Читать книгу King Spruce, A Novel - Holman Day - Страница 16

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“We dug him out of his blankets, and hauled him out to the

light—

His eyes were red with the tears he had shed, but now he

wanted to fight.

And screaming a string of curses, he struck as he raved and

swore—

Floored Joe Lacrosse and the swamping boss and announced

he was ready for more.”

—The Fight at Damphy’s.

Civilization sets her last outpost at Castonia in the plate-glass windows of Rodburd Ide’s store. Civilization had some aggravating experiences in doing this. Four times hairy iconoclasts from the deep woods came down, gazed disdainfully at these windows as an effort to put on airs, and smashed them with rocks dug out of the dusty road. Four times Rodburd Ide collected damages and renewed the windows—and in the end civilization won out.

Those experienced in such things can tell a Castonia man anywhere by the pitch of his voice. Everlastingly, Umcolcus pours its window-jarring white waters through the Hulling Machine’s dripping ledges. Here enters Ragmuff stream, bellowing down the side of Tumbledick, a mountain that crowds Castonia close to the river. Most of the men of the settlement do their talking on the platform of Ide’s store, with the spray spitting into their faces and the waters roaring at them. And go where he will, a Castonia man carries that sound in his ears and talks like a fog-horn.

The satirists of the section call Ide’s store platform “The Blowdown.” In the woods a blowdown is a wreck of trees. On Ide’s platform the loafers are the wrecks of men. Here at the edge of the woods, at the jumping-off place, the forest sets out its grim exhibits and mutely calls, “Beware!” There are men with one leg, men with one arm, men with no arms at all; there are men with hands maimed by every vagary of mischievous axe or saw. There are men with shanks like broomsticks—men who survived the agonies of freezing. There is always a fresh subscription-paper hung on the centre post in Ide’s store, meekly calling for “sums set against our names” to aid the latest victim.

Wade, looking at this pathetic array of cripples as he slowly swung himself over the wheel of the stage, felt that he was in congenial company; for the foot that MacLeod had so brutally jabbed with his spikes had stiffened in its shoe. It ached with a dull, rancor-stirring pain. When he limped across the platform into the store, carrying the girl’s valise, he hobbled ungracefully. The loungers looked after him with fraternal sympathy.

“The boss spiked him down to the deepo,” advised Tommy, slatting sweat from his forehead with muddy forefinger. “He’s the new time-keeper.”

“Never heard of the boss calkin’ the chaney man before,” remarked Martin McCrackin, rapping his pipe against his peg-leg to dislodge the dottle.

Tommy twisted his face into a prodigious wink, jabbed a thumb over his shoulder towards the store door, and gazed archly around at the circle of faces.

“He cut the boss out with the Ide girl!” He whispered this hoarsely.

The listeners looked at the door where Wade and the girl had disappeared, and then stared at one another. They had viewed the arrival of the stage with the dull lethargy of the hopelessly stranded. Now they displayed a reviving interest in life.

“And that was all he done to him—step on his foot?” demanded a thin man, impatiently twitching the stubs of two arms, off at the elbows.

“Old P’laski got in!” said Tommy, with meaning. “Used his old elbows for pick-holes and fended Colin off.”

“It will git him, though!” said another. He had shapeless stumps of legs encased in boots like exaggerated whip-sockets.

“You bet it will git him!” agreed McCrackin.

Rodburd Ide, busy, chatty, accommodating little man, trotted out of the store at this instant with a handful of mail to distribute among his crippled patrons.

“That’s what the river boys call this crowd here,” he said, over his shoulder, to Wade, who followed him. “The ‘It-’ll-git-ye Club.’ I guess It will get ye some time up in this section! Here’s the last one, Mr. Wade. Aholiah Belmore—that’s the man with the hand done up. Shingle-saw took half his fin. Well, ’Liah, don’t mind! No one ever saw a whole shingle-sawyer. It’s lucky it wasn’t a snub-line that got ye. There’s what a snub-line can do, Mr. Wade.”

He pointed to the armless man and to the man with the shapeless legs.

“All done at the same time—bight took ’em and wound ’em round the snub-post.”

“And it’s a pity it wa’n’t our necks instead of our legs and arms,” growled one of the men—“trimmed like a saw-log and no good to nobody!”

