CHAPTER IX

BY ORDER OF PULASKI D. BRITT

"Twinkle, twinkle, 'Ladder' Lane, With your wavin' winder-pane, Up above the world so high, Like a flash-bug in the sky."

The fire-lookout at the Attean station winked this ditty humorously with playful heliograph to "Ladder" Lane, lookout on the high, bald poll of old Jerusalem Knob. The Attean lookout got it by telephone from Castonia. Lyrist unreported.

Jerusalem station is more serene in its isolation than the other five lookouts on the mountains of the north country. It has no telephone. Lane allowed to his lonely self that he got more news than he really wanted, anyhow. And most of the news was of the sort that the humorous Attean lookout, or the equally humorous Squaw Mountain man, considered likely to tease the cranky solitary on the highest and farthest outpost of the chain of lookouts. They whiled away their solitude by gossipy chattings over the wire. Lane confined himself to terse winkings that would have been gruff were it possible for a heliograph to be gruff. He seemed to take a certain grim pride in the fact that he was a thousand feet higher than any of them and commanded three hundred thousand acres.

Sitting now in the glare of the September sunshine on the flat roof of his cabin, he gravely and stolidly scrawled down the words of the verse as the Attean heliograph, blinking and glaring, spoke to him in the Morse code.

"Huh!" he grunted, and went on writing with stubby pencil his interrupted day's entry in his official diary. For the twenty-fifth time he wrote:

"Clear, bright, and still dry."

He screwed his eyelids close to peer into the heavens bending over him, hard as the bottom of a brass kettle. He took off his hat and held it edgewise at his forehead while his gaze swept the mighty range of his vision. An imaginative person might have smiled at the likeness between his brown and bald poll, thrust above the straggle of hair, and the bare and bald poll of old Jerusalem, rounding above the straggle of growth on its lower slopes.

Some one bawled at him from the ground below. Lane did not start, though that was the first human voice he had heard in two months.

The young man who stood there, and who had come across the gray ledges from the edge of the timber growth, carried an arm in a sling.

"Do you ever look at anybody if they're nearer than ten miles away?" inquired the visitor, with the teasing irony that it seemed popular in the Umcolcus region to employ with "Ladder" Lane.

When the old man stood up the fitness of his sobriquet was apparent. He unfolded himself, joint by joint, like a carpenter's rule, and stood gaunt as a bean pole and well towards seven feet in height.

The name painted on the door of the photograph "saloon" that even now lies rotting on the banks of Ragmuff in Castonia settlement is: "Linus Lane. Tintypes and Views." No one in Castonia ever knew whither he had come. Oxen or horses and a teamster hired for each trip had dragged the rumbling van from settlement to settlement at the edge of the woods, and finally to Castonia, where it arrived hobbling on three wheels, one corner supported by a dragging sapling. Lane strode ahead, swearing over his shoulder at the driver, and his ill-temper did not seem to leave him even when he had opened his door for business. It is remembered that his first customer was old Bailey, who was corresponding with an unknown woman down-country, and who came for a tintype with hair and whiskers colored to the hue of the raven's wing, evidently desiring to make an impression on his correspondent. And when old Bailey, shocked and disappointed at the painful verity of the tintype, had muttered that it didn't seem to be a very pretty picture, Lane, who was doubled like a jack-knife under the saloon's low roof, had yelled at him:

"Pretty picture! You come to me with a face like a scrambled egg dropped into a bucket of soot and complain because you don't get a pretty picture! Get out of here!"

And he stopped slicing up the sheet of tintypes, slammed it on the floor, drove out old Bailey, nailed up the door of the saloon, and started for the big woods with his few possessions on his back.

To those who remonstrated on behalf of the offended old Bailey, Lane said he had been feeling like that for some time, and was taking to the woods before he expressed his disgust by killing some one.

Therefore, the job on the top of Jerusalem that fell to him quite naturally, after his many years' sojourn as a recluse at its foot, was a job that fitted admirably with his scheme of life.

"And it looks up there like it must have looked when Noah said, 'All ashore that's goin' ashore,' on Mount Ariat, or wherever 'twas he throwed anchor," announced Tommy Eye, of Britt's crew, returning once from a Sunday trip to the fire station.

For, painfully acquired, with gouges, clawings, and scratches to show for it all, "Ladder" Lane had accumulated companions of his loneliness, to wit:

One bull moose, captured in calfhood in deep snow; two bear cubs; a raccoon; a three-legged bobcat, victim of an excited hunter; two horned owls; and a fisher cat.

On this menagerie, variously tethered or crated in sapling cages, the visitor with the disabled arm bestowed a contemptuous side glance while he blinked at the tall figure on the cabin's flat roof.

Without haste Lane worked himself through the roof-scuttle like an angle-worm drawing into his hole; without cordiality he appeared at the cabin door, lounging out into the sunshine.

"I suppose you are still doing the second-hand swearing for Britt, MacLeod," he suggested.

