Front matter (continued 6)

Warned by the shadow, the cook looked up and saw her in Stetson hat, short skirt, high-laced shoes, a sunlit vision with the freshness of the morning upon its cheeks. "God bless you! Come right in," he exclaimed. "Your daddy an' Mr. Hart hev' gone down line. Devil's Muskeg got hungry las' night an' swallered ten thousand yards of gradin'."

As yet she knew nothing of those treacherous sinks that gulp grades, trestles, and the reputations of their builders as a frog swallows flies, and he went on, answering her puzzled look: "Morass, you know, swamp with quicksand foundation that goes clean down to China. Nope, 'tain't Mr. Carter's loss. He ain't such a fool as to go an' load a muskeg down with clay and rock. An Easterner had it on a sub-contract, an' though Mr. Carter warned him, he reckoned he could make it bear a grade on brush hurdles. Crowed like a Shanghai rooster because it carried trains for a week.

"Oh, I don't know," he commented upon her pity for the luckless contractor. "You kain't do nothin' with them Easterners. He was warned. Besides," he vengefully added, "he shedn't ha' come crowing over us. More coffee, miss?"

Leaving the cook-house, a shadow fell between her and the sun, and Carter gave her good-morning. "Breaks the poor devil," he supplemented the cook's information, "and bothers us. Cuts off our communications. We shall have to move the outfits back to prairie grading till they are re-established. I'm going down there—now, if you'd like a hand-car ride?"

Would she? In five minutes she was speeding along under urge of ten strong arms, over high trestles which gave her sudden livid gleams of water far below, through yellow cuts, across hollow-sounding bridges, always between serried ranks of sombre spruce. Sometimes the car rolled in between long lines of men who were tamping gravel under the ties. Rough fellows at the best, they had herded for months in straw and dirt, seeing nothing daintier than their unlovely selves, and as they were not the kind that mortifies the flesh, the girl was much embarrassed by the fire of eyes. Apart from that, she hugely enjoyed the ride. With feet almost touching the road-bed, she got all there was of the motion, besides most of the wind that blew her hair into a dark cloud and set wild roses blooming in her cheeks.

She gained, too, a new view-point of Carter, who chatted gayly, pointing, explaining, as though they were merely out for pleasure and another had not been just added to the heavy cares that burdened his broad shoulders. She learned more of the life, its hardship, comedy, tragedy, in half an hour's conversation, than she could have obtained for herself in a year's experience.

These different elements sometimes mixed—as when he indicated a blackened excavation. "See that? A man was sitting on the stump that was blasted out there. Reckon he got sort of tired of the world," he replied to her horrified question, "and wanted a good start for the next." Then, easily philosophical, quietly discursive, he wandered along, touching the suicide's motives. There had been different theories—drink, religion, a girl—but he himself inclined to aggravated unsociability. The sombre forest, with its immensity of sad, environing space, had translated mere moroseness into confirmed hypochondria. He had so bored the stumping outfit, to which he belonged, with pessimistic remarks on things in general that, in self-defence, they threw something at him whenever he opened his mouth; and so, bottled up, his gloom accumulated until, in an unusually dismal moment, he placed a full box of dynamite under a stump and sat down to await results.

"Why didn't some one pull him off?" she cried.

His answer was pregnant. "Short fuse. Anyway, the boys didn't feel any call to mix in his experiments—especially as he swore a blue streak at them till the stump lifted."

"Horrible!" she breathed.

"Just what they said." He solemnly misunderstood her. "They never heard such language. 'Twas dreadfully out of place at a funeral."

"Oh—I didn't mean that!" Then, considering his serious gravity, "Was—was there—"

"Pretty clean." He relieved her of the remainder of the question. "Mostly translated."

Incredulous, she glanced from him to his men and received grisly confirmation, for one thrust out a grimy finger to show a horseshoe ring. "I picked it up on the track, miss, forty rod from the—obseq'ses. Didn't allow he'd want it again."

Shuddering, she turned back to Carter, but before she could make further comment the car rolled from a cut out on the edge of the Devil's Muskeg.

She thought him cold-blooded until, that evening, she learned from her friend, the cook, that he had been caught on the edge of the blast as he rushed to save the man and had been thrown a hundred feet. A little disappointed by his apparent callousness, she joined her father and lover, who, with the contractor, stood looking out over the muskeg. Sterile, flat, white with alkali save where black slime oozed from the sunken grade, it stretched a long mile on either side of the right of way. Around its edges skeleton trees thrust blanched limbs upward through the mud, and beyond this charnel forest loomed the omnipresent spruce. In spring-time its quaking depths would have opened under a fox's light padding, but the summer's sun had dried the surface until it carried a team—which fact had lured the contractor to his financial doom. A fat, gross man, he stood mopping his brow and wildly gesticulating towards the half-mile of rails that, with their ties, lay like the backbone of some primeval lizard along the mud, calling heaven and the chief engineer to witness that this calamity was beyond the prevision of man.

"'Jedgment of God,' it's termed in government contrac's," he exclaimed to the chief, who, however, shrugged at such blackening of Providence.

"Well, Mr. Buckle," he answered, as Carter came up, "the judgment was delivered against you, not us."

"Yes, yes!" the man grovellingly assented. "I know—mine's the loss. But you gentlemen orter give me a chance to make it up building round this cursed mud-hole?"

"Round what?"

He turned scowlingly upon Carter. "This mud-hole, I said." With a greasy sneer, he added: "But mebbe you kin build across it?"

"I can."

"What?" he screamed his angry surprise. "Why, hell! Wasn't it you that tol' me it wouldn't carry a grade?"

"I said it wouldn't carry yours."

His quiet assurance gave the contractor pause, while engineer and surveyor looked their surprise. "Going to drive piles down to China?" The contractor grew hysterically sarcastic. "You'll need a permit from Li Hung Chang. What do you know about grades, anyway? I was building this railroad while you was wearing long clothes."

"Likely." Carter's easy drawl set the others a-grin and caused Dorothy to hide her smile in her handkerchief. "But you ain't out of yours yet. A yearling baby wouldn't try to stack rock on top of mud. But that isn't the question. D' you allow to finish the contract?"

"Think I'm a fool?" the man rasped.

"'Tain't always polite to state one's thoughts. But—do you?" And when the other tendered a surly negative, he turned to the engineer. "You hear, sir? And now I file my bid."

The chief, however, looked his doubt. As yet engineering science offered no solution for the muskeg problem, and this was not the first grade he had seen sacrificed to a theory. "Are you serious?"

"As a Methodist sermon," Carter answered his grave question. Then, drawing him aside, he pulled a paper from his pocket—an estimate for the work. It was dated two weeks back, prevision that caused the chief to grimly remark: "Pretty much like measuring a living man for his coffin, wasn't it? But look here, Carter! I'd hate to see you go broke on this hole. I doubt—and your figure is far too low. What's your plan?"

"I'm going to make a sawdust fill with waste from the Portage Mills."

Whistling, the chief looked his admiration, then grinned, the idea was so ludicrous in its simplicity. For, all said, the problem resolved itself into terms of specific gravity—iron sinks and wood floats in water; and the muskeg which swallowed clay would easily carry a sawdust bank. Moreover, the idea was thoroughly practicable. Situated five miles from Winnipeg, the Portage Mills were the largest in the province and their owners would willingly part with the refuse that cumbered their yards.

"You've got it!" he cried, slapping his thigh.

"That's not all. If old Brass Bowels—" Noticing that the contractor was looking their way, he finished in a whisper, the significance of which caused the chief's grizzled brows to rise till lost in the roots of his hair.

"You'll break camp—?" he questioned.

"To-morrow. Build a spur into the mills, then start prairie grading at the American line and run north. Ought to make a junction about the time the sink is filled."

And this he did. The few miles of spur-track being quickly built, a yellow tide of sawdust was soon flowing out to the Devil's Muskeg, where Bender's wood gang directed its flow. At first there was great argument about this new material, some holding that one might as well try to build a road-bed with feathers. But it proved itself. Tamping hard as clay, it had greater resilience, and soon the twisted track rose like a mained serpent from the slimy clutch of the devil. Yes, miles of flat-cars, boarded up till they loomed big as houses, moved between mill and slough through that summer, and no one dreamed of their slow procession having other significance up to the moment that Helen heard newsboys crying a special in the hot streets—

"Monopoly refuses new line a crossing. Section gangs tear up Carter's diamond."

XXVI

WINNIPEG

By that time Helen had shaken down to a life that was new as strange—though not without travail; shaking is always uncomfortable.

Coming in to the city, a natural nervousness—that indefinite apprehension which assails the stoutest under the frown of new adventures—had been accentuated by heart-sickness from her late experiences, and was justified by some to come. She viewed its distant spires very much as an outlaw might contemplate far-off hostile towers. Entering from the west, as she did, one sees taller buildings poke, one by one, from under the flat horizon. For the city sits by the Red River—smoothest, most treacherous of streams—in the midst of vast alluvial plains, its back to the "Ragged Lands," facing the setting sun. North, south, east, and west of it they stretch, these great flat plains. Vividly emerald in spring-time, June shoots their velvet with chameleon florescences that glow and blaze with the seasons, fix in universal gold, then fade to purest white. Dark, dirty, the city stands out on the soft snow-curtain like a sable blot on an ermine mantle. Withal it is a clean city, for if the black muck of its unpaved streets cakes laboring wagons and Red River carts to the hubs after spring thaws, the dirt is all underfoot. No manufactures foul the winds that sweep in from boreal seas with the garnered essences of an empire of flowers.

