nor swore.  He remained faithful to the memory of a woman who had married somebody else.  For her sake he sold his horse and saddle, and became a lumber-man.  The losing of his Mamie was, of course, the heaviest of his many bludgeonings.  She was a simple soul, like D. Brown, inured to hard work, and at the mercy of a drunken father, who had perilously escaped by the very skin of his teeth from the clutches of Judge Lynch.  To give to Mamie a home had been the consuming desire of poor Dennis.  For this he pinched and saved till, at last, the needful sum lay snug in a San Lorenzo bank.  Then the bank “bust”!

Without a word to Mamie, Dennis drifted away to some distant range, and before he was seen again Tom Barker had appeared.  Why Tom, a big, brutal lumberman, desired to marry Mamie, no longer young, never pretty, penniless, and admittedly fond of Dennis, must remain a mystery.  Why Mamie married Tom is a question easily answered.  Tom was “boss” of a logging-camp, and none had ever denied his Caesarean attributes.  He had the qualities and vices conspicuously absent in Dennis.  He was Barker, of Barker’s Inlet.  The mere mention of his name in certain saloons was enough to put the fear of God into men even bigger than himself.  A sort of malefic magnetism exuded from every pore of his skin.  When he held up his finger Mamie crawled to him.  She believed, probably, that she was escaping from a drunken father, and she knew that Tom could and would supply many things for which she had yearned—­a parlour, for instance, possibly a piano, and a silk dress.  She would have taken Dennis without these amenities, but Dennis had fled to the back of Nowhere without even saying good-bye.

Months after the marriage Dennis came back.  Ajax described the wedding and the subsequent flitting to Barker’s Inlet.  Dennis listened, stroking his too thin, straggling moustache.  Next day he sold his horse and saddle.

When he appeared at Barker’s Inlet and asked for a job, Tom Barker smiled.  He had heard of Dennis, and he knew that Mamie had given to Dennis what never would be given to him—­the love and confidence of a simple woman.  Into his savage bull-head crept the determination to torment these two unsophisticated creatures delivered by Fate to be his slaves, and as such at his mercy.

Accordingly, Dennis was engaged.

Tom’s position at the inlet must be defined.  Some years before he had been known as a timber-cruiser—­that is to say, a man who “locates,” during his wanderings through forests primeval, belts of timber which will be likely to allure the speculative lumberman.  Barker, therefore, had discovered the inlet which bore his name, and in consideration of his services, and with a due sense of his physical and mental qualifications, he had been appointed boss of the camp by the real owners—­a syndicate of rich men, who knew that logs were worth ten dollars a thousand feet, and that the man to make them so was Tom Barker.  The syndicate wisely gave Tom a free hand, knowing that, in everything which concerned the working of men and machinery to the limit, Tom would begin at the point where their less elastic consciences might leave off.  The syndicate, therefore, remained in Victoria, or Vancouver, or San Francisco, and said of Tom that he was a rustler from “Way back, and as lively as they make ’em.”