Joan of Arc of the North Woods - Holman Day (best book recommendations .txt) 📗

feels."
"Well, you seem to have extracted a fair amount of information, considering that she's hardly got her feet planted."
"Oh," confessed Brophy, "it came out because I made her mad when I hinted that it was kind of queer for a woman to be traveling around alone up here. Well, now that they're voting, you can look for 'most anything. What shall I tell her from you when I take in her pie?"
"I'll wait on the lady after I eat my supper."
When the drive master was ushered into the parlor-presence by the landlord, the lady was sitting in front of an open Franklin stove, smoking a cigarette. She had made a change in attire since her arrival, the new garb suggesting that she proposed to suit herself to the nature of the region to which she had come. She was in knickerbocker costume, had tipped back her chair, one foot on the hearth and the other foot propped on her knee, and she asked Latisan to sit down, pointing to a chair beside her. She offered a cigarette with a real masculine offhandedness. The caller faltered something about a pipe. She insisted that he smoke his pipe. "It rather puts strangers at their ease, don't you think, a little tobacco haze in the room?"
Latisan, packing the bowl of his briar, agreed.
"I take it that you're well acquainted with this region?"
"Fairly so, though I know the Tomah country better."
"You're a guide, I understand."
"I don't understand where you got that information, madam," replied the drive master, a bit pricked.
"I don't remember that anybody did tell me that in so many words. Somehow it was my impression. But no matter. Please listen a moment." She smiled on him, checking his attempt at a statement regarding himself; she had conned her little speech and used her best vocabulary to impress this woodsman. "No doubt you have something very important in the way of occupation. A man of your bearing is bound to. You needn't thank me for a compliment--I'm very frank. That's the way to get on and accomplish things quickly. So I'm frank enough to say it's my habit to meet men on the plane of man to man. Please do not regard me as a woman--that sort of stuff is old-fashioned in these days. I vote and pay taxes. Yet if I were merely a woman you gave evidence on the station platform to-day that you know how to protect one from insults. I was attracted by that trait in you--and afterwards minded your own business quite after my heart. I need outdoor life. I'm up here early for the first fishing. I want to tour the woods. I may invest in timberlands. Putting out of your mind all this foolish sex matter--as I have explained my man-to-man theory--will you go with me? I'll have a cook, of course. Pardon my sudden reference to pay--I'll pay you twice what you're getting now--providing you're working for wages."
"I am working for wages. And I can't leave the work."
"What is it?"
"I'm the master of the Flagg drive on these waters."
"And you prefer to boss rough men and endure hardship rather than to come with me?"
The bitterness of the last interview with Flagg was still with Latisan. "If it was a matter of preference--but that isn't the way of it!" He returned her gaze and flushed. In spite of his resolve to go on with the battle that was ahead, he was tempted, and acknowledged to himself the fact; but Flagg was trying him cruelly.
"You have been the drive master here for a long time--that's why you cannot be spared?" She tossed away her cigarette and gave him earnest attention.
"I'm just beginning my work with Flagg."
"Then of course you're not vital. Let the man who used to be master----"
"That was Flagg, himself. He's laid up with paralysis."
"Oh!" she drawled, provokingly. "A matter of conscientiousness--loyal devotion--champion of the weak--or a young man's opportunity to be lord of all for the future!"
"He's an old devil to work for, and the job promises no future," blurted Latisan, his manner leaving no doubt as to his feelings.
"Then come with me," she invited. "If I get to own timberlands, who knows?"
He shook his head. "There are reasons why I can't quit--not this season."
"I hoped I'd seem to you like a good and sufficient reason," she returned, insinuatingly; in her anxiety to make a quick job of it, in her cynical estimate of men as she had been finding them out in the city, she was venturing to employ her usual methods as a temptress, naturally falling into the habit of past procedure.
She found it difficult to interpret the sudden look he gave her, but her perspicacity warned her that she was on the wrong tack with this man of the north country.
"I'm afraid you're finding me a peculiar person, Mr. Latisan," she hastened to say. "I am. I'm quick to judge and quick to decide. Your gallantry at the railroad station influenced me in your behalf. I like your manners. And I know now what's in your mind! You think it will be very easy for me to find somebody else as a guide--and you're quite sure that you can't give up your responsibility for a woman's whim."
The drive master owned to himself that she had called the turn.
"I'll continue with my frankness, Mr. Latisan. It's rather more than a guide I'm looking for on that man-to-man plane I have mentioned. You can readily understand. I need good advice about land. Therefore, mine is not exactly a whim, any more than your present determination to go on with your job is a whim. This matter has come to us very suddenly. Suppose we think it over. We'll have another talk. At any rate, you can advise me in regard to other men."
