CHAPTER XXII

THE HOSTAGE OF THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE

"Round the bellowin' falls of Abol we lugged him through the brush, And Death had marked his forehead: 'To a Woman. Kindly Rush!'"

When Christopher and Wade started up and hurried into the lean-to, the cook of the "Lazy Tom" camp went ahead carrying a lamp to light the place whose rude interior had so suddenly been made mystic by death.

"'Yes, s'r,' says I to him," he repeated, with queer, bewildered, hysterical sort of chuckle. "I says to him, jolly as a chipmunk in a beech-nut tree, I says, 'Set up and have a doughnut all fresh laid,' and I'll be bunga-nucked if he wa'n't dead! And that's a joke on me, all right!"

He held the lamp over the features of old "Ladder" Lane, and Dwight Wade and Christopher Straight bent and peered.

"Look; if he ain't grinnin'!" whispered the cook, huskily. For one horrid moment it seemed to Wade that the fixed grimace of the death-mask expressed hideous mirth. The scrawl that the young man still clutched in his fist held the words that the dead lips seemed to be mouthing: "You stole my wife. I've got your daughter. Now, damn you, crawl and beg!" And at the thought of Elva Barrett, hidden, lost--worse than lost--somewhere in that great silence about them, Wade's agony and anger found vent in the oath that he groaned above the dead man, who seemed to lie there and mock him.

But Christopher Straight gently laid his seamed hand on the shaggy fringe of the gray poll.

"It was a hot fire that burned in there, poor old fellow," he murmured. "And those that knew you can't be sorry that it's gone out."

He pressed his hand up under the hanging jaw, and smoothed down the half-opened eyelids. And when he stepped back, after his sad and kindly offices, the old man's face was composed; it was the worn, wasted face of an old man who had suffered much; grief, hardship, hunger, and all human misery were writ large there in pitiful characters, in hollow temple, sunken cheeks, pinched nostrils, and lips drawn as one draws them after a bitter sob. And over its misery, after a long look of honest grief, the old woodsman drew up the edge of the bunk's worn gray blanket, muttering as soothingly as though he were comforting a sick man: "Take your rest, old fellow! There's a long night ahead of you."

With bowed head Wade led the way into the main camp. He stumbled along blindly, for the sudden tears were hot in his eyes. He regretted that instant of anger as a profanation that even his harrowing fears for Elva Barrett could not excuse. For Linus Lane, lying there dead, he reflected, was the spoil of the lust of Elva Barrett's father, as his peace of mind and his sanity had been playthings of John Barrett's contemptuous indifference; and who was he, Dwight Wade, that he should sit in judgment, even though his heart were bursting with the agony of his fears?

"In the woods a tree falls the way of the axe-scarf, Mr. Wade," said old Christopher, patting his shoulder. "John Barrett felled that one in there, and he and his got in the way of it. Don't blame the tree, but the man that chopped it."

"Where is she, Christopher? What has he done with her?" demanded the young man, hoarsely. He did not look up. His eyes were full. He was trying to unfold the scrap of paper, but his fingers trembled so violently that he tore it.

They had not marked the hasty exit of the cook. But his return broke in upon the long hush that had fallen between Wade and the woodsman. He was bringing Barnum Withee, operator on "Lazy Tom," and his chopping-boss, and the men of "Lazy Tom" came streaming behind, moved by curiosity.

"And I says to him--and these gents here will tell you the same--I says, 'Set up and have a fresh-laid doughnut!'" babbled the cook, retailing his worn story over and over.

"I didn't know you were here," said the hospitable head of the camp, "till cook passed it to me along with the other news, that poor Lane had parted his snub-line. I looked him over when he was brought in, but I didn't see any chance for him." And after inviting them to eat and make "their bigness" in the office camp, he went on into the lean-to.

"Put on your cap, boy!" said old Christopher, touching Wade's elbow. The grumble of many voices, the crowd slowly jostling into the camp, the half-jocose comments on "Ladder" Lane disturbed and distressed Christopher, and he realized that the young man was suffering acutely from a bitter cause. "Come out with me for a little while."

The wind had lulled. The heavens were clear. The Milky Way glowed with dazzling sheen above the forest's nicking, where the main road led. Wherever the eye found interstice between the fronds of spruce and hemlock the stars spangled the frosty blue. There was a hush so profound that a listener heard the pulsing of his blood. And yet there was something over all that was not silence, nor yet a sound, but a rhythmical, slow respiration, as though the world breathed and one heard it, and, hearing it, could believe that nature was mortal--friend or kin.

Christopher walked to the first turn of the logging-road, and the young man followed him; and when the trees had shut from sight the snow-heaped roofs and the yellow lights and all sign of human neighbors, Christopher stopped, leaned against a tree, and gazed up at the sparkling heavens.

"I reckoned your feelings was gettin' away from you a bit, Mr. Wade," said the old man, quietly, "and I thought we'd step out for a while where we can sort of get a grip on somethin' stationary, as you might say. In time of deep trouble, when they happen to be round, a chap feels inclined to grab holt of poor human critters, but they ain't much of a prop to hang to. Not when there's the big woods!"

"The big woods have got her, Christopher," choked the young man, despairingly. "And I'm afraid!"

