CHAPTER VII.
MASTER OF THE SITUATION.
CONSCIOUSLY Bob Bainbridge stepped back a pace or two, and rested one hand on the shoulder of Moose. He was breathing hard, and the reaction from the stress and strain of vigorous fighting made him feel limp and unsteady.
No hint of this appeared on the surface. With cold, unemotional eyes he watched three or four men pick up the unconscious Schaeffer and carry him back to the tent.
Some of the men stood staring curiously, but the majority had gathered about a brawny youngster, handsome in a physical way, with bold blue eyes, a thatch of tawny yellow curls, and a reckless, dare-devil manner. He was one of those who had been readiest to take Schaeffer’s part, and now, as he turned toward Bainbridge, followed by a dozen or more of his companions, Bob was conscious of a sudden, curious sense of familiarity with the boy’s face. For a second he thought it simply the result of a rather good memory. This was his first sight of Schaeffer’s river gang but it was quite possible he had run across the rather striking youngster at some other time or place.
Curiously, yet—impassively, he watched the latter approach. There was a devil-may-care impudence in the very swing of his lithe, muscular body. When he came to a stop before the lumberman, hat stuck rakishly on one side of that yellow thatch, and hands resting lightly on his slim hips, his whole manner was one of such cool arrogance that Bob’s eyes narrowed, and the angry blood began to tingle again through his veins.
“Look here,” said the fellow insolently, “that was one dirty trick you played on Pete, and you’re goin’ to pay for it. Do you know what we’re goin’ to do”
“Yes!” flamed Bainbridge, in a voice which made more than one husky river hog start nervously. “I do! You’re going down to that jam on the jump—and work! Get me? I mean real work, too, and not an imitation of kids playing. Thanks to a crooked drive boss the logs are hung up where no drive ever hung before. If you’d been half-way men you’d never have let such a thing happen.”
“By cripes!” roared the blond furiously, leaping at Bob, “there ain’t a man livin’ as can talk like that to me an’ git away with it. Why, you city dude, I’m going to show you that you can’t”
“Cut that!”
Bainbridge suddenly loosened his grip on the Indian’s shoulder, and thrust his face squarely into the young fellow’s, until scarcely six inches separated them. He said not another word, but something blazed in his black eyes which presently sent the lids fluttering down over the blue ones, and brought a touch of dull scarlet flaming dully beneath the deeply tanned skin. It was simply the force of a stronger nature, a nature untroubled by brag and bluster which imposes its will on others by sheer strength of character.
The instant the silent duel had ended, Bob flung back his head and glanced again at the puzzled, waiting throng of men.
“I’m Bob Bainbridge,” he said, in a crisp, unemotional tone, which was in odd contrast to the sense of tension just passed. “We’ve wasted entirely too much time jawing, and it’s up to you boys to get a move on. That jam’s got to be started before sundown. Understand? Now, where’s the jam boss, Jack Peters?”
“Laid up,” explained one of the men, after a moment’s hesitation. “He got his foot near cut off with an ax.”
Bainbridge’s eves narrowed. This would be termed an accident, of course, but there was no doubt in his mind that it was simply another score to the credit of Schaeffer and the men who had bribed him to do his dirty work.
“Humph!” he shrugged. “Where’s your dynamite, then? Oh, you’re the one, are you? Well, get your stuff down to the jam in a hurry. How many charges have been fired already?”
With downcast eyes the riverman explained that dynamite had not yet been used. Bob’s lips curled.
“I might have guessed it,” he said scornfully. “Well, hustle along the canned thunder! The rest of you get ready to follow down the drive.”
The men obeyed without question, and in a moment were streaming toward the jam. Besides command in Bainbridge’s voice, there was optimistic confidence which stirred these rough-and-ready river hogs. Because Schaeffer ordered it they had dawdled along fruitlessly for several days, knowing perfectly well that the jam was beyond any hope from picking, and that dynamite was the only thing which would stir it. Superficially they had enjoyed these days of loafing, but deep down in their hearts had lingered a feeling of personal shame that a gang of supposedly A-1 lumberjacks should be knowingly throwing away their time in this manner.
The youngster with the bold blue eyes and curly yellow hair went with the rest, but more slowly, perhaps, and biting his lip as he strode away. His face was flushed darkly and his muscular hands tightly clenched at the thought of having allowed himself to be called down in this humiliating manner, without even a word of retort. Even now he did not know why he had done it. The fact that the newcomer was Bob Bainbridge was not a thing entirely to influence his independent soul. There was something else—some quality in the man himself that had made him knuckle down as he had never done before.
