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Reasoning thus, the detective decided upon promptly arresting the fellow before proceeding to search further. It would be safer to have Skidway in prison than at large in any event.
A new skidway had made its appearance on the side of the jutting mountain nearest the dam. Logs were tumbling downward in slow, but steady succession, to disappear, then to show themselves, bobbing jerkily outward toward the center of the lake. That skidway had not been there before.
When the log had been cat-a-cornered from its bed, the chain was fastened around one end by means of the ever-useful steel swamp-hook, and it was yanked across the dray. Then the travoy took its careful way across the ice to where a dip in the shore gave access to a skidway. Four logs had thus been safely hauled. The fifth was on its journey across the lake.
When supper time drew near, men and horses were worn out, and Festing knew that if he urged the former to continue he could not do much without the teams. There were, however, a few logs he meant to haul to the skidway before he stopped, and he had some misgivings when he started with the last. It was an unusually large trunk, and the tired horses floundered as they tightened the chain.
She, too, would fight, even as he had fought and win. He had not been discouraged and beaten. She remembered the look upon his face as he strode toward her that morning on the skidway in search of Leduc. Unconsciously her tiny fists doubled, her delicate white jaw squared, and her eyes narrowed to slits, even as his had narrowed but her lips did not smile. He was her man!
He thought of the forty years he had spent here on the homestead the rude, pioneer days the house he had built for himself, with its plain furniture, the old-fashioned spinning-wheel on which Anna had spun his trousers, the wooden telephone and the rude skidway on which he ate his meals. He looked out over the swamp and sighed.
While she was doing this, the light now being strong enough to permit, Tom climbed the bank to examine the skidway from which the logs had swept down over their camp. Tom remained up there until the loud halloos of his companions informed him that breakfast was ready. The forester returned to his camp slowly and thoughtfully.
The air was literally filled with flying snow fine as dust, which formed an opaque screen through which his gaze penetrated scarcely an arm's reach. Time and again he strayed from the skidway and brought up sharply against a tree, but each time he altered his course and floundered ahead until he found himself suddenly upon the steep slope where the bank inclined to the river.
He cut a grade for the skidway up the hill, slashing tangled bush and blasting rocks, worked in the snow by moonlight long after his men stopped, and afterwards learned that Lawrence often went without a meal when pay-day got near. But they hauled out the logs and the lumber was delivered. When he stopped, Featherstone looked up with some color in his face. "Thank you," he said.
Finally, tiring of the sight, she arose and started for the clearing, and then suddenly drew back and stepped behind the bole of a great pine, for, striding rapidly toward her on the skidway was Bill Carmody, and she pressed still closer to the tree-trunk that he might pass without observing her.
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