“Never say die—never say die!” chirruped the jovial “Mayor of Castonia.” He threw back his head in his favorite attitude, thrust out his gray chin beard and tapped his pencil cheerily against the obtrusive false teeth showing under his smoothly shaven upper lip. “Your subscription-papers are growing right along, boys. The first thing you know you’ll have enough to buy artificial arms and legs, such as we were looking at in the advertisements the other day. It beats all what they can make nowadays—teeth, arms, legs, and everything.”

“They can’t make new heads, can they?” inquired Tommy Eye, whose mien was that of a man who had something important to impart and was casting about for a way to do it gracefully.

“Who needs a new head around here?” smilingly inquired the “mayor.”

“Him,” jerked out Tommy, pointing to Wade. “Leastwise, he will in about ten minutes after the boss gits here.” And having thus delicately opened the subject, Tommy’s tongue rushed on. “He was good to me when I didn’t know it!” His finger again indicated the time-keeper. “I ain’t goin’ to see him done up any ways but in a fair fight. But he’s comin’. There’s blood in his eyes and hair on his teeth. I heard him a-talkin’ it over to himself—and he’s goin’ to kill the ‘chaney man’ for a-gittin’ his girl away from him. Now,” concluded Tommy, with a hysterical catch in his throat, “if it can be made a fair fight, knuckles up and man to man, then, says I, here’s your fair notice it’s comin’. But there’s a girl in it, and girls don’t belong in a fair fight—and I’m afeard—I’m afeard! You’d better run, ‘chaney man.’”

Nina Ide was in the door behind her father. Her face was crimson, and she winked hard to keep the tears of vexed shame back—for the faces of the loungers told her that Tommy had been imparting other confidences. She did not dare to steal even a glance at Wade. She was suffering too much herself from the brutal situation.

“‘A girl!’ ‘His girl!’” repeated Ide, seeing there was something he did not understand. “Whose—”

“Father!” cried his daughter. And when he would have continued to question, snapping his sharp eyes from face to face, she stamped her foot in passion and cried, “Father!” in a manner that checked him. He stood surveying her with open mouth and staring eyes.

Dwight Wade had fully understood the quizzical glances that were levelled at him. It was not a time—in this queer assemblage—for the observance of the rigid social conventions. Taking the father aside would be misconstrued—and slander would still pursue the girl.

“Mr. Ide,” he cried, his eyes very bright and his cheeks flushing, “I want you and the others to understand this thing. It’s all a mistake. Mr. Britt introduced me to your daughter, and I paid her a few civilities, such as any young lady might expect to receive. But I seem to have stirred up a pretty mess. It’s a shameful insult to your daughter—this—this—oh, that man MacLeod must be a fool!”

“He is!” said the girl, indignantly.

“And he’s a fighter,” muttered Tommy Eye.

Rodburd Ide clutched his beard and blinked his round eyes, much perplexed.

“It isn’t a very nice thing, any way you look at it—this having two young men scrapping through this region about my girl. It isn’t that I don’t expect her to get some attention, but this is carrying attention too far.” He took her by the arm and led her to one side. “Nina, there is nothing between you and Colin MacLeod?”

“Nothing, father. We have danced together at the hall, and he has walked home with me—and that’s the only excuse he has for making a fool of himself in this way.”

“And—and this new man, here?”

“I never saw him till this very day! And he’s in love with John Barrett’s daughter. Oh, what an idiot MacLeod is! This stranger will think we’re all fools up here!” Tears of rage and shame filled her eyes.

Ide’s gaze, wandering from her face to Wade and then to the loafers, saw one of Britt’s great wagons topping the distant rise, and he heard a wild chorus of hailing yells.

“You run up to the house, girl,” he said.

“I’ll not,” she replied. And when he began to frown at her she clasped his arm with both her hands and murmured: “He’s a stranger and a gentleman, father, and they’re abusing him. He is nothing to me. He’s in love with another girl. It was through being obliging and kind to me that this horrible mistake has been made. Now, I’ll not run away and leave him to suffer any more.”

Rodburd Ide, an indulgent father, scratched his nose reflectively.

“It isn’t the style of the Ide family to leave friends on the chips, Nina,” he said—“not even when they’re brand new friends. We know what an ingoing lumber crew is, and he probably doesn’t, and it’s the green man that always gets the worst of it. So I’ll tell you what to do: Invite him up to the house, and you entertain him until P’laski and I can get this thing smoothed over.”

Tommy Eye, hovering near in piteous trepidation lest his kindly offices should miscarry, overheard the invitation that father and daughter extended to the young man, who was gloomily eying the approach of the wagon.

