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The Blazed Trail

by Stewart Edward White · English · Gutenberg #3413 · 650,868 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Blazed Trail

Author: Stewart Edward White


        
Release date: September 1, 2002 [eBook #3413]
                Most recently updated: March 12, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3413

Credits: Produced by Douglas E. Levy, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLAZED TRAIL ***




Produced by Douglas E. Levy





THE BLAZED TRAIL

By Stewart Edward White


TO MY FATHER--From whose early pioneer life are drawn many of Harry
Thorpe's experiences.


CONTENTS

     PART I:    THE FOREST

     PART II:   THE LANDLOOKER

     PART III:  THE BLAZING OF THE TRAIL

     PART IV:   THORPE'S DREAM GIRL

     PART V:    THE FOLLOWING OF THE TRAIL




PART I: THE FOREST



Chapter I


When history has granted him the justice of perspective, we shall know
the American Pioneer as one of the most picturesque of her many figures.
Resourceful, self-reliant, bold; adapting himself with fluidity to
diverse circumstances and conditions; meeting with equal cheerfulness of
confidence and completeness of capability both unknown dangers and the
perils by which he has been educated; seizing the useful in the lives
of the beasts and men nearest him, and assimilating it with marvellous
rapidity; he presents to the world a picture of complete adequacy which
it would be difficult to match in any other walk of life. He is a strong
man, with a strong man's virtues and a strong man's vices. In him the
passions are elemental, the dramas epic, for he lives in the age when
men are close to nature, and draw from her their forces. He satisfies
his needs direct from the earth. Stripped of all the towns can give
him, he merely resorts to a facile substitution. It becomes an affair of
rawhide for leather, buckskin for cloth, venison for canned tomatoes.
We feel that his steps are planted on solid earth, for civilizations
may crumble without disturbing his magnificent self-poise. In him we
perceive dimly his environment. He has something about him which
other men do not possess--a frank clearness of the eye, a swing of the
shoulder, a carriage of the hips, a tilt of the hat, an air of muscular
well-being which marks him as belonging to the advance guard, whether he
wears buckskin, mackinaw, sombrero, or broadcloth. The woods are there,
the plains, the rivers. Snow is there, and the line of the prairie.
Mountain peaks and still pine forests have impressed themselves subtly;
so that when we turn to admire his unconsciously graceful swing, we seem
to hear the ax biting the pine, or the prospector's pick tapping the
rock. And in his eye is the capability of quiet humor, which is just the
quality that the surmounting of many difficulties will give a man.

Like the nature he has fought until he understands, his disposition is
at once kindly and terrible. Outside the subtleties of his calling, he
sees only red. Relieved of the strenuousness of his occupation, he turns
all the force of the wonderful energies that have carried him far where
other men would have halted, to channels in which a gentle current
makes flood enough. It is the mountain torrent and the canal. Instead
of pleasure, he seeks orgies. He runs to wild excesses of drinking,
fighting, and carousing--which would frighten most men to sobriety--with
a happy, reckless spirit that carries him beyond the limits of even his
extraordinary forces.

This is not the moment to judge him. And yet one cannot help admiring
the magnificently picturesque spectacle of such energies running riot.
The power is still in evidence, though beyond its proper application.



Chapter II


In the network of streams draining the eastern portion of Michigan and
known as the Saginaw waters, the great firm of Morrison & Daly had for
many years carried on extensive logging operations in the wilderness.
The number of their camps was legion, of their employees a multitude.
Each spring they had gathered in their capacious booms from thirty to
fifty million feet of pine logs.

Now at last, in the early eighties, they reached the end of their
holdings. Another winter would finish the cut. Two summers would see
the great mills at Beeson Lake dismantled or sold, while Mr. Daly, the
“woods partner” of the combination, would flit away to the scenes of new
and perhaps more extensive operations. At this juncture Mr. Daly called
to him John Radway, a man whom he knew to possess extensive experience,
a little capital, and a desire for more of both.

“Radway,” said he, when the two found themselves alone in the mill
office, “we expect to cut this year some fifty millions, which will
finish our pine holdings in the Saginaw waters. Most of this timber
lies over in the Crooked Lake district, and that we expect to put in
ourselves. We own, however, five million on the Cass Branch which we
would like to log on contract. Would you care to take the job?”

“How much a thousand do you give?” asked Radway.

“Four dollars,” replied the lumberman.

“I'll look at it,” replied the jobber.

So Radway got the “descriptions” and a little map divided into
townships, sections, and quarter sections; and went out to look at it.
He searched until he found a “blaze” on a tree, the marking on which
indicated it as the corner of a section. From this corner the boundary
lines were blazed at right angles in either direction. Radway followed
the blazed lines. Thus he was able accurately to locate isolated
“forties” (forty acres), “eighties,” quarter sections, and sections in a
primeval wilderness. The feat, however, required considerable woodcraft,
an exact sense of direction, and a pocket compass.

These resources were still further drawn upon for the next task. Radway
tramped the woods, hills, and valleys to determine the most practical
route over which to build a logging road from the standing timber to the
shores of Cass Branch. He found it to be an affair of some puzzlement.
The pines stood on a country rolling with hills, deep with pot-holes.
It became necessary to dodge in and out, here and there, between the
knolls, around or through the swamps, still keeping, however, the same
general direction, and preserving always the requisite level or down
grade. Radway had no vantage point from which to survey the country.
A city man would promptly have lost himself in the tangle; but the
woodsman emerged at last on the banks of the stream, leaving behind him
a meandering trail of clipped trees that wound, twisted, doubled, and
turned, but kept ever to a country without steep hills. From the main
road he purposed arteries to tap the most distant parts.

“I'll take it,” said he to Daly.

Now Radway happened to be in his way a peculiar character. He was
acutely sensitive to the human side of those with whom he had dealings.
In fact, he was more inclined to take their point of view than to hold
his own. For that reason, the subtler disputes were likely to go against
him. His desire to avoid coming into direct collision of opinion with
the other man, veiled whatever of justice might reside in his own
contention. Consequently it was difficult for him to combat sophistry
or a plausible appearance of right. Daly was perfectly aware of Radway's
peculiarities, and so proceeded to drive a sharp bargain with him.

Customarily a jobber is paid a certain proportion of the agreed price as
each stage of the work is completed--so much when the timber is cut;
so much when it is skidded, or piled; so much when it is stacked at the
river, or banked; so much when the “drive” down the waters of the river
is finished. Daly objected to this method of procedure.

“You see, Radway,” he explained, “it is our last season in the country.
When this lot is in, we want to pull up stakes, so we can't take any
chances on not getting that timber in. If you don't finish your Job, it
keeps us here another season. There can be no doubt, therefore, that you
finish your job. In other words, we can't take any chances. If you start
the thing, you've got to carry it 'way through.”

“I think I can, Mr. Daly,” the jobber assured him.

“For that reason,” went on Daly, “we object to paying you as the work
progresses. We've got to have a guarantee that you don't quit on us, and
that those logs will be driven down the branch as far as the river in
time to catch our drive. Therefore I'm going to make you a good price
per thousand, but payable only when the logs are delivered to our
rivermen.”

Radway, with his usual mental attitude of one anxious to justify the
other man, ended by seeing only his employer's argument. He did not
perceive that the latter's proposition introduced into the transaction
a gambling element. It became possible for Morrison & Daly to get a
certain amount of work, short of absolute completion, done for nothing.

“How much does the timber estimate?” he inquired finally.

“About five millions.”

“I'd need a camp of forty or fifty men then. I don't see how I can run
such a camp without borrowing.”

“You have some money, haven't you?”

“Yes; a little. But I have a family, too.”

“That's all right. Now look here.” Daly drew towards him a sheet of
paper and began to set down figures showing how the financing could
be done. Finally it was agreed. Radway was permitted to draw on the
Company's warehouse for what provisions he would need. Daly let him feel
it as a concession.

All this was in August. Radway, who was a good practical woodsman, set
about the job immediately. He gathered a crew, established his camp, and
began at once to cut roads through the country he had already blazed on
his former trip.

Those of us who have ever paused to watch a group of farmers working
out their road taxes, must have gathered a formidable impression of
road-clearing. And the few of us who, besides, have experienced the
adventure of a drive over the same highway after the tax has been
pronounced liquidated, must have indulged in varied reflections as to
the inadequacy of the result.

Radway's task was not merely to level out and ballast the six feet of
a road-bed already constructed, but to cut a way for five miles through
the unbroken wilderness. The way had moreover to be not less than
twenty-five feet wide, needed to be absolutely level and free from any
kind of obstructions, and required in the swamps liberal ballasting with
poles, called corduroys. To one who will take the trouble to recall
the variety of woods, thickets, and jungles that go to make up a wooded
country--especially in the creek bottoms where a logging road finds
often its levelest way--and the piles of windfalls, vines, bushes, and
scrubs that choke the thickets with a discouraging and inextricable
tangle, the clearing of five miles to street width will look like an
almost hopeless undertaking. Not only must the growth be removed, but
the roots must be cut out, and the inequalities of the ground levelled
or filled up. Reflect further that Radway had but a brief time at his
disposal,--but a few months at most,--and you will then be in a position
to gauge the first difficulties of those the American pioneer expects
to encounter as a matter of course. The cutting of the road was a mere
incident in the battle with the wilderness.

The jobber, of course, pushed his roads as rapidly as possible, but was
greatly handicapped by lack of men. Winter set in early and surprised
him with several of the smaller branches yet to finish. The main line,
however, was done.

At intervals squares were cut out alongside. In them two long timbers,
or skids, were laid andiron-wise for the reception of the piles of logs
which would be dragged from the fallen trees. They were called skidways.
Then finally the season's cut began.

The men who were to fell the trees, Radway distributed along one
boundary of a “forty.” They were instructed to move forward across the
forty in a straight line, felling every pine tree over eight inches in
diameter. While the “saw-gangs,” three in number, prepared to fell
the first trees, other men, called “swampers,” were busy cutting and
clearing of roots narrow little trails down through the forest from the
pine to the skidway at the edge of the logging road. The trails were
perhaps three feet wide, and marvels of smoothness, although no attempt
was made to level mere inequalities of the ground. They were called
travoy roads (French “travois”). Down them the logs would be dragged and
hauled, either by means of heavy steel tongs or a short sledge on which
one end of the timber would be chained.

Meantime the sawyers were busy. Each pair of men selected a tree, the
first they encountered over the blazed line of their “forty.” After
determining in which direction it was to fall, they set to work to chop
a deep gash in that side of the trunk.

Tom Broadhead and Henry Paul picked out a tremendous pine which they
determined to throw across a little open space in proximity to the
travoy road. One stood to right, the other to left, and alternately
their axes bit deep. It was a beautiful sight this, of experts wielding
their tools. The craft of the woodsman means incidentally such a free
swing of the shoulders and hips, such a directness of stroke as the
blade of one sinks accurately in the gash made by the other, that one
never tires of watching the grace of it. Tom glanced up as a sailor
looks aloft.

