Connie Morgan in the Lumber Camps

by James B. Hendryx

Connie snickered. "I bet Slue Foot's growling this morning, with no roof on his office and blacksmith shop, and his stable and oat house only about half chinked."

"He'd growl if his camp was 'lectric lit an' steam het. I'm ready fer breakfast, if the cook's saved us some. You go on over an' I'll be 'long when I git the men strung out." Saginaw filled the stove with chunks and together they left the office, the older man heading for the men's camp, while Connie made directly for the cook's camp. As the boy lowered his head to the sting of the sweeping snow and plodded across the clearing, a feeling of great loneliness came over him, for he knew that there lurked in the man's mind a feeling of distrust—a feeling that he had studiously attempted to conceal. Nothing in the spoken words revealed this distrust, but the boy was quick to note that the voice lacked something of the hearty comradery that had grown up between them.

"This is almost like Alaska," Connie muttered, as he breathed deeply of the clean, cold air. "I wish I was in Ten Bow right now—with Waseche Bill, and MacDougall, and Dutch Henry and the rest of 'em—or else over on the Yukon with Big Dan McKeever, and Rickey." The boy's fists clenched within his mittens, as was their habit when he faced a difficult situation. "If it wasn't that Waseche is depending on me to straighten out this mess, I'd strike out for Ten Bow today. But I've just naturally got to see it through—and I've got to go it alone, too. If I should let Saginaw in, and it should turn out that Hurley is crooked, my chance of nailing him would be shot, because Saginaw and Hurley are one, two, three.

"The first thing I better do," he decided, as he stamped the snow from his boots before the door of the cook's camp, "is to slip up and see Mike Gillum and find out how he knows Hurley is in the pay of the Syndicate."

During the breakfast the boy was unusually silent and when the meal was finished he returned directly to the office, and stood for a long time staring out into the whirling white smother. As he turned to his desk his eye encountered Hurley's snow-shoes hanging from their peg on the opposite wall. "It's only ten miles to Willow River," he muttered, "and I've just got to see Mike Gillum."

A moment later he stepped through the door, fastened on the snow-shoes and, hastening across the clearing, plunged into the timber.

It was nearly noon when Saginaw Ed returned to the office and found it empty. Almost instantly he noticed that the boss's snow-shoes were missing and he grinned: "Kid's out practising on the rackets, I guess." Then he stepped to the door. The snow had continued to fall steadily—fine, wind-driven flakes that pile up slowly. The trail was very faint, and as the man's eye followed it across the clearing his brows drew into a puzzled frown. "That don't look like no practice trail," he muttered. "No, sir! They ain't no greener ever yet started off like that." He pinched his chin between his thumb and forefinger and scowled at the trail. "One of two things: Either the kid ain't the greener he lets on to be, or else someone else has hiked off on the boss's snow-shoes. An' either which way, it's up to me to find out." Crossing swiftly to the cook shack he returned a few minutes later, the pockets of his mackinaw bulging with lunch, and drawing his own snow-shoes from beneath his bunk, struck out upon the fast dimming trail.

"I mistrust Slue Foot, an' I didn't like the way he started to bawl out the kid yeste'day. It seemed kind of like it wasn't straight goods. He's a beefer an' a growler, all right, but somehow, this time it seemed as if it was kind of piled on fer my special benefit."

In the timber, sheltered from the sweep of the wind, the track had not drifted full, but threaded the woods in a broad, trough-like depression that the woodsman easily followed. Mile after mile it held to the north, dipping into deep ravines, skirting thick windfalls, and crossing steep ridges. As the trail lengthened the man's face hardened. "Whoever's a-hikin' ahead of me ain't no greener an' he ain't walkin' fer fun, neither. He's travellin' as fast as I be, an' he knows where he's a-goin', too." He paused at the top of a high ridge and smote a heavily mittened palm with a mittened fist. "So that's the way of it, eh? I heard how the Syndicate was runnin' a big camp on Willow River—an' this here's the Willow River divide. They ain't only one answer, the kid, or whoever it is I'm a-follerin', has be'n put in here by the Syndicate to keep cases on Hurley's camps—either that, or Slue Foot's in with 'em, an' is usin' the kid fer a go-between. They're pretty smart, all right, headin' way up to this here Willow River camp. They figgered that no one wouldn't pay no 'tention to a trail headin' north, while if it led over to the Syndicate camp on Dogfish someone would spot it in a minute. An' with it snowin' like this, they figgered the trail would drift full, or else look so old no one would bother about it. They ain't only one thing to do, an' that's to go ahead an' find out. What a man knows is worth a heap more'n what he can guess. They's a-goin' to be some big surprises on Dogfish 'fore this winter's over, an' some folks is a-goin' to wish they'd of be'n smarter—or stayed honester."