the veins knotted on his forehead
and he panted for breath. Latisan wanted to urge him to be careful.
Flagg was exhibiting the dread symptoms of apoplexy. "Safe! I'll be
locked into this dam by you, with sluiceway refused to me--that's what
it will come to--you offering me a cut price for the logs I can't get
down to the Adonia sawmills. If you can't kill one way, as you killed
off the Latisans, you'll kill in another way. You're a devilish thief,
Craig. I wonder if the men who hire you know what you are. Special acts,
hey? That legislature has given a robber a loaded gun without knowing
it. By the bald-headed jeesicks! I've got a drive coming down this
river! And for fifty years, every spring, it has gone through. It's
going through this year, too, and if you're underfoot here you'll be
walked on. And that's just as good as your trumped-up law; it's
better--it's justice."

Flagg acted like a man who did not dare to remain longer in the presence
of such an enemy; his big hands were doubling into hard fists; he was
shaking in all his muscles. He leaped back onto the seat of his jumper,
swung his team and sent his horses leaping up a whiplash road which
traversed the cliff--a road he had disdained in his wild impatience to
meet his foe.

When they reached the level of the wooded country Flagg had something to
say about his abrupt departure from Craig, as if the master feared that
his employe might suspect that there was an element of flight in the
going-away. "There's a law against killing a man, and I've got to
respect that law even if I do spit on special acts that those gum-shoers
have put through. I didn't go down to their legislature and fight
special acts, Latisan. I found these waters running downhill as God
Almighty had set 'em to running. I have used 'em for my logs. And if any
man tries now to steal my water at Skulltree, or block me with a raised
dam, there's going to be one devil of a fight at Skulltree and I'll be
there in the middle of it. What I wanted to do to Craig to-day can well
wait till then when the doing can count for full value."

Ward had been casting solicitous side glances at the empurpled face and
the swollen veins. He did not dare to counsel Flagg as to his motions or
his emotions. But he felt sure that an old man could not indulge in such
transports without danger. He knew something about the effects of an
embolism. His violent grandfather had been a victim of a fit of flaming
anger in his