He finished speaking and hobbled toward the door, and, passing out, closed it behind him. Alone in the bunk-house Bill Carmody turned again to the jug and fitted the cork to its mouth, and with his crutch pushed it under the edge of Fallon's bunk.
Hours later, when the men stamped in noisily to the wash-bench, he was sitting there in the dark—thinking.
The results of Daddy Dunnigan's cooking were soon evident in the Blood River camp. Men no longer returned to the bunk-house growling and cursing the grub, and Moncrossen noted with satisfaction that the daily cut was steadily climbing toward the eighty-thousand mark.
The boss added a substantial bonus for each day's "top cut," and in the lengthening days an intense rivalry sprang up between the sawyers; not infrequently Bill and Fallon were "in on the money."
It was nearly two weeks after the incident, that Creed came to Moncrossen with his own story of what happened that night at Melton's No. 8, and the boss knew that he lied.
As they talked in the little office the greener, accompanied by Fallon, passed close to the window.
At the sight of the man the spotter's face became pasty, and he shrank trembling and wide-eyed, as from the sight of a ghost, and Moncrossen knew that his abject terror was not engendered by physical fear.
He flew into a rage, cursing and bullying the craven, but failed utterly to dispel the unwholesome fear or to shake the other's repeated statement that at a few minutes past ten o'clock that night he had seen the greener lying hopelessly drunk upon the floor of the shack with the flames roaring about him, and at six o'clock the next evening had seen him hobble into Burrage's store, forty miles to the southward, fresh and apparently unharmed save for his injured foot.
Moncrossen's hatred of the greener rested primarily upon the fear that one day he would expose him to Appleton; added to this was a mighty jealousy of his rapid rise to proficiency and the rankling memory of the scene of their first meeting in the grub-shack.