Craig had met Ben Kyle by appointment at the foot of the Oxbow portage and he had found Kyle to be particularly malevolent and entirely willing—and Kyle had gone north to the Flagg drive in the pay of the Three C’s.
It had been a profitable interview, as Director Craig viewed it.
Now he was chasing along the trail of rumor to Adonia; the rumor was encouraging. If Latisan really had been pried out of the section, Craig saw an opportunity to run back to New York to make a private settlement with Mern and enjoy a little relaxation before the pressing matters of the drive in full swing claimed all his attention. Right then, according to all appearances, the Comas business up-country was doing very well in the hands of the understrapper bosses. Therefore, Director Craig smiled over the pages of his notebook.
The brown smudges in single file went on and on. Noon at the foot of the portage at Oxbow! Lida sniffed the wood smoke of the cook fire and ate her lunch and drank her tea.
Up the narrow trail of the gorge she followed at the rear of her men; the canoes, upturned on their shoulders, glistened in the sparkling sunshine. She was bringing real aid in a time of stress, as one of the Flaggs should! More and more that consciousness heartened her.
Quiet water at the put-in, then rapids where the canoes were poled, the irons clinking on the rocks over which the turbid waters rolled; more calm stretches where haste was made.
A night in the open at a camping site where a couch of boughs was piled for her under a deftly contrived shelter of braided branches of hemlocks.
And on in the first flush of the morning toward the drive.