Joan of Arc of the North Woods, Holman Day [accelerated reader books txt] 📗

off and came running down the shore.
He went straight to Lida and faced her manfully; but his eyes were humbly beseeching and his features worked with contrite apology. "I know now who you are, Miss Kennard. I don't mean to presume, in the case of either you or your men. But will you allow me to speak to them?"
"Yes," she assented, trying to hold her poise, helped by his manner.
He turned quickly from her eyes as if her gaze tortured him.
"I have been a coward, men. I ran away from my job. I'm ashamed of myself. I can't square myself, but let me do my bit to-day."
"I don't know what you can do--with that gang o' sneaks--after real men have had to quit," growled Vittum, unimpressed.
"Maybe I'm sneak enough these days to know how to deal with 'em," confessed Latisan, bitterly. "I stayed back there just now while the fight was on, but I knew a man fight wouldn't get us anything from them."
The men of the crew made no demonstration; they were awkwardly silent. The arrival of the deserter who confessed that he had been a coward did not encourage them at a time when they had failed ridiculously in their first sortie. He had ceased to be a captain who could inspire. He was one man more in a half-whipped crew, that was all.
They who had been dumped over the dam dragged slimy mud from their faces and surveyed him with sullen rebuke, remembering sharply that he had run away from the girl whose cause they had taken up.
The others, their faces marked with welts from blows, gazed and sniffed disparagingly.
But when he spoke out to the girl and her crew they listened with increasing respect because a quick shift to manly resolution impressed them.
His tone was tensely low and the noise of the tumbling water shielded his voice from eavesdroppers on the dam. "I stood back there in the fog and I heard what was said about an injunction. It's bad business, running against the courts, men. That injunction hangs over the crew of Echford Flagg. I am not one of that crew. What I may do is on my own account, and I'll stand the blame of it. All I ask is that you step aside and let me alone."
"That ain't the way we want to play this game," declared Vittum.
"It isn't a square game, men, and that's why you mustn't play it. It isn't a riverman fight to-day. I came north from New York on the train with Craig. He brought a gang of gunmen with him. They're hidden there in the fog. He means to go the limit, hoping to get by with it because you made the first attack. It's up to me from now on."
"What in the name of the horn-headed Sancho do you think you can do all alone against guns?" demanded Vittum, scornfully.
"Think?" repeated Latisan. "I've had plenty of time for thinking on my way up here. Let me alone, I say!"
Lida went to him and put her hand on his arm, and he trembled; it seemed almost like a caress. But by no tenderness in his eyes or his expression was he indicating that he considered himself back on his former footing with her.
"Miss Kennard, don't keep me from trying to square myself with the Flagg crew, if I can. I'm not hoping that anything can square me with you; it's past hope."
He moved away, but she clung to him. "I must know what you intend to do. I'll not accept a reckless sacrifice--no, I'll not."
"One evening in Adonia you gave me a lecture on duty and self-respect, Miss Kennard. I wish I'd taken your advice then. But that advice has never left my thoughts. I'm taking it now. I entreat you, don't let me shame myself again. This is before men," he warned her, in low tones. "Give me my fighting chance to make good with them--I beg you!"
He set back his shoulders, turned from her, and shouted Craig's name till the Comas director replied.
"Craig, yon in the fog! Do you hear?"
"I hear you, Latisan!"
"Do our logs go through Skulltree by your decent word to us?"
"I'll never give that word, my man!"
"Then take your warning! The fight is on--and this time I'm in it."
"I'm glad to be informed. I have an announcement of my own to make. Listen!" He gave a command. Instantly, startlingly, in the fog-shrouded spaces of the valley rang out a salvo of gun fire. Many rifles spat. The sound rolled in long echoes along the gorge and was banged back by the mountain sides.
"Latisan, those bullets went into the air. If you and your men come onto this dam----"
"There's only one kind of a fight up here among honest men--and you won't stand for it, eh?"
"We've got your number! You're declared outlaws. These men will shoot to kill."
In the chorus from the Flagg crew there were howls and groans.
"And argument won't bring to you any sense of reason and decency, will it?" demanded the drive master.
"We shall shoot to kill!" insisted the magnate of the Comas corporation.
"All right! If those are your damnable principles, I'll go according to 'em."
The girl caught his hands when he started away. "You must not! No matter what you are--no matter what you know I am, now. He'll understand when we tell him--down there! There's more to life than logs!"
"I have my plans," he assured her, quietly. "You must realize how much this thing means to me now."
The unnatural silence in the ranks of the Flagg crew, after Latisan's declaration had been voiced, provoked Craig to venture an apprehensive inquiry. "You don't intend to come ramming against these guns, do you?"
