The Rules of the Game | Page 2

exploded.
"Look here, you little squirt!" he cried, "I'd have you know I'm riding logs yet. I don't suppose you'd know a log if you'd see one, you' soft-handed, degenerate, old riverhog, you! A golf ball's about your size!"
"No," said Orde; "a fat old hippopotamus named Welton is about my size--as I'll show you when we land at the Marsh!"
Welton grinned.
"How's Mrs. Orde and the little boy?" he inquired.
"Mrs. Orde is fine and dandy, and the 'little boy,' as you call him, graduated from college last June," Orde replied.
"You don't say!" cried Welton, genuinely astounded. "Why, of course, he must have! Can he lick his dad?"
"You bet he can--or could if his dad would give him a chance. Why, he's been captain of the football team for two years."
"And football's the only game I'd come out of the woods to see," said Welton. "I must have seen him up at Minneapolis when his team licked the stuffing out of our boys; and I remember his name. But I never thought of him as little Bobby--because--well, because I always did remember him as little Bobby."
"He's big Bobby, now, all right," said Orde, "and that's one reason I wanted to see you; why I asked you to run over from Chicago next time you came down. Of course, there are ducks, too."
"There'd better be!" said Welton grimly.
"I want Bob to go into the lumber business, same as his dad was. This congressman game is all right, and I don't see how I can very well get out of it, even if I wanted to. But, Welton, I'm a Riverman, and I always will be. It's in my bones. I want Bob to grow up in the smell of the woods--same as his dad. I've always had that ambition for him. It was the one thing that made me hesitate longest about going to Washington. I looked forward to Orde & Son."
He was resting on his oars, and the duck-boat drifted silently by the swaying brown reeds.
Welton nodded.
"I want you to take him and break him in. I'd rather have you than any one I know. You're the only one of the outsiders who stayed by the Big Jam," Orde continued. "Don't try to favour him--that's no favour. If he doesn't make good, fire him. Don't tell any of your people that he's the son of a friend. Let him stand on his own feet. If he's any good we'll work him into the old game. Just give him a job, and keep an eye on him for me, to see how well he does."
"Jack, the job's his," said Welton. "But it won't do him much good, because it won't last long. We're cleaned up in Minnesota; and have only an odd two years on some odds and ends we picked up in Wisconsin just to keep us busy."
"What are you going to do then?" asked Orde, quietly dipping his oars again.
"I'm going to retire and enjoy life."
Orde laughed quietly.
"Yes, you are!" said he. "You'd have a high old time for a calendar month. Then you'd get uneasy. You'd build you a big house, which would keep you mad for six months more. Then you'd degenerate to buying subscription books, and wheezing around a club and going by the cocktail route. You'd look sweet retiring, now, wouldn't you?"
Welton grinned back, a trifle ruefully.
"You can no more retire than I can," Orde went on. "And as for enjoying life, I'll trade jobs with you in a minute, you ungrateful old idiot."
"I know it, Jack," confessed Welton; "but what can I do? I can't pick up any more timber at any price. I tell you, the game is played out. We're old mossbacks; and our job is done."
"I have five hundred million feet of sugar pine in California. What do you say to going in with me to manufacture?"
"The hell you have!" cried Welton, his jaw dropping. "I didn't know that!"
"Neither does anybody else. I bought it twenty years ago, under a corporation name. I was the whole corporation. Called myself the Wolverine Company."
"You own the Wolverine property, do you?"
"Yes; ever hear of it?"
"I know where it is. I've been out there trying to get hold of something, but you have the heart of it."
"Thought you were going to retire," Orde pointed out.
"The property's all right, but I've some sort of notion the title is clouded."
"Why?"
"Can't seem to remember; but I must have come against some record somewhere. Didn't pay extra much attention, because I wasn't interested in that piece. Something to do with fraudulent homesteading, wasn't it?"
Orde dropped his oars across his lap to fill and light a pipe.
"That title was deliberately clouded by an enemy to prevent my raising money at the time of the Big Jam, when I was pinched," said he. "Frank