Puzzled, chagrined, scowling blackly, he slouched after his comrades, hands thrust deep in trousers pockets, and feet kicking at roots or hummocks—for all the world like a spoiled, sullen schoolboy.
Bainbridge was, by this time, utterly oblivious to the man’s very existence. He had thrust from his mind every thought save the immediate pressing need of starting the jam, and to this end he bent every effort.
While Jerry Calker was making ready the dynamite cartridges, Bob went out on the great mass of logs piled up like a heap of gigantic jackstraws, and inspected it hastily but thoroughly. It was he who directed the placing of the first blast, and he who was the first to seek cover. He it was who first rushed to the spot in the very midst of that shower of bark and splinters and wood chips raining down after the upheaval of timber had subsided.
He saw the whole vast surface of the jam quiver and heave, and for a moment he hoped the shot had been successful. That hope proved groundless, however. The jam settled back into immovability again; they would have to try once more.
The second blast seemed at first to be no more effective than the other. Then Bob’s keen eye perceived an encouraging variation. Over the surface of the jam a curious, uneasy motion began to spread from one log to another. The crew, which had run lightly out to the very face, worked swiftly with their peavies, pulling, shoving, jerking the timbers this way and that. From his point of vantage Bainbridge watched their work with approval. They were evidently far from being the incompetents that first sight of them might have led one to suppose. He noticed that the fellow with the curly yellow hair was particularly skillful, having apparently laid aside his grouch, and taken hold from sheer love of the work and delight in accomplishing something.
Somehow Bob could not help following his movements for a minute or two, and presently, in spite of all that had gone before, his heart began to warm to the lithe, active, fearless youngster who seemed to have the knack of always being in the right place and doing the thing most needed at precisely the right moment.
“A good man,” Bainbridge muttered to himself at length, “Hanged if he isn’t!”
But now the jam was actually in motion, crawling forward with many creaks and crackings. The men worked harder, accelerating its progress, and making sure that nothing went wrong. Suddenly the whole central part of the face fell forward into the stream with a tremendous crash, and there was a whirling, backward rush on the part of those who had been working on the very brink. As they zigzagged to shore by devious routes, they raised the gladsome cry:
“She pulls, boys—she pulls!”
The sound was as music to Bainbridge’s ears, but he only smiled grimly and strode rapidly along the bank of the stream. His eyes were fixed on the foam and spray and rolling, rushing timbers, on some of which, holding by their sharp spikes and balancing perfectly, rode the skilled rivermen who preferred this method to the more prosaic one of walking ashore.
One of these was the blond youngster, and presently, reaching a point on the bend where he thought a man was needed to prevent fresh jamming, Bob beckoned him ashore.
He came—lightly, easily—leaping from log to log, or working the one he temporarily rode nearer the bank by means of his peavey. His last easy spring brought him to land beside Bainbridge, where he stood at silent attention, his boldly handsome face beginning to show anew the look of sullen embarrassment it had momentarily lost.
“Keep a lookout here for while,” Bob said briefly. “It’s rather a bad place. By the way,” he went on, struck afresh by that haunting sense of familiarity which had come to him before, “what’s your name?”
The young giant dropped his lids, and his muscular fingers interlocked tightly around the stout ash pole of the peavey.
“Curly,” he said, in an oddly embarrassed tone.
“Ah! That all?”
The youngster hesitated, and then, flinging back his head, stared defiantly at Bainbridge.
“No,” he retorted. “It’s Kollock—Curly Kollock.”
Bob frowned slightly. “Indeed! Any relation to Bill?” “His brother.”
The frown deepened and there was silence for a moment. Bill Kollock, the “trouble man” of Elihu Crane and his associates in the Lumber Trust, was not a character to commend himself to Bainbridge. The brother was more than likely to be of the same breed, he reflected as he stared with hard, narrowing eyes at the flushed, defiant face of the boy before him. And yet
“Well?” snapped the boy suddenly. “I s’pose this means git my time?”
Bob raised his eyebrows. “Why so?” he inquired coldly.
Kollock shrugged his shoulders with an exaggerated nonchalance and ease which defeated its purpose.
“I don’t reckon you’re very keen about having a Kollock on your drive,” he retorted.
“That’s where you guess wrong,” returned Bainbridge, with a sudden bland indifference. “If you want to quit, of course, that’s your own affair; but as for laying you off, I never fire a good workman because his family doesn’t happen to be to my liking. So far as anything really underhand is concerned”—he paused for a second and looked the boy square in the eyes—“I’m not afraid of that—from you.”
Without waiting for a reply, he turned and strode on along the river bank, leaving young Curly to stare after him, his face flushed, and a curious, unwonted expression in his blue eyes.