“All right,” she said, giving Jack a thrilling glance.  “If you say so, I’ll return by the trail to please you.  Good-bye, everybody.”

She lifted the bushes and started toward the entrance.

“You damned fool!  Stop her!” growled Wessner.  “Keep her till we’re loaded, anyhow.  You’re playing hell!  Can’t you see that when this thing is found out, there she’ll be to ruin all of us.  If you let her go, every man of us has got to cut, and some of us will be caught sure.”

Jack sprang forward.  Freckles’ heart muffled in his throat.  The Angel seemed to divine Jack’s coming.  She was humming a little song.  She deliberately stopped and began pulling the heads of the curious grasses that grew all around her.  When she straightened, she took a step backward and called:  “Ho!  Freckles, the Bird Woman wants that natural history pamphlet returned.  It belongs to a set she is going to have bound.  That’s one of the reasons we put it under the box.  You be sure to get them as you go home tonight, for fear it rains or becomes damp with the heavy dews.”

“All right,” said Freckles, but it was in a voice that he never had heard before.

Then the Angel turned and sent a parting glance at Jack.  She was overpoweringly human and bewitchingly lovely.

“You won’t forget that ride and the red tie,” she half asserted, half questioned.

Jack succumbed.  Freckles was his captive, but he was the Angel’s, soul and body.  His face wore the holiest look it ever had known as he softly re-echoed Freckles’ “All right.”  With her head held well up, the Angel walked slowly away, and Jack turned to the men.

“Drop your damned staring and saw wood,” he shouted.  “Don’t you know anything at all about how to treat a lady?” It might have been a question which of the cronies that crouched over green wood fires in the cabins of Wildcat Hollow, eternally sucking a corncob pipe and stirring the endless kettles of stewing coon and opossum, had taught him to do even as well as he had by the Angel.

The men muttered and threatened among themselves, but they began working desperately.  Someone suggested that a man be sent to follow the Angel and to watch her and the Bird Woman leave the swamp.  Freckles’ heart sank within him, but Jack was in a delirium and past all caution.

“Yes,” he sneered.  “Mebby all of you had better give over on the saw and run after the girl.  I guess not!  Seems to me I got the favors.  I didn’t see no bouquets on the rest of you!  If anybody follows her, I do, and I’m needed here among such a pack of idiots.  There’s no danger in that baby face.  She wouldn’t give me away!  You double and work like forty, while me and Wessner will take the axes and begin to cut in on the other side.”

“What about the noise?” asked Wessner.

“No difference about the noise,” answered Jack.  “She took us to be from McLean’s gang, slick as grease.  Make the chips fly!”