“She'll do, Hank,” he said.

The two then with a dozen half clips of the ax, removed the inequalities
of the bark from the saw's path. The long, flexible ribbon of steel
began to sing, bending so adaptably to the hands and motions of the
men manipulating, that it did not seem possible so mobile an instrument
could cut the rough pine. In a moment the song changed timbre. Without
a word the men straightened their backs. Tom flirted along the blade
a thin stream of kerosene oil from a bottle in his hip pocket, and the
sawyers again bent to their work, swaying back and forth rhythmically,
their muscles rippling under the texture of their woolens like those of
a panther under its skin. The outer edge of the saw-blade disappeared.

“Better wedge her, Tom,” advised Hank.

They paused while, with a heavy sledge, Tom drove a triangle of steel
into the crack made by the sawing. This prevented the weight of the tree
from pinching the saw, which is a ruin at once to the instrument and the
temper of the filer. Then the rhythmical z-z-z! z-z-z! again took up its
song.

When the trunk was nearly severed, Tom drove another and thicker wedge.

“Timber!” hallooed Hank in a long-drawn melodious call that melted
through the woods into the distance. The swampers ceased work and
withdrew to safety.

But the tree stood obstinately upright. So the saw leaped back and forth
a few strokes more.

“Crack!” called the tree.

Hank coolly unhooked his saw handle, and Tom drew the blade through and
out the other side.

The tree shivered, then leaded ever so slightly from the perpendicular,
then fell, at first gently, afterwards with a crescendo rush, tearing
through the branches of other trees, bending the small timber, breaking
the smallest, and at last hitting with a tremendous crash and bang which
filled the air with a fog of small twigs, needles, and the powder of
snow, that settled but slowly. There is nothing more impressive than
this rush of a pine top, excepting it be a charge of cavalry or the fall
of Niagara. Old woodsmen sometimes shout aloud with the mere excitement
into which it lifts them.

Then the swampers, who had by now finished the travoy road, trimmed the
prostrate trunk clear of all protuberances. It required fairly skillful
ax work. The branches had to be shaved close and clear, and at the same
time the trunk must not be gashed. And often a man was forced to wield
his instrument from a constrained position.

The chopped branches and limbs had now to be dragged clear and piled.
While this was being finished, Tom and Hank marked off and sawed the log
lengths, paying due attention to the necessity of avoiding knots, forks,
and rotten places. Thus some of the logs were eighteen, some sixteen, or
fourteen, and some only twelve feet in length.

Next appeared the teamsters with their little wooden sledges, their
steel chains, and their tongs. They had been helping the skidders to
place the parallel and level beams, or skids, on which the logs were to
be piled by the side of the road. The tree which Tom and Hank had just
felled lay up a gentle slope from the new travoy road, so little Fabian
Laveque, the teamster, clamped the bite of his tongs to the end of the
largest, or butt, log.

“Allez, Molly!” he cried.

The horse, huge, elephantine, her head down, nose close to her chest,
intelligently spying her steps, moved. The log half rolled over, slid
three feet, and menaced a stump.

“Gee!” cried Laveque.

Molly stepped twice directly sideways, planted her fore foot on a root
she had seen, and pulled sharply. The end of the log slid around the
stump.

“Allez!” commanded Laveque.

And Molly started gingerly down the hill. She pulled the timber, heavy
as an iron safe, here and there through the brush, missing no steps,
making no false moves, backing, and finally getting out of the way of
an unexpected roll with the ease and intelligence of Laveque himself. In
five minutes the burden lay by the travoy road. In two minutes more
one end of it had been rolled on the little flat wooden sledge and, the
other end dragging, it was winding majestically down through the ancient
forest. The little Frenchman stood high on the forward end. Molly
stepped ahead carefully, with the strange intelligence of the logger's
horse. Through the tall, straight, decorative trunks of trees the little
convoy moved with the massive pomp of a dead warrior's cortege. And
little Fabian Laveque, singing, a midget in the vastness, typified the
indomitable spirit of these conquerors of a wilderness.

When Molly and Fabian had travoyed the log to the skidway, they drew
it with a bump across the two parallel skids, and left it there to be
rolled to the top of the pile.

Then Mike McGovern and Bob Stratton and Jim Gladys took charge of it.
Mike and Bob were running the cant-hooks, while Jim stood on top of the
great pile of logs already decked. A slender, pliable steel chain, like
a gray snake, ran over the top of the pile and disappeared through a
pulley to an invisible horse,--Jenny, the mate of Molly. Jim threw
the end of this chain down. Bob passed it over and under the log and
returned it to Jim, who reached down after it with the hook of his
implement. Thus the stick of timber rested in a long loop, one end of
which led to the invisible horse, and the other Jim made fast to the top
of the pile. He did so by jamming into another log the steel swamp-hook
with which the chain was armed. When all was made fast, the horse
started.

“She's a bumper!” said Bob. “Look out, Mike!”

The log slid to the foot of the two parallel poles laid slanting up the
face of the pile. Then it trembled on the ascent. But one end stuck
for an instant, and at once the log took on a dangerous slant. Quick as
light Bob and Mike sprang forward, gripped the hooks of the cant-hooks,
like great thumbs and forefingers, and, while one held with all his
power, the other gave a sharp twist upward. The log straightened. It was
a master feat of power, and the knack of applying strength justly.

At the top of the little incline, the timber hovered for a second.

“One more!” sang out Jim to the driver. He poised, stepped lightly up
and over, and avoided by the safe hair's breadth being crushed when the
log rolled. But it did not lie quite straight and even. So Mike cut a
short thick block, and all three stirred the heavy timber sufficiently
to admit of the billet's insertion.

Then the chain was thrown down for another.

Jenny, harnessed only to a straight short bar with a hook in it, leaned
to her collar and dug in her hoofs at the word of command. The driver,
close to her tail, held fast the slender steel chain by an ingenious
hitch about the ever-useful swamp-hook. When Jim shouted “whoa!”
 from the top of the skidway, the driver did not trouble to stop the
horse,--he merely let go the hook. So the power was shut off suddenly,
as is meet and proper in such ticklish business. He turned and walked
back, and Jenny, like a dog, without the necessity of command, followed
him in slow patience.

Now came Dyer, the scaler, rapidly down the logging road, a small
slender man with a little, turned-up mustache. The men disliked him
because of his affectation of a city smartness, and because he never ate
with them, even when there was plenty of room. Radway had confidence in
him because he lived in the same shanty with him. This one fact a good
deal explains Radway's character. The scaler's duty at present was to
measure the diameter of the logs in each skidway, and so compute the
number of board feet. At the office he tended van, kept the books, and
looked after supplies.

He approached the skidway swiftly, laid his flexible rule across the
face of each log, made a mark on his pine tablets in the column to which
the log belonged, thrust the tablet in the pocket of his coat, seized
a blue crayon, in a long holder, with which he made an 8 as indication
that the log had been scaled, and finally tapped several times strongly
with a sledge hammer. On the face of the hammer in relief was an M
inside of a delta. This was the Company's brand, and so the log was
branded as belonging to them. He swarmed all over the skidway, rapid
and absorbed, in strange contrast of activity to the slower power of the
actual skidding. In a moment he moved on to the next scene of operations
without having said a word to any of the men.

“A fine t'ing!” said Mike, spitting.

So day after day the work went on. Radway spent his time tramping
through the woods, figuring on new work, showing the men how to do
things better or differently, discussing minute expedients with the
blacksmith, the carpenter, the cook.

He was not without his troubles. First he had not enough men; the snow
lacked, and then came too abundantly; horses fell sick of colic or
caulked themselves; supplies ran low unexpectedly; trees turned out
“punk”; a certain bit of ground proved soft for travoying, and so on. At
election-time, of course, a number of the men went out.

And one evening, two days after election-time, another and important
character entered the North woods and our story.



Chapter III


On the evening in question, some thirty or forty miles southeast of
Radway's camp, a train was crawling over a badly laid track which led
towards the Saginaw Valley. The whole affair was very crude. To the
edge of the right-of-way pushed the dense swamp, like a black curtain
shutting the virgin country from the view of civilization. Even
by daylight the sight could have penetrated but a few feet. The
right-of-way itself was rough with upturned stumps, blackened by fire,
and gouged by many and varied furrows. Across the snow were tracks of
animals.

The train consisted of a string of freight cars, one coach divided
half and half between baggage and smoker, and a day car occupied by two
silent, awkward women and a child. In the smoker lounged a dozen men.
They were of various sizes and descriptions, but they all wore heavy
blanket mackinaw coats, rubber shoes, and thick German socks tied at the
knee. This constituted, as it were, a sort of uniform. The air was so
thick with smoke that the men had difficulty in distinguishing objects
across the length of the car.

The passengers sprawled in various attitudes. Some hung their legs over
the arms of the seats; others perched their feet on the backs of the
seats in front; still others slouched in corners, half reclining.
Their occupations were as diverse. Three nearest the baggage-room
door attempted to sing, but without much success. A man in the corner
breathed softly through a mouth organ, to the music of which his seat
mate, leaning his head sideways, gave close attention. One big fellow
with a square beard swaggered back and forth down the aisle offering to
everyone refreshment from a quart bottle. It was rarely refused. Of the
dozen, probably three quarters were more or less drunk.

After a time the smoke became too dense. A short, thick-set fellow
with an evil dark face coolly thrust his heel through a window. The
conductor, who, with the brakeman and baggage master, was seated in the
baggage van, heard the jingle of glass. He arose.

“Guess I'll take up tickets,” he remarked. “Perhaps it will quiet the
boys down a little.”

The conductor was a big man, raw-boned and broad, with a hawk face. His
every motion showed lean, quick, panther-like power.

“Let her went,” replied the brakeman, rising as a matter of course to
follow his chief.

The brakeman was stocky, short, and long armed. In the old fighting
days Michigan railroads chose their train officials with an eye to their
superior deltoids. A conductor who could not throw an undesirable fare
through a car window lived a short official life. The two men loomed on
the noisy smoking compartment.

“Tickets, please!” clicked the conductor sharply.

Most of the men began to fumble about in their pockets, but the three
singers and the one who had been offering the quart bottle did not stir.

“Ticket, Jack!” repeated the conductor, “come on, now.”

The big bearded man leaned uncertainly against the seat.

“Now look here, Bud,” he urged in wheedling tones, “I ain't got
no ticket. You know how it is, Bud. I blows my stake.” He fished
uncertainly in his pocket and produced the quart bottle, nearly empty,
“Have a drink?”

“No,” said the conductor sharply.

