The Trail Of The Axe Part 33

"I see now. G.o.d!"

The exclamation was involuntary. It came at the sudden realization of how well his work had been carried out, and what that work meant. Dave, watching, grasped something of its meaning. There was that within him which guided him surely in the mental workings of his fellow man. He was looking into the very heart of this man who had so desperately tried to injure him. And what he saw, though he was angered, stirred him to a strange pity.

"It's pretty mean when you think of it," he said slowly. "Makes you think some, doesn't it? Makes you wonder what folks are made of. If you hated, could you have done it? Could you have deliberately set out to ruin a fellow--to take his life? The man that did this thing figured on just that."

"Did he say so?"

Truscott's face had paled, and a haunting fear looked out of his eyes.

It was the thought of discovery that troubled him.

Dave ignored the interruption, and went on with his half-stern, half-pitying regard fixed upon the other.

"Had things gone right with him, and had the fire got a fair hold, nothing could have saved us." He shook his head. "That's a mean hate for a man I've never harmed. For a man I've always helped. You couldn't hate like that, Truscott? You couldn't turn on the man that had so helped you? It's a mean spirit; so mean that I can't hate him for it.

I'm sorry--that's all."

"He must be a devil."

The fear had gone out of Truscott's eyes. All his cool a.s.surance had returned. Dave was blaming the sawyer, and he was satisfied.

The lumberman shrugged his great shoulders.

"Maybe he is. I don't know. Maybe he's only a poor weak foolish fellow whose wits are all mussed up with brandy, and so he just doesn't know what he's doing."

"The man who filed that steel knew what he was doing," cried Truscott.

"Don't blame him," replied Dave--his deep voice full and resonant like an organ note.

But Truscott had achieved his object, and he felt like expanding. Dave knew nothing. Suspected nothing. Mansell had played the game for him--or perhaps----

"I tell you it was a diabolical piece of villainy on the part of a cur who----"

"Don't raise your voice, lad," said Dave, with a sudden solemnity that promptly silenced the other. "Reach round behind you and lift that fur robe."

He had risen from his seat and stood pointing one knotty finger at the corner where the dead man was lying. His great figure was full of dignity, his manner had a command in it that was irresistible to the weaker man.

Truscott turned, not knowing what to expect. For a second a shudder pa.s.sed over him. It spent itself as he beheld nothing but the pile of furs. But he made no attempt to reach the robe until Dave's voice, sternly commanding, urged him again.

"Lift it," he cried.

And the other obeyed even against his will. He reached out, while a great unaccountable fear took hold of him and shook him. His hand touched the robe. He paused. Then his fingers closed upon its furry edge. He lifted it, and lifting it, beheld the face of the dead sawyer.

Strangely enough, the glazed eyes were open, and the head was turned, so that they looked straight into the eyes of the living.

The hand that held the robe shook. The nerveless fingers relinquished their hold, and it fell back to its place and shut out the sight. But it was some moments before the man recovered himself. When he did so he rose from his chair and moved as far from the dead man as possible.

This brought him near the door, and Dave followed him up.

"He's dead!"

Truscott whispered the words half unconsciously, and the tone of his voice was almost unrecognizable. It sounded like inquiry, yet he had no need to ask the question.

"Yes, he's dead--poor fellow," said Dave solemnly.

Then, after a long pause, the other dragged his courage together. He looked up into the face above him.

"Did--did he say why he did it--or was he----"

It was a stumbling question, which Dave did not let him complete.

"Yes, he told me all--the whole story of it. That's the door, lad. You won't need to shake hands--now."

CHAPTER XIX

IN THE MOUNTAINS

It was Sunday evening. Inside a capacious "dugout" a small group of two men and a girl sat round the stove which had just been lit.

In the mountains, even though the heat of August was still at its height, sundown was the signal for the lighting of fires. Dave's lumber camps were high up in the hills, tapping, as they did, the upper forest belts, where grew the vast primordial timbers. In the extreme heat of summer the air was bracing, crisp, and suggested the process of breathing diamonds, but with the setting of the sun a cold s.h.i.+ver from the ancient glaciers above whistled down through the trees and bit into the bones.

