“Keep a lookout here for while,” Bob said briefly. “It’s rather a bad place. By the way,” he went on, struck afresh by that haunting sense of familiarity which had come to him before, “what’s your name?”
The young giant dropped his lids, and his muscular fingers interlocked tightly around the stout ash pole of the peavey.
“Curly,” he said, in an oddly embarrassed tone.
“Ah! That all?”
The youngster hesitated, and then, flinging back his head, stared defiantly at Bainbridge.
“No,” he retorted. “It’s Kollock—Curly Kollock.”
Bob frowned slightly. “Indeed! Any relation to Bill?”
“His brother.”
The frown deepened and there was silence for a moment. Bill Kollock, the “trouble man” of Elihu Crane and his associates in the Lumber Trust, was not a character to commend himself to Bainbridge. The brother was more than likely to be of the same breed, he reflected as he stared with hard, narrowing eyes at the flushed, defiant face of the boy before him. And yet——
“Well?” snapped the boy suddenly. “I s’pose this means git my time?”