"But there's a thing I can see," called one of the men who had gone skirmishing in the direction which the attorney and sheriff had taken. "Here's a Comas crowd strung along the wings o' the dam. I can see what they're lugging! Come on, men! It's a cant-dog, pick-pole fight."

The attackers went into the fray with a yell.

The defenders of the dam were on higher ground; some of them thrust with the ugly weapons, others swung the strong staves and fenced. There was the smash of wood against wood, the clatter of iron. Men fell and rolled and came up! They who were bleeding did not seem to mind.

"They're backing up," yelled one of the Flagg crew. "Damn 'em, they're getting ready to run, as usual!"

There did seem to be some sort of concerted action of retreat on the part of the defenders.

"Look out for tricks," counseled Vittum, getting over the guard of an antagonist and felling him.

A few moments later the line of the defense melted; the Comas men dodged somewhere into the fog. The assailants had won to the higher level of the dam's wing.

And then that level melted, too!

It was a well-contrived trap—boards covered with earth—a surface supported by props which had been pulled away by ropes. More than half the Flagg men tumbled into deep and muddy water and threshed helplessly in a struggling mass until the others laid down their weapons and pulled the drowning men out.

The attacking army retired for repairs and grouped on the solid shore. Except for the roar of the sluiceway and the gasping of the men who were getting breath there was something like calm after the uproar of the battle.

Out of the fog sounded the voice of Director Craig.

"We have given you your chance to show how you respect the law. What you have done after a legal warning is chalked up against you. Now that you have proclaimed yourselves as outlaws I have something of my own to proclaim to you. I am up here——"

A stentorian voice slashed in sharply, and Craig's speech was cut off.

The voice came from one who was veiled in the fog, but they all knew it for Ward Latisan's. "Yes, Craig, you're here—here about five hours ahead of me because you had the cash to hire a special train. However, I know the short cuts for a man on horseback. I'm here, too!"

His men got a dim view of him in the mists; he loomed like a statue of heroic size on the horse. Then he flung himself off and came running down the shore.

He went straight to Lida and faced her manfully; but his eyes were humbly beseeching and his features worked with contrite apology. "I know now who you are, Miss Kennard. I don't mean to presume, in the case of either you or your men. But will you allow me to speak to them?"

"Yes," she assented, trying to hold her poise, helped by his manner.

He turned quickly from her eyes as if her gaze tortured him.

"I have been a coward, men. I ran away from my job. I'm ashamed of myself. I can't square myself, but let me do my bit to-day."

"I don't know what you can do—with that gang o' sneaks—after real men have had to quit," growled Vittum, unimpressed.

"Maybe I'm sneak enough these days to know how to deal with 'em," confessed Latisan, bitterly. "I stayed back there just now while the fight was on, but I knew a man fight wouldn't get us anything from them."

The men of the crew made no demonstration; they were awkwardly silent. The arrival of the deserter who confessed that he had been a coward did not encourage them at a time when they had failed ridiculously in their first sortie. He had ceased to be a captain who could inspire. He was one man more in a half-whipped crew, that was all.

They who had been dumped over the dam dragged slimy mud from their faces and surveyed him with sullen rebuke, remembering sharply that he had run away from the girl whose cause they had taken up.

The others, their faces marked with welts from blows, gazed and sniffed disparagingly.

But when he spoke out to the girl and her crew they listened with increasing respect because a quick shift to manly resolution impressed them.

His tone was tensely low and the noise of the tumbling water shielded his voice from eavesdroppers on the dam. "I stood back there in the fog and I heard what was said about an injunction. It's bad business, running against the courts, men. That injunction hangs over the crew of Echford Flagg. I am not one of that crew. What I may do is on my own account, and I'll stand the blame of it. All I ask is that you step aside and let me alone."

"That ain't the way we want to play this game," declared Vittum.

"It isn't a square game, men, and that's why you mustn't play it. It isn't a riverman fight to-day. I came north from New York on the train with Craig. He brought a gang of gunmen with him. They're hidden there in the fog. He means to go the limit, hoping to get by with it because you made the first attack. It's up to me from now on."

"What in the name of the horn-headed Sancho do you think you can do all alone against guns?" demanded Vittum, scornfully.

