A Man's Measure

by Harold Titus

 

A
Man's
Measure

By

Harold Titus

A Novelette Proving One
Mans Death May Be
Another Man's
Redemption

HE stood against the wall opposite Papa Pertwee's bar, alone in a room clamorous with the free mingling of many men. Rumpled clothes of a cut never originating or even sold in Chester's Dump or any other Michigan logging town hung from his broad shoulders and supple waist. His shirt was open, his head bare and on his face was a kindly, vacant smile, touched by wistfulness.

It was a big night for Papa and for the Dump it was to be even a bigger night; in fact, it was to be a night of nights although that, of course, was not dreamed of early in the evening. But even its beginnings were of unusual proportions with Bob McIver, the new tug-boat captain, just up from below to tow booms of old man Chester's logs down-river, making inroads on his roll of bills, Pertwee's stock of liquor and the sober population of the town.

The bar was lined full. The low room blue with smoke, filled with heat from the camp stove and the smell of damp woolens; the sounds of rough voices, the gritting scuff of river-boots as calks bit into the speckled pine floor—a vigorous bit of play by vigorous men.

But Thad Chester stood apart and smiled doubtfully, as if he wanted to be what he was not: like other men.

Once more the big stranger turned toward him and waved imperiously.

“Step up, chum, an' try th' poison!”

Deep down in his hazy consciousness an impulse to acknowledge the invitation struggled upward and died out. He just stood there and smiled his pathetic smile, and the other turned to his drinking with a shrug.

Young Chester was trying to remember what he had started to do. It was so long ago that he had made up his mind—he had resolved on something—sure! He would go home. That was it! Go to the shanty where he lived alone on the river bank and sleep—sure; that was it! And yet he had not gone; could not go now, even when he remembered. And soon, if he tarried, he would pitch over and lie where he fell until youth's vitality burned out the poison that numbed body and brain, unless some one helped him home—

S}}IGHTS and sound were hazy. He saw the new tug-boat man turn to look at him again as Tim Bryant, boss of Camp Seven, elbow on the bar, talked confidentially to him. So Bryant was explaining why old man Chester's son just stood against the wall and smiled when asked to drink! The idea came foggily and he did not care, much, that his delinquencies were being discussed by one of his father's hired men and a stranger. That was part of being son of the push. Just so long as they treated him with the respect due.

Thad's uncertain idea was correct. He was being talked about.

“Don't mean nothin',” assured Bryant. “Don't mean nothin' a-tall, McIver! He's be'n drunk for months. Sometimes he's most all right; lot of th' time he's like he is now, and now 'nd then he gits plumb helpless!”

“An up-an'-comin' young scion, eh?” boomed the good-natured McIver and looked along the bar.

“We can't gain on her this way, lads!” he roared. “Sure 're never goin' to git to th' bottom if we don't git spry. What's th' soundin' rod show, Daddy?” His gray eyes twinkled at the stringy, bearded proprietor who made no reply to his jocularity. “Four foot 'n th' hold? Come on, lads, we ain't gainin' a drop!”

Pertwee responded with no flicker of a smile but he moved with alacrity, the bottle thumped along the bar, cloudy glasses filled, another bill was peeled from McIver's roll and he turned to Bryant again.

“Yeah? So th' push sired a prime drunkard, eh? Sent him up here to be got from under foot?”

Bryant twisted his head seriously. “N'sir! Not so! Sent him up for ol' Tom Tolman, who's cruised for Chester since he bought his first forty, to make a man of. That's what, an' dam' my eyes if he didn't make a start! That kid, he goes into th' woods first winter an' starts just like anybody else would, swampin'. He sure catched on an' afore spring he was top-loadin' an' doin' a spry job of it, too!

“Wa'n't no man's fool on th' river when we drove, neither. Chester had a option on some pulp stuff acrost in Canad' an' Tolman went to cruise it an' took th' kid with him. Come back, he says th' kid's gone a long ways toward gettin' to be a man. Why, everybody liked him; didn't seem to be stuck-up or nothin' an' he seemed allus to do what he set out ontil it come to th' girl.”

“Woman, eh?” McIver crooked his elbow, jerked his head backward, set down the glass and wiped his lips with a loud smack. “Woman, eh?”

“Sure. Little, yellah headed one, no bigger 'n my arm! She's Haynes' niece.” (Haynes was superintendent of all the Chester operations in woods and on the river.) “He went plumb dotty over her an' she's only a little hoity-toity swell thing but she wouldn't have him an' so he took to hooch to drown his sorrows.”

Well, well and a coupla red-hot damns, commented Mr. McIver. Now, think of that. And he didn't mean nothin' by not answerin' but was just so boiled he couldn't cough up a word or choke down a swaller, eh? Well, well, and some more rolling oaths, he'd bet old Chester wasn't all swoll up with pride about his rightful an' lawful an' likely legitimate heir!

“Right-o!” vouched Bryant. “Clean disgusted, he is. An' so's Tom Tolman, though he does sorta look after Thad to see he don't flop onto a hot stove or into th' river. Th' Dump'd be disgusted, too, if he wasn't who he is. 'Course, might say th' town's disgusted now, but it won't do to let him know he's got us that way. Not much!”

He leaned closer: “Mebby things'll git even worse. She's come home!”

“Be'n away?”

“Off to some high-toned school in New York or some such town. She come home this afternoon. Expeck he'll git real drunk when he finds that out!”

IT WAS at this point that McIver turned again to young Chester and Thad had the fuzzy but correct idea that he was under discussion and did not care. But even had he cared it is not likely he would have gone on with caring at that moment because the door opened and Red Bart Delaney entered the room.

He stepped in just as a great shout of laughter rose and his coming sent that laughter down to mumbles before it reached the height toward which it surely had been bound.

He stood a moment, looking about truculently. Then, without so much as a nod to any one, his squat, powerful body moving with a rolling swagger, his slouch-hatted red head thrust forward from his huge shoulders, he walked to take a place at the end of the bar.

Papa Pertwee mummed his chew more briskly and his scraggly mustache and beard came hard together as his jaws worked.

“Roll 'em in, daddy!” boomed McIver. “Speak up, chum, an' give it a name!”

This last was to Delaney and the man turned his bright blue eyes with their rings of white on the tug-boat captain in cold scrutiny.

“I buy my own whisky,” he announced sourly and quirked a thumb at Papa.

The proprietor moved with a haste that had not even been inspired by the great profit accruing from McIver's generosity and clapped bottle and whisky glass before the newcomer. Bart picked up the latter and eyed it balefully. Then he tossed it splintering to the floor.

“Bring me somethin' as 'll hold a man's swaller,” he growled and Papa, hissing an acquiescent whisper, trotted to fetch a tumbler.

McIver scratched his head and swore a sputtering oath.

“That beats!” he added, “a lotta hostyle folks in this locality.” He arched his brows and blew from puffed cheeks in amazement. He squinted at Thad Chester. “First him; an' now a red-headed party who thinks poison ain't a beverage but bath water. Le's th' rest of us proceed!”

Bryant, during this, had plucked his sleeve and tried to hush him, but McIver gave no heed until the glasses were filled and talk had started up again, less boisterous, more self-conscious than it had been before.

“What's th' trouble?” he then asked genially. “What's all th' shooshin' for?” Bryant, back toward the end of the bar, winked slowly and rocked his head in an indicating gesture.

“Him,” he said cautiously. “That's Red Bart Delaney.”

“Oh-ho!” McIver eyed the red Irishman. “Heard 'bout that party!”

“Sure! Who ain't? Who ain't, in this part of Michigan an' large parts of Canady? He's a bad customer, him! Rougher'n a bar of pig-iron. He's fit his way up an' down an' acrost an' back an' the' ain't anybody left for him to fight in this here locality, where he hangs out most. Only way to git along 's to leave him be. If he don't kill somebody afore he's through his bullyin', I miss my guess!”

“Ho!” snorted McIver scornfully. “I guess he ain't so bad as all that! Th' higher they fly—” He looked up and down the bar again.

“Come, daddy, what's th' well show? We ain't gainin' a inch? Damn us all, lads, every one; le's try th' pumps again!”

And so on, while the hours stretched to their greatest length and Thad Chester stood smiling and finally turned and walked slowly to the rear as if to go out and seek his shanty by the river. But when he reached the spotty pool-table he stopped and stood there as the fight started and did not even turn to look, but after a time slumped forward on his face and flopped over and lay still.

Chapter II

IT WAS Papa Pertwee's determination to keep all his transactions regular which sprouted the seed of trouble that Red Bart always sowed about him.

Papa looked into the face with its fringe of red beard stubble and mummed his chew with incredible speed.

“But you ain't a-paid for th' last un!” he protested.

Delaney quirked his thumb for the bottle. (He was leaning indolently against crossed fore arms.) “A drink, I said,” he growled.

“I never run no tick, Delaney, 'n you know it!” Pertwee whined. “Cash business, 'nd I ain't goin' to do no a-different fer anybody.”

By then other voices had been dampered to silence, for none had believed that Papa's avarice would ever carry him so far.

“I said, I want a drink,” Delaney repeated ominously. “That makes three times I've said it, which is too many.”

“But you ain't—”

One of Bart's great hands whipped out and stout fingers fastened in the shirt over Papa's skinny chest. Delaney's face was thrust forward as he drew the sputtering proprietor to him.

“If you ain't got change, this gen'man's been buyin' all night!” shrilled Pertwee with a wild wave toward McIver. “He offered you a drink like a gen'man 'nd you a-didn't take it 'nd now you want me to—”

“Who buys my whisky is my business.”

“Well somebody's got to pay for it a-when you git it!” Papa yelped.

Those men who had lived with Red Bart only by giving him a wide berth saw rage flood his face. He half lifted the little man with one hand and the other crushed the sorry beard against a wizened throat and Papa's breath retched in a falsetto gurgle.

“Aw, now, Bart—”

This was one of the Dump's bravest, opening a conciliatory protest, and it was Bob McIver who cut him short.

“Don't aw-now that scum!” he said sharply, yanking the peace-maker aside and glaring at him an instant. “He ain't no party to be got peaceable by aw-nowin' from t'night 'til hell freezes.” He flung a glance about the silent group. “What's wrong with this town, anyhow? Standin' here an' lettin' a Chiny-eyed Mick pinch daddy's wizen 'til he's clean uncomfortable?”

He nodded vehemently and hitched up his pants and spat and took the half-dozen steps which placed him at the bar's end. He leaned his elbow on the fixture and put his face close to Red Bart's.

“Chum,” said McIver and cleared his throat, “I wouldn't do that.”

He spoke almost casually and he looked at Papa, whose eyes bulged and whose hands, instead of waving in futile gestures of defense, now fluttered at his sides. Clearly McIver had only an academic sympathy for the mean little miser, but when he looked back at Red Bart and saw the mad light in that man's eyes, his mood was far from casual.

“Chum,” he repeated, rumblingly, “I wouldn't.”

The choking hand let Pertwee take a ragged, noisy breath; he began to cry as Red Bart still held him close by the grip on his clothing.

“Why not?” Delaney asked ominously. “Who wants me to stop?”

McIver's first move was deliberate but Delaney's was like lightning. He let Papa go as the stranger surged clear of the corner of the bar and the hand that had done the choking knotted to a fist and drove out to rock the tug-boat man's head. Just his head; his body, though it halted short, was not swayed, but his head snapped backward and blood burst from his mouth.

He looked about dully. “He hit me!” he said. “Hot dam'; he hiit me!”

He felt his mouth with finger tips and inspected them, saying again that he had been hit. And then, with no warning at all, he charged and went through the rain of blows until his great arms were about the other's body. He lifted Bart from his feet and swung him about as men stampeded away to make room and drove the small of Delaney's back against the edge of the bar with an impact which stirred the man's voice to a roar of pain and rage.

