II
Sandy Macdougal was enjoying his afternoon nod when Hammond dropped in at their bunkhouse, but immediately after the latter’s entry the cook rolled out of the blankets in his sock-feet. “Cripes, didn’t I lock that door?” he gasped as he sat blinking at the newcomer. “Huh, guess I’m gettin’ nerves, but the goings on here lately is enough to make a man loco.”
“Why—what’s up now, Sandy?” laughed Hammond.
“Place is alive with cut-throats,” declared the other. “Fellow has to sleep with one eye open to watch that one of ’em don’t come in to bean him for his wad.”
“Yes, I saw a lot of strangers about the camp,” observed Hammond. “Who are they anyway?”
“Gang of low-brow detectives and strike-breakers brought in from Winnipeg and Duluth on a towed barge early this morning. They’re the scum of creation, and the way they gave orders to my boys when they came in for eats—well, when Acey Smith comes back he’ll have another strike on his hands. My outfit didn’t hire on here to be bossed around by no second-class bums like them.”
“So the North Star’s putting up a bluff of breaking the strike?”
“North Star nothin’!” derided Sandy. “If it was I wouldn’t feel so cussed mean toward them. This gang’s been put in here by the other company—the Kam City Pulp and Paper Mill crowd—to take hold of the camp work if the North Star’s pole-cutters and boom-tenders go out in sympathy with the tugmen. Mooney put me wise, and you bet we make ’em whack up for every meal they get here at rates just the same as if they was stoppin’ at the Royal Aleck in Winnipeg.”
Hammond whistled. “So that’s the idea, eh?” He had to concede to himself that Gildersleeve must have acted with considerable despatch. No doubt he intended to use these men for waterfront land work when he got his tugs over from Duluth to convey the poles to Kam City.
“Oh, they ain’t goin’ to come very much, at that,” insisted Macdougal. “Any old time this strike is settled it will be settled by the North Star itself—and it won’t be settled till then, not if they bring all the strikebreakers and mounties between here and hell’s gangway to the camp.”
“So you think the North Star has the upper hand in this deal, Sandy?”
Macdougal fished out his black bottle and insisted on Hammond having a “nip” with him. “If they ain’t got the upper hand right now,” he replied, “they will have it when the shuffle’s over. There ain’t any outsider can come in here and put it over Acey Smith. . . . And believe me, whatever is his game, I’m one who wants to see the Big Boss win. Here’s to him!”
The deep underlying note in Sandy’s tones made Hammond gaze at him fixedly. “You used to say, Sandy, that he was the king of crooks,” he reminded. “You used to say, in fact, that Acey Smith was a devil in human form.”
“Crook he may be and devil too,” conceded the other. “But I’m with him because—” and Sandy smote a nearby bench with his fist,—“because he’s a man! He’s one of them kind of men that if the whole world was jumpin’ at his throat he’d put his back again’ a rock and fight it out without askin’ help or sob-stuff from any of ’em. And he’d go down grinnin’ that little devil-grin o’ his and tellin’ them all to go to hell and be damned to them—that’s the kind of a man the Big Boss is!”
Hammond did not smile at this unexpected outburst of hero-worship. The little Scotch-Canadian was so emotionally intense about it.
“Listen, Hammond,” he was saying. “The Big Boss likely is as black a rascal as they say he is, and that’s a whole lot; but he never fights the weak or the poor. Ain’t I seen what he’s done unbeknownst to most for unfortunates in this camp? Ain’t I been in the city when I seen him stop on the street to help a blind bum over a dangerous crossin’ when everybody else was hustlin’ by and lookin’ the other way so they wouldn’t see their duty? Don’t I know that in the hard times six years ago it was this same Acey Smith who bought up a row of shacks in the coal docks district where the landlords was dumpin’ whole families out because they had nothin’ to pay them with, and don’t I know that none of them has ever paid since when they was hard up? I know because it was one of my side jobs to look after them houses and see that the taxes was paid.
“Yes, and I could tell you lots of other things about the Big Boss that would be just as hard to believe,” the cook went on. “Suppose you never heard about the case of that Frompton girl?”
Other matters were uppermost in Hammond’s mind, but he knew there was no stopping Sandy when the talking mood was on him, so he said good-naturedly: “No, Sandy, tell us the story.”