“Say, you hold on there!” barked Mern, managing a few oaths of his own after struggling out of the amazement stirred by this ferocious attack. “If you’re here to do business or to complain about the business that has been done, you’ll have to be decent, or I’ll run you out.” Mern jutted his jaw and took two steps in Craig’s direction—and Craig had suffered violence too recently to persist in inviting more.
But he was still as acrimonious as he dared to be. Behind his rage there was the bitterness of a man who had been tricked out of money—betrayed shamefully—but Craig was so precipitate, breathless, violent, so provokingly vague with his tumbling words and his broken sentences, that Mern ceased to be angry in return and was merely bewildered.
The Comas field director shook under Mern’s nose a sheet of paper. He kept referring to the writing on the paper and vouchsafed information that the writing was made up of notes of a long-distance conversation between the woods and the New York offices of the Comas company.
After a time Mern suggested with acerbity that Craig was incoherent.
“I don’t doubt it. I feel that way,” yelped Craig. “But this message has come over three or four hundred miles of wire—relayed, at that, and I think the man who started the word from a fire-outpost station wasn’t entirely right in his head. There’s no other way of accounting for the statement that Ward Latisan’s cap and Eck Flagg’s cant dog are bossing the Flagg drive.”
“Don’t get wrought up by crazy guff!”
“But here are some statements that I am wrought up over,” declared the director, brandishing the paper. “I’ve got to believe ’em. They sound straight. Three of our new hold dams in streams that feed the Noda have been blown. The water has been used to sweep the Flagg logs in ahead of ours. The lip of the Tougas Lake has been blown, too, and if we lose that water it’s apt to leave us high and dry; our Tougas operation is a long way in from the main river. They’ve shot blue blazes out of Carron Gorge and have taken the water along with ’em. Merry hell is to pay all up and down that river, Mern.”
The agency chief did not relish Craig’s bellicose manner, nor the glare in his one eye that showed, nor the imputation of vindictive rebuke in his rasping tones.
“Craig, I never saw a log in a river. I know nothing about your drives. Why are you pitching into me?”
“Why? Why? Because this message says that the girl you sent north—the girl who was paid by our money—this report says that she has gone up there and has put the very devil into Flagg’s men; is making ’em do things that the worst pirates on the river never dared to do before. What kind of a she wildcat did you hand me, anyway? Mern, a thousand tons of liquid fire poured into the valley of the Noda couldn’t hurt us like that girl is hurting us. Who is she? What is she? Get your word to her! Call her off!”