Joan of Arc of the North Woods Part 46

He knew the resources and methods of the drive. Soon he came upon a bateau pulled high on the river bank. There were boxes in the bateau, covered by a tarpaulin whose stripings of red signaled danger. He found a sack in the craft. He pried open one of the boxes and out of the sawdust in which they were packed he drew brown cylinders and tucked them carefully into the sack. The cylinders were sticks of dynamite. The sack was capacious and he stuffed it full. The bag sagged heavily with the weight of the load when he swung it over his shoulder and started up the bank, away from the river.

When Latisan walked away from Lida the mist again had lent its illusion, and he seemed to become of heroic size before the gray screen hid him from her sight.

Vittum tried pathetically to relieve the stress of the silence.

"The last peek at him made him look big enough to do 'most anything he sets out to do."

"Yes! But how can he fight them all single-handed?" She was pale and trembling.

"If I'm any judge, by the direction he took just now he has gone up and tapped our stock of canned thunder, miss. And if I ain't mistook about his notions, he is going to sound just about as big as he looked when we got that last peek!"

The rivermen did not lounge on the ground, as they usually did when they were resting. They stood, tensely waiting for what Latisan's manner of resolution had promised.

Lida asked no more questions; she was unable to control her tones. She had been given a hint of Ward's intentions by what the old man had said about the "canned thunder." She did not dare to be informed as to the probable details of those intentions; to know fully the nature of the risk he was running would have made the agony of her apprehensiveness unendurable.

It seemed to them, waiting there, that what Latisan had undertaken was never going to happen. They were not checking off the time in minutes; for them time was standing still. The far grumble of waters in the gorge merely accentuated the hush--did not break upon the profound silence.

When a chickadee lilted near at hand the men started nervously and the girl uttered a low cry; even a bird's note had power to trip their nervous tension.

The sound for which they were waiting came to them at last.

It was a sound with a thud in it!

Listeners who possessed an imagination would have found a suggestion of the crash of the hammer of Thor upon the mountain top.

"He looked big enough for that when he left us!" muttered the old man.

He had never heard of the pagan divinity whom men called Thor. His mind was on the river gladiator who had declared that he would come down heavy on his heels when he started.

The brooding opacity which wrapped the scene made the location of the sound uncertain; but it was up somewhere among the hills. The echoes battered to and fro between the cliffs.

Before those echoes died the sound was repeated.

"He's coming slow, but he's come sure!" Vittum voiced their thoughts.

"Them's the footsteps of Latisan!"

On they came! And as they thrust their force upon the upper ledges there was a little jump of the earth under the feet of those who stood and waited.

There was something indescribably grim and bodeful in those isochronal batterings of the solid ground. The echoes distracted the thoughts--made the ominous center of the sounds a matter of doubt. That uncertainty intensified the threat of what was approaching the dam of Skulltree.

There were other sounds, after a few moments. Rifles were cracking persistently; but it was manifestly random firing.

The old man stepped to Lida and grasped her hand and held it. "Don't be 'feared for him, miss. They're only guessing! He'll be knowing the ledges--every lift of 'em that's betwixt him and them. They'll never get him with their popguns. But he'll get _them_!" he declared, with venom.

"I wonder what Craig is thinking now, with his old bug eyes poking into that fog and doing him as much good as if he was stabbing a mill pond with his finger!"

The rifle fire died away, after a desultory patter of shots.

"They're running!" said one of the crew. "They must be on the run!"

"You bet they're running," agreed the old man. "The Three C's hasn't got money enough to hire men, to stand up in front of what's tromping down toward Skulltree! Heavier and heavier on his heels!"

Measuredly slow, inexorably persistent, progressed the footsteps of the giant blasts.

Latisan's men needed no eye-proof in order to understand the method.

The drive master was hurling the dynamite sticks far in advance of himself and to right and to left, making his own location a puzzling matter. The men had seen him bomb incipient jams in that fas.h.i.+on, lighting short fuses and heaving the explosive to a safe distance.

The blasts were nearer and still nearer, and more frequent; the ground quaked under their feet; in the intervening silences they heard the whine and the rustle of upthrown litter in the air, the patterings and plops of debris raining into the s.p.a.ces of the deadwater.

Behind the attack was the menace of the bodefully unseen--the lawlessness of the fantastically unprecedented.

"I don't blame the fellers with the guns, if they have quit," commented Vittum. "They might as well try to lick the lightning in a thundercloud."

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Mern's mercenaries were not cowards. They had served valiantly as guards of strike breakers, had fought in many forays, had winged their attackers, and had been winged in return. At mill gates they had resisted mobs and had endured missiles; they had ridden on trucks, protecting goods and drivers, through lanes of howling, hostile humanity; they had thrown the cordon of their bodies around dock workers.

But the gunmen's exploits in intrepidity had been, of and in the cities.

The environment at Skulltree was the Great Open.

They were not backed by solidity or barricaded behind walls. There was not the rea.s.surance of good, honest earth under their feet; they were precariously perched in s.p.a.ce, so it seemed--standing on the stringers of the dam, peering into a void of shrouding mists and thunderous waters, the wilderness all about them!

In their battles in past times they had been able to see the foe; now they were called on to fight a noise--the bodeful detonations of blasts, to right, to left--here and there.

There was a foe; he was on his way. They did not know what sort of ruin he purposed to wreak as the climax of his performance. Craig himself did not know, so he affirmed in reply to anxious queries, and the boss's uncertainty and increasing consternation added to the peculiar psychological menace of the thing.

"Give us orders, Mr. Craig!" pleaded the captain of the guards. "Show us something to fight against. How many of 'em are there? Where are they?

"It's that d.a.m.nable Latisan, working single-handed. I'm sure of it. Go get him!"

"If you don't get him, he's going to blow up this dam," stated the frightened lawyer.

A far-flung bomb of dynamite landed in the water and shot a geyser spraying against the fog pall.

"I'm taking that guess for gospel," affirmed the chief gunman, wiping spray from his face. "Mr. Craig, you can't expect us to hang on here, facing a thing like what's coming!"

"Shoot him!" gasped the Comas director, but he was revolving on unsteady feet and the aimlessness of his gaze revealed that he had no definite idea of procedure; his incert.i.tude wrecked all the courage of his supporters.

"It can't be done, sir. Not in this fog! We'd better get ash.o.r.e----"

"And let him wreck this dam?"

"If he's going to wreck it, we'd better be off it."

In his fear Craig became insulting, and that att.i.tude ended his control of the situation. "You're hired with money, you cowards! Now earn it!"