“My boy,” he said, “the Enchanted Township Lumber Company is incorporated, and you and I own the stock. With your consent, I’m goin’ to make over ten shares of that stock to Thomas Eye before I sleep to-night. I reckon this company stands ready to fight its battles and protect its members.”
“Mr. Ide,” gulped Wade, contritely, “forgive me for that hasty speech. But God help me, partner, I’ve been in hell since I saw you last, and I’m full of the fires of it! I think you can understand.”
He crouched there in the bateau, clutching the gunwale with hands that trembled until they shook his body to and fro. His face was streaked with the grime of days and nights of toil. His eyes were haggard with sleeplessness. Fasting had hollowed his cheeks. Such lines as only the bitter things of life can set in the human countenance were traced deep upon the brown skin. In his rags and his weariness he was as one who had been conquered instead of one who had fulfilled. The little man of Castonia reached down and patted his shoulder with a hand that had a father’s sympathy in its touch.
“Bub,” he murmured, “I’m goin’ to take some other time to tell you what I think of you. Just now I want you to go down to the house. My Nina will know what to do for you and what to say to you. She has some letters for you to read before you go to sleep, and I reckon they’ll give you pleasant dreams.”
Kate Arden opened the door and welcomed him with a smile, the first he had ever seen on her face. His heart came into his mouth at sight of her. Never had she seemed so like Elva Barrett. But before he had word with her Nina Ide came running, floury hands outspread, her face alight above her housewife’s tire. She stood on tiptoe, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him.
“Brother Dwight! Brother Dwight!” she half sobbed. “Oh, Brother Dwight, I didn’t know—I didn’t realize—I didn’t understand, or I would have held you back until you had torn these two arms from my shoulders. I prayed for you and watched for you. They buy their logs with blood up there. But it shall not be with your blood, Dwight. I have hated father all these days. He knew what you were going back to, and didn’t stop you!”
“It was all my own affair, little girl,” Wade returned, gently—“my duty, to which I was bound by fair man-promise. And I’ve got our logs into the river, but it has been the kind of work that blisters souls, Sister Nina!” His voice had a pathetic quaver of weariness.
“I was at the sorting-gap when the first one came, and I knelt and kissed it,” she said, smiling at him from misty eyes. “And then I wrote to the one of all the world and told her about a hero.”
An hour later he lay asleep in a darkened room, the tense lines gone from his face, his lax hand spread over a letter, finding the sweetest solace in slumber he had known for many a day.