"Better come out o' that right now and finish on this 'ere nigh pile."
Goodine looked up, eyed first his adviser, then very narrowly the logs, and answered, tersely, "Go to h—ll!"
"That's just like the both of 'em," muttered McElvey, as Goodine turned and resumed his chopping.
At this moment there came a sullen, tearing sound; and the top of the near pile, which had been half cut through, began to lean slowly, slowly. A yell of desperate warning arose. Goodine dropped his axe, turned like lightning, and made a tremendous leap for safety. He gained the edge of the landing-front, slipped on an oozy stone, and fell back with a cry of horror right beneath the toppling mass of logs.
As his cry re-echoed from every throat, Jim Reddin dropped beside him as swiftly and almost miraculously as a sparrow-hawk flashes upon its prey. With a terrific surge he swung Goodine backward and outward into the raging current, but away from the face of the impending avalanche. Then, as the logs all went with a gathering roar, he himself sprang outward in a superb leap, splashed mightily into the stream, disappeared, and came up some yards below. Side by side the two men struck out sturdily for shore, and in a couple of minutes their comrades' eager hands were dragging them up the bank.
"Didn't I tell you Jim Reddin wasn't no coward?" said McElvey, with glistening eyes, to Laurette; and Laurette, having no other way to relieve her excitement and give vent to her revulsion of feelings, sat down on a sled and cried most illogically.
As the two dripping men approached the camp, she looked up to see a reconciliation. Presently Goodine emerged from a little knot of his companions, approached Reddin, and held out his hand.
"I ask yer pardon," said he. "You're a man, an' no mistake. It is my life I owe to you; an' I'm proud to owe it to sech as you!"
But Reddin took no notice of the outstretched hand. The direct and primitive movements of the backwoodsman's mind may seem to the sophisticated intelligence peculiar; but they are easy to comprehend. Jim Reddin quite overlooked the opportunity now offered for a display of exalted sentiment. In a harsh, deliberate voice he said,—
"An' now, Bill Goodine, you've got to stand up to me, an' we'll see which is the better man, you or me. Ever sence you growed up to be a man you've used me just as mean as you knowed how; an' now we'll fight it out right here."