He stood very straight and shot Mern through with a stare from hard gray eyes. There was no longer any of the faltering uncertainty that he had displayed. Grim determination radiated from him.
“Good day to you, also!” Mern called after Latisan when he strode toward the door, then adding suggestively. “If any mail happens to come here for you, I’m to forward it along to that Skulltree dam, so I take it!”
The irony did not provoke any retort from the drive master. He went away with a rush, but his demeanor showed that he was not running away from anything or anybody. He was hastening toward something.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
LATISAN was on that one o’clock train when it left Grand Central station.
From the gallery of the concourse he had seen Craig march to the gate and give a packet into the hands of one of a group of men waiting there. Then Craig had gone on quickly with the air of a cautious performer who did not care to be identified with the persons for whom he had provided transportation.
The drive master rode in a coach and felt safe from detection; he guessed that Craig would hide his battered face in the privacy of a drawing room. Latisan had trailed the operatives and saw them enter the smoking car.
In the late afternoon, at a stage in the journey, he crossed a city on the heels of the party and again was an unobtrusive passenger in a coach, avoiding the sleeping cars. He slept a bit, as best he could, but mostly he pondered, fiercely awake, bitterly resolute. He fought away his memory of the betrayal of a trust; he indulged in no fond hopes in regard to one whom he now knew as Lida Kennard. He was concentrating on his determination to go back to the drive, not as master, but as a volunteer who would carry his cant dog with the rest of them, as humble as the plainest toiler. He did not try at that time to plan a course of action to be followed after he was back on the Flagg drive. He was going, that was all!
It was a hideous threat, the menace that Craig was conveying into the north country in the persons of those gunmen from the city! There had been plenty of fights over rights on the river, but they had always been clean fights, where muscles and fists counted for the victory.