Читать книгу King Spruce, A Novel - Holman Day - Страница 14

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“With eddies and rapids it’s middlin’ tough,

To worry a log-drive through.

But to manage a woman is more than enough

For a West Branch driving crew.”

—Leeboomook Song.

Just how Tommy Eye escaped so nimbly from the ruck of the fight at the foot of Pugwash Hill he never knew nor understood, his wits not being of the clearest that day—and the others being too busy to notice.

But he did escape. One open-handed buffet sent him reeling into and through some wayside bushes. He sat on his haunches on the other side a moment like a jack-rabbit and surveyed the stirring scene, and then made for higher ground. At the end of an enervating sixty-days’ sentence in the county jail—his seventeenth summer “on the bricks” for the same old bibulous cause; second offence, and no money left to pay the fine—Tommy did not feel fit for the fray.

He sat on a bowlder at the top of the rise for a little while and gazed down on them—the hundred men of “Britt’s Busters,” bound in for the winter cutting on Umcolcus waters. They were fighting aimlessly, “mixing it up” without any special vindictiveness, and Tommy, an expert in inebriety, sagely concluded that they were too drunk to furnish amusement. So he rolled over the bowlder and nestled down to ease his headache, knowing, as a teamster should know, that Britt’s tote wagons were to hold up at the Pugwash for a half-hour’s rest and bait.

For that matter, a fight at the Pugwash was no novel incident—not for Tommy Eye, at least, veteran of many a woods campaign.

The hang-up at the hill is a teamster’s rule as ancient as the tote road.

And the fight of the ingoing crew is as regular as the halt. All the way from the end of the railroad the men have been crowded on the wagons, with nothing to do but express personal differences of opinion. Every other man is a stranger to his neighbor, for employment offices do not make a specialty of introductions. As the principal matter of argument on the tote wagons is which is the best man, the Pugwash Hill wait, where there is soft ground and elbow-room, makes a most inviting opportunity to settle disputes and establish an entente cordiale that will last through all the winter.

Two other men—two men who had been on the outskirts of the fray from its beginning—came leisurely up the hill, and sat down on the bowlder behind which was couched Tommy Eye.

One was the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt; the other was Colin MacLeod.

The Honorable Pulaski tucked the end of a big cigar into the opening in his bristly gray beard where his mouth was hidden, and lighted it. As an after-thought he offered one to MacLeod. The young man, his elbows on his knees, his flushed face turned aside, shook his head sullenly.

“Well, you’re having a run of cuss-foolishness that even our champion fool, Tommy Eye himself, couldn’t match,” snorted the old man, rolling his tongue around his cigar.

Tommy, behind the rock, tipped one ear up out of the moss.

“Here you go pouncing into that car to-day, where my new time-keeper was, and go to picking a fuss with him, and—”

“He was the one that started it, Mr. Britt,” said the boss, in the dull monotone of one who has said the same thing many times before.

“Don’t bluff me!” snapped the Honorable Pulaski. “You were gossiping over a lot of his private business with that Ide girl—and bringing me into it, too. You can’t fool me! Old Jeff back in the car heard it all. The young feller had a right to put in an oar to stop you, and he did it, and I’ll back him in it.”

“Yes, and you went and introduced him to Miss Ide—that’s some more of your backin’,” said MacLeod, bitterly.

“Just common politeness—just common politeness!” cried Britt, waving his cigar impatiently. “That girl hasn’t said she’d marry you, has she? No! I knew she hadn’t. Well, she’s got a right to talk with nice young men that I introduce to her, and there’s nothing to it to make a fuss over, MacLeod—only common politeness. You’re making a fool of yourself, and setting the girl herself against you by acting jealous like that before the face and eyes of every one. That’s enough time and talk wasted on girls. Now, quit it, and get your mind on your work. You understand that I won’t have any more of this scrapping in my crew.”

With a blissful disregard of consistency, he gazed through smoke-clouds down at the men below, who were listlessly exchanging blows or rolling on the ground, locked in close embrace.

MacLeod stood up, and tugged the collar of his wool jacket away from his throat.

“I ain’t much of a man to talk my business over with any one, Mr. Britt,” he said. “But you are putting this thing on a business basis, and you don’t have the right to do it. I ain’t engaged to Nina Ide, and I ’ain’t asked her to be engaged to me, for the time ’ain’t come right yet. But there ain’t nobody else in God’s world goin’ to have her but me. She ain’t too good for me, even if her father is old Rod Ide. I’ll have money some day myself. I’ve got some now. I can buy the clothes when I need ’em, if that’s all that a girl likes. But it ain’t all they like—not the kind of a girl like Nina Ide is. She knows a man when she sees him. She knows that I’m a man, square and straight, and one that loves her well enough to let her walk on him, and that’s the kind of a man for a girl born and bred on the edge of the woods.”

He drew up his lithe, tall body, and snapped his head to one side with almost a click of the rigid neck.

