The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVII.
COLLINS CORNERS JOAN.
Late the previous afternoon, the first pursuing party returned in disgust to Midas and beached their poling boat, as long and slender as the man who had chosen it for the upriver search—Slim Jim Collins. He him-self, in the stern of another poling boat, returned from downriver early next morning, beating in by half an hour a third boat which had been sent up a large confluent of the Koyukuk.
“No trace of the red canoe,” reported Collins sourly, “unless those fellows up the tributary catch 'em.”
A scrawny, dessicated figure was standing near, his bony hands in his pockets.
“Red canoe!” he exclaimed. “Why, was there more'n one red canoe up here?”
“No, you dried-up eel,” replied Collins. “What's it to you?”
“Haw, haw!” replied the Evaporated Kid—he was none too fully witted. “I kin tell you where that canoe is, if that's all you want to know.”
“Where?” demanded Collins, and twenty men surrounded them.
“Under a pile of river stones in the pool, yonder.”
Collins grabbed him by the collar.
“You been putting something over on us!”
“It was the Manners gal, boss. I seen her doin' it at sunup a few days ago—'bout two o'clock it must have b'en.”
Led by the parchment-covered person, Collins and a dozen others made off to the pool where, lying on their stomachs, several of them descried the dark shadow of the canoe, under ten feet of water. They rose and faced each other excitedly.
“Who's right now about your fair, impartial judge, Tholmes?” sneered Collins. “I told you he was in cahoots with them!”
Tholmes turned frowningly away, angry at himself, furious at Manners.
“Pretty neat piece of work, all right,” cackled Othmer derisively. “'The villains!' she shrieks, all het up and madlike. 'They've escaped in their canoe! Let's come down and see if it's there?' Pulls us around like—like”
“Monkeys on a string,” finished Redbank.
“They escaped overland, and she knows all about it,” Rossiter yelled.
“String up the judge—he's the worst one of the bunch!” howled another, and as they surged over the flat they were joined by half the men in the camp.
Manners was inside his cabin at carpenter work when, with scant ceremony, he was seized and bound. Collins, however, kept unobtrusively back! Joan, returning in haste from the hillside, from which she had seen the crowd of men press upon the cabin, ran to her father—trussed and flung upon his bed. But Colwell, the blacksmith, took her by the arm and led her away.
“You let me go, you great big, brutal bully!” panted Joan, trying with all her strength to wrench her arm away. She was as though chained to a wall.
“The biggest man's the best to handle you, miss,” protested Colwell. “A smaller man might hurt you some trying to hold you.”
“Lock her up in her room, Bill,” said Con Redbank, “and nail up the winder from the outside.”
Beyond denying that he knew anything about the affair of the red canoe, Manners refused to talk himself, or to question Joan! He remarked. however, that if any harm were done his daughter, the man or men responsible for it would do well to commit suicide. A guard was set over him, outside the cabin, a meeting was arranged for the afternoon, and the men, more angry now than they had ever been, dispersed to their camps and shacks for their noon-day meal. Except Collins!
He strolled over to Osmund Johnson, the guard, and said:
“You'd better go down and get your grub, Johnson. I'll look out for these birds till you get back.” Johnson accepted the suggestion with alacrity, and Collins entered the office.
“I'm sorry, Manners,” he said stiffly.
“Then why don't you do something about it?” retorted Manners, who itched to tell him what he thought of him.
“I will, if I can,” returned Collins smoothly. “But I'll have to question Miss Manners first. Perhaps I can square things.” He moved toward the door of the partition.
“Eh—Collins!”
Slim Jim paused, his fingers on the key in the lock.
“I think I read your mind, my tall friend. I've certainly read your eyes lately, when Joan's been around. You wouldn't take advantage of this situation, Collins—now, would you? And remember I'm bound—though I think, if it came to a case of Joan, I could get loose all right!”
Collins flushed: “Whether you were bound, unbound, or miles away, your honor, I'd treat Miss Manners just the same!”
He passed into the room, and locked the door again. Joan rose as he entered.
“What do you want?” she asked in a low but very dangerous voice.
“I want to talk to you, Miss Manners.”
“You wanted 'an even break' the last time you talked to me alone. Is this what you call an even break?”