“A' right,” replied Jack, amiably, “take one myself.” He tipped the
bottle, emptied it, and hurled it through a window. The conductor paid
no apparent attention to the breaking of the glass.

“If you haven't any ticket, you'll have to get off,” said he.

The big man straightened up.

“You go to hell!” he snorted, and with the sole of his spiked boot
delivered a mighty kick at the conductor's thigh.

The official, agile as a wild cat, leaped back, then forward, and
knocked the man half the length of the car. You see, he was used to it.
Before Jack could regain his feet the official stood over him.

The three men in the corner had also risen, and were staggering down
the aisle intent on battle. The conductor took in the chances with
professional rapidity.

“Get at 'em, Jimmy,” said he.

And as the big man finally swayed to his feet, he was seized by the
collar and trousers in the grip known to “bouncers” everywhere, hustled
to the door, which someone obligingly opened, and hurled from the moving
train into the snow. The conductor did not care a straw whether the
obstreperous Jack lit on his head or his feet, hit a snowbank or a
pile of ties. Those were rough days, and the preservation of authority
demanded harsh measures.

Jimmy had got at 'em in a method of his own. He gathered himself into a
ball of potential trouble, and hurled himself bodily at the legs of his
opponents which he gathered in a mighty bear hug. It would have been
poor fighting had Jimmy to carry the affair to a finish by himself, but
considered as an expedient to gain time for the ejectment proceedings,
it was admirable. The conductor returned to find a kicking, rolling,
gouging mass of kinetic energy knocking the varnish off all one end of
the car. A head appearing, he coolly batted it three times against a
corner of the seat arm, after which he pulled the contestant out by the
hair and threw him into a seat where he lay limp. Then it could be seen
that Jimmy had clasped tight in his embrace a leg each of the other two.
He hugged them close to his breast, and jammed his face down against
them to protect his features. They could pound the top of his head and
welcome. The only thing he really feared was a kick in the side, and for
that there was hardly room.

The conductor stood over the heap, at a manifest advantage.

“You lumber-jacks had enough, or do you want to catch it plenty?”

The men, drunk though they were, realized their helplessness. They
signified they had had enough. Jimmy thereupon released them and stood
up, brushing down his tousled hair with his stubby fingers.

“Now is it ticket or bounce?” inquired the conductor.

After some difficulty and grumbling, the two paid their fare and that of
the third, who was still dazed. In return the conductor gave them slips.
Then he picked his lantern from the overhead rack whither he had tossed
it, slung it on his left arm, and sauntered on down the aisle punching
tickets. Behind him followed Jimmy. When he came to the door he swung
across the platform with the easy lurch of the trainman, and entered the
other car, where he took the tickets of the two women and the boy.
One sitting in the second car would have been unable to guess from the
bearing or manner of the two officials that anything had gone wrong.

The interested spectators of the little drama included two men near the
water-cooler who were perfectly sober. One of them was perhaps a little
past the best of life, but still straight and vigorous. His lean face
was leather-brown in contrast to a long mustache and heavy eyebrows
bleached nearly white, his eyes were a clear steady blue, and his frame
was slender but wiry. He wore the regulation mackinaw blanket coat, a
peaked cap with an extraordinarily high crown, and buckskin moccasins
over long stockings.

The other was younger, not more than twenty-six perhaps, with the
clean-cut, regular features we have come to consider typically American.
Eyebrows that curved far down along the temples, and eyelashes of a
darkness in contrast to the prevailing note of his complexion combined
to lend him a rather brooding, soft, and melancholy air which a very
cursory second examination showed to be fictitious. His eyes, like the
woodsman's, were steady, but inquiring. His jaw was square and settled,
his mouth straight. One would be likely to sum him up as a man whose
actions would be little influenced by glamour or even by the sentiments.
And yet, equally, it was difficult to rid the mind of the impression
produced by his eyes. Unlike the other inmates of the car, he wore an
ordinary business suit, somewhat worn, but of good cut, and a style that
showed even over the soft flannel shirt. The trousers were, however,
bound inside the usual socks and rubbers.

The two seat mates had occupied their time each in his own fashion.
To the elder the journey was an evil to be endured with the patience
learned in watching deer runways, so he stared straight before him,
and spat with a certain periodicity into the centre of the aisle. The
younger stretched back lazily in an attitude of ease which spoke of the
habit of travelling. Sometimes he smoked a pipe. Thrice he read over a
letter. It was from his sister, and announced her arrival at the little
rural village in which he had made arrangements for her to stay. “It
is interesting,--now,” she wrote, “though the resources do not look as
though they would wear well. I am learning under Mrs. Renwick to sweep
and dust and bake and stew and do a multitude of other things which I
always vaguely supposed came ready-made. I like it; but after I have
learned it all, I do not believe the practise will appeal to me much.
However, I can stand it well enough for a year or two or three, for I am
young; and then you will have made your everlasting fortune, of course.”

Harry Thorpe experienced a glow of pride each time he read this part of
the letter. He liked the frankness of the lack of pretence; he admired
the penetration and self-analysis which had taught her the truth that,
although learning a new thing is always interesting, the practising of
an old one is monotonous. And her pluck appealed to him. It is not easy
for a girl to step from the position of mistress of servants to that of
helping about the housework of a small family in a small town for the
sake of the home to be found in it.

“She's a trump!” said Thorpe to himself, “and she shall have her
everlasting fortune, if there's such a thing in the country.”

He jingled the three dollars and sixty cents in his pocket, and smiled.
That was the extent of his everlasting fortune at present.

The letter had been answered from Detroit.

“I am glad you are settled,” he wrote. “At least I know you have enough
to eat and a roof over you. I hope sincerely that you will do your best
to fit yourself to your new conditions. I know it is hard, but with my
lack of experience and my ignorance as to where to take hold, it may be
a good many years before we can do any better.”

When Helen Thorpe read this, she cried. Things had gone wrong that
morning, and an encouraging word would have helped her. The somber tone
of her brother's communication threw her into a fit of the blues from
which, for the first time, she saw her surroundings in a depressing and
distasteful light. And yet he had written as he did with the kindest
possible motives.

Thorpe had the misfortune to be one of those individuals who, though
careless of what people in general may think of them, are in a
corresponding degree sensitive to the opinion of the few they love. This
feeling was further exaggerated by a constitutional shrinking from any
outward manifestation of the emotions. As a natural result, he was
often thought indifferent or discouraging when in reality his natural
affections were at their liveliest. A failure to procure for a friend
certain favors or pleasures dejected him, not only because of that
friend's disappointment, but because, also, he imagined the failure
earned him a certain blame. Blame from his heart's intimates he shrank
from. His life outside the inner circles of his affections was apt to
be so militant and so divorced from considerations of amity, that as
a matter of natural reaction he became inclined to exaggerate the
importance of small objections, little reproaches, slight criticisms
from his real friends. Such criticisms seemed to bring into a sphere
he would have liked to keep solely for the mutual reliance of loving
kindness, something of the hard utilitarianism of the world at large. In
consequence he gradually came to choose the line of least resistance,
to avoid instinctively even the slightly disagreeable. Perhaps for this
reason he was never entirely sincere with those he loved. He showed
enthusiasm over any plan suggested by them, for the reason that he never
dared offer a merely problematical anticipation. The affair had to be
absolutely certain in his own mind before he ventured to admit anyone to
the pleasure of looking forward to it,--and simply because he so feared
the disappointment in case anything should go wrong. He did not realize
that not only is the pleasure of anticipation often the best, but
that even disappointment, provided it happen through excusable causes,
strengthens the bonds of affection through sympathy. We do not want
merely results from a friend--merely finished products. We like to be in
at the making, even though the product spoil.

This unfortunate tendency, together with his reserve, lent him the false
attitude of a rather cold, self-centered man, discouraging suggestions
at first only to adopt them later in the most inexplicable fashion,
and conferring favors in a ready-made impersonal manner which destroyed
utterly their quality as favors. In reality his heart hungered for the
affection which this false attitude generally repelled. He threw the
wet blanket of doubt over warm young enthusiasms because his mind worked
with a certain deliberateness which did not at once permit him to see
the practicability of the scheme. Later he would approve. But by that
time, probably, the wet blanket had effectually extinguished the glow.
You cannot always savor your pleasures cold.

So after the disgrace of his father, Harry Thorpe did a great deal of
thinking and planning which he kept carefully to himself. He considered
in turn the different occupations to which he could turn his hand, and
negatived them one by one. Few business firms would care to employ the
son of as shrewd an embezzler as Henry Thorpe. Finally he came to a
decision. He communicated this decision to his sister. It would have
commended itself more logically to her had she been able to follow step
by step the considerations that had led her brother to it. As the event
turned, she was forced to accept it blindly. She knew that her brother
intended going West, but as to his hopes and plans she was in ignorance.
A little sympathy, a little mutual understanding would have meant a
great deal to her, for a girl whose mother she but dimly remembers,
turns naturally to her next of kin. Helen Thorpe had always admired her
brother, but had never before needed him. She had looked upon him as
strong, self-contained, a little moody. Now the tone of his letter
caused her to wonder whether he were not also a trifle hard and cold.
So she wept on receiving it, and the tears watered the ground for
discontent.

At the beginning of the row in the smoking car, Thorpe laid aside his
letter and watched with keen appreciation the direct practicality of
the trainmen's method. When the bearded man fell before the conductor's
blow, he turned to the individual at his side.

“He knows how to hit, doesn't he!” he observed. “That fellow was knocked
well off his feet.”

“He does,” agreed the other dryly.

They fell into a desultory conversation of fits and starts. Woodsmen of
the genuine sort are never talkative; and Thorpe, as has been explained,
was constitutionally reticent. In the course of their disjointed
remarks Thorpe explained that he was looking for work in the woods, and
intended, first of all, to try the Morrison & Daly camps at Beeson Lake.

“Know anything about logging?” inquired the stranger.

“Nothing,” Thorpe confessed.

“Ain't much show for anything but lumber-jacks. What did you think of
doing?”

“I don't know,” said Thorpe, doubtfully. “I have driven horses a good
deal; I thought I might drive team.”

The woodsman turned slowly and looked Thorpe over with a quizzical eye.
Then he faced to the front again and spat.

“Quite like,” he replied still more dryly.

The boy's remark had amused him, and he had showed it, as much as he
ever showed anything. Excepting always the riverman, the driver of a
team commands the highest wages among out-of-door workers. He has to
be able to guide his horses by little steps over, through, and around
slippery and bristling difficulties. He must acquire the knack of facing
them square about in their tracks. He must hold them under a control
that will throw into their collars, at command, from five pounds to
their full power of pull, lasting from five seconds to five minutes.
And above all, he must be able to keep them out of the way of tremendous
loads of logs on a road which constant sprinkling has rendered smooth
and glassy, at the same time preventing the long tongue from sweeping
them bodily against leg-breaking debris when a curve in the road is
reached. It is easier to drive a fire engine than a logging team.

