Bat thrust the letter away and looked up.

“Father Adam didn’t write that letter for you?  He just handed it out to you to bring along?”

“That’s how,” Bull nodded.

“Sure.”  Bat’s tone became reflective.  “He must have wrote that letter years, and held it against the time he located you.  He’s queer.”

Bull laughed.

“Maybe he is,” he said, “I don’t know about that.  But he’s one hell of a good man,” he went on warmly.  “Do you know him?  But of course you do.  Say, he’s just father and mother to every darn lumber-jack that haunts the forests of Quebec, and it don’t worry him if his children are hellhound or honest.  There’s that to him sets me just crazy.  I’d like to see his thin, tired face, always smiling.”  He stirred.  And the warmth died abruptly out of his manner.  “Say, you knew me—­at the wharf?”

“Sure.  I knew you before you came along.  We’ve a wireless out on the headland.”

“I see.  Father Adam warned you I was coming.  He told you—­”

“The whole darn yarn.  Sure.”

Bull laughed grimly.

“That he guessed to shoot me to small meat if I didn’t do as he said?”

“If you didn’t cut out homicide from your notions of—­sport.”

“Yes.  It was tough,” Bull regretted.  “But I’m glad—­now.”

“Yep.  Guess any straight sort of feller would feel that way—­after.”

The lumberman’s regret was unnoticed by the other.

Suddenly Bull leant forward in his chair.  A smile, half whimsical, half incredulous, lit his eyes.  He thrust his elbows on the desk and supported his face in his hands.

“It just beats hell!” he cried.  “It certainly does.  Oh, I’m awake all right.  Sure, I am.  One time I wasn’t sure.  Two months back I was lying around a lousy summer camp getting ready to take a hand in the winter cut for the Skandinavia Corporation.  I was within two seconds of breaking a man’s life—­the rotten camp boss.  And now?  Why, now I’m sitting around in dandy tweeds in the boss chair of a swell office, with a crazy notion back of my head I’m here to beat the game with the greatest groundwood mill in the world, and ten million dollars capital behind me.  Maybe there’s folks wouldn’t guess I’m awake, but I allow I am.  But the whole thing sets me thinking of the fairy stories I used to read when I was a kid, and never could see the horse sense in wasting time over.”

Bat helped himself to a chew from a fragment of plug tobacco.

“Here, listen,” Bull went on, after the briefest pause.  “It’s my ’show down.’  I don’t understand a thing.  I’m mostly a kid from college with a yearning for fight.  So far I’ve learned some of the things the forest can teach the feller who wants to learn.  They’re the rough things.  And I like rough things.  I’ve some grip on groundwood.  And the making of groundwood’s the main object of my life.  That, and the notion of licking hell out of the other feller.  That’s me, and those are the things made Father Adam send me along down to Sachigo.  Well, it’s up to you.”  He spread out his hands, “Where do I stand?  How do I stand?  And why in the name of all that’s crazy am I sitting in this boss chair—­right now?”