“Not on your say-so,” retorted Watkins, whose fighting blood had not cooled with age. “Don’t you get gay with the old man, Shan McCane. I’ll——”
“Shut up, Ben!” MacNutt ordered. He turned to McCane. “I’ll give you the logs because your men are sure and mine ain’t. Break them out o’ that, Haggarty; and you, Laviolette, hitch on and pull them across the line to wherever they say they laid. All the same I want to tell ye it wasn’t my teamsters snaked them here.”
“An’ do ye think mine did?—a likely t’ing” said Rough Shan. “Mind this, now, MacNutt, you be more careful about whose logs ye take.”
MacNutt lit his pipe deliberately before replying.
“The next one ye pull onto our skidways we’ll keep,” said he.
McCane glowered at him. “Ye’ve got a gall. Steal our logs, an’ tell me I done it meself! I want to tell ye, MacNutt, I won’t take that from you nor anny man.”
“Go back and boss your gang,” said MacNutt coldly, refusing the evident challenge.
He had made up his mind to give no provocation; but he had also determined to push the fight to a finish when it came, as he saw it inevitably must. The occurrence of the morning’ confirmed his suspicion that McCane was following out a deliberate plan. He perceived, too, that the matter of the logs was a tactical mistake of the latter’s. For, if Rough Shan had confined his activities to supplying the men with whiskey and fomenting discontent, MacNutt would have been forced to discharge half of them, and good hands were scarce. Thus the camp would have been practically crippled. But an accusation of log stealing would weld the men solidly together for the honour of their employer.
Haggarty, the iron-fisted cant-hook man, who had drawn Kent pay for years, took up the matter in the bunk-house that night.
“Nobody knows better nor Rough Shan hisself who put them logs on our skidway,” he declared with a tremendous oath. “An’ for why did he do it? To pick a row, no less. He thought ould Mac would keep the sticks an’ tell him to go to the divil. Mac was too foxy for him that time.”