Purely agricultural, then, in its functions, the bulk of its burgesses were, as might be expected, store-keepers, implement men, bankers, lawyers, land agents, all who serve or prey upon the farmer; for there, also, lurked the usurers, the twenty-per-cent. Shylocks, fat spiders whose strangling webs enmeshed every township from the Rockies to the Red. Spring, fall, or winter, grist failed not in their dark mills, which ground finer and faster than those of the gods. Scattering their evil seed on the dark days, it was their habit to reap in the sunshine, competing for the last straw with their fellows, the business men, in their single season of profit—Harvest. For in summer the city drowsed amid green wheat seas that curved with the degrees over the western world; it slept, nodding, till the wheat, its life-blood, came in huge arterial gushes to gorge its deflated veins.

Thus Helen found it—asleep under the midsummer sun. Walking to her destination, she met few people; after the hotel 'buses rattled by, the streets were deserted save for an occasional buck-board or slow ox-team chewing the peaceful cud at the wooden sidewalk. When, later, she walked those hot streets on that most wearisome of occupations, the search for an occupation, she became familiar with the city's more intimate topography—the huge concrete foundations, vacant, gaping as though at the folly which planned them and their superstructures, the aërial castles that blew up with the boom; the occasional brick blocks that raised hot red heads proudly above surrounding buildings, the river, with its treacherous peace; old Fort Garry, which she repeopled with governors, commissioners, factors, and trappers of the Hudson Bay Company.

Also she grew sensitive to its varied life, easily distinguishing between emigrants, who were injected by daily spurts into the streets, the city's veins, from the old-timers—remittance-men, in yellow cords and putties; trappers from Keewatin, Athabasca, the Great Slave Lake, in fringed moose-skins; plethoric English farmers, or gaunt Canadian settlers from the rich valley round-about; Indians of many tribes—Cree, Sioux, Ojibway; the heterogeneous mixture that yet lacked a drop of the Yankee or continental blood which would flow, ten years later, in a broad river over the American border. But this was after she had fallen into her place in the household of Glaves's big sister among a scattering of teachers, up for the Normal course, a brace of lawyers, three store-keepers, and a Scotch surgeon.

Just what or where that place was would be hard to say, seeing that it varied with the view-point of each lodger, nor remained the same in the opinion of any specific one. Thus did she shine, for one whole week, the particular star in the heaven of an English teacher, a mercurial lad of twenty; then having rejected his heart with a pecuniary attachment of thirty-five dollars per mensem, she fell like a shooting-star and became a mere receptacle for his succeeding passions, which averaged three a month. His fellow-teachers swung on an opposite arc. Canadians, and mostly recruited from the country, the soil still clung to their heavy boots. The profession, its aims and objects, formed their staple of conversation. Deeply imbued with the sense of the central importance of pedagogy in the scheme of things, they wore an air of owlish wisdom that was incompatible with the contemplation of such sublunary things as girls. Having wives, it was not to be expected that the store-keepers could notice a young person whose attractions so far exceeded her known acquaintance, and though the surgeon, a young man prodigiously bony as to the leg and neck, really worshipped her from behind the far folds of his breakfast newspaper, thought transference still lay in the womb of future humbuggery and she catalogued him as injuriously cold.

From this conglomerate of humanity she gained one friend, the young wife of a lawyer who had lately come West. Prettily dark as Helen was delicately fair, each made a foil for the other, which necessary base for feminine friendships being established, their relations were further cemented by an equal loneliness, and made more interesting by the expectation of an event. As it was not yet fashionable to shoo the stork away from the roof-tree, behold the pair fussing and sewing certain small garments with much tucking, trimming, insertioning, regulating said processes by the needs of some future mystery dight "shortening"—all of which brought Helen mixed feelings. The young husband's part in said operations was particularly trying. Supposedly immersed in his paper of evenings, he would watch them over the tip with a delighted sagacity akin to the knowing look which a bull-dog bestows on a crawling kitten. At times, too, he would descend upon the work and lay wee undervests out on his big palm, tie ridiculously small caps over his shut fist, ask absurd questions, and generally display the manly ignorance so sweet to the wifely soul; while Helen sat, a silent spectator of their happiness. It is a question which the acquaintance brought her most, pain or pleasure.

The tale of the boarders would not be complete without mention of Jean Glaves, a buxom woman, fair of hair, whose strong, broad face seemed to incarnate the very spirit of motherhood. With her Helen's place was never in doubt. Opening her big heart, she took the lonely girl right in, and proved a veritable fount of energy in her disheartening search for work.

In this her first experience conformed to that usual with a working-girl—she shivered under icy stares, shrank from the rude rebuffs of busy men, and blushed under smiles of idle ones; sustained the inevitable insult at the hands of a rascally commission broker at the end of one day's employment. His quick, appraising glance, following a first refusal, would have warned a sophisticated business woman, but the innocence which betrayed Helen later proved her best protection. The horror in her eyes, childlike look of hurt surprise, set the dull reds of shame in the fellow's cheeks, but she was out in the street with hat and jacket while he was still muttering his apology. Yet his grossness fell short of the vile circumspection of her next employer. A smug pillar of society and something in a church, caution would not permit him to stake reputation against possible pleasure on a single throw, yet she labored under no illusions as to the motive behind her second discharge.

"Oh, I can't bear it! I just can't try again!" she cried that night to Jean Glaves.

"You won't have to, dearie," the big woman comforted, and having tucked her comfortably upon her own lounge with a wet cloth upon her aching head, she went straight to the Scotch surgeon's room.

Her choice of confidant may have been due either to intuition or knowledge of what was going on behind the ramparts of the young man's breakfast paper. The event proved it wise, for his giraffe neck lengthened under his angry gulps, his bony hands and nodding head emphasized and attested Jean's scathing deliverence upon men in general. "The scoundrel!" he exclaimed, when she paused for lack of breath. "The scoundrel! I'd flog him mysel' but for the scandal. But see you he'll no' go unpunished. He's a bid in for the hospital supplies, and I'll be having a word with the head doctor." And thus, later, was the smug villain hit to the tune of some hundreds in his tenderest place, the pocket.

Not content with future revenge, the Scotchman's sympathy expressed itself in practical suggestion. "If ye'd think, Mistress Glaves"—he always accorded Jean the quaint title, and it fell gracefully from his stiff lips—"now if ye'd suppose the young leddy would like to try her hand at nursing, there's a vacancy in the hospital."

While he hesitated, Jean literally grabbed opportunity by the collar. "You come along with me."

Introduced a few seconds thereafter to man and subject, Helen exclaimed that she would love the work; nor were her thanks less sincere for being couched in stereotyped form. How could she thank him? Being sincere to the point of pain, after the fashion of his nation, the young man had almost answered that the obligation lay with him in that his studies behind the newspaper would be furthered and facilitated. He replied, instead, that the pay would be small, the work hard.

Not to be discouraged, she was thus launched upon what, in her condition, was the best of possible careers. For the mental suffering which, lacking an outlet, burns inwardly till naught is left of feeling but slag and cinders, becomes the strongest of motor forces when expended in service for others. Throwing herself body and soul into the new work, she forgot the suspicion, scandal that had lately embittered her days, and had such surcease of loneliness that in one month the lines of pain disappeared from around her eyes, her drooping mouth drew again into the old firm tenderness.

Besides content, the month brought her other satisfactions. Owing to lack of accommodation at the hospital, she still slept at the boarding-house, and dropping into Jean Glaves's room for a chat one evening, she found her conversing with a girl of her own age. She would have retired but that Jean called her back. "Don't go! We were talking of you. This is Miss Dorothy Chester, who used to board with me. Miss Chester—Mrs. Morrill."

There was, of course, nothing in the names to convey the significance of the introduction to either. After that period of secret study which is covered by the feminine amenities, each decided that she liked the other. Helen gladly accepted Dorothy's invitation to call, and in this ordinary fashion began a momentous acquaintance that soon developed through natural affinity into one of those rare and softly beautiful friendships which are occasionally seen between women. And as friendship means association in a city that has no theatre and few amusements, it soon happened that any evening might see Dorothy in Helen's room, or Helen on the way to her friend's hotel. Naturally Helen quickly learned that her friend's father and lover were head engineers on Carter's road, and that she had visited them in camp; and as Dorothy was as willing to talk of her novel experience as Helen to listen, imagine the pair in the former's cosey bedroom, one snugged up on a lounge, the other coiled in some mysterious feminine fashion on pillows at her side, fair girl hanging on dark girl's lips as she prattled of Carter, or joining in speculations as to what kind of a woman his wife might be.

She positively jumped when Dorothy declared one evening: "I'm sure he still loves her. Ernest says that he scoured the city for her; only gave up when he felt sure that she had gone East to her friends. When the road is finished, he is going back to look for her."

He had searched for her! Still loved her! It rhymed with her deft fingers rolling bandages; tuned her feet as she bore medicine-trays from ward to ward; ousted the dry anatomical terms of the daily lecture from their proper place in her mind. The thought illumined her face so that maimed men twisted on their cots to watch her down the ward. Meeting her on the main stairs, one day, Carruthers, the Scotch surgeon, almost mistook her for the Virgin Mother in the stained window above the landing. He searched for me! is going back East to look for me! The days spun by to that magical refrain.

Why, in view of all this, did she not confide in Dorothy? Though its roots grip deep down in woman nature, the strange, contradictory, inconsequential, yet wise woman nature, the reason lies close to the surface. Physically akin to the impulse which urges a shy doe to fly from its forest mate, her feeling flowed, mentally, from injured wifehood. For all her natural sweetness and joy over the thought of reunion, she was not ready to purchase happiness with unconditional surrender; to make overtures directly, or through Dorothy, that might be construed as a bid for executive clemency. As he had deserted her, so he must return; and that prideful resolution was strengthened and justified by the suffering which had immeasurably exceeded her fault. Yes, first he must return, then—would she instantly forgive him? Any lover can answer the question; if not, let him consult his sweetheart. "I'd make him suffer!" she will cry, gritting pretty teeth. So Helen. Very unchristian, wicked, but natural.

