Читать книгу King Spruce, A Novel - Holman Day - Страница 12

“Oh, there ain’t no girl, no pretty little girl,

That I have left behind me.”

There sounded the clang of the engine bell far to the front. There was the premonitory and approaching jangle of shacklings, as car after car took up its slack.

“Look after your man there, MacLeod!” cried the girl. “The yank will throw him off.”

“Let him go, then!” gritted the foreman. The flame in Wade’s eyes was like the red torch of battle to him. Not for years had a man dared to give him that look.

Suddenly the car sprang forward under their feet as the last shackle snapped taut. The boss was driven towards Wade, and let himself be driven. The other braced himself, blind in his fury, realizing at last the nature of the blood lust.

A squall, fairly demoniac in intensity, stopped them. MacLeod recognized the voice, and even his passion for battle yielded. When the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt, baron of the Umcolcus, yelled in that fashion it meant obedience, and on this occasion the squall was reinforced by a shriek from the girl. And MacLeod whirled, dropping his fists.

There on the platform stood Britt, clutching the limp and soggy Tommy Eye by the slack of his jacket. The Honorable Pulaski, jealous of every second of time, had remained in conversation to the last with his birch foreman. He stepped aboard just as Tommy, jarred from his feet, was pitching off the other side of the platform. The Honorable Pulaski snatched for him and held on, at the imminent risk of his own life. Already both of them were leaning far out, for Tommy Eye, in the blissful calm of his spirit, was making no effort to help himself.

In an instant MacLeod was down the car aisle and had pulled both back to safety.

“Why in blastnation ain’t you staying in this hog-car here, where you belong, you long-legged P.I. steer?” roared the old man, his anger ready the moment his fright subsided. “What do I hire you for? You came near letting me lose the best teamster in my whole crew. Now get into that car and stay in that car till we get to the end of this railroad.”

He put his hands against MacLeod’s breast and shoved him backward into the door, where Tommy Eye, grinning in fatuous ignorance of the danger he had passed through, had just disappeared ahead of him. The angry shame of a man cruelly humiliated twisted MacLeod’s features, but he allowed his imperious despot to push him into the car, casting a last appealing look at the girl. Britt slammed the door and stood on the platform, bracing himself by a hand on either side the casing, and peered through the dingy glass to make sure that his crew was now under proper discipline.

“He’s a driver and a master,” piped up Grizzly Whiskers, with the appositeness of a Greek chorus.

“There’s the song about him, ye know:

“Oh, the night that I was married,

The night that I was wed,

Up there come Pulaski Britt

And stood at my bed-head.

Said he, ‘Arise, young married man,

And come along with me.

Where the waters of Umcolcus

They do roar along so free.’”

“I’ll bet he went, at that,” volunteered a man farther back in the car. “When Britt is after men he gits’ em, and when he gits ’em he uses ’em.”

“Mr. Britt,” he shouted down the car aisle as the old man entered, “that was brave work you done in savin’ Tommy’s life!”

“Go to the devil with your compliments!” snapped Britt. “If it wasn’t that I was losing my best teamster I wouldn’t have put out my little finger to save him from mince-meat.”

He saw the girl, turned over a seat to face her, and began to fire rapid questions at her regarding her father and mother and the latest news of Castonia settlement. When the conversation languished, as it did soon on account of the inattention of the young woman, the Honorable Pulaski caught the still flaming eye of Dwight Wade, and crooked his finger to summon him. Wade merely scowled the deeper. The Honorable Pulaski serenely disregarded this malevolence as a probable optical illusion, and when Wade did not start beckoned again.

“Come here, you!” he bellowed. “Can’t you see that I want you?”

With new accession of fury at being thus baited, the young man started up, resolved to take his employer aside and free his mind on that matter of news-mongering. But the bluff and busy tyrant was first, as he always was in his dealings with men.

“Here, Wade,” he shouted, “you shake hands with the prettiest girl in the north country! This is Miss Nina Ide, and this is my new time-keeper, Dwight Wade. He’s going to find that there’s more in lumbering than there is in being a college dude or teaching a school. Sit down, Wade.”

He pulled the young man into the seat.

“Entertain this young lady,” he commanded. “She don’t want to talk with old chaps like me. Her father—well, I reckon you know her father! Oh, you don’t? Well, he’s first assessor of Castonia settlement, runs the roads, the schools, and the town, has the general store and post-office, and this pretty daughter that all the boys are in love with.”

And at the end of this delicate introduction he pushed brusquely between them, and went back to talk with his elderly admirer in the rear of the car.

Wade looked into the gray eyes of the girl sullenly. There was an angry sparkle in her gaze.

“Well, Mr. Wade, you may think from what that old fool said that I’m suffering to be entertained. If you think any such thing you can change your mind and go back.”

