As with Bill, so the others. Filing in, they testified, one by deeper sullenness, others by attempts at a swagger, to the influences which had wrought on him. Few attained the easy insolence of Michigan Red, who demanded an itemized account of his store bill and insisted on signing the roll with his own hand. Touching the pen, railroad fashion, they passed out, while Hart signed for them, to add their doubtings to the general mystification.
What was forward? Had Carter obtained new crews, or would the company close down work? As the line still fell thirty miles short of the northern settlements, the latter thought filled the minds of the Silver Creek men, who saw themselves left marketless by their own act, with sick misery; brought pause to their envious cupidity, despite Michigan's assurances that it was all a bluff.
"'Tain't," Bill Anderson contradicted him. "I was just over to the cook-house for a drink, an' the cook has orders to serve no meals after breakfast to-morrow morning."
"That so?" a dozen voices questioned.
"Ask for yourselves. He's at the door now calling to supper."
And the cook confirmed the report, adding, moreover, his mite to their discomfiture by malignantly animadverting upon the ménages to which they were about to return. "My cooking don't suit, eh?" demanded the offended artist. "It's pertatoes an' sow-belly for yours after this. In a month you won't be able to tell your ribs from a rail corral." And truth so flavored his railings that they saw, in fancy, themselves looking back from their prairie farms upon his rude but plentiful fleshpots—at which ripe moment the door opened to admit Carter, Smythe, and Bender.
Pausing at the end of the centre table, Carter glanced over the rows of faces which turned curiously up to him as on the occasion that marked the beginnings of his fight for mastery in the cook-house at the winter camp. Very fittingly, setting and persona for this last act of a long struggle were almost the same as the first. Hines and the Cougar, to be sure, were gone over the Great Divide. Strangers sat in place of Shinn and the handful that returned to their farms after the log-drive. But here were the tables, a-bristle with tinware; dim lanterns, dependent from the low pole-roof; the faces, peering from Rembrandt shadows, fiercely animal, pregnant with possibilities such as have reddened the snows of many a forest camp. Overlooking them now, at the climax of a year-long play, he could not but thrill to the thought that whereas they had opposed him at every turn, those iron impresarios, the Fates, had left choice of endings with him, author of the drama. It was his to crush or spare—to crush and gain the cringing respect which they accorded to frost, drought, pestilence, stern henchmen of the illimitable; to spare and attain next place to a fair potato-crop in their esteem; to manage them for their and his own good.
To the latter end he bent his words, addressing them, half jocularly, in their own argot. "Well, boys, we've played our game to a finish, but before we throw away the deck let's count tricks. I don't blame you for striking. You have a right to sell your labor in the dearest market as I have to buy mine in the cheapest. You simply asked more than I felt able to pay, so while you rested I took a jaunt down to the States to see how you stood on the market. What did I find? First let us take a look at your hand.
"What do you hold? Harvest is half over and the wheat farmers from the Portage to Brandon and down to the Pipestone have hired their help at two dollars a day. No betterment there. You can't break prairie in the fall, so there's nothing at home except eating, and the lumber-camps don't open up before the snows. On the other hand, your stake in this line is as big as mine. Unfinished, you are without the markets you have been shouting for these years; finished, it lets in American competition and trebles your values in land." Pausing, he shook his head, and smiling, went on: "Looks as if some one had dealt you a miserable hand, and I wonder if it wouldn't pay you to shuffle, cut, and try another deal? Now before I bring in new crews—"
"New crews? Where kin you get them?"