King Spruce Part 37

Barrett had picked up one of the discarded bludgeons and was supporting himself on it. His legs trembled visibly when he walked to Ide's side.

"Rodburd," he said, appealingly, "I can see that you think this thing strange. I don't want you to have wrong ideas. You and I have known each other too long to get into quarrels. You have seen that I have been trying to smooth matters here to-day. I can't talk it over with you now.

I'm sick--I'm a sick man, Rodburd! I've been through a dreadful experience up here."

"You don't look well," returned Ide, solicitously, his ever-ready sympathy enlisted.

Barrett's face was haggard and his eyes were bloodshot. He wavered on his feet, tipping from heel to toe like a drunken man.

"You ought to get out of these woods as quick as you can," the Castonia man went on.

Even Britt saw now that his a.s.sociate was in a bad way. He gave a keen glance at him, and shouted to MacLeod, who was waiting at the edge of the woods, "Send back four of my men!"

"I feel dreadfully," mourned Barrett. His grit and his excitement had been keeping him up. Now, like most strong men who have to confess that they are conquered, he gave way to his illness with utter abandonment of courage.

"Mr. Barrett," said Ide, surveying him pityingly, "I can see that you're a sick man. I don't want to say that to frighten you, but because you ought to know it. You'd better only try to make Castonia, and have a doctor sent there. My girl will be there as soon as you are. You go to my house, and get doctored up before you tackle the trip down-river.

That buckboard ride will kill you if you try it in the shape you're in now."

"You'd better do as he says, John," advised Britt, checking the timber baron's feeble protests. "I'm going to have these four men make a litter for you and lug you. You can stand that sort of ridin', but unless you are in better shape when you get to Castonia you wouldn't be good for that stage ride. Use common-sense, and rest up at Rodburd's house."

"Give the men their orders," whispered the little Castonia magnate in an aside to Britt. "It's fever, and a bad one if I ain't mistaken. By the time he's got to my place he'll probably be too sick to give any orders of his own. I never saw a man grow sick so fast. Tell the men to leave him there." He talked impatiently, for his crew had disappeared up the trail. "I've got to be hurryin'," he added. "Mr. Barrett, make my home yours!" he cried over his shoulder, as he trotted off. "I'll be back in a few days--as soon as I get this crew of mine located."

The four men were already at work securing poles and boughs for the litter.

Barrett sat down upon a tussock, and held his throbbing head in his hands. He began weakly to complain that Britt had made a mistake in bringing his men and insisting on possession of the girl.

The Honorable Pulaski promptly checked the incoherent expostulations of the stumpage baron.

"No, I haven't committed you, either," he blurted. "Bluff it out! It's the only way to do. It's the way I advised you to do in the first place.

The thing looks big to you here in the woods. You're down on the level with it. Get back into the city, and get your tail-coat on and your dignity, and sit up on top of that governor's boom of yours, and the story will only be political blackmail if they try it on you. But they won't. That Wade fellow is one of those righteous sort of a.s.ses that like to read moral lessons to other people, and especially to you, so he can work out his grudge. But he's all done. I know the sort. The thing began to scorch his fingers and he chucked it. He's got enough to attend to in these woods. Don't you worry."

"But I do worry," mourned Barrett. "And there's the girl to consider.

G.o.d save me, Pulaski, she's mine! Her looks show it. I can't sleep nights after this, unless she is taken care of in a decent way."

"There'll be a dozen methods of doin' it when the time is ripe," urged the other, consolingly. "As it is now, you get out of these woods and stay out, and attend to your business--which is my business, too, when it comes to the governor matter. By ----, you've seen enough in this trip to understand that we haven't got any too safe timber laws as it is. If the farmers get control next trip it means trouble for such of us as take to the tall timber. Buck up, man! Don't believe for a minute that we're goin' to let a college dude and a State pauper queer you. The thing will work itself out."

He uttered a sudden snort of disgust, gazing over Barrett's shoulder.

"Foolish Abe" of the Skeets had edged out of the bush, the silence after the uproar of voices and conflict encouraging him. He seemed pitifully bewildered. An instinct almost canine prompted him to take the trail to the south, for his only friend, the girl of the tribe, had gone that way. But a strange female had gone with her, and of strange females he entertained unspeakable fear.

"Here, you cross-eyed baboon," called the Honorable Pulaski, "go!

Scoot!" He pointed north in the direction in which the Enchanted crew had disappeared. "Young man want you. Follow him. Stay with him. Run!"

He picked up his discarded sled-stake, and the fool hurried away towards the Notch. "I'd like to see that human nail-keg plastered onto the Enchanted crew for the winter," remarked Britt, with malice. "There's no fillin' him up. He'll eat as much as three men, and that Wade is just enough of a soft thing not to turn him out. If I can't bore an enemy with a pod-auger, John, I'll do it with a gimlet--a gimlet will let more or less blood."

Five minutes later Barrett was borne on his way south, his courage braced by some final arguments from his iron a.s.sociate, his mind made up to adopt the course of indignant bluff suggested by the belligerent Britt.

And Britt was stumping north, driving the blubbering Abe before him with sundry hoots and missiles.

When the poor creature came crawling to the fire on hands and knees at dusk that evening, hairy, pitiable, and drooling with hunger, Rodburd Ide accepted him with resignation, though he recognized Britt's petty malice; for unless he were driven, Abe Skeet would never have come past a well-stocked lumber-camp to follow wanderers into the wilderness.

That night the Enchanted crew camped on Attean Stream, a short day's journey from their destination. The tired men s.n.a.t.c.hed supper from their packs and fell back snoring, their heads on their dunnage-bags.

They were away in the first flush of the morning, Rodburd Ide leading with his partner. Wade welcomed the little man's absorbed interest in the business ahead of them. Ide asked no questions about the incident at Durfy's. Wade put the hideous topic as far behind other thoughts as he could, and soon other thoughts crowded it out.

As they pa.s.sed from the zone of striped maple, round-wood, witch-hobble, and mountain holly that Mother Nature had drawn across her naked breast after the rude hand of Pulaski Britt had stripped the virgin growth, his heart lifted. Under the great spruces of Enchanted the town's bricks, streets, and human pa.s.sions seemed very far away.

Before he slept that night he had had an experience that thrilled the sense of the primitive self hidden within him, as it is hidden in all men, and covered by conventions.

He had staked the metes and bounds, the corners, the frontage, all the dimensions of a new home, where no roof except the crowns of trees had ever shut sunlight off the earth.

Mankind in general opens eyes within walls that the hands of those coming before have built.

Many have no occasion to seek ever for other quarters than those their fathers have given them. With most the limit of exploration is the quest for a new rental. Mankind who build, build along settled streets, first taking note that sewers and water systems have been installed.

Even in the woods most crews come up to find that the advance skirmishers have builded main camp, meal camp, horse-hovels, and w.a.n.gan.

Owing to the sudden forming of Rodburd Ide's partners.h.i.+p with the young man whom Fate threw in his way, and his equally sudden determination to operate on virgin Enchanted, there had been no time for preliminaries.

Even the tote teams with the first of the winter's supplies were miles away down the trail, for in the woods the human two-foot outcla.s.ses the equine four-foot.

Therefore, Wade, perspiring in the forefront of the toilers, saw the first tree topple, heard it crash outward from the site of the camp, and tugged with the others when it was set into place as the sill. When he stood back and wiped his forehead and gazed on that one lonesome log it made roofless out-doors seem bigger and more threatening. The rain was pattering from a cold sky. The thrall of centuries of housed ancestors was on him. Roof and walls had attached themselves to his sentiency, even as the sh.e.l.l of the snail is attached to its pulp.

But the next moment Larry Gorman started a song, and the rollicking hundred men about him took it up and toiled with merry thoughtlessness of all except that G.o.d's good greenwood was about them and G.o.d's sky above them, and Wade bent again to labor, ashamed that he had counted s.h.i.+ngles and plaster as standing for so much.

They put up eight-log walls for the main camp, notching the ends. A hundred willing men made the buildings grow like toadstools. While the walls were going up men laid floors of poles shaved flat on one side.

Others brought moss and c.h.i.n.ked the s.p.a.ces between the logs of the walls. The first team up brought tarred paper and the few boards needed for tables and like uses. The tarred paper and cedar splints roofed all comfortably.

The second team brought stove, tin dishes, and raw staples--and cook and cookee walked behind.

And when old Christopher Straight came at the tail of the procession as fast as he could hurry back from Castonia settlement, the camps stood nearly complete under the frown of Enchanted Mountain, Enchanted Stream gurgling over brown rocks at the door.

The distant whick-whack of axes told where the swampers were clearing the way, and the tearing crash of trees punctuated the ceaseless "ur-r rick-raw!" of the cross-cut saws. The only axe scarf on Ide's trees was the nick necessary to direct their fall. They were felled by the saw.

Two days of exploration on the spruce benches straight back from the stream showed up several million feet of black growth easily available for a first season's operation.

Ide, Wade, and old Christopher cruised, pacing parallels and counting trees. And when they sat down on an outcropping of ledge the young man made so many sagacious observations that Ide's eyes opened in amazement.

"Where did you learn lumberin'?" he demanded.

"I wasn't aware that I knew it--not as it is viewed from a practical stand-point," replied Wade, humbly. "I was going to ask you in a moment if you wouldn't like to have me keep still so that you and Christopher could talk sense."

"I never heard better opinions on a stand of timber and a lay of land,"

affirmed his partner. "It looks as though you'd been holdin' out on me,"

he added, with a grim smile.

The young man smiled back. There was a certain grateful pride in his expression.

"I know how old woodsmen look at book-learned chaps, Mr. Ide. Pulaski Britt told me once. I was simply trying on you a bit of an experiment with my little knowledge of books. I was waiting to have you and Christopher pull me up short. I'm rather surprised to find that you think what I said was good sense. But after a book-fellow has b.u.mped against practical men like--like Mr. Britt for a time, he begins to distrust his books. It's simply this way, Mr. Ide: I had a few young men in my high-school who were interested in forestry of the modern sort, and I worked with them to encourage them as much as I could. It is almost impossible for a reading-man in these days not to take an interest in the protection of our forests, for the folks at Was.h.i.+ngton are making it the great topic of the times."

"Well," remarked Ide, with a sigh of appreciation, "I never read a book on forestry in my life, and I never heard of a lumberman in these parts who ever had. But if you can get facts like those you've stated out of books, I reckon some of us better spend our winter evenin's readin'

instead of playin' pitch pede." He got up and gave the young man a complimenting palm. "Wade," he said, earnestly, "I'll own up that I've been a little prejudiced against book-fellows myself. Instead of givin'