She rose and extended her hand. "We can be very good friends, I trust."
He took her hand in a warm clasp. "I'll do what I can--be sure of that."
"I feel very much alone all of a sudden. I'm depending on you. You're not going back to the drive right away, are you?" she asked, anxiously.
"I'll be held here for a day or so." The matter of the dynamite was on his mind.
"Good!" she said, and patted his arm when he turned to leave the room.


CHAPTER TWELVE
Latisan took the forenoon train down from Adonia to the junction the next day. He was keeping his own counsel about his intent.
He had done some busy thinking during the evening after he left the new star boarder in her parlor. In spite of his efforts to confine his attention, in his thoughts, to business, he could not keep his mind wholly off her attractive personality and her peculiar proposition. He was obliged to whip up his wrath in order to get solidly down to the Flagg affairs.
By the time he went to sleep he knew that he was determinedly ugly. There was the slur of Flagg about his slack efficiency in meeting the schemes of Craig. There was the ireful consciousness that the narrow-gauge folks were giving him a raw deal on that dynamite matter. They had hauled plenty of explosive for the Comas--for Craig. To admit at the outset of his career on the Noda that he could not get what the Three C's folks were getting--to advertise his impotency by making a twenty-mile tote trip over slushy and rutted roads--was a mighty poor send-off as a boss, he told himself. He knew what sort of tattle would pursue him.
The stout young man--that "drummer"--was at the station. Latisan was uncomfortably conscious that this person had been displaying more or less interest in him. In the dining room at breakfast, in the office among the loafers, and now at the railroad station the stranger kept his eyes on Latisan.
The drive master was just as ugly as he had been when he went to sleep. He was keeping his temper on a wire edge for the purposes of the job of that day, as he had planned the affair. He did not go up to the impertinent drummer and cuff his ears, but the stranger did not know how narrowly he escaped that visitation of resentment.
The fellow remained on the platform when the train pulled out; it occurred to Latisan that the fresh individual maybe wished to make sure of a clear field in order to pursue his crude tactics with the lady of the parlor.
After the arrival at the junction Latisan had matters which gave him no time to ponder on the possible plight of the lady.
As he had ascertained by cautious inquiry, the crew of the narrow-gauge train left it on its spur track unattended while they ate at a boarding house. There were workmen in the yard of a lumber mill near the station, loafing after they had eaten their lunches from their pails. The Flagg dynamite was in a side-tracked freight car of the standard gauge. Latisan promptly learned that the lumber-yard chaps were ready and willing to earn a bit of change during their nooning. He grabbed in with them; the boxes of dynamite were soon transferred to the freight car of the narrow-gauge and stacked in one end of the car. Latisan paid off his crew and posted himself on top of the dynamite. In one hand he held a coupling pin; prominently displayed in the other hand was a fuse.
"I'm in here--the dynamite is here," he informed the conductor when that official appeared at the door of the car, red-faced after hearing the news of the transfer. "I'm only demanding the same deal you have given the Three C's. You know you're wrong. Damn the law! I'm riding to Adonia with this freight. What's that? Go ahead and bring on your train crew." He brandished coupling pin and fuse. "If you push me too far you'll have a week's job picking up the splinters of this train."
Bravado was not doing all the work for Latisan in that emergency. The conductor's conscience was not entirely easy; he had made an exception in the case of the Three C's--and Craig, attending to the matter before he went to New York, had borne down hard on the need of soft-pedal tactics. The conductor was not prepared to risk things with canned thunder in boxes and an explosive young man whose possession just then was nine points and a considerable fraction.
Latisan was left to himself.
At last the train from downcountry rumbled in, halted briefly, and went on its way. From his place in the end of the freight car Latisan could command only a narrow slice of outdoors through the open side door. Persons paraded past on their way to the coach of the narrow-gauge. He could see their backs only. There had been a thrill for him in the job he had just performed; he promptly got a new and more lively thrill even though he ridiculed his sensations a moment later. Among the heads of the arrivals he got a glimpse of an object for which he had stretched his neck and strained his eyes--the anxious soul of him in his eyes--on the street in New York City. He saw a green toque with a white quill.
As though a girl--such a girl as he judged her to be--would still be wearing the same hat, all those months later! But that hat and the very cock of the angle of the quill formed, in a way, the one especially vivid memory of his life. However, he had a vague, bachelor notion that women's hats resembled their whims--often changed and never twice alike, and he based no hopes on what he had seen.
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