_ In the morning Parker's foreman was waiting for him in the men's room of the tavern. It was so early that the smoky kerosine lamp was still struggling with the red glow of the dawn.
"Mr. Parker," said the foreman earnestly, "have you go it figured what the old chap is goin' to do to us?"
"That is hardly a fair question to put to me Mank," said the engineer, pulling on his mittens. "You knew him up this way better than I. Now you tell me what you expect him to do."
But the foreman shook his head dubiously.
"It'll never come at a man twice alike," he said.
"Sometimes he just snorts and folks just run. Sometimes he kicks, sometimes he bites, sometimes he rears and smashes things all to pieces. But the idea is, you can depend on him to do something and do it quick and do it mighty hard. We've known Gideon Ward a good many years up this way and we've never seen him so mad before nor have better reason for being mad. The men are worrying. I thought it right to tell you that much."
"Well, I'm worrying, too," said Parker. He tried to speak jestingly, but the heaviness of the night's foreboding was still upon him and the foreman detected the nervousness in his voice. The man now showed his own depression plainly.
"I was in hopes I could tell the men that you could see your way all free and clear" he said.
"Then the men are worrying?"
"That they are, sir. A good many of us own houses here in Sunkhaze and there's more than one way for Colonel Gideon Ward to get back at us. Several of the boys came to me last night and wanted to quit. I understand that the postmaster has been talking to you and he must have told you some of the things that the old man done and hasn't been troubled about, either by his conscience or the law. You see what kind of a position that puts us in."
"You don't mean that the crew is going to strike, or rather slip out from under, do you, Mank?" asked Parker, struck by the man's demeanor.
"Well, I'd hardly like to say that. I ain't commissioned to put it that strong. But we've got to remember the fact that we'll probably want to live here a number of years yet, and railroad building won't last forever. Still, it's hardly about future jobs that we're thinking now. It's what is liable to happen to us in the next few days. It will be tough times for Sunkhaze settlement if the Gideonites swoop down on us, Mr. Parker."
The engineer threw out his arms impetuously.
"But I'm in no position, Mank, to guarantee safety to the men who are working for the company," he cried. "It looks to me as tho I were standing here pretty nigh single-handed. If I understand your meaning, I can't depend on my crew to back me up if it comes to a clinch with the old bear?"
"The boys here are not cowards," replied the foreman with some spirit. "They're good, rugged chaps with grit in 'em. Turn 'em loose in a woods clearing a hundred miles from home and I'd match 'em man for man with any crowd that Gid Ward could herd together. I don't say they wouldn't fight here in their own door yards, Mr. Parker. They'd fight before they'd see their houses pulled down or their families troubled. But as to fighting for the property of this railroad company and then taking chances with the Gideonites afterward--well, I don't know about that! It's too near home!" Again the foreman shook his head dubiously. "As long as you can reckon safely that the old one is goin' to do something, the boys thought perhaps you'd notify the sheriff."
But Parker remembered his instructions. Reporting his predicament to the sheriff would mean sowing news of the Sunkhaze situation broadcast in the papers.
"It isn't a matter for the sheriffs," he replied shortly. "We'll consider that the men are hired to transport material and not to fight. We can only wait and see what will happen. But, Mank, I think that when the pinch comes you will find that my men can be as loyal to me, even if I am a stranger, as Ward's men are to the infernal old tyrant who has abused them all these years. I'm going to believe so at any rate."
He turned away and started out of doors into the crisp morning. "I'm going to believe that last as long as I can," he muttered.
"It'll help to keep me from running away."
He found his crew gathered in the railroad yard near the heaps of unloaded material for construction. The men eyed him a bit curiously and rather sheepishly.
"I know how you stand, men," he said cheerily. "I don't ask you to undertake any impossibilities. I simply want help in getting this stuff across Spinnaker Lake. Let's at it!"
His tone inspired them momentarily.
They were at least dauntless toilers, even if they professed to be indifferent soldiers.
The sleds or skids were drawn up into the railroad yard by hand and loaded there. Then they were snubbed down to the lake over the steep bank. On the ice the "train" was made up.
Even Parker himself was surprised to find what a load the little locomotive could manage. He made four trips the first day and at dusk had the satisfaction of beholding many tons of rails, fish-plates and spikes unloaded and neatly piled in the yarding place at the Spinnaker end of the carry.
Between trips, while the men were unloading, he had opportunity to extend his right-of-way lines for his swampers and attend to other details of his engineering problem.
'Twas a swift pace he set!
He dared to trust no one else in the cab of the panting "Swamp Swogon" as engineer, and rushed back from his lines when the fireman signalled with the whistle that they were ready for a return trip. It may readily be imagined that with duties pressing on him in that fashion Parker had little time in which to worry about the next move of Colonel Ward. And the men worked as zealously as tho they too had forgotten the menace that threatened in the north.
