Then I'll Come Back to You Part 41

"Well," he demanded, "let's hear it. What's on your mind?"

There are times when hatred will betray 'most any man. Hatred now led Wickersham to speak not wisely but with venom.

"I want you to refuse to renew your name on the East Coast notes," he said. "They are due on the second."

Few men had ever said "I want you to" to Dexter Allison and, as he put it, "gotten away with it to any great extent." And of all nights this one in particular was the least likely to prove propitious for such an attempt. That was Wickersham's oversight.

"So!" said Dexter, "so! Well, now for your reason."

Wickersham had not learned until after Barbara's departure that she was spending the holidays in Morrison, for he had himself expected to be away. And it is only fair to the girl to say that she had honestly forgotten to apprise him of her plan, in her real excitement at going.

But finding it out for himself had not made the fact any pleasanter to Wickersham.

"It should be clear enough without explanation," he enunciated each word nicely, "if you want that road they are building."

Allison glanced up, surprised at the tone employed.

"Meaning of course I do," he mused. "And yet--and yet, I don't know!"

Fear burned in the tall, thin man's eyes that night--fear that made his hatred for the absent man who was teaching him fear anything but a pretty thing to watch.

"I've tried to buy off their men." He was holding himself with an effort that made him tremble. "I've held up their supplies on every track that we control, but they've had the luck with them. They've made up lost time by working day and night. I've----"

"You've set a drunken fool to steal his plans," drawled the other with deadly sarcasm, "like a second-rate, one-night-stand villain. Don't forget to mention that, too!"

In many ways it resembled an earlier conference which they had shared together; in many points it differed from it. For if Allison had goaded the other man, on that former occasion, largely from a malicious delight in stirring him to verbal violence, such a thought was farthest from his mind now. Allison was talking from a new angle. If a turned page was a turned page to him, at least his memory was good. His lounging body s.h.i.+fted a little.

"Archie, do you remember what I told you about that woods-rat, as you called him once? Did I tell you that he would fight? Well, listen and listen closely while I repeat it for you. He hasn't even warmed to it yet!"

Wickersham went yellow at that, but his icy self-control held firm. He did not break into vituperation this night; he smiled, though his voice was only a whisper.

"Men have dropped out of sight before now, in those woods," he husked.

"I'll win, or I'll see that he lies and rots in one of his own sink-holes."

A big voice is a wonderful weapon at times. Allison's booming ba.s.s made Wickersham's threat seem only mean and hollow when the heavy man leaped to his feet and shook a finger under that high-bridged nose.

"No you won't!" he snapped. "No you won't! And if I didn't know, after hearing you talk, that you haven't stuff enough in you to be dangerous, I'd fix you so you'd be in no condition to bushwhack anybody for the next six months. I'm in a bad mood to-night. Drop out of sight, eh? You'll play this fair--fair at least as I see it by my standards, and they are better standards than yours. You've come dictating to me, ordering me to slip a knife into their backs. Are you that kind of a sneak? Did you think I was? Now listen again, and listen well, for I mean what I say!

"I want that railroad, if the man who is building it is too weak to keep me from taking it away from him. But if I don't get it on such a basis, I'll know that there is a man at the head of it who is big enough to take care of my share of it. Have you got that? Very well.

And now go back to your melodrama, if you want to. Steal his men, if he will let you; fight him every inch of his construction--that is your job--and I'll still insist that it is his fault if he is tardy on the first of May. But it's you and O'Mara from now on, Archie. I'll be a spectator now! And, by Gad, don't you ever come near me again with a request that I . . . don't you ever let me hear you threaten that you----"

Allison's face was suffused before he finished, and Wickersham, astounded past utterance, slid from his chair away from that flouris.h.i.+ng hand which had become a fist. It was no scene to take place between a man and his prospective son-in-law. Realizing that Allison tried to laugh, deprecatingly, at his temper.

"Go out and get him, Archie," he invited. "I'll be watching, don't doubt that. And I know how much you want to win. It's a bigger stake than most folks realize!"

Like Barbara he tried to make his side of the interview kindly at the end, but he sent the other man away wondering whether he had understood that last remark, and afraid to think that he had. And two other things Allison had done. For once he had started to pay hush money to his conscience. Once and for all, like Fat Joe, he had registered at last a refusal to interfere in any way that might spoil the climax of the "big show" for which Fate or Chance or Destiny, or whatever men may call it, was setting the stage, with an unhurried calm that contrasted, ironically, with the mad haste of her actors.

But he watched, as he had promised he would. The same day that more than half of O'Mara's men went on strike and deserted to the Reserve Company's payroll, the news reached him that a trainload of laborers had been shot in to take their places--those very types of laborers which Steve himself had warned Elliott would not last an hour, in the event of trouble. For a week Allison wondered that there was no clash between the displaced men who believed that the river was theirs alone and this new corps which Garry Devereau was handling at the lower end of construction, not by physical prowress, as Fat Joe had ruled, but just as surely and all because, as Joe himself put it, he could d.a.m.n a man merely by bidding him good-morning.

"Honey crossed north to-day to have a look at his winter cut," Joe would observe to his chief at supper at Thirty-Mile; and before the night was many hours older Allison too, in Manhattan, would have learned by wire in less picturesque phraseology, that Archie Wickersham was missing no chances.

"They have now finished hauling their logs to the river," Joe told Steve one night after a prolonged scouting trip. "They are turning their attention to their float dams, now!"

And when that news was relayed to the big man who never ceased to watch he understood why there had been no violence when the rivermen went on strike.