But in spite of the naivete of the remark, the woodsman had seen
something in Thorpe he liked. Such men become rather expert in the
reading of character, and often in a log shanty you will hear opinions
of a shrewdness to surprise you. He revised his first intention to let
the conversation drop.

“I think M. & D. is rather full up just now,” he remarked. “I'm
walkin'-boss there. The roads is about all made, and road-making is what
a greenhorn tackles first. They's more chance earlier in the year. But
if the OLD Fellow” (he strongly accented the first word) “h'aint nothin'
for you, just ask for Tim Shearer, an' I'll try to put you on the trail
for some jobber's camp.”

The whistle of the locomotive blew, and the conductor appeared in the
doorway.

“Where's that fellow's turkey?” he inquired.

Several men looked toward Thorpe, who, not understanding this argot of
the camps, was a little bewildered. Shearer reached over his head and
took from the rack a heavy canvas bag, which he handed to the conductor.

“That's the 'turkey'--” he explained, “his war bag. Bud'll throw it off
at Scott's, and Jack'll get it there.”

“How far back is he?” asked Thorpe.

“About ten mile. He'll hoof it in all right.”

A number of men descended at Scott's. The three who had come into
collision with Jimmy and Bud were getting noisier. They had produced a
stone jug, and had collected the remainder of the passengers,--with the
exception of Shearer and Thorpe,--and now were passing the jug rapidly
from hand to hand. Soon they became musical, striking up one of the
weird long-drawn-out chants so popular with the shanty boy. Thorpe
shrewdly guessed his companion to be a man of weight, and did not
hesitate to ascribe his immunity from annoyance to the other's presence.

“It's a bad thing,” said the walking-boss, “I used to be at it myself,
and I know. When I wanted whisky, I needed it worse than a scalded pup
does a snow bank. The first year I had a hundred and fifty dollars,
and I blew her all in six days. Next year I had a little more, but she
lasted me three weeks. That was better. Next year, I says to myself,
I'll just save fifty of that stake, and blow the rest. So I did. After
that I got to be scaler, and sort've quit. I just made a deal with the
Old Fellow to leave my stake with headquarters no matter whether I call
for it or not. I got quite a lot coming, now.”

“Bees'n Lake!” cried Jimmy fiercely through an aperture of the door.

“You'll find th' boardin'-house just across over the track,” said the
woodsman, holding out his hand, “so long. See you again if you don't
find a job with the Old Fellow. My name's Shearer.”

“Mine is Thorpe,” replied the other. “Thank you.”

The woodsman stepped forward past the carousers to the baggage
compartment, where he disappeared. The revellers stumbled out the other
door.

Thorpe followed and found himself on the frozen platform of a little
dark railway station. As he walked, the boards shrieked under his feet
and the sharp air nipped at his face and caught his lungs. Beyond the
fence-rail protection to the side of the platform he thought he saw the
suggestion of a broad reach of snow, a distant lurking forest, a few
shadowy buildings looming mysterious in the night. The air was twinkling
with frost and the brilliant stars of the north country.

Directly across the track from the railway station, a single building
was picked from the dark by a solitary lamp in a lower-story room.
The four who had descended before Thorpe made over toward this light,
stumbling and laughing uncertainly, so he knew it was probably in the
boarding-house, and prepared to follow them. Shearer and the station
agent,--an individual much muffled,--turned to the disposition of some
light freight that had been dropped from the baggage car.

The five were met at the steps by the proprietor of the boarding-house.
This man was short and stout, with a harelip and cleft palate, which at
once gave him the well-known slurring speech of persons so afflicted,
and imparted also to the timbre of his voice a peculiarly hollow,
resonant, trumpet-like note. He stumped about energetically on a wooden
leg of home manufacture. It was a cumbersome instrument, heavy, with
deep pine socket for the stump, and a projecting brace which passed
under a leather belt around the man's waist. This instrument he used
with the dexterity of a third hand. As Thorpe watched him, he drove in a
projecting nail, kicked two “turkeys” dexterously inside the open door,
and stuck the armed end of his peg-leg through the top and bottom of the
whisky jug that one of the new arrivals had set down near the door. The
whisky promptly ran out. At this the cripple flirted the impaled jug
from the wooden leg far out over the rail of the verandah into the snow.

A growl went up.

“What'n hell's that for I!” snarled one of the owners of the whisky
threateningly.

“Don't allow no whisky here,” snuffed the harelip.

The men were very angry. They advanced toward the cripple, who retreated
with astonishing agility to the lighted room. There he bent the wooden
leg behind him, slipped the end of the brace from beneath the leather
belt, seized the other, peg end in his right hand, and so became
possessed of a murderous bludgeon. This he brandished, hopping at the
same time back and forth in such perfect poise and yet with so ludicrous
an effect of popping corn, that the men were surprised into laughing.

“Bully for you, peg-leg!” they cried.

“Rules 'n regerlations, boys,” replied the latter, without, however, a
shade of compromising in his tones. “Had supper?”

On receiving a reply in the affirmative, he caught up the lamp, and,
having resumed his artificial leg in one deft motion, led the way to
narrow little rooms.



Chapter IV


Thorpe was awakened a long time before daylight by the ringing of a
noisy bell. He dressed, shivering, and stumbled down stairs to a round
stove, big as a boiler, into which the cripple dumped huge logs of wood
from time to time. After breakfast Thorpe returned to this stove and sat
half dozing for what seemed to him untold ages. The cold of the north
country was initiating him.

Men came in, smoked a brief pipe, and went out. Shearer was one of them.
The woodsman nodded curtly to the young man, his cordiality quite gone.
Thorpe vaguely wondered why. After a time he himself put on his overcoat
and ventured out into the town. It seemed to Thorpe a meager affair,
built of lumber, mostly unpainted, with always the dark, menacing fringe
of the forest behind. The great saw mill, with its tall stacks and its
row of water-barrels--protection against fire--on top, was the dominant
note. Near the mill crouched a little red-painted structure from whose
stovepipe a column of white smoke rose, attesting the cold, a clear
hundred feet straight upward, and to whose door a number of men were
directing their steps through the snow. Over the door Thorpe could
distinguish the word “Office.” He followed and entered.

In a narrow aisle railed off from the main part of the room waited
Thorpe's companions of the night before. The remainder of the office
gave accommodation to three clerks. One of these glanced up inquiringly
as Thorpe came in.

“I am looking for work,” said Thorpe.

“Wait there,” briefly commanded the clerk.

In a few moments the door of the inner room opened, and Shearer came
out. A man's head peered from within.

“Come on, boys,” said he.

The five applicants shuffled through. Thorpe found himself in the
presence of a man whom he felt to be the natural leader of these wild,
independent spirits. He was already a little past middle life, and his
form had lost the elastic vigor of youth. But his eye was keen, clear,
and wrinkled to a certain dry facetiousness; and his figure was of that
bulk which gives an impression of a subtler weight and power than the
merely physical. This peculiarity impresses us in the portraits of such
men as Daniel Webster and others of the old jurists. The manner of
the man was easy, good-natured, perhaps a little facetious, but
these qualities were worn rather as garments than exhibited as
characteristics. He could afford them, not because he had fewer
difficulties to overcome or battles to fight than another, but because
his strength was so sufficient to them that mere battles or difficulties
could not affect the deliberateness of his humor. You felt his
superiority even when he was most comradely with you. This man Thorpe
was to meet under other conditions, wherein the steel hand would more
plainly clink the metal.

He was now seated in a worn office chair before a littered desk. In
the close air hung the smell of stale cigars and the clear fragrance of
pine.

“What is it, Dennis?” he asked the first of the men.

“I've been out,” replied the lumberman. “Have you got anything for me,
Mr. Daly?”

The mill-owner laughed.

“I guess so. Report to Shearer. Did you vote for the right man, Denny?”

The lumberman grinned sheepishly. “I don't know, sir. I didn't get that
far.”

“Better let it alone. I suppose you and Bill want to come back, too?” he
added, turning to the next two in the line. “All right, report to Tim.
Do you want work?” he inquired of the last of the quartette, a big
bashful man with the shoulders of a Hercules.

“Yes, sir,” answered the latter uncomfortably.

“What do you do?”

“I'm a cant-hook man, sir.”

“Where have you worked?”

“I had a job with Morgan & Stebbins on the Clear River last winter.”

“All right, we need cant-hook men. Report at 'seven,' and if they don't
want you there, go to 'thirteen.'”

Daly looked directly at the man with an air of finality. The lumberman
still lingered uneasily, twisting his cap in his hands.

“Anything you want?” asked Daly at last.

“Yes, sir,” blurted the big man. “If I come down here and tell you I
want three days off and fifty dollars to bury my mother, I wish you'd
tell me to go to hell! I buried her three times last winter!”

Daly chuckled a little.

“All right, Bub,” said he, “to hell it is.”

The man went out. Daly turned to Thorpe with the last flickers of
amusement in his eyes.

“What can I do for you?” he inquired in a little crisper tones. Thorpe
felt that he was not treated with the same careless familiarity,
because, potentially, he might be more of a force to deal with. He
underwent, too, the man's keen scrutiny, and knew that every detail of
his appearance had found its comment in the other's experienced brain.

“I am looking for work,” Thorpe replied.

“What kind of work?”

“Any kind, so I can learn something about the lumber business.”

The older man studied him keenly for a few moments.

“Have you had any other business experience?”

“None.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

The lumberman's eyes hardened.

“We are a very busy firm here,” he said with a certain deliberation; “we
do not carry a big force of men in any one department, and each
of those men has to fill his place and slop some over the sides. We do
not pretend or attempt to teach here. If you want to be a lumberman, you
must learn the lumber business more directly than through the windows of
a bookkeeper's office. Go into the woods. Learn a few first principles.
Find out the difference between Norway and white pine, anyway.”

Daly, being what is termed a self-made man, entertained a prejudice
against youths of the leisure class. He did not believe in their
earnestness of purpose, their capacity for knowledge, nor their
perseverance in anything. That a man of twenty-six should be looking for
his first situation was incomprehensible to him. He made no effort to
conceal his prejudice, because the class to which the young man had
belonged enjoyed his hearty contempt.

The truth is, he had taken Thorpe's ignorance a little too much for
granted. Before leaving his home, and while the project of emigration
was still in the air, the young fellow had, with the quiet enthusiasm of
men of his habit of mind, applied himself to the mastering of whatever
the books could teach. That is not much. The literature on lumbering
seems to be singularly limited. Still he knew the trees, and had
sketched an outline into which to paint experience. He said nothing of
this to the man before him, because of that strange streak in his nature
which prompted him to conceal what he felt most strongly; to leave to
others the task of guessing out his attitude; to stand on appearances
without attempting to justify them, no matter how simple the
justification might be. A moment's frank, straightforward talk might
have caught Daly's attention, for the lumberman was, after all, a shrewd
reader of character where his prejudices were not concerned. Then events
would have turned out very differently.

