MacLeod noticed the look and its scorn with delight, and grasped at this opportunity to get outside the platitudes of conversation. But in his eagerness to be news-monger he did not soften his “out-door voice,” deepened by many years of bellowing above the roar of white water.
“Oh, that ain’t a drummer! That’s Britt’s new chaney man—the time-keeper and the wangan store clerk.” MacLeod knew that a girl born and bred in Castonia settlement, on the edge of the great forest, needed no explanation of “chaney man,” the only man in a logging crew who could sleep till daylight, and didn’t come out in the spring with callous marks on his hands as big as dimes. But he seemed to be hungry for an excuse to stay beside her, where he could gaze down on the brown hair looped over her forehead and her radiantly fair face, and could catch a glimpse of the white teeth. “Britt was tellin’ me on the side that he’s been teachin’ school or something like that, and—say, you’ve heard of old Barrett, who controls all the stumpage on the Chamberlain waters—that rich old feller? Well, Britt, being hitched up with Barrett more or less, and knowin’ all about it—”
Wade was now upright in his seat, but the absorbed foreman, catching at last a gleam of interest in the gray eyes upraised to his, did not notice.
“—Britt says that Mister School-teacher there went to work and fell in love with Barrett’s girl, and now she’s goin’ to marry a rich feller in the lumberin’ line that her dad picked out for her, and instead of goin’ to war or to sea, like—”
Wade, maddened, sick at heart, furious at the old tattler who had thus canvassed his poor secret with his boss, had tried twice to cry an interruption. But his voice stuck in his throat.
Now he leaped up, leaned far over the seat-back in front of him, and shouted, with face flushed and eyes like shining steel:
“That’s enough of that, you pup!”
In the sudden, astonished silence the old man dragged his fingers through his grizzled whiskers and whined plaintively:
“Ain’t he peppery, though, about anybody talking? He shet me up, too!”
“It’s my business you’re talking!” shouted Wade, beating time with clinched fist. “Drop it.”