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Late in the evening they saw in a valley below them a group of log huts, their snowy roofs silvered by the moonlight. Yellow gleams from the low windows showed that the camp was occupied. "That's the Sourdanheunk baitin'-place," Connick explained, in answer to a question from his captive. "One o' Ward's tote-team hang-ups an' feedin'-places."
"Was there a tall stranger come up on the tote-team two weeks or so ago?" asked the postmaster. "There were," Miles replied, listlessly, and intent on his own troubles. "Hear anything special about his business?" "No. The old man took the stranger into the wangun camp, where it was private, and they talked. None of us heard 'em." "And then the stranger went away, hey?"
"Why, there he was ready to meet us at the Elberon store," laughed Lance. "I found out that everybody along the Big Woods trails knows the mongrel. He had come up yesterday with a tote-team which was going into the woods. "He welcomed Reddy and me as if we were his long-lost brothers. But it's Purt he wants to see believe me!"
Therefore, whenever he sent a messenger to town or a man down the line with a tote-team for goods, he scrawled on his back with a piece of chalk the peculiar hieroglyph of crosses and circles that made up the Gideon Ward "log-mark."
Gideon Ward was fifty miles up the West Branch, looking after a timber operation on Number 8, Range 23, he borrowed leggings, shoe-pacs and an overcoat and hastened on by means of a tote-team. A week later, silent and grim and pinched with cold, he unrolled himself from buffalo-robes and took the train at Sunkhaze.
"I'm goin' down for a doctor," and then he went striding away, even as Joshua Ward took the up-trail. Parker spent all that day in sober thought, and then, forming his resolution, took passage on the first tote-team that went floundering through toward Sunkhaze. His departure was neither hindered nor encouraged.
He ordered the driver of the tote-team to whip up and rode away toward Sunkhaze, leaving the men gaping after him. He observed the same reticence at the settlement, tho he was received with a demonstration that was something like an ovation.
For days, sometimes, he would ejaculate nothing but monosyllables, looking steadily on the things about him. He had walked in ahead of the tote-team late one evening in the autumn, after the Rough Red and his devils had been at work a fortnight. The camp consisted quite simply of three buildings, which might have been identified as a cook-camp, a sleeping-camp, and a stable.
I tell you she beats a buckboard!" The man whom he addressed smiled with some constraint, and exchanged glances with his companions. "I guess we'll stick to our own tote-team as usual, Connick," said another in the party, jerking his thumb at the muddy buckboard that was waiting. "Oh say, now, ye've got to meet these here railroad fellers. They're your style all business!" bawled Connick.
The setting sun shone weak and coppery above the pines as the big four-horse tote-team dashed with a flourish into the wide clearing of the new camp on upper Blood River. The men had not yet "knocked off," and from the impenetrable depths of the forest came the ring of axes and the roar of crashing trees.
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