No, she did not confide in Dorothy, went quietly about her business, hugging her sweet secret to her own soul, until— But this summary of her thought and feeling would not be complete without mention of a last, perhaps greatest, satisfaction—her joy in reading newspaper accounts of Carter's progress. Editorials, politics, reports, she read all, day by day, glowing over red-hot denunciations of the monopoly while she thought what good men the editors must be, and how intelligent to so clearly discern her husband's merits. She was mightily troubled by the insatiate appetite of the Devil's Muskeg, studying its rapacious dietary as though it were a diabetes patient. She triumphed when Carter successfully treated its ineffable hunger with vegetarian diet of sawdust; shivered when he was refused a crossing of the trunk line; thrilled over the battle when Bender and the woodmen beat back the monopoly's levies while the trackmen laid the "diamond," and grew sick with fear, as before mentioned, when she heard the newsboys crying out Carter's final repulse as she was walking home to her room about eight o'clock one evening.

Though very tired, she immediately turned in her agitation, and, undeterred by the continent of blue-print uniform that spread below her brown ulster, she hurried to Dorothy's hotel, an old caravansary that had survived two rebellions and the bursting of the boom. Once chief of the city's hostelries, the old house still attracted people who preferred its solid comfort to the gilt, lacquer, garish splendors of more modern rivals. The parlor in which she waited while her name was taken up to Dorothy, was panelled with sombre woods; her feet literally sank in a pile carpet, thick, green, and dark as forest moss. Walls were upholstered in hammered leather; chairs, heavy table, massive furnishings, all were of black oak. The portraits of governors, high commissioners, and chief factors of the Hudson Bay Company, soldiers and traders or both, seemed ready to step down from their frames to engage in wise council and issue fiats that would set a hundred tribes in motion. Time stood still in that solid atmosphere. Heavy odors of leather and wood, the pervading feeling of peaceful age combined to soothe her fretted nerves, and she had just relaxed her tired body within the embrace of a mighty chair when passing footsteps and a voice brought her up, tense and rigid.

Returning just then, the bell-boy repeated her question: "Gentlemen who just passed, Miss? Mr. Greer and Mr. Smythe, people that are financing the new line, and Mr. Carter, their head contractor. They are dining here with the general manager of the trunk line. If you'd like to see them," he added, interpreting her interest as curiosity, "just step this way. They've all gone in, and you can peep through the glass doors. It's that dark in the passage no one will see you."

As she tiptoed after him down the dark hallway he whispered further—"Reminds me of them old Romans, the general manager; them fellows that used to invite a man to a poisoned dinner. He's got those chaps shooed up into a corner, and now he's going to kill their financial goose over the cigars and wine. Sure, Miss, everybody knows that Greer's on his last legs. Bit off more than he could chew when he went to railroading; but old Brass Bowels will treat his indigestion. That's him, stout gent with his back this way. Greer and Smythe's either side of him. That's Mr. Carter opposite. T'other gentleman, Mr. Sparks, is general superintendent of the western division."

Slipping by the others her glance glued—the term is eschewed by purists, who ironically inquire if the adhesive used was of the carpenter variety, but it exactly describes her steadfast gaze—her glance glued to Carter's face. From above an arc lamp streamed white light down upon him, darkening the hollows under his eyes, raising his strong features in bold relief. This, be it remembered, was the first she had seen of him since he broke in upon the Ravell dinner-party, black, sooty, smelling evilly of sweat and smoke. And now he sat with a waiter behind his chair, at meat with the greatest man in the north, at a table that was spread with plate, cut-glass, linen, all of a costly elegance that transcended her own experience. The champagne bucket, at his elbow, of solid silver, with gold-crusted bottles thrusting sloping shoulders out of cracked ice, the last accessory of luxurious living, took on wonderful significance in that it accentuated to the last degree their changed positions. For surely the gods had turned the tables by bringing her in print hospital uniform and shabby ulster to witness this crowning of his development.

Be sure she felt the contrast. How could she do otherwise? Yet her feeling lacked the slightest touch of humiliation. Above such snobbishness, she was filled by joy and pride in his achievement, joined with tremulous fear, for the bell-boy's remarks had quickened her apprehension. That distinguished company, costly appointments, perfect service, impressed her as little as it did Carter, which is saying a good deal, for the pomp of civilization counts more with women than men, and he was bearing himself with the easiness of one who has conquered social circumstance. He chose the right fork for his salad, knife for his butter; broke his bread delicately, trifled with green olives as if born to the taste—though this edible presented itself as a new and bitter experience—small things and foolish if made an end in themselves, yet important in that, with improper usage, they become as barbed thorns in the side of self-respect. Significant things in Carter's case because they showed that he had applied to his social relations the same shrewdness, common-sense, keen sight that was making him successful in large undertakings.

Of course she noted his improvement? That he no longer used knife for spoon, squared elbows over his head, sopped bread in gravy? On the contrary, she saw only his face, dark and stern save when a smile brought the old humor back to his mouth. Her hungry eyes traced its every line, marking the minutest changes wrought by thought, care, sorrow, time's graving tools. Hands pressing her breast, she struggled for his voice with thick oak and heavy plate-glass, and so stood, wrapped up in him and their past, till the bell-boy spoke.

"Miss Chester said you was to go right up, Miss."

She jumped, and her tremulous fear took form in words. "You are sure the general manager will—"

"—Do things to 'em?" he finished, as he led her upstairs. "They're dead ones, Miss."

XXVII

THE NATURE OF THE CINCH

The bell-boy was not alone in his opinion. Through that summer twenty thousand settler farmers had kept suspicious tab on the monopoly, and now that it felt the clutch reclosing on its throat, the entire province had flamed up in wrath and fear. Press, legislature, and pulpit denounced the refusal of a crossing that was without shadow of a claim in equity, and was plainly intended to kill competition by tedious and costly litigation. In town, village, on trail, at meeting, wherever two settlers were gathered together, the general manager's action was damned in no uncertain terms. Indignation flowed like a tidal-wave over the plains. Skimming low with the north wind, an aeronaut would have heard the hum of speech rise from the face of the land, angry and continuous as the buzz of swarming bees. It had pealed out in clarion triumph, that huge vox humana, when the "diamond" was laid after desperate fighting; it swelled in furious discordance when, the previous day, Carter's men were forced back by sheer weight of the levies that the general manager had gathered and brought in from the sections along three thousand miles of track.

It was one of those situations which require only a touch of demagoguery to wreak great harm. Insurrection hung thick in the air. Secession and coalescence with the United States were openly advocated by men who later read with astonishment their own words in the papers of that stormy time. Thousands of armed settlers waited only for the word to fall upon the monopoly's levies, but in face of united public opinion, backed by an inflamed press, Carter and his people remained quiescent—supinely quiescent, according to certain editorials.

A morning paper recalled its prediction of months ago: "We warned Mr. Carter not to be deceived by the monopoly's complaisance in bringing his construction outfit and supplies out from the East over its tracks. The concession was merely bait for the trap, analogous to the handing of a rope to a fool wherewith to hang himself. We are loath to quote the old proverb against Mr. Carter, yet were it not for the fact that the monopoly snaps its fingers in the face of this province through him, we should be tempted to show satisfaction at the plight to which his fatuous self-confidence has brought him."

The article closed with a vivid word picture of the general manager chuckling à la Mephistopheles in the privacy of his luxurious office; which, perhaps, approximated the reality more closely than that in the minds of the laity. For a composite of the popular impression would have shown the entire railroad pantheon, general manager, department heads, with their clerks, sub-heads, assistants, and deputy assistants, all very lofty of brow and solemn of face, in session over the crisis.

The reality was much more prosaic. Indifferent to the newsboys, who were crying his crimes on the streets, the general manager sat in the office of the division superintendent that morning, chair tilted back, feet on the table, thumbs comfortably bestowed in the arm-holes of his vest. It has remained for a practical business age to clothe itself in the quintessence of ugliness. Imagine Julius Cæsar in a tuxedo, Hamlet wearing a stove-pipe hat! His black coat, check trousers would have pleased a grocer's fancy in Sunday wear, and it were difficult to realize that their commonplace ugliness clothed a power greater than Cæsar's—the ability to create and people provinces, to annihilate and build up towns, to move cities like checkers over the map; harder still to listen to his curt speech, issuing from blue tobacco smoke, and believe that an empire larger than ancient Rome paid him tribute, that the blood and sweat of a generation had gone to grease his juggernautal wheels. Yet the speech itself certified to the power.

"We made a mistake, Sparks; but who could foresee this fellow Carter? Here's the N.P. lusting for a chance to cut in over the border. Give them that crossing and old Jim Ball will place their bonds for any amount in exchange for reciprocal running arrangements. So we've got to make a quick killing. Buy 'em out, lock, stock, and barrel, while the fear of God's in their hearts. They must sell—look at this Bradstreet report on old Greer's assets. Just about at the end of his string. So I want you to write and invite them to dinner to-night—Greer, Smythe, and Carter—though the order ought to be reversed; he's the brains of the business. Draw it mild—conference with a view to amicable arrangement of points at issue, and so forth. But when we once get them there—" His nod was brutal in its significance.

Equally wide of popular conception was the scene in the banking office of Greer & Smythe when the invitation was delivered. Carter, who swung an easy leg from his favorite perch on the table, seemed to have thrived on defeat; the most elastic imagination would have failed to invest him with the weight of a people's cares. Indeed, he laughed when the senior partner handed him the general manager's note.

"Hum! 'Will you walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly!' What do I make of it? That's easy. Has us going—or thinks he has—and is aching to deliver the knock-out. A million to a minute he wants to buy us out."