After his speech the business man had whirled back to his desk.

“Have you anything for me to do in the woods, then?” the other asked
quietly.

“No,” said Daly over his shoulder.

Thorpe went out.

Before leaving Detroit he had, on the advice of friends, visited the
city office of Morrison & Daly. There he had been told positively that
the firm were hiring men. Now, without five dollars in his pocket, he
made the elementary discovery that even in chopping wood skilled labor
counts. He did not know where to turn next, and he would not have had
the money to go far in any case. So, although Shearer's brusque greeting
that morning had argued a lack of cordiality, he resolved to remind the
riverman of his promised assistance.

That noon he carried out his resolve. To his surprise Shearer was
cordial--in his way. He came afterward to appreciate the subtle nuances
of manner and treatment by which a boss retains his moral supremacy in
a lumber country,--repels that too great familiarity which breeds
contempt, without imperiling the trust and comradeship which breeds
willingness. In the morning Thorpe had been a prospective employee of
the firm, and so a possible subordinate of Shearer himself. Now he was
Shearer's equal.

“Go up and tackle Radway. He's jobbing for us on the Cass Branch. He
needs men for roadin', I know, because he's behind. You'll get a job
there.”

“Where is it?” asked Thorpe.

“Ten miles from here. She's blazed, but you better wait for th' supply
team, Friday. If you try to make her yourself, you'll get lost on some
of th' old loggin' roads.”

Thorpe considered.

“I'm busted,” he said at last frankly.

“Oh, that's all right,” replied the walking-boss. “Marshall, come here!”

The peg-legged boarding-house keeper stumped in.

“What is it?” he trumpeted snufflingly.

“This boy wants a job till Friday. Then he's going up to Radway's with
the supply team. Now quit your hollerin' for a chore-boy for a few
days.”

“All right,” snorted Marshall, “take that ax and split some dry wood
that you'll find behind the house.”

“I'm very much obliged to you,” began Thorpe to the walking-boss,
“and--”

“That's all right,” interrupted the latter, “some day you can give me a
job.”



Chapter V


For five days Thorpe cut wood, made fires, drew water, swept floors, and
ran errands. Sometimes he would look across the broad stump-dotted plain
to the distant forest. He had imagination. No business man succeeds
without it. With him the great struggle to wrest from an impassive and
aloof nature what she has so long held securely as her own, took on the
proportions of a battle. The distant forest was the front. To it went
the new bands of fighters. From it came the caissons for food, that
ammunition of the frontier; messengers bringing tidings of defeat or
victory; sometimes men groaning on their litters from the twisting and
crushing and breaking inflicted on them by the calm, ruthless enemy;
once a dead man bearing still on his chest the mark of the tree that had
killed him. Here at headquarters sat the general, map in hand, issuing
his orders, directing his forces.

And out of the forest came mystery. Hunters brought deer on sledges.
Indians, observant and grave, swung silently across the reaches on their
snowshoes, and silently back again carrying their meager purchases. In
the daytime ravens wheeled and croaked about the outskirts of the town,
bearing the shadow of the woods on their plumes and of the north-wind
in the somber quality of their voices; rare eagles wheeled gracefully
to and fro; snow squalls coquetted with the landscape. At night the
many creatures of the forest ventured out across the plains in search
of food,--weasels; big white hares; deer, planting daintily their little
sharp hoofs where the frozen turnips were most plentiful; porcupines in
quest of anything they could get their keen teeth into;--and often the
big timber wolves would send shivering across the waste a long whining
howl. And in the morning their tracks would embroider the snow with many
stories.

The talk about the great stove in the boarding-house office also
possessed the charm of balsam fragrance. One told the other occult facts
about the “Southeast of the southwest of eight.” The second in turn
vouchsafed information about another point of the compass. Thorpe heard
of many curious practical expedients. He learned that one can prevent
awkward air-holes in lakes by “tapping” the ice with an ax,--for the
air must get out, naturally or artificially; that the top log on a load
should not be large because of the probability, when one side has dumped
with a rush, of its falling straight down from its original height, so
breaking the sleigh; that a thin slice of salt pork well peppered is
good when tied about a sore throat; that choking a horse will cause him
to swell up and float on the top of the water, thus rendering it easy
to slide him out on the ice from a hole he may have broken into; that
a tree lodged against another may be brought to the ground by felling
a third against it; that snowshoes made of caribou hide do not
become baggy, because caribou shrinks when wet, whereas other rawhide
stretches. These, and many other things too complicated to elaborate
here, he heard discussed by expert opinion. Gradually he acquired an
enthusiasm for the woods, just as a boy conceives a longing for the
out-of-door life of which he hears in the conversation of his elders
about the winter fire. He became eager to get away to the front, to
stand among the pines, to grapple with the difficulties of thicket,
hill, snow, and cold that nature silently interposes between the man and
his task.

At the end of the week he received four dollars from his employer;
dumped his valise into a low bobsleigh driven by a man muffled in a
fur coat; assisted in loading the sleigh with a variety of things, from
Spearhead plug to raisins; and turned his face at last toward the land
of his hopes and desires.

The long drive to camp was at once a delight and a misery to him. Its
miles stretched longer and longer as time went on; and the miles of a
route new to a man are always one and a half at least. The forest, so
mysterious and inviting from afar, drew within itself coldly when Thorpe
entered it. He was as yet a stranger. The snow became the prevailing
note. The white was everywhere, concealing jealously beneath rounded
uniformity the secrets of the woods. And it was cold. First Thorpe's
feet became numb, then his hands, then his nose was nipped, and finally
his warm clothes were lifted from him by invisible hands, and he was
left naked to shivers and tremblings. He found it torture to sit still
on the top of the bale of hay; and yet he could not bear to contemplate
the cold shock of jumping from the sleigh to the ground,--of touching
foot to the chilling snow. The driver pulled up to breathe his horses at
the top of a hill, and to fasten under one runner a heavy chain, which,
grinding into the snow, would act as a brake on the descent.

“You're dressed pretty light,” he advised; “better hoof it a ways and
get warm.”

The words tipped the balance of Thorpe's decision. He descended stiffly,
conscious of a disagreeable shock from a six-inch jump.

In ten minutes, the wallowing, slipping, and leaping after the tail
of the sled had sent his blood tingling to the last of his protesting
members. Cold withdrew. He saw now that the pines were beautiful and
solemn and still; and that in the temple of their columns dwelt winter
enthroned. Across the carpet of the snow wandered the trails of her
creatures,--the stately regular prints of the partridge; the series of
pairs made by the squirrel; those of the weasel and mink, just like the
squirrels' except that the prints were not quite side by side, and
that between every other pair stretched the mark of the animal's long,
slender body; the delicate tracery of the deer mouse; the fan of the
rabbit; the print of a baby's hand that the raccoon left; the broad pad
of a lynx; the dog-like trail of wolves;--these, and a dozen others,
all equally unknown, gave Thorpe the impression of a great mysterious
multitude of living things which moved about him invisible. In a thicket
of cedar and scrub willow near the bed of a stream, he encountered one
of those strangely assorted bands of woods-creatures which are always
cruising it through the country. He heard the cheerful little chickadee;
he saw the grave nuthatch with its appearance of a total lack of humor;
he glimpsed a black-and-white woodpecker or so, and was reviled by a
ribald blue jay. Already the wilderness was taking its character to him.

After a little while, they arrived by way of a hill, over which they
plunged into the middle of the camp. Thorpe saw three large buildings,
backed end to end, and two smaller ones, all built of heavy logs, roofed
with plank, and lighted sparsely through one or two windows apiece. The
driver pulled up opposite the space between two of the larger buildings,
and began to unload his provisions. Thorpe set about aiding him, and so
found himself for the first time in a “cook camp.”

It was a commodious building,--Thorpe had no idea a log structure ever
contained so much room. One end furnished space for two cooking ranges
and two bunks placed one over the other. Along one side ran a broad
table-shelf, with other shelves over it and numerous barrels underneath,
all filled with cans, loaves of bread, cookies, and pies. The center was
occupied by four long bench-flanked tables, down whose middle straggled
utensils containing sugar, apple-butter, condiments, and sauces, and
whose edges were set with tin dishes for about forty men. The cook, a
rather thin-faced man with a mustache, directed where the provisions
were to be stowed; and the “cookee,” a hulking youth, assisted Thorpe
and the driver to carry them in. During the course of the work Thorpe
made a mistake.

“That stuff doesn't come here,” objected the cookee, indicating a box of
tobacco the newcomer was carrying. “She goes to the 'van.'”

Thorpe did not know what the “van” might be, but he replaced the
tobacco on the sleigh. In a few moments the task was finished, with the
exception of a half dozen other cases, which the driver designated as
also for the “van.” The horses were unhitched, and stabled in the third
of the big log buildings. The driver indicated the second.

“Better go into the men's camp and sit down 'till th' boss gets in,” he
advised.

Thorpe entered a dim, over-heated structure, lined on two sides by a
double tier of large bunks partitioned from one another like cabins of
boats, and centered by a huge stove over which hung slender poles. The
latter were to dry clothes on. Just outside the bunks ran a straight
hard bench. Thorpe stood at the entrance trying to accustom his eyes to
the dimness.

“Set down,” said a voice, “on th' floor if you want to; but I'd prefer
th' deacon seat.”

Thorpe obediently took position on the bench, or “deacon seat.” His
eyes, more used to the light, could make out a thin, tall, bent old man,
with bare cranium, two visible teeth, and a three days' stubble of white
beard over his meager, twisted face.

He caught, perhaps, Thorpe's surprised expression.

“You think th' old man's no good, do you?” he cackled, without the
slightest malice, “looks is deceivin'!” He sprang up swiftly, seized the
toe of his right foot in his left hand, and jumped his left foot through
the loop thus formed. Then he sat down again, and laughed at Thorpe's
astonishment.

“Old Jackson's still purty smart,” said he. “I'm barn-boss. They ain't a
man in th' country knows as much about hosses as I do. We ain't had but
two sick this fall, an' between you an' me, they's a skate lot. You're a
greenhorn, ain't you?”

“Yes,” confessed Thorpe.

“Well,” said Jackson, reflectively but rapidly, “Le Fabian, he's quiet
but bad; and O'Grady, he talks loud but you can bluff him; and Perry,
he's only bad when he gets full of red likker; and Norton he's bad when
he gets mad like, and will use axes.”