The young man grunted.

"How did ye hurt your arm? Britt chaw it?"

"Peavy-stick flipped on me," growled the young man, willing to hide his humiliation from at least one person in the world--and the hermit of the Jerusalem station seemed to be the only one sufficiently isolated.

"Huh! I thought his name was Wade." There was no spirit of jest in the tone. The old man surveyed him sourly. "That's what the Attean helio said."

"Is that what you use them things for--to pass gossip like an old maid's quiltin'-bee?"

"There's a good deal in this world in letting a man place his own self where he belongs," remarked Lane, with calm conviction. "I've let you prove yourself a liar."

He turned and went into the cabin and back up the stairs to the roof, picking up a huge telescope as he went. Something in the valley seemed to have attracted his attention. MacLeod followed, his face red, oaths clucking in his throat.

In the nearer middle ground of the great plat of country below Patch Dam heath was set into the green of the forest like a medallion of rusty tin. To the west of it smoke began to puff above the tree-tops.

"On Misery," mumbled Lane, his long arms steadying his instrument. Then, with the caution of a man of method, he went into the scuttle-hole and secured his range-finder.

"What's the good of tinker-fuddlin' with that thing?" demanded MacLeod; "it's on Misery, as you said."

"Two hundred and fifty-nine degrees," muttered the fire-scout, booking the figures in his dog's-eared diary.

"Say, about that fire, Mr. Lane," blurted MacLeod, nervously. "I'm up here to-day by Mr. Britt's orders to tell you not to report it. It's on Misery Gore, and he's there looking after it, and it ain't goin' to be worth while to report. I know all about it, and that's the truth."

Lane, without bestowing a glance on the speaker, was setting up his heliograph tripod. At the young man's last words he grunted over his shoulder:

"So it was a peavy-stick! But they told me his name was Wade."

"Now you look here," stormed the timber baron's boss, "you can slur all you want to about my lyin', but I tell you, Lane, this is straight goods. You report that fire, after the orders you've got from Britt, and you'll lose your job. I know what I'm talkin' about."

Lane kneeled, his thin trousers hanging over his slender shanks like cloth over broomsticks. MacLeod stifled an inclination to take him in one hand and snap him like a whip-lash. The old man was peering through the centre hole in the sun-mirror, bringing his disks into alignment.

"Britt has got orders from the court, and he's there to put the Skeets and Bushees out and torch off their shacks. That's all there is to that fire, Lane, and Britt don't want a stir and hoorah made about it. He told me to tell you that. He says the cussed newspapers get a word here and a word there, and they're always ready to string out a lot of lies about King Spruce and wild-landers, and how they abuse settlers, and all that rot--and it hurts prominent men, like Mr. Britt and his associates, because folks get wrong ideas from the papers. Now you know that! Don't report that fire, Lane."

It was fulsome appeal and eager appeal, and MacLeod was apparently obeying some very emphatic orders from his superior, who had supplied language as well as directions of procedure.

But the old fire-warden kept on with his preparations, exact, careful, without haste.

"He said you understood--Britt did," clamored MacLeod, hastening around in front of the heliograph. "You know it ain't right to have those people there in this dry time, with all that slash about 'em. Mr. Britt will make it all right with them--the same as the land-owners always do. It will be the papers that will lie and call the land-owners names for the sake of stirrin' up a sensation about leadin' men--makin' politics out of it, and gettin' the people prejudiced so as to put more taxes onto wild lands." More of Britt's ammunition! "Mr. Britt said you'd understand--and you do understand--and you can't report that fire."

Lane set his gaunt grasp about the handle of the screen, ready to tilt it for the first flash.

"I understand just this, MacLeod--that I'm a fire-warden of the State, sworn to do my duty as my duty is spread before me." He swept his left arm in impressive gesture. "Look behind you! Do you see that?"

Smoke was ballooning from the notch of the woods below them. Round puffs seemed to be dancing in fantastic ballet from tree-top to tree-top.

"That's a fire, MacLeod. I take no man's say-so as to what and why. That may be Pulaski Britt smoking a cigar. It may be Jule Skeet's new spring bonnet on fire. I don't care what it is. It's a fire, and it's going to be reported. Stand out of range."

His code-card was in the top of his hat. He waved the headgear impatiently at MacLeod, his right hand still on the handle of the screen.

MacLeod knew what the orders of Pulaski D. Britt meant. Britt had not hesitated to rely upon the loyalty of "Ladder" Lane, for Britt, when State senator, had caused Lane to be appointed to the post on Jerusalem. MacLeod reflected, with fury rising like flame from the steady glow of his contemptuous resentment at this old recalcitrant, that Pulaski Britt would never make allowance for failure under these circumstances. To be sure, that fire yonder didn't look like a carefully conducted incineration of the dwellings of Misery Gore, and it was a little ahead of time--that time being set for the calm of early evening. But orders from Britt were--to his men--orders from the supreme tribunal.

