III
“That all happened in the days before the war when the Big Boss was feelin’ a lot more cocky than he seems to be nowadays,” began the cook. “This Frompton girl, who was a waitress in one of the city eatin’ houses, was something of a good looker, but it seems that down east she’d had a nasty bit of past, mostly some low skunk’s fault who deceived her and skipped out leavin’ her to face it alone. After her baby, maybe lucky for its poor little self, died, her and her mother came up to Kam City where nobody knew them. But scandal like that, especially if it’s about a woman, will travel. One night a young blood, a son of one of the wealthy ginks in the town, being a little worse of bootleg, tried to get fresh with her, and the hot-tempered little thing hauls off and biffs him in the face. The poor prune wasn’t man enough to take his medicine, but bawls her out with some dirty remark about what she’d been in the town she’d come from. I guess she got seein’ red over that, for she picked up a catsup bottle and bashed him on the head with it. The rich man’s son came near kickin’ the bucket from that clout, and, as it was, he was a month or so in the hospital before they were sure he’d pull through. They didn’t pull the girl up for attackin’ him, because his family didn’t want the notoriety; but she was held in jail on a charge of disorderly conduct till they’d see what would happen to him. Then, if he lived, they intended to bring her before the magistrate and get her packed off to a reformatory as an example of what happens to bad girls who beat up rich men’s sons.
“Well, I happened to know some of the crowd that was mixed up in the rumpus and had been followin’ the case. One night when the Big Boss was in the dinin’ camp havin’ supper I threw down the paper and started to cuss.’
“He looks over at me and asks: ‘Why all the sweet language, Macdougal?’
“I starts in and tells him all about the case and how I thought the world was all wrong that nobody would lift a finger to help out a poor, fallen woman like this one. He listened with a lot more interest than you can generally get out of him, and I wound up by sayin’, ‘Cripes, what’s all the preachers for that they don’t start in scorin’ the guilty parties instead of standin’ by while everybody pans the girl?’
“‘The preachers ain’t to blame, Sandy,’ he comes back. ‘Most of the preachers go as far as they dare in settin’ the world right, and every once in awhile you read about some of the darin’ ones being bumped out of their pulpits for speakin’ their minds.’ Then his face gets chalk-white like you see it when he’s mad. ‘It’s this system they call Society needs fixin’, Sandy,’ he sneers. ‘Society that just wants to use the law and the preachers to keep its chosen crowd out of jail in this world and out of hell in the next.’
“Think of him, the king of the big timber crooks, a-talkin’ this way. But that was just like him—always contrary to everybody else.
“‘Macdougal,’ says he suddenly, ‘don’t you wish you was a great lawyer?’
“‘Why?’ I asks.
“‘Because,’ says he, ‘you could defend this girl before the court and maybe cheat the thing they call the Law.’
“‘I never thought of that,’ I replied, but I could see there was something comin’.
“That little devil-grin flickers around the Big Boss’s poker face that’s always there when he’s plannin’ hellery. ‘We ain’t lawyers, Macdougal,’ he states, ‘but I know where the money can be found to hire the best sob-stirrin’ lawyer in Kam City, and if he gets her clear there’ll be a bonus of a couple of hundred in it for him.’
“I knew what that meant. I had wished myself into the job of hirin’ the lawyer and seein’ that he got the money on the quiet. Acey Smith outlines how I am to go about the deal and says: ‘If the lawyer gets her off, we’ll see if we can’t get a job for her.’
“To make a long story short we got Jacobs, the best lawyer on them sort of cases in Kam City, and he puts up such a talk for her, a-quotin’ Scripture and so on, that he had everybody in the courtroom except the district crown attorney wipin’ the corners of their eyes. He winds up by statin’ there was a party who was prepared to start her off fresh on a decent job. The old magistrate was so taken with Jacob’s speil he said he thought she hadn’t had a chance, and, after a lecture to her on the straight and narrow path, he lets her off without even the suspended sentence the crown attorney tried to horn in with as a last resort.