"Think?" repeated Latisan. "I've had plenty of time for thinking on my way up here. Let me alone, I say!"

Lida went to him and put her hand on his arm, and he trembled; it seemed almost like a caress. But by no tenderness in his eyes or his expression was he indicating that he considered himself back on his former footing with her.

"Miss Kennard, don't keep me from trying to square myself with the Flagg crew, if I can. I'm not hoping that anything can square me with you; it's past hope."

He moved away, but she clung to him. "I must know what you intend to do. I'll not accept a reckless sacrifice—no, I'll not."

"One evening in Adonia you gave me a lecture on duty and self-respect, Miss Kennard. I wish I'd taken your advice then. But that advice has never left my thoughts. I'm taking it now. I entreat you, don't let me shame myself again. This is before men," he warned her, in low tones. "Give me my fighting chance to make good with them—I beg you!"

He set back his shoulders, turned from her, and shouted Craig's name till the Comas director replied.

"Craig, yon in the fog! Do you hear?"

"I hear you, Latisan!"

"Do our logs go through Skulltree by your decent word to us?"

"I'll never give that word, my man!"

"Then take your warning! The fight is on—and this time I'm in it."

"I'm glad to be informed. I have an announcement of my own to make. Listen!" He gave a command. Instantly, startlingly, in the fog-shrouded spaces of the valley rang out a salvo of gun fire. Many rifles spat. The sound rolled in long echoes along the gorge and was banged back by the mountain sides.

"Latisan, those bullets went into the air. If you and your men come onto this dam——"

"There's only one kind of a fight up here among honest men—and you won't stand for it, eh?"

"We've got your number! You're declared outlaws. These men will shoot to kill."

In the chorus from the Flagg crew there were howls and groans.

"And argument won't bring to you any sense of reason and decency, will it?" demanded the drive master.

"We shall shoot to kill!" insisted the magnate of the Comas corporation.

"All right! If those are your damnable principles, I'll go according to 'em."

The girl caught his hands when he started away. "You must not! No matter what you are—no matter what you know I am, now. He'll understand when we tell him—down there! There's more to life than logs!"

"I have my plans," he assured her, quietly. "You must realize how much this thing means to me now."

The unnatural silence in the ranks of the Flagg crew, after Latisan's declaration had been voiced, provoked Craig to venture an apprehensive inquiry. "You don't intend to come ramming against these guns, do you?"

"Hold your guns off us! I'm going away. And these men are going with me."

"That's good judgment."

"But I'm coming back! I won't sneak up on you. That isn't my style of fighting. You'll hear me on the way. I'll be coming down almighty hard on my heels. Remember that, Craig!"

Lida was at his side when he marched away up the shore toward the Flagg camp at the deadwater, and his men trailed him, mumbling their comments on the situation and wondering by what sort of miracle he would be able to prevail over armed gangsters who were paid to kill.

"I'm going to ask you all to excuse me for playing a lone hand from now on, boys," said the drive master, standing in front of them when they were gathered at the camping place. "If they weren't working a dirty trick with their guns, I'd have you along with me just as I intended in the past. But you have had your fun while I've been making a fool of myself! Give me my chance now!"

He bowed to Lida and walked up the shore alone. No one stayed him. The girl locked together her trembling fingers, straining her eyes till he disappeared.

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 fashion, 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 spaces 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 reassurance of good, honest earth under their feet; they were precariously perched in space, 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 damnable 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 incertitude wrecked all the courage of his supporters.

"It can't be done, sir. Not in this fog! We'd better get ashore——"

"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 attitude ended his control of the situation. "You're hired with money, you cowards! Now earn it!"

"This is where your money can't buy something for you, Mr. Craig," the captain of the gunmen declared, and then he led the retreat of his squad across Skulltree dam and into the woods on the far shore from the portentous, invisible peril.

And with dire extremity clearing for the moment his clouded vision, enabling him to look squarely at the matter of service and loyalty as he was able to command it, Craig knew that when his money failed him in the north country he had no other resource. He had blinked that fact in the past, having found that in ordinary affairs his dollars were dominant; but this extraordinary event was knocking out from under him all the props of confidence; he felt bitterly alone all of a sudden.

"We'll have to vamoose off this dam," declared the deputy sheriff.