FOR an instant after that crash the rigidity went from Red Bart and he sagged sideways and McIver relaxed a trifle, just a trifle, enough to let one of Red Bart's hands slide across his stomach and the fingers slipped inside his shirt and when they came out men who had been still drunk a moment before swore sharp, sober oaths as the knife blade glittered.

It made one livid sweep and then remained still, glittering as McIver's hand bound Delaney's wrist and held it full length from his body.

“You pig-stickin' scum!” he cried hoarsely, his whole rage up, then.

Strength matched strength and their breathing sobbed in the silence. Then Red Bart gave. He went down to a knee and struck with his free hand. But McIver did not mind that; he twisted the wrist he held until it cracked and the knife spilled from flexed fingers into his waiting hand.

“You'd knife me, eh?” he panted.

Delaney stayed on his knee, a hand on the floor, tense, ready to pounce or elude. McIver backed to the bar, never taking his eyes from that evil face; his hand holding the knife rose high and as it drove downward the blade hit the pine plank to bury itself a third its length. Then the tug-boat captain wrenched and the steel snapped and he tossed the broken knife across the room.

Slowly he wiped his palms on his pants and said, quietly for so loud a man: “Now, red-head, we'll see!”

They did see. A mountain of a man, this McIver, a great hulk of lithe fury and he did terrible things to Red Bart Delaney, who had done so many terrible things to so many men and in the end he lifted Red in his arms, lumbered to the door and dropped his burden on the topmost of the three steps. The limp form thumped down the other two and its last unconscious movement was a smack of a palm as the arm described an arc and slapped it down on the damp, cool earth.

“Well, now,” queried McIver as he rolled back into the room, feeling his lip, “did anybody see that scum hit me? He did— An' le's resume.”

They all did and the drink was on Papa Pertwee and the only ones in the place who did not find emotional room for amazement at this unprecedented liberality were McIver, who had come to town only that day, and young Thad Chester who slept on the pool-table, a smoking oil-lamp casting a sodden glow over his good-natured face; a face that, about the mouth, now had an expression which spoke of many things, of disillusionment and heart-break and a fund of strength gone sour.

No one noticed it, but the cuckoo clock in Papa Pertwee's saloon had sounded the half after midnight just as Delaney's palm smacked down on the beaten path to the door; and it was tootoodeling its information that two o'clock was dead when the last of Papa's patrons lurched out, not counting, of course, the lad who smiled upward into the darkness from the pool-table.

The proprietor blew out the lamps that had not gone dry, stuffed the contents of the till into his shirt and climbed the stairs to his dusty room overhead. Mr. Chester slept on and after a time all the Dump slept—but one.

Red Bart, face bruised and cut, moving stiffly when he stooped, paddled canoe upstream and cached it under bushes around a point. Next, he stood for a time outside the store, looking and listening. Satisfied as to the repose of the town he went to the rear, raised a window and emerged with a new pack-sack suffed full. This he carried to his canoe, retraced his way, climbed to the hotel room where he had intended to sleep and came down again with a rifle under his arm.

The first birds were twittering then and out on the river a gull cried. The east was brightening and Bart moved slowly down toward the dock.

NOW, looking from his bedroom window above the store, bald-headed Osy Bartlett, the proprietor, observed two things that struck him as significant. The first was that the shadowy figure out there walked with his head thrust far forward from swaying shoulders, and only one man he knew walked in that particular posture. The second was that the man carried a rifle.

To see a resident of the Dump carrying a rifle at dawn was not odd. Deer browsed close to town and people took what they needed. But to see this particular man carrying a rifle made the lone observer pause.

He did not pause long, however, for his wife was up and demanding water and, shivering a bit in the chill dawn, Osy crossed the street to where a flowing well debouched into a hollowed bass-wood log. He filled his bucket as an early teamster drove his horses to the trough.

“Big time, eh?” the teamster asked.

“'At so? How's 'at?”

“Ain't you heard? Red Bart got th' hell beat outen him.”

Osy listened and shrugged and began putting two and two together to make a sum greater than four. Then he hurried home and what he had to tell checked his wife's bustle about the stove. Ten minutes later old man Tolman, the cruiser, sat up in bed and listened as closely as Mrs. Bartlett had while the storekeeper told what he had seen and heard.

IT WAS significant of Tolman's standing that the informer went to him rather than Haynes, the superintendent. Haynes was a good business man, but Tolman, the veteran of the bush, knew men and it was a man who knew men who would be needed today.

Tom Tolman was a good man, though old, but he had no fool's notion of his own capacities, nor did he have hope that law, order and perhaps life could be maintained by any unofficial vigilance the Dump could offer. His first destination was the store, to call the sheriff by telephone. He spoke tersely and his admonition was that grave trouble impended and that the officer had best come a-running. Then it was four o'clock and the town was stirring and breakfast was of little consequence because the story ran like word of fire:

Red Bart Delaney is skulking with a gun for the tug-boat man! Red Bart had met his master in a free fight and was about to become a killer!

Quietly old man Tolman went about. He looked into McIver's pilot house and decided he had a margin of time there because the man slept profoundly. He questioned others but none had seen Delaney nor could guess where he might be. Best, he thought, to delay search until the sheriff came.

But at seven the sheriff was not there; men went reluctantly to work. Tolman called the jail again and turned from the telephone with mouth set.

“Afeerd to come?” a bystander asked.

“That's what a country gets,” Tolman commented, “by listenin' to politicians instead of a man with bark on!”

HE WENT again to McIver's tug as the sun pushed over the Ontario hills across the broad river and shook the man and sat beside him on the pilot house locker and remarked gravely that Red Bart was likely hiding somewhere with a rifle, that the sheriff had been sent for and that his advice to Mr. McIver was that he stay under cover until either Delaney was definitely located or the law personally represented in the Dump.

McIver yawned and stretched and said he was darned if he'd hide for any Chiny-eyed Mick who went around chokin' old men for a drink of rot-gut. No, to hell with 'em; when he'd slept his sleep he was going about his business and dam' the man who tried to stop him, friend or otherwise. Women and kids? Sure, he had; a lot of both. He laughed sleepily. But he'd kept his skin whole a good while to take care of 'em and if this party had a crimp in Chester's Dump it was only a sign that they were a bunch of yellow-bellied corn-huskers instead of men and what scared them couldn't scare him a nickel's worth.

“An' it's early,” he concluded. “If you want to do me a favor, tell th' cook to fry the meat 'til it'll half-sole boots an' not to sing out until it's ready. It's th' late hours of this burg that's run yellow into your necks. If you'd sleep more an' talk less you wouldn't worry over no Chiny-eyed Mick!”

So Tolman gave that up and waited silently for the sheriff who, he felt in his heart, never had intended to hurry. The sheriff knew Delaney and the sheriff in hedging—if he were hedging—was doing no more, really, than the Dump and other towns had done for a decade. Still—he was the sheriff.

At eight-thirty-five McIver appeared on the dock, hitched his pants, stuffed a chew into his cheek and rolled up toward town to talk business with Haynes. His way, as he neared the shore, was flanked by the tops of alders which grew rank in the mushy soil along the river's edge. He was smiling as he walked, an arrogant, sparkling smile, and his gaze, caught by a movement in the bushes came to rest on a fleck of color.

It was a vivid yellow warbler, perking its head and eying the huge man. He grinned and started to speak a morning greeting to the midget songster as its throat swelled and sweet music poured out.

BUT McIver did not speak. A gun spoke instead; a flat, dull crash. The man on the dock put his foot down sharply without completing the step it had been about to take. He swayed a trifle and lifted a hand to his stomach. The hand fluttered there an instant and then slid down over his belly, over his thigh and, as he bent forward, the heel of it came to rest on his knee propping his torso half erect. He held that posture, a brief, brief moment and then went over on his face. He coughed once and lay very still, queerly flattened on the planks for so large a man.

A wisp of blue vapor floated over the top of a bush and the warbler, his music having been cut off so abruptly by the shot, shook himself, hopped to another twig and looked about. He sang again, the notes loud in the silence.

Up the street a woman screamed after that instant's pause and men started running. But they stopped in their tracks when Red Bart emerged from the alders.

His face was white, in strange contrast to the red beard stubble on his chin. He looked up the street and jerked the butt of the rifle to his hip, sweeping the town. He sidestepped across the shore end of the dock, never looking at the motionless figure behind him and when he was beyond the clump of alders on the far side he began running along the reedy bank of the river, running half sideways with his face turned over his shoulder to watch for pursuit.

They did not run after him. They ran to McIver and found him dead and consternation over the anticipated tragedy prevailed until some one discerned a canoe far out on the river. It had kept the screen of the long point for a time and its occupant had been able to put much water between him and the Dump before revealing his whereabouts. It must be Delaney, men thought, and hurried to McIver's tug to give chase but the engineer had been repacking his steam-pipe and the boiler was cold so that was hopeless. There was considerable talk of pursuing in other canoes but it came to nothing because the man they wanted was Red Bart Delaney, who had been bad enough to cow them before, but who now had became a killer.

It was noon when the sheriff drove into town with a deal of bluster. But he quieted oddly when he looked into Tom Tolman's face and when the cruiser told him that the next best move would be to telephone the provincial police of Ontario to head off his man he agreed. But he went on taking notes in a little book and did not telephone and Tolman went home in disgust.

Chapter III

McIVER was dead. Red Bart was gone. The first hysterical flush of excitement had subsided and Chester's Dump was mostly at dinner when young Thad stirred on the spotty pool-table and wrinkled his face and opened his mouth and moaned.

He sat up and with eyes squeezed shut clung to the edge of the table. After steadying himself he blinked and looked about. Four men were at the bar talking earnestly. Through the open double doors in the front streamed the splendid sunshine of June.

Thad swung his feet over the rail and was about to drop gingerly to the floor when a figure emerged from the store across the way.

It was the figure of a girl, lissom, small, clad in the faintest of blue frocks, dangling by its string a wide, floppy hat and the sun light fell on hair the color of spun gold. She came into the street with all the lightness of a bit of drifting down and walked away with the grace of a sprite. He watched her go out of his range of vision. Then he opened his mouth as though to speak, dropped to the floor and took a half-dozen quick strides forward.

For the moment he was all determination but as he neared the doorway his decisiveness ebbed sharply. He stopped and put out a hand to the bar and the other rested over his eyes as though to shield them from a blinding light. When he lowered it he saw himself in the dusty, bubbly mirror on the wall and his smile was dark. He made a wry, hopeless grimace at that reflection because he was seeing, in a dulled, foggy manner, the contrast between its dark visage and the fine lightness of the figure he had watched across the street.

Papa Pertwee was on his knees under the bar, filling a demijohn from a spigot.

The men spoke to Thad more elaborately than they would have greeted one another, with deference and something that smacked of patronage, and went on with their earnest talk. For an interval none of it registered on the consciousness of Thad Chester and then words came:

“—— undertaker ought to be here by now.”

Undertaker, that connoted death.

“Who's dead?”

The faces turned to him again; even Papa Pertwee's, popping up above the level of the bar and disappearing with a rattling sound from his throat.

“Dead? Who? My ——, ain't you heerd?”

“No I've been—” He felt a sweep of self-consciousness as he started to explain why he was not abreast of the Dump's news but that faded out.

“McIver— Th' tug-boat—”

“Red Bart's fin'ly done it,” another broke in and then all four talked at once, contributing concurrently some thrilling morsel of the striking event and young Chester stood frowning, trying to realize that his was not the only tragedy enacted in the town. They edged closer and their interruptions became more frequent as memories brought up new detail, but somehow the boy was not much impressed.

What they related did affect him, in a way. The atmosphere of another tragedy darkened the sun, added to young Mr. Chester's giddiness—either that or the liquor of yesterday and the day before and the weeks before that— Death! He shuddered.