In three days fully half the weight of material had been safely landed across the lake.
But on the evening of the third day Parker was more seriously alarmed by the weather-frowns than he had been by the threats of Gideon Ward himself.
The postmaster presaged it, sniffing into the dusk with upturned nose and wagging his head ominously.
"I reckon old Gid has got one more privilege of these north woods into his clutch and is now handlin' the weather for the section," he said. "For if we ain't goin' to have a spell of the soft and moist that will put you out of business for a while, then I miss my guess."
It began with a fog and ended in a driving rainstorm that converted the surface of the lake into an expanse of slush that there was no dealing with.
Parker's experience had been with climatic conditions in lower latitudes and in his alarm he believed that spring had come swooping in on him and that the storm meant the breaking up of the ice or at least would weaken it so that it would not bear his engine.
But the postmaster, who could be a comforter as well as a prophet of ill, took him into the little enclosure of his inner office and showed him a long list of records pencilled on the slide of his wicket.
"Ice was never known to break up in Spinnaker earlier than the first week in May," said Dodge, "and this rain-spitting won't open so much as a riffle. You just keep cool and wait."
At the end of the rain-storm the weather helped Parker to keep cool. He heard the wind roaring from the northwest in the night. The frame of the little tavern shuddered. Ice fragments, torn from eaves and gables, went spinning away into the darkness over the frozen crust with the sound of the bells of fairy sleighs.
When Parker, fully awakening in the early dawn, looked out upon the frosty air, his breath was as visibly voluminous as the puff from an escape-valve of the "Swogon." With his finger-nail he scratched the winter enameling from his window-pane, and through that peep-hole gazed out upon the lake. The frozen expanse stretched steel-white, glary and glistening, a solid sheet of ice.
"There's a surface," cried Parker, in joyous soliloquy, "that will enable the Swogon to haul as much as a P. K. & R. mogul! Jack Frost is certainly a great engineer."
He at once put a crew at work getting out more saplings for sleds. In two more trips, with his extra "cars" and with that glassy surface, he believed that every ounce of railroad material could be "yarded" at the Po-quette Carry. When the sun went down redly, spreading its broad bands of radiance across ice-sheeted Spinnaker, the Swogon stood bravely at the head of twenty heavily loaded sleds. The start for the Carry was scheduled to occur at daybreak.
The moon was round and full that evening, and Parker before turning in went out and remained at the edge of the lake a moment, looking across Spinnaker's vast expanse of silvery glory.
"You could take that train acrost the lake to-night, Mr. Parker," suggested the foreman, who had followed him from the post-office. "It's as light as day."
"Do you know," admitted the young man, "I just came out with the uneasy feeling, somehow, that I ought to fire up and start out. I suppose the old women would call it a presentiment. But the men have worked too hard to-day to be called out for a night job. With a freeze like that we haven't got to hurry on account of the weather."
The foreman patted his ears briskly, for the night wind was sweeping down the lake and squalling shrewishly about the corners of buildings in the little settlement. Suddenly the man shot out a mittened hand, and pointed up the lake.
"What's that?" he ejaculated.
Parker gazed. Far up Spinnaker a dim white bulk seemed to hover above the ice. It was almost wraith-like in the moonlight. It flitted on like a huge bird, and seemed to be rapidly advancing toward Sunkhaze.
"If it were summer-time and this were Sandy Hook," said Parker, with a smile, "I should think that perhaps the cup-race might be on."
"I should say, rather, it is the ghost of Gid Ward's boom gunlow," returned the man, not to be outdone in jest. "He's got an old scow with a sail like that."
Both men surveyed the dim whiteness with increasing interest.
"Are there any ice-boats on the lake?" inquired the engineer.
"I never heard of any such thing hereabouts."
"Well, I have made that out to be an iceboat of some description. And with that spread of sail it is making great progress." Parker rolled up his coat collar and pulled down his fur cap. A feeling of disquiet pricked him. "I think I'll stay here a little while and watch that fellow," he said.
"So will I," agreed his employé.
The approaching sail grew rapidly. Soon the craft was to be descried more in detail. Under the sail was a flat, black mass. And now on the breeze came swelling a chorus of rude songs, the melody of which was shot through with howls and bellows of uproarious men.
"Trouble's coming there, Mr. Parker!" gasped the foreman, apprehensively. "The wind behind 'em an' rum inside 'em."
"Ward's men, eh?" suggested the engineer.
"That they are! The Gideonites! They can't be anything else."
"Get our men together!" Parker cried, clapping his gloved hands. "Rout out every man in the settlement."
The foreman started away on the run, banging on house doors and bawling the cry:
"Whoo-ee! All up! Parker's crew turn out! All hands wanted at the lake!"
In the excitement of the moment Mank did not question the command nor pause to reflect that he might be calling his neighbors into trouble that they would not relish. _