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Law in that wilderness was not, saving that which the Rough Red chose to administer. Except in one instance, penalty more severe than a beating there was none, for the men could not equal their leader in breaking the greater and lesser laws of morality. The one instance was that of young Barney Mallan, who, while drunk, mishandled a horse so severely as to lame it. Him the Rough Red called to formal account.

“Don’t ye know that horses can’t be had?” he demanded, singularly enough without an oath. “Come here.”

The man approached. With a single powerful blow of a starting-bar the Rough Red broke one of the bones of his tibia.

“Try th’ lameness yerself,” said the Rough Red, grimly. He glared about through the dimness at his silent men, then stalked through the door into the cook-camp. Had he killed Barney Mallan outright, it would have been the same. No one in the towns would have been a word the wiser.

On Thanksgiving Day the entire place went on a prolonged drunk. The Rough Red distinguished himself by rolling the round stove through the door into the snow. He was badly burned in accomplishing this delicate jest, but minded the smart no more then he did the admiring cheers of his maudlin but emulative mates. FitzPatrick extinguished a dozen little fires that the coals had started, shifted the intoxicated Mallan’s leg out of the danger of someone’s falling on it, and departed from that roaring hell-hole to the fringe of the solemn forest. And this brings us to FitzPatrick.

FitzPatrick was a tall, slow man, with a face built square. The lines of his brows, his mouth, and his jaw ran straight across; those of his temples, cheeks, and nose straight up and down. His eye was very quiet and his speech rare. When he did talk, it was with deliberation. 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. FitzPatrick entered the sleeping-camp, stood his slender scaling-rule in the corner, and peered about him through the dusk of a single lamp.

He saw a round stove in the centre, a littered and dirty floor, bunks filled with horrible straw and worse blankets jumbled here and there, old and dirty clothes drying fetidly. He saw an unkempt row of hard-faced men along the deacon-seat, reckless in bearing, with the light of the dare-devil in their eyes.

“Where is the boss?” asked FitzPatrick, steadily.

The Rough Red lurched his huge form toward the intruder.

“I am your scaler,” explained the latter. “Where is the office?”

“You can have the bunk beyand,” indicated the Rough Red, surlily.

“You have no office then?”

“What’s good enough fer th’ men is good enough for a boss; and what’s good enough fer th’ boss is good enough fer any blank blanked scaler.”

“It is not good enough for this one,” replied FitzPatrick, calmly. “I have no notion of sleepin’ and workin’ in no such noise an’ dirt. I need an office to keep me books and th’ van. Not a log do I scale for ye, Jimmy Bourke, till you give me a fit place to tally in.”

And so it came about, though the struggle lasted three days. The Rough Red stormed restlessly between the woods and the camp, delivering tremendous broadsides of oaths and threats. FitzPatrick sat absolutely imperturbable on the deacon-seat, looking straight in front of him, his legs stretched comfortably aslant, one hand supporting the elbow of the other, which in turn held his short brier pipe.

“Good-mornin’ to ye, Jimmy Bourke,” said he each morning, and after that uttered no word until the evening, when it was, “Good-night to ye, Jimmy Bourke,” with a final rap, rap, rap of his pipe.