Papa Pertwee corked the demijohn, wiped his hands on his stained shirt front, set a glass before Thad and thumped the bottle on the bar.

The young man stood staring into the street, brows drawn into a deep frown. He had ceased listening— A man shot dead, yonder in that sunshine.

Papa spoke. “Here's your mornin's mornin'.”

Thad drew his great, lax shoulders up slowly but did not look at him.

One of the others took the bottle and poured a drink and the rest did likewise, leaving it at the far end of the line. Pertwee collected their change, shuffled along the bar, retrieved the bottle, slid it out to where it would touch the back of Thad's hand and wheezed again:

“Here's your mornin's mornin', sonny.”

Thad looked at him, and Papa smiled a toothless running smile. He always smiled at Thad Chester because Thad Chester's allowance was by far the largest single item that passed across his bar. But now instead of bowing with grave courtliness as he usually did, instead of smiling his weak, habitual smile, his best customer looked right through Mr. Pertwee and when the cuckoo popped out of its cote and tootoodelooed the half after twelve as it had an even dozen hours ago when Red Bart came to ignominious rest outside, Thad started as if struck.

“No thank you,” he said and moved away.

Papa was startled.

“What's th' matter?” he squawked.

Thad shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, frowning at the bottle and wiping his hot, parched lips. “Nothing, Mr. Pertwee; nothing at all.”

BUT, of course, much was the matter. He was confused, but for months, now, he had been confused on waking; he was depressed today, conflicting emotions were surging within him; he had been shocked by the the tale of McIver's death. But confusion, depression, shock—none of these mattered much, because he had had a vision of lovely life, swinging a straw hat, and he knew that he had failed in another thing he had started out to do; he had sought to drown despair over one failure in Papa's liquor and had not only failed to achieve forgetfulness but had made matters worse—much worse.

His lips, his throat, his raw nerves, screamed for whisky, but he would not let them have whisky. The self deep in him revolted from it and chastized the body by saying that no whisky was to be its portion that day—not until he had tried once again!

He started out and Papa Pertwee, beard sagging at this disaster of his commerce, bent forward. As Thad reached the doorway the old man croaked:

“Ain't you going to a-settle, young man?”

The boy stopped and turned unsteadily.

“What's that, Mr. Pertwee?”

“Ain't yon a-goin' to settle?” be repeated in his craved whine.

“Do I owe you something? I—I didn't recall ”

He fished in his pocket and Papa's eyes guttered with avarice.

“I don't aim to take lodgers,” he said. “No more do I aim to keep pool players waitin'. You be'n sleepin' twelve hours on my table an' that's worth a-suthin'.”

No amazement showed in Thad's face; no humor or resentment, either. He was preoccupied as he walked back to the bar, fumbling in his pocket.

“I'd a-ought to charge city,” Papa wheezed. “'N Detroit they gits fifty cents a hour for pool-tables, but I don't a-want to be called niggardly.”

Thad found a crumpled bill and tossed it to the bar.

“And have a drink,” he said abstractedly as he turned away.

Chapter IV

SO BILLIE COMPTON was back! That amazing fact was the one thing which clung clearly in his mind, resting against a jumbled background of subordinate thoughts, of failure, and dismay and death, a confused, fuzzy background.

It was there in his mind, a burning burden, when he left the saloon. It was there when he came up from his long dive in the biting waters of the river. It was there, and reflected in his eyes, as he bent to the broken mirror and shaved with trembling hands. It goaded him as he dressed and impelled him later up the one street of the town, clean, shaven, hatless, walking slowly and heedlessly past the group of men clustered about ±e sheriff and about old Tom Tolman.

Billie Compton was back, back in the house of her uncle, Haynes, and that fact relegated murder to a secondary place in the boy's fogged mind.

He had believed, up to that moment of waking on Pertwee's pool-table, that he had forgotten, thought he had drowned memory of her, desire for her in Papa's poison; but she had come back and demonstrated to him that the frittering of his strength and his self-respect had been only waste. And he was going to her, a moth again to the flame; a singed moth, after two years up here in the North, where his roaring old father had sent him to learn to be a man.

He grimaced at that. He knew what his father's idea amounted to. He knew what his father had been striving at, for the elder Chester was of that school of rich men who had had nothing but vision and vitality with which to fashion beginnings. He wanted his son to have the experience of that same hard school. Perhaps doing what was called a man's work for a wage proved something, but young Thad had doubted it from the beginning.

Still, he tolerantly put himself into the process and did what any employee was expected to do. But would that make a man? He had no lack of woolens; he had no broken rubbers, no ragged mittens; no wife and children dependent on his meager wage, no indefinite future of such toil, even. He had youth and strength, agility and a zest for action and behind him was his father, beyond him the Chester millions. Tolman, he knew, had written to his father that the man was emerging from the youth. He had gone up the Zhing-wauk with the cruiser to look over that Ontario pulp stuff and had acquitted himself well and his guide had smiled and said that he was coming along.

But what makes a man? Hardships? Physical courage? He had tried what these men called hardships and found it play; he had a reputation for being unafraid in woods and on river, but when Billie Compton came, what had these mattered?

Billie Compton, with her blue eyes and gentle voice! She had snared his heart as easily as he, on the boom, sent logs to their berths with his pike pole. She had taken his assurance, his balance; she had made him plead when he wanted to be masterly; she had made him feel like weeping when he knew that strategy demanded laughter. She had made a fool of him in his own eyes and he had not the manhood to help himself.

It was memory of her teasing laughter that would not let him sleep sober; memory of her slim arms slipping through his hands that drove him to Papa Pertwee's. It was Billie Compton, the flirt, who had made him quit trying to be a man and sell his soul on the assumption that he could have peace.

And he had not achieved the forgetfulness which meant peace! He had tried since Fall to drink himself to indifference and had renounced drink today only that he might be fit to go to her again. Failing now, though, what would be left? He not now. He had come up here to learn to be a man and was going to her again, like a singed moth to the flame.

“Billie!”

His voice crackled strangely as she emerged from the cool shadows of the wide living-room in response to his ring.

“Dear old Thad!”

He wanted to be reserved. He wanted to come this afternoon with an air of casualness and yet he had called her name in a voice that broke like a small boy's and when she spoke he felt his knees tremble!

“Dear, dear old Thad!”

She was in knickers, now, and a low-necked blouse. She was offering her hand, the cool, slender, pink-and-white hand, and he was telling himself that he must appear indifferent and yet with that hand in his he lurched forward with a moan and she was back in the room, with those devils of triumph dancing in her eyes and breaking his heart.

AFTER that he sat down and talked a a bit. Billie prattled on, about her winter in the East, about this prom, that dinner; about Tom and Dick and Harry, and her words were like fine blades in his heart and she watched him and knew this and gorged herself with his suffering.

Then she came about. She was prim, grave.

“But they've told me, dear Thad,” she said just above a whisper. “They've told me about you. Why; why must you throw yourself away?”

He laughed bitterly and for once she was startled and in doubt, but he did not see that. Failure danced before him and he paced the room while she watched with something like alarm. Things were clear, now, blindingly clear to his singing nerves. It was as though he had finally shaken off that fog.

Adroitly, the girl nipped the talk and led it off.

“That terrible Delaney!” she murmured. “And uncle says they'll never get him, now!”

He was glad of respite, of letting her talk of another tragedy than his and listened while she told.

The crew of a tug-boat which had been across the river at dawn and had docked at the Dump at high noon reported seeing Red Bart driving his canoe straight for the mouth of Zhing-wauk. The sheriff was afraid to follow, had made only the feeblest pretense of searching the river. No other would go, if the sheriff would not, and who could blame them? It was a man's job, her uncle had said; a man would take his life in his hands by following Red Bart. Besides, what good would it do, now, with the start he had and the sort of man he was known to be on trail and river?

“Oh, it would take a man to get Red Bart!” she said. “A man—a man's man. A man like you might be, dear Thad, if you'd let drink alone!”

So she had tired of that other tragedy and was back at him, toying with his emotions, experimenting to see what a girl can do with a man's heart!

He was filled with pain and held himself quiet as he listened. He wanted to beat his breast and scream out but instead he sat quietly, slouched in a chair and his burning eyes devoured her from the tips of her little pacs to the crown of her yellow head. He was dizzy again shortly; the fog close in after that interval of clarity. At times her voice, even, floated away and when he spoke he scarcely knew what he said, but all the time he was acutely aware of her loveliness, his great desire for her.

And that want swelled his chest like a bursting breath until he fell on his knees before her, reaching for the hands which she drew away. She told him he must not, that he did not know what he was saying.

“You don't realize, Thad dear, what you're doing!”

Oh, good God, didn't he? Didn't he know he was a fool, to grovel at her feet? Didn't he know he was a weakling? Didn't he know that this was wholly the wrong move to make? But what could he do, when he was no man and she tortured him so?

Yes, what? And he dropped his face into her lap and clasped his hands over his head and begged her brokenly, abjectly, like a fool, to love him, to tolerate him, to help him prove himself worthy of her love.

“Prove?” And now her voice was sharp with ascendency. “Prove fitness, Thad? What have you done to prove fitness since I went away?... Ugh!”

Her disgust gave him a modicum of control. He slumped back on one hip, hands lax on the rag and lifted his eyes to see the from on her face and bowed his head in humiliation again.

“You come to me and talk of love!” she went on, a malicious smile quirking her mouth, the smile of cruel maidenhood, tasting the sweets of petty power. “And after the stories I've heard of you! What have you done to win a girl's love? What can you do to prove worthiness?”

“Tell me!” Ah, there was a challenge at last and his head shot up as he flung it desperately at her. “You tell me what it is, Billie!”

THAT silenced her and for a moment her eyes were confused before the cunning lights began to dance in them. “That's what I've wanted to know; what does a man do to make a girl like you know he loves her?” He gripped his chest in that terrible, humorless earnestness of youth. “You've accused me. I am guilty of a lot. But now, what's your answer? What would prove to you I'm fit?”

Ah, young Thad! Today, with death and tragedy and turmoil heavy on the town, and you talk so to such a child!

“A man,” she began breathlessly, “must have those things which all women admire: strength of body, strength of mind; courage, high courage, Thad! He must do and dare and not only for her but for all who know them, for all who might ever come to know them! He must be a heroic figure; his name must be on every man's lips. He must—”

She laid the tip of a manicured finger on her own delectable lips while he watched her. She closed her eyes to think and he could hear her breath catch.

“Such a man as might have manner and breeding: gentleness, poise. And yet such a man as might have the courage to do what even these strong men of our North are afraid to do—afraid to do today—”

She leaned forward, hands in her lap, her lovely hands which held his heart so closely— He moved his lips but no words came. Still, the query in his eyes was beyond mistaking and she nodded slowly.

“It would wipe it all out,” she said in that low, low voice. “It would erase the past, absolve all shame. It would make you a man among men to bring Red Bart back to justice.”

He lurched to his feet.

“YOU mean that?” he cried sharply, intently, though the conscious part of him seemed to be standing far off, only watching. “You mean that if I should bring him back you'd—you'd—Billie?”

Her palms held her cheeks, now, in counterfeit distress and indecision.

“Yes,” she breathed finally. “It would be a proper test. It would—”

“You'd love me, Billie? You'd let me love you? You'd be kind and not drive me away? You'd not laugh at me and hurt and—and devil me? You'd not tease me, you'd be sweet and kind and—and—Billie?”

He bent close to her for she was standing now, and his knuckles drummed one another in a ferment of excitement. She closed her eyes and let her head rock backward.

“Any girl can love any man who—proves himself,” she breathed.

And then, gallant gesture, he had her hand and was kissing it and muttering that he could, that he would, that doing the thing no other man on the river would dare do was little enough to show her the mettle that would hold love.