Thorpe did not know he was getting valuable points on the camp bullies.
The old man hitched nearer and peered in his face.

“They don't bluff you a bit,” he said, “unless you likes them, and then
they can back you way off the skidway.”

Thorpe smiled at the old fellow's volubility. He did not know how near
to the truth the woodsman's shrewdness had hit; for to himself, as to
most strong characters, his peculiarities were the normal, and therefore
the unnoticed. His habit of thought in respect to other people was
rather objective than subjective. He inquired so impersonally the
significance of whatever was before him, that it lost the human quality
both as to itself and himself. To him men were things. This attitude
relieved him of self-consciousness. He never bothered his head as to
what the other man thought of him, his ignorance, or his awkwardness,
simply because to him the other man was nothing but an element in his
problem. So in such circumstances he learned fast. Once introduce the
human element, however, and his absurdly sensitive self-consciousness
asserted itself. He was, as Jackson expressed it, backed off the
skidway.

At dark the old man lit two lamps, which served dimly to gloze the
shadows, and thrust logs of wood into the cast-iron stove. Soon
after, the men came in. They were a queer, mixed lot. Some carried the
indisputable stamp of the frontiersman in their bearing and glance;
others looked to be mere day-laborers, capable of performing whatever
task they were set to, and of finding the trail home again. There were
active, clean-built, precise Frenchmen, with small hands and feet, and a
peculiarly trim way of wearing their rough garments; typical native-born
American lumber-jacks powerful in frame, rakish in air, reckless in
manner; big blonde Scandinavians and Swedes, strong men at the sawing;
an Indian or so, strangely in contrast to the rest; and a variety of
Irishmen, Englishmen, and Canadians. These men tramped in without a
word, and set busily to work at various tasks. Some sat on the “deacon
seat” and began to take off their socks and rubbers; others washed at
a little wooden sink; still others selected and lit lanterns from a
pendant row near the window, and followed old Jackson out of doors. They
were the teamsters.

“You'll find the old man in the office,” said Jackson.

Thorpe made his way across to the small log cabin indicated as the
office, and pushed open the door. He found himself in a little room
containing two bunks, a stove, a counter and desk, and a number of
shelves full of supplies. About the walls hung firearms, snowshoes, and
a variety of clothes.

A man sat at the desk placing figures on a sheet of paper. He obtained
the figures from statistics pencilled on three thin leaves of beech-wood
riveted together. In a chair by the stove lounged a bulkier figure,
which Thorpe concluded to be that of the “old man.”

“I was sent here by Shearer,” said Thorpe directly; “he said you might
give me some work.”

So long a silence fell that the applicant began to wonder if his
question had been heard.

“I might,” replied the man drily at last.

“Well, will you?” Thorpe inquired, the humor of the situation overcoming
him.

“Have you ever worked in the woods?”

“No.”

The man smoked silently.

“I'll put you on the road in the morning,” he concluded, as though this
were the deciding qualification.

One of the men entered abruptly and approached the counter. The writer
at the desk laid aside his tablets.

“What is it, Albert?” he added.

“Jot of chewin',” was the reply.

The scaler took from the shelf a long plug of tobacco and cut off two
inches.

“Ain't hitting the van much, are you, Albert?” he commented, putting
the man's name and the amount in a little book. Thorpe went out, after
leaving his name for the time book, enlightened as to the method of
obtaining supplies. He promised himself some warm clothing from the van,
when he should have worked out the necessary credit.

At supper he learned something else,--that he must not talk at table.
A moment's reflection taught him the common-sense of the rule. For one
thing, supper was a much briefer affair than it would have been had
every man felt privileged to take his will in conversation; not to speak
of the absence of noise and the presence of peace. Each man asked for
what he wanted.

“Please pass the beans,” he said with the deliberate intonation of a man
who does not expect that his request will be granted.

Besides the beans were fried salt pork, boiled potatoes, canned corn,
mince pie, a variety of cookies and doughnuts, and strong green tea.
Thorpe found himself eating ravenously of the crude fare.

That evening he underwent a catechism, a few practical jokes, which he
took good-naturedly, and a vast deal of chaffing. At nine the lights
were all out. By daylight he and a dozen other men were at work, hewing
a road that had to be as smooth and level as a New York boulevard.



Chapter VI


Thorpe and four others were set to work on this road, which was to be
cut through a creek bottom leading, he was told, to “seventeen.” The
figures meant nothing to him. Later, each number came to possess an
individuality of its own. He learned to use a double-bitted ax.

Thorpe's intelligence was of the practical sort that wonderfully helps
experience. He watched closely one of the older men, and analyzed the
relation borne by each one of his movements to the object in view. In a
short time he perceived that one hand and arm are mere continuations of
the helve, attaching the blade of the ax to the shoulder of the wielder;
and that the other hand directs the stroke. He acquired the knack thus
of throwing the bit of steel into the gash as though it were a baseball
on the end of a string; and so accomplished power. By experiment he
learned just when to slide the guiding hand down the helve; and so
gained accuracy. He suffered none of those accidents so common to new
choppers. His ax did not twist itself from his hands, nor glance to cut
his foot. He attained the method of the double bit, and how to knock
roots by alternate employment of the edge and flat. In a few days his
hands became hard and used to the cold.

From shortly after daylight he worked. Four other men bore him company,
and twice Radway himself came by, watched their operations for a moment,
and moved on without comment. After Thorpe had caught his second wind,
he enjoyed his task, proving a certain pleasure in the ease with which
he handled his tool.

At the end of an interminable period, a faint, musical halloo swelled,
echoed, and died through the forest, beautiful as a spirit. It was taken
up by another voice and repeated. Then by another. Now near at hand,
now far away it rang as hollow as a bell. The sawyers, the swampers, the
skidders, and the team men turned and put on their heavy blanket coats.

Down on the road Thorpe heard it too, and wondered what it might be.

“Come on, Bub! she means chew!” explained old man Heath kindly. Old man
Heath was a veteran woodsman who had come to swamping in his old age.
He knew the game thoroughly, but could never save his “stake” when Pat
McGinnis, the saloon man, enticed him in. Throughout the morning he had
kept an eye on the newcomer, and was secretly pleased in his heart of
the professional at the readiness with which the young fellow learned.

Thorpe resumed his coat, and fell in behind the little procession. After
a short time he came upon a horse and sledge. Beyond it the cookee
had built a little camp fire, around and over which he had grouped big
fifty-pound lard-tins, half full of hot things to eat. Each man, as he
approached, picked up a tin plate and cup from a pile near at hand.

The cookee was plainly master of the situation. He issued peremptory
orders. When Erickson, the blonde Swede, attempted surreptitiously to
appropriate a doughnut, the youth turned on him savagely.

“Get out of that, you big tow-head!” he cried with an oath.

A dozen Canada jays, fluffy, impatient, perched near by or made little
short circles over and back. They awaited the remains of the dinner. Bob
Stratton and a devil-may-care giant by the name of Nolan constructed a
joke wherewith to amuse the interim. They cut a long pole, and placed it
across a log and through a bush, so that one extremity projected beyond
the bush. Then diplomacy won a piece of meat from the cookee. This they
nailed to the end of the pole by means of a pine sliver. The Canada jays
gazed on the morsel with covetous eyes. When the men had retired, they
swooped. One big fellow arrived first, and lit in defiance of the rest.

“Give it to 'im!” whispered Nolan, who had been watching.

Bob hit the other end of the pole a mighty whack with his ax. The
astonished jay, projected straight upward by the shock, gave a startled
squawk and cut a hole through the air for the tall timber. Stratton and
Nolan went into convulsions of laughter.

“Get at it!” cried the cookee, as though setting a pack of dogs on their
prey.

The men ate, perched in various attitudes and places. Thorpe found it
difficult to keep warm. The violent exercise had heated him through, and
now the north country cold penetrated to his bones. He huddled close to
the fire, and drank hot tea, but it did not do him very much good. In
his secret mind he resolved to buy one of the blanket mackinaws that
very evening. He began to see that the costumes of each country have
their origin in practicality.

That evening he picked out one of the best. As he was about to inquire
the price, Radway drew the van book toward him, inquiring,

“Let's see; what's the name?”

In an instant Thorpe was charged on the book with three dollars and a
half, although his work that day had earned him less than a dollar. On
his way back to the men's shanty he could not help thinking how easy it
would be for him to leave the next morning two dollars and a half ahead.
He wondered if this method of procedure obtained in all the camps.

The newcomer's first day of hard work had tired him completely. He was
ready for nothing so much as his bunk. But he had forgotten that it was
Saturday night. His status was still to assure.

They began with a few mild tricks. Shuffle the Brogan followed Hot Back.
Thorpe took all of it good-naturedly. Finally a tall individual with
a thin white face, a reptilian forehead, reddish hair, and long baboon
arms, suggested tossing in a blanket. Thorpe looked at the low ceiling,
and declined.

“I'm with the game as long as you say, boys,” said he, “and I'll have as
much fun as anybody, but that's going too far for a tired man.”

The reptilian gentleman let out a string of oaths whose meaning might be
translated, “We'll see about that!”

Thorpe was a good boxer, but he knew by now the lumber-jack's method
of fighting,--anything to hurt the other fellow. And in a genuine
old-fashioned knock-down-and-drag-out rough-and-tumble your woodsman is
about the toughest customer to handle you will be likely to meet. He
is brought up on fighting. Nothing pleases him better than to get drunk
and, with a few companions, to embark on an earnest effort to “clean
out” a rival town. And he will accept cheerfully punishment enough to
kill three ordinary men. It takes one of his kind really to hurt him.

Thorpe, at the first hostile movement, sprang back to the door, seized
one of the three-foot billets of hardwood intended for the stove, and
faced his opponents.

“I don't know which of you boys is coming first,” said he quietly, “but
he's going to get it good and plenty.”

If the affair had been serious, these men would never have recoiled
before the mere danger of a stick of hardwood. The American woodsman is
afraid of nothing human. But this was a good-natured bit of foolery,
a test of nerve, and there was no object in getting a broken head for
that. The reptilian gentleman alone grumbled at the abandonment of the
attack, mumbling something profane.

“If you hanker for trouble so much,” drawled the unexpected voice of old
Jackson from the corner, “mebbe you could put on th' gloves.”

The idea was acclaimed. Somebody tossed out a dirty torn old set of
buckskin boxing gloves.

The rest was farce. Thorpe was built on the true athletic lines, broad,
straight shoulders, narrow flanks, long, clean, smooth muscles.
He possessed, besides, that hereditary toughness and bulk which no
gymnasium training will ever quite supply. The other man, while powerful
and ugly in his rushes, was clumsy and did not use his head. Thorpe
planted his hard straight blows at will. In this game he was as
manifestly superior as his opponent would probably have been had the
rules permitted kicking, gouging, and wrestling. Finally he saw his
opening and let out with a swinging pivot blow. The other picked himself
out of a corner, and drew off the gloves. Thorpe's status was assured.

