MERN’S mercenaries were not cowards. They had served valiantly as guards of strike breakers, had fought in many forays, had winged their attackers, and had been winged in return. At mill gates they had resisted mobs and had endured missiles; they had ridden on trucks, protecting goods and drivers, through lanes of howling, hostile humanity; they had thrown the cordon of their bodies around dock workers.

But the gunmen’s exploits in intrepidity had been, of and in the cities.

The environment at Skulltree was the Great Open.

They were not backed by solidity or barricaded behind walls. There was not the reassurance of good, honest earth under their feet; they were precariously perched in space, so it seemed—standing on the stringers of the dam, peering into a void of shrouding mists and thunderous waters, the wilderness all about them!

In their battles in past times they had been able to see the foe; now they were called on to fight a noise—the bodeful detonations of blasts, to right, to left—here and there.

There was a foe; he was on his way. They did not know what sort of ruin he purposed to wreak as the climax of his performance. Craig himself did not know, so he affirmed in reply to anxious queries, and the boss’s uncertainty and increasing consternation added to the peculiar psychological menace of the thing.

“Give us orders, Mr. Craig!” pleaded the captain of the guards. “Show us something to fight against. How many of ’em are there? Where are they?

“It’s that damnable Latisan, working single-handed. I’m sure of it. Go get him!”

“If you don’t get him, he’s going to blow up this dam,” stated the frightened lawyer.

A far-flung bomb of dynamite landed in the water and shot a geyser spraying against the fog pall.

“I’m taking that guess for gospel,” affirmed the chief gunman, wiping spray from his face. “Mr. Craig, you can’t expect us to hang on here, facing a thing like what’s coming!”

“Shoot him!” gasped the Comas director, but he was revolving on unsteady feet and the aimlessness of his gaze revealed that he had no definite idea of procedure; his incertitude wrecked all the courage of his supporters.

“It can’t be done, sir. Not in this fog! We’d better get ashore——”

“And let him wreck this dam?”

“If he’s going to wreck it, we’d better be off it.”

In his fear Craig became insulting, and that attitude ended his control of the situation. “You’re hired with money, you cowards! Now earn it!”

“This is where your money can’t buy something for you, Mr. Craig,” the captain of the gunmen declared, and then he led the retreat of his squad across Skulltree dam and into the woods on the far shore from the portentous, invisible peril.

And with dire extremity clearing for the moment his clouded vision, enabling him to look squarely at the matter of service and loyalty as he was able to command it, Craig knew that when his money failed him in the north country he had no other resource. He had blinked that fact in the past, having found that in ordinary affairs his dollars were dominant; but this extraordinary event was knocking out from under him all the props of confidence; he felt bitterly alone all of a sudden.

“We’ll have to vamoose off this dam,” declared the deputy sheriff.

“You’ve got your duty as an officer of the law,” shouted Craig, desperately feeling that in the case of this man, at least, he was making an appeal to something that was not covered by a money consideration.

“And I’ve got my common sense, too!” retorted the sheriff. He started away.

“So have I,” agreed the attorney, a lawyer who had obeyed a telegram and had joined the Craig expedition at the shire town of the county the night before.

“There’s an injunction!” stormed the field director.

“And there’s a lunatic with a sack of dynamite.” The lawyer crooked his arm across his face; a missile from the white void had splashed near by and water sprayed him. “You have told me that Latisan is no longer in Flagg’s service. I’m not depending now on law, Mr. Craig, I’m depending on my legs.”

He fled on the trail of the officer. But he left a pregnant thought in Craig’s mind: Latisan was not an employee of Echford Flagg. As a matter of fact, Craig owned to himself—his clarity of vision persisting in that time of overwhelming disaster, in the wreck of the hopes built on the power of his money—that the thing had now become almost wholly a personal, guerrilla warfare between himself and Latisan; and when the truth came out, if the matter were forced to that issue, Craig would lack the backing of authority fully as much as Latisan lacked it then, in his assault on property. The bluff of the guns had not worked! Craig was realizing that in hiring such men, as he had on the spur of the moment, his rage instead of his business good judgment had prevailed.

There were the repeated warnings of his superiors! The law would be obliged to investigate if Skulltree dam were wrecked, and would probe to the bottom of the moving reasons! Scandal, rank scandal! Craig could behold President Horatio Marlow as he sat that day with upraised, monitory forefinger, urging the touchy matter of credits and reputation. Craig could hear Dawes, the attorney: “That talk puts the thing up to you square-edged!”

Down from the mist-shrouded cliff was advancing a vengeful man who walked with the footsteps of thunder.

As Craig had looked ahead, basing his judgment on his experience with men and matters, it had seemed an easy matter to guard Skulltree with money and law. But in this astounding sortie of Latisan’s, Comas money was of no use and Craig was developing an acute fear of the law which, invoked, would take matters into court. Over and over, his alarmed convictions pounded on his caution.

He crouched under a rain of dirt and pebbles—then he ran away.

