Story of "Conflict"

THE STORY OF “CONFLICT”, starring Priscilla Dean.

Showing at the Star Theatre, Cranbrook, Dec. 19 to 22

            John Remalie and his brother Henry were lumbermen in the Great North Woods; alike in blood yet in temperament as different as a pine and an oak.

            John was a religious young man, gifted in prayer and given to a piety that smacked of hypocrisy.  He stayed in the woods while Henry went to the city to handle the gregarious portions of the Remalie lumber business, then on its way to a million.

            John never married.  Once he had planned to marry.  He built a magnificent stone castle to house his bride, but suddenly, without warning or reason, he broke off his engagement and altered the appearance of the house.  He made it a grim, prison-like structure and moved in with a Miss Labo, daughter of a camp cook, as his housekeeper.  She was a silent woman, as grim and forbidding as his house, and for twenty-seven years she had said no unnecessary word to him.

            In the city Henry had married and of their union there came a beautiful girl, Dorcas, who grew to eighteen in luxury, the tempestuous blood of the forest coursing unseen through her veins under a veneer of culture and education.  Dorcas had only met John Remalie once, and that was at the funeral of her beloved father.  She disliked her uncle intensely.

            When the will of Henry Remalie was read it provided that his daughter should become the ward of his brother and stay within his house until she became of age.

            Rebelliously, Dorcas left for the woods, a spoiled and pampered child of wealth.  With her went a maid and five trunks.  Miss Labo met her at the door – sullenly.  An hour later John Remalie arrived from his lumber office at the mill and told her that her sinful soul would have to mend before she could reap the benefits of his pleasures.  They sat down to a frugal meal, unctuously eaten with a pall of hypocritical piety hanging over the forbidding room like a shroud.  Dorcas was miserably unhappy and rebellious.

            In a few days Dorcas, with feminine instincts, senses that something is wrong with John Remalie and his whole scheme of life.  She cannot understand the sullen housekeeper, and trembles with a foreboding of evil.

            In the town comes Jevons, a splendid figure of a young man, but a person of mystery.  No one knows why he is there and every one likes him for his cheerful manner and his open frankness in everything except himself.

            Particularly interested in Jevons is Sloan, Remalie’s camp foreman, who wants Dorcas for her beauty and fears the presence of any other man in the village, particularly one as clean as Jevons.  On a pretense he picks a fight with Jevons, and is thrashed for his trouble.  Accidentally Dorcas meets Jevons, and while despising lumberjacks, is surprised at his apparent education.  The girl and the man become interested in one another until Dorcas overhears a conversation in which Miss Labo tells a certain mysterious visitor that she is his mother and John Remalie is his father.  Dorcas has reason to believe that the visitor is Jevons.  She is torn with anguish.

            Jevons announces that he is going to compete with Remalie in the lumber business and begins constructing a mill.  Remalie plans to have him put out of the way, perhaps unctuously, but nevertheless, effectively.  Sloan is to do the work.

            Remalie leaves for Boston so as to be absent when Jevons is killed.  The housekeeper, to get his fortune for her son as the only heir, tries to poison Dorcas.  She leaves the grim house and goes to live with the three Ginger brothers, uncouth but mighty men of the forest, who swear to protect her.

            Jevons saves her from annoyance at the hands of Sloan.  She learns that Jevons is not the mysterious visitor.  She is thrilled by Jevons’ plans to get his logs to the mill and outwit the timber baron Remalie.  They soon become sweethearts.  She pledges to carry on his work in case aught happens to the young lumberman.

            The day is set for pitting of forces – on the one side the wit of Jevons and the loyalty of his crew – ex-service men who had fought under him in France – and on the other, the hireling lumberjacks of the Remalie interests.

            On the moprning of the day, word reached Dorcas that Jevons is missing.  Sloan has taken him prisoner and bound him in a deserted cabin.  Dorcas, thinking Jevons is dead, goes to finish his job.

            She arrives at the Jevons logging camp in time to see the two forces engage in conflict.  She spurs the minions of Jevons.  The tide of battle turns against them, however, so she determines to outwit her uncle’s forces by desperate means.

            She sets off the fuse which blows up the dam behind which Jevons had stored millions of gallons of river water and thousands of logs.  The liberated waters roar down the dry river bed, the logs rolling and tumbling on their way to the mill below.  It is then she learns from Sloan that Jevons is helpless in a cabin directly in the path of the flood.

            Then begins a terrible race between the rushing waters and the girl on horseback.  She is too late to reach the cabin, but soon overtakes Jevons who is floating down unconscious on a section of the cabin floor.  He rapidly is approaching a cataract.

            Forsaking her horse, Dorcas takes to the river, jumping from log to log – sometimes falling between them.  She reaches Jevons in the nick of time and hauls him to safety.

            The rule of the lumber baron is broken.  Dorcas inspires him to honor and right and prevails upon him to marry Miss Labo, so that Sloan, their son, can hold up his head again.  Then, with Jevons, her happiness is complete.