last time. I lumbered square. And the agent was mad because I wasn’t crooked and didn’t have hush-money for him. And he spiked me with John Barrett; but you fellows, and all the rest that are willin’ to whack up and steal in company, will get your contracts all right. And I’m froze out, with camps all built and five thousand dollars’ worth of supplies in my depot-camp.”

“Hold on!” protested several of the men, in chorus, crowding close to this dangerous tale-teller. “You ain’t tryin’ to sluice the rest of us, are you, just because you’ve gone to work and got your own load busted on the ramdown?”

“I’d like to see the whole infernal game of graft, gamble, and woods-gashin’ showed up. Let John Barrett go up and look at his woods and he’ll see what you are doin’ to ’em—you and his agents! And the man that lumbers square, and remembers that there are folks comin’ after us that will need trees, gets what I’ve just got!” He shook his crumpled hat in their faces. “And I’m just good and ripe for trouble, and a lot of it.”

“Here, you let me talk with you,” interposed a man who had said nothing before, and he took the recalcitrant by the arm, led him away to a corner, and they entered into earnest conference. At the end of it the destructionist drove his hat on with a smack of his big palm and strode out, sullen but plainly convinced.

[Pg 6]

[Pg 6]

The other man returned to the group and spoke cautiously low, but in that big, bare room with its resonant emptiness even whispers travelled far.

“I’ll take a double contract and sublet to him,” he explained. “Barrett won’t know, and after this Dave will come back into line and handle the agent. I reckon he’s got well converted from honesty in a lumberin’ deal. It’s what we’re up against, gents, in this business; the patterns are handed to us and we’ve got to cut our conduct accordin’ to other men’s measurements. Barrett gets his first; the agent gets his; we get what we can squeeze out of a narrow margin—and the woods get hell.”

A man came out of the inner office stroking the folds of a stumpage permit preparatory to stuffing it into his wallet, and the peacemaker departed promptly, for it was now his turn to pay his respects to King Spruce.

In what he had seen and what he had heard, Dwight Wade found food for thought. The men so manifestly had accepted the stranger as some one utterly 

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