The daylight still lingered outside, and the cotton-covered windows of the dugout let in just sufficient of it to leave the remoter corners of the hut bathed in rapidly growing shadow. There was a good deal of comfort in the room, though no luxury. The mud cemented walls were whitewashed and adorned with ill.u.s.trations from the _Police Gazette_, and other kindred papers. For the most part the furniture was of "home"

manufacture. The chairs, and they were all armchairs of sorts, were mere frames with seats of strung rawhide. The table was of the roughest but most solid make, strong enough to be used as a chopping-block, and large enough for an extra bed to be made down upon it. There was a large cupboard serving the dual purpose of larder and pantry, and, in addition to the square cook-stove, the room was heated by a giant wood stove. The only really orthodox piece of furniture was the small writing-desk.

For a dugout it was capacious, and, unlike the usual dugout, it possessed three inner rooms backing into the hill against which it was built. One of these was a storeroom for dynamite and other camp equipment, one was a bedroom, and the other was an armory. The necessity for the latter might be questioned, but Bob Mason, the camp "boss," the sole authority over a great number of lumber-jacks, more than a hundred and fifty miles from the faintest semblance of civilization, was content that it should be there.

The three faces were serious enough as they gazed down in silence at the glowing, red-hot patch in the iron roof of the stove, and watched it spread, wider and wider, under the forced draught of the open damper. They had been silent for some moments, and before that one of them had practically monopolized the talk. It was Betty who had done most of the talking. Bronzed with the mountain air and sun, her cheeks flushed with interest and excitement, her sweet brown eyes aglow, she had finished recounting to her uncle and Bob Mason a significant incident that had occurred to her that afternoon on her way from the sick camp to the dugout.

Walking through a patch of forest which cut the sick quarters off from the main, No. 1, camp, she had encountered two lumber-jacks, whom she had no recollection of having seen before.

"They weren't like lumber-jacks," she explained, "except for their clothes. You can't mistake a lumber-jack's manner and speech, particularly when he is talking to a girl. He's so self-conscious and--and shy. Well, these men were neither. Their speech was the same as ours might be, and their faces, well, they were good-looking fellows, and might never have been out of a city. I never saw anybody look so out of place, as they did, in their clothes. There was no beating about the bush with them. They simply greeted me politely, asked me if I was Miss Somers, and, when I told them I was, calmly warned me to leave the hills without delay--not later than to-morrow night. I asked them for an explanation, but they only laughed, not rudely, and repeated their warning, adding that you, uncle, had better go too, or they would not be answerable for the consequences. I reminded them of the sick folk, but they only laughed at that too. One of them cynically reminded me they were all 'jacks' and were of no sort of consequence whatever, in fact, if a few of them happened to die off no one would care. He made me angry, and I told them we should certainly care. He promptly retorted, very sharply, that they had not come there to hold any sort of debate on the matter, but to give me warning. He said that his reason in doing so was simply that I was a girl, and that you, uncle, were a much-respected parson, and they had no desire that any harm should come to either of us. That was all.

After that they turned away and went off into the forest, taking an opposite direction to the camp."

Mason was the first to break the silence that followed the girl's story.

"It's serious," he said, speaking with his chin in his hands and his elbows resting on his parted knees.

"The warning?" inquired Chepstow, with a quick glance at the other's thoughtful face.

Mason nodded.

"I've been watching this thing for weeks past," he said, "and the worst of it is I can't make up my mind as to the meaning of it. There's something afoot, but---- Do you know I've sent six letters down the river to Dave, and none of them have been answered? My monthly budget of orders is a week overdue. That's not like Dave. How long have you been up here? Seven weeks, ain't it? I've only had three letters from Dave in that time."

The foreman flung himself back in his chair with a look of perplexity on his broad, open face.

"What can be afoot?" asked Chepstow, after a pause. "The men are working well."

"They're working as well as 'scabs' generally do," Mason complained.