"You've got your duty as an officer of the law," shouted Craig, desperately feeling that in the case of this man, at least, he was making an appeal to something that was not covered by a money consideration.

"And I've got my common sense, too!" retorted the sheriff. He started away.

"So have I," agreed the attorney, a lawyer who had obeyed a telegram and had joined the Craig expedition at the shire town of the county the night before.

"There's an injunction!" stormed the field director.

"And there's a lunatic with a sack of dynamite." The lawyer crooked his arm across his face; a missile from the white void had splashed near by and water sprayed him. "You have told me that Latisan is no longer in Flagg's service. I'm not depending now on law, Mr. Craig, I'm depending on my legs."

He fled on the trail of the officer. But he left a pregnant thought in Craig's mind: Latisan was not an employee of Echford Flagg. As a matter of fact, Craig owned to himself—his clarity of vision persisting in that time of overwhelming disaster, in the wreck of the hopes built on the power of his money—that the thing had now become almost wholly a personal, guerrilla warfare between himself and Latisan; and when the truth came out, if the matter were forced to that issue, Craig would lack the backing of authority fully as much as Latisan lacked it then, in his assault on property. The bluff of the guns had not worked! Craig was realizing that in hiring such men, as he had on the spur of the moment, his rage instead of his business good judgment had prevailed.

There were the repeated warnings of his superiors! The law would be obliged to investigate if Skulltree dam were wrecked, and would probe to the bottom of the moving reasons! Scandal, rank scandal! Craig could behold President Horatio Marlow as he sat that day with upraised, monitory forefinger, urging the touchy matter of credits and reputation. Craig could hear Dawes, the attorney: "That talk puts the thing up to you square-edged!"

Down from the mist-shrouded cliff was advancing a vengeful man who walked with the footsteps of thunder.

As Craig had looked ahead, basing his judgment on his experience with men and matters, it had seemed an easy matter to guard Skulltree with money and law. But in this astounding sortie of Latisan's, Comas money was of no use and Craig was developing an acute fear of the law which, invoked, would take matters into court. Over and over, his alarmed convictions pounded on his caution.

He crouched under a rain of dirt and pebbles—then he ran away.

When he reached the far shore he jumped into a bateau that was pulled up there. With all the power of his lungs he yelled for rowers. He was obliged to confess loudly and unreservedly that he was giving up the fight—was seeking a way of stopping Latisan—before any of his men would come from the shelter of woods and fog and serve him.

He cursed them with the vigor of a master of galley slaves when the bateau was frothing along the deadwater. Then he bellowed into the fog, seeking a replying hail which would locate for him the Flagg crew. There was no repentance in him; his was a panic of compromise—a headlong rush to save himself from consequences. There was just as much uncertainty about what Latisan would do as there was about the dynamiter's exact location in that fog.

Therefore, Craig announced himself with raucous staccato of: "I quit! I quit! Get that man! Tell him I quit!"

Men hailed from the shore and their voices guided the rowers. Craig leaped from the bow of the bateau and waded for the last few yards.

"Go stop him! Bring him here!" He tossed his arms.

"Huh!" scoffed old Vittum. "That's a job for somebody who can tell which way the next stroke of lightning is heading."

"I'll give five hundred dollars to the man who'll get to him and stop him before he smashes that dam!"

Craig added to the other visions which had been torturing him the possible catastrophe of the Comas logs roaring through past the mouth of a useless canal; he could look ahead still farther and see the grins of the sawmill men down the Noda, setting their own prices.

Once more Craig was finding that his money was getting him nothing that day, and his sense of helplessness was revealed by his sagging jowls and dolorous eyes; and he had always depended on what money could buy!

There was no alacrity for service shown by any man of Flagg's crew.

"We're not afraid," said Felix Lapierre, breaking on Craig's furious taunts. "We have promise' to keep off and let him make good for himself—the lone hand—that's it!"

"That's it!" agreed Vittum.

"He has made good," bleated the Comas man. "If he goes any farther it will only be bad."

The dialogue was taking place disjointedly in the silences between the blasts. But Craig made himself heard above the next explosion. "He's ripping hell out of that dam now. Get to him. A thousand dollars for the man who stops him!"

"No man in this crew needs any of your money!" Lida was defiantly in front of the Comas director. "But if you're ready to listen to reason after this——"

She broke off and turned from him.