"Britt put you here!" stuttered MacLeod.

"I'm working for the State, not Pulaski D. Britt," replied the old man.

"And I'm working for Britt, and, by ---- he runs the State in these parts! Him and you and the State can settle it between you later, but just now"--he swung to one side, leaned back, and drove his foot with all the venom of his repressed rage against the apparatus--"that fire report don't go!"

"Ladder" Lane, serene in his proud conjuration, "The State," had expected no such enormity. The heliograph skated on its spider legs, went over the edge of the roof, and, after a hushed moment of drop, crashed upon the ledge with shiver and tinkle of flying glass.

The boss of "Britt's Busters" turned and darted through the scuttle and down the stairs, excusing this flight to himself on the ground of his out-of-commission arm.

He leaped out into the sunshine and clattered away over the ledges, the spikes in his shoes striking sparks.

He had made half a dozen rods when he heard the old man scream "Halt!" MacLeod kept on, with a taunting wave of his well hand above his head. The next moment a rifle barked, and the bullet chipped the ledge in front of him.

"The next one bores you in the back, MacLeod!"

He stopped then, and whirled in his tracks.

Lane stood at the edge of his roof, his rifle-butt at his cheek.

"Come back here!"

"You ain't got the right to hold me up, Lane. I'll have the law on ye!"

"Come back here!"

There was a grate in the tone, a menace not to be braved.

The young man shuffled slowly towards the cabin, roaring oaths and insults to which Lane deigned no reply.

MacLeod did not try to run when the warden disappeared for his trip to the door. He waited sullenly.

Near the door was a good-sized, empty cage of strong saplings, built in "Ladder" Lane's abundant leisure, for the reception of any new candidate for the menagerie. The old man jerked his head sideways at it. There was a gap of three saplings in the side, and the poles stood there ready to be set in.

"I won't be penned that way!" yelled MacLeod. "I ain't no raccoon!"

But the bitter visage of the warden, the merciless flash of his gray eyes, and the glint of the rifle-barrel, swinging into line with his face, combined with the sudden remembrance that it was hinted that "Ladder" Lane was not always right in his head, drove the stubborn courage out of MacLeod. He slunk rather than walked into the cage with the mien of a whipped beast. The old man set the saplings one by one into place, and nailed them with vigorous hammer-blows.

"How long have I got to stay here, Lane?" he pleaded.

"Till I can turn you over to them who will put you where you belong for destroying State's property and interfering with a State officer."

The old man turned away and gazed out over the forest stretches between Jerusalem and Misery. MacLeod, clutching the bars of his cage with his left hand, looked, too.

It was no puny torching of the Misery huts that he was looking on, and he realized it with growing apprehensiveness as to his zeal in suppressing news.

Vast volumes of yellow smoke volleyed up over the crowns of the green growth. It was a racing fire--even those on Jerusalem could see that much across the six miles between. Spirals waved ahead like banners of a charging army. Its front broadened as the fire troops deployed to the flanks. Ahead and ever ahead fresh smoke-puffings marked the advance of the skirmish-line. Now here, now there, drove the cavalry charges of the conflagration, following slash-strewn roads and cuttings, while the dun smoke ripped the green of the maples and beeches.

"It's liable to interest Pulaski D. Britt somewhat when he finds out why Jerusalem lookout ain't callin' for a fire-posse," Lane remarked, bitterly.

The situation seemed to overwhelm the boss. He looked with straining gaze at the rush of the conflagration, and had no word for reply.

"But it may not all be loss for you," the old man proceeded, grimly. "Perhaps the girl will be burned up--perhaps that was in your trade with Britt."

"I don't know what you mean about any girl," mumbled MacLeod, looking away from the old man's boring eyes.

"You're a liar again as well as a dirty whelp of a sneak."

Lane spat the words over his shoulder, stumping away, the bristle of his gray beard standing out like an angry porcupine's quills.

"I don't allow anybody to put them words on me!" roared MacLeod.

"You don't, heh?" Lane whirled and stumped back. He bent down and set his face close to the saplings, his eyes narrowing like a cat's, his nose wrinkling in mighty anger. "You can steal time paid for by Pulaski D. Britt, and hang around Misery Gore, and coax on an ignorant girl into a worse hell than she's living in now"--he pointed a quivering finger at the smoke-wreathed valley--"when you know and I know, and everyone on these mountain-tops of the Umcolcus knows and gossips it with the settlements, that you've picked her up only to throw her farther into the wallow where you found her. It's the Ide girl you're courtin'. It's poor little Kate of Misery that you're killin'. There isn't another man in the north woods mean enough to steal from a girl as poor as she is--steal love and hope and faith. It's all she's got, MacLeod, and you've taken all."

The young man grunted a sullen oath.

"There's a lot I could say to you," raged Lane, "but I ain't going to waste time doing it. I'll simply express my opinion of you by--"

He spat squarely into the convulsed face of MacLeod, and went away into his cabin.