When he reached the far shore he jumped into a bateau that was pulled up there. With all the power of his lungs he yelled for rowers. He was obliged to confess loudly and unreservedly that he was giving up the fight—was seeking a way of stopping Latisan—before any of his men would come from the shelter of woods and fog and serve him.

He cursed them with the vigor of a master of galley slaves when the bateau was frothing along the deadwater. Then he bellowed into the fog, seeking a replying hail which would locate for him the Flagg crew. There was no repentance in him; his was a panic of compromise—a headlong rush to save himself from consequences. There was just as much uncertainty about what Latisan would do as there was about the dynamiter’s exact location in that fog.

Therefore, Craig announced himself with raucous staccato of: “I quit! I quit! Get that man! Tell him I quit!”

Men hailed from the shore and their voices guided the rowers. Craig leaped from the bow of the bateau and waded for the last few yards.

“Go stop him! Bring him here!” He tossed his arms.

“Huh!” scoffed old Vittum. “That’s a job for somebody who can tell which way the next stroke of lightning is heading.”

“I’ll give five hundred dollars to the man who’ll get to him and stop him before he smashes that dam!”

Craig added to the other visions which had been torturing him the possible catastrophe of the Comas logs roaring through past the mouth of a useless canal; he could look ahead still farther and see the grins of the sawmill men down the Noda, setting their own prices.

Once more Craig was finding that his money was getting him nothing that day, and his sense of helplessness was revealed by his sagging jowls and dolorous eyes; and he had always depended on what money could buy!

There was no alacrity for service shown by any man of Flagg’s crew.

“We’re not afraid,” said Felix Lapierre, breaking on Craig’s furious taunts. “We have promise’ to keep off and let him make good for himself—the lone hand—that’s it!”

“That’s it!” agreed Vittum.

“He has made good,” bleated the Comas man. “If he goes any farther it will only be bad.”

The dialogue was taking place disjointedly in the silences between the blasts. But Craig made himself heard above the next explosion. “He’s ripping hell out of that dam now. Get to him. A thousand dollars for the man who stops him!”

“No man in this crew needs any of your money!” Lida was defiantly in front of the Comas director. “But if you’re ready to listen to reason after this——”

She broke off and turned from him.Before they realized that she had volunteered, she was away in the fog.

In a moment they heard her voice, raised in a thrilling call, appealing to the avenger.

“That’ll fetch him back—even if he was two miles deep in hell,” Craig was informed by one of the men. “It’s a lucky thing for the Three C’s that she’s on the job to-day.”

The Comas director stood holding to a tree. He shivered every time an explosion clanged its echoes from cliff to cliff.

And when, after a waiting that was agony, the dreadful bombardment ceased, Craig staggered to the bateau and sat down on its prow.

“I don’t blame you for looking that way,” said Vittum. “If Latisan had been driven to get that dam to-day you would have lost your drive for the canal; and, before God and your directors, you would have been responsible!”

When Latisan came out of the fog he had put away, somewhere, the sack which had held destruction.

When he had gone away from them, entering upon the perils of his undertaking, he was calm and resolute. Now that he was back, a champion who had prevailed single-handed, he was pale, trembling, and broken; they did not understand, at first.

Lida came with him, trying to soothe him, pleading and protesting; he constantly muttered broken speech and seemed to be trying to control a mood that was half frenzy. He left her and stumbled across the open space to Craig.“Everything else you have done—it’s nothing as bad as this last. You sent her where you didn’t dare to go yourself. Good God! you Comas sneak, I ought to kill you where you sit! For all you cared you were making me a murderer of an innocent girl!”

“You had to be stopped. She went before I knew what she was going to do.”

“And if she hadn’t gone on her own account you would have tried to hire her to do it! It’s always a case of what you can buy with your money—that’s your style, Craig. Now you’re up against something you can’t buy. I’m still working alone—understand that? If you want to report me as an outlaw, go ahead! I’m giving you squarer warning than you gave me on the Tomah when you smashed the Latisans. If I smash that dam down there I’ll be smashing you! I’ll do it if you put as much as a toothpick in the way of the independent drives. I’ll blow the bottom out of your canal, in the bargain. And if you think you or your gang can locate me over there”—he pointed in the direction of the hills of the watershed between the rivers basins—“try it! I know every hole in those hills. I’ll keep bombing your drives till you can’t keep a man on the job. That’s the kind of an outlaw I am from now on.”

“It’s between us now, Latisan. I’ll own up to it. It has come to that.”

“Yes, it’s between renegades. I’m admitting that I’m one,” retorted Ward.

Craig stood up. If there was any of the spirit of Three C’s bluster left in him he was concealing it successfully.“Latisan, all these men have heard me say that I quit. I lost my head and was pushing the thing too far, considering it from a business standpoint. Can I be any more honest than that?”

“It sounds all right, but I take stock in you only to the extent that you’ll stay in line if I stay on the job. I shall stay, as I have warned you.”

“Suppose we talk turkey about the common rights at Skulltree!”

“You’ll have to talk with Miss Kennard about her grandfather’s interests. I’m simply a chance comer here!”

Latisan walked away and leaned against a tree.

