"Oh, come now, Frenchy—not fifty men."
"Well, was seex, anyhow. Ovaire on Leech Lak' an' sacre! He ain' say nuttin', dat tam—joos' mak' hees eyes leetle an' shine lak de loup cervier—an' smash, smash, smash! An', by goss, 'bout twenty of dem feller, git de busted head."
Connie laughed, and during all the long miles of the tote road he listened to the exaggerated and garbled stories of the Frenchman—stories of log drives, of fights, of bloody accidents, and of "hants" and windagoes. At the railroad, the boy helped the teamster and the storekeeper in the loading of the sleigh until a long-drawn whistle announced the approach of his train. When it stopped at the tiny station, he climbed aboard, and standing on the platform, waved his hand until the two figures whisked from sight and the train plunged between its flanking walls of pine.
In Minneapolis Connie hunted up the office of the Syndicate, which occupied an entire floor, many stories above the sidewalk, of a tall building. He was a very different looking Connie from the roughly clad boy who had clambered onto the train at Dogfish. A visit to a big department store had transformed him from a lumberjack into a youth whose clothing differed in no marked particular from the clothing of those he passed upon the street. But there was a difference that had nothing whatever to do with clothing—a certain something in the easy swing of his stride, the poise of his shoulders, the healthy bronzed skin and the clear blue eyes, that caused more than one person to pause upon the sidewalk for a backward glance at the boy.
Connie stepped from the elevator, hesitated for a second before a heavily lettered opaque glass door, then turned the knob and entered, to find himself in a sort of pen formed by a low railing in which was a swinging gate. Before him, beyond the railing, dozens of girls sat at desks their fingers fairly flying over the keys of their clicking typewriters. Men with green shades over their eyes, and queer black sleeves reaching from their wrists to their elbows, sat at other desks. Along one side of the great room stood a row of box-like offices, each with a name lettered upon its glass door. So engrossed was the boy in noting these details that he started at the sound of a voice close beside him. He looked down into the face of a girl who sat before a complicated looking switchboard.
"Who do you wish to see?" she asked.
Connie flushed to the roots of his hair. It was almost the first time in his life that any girl had spoken to him—and this one was smiling. Off came his hat. "Is—is Heinie Metzger in?" he managed to ask. Connie's was a voice tuned to the big open places, and here in the office of the Syndicate it boomed loudly—so loudly that the girls at the nearer typewriters looked up swiftly and then as swiftly stooped down to pick up imaginary articles from the floor; the boy could see that they were trying to suppress laughter. And the girl at the switchboard? He glanced from the others to this one who was close beside him. Her face was red as his own, and she was coughing violently into a tiny handkerchief.
"Caught cold?" he asked. "Get your feet dry, and take a dose of quinine, and you'll be all right—if you don't get pneumonia and die. If Heinie ain't in I can come again." Somehow the boy felt that he would like to be out of this place. He felt stifled and very uncomfortable. He wondered if girls always coughed into handkerchiefs or clawed around on the floor to keep from laughing at nothing. He hoped she would say that Heinie Metzger was not in.