Before they realized that she had volunteered, she was away in the fog.

In a moment they heard her voice, raised in a thrilling call, appealing to the avenger.

"That'll fetch him back—even if he was two miles deep in hell," Craig was informed by one of the men. "It's a lucky thing for the Three C's that she's on the job to-day."

The Comas director stood holding to a tree. He shivered every time an explosion clanged its echoes from cliff to cliff.

And when, after a waiting that was agony, the dreadful bombardment ceased, Craig staggered to the bateau and sat down on its prow.

"I don't blame you for looking that way," said Vittum. "If Latisan had been driven to get that dam to-day you would have lost your drive for the canal; and, before God and your directors, you would have been responsible!"

When Latisan came out of the fog he had put away, somewhere, the sack which had held destruction.

When he had gone away from them, entering upon the perils of his undertaking, he was calm and resolute. Now that he was back, a champion who had prevailed single-handed, he was pale, trembling, and broken; they did not understand, at first.

Lida came with him, trying to soothe him, pleading and protesting; he constantly muttered broken speech and seemed to be trying to control a mood that was half frenzy. He left her and stumbled across the open space to Craig.

"Everything else you have done—it's nothing as bad as this last. You sent her where you didn't dare to go yourself. Good God! you Comas sneak, I ought to kill you where you sit! For all you cared you were making me a murderer of an innocent girl!"

"You had to be stopped. She went before I knew what she was going to do."

"And if she hadn't gone on her own account you would have tried to hire her to do it! It's always a case of what you can buy with your money—that's your style, Craig. Now you're up against something you can't buy. I'm still working alone—understand that? If you want to report me as an outlaw, go ahead! I'm giving you squarer warning than you gave me on the Tomah when you smashed the Latisans. If I smash that dam down there I'll be smashing you! I'll do it if you put as much as a toothpick in the way of the independent drives. I'll blow the bottom out of your canal, in the bargain. And if you think you or your gang can locate me over there"—he pointed in the direction of the hills of the watershed between the rivers basins—"try it! I know every hole in those hills. I'll keep bombing your drives till you can't keep a man on the job. That's the kind of an outlaw I am from now on."

"It's between us now, Latisan. I'll own up to it. It has come to that."

"Yes, it's between renegades. I'm admitting that I'm one," retorted Ward.

Craig stood up. If there was any of the spirit of Three C's bluster left in him he was concealing it successfully.

"Latisan, all these men have heard me say that I quit. I lost my head and was pushing the thing too far, considering it from a business standpoint. Can I be any more honest than that?"

"It sounds all right, but I take stock in you only to the extent that you'll stay in line if I stay on the job. I shall stay, as I have warned you."

"Suppose we talk turkey about the common rights at Skulltree!"

"You'll have to talk with Miss Kennard about her grandfather's interests. I'm simply a chance comer here!"

Latisan walked away and leaned against a tree.

Craig approached Lida. "We have already had some talk about the matter, I believe. I retreat from the position I have taken. Evidently we must make mutual allowances. What have you thought out about the details of a plan to let your logs through?"

The girl did not reply; she had no plans; she did not understand such matters.

"We'll have to decide on the head of water you'll need, and I take it you'll allow us enough for the canal so that we can save our drive." Craig was trying hard to offer compromise, but he was not able to repress all his sarcastic venom. "There's the matter of sorting and the other details. I'll have to ask for your views, Miss Kennard, because any misunderstanding may be dangerous, so I have been informed."

She looked helplessly from Craig to Latisan. The latter's aloofness, which he had displayed ever since he first appeared to her that day, his present peculiar relationship to the affair, his insistence that he must serve alone, made her problem more complex. Her vivid yearning was to give all into Latisan's keeping, but she did not dare to propose it.

She looked at Vittum and Felix, seeking advice. The French Canadian smiled and shrugged his shoulders, evading responsibility. He did not understand such matters, either.

"I suppose I might be able to dig up some sort o' general ideas, give me time enough," said Vittum, when her eyes questioned him anxiously. "But I'm sort of hazy right now." He winked at her and ducked his head to indicate Latisan.

"I'm afraid!" she phrased the lament with a doleful motion of her lips rather than with spoken words.