A Frenchman took down his fiddle and began to squeak. In the course of
the dance old Jackson and old Heath found themselves together, smoking
their pipes of Peerless.

“The young feller's all right,” observed Heath; “he cuffed Ben up to a
peak all right.”

“Went down like a peck of wet fish-nets,” replied Jackson tranquilly.



Chapter VII


In the office shanty one evening about a week later, Radway and his
scaler happened to be talking over the situation. The scaler, whose
name was Dyer, slouched back in the shadow, watching his great honest
superior as a crafty, dainty cat might watch the blunderings of a St.
Bernard. When he spoke, it was with a mockery so subtle as quite to
escape the perceptions of the lumberman. Dyer had a precise little
black mustache whose ends he was constantly twisting into points, black
eyebrows, and long effeminate black lashes. You would have expected his
dress in the city to be just a trifle flashy, not enough so to be loud,
but sinning as to the trifles of good taste. The two men conversed in
short elliptical sentences, using many technical terms.

“That 'seventeen' white pine is going to underrun,” said Dyer. “It won't
skid over three hundred thousand.”

“It's small stuff,” agreed Radway, “and so much the worse for us; but
the Company'll stand in on it because small stuff like that always
over-runs on the mill-cut.”

The scaler nodded comprehension.

“When you going to dray-haul that Norway across Pike Lake?”

“To-morrow. She's springy, but the books say five inches of ice will
hold a team, and there's more than that. How much are we putting in a
day, now?”

“About forty thousand.”

Radway fell silent.

“That's mighty little for such a crew,” he observed at last, doubtfully.

“I always said you were too easy with them. You got to drive them more.”

“Well, it's a rough country,” apologized Radway, trying, as was his
custom, to find excuses for the other party as soon as he was agreed
with in his blame, “there's any amount of potholes; and, then, we've had
so much snow the ground ain't really froze underneath. It gets pretty
soft in some of them swamps. Can't figure on putting up as much in this
country as we used to down on the Muskegon.”

The scaler smiled a thin smile all to himself behind the stove. Big John
Radway depended so much on the moral effect of approval or disapproval
by those with whom he lived. It amused Dyer to withhold the timely word,
so leaving the jobber to flounder between his easy nature and his sense
of what should be done.

Dyer knew perfectly well that the work was behind, and he knew the
reason. For some time the men had been relaxing their efforts. They had
worked honestly enough, but a certain snap and vim had lacked. This was
because Radway had been too easy on them.

Your true lumber-jack adores of all things in creation a man whom he
feels to be stronger than himself. If his employer is big enough to
drive him, then he is willing to be driven to the last ounce of his
strength. But once he gets the notion that his “boss” is afraid of, or
for, him or his feelings or his health, he loses interest in working for
that man. So a little effort to lighten or expedite his work, a little
leniency in excusing the dilatory finishing of a job, a little easing-up
under stress of weather, are taken as so many indications of a desire to
conciliate. And conciliation means weakness every time. Your lumber-jack
likes to be met front to front, one strong man to another. As you value
your authority, the love of your men, and the completion of your work,
keep a bluff brow and an unbending singleness of purpose.

Radway's peculiar temperament rendered him liable to just this mistake.
It was so much easier for him to do the thing himself than to be harsh
to the point of forcing another to it, that he was inclined to take the
line of least resistance when it came to a question of even ordinary
diligence. He sought often in his own mind excuses for dereliction in
favor of a man who would not have dreamed of seeking them for himself. A
good many people would call this kindness of heart. Perhaps it was; the
question is a little puzzling. But the facts were as stated.

Thorpe had already commented on the feeling among the men, though, owing
to his inexperience, he was not able to estimate its full value. The
men were inclined to a semi-apologetic air when they spoke of their
connection with the camp. Instead of being honored as one of a series of
jobs, this seemed to be considered as merely a temporary halting-place
in which they took no pride, and from which they looked forward in
anticipation or back in memory to better things.

“Old Shearer, he's the bully boy,” said Bob Stratton. “I remember when
he was foremap for M. & D. at Camp 0. Say, we did hustle them saw-logs
in! I should rise to remark! Out in th' woods by first streak o' day. I
recall one mornin' she was pretty cold, an' the boys grumbled some about
turnin' out. 'Cold,' says Tim, 'you sons of guns! You got your ch'ice.
It may be too cold for you in the woods, but it's a damm sight too hot
fer you in hell, an' you're going to one or the other!' And he meant it
too. Them was great days! Forty million a year, and not a hitch.”

One man said nothing in the general discussion. It was his first winter
in the woods, and plainly in the eyes of the veterans this experience
did not count. It was a “faute de mieux,” in which one would give an
honest day's work, and no more.

As has been hinted, even the inexperienced newcomer noticed the lack of
enthusiasm, of unity. Had he known the loyalty, devotion, and adoration
that a thoroughly competent man wins from his “hands,” the state of
affairs would have seemed even more surprising. The lumber-jack will
work sixteen, eighteen hours a day, sometimes up to the waist in water
full of floating ice; sleep wet on the ground by a little fire; and then
next morning will spring to work at daylight with an “Oh, no, not
tired; just a little stiff, sir!” in cheerful reply to his master's
inquiry,--for the right man! Only it must be a strong man,--with the
strength of the wilderness in his eye.

The next morning Radway transferred Molly and Jenny, with little Fabian
Laveque and two of the younger men, to Pike Lake. There, earlier in the
season, a number of pines had been felled out on the ice, cut in logs,
and left in expectation of ice thick enough to bear the travoy
“dray.” Owing to the fact that the shores of Pike Lake were extremely
precipitous, it had been impossible to travoy the logs up over the hill.

Radway had sounded carefully the thickness of the ice with an ax.
Although the weather had of late been sufficiently cold for the time
of year, the snow, as often happens, had fallen before the temperature.
Under the warm white blanket, the actual freezing had been slight.
However, there seemed to be at least eight inches of clear ice, which
would suffice.

Some of the logs in question were found to be half imbedded in the ice.
It became necessary first of all to free them. Young Henrys cut a strong
bar six or eight feet long, while Pat McGuire chopped a hole alongside
the log. Then one end of the bar was thrust into the hole, the logging
chain fastened to the other; and, behold, a monster lever, whose fulcrum
was the ice and whose power was applied by Molly, hitched to the end of
the chain. In this simple manner a task was accomplished in five minutes
which would have taken a dozen men an hour. When the log had been
cat-a-cornered from its bed, the chain was fastened around one end by
means of the ever-useful steel swamp-hook, and it was yanked across the
dray. Then the travoy took its careful way across the ice to where a dip
in the shore gave access to a skidway.

Four logs had thus been safely hauled. The fifth was on its journey
across the lake. Suddenly without warning, and with scarcely a sound,
both horses sank through the ice, which bubbled up around them and over
their backs in irregular rotted pieces. Little Fabian Laveque shouted,
and jumped down from his log. Pat McGuire and young Henrys came running.

The horses had broken through an air-hole, about which the ice was
strong. Fabian had already seized Molly by the bit, and was holding her
head easily above water.

“Kitch Jenny by dat he't!” he cried to Pat.

Thus the two men, without exertion, sustained the noses of the team
above the surface. The position demanded absolutely no haste, for it
could have been maintained for a good half hour. Molly and Jenny, their
soft eyes full of the intelligence of the situation, rested easily in
full confidence. But Pat and Henrys, new to this sort of emergency, were
badly frightened and excited. To them the affair had come to a deadlock.

“Oh, Lord!” cried Pat, clinging desperately to Jenny's headpiece. “What
will we'z be doin'? We can't niver haul them two horses on the ice.”

“Tak' de log-chain,” said Fabian to Henrys, “an' tie him around de nec'
of Jenny.”

Henrys, after much difficulty and nervous fumbling, managed to loosen
the swamp-hook; and after much more difficulty and nervous fumbling
succeeded in making it fast about the gray mare's neck. Fabian intended
with this to choke the animal to that peculiar state when she would
float like a balloon on the water, and two men could with ease draw her
over the edge of the ice. Then the unexpected happened.

The instant Henrys had passed the end of the chain through the knot,
Pat, possessed by some Hibernian notion that now all was fast, let go
of the bit. Jenny's head at once went under, and the end of the logging
chain glided over the ice and fell plump in the hole.

Immediately all was confusion. Jenny kicked and struggled, churning the
water, throwing it about, kicking out in every direction. Once a horse's
head dips strongly, the game is over. No animal drowns more quickly. The
two young boys scrambled away, and French oaths could not induce them
to approach. Molly, still upheld by Fabian, looked at him piteously with
her strange intelligent eyes, holding herself motionless and rigid with
complete confidence in this master who had never failed her before.
Fabian dug his heels into the ice, but could not hang on. The drowning
horse was more than a dead weight. Presently it became a question of
letting go or being dragged into the lake on top of the animals. With a
sob the little Frenchman relinquished his hold. The water seemed slowly
to rise and over-film the troubled look of pleading in Molly's eyes.

“Assassins!” hissed Laveque at the two unfortunate youths. That was all.

When the surface of the waters had again mirrored the clouds, they
hauled the carcasses out on the ice and stripped the harness. Then they
rolled the log from the dray, piled the tools on it, and took their way
to camp. In the blue of the winter's sky was a single speck.

The speck grew. Soon it swooped. With a hoarse croak it lit on the snow
at a wary distance, and began to strut back and forth. Presently, its
suspicions at rest, the raven advanced, and with eager beak began its
dreadful meal. By this time another, which had seen the first one's
swoop, was in view through the ether; then another; then another. In an
hour the brotherhood of ravens, thus telegraphically notified, was at
feast.



Chapter VIII


Fabian Laveque elaborated the details of the catastrophe with
volubility.

“Hee's not fonny dat she bre'ks t'rough,” he said. “I 'ave see dem bre'k
t'rough two, t'ree tam in de day, but nevaire dat she get drown! W'en
dose dam-fool can't t'ink wit' hees haid--sacre Dieu! eet is so easy, to
chok' dat cheval--she make me cry wit' de eye!”

“I suppose it was a good deal my fault,” commented Radway, doubtfully
shaking his head, after Laveque had left the office. “I ought to have
been surer about the ice.”

“Eight inches is a little light, with so much snow atop,” remarked the
scaler carelessly.

By virtue of that same careless remark, however, Radway was so confirmed
in his belief as to his own culpability that he quite overlooked
Fabian's just contention--that the mere thinness of the ice was in
reality no excuse for the losing of the horses. So Pat and Henrys were
not discharged--were not instructed to “get their time.” Fabian Laveque
promptly demanded his.

