King Spruce Part 5

But noting the glitter in Wade's eyes, Mr. Britt chuckled amiably and took himself off down the car to talk business with a man.

During the long ride to Umcolcus Junction, Wade sat revelling in the bitterness of his thoughts. He was not disturbed because he had given up his school. There was a relief in escaping from meddlesome backbiters.

The school had been only a means to an end: it afforded revenue to attain certain cherished professional plans that loomed large in Wade's prospects. Money earned honorably in any other fas.h.i.+on would count for as much. But the fact remained that he was fleeing, was hiding. Britt's rough and somewhat contemptuous proprietors.h.i.+p, so instantly displayed, wounded his pride. When he had pa.s.sed the station to which he had purchased his ticket before he met Britt, he offered more pay to the conductor. He had seen Britt talking with the conductor a moment before, brandis.h.i.+ng a hairy hand in his direction.

"It's all settled by Mr. Britt," the train officer stated, pa.s.sing on.

"You're one of his men, he says."

He growled under his breath as he accepted that label--"One of Britt's men."

There were one hundred more waiting for them at Umcolcus Junction, where they changed to the spur line that ran north.

Most of the men were in a state of social inebriety. A few fighters were sitting apart on their dunnage-bags, nursing bruises and grudges.

Mindful of the State law that forbade the wearing of calked boots on board a railroad train, the men who owned only that sort of footgear were in their stocking feet. They carried their boots strung about their necks by lacings. Many were bareheaded, having thrown away their hats in their enthusiasm. Wade was not in a frame of mind to see any picturesqueness in that frowsy crowd. He was one of them; he walked dutifully behind his master, the Honorable Pulaski Britt.

A little man, with neck wattled blue and red with queer suggestion of a turkey's characteristics, lurched out of a group and came at Pulaski Britt with a meek and watery smile of welcome. His knees doubled with a drunkard's limpness, and he had to run to keep from falling. Britt evidently did not propose to serve as dock for this human derelict. He stepped to one side with an oath, and the man made a dizzy whirl and dove headforemost under the train on the main track, and at that moment the train started. The man rolled over twice, and lay, serenely indifferent to death, on the outer rail.

After it was all over Wade sourly told himself that he acted as he did simply to avoid witnessing a hideous spectacle.

For, in spite of Britt's yells of protest, he went under the car, missed the grinding wheels by an inch, and rolled out on the other side with the drunken man in his arms.

And when the train had drawn out of the station he came back across the track, lugging the little man as he would carry a gripsack, tossed him into the open door of the baggage-car of the waiting train, spatted the dust off his own clothes, and went into the coach, casting surly looks at the sputtering inebriates who attempted to shake hands with him.

When the train started Britt came again and penned the young man in his seat against the window-casing.

"You've started in makin' yourself worth while, even if you are only the chaney man," vouchsafed his employer. "You did an infernal fool trick, but you've saved me Tommy Eye, the best teamster on the Umcolcus waters.

As he lies there now he ain't worth half a cent a pound to feed to cats; when he's on a load with the webbin's in his hands I wouldn't take ten thousand dollars for him."

"Is he a sort of personal property of yours?" asked Wade, sullenly. He was venting his own resentment at Pulaski Britt's airs of general proprietors.h.i.+p over men.

"Just the same as that," replied Britt, complacently. "I've had him more than twenty years, and I'd like to see him try to go to work for any one else, or any one else try to hire him away." He struck his hand on the young man's knee. "Up this way, if you don't make men know you own 'em, you're missin' one of the main points of forestry!" He sneered this word every time he used it in his talk with Wade. The new chaney man began to wonder how much longer he could endure the Honorable Pulaski D.

Britt without rising and cuffing those puffy cheeks.

CHAPTER IV

THE BOSS OF THE "BUSTERS"

"If you don't like our looks nor ain't stuck on our kind, Git back with the dames in the next car behind."

On and on went the yelping staccato of the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt.

The Honorable Pulaski D. was discoursing on his favorite topic, and his voice was heard above the rattle and jangle of the shaky old pa.s.senger-coach that jolted behind some freight-cars.

"Forty years ago I rolled nigh onto a million feet into that brook there!" shouted the lumber baron of the Umcolcus. His knotted, hairy fist wagged under the young man's nose as he pointed at the car window, his unwholesome breath fanned warmly on Wade's cheek, and when he crowded over to look into the summer-dried stream his bristly chin-whiskers tickled his seat-mate's ear. The September day was muggy and human contact disquieting. Wade shrank nearer the open window. The Honorable Pulaski did not notice the shrinking. He was accustomed to crowd folks. His self-a.s.sertiveness expected them to get out of the way.

"Yes, sir, nigh onto a million in one spring, and half of it 'down pine'

and sounder'n a hound's tooth. Nothing here now but sleeper stuff. It's a good many miles to the nearest saw-log, and that's where I'm cutting on Jerusalem. I tell you, I've peeled some territory in forty years, young man."

Wade looked at the red tongue licking l.u.s.tfully between blue lips, and then gazed on the ragged, bush-grown wastes on either side. While he had been crowding men the Honorable Pulaski had been just as industriously crowding the forest off G.o.d's acres. The "chock" of the axe sounded in his abrupt sentences, the rasp of saws in his voice.

"We left big stumps those days." The hairy fist indicated the rotten monuments of moss-covered punk shouldering over the dwarfed bushes.

"There was a lot of it ahead of us. Didn't have to be economical. Get it down and yanked to the landings--that was the game! We're cutting as small as eight-inch spruce at Jerusalem. Ain't a mouthful for a gang-saw, but they taste good to pulp-grinders."