"It can't be said but what he'll be impartial—the best one to ask," mumbled Vittum, stepping close to her. "He ain't hired by either side, as I understand it!" He was ironic, but there was a suggestion which she grasped desperately. She went to Latisan. Their conversation was in an undertone and the bystanders did not hear the words.

When she returned to Craig, Lida, confident in her new poise, reassured, informed in a fashion which fortified her self-reliance, met the Comas man with a demeanor which did credit to the granddaughter of Echford Flagg.

"I have not tried to involve Mr. Latisan in any way. I have asked his advice as an expert." She looked straight into the shifting eyes of the Comas director. "Last fall he was at Tech, and took a special course in hydraulic engineering. You know that, of course, Mr. Craig!" She paused till he bowed to admit the truth with which she insisted on displacing the lie which had followed Latisan in the north country. "And Mr. Latisan has had a great deal of practical experience on his own drives. It seems absolutely necessary to have a sorting gap here, with men of both crews handling the logs. When our timber is through the sluiceway—the daily run of logs—we are to be given a head of water which will take us through the gorge. As to the logs upriver—the rear—we are willing to join drives with you, Mr. Craig, so that we may use all the water together." She set back her shoulders. "That plan will serve us this season. For another season the independents will have laws of their own from the legislature. I'm quite sure that the independents have waked up and know now what some special legislative acts can do for their interests."

"I beg your pardon for breaking in, Miss Kennard," said Latisan, from his distance. "But this seems to be the time for me to say to Mr. Craig, in the presence of witnesses, that the same plan goes for the Tomah region. The independents over there can't be licked, sir."

"Nor the Latisans," shouted somebody in the Flagg crew.

That friendly corroboration of the young man's inmost determination served as a challenge. The drive master walked toward Craig and shook his fist. "No, nor the Latisans! We have a sawmill, and we're not worrying about the logs to feed it. But you understand, Mr. Craig, that the independents must have gangway on the river for their cut. And we know how to get gangway!"

He went back to his tree and resumed his whittling.

"To me the future looks very promising," said Lida. "We're all a little disturbed now, Mr. Craig, but we're coming to a perfect understanding. Don't you think so?"

Craig did not reply at once, and she added, with ingenuous affectation of desiring to bring forward reasons for his agreement, "If the Comas company does join drives with us you will have the help of a perfectly wonderful crew, Mr. Craig. I'm told that we're a week or ten days ahead of the usual time—and the men have never seemed to be considering mere wages!"

The Three C's director rolled his eyes, avoiding her candidly provoking regard. He shifted his gaze to Latisan, who had turned his back on the group and was still whittling placidly, propped against a tree by his shoulder. "Wonderful teamwork," growled the Comas man. "But sticking out for anything else will be a fool stunt. Miss Kennard, there's a lawyer over there in the woods, somewhere! The thing to do now seems to be to hunt him up so that he can help us to pass papers of agreement." He swung his hand to indicate the bateau. "Will you go with me?"

She hesitated. Then she smiled amiably on Craig. "I think I'd rather walk along the path, sir. I'll meet you and the lawyer at this end of the dam."

Craig trudged down to the boat and was swept away into the fog.

Latisan did not turn; he kept on whittling.

"Mr. Latisan!" she invited. "May I have your company to the dam? I'm sorry to trouble you, but I may be obliged to refer to you for further advice."

"I feel called on to remark," said old Vittum, always an irrepressible commentator when comment seemed to be necessary, speaking after Latisan and Lida had walked away into the mist—"I'll say to all that she knows her business."

"But it was Latisan who advised her," objected a literalist.

"Hell! I ain't speaking of this drive," snapped the old man. "I'm complimenting her on a job where she doesn't need anybody's advice!"



CHAPTER THIRTY

The sun at meridian that day burned away the mists, for it was May and the high sun was able to prevail.

The sluiceway of Skulltree dam was open and in the caldron of the gorge a yeasty flood boiled and the sunlight painted rainbows in the drifting spume. Rolling cumbrously, end over end, at the foot of the sluice, lifting glistening, dripping flanks, sinking and darting through the white smother of the waters, the logs of the Flagg drive had begun their flight to the holdbooms of Adonia.