“Sacre bleu!” said he to old Jackson. “I no work wid dat dam-fool dat no
t'ink wit' hees haid.”

This deprived the camp at once of a teamster and a team. When you
reflect that one pair of horses takes care of the exertions of a crew
of sawyers, several swampers, and three or four cant-hook men, you
will readily see what a serious derangement their loss would cause. And
besides, the animals themselves are difficult to replace. They are
big strong beasts, selected for their power, staying qualities, and
intelligence, worth anywhere from three to six hundred dollars a pair.
They must be shipped in from a distance. And, finally, they require
a very careful and patient training before they are of value in
co-operating with the nicely adjusted efforts necessary to place the
sawlog where it belongs. Ready-trained horses are never for sale during
the season.

Radway did his best. He took three days to search out a big team of
farm horses. Then it became necessary to find a driver. After some
deliberation he decided to advance Bob Stratton to the post, that
“decker” having had more or less experience the year before. Erickson,
the Swede, while not a star cant-hook man, was nevertheless sure and
reliable. Radway placed him in Stratton's place. But now he must find a
swamper. He remembered Thorpe.

So the young man received his first promotion toward the ranks of
skilled labor. He gained at last a field of application for the accuracy
he had so intelligently acquired while road-making, for now a false
stroke marred a saw-log; and besides, what was more to his taste, he
found himself near the actual scene of operation, at the front, as
it were. He had under his very eyes the process as far as it had been
carried.

In his experience here he made use of the same searching analytical
observation that had so quickly taught him the secret of the ax-swing.
He knew that each of the things he saw, no matter how trivial, was
either premeditated or the product of chance. If premeditated, he tried
to find out its reason for being. If fortuitous, he wished to know
the fact, and always attempted to figure out the possibility of its
elimination.

So he learned why and when the sawyers threw a tree up or down hill;
how much small standing timber they tried to fell it through; what
consideration held for the cutting of different lengths of log; how the
timber was skilfully decked on the skids in such a manner that the pile
should not bulge and fall, and so that the scaler could easily determine
the opposite ends of the same log;--in short, a thousand and one little
details which ordinarily a man learns only as the exigencies arise to
call in experience. Here, too, he first realized he was in the firing
line.

Thorpe had assigned him as bunk mate the young fellow who assisted
Tom Broadhead in the felling. Henry Paul was a fresh-complexioned,
clear-eyed, quick-mannered young fellow with an air of steady
responsibility about him. He came from the southern part of the State,
where, during the summer, he worked on a little homestead farm of his
own. After a few days he told Thorpe that he was married, and after a
few days more he showed his bunk mate the photograph of a sweet-faced
young woman who looked trustingly out of the picture.

“She's waitin' down there for me, and it ain't so very long till
spring,” said Paul wistfully. “She's the best little woman a man ever
had, and there ain't nothin' too good for her, chummy!”

Thorpe, soul-sick after his recent experiences with the charity of the
world, discovered a real pleasure in this fresh, clear passion. As he
contemplated the abounding health, the upright carriage, the sparkling,
bubbling spirits of the young woodsman, he could easily imagine the
young girl and the young happiness, too big for a little backwoods farm.

Three days after the newcomer had started in at the swamping, Paul,
during their early morning walk from camp to the scene of their
operations, confided in him further.

“Got another letter, chummy,” said he, “come in yesterday. She tells
me,” he hesitated with a blush, and then a happy laugh, “that they ain't
going to be only two of us at the farm next year.”

“You mean!” queried Thorpe.

“Yes,” laughed Paul, “and if it's a girl she gets named after her
mother, you bet.”

The men separated. In a moment Thorpe found himself waist-deep in the
pitchy aromatic top of an old bull-sap, clipping away at the projecting
branches. After a time he heard Paul's gay halloo.

“TimBER!” came the cry, and then the swish-sh-sh,--CRASH of the tree's
fall.

Thorpe knew that now either Hank or Tom must be climbing with the long
measuring pole along the prostrate trunk, marking by means of shallow
ax-clips where the saw was to divide the logs. Then Tom shouted
something unintelligible. The other men seemed to understand, however,
for they dropped their work and ran hastily in the direction of the
voice. Thorpe, after a moment's indecision, did the same. He arrived to
find a group about a prostrate man. The man was Paul.

Two of the older woodsmen, kneeling, were conducting coolly a hasty
examination. At the front every man is more or less of a surgeon.

“Is he hurt badly?” asked Thorpe; “what is it?”

“He's dead,” answered one of the other men soberly.

With the skill of ghastly practice some of them wove a litter on which
the body was placed. The pathetic little procession moved in the solemn,
inscrutable forest.

When the tree had fallen it had crashed through the top of another,
leaving suspended in the branches of the latter a long heavy limb. A
slight breeze dislodged it. Henry Paul was impaled as by a javelin.

This is the chief of the many perils of the woods. Like crouching pumas
the instruments of a man's destruction poise on the spring, sometimes
for days. Then swiftly, silently, the leap is made. It is a danger
unavoidable, terrible, ever-present. Thorpe was destined in time to
see men crushed and mangled in a hundred ingenious ways by the saw log,
knocked into space and a violent death by the butts of trees, ground to
powder in the mill of a jam, but never would he be more deeply impressed
than by this ruthless silent taking of a life. The forces of nature are
so tame, so simple, so obedient; and in the next instant so absolutely
beyond human control or direction, so whirlingly contemptuous of puny
human effort, that in time the wilderness shrouds itself to our eyes in
the same impenetrable mystery as the sea.

That evening the camp was unusually quiet. Tellier let his fiddle hang.
After supper Thorpe was approached by Purdy, the reptilian red-head with
whom he had had the row some evenings before.

“You in, chummy?” he asked in a quiet voice. “It's a five apiece for
Hank's woman.”

“Yes,” said Thorpe.

The men were earning from twenty to thirty dollars a month. They had,
most of them, never seen Hank Paul before this autumn. He had not,
mainly because of his modest disposition, enjoyed any extraordinary
degree of popularity. Yet these strangers cheerfully, as a matter of
course, gave up the proceeds of a week's hard work, and that without
expecting the slightest personal credit. The money was sent “from the
boys.” Thorpe later read a heart-broken letter of thanks to the unknown
benefactors. It touched him deeply, and he suspected the other men of
the same emotions, but by that time they had regained the independent,
self-contained poise of the frontiersman. They read it with unmoved
faces, and tossed it aside with a more than ordinarily rough joke
or oath. Thorpe understood their reticence. It was a part of his own
nature. He felt more than ever akin to these men.

As swamper he had more or less to do with a cant-hook in helping the
teamsters roll the end of the log on the little “dray.” He soon caught
the knack. Towards Christmas he had become a fairly efficient cant-hook
man, and was helping roll the great sticks of timber up the slanting
skids. Thus always intelligence counts, especially that rare
intelligence which resolves into the analytical and the minutely
observing.

On Sundays Thorpe fell into the habit of accompanying old Jackson Hines
on his hunting expeditions. The ancient had been raised in the woods.
He seemed to know by instinct the haunts and habits of all the wild
animals, just as he seemed to know by instinct when one of his horses
was likely to be troubled by the colic. His woodcraft was really
remarkable.

So the two would stand for hours in the early morning and late evening
waiting for deer on the edges of the swamps. They haunted the runways
during the middle of the day. On soft moccasined feet they stole about
in the evening with a bull's-eye lantern fastened on the head of one of
them for a “jack.” Several times they surprised the wolves, and shone
the animals' eyes like the scattered embers of a camp fire.

Thorpe learned to shoot at a deer's shoulders rather than his heart,
how to tell when the animal had sustained a mortal hurt from the way it
leaped and the white of its tail. He even made progress in the difficult
art of still hunting, where the man matches his senses against those of
the creatures of the forest,--and sometimes wins. He soon knew better
than to cut the animal's throat, and learned from Hines that a single
stab at a certain point of the chest was much better for the purposes of
bleeding. And, what is more, he learned not to over-shoot down hill.

Besides these things Jackson taught him many other, minor, details of
woodcraft. Soon the young man could interpret the thousands of signs, so
insignificant in appearance and so important in reality, which tell the
history of the woods. He acquired the knack of winter fishing.

These Sundays were perhaps the most nearly perfect of any of the days of
that winter. In them the young man drew more directly face to face with
the wilderness. He called a truce with the enemy; and in return that
great inscrutable power poured into his heart a portion of her grandeur.
His ambition grew; and, as always with him, his determination became the
greater and the more secret. In proportion as his ideas increased, he
took greater pains to shut them in from expression. For failure in great
things would bring keener disappointment than failure in little.

He was getting just the experience and the knowledge he needed; but that
was about all. His wages were twenty-five dollars a month, which his van
bill would reduce to the double eagle. At the end of the winter he would
have but a little over a hundred dollars to show for his season's work,
and this could mean at most only fifty dollars for Helen. But the future
was his. He saw now more plainly what he had dimly perceived before,
that for the man who buys timber, and logs it well, a sure future is
waiting. And in this camp he was beginning to learn from failure the
conditions of success.



Chapter IX


They finished cutting on section seventeen during Thorpe's second week.
It became necessary to begin on section fourteen, which lay two miles
to the east. In that direction the character of the country changed
somewhat.

The pine there grew thick on isolated “islands” of not more than an acre
or so in extent,--little knolls rising from the level of a marsh. In
ordinary conditions nothing would have been easier than to have ploughed
roads across the frozen surface of this marsh. The peculiar state of the
weather interposed tremendous difficulties.

The early part of autumn had been characterized by a heavy snow-fall
immediately after a series of mild days. A warm blanket of some
thickness thus overlaid the earth, effectually preventing the freezing
which subsequent cold weather would have caused. All the season Radway
had contended with this condition. Even in the woods, muddy swamp and
spring-holes caused endless difficulty and necessitated a great deal of
“corduroying,” or the laying of poles side by side to form an artificial
bottom. Here in the open some six inches of water and unlimited mud
awaited the first horse that should break through the layer of snow and
thin ice. Between each pair of islands a road had to be “tramped.”

Thorpe and the rest were put at this disagreeable job. All day long they
had to walk mechanically back and forth on diagonals between the marks
set by Radway with his snowshoes. Early in the morning their feet were
wet by icy water, for even the light weight of a man sometimes broke the
frozen skin of the marsh. By night a road of trampled snow, of greater
or less length, was marked out across the expanse. Thus the blanket was
thrown back from the warm earth, and thus the cold was given a chance at
the water beneath. In a day or so the road would bear a horse. A bridge
of ice had been artificially constructed, on either side of which lay
unsounded depths. This road was indicated by a row of firs stuck in the
snow on either side.

It was very cold. All day long the restless wind swept across the
shivering surface of the plains, and tore around the corners of the
islands. The big woods are as good as an overcoