King Spruce Part 28

--Gettin' Larry Home.

When they came out upon the bare granite, long after mid-day, they fell upon their faces, and lay there without speaking or the desire to speak.

They did not open their smarting eyes.

Over and over again Wade heard a dull rumble which his stricken senses failed to understand. But when a hollow boom reverberated among the hills and jarred the granite under his face he sat up. He saw the purple flash s.h.i.+ver across the swaying smoke, heard the splitting crack of the bolt, and felt a raindrop on his face.

"Thank G.o.d, Mr. Barrett, it has come at last! The rain!" he shouted. And the timber baron staggered to his feet, and turned a bloodshot gaze on the panorama of blazing forest and sheeting heavens. Then he looked at Wade, blinking stupidly and searching his soul for words.

"I haven't got the language, Mr. Wade--" he began. But the young man broke upon his stammering speech.

"There's no need of saying anything," he said, looking away. "I don't want to hear any thanks."

"I was left there to die--tied up there and left to die by a crazy fool that tried to blackmail me--that's it, tried to blackmail me. And I'll put him where he belongs. It was the most infernal plot ever put up on a man. Blackmail and murder!" He gabbled his charges hysterically. The shock of his experience had unmanned him. "You can't blackmail a man like me without suffering for it. I'll put him into the deepest hole in the insane asylum--with a gag in his mouth." He was going on to relate his experience, but Wade again interrupted him.

"I won't bother you to tell it, Mr. Barrett," he said, coldly. "I know how it happened. Mr. Withee told me this morning."

"It's all lies and blackmail!" screamed Barrett, his fury rising at thought of this gossip. "Withee is against me, too. I told him I'd take his stumpage contract away, and this is how he is getting back. I'll have him and his whole crew in jail for blackmail if he doesn't shut his yawp."

A roar of thunder drowned his voice, and he stood, with the rain pelting on him, shaking his fists above his head. But by the twist of his mouth Wade saw that he was still cursing "blackmail."

The sight angered him. In as insulting a pa.s.sion had John Barrett railed at him, Dwight Wade, when he had asked for the hand of John Barrett's daughter. The man had tossed his arms in the same way when he called Wade "a beggar of a school-master."

"Don't call it blackmail and murder--not to me, Mr. Barrett," he said, harshly.

"Don't you know it's blackmail and a put-up job to ruin me?" roared the timber baron.

Wade stood up now and faced him. Torrents of rain beat upon them, and they took no heed; for the face of the young man was working with a mighty emotion and the features of the other man showed that sudden fear had come upon him.

"Have you ever seen that daughter of yours that you left to wallow with human swine?" demanded Wade, with a fury he could not restrain. "Well, I have!" Into those words he put all the bitter resentment of months of remembrance of John Barrett's insults.

"And I have seen the daughter you cherish in your home. I don't need any man's say-so to prove to me that they're both your children, Mr.

Barrett. You stand convicted in the eyes of every man who has eyes and who sees Elva Barrett and then looks on poor Kate Arden--even her name a cruel jest! I don't want to hear a man like you lie, Mr. Barrett. Don't talk any more to me about blackmail." He shook his fist at the roof of the Jerusalem fire station, just showing above the ledges. "I know that girl over there is your daughter. Now go slow, Mr. Barrett, with your threats of what you will do to Lane. If there is any unwritten law, he deserves to have the forfeit of the life that I've helped to save.

That's still a matter between you two. But as to that girl yonder, I propose to ask something. What are you going to do with her?"

Barrett muttered incoherently, dazed by the new light of Wade's words.

"Your blackmail story may go with woodsmen, Mr. Barrett. But if Lane should go out of these woods with his story and that girl to back it he can hold you up to execration by every decent person in the State. The girl proves it in every feature of her face."

"The lunatic tried to make me take her home, own her publicly, and treat her as a daughter--and he demanded that to ruin me. It would ruin me in my political prospects, Wade. You know it. I'm willing to do what's right. But I can't do that." His courage revived a little. "I'd rather go down fighting."

The young man pondered awhile.

"I don't want you to think that I'm persecuting you for any of the trouble between us, Mr. Barrett," he said, at last. "That is all over and done with. But as a man who knows what that poor girl has been condemned to, and like others here who can tell by their own eyes that Lane is speaking the truth, I'm going to see that she gets a fair show."

Barrett concealed his private doubts as to the young man's animus. But sudden dread of this new weapon in his foe's hand mastered him.

"In the name of G.o.d, help me out, Wade!" he pleaded, dropping all his obstinacy. "I couldn't argue with that crazy man. I'll put the girl to school. I'll give her money. She shall have everything heart can wish--except my home. Think of my family, Mr. Wade! Think of my daughter! I want to have the respect of my family, Mr. Wade, for the few years that are left to me. Help me, and you won't be sorry for it.

I'll--"

"I want no pay and no promises," broke in the young man. "You have been free with your cry of blackmail. You can never taunt me with that. I'm simply appealing to your manhood. But I'm going to see that your daughter gets her rights, and that is no threat--it is justice."

"Aren't those rights enough--what I have said?" urged Barrett.

"Perhaps they are. They are probably all she can expect. People hardly ever get all they deserve in this world--either in blessings or punishments." His tone was bitter. And he stood apart and gazed out over the broad expanse to the south, his brow wrinkling. He was trying to a.n.a.lyze the emotions that made him champion the outcast.

The thunder-heads had rolled on, but like mighty and noisy engines they had dragged behind them ma.s.ses of clouds that covered the skies with a slaty expanse, and a storm, settled and steady, poured down its grateful floods.

Already the fire was dying. Only here and there scattered flames fought the streaming skies from the tops of resinous trees.

"Mr. Barrett," said Wade, at length, "the girl is at Lane's. You can't meet her now. It is not the time and place. Probably Lane has returned there. I don't think his mind is right--and after knowing the wrong you did him, I can understand why. You've time to reach Britt's camp before night. It is in the clearing to the north. You are an old woodsman. You can find your way there."

Barrett nodded relieved a.s.sent.

"You have asked me to help you. As that includes helping this poor girl most of all, I am going to do what I can, for the sake of you and your family." Barrett gave a quick glance at him, but the young man's face was impa.s.sive. Perhaps the timber baron had hoped, for his own temporary guarantee, to see a flash of the old love in Wade's eyes. "I'm going to request you to leave this matter in my hands for the present. I will see Withee, and try to stop gossip in that quarter. Will you give me the right to--well, to modify some of your threats? And as to Withee--I believe you spoke of a contract!"

John Barrett stood straighter now. The sneer of conscious authority, the frown of tyranny, had gone from his face. There was a frankness in his face and a sincerity in his tones that few persons had seen or heard before. But the new inspiration was logical and real. The young man who stood before him had just waived a mean vengeance so n.o.bly that his heart swelled. His doubts were quieted.

"My boy," he said, softly, pulling off his cap and standing bareheaded in the rain, "I'm alive now, after the experience of looking straight into the eyes of death and giving up every hope. And, I tell you, it seemed hard to die--just now, when the best hopes of my life are coming true. I had time to think. I thought. I know I talked hard just a bit ago. But I wasn't myself then. I was too near the smoke and fire." He stopped and put his hand to watering eyes. "I can see clear now. And I've got over my bitterness, and I guess now I can understand the Golden Rule. That's my word, and there's my hand on it. Now talk for me to those I've hurt."

They clasped hands. But it was Barrett who made that overture.

"I'll wait for you at Britt's camp--until you come and tell me what I'm to do," said the timber baron. And then he turned and trudged away across the wet ledges.

Wade gazed after him until he disappeared in the stunted growth. He gazed sourly into the palm of the hand that the millionaire had squeezed, and reflected that perhaps Barrett's precipitate repentance was off the same piece as his own forgiveness of the bitter matter that lay between them. Being a young man inclined to be honest with himself, Dwight Wade confessed that the fabric of his forgiveness had a selvage that already showed signs of ravelling. He was a little angry at his state of mind.

"And yet it sounded like a campaign speech to catch votes," he muttered.

He was still angrier at himself then, for, put into words, his doubt seemed an unjust suspicion.

"I must have got more of a jolt than I thought when I dropped from ideals to the real," he pondered, gazing out through the slanting lines of rain. "I seem to have about as many grudges against humanity as old Lane himself."

When he looked towards the roof of the little fire station he awoke to the consciousness that the rain was wet and the wind searching. To himself, in a sudden flash of introspection, he seemed to be as unkempt within as without. There on the granite of the bare mountain, with the forces of nature conquering the last embers of the mighty conflagration, the narrower things of life and living--the amenities, the trammels that man patiently puts upon himself for the sake of the social fabric--appeared vain and delusive ideals. It was not thus that the strong battled and won.

"Considering what sort of a man they're making of me up here, where cast-iron is better than velvet, I think it's likely, John Barrett, that it has been lucky for you that you have a daughter away down there."

He set his face in long gaze to the southern hills, bulked dimly behind the mists.

"As for Kate Arden--" He shook his head despondently, and walked away across the glistening granite towards "Ladder" Lane's house.

CHAPTER XVI

IN THE PATH OF THE BIG WIND

"So we fellers of the camp, when the wind-spooks rave and ramp, We fasten up the dingle-door with spike and extry clamp; For it ain't a mite against 'em if the boldest chaps do hide When the big old trees go tumblin', crash and bang, on ev'ry side."