All in a fog, this, in that detached sort of suffering he underwent today. Yesterday's whisky? Turmoil of chagrin? Suddenly born hope? Ah, he did not know the reason for his confusion. He moved in a dream, a dream of excitement, and promised the thing hysterically and was gone while Billie watched him swing down the street, small triumph in her wide blue eyes.

Chapter V

TOM TOLMAN was telling it to the sheriff and a cluster of men listened, torn between awe for his temerity and delight at the other's discomfort.

“You ain't even telephoned acrost, yet!” accused the old man.

“Seems to me, Tolman, that this is official business an' you're goin'—”

“Seems to me, Sheriff, it's public business. We call you to stop a killin' and you don't deliver. You get here finally and we know to th' very river where th' man's gone and you let him get hours an' hours of start!”

“You're just guessing at where he's gone. He might come back—”

“Come back!” the old woodsman's scorn was bitter. “You know better! And as for guessin', it's a good one. He knows he can't come back but he knows the North. He'll get over th' height of land an' down toward th' Bay an' he'll hole up there an' nobody'll be wiser. Except us, here, who'll know how to vote on a sheriff again!”

“Now don't go too far!”

“I can't. I can't go too far after what's been left undone here today.” Tolman started away but turned back sharply. For a moment he eyed the sheriff sternly and then spoke. “Mebby I've said enough, but I'll go further. I'll leave you nothin' to fall back on. I know that country like—like you know votin' places in this county an' I'll tell you where to look.

“He's gone up the Zhing-wauk. He'll make th' head of th' lake tonight an' likely camp there. He's decided on that river an' can't quit it. Tomorrow night he'll be at th' mouth of th' Wolf. Next day he'll make through Windigo Valley an' camp at Thirty Mile rapid. That's three days”—checking them off on the fingers of a hand raised in accusing posture. “Fourth day he'll make th' big beaver meadow if he don't find too much down stuff an' next day if he goes hard—an he can—he'll come to th' old cabin.

“That's my guess about his program an' even with th' moon he can't go much faster. After that it's a wild guess. He'll have to cross th' railroad an' once over that he's only a two-mile carry to Pike Lake an' then it's down-stream clean to th' Bay.

“There's two things to do. Have th' Canady officers come down or go up yourself. You can't miss him, if you've got th' sand to try not to.”

The sheriff laughed uncomfortably.

“You've done a lot of guessin', Tolman. It don't sound reasonable to me but if you think it is, why don't you go after him yourself?”

The cruiser's scorn was withering.

“I'm no officer, an—”

“I'll make you one!”

Tolman waved a dignified gesture. “An' I'm an old man,” he added with a tinge of sorrow. “Was I packin' a few less years, I'd go. I'd go, Sheriff, an' these men know that ain't hot air.”

“Hell!” remarked the other and spat.

HE looked around, but saw only hostility in those faces. He did not see the puzzlement on one, on young Thad Chester's. He saw only that which he feared but knew he would find: enmity, scorn. They knew he feared to follow Delaney. They knew, too, that he had not called to Canada for help because that would entail the responsibility of bringing the man home from the point of detention. Surely, had they charity those men would have sympathized because Red Bart, even captured by others, would be no docile prisoner to handle. He would fight, now, with all the ingenuity the devil had given him, but this man was sheriff of the county, committed to face danger, and so they scorned him.

“And if any of you,” he said, “think there's enough in Tolman's guess to warrant tryin' it, I'll deputize you, for what good it'll do, across yonder. Why—I tell you, he's hid out somewheres now and it'd be like lookin' for a needle in a haystack, but if any of you—”

A movement in the group cut him off.

“I'd like to try. Sheriff.”

That was young Thad and mutters of amazement followed the silence. Then, close after them, a chuckle or two and a disgusted oath. This boy, this drunken bum in such a moment, in such a circumstance!

The sheriff gawped.

“I'd like to give it a try,” the lad went on, trying to hold his voice steady. Things swam before him: the sheriff's loose jaw, those sneering faces; trees and things. His own voice sounded faintly because his ears still rang with the low music of Billie Compton's words, holding out precious hope.

“You mean that, son? You want to go get Red Bart?” The sheriff grinned and winked at the others. Ho, he thought, this is one on the crowd! The only one among them who would do the thing they were riding him for not doing was old man Chester's drunken bum of a son! This was revenge of a sort; this would give him one laugh, anyhow! “All right, then, young man. I've got a badge in my car. You're a deputy now—and good luck to you!”

He moved toward his automobile and Thad followed. No other did, but grunts did and derisive laughter and these penetrated the mist that shut Thad Chester out of reality. No more fawning, now, no gestures of respect for the son of the push. He had made a play and he understood that what they had really thought of him all along was welling to the surface to find expression and a wave of anger surged through him. He was being derided, he was being proclaimed a joke, he was being laughed at!

Little they knew! Little they knew the high purpose in his heart, half smothered by that fog in his mind. He gritted his teeth, he turned, with the badge in his hand and the sheriff's taunt in his ears, looking for Tolman. Tolman would not laugh at him; Tolman had said once he was getting to be a man. But Tolman had gone and Thad put a hand over his eyes, striving for a moment of clear thought.

No one understood; no one could understand; they did not understand and they were sneering at him because none of them had the courage to do this thing he was about to do.

Savagely, then, he prepared, while the sheriff pompously telephoned and the line formed at Pertwee's bar. None gave him heed and, as it was supper time when he shoved off, none saw him until he was far out, light pack-sack in the bow, paddling toward the fading eastern sky, toward Ontario and the mouth of the Zhing-wauk, up which Bart Delaney had fled.

The cool wind was good on his hot, bare head and drove some of the fog from his mind but even yet he was in that half daze and once caught himself grinning good-naturedly, blankly. He straightened and dipped the paddle deeper.

Chapter VI

“BLESSED if th' fool kid didn't make a start!”

“Blessed if he didn't!”

This, the ingenuous exchange of the two tug-boat men as they stood on deck and watched the distant fleck through a marine glass.

“Well, he'll sober up and be back when Papa opens tomorrow,” the first predicted.

That was what others said when the gossip reached Papa Pertwee's. The kid would be back and plastered by noon.

The gossip drifted to the store and people carried it from there hither and yon and before long the tale of a fool's quest reached Haynes and when Haynes told his niece Billie chirruped that she was thrilled to death.

“Yea, and he'll be somethinged to death, too, unless he comes back,” her uncle said sourly and rattled his newspaper. After a bit he got out of his chair and stamped his feet and said that if he thought the young fool would not turn back he'd sent after him. “But then,” he added, “it's only a drunken whim.”

He dropped his concern with this assuring reasoning but Billie Compton did not. She became grave and took a worry to bed and slept fitfully and as the night aged a sense of responsibility came to her. It was a fresh experience for the girl and at dawn she was cowering by her window looking out at the smoky river, at the ragged banners of light breaking through strips of eastern clouds.

After a bit she rose and dressed and went white faced through the town to the tar paper shack that Thad Chester had called home.

She called his name gently; and again: “Thad? Thad!” She rapped on the door and it swung creakingly open.

The one room was empty, in bad disarray. The clothes he had worn yesterday were dumped on a backless chair and when she saw these and felt the bedding to find it cold (she was not the daughter of a woodsman for nothing) she let a low whimper slip through her thin lips.

She ran out and along the beach to another shanty and rapped feverishly.

“Uncle Tom! Uncle Tom!” she cried.

Inside, a cough and a startled grunt.

“Yes, Billie? What's up?”

“Let me in, uncle; oh, let me in!”

“Just a minute, now; just a mite of a minute!”

She heard his bare feet on the floor, heard him moving and in a moment he appeared in the doorway, drawing his suspenders over his shirt, sleep in his clear old eyes, gray hair bristling.

“Whatever brings you down here?”

“Oh, Uncle Tom it's— It's Thad! He went!”

“Went? Went? Went where, Billie?”

Tears were on her lashes now, and honest tears. She could not speak at once and gestured to the east where the dawn flushed.

“He went after Delaney and I—I sent him—”

Old Tolman drew a deep breath.

“Oh, so he started, did he? Well—well—come in, sister; come in here and let's get this over.”

She sat weakly in an old rocker, knuckles at her lips.

“Now, don't you go frettin' about him, sister. I mind now, that he made some fool play to the sheriff yesterday. I didn't pay no attention, 'cause I was quite hot then. But if he really started out, I didn't know it. I sorta set here last evenin' an' cooled off, so I didn't know. But if he did start he'll be back. He— He ain't never finished anything.”

“Oh, but you don't understand?” she cried at that. “He—it's different, Uncle Tom—I know he's never finished anything but—but this is—oh, I'm frightened; I'm wretched!”

Her distress took away some of the old man's casualness and he frowned.

“Now, let's take it easy an' get this straight. You say you sent him?”

SHE nodded and looked away. “He came up yesterday afternoon and started talking as he used to talk, as—oh, you know: he's made love to me.”

“Yeah. Most of us knows; an' you wouldn't have him an' he—he got upsot about it.”

“Yes. But yesterday he was different. He asked me what he could do to show he was the sort of man worthy of a girl. What he could do to make me love him. And I told him that if he would bring Red Bart back it would prove— Oh, I was a fool! I never thought he'd go! I thought it was—was smart to use the power I had over him, but—”

She did not finish. Her eyes wet with misery, went to Tolman's.

“An' he took you up.”

"Yes; yes! He took me up and father says—”

But she could not go on. Realization of what she might have done overwhelmed her again. She was no longer the coquette, the flirt. She was face to face with potential tragedy and should that tragedy come she would be responsible for it and that thought was more than she could hardily bear.

Old Tolman said nothing but he reached for his socks, laid out carefully over the tops of his pacs, and began drawing them on.

“'Course, chances are he's on his way back now; ashamed an' regretful-like, but if he shouldn't be—”

He did not finish and the alacrity with which he dressed his feet bespoke the seriousness with which he considered the alternative. The girl checked her weeping.

“You will help me? We'll go after him, Uncle Tom?”

“I will. I'll get somebody to go along. It'll be no place for a girl like—”

“But I must go! Don't you see, I'm to blame? I sent him after that ruthless man and put him in danger? Don't you see I've got to undo what I did? And I can paddle! Why, you've said many times that I was as good as any boy in the woods and—”

“Not now, sister. This is no campin' trip. This may be—”

Again he left the thing he had started to say half finished but the girl was on her feet.

“I will go!” she cried. “Do you think I can let myself start a thing like this and then not lift a hand to stop it? No, Uncle Tom, I'm going with you. Two can go up the river faster than he can. We must! We must go fast and hard and long until we find him—”

“You're goin' loony, now, sister, you—”

“I never was so sane or sensible in my life! I grew up last night, uncle. I'm going”—with a mature derisiveness that made the old man shrug helplessly.

Chapter VII

AT DAWN young Thad Chester opened his eyes slowly. He was cold. His lips ached from the drill and the hardness of the sand on which he had spread his blanket. Ashes of the midget fire he had built in the moonlight to boil his kettle were gone, whirled away by the night wind. His canoe, bottom up, rested on the beach at the foot of Zhing-wauk Lake and as he lay there the morning breeze, sweeping through the wide band of rushes in the water, sounded a mellow, mournful organ note.

He sat up with a start and for a moment remained so, propped erect by his hands spread behind him. Then he lifted one hand to his queer feeling head. He shook that head and blinked but the feeling would not depart. The call of a pileated woodpecker came sharp and clear to his ears and he looked about expecting to see the bird close at hand. He had not heard a sound so distinctly in a long time.

