“It means that I take ye by your heels and snap your head off,” rasped Ward, tucking his sleeves away from his corded wrists.  “You ain’t got your club with you this time.”

The Cap’n sighed resignedly.

“Now,” went on the Colonel, with the vigorous decision of a man who feels that he has got the ascendency, “you talk about something that amounts to something.  That stumpage on number eight is mostly cedar and hackmatack, and I’ve got an offer from the folks that want sleepers for the railroad extension.”

He went on with facts and figures, but the Cap’n listened with only languid interest.  He kept sighing and wrinkling his brows, as though in deep rumination on a matter far removed from the stumpage question.  When the agreement of sale was laid before him he signed with a blunted lead-pencil, still in his trance.

“Northin’ but a cross-cut saw with two axe-handles for legs,” he said to himself, his eyes on the Colonel’s back as that individual stamped wrathfully away.  “Teeth and edge are hard as iron!  It’s no good to talk mattermony to him.  Prob’ly it wouldn’t do no good for me to talk mattermony to Phar—­Phar—­to t’other one.  She couldn’t ask him to go git a minister.  ’Tain’t right to put that much onto a woman’s shoulders.  The trouble with him is that he’s too sure of wimmen.  Had his sister under his thumb all them years, and thought less and less of her for stayin’ there.  He’s too sure of t’other.  Thinks nobody else wants her.  Thinks all he’s got to do is step round and git her some day.  Ain’t got no high idee of wimmen like I have.  Thinks they ought to wait patient as a tree in a wood-lot.  Has had things too much his own way, I say.  Hain’t never had his lesson.  Thinks nobody else don’t want her, hey?  And she can wait his motions!  He needs his lesson.  Lemme see!”

With his knurly forefinger at his puckered forehead he sat and pondered.

He was very silent at supper.

The Colonel, still exulting in his apparent victory, said many sneering and savage things, and clattered his knife truculently on his plate.  Sproul merely looked at him with that wistful preoccupation that still marked his countenance.

“He’s a quitter,” pondered the Colonel.  “I reckon he ain’t playin’ lamb so’s to tole me on.  He’s growed soft—­that’s what he’s done.”

Ward went to sleep that night planning retaliation.

Sproul stayed awake when the house was quiet, still pondering.

IV

During the next few days, as one treads farther and farther out upon thin ice to test it, the Colonel craftily set about regaining, inch by inch, his lost throne as tyrant.  Occasionally he checked himself in some alarm, to wonder what meant that ridging of the Cap’n’s jaw-muscles, and whether he really heard the seaman’s teeth gritting.  Once, when he recoiled before an unusually demoniac glare from Sproul, the latter whined, after a violent inward struggle: