King Spruce Part 48

"I got just what I went after," snarled the young man. "I got in four words the fighting rules of these woods, explained by the head devil of them all, and, by ----, if that's the only way for an honest man to save his skin up here, they can have the fight on those lines! Take the reins, Mr. Ide; I want to straighten this thing in my mind."

Little pa.s.sed between them on the return journey, but they talked far into the night, leaning towards each other across the little splint table in the office camp.

The next morning they climbed the side of Enchanted, following the main road that had been swamped to Enchanted Stream. On the upper slopes they came upon the log-yards, and heaps of great, stripped spruces piled ready for the sleds. Farther up the slopes they heard the monotonous "whush-wish" of the cross-cut saws and the crackling crash of falling trees.

In the Maine woods it is not the practice to haul to landings until the tree crop is practically all down and yarded on the main roads. This practice in the case of the Enchanted operation that winter was providential; for in the conference of the night before Rodburd Ide and his partner had definitely abandoned Enchanted Stream. That decision left them the alternative of Blunder Stream. It was the only plan that fitted with Rodburd Ide's new hopes based on the log contract in his breast-pocket. For months he had dimly foreseen this crisis without clear conception as to how it was to be met. But the possibilities of the gamble had fascinated him.

In his calculations he had tried to keep prudence to the fore. But he had been waiting so long that at last prudence became dizzy in the swirl of possibilities. He had never intended to make Dwight Wade his mere cat's-paw. But the vehement courage of that st.u.r.dy young man, as displayed in the battle of Castonia, had touched something in Rodburd Ide's soul. All through his quiet life he had seen might and mastery make money out of the woods. And so at last he himself ventured, trusting much to the might and mastery he found in this self-reliant young gentleman whom Fate had flung into his life. Gasping at the boldness of it, he was willing that the whole winter's cut of the Enchanted operation should be landed upon Blunder Stream. That there was a way to get their water he admitted to himself, but he did not dare to think much upon the means. Dwight Wade, driven by fierce anger against Pulaski Britt, who blocked his way to the girl whom his own hands could win but for Britt, smote the splint table and declared that there should be a spring flood in Blunder Stream.

"And if you fear lawsuits, being a man of property, Mr. Ide, you should not know what I intend to do. You may be held as a partner. Dissolve that partners.h.i.+p. You may be held as an employer. Discharge me when this log-cut is landed. Protect yourself. I have only my two hands for them to attach."

The little man blinked at him admiringly, and then patted his shoulder.

"You needn't tell me what you intend to do. You are the one for this end, and I can trust you. But when it comes to responsibility and the law, Wade, if those thieves try it on, after all they've stolen, you'll find Rod Ide right with you. You're my partner, and you'll stay my partner," declared Ide, stoutly.

He repeated it as they swung around the upper granite dome of Enchanted, and looked down the western slope into Blunder valley.

"There's the place for your main road, Wade," he said--"down that shoulder there! Swamp a half-mile of the steep pitch and you'll come into the Cameron road, and it will take you to the stream. You'll need about fifteen hundred feet of snub-line for that sharp incline there, and I'll have it up to you by the time you are ready for it. Put the swale hay to the rest of the pitches. It will trig better than gravel.

Don't let 'em put a chain round a runner. You want to keep your road so smooth that every load of logs will go down there like a boy down a barn rollway. Sprinkle your levels and keep 'em glare ice. By ----, it's a beauty of an outlook for a landing-job! Cut your high slopes this trip.

Keep your logs above the level of that shoulder, and every hoss team will make a four-turn day of it. We'll save a dollar a thousand on the landing-proposition alone, over and above the Enchanted road chance! And up there--" He gazed to the north up the valley over the wooded ridges, and then hushed his voice, as though there lay somewhere in that blue distance a thing that he feared.

"Up there is a lake of water, Mr. Ide, that G.o.d designed to flow down this valley, and it's going to find its own channel again--somehow! I hope that doesn't sound like cheap boasting. It's only my idea of the right."

He led the way back around the granite dome above the spruce benches, and the old man followed in silence.

Two hours later Rodburd Ide was off and away for Castonia, his jumper-bell jangling its echoes among the trees. He had hope in his heart and a letter in his pocket. The hope was his own. The letter was addressed to John Barrett's daughter, and the superscription had brought a little scowl to the brows of the magnate of Castonia. Somehow it seemed like communication with the enemy. But Dwight Wade, writing it in the stillness of the night, while the little man snored in his bunk, had seemed in his own imaginings to be putting into that letter, as one lays away for safe keeping in a casket, all that heart and soul held of love and candor and tenderness. It was as though he intrusted those into her hands to preserve for him against the day when he might take them back into life and living once more. Just now they did not seem to belong to this life on Enchanted; they did not harmonize with the bitter conditions. He pressed down the envelope's seal with the fantastic reflection that he was sending out of the conflict witnesses in whose presence he might stand ashamed.

Therefore, it was not treason that Rodburd Ide bore in the pocket of his big fur coat. Dwight Wade had sent tenderer emotions to the rear. He stood at the front, ready to meet iron with iron and fire with fire.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE DEVIL OF THE HEMPEN STRANDS

"When the snub-line parts and the great load starts There's nothing that men may do, Except to cower with quivering hearts While the wreck goes thundering through."

--The Ballad of Tumbled.i.c.k.

Days of winter snow and blow; days of suns.h.i.+ne, hard and cold as the radiance from a diamond's facets; days of calm and days of tempest; days when the snowflakes dropped as straight as plummets, and days when the whirlwinds danced in crazy rigadoons down the valleys or spun like dervishes on the mountain-tops! And all were days of honest, faithful toil in the black growth of Enchanted, and the days brought the dreamless sleep o' nights that labor won.

In those long evenings hope lighted a taper that shone brightly beside the lantern of the office camp in whose dull beams Dwight Wade wrote long and earnest letters. But these were not to John Barrett's daughter; the conditions of their waiting love had tacitly closed the mail between them.

Again Dwight Wade, in the honesty of his soul, had seen a light of hope that contrasted cheerily with the red glare of might against might which made his decency quail. He saw a chance to win as a man, not as a thug.

The most brilliant young attorney of the newer generation in the State had been Wade's college mate. To him Wade detailed in those long letters the iniquitous conditions that fettered independent operators in the north country, and gave the case into his enthusiastic keeping. It meant digging into the black heart of the State's political corruption, timber graft, and land steals. It was a task that the young attorney, with earnest zeal and new ideals of civic honor, had long before entered upon. He seized upon this store of new ammunition with delight, and Wade rejoiced at the tenor of his replies. That the law and the right would intervene in Blunder valley to preserve him from a conflict in which he must use the shameful weapons selected by Britt for the duello was a promise that he cherished. And thus heartened, he toiled more eagerly.

It was well into February before they began to haul their logs to the landing-place on Blunder Stream. But even with an estimated five millions to dump upon the ice of Blunder, time was ample, for the snub-line down the steep quarter-mile of Enchanted's shoulder made a cut-off that doubled the efficiency of the teams. It was the crux of the situation, that snubbing-pitch. With its desperate dangers, its uncertainties, its celerity, it was ominous and it was fascinating. But it was the big end of the great game. Dwight Wade made himself its captain. Tommy Eye, master of horses, came into his own and was his lieutenant.

Those two trudged there together in the gray of the dawn; they trudged back together in the chilled dusk, still trembling with the racking strain of it all.

Wade, cant-dog in hand, stood beside the snubbing-post and gave the word for every load to start, and watched every inch of its progress with tense muscles and pounding heart. Tommy Eye mounted the load and took the reins from the deposed driver as each team came to the top of the pitch; and the snorting, fearing horses seemed to know his master touch, and in blind faith went into their collars and floundered down under the fateful looming of the great load. Thus, every hour of the day, Tommy Eye silently, boldly ventured his life in the interests of the man who had once saved it, and Dwight Wade watched over his safety from the top of the slope. No word pa.s.sed between the two. But they understood.

There was no other man in the north country with the soothing voice, the a.s.suring touch on the reins, and the mystic power to inspire confidence in dumb brutes--no other man that could bring the qualities that Tommy Eye brought to his task, coupled with the blind courage to perform. The horses turned their heads to make sure that he held the reins and was adventuring with them. Then they went on.

The snubbing-post was a huge beech, sawed to leave four feet of stump.

It had been adzed to the smoothness of an axe-handle. The three-inch hawser clasped it with four turns, and two men, whose hands were protected by huge leather mittens, kept the squalling coils loosened and paid out the slack, when the cable was hooked to the load of logs on its way down the slope in order to hold it back. And when the coils yanked themselves loose and the rope ran too swiftly, even making the leather mittens smoke, Wade, with his cant-dog, threw the hawser hard against the stump and checked it. It was a trick that Tommy Eye taught him, and it required muscle and snap. At the instant of peril he drove his cant-dog's iron nose into the roots of the stump, surged back on his lever, and pinched the rope between post and ash handle of the tool.

Friction checked and held the load, but it was muscle-stretching, back-breaking labor.

And all the time there was the rope to watch to make sure that no rock's edge or sharp stick had severed a strand, for broken strands uncoil like a spring under the mighty strain. There were the flipping bights of the coiled hawser to guard against as the men paid it out. Men are caught by those bights and ground to horrible death against the snubbing-post.