He rose, mystified, started a fire and kicked off his pants. Stripped, he stood on a rock and eyed the clear water beneath him. Then he went in a long, angling dive and came up blowing mightily. He stood with his back to the blaze while goose pimples flecked his pink and white skin. Yonder, the horizon was sharp; sharper than he remembered horizons were. The water was a tender, bright blue, too, under the light breeze. A raven flew over him and he remarked the gloss to the feathers. The smell of dry spruce burning at his feet was sharp and acrid in his nostrils. Such a distinct odor.

He drew a deep breath and an odd smile crept over his countenance.

“Under Heaven, I'm sober!” he muttered and slowly began to dress.

But before he commenced to lace his pacs that smile was gone; wholly gone, and a frown was between brows. It was not from the dull and growing headache, not from the sore muscles, strained by yesterday's and last evening's paddling. It was a frown for folly done and he stopped all activity and let his hands go limp while he stared darkly out across the bright lake.

So he had committed himself to this fool thing, had he? He had come here on the trail of Red Bart Delaney single handed! He grinned a sickly, grin. He had made a fool of himself— For Billie! (His breath caught.) He had done it for her, yes. Oh, what a fool, what a fool!

It was downright boyish; childish. Any man, alone, against Red Bart when the only man to whip him in a decade had paid for it with his life! He laughed aloud at himself. Why, he had not even a gun; he had come unarmed. He rose and moved to the pack-sack lying on a boulder, opened it and looked at the scanty supply of food he had brought and laughed again. For a long interval he stood erect, thinking.

Go back? That would be humiliating, with memory of the scornful laughter he had heard yesterday ringing in his ears. Go back? When he had tried for months to drown memory of Billie Compton and when the ordeal she had laid out for him yesterday had fired him with this foolhardy ambition which, he well knew, was the last try he could make to win her favor? Go back? And admit once and and for all that he had failed to make a man of himself?

He shrugged and shook his head savagely.

But go on? With Red Bart Delaney, the killer, beyond him ready to kill again to keep his freedom? But go on? Empty handed, poorly equipped, into a wilderness scarcely touched by man? Go on? Risk throwing his life away in an errand that none other in all the country would undertake?

Still, as he stood there he saw himself clearly for perhaps the first time in his life. He was distinguished for two things: for the accident of birth which made him the son of a rich man and for his worthlessness, his uselessness and, marking this, a feeling of revulsion swept him. He was sober now; he had perspective on himself. He had frittered the best period of his young manhood, he had smirched his name and his father's name; he was a joke to Chester's Dump, to his family and to the girl whose elusive charm had beset him. And he did not want to be a joke!

Oh, he could hear the Dump, he could see the Dump, should he go sneaking back! The I-told-you-sos would pop from every lip. They had laughed at him yesterday and now they would be restless, wondering if they might have been wrong about him, worrying for fear they might have laughed too soon, and the bitterness engendered by this doubt would be pronounced should he go back and prove them right, after giving cause for uneasiness.

Youth can stand scorn, youth can bear pity, but youth cannot put up so easily with laughter. Youth is serious-minded, youth is bothered by various complexes, youth must believe itself considered with gravity. Go back, this youth, and see their cruel grins, hear their bucolic snickering? Go back and suffer these?

No, the die was cast! A fool's errand, pregnant with all manner of tragic possibilities, and yet he felt that if he turned back now he could never again hold his head erect, face Tolman or his father or the men who labored for his father, or Billie Compton.

HE SLAPPED bacon into the pan, chucked a tin bucket into the flames and brewed strong tea. He bolted the food inelegantly, his eyes on the upper lake, watching for a tell-tale thread of smoke, repeating again and again to himself what he had heard Tolman tell the sheriff about his guess as to Delaney's course, for he knew that none was wiser to the ways of men and the nature of rivers than the cruiser.

He kicked the brands of fire into the water, shoved off and, dark hair blown back by the morning breeze, set out doggedly.

It is fifteen miles from end to end of Zhing-wauk Lake, four hard hours for an able boatman, but today Thad Chester was sober for the first time in months. His head was like to burst, stomach wry with his breakfast; he ached from skull to soles and despite the breeze he sweat as he made mediocre progress. He sweat and fought pain and sickness because he did not want to be laughed at and because Billie Compton had said what she said. He sweat and ground his teeth and told himself he'd show them all. But the important factor was that he sweat! It worked the stiffness out of his muscles, it relieved the nausea and though his head was torment, poison was draining out and blood was pumping clean strength to an abused body.

With the sun riding high overhead he reached the end of that phase of his journey and beached on the sand flat where any man would camp should he elect to sleep at the head of the lake. But no man had camped there. A doe and twin fawns had come down to drink yesterday, leaving their tracks sharp in the golden sand; a heron had stalked there, but no canoe had been dragged, no human foot had stepped, no fire had been built since the last rain, and rain had not come for a fortnight.

Thad looked about at the hills. Surely, no man would leave the river and try escape across that rugged country. If the trail were blind, his best guess was to push on—and Tolman had been sure— So he moved off again, conscious of weariness and a burning throat and made his way up the placid, winding stream.

He had not been gone an hour before he was rewarded. A spruce tree had fallen across a riffle, and when he stepped into the water to lift his canoe over he stopped with a little cry of exultation.

Those branches had been broken and the exposed wood was fresh and as he looked he saw the faint outlines of a man's footprint in the clay bottom.

True, it might have been a far-ranging sportsman, a prospector, a land-looker who had lifted his canoe over that down tree, but some one had gone this way yesterday and Red Bart had started this way!

And, mere minutes later, watching the bank as he traveled, he saw man tracks again and found where a canoe had been dragged out, where a rifle-butt had rested in the moist earth and where a tiny fire had been built. It was such a small blaze, so well screened, would send up so little smoke! And no man with an open mission would have built such a fire last night because the hours of darkness were cold!

So Red Bart had accepted the Zhing-wauk as his readiest means of escape and had camped here last night. He had gone farther by an hour's journey than Tolman believed he would and he had exercised great caution.

Chapter VIII

NEARLY a day behind, then, was young Thad Chester, and he bent to his task with new vigor though wearied muscles, unaccustomed these many months to such a strain, rebelled.

He reached the foot of a long riffle and, track line over his shoulder, went upstream at a trot, throwing great fronds of water before him. He had been up and down this stream once, when he and Tolman cruised the Ontario purchase. He tried to remember things about it, distances, the location of Wolf River, where the cruiser had guessed Delaney would camp after his second day, but could not. He toiled on after the sun had gone, until he could take not so much as one more stroke of the paddle, until he could drag the canoe no more by its track line, but he did not reach the tributary.

He thought sleep would come but it did not. When he spread his blankets and looked up at the peaceful stars above the spruce tips he was conscious of a decided ache in his throat, the singing of his nerves and stood up, frightened. He wanted whisky! He had been wanting whisky all day and had not been aware of it. Now, with the excitement of strenuous travel broken the need asserted itself. His lips were dry, head hot and his eyes burned. He felt himself trembling in a fit of weakness and moaned aloud.

A tempting devil rose in him. “Turn back,” it cried. “Turn back; this is a fool's errand! Death, perhaps waits at the end, even though you can stand the going and overtake your man. You are handicapped, you have no chance; even if something less than death awaits, surely humiliation is at the end of the trail! So turn back! You need never see the Dump again, you need never face sneering laughter. Leave the country; you've failed here. Find another place and make the fight for yourself there—get back to whisky again—just for a night, a week—taper off. You can't let it go suddenly—not this way.”

Again the romantic bent of youth came to his rescue and, just as he had dropped to his knees to fold his blanket, declaring that he would turn back, that if he were to make a fool of himself it would be in a congenial manner, he fancied he heard once more Billie Compton's silken voice, felt again the smooth taper of her arms, touched, once more, his lips to her cool fingers.

“Oh, God,” he moaned, lifting his face, “help me! Help me over tonight and I'm on top of it!”

He paced the narrow shelf on which he had camped; he built a fire and made strong tea and when dawn came he stripped himself and dived into the pool below his camping place and came up growling to himself that need of whisky couldn't turn him back!

HE WAS on the river before it was well light and before noon had passed the mouth of the Wolf. However, none had camped there, no sign was left that he could read and it was not until he reached the first portage that he knew a man still pushed ahead of him.

He saw where that man had landed, where he had gone and come and gone again. One trip for the pack, one for the canoe; and on one of those trips the man had run where going permitted speed. No fisherman, no prospector left that sign; it was left by some one in desperate haste.

So now, he reasoned with a great surge of accomplishment, completion of his errand lay first in speed, secondly, in craft. Once close on Red Bart he would lay his plan, but the initial requisite was speed.

He pushed on, well into evening again, though his body was tortured with outraged muscles and fatigue. His face was drawn and haggard, hands unsteady, but that night he slept. The devil of temptation rose again but he put it back firmly, atremble inside, and knew that once and for all he need never again be called a drunkard!

He had chopped down a small dead spruce because firewood was not handy, but his mind had been so occupied with himself and his triumph over that self that he gave no heed to the phenomenal echoes which rang from his blade. Nor did he realize until morning that he had entered the part of the stream known as Windigo Valley.

Tolman had told him of it last year, of how old Indians refused to enter that part of the river and of how, when the wind was right, the moaning of ship whistles bound to and from Lake Superior sometimes penetrated to the upper end of the gorge, sound vibrations sucked up between the hills for miles with wonderful clarity.

No, he did not recall this. He had won one fight; he was closing in for another and he knew that tonight he must sleep to restore his strength.

And he did sleep, the heavy slumber of exhaustion, and while he slept, far upstream a man sat in the moonlight, smoking a pipe, frowning, listening. The blows of Thad's ax had come to Red Bart while he cooked his evening meal as distinctly as though they originated just below the bend. But he knew the river, knew the deceptive acoustic qualities of the valley, and had no fear that whoever had swung that ax was within miles.

In fact, after the moon was high, Delaney packed his outfit, shoved off his canoe and floated silently downstream. He stood up now and then and looked at the faintly lighted country on either side and after a time stopped and went ashore. He felt of the brush and found it drenched with dew, but he explored until he found a dead balsam and from it he broke a great pile of brittle branches. He crossed the river and gathered more, brash, dry brush. Then, for a time, he dozed, sitting against a stump, blanket drawn about his shoulders.

And down at the mouth of the Wolf two more people slept beside the tumbling Zhing-wauk—slept after the one had reached out to touch the blanketed shoulder of the other and said lowly:

“'S all right, sister. Mournin', now, won't do any good. It's up to us to go fast an' hard an' stop him an' cryin' won't make miles for us.”

Chapter IX

SMOKE wakened Thad Chester. He started up sharply. The sun was above the hills to the eastward. He had slept late, hours late, and now smoke was in his nostrils!

He leaped out of his blankets and stared around him and the odor was so pungent that his heart raced. Another camp? His man, close as this? Then his eyes swept the horizon and high up, borne along by the brisk breeze, he saw a faint streamer of dun against the immaculate sky. No; no camp-fire, that. But it was fire, surely enough, a fire running in the forest!

Thad had been enough in the woods to know the terror of that. Fire at any time is enough to stir the apprehension of those who know fire and the bush. But now, what wild fire might do to him and his quest was a terrifying possibility. He looked about, desperately alert.

Behind him towered a pinnacle of ancient rock, weathered black, cracked by long erosive processes, with here and there a valiant tree clinging to ledge or crevice. It was the highest point he had yet seen, higher, surely than any downstream and he chanced that it was higher than any beyond.

He began the labored ascent, pulling himself up from boulder to boulder at the base, finding a ledge that ran upward, swinging to another by the help of a small cedar, working around and away from the river until he gained the top. He stood there, three hundred feet above the river and saw the thing that brought a cry of dismay from he throat.

Windigo Valley stretched before him and the river wound its torturous way through a crack in the hills. Upstream the flat between the cliffs widened and spruces grew on the shelves between river and heights. Still beyond that the flats were wider though the timber was not so thick.