The train began to groan and jerk to a stand-still, and the old man dove out of his seat and staggered down the aisle, holding to the backs of the seats. At the last station he had spent ten minutes of hand-brandis.h.i.+ng colloquy on the platform with a s.h.i.+ngle-mill boss whom he had summoned to the train by wire. He was to meet a birch-mill foreman here. Wade looked out at the struggling cedars and the white birches, "the ladies of the forest," pathetic aftermath which was now falling victim to axe and saw, and wondered with a flicker of grim humor in his thoughts why the Honorable Pulaski did not set crews at work cutting the bushes for hoop-poles and then clean up the last remnant into toothpicks.

"He's a driver, ain't he?" sounded a voice in his ear. An old man behind him hung his grizzled whiskers over the seat-back and pointed an admiring finger at the retreating back of the lumber baron.

Wade wished that people would let him alone. He had some thoughts--some very bitter thoughts--to think alone, and the world jarred on him. The yelp of the Honorable Pulaski's monologue, that everlasting, insistent bellow of voices in the smoking-car ahead, where the ingoing crew of Britt's hundred men were trying to sing with drunken l.u.s.tiness, and now this amiable old fool of the grizzled whiskers, stung the dull pain of his resentment at deeper troubles into sudden and almost childish anger.

"Once when I was swamping for him on Telos stream, he says to me, 'Man,'

he says, 'remember that the time that's lost when an axe is slicin' air ain't helping me to pay you day's wages!' And I says to him, 'Mister Britt,' says I--"

Dwight Wade, college graduate, former high-school princ.i.p.al, and at all times in the past a cultured and courteous young gentleman, did the first really rude and unpardonable act of his life. He twisted his chin over his shoulder, scowled into the mild, dim, and watery eyes of his interlocutor, and growled:

"Oh, cut it short! What in--" He checked the expletive, and snapped himself up and across the aisle, and slammed down into another seat. The red came over his face. He did not dare to look back at the old man. He hearkened to the rip-roaring chorus in the smoking-car, and reflected that as the new time-keeper he was now one of "Britt's Busters," and that the demoralizing license of the great north woods must have entered into his nature thus early. He grunted his disgust at himself under his breath, and hunched his head down between his shoulders.

In his nasty state of mind he glowered at a pa.s.senger who came into the car at the front. It was a girl, and a pretty girl at that. She nodded a cheery greeting to the old man of the grizzled whiskers, and with a smile still dimpling her cheeks flashed one glance at Wade. It was not a bold look, and yet there was the least bit of challenge in it. The sudden pout on her lips might have been at thought of confiding her fresh, crisp skirts to the dusty seat; and yet, when she turned and shot one more quick glance at the young man's sour countenance, the pout curled into something like disdain, and a little shrug of her shoulders hinted that she had not met the response that she was accustomed to find on the faces of young men who saw her for the first time.

While Wade was gazing gloomily and abstractedly at the fair profile and the nose, tip-tilted a wee bit above the big white bow of her veil tied under her chin, one of the crew lurched from the door of the smoking-car, caught off his hat, and bowed extravagantly. It was Tommy Eye. He had to clutch the brake-wheel to keep himself from falling. But his voice was still his own. He broke out l.u.s.tily:

"Oh, there ain't no girl, no pretty little girl, That I have left behind me.

I'm all cut loose for to wra.s.sle with the spruce, Way up where she can't find me.

Oh, there ain't no--"

An angry face appeared over his shoulder in the door of the smoker, two big hands clutched his throat, jammed the melody into a hoa.r.s.e squawk, and then the songster went tumbling backward into the car and out of sight.

Almost immediately his muscular suppressor crossed the platform and came into the coach, s.n.a.t.c.hing the little round hat off the back of his head as he entered. Wade knew him. His employer had introduced them at the junction as two who should know each other. It was Colin MacLeod, the "boss."

"And Prince Edward's Island never turned out a smarter," the Honorable Pulaski had said, not deigning to make an aside of his remarks. "Landed four million of the Umcolcus logs on the ice this spring, busted her with dynamite, let h.e.l.l and the drive loose, licked every pulp-wood boss that got in his way with their kindlings, and was the first into Pea Cove boom with every log on the scale-sheet. That's this boy!" And he fondled the young giant's arm like a butcher appraising beef.

Wade paid little attention to him then. With his ridged jaw muscles, his hard gray eyes, and the bullying c.o.c.k of his head, he was only a part of the ruthlessness of the woods.

But now, as he came up the car aisle, his face flushed, his eyes eager, his embarra.s.sment wrinkling on his forehead, Wade looked at him with the sudden thought that the boss of the "Busters" was merely a boy, after all.

"It was only Tommy Eye, Miss Nina," explained MacLeod, his voice trembling, his abashed admiration s.h.i.+ning in his face. "He's just out of jail, you know." He looked at Wade and then at the old man of the grizzled whiskers, and raised his voice as though to gain a self-possession he did not feel. "Tommy always gets into jail after the drive is down. He's spent seventeen summers in jail, and is proud of it."

"But there ain't no better teamster ever pushed on the webbin's," said the old man, admiration for all the folks of the woods still unflagging.

The girl did not display the same enthusiasm, either for Tommy Eye's mishaps or for the bashful giant who stood s.h.i.+fting from foot to foot beside her seat.

"Crews going into the woods ought to be nailed up in box-cars, that's what father says. And when they go through Castonia settlement I wish they were in crates, the same as they s.h.i.+p bears."

"How is your father since spring?" asked the young boss, stammeringly, trying to appear unconscious of her scorn.

"Oh, he's all right," she returned, carelessly, patting her hand on her lips to repress a yawn.