Early the next morning glaziers, carpenters, and telephone repair men
monopolized the Vose-Mern offices to the exclusion of regular business.
The chief had told his office force to stay away for the day.
He had found one chair that was whole, and he sat and watched the "after
the storm" effect gradually disappear.
Mern's thoughts were as much in disorder as the interior he was
surveying.
Instead of feeling lively enmity in the case of Latisan, he was
admitting to himself that he rather admired the young wildcat from the
woods. At any rate, Latisan had accepted at face value Mern's repeated
dictum that if the other fellow could get Mern while Mern was set on
getting the fellow, there would be no grudges. Latisan's come-back, the
chief reflected, was crude work, but it was characteristically after the
style of the men of the open; and the wreck of an office was less
disastrous than the wreck of a man's prospects and his very soul. Mern
was not a bit of a sentimentalist, but he could see the situation
vaguely from Latisan's standpoint. And he realized that there was still
something behind it all which he had not come at.
He was roused from his ponderings by the crunching of feet on broken
glass, and looked up and beheld Latisan. Halted just inside the door of
the main office was a policeman in uniform. And the officer, well known
by Mern, caught the chief's eye and winked.
Mern jumped to his feet; he was much astonished and glanced to see
whether Latisan's fists were doubled.
"Good morning, sir!" said the caller, politely. "I have come around
early to let you know that I'm not the kind of a man who does a thing
and runs away from the responsibility of it."
With prolonged scrutiny--stares which crossed like fencing blades--the
two principals mutely questioned each other. Latisan displayed the most
composure. He had not the same reason as had Mern to be surprised; it
was immediately made plain that Latisan had devoted some thought to
preparations for the interview. He stepped closer. Even though his smile
seemed to be meant as an assurance of amity, Mern flinched; he
remembered that the woodsman had begun the battle the day before after a
remark in a most placid tone.
Latisan tipped his head to indicate the waiting policeman. "I brought
him along. I asked him to come up from the street. He doesn't know what
for."
"Nor I, either!" blurted Mern.
"I thought you might want me arrested on sight, and I remember what I
did to your telephones, and I figured I'd save you the trouble of
sending out."
There was no mistaking the drive master's new mood. He was polite; he
was contrite. The picturesque touch furnished by supplying a policeman
suggested the Vose-Mern "anticipatory system" and appealed to the
chief's grim sense of humor. Also, Mern was moved by that consciousness
which warms real men, when it's a mutual acknowledgment, "He's a good
sport."
Mern waved his hand to the policeman, putting into that gesture a
meaning which the officer understood; the officer started for the outer
door.
"Just a second!" called Latisan. He pulled out a roll of money and gave
the policeman a bill. "You can use that to pay your fare down in the
elevator."
Latisan held the roll in sight until he and Mern were alone. "While the
cash is out, I may as well inquire what the bill is."
"For what?"
"For this." The woodsman swung the hand which held the money, making a
wide sweep to take in all the wreck.
"No bill, Latisan! You can't pay a cent. I think we'll call it natural
wear and tear in the course of business."
The chief was sitting in the chair which had escaped damage. He insisted
on the caller taking that chair; Mern sat on a carpenter's sawhorse.
"Perhaps I had you going yesterday, Chief Mern, but to-day it's you who
have got me going!" admitted Latisan, frankly mystified by this
forbearance.
"I'm only backing up the talk I have always made about giving the other
fellow his innings if he wants to take 'em and has the grit to put it
over. Look here, Latisan, two men are never really well acquainted till
they've had a good run-in with their fists. You and I have been standing
each other off on facts. Let's get down to cases. How did it happen that
you fell for Lida Kennard so suddenly?"
Ward flushed. It was a sacred subject, but he resolved to be frank with
Mern, searching for the truth. "It was not sudden. I met her here in the
city by accident months ago--and I must have fallen in love with her
then. I've been admitting that I did, though I did not know her real
name till yesterday. And I did not know she was a detective, set on my
trail. And even now----"
"You don't believe it, eh? Let me say it to you, Latisan--and get me
right! You're a square chap and I can afford to be square, now that the
job is done and paid for. The girl never was an operative. She was my
confidential secretary, and the best one I ever had. Working hard here
to pay up the debts she had incurred on account of her mother. As clean
as a whistle, Latisan! She never told me she was going north. That
letter you brought is one I wrote after Crowley reported that she was
there--and I wanted to know why she was there."