Craig approached Lida. “We have already had some talk about the matter, I believe. I retreat from the position I have taken. Evidently we must make mutual allowances. What have you thought out about the details of a plan to let your logs through?”

The girl did not reply; she had no plans; she did not understand such matters.

“We’ll have to decide on the head of water you’ll need, and I take it you’ll allow us enough for the canal so that we can save our drive.” Craig was trying hard to offer compromise, but he was not able to repress all his sarcastic venom. “There’s the matter of sorting and the other details. I’ll have to ask for your views, Miss Kennard, because any misunderstanding may be dangerous, so I have been informed.”

She looked helplessly from Craig to Latisan. The latter’s aloofness, which he had displayed ever since he first appeared to her that day, his present peculiar relationship to the affair, his insistence that he must serve alone, made her problem more complex. Her vivid yearning was to give all into Latisan’s keeping, but she did not dare to propose it.

She looked at Vittum and Felix, seeking advice. The French Canadian smiled and shrugged his shoulders, evading responsibility. He did not understand such matters, either.

“I suppose I might be able to dig up some sort o’ general ideas, give me time enough,” said Vittum, when her eyes questioned him anxiously. “But I’m sort of hazy right now.” He winked at her and ducked his head to indicate Latisan.

“I’m afraid!” she phrased the lament with a doleful motion of her lips rather than with spoken words.

“It can’t be said but what he’ll be impartial—the best one to ask,” mumbled Vittum, stepping close to her. “He ain’t hired by either side, as I understand it!” He was ironic, but there was a suggestion which she grasped desperately. She went to Latisan. Their conversation was in an undertone and the bystanders did not hear the words.

When she returned to Craig, Lida, confident in her new poise, reassured, informed in a fashion which fortified her self-reliance, met the Comas man with a demeanor which did credit to the granddaughter of Echford Flagg.

“I have not tried to involve Mr. Latisan in any way. I have asked his advice as an expert.” She looked straight into the shifting eyes of the Comas director. “Last fall he was at Tech, and took a special course in hydraulic engineering. You know that, of course, Mr. Craig!” She paused till he bowed to admit the truth with which she insisted on displacing the lie which had followed Latisan in the north country. “And Mr. Latisan has had a great deal of practical experience on his own drives. It seems absolutely necessary to have a sorting gap here, with men of both crews handling the logs. When our timber is through the sluiceway—the daily run of logs—we are to be given a head of water which will take us through the gorge. As to the logs upriver—the rear—we are willing to join drives with you, Mr. Craig, so that we may use all the water together.” She set back her shoulders. “That plan will serve us this season. For another season the independents will have laws of their own from the legislature. I’m quite sure that the independents have waked up and know now what some special legislative acts can do for their interests.”

“I beg your pardon for breaking in, Miss Kennard,” said Latisan, from his distance. “But this seems to be the time for me to say to Mr. Craig, in the presence of witnesses, that the same plan goes for the Tomah region. The independents over there can’t be licked, sir.”

“Nor the Latisans,” shouted somebody in the Flagg crew.

That friendly corroboration of the young man’s inmost determination served as a challenge. The drive master walked toward Craig and shook his fist. “No, nor the Latisans! We have a sawmill, and we’re not worrying about the logs to feed it. But you understand, Mr. Craig, that the independents must have gangway on the river for their cut. And we know how to get gangway!”

He went back to his tree and resumed his whittling.

“To me the future looks very promising,” said Lida. “We’re all a little disturbed now, Mr. Craig, but we’re coming to a perfect understanding. Don’t you think so?”

Craig did not reply at once, and she added, with ingenuous affectation of desiring to bring forward reasons for his agreement, “If the Comas company does join drives with us you will have the help of a perfectly wonderful crew, Mr. Craig. I’m told that we’re a week or ten days ahead of the usual time—and the men have never seemed to be considering mere wages!”

The Three C’s director rolled his eyes, avoiding her candidly provoking regard. He shifted his gaze to Latisan, who had turned his back on the group and was still whittling placidly, propped against a tree by his shoulder. “Wonderful teamwork,” growled the Comas man. “But sticking out for anything else will be a fool stunt. Miss Kennard, there’s a lawyer over there in the woods, somewhere! The thing to do now seems to be to hunt him up so that he can help us to pass papers of agreement.” He swung his hand to indicate the bateau. “Will you go with me?”

She hesitated. Then she smiled amiably on Craig. “I think I’d rather walk along the path, sir. I’ll meet you and the lawyer at this end of the dam.”

Craig trudged down to the boat and was swept away into the fog.

Latisan did not turn; he kept on whittling.”Mr. Latisan!“ she invited. ”May I have your company to the dam? I’m sorry to trouble you, but I may be obliged to refer to you for further advice.“

”I feel called on to remark,“ said old Vittum, always an irrepressible commentator when comment seemed to be necessary, speaking after Latisan and Lida had walked away into the mist—”I’ll say to all that she knows her business.“

”But it was Latisan who advised her,“ objected a literalist.

”Hell! I ain’t speaking of this drive,“ snapped the old man. ”I’m complimenting her on a job where she doesn’t need anybody’s advice!“