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

the case from Eck.
"Sylvia came out on the heels of Alf, and she had with her the little Lida, Eck's granddaughter. And after Eck had had his say to Alf and had thrown him over the fence, he gave Sylvia her choice--stay with her father or go away with Alf. Well, she had loved Alf well enough to come home and face Eck with him; she loved Alf enough to turn her back on Eck and face the world with her husband. Natural, of course! Eck tried to grab the little girl away--to save his own from the thieves, so he said. Sylvia fought him off and hung to the girl. It was a tough sight, Latisan! And he stood there and shook his fists and cast 'em all off for ever and aye. That's his nature--no allowance made if anybody does him dirt.
"I'll admit that Eck did make an allowance later, after Alf died and the news of it got back here to Adonia. Lida was grown up to around sixteen by that time. I got this from Rickety Dick. Know him?"
Latisan, relighting his pipe, shook his head with an indifferent wag.
"Well, you soon will. He cooks and waits and tends on Eck. Looks up to Eck. Loves Eck--and that's going some! Dick told me about the allowance Eck made for once in his life after I had touched Dick up by telling him that Eck Flagg never made an allowance to anybody. Eck allowed to Dick that Lida was too young to choose the right way that day in the yard. When she had grown up Eck sent old Dick to hunt for her in the city, to tell her she could come back to him, now that she was old enough to make her choice. Said Sylvia couldn't come back. Now that was a devil of a position to put a girl in. What? Hey?"
Latisan nodded, displaying faint interest.
"And Sylvia right then was in bed with her never-get-over, so Dick told me. Of course Lida wouldn't come back. And she was working her fingers to the bone to take care of her mother. Old Dick cried like a baby when he was telling me. He cries pretty easy, anyway. He never dared to give to Eck the word that Lida sent back. She's got the spirit of the Flaggs, so I judge from what Dick told me. She wouldn't even take the eggs and the truck Dick lugged down, though Dick had bought 'em with his own money; she thought the stuff came from her grandfather. Dick had to hide 'em under the table when he came away. And so Eck has crossed Lida off for ever and aye. Now that's some story, ain't it?"
"I haven't enjoyed it," said Ward, brusquely.
"Prob'ly not. I wasn't telling it thinking you'd give three cheers when I finished. But I've been warning you not to make a foolish break by stubbing your toe over the family topic. I've heard what has happened to the Latisans over Tomah way. You're our real sort, and I'm blasted sorry for you. I reckon you need a job and I'm trying to help you hold it. I like your looks, young Latisan. I hate the Comas crowd. Craig has never set down to my table but what he has growled about the grub. The cheap rowdies he hires for his operations on these waters come through here with bootleg booze and try to wreck my house. I'd like to be friends with you, young Latisan, and if you feel that way about it, put it there!"
Brophy held out a fat hand and Latisan grasped it cordially.
"In my position I hear all the news," stated the landlord. "I'll sift the wheat out of the chaff and hand you what's for your own good. And now you'll have to excuse me whilst I go and pound steak and dish up dinner and wait on the table. That's the trouble with running a tavern up here in the woods. I can't keep help of the girl kind. They either get homesick or get married."
There was an ominous crash in the dining room.
Brophy swore roundly and extricated his rotund haunches from the arms of his chair. "There goes Dirty-Shirt Sam! I have to double him as hostler and waiter. He'd smash the feed pails in the stable if they wasn't galvanized iron."
He pounded with heavy gait across the office and flung open the dining-room door, disclosing a lop-sided youth who was listlessly kicking broken dishes into a pile.
"You're fourteen dollars behind your wages, already, with dishes you've dropped and smashed," shouted Brophy. "I'd give a thousand dollars for the right kind of a girl to stay here and wait on tables if she wouldn't get married or homesick. I'll make it a standing offer." He cuffed the youth in a circle around the heap of broken crockery and went on his way to the kitchen.
Latisan smoked and reflected on the nature of Echford Flagg as Brophy had exposed it from the family standpoint.
Then he looked at the sullen youth who was sweeping up the fragments of the dishes. The whimsical notion occurred to Ward that he might post Brophy on the advantages of a cafeteria plan of operating his hostelry. But he had by these thoughts summoned the memory of one certain cafeteria, and of a handsome girl who sat across from him and who had so suddenly been swallowed up in the vortex of the city throngs--gone forever--only a memory that troubled him so much and so often that he was glad when his own Tomah men appeared to him, asking for commands and taking his mind off a constantly nagging regret.