"I can tell you why. She is Echford Flagg's granddaughter."
Mern leaped up and kicked the carpenter's bench away from him. Latisan
rose, too, as if prepared to resent any detracting speech.
"Don't trouble yourself," snapped Mern. "I'm not saying a word against
her for what she was doing up there. I trained her myself in what she
called the ethics of this business, and she had been practicing what I
have preached. It's all right, Latisan."
"The thing cleared itself up pretty quickly for me yesterday when I
found out her name. But now that I know who she is I'm in hell. I ran
away! I have left that drive----"
"Aw, to blazes with your drive!" yelped Mern, with scorn. "Only logs!
But what I want to know is this, does the girl love you?"
"She told me so, but how can she have any affection for such a man as I
have shown myself to be? I think she was sacrificing herself because she
believed I was the one who could bring down the Flagg drive."
Mern surveyed him cynically. "Say, Latisan, I hope you're not the kind
who would bite a gold coin stolen from a dead man's eye. You woods
fellows have too much time for joint debates with your own selves. Go
find that girl and square yourself. I want her to have what she wants,
if she is in love with you. That's the kind of a friend I am to her. I
can't tell you where she is. I haven't heard from her since she walked
out of this office. But let me say something to you! My kind of work has
wised me up to what folks are likely to do! I'll bet a thousand dollars
the girl hasn't run very far away from the north country, even if you
did think it was too hot to hold you."
Latisan shook his head slowly. Confidence was still chilled in him; the
memory of what had happened was a forbidding barrier; in her case, at
the thought of thrusting himself back into her presence, he was as
timid to an extreme as he had been fearless in his dealings with men in
the Vose-Mern offices.
While he was wrestling with his thoughts, delivery men were wrestling
with furniture, bringing it in through the door from the corridor,
blocking the passage.
Mern snapped his attention from Latisan, then he pushed the latter out
of the range of vision from the corridor door.
Craig was out in the corridor, cursing the furniture and the men who
were obstructing the doorway. Craig was in a hurry and in a state of
mind; his language revealed his feelings.
"It won't do--it won't do!" insisted Mern when Latisan protested at
being shoved behind the partition. "He mustn't see you. Hear him rave!
I'm not staging another fight to-day. Stay in there! Crouch down! Keep
out of sight."
When Craig won his way past the blocking furniture he stormed to Mern,
stamping across the glass-strewn floor, shaking his fists and jabbering.
He was in a horrible state of rage. His face was so apoplectically
purple that the bruises on his patched-up countenance were subdued
somewhat by lack of contrast.
"Look at me! Called down to the home office just now, looking like this.
Lying like blazes about an automobile accident! That's what your
invitation to view the tame tiger has done for me. But that isn't what
I'm here for, you damnation, four-flushing double-crosser." He continued
to berate the chief.
"Say, you hold on there!" barked Mern, managing a few oaths of his own
after struggling out of the amazement stirred by this ferocious attack.
"If you're here to do business or to complain about the business that
has been done, you'll have to be decent, or I'll run you out." Mern
jutted his jaw and took two steps in Craig's direction--and Craig had
suffered violence too recently to persist in inviting more.
But he was still as acrimonious as he dared to be. Behind his rage there
was the bitterness of a man who had been tricked out of money--betrayed
shamefully--but Craig was so precipitate, breathless, violent, so
provokingly vague with his tumbling words and his broken sentences, that
Mern ceased to be angry in return and was merely bewildered.
The Comas field director shook under Mern's nose a sheet of paper. He
kept referring to the writing on the paper and vouchsafed information
that the writing was made up of notes of a long-distance conversation
between the woods and the New York offices of the Comas company.
After a time Mern suggested with acerbity that Craig was incoherent.
"I don't doubt it. I feel that way," yelped Craig. "But this message has
come over three or four hundred miles of wire--relayed, at that, and I
think the man who started the word from a fire-outpost station wasn't
entirely right in his head. There's no other way of accounting for the
statement that Ward Latisan's cap and Eck Flagg's cant dog are bossing
the Flagg drive."
"Don't get wrought up by crazy guff!"
