第8章

Thorpe followed and found himself on the frozen platform of a little dark railway station.As he walked, the boards shrieked under his feet and the sharp air nipped at his face and caught his lungs.Beyond the fence-rail protection to the side of the platform he thought he saw the suggestion of a broad reach of snow, a distant lurking forest, a few shadowy buildings looming mysterious in the night.The air was twinkling with frost and the brilliant stars of the north country.

Directly across the track from the railway station, a single building was picked from the dark by a solitary lamp in a lower-story room.The four who had descended before Thorpe made over toward this light, stumbling and laughing uncertainly, so he knew it was probably in the boarding-house, and prepared to follow them.

Shearer and the station agent,--an individual much muffled,--turned to the disposition of some light freight that had been dropped from the baggage car.

The five were met at the steps by the proprietor of the boarding-house.This man was short and stout, with a harelip and cleft palate, which at once gave him the well-known slurring speech of persons so afflicted, and imparted also to the timbre of his voice a peculiarly hollow, resonant, trumpet-like note.He stumped about energetically on a wooden leg of home manufacture.It was a cumbersome instrument, heavy, with deep pine socket for the stump, and a projecting brace which passed under a leather belt around the man's waist.This instrument he used with the dexterity of a third hand.As Thorpe watched him, he drove in a projecting nail, kicked two "turkeys" dexterously inside the open door, and stuck the armed end of his peg-leg through the top and bottom of the whisky jug that one of the new arrivals had set down near the door.The whisky promptly ran out.At this the cripple flirted the impaled jug from the wooden leg far out over the rail of the verandah into the snow.

A growl went up.

"What'n hell's that for I!" snarled one of the owners of the whisky threateningly.

"Don't allow no whisky here," snuffed the harelip.

The men were very angry.They advanced toward the cripple, who retreated with astonishing agility to the lighted room.There he bent the wooden leg behind him, slipped the end of the brace from beneath the leather belt, seized the other, peg end in his right hand, and so became possessed of a murderous bludgeon.This he brandished, hopping at the same time back and forth in such perfect poise and yet with so ludicrous an effect of popping corn, that the men were surprised into laughing.

"Bully for you, peg-leg!" they cried.

"Rules 'n regerlations, boys," replied the latter, without, however, a shade of compromising in his tones."Had supper?"On receiving a reply in the affirmative, he caught up the lamp, and, having resumed his artificial leg in one deft motion, led the way to narrow little rooms.

Chapter IV

Thorpe was awakened a long time before daylight by the ringing of a noisy bell.He dressed, shivering, and stumbled down stairs to a round stove, big as a boiler, into which the cripple dumped huge logs of wood from time to time.After breakfast Thorpe returned to this stove and sat half dozing for what seemed to him untold ages.The cold of the north country was initiating him.

Men came in, smoked a brief pipe, and went out.Shearer was one of them.The woodsman nodded curtly to the young man, his cordiality quite gone.Thorpe vaguely wondered why.After a time he himself put on his overcoat and ventured out into the town.It seemed to Thorpe a meager affair, built of lumber, mostly unpainted, with always the dark, menacing fringe of the forest behind.The great saw mill, with its tall stacks and its row of water-barrels--protection against fire--on top, was the dominant note.Near the mill crouched a little red-painted structure from whose stovepipe a column of white smoke rose, attesting the cold, a clear hundred feet straight upward, and to whose door a number of men were directing their steps through the snow.Over the door Thorpe could distinguish the word "Office." He followed and entered.

In a narrow aisle railed off from the main part of the room waited Thorpe's companions of the night before.The remainder of the office gave accommodation to three clerks.One of these glanced up inquiringly as Thorpe came in.

"I am looking for work," said Thorpe.

"Wait there," briefly commanded the clerk.

In a few moments the door of the inner room opened, and Shearer came out.A man's head peered from within.

"Come on, boys," said he.

The five applicants shuffled through.Thorpe found himself in the presence of a man whom he felt to be the natural leader of these wild, independent spirits.He was already a little past middle life, and his form had lost the elastic vigor of youth.But his eye was keen, clear, and wrinkled to a certain dry facetiousness; and his figure was of that bulk which gives an impression of a subtler weight and power than the merely physical.This peculiarity impresses us in the portraits of such men as Daniel Webster and others of the old jurists.The manner of the man was easy, good-natured, perhaps a little facetious, but these qualities were worn rather as garments than exhibited as characteristics.He could afford them, not because he had fewer difficulties to overcome or battles to fight than another, but because his strength was so sufficient to them that mere battles or difficulties could not affect the deliberateness of his humor.You felt his superiority even when he was most comradely with you.This man Thorpe was to meet under other conditions, wherein the steel hand would more plainly clink the metal.

He was now seated in a worn office chair before a littered desk.In the close air hung the smell of stale cigars and the clear fragrance of pine.

"What is it, Dennis?" he asked the first of the men.

"I've been out," replied the lumberman."Have you got anything for me, Mr.Daly?"The mill-owner laughed.