“Being locked up here, you mean? Eh—may I sit down, Miss Manners?”
“How very polite of you! It seems to me, if I hadn't scrupled to enter a woman's room uninvited, I'd do as I pleased with the furniture!”
“Why, you're locked in here, Miss Manners. I couldn't come in any other way.”
“I asked you what you wanted?”
“I want to tell you, to begin with, that the men know the red canoe was sunk and that you sank it. You helped those fellows get away, and it's going to go hard with you, or anyhow with your father!”
Joan burst into angry tears. “He doesn't know a thing about it. Not a thing! I did it; and I never even told him.”
“Miss Manners,” said Collins earnestly, “you've made a mistake in men. Young girls often do. I was careless with you, like a man will be who lives around careless women. He was careful. I give him credit for that. But you know what he is now, and—I don't think you ever heard any one knock me, as far as being square”
“I don't recall. I haven't been interested,” replied Joan with curt indifference.
“Thank you, Miss Manners,” said Collins bitterly, “Anyhow, it's a fact. I don't bull honest prospectors and miners, and take money from hard-working women like those Corliss girls, and”
“Miss O'Brien!” interjected Joan, though she could have bitten her tongue a moment later.
His sallow face became sallower. “Or Miss O'Brien. Or, worse still, I don't stand back in the shadow and let another man do the dirty work.”
Joan flushed to the roots of her hair: “If you have anything to say to me that isn't personal, please say it and get out. I'm interested in my father, and in nobody else!”
“I'm glad of that,” said Collins meaningly. “About him, then. If I was more interested in him than I am now, if he was going to be my—well, if you was going to marry mr”
“Marry you!” gasped Joan.
Collins flushed crimson, and his pale eyes lit. “You think I'm crazy, of course.”
“Yes, I don't!” said Joan, coming very close to him so she could look up squarely into his eyes. “I think you're crazy like a fox! You schemed this whole thing—to-day, last week, last month—how far back I don't know.”
“I did not,” he denied, and he only half lied, for he had in fact merely taken advantage of the drift of events. “I'm sorry for some things and glad of others.”
“Glad? Of course you're glad”
“I'm glad I can be of some service to you now.”
“You can't—without throwing down your friends like a treacherous cur!”
“You may live to regret those words, Miss Manners!”
Joan gathered her wits with a mighty effort. “I said you'd have to be that to help father.”
“You're wrong there; I got a right to persuade them to do nothing rash; to let him go, or, at least, to take him to Nome”
“If?”
“If you'll promise to marry me afterward, on your word of honor.”
“A man I despise!”
Collins drew himself very straight: “You got no right to despise me. I'm in dead earnest. I want you bad—bad. I never yet seen a gal I”
Joan wrung her hands. “Men, oh, men! Poor girl, poor light, foolish, loving girl who”
Collins' brow had knitted: “Miss O'Brien, you mean?”
She made no answer, and he understood.
“She's got no holt on me—and never had. I've told her straight I intended to get you, if I could!”
Joan wept again; again wrung her hands: “The insult! The degredation of it!” She retreated to the end of the room and turned, panting.
“Father would never, never allow me, if he knew. He'd die first!”
“He don't need to know; he can just think that”
She turned on him wildly: “What can you do with all those other men?”
“They think a heap of my judgment,” replied Collins significantly. “And even if I couldn't swing them—why, for you” His eyes narrowed and, unconsciously, his hand moved back a little toward his hip. “I'd help you and your father stand 'em off. I handle an ugly gun, some say! They're not liable to stand for bloodshed to get him; they don't hate him bad enough for that. I'll treat you the best I know how—like a man would have to treat my own sister. And I can do it. I'm well fixed, you know. This Midas is just a side spec with me. You might do worse, little girl. You're broke, dead broke, you and your dad, and his good name is gone besides!”
Joan jerked up her head. “That is a lie. No man like you can smirch him. There's not a thing against him, and you know it. If you mean this red canoe, I tell you I did it, alone. I did it because I wouldn't see Bruce Waring hung.”
“You loved him?”
“It's none of your infernal business if I did!”
“A dirty swindler like that! Why—say he”
The panel of the door resounded to the impact of pounding knuckles.