CHAPTER SEVEN
The set-off of the Flagg expedition in the gray of early dawn had an element of picaresque adventure about it.
Latisan was making an estimate of his crew while he mixed with the men, checking them up, as they assembled again in front of the tavern of Adonia. Old Cap'n Blackbeard would have cheerfully certified to the eminent fitness of many of them for conscienceless deeds of derring-do. The nature of Flagg's wide-flung summons and his provocative method of selection must needs bring into one band most of the toughest nuts of the region, Latisan reflected, and he had brought no milk-and-water chaps from the Tomah. He had come prepared for what was to face him. He had led his willing men in more or less desperate adventures in his own region; his clan had been busy passing the word among the strangers that old John Latisan's grandson was a chief who had the real and the right stuff in him. It was plain that all the men of the crew were receiving the information with enthusiasm. Some of them ventured to pat him on the shoulder and volunteered profane promises to go with him to the limit. They did not voice any loyalty to Flagg. Flagg was not a man to inspire anything except perfunctory willingness to earn wages. The men saw real adventure ahead if they followed at the back of a heroic youth who was avenging the wrongs dealt to his family fortunes.
There were choruses of old river chanteys while the men waited for the sleds. A devil-may-care spirit had taken possession of the crew. Latisan began to feel like the brigand chief of bravos.
He was jubilantly informed by one enthusiast that they were all in luck--that Larry O'Gorman, the woods poet, had picked that crew as his own for that season on the river.
The songs of Larry O'Gorman are sung from the Mirimichi to the Megantic. He is analyst as well as bard. He makes it a point--and he still lives and sings--to attach himself only to forces which can inspire his lyre.
It was conveyed to the new boss that already was Larry busy on a new song. Ward, his attention directed, beheld the lyricist seated on the edge of the tavern porch, absorbed in composition, writing slowly on the planed side of a bit of board, licking the end of a stubby pencil, rolling his eyes as he sought inspiration.
A bit later Larry rehearsed his choristers and Latisan heard the song.
Come, all ye bold and bully boys--come lis-sun unto me!
'Tis all abowit young Latis-an, a riverman so free.
White water, wet water, he never minds its roar,
'Cause he'll take and he'll kick a bubble up and ride all safe to
shore.
Come, all, and riffle the ledges! Come, all, and bust the jam!
And for all o' the bluff o' the Comas crowd we don't give one good--
Hoot, toot, and a hoorah!
We don't give a tinker's dam.
Every man in the crowd was able to come in on the simple chorus.
They were singing when Echford Flagg appeared to them. He was riding on a jumper, with runners under it, and he was galloping his strapping bay horses down from the big house on the ledges. On the bare ground the runners shrieked, and he snapped his whip over the heads of the horses.
"What is this, a singing school or a driving crew?" he demanded, raucously.
"The sleds have just come, sir," explained Latisan, who had been marshaling the conveyances.
"Listen, all ye!" shouted Flagg. "Nothing but dunnage bags go on those sleds till the runners hit the woods tote road and there's good slipping on the snow. The man who doesn't hoof it till then hears from me."
He ordered Latisan to get onto the jumper seat beside him, slashed his horses with the whip, and led the way toward the north.
There was no word between the two for many a mile.
Near noon they arrived at a wayside baiting place, a log house in a clearing. They ate there and the horses were fed. There was plenty of snow in the woods and the first rains of April had iced the surface so that the slipping had been good.
As if the chewing of food had unlocked Flagg's close-set jaws, he talked a bit to Latisan after the meal and while the horses were put to the jumper.
"I'm going to swing off here and ride down to Skulltree dam. I'm hearing reports of something going on there."
They heard something very definite in the way of reports before they reached Skulltree. The sound of explosions came booming through the trees. It was dynamite. Its down-thrusting thud on the frozen ground was unmistakable.
"I knew that all those boxes of canned thunder that have been going through Adonia, with the Three C's on the lid, weren't intended to blow up log jams," vouchsafed Flagg, after a few oaths to spice his opinion of the Comas company.
Latisan knew something about the lay of the land at Skulltree, himself. When he was a young chap the Latisans had operated in a small way as a side-line on the Noda waters. There was a rift in the watershed near Skulltree. There was a canon leading down to the Tomah end, and the waters of the gorge were fed by a chain of ponds whose master source was near the Noda. The Latisans had hauled over to the pond from the Noda Valley.
When Flagg pulled his horses to a halt on the edge of a cliff which commanded a view of the Skulltree and its purlieus, he sat in silence for five minutes until he had taken in every