Joan of Arc of the North Woods Part 15

"I'm afraid you're finding me a peculiar person, Mr. Latisan," she hastened to say. "I am. I'm quick to judge and quick to decide. Your gallantry at the railroad station influenced me in your behalf. I like your manners. And I know now what's in your mind! You think it will be very easy for me to find somebody else as a guide--and you're quite sure that you can't give up your responsibility for a woman's whim."

The drive master owned to himself that she had called the turn.

"I'll continue with my frankness, Mr. Latisan. It's rather more than a guide I'm looking for on that man-to-man plane I have mentioned. You can readily understand. I need good advice about land. Therefore, mine is not exactly a whim, any more than your present determination to go on with your job is a whim. This matter has come to us very suddenly.

Suppose we think it over. We'll have another talk. At any rate, you can advise me in regard to other men."

She rose and extended her hand. "We can be very good friends, I trust."

He took her hand in a warm clasp. "I'll do what I can--be sure of that."

"I feel very much alone all of a sudden. I'm depending on you. You're not going back to the drive right away, are you?" she asked, anxiously.

"I'll be held here for a day or so." The matter of the dynamite was on his mind.

"Good!" she said, and patted his arm when he turned to leave the room.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Latisan took the forenoon train down from Adonia to the junction the next day. He was keeping his own counsel about his intent.

He had done some busy thinking during the evening after he left the new star boarder in her parlor. In spite of his efforts to confine his attention, in his thoughts, to business, he could not keep his mind wholly off her attractive personality and her peculiar proposition. He was obliged to whip up his wrath in order to get solidly down to the Flagg affairs.

By the time he went to sleep he knew that he was determinedly ugly.

There was the slur of Flagg about his slack efficiency in meeting the schemes of Craig. There was the ireful consciousness that the narrow-gauge folks were giving him a raw deal on that dynamite matter.

They had hauled plenty of explosive for the Comas--for Craig. To admit at the outset of his career on the Noda that he could not get what the Three C's folks were getting--to advertise his impotency by making a twenty-mile tote trip over slushy and rutted roads--was a mighty poor send-off as a boss, he told himself. He knew what sort of tattle would pursue him.

The stout young man--that "drummer"--was at the station. Latisan was uncomfortably conscious that this person had been displaying more or less interest in him. In the dining room at breakfast, in the office among the loafers, and now at the railroad station the stranger kept his eyes on Latisan.

The drive master was just as ugly as he had been when he went to sleep.

He was keeping his temper on a wire edge for the purposes of the job of that day, as he had planned the affair. He did not go up to the impertinent drummer and cuff his ears, but the stranger did not know how narrowly he escaped that visitation of resentment.

The fellow remained on the platform when the train pulled out; it occurred to Latisan that the fresh individual maybe wished to make sure of a clear field in order to pursue his crude tactics with the lady of the parlor.

After the arrival at the junction Latisan had matters which gave him no time to ponder on the possible plight of the lady.

As he had ascertained by cautious inquiry, the crew of the narrow-gauge train left it on its spur track unattended while they ate at a boarding house. There were workmen in the yard of a lumber mill near the station, loafing after they had eaten their lunches from their pails. The Flagg dynamite was in a side-tracked freight car of the standard gauge.

Latisan promptly learned that the lumber-yard chaps were ready and willing to earn a bit of change during their nooning. He grabbed in with them; the boxes of dynamite were soon transferred to the freight car of the narrow-gauge and stacked in one end of the car. Latisan paid off his crew and posted himself on top of the dynamite. In one hand he held a coupling pin; prominently displayed in the other hand was a fuse.

"I'm in here--the dynamite is here," he informed the conductor when that official appeared at the door of the car, red-faced after hearing the news of the transfer. "I'm only demanding the same deal you have given the Three C's. You know you're wrong. d.a.m.n the law! I'm riding to Adonia with this freight. What's that? Go ahead and bring on your train crew."

He brandished coupling pin and fuse. "If you push me too far you'll have a week's job picking up the splinters of this train."

Bravado was not doing all the work for Latisan in that emergency. The conductor's conscience was not entirely easy; he had made an exception in the case of the Three C's--and Craig, attending to the matter before he went to New York, had borne down hard on the need of soft-pedal tactics. The conductor was not prepared to risk things with canned thunder in boxes and an explosive young man whose possession just then was nine points and a considerable fraction.