"Well, he never will!" Red and plethoric, the senior partner sprang up. An elderly man, his clear eyes, honest face, framed in white side-whiskers of the Dundreary style, all stamped him as belonging to the old-fashioned school of finance which aimed always to advance the civic interest while turning an honest penny. "No, sir!" he reiterated. "We'll break first; and goodness knows that is not so far away. Yesterday I approached Murray, of the North American Bank, but he answered me in his broad Scotch: 'Hoots, mon! get your crossing first. Get your crossing an' we'll talk.' And so with Butler, Smith, and others who promised support."

"Cold feet, eh?" Carter commented. "They'll warm them presently chasing themselves for a chance to come in."

The old gentleman ran on in his indignation. "Yes, we are about at the end of our financial string, but we would rather dangle there than yield to these pirates. Am I right, sir?"

Smythe, a younger man, lean, laconic, and dark as the other was stout, florid, nodded, and his vigorous answer was untainted by a suspicion of compromise. "Surely, sir! But if Mr. Carter's plan fails—" His shrug supplied the hiatus.

Carter answered the shrug. "It won't fail." He held up the invitation. "But, say! Fancy—to-day, of all days?"

"Of course we won't go," Smythe frowned.

"Of course we* will*," Carter grinned. "Think what it means? Besides blinding them to the trap, we shall be there when it springs, and I wouldn't miss Brass Bowels' face for a thousand, cash. Let me see; the bid is for eight-thirty. Western flyer is due at Portage station nine-fifteen. He'll hardly broach business before the coffee, and with any kind of luck we ought to serve him up a beautiful case of indigestion."

"With luck?" the senior partner echoed.

"With or without. Everything is planned beyond possibility of failure. Mr. Chester goes with Mr. Hart on the construction-train, while Bender keeps things humming at the crossing. By-the-way, he's in the outer office now, with Hart, waiting for last orders, and if you don't mind I'll have them in. I wouldn't take a chance even on your clerks."

In view of just such a contingency, Bender had invested his bulk with store clothes of that indescribable pattern and cut which fulfils lumberman ideals. From his mighty shoulders a quarter-acre of black coat fell half-way down worsted pantaloons that were displaying an unconquerable desire to use the wrinkles of high boots as a step-ladder to his knees. As collars did not come in sizes for his red throat, he had compromised on a kerchief of gorgeous silk, and a soft hat, flat and black, completed a costume that was at once his pride and penance. In the luxurious office, with its rich fittings in mahogany and leather, he loomed larger than ever; was foreign as a bear in a lady's boudoir. Uncomfortably aware of the fact, he took the chair which the senior partner offered with a sigh of relief, and was fairly comfortable till the position discovered its own disadvantages—while his coat announced every movement with miniature feux de joie from bursting seams, his trousers ascended his boots as a fireman goes up a hotel escape. To which sources of discomfort was added the knowledge that his face mapped in fair characters the fluctuations of the recent combat. But he forgot all—scars, raiment, unconventional bulk—as soon as he began to talk.

"All ready," he replied to Carter's question. "Buckle has been round the camp some lately. Only this morning I caught him talking to Michigan Red. It's a cinch that he was spotting for the railroad, but as I knew you'd as lief he'd tip us off as not, I didn't bust his head. Jes' allowed I didn't see him."

"Yes, let him talk," Carter replied, relative to the broken contractor. "But"—he addressed the surveyor—"there's no whispering in your outfit?"

"Couldn't be," the young fellow laughed. "Mr. Chester only told me an hour ago. The men know nothing—will know nothing up to the moment we pull into Prairie."

"Good. Now, you are to leave at dusk, and don't forget to grab the operator before he can rattle a key. But turn him loose as soon as you are through and let him wire in the news. And you, Bender, start in at eight, keep 'em busy as long as you can, then load what's left of you in a flat-car and steam round for Mr. Hart."

"What's left of me?" Bender growled, as he walked with the surveyor down-street a few minutes later. "Hum! Give me the Cougar and an even hundred of old-style Michigan men, and I'd drive the last of Brass Bowels' tarriers into the Red and beat you out laying the diamond. But, Lordy, what's the use o' talking! The old stock petering out an' the new's jes' rotten with education. They'd sooner work than fight, an' loaf than either, for they ain't exactly what you'd call perticler hell on labor. What's left of me? Well, there'll be some fragments, I guess. While I was hanging round I picked up an odd score of Oregon choppers that blew in here las' week. Brass Bowels' agent tried for 'em, but they'd lumbered with me in British Columbia. Come out an' see 'em. They're beauties."

Perhaps they were, for standards of beauty, morality, of any old thing, are merely relative and depend so much on local color. To Hart, who reviewed the "beauties" in Bender's camp, they seemed the most unmitigated ruffians in his railroad experience; but as they strut on this small section of the world-stage for "Positively one appearance only," let them be judged by their record in the rough work of that night; by the way in which they bore themselves in the roar, surge, and tumble of a losing fight, the echoes of which alarmed the dark city and came with the soup to the general manager's dinner; and let him deliver their valedictory to his guests at table.

Throwing a telegram—which a waiter brought in just after Helen went up-stairs—across to Carter, the magnate remarked: "That big foreman of yours has been at it again. He has put two of our heaviest engines into the ditch and ten men into hospital. Not bad, but—he didn't lay the diamond."

"Oh, well," Carter shrugged, "better luck next time."

"Ah, yes—the next time?" Repeating the phrase with dubious inflection, he went on with his dinner, and for an hour thereafter no one heard the rattle of the skeleton behind the feast. He acted the perfect host, easily courteous, pleasant, anxious for the preference of his guests. As he ran on, drawing from the sources of a wide and unusual experience for his dinner chat, it was curious to note the shadings in his manner. Addressing the partners, he seemed to exhale rather than evidence a superiority which, on their part, they countenanced by an equally subtle homage. Integrity and deprecation of his policy and methods were dominated by the orthodox business sense which forced subconscious recognition of his title as king of their business world. With Carter, however, he was frankly free, as though they two had been section-men eating their bite together on a pile of ties, and doubtless the difference in his manner sprang from some such feeling. For whereas the partners were born to their station, he recognized Carter as a product—unfinished, but still a product—of the forces which had produced himself and a dozen other kings and great contractors of the constructive railroad era. Without invidious distinction or neglect of the others, he yet made him the focus of attention.

"We heard all about your sawdust grades," he complimented, with real cordiality. "A mighty clever idea, sir; pity you couldn't patent it—though we are glad you cannot, for we intend to apply it on all our Rainy River muskegs."

Approaching business at the close of the meal, he was equally suave. "You are to be complimented upon your achievement, gentlemen," he said, addressing the partners. "We feel that while supplying a real need of the province, you have convicted us of remissness. But now that we do see our duty, it would be equally criminal for us to leave you the burden of this heavy responsibility. We know how it has taxed your resources"—his gray eye stabbed the senior partner—"and we are fully prepared to relieve you." Pausing, he lit a cigar, puffed a moment, and finished, "We will take the enterprise off your hands, bag and baggage, on terms that will yield you a handsome profit."

A pause followed. No man turns from an easy road to a rocky climb without lingering backward glances, and the partners looked at one another while the general manager leaned back and smoked with the air of one who had faithfully performed a magnanimous duty. Greer spoke first.

"Very kind offer, I am sure."

"Most handsome," Smythe, the laconic, added. "But—" He glanced at Carter, who finished, "We are not on the market."

The manager raised his brows. Expecting a first refusal, he was slightly staggered and irritated by its bluntness, yet masked both emotions. "Not on your own terms?"

"On no terms," Greer emphatically answered; then, flushing, he added: "Our chief motive in going into this enterprise, sir, was to bring sorely needed railroad competition into this province. It would not be subserved by our selling to you."

The manager flicked the ash from his cigar. Then, while smoking, he regarded the old gentleman from under bulging lids very much as a curious collector might note the wriggles of an impaled beetle. "Very laudable intention; does you credit, sir. But you must pardon me if I doubt that you will carry it to the length of financial hari-kari. You have heard of that Japanese custom? A man commits suicide, empties himself upon a cold and unsympathetic world for the benefit of his enemy, who is compelled by custom to go and do likewise. In your case the sacrifice would be foolish because we shouldn't follow suit. Now when I spoke of your resources"—during an ugly pause his glance flickered between the partners—"I did not state our exact knowledge of their extent. You are—practically—broke. In addition, we have bought up all of your paper that we could find floating on the market, and three months from now—we shall be in a position to demand a receiver in bankruptcy. Stop!" Frowning down Greer's attempted interruption, he dropped his suave mask and stood out, the financial king, brutal, imperious, predatory. "I know what you would say. Three months is a long time. But no one will make you a better offer—any offer—till you can cross our line. You can force a crossing? Yes, but we'll law you, badger you, carry the case from court to court up to the privy council—two years won't make an end. In the meantime—" He had thrown himself at them, bearing down upon them with all the force of his powerful will, of the furiously strong personality that had crushed financial opposition to plans and projects beside which their enterprise was as a grain of sand to the ocean. Now, in a flash, he became again the polished host. "Take your time, gentlemen. We are in no hurry. Several days, if you choose. But—be advised."

But big, strong, and masterful as the manager was, every Goliath has his David, and the first stone in the forehead came from the sling of Smythe—Smythe, who had hardly opened his mouth through the meal save for the admittance of food or drink. Banging the table so that the glass rang and a champagne bowl flew from its thin stem, he sprang up, his dark face flushed and defiant. "We'll take neither your advice nor your time! God knows that we are hard shoved, but damn a man who sells his country! And since you have been so outspoken, let me tell you that we'll run trains across your line, and that inside—"

"This hour." In its quiet assurance, Carter's interpolation came with all the force of an accomplished fact. The manager started, and the division superintendent upset his wine. As their backs were to the door, neither saw a waiter take a telegram from a messenger-boy, and sign for its delivery after a glance at the clock, which indicated half-past nine. Nor could either fact have the significance for them that their combination had for Carter.

