The chaney man reached his hand to the girl under the shelter of the seat-back.
"Shake!" he said, simply. "I've come up here to stay awhile, and it's good to feel that I've got one friend that's--that's a woman."
"And you--" She faltered and paused to listen, lips apart.
"I've come to stay," he repeated, grimly.
Far behind them they heard the dull rumble of the heavy wagons over the ledges. The raucous howling of the revellers had something wolf-like about it. It seemed to close the line of retreat. Ahead were the big woods, looming darkly on the mountain ridges--that vast region of man to man, and the devil take the weak.
And again he said, not boastingly, but with a quiet setting of his tense jaw muscles:
"With eddies and rapids it's middlin' tough, To worry a log-drive through. But to manage a woman is more than enough For a West Branch driving crew."
Just how Tommy Eye escaped so nimbly from the ruck of the fight at the foot of Pugwash Hill he never knew nor understood, his wits not being of the clearest that day--and the others being too busy to notice.
But he did escape. One open-handed buffet sent him reeling into and through some wayside bushes. He sat on his haunches on the other side a moment like a jack-rabbit and surveyed the stirring scene, and then made for higher ground. At the end of an enervating sixty-days' sentence in the county jail--his seventeenth summer "on the bricks" for the same old bibulous cause; second offence, and no money left to pay the fine--Tommy did not feel fit for the fray.
He sat on a bowlder at the top of the rise for a little while and gazed down on them--the hundred men of "Britt's Busters," bound in for the winter cutting on Umcolcus waters. They were fighting aimlessly, "mixing it up" without any special vindictiveness, and Tommy, an expert in inebriety, sagely concluded that they were too drunk to furnish amusement. So he rolled over the bowlder and nestled down to ease his headache, knowing, as a teamster should know, that Britt's tote wagons were to hold up at the Pugwash for a half-hour's rest and bait.
For that matter, a fight at the Pugwash was no novel incident--not for Tommy Eye, at least, veteran of many a woods campaign.