"But here are some statements that I _am_ wrought up over," declared
the director, brandishing the paper. "I've got to believe 'em. They
sound straight. Three of our new hold dams in streams that feed the Noda
have been blown. The water has been used to sweep the Flagg logs in
ahead of ours. The lip of the Tougas Lake has been blown, too, and if we
lose that water it's apt to leave us high and dry; our Tougas operation
is a long way in from the main river. They've shot blue blazes out of
Carron Gorge and have taken the water along with 'em. Merry hell is to
pay all up and down that river, Mern."
The agency chief did not relish Craig's bellicose manner, nor the glare
in his one eye that showed, nor the imputation of vindictive rebuke in
his rasping tones.
"Craig, I never saw a log in a river. I know nothing about your drives.
Why are you pitching into me?"
"Why? Why? Because this message says that the girl you sent north--the
girl who was paid by our money--this report says that she has gone up
there and has put the very devil into Flagg's men; is making 'em do
things that the worst pirates on the river never dared to do before.
What kind of a she wildcat did you hand me, anyway? Mern, a thousand
tons of liquid fire poured into the valley of the Noda couldn't hurt us
like that girl is hurting us. Who is she? What is she? Get your word to
her! Call her off!"
That was no time for equivocation. Craig's frenzy demanded candor and
threatened reprisal if the truth were not forthcoming. Mern told part
of the truth.
"She has called her own self off, Craig, so far as this agency is
concerned. I have no further control over her actions."
Chief Mern was not conscious of any especial surprise after Craig had
reported that section of his news which could be understood. The
granddaughter of Flagg could not be expected to do other than she was
doing. In his honest regard for the helper who had served him so long
and efficiently, the chief was wondering whether he ought to reveal her
identity to the Comas man, trying to estimate the danger of such a
revelation. Craig was not stating that his news hinted who she was.
As to the details of the drive, he was more explicit. He raged on while
Mern pondered. "The Flagg drive is a week ahead of time. It must be near
Skulltree dam. I ought to have been up there and I don't understand why
the infernal fools have been so slow in getting word to me."
He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.
"Look here, Mern, I never ought to do another stroke of business with
you, but I'm in too much of a hurry to go anywhere else."
The business instincts of the head of the agency were stirred; the Comas
money had been good picking in the past. "I don't think I should be held
responsible for an operative who has severed connections. Craig, you
have probably made your own mistakes in depending on helpers."
"Don't you make any mistake this time, Mern! I want a dozen or fifteen
men--gunmen. Can you furnish 'em?"
"Sure thing! Within an hour."
"I have promised results to my folks this season. I've got to deliver.
My job depends on it, after all the talk I've made at headquarters."
"Will your headquarters back up my operatives?"
"I'll do that! I'm playing this game on my own hook. There'll be no
fight. The bluff will be enough, if I have the men. And if I have
to--well, there's a fight between lumberjacks every season on that
river, and there's a big wall of woods between Skulltree dam and New
York, Mern! I'll take my chances up behind that wall. Get the men for
me."
"When are you leaving?"
"One o'clock this afternoon--Grand Central."
"I'll deliver the men to you there."
Craig stamped away across the glass-littered floor and disappeared.
"Well," averred the chief when Latisan came out from behind the
partition, "it looks as if somebody had been attending to your job for
you, son! Also looks as if there might be considerable more doing right
away!"
"So that's more of your devilish business, is it, sending gunmen to
fight honest workers?" demanded the drive master, with venom.
"Business is still business with me in spite of the looks of this
office," returned Mern, unruffled. "Latisan, you can't beef about not
getting a square deal--and I've put you in the way of getting a tip. It
looks to me----"
"Just the same as it looks to me!" cried the young man. "We're fully
agreed as to all the looks! Good day!"
He stood very straight and shot Mern through with a stare from hard gray
eyes. There was no longer any of the faltering uncertainty that he had
displayed. Grim determination radiated from him.
"Good day to you, also!" Mern called after Latisan when he strode toward
the door, then adding suggestively. "If any mail happens to come here
for you, I'm to forward it along to that Skulltree dam, so I take it!"
The irony did not provoke any retort from the drive master. He went away
with a rush, but his demeanor showed that he was not running away from
anything or anybody. He was hastening toward something.