"You won't be fit for anything but bait for a bear-trap ten minutes after I get you back to camp," bellowed the tyrant. "MacLeod, get that man down!"
"Don't you want to hire a teamster, Mr. Ide?" bleated Tommy, crawfishing to the peak of the low roof. "You know what I be on twitchro'd, ramdown, or in a yard. You don't find my hosses calked or shoulder-galled." He hastened in nervous entreaty: "You hire me, Mr. Ide. I never had a team sluiced yet. You know what I can do in the woods."
The plaintiveness of the frightened man's appeal touched Wade. He realized the weight of misery this pathetic turncoat might expect thereafter at the hands of Britt and his crew of "Busters." MacLeod was advancing towards the ladder that conducted to the roof, his sullen face lighting with a certain amount of satisfaction. Wade put himself before the ladder.
"Hirin' men out from under isn't square woods style, Tommy," said Ide, shaking his head.
"That man isn't a slave," protested Wade. "He is the only man I've found in these woods with courage enough to stand up for what's right, Mr. Ide. I don't believe in leaving him to those who are going to make him suffer for it."
"Up to now, you dude, you've done about everything that shouldn't be done in the woods!" cried Britt. "But there's one thing you can't do, and that's take a man out of my crew."
"It's an unwritten law, Wade," protested his partner. "It isn't square business to meddle with another operator's crew."
"When a case like this comes up, it's time to change the law, then," declared Wade, with savageness of his own, the menacing proximity of MacLeod acting on his anger like bellows on coals.
"I can't afford to be mixed into anything of the sort," persisted Ide.
"And nobody but a fool would try it, Rod. I've warned you to get rid of him. You can see for yourself now! He don't fit. He's protectin' fire-bugs, standin' out against timber-owners' interests, and breaking every article in the code up here."
"And I'm likely to keep on breaking the kind of code that seems to go north of Castonia!" cried the young iconoclast. For a moment his flaming eyes dwelt on the face of the Honorable John Barrett, and that gentleman, who had been wondering just what shaft his own recalcitrancy would next draw from this champion of the oppressed, looked greatly perturbed. "Mr. Ide, do you forbid me to hire this man?"