Rodburd Ide, an indulgent father, scratched his nose reflectively.
“It isn’t the style of the Ide family to leave friends on the chips, Nina,” he said—“not even when they’re brand new friends. We know what an ingoing lumber crew is, and he probably doesn’t, and it’s the green man that always gets the worst of it. So I’ll tell you what to do: Invite him up to the house, and you entertain him until P’laski and I can get this thing smoothed over.”
Tommy Eye, hovering near in piteous trepidation lest his kindly offices should miscarry, overheard the invitation that father and daughter extended to the young man, who was gloomily eying the approach of the wagon.
“Yess’r, they’ve got the right of it,” stammered Tommy, unluckily. “You’ll git it if ye don’t—and the ‘It-’ll-git-ye Club’ will see ye git it. Ye’d best run!”
Wade looked into the flushed face of the girl, at the officious father of commiserating countenance, and at the loungers who had heard Tommy’s condescending counsel and were looking at him with a sort of scornful pity.
Again that strange, sullen, gnawing rage at the general attitude of the world seized upon him. He felt a bristling at the back of his neck and in his hair—the primordial bristling of the beast’s mane.
“It is kind of you to invite a stranger,” he said, “but I fear that among these peculiar people even that kindness would be misconstrued. I belong with Britt’s crew. I’ll stay here.”
There was that in his voice which checked further appeal. The girl stood back against the wall of the store.
The Honorable Pulaski was the first off the wagon, and he greeted Ide with rough cordiality. When the latter began to whisper rapidly in his ear, he shook his head.
“I’ve wasted a good deal of valuable time and some temper holding those two young fools apart to-day,” he snapped. “The last thing MacLeod wanted to do was to lick me. Now, I’m too old to be mixed up in love scrapes. I’m going over to measure that spool stock, and the one that’s alive when I get back, I’ll load him onto the wagon and we’ll keep on up the river.” He strode away, leaving the “mayor” champing his false teeth in resentful disappointment.