"No threats, sir. If you won't take our drive for the usual fees and guarantee its delivery, will you let us drive it independently?" "Not with my water--and you'll pay fees just the same!" "_Your_ water! Who made you the boss of God's rains and rivers? Have you any charter, giving you the right to turn the State waters of Blunder Lake from their natural outlet and keep everybody else from using them?" Britt clacked his finger in his hard palm and blurted contemptuous "Phuh!" through his beard. "Show me any such charter, Mr. Britt, or tell me where to find the record of it, and I'll accept the law." "Hell on your law!" cried the tyrant of the Umcolcus. "Aren't you willing to let the law decide it, Mr. Britt?" "Hell on your law!" Three times more did Wade, his face burning in his righteous anger, his voice trembling with passion, ask the question. Three times did the Honorable Pulaski Britt fling those four words of maddening insult back at him. And Wade, his face going suddenly white, snatched the reins from Ide's hands, struck the horse, whirled him into the trail, and drove away madly. Down the aisles of the forest followed those four words as long as Pulaski Britt felt that their iteration could reach the ears of listeners. "So you finished your business with him, did you?" inquired Ide, at last, allowing himself, as a true prophet, a bit of a sneer. "I got just what I went after," snarled the young man. "I got in four words the fighting rules of these woods, explained by the head devil of them all, and, by ----, if that's the only way for an honest man to save his skin up here, they can have the fight on those lines! Take the reins, Mr. Ide; I want to straighten this thing in my mind." Little passed between them on the return journey, but they talked far into the night, leaning towards each other across the little splint table in the office camp. The next morning they climbed the side of Enchanted, following the main road that had been swamped to Enchanted Stream. On the upper slopes they came upon the log-yards, and heaps of great, stripped spruces piled ready for the sleds. Farther up the slopes they heard the monotonous "whush-wish" of the cross-cut saws and the crackling crash of falling trees. In the Maine woods it is not the practice to haul to landings until the tree crop is practically all down and yarded on the main roads. This practice in the case of the Enchanted operation that winter was providential; for in the conference of the night before Rodburd Ide and his partner had definitely abandoned Enchanted Stream. That decision left them the alternative of Blunder Stream. It was the only plan that fitted with Rodburd Ide's new hopes based on the log contract in his breast-pocket. For months he had dimly foreseen this crisis without clear conception as to how it was to be met. But the possibilities of the gamble had fascinated him.