Lida and the taciturn squire whom she had drafted had climbed to the cliffs above the gorge in order to behold the first fruits of the compact which had been concluded with Craig and the Comas. Latisan went with her to the cliff because she had asked him to show her the way. His manner with her was not exactly shyness; she had been studying him, trying anxiously to penetrate his thoughts. He was reserved, but awkwardly so; it was more like embarrassment; it was a mingling of deference and despair in the face of a barrier.

It was warm up there where the sun beat against the granite, and she pulled off the jacket which had been one of her credentials in the north country. "I took the liberty of wearing it—and the cap. I'll not need them any more."

She took the cap from her head. The breeze which had followed the calm of the mist fluttered a loose lock of her hair across her forehead and the sun lighted a glint within the tress. He gazed and blinked.

"I heard you had them—I heard it in Mern's office in New York," he said, with poor tact.

She offered them and he took the garments, clutching the cap and holding the jacket across his arm.

"I don't blame you for looking at me as you do," she went on, demurely and deprecatingly feminine at that moment. She smoothed her blouse with both hands and glanced down at her stained and ragged skirt. "It's my only warm dress and I've lived and slept in it—and I haven't minded a bit when the coffee slopped. I was trying to do my best."

He rocked his head voicelessly, helplessly—striving to fit speech to the thoughts that surged in him.

Then she made a request which perturbed him still more: "You came up here on horseback, I think you said. May I borrow the horse?"

"Do you mean that you're going away?" he gulped.

She spread her hands and again glanced down at her attire. She was hiding deeper motives behind the thin screen of concern for her wardrobe, trying to make a jest of the situation, and not succeeding. "You must own up that I need to go shopping."

He turned from her to the chasm where the logs were tumbling along.

"And there's nothing to keep me here any longer, Mr. Latisan, now that you have come back!"

He faced her again, swinging with a haste that ground his heels sharply on the ledge. But she put up her hand when he opened his mouth.

"Do you think it will do us any good to bring up what has happened? I don't. I implore you not to mention it. You have come back to your work—it's waiting for you. After what you have done to-day you'll never need to lower your eyes before any man on this river. In my heart, when I gave you your cap and jacket, I was asking you to take back your work. I ask you with all the earnestness that's in me! Won't you do it?" There was a hint of a sob in her tones, but her eyes were full of the confidence of one who felt that she was not asking vainly.

He did not hesitate. But words were still beyond the reach of his tongue. He dragged off the billycock hat which he had bought in town and scaled it far out into the turbid flood. He pulled off the wrinkled coat of the ready-made suit and tossed it down the side of the cliff. With the cap on his head and buckling the belt of the jacket he stood before her. "The men gave me my chance to-day; you're giving me a bigger one."

"Then I'm only wasting your time—up here!"

It had not been in Latisan's mind that he would make any reference to the past; she had implored him to keep silent and he was determined to obey. He was rigidly resolved to offer no plea for the future; this was the granddaughter—presumably the heiress of Echford Flagg, to be taken into her own after this service she had rendered. A Latisan of the broken Latisans had no right to lift his eyes to her!

If there had been a twinkle of hope for his comfort in her attitude of reliance on him after he had arrived at Skulltree, there was none at that moment, for she had become distinctly dignified and distant. He swung back to that bitter conclusion which he had made a part of his convictions when he had pondered on the matter in his little room in New York—her frantically pledged affection had been only a part of her campaign of sacrifice. He was not blaming her for the pretense—he was not calling it deceit. She had fought for her own with such weapons as she could command in a time of stress.

He followed her meekly when she hurried down from the cliff.

On the path which led back to the Flagg camp a breathless cookee met them. "A team is here from Adonia, miss. It's the big bays—Mr. Flagg's horses."

Instinctively she turned to Ward, making him her prop as she had done previously on that day.

"I've been expecting it," he told her. "It's just what your grandfather would do after he got word that Craig had gone through Adonia with his roughnecks. Mr. Flagg wouldn't leave you here to face what was threatened."

"I didn't tell my grandfather who I was. Dick promised to keep the secret," she faltered.

"Remember! Words have wings up in this region! I explained to you once, Miss Kennard, and you know what happened when I let loose that flock of them at Adonia—like a fool. I don't dare to think about it!"