"The big woods look savagest to you when you're peekin' into them from a camp window in the night," declared the old man. "But when you're right in 'em, like we are now, they ain't anything but friendly. Look around you! Listen! There's nothing to be afraid of. Let the big woods talk to you a moment, my boy. Forget there are men for just a little while. I've let the woods talk to me in some of the sore times in my life, and they've always comforted me when I really set myself to listen."

"My God, I can only hear the words that are written on this scrap of paper!" cried Wade. He shook "Ladder" Lane's crumpled letter before the woodsman's face, and Christopher quietly reached for it, took it, and tore it up.

"When a paper talks louder than the good old woods talk, it's time to get rid of it," he remarked, and tossed the bits over the snow.

"I ain't goin' to tell you not to worry," Christopher went on, after a time. "I'm no fool, and you're no fool. It's a hard proposition, Mr. Wade. A lunatic whirling in a snow-cloud like a leaf, round and round, and then driftin' out, and no way in the world of tellin' where he came from! And there's some one--off that way he came from--that you want terrible bad! Yet even that lunatic's tracks have been patted smooth by the wind. It's no time to talk to human critters, Mr. Wade. It would be 'Run this way and run that!' Let the woods talk to you! They've been wrastlin' the big winds all day. They'll probably have to wrastle 'em again to-morrow. And they'll be ready for the fight. Hear 'em sleep? The same for you and for me, Mr. Wade. Go in and sleep, and be ready for what comes to-morrow."

He walked ahead, leading the way back to camp, and Wade followed, every aching muscle crying for rest, though his heart, aching more poignantly, called on him to plunge into the forest in search of the helpless hostage the woods were hiding.

It is not in the nature of woodsmen to pry into another's reason for this or that. Barnum Withee gave Christopher Straight a chance to tell why he and his employer were so far off the Enchanted operation; but when Christopher Straight smoked on without explaining, Barnum Withee smoked on without asking questions. In one of the dim bunks of the wangan Wade breathed stertorously, drugged with nature's opiate of utter weariness. And after listening a moment with an air of relief, Christopher broke upon Withee's meditations.

"Was you tellin' me where Lane has been makin' his headquarters since he skipped the fire station?" he inquired, innocently.

"I was thinkin' about him, too," returned Withee, promptly. "Headquarters! Does an Injun devil with a steel trap on his tail have headquarters while he's runnin' and yowlin'? Whether he's been in the air or in a hole since he went out of his head, time of the fire, I don't know. Eye ain't been laid on him till he come out of that snow-squall, walkin' like an icicle and hootin' like a barn owl."

"Heard of any goods bein' missed from any depot camps?" pursued the woodsman, shrewdly. "That might tell where he's been hangin' out."

"No," said the operator, suddenly brusque. Then he looked up from the sliver that he had been whittling absent-mindedly, and fixed keen eye on Straight. "Say, look here, Chris, if you and your young friend are over here huntin' for Lane, or for any documents or papers or evidence to make more trouble for Honorable John Barrett, I've got to tell you that you can't ring me in. Honorable Barrett and me has fixed!"

"I reckoned you would," said Christopher. "Stumpage kings usually get their own way."

"Well, it's different in this case," declared the operator, triumphantly, "and when I've been used square I cal'late to use the other fellow square, and that's why I'm tellin' you, so that you won't make any mistakes about how I feel towards Mr. Barrett. I don't approve of any move to hector him about that Lane matter. He says to me at Castonia--"

"When?"

"No longer ago than yesterday. I came through from down-river with two new teamsters and a saw-filer, and hearin' Mr. Barrett was able to set up and talk a little business for the first time, I stepped into Rod Ide's house, and we fixed. He throwed off all claims for extry stumpage and damages on Square-hole. And when a man gives me more than I expect, that fixes me with him."

"Ought to, for sartin," agreed Christopher. "Change of heart in him, or because you knowed about the Lane case?" The tone was rather satirical, and Withee flushed under his tan.

"You don't think I went to a sick man's bedside and blackmailed him, do you, like some--"

"Friend Barn," broke in the old woodsman, quietly, "don't slip out any slur that you'll wish you hadn't."

"Well," growled the operator, "it may be that 'Stumpage John' Barrett ain't always set a model for a Sunday-school, but if I had as pretty a daughter as that one that was settin' in his room with him, and as nice a girl as she seems to be, though of course she didn't stoop to talk to a grizzly looservee like me, I'd hate to have an old dead and decayed scandal dug up in these woods, and dragged out and dumped over my front-yard fence in the city!"

And Christopher remembered what he had remarked on one occasion to Dwight Wade, when they had seen the waif of the Skeet tribe on Misery Gore, and now he half chuckled as he squinted at Withee and muttered in his beard, "Lots of folks don't recognize white birch when it's polished and set up in a parlor."

"What say?" demanded the operator, suspiciously.

"I'm so sleepy I'm dreamin' out loud," explained Christopher, blandly, "and I'm goin' to turn in." And he sighed to himself as he rolled in upon the fir boughs and pulled the spread about his ears. "There's some feller said that good counsel cometh in the morning. Mebbe so--mebbe so! But it will have to be me and the boy here for the job, because old Dan'l Webster, with all his flow of language, couldn't convince Barn Withee now that it's John Barrett's daughter that is lost in the woods. I know now why something told me to go slow on the hue and cry."