It was up there in the sparser growth where the smoke culminated. He could see it, brown, angry, thick, rolled along by the breeze, sucking down the valley to obscure it from his view in places. Fire was burning on either side of the stream, eating through birch and poplar toward that thick timber, and he started back down from the height recklessly, for he knew that if fire found hold in those spruce thickets he never would pass between them until it had burned itself out. The country was tinder dry, the wind was rising, blowing the conflagration downstream; the blaze was already hot and it would run—he did not know how fast it would run!

He flung his meager equipment into the canoe, shoved off and put all the strength back and shoulders against the paddle. He rounded the first bend and was forced to track up a rapid. He raced through to deep water above and again bent savagely to the paddling.

Smoke came thicker now. It stung his eyes and tickled his throat as he drove into it and this, with his quickened breathing, made him cough and strangle.

Within the hour he was between the ranks of tall spruces. The timber grew so thickly! Should he be unable to push through that piece of luxuriant forest before it found a hold in it he knew he would be caught in a crucible, forced to retreat and, with those rough hills on either side, carrying around the fire and not losing the day was out of the question.

He bent low to his task, dashed water into his eyes, swore through his teeth as a fit of coughing held him back. Smoke was so thick he could scarcely see and he ran the canoe up on a boulder until it all but upset him, and he cried aloud that he must get through, that he must have his chance!

HE COULD paddle no farther and make time so he slipped out, grappling at the track line. He floundered on and soon felt a breath of hot air, and then a second. He rounded a bend, groping the bottom with his feet and saw an angry glow flicker through the dun curtain that was all about him. He went on a dozen paces and bowed his head against the wave of heat that came to blister his face. He hung there doggedly, unable to take another step, coughing.

Thad looked up, holding his eyes open by sheer force of will and could see that the growth on either side was not so thick. He was nearly through the spruce. The front of the fire was yonder, raging through light birch and poplar. If he could pass it, if he could get that far.

He dragged a blanket from the canoe and soused it in the stream. He lifted the sodden cloth, then, and threw it over his head and shoulders. He did not try to look ahead but looked down at his feet and edged along, protected somewhat from the heat but forced to go forward inch by inch.

Protected from the heat, yes—it did not singe his hair, did not blister his exposed skin, but he drank fire as he gasped for air and could feel the beat of the blast even through his thick, soaked wool shield. It crinkled his eyeballs and though he blinked desperately they remained dry, rough and raw.

The stream was littered with ash and bits of charred trees and a burning brand swirled against his feet, throwing up a spiral of resinous smoke and he drank it in. It stifled him, strangled him, and as he kicked at the thing to be rid of its overwhelming vapor he staggered and fell. The blanket slipped from tis shoulders and he felt the furnace breath strike through his shirt so savagely that he cried out even through the choking, and dragged the blanket back about his body with wild haste.

Thad worked on, crawling on hands and knees, water over his hips, for the air was better down there, but the water deepened and he had to rise higher to fight the current. The river tugged at him, swung him about, all but swept him into deep water. He fought savagely to remain in the shoals and finally succeeded, but when he tried to rise—for he went down again—he floundered heavily.

The ordeal was taking its toll. Things grew indistinct. He was conscious chiefly of the great agony it caused him to breathe. He heard indistinctly the savage woosh of flame as, reaching the outpost of the spruces, it mounted through the crowns of trees with a cry of destructive delight. He knew he must get out of this, must move or perish, and crawled on. The blanket was hot against him and steam from it further hampered his breathing, but he lurched forward, careful to keep close to the bank, clinging to his track line as doggedly as he clung to consciousness.

But his head spun. His balance was going as his ability to breathe and see were going. He edged along sideways, pulling the canoe a foot at a time by great effort, hearing again and again the furious call of fire as it leaped to the tops of spruces.

It seemed to the boy as though his blanket, his very body must burst into flame under that furnace breath. His flesh cried out for him to turn back, to flop into the canoe and drift down stream out of this torture, but his spirit would not yield. It drove his legs and arms and mind to the task, making him endure fresh degrees of suffering with each step taken, telling his reluctant flesh that by keeping on it would find relief and retain a chance of completing this errand on which it had embarked.

Beyond was sparse growth, grass, light brush burning, generating no such heat as was thrown out by the combustion of spruces. Beyond, then, was relief if his weakening body would only keep on.

He fell again and the immersion of face and head in the river washed away some of the dizziness. He hunched himself along, throat giving out strange sounds of protest. He tried to hold his breath so the heat would not torture his lungs. He rose and ran, a crazy, staggering run, and the blanket, a corner trailing in the water, slipped from his shoulders.

Thad threw up an arm to protect his face from the blast—there was no blast! It was hot, terribly hot, but it did not blister, did not seem to drive needles into his flesh.

Steamers of blue smoke assailed him, the air was filled with ash, but the river was no longer littered with charred brands. He was out of the heavy timber, out where the river flowed through sparse trees, out where the fire had consumed the most that it could—in a burn that was already losing its heat.

He leaned low and drank deep of the breathable air. He crawled into a bed of horsetail and lay down, letting his body chill in the cold water, finding sweet air close to the moist earth of\he bank.

AND well he lay there motionless, screened by smoke because, mounted on the tip top of a huge pile of rock litter at the base of a cliff a red-haired man had watched that fire he started run down the stream, nursing a rifle against his belly. Watched the fire, yes, and watched for a boatman to appear through the smoke, should any be fool enough to brave the risk. But after he had seen the great spirals of flame writhe upward from the spruce thicket and none other had appeared Red Bart Delaney went down over the jagged rocks nimbly, face still turned down stream from time to time. He shoved off his canoe and paddled on.

He had delayed his start by hours but he knew that none could follow through the inferno he had started for many times the hours he had invested. Last night, whoever camped below, was less than a days journey away; now they would be farther off.

To be sure, he could have lain in wait and shot from ambush. But there might be many behind him, and something might go wrong.

Miles below, Tolman and Billie Compton, the girl white, the cruiser gray beneath his bronze, paddled into the thickening smoke cautiously apprehensive of what they might encounter. Below the spruce forest they halted and waited for the fire to reach the barren strip of rocky waste just above them. It must stop there, and what had burned must cool before they could pass.

Chapter X

AND now Red Bart Delaney, working up the Zhing-wauk with rifle-butt ever between his knees, driving up straight stretches with all the speed made possible by his great strength and his long service with a paddle, but rounding all bends cautiously, so cautiously, now.

Tonight he would make the big beaver meadow; tomorrow night he would reach the cabin he knew and that every man who traveled the river knew. But beyond the cabin, a day's journey by river and trail, stretched the steel of a transcontinental railroad. That was the thing Red Bart feared most. He felt that he had cut off or safely delayed pursuit. No courage he had ever encountered would have braved that fire. It would be night before one could pass that forest he had laid waste, and so his vigilance was ever ahead because, should provincial officers be on the alert for him, they might have stationed themselves at the railroad to cut him off from the rivers that ran to the northward and safety. Or they might even be coming to meet him, outnumbering him many to one, as certain to shoot as he was certain to shoot, with only this difference: behind them stood the law; behind him was only murder.

And so, when he tracked, he carried the rifle in one hand, and when he portaged, as he did thrice that day, he had the weapon ever his hands, a precaution which slowed him considerably; slowed him almost as much as the dread which rode in his heart, reduced his speed so much, in truth, that when young Chester, with a deputy's badge forgotten in the pocket of his soaked and scorched pants, finally stood up and stepped into the blistered and charred canoe, he was destined to finish the day closer by miles upon the man he pursued than he had been last night.

Thad found the place where his man had camped and cooked fish for his supper. Half a fried trout lay on the wind-swept, rain-washed rock and the boy tucked it into his grub sack because but one more meal of bacon remained and he had not so much as a single fish-hook to use in supplementing this supply.

And the next morning he found the place where Red Bart had camped in the big meadow and knew his journey was drawing to a close. Did the man cross the height of land he could not follow without supplies, should he stop in the cabin and hide out. He shrugged. He did not know what would happen then. He had only his bare hands and his wits, but his wits were clear, clear as crystal, now. He coughed some from yesterday's smoke, but much of the lameness was gone out of him and his whisky-tortured nerves were quieting. He told himself nothing, now, made no promises to self. Occasionally he thought of Billie Compton but, somehow, his impression of her, her looks, sound of her voice, fragrance of her presence were dulled. Remembering her did not bring that thrill it once had because he was considering at close range the slender margin between life and death. He had little time for the consideration of anything except what might happen when he came face to face with the killer or came within range of his rifle.

HE WAS hungry on that fifth day; so hungry that he ached and was faint with it. Last night he had eaten the remnant of Delaney's meal he found. This morning he had had tea; no more. But shortly after noon he spied a porcupine feeding in a poplar tree, landed, chopped down the tree, finished the whimpering beast with the butt of his hand-ax and within minutes was twirling a twig hung with thin strips of flesh over a blaze that was no larger than a good sized cup. He fed small pieces of wood to the fire sparingly and ate the fat, scorched meat with relish.

The meal gave him strength and he stood beside his canoe considering possibilities. Success—if he were to achieve success—was not far away now. Tomorrow—perhaps today—he would overtake his man— And then what? One knee gave sharply, not in conscious fear, but because he was young, untried, and was going, probably, to the ultimate test of a man's fiber.

Before the sun was well down, as he was tracking slowly up a noisy rapid—slowly, now, because he had sacrificed speed for caution—he stopped suddenly and scooped into the water for a half floating object which had caught his eye.

The thing was a twig of alder, freshly broken from its branch. He held it in his hands, turning it over and over. That had been broken today; perhaps within the hour. To be sure, a running moose, a deer crashing through a thicket might have torn it away. But a man, caching a canoe, might also have done it.

Cautiously, then, he led his canoe to the bank. He untied his hand-ax from its anchorage to a thwart, slipped it into his belt and then carefully, very slowly, began making his way up the country, keeping close to the stream, stopping now and again to listen.

Darkness came and he found himself stepping on dry branches, dislodging noisy stones. He sat down to wait for the moon. A great owl hooed at the night and from afar off his ears caught the faint reverberations of a wolf howl. It was difficult to sit there, still, making no progress and his palms sweat in excitement. It seemed as though the moon never would come, but it finally did, as the night was aging and when it was high enough for him to travel quietly he went on.

It was well past midnight, he thought, when he reached the trail which led from river to cabin. No indication of man had come to him and, in the shadows he could not tell if the tracks in the muck beneath the bushes were those of man or beast. Surely the tracks of moose and deer and bear were there but he could make nothing certain of the water-filled depressions in the black earth.

He crawled cautiously up from the thicket and stretched himself over a moss-covered ledge, pressing his ear to the ground. The night was cold and he shuddered. Fireflies danced above the stream behind him and far off the solemn owl whooped at intervals. But no significant sound, no sound of man.

The cabin was little more than a hundred paces from him and a light in it, he knew, would have been visible from that distance. But though he held his straining eyes in that direction for long his searching went unrewarded. He sat up, careful to dislodge no pebble, snap no twig, and debated.

Tolman had been right, day for day, in his guess as to how this man would act. This was the logical place for him to camp this night, because the height of land was less than a forenoon's journey away. Tomorrow—for a man bound toward the northern slope of a continent—would be a day of grilling labor, long portages, hard country through which to travel. It was reasonable to think that such a man would rest; particularly when such a man was in full flight.

But what move to make? He might creep close to that cabin without betraying himself; he might hide and grapple with Delaney when he came down the trail with the dawn. Or, of course, he might be all wrong; Red Bart might not have stopped there. The cabin might be empty—

BUT the cabin was not empty! His nostrils told him that; had been trying to tell him that for minutes as he sat there. He sniffed again. Tobacco! Peerless, the pipe smoke of the woods, pungent, rank, drifting down the slope, held close to the ground by heavy air!