She had not a city-bred woman’s self-poise, he thought. Her manner was that of the country belle, spoiled the least bit by flattery and attention. And yet, as he looked at her, he thought that he had never seen fairer skin to set off the flush of angry beauty. For others there was something alluring in the absolute whiteness of her teeth, peeping under the curve of her lip, in the nose (the least bit retroussé), in the looped locks of brown hair crossing her temples. Yet there was no admiration in his eyes.

“I hope you won’t hold me guilty of being the intruder,” he said, coldly.

“Not if you move your brogans over to some seat where there is more room for them,” she returned, with a click of her white teeth that showed mild savagery. This young man who was in love with some one else, and who had scowled at her, was decidedly not to her liking, she thought, in spite of his regular features, his firm chin, his clean-cut mouth unhidden by beard, and his brown eyes.

Wade flushed, rose, bowed with hat lifted to a rather ironical height, and took his seat alone, well to the front of the car. He saw MacLeod’s baleful face framed in the little window of the smoking-car’s door. For mile after mile, as the train jangled on, it remained there.

The menace of the expression, the challenge in the attitude, and this insolent espionage, all following the insults of his gossiping tongue, wrought upon the young man’s feelings like a file on metal. As his resentment gnawed, it was in his mind to go and smash his fist through the little window into the middle of that lowering countenance.

To him came the Honorable Pulaski, bristling and bustling.

“They’re telling me back there, young man, that you and Colin came near to having some sort of rumpus a little while ago. Now, I can’t have anything of that sort going on among my men. You mind your business. I’ll make him mind his. But what’s it all about, anyway? Why were you going to fight like roosters at sight?”

Wade looked at his pompous red face and into his eyes with their yellowish sclerotic, and choked back the recrimination he had intended. The thought of opening his heart’s poor secret by bandying words with this man made him quiver.

“As well to talk to a Durham bull,” he reflected.

“Why, you poor college dude,” went on his employer, scornfully, “Colin MacLeod would break you in two and use you to taller his boots, a piece in each hand. You’re hired to keep books and peddle wangan stuff according to the prices marked! Keep your place, where you belong. Don’t go to stacking muscle against the boss of the Busters.”

The former centre of Burton College’s football eleven stiffened his muscles and set his nails into his palms to keep from hot retort. What was the use? What did college training avail if it didn’t help a gentleman to hold his tongue at the right time?

“Now, remember what I’ve told you,” ordered Britt, “and I’ll go and set MacLeod to the right-about, so that you won’t have to be afraid of him if you mind your own business.”

He went away into the smoking-car. Between the opening and the closing of the door there puffed out a louder jargon from the orgy. It then settled into its dull diapason of maudlin voices.

For the rest of the journey, to the end of the forest railroad spur, Wade sat and looked out into the hopeless and ragged ruin left by the axes. The sight fitted with his mood. Britt, back from his interview with MacLeod, and serene in the power of the conscious autocrat, sat by himself and figured endlessly with a stubby lead-pencil. Wade looked around only once at the girl. When he did he caught her looking at him, and she immediately snapped her eyes away indignantly.

At last the engine gave a long shriek that wailed away in echoes among the stumps. It was a different note from its careless yelps at the infrequent crossings.

“Here we are!” bellowed Britt, cheerfully, stuffing away his papers and coming up the car for his little bag. He stopped opposite Wade.

“Remember what I told you about minding your business,” he commanded, brusquely. “You may be a college graduate, but MacLeod is your boss. He won’t hurt you if you keep your place!”

In medicine there are cumulative poisons—the effect of small doses at intervals amounting in the end to a single large dose.

In matters of heart, temper, and moral restraint there are cumulative poisons, too. Dwight Wade, struggling up as the train jolted to a halt, felt that this last insult, coming as it did out of that brusque, rough-sneering, culture-despising spirit of the woods, exemplified in Pulaski D. Britt, had put an end to self-restraint.

It was the same brusque, money-worshipping, intolerant spirit of the woods that sounded in John Barrett’s voice when he had sneered at Wade’s pretensions to his daughter’s hand. There it was now in those roaring voices in the smoking-car. And yet he had come to it—hating it—fleeing from the sight of men of his kind when his little temple of love seemed closed to him, and the world had jeered at him behind his back! He looked through the dirty car windows at the little shacks of the railroad terminus, heard the bellow of voices, gritted his teeth in ungovernable rage at Britt’s last words, and determined to—well, he hardly knew what he did propose to do.

But it should be something to show them all that he could no longer be bossed and insulted and jeered at—all in that bumptious, braggadocio, bucko spirit of the woods!

Both platforms of the cars were swarming with men—men rigged in queer garb: wool leggings, wool jackets striped off in bizarre colors or checked like crazy horse-blankets. Each man in sight carried his heavy brogan shoes hung about his neck.

They were singing in fairly good time, and Wade listened to the words despite himself:

“Oh, here I come from the Kay-ni-beck,

With my old calk boots slung round my neck

Here we come—yas, a-here we come—

A hundred men and a jug of rum.

