“That Half-Breed Jake has been at the hotel all evening,” he said at last. “He has been talking a long time about the Edmonds boys and how they have disappeared because they had to. It is true that John’s books at the bank were pretty badly mixed and they have had an expert up to go over them, but nothing has been proved yet, one way or the other. It seemed to me, at last, that Jake talked rather too much. He always hated the Edmonds boys, they were too square and honest and they had blocked him more than once in some of his devilment. If there is a mean or a cruel or a crooked way of doing a thing, he will do it. That’s Jake.”
“But why is every one so afraid of him?” inquired Hugh. “He is only one man against all of you.”
“It is just part of living here to be afraid of him, I suppose, and to try to keep out of trouble with him,” Jethro answered slowly. “The Indians fear him so much that they will do anything he says; he understands them as very few men do and he uses his knowledge to get what he wants. A man who can control these Chippewas has a lot of power. There is a white deer that ranges these woods once in a long time and is supposed to bring bad luck. The Indians have a saying that whoever sees the white deer or opposes Half-Breed Jake is sure to die inside a year.”
“But the Swedes have better sense than that!” exclaimed Hugh.
“The Swedes are very superstitious too, and once they are convinced of a thing it is hard to make them change. And it does seem that whoever stands in Jake’s way is cursed with bad fortune until he gives it up. There are only a few that ever dared stand out against him, such as the Edmonds boys, and where are they?”
Hugh sat quiet, watching the moon come up over the eastern rim of the valley. He found Jethro as talkative as the Swedes were silent, but he felt no very great interest in these accounts of Half-Breed Jake, a man whom he instinctively hated and would, he hoped, never see again. Only wonder as to why Jethro wished him to stay in Rudolm and what all these details had to do with himself, held his lagging attention.
“Do you see that road,” Jethro went on heatedly, “that road yonder that leads over the hill? That would have meant a lot to the people here, but it came to nothing. It was to be built through the woods as far as Jasper Peak and would have opened up the country at the upper end of the lake. Jake stopped it. He calls all that country his, and is bound to keep the fishing and the hunting and trapping for himself. He killed the plan with open threats and secret lies: at first the men went at it with a rush, but in the end somehow the whole thing fell through. It was the first time he ever scored a real victory off Oscar Dansk.”
Hugh turned, his interest caught at last.
“That is one person I want to know about,” he said. “Who is this Oscar Dansk?”
“He is Linda Ingmarsson’s younger brother,” Jethro answered. “You know that much and it is hard to tell you a great deal more. Oscar isn’t like the rest of us. I don’t quite know what to say about him; he is always dreaming about something big, some way. His father must have been quite a great person back in Sweden; he was poor to the end of his life, just as every one in Rudolm is poor, but you can see that Oscar and Linda are not quite the same kind of people as the rest.”