CHAPTER XXII.

THREAT OF SPIKES.

The music broke off in the middle of a run. The group at the bar pressed forward, all eager to see how this strange outlaw, who had dared them to collect the price on his head, would acquit himself against a whisky-crazed lumberjack. Delores, her interest really captured by the upstanding figure of the newcomer and clinched by that livid horseshoe scar upon his high forehead, made faltering effort to halt the trouble she had started.

"Back to your kennel, you yellow dog!" she ordered. "I'll dance with you when you pull off them spiked boots. Be yourself and show some sense."

She tried to throw herself in front of Childress and take the brunt of the jealous rush. But Childress swept her to one side and behind him.

The first blow of the contest momentarily stopped the adversary who had thundered forward with huge hands outstretched in the obvious intent to grip the sergeant's throat.

Slightly taller than Childress and much heavier, the Swede shook himself. For a second his close-set, turquoise eyes blazed downward. Then, with lowered head, he rushed again.

That Childress had not been in the path of the human steam roller, that he had side-stepped and was urging Sven Larsen to wait a minute and have his girl returned to him, appeared only to increase the logger's fury. In the next few minutes the sergeant had no thoughts to spare from his blows and footwork.

Larsen abandoned his futile rushing tactics and tried to connect with mallet-like swings. Had one of them landed true, the innocent cause of his jealous rage must have gone to sleep for an uncertain length of time. Although strictly an amateur in all his sports, Childress had developed considerable boxing skill in his barrack days at Regina and by way of exercise in lonely posts from the Yukon to the Arctic; yet, clumsy as was the woodsman's attack, its weight taxed him to avoid being knocked out.

That Larsen shed his return attack as though it were from feather pillows instead of reasonably seasoned fists was disconcerting. The skin of the logger's face was doubtless tough as leather from years of outdoor work in all sorts of weather; moreover, it was heavily bearded and, as yet, showed no mark. Childress was already bleeding in a couple of places from scraping blows which he had not been able altogether to avoid.

The sergeant had no "war" with the Swede. Could he have ended the futile contest by clinching and crying enough, he would have been tempted to do so for the sake of his mission. But, remembering Larsen's threat to finish him, he dared not risk putting himself under such disadvantage.

In the early days of his service with the Scarlet, when on detachment assignment with the end-of-rail crews that were building the Grand Trunk Pacific through the forests of British Columbia, he had witnessed rough-and-tumble bouts in logging camps, although this was his most active participation in one. Always the uniform had prevented his entry, even if he had been so inclined. Generally the crowd stepped in before the last breath had been crushed from the vanquished, and when the onlookers held back he had ordered festivities to cease. Twice within his knowledge, when he had been elsewhere, the crowd had waited too long and murder was the ugly result. In this rough-shod mill, he could not interfere.

His best chance seemed to lie in wearing down the self-crazed giant, then driving home a blow to chin or temple that would force a respite in which he might explain that the black-eyed Delores was nothing of interest in his clam-shell life. Childress began to spar with caution, playing for the logger's wind whenever he was within reach, but chiefly engaging himself in keeping out of the way.

As the minutes passed with no call of time, the sergeant's plan of campaign seemed to be succeeding. Larsen's breathing sounded like the wheeze of a bellows. If he knew anything of reserve, the logger was too angry to apply the knowledge. Evidently feeling the pace telling on him, he tore at the neck of his shirt with one hand, ripping off the buttons until there was exposed a chest as hairy as that of an ape. Then he rushed the harder. Long since he had abandoned the invective of his adopted English for what were probably more weighty curses in his mother tongue.

The sentiment of the onlookers at first had been with the Swede, but this now showed division. The loggers, pressed against the wall of the dance room that the fighters might have all the room they needed, were still with Larsen. But the stranger's game battle against odds of height, reach and weight was winning him supporters among the outlaw group at the open doorway. They did not hesitate to ejaculate pithy advice and encouragement.

Then suddenly, Larsen showed himself still capable of thought. Having edged toward the on-lookers, he lurched and seized a stool which had been vacated to give room. This he spun along the floor, torn and splintered by the spikes of countless boots, toward his advancing opponent. Catching Childress at the knees, it tripped him to a heavy fall. Lunging toward him came the Swede.

Objection from the outlaw spectators showed in a forward press, gasped invective and Bart Crowe's shouted warning:

"Look out there, he means to calk you!"

Already the angry jack's purpose showed in the lift of one spiked, heavy boot. Childress realized that there was not a second to spare.

Larsen meant to calk him--the most dreaded punishment of the West woods! In the thought flashes that come in moments of stress, he remembered men who had suffered the torture and lived through its years of after horror, with cheeks and forehead pitted as from disease, noses flattened, lips punctured--even with eyes gouged out.

