“Hell!” he cried violently.  “Have we got to sit around like mush-men, while the rats are chawin’ our vitals.  Fifteen or sixteen year I’ve handled this lay-out without a growl I couldn’t kick plumb out o’ the feller who made it.  Now—­now, because of a fool play I made, I’ve got to set the kid gloves on my hands, sayin’ ‘thank you,’ while the boys git up and plug me between the eyes.  No, sir.  It ain’t my way.  It’s me for the shot gun in the stern of the gopher all the time.  It’s me to mush up the features of any hoboe who don’t know better than to grin when I’m throwin’ the hot air.  I can’t stand for the politics of labour where I hand out the wage.  A man’s a man to me, not one darn slobber of policy.  I’m goin’ to jump in on that talk.  And when I’m thro’—­”

“You’ll get all the trouble in the world plumb on your neck.”  Bull’s fine eyes were alight with humour.  He revelled in the fighting spirit of the older man.  “Here, Bat,” he cried, “I’m a fool kid beside you.  I don’t begin to know my job when I think of you.  But I’m up sides with all the politics games.  Politics are ideals, notions.  They haven’t real horse sense within a mile.  They’re just the fool thoughts of folk who haven’t better to do than sit around and think, and talk, an’ see how they can make other folk conform to the things they think.  That’s all right.  It’s human nature in its biggest conceit, or it’s another way of helping themselves without pushing a shovel.  It don’t matter which it is.  But what I want to impress on you is, it’s the biggest thing in life.  It’s the whole thing in life.  Get a notion and think it hard enough, and talk it hard enough, and you’ll hypnotise a hundred brains bigger than your own, and sweep the crowd with you.  You’ll even hypnotise yourself into believing the truth of a thing your better sense knows isn’t true, never was true, an’ couldn’t be true anyway.  And when you’re fixed that way you’ll die for your notion.  Oh, a politician ain’t yearning for any old grave.  He wouldn’t get an audience there.  Politicians ’ud hate to die worse than a condemned man.  But that’s the queer of it; he’d die rather than give up a notion he’s built up.  He’d hate to death to push a blue pencil through it and—­try again.  All of which means, bar the doors of this recreation room parliament, and you’ll start up a hundred such parliaments, and worse, throughout your enterprise here on Labrador, and you’ll finish by wrecking the whole blessed concern.”

If Bull looked for yielding he was disappointed.  But he appreciated the twinkle that had crept into the lumberman’s stern eyes.  The answer he received was a curiously expressive grunt as the man took out his timepiece and consulted it.  When he saw him rise abruptly from his chair, Bull felt that if his talk had not had the effect he desired it had not been wholly wasted.

“Guess I’ll git goin’,” Bat said shortly.  Then he glanced out of the window, where he could plainly see the stream of the Myra’s smoke as she came down the cove.  “I’ll bring your lady friend right up.  Maybe she’ll fancy the dope, which I ‘low you can hand out good an’ plenty.”