“Along comes that college dude,” he snarled, “just thrown over by a city girl and lookin’ for some one else to make love to, and he cuts in”—his voice broke—“you see what he done, Mr. Britt! He helped her off the train before I could get there. He put her on the stage, and rode away with her while you were makin’ me handle the men. And he’s ridin’ with her now, damn him, and he’s a-talkin’ with her and laughin’ at me behind my back!” He shook both fists at the road to Castonia settlement, winding over the hill, and there were tears on his cheeks.

“He probably isn’t laughing very much,” replied Britt, dryly. “Not since you plugged that spike boot of yours down on his foot there on the depot platform. A nasty trick, MacLeod, that was.”

“I wish I’d ’a’ ground it off,” muttered the boss. He struck his spikes against the bowlder with such force that a stream of fire followed the kick.

“He can’t do it—he can’t do it, Mr. Britt! He can’t steal her! I’ve loved her too long, and I’ll have her. You just gave off your orders to me about fighting. You don’t say anything to those cattle down there fighting about nothin’. You let them settle their troubles. Here I am!” He struck his breast. “For five years, first up in the dark of the mornin’, last to bed in the dark of the night. I’ve sweat and swore and frozen in the slush and snow and sleet, driving your crew to make money for you. And I’ve waded from April till September, I’ve broken jams and taken the first chance in the white water, so that I could get your drive down ahead of the rest. And now, when it comes to a matter of hell and heaven for me, you tell me I can’t stand like a man for my own. You call it wastin’ time!”

He bent over the Honorable Pulaski, his face purple, his eyes red. Britt took out his cigar and held it aside to blink up at this disconcerting young madman.

“I tell you, you are taking chances, Mr. Britt. You have bradded me on, and told me that a man of the woods always gets what he wants if he goes after it right. Twice to-day you have stood between me and what I want. You’ve let a college dude take the sluice ahead of me. I know you pay me my money, but don’t you do that again. I’m going to have that girl, I say! The man that steps in ahead of me, he’s goin’ to die, Mr. Britt, and the man that steps between me and that man, when I’m after him, he dies, too. And if that sounds like a bluff, then you haven’t got Colin MacLeod sized up right, that’s all!”

The Honorable Pulaski winked rapidly under the other’s savage regard. He knew when to bluster and he knew when to palter.

“MacLeod,” he said, at last, getting up off the rack with a grunt, “what a man that works for me does in the girl line is none of my business. But after that kind of brash talk I might suggest to you that a cell in state-prison isn’t going to be like God’s out-doors that you’re roaming around in now.”

The boss sneered contemptuously.

“Furthermore, this college dude, that you are talking about as though he were a water-logged jill-poke, was something in the football line when he was in college—I don’t know what, for I don’t know anything about such foolishness—but, anyway, from what I hear, it was up to him to break the most arms and legs, and he did it, I understand. This is only in advice, MacLeod—only in advice,” he cried, flapping a big hand to check impatient interruption. “You saw when Tommy Eye, the drunken fool, fell under the train at the junction to-day, as he is always doing, that feller Wade picked him up with one hand and lugged him like a pound of sausage-meat—saved the fool’s life, and didn’t turn a hair over it. So, talk a little softer about killing, my boy, and, best of all, wait till you find out that he wants the girl or the girl wants you!”

He walked down the hill.

“Go to blazes with your advice, you old fool!” growled MacLeod, under his breath. “He’s lookin’ for it; he’s achin’ for it! He gave me a look to-day that no man has given me in ten years and had eyes left open to look a second time. He’ll get it!”

As he turned to follow his employer he saw the recumbent Tommy, and went out of his way far enough to give him a vicious kick.

“Get onto the wagons, you rum-keg, or you’ll walk to Castonia!”

“Be jigged if I won’t walk!” groaned Tommy, surveying the retreating back of the boss with sudden weak hatred. “So there was a man who saved my life to-day when I didn’t know it! And there was another man who kicked me when I did know it! It’s the chaney man he’s after, and the chaney man was good to me! I’ll make a fair fight of it if my legs hold out, and that’s all any man could do.”

The horses were still munching fodder, and the gladiators, thankful for an excuse to stop the fray, were stupidly listening to a harangue by the Honorable Pulaski, who was explaining what would be allowed and what would not be allowed in his camps.

Tommy Eye ducked around the bushes and took the road with a woodsman’s lope, his wobbly knees getting stronger as the exercise cleared his brain.

A woodman’s lope is not impressive, viewed with a sprinter’s eye. Nor is a camel’s stride. But either is a great devourer of distance. So it happened that Tommy Eye, sweat-streaked and breathing hard, caught up with the sluggish Castonia stage while it was negotiating the last rock-strewn hill a half-mile outside the settlement.

Dwight Wade, time-keeper of the Busters, heard the stertorous puffing, and looked around to see Tommy Eye clinging to the muddy axle and towing behind. Tommy divided an amiable and apologetic grin between Wade and the girl beside him.

“I’m only—workin’ out—the—the budge!” Tommy explained, between the jerks of the wagon. “Don’t mind me!”

Down the half-mile of dusty declivity into Castonia, the only smooth road between the railroad and the settlement, the stage made its usual gallant dash with chuckling axle-boxes and the spanking of splay hoofs.

And Tommy Eye came limply slamming on behind.