CHAPTER XXVI
THE DEVIL OF THE HEMPEN STRANDS
“When the snub-line parts and the great load starts
There’s nothing that men may do,
Except to cower with quivering hearts
While the wreck goes thundering through.”
—The Ballad of Tumbledick.
Days of winter snow and blow; days of sunshine, hard and cold as the radiance from a diamond’s facets; days of calm and days of tempest; days when the snowflakes dropped as straight as plummets, and days when the whirlwinds danced in crazy rigadoons down the valleys or spun like dervishes on the mountain-tops! And all were days of honest, faithful toil in the black growth of Enchanted, and the days brought the dreamless sleep o’ nights that labor won.
In those long evenings hope lighted a taper that shone brightly beside the lantern of the office camp in whose dull beams Dwight Wade wrote long and earnest letters. But these were not to John Barrett’s daughter; the conditions of their waiting love had tacitly closed the mail between them.
Again Dwight Wade, in the honesty of his soul, had seen a light of hope that contrasted cheerily with the red glare of might against might which made his decency quail. He saw a chance to win as a man, not as a thug.