“What for?” called the chopping-boss, bluntly. His natural desire to get at the meat of things quickly was stimulated by ardent curiosity.
“You are all sticking your noses into a matter that doesn’t belong to you!” cried Lane, his well-known crustiness showing itself, though it was evident that he was hiding some deeper emotion. “I want this man to go with me. It’s business. And he’s going!” His voice was almost a snarl, but there was a resoluteness in the tone that awed them more than violence would have done.
“Are you going to give me up to a murderer?” bleated Barrett, for his study of the faces in the lamplight did not reassure him.
“Hadn’t you better let us step out, and you talk your business over with him right here, Linus?” inquired Withee, conciliatingly.
“He’s going with me, and he’s going now!” shouted Lane, his repression breaking. “The man that gets in our way will get hurt.”
He banged his rifle-butt on the floor, and those who looked on him shrank before his awful rage.
“Put on your hat, Barrett, and walk out!” he shrilled. “Make way, there! This is my man, by —— and he knows in his dirty heart why he’s mine.”
But Barnum Withee’s quiet woodsman’s soul was not of a nature to be intimidated, and his instincts of fairness, when it was between man and man, had been made acute by many years of woods adjudication.
“Hold on a minute, Linus!” he entreated, stepping between the two men with upraised hand. “You are both under my roof, and you’ve both eaten my bread to-day. I never got between men in a fair, square quarrel. I won’t now. But you’ve got a gun, and he hasn’t. I don’t want to know your business. But if there’s trouble between you it’s got to be settled fair. You can’t drag a man out of my camp to do him dirty—and it would be the same if it was only young Harry there that you were tryin’ to take.”
“Good talk!” yelled the boss.