“You are promoted to position vacated by Renwick. Refuse strikers’ demands. Ship at Squamish Oriental order white pine. Utmost importance lumber loaded within week. Use every means in power to keep plant operating.
“Robert Rennie.”
He passed the message to Gillis. The big man turned and grasped Donald’s hand in congratulation.
“We’ll get that order out on time or bust,” declared Gillis grimly.
Donald distributed firearms among his loyal men, and one-half the crew patrolled the plant while the others slept.
Donald had been up the greater part of the night, and at Gillis’s earnest request he went to his cabin near midnight. As the door closed behind him, Connie, with her rifle resting in the hollow of her arm, rose silently from behind a tree in the darkness of the hillside and flitted noiselessly on moccasined feet from stump to stump. Unseen she reached the corner of Donald’s cabin, where she sank to the ground with the soft, slow grace of a nestling bird.
The Cheakamus Mill, robbed of man-power, was forced to cease operations. At the Summit Mill work went on with such speed as in the situation Donald was able to induce in the men, who were on edge. To him it seemed that they were working on top of a powder mine that might go off at any moment. He discovered in himself a faculty to handle men and to raise them to a fever pitch of enthusiasm—not that the B.C. logger is a hard man to lift to the fighting point. His fight against great odds had gained the sympathy of the loyal—a sympathy and respect that money could not buy. Gillis’s gang, with the exception of “Blackie,” remained fervently faithful.
Toiling in the hot sun, nearly blinded by sweat, singing lustily, this gallant crew worked their twelve hours without a murmur of complaint. Donald lived on the job, ate on the job, and all day long he drove his men even as he drove himself. His rest consisted of such fitful snatches of sleep as he could steal between his rounds of the night guards.
The first move of the strikers was not of open violence. The haul-back on two of the donkeys broke without apparent reason; one of the big saws had been tampered with; Wilkinson reported two fires of incendiary origin, and also that an attempt to dynamite the power-house had been frustrated.
On the third morning Hand, at the head of a mob of fifty men, made a swift descent on the lumbering operations. It might have been successful if Donald had not expected something of this kind and set efficient watch.