“If it’ll only last,” Bob returned, sitting down on a log for a moment’s rest.
Somewhat to their surprise Jean Larue had not left the camp after his fight with Bob. The lot of a dethroned bully in a lumber camp is not an enviable one. Once lost, his power can seldom be regained.
“Kape yer eyes on thot Larue,” Tom had cautioned Bob only that morning. “He wouldn’t be after staying on here after thot batin’ ye gave him if he wan’t up ter sumpin.”
“Oh, I guess he’s all right,” Bob had replied easily.
But now, as from his seat on the log he glanced across the space from which the trees had been cut, and saw the Frenchman staring at him, a look of fierce hatred in his eyes, the foreman’s warning returned to his mind.
“Guess I had better look out for that fellow,” he thought, as he slipped from the log and attacked a large spruce. “He certainly has it in for me if he ever gets the chance.”
When at noon time the loud blast of the dinner horn rang through the woods, Bob had nearly finished the felling of an extra large spruce. Fearing that if he left it as it was the rising wind would blow it over in the wrong direction, he decided to finish it before leaving.
“You trot along and I’ll be with you by the time you get to eating,” he said to Jack who had just finished trimming a tree.
“Well, make it snappy,” Jack replied, as he followed the last of the men leaving Bob making the forest ring with the sound of his blows.
He had almost finished and the big spruce was beginning to totter when, just as he drew back his ax for what he thought would be the final stroke, he felt rather than heard something whiz past his head. Quickly he glanced up and there, sticking in the trunk of the tree upon which he was at work was an ax minus its helve. A cold chill ran down his spine as he realized how narrowly it had missed him. A quick glance behind him revealed Jean Larue, standing about twenty feet away, and holding in his hand a helve minus an ax.