“I shall take care of him,” she said. “I shall nurse him, and no one but me! I shall know how, Mr. Wade. He’ll need me now. You go and tell them all that I shall nurse him. No one else shall do it.”
It was the woods mate claiming her own. It was more than love as convention has classed it. It was the fire, lighted by the primordial torch of passion, which burns and does not reason, not to be smothered by rebuff or abuse; its pride not the calculating pride of a resentment that can divorce it from its object, but the pride of blind, utter loyalty through all.
Dwight Wade had gone near enough to the heart of things to understand this love.
He looked at her a little while, sympathy lighting his eyes and vibrating in his voice as he answered her:
“You shall have him, poor little girl, because he needs you.”
He opened the door for her, closed it behind her, and left them alone together.
Two days later the “It-’ll-git-ye Club” realized the full climax of ominous prophecy and was correspondingly content. The Honorable Pulaski D. Britt was brought out from Jerusalem dead-water and taken down-river, a helpless hulk of a man grunting stertorous breaths, the right hand, which had waved command all those years along Umcolcus, now hanging helpless at his side, his right leg dangling uselessly as they lifted him along to a wagon.
It was the fate that the choleric tyrant had invited. That last and mightiest rage of his life, when with swollen veins and purple face he had stamped about the head-works platform, had done for Pulaski Britt and his weakened blood-vessels what those who knew him well had predicted. Wade was not surprised, for the suppression of Britt by this means and at this frantic climax in Britt’s affairs was too entirely logical. It came to him suddenly that he felt a sense of relief, and then he wondered with shame whether he had hoped for it. Then he dismissed the speculation as unprofitable and not agreeable. The tyrant was in chains of his own forging. His logs came limping along in scattered squads, and were sent through the sorting-gap and down-river.
The new master of the corporation drive was not cordial when he appeared, hurrying towards headwaters. But he was not hostile, either. He surlily demanded expedition at the Castonia sorting-gap, and went on up-river.