The spiked boot was above his head now, about to be ground down into his face. He never had thought much of his looks, but he couldn't endure to be a horror to all who, perforce, should have to notice him.

There entered in a determining thought-flash. Flame of Fire Weed was the whole of it. All of a sudden he realized that he loved the ranch girl. For her, whether he won or lost her, he must save such personal appearance as he had. Thank Heaven that he had a gun--that, although loath to draw it, never had he been beaten in point of time thereto, once his mind was made up. It was now--for Flame!

All in the same flash with his realizations, his gun hand had gone to his hip, his fair warning had been lifted.

"Take care, boozo--I've got you covered!"

The pause gained by his boast was only the length of a breath, of a look. His hand was empty--had failed to find the trusty Colt where it should have been stalled in his hip holster!

A rasped curse from the Swede sounded like the breath of an Arctic winter storm, the sort of storm he had become familiar with on his last long detail in the North.

The boot studded with calks descended, and the end--the unspeakable end--was near.

But in the fraction of the last second a fury of denial moved the seemingly helpless man upon the splintered floor. The vivid remembrance of Flame Gallegher, freckled nose, fiery hair, had something to do with it.

"Not me; not me!" shrieked his primal appetence--his will to live.

With all the power conserved in him by years of trouble service, he threw up the arm that had reached in vain for his gun and took the Swede's tread square, without a whimper, although the pain was beyond experience.

The spikes cut into his forearm, snagging the flesh to the bone. Borrowing strength from the very torture forced upon himself, he gave an upward heave that forced him to a sitting posture and toppled Larsen to a fall.

How long Childress lay in a faint he never knew, for he forgot to ask. The only detail that mattered when he at last came to was that his agonizing effort had ended the fight. In falling backward, the logger had crashed his head against a corner of the "tin" piano and already had been carried out to sleep it off under the trees.

"And if he never comes out of it--the trance," said Crowe, "there won't be any crepe hanging on the front door of the Nest."

"You said some words, brother!" This from Delores, who had been ministering to the sadly punctured forearm. "I'll take him to my cabin for I guess I won him."

"What the hell did you do?" demanded the peg-leg crook.

Childress awoke--otherwise returned to consciousness. He took a look at his arm before they put upon it an antiseptic salve that any road house, used to spearing fights, keeps behind the bar. Then he did shudder at what he had escaped. Would Flame, little Flame with the delicious freckles across her nose--would she ever have looked at him again had he come back to her with the logger's mark all over his face? Of course, she would have scorned him!

Came forward then the violinist of the two-piece orchestra. He held out something that Childress had missed at a vital moment.

"Didn't it fall out of your holster when he tripped you with that stool?" asked the dope artist. "When you were heeled with all of that, me friend, why didn't you pull it sooner?"

"Never draw unless necessary," said Childress, wondering how the gun had torn loose.

"And then," declared the pasty-faced musician, "necessity ain't what it used to be!"

The sergeant was himself again. The arm still pained, but he was inured to pain. But there was a new sort of trouble in the immediate offing--Delores.

"You'll come to my cabin," she said, as if with authority. "I know what's good for all that's happened to you, horse thief."

"Horse thief?" he asked, forgetting for the moment.

"Your forehead!" exclaimed the dark-eyed sister of trouble. "I don't mind. My only husband was one and they strung him up down Missoula way. You come with me."

Childress had no intention of going with the girl, either to her cabin or to any other. Even had he not been a clean-living soul there must have intervened that early-morning meeting with Flame Gallegher.

"It can't be done, sister," he said, offering a smile for her interest.

"But it was my fault--I got you into the mess," she protested.

"And I got out of it with small damage," he returned cheerfully. "You'd better see what you can do for our logger friend. That crack he gave his head when I threw him might well mean more than a headache to-morrow."

"To hell with----"

Having listened to the colloquy, and realizing from the text thereof that the stranger was no ordinary philanderer, Bart Crowe stepped in with all the authority that is rested in the proprietor of an outlaw joint.

"Here you, Delores, take your damn logger to your own cabin," he said harshly. "You've made trouble enough for one afternoon. Mr. Childress is going to be my guest until he decides what he wants to do, who, with and when. Did you get that?" And he called her a name which is too descriptive for the printed page, no matter how much she may have deserved it.

Thus Sergt. Childress of the "Royal" won his spurs in the most notorious outlaw camp which the States still permits. After a supper with the "bunch," about the board at which he was freely toasted over his escape from the "logger's curse," he rented a cabin of his own and took possession, accepted fully as a horse rustler and a man who could take care of himself whatever the odds.