The former centre of Burton College’s football eleven stiffened his muscles and set his nails into his palms to keep from hot retort. What was the use? What did college training avail if it didn’t help a gentleman to hold his tongue at the right time?
“Now, remember what I’ve told you,” ordered Britt, “and I’ll go and set MacLeod to the right-about, so that you won’t have to be afraid of him if you mind your own business.”
He went away into the smoking-car. Between the opening and the closing of the door there puffed out a louder jargon from the orgy. It then settled into its dull diapason of maudlin voices.
For the rest of the journey, to the end of the forest railroad spur, Wade sat and looked out into the hopeless and ragged ruin left by the axes. The sight fitted with his mood. Britt, back from his interview with MacLeod, and serene in the power of the conscious autocrat, sat by himself and figured endlessly with a stubby lead-pencil. Wade looked around only once at the girl. When he did he caught her looking at him, and she immediately snapped her eyes away indignantly.
At last the engine gave a long shriek that wailed away in echoes among the stumps. It was a different note from its careless yelps at the infrequent crossings.
“Here we are!” bellowed Britt, cheerfully, stuffing away his papers and coming up the car for his little bag. He stopped opposite Wade.
“Remember what I told you about minding your business,” he commanded, brusquely. “You may be a college graduate, but MacLeod is your boss. He won’t hurt you if you keep your place!”
In medicine there are cumulative poisons—the effect of small doses at intervals amounting in the end to a single large dose.
In matters of heart, temper, and moral restraint there are cumulative poisons, too. Dwight Wade, struggling up as the train jolted to a halt, felt that this last insult, coming as it did out of that brusque, rough-sneering, culture-despising spirit of the woods, exemplified in Pulaski D. Britt, had put an end to self-restraint.
It was the same brusque, money-worshipping, intolerant spirit of the woods that sounded in John Barrett’s voice when he had sneered at Wade’s pretensions to his daughter’s hand. There it was now in those roaring voices in the smoking-car. And yet he had come to it—hating it—fleeing from the sight of men of his kind when his little temple of love seemed closed to him, and the world had jeered at him behind his back! He looked through the dirty car windows at the little shacks of the railroad terminus, heard the bellow of voices, gritted his teeth in ungovernable rage at Britt’s last words, and determined to—well, he hardly knew what he did propose to do.