WHOOP-fa-dingo!

Old Prong Jones!”

The girl passed Wade, going down the aisle before he left his seat. He came behind her. But they were obliged to wait at the door. The men crowded close upon both platforms. Each man had a meal-sack stuffed with his possessions. They were all elbowing each other, and the result was a congestion that the kicks of the Honorable Pulaski and the cuffings of Colin MacLeod did little to break.

The boss of the Busters kept stealing glances at the girl, as though to challenge her notice, and perhaps her admiration, as she saw him thus a master of men.

It was then that the spirit of anger and rebellion seething in Dwight Wade—the cumulative poison of his many insults—stirred him to bitter provocation in his own turn.

The girl carried a heavy leather suit-case, and now, waiting for the press of men to escape from the car, she rested it against a seat, and sighed in weariness and vexation.

With quiet masterfulness Wade took it from her hand and smiled into the astonished gray eyes that flashed back over her shoulder at him. It was a smile that not even a maiden, offended as she had been, could resist.

“I will assist you to—to—I believe it is a stage-coach that takes us on,” he said. “Let me do this, so that you won’t remember me simply as a man whose own troubles made him a boor.”

MacLeod’s look of fury as he saw the act fell full upon them both, and the girl resented it.

“I thank you,” she returned, smiling at her squire with a little exaggeration of cordiality. And when at last the platforms were cleared they stepped out, still talking.

All about them men were kneeling, fastening the latchets of their spike-sole shoes.

“Rod Ide’s gal has got a new mash!” hiccoughed one burly chap, leering at them as they passed. At the instant MacLeod, at their heels, struck the man brutally across the mouth, shouldered Wade roughly, and spoke to the girl, his round hat crumpled in his big fist.

“Miss Nina,” he stammered, “I’m—I’m sorry for forgetting that you were in that car awhile back. But you know I ain’t used to takin’ talk of that sort. So, let me see you safe aboard the stage, like an old friend should.”

“This gentleman will look after me,” said the girl. She tried to be calm, but her voice trembled. A city woman, confident of the regard due to woman, would not have feared so acutely. But Nina Ide, bred on the edge of the forest, was accustomed to see the brute in man spurn restraint. The passions flaming in the eyes of these two were familiar to her. She expected little more from the gentleman in the way of consideration for her feelings than she did from the lumber-jack. “You go along about your business, Colin,” she said, hastily. “I can attend to mine.”

“Give me that!” snarled the boss, his eyes red under their meeting brows. In his rage he forgot the deference due the woman.

“See if you can take it!” growled back the other. With him the girl was only the means to the end that his whole nature now lusted for. He forgot her.

Wade looked for the young giant to strike. But the woods duello has its vagaries.

MacLeod lifted one heavy shoe and drove its spiked sole down upon Wade’s foot, the brads puncturing the thin leather. With his foe thus anchored, he clutched for the valise. But ere his victim had time to strike, the furious, flaming, bristling face of the Honorable Pulaski was between them, and his elbows, hard as pine knots, drove them apart with wicked thrustings. As they staggered back the old lumber baron, used to playing the tyrant mediator, grabbed an axe from the nearest man of the crew.

“I’ll brain the one that lifts a finger!” he howled. “What did I tell you about this? Who is running this crew? Whose money is paying you? Get back, you hounds!”

Once more, though he gasped in the pure madness of his rage, MacLeod was cowed by his despot. He turned and began marshalling the crew aboard great wagons that were waiting at the station.

“You take your seat in that wagon, young man!” roared Britt, shaking that hateful, hairy fist under Wade’s nose. “We’ll see about all this later! Get onto that wagon!”

At the opposite side of the station was the mail-stage, a dusty, rusty conveyance with a lurching canopy of cracked leather above its four seats, and four doleful horses waiting the snap of the driver’s whip.

Without a word to Britt, Wade led the way to the coach, and set the suit-case between the seats. He limped as he walked, and his teeth were set in pain.

He gave his hand to the girl, and she silently accepted the assistance and took her place in the coach.

Then he turned to meet the fiery gaze of the Honorable Pulaski, who had followed close on their heels, choking with expletives.

“I reckon I see through this now,” he growled. “Tryin’ to cut out the cleanest feller in the Umcolcus with your dude airs! But Rod Ide’s girl ain’t to be fooled by city notions. She knows a man when she sees him.” He chucked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of MacLeod, busy with the laggard men. “Go aboard, and let this be an end of your meddling, young man.”

“You just speak for yourself and attend to your business, Mr. Britt!” cried the girl, with a spirit that cowed even the tyrant’s bluster. “‘Rod Ide’s girl,’ as you call her, can choose all her own affairs, and you needn’t scowl at me, for I’m not on your pay-roll and I’m not afraid of you!”

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.”