“Yess’r, they’ve got the right of it,” stammered Tommy, unluckily. “You’ll git it if ye don’t—and the ‘It-’ll-git-ye Club’ will see ye git it. Ye’d best run!”

Wade looked into the flushed face of the girl, at the officious father of commiserating countenance, and at the loungers who had heard Tommy’s condescending counsel and were looking at him with a sort of scornful pity.

Again that strange, sullen, gnawing rage at the general attitude of the world seized upon him. He felt a bristling at the back of his neck and in his hair—the primordial bristling of the beast’s mane.

“It is kind of you to invite a stranger,” he said, “but I fear that among these peculiar people even that kindness would be misconstrued. I belong with Britt’s crew. I’ll stay here.”

There was that in his voice which checked further appeal. The girl stood back against the wall of the store.

The Honorable Pulaski was the first off the wagon, and he greeted Ide with rough cordiality. When the latter began to whisper rapidly in his ear, he shook his head.

“I’ve wasted a good deal of valuable time and some temper holding those two young fools apart to-day,” he snapped. “The last thing MacLeod wanted to do was to lick me. Now, I’m too old to be mixed up in love scrapes. I’m going over to measure that spool stock, and the one that’s alive when I get back, I’ll load him onto the wagon and we’ll keep on up the river.” He strode away, leaving the “mayor” champing his false teeth in resentful disappointment.

But the autocrat of Castonia had a courage of his own. He set back his head and marched up to MacLeod, who was standing in the middle of the road, his jacket thrown back, his thumbs in his belt.

“Colin,” he demanded, indifferent as to listeners, “what’s all this about my girl? Can’t she come along home, minding her own business like the good girl that she is, without a fuss that has set all the section wagging tongues? I thought you were a different chap from this!”

“He had his lie made up when he got here, did he?” growled MacLeod.

“I believe what my own girl says,” the father retorted.

“So he’s got as far as that, has he? I tell ye, Rod Ide, if you don’t know enough—don’t care enough about your own daughter to keep her out of the clutches of a cheap masher like that—the kind I’ve seen many a time before—then—it’s where I grab in. Ye’ll live to thank me for it. I say, ye will! You don’t know what you’re talking about now. But you’ll know your friends in the end.”

He put up one arm, stiffened it against Ide’s breast, and slowly but relentlessly pushed him aside.

Viewed in the code of larrigan-land, the situation was one that didn’t admit of temporizing or mediation. The set faces of the men who looked on showed that the trouble between these two, brooding through the hours of that long day, was now to be settled. As for his men, Colin MacLeod had his prestige to keep—and a man who had suffered a stranger to carry off the girl he loved without fitting rebuke could have no prestige in a lumber camp. And it was prestige that made him worth while, made him a boss who could get work out of men.

The uncertain quantity in the situation was the stranger.

With one movement of heads, all eyes turned to him.

He was not a woodsman, and they expected from him something different from the usual duello of the woods.

They got it!

For instead of waiting for the champion of the Umcolcus to take the initiative, this city man calmly walked off the store platform at this juncture and bearded the champion.

“And there ye have it—two bucks and one doe!” grunted old Martin. “The same old woods wrassle.”

The boss dropped his hands at his side as the time-keeper approached. He grinned evilly when he noted the limp. Wade came close and spoke without anger.

“I see you are still determined to be a fool, MacLeod. I want no trouble with you. Aren’t you willing to settle all this fuss like a man?”

“That’s what I’m here for,” replied the boss, with grim significance.

“Then go and offer an apology to that young lady. Do it, and I’ll cancel the one you owe to me.”

If Wade had been seeking to provoke, he could have chosen no more unfortunate words.

“Apology!” howled MacLeod. “Do ye hear it, boys? Talkin’ to me like I was a Micmac and didn’t know manners! Here’s an Umcolcus apology for ye, ye putty-faced dude!”

His lunge was vicious, but in his contempt for his adversary it was wholly unguarded. A woodsman’s rules of battle are simple. They can be reduced to the single precept: Do your man! Knuckles, butting head, a kick like a game-cock with the spiked boots, grappling and choking—not one is called unfair. MacLeod simply threw himself at his foe. It was blood-lust panting for the clutch of him.

Those who told it afterwards always regretfully said it was not a fight—not a fight as the woods looks at such diversions. No one who saw it knew just how it happened. They simply saw that it had happened.