of the section, Craig
saw an opportunity to run back to New York to make a private settlement
with Mern and enjoy a little relaxation before the pressing matters of
the drive in full swing claimed all his attention. Right then, according
to all appearances, the Comas business up-country was doing very well in
the hands of the understrapper bosses. Therefore, Director Craig smiled
over the pages of his notebook.

The brown smudges in single file went on and on. Noon at the foot of the
portage at Oxbow! Lida sniffed the wood smoke of the cook fire and ate
her lunch and drank her tea.

Up the narrow trail of the gorge she followed at the rear of her men;
the canoes, upturned on their shoulders, glistened in the sparkling
sunshine. She was bringing real aid in a time of stress, as one of the
Flaggs should! More and more that consciousness heartened her.

Quiet water at the put-in, then rapids where the canoes were poled, the
irons clinking on the rocks over which the turbid waters rolled; more
calm stretches where haste was made.

A night in the open at a camping site where a couch of boughs was piled
for her under a deftly contrived shelter of braided branches of
hemlocks.

And on in the first flush of the morning toward the drive.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Ben Kyle made "his bigness" when he went into Flagg's crew on his
mission for Craig. He was not admitting to himself or anybody else that
he was traitor. He blustered and bullyragged; he had been their boss and
he had been fired without cause, he insisted. Even the loyal men did not
presume to answer back; he had been too recently their master and the
aura of authority still persisted. He came with a white-hot grudge and
with rumors which he embroidered to suit his needs. Kyle had been far on
the edge of affairs, and only the ripples of the Adonia events reached
him. But his statement that Latisan had run away with a girl seemed to
be certified by the drive master's continued absence. And there were
those stories of Latisan's former weakness in the city; they had been
sleeping; they were not dead.

Kyle was hiring for the Comas company--unabashed, blatantly. He strode
from man to man, banging heavy palm on shoulders. "Come with the real
folks. What's old Eck Flagg to-day? You might as well be hired by a
bottle-sucking brat in a baby carriage. Where's Latisan? You tell me his
men went downriver to meet him; they've kept on going. He has hid away,
dancing his