“Foolish Abe” of the Skeets had edged out of the bush, the silence after the uproar of voices and conflict encouraging him. He seemed pitifully bewildered. An instinct almost canine prompted him to take the trail to the south, for his only friend, the girl of the tribe, had gone that way. But a strange female had gone with her, and of strange females he entertained unspeakable fear.
“Here, you cross-eyed baboon,” called the Honorable Pulaski, “go! Scoot!” He pointed north in the direction in which the Enchanted crew had disappeared. “Young man want you. Follow him. Stay with him. Run!” He picked up his discarded sled-stake, and the fool hurried away towards the Notch. “I’d like to see that human nail-keg plastered onto the Enchanted crew for the winter,” remarked Britt, with malice. “There’s no fillin’ him up. He’ll eat as much as three men, and that Wade is just enough of a soft thing not to turn him out. If I can’t bore an enemy with a pod-auger, John, I’ll do it with a gimlet—a gimlet will let more or less blood.”
Five minutes later Barrett was borne on his way south, his courage braced by some final arguments from his iron associate, his mind made up to adopt the course of indignant bluff suggested by the belligerent Britt.
And Britt was stumping north, driving the blubbering Abe before him with sundry hoots and missiles.
When the poor creature came crawling to the fire on hands and knees at dusk that evening, hairy, pitiable, and drooling with hunger, Rodburd Ide accepted him with resignation, though he recognized Britt’s petty malice; for unless he were driven, Abe Skeet would never have come past a well-stocked lumber-camp to follow wanderers into the wilderness.
That night the Enchanted crew camped on Attean Stream, a short day’s journey from their destination. The tired men snatched supper from their packs and fell back snoring, their heads on their dunnage-bags.
They were away in the first flush of the morning, Rodburd Ide leading with his partner. Wade welcomed the little man’s absorbed interest in the business ahead of them. Ide asked no questions about the incident at Durfy’s. Wade put the hideous topic as far behind other thoughts as he could, and soon other thoughts crowded it out.
As they passed from the zone of striped maple, round-wood, witch-hobble, and mountain holly that Mother Nature had drawn across her naked breast after the rude hand of Pulaski Britt had stripped the virgin growth, his heart lifted. Under the great spruces of Enchanted the town’s bricks, streets, and human passions seemed very far away.
Before he slept that night he had had an experience that thrilled the sense of the primitive self hidden within him, as it is hidden in all men, and covered by conventions.
He had staked the metes and bounds, the corners, the frontage, all the dimensions of a new home, where no roof except the crowns of trees had ever shut sunlight off the earth.