“Hold on!” protested several of the men, in chorus, crowding close to this dangerous tale-teller. “You ain’t tryin’ to sluice the rest of us, are you, just because you’ve gone to work and got your own load busted on the ramdown?”
“I’d like to see the whole infernal game of graft, gamble, and woods-gashin’ showed up. Let John Barrett go up and look at his woods and he’ll see what you are doin’ to ’em—you and his agents! And the man that lumbers square, and remembers that there are folks comin’ after us that will need trees, gets what I’ve just got!” He shook his crumpled hat in their faces. “And I’m just good and ripe for trouble, and a lot of it.”
“Here, you let me talk with you,” interposed a man who had said nothing before, and he took the recalcitrant by the arm, led him away to a corner, and they entered into earnest conference. At the end of it the destructionist drove his hat on with a smack of his big palm and strode out, sullen but plainly convinced.
The other man returned to the group and spoke cautiously low, but in that big, bare room with its resonant emptiness even whispers travelled far.
“I’ll take a double contract and sublet to him,” he explained. “Barrett won’t know, and after this Dave will come back into line and handle the agent. I reckon he’s got well converted from honesty in a lumberin’ deal. It’s what we’re up against, gents, in this business; the patterns are handed to us and we’ve got to cut our conduct accordin’ to other men’s measurements. Barrett gets his first; the agent gets his; we get what we can squeeze out of a narrow margin—and the woods get hell.”
A man came out of the inner office stroking the folds of a stumpage permit preparatory to stuffing it into his wallet, and the peacemaker departed promptly, for it was now his turn to pay his respects to King Spruce.
In what he had seen and what he had heard, Dwight Wade found food for thought. The men so manifestly had accepted the stranger as some one utterly removed from comprehension of their affairs or interest in their talk that they had not been discreet. It occurred to him that his own present business with John Barrett would be decidedly furthered were he to utilize that indiscretion.
This thought occurred to him not because he intended for one instant to use his information, but because he saw now that his business with John Barrett was more to John Barrett’s personal advantage than that gentleman realized. This knowledge gave him more confidence. He was proposing something to the Honorable John Barrett that the latter, for his own good, ought to be pressed into accepting.
The earlier reflection which had made him uneasy, that a millionaire timber baron would not listen patiently to suggestions about his own business offered by the principal of the Stillwater high-school, had now been modified by circumstances. Even that lurking fear, that awe of John Barrett which he had his peculiar and private reason for feeling and hiding, was not quite so nerve-racking.