"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."