“Ide,” he cried, “you and I seem to be always in trouble with each other lately! But it’s of your own makin’, not mine! These sheer-booms that you’ve stuck in here obstruct navigation. I want to get my boats up. You’ve got to cut these booms loose.”
“Mr. Britt,” returned Ide, his tones quivering with passion, “two men in each bateau crew can shove those booms down with pick-poles and let a bateau over without wasting a minute’s time. You’ve brought those bateaux over all your own sheer-booms below here—you’ve got your own booms above. You’ve been riding over ’em for thirty years. Now be reasonable.”
“You run back down there to your store and get onto your job of sellin’ kerosene and crackers,” advised the Honorable Pulaski, sarcastically. “Don’t you undertake to tell me my business. As river-master, I say those logs obstruct navigation, and what I say on this river goes!”
“You talk, Britt, as though a title that you’ve grabbed onto, the same as you have everything else along this river, amounted to anything in law,” objected the magnate of Castonia. “I own the land that those booms are hitched to, and you’re not goin’ to bluff me by any of your obstruction-to-navigation talk. You’ve managed to get most things along this river this spring your own way, but I reckon I know when you’ve gone about far enough. Don’t try to rub it in!”
Mr. Britt, serene in his autocracy as drive-master, was in no mood to bandy arguments nor waste time on such as Rodburd Ide.
He whirled away, lifted a wooden box from one of the wagons, and set it down gingerly.
“MacLeod!” he called. The boss came away from the river-bank, where he was superintending stowing of supplies. “Unpack this dynamite, and blow damnation out of those booms—the sortin’-gap first!”
The man twisted his face in a queer grimace.
“I don’t think I’ll do it, Mr. Britt,” he said, curtly.
He looked away from Britt when the tyrant began to storm at him, and fixed his eyes on Wade’s face with an expression there was no reading.