Again came the possibility; that this man he followed might be innocent, yet an innocent man, alone, would have had fire tonight. An innocent man would have made some sound in the length of time he, Thad Chester, had been listening. A cough, a clearing of the throat; anything—but some one was in that cabin; that some one was smoking which meant wakefulness and a man whose mind is at peace and who travels vigorous rivers by day does not lie awake by night.

Thad lay back on one elbow, trying to still the racing of his heart. He was not afraid; he knew no shadow of fear for himself, but he was alone, bare handed, close to an armed and ruthless fugitive. He wanted with all that feverish want that only youth can know to make this capture, to take Red Bart Delaney back to Chester's Dump and prove to the men who had laughed at him that he could measure to manhood by their standards. Significant fact: no thought of Billie Compton traveled his mind in that hour. This was no matter for romance. This situation had nothing to do with a blue-eyed girl who could be divine and devilish in the same moment. Unconsciously, he had put her aside, her part in sending him here, the tragic part had played in his life.

He tried to recall the things Tolman had told him about conflict, primitive combat in the forest; tried to remember what the cruiser had said of stalking men but only the vaguest fragments floated up through the excitement in him.

Mist drifted down the stream, striking through his clothing. He looked at the lop-sided moon and started. It was not so bright; in the east was the faintest suggestion of gray. He had debated long enough. Time for action had come.

He started crawling up the trail. He went slowly, inch by inch, and when a pebble slid over a half-buried boulder he dropped flat and lay so for long while his heart thumped the stone in suffocating measure until certain that the tiny rattle of sound had not betrayed him.

A breeze arose, the stirring of air before the dawn; he knew and wondered, with a grimace, what this day might hold for him.

He could see the cabin now. About it was a clearing, broken here and there by low poplar growth, and he was about on the edge of scattered cedars which had given him their screening shelter.

The door stood open, wide open, and he lifted himself to his knees so that he might see more, but the light was so faint that he could not be sure. It seemed that a dark huddle lay just within the door, but that might have been fancy or a trick of his overstrained eyes—until the huddle moved—

It moved! And Thad Chester dropped flat, squeezing himself against the ground, grinding his chin into the dirt and holding his eyes on that opening.

The breeze died. In the east the low-hanging stars commenced to fade. Down by the stream a bird twittered sleepily and then—a man snored! A man sleeping in that abandoned cabin snored loudly, repeatedly, a dozen times, the uncouth gaspings of a wearied body!

After the sound ceased the bird chirped again and Thad, worming on his belly, left the last of the cedars. He was in the open now, screened from eyes that might watch from the cabin only by a clump of poplar brush and the long, drenched grass through which he crawled. He crept forward to the bushes and stopped again, trying to still his pulses so the blood would not roar so loudly in his ears.

Birds were singing, light was increasing rapidly, as it does in the north. He could see the figure within the doorway, now a lump beneath blankets. He rose cautiously to his knees, ready to spring if the sleeper moved, and from that position could see the bright butt plate of a rifle, dull in the dawn, protruding from the blankets, barrel across the man's body.

He hitched himself closer to the poplars, stood slowly up and took the first cautious step, but with that movement from the far side of the clearing came a sharp, whistling breath; that, and a crash of brush and the sound of feet on rocks as the browsing deer bounded away.

ONLY a browsing deer, but even before hooves smote the exposed ledge the blankets heaved sharply and the shoulders of a man emerged and let out a snarling, choking oath as from out yonder a shape hurtled on him and beat the breath from him and clawed for his rifle!

It was Red Bart and he swore again as he struck out and felt the rifle torn from his grasp. He kicked and his foot struck the butt of the gun, knocked free from Thad's insecure hold and sent it clattering across the flat stone of the doorstep into the grass.

But the kick had done more. It caught Chester in movement and sent him on to pitch on his face and as he flopped over, reeling to his feet, he saw Red Bart, entangle in his blankets, grasp the sagging door for balance. The door swept toward him with a wail of dry hinges and slammed shut as its swing loosened Delaney's poor hold and he staggered backward, bringing up against the wall. He swung forward then, to take the few strides that would put him back to the door, let him shove it open, cross the threshold and secure the rifle that lay waiting outside but Thad, just coming to erect posture himself, farther from the door than was the other, called into use the only weapon he possessed, his hand-ax, and as it came out of his belt his shout filled the room:

“Another step and I'll cut you in two, Delaney!”

His last chance, that! His last good chance for life itself and his threat convinced Delaney. He stopped. Stopped even as he began his lurch toward the door, his rifle, another killing and escape. He saw the lad poised, hand-ax at arm's length behind him, ready to rush and strike. He remained there, one hand put against the logs to help shove him along, contracted slowly to a gnarled fist. He swayed slightly, as though he might even yet brave that risk and resume the rush but he did not and in that instant young Thad assumed the ascendency.

For a long, long moment the boy remained so, the ax ready to strike and then he said again in measured words:

“One step, Delaney, one step for that gun and I'll cut you in two!”

After that he lowered his arm and stood breathing rapidly. Neither spoke. Outside, birds clamored and a squirrel scampered over the roof above them. On that sound Delaney drawled.

“Well, kid, you got yourself into a mess, ain't you?”

Chester did not reply. He was thinking swiftly and knew that to relax his vigilance a fractional second would let Red Bart make the move which meant possession of the rifle. To attempt to secure it himself he must pass close to the man, and that would not do. He would take no chances of hand-to-hand combat with this bully!

A dozen feet only separated them. Spilled from Delaney's blankets his belt and sheath-knife lay almost at Thad's feet. The renegade was completely unarmed, then, and Thad felt a sense of security warm him.

“You step back along the wall,” he said, gesturing away from the door.

He could feel the searching gaze from those cold blue eyes though the light was not yet strong enough to let him see much detail.

“What's th' game, Kid?” Delaney asked coolly.

“You move back.” He hefted the ax. “I'm going to get your gun and we're going down the river.”

He heard the man swallow.

“An' what if I don't step back? What'll you do then?”

Yes, what? He was about to say that he would drive him back with a blow of the ax and yet something rose in him, growing swiftly to revulsion, and Red Bart laughed jeeringly.

“Yeah,” he drawled. “'N ax ain't a gent's weapon, is it, kid? If it was a gun, now but bein' 'n ax, I ain't much mind to do any movin'.”

Truth, there! Thad felt it surging through him, dragging dismay with it.

The man would not obey and what was left for him? Strike, of course; strike quickly, lustily, and at the only part of the man's body where an ax is sure to be effective: the head. Crunch a man's skull with an ax to make him move? Thad shuddered; his vitals crawled at the notion. Were he being attacked, should his life be in the immediate balance, were he carried into a frenzy of rage he could strike. But until such a time—Red Bart had been right; the ax is no gentleman's weapon; more: no weapon for a civilized man to use in a mood less than passion.

“Am I right, kid?” the man asked, as though he read the boy's thoughts, and laughed again.

THAD was confused. A moment ago he had believed this man to be in his power; now he was only a party to an armed truce, he being armed against any definite move which menaced his life. Delaney armed against assault by the softening processes of which civilization is made.

The lad stooped, careful to keep alert, and secured Bart's belt and knife. Then he backed to the one sashless window and tossed the belt outside.

He had a sense of fatigue, now, of weakness and backed against the wall, leaning his shoulders to the logs to take some of his weight from his feet. Delaney, across the room, laughed again.

“Tired, eh?” he taunted. “Well, you got license to be. You come fast, for a greenhorn.” After a moment he added: “For a drunken bum.”

A little thrill went through Thad at that. He was no drunken bum, now. He had come that far. How much farther could he go?

Could he finish what he had started? Could he take this man back to the Dump? How long could he stand here in this small cabin with a ruthless murderer and tell himself that he could not drive that ax into a skull? It seemed the only thing to do; either that or close with Delaney with his bare hands and that entailed heavy risk. McIver had thrown the man out of Papa Pertwee's, but McIver was a mountain of man—had been, rather, before Red Bart killed him from ambush.

Sunlight slanted across the floor through a gap between logs. It was bright day now, with birds singing all about, a sweet breeze blowing, and the river tumbling down country, down toward the Dump, where he must take this man.

The sun was an hour high before another word was spoken.

“When do we eat?”

Thad said: “We don't eat.”

The other shrugged and grinned.

“What we goin' to do then, besides not eat?”

The boy did not reply and after a moment Red Bart chuckled huskily.

“Got yourself in a jack-pot, didn't you, kid?”

A porcupine waddled along outside and began gnawing on a rough sill, snuffling as he consumed the portions of salt or grease he found in the wood fiber. After a time he went away.

Delaney was studying Chester's face now, a white, drawn face, a haggard, worried face, despite the determined set of the jaw. The man's moccasin moved ever so slightly, heel sliding outward, toe then straightening out; heel moving again. The wind dropped and the slight scuff sounded in the silence. Thad tensed, leaping out from his place against the wall, ax half raised.

“Stop it!” he snapped. “Pull back that foot!”

The foot went back and hate glittered in Delaney's eyes and melted away in a malicious grin because when he had followed that order the decision faded from the boy's expression and worry replaced it.

Minutes later Thad moved backward to the wall and leaned against it and gave no flicker of response to Red Bart's scornful laugh.

After another long interval the man spoke again.

“He had it comin'.” The other gave no indication that he had heard. “He beat me up an' he had it comin'.” He spat viciously. “I hold up my end, allus. He beat me up, an' I dropped him like a beef. You made a fool play an' I'll get you in the end.” He nodded in calm threat.

The threat stuck in his consciousness and in another half-hour he asked:

“What's it goin' to get you?” Then answered himself: “Nothin', but what he got. I won't make no move for that gun—yet. You won't make no move but stand there like a damn owl because if you do you'll get what he got. You ain't got the guts to swing that ax on me, kid.”

“We'll see,” the boy said grimly, but knew his response was flat. When Bart laughed, though, a new rage came. “We'll see before night!” He narrowed his eyes and nodded slowly.

“Tryin' to make me think the's others comin'? I ain't simple! You're makin' a lone-hand, fool play because nobody else had th' guts even to make a start after me. I know.” And he did know, Thad felt, with another cause for dismay. “If others was comin', they'd been with you; or before you. It's you 'nd me—nobody else. Oh, you're in a hell of a mess!”

“Shut up, Delaney!”

“All right; anythin' to please,” mockingly.

Thad hated to meet the other's eyes. Physically he held a temporary upper hand; spiritually, he was slipping, losing ground. The man would wait the day out and when darkness came he could make that door undetected. That was—well, at the least, it was disconcerting.

His hand was sweating against the ax-handle and he felt his pulse quickening. It held to that speedy measure and he felt his skin growing fever hot.

Between now and darkness, then, he must do one thing or another. He must bring himself to strike with the weapon of a mad man or he must risk the fate that had befallen McIver.

Sunlight, from a crack in the roof, crept across his eyes and he moved out of it. Sunlight, from that angle! The sun had reached its height! Darkness was half-way here and Delaney, squatting on his heels, sat and watched him, almost indifferently, as though he were waiting for some casual happening.

With their positions reversed Thad knew Red Bart would not hesitate. He would strike his life out with a savage joy. But he was not Red Bart. He wanted to fight fair, even though his adversary would stop at nothing.

HE BEGAN to wish that Delaney would make some desperate decision, some sudden move: a lurch toward that door, a brash attempt to secure the gun, which would let down all bars. He could strike then, strike to maim and kill. But Delaney would do no such thing; he would wait for the cover of night. And in the darkness he could not even strike effectively with his ax. In darkness it would be, at last, man to man, hand to hand. Man to man and hand to hand, the fairest terms on which men have fought since the beginning of time. Thad Chester, a youth, less than a week from a drunken bum, against Red Bart Delaney, who had been whipped but once in hand-to-hand fighting.

