King Spruce Part 8

She turned to Wade with real gentleness in her tones.

"I'm afraid he hurt you. It's a rough country up here. If you hadn't been trying to help me it wouldn't have happened. He had no right to--"

She checked herself suddenly, and her cheeks flamed.

"That wasn't a fair twit about my sticking my nose into your affairs, Miss Nina," protested Britt, and turning from her he visited his rage vicariously on his time-keeper, taking him by the arm and starting to drag him. "I told you to get aboard!" he rasped. "And when my men that I hire don't do as I tell 'em to do, I kick 'em aboard--and a time-keeper is no better than a swamper with me when he leaves this railroad. You want to understand those things and save lots of trouble."

"You take your hand off my arm, Mr. Britt," said the young man. He did not speak loudly, but there was something in his voice that impressed the Honorable Pulaski, who knew men.

"Now," resumed Wade, "for reasons of my own and that I don't propose to explain, I am going to ride to Castonia settlement on this mail-stage."

"It's safe to go on the wagon," persisted Britt, more mildly. "I tell you, if you mind your own business, I won't let him lick you."

With face gray and rigid at an insult that the old man couldn't understand, Wade opened his mouth, then shut it, turned his back, and climbed aboard the coach. The girl moved along to the farther end, and gropingly and blindly, without thought as to where he was sitting, he took the place beside her.

He remembered that as they drove away Britt shook that hairy fist at him, and that some rude roisterer on the wagons lilted some doggerel about "the chaney man." And through a sort of red mist he saw the face of Colin MacLeod.

They were miles along the rough road before he looked at the girl. At the movement of his head she turned her own, and in the piquant face above the big white bow of the veil he saw real sympathy.

He did not speak, but he looked into her clear eyes--eyes that had the country girl's spirit and a resourcefulness beyond her years--and from them he drew a certain comfort.

"Mr. Wade," she said, at last, "I'm only nineteen years old, but up in Castonia settlement we see what men are without the wrappings on them. I don't know much about real society, but I've read about it, and I guess society women get sort of dazzled by the outside polish and don't see things very clear. But up our way, with what they see of men, girls get to be women young. You are a college graduate and a school-teacher and all that, and I'm only nineteen, but--well, it just seems to me I can't help reaching over like this--"

She patted his arm.

"--And what I feel like saying is, 'Poor boy!'"

There was such vibrant sympathy in her voice that though he set his teeth, clinched his hands, and summoned all his resolution, his nervous strain slackened and the tears came into his eyes--tears that had been slowly welling ever since he had turned from John Barrett's door.

It was woman's attempt at consolation that broke through his restraint.

"I don't blame you much for squizzlin' a little," broke in the stage-driver, who saw this emotion without catching the conversation.

"He did bring his huck down solid when he stamped. But I've been calked myself, and a tobacker poultice allus does the business for me--northin'

better for p'isen in a wound."

The chaney man reached his hand to the girl under the shelter of the seat-back.

"Shake!" he said, simply. "I've come up here to stay awhile, and it's good to feel that I've got one friend that's--that's a woman."

"And you--" She faltered and paused to listen, lips apart.

"I've come to stay," he repeated, grimly.

He listened too.

Far behind them they heard the dull rumble of the heavy wagons over the ledges. The raucous howling of the revellers had something wolf-like about it. It seemed to close the line of retreat. Ahead were the big woods, looming darkly on the mountain ridges--that vast region of man to man, and the devil take the weak.

And again he said, not boastingly, but with a quiet setting of his tense jaw muscles:

"I've come to stay."

CHAPTER V

DURING THE PUGWASH HANG-UP

"With eddies and rapids it's middlin' tough, To worry a log-drive through.

But to manage a woman is more than enough For a West Branch driving crew."

--Leeboomook Song.

Just how Tommy Eye escaped so nimbly from the ruck of the fight at the foot of Pugwash Hill he never knew nor understood, his wits not being of the clearest that day--and the others being too busy to notice.

But he did escape. One open-handed buffet sent him reeling into and through some wayside bushes. He sat on his haunches on the other side a moment like a jack-rabbit and surveyed the stirring scene, and then made for higher ground. At the end of an enervating sixty-days' sentence in the county jail--his seventeenth summer "on the bricks" for the same old bibulous cause; second offence, and no money left to pay the fine--Tommy did not feel fit for the fray.

He sat on a bowlder at the top of the rise for a little while and gazed down on them--the hundred men of "Britt's Busters," bound in for the winter cutting on Umcolcus waters. They were fighting aimlessly, "mixing it up" without any special vindictiveness, and Tommy, an expert in inebriety, sagely concluded that they were too drunk to furnish amus.e.m.e.nt. So he rolled over the bowlder and nestled down to ease his headache, knowing, as a teamster should know, that Britt's tote wagons were to hold up at the Pugwash for a half-hour's rest and bait.

For that matter, a fight at the Pugwash was no novel incident--not for Tommy Eye, at least, veteran of many a woods campaign.

The hang-up at the hill is a teamster's rule as ancient as the tote road.

And the fight of the ingoing crew is as regular as the halt. All the way from the end of the railroad the men have been crowded on the wagons, with nothing to do but express personal differences of opinion. Every other man is a stranger to his neighbor, for employment offices do not make a specialty of introductions. As the princ.i.p.al matter of argument on the tote wagons is which is the best man, the Pugwash Hill wait, where there is soft ground and elbow-room, makes a most inviting opportunity to settle disputes and establish an _entente cordiale_ that will last through all the winter.

Two other men--two men who had been on the outskirts of the fray from its beginning--came leisurely up the hill, and sat down on the bowlder behind which was couched Tommy Eye.

One was the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt; the other was Colin MacLeod.

The Honorable Pulaski tucked the end of a big cigar into the opening in his bristly gray beard where his mouth was hidden, and lighted it. As an after-thought he offered one to MacLeod. The young man, his elbows on his knees, his flushed face turned aside, shook his head sullenly.

"Well, you're having a run of cuss-foolishness that even our champion fool, Tommy Eye himself, couldn't match," snorted the old man, rolling his tongue around his cigar.

Tommy, behind the rock, tipped one ear up out of the moss.

"Here you go pouncing into that car to-day, where my new time-keeper was, and go to picking a fuss with him, and--"

"He was the one that started it, Mr. Britt," said the boss, in the dull monotone of one who has said the same thing many times before.

"Don't bluff me!" snapped the Honorable Pulaski. "You were gossiping over a lot of his private business with that Ide girl--and bringing me into it, too. You can't fool me! Old Jeff back in the car heard it all.

The young feller had a right to put in an oar to stop you, and he did it, and I'll back him in it."

"Yes, and you went and introduced him to Miss Ide--that's some more of your backin'," said MacLeod, bitterly.

"Just common politeness--just common politeness!" cried Britt, waving his cigar impatiently. "That girl hasn't said she'd marry you, has she?

No! I knew she hadn't. Well, she's got a right to talk with nice young men that I introduce to her, and there's nothing to it to make a fuss over, MacLeod--only common politeness. You're making a fool of yourself, and setting the girl herself against you by acting jealous like that before the face and eyes of every one. That's enough time and talk wasted on girls. Now, quit it, and get your mind on your work. You understand that I won't have any more of this sc.r.a.pping in my crew."

With a blissful disregard of consistency, he gazed through smoke-clouds down at the men below, who were listlessly exchanging blows or rolling on the ground, locked in close embrace.