The manager recovered his poise even as the waiter handed the telegram to his colleague, and, though puzzled, hid the feeling behind a show of confident contempt. "I hardly gather your meaning, but presume you mean—war?"

Missing the superintendent's sudden consternation, he was going on. "Very well. I had hoped—" when the former pulled his sleeve. "What's this?"

He stared blankly at the words: "Construction-train, with men and Gatling-guns, across our tracks at Prairie. Number ten, Western Mail, held up with three hundred passengers."

During an astonished silence, the partners watched the manager, who looked at Carter, who lightly drummed on the table. "Your train?" he went on, slowly, with words that evidenced his flashing insight into the situation. "Hum! Sawdust, eh? Came down the spur you laid to the Portage Mills at Prairie; grabbed our operator; then extended the mill-switch across our tracks. Know how to kill two birds with one stone, don't you?"

During a second silence he fenced glances, nervously fingering the telegram, then suddenly asked: "What's the use? You can't hold it?"

"With two Gatlings and five hundred men—five thousand, if I need them?"

"The law's against you."

"As it is against you at the crossing. Possession is said to be nine of its points, anyway, so we have you just nine-tenths to the bad." Slightly smiling, he quoted: "'We'll law you, badger you, carry the case from court to court up to the privy council—two years won't make an end.'"

The manager raised heavy lids. "In three months we'll break you."

Carter shrugged. "Who knows? In the mean time—your traffic will be suspended?"

Through all the superintendent had fidgeted nervously; now he broke in: "Pish, man! We'll build round your old train in six hours."

"Will you?" Without even a glance in his direction, Carter ran on, addressing the manager: "You see, land is that cheap since the boom that we took options on a right of way from Prairie clean up to the north pole and down to the American border. No, you won't go around us, but we shall go round you and come into this burg south of your tracks."

"But you're out of law," the superintendent angrily persisted. "You haven't the shadow of a right—"

"Oh, shut up, Sparks," the manager impatiently interrupted. "What has right to do with it? He's got us in the door and it's no use squealing. Now"—the glance he turned on Carter was evenly compounded of hostility and admiration—"terms? You'll release our train—"

"When you cede our legal crossing, and call off your dogs. We'll hold Prairie till every man Jack of your guards is shipped out of the city."

"Could you have the papers drawn—" He had intended "to-night," but he paused as Greer drew them from an inner pocket and his iron calm dissolved in comical disgust. "Hum! You're not timid about grabbing time by the forelock. But, let me see!"

Once more the arc lights could be heard sputtering. In that tense moment their own fortunes swung in the balance with the welfare of a province, and while the manager read they waited in silence. Trimming the end of a cigar with careful precision, Carter masked all feeling, but the partners could not hide their nervousness—Smythe fidgeted, Greer locked and unlocked clasped fingers. Both held their breath till the manager's pen made a rough scratch on the silence.

A good loser, he said, as Greer rose after buttoning his coat over the precious document: "Don't go, gentlemen—at least till we have drunk the occasion. I see another bottle there in the ice."

And his toast, "To our next merry meeting," formed the premise of the deduction which Carter returned to Greer's relieved exclamation when they stood, at last, alone in the street.

"Thank God! It is over!"

"On the contrary, it is just begun."

Passing under a street lamp, its white light revealed the pale disturbance which banished the senior partner's flushed content. Stopping dead, he agitatedly seized Carter's arm.

"You don't suppose he will go back on his—"

"Signature? No, he won't repeat. He's done with the crossing."

"Then we can weather through," Greer said, and Smythe echoed his sigh of relief.

"But—" Carter quoted the bucolic proverb which recites the many ways in which a pig may be killed other than by a surfeit of butter.

"But what can he do?" Greer persisted.

"Don't know," Carter slowly answered. "Only a man don't have to look at that bull-dog jaw of his a second time to know that he'll do it, and do it quick."

"I'd give a good deal to know," Smythe frowned, then smoothed his knotted brow as he laughed at Carter's rejoinder.

"I'd give three cents myself."

Not feeling sleepy, Carter walked on after he had dropped the partners at their respective doors, aimlessly threading the dark streets that gave back his hollow foot-fall; and so passing, by chance, under Helen's window, he brought a pause in the anxious meditation which had kept her restlessly tossing, and set her to momentary speculations as to the owner of that firm and heavy tread. She listened, listened till it grew fainter and died as he turned the corner. Keeping on in the cool silence, he presently came to the Red River suspension bridge, where he paused and leaned on the parapet at the very spot from which she loved to watch Indians and chattering squaws float beneath in quaint birch canoes. There was, of course, nothing to warn him of the fact any more than she could have guessed him as owner of the solitary foot-fall. He thought of her, to be sure. Always she stood in the background, ready to claim him whenever press of affairs permitted reflection; and now she thrust in between him and the twinkling lights of the sleeping city. Where was she? And doing—what? How much longer before he could go in search of her? After long musing he swept the weary intervening days away with an impatient gesture, and his longing took form in muttered speech:

"How long? My God! how much longer?"

The thought brought him back to his work and the events of the evening. What would be the manager's next move? He gazed down into the dark river intently, as though he expected its hoarse voice to give answer. But though he canvassed, as he thought, every possibility, the reality—which presented itself a week or so after he resumed operations in the Silver Creek forests—was beyond the range of his thought.

XXVIII

THE STRIKE

As aforesaid, it was the unexpected that opposed Carter with a visage of stony calm when he came from Winnipeg out to the "Ragged Lands" a week or so later. For whereas he had left the camp convulsed in throes of constructive labor, the whistle of his engine raised piercing echoes; no other sounds disturbed the sleeping forest. In the cut south of the camp he passed the big digger, at rest from the roar, rattle, and clank of chains, hiss of escaping steam. The pile-driver loomed idly on a distant trestle. When engine and caboose stopped opposite the cook-house, he saw that the camp—which ought to have been empty—teemed with men.

He shrugged when Hart, who was with him, exclaimed in wonder: "Can't prove it by me. But we'll soon know. There's Bender—coming from the office."

"Strike," the giant replied to their questioning. "Teamsters, graders, bridge and track men, all went out at noon. What for? God knows; but I allow that Buckle could tell. He wasn't hanging round the Winnipeg camp for nothing. I'm sorry now—" His bunched fists, big as mauls, fully explained his regret, and indicating a group which was arranging its progress so as to make the office door with Carter, he finished: "But if you're hankering for reasons, consult them gentlemen. It's a depytation—by its scowl. An' it's loaded to the muzzle with statistics to fire at you."

Following his finger, Carter noted that Michigan Red was of the deputation, but when it ranged up at the tent door in sheepish yet defiant array, that worthy hung modestly in the rear, permitting a big teamster from the Silver Creek settlements to act as spokesman. Blunt, honest, tenacious as a bull-dog in holding to an idea, the man was an ideal tool for unscrupulous hands; but though he instantly divined the reasons behind his leadership, Carter listened quietly to his tale—the old tale—overwork, poor food, underpay.

His answer was equally quiet. "You are certainly to be pitied, Bill; breaks me all up just to think of your wrongs. I've always admired your thrift, and I sympathize with your desire to raise the mortgage off your farm. Took you five years to put it on, didn't it, Bill? And you are calculating to pay it off in the next two months. Well, perhaps—but you'll have to screw it out of some one else than me."

Shuffling uneasily, the teamster glanced at his backers, who, equally nonplussed, gazed at one another. For where an angry, or even a plain answer would have merely incited them to dogged opposition, this quiet ridicule sapped conceit in their cause, besides conveying an alarming suggestion of strength in reserve.

"Then you don't allow to fall in with our notions?" The spokesman returned after a whispered conference.

"Meaning—an hour less and a dollar more? You're sure a psychic, Bill; plumb wasted on railroading. Open an office in town and go to fortune-telling and you'd pull that plaster off your homestead inside a month."

Assured that there was no hurry, that he could take a week to consider the matter, he gravely added: "Obliged to you, Bill; but I don't allow to require it. The world, you'll remember, was made in six days, and this isn't near such a big job. No time like the present, and here's my answer—same hours, same grub, same pay. It's fortune-telling or present rates for yours, Bill."

Through all he entirely ignored the delegation, and now he leaned in the door, idly watching as it made its way across the camp and was swallowed in the crowd of strikers about the bunk-house. But his face fell as he stepped inside beyond eye and ear shot. "Serious?" he repeated Hart's question. "Couldn't be worse. Not one of those fellows could make a quarter of the wages or live half as well on the farm, but they'd hog it all if I died in the ditch. But there's more behind this than their spite and greed. You see, we have just about pulled old Murray in for funds to make a clean finish, and if he gets wind of this he'll crawfish like a one-legged crow. I must go back at once. And you, Bender—you, also, Hart—see to it that not even a dog crawls out of this camp until I return."

"To keep these chaps guessing," he added, after a moment's dark reflection, "I'd better slip out after dusk. You go over, Hart, and whisper the engineer to back out and wait for me at the other side of the cut. Mystery is good as aces up in any old game, and we can't fog them too much."

Pulling out at dark, he made the run back to town—fifty miles—in an hour and a quarter, reckless running on unballasted road. Murray must be fully committed before the news leaked out. We must get him, must get him, must, must, must! The wheels clicked it, the steam hissed it, the fire roared it, the wind shrieked the imperative refrain. But though Bender lived in the strict letter of his instructions so that a mosquito could scarce have escaped from the camp; though a man could not have made the distance in two days on foot, or a wild goose have passed the throbbing engine as it bounded along that raw track, newsboys were yet crying the strike as he came out on Main Street.