"Hold your guns off us! I'm going away. And these men are going with me."
"That's good judgment."
"But I'm coming back! I won't sneak up on you. That isn't my style of fighting. You'll hear me on the way. I'll be coming down almighty hard on my heels. Remember that, Craig!"
Lida was at his side when he marched away up the shore toward the Flagg camp at the deadwater, and his men trailed him, mumbling their comments on the situation and wondering by what sort of miracle he would be able to prevail over armed gangsters who were paid to kill.
"I'm going to ask you all to excuse me for playing a lone hand from now on, boys," said the drive master, standing in front of them when they were gathered at the camping place. "If they weren't working a dirty trick with their guns, I'd have you along with me just as I intended in the past. But you have had your fun while I've been making a fool of myself! Give me my chance now!"
He bowed to Lida and walked up the shore alone. No one stayed him. The girl locked together her trembling fingers, straining her eyes till he disappeared.
He knew the resources and methods of the drive. Soon he came upon a bateau pulled high on the river bank. There were boxes in the bateau, covered by a tarpaulin whose stripings of red signaled danger. He found a sack in the craft. He pried open one of the boxes and out of the sawdust in which they were packed he drew brown cylinders and tucked them carefully into the sack. The cylinders were sticks of dynamite. The sack was capacious and he stuffed it full. The bag sagged heavily with the weight of the load when he swung it over his shoulder and started up the bank, away from the river.
When Latisan walked away from Lida the mist again had lent its illusion, and he seemed to become of heroic size before the gray screen hid him from her sight.
Vittum tried pathetically to relieve the stress of the silence.
"The last peek at him made him look big enough to do 'most anything he sets out to do."
"Yes! But how can he fight them all single-handed?" She was pale and trembling.
"If I'm any judge, by the direction he took just now he has gone up and tapped our stock of canned thunder, miss. And if I ain't mistook about his notions, he is going to sound just about as big as he looked when we got that last peek!"
The rivermen did not lounge on the ground, as they usually did when they were resting. They stood, tensely waiting for what Latisan's manner of resolution had promised.
Lida asked no more questions; she was unable to control her tones. She had been given a hint of Ward's intentions by what the old man had said about the "canned thunder." She did not dare to be informed as to the probable details of those intentions; to know fully the nature of the risk he was running would have made the agony of her apprehensiveness unendurable.
It seemed to them, waiting there, that what Latisan had undertaken was never going to happen. They were not checking off the time in minutes; for them time was standing still. The far grumble of waters in the gorge merely accentuated the hush--did not break upon the profound silence. When a chickadee lilted near at hand the men started nervously and the girl uttered a low cry; even a bird's note had power to trip their nervous tension.
The sound for which they were waiting came to them at last.
It was a sound with a thud in it!
Listeners who possessed an imagination would have found a suggestion of the crash of the hammer of Thor upon the mountain top.
"He looked big enough for that when he left us!" muttered the old man. He had never heard of the pagan divinity whom men called Thor. His mind was on the river gladiator who had declared that he would come down heavy on his heels when he started.
The brooding opacity which wrapped the scene made the location of the sound uncertain; but it was up somewhere among the hills. The echoes battered to and fro between the cliffs.
Before those echoes died the sound was repeated.
"He's coming slow, but he's come sure!" Vittum voiced their thoughts. "Them's the footsteps of Latisan!"
On they came! And as they thrust their force upon the upper ledges there was a little jump of the earth under the feet of those who stood and waited.
There was something indescribably grim and bodeful in those isochronal batterings of the solid ground. The echoes distracted the thoughts--made the ominous center of the sounds a matter of doubt. That uncertainty intensified the threat of what was approaching the dam of Skulltree.
There were other sounds, after a few moments. Rifles were cracking persistently; but it was manifestly random firing.
The old man stepped to Lida and grasped her hand and held it. "Don't be 'feared for him, miss. They're only guessing! He'll be knowing the ledges--every lift of 'em that's betwixt him and them. They'll never get him with their popguns. But he'll get _them_!" he declared, with venom. "I wonder what Craig is thinking now, with his old bug eyes poking into that fog and doing him as much good as if he was stabbing a mill pond with his finger!"
The rifle fire died away, after a desultory patter of shots.
"They're running!" said one of the crew. "They must be on the run!"
"You bet they're running," agreed the old man. "The Three C's hasn't got money enough to hire men, to stand up in front of what's tromping down toward Skulltree! Heavier and heavier on his heels!"
Measuredly slow, inexorably persistent, progressed the footsteps of the giant blasts.
Latisan's men needed no eye-proof in order