations, his gun hand had gone to
his hip, his fair warning had been lifted.
"Take care, boozo--I've got you covered!"
The pause gained by his boast was only the length of a breath, of a
look. His hand was empty--had failed to find the trusty Colt where
it should have been stalled in his hip holster!
A rasped curse from the Swede sounded like the breath of an Arctic
winter storm, the sort of storm he had become familiar with on his
last long detail in the North.
The boot studded with calks descended, and the end--the unspeakable
end--was near.
But in the fraction of the last second a fury of denial moved the
seemingly helpless man upon the splintered floor. The vivid
remembrance of Flame Gallegher, freckled nose, fiery hair, had
something to do with it.
"Not me; not me!" shrieked his primal appetence--his will to live.
With all the power conserved in him by years of trouble service, he
threw up the arm that had reached in vain for his gun and took the
Swede's tread square, without a whimper, although the pain was beyond
experience.
The spikes cut into his forearm, snagging the flesh to the bone.
Borrowing strength from the very torture forced upon himself, he gave
an upward heave that forced him to a sitting posture and toppled
Larsen to a fall.
How long Childress lay in a faint he never knew, for he forgot to
ask. The only detail that mattered when he at last came to was that
his agonizing effort had ended the fight. In falling backward, the
logger had crashed his head against a corner of the "tin" piano and
already had been carried out to sleep it off under the trees.
"And if he never comes out of it--the trance," said Crowe, "there
won't be any crepe hanging on the front door of the Nest."
"You said some words, brother!" This from Delores, who had been
ministering to the sadly punctured forearm. "I'll take him to my
cabin for I guess I won him."
"What the hell did you do?" demanded the peg-leg crook.
Childress awoke--otherwise returned to consciousness. He took a look
at his arm before they put upon it an antiseptic salve that any road
house, used to spearing fights, keeps behind the bar. Then he did
shudder at what he had escaped. Would Flame, little Flame with the
delicious freckles across her nose--would she ever have looked at him
again had he come back to her with the logger's mark all over his
face? Of course, she would have scorned him!
Came forward then the violinist of the two-piece orchestra. He held
out something that Childress had missed at a vital moment.
"Didn't it fall out of your holster when he tripped you with that
stool?" asked the dope artist. "When you were heeled with all of
that, me friend, why didn't you pull it sooner?"
"Never draw unless necessary," said Childress, wondering how the gun
had torn loose.
"And then," declared the pasty-faced musician, "necessity ain't what
it used to be!"
The sergeant was himself again. The arm still pained, but he was
inured to pain. But there was a new sort of trouble in the immediate
offing--Delores.
"You'll come to my cabin," she said, as if with authority. "I know
what's good for all that's happened to you, horse thief."
"Horse thief?" he asked, forgetting for the moment.
"Your forehead!" exclaimed the dark-eyed sister of trouble. "I don't
mind. My only husband was one and they strung him up down Missoula
way. You come with me."
Childress had no intention of going with the girl, either to her
cabin or to any other. Even had he not been a clean-living soul
there must have intervened that early-morning meeting with Flame
Gallegher.
"It can't be done, sister," he said, offering a smile for her
interest.
"But it was my fault--I got you into the mess," she protested.
"And I got out of it with small damage," he returned cheerfully.
"You'd better see what you can do for our logger friend. That crack
he gave his head when I threw him might well mean more than a
headache to-morrow."
"To hell with----"
Having listened to the colloquy, and realizing from the text thereof
that the stranger was no ordinary philanderer, Bart Crowe stepped in
with all the authority that is rested in the proprietor of an outlaw
joint.
"Here you, Delores, take your damn logger to your own cabin," he said
harshly. "You've made trouble enough for one afternoon. Mr.
Childress is going to be my guest until he decides what he wants to
do, who, with and when. Did you get that?" And he called her a name
which is too descriptive for the printed page, no matter how much she
may have deserved it.
Thus Sergt. Childress of the "Royal" won his spurs in the most
notorious outlaw camp which the States still permits. After a supper
with the "bunch," about the board at which he was freely toasted over
his escape from the "logger's curse," he rented a cabin of his own
and took possession, accepted fully as a horse rustler and a man who
could take care of himself whatever the odds.