Feeling certain that the office would be closed at that hour, he intended to go straight to Greer's house, but seeing a light in the partners' room as he came opposite the building, he went in and found Smythe there, alone. With lean legs thrust out before him, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched to his ears, his attitude incarnated deep dejection; gloom resided in his nod.

"Greer?" he said. "At home—sick. You see, we were to have closed the deal with Murray this very evening, and the disappointment just knocked the old man out. He's been running altogether on his nerve lately; something had to give. Why couldn't this have happened a day later?"

Answering Carter's question, he went on: "We heard it at noon. Papers got out an extra. Presses must have been running it off before you left."

"Noon?" Carter whistled. "Why the men didn't quit till two!" Then as the significance flashed upon him, he exclaimed: "Brass Bowels for a million! It was all cut, dried, and laid away for us, and they served it hot to the minute. Don't—it—beat—hell!"

His comical disgust caused Smythe a wintry grin, but, sobering, he said: "I wouldn't mind so much for myself. I'm young enough to do it again. But the old gentleman—with that nice family! You know he was just about ready to retire; only took up this business from a strong sense of public duty. And now, in his extremity, every rat financier in this city runs to his hole in fear of the cat. The poor old man!"

Carter nodded his sympathy. On the occasions that he visited their house, Greer's wife, a silver-haired old lady, had vied with her two daughters in pleasant attentions. But it did not require that thought to stir him to action.

"Oh, here!" he laughed. "We are not dead yet. To-morrow I'll go the round of the employment offices and—"

Smythe threw up his hands, a gesture eloquent of despair. "Went round myself—this afternoon. Harvest is on and men scarcer than diamonds. Besides, Brass Bowels has left an order with every agency in town to ship every man they can get west to the mountains."

"Um-m!" Carter thought a while. "Then we'll have to play the last card."

"The last card?" Smythe raised his eyebrows.

"Yes, biggest trump in the pack. How long before—"

"Oh, they can't touch us for two months."

"Good! Now listen." Glancing around as though distrustful of the very walls, he whispered in Smythe's ear for a minute that saw the latter's dejection dissolve in new-born hope. "You must go with me," he finished, aloud. "While you pack your grip, I'll drop round and see Greer. He must be here to-morrow to carry out the bluff. And hurry—for we must make it down and back before we are missed."

XXIX

THE BLUFF

It was the fifth day of the strike, and still no sound of labor disturbed the sleeping forest. Quiet and calm, like that of the Sabbath, brooded over the camp, but not its peace, for, being well rested, the strikers chafed under inaction, moving restlessly among the buildings. Michigan Red, to be sure, was dealing interminable poker on a blanket under a tree, while the younger men skylarked or tried one another out in games, but neither forms of amusement appealed to the older and more thrifty Canadians. Secret disquiet, moreover, underlay even the nonchalance of the gamblers, for Bender's mysterious looks and Carter's continued absence were rapidly disintegrating the strikers' confidence.

"He ain't here," the giant had answered, when the committee had called for another conference, and to further questioning he had returned an irritating grin. "When will he be back? That's for us to know an' you to find out." And so, shorn of its functions, the committee had languished like a moulting peacock. In addition, the cook's ominous visage at meal-times bade the strikers beware that the curse of labor still clung to the fruits of the earth; and the fact that almost a month's back pay rested in Carter's hands, served as a text and lent force to the unpreached sermon. What if he never came back? The history of Western construction abounded with cases of absconding contractors, and the hostility of the monopoly lent substance to the doubt. Most of them would have hailed Carter's advent, just then, with real if secret pleasure, and the general uneasiness manifested itself in a grumbling remark made as Michigan Red raked a fat "jack-pot" into his winnings.

"You're the only one that's making anything these days."

"That's right," another grumbler added. "An' what's more, if we're out another five days the raise won't pull us even by freeze-up. Ten days lost at three-fifty is thirty-five dollars. Take the extra dollar seven weeks to make it up—if the frost holds off that long."

Apparently indifferent, Michigan went on with his deal. "You're hell at figures, Chalky. Where'd you learn? Figuring interest on your mortgage? How many cards, Bill?"

But Bill, spokesman of the committee, laid down his hand. "Look here, Red! Chalky's right. If we hadn't struck we'd have had a pay-day yesterday, an' if we're standing to lose that much we can't call it off too soon for me."

"Nor me."

"Nor me." The voices, pitched in altercation, had brought the idlers crowding, and the support came in from all around.

Michigan's teeth gleamed white through his red beard while his bleak eyes took stock of the crowding faces as though calculating just how far envy and avarice would take them. "You don't stand to lose a cent, Bill. They've got to finish the contrac' before freeze-up to reach the tie an' lumber-camps. Otherwise the road 'll be idle all winter, an' what's a few days' pay alongside the freight on a hundred million feet of lumber. He's got to finish it. If he kain't"—pausing, he distributed a significant nod around the circle—"there's others as kin an' will."

"But what if he don't come back?"

To the question which expressed the most pregnant doubt, he returned a second meaning nod. "Same folks 'll make good."

"Back pay?" Bill pressed.

"Back pay."

"On whose say so?"

"Ain't mine good enough?" Ruffling, he turned a stream of fierce profanity upon Carrots Smith, his questioner. "Want Bible and oath for yours, eh? There's some things that kain't be told to idiots—"

"Yes, yes, Red!" Bill soothed. "We know—that's all right, Red. Don't mind him, he's only a suckling kid."

"Sure, Red! You know what you're talking about. Go on!" others chorused, and having gained his point by the show of anger, real or false, the teamster allowed himself to be placated.

"If 'twas necessary," he continued, "we could tie up the road with a laborer's lien. But 'twon't be—I have somebody's word for it. If Carter goes under, we jes' go right on."

"With the raise?"

"With the raise."

"But if he comes back?" Chalky raised another doubt. "What about lost time? Freeze-up is freeze-up, an' we kain't make it up if we're docked for the lay-off."

"That's easy. Who's to blame for it?" He threw it at the circle.

"Him! He wouldn't give the raise."

"Then let him pay for his fun. We've got him coming or going, an' we draw time, at the new rates, for every idle day before we touch a tool. Ain't that right?"

It was not, yet his crooked logic exactly matched their envious cupidity. Confidence once more returned; the younger men returned to their sports; Bill picked up his hand, and the game proceeded until interrupted, a half-hour later, by a sudden shout and shrill neighing from the horse lines.

"The stallion's loose!"

Shouting, the roustabout tore across the clearing and just escaped the rush of the vicious brute by nimbly climbing the projecting logs at the cook-house corners. At his cry, a youth dropped the shot he had poised for a throw, the gamblers their cards, and, balking in the take-off for a broad jump, Carrots Smith led the rush for cover. A minute saw them all on top of cook or bunk houses, and thus defrauded of his preference, the stallion ran amuck among the horses which were tied at long hay-racks, kicking, rearing, biting. Though built massively of logs, the racks gave way with splintering crashes under the combined pull of a hundred frightened beasts; and bunching, the string tore round the clearing, squealing their fear.

To give the beast ease with his oats, Michigan had removed the iron muzzle according to his custom, and now, a free, wild thing, he bounded along in hot pursuit, curveting, caracoling, satanic in his jet-black beauty. Tossing his wild mane, he would call the mares with stridulous cachinnations, yet for all his exultant passion left them to chase a belated teamster, nose lowered, ears wickedly pricked, thrice around the cook-house. Balked again, he reared, kicked, and was plunging once more after the string when a whistle outshrilled his neigh, and an engine with caboose attached rolled out of the cut south of the camp.

But for the pounding hoofs, the collective whisper, "It's the boss!" would have carried to Carter, who, with Smythe, stood looking out at the door of the caboose; and his first remark, "Regular circus, isn't it?" was eminently applicable to the situation. Upholding the sky's blue roof, black spruce cones formed bulky pillars for the natural amphitheatre in which the horses circled and recircled, a kicking, squealing stream, before the audience on the roofs.

"Where are you going?" Smythe exclaimed, as Carter leaped to the ground.

"To rope that beast before he runs a season's flesh off the teams. There's a riata in the office."

"Better shoot him," Smythe counselled. "Here! come back!" But he was already half-way across the clearing.

Choosing his time, he passed from the smithy to the bunk-house, thence to the cook-house, and so working from building to building under the eyes of his men, he gained the office at last and shot in, barely escaping the mad cavalcade. As he emerged, coiling the riata, Smythe's gaze drew to a second actor in this woodland drama.

When the poker players broke for cover, Michigan Red had paused long enough to pocket the stakes along with his winnings, then picking up the blanket he walked over to the cook-house, and had watched all from the angle formed by the jutting corner logs. "A bit closer would have suited better," he had grumbled, as Carter's last rush carried him from under the hoofs. Now he commented: "Going to rope him, are you? Not if I know it." Knowledge of his fellows' liability to lapses of hero-worship inhered in his conclusion. "If there's to be gran'stan' plays I'll make 'em myself."

"Fools!" he snarled, as the beat of feet warned him that the strikers on the roof were watching Carter, who had taken position behind the next corner. He heard also the swish of the circling noose, its quickened whir as the horses swooped around on the next lap; then, just as the band passed, he sprang out, uttering a sudden harsh command, directly in the stallion's path.

A desperate play, it drew gambler's luck. A frontier superstition has it that the equine eye magnifies objects, and whether or no the red teamster with his pale-green face loomed in the stallion's sight as some huge and passionate fiend, he reared back on strung haunches, ploughing the sod in a desperate effort to stop; and while he hung in mid-air, Michigan stepped and threw his blanket, matador-fashion, over the ugly head. As the brute settled on all-fours and stood shivering, Michigan turned, grinning, to reap the fruit of his daring.