In time that rope came to have sentiency in the eyes of Wade. Some days it seemed to be possessed by the spirit of evil. It would not run smoothly. It fed out by jerks, getting more and more of slack at each jump. It began to sway and vibrate between post and load, a wider arc with every jerk, a gigantic cello-string booming horrible music. It snarled on the post; it growled grim and sinister warning along its tense length. So terrible are these wordless threats that men have been known to surrender in panic, flee from the snubbing-post, and let destruction wreak its will. Hence the silent and understanding partners.h.i.+p between Tommy Eye, shadowed by death on the load, and Dwight Wade fiercely alert at the snubbing-post.

There came a day when the spirit of evil had full sway.

The weather was hard, with gray skies and a bone-searching chill. The hawser, made smooth as gla.s.s by attrition, was steely and stiff with the cold. It had new voices. Once it leaped so viciously at the legs of one of the post-men that he gave a yell and ran. In the tumult of his pa.s.sion and fear Wade cursed the caitiff, his own legs in the swirl of the bights, his cant-dog nipping the rope to the post and checking it short. And far down the slope Tommy Eye, his teeth hard shut on his tobacco, waited without turning his head, a mute picture of utter confidence.

It was while Wade held the line, waiting for the men to re-coil the hawser into safe condition to run, that the Honorable Pulaski Britt appeared. He came trotting his horses down the Enchanted main road and jerked them to a halt at the top of the pitch. Two men were with him on the jumper. Each wore the little blue badge of a game warden.

"We are after a man named Thomas Eye, of your crew," said one of the men, catching Wade's inquiring gaze. "We've traced that cow-moose killing to him--the Cameron case."

For an instant Wade's heart went sick, and then it went wild. Such an impudent, barefaced plot to rob him of an invaluable man at this crisis in his affairs seemed impossible to credit. It was vengefulness run mad, gone puerile.

"Mr. Britt has signed the complaint and has the witnesses," said the warden. "We've got a warrant and we'll have to take the man."

"And there he is on that load," said the Honorable Pulaski, pointing his whip-b.u.t.t.

"Hold that line, men," commanded Wade, coming away from the post. "Tommy Eye has not been out of my camp, wardens. He is absolutely indispensable to me. He has killed no moose. But if it can be proven I'll pay his fine."

"It takes a trial to prove it," said the warden, dryly. "That's why we're after him."

"Britt, I didn't think you'd get down to this," stormed the young man.

"I'm not a game warden," retorted the baron of the Umcolcus. "You're dealin' with them, not me."

He sat, slicing his whip-lash into the snow, and watched the young man's bitter anger with huge enjoyment. And when Wade seemed unable to frame a suitable retort he went on: "If you think I've got anything to do with taking that crack teamster out of your crew, you'd better thank me.

Anything that interferes with your landing your logs in a blind pocket like Blunder Stream is a G.o.dsend to you and Rod Ide." His temper began to flame. "What do you think you're going to do there? Do you calculate to steal any of my water? Do you think that whipper-snapper whelp of a lawyer that you've set yappin' at our heels is goin' to spin a thread for you against the men that have run this section for thirty years? If you've only got the law bug in your head, give it up. But if you have the least sneakin' idea of troublin' that dam up there"--he shook his fist into the north--"coil your snub-line and save time and money; for, by the eternal Jehovah, blood will run in that valley before water does!"

In the pause that followed one of the wardens asked, "Do you propose to resist the arrest of Eye, Mr. Wade?"

The question was an incautious one. In a flash the young man saw that this last sortie of the Honorable Pulaski was not so much an adventure against Tommy Eye as against himself--with intent to embroil him with the officers of the law. That might mean more trouble than he dared reflect upon. He had a very definite apprehension of what the legal machinery of Britt and his a.s.sociates might do to him if he afforded any pretence for their procedure.

One of the wardens dropped off the jumper at a word from Britt, and the timber baron urged his horses down the slope, the other officer accompanying him.

Tommy Eye sat on his load, still with gaze patiently to the front, waiting in serene confidence the convenience of his employer. That back turned to Wade was the back of the humble confider, the back of the martyr. In his sudden trepidation at thought of his own imperilled interests, were he himself enmeshed in the law, Wade had thought to leave Tommy's possible fate alone. But now, almost without reflection or plan, he ran down the hill. The martyr's serene obliviousness struck a pang to his heart. In those days of strife and toil and understanding Tommy Eye had grown dear to him. Britt, turning, yelled to the officer at the top of the slope, "Give that snub-line a half-hitch and hold that load!"

A bit of a rock shelf broadened the road where the logs were halted.

Britt lashed his horses around in front of the load with apparent intent to intimidate Tommy. The warden dropped off the jumper and shut off retreat in the rear. And Wade, running swiftly, carrying his cant-dog, came and leaped upon the load and stood above Tommy--his protecting genius, but a genius who had no very clear idea of what he was about to do.