With a clumsiness that shamed him Allison contrived to pa.s.s on to his daughter all such bits of gossip which dribbled down to him; that is, all which appertained strictly to Stephen O'Mara's race against time, and not to the opposition which he was meeting. Her excitement was a bubbling thing, innocent of suspicion or premonition, but he was like a war-worn veteran who stands watching column after column wheel into position, waiting the word to go in, and knows he cannot respond.

Many times Barbara tried to write to Steve in those days and each time destroyed the badly scored sheet, either in dismay at the wilful intimacy of her pen or disgusted with its stilted aloofness. She saw less and less of Wickersham that winter, partly because his affairs were monopolizing all his time, partly because she managed to spend most of her waking hours with Miriam Burrell or her father, who appeared doubly, humbly glad of her companions.h.i.+p. Always she insisted that Stephen O'Mara would win through; she made happy, petty wagers with both of them, in antic.i.p.ation of their journey north, against the first of May. But there was one bit of news which her father had not been able to pa.s.s on to her. For Dexter Allison had had no way of learning of a night when the man who was most in their thoughts had finally lifted a bleak face from his arms, in his cabin up-river, and forced himself, hard-eyed, to acknowledge one defeat.

It was the bitterest January that the hill country had known in twenty years; but mile by mile that month the twin lines of steel crept steadily into the north under the urgings of Garry's smooth voice. The snowfall for February broke all records for half that period; but Steve, with his handful of men at Thirty-Mile, put his piling down.

And then it rained--it rained until small brooks ran torrents and the river tumbled white and thunderous its entire length.

The snow went off the last of March that spring and the gorges could not carry away the water. The sun turned summer hot; it burned the higher ridges dry while the valleys still lay hidden in flood. It was August temperature, the third Sunday in April, when Stephen O'Mara stood and watched, beneath the glare of kerosene torches, his bridge at Thirty-Mile go into position between dark and dawn.

There was no man among them that day who did not show upon his face the strain they had been under. They were few, they were unshaven and dirty and lean as hungry hounds; but they were the men whom Steve had once bidden Hardwick Elliott to watch, once they had begun to scent combat. Fat Joe was no longer plump. Steve was worn down to actual thinness. And it would have taken a careful eye to have selected the chief from their ranks that Sunday.

The huge timbers had dropped into place like bits of jig-sawed puzzle.

At three in the afternoon, too tired both in body and soul for elation, Steve watched them drive home the last spike and heard their hoa.r.s.e effort at a cheer. He had turned to start toward his shack, not like a man who knows that the end of a well-nigh hopeless task is in sight, but like a beaten man. The first of May meant more to Steve than any clause of the East Coast Company's contract could convey. He had not had even one letter since he put her upon her train. Wickersham's appearance on horseback, at the head of the valley, picking his way around the flooded meadow, halted him in his heavy-footed climb. A whistle shrilled, far to the south of them, down the completed track.

And then, after ten years and more, they were face to face again.

"That bridge will have to go down!" Wickersham was breathing hard, for all that he had been riding. "I'm going through with my drive to-day!"

He had dismounted. Steve smiled at him.

"You're a whole week previous, Wickersham," he said, wearily. "I'll be signaling for your first load of logs in less than sixty hours."

Archibald Wickersham wished that he could have believed it impossible, for it would have given him courage and lent conviction to his stand.

But he knew just how fast those few remaining miles of open roadbed would be spanned. His eyes were furtive; there was no body to his voice.

"My men are on the banks," he bl.u.s.tered. "My first head of logs has started down. It's too late to argue now--too late for your promises that none but fools ever believed!" The sure irrevocability of what he was saying blanched his cheeks. "I cannot wait for a miracle to be performed. My timber must come out on this flood."

Stephen O'Mara had whipped him once, but men had interfered. This day Chance or Destiny or Fate--whatever you may choose to call it--saved him from destruction. The lean and weary man who had not been out of his clothes for three days and three nights, save for a plunge in the icy river, had taken his first step forward, when the whistle screamed a nearer warning.

She had told him that she would come to see the finish of his race, but he had long since stopped believing that. And now when she stood and waved her hand at him from the bra.s.s-railed observation platform of Allison's private car which a switch engine, out of patience with the grade, was shunting across the lower end of the clearing, he could only stand and stare dully, no faith in his eyes.

The loud plaid of her father's garb flashed behind her in the doorway.

Hardwick Elliott's fine face peered over his shoulder. And Wickersham, who had not seen his fiance in a month, had started toward them, stiffly erect in his immaculate whipcord habit. Wickersham was smiling; Wickersham was safe again. For Fate or Chance or Destiny who had been setting the stage was bringing on her princ.i.p.als. She would brook no _ad lib_ now.

A low mutter in the north became an ominous murmur while Steve was following slowly in Wickersham's steps, and he realized what it meant.

He stopped to stare at his handful of men, rearing their heads to listen, too. Steve had been all winter alone with the puzzle of his own inferiority which he could never understand. And a minute later, when he had reached out to help to the ground a little blue clad figure with fur at throat and wrists, she drew the be-furred edge of her skirt about her ankles and laughingly refused his a.s.sistance, and jumped to the ground unaided. She was far too excited to know what she was doing; she hardly saw him at all in that first moment, but the act spelled much to him. His hands were grimy, his face stubbly and streaked with sweat and mud, and he had been months alone with his too-sensitive spirit.

"You should not be here," was all he said to her. "This is no place for you."

He shook hands with the men, mechanically--Allison quizzical, Elliott concerned. He went back to his bridge. The water had come up a half foot in the last few minutes some one--Fat Joe, perhaps--told him; it was sucking greedily at the piles. And in the north the ominous murmur had become a rhythmic roar.

Wickersham's men were driving the river. They were singing "Harrigan, That's Me!"