But his grin quickly faded, for, flashing on to his purpose, Carter had swung and roped the rat-tailed mare, the stallion's mate, as the band flew by. Worse! Michigan choked. Almost every man in camp had a grudge against the mare, some vicious lunge or graze from her snapping teeth, so a dozen strikers had jumped and were helping Carter to choke her down, while the others cheered them on with approving laughter.

Furious, he yelled: "What's the matter with you chaps up there? Taken to roosting like chickens? I'd like a picture of the bunch, it ud pass anywhere for a Methodist convention. An' you fellows quit yanking that mare. 'Tain't tug-o'-war you're playing." But he made small headway against the uproarious tide of yells and laughter, and, remembering his snub, Carrots Smith shouted back, "She's doin' most of the pulling, an' if she wants to hang, why let her."

Worst of all, it was Carter who finally interfered on behalf of the struggling brute, and Michigan chafed at the ready obedience accorded his orders.

"Thought you fellows was on strike?" he growled at Brady, the Irish teamster, as he retied the stallion in the horse lines.

But wrathfully indicating a bloody bruise on his own horse, the Irishman hotly retorted, "Faith, thin, an' that's no sign that we'll be lettin' them murthering brutes av yourn chew the necks av our teams? If they was mine, I'd make wolf-meat av the pair before supper."

Michigan sneered. "Didn't I ketch him myself? An' then you fellows had to go running your legs off to suit him. Keep it up, an' it's you an' your strike that'll be made into hash for his supper."

While Michigan thus tried to scotch incipient sympathy with rough sarcasm, Carter carried with him to the office the comfortable assurance that fortune had turned down to him this accidental trick in a difficult game. Shrugging deprecation of Hart's admiring comments on his skill with the riata, he returned a reminiscence of his cowpunching days to Smythe's chidings, asserting that the stallion was not a circumstance to a long-horn steer on an open prairie. While talking, he helped to arrange the contents of Smythe's grip on the rough table, piling greenbacks by denominations between flanking columns of silver, an imposing array.

"No hurry," he said, when Hart asked if he should call the men, and, lighting a cigar, he drawled a story which at one time explained his reason and illumined his plan. "I remember a kid who won three sizes out of his class by a little judicious waiting. His dad had set him a spading stint in the back lot, and when this other boy brings-to on the sidewalk and begins to heave belligerencies over the fence, he answers, that calm and deliberate that you'd never think he was burying his heart under every spadeful, 'Jes' you wait till I finish my patch.' And he goes on digging so cheerfully that the other kid is a mite staggered. As I say, he was about three sizes to the good, but as you'll remember, Napoleon's Old Guard could put it all over a young lady's seminary for hysteria if it was kept too long waiting. Watching that slow spade, this lad's imagination went to working so hard that he fought that fight thirteen times in as many minutes, and felt that used up he just ran like a March hare when the other kid stuck his spade in the trench. The wise kid?" He twinkled on Hart. "I was that glad, I played hookey from school an' won a licking from the old man five sizes larger than I'd have got from the boy. But it was worth it. I learned that it always pays to give it time to soak in."

Outside the strikers furnished a vivid illustration of that lesson during the next three hours he kept them waiting. Grouping, they made loud mouths at first, over supposititious wrongs or affected indifference that was belied by uneasy glances officeward. Less loquacious at the end of the first hour, the second left them sullen and silent; the third, eaten by suspense. They started, as at a sudden explosion, when Bender finally came out; stared blankly when he announced that the boss was waiting to pay off the camp.

Affording no time for recovery, Hart called the first name on the pay-roll, and Bender's stentorian bass sent it rolling into the woods. "Anderson! Anderson! Hurry up, Anderson!"

The name chanced to be the property of Bill, the spokesman, but though used as little as his Sunday clothes, there was more than unfamiliarity behind his slowness. More tenacious of idea, as aforesaid, than quick of wit, Bill now found himself without plan, precedent, or time for counsel in these unexpected premises, nor could he draw inspiration from the blank looks of his fellows.

"Hurry up, Anderson!" Bender crossly repeated; and starting as though touched in some secret spring, Bill lurched forward and in, and so found himself facing Carter, Hart, and Smythe behind an awesome financial array.

Never before had Bill seen so much money at once—even in dreams; it totalled more than the hard earnings of his forty-odd years; would have paid his mortgage ten times over. The substance of modern power, its glitter challenged the loud-mouthed assertions of him and his fellows that, given the same luck, they could have done as well as Carter. By the light of its golden glow, Bill saw himself very weak and small and foolish. At home he seldom saw a dollar; had trouble in scraping up currency enough to pay his taxes, and effected his barterings at the store in truck and trade. With his doubts settled as to the solvency of the firm, Bill was suddenly afflicted with a suspicion that he had made the biggest kind of a fool of himself.

Correctly interpreting his glance at the table, Carter gave him a genial smile. "Yes, Bill; but you don't get it by laying off. Here's your bit. Touch the pen and— Five dollars short? Board and feed for five days, Bill. Man earns his bread by the sweat of his brow, you know. Pass on, and don't forget to remember me to your wife when you gain home."

As with Bill, so the others. Filing in, they testified, one by deeper sullenness, others by attempts at a swagger, to the influences which had wrought on him. Few attained the easy insolence of Michigan Red, who demanded an itemized account of his store bill and insisted on signing the roll with his own hand. Touching the pen, railroad fashion, they passed out, while Hart signed for them, to add their doubtings to the general mystification.

What was forward? Had Carter obtained new crews, or would the company close down work? As the line still fell thirty miles short of the northern settlements, the latter thought filled the minds of the Silver Creek men, who saw themselves left marketless by their own act, with sick misery; brought pause to their envious cupidity, despite Michigan's assurances that it was all a bluff.

"'Tain't," Bill Anderson contradicted him. "I was just over to the cook-house for a drink, an' the cook has orders to serve no meals after breakfast to-morrow morning."

"That so?" a dozen voices questioned.

"Ask for yourselves. He's at the door now calling to supper."

And the cook confirmed the report, adding, moreover, his mite to their discomfiture by malignantly animadverting upon the ménages to which they were about to return. "My cooking don't suit, eh?" demanded the offended artist. "It's pertatoes an' sow-belly for yours after this. In a month you won't be able to tell your ribs from a rail corral." And truth so flavored his railings that they saw, in fancy, themselves looking back from their prairie farms upon his rude but plentiful fleshpots—at which ripe moment the door opened to admit Carter, Smythe, and Bender.

Pausing at the end of the centre table, Carter glanced over the rows of faces which turned curiously up to him as on the occasion that marked the beginnings of his fight for mastery in the cook-house at the winter camp. Very fittingly, setting and persona for this last act of a long struggle were almost the same as the first. Hines and the Cougar, to be sure, were gone over the Great Divide. Strangers sat in place of Shinn and the handful that returned to their farms after the log-drive. But here were the tables, a-bristle with tinware; dim lanterns, dependent from the low pole-roof; the faces, peering from Rembrandt shadows, fiercely animal, pregnant with possibilities such as have reddened the snows of many a forest camp. Overlooking them now, at the climax of a year-long play, he could not but thrill to the thought that whereas they had opposed him at every turn, those iron impresarios, the Fates, had left choice of endings with him, author of the drama. It was his to crush or spare—to crush and gain the cringing respect which they accorded to frost, drought, pestilence, stern henchmen of the illimitable; to spare and attain next place to a fair potato-crop in their esteem; to manage them for their and his own good.

To the latter end he bent his words, addressing them, half jocularly, in their own argot. "Well, boys, we've played our game to a finish, but before we throw away the deck let's count tricks. I don't blame you for striking. You have a right to sell your labor in the dearest market as I have to buy mine in the cheapest. You simply asked more than I felt able to pay, so while you rested I took a jaunt down to the States to see how you stood on the market. What did I find? First let us take a look at your hand.

"What do you hold? Harvest is half over and the wheat farmers from the Portage to Brandon and down to the Pipestone have hired their help at two dollars a day. No betterment there. You can't break prairie in the fall, so there's nothing at home except eating, and the lumber-camps don't open up before the snows. On the other hand, your stake in this line is as big as mine. Unfinished, you are without the markets you have been shouting for these years; finished, it lets in American competition and trebles your values in land." Pausing, he shook his head, and smiling, went on: "Looks as if some one had dealt you a miserable hand, and I wonder if it wouldn't pay you to shuffle, cut, and try another deal? Now before I bring in new crews—"

"New crews? Where kin you get them?"

All through the men had given close attention, and after a single impatient glance at Michigan Red the faces turned back to Carter, who ignored the interruption. Leaning eagerly forward, they took the words from his mouth as he ran on roughly outlining his own plans, prospecting the coming years. Few of them, perhaps none, were given to looking beyond the present, and the vista to which he turned their dull eyes glimmered like sunshine on the prairies. This was to be no casual job! The province, ay, and the whole Northwest, required branch roads; would be gridironed with them before the finish! So what of construction in summer, logging in winter, they could look for profitable employment the round of the seasons!

"So talk it over among yourselves," he finished, "and those who feel that a fresh deal is in order can call round at the office after supper."

Long before that, nods and approving murmurs had testified to his victory, and as the burr of hot tongues followed them out through the open windows, Bender exclaimed: "Whipped to a finish! But what about them new crews?" Then catching Carter's grin, he burst out in uproarious laughter. "What a bluff!"

"Not a man in Minneapolis," Carter confirmed. "But that wasn't what we went down for. So it didn't matter."

"But will they believe it?" Smythe asked.

"Believe it?" Bender took it upon himself to answer it. "A frightened man will run from his shadow, an' they're that badly scared 'twon't take them five minutes to locate them crews."