“It was Jacobs turned the girl and her mother loose on me when they insisted on thanking the man who’d put up the money to defend her, and in a weak moment, bein’ kind of flustered, I promised to take them to him. I’ll never forget what happened when I took them out to the old camp layout on the tug. As I said, the girl was rather a good-lookin’ kid and she hadn’t commenced to get that hard jib women who go under seem to take on. She seemed still kind of dazed over it all when I walked her and her mother into the superintendent’s office. ‘There’s the man,’ says I before I had yet thought just what I was doing. ‘There’s the man you can thank for savin’ you from the clink.’
“The Big Boss he scowls at me as black as thunder and I knew I’d put my foot in it for fair, but the girl breaks down and falls at his feet, a-sobbin’ that she wasn’t worth savin’. In sort of hysterics she was. For once the Big Boss seemed like he didn’t know what to do. He looked around wild-eyed as though he’d like to beat it out the door. But he couldn’t, because in her little cryin’ fit she’d taken a strangle hold on his boots. So he lifts her up and chucks her into her mother’s arms.
“‘Get up, girl,’ he cries kind of hoarse and bashful-like. ‘I ain’t your judge, and if you’ve done any wrong I don’t know anything about it and don’t want to. The North Star’s goin’ to offer you a job, and Macdougal here has the lookin’ after of that. Go straight, girl,’ he adds, fixin’ her with them flashin’ coal-black eyes of his, ‘and if any one throws this thing up at you again let us know about it and there’ll be little old hell to pay!’
“Then he packs us back on the next tug with orders where she was to look for the job. It wasn’t in a North Star office, but one of the other factories in town that people say is run with North Star money.
“But don’t you think there wasn’t a curtain-call for me when I got back to camp for givin’ away to the girl and her mother as to the man whackin’ up for her lawyer. The Big Boss nearly fired me.
“‘You don’t know me, Macdougal,’ he grits. ‘I ain’t a movin’ picture hero such as you seem to think. Didn’t I tell you we were in on this thing just for the fun of cheatin’ the law? Besides, it wasn’t my money but the North Star’s that paid for her lawyer, and it was the North Star’s influence that got her that job, just the same as the North Star has rescued other people from the clutches of the law that it knew it could use. That girl’s one of us now and she’d go through hell-fire in the company’s interests if she was asked to. If you wasn’t blind you’d have seen that from the first. Beat it to your beanery and don’t let me ever hear you mention a word about this again.’
“Aye, he’s a queer, queer man, is Acey Smith,” concluded the cook. “Sometimes it seems to me something is eatin’ the heart out of him—something burnin’ inside him and fillin’ him up with hellery. Sometimes I think he’s a good man with a devil in him that won’t give him no rest.”
The cook’s story, like others he had heard, impressed Hammond even if it did increase the enigma that hung about the personality of the timber boss. “It is certain he has some fixed method in all this madness of his,” Hammond mused as much to himself as to his companion. “One object undoubtedly is to keep every one guessing what his real motives are. He has to keep himself pretty much a mystery in order to carry out the orders of his bosses.”
“Oh, but he ain’t carryin’ out their crooked work just for the money there’s in it,” spoke up Macdougal. “There’s something deeper’n that. I’ve been a-studyin’ the man too close and too long to believe that. It’s something inside the man himself that makes him carry on as he does.”
“I’ll quite agree with you there,” responded Hammond. “You call it a devil while I would call it an obsession of mind or a ruling mania: all of which are pretty much the one and the same thing, except that our forefathers called it a devil and let it go at that. If one could only get the key to that obsession they’d soon be able to clear up the whole mystery of this camp.”
“Aye, Hammond, if you could get the key,” observed the cook, “but Acey Smith is canny enough to keep that key locked up in a dark place that nobody knows but him.”