He paced away from her; then he returned, calm again. "Mr. Flagg must have heard—he would keep in touch with what has been going on up here—and after he knew, it would be his style to let you go ahead and win out. He would understand what it is you're trying to do. His sending that team, now that he is afraid of danger, proves that he knows."

When she ran on ahead Latisan did not try to keep up with her; he was once again the drive boss of Flagg's crew, a hired man; he had no excuse for meddling in the family affairs of his employers, he reflected, and in his new humility he was avoiding anything which might savor of inquisitive surveillance.

The man who had put the horses to the jumper in Adonia, the man whom she knew as Jeff, was the deputy whom Flagg had sent. He had come in haste—that was plain to her; he was mopping the flanks of the sweating bays.

The deference with which he touched his cap informed her fully as to the amount of knowledge possessed by the Flagg household. He unbuttoned, one after the other, his overcoat, his inner coat, his waistcoat, and from the deepest recess in his garments produced a sealed letter; his precautions in regard to it attested the value he put on a communication from the master to the master's granddaughter.

The envelope was blank.

The men of the shift that had been relieved stood about her in a circle. The arrival of the bays was an event which matched the other sensational happenings of the crowded day, and she was conscious that, without meaning to be disrespectful, the men were hankering to be taken wholly into her confidence—were expecting that much favor from her.

Granddaughter of Echford Flagg she might be—but more than all she was one of the crew, that season, a companion who had inspired them, toiled with them, and triumphed with them. If any more good news had come they, as friends, were entitled to know it, their expressions told her. They were distinctly conveying to her their notion that she should stand there and read the letter aloud.

The hand which clutched the missive was trembling, and she was filled with dread in spite of the consoling thought that she had achieved so much. She was afraid to open the letter and she escaped out of the circle of inquiring faces and hid herself in her tent; even the crude flourish of importance displayed by the manner of Jeff in delivering the communication to her had its effect in making her fears more profound. The whims of old age—Flagg had dwelt on the subject! She remembered that when she was in the big house with Latisan, her grandfather had beat on the page of the Bible and had anathematized the ties of family in his arraignment of faults. He had been kind, after his fashion, when she was incognito, but now that he knew——

She ripped the envelope from the letter and opened the sheet; it was a broad sheet and had been folded many times to make it fit the envelope.

It was more like rude print than handwriting. At first she thought that her grandfather had been able to master a makeshift chirography with his left hand. But boldly at the top of the sheet, as a preface of apology, was this statement: "Dicktated to Dick and excuse looks and mesteaks. Hese a poor tool at writtin."

Crouching on her bed of boughs, the sheet on her knees, her hands clutched into her wind-rumpled hair above her temples, she read the letter which her grandfather had contrived with the help of his drafted amanuensis.

To my Grand-daughter. He have to use short words and few. Dick is slow and can't spel.

Lida's thoughts were running parallel with her reading, and she remembered that, in those letters of hideous arraignment which she had found in her mother's effects, Echford Flagg's own spelling was fantastically original. But under the layers of ugly malediction she had found pathos: he said that he'd had no schooling of his own, and on that account had been led to turn his business over to the better but dishonest ability of Alfred Kennard.

Reading on, she could picture the scene—the two old men toiling with pathetic earnestness over the task of preparing that letter; here and there, the words only partially deleted by lines run across them, were evidences that in his flustration under the master's vitriolic complaints, old Dick had confused comment with dictated matter—and had included comment in his unthinking haste to get everything down. Three times a "Dam your pelt" had been written and crossed out.

He tell you I knew you when I gave you my old cant dog.

Lida gasped when she read the blunt declaration. She might have guessed that Echford Flagg would have repulsed a stranger; he had disguised his true sentiments under the excuse of an old man's whim!

I let you go. It was making a squair deal between you and me. Nicola sent me a man to tell me how you had gorn north with his men and so I took Dick back after I had fired him.

It was at this point that a particularly prominent "Dam your pelt" was interjected.

The old fool would have blabbed to me what you told him to keep quiet about. He aint fit to be trusted with any secrits. But he was scard to tell me you was Lida. I told him. But the Comas helyun has gorn past here with men and guns. Let him have the logs. I want you, my granddaughter. Come home.

Tears flooded her eyes. "Come home!" Old Dick had printed those words in bold letters.

This is in haist but he has been 2 hours writtin it and so I send Jeff to bring you. Dont wait. Kepe away from danjur. Come home.