He gave them, indeed, too much time, for, as he said, fear destroys perspective and the strikers were almost ready to believe that Carter could conjure men from the trackless forest.

Carrots Smith led the panic with a theory, even as he had headed the run from Michigan's horse. "Said he'd been prospectin' down in the States? Minneapolis, I'll bet you, an' the place jes' rotten with whaleback Swedes."

"Sawyer's gang is through with the N.P.'s Devil's Lake extension," another added. "I read it in the paper Sunday. Old Sawyer ud on'y be too glad for a chance to finish out the fall."

Other theories were not wanting, nor could Michigan Red stem the rout. Just twenty minutes thereafter a sheepish delegation presented itself at the office door and delivered itself through the mouth of Bill of the Anderson ilk.

"We've concluded," said Bill, "as 'twouldn't hardly be right to leave you ditched."

Albeit Carter's eyes returned Hart's twinkle, he replied in kind. "I'm real tickled to think that you won't desert me."

And so, with this bit of diplomatic comedy, ended not only the strike, but also the bitter fight which he, like every village Hampden, had had to wage against the envious ignorance of his fellows. For a while, to be sure, their stiff necks would balk at the homage secret consciousness dictated as his meed. They would refuse it, indeed, till the world outside sealed his success; whereafter every man of them would proclaim himself as the particular prophet who had discerned greatness in his humble beginnings. But in the mean time they would refrain from further hostilities.

"What about that Red man?" Smythe said, as the delegation made its jubilant way back to its fellows. "You'll surely discharge him?"

"Michigan Red?" Carter said. "Not if he wants to stay. His team is worth any two in camp, and his teeth are drawn for good. But he won't stay."

"That's a cinch," Bender echoed. "He's due in Winnipeg to report his failure sometime in the next three days."

XXX

FIRE

Dawn saw the strikers going about their chores with a cheerful alacrity that was as gall to Michigan Red, who chewed the bitter cud of unsuccessful leadership as he sat drumming his heels on a block by the cook-house door. He had come to the end of his rope—rather, dangled there, an object of contemptuous pity in the eyes of his fellows. Had he doubted the fact, it was to be easily read in their studied avoidance; but he knew that he had failed—in what? He could hardly have answered the question himself; for whether or no he had plotted in the monopoly's interest, the strike was merely incidental to the persistent war he had waged against Carter, to the dogged opposition which had root in the turbulent anarchism of his nature. Sufficient that though his weird face held its usual bleak calm, he writhed, mentally, under defeat, while the few who ventured within range of his tongue sensed the lava beneath the crust.

"Not with this crowd. I draw the color line," he rasped, when Anderson inquired if he were not going to work, while Carrots Smith drew a curse along with the information, "It's me for a better job. I'm tired of herding sheep." So now he was left strictly alone, though speculative glances travelled often his way.

"He's waiting for the boss," a teamster remarked to his neighbor. "Say, I'd like to see 'em at grips!"

"Rather him nor me," the other said, expressing general opinion. "The boss is a tough proposition. They say he beat Shinn up so badly that he'll never be more 'n half a man again. Red ain't no slouch, though. Bet you I'd like to see it."

However, as tools had to be reissued and a hundred details despatched, the men were all at work before Carter could come to breakfast, so only Smythe and the cook witnessed that meeting.

It was a beautiful day. Already the heat fulfilled the prediction of a torrid sunrise, and, like an egg in a pan, the camp fried within the encircling spruce which, on their part, seemed to lift over surrounding birch and poplar as though tiptoeing for cooler air. The same errand had brought the cook out from the bowels of his own particular inferno, and as certain phases of the encounter could not be set forth in choicer terms than those in which he delivered himself to an interested audience that evening, now let him speak.

"I was sitting in the doorway, that close to Red I could have pulled his ear, when the boss kem along. Stopping opposite, he looked down on Red with eyes dark and steady as night. They're blue, you know, by rights, but they seemed to darken to pure black, an' I never felt him so tall before.

"'Well, Red?' he says, quiet, like that; but Red's eyes stayed down, though his lip lifted clear of his corner teeth like you've seen a trapped coyote, and so the pair of 'em remained for a full three minutes."

Imagine them—the greenish face of the one reflecting murderous passion, troubled as waves on shaken acid; the other darkly silent, yet, for all his quiet, oppressing both Smythe and the cook with the loom of imminent death. So was fought out the silent duel of personalities—one minute, two; at the third, sweat broke profusely upon the teamster's face, and the cook breathed once more. Burning with Cain's lust, his glance travelled but once above the other's knee, to fall as quickly again.

"What's the matter, Red?" Smythe actually started as Carter's voice broke on the quiet of the camp. "Quitting? What for?"

"No, it isn't exactly my business," he cheerfully answered the teamster's growl. "If you will, you will." Turning back after entering, he added: "Heading for Winnipeg, I suppose? Then give my compliments to Friend Buckle and tell him to please hand them higher up."

When he came out Michigan was still there, but Carter passed without a glance, and led Smythe down the right of way into the forest. Even then Michigan sat on. It was, indeed, almost noon before he loafed over to the horse lines, after refusing the cook's invitation to wait for dinner. Without returning a word of thanks for the grub-sack which the latter sent over by a cookee, he hitched to his wagon and drove slowly away.

A week's rest had freshened the blacks so much that, if given their heads, they would have covered half the distance to Winnipeg that day. But he took a vicious pleasure in balking their inclination. Jerking the bits, which hinged on a cruel curb, he pulled them down to a nervous, teetering walk.

For a while the trail paralleled the right of way, then swung on a wide arc around a morass, and for an hour thereafter ran alternately among sloughs, sand-hills, muskegs, through a country indescribably desolate and which teemed with savage life. Myriad frogs set his ears singing with dismal, persistent croaking; a pole-cat scuttled across the trail, poisoning the dank air. From brazen skies a hawk shrieked a malediction upon his head; his horses threw up their heads, snorting, as a lynx screamed a long way off. Here, too, dark woods shut off errant breezes and he fell a prey to a curse of sand-flies that stung and envenomed his flesh. There was no escape. They settled, by hundreds, on the hands that wiped them off his face; stung his face as he slapped his hands.

Coming back, mad with pain and rage, from this détour, his eyes drew to a trestle—longest, highest, most expensive of Carter's works—and, reining in, he allowed his glance to wander lustfully over the stout timbers which his fancy wrapped in flame. A single match—but reason urged that the embers would undoubtedly furnish red lights for his hanging, and he drove on, hotter, madder for the restraint. He was ripe for any mischief that offered a running chance of escape, when, midway of the afternoon, he came on wheel-tracks that swung at right angles from the trail into a chain of sloughs.

"Red River cart," he muttered, noticing the wide gauge; then, furiously slapping his thigh, "Carter's Cree, by G—!"

He meant the Indian who had brought in the venison which formed the tidbit at Dorothy Chester's first meal in camp. All through the summer he had come in with deer-meat twice or thrice a week, but though Michigan and other teamsters had searched for his tepee during the idle days of the strike, no one had penetrated to the woodland lake where his squaw—a young girl, handsome, as Indian women go—was free from rude glances, safe from insult or worse. Now the trail lay, plain as a pike-road, under Michigan's nose; and, leaping down, he tied his team to a tree and followed it along the sloughs.

Through a gully, patch of woodland, the tracks led into a second long slough, and presently debouched on the strand of a small lake, one of the thousands that gem that black wilderness. Bird-haunted in spring, lonesomeness now lay thick upon it. Uttering its weird cry, a loon rose on swift wing, angling in its flight over the tepee, whose bull's hide, raw, smoke-blacked, harmonized with that savage setting.

Just then Michigan was in fettle to exact a vicarious revenge. Early in summer Carter had nipped a disposition on the part of his men to joke and make free with the Indian, giving strict orders that he was to be unmolested, coming or going. This girl who lived in his protecting shadow would have fared ill at Michigan's hands. But the tepee flaps were thrown wide, and though he strained his eyes from a covert of tall reeds, he saw no sign of her, without or within. Save the lipping of waters, sough of a rising wind, no sound broke the solitude that guarded this, the lair of primitive man. Only those who have experienced its frightful loneliness can know how terrible a northern solitude can be; how awesome, oppressive. Some note of it caused the teamster to speak aloud, heartening himself with sound of his voice.

"They'll be back to-night, sure, for the ashes is banked over the embers."

Gaining back to his team, he drove on a scant quarter-mile, then turned into a slough parallel to those he had just left, and which had its end in a wooded dell. Here high banks would have effectually screened a fire, yet he endured mosquitoes till dusk smothered his smudge. Then tying his team in the thick of its reek, he cut across the intervening bush and followed, as before, along the slough chain till he saw a dim cloud quivering on the blackness ahead.

Beneath this, smoke from the Cree's fire, presently appeared a rich incandescence, and after worming the last yards on the flat of his belly, Michigan peered from thick sedge out at the Cree woman, who sat and suckled her child by the fire that enriched the bronze of her bosom with a blush from its glow. A free, wild thing, her deep eyes now caressed her child, again searched the fire's red mystery, giving back its flame as forest pools reflect a hunter's flare; sombre and silent, eons of savagery flickered in her glance.

From her the watcher's evil face turned to the Cree, who was skinning a deer that hung by the hams from a poplar crotch. The heavy, clammy odor of fresh blood hung thick in the air, filled his nostrils as he lay, like primitive man by the mouth of his enemy's cave, watching the knife slip around the carcass. Savage could not have been more wicked of intent. Again and again his hand gripped his own knife, always to fall again at sight of the rifle that leaned against the Red River cart, close to the Indian's hand. And thus he waited, baleful glance flickering between man and woman, till the deer was dressed and loaded upon the cart.