But this weary man in knickerbockers, his puffy face mottled by the hues of self-indulgence and haggard after a night of ceaseless tramping along a woods trail, was not an object of awe as he squatted beside the pool like a giant frog.
The woodsman who stood over him, his gaunt face seamed and brown, his bony frame erect to the height that had won him the sobriquet of “Ladder” Lane, seemed now the man of dignity and authority. He was of the woods. He was in the woods. Two nights without sleep, miles of bitter struggle through the forest to report that conflagration roaring north to Misery township, and now puffing its stifling breath upon them, and the agony of recollection that John Barrett’s crossing his path had dragged out—all these gave no sign in “Ladder” Lane’s features and mien. Even his voice was steady with a repression almost humble.
What John Barrett did not know was that this humbleness was that of one who stood in the presence of a mighty problem, awed by it. In the long hours of self-communion, as he had plodded on, driving the timber baron before him, he had pondered that problem until his weary brain reeled. Introspection had always made his simple nature dizzy.
Now the tumult and torment in his soul frightened him. Over and over again in the darkness of the night, as he had followed at the heels of Barrett, he had whispered, in a half-frightened manner, to himself: “I told him to keep away! And now he’s here!”
He had looked at the back of the man, stumbling ahead of him in the lantern-light, and had pitied him in a sort of dull, wondering fashion. He had pitied him because he knew that Barrett, despoiler of his home, seducer of his wife, was helpless in his hands. And because “Ladder” Lane realized that grief and isolation had made him over into such a one as sane men flout or fear, he was afraid of himself.
“This here is as good a place as any, Mr. Barrett,” he said.
By striving to be calm, even to the point of being humble, Lane tried to tame the dreadful beast that he knew his inner being had become. But Barrett, pricking his ears at this humbleness, was too foolish to understand. In the mystery of the night he had feared cruelly. With day to reinforce his prestige, it occurred to him that the man was cowed by his presence and by the reflection that a person of influence cannot be kidnapped with impunity.
“I can make it hot for you, Lane, for dragging me out of camp and running me all over creation,” he blustered, grasping at what he considered his opportunity to regain mastery. “But I’m willing to settle and call quits. I’ve always been ready to settle. Now, out with it, man-fashion! How much will it take?”
Another of those red flashes from the sullen coals of many and long years’ hatred roared up in Lane like the torching of a pitch-tree. He had been trying for hours to beat those flashes down, for they made him afraid.
He trembled, blinking hard to see past the red. His hands fumbled nervously at his sides, as though seeking something that they could seize upon for steadiness. If the wind would only blow upon his face—a wind of the woods, clear, cool, and hale—he felt that he might get his grip on manhood once more.