And old Dick, the toiling scribe, had smuggled in at the bottom of the sheet a postscript, a vicarious confession which Echford Flagg did not know how to make, "Hese cryin and monein for you. Come home!"

It was as if those two summoning words were spoken in her ear, plaintively and quaveringly.

She ran from the tent, carrying her little bag and the cant dog scepter of the Flaggs.

"Can you start back at once?" she called to Jeff.

"Aye! It's orders."

She saw Latisan at the shore, directing the movements of the men; he was once more the drive master, his cant dog in his hand, terse in his commands, obeyed in his authority.

He pulled off his cap and walked to meet her when she hastened toward him.

"I'm going back to Adonia."

"My guess was right, you see!"

"Are you coming soon to report?—Shall I tell my grandfather——" She halted in her query as if she were regretting the eagerness in her tone.

"I'll leave it to you to tell him all that has happened up here. But you may say to him, if you will, that I'm staying with the drive from now on."

Her charioteer swung the big bays and headed them toward the mouth of the tote road, halting them near her.

Her emotions were struggling from the fetters with which she tried to bind them. Those men standing around! She wished they would go away about their business, but they surveyed her with the satisfied air of persons who felt that they belonged in all matters that were on foot.

Latisan was repressed, grave, keeping his place, as he had assigned a status to himself. She was glad when old Vittum broke upon the silence that had become embarrassing. "It won't be like what it has been, after you're gone, Miss Lida Kennard. But I feel that I'm speaking for the men when I say that you're entitled to a lay-off, and if you'll be out on the hill where you can wave your hand to us when we ride the leader logs into the hold-boom, we'll all be much obligated to you! I was thinking of calling for three cheers, but I remember how this idea seemed to hit better." He led the procession of men past her; they scrubbed their toil-roughened palms across their breasts and gave her silent pledges when they grasped her hand. "It's sort of a family party," said Vittum.

There was inspiration for her in that suggestion. This was no time for convention, for placid weighing of this consideration against that, for strait-laced repression. The environment encouraged her. Her exulting joy drove her on.

Once before, forced by the intensity of her need, she had made small account of convenances. But she acknowledged that a half truth had nearly compassed destruction of her hopes and the ruin of a man; a liar had taken advantage of an equivocal position. But now the whole truth about her was clear. Her identity was known—her motives were beyond all question. And there were no vindictive liars among those loyal followers who had come storming down the river for the sake of her cause.

If she did what she had in her mind to do, what was it except the confirmation of a pledge and the carrying out of a promise?

But when she looked appealingly up at Latisan he was steadfastly staring past her. Her impulses were already galloping, but the instant prick of pique was the final urge which made the impulses fairly run away.

She reached out and took Ward's hand and pressed it between her palms.

"If it's because I'm Lida Kennard instead of the table girl at Brophy's tavern, you're foolish," she whispered, standing on tiptoe. "I gave you my promise. But perhaps you think it isn't binding because there was no seal, such as I put on that lawyer's paper down at the dam. Well—then—here's the seal."

She flung her arms about his neck and kissed his cheek.

"Now let the winged word take flight through the region!" she told herself. No man could misunderstand the declaration of that kiss!

When Latisan came to his senses sufficiently to move his muscles, she avoided his groping arms and ran to the wagon. For a moment the big bays crouched, expecting the whistling sweep of the whip, bending their necks to watch the passenger climbing to her seat.

"Wait!" begged Latisan. He stumbled toward the wagon, staring at her, tripped by the earth ridges to which he paid no heed.

"Yes!" she promised. And then in tones that were low and thrilling and significant with honest pledge she said, "I'll wait for you—at home—at home!"

Jeff obeyed her quick command and swung the whistling whip, and Latisan stood gazing after her.

The men respected his stunned absorption in his thoughts. They went scattering to their work. Felix walked with Vittum.

"Ba gor!" The French Canadian vented the ejaculation after taking a deep breath. "When she say it to him—as she say it—it make goose flesh wiggle all over maself!"

"As I have said!" Vittum was trudging along, his eyes on a big plug of tobacco from which he was paring a slice. "As I have said!" He slid the slice into his mouth from the blade of the knife. "She knows her business!"

THE END