Latisan was left to himself.

At last the train from downcountry rumbled in, halted briefly, and went on its way. From his place in the end of the freight car Latisan could command only a narrow slice of outdoors through the open side door.

Persons paraded past on their way to the coach of the narrow-gauge. He could see their backs only. There had been a thrill for him in the job he had just performed; he promptly got a new and more lively thrill even though he ridiculed his sensations a moment later. Among the heads of the arrivals he got a glimpse of an object for which he had stretched his neck and strained his eyes--the anxious soul of him in his eyes--on the street in New York City. He saw a green toque with a white quill.

As though a girl--such a girl as he judged her to be--would still be wearing the same hat, all those months later! But that hat and the very c.o.c.k of the angle of the quill formed, in a way, the one especially vivid memory of his life. However, he had a vague, bachelor notion that women's hats resembled their whims--often changed and never twice alike, and he based no hopes on what he had seen.

Whoever she was, she was on the train. But there were stations between the junction and Adonia--not villages, but the mouths of roads which led far into remote regions where a green toque could not be traced readily.

He acutely desired to inform himself regarding the face under that hat.

But he had made possession the full ten points of his law, sitting on that load of dynamite. What if he should allow that train crew an opening and give Echford Flagg complete confirmation of the report that his drive master was a sapgag with women?

After the intenseness of the thrill died out of him he smiled at the idea that a chance meeting in New York could be followed up in this fas.h.i.+on in the north country. At any rate, he had something with which to busy his thoughts during the slow drag of the train up to Adonia, and he was able to forget in some measure that he was sitting on dynamite and would face even more menacing explosives of another kind when the drive was on its way.

He posted himself in the side door of the car when the train rolled along beside the platform at Adonia. He had ordered men of the Flagg outfit to be at the station with sleds, waiting for the train; they were on hand, and he shouted to them, commanding them to load the boxes and start north.

There was a man displaying a badge on the platform--a deputy sheriff who had his eye out for bootleggers headed toward the driving crews; the conductor ran to the officer and reported that Latisan had broken the law relating to the transportation of explosives; the trainman proposed to s.h.i.+ft the responsibility, antic.i.p.ating that the sheriff might give official attention to the cargo.

Just then Latisan spied the green toque; the face was concealed because the head was bowed to enable the toque's wearer to pick her way down the steps of the coach.

The drive master leaped from the door of the car and his men scrambled past him to enter.

"About that dynamite----"

Latisan elbowed aside the questioning sheriff, and looked straight past the officer. "If you go after me on that point you'll have to go after Craig and the Three C's, too--and I'll put the thing up to the county attorney myself. Right now I'm busy."

The men were lugging out the boxes. "If anybody gets in your way, boys, drop a box on his toes," he shouted, starting up the platform.

"Leave it to us, Mr. Latisan," bawled one of the crew.

The drive master had his eyes on the girl who was walking ahead of him.

He could hardly believe that the voicing of his name attracted her attention. She did not know his name! But she stopped and whirled about and stared at him.

It was surely the girl of the cafeteria!

She plainly shared Latisan's amazement, but there was in her demeanor something more than the frank astonishment which was actuating him.

He pulled off his cap and hurried to her and put out his hand. "I saw you--I mean I saw your hat. I thought it might be you--but I looked for you in New York--for that hat----" He knew he was making a fool of himself by his excitement and incoherence. "I have been thinking about you----" He was able to check himself, for her eyes were showing surprise of another sort. Her manner suggested to Latisan that she, at any rate, had not been thinking especially about him during the months.

She had recovered her composure.

"It is not surprising about the hat, Mr.--I believe I heard somebody call your name--Mr. Latisan?" There was an inflection of polite query, and he bowed. "My sarcastic friends are very explicit about this hat serving as my identifier."

"I didn't mean it that way. I don't know anything about girls' hats. But to see you away up here----"

She forced a flicker of a smile.

"It seems quite natural to find you here in the woods, though I believe you did tell me that your home is over Tomah way."

He was not able to understand the strange expression on her countenance.

And she, on her part, was not able to look at him with complete composure; she remembered the character given to this man by Craig, and she had ventured to give him something else in her report--the swagger of a _roue_ and a black mustache!

There was an awkward moment and he put his cap back on his head. He looked about as if wondering if she expected friends. He had treasured every word of hers in the cafeteria. She had spoken of the woods as if her home had been there at one time.