A fair fight it would be when darkness came, if it be fair for a lad who had never had his trial to go against a woods bully with a reputation that had spread far over the north. Was that fair? Had he a chance in a fight like that, with the record he had already written to attest to his strengths and his weaknesses?

But he had come on this errand, persisted in it. For the first time in his life he had driven himself to a grilling task. He told himself that consciously, forming the sentence with moving lips after he had decided it was so. For the first time he had put himself to a great task, he had made himself do a difficult work. He had made himself keep on when whisky called him back! He had made himself travel the river with better speed even than this hardened traveler had shown. At dawn he had made himself take for the time the upper hand of this fellow, Delaney. He had done these things because he believed he could do them!

For the first time since he left the Dump, he realized how he had accomplished what was behind him. Why, for the first time in his life he had believed in himself! He had started out in the north to show his father he had manhood, engaging in what other men considered hardships but what was for him, with his excess of youth's vitality, only play. He had encountered the first real obstacle of his experience in a girl and from the beginning had sensed his own inadequacy, had known he would fail with her, and had failed.

Casual words of old Tom Tolman's homely philosophy spoken about camp-fires came back: “It ain't what a man does easy-like that counts; it's what's hard for him to do that shows his stuff. Thinkin' you can do a job is nine-tenths the gettin' ready for it. If I was to judge a man, I'd sooner see him in one tight pinch than in a hundred places where he knew about what was going to happen.” Homely old truisms, and yet, he now thought, containing all the wisdom of the ages.

He wiped his sweaty hand on his hip slowly. He had to do this thing, he knew; he had started out to take Red Bart back and he must do that or know that the Dump's laughter was justified, know that he had not that belief in self which makes nothing else matter!

Delaney started up as Thad's arm a wide back-hand sweep and the ax went spinning through the sashless window. The man came up, arms bent, fists clenching, cold triumphant fire sweeping into his eye.

Thad poised in mid-floor and his voice was thick.

“We won't wait, Delaney. You're right, damn you—the ax— But this, it's different.”

His rush pinned the other to the wall for a second and the man's breath was hot on his cheek. His first blow found its mark on Delaney's chin and he heard the bullet head thud against the log and drove at Bart's stomach with the other. But a knee, snapping upward, half lifted him from his feet, sent nauseating pain tearing through his vitals and he was swung back, turned around, his balance rocked by a blow in the face.

He had pinned one of Bart's arms to his side and with the other hand groped for the bearded throat, shielding his own face against the man's chest. Another blow on the temple staggered him and he lost the grip which had held one of Delaney's hands helpless.

“——damn cub, damn drunken——”

The words sounded hollowly through the pain which sickened him but the first exquisite edge of that suffering was turned and he resisted the efforts to drive him off, to get in the blow that would throw him off balance. He grappled blindly for the arms that flailed at him, wound his foot abort Red Bart's lower leg and then went down with a crash.

He was curiously alive as they fell sideways, face to face, neither having the advantage in the fall, and as they struck he let go his clasp of the man's body, kicked and rolled free, staggering to his feet clear across the room.

“I can!” he gasped aloud. “I can.”

He tried to sidestep as Delaney rushed with a husky roar of rage and triumph but he did not turn the trick; neither did he get in the blow he started and they clinched again, Delaney's head grinding hard into the pit of his stomach, one of Delaney's hands gripping his wrist and as he tried to shove free sharp teeth sank into the flesh of his palm.

A scream of pain was wrung from him by that but the quick up-drive of a knee as he let go and reeled backward loosened the clamp of Delaney's jaws and this time when the man rushed he knew he could get in that blow and struck him fairly in the mouth with a rocking force.

AGAIN Delaney roared out that he was a drunken cub as he flung out his arms for a new hold on Thad's body. By then the lad realized that his best chance was in open fighting. The other was too heavy, too abnormally strong for him when they grappled and he backed away, swinging again at the lowered head, leaping to one side when Red Bart dived for him and gasping out that he could—he could!

With more experience in such battling he might have dropped on his adversary because Delaney missed his hold and scrubbed across the floor, but before Thad could follow that advantage the man was up, coming stealthily toward him.

A fierce joy was surging the lad's veins, thought of danger, consideration of the outcome should a blow drive out consciousness, should those hands find hold on his throat were all gone. This was a test, once and for all, of the stuff in him. This was the manhood he had been sent north to find. Such thoughts swirled his mind, even in the heat of terrific combat, with thick dust choking him, pain scourging him.

Delaney kicked with dexterity and the moccasin struck him in the side, driving the breath from him. He was forced to close then to keep his feet and sickened as a hard hand slid across his face, and fingers felt for his eyeballs. He shook off the menace of gouging and they waltzed about the room close locked.

A blanket tripped them and they went down, Delaney twisting with his last fraction of balance and Thad was forced to bite a cry as the man's weight crushed him.

“So,” Delaney sobbed.

He broke off to cough as his fist bashed into Thad's cheek and the other hand clawed for the boy's throat, nails digging into the flesh. The cough turned that crisis, for with a quick updrawing of his knees Thad half rose beneath the weight, pitched sideways and when they went down again he was on top.

But he was unable to hold there, though he shouted that he could. He rained blows on the man's face but it would not stay down. He wrapped his legs about Delaney's legs but Red Bart wriggled loose. His wrist was caught by those savage teeth again but he did not cry out. He got one of the other's hands beneath a knee, his free thumb found a windpipe and then he had two hands to use.

Still, he could not hold his throttling grip and when Delaney tore the hand from beneath the prisoning knee it swung out, struck a cobblestone that had once been used to supplement a broken stove-leg and flung it upward.

Thad saw it coming but the stone grazed his head and he went over backward. He got half-way to his feet before Delaney was on him but things were going black. His head was ringing torment, his legs and arms were heavy, hard to lift, let alone move adroitly. He was going out, losing consciousness, being dragged down and beaten and he could not help himself.

That assertion of failure, burning through his dazed wits in a white-hot streak of alarm, gave him life and somehow he got up, with Delaney sobbing as he clung to his belt to hold him back and flung himself about and free.

Red Bart stood in mid-room gasping. The shirt was torn from his torso. The skin beneath a mat of red hair was scratched and bruised. Blood trickled into his beard and in his eyes was the light of a mad animal. In the stillness, even through the torrential rush of blood in his own head, Thad Chester heard that bubbling, gasping breath, realized that Delaney would not longer carry the fight. The man was swaying, staggering, edging away, preparing to—

The boy cried hoarsely. He had forgotten the gun outside but now Delaney was after it, trying to edge toward the door and he stopped as Thad charged and screened his face with his forearms and doubled and fell against the wall.

But he had his feet again in an instant because the boy was reeling with weakness, brushing blood from his eyes, and when they met hands found Thad's throat. Hard fingers locking about his neck, biting into his flesh, tearing it and shutting off his breath.

They fell and as they fell another pair of hands locked on another throat and felt the gristly windpipe slip beneath their pressure. So, rolling on the floor, each with a strangle hold, will matched will. Blood seemed ready to burst Thad's ear-drums, spasmodic, choking ran the length of his chest but he could not cough. He twisted his head, seeking to tear it free. His foot found pressure on Red Bart's chest and he shoved tentatively.

It was all so slow, now, movement was so ponderous, so deliberate. The pain of actual grip on his throat, the darkness, the pressure in his ears, the bursting of his lungs hammered at his will, but his determination would not yield.

And then he was drenched with water. His throat, his lungs, his head filled with—with water? Under Heaven, it was air! He was breathing. He had broken Red Bart's hold and his own clutch was secure!

He lay there a long, long time, coughing, strangling, squeezing his eyes shut while the other struggled feebly. Hands tugged at his wrists but the fingers would not hold. They groped feebly again and again but each time the effort was weaker. The man trembled; strange and terrible sounds came from him and then he lay still.

Thad opened his eyes and relaxed the grip of his hands. A retching moan, long-drawn, came from Delaney. The boy hitched himself to his knees and fell dizzily across that prone body. His own breath was shallow and swift and things were fading away. Even that sweet air, as tangible as water itself, could not keep his mind clear. Slowly he unbuckled his belt and dragged it through its loops. He drew Bart's wrists together painfully and pinned them to the small of the man's back with a knee. Then, with the greatest care he had ever exercised in his life, he bound them tight.

After a long, long time he roused again. His fingers groped along the moaning man beneath him. Another belt came free. He bound the ankles with that, putting into the last long pull on the leather the final iota of strength that remained in him.

Red Bart Delaney was his, bound hand and foot. He had done what he had to do, what he had believed he could do, and let go all holds.

Chapter XI

WORDS aroused him. The words were.

“He done what he come for!"

Thad found himself sitting up, staring into the fading sunset. In the doorway stood a man, rifle under his arm. He could not make out features but the voice was Tolman's and after he had said those words he turned sharply to say to another:

“Stay there, Billie. He's all right, but it's nothin' for a girl to look at.”

Nothing for a girl to look at, either, two nights later when they camped at the foot of Zhing-wauk Lake. Hands bound behind him, morose, watching the others, Red Bart sat against a smooth boulder.

Tolman was cleaning a pike down at the shore and Thad stood beside Billie Compton winding a clean cloth about his wrist where the marks of teeth were.

Until then they had not spoken of the thing so high in the consciousness of each, but when Thad looked at the girl and saw her eyes so fast on him, he knew it must be said.

“I guess, Billie, I've got a lot to thank you for,” he said, trying to make his voice sound natural.

“No, Thad, nothing at all. It's I who—”

He did not notice that her voice had broken, so concerned was he with the thing he must say. He wanted to say it gently, now; once, in the beginning back there in the cabin, he had been bitter, but he was bitter no longer; yet he knew she must understand him.

“It's funny, but I guess I'm not the kind that would do for you, Billie. You see, I don't amount to a great deal. This wasn't much. I just sort of had it to do. But now—I guess I've got to go out and do a lot of things. And so—well, you needn't say whatever it was you thought you was obliged to say.”

A stumbling, fumbling attempt, but the girl knew what was in his heart. She knew that he had looked death in the face to see life. She knew that he thought her a silly little fool who would never know life. She knew that even though she had been a factor in letting him find himself she had sent him into the shadow lightly, selfishly, to exercise her power over a man; he knew that too, and held her, because of it, less than the dust.

She knew these things, but she took it standing and said steadily:

“Very well, Thad. I think I understand.”

And again two days passed; Red Bart was in jail and the Dump was getting back to normal from its second upheaval. Billie Compton was at Tolman's feet, crying her heart out after that long, long talk and saying again and again: “I don't blame him—but I've grown up—I've grown up.”

For an interval the old cruiser stroked her yellow hair with his hard hand and his eyes were far away.

Thad Chester was gone, rather savagely, abruptly, packing his things and saying good-by to the Dump. No, he wouldn't be back, he had said. He had things to do; life was full of things waiting to be done.

The old man shook cold ashes from his pipe.

“Now, let me git up, Sister,” he said and gently lifted her head from his knees. “I got just about time.”

She sat on one hip on the floor, wiping her eyes; sober eyes, now; more lovely than they ever had been, with womanhood there instead of deviltry.

“Make what, Uncle Tom?” she asked.

“Town, an' th' train for th' Straits. I 'spect his daddy'll know where to find him. If he don't, I'll have to fuss around until I pick up his trail myself.”

She did not move, did not speak. As he pulled the old valise from under his bunk he looked at her and winked soberly.

“Of course I'm goin' after him! It wouldn't be lady-like for you to, would it? An' somebody's got to, ain't they? Lord, yes: somebody's got to!”

He cleared his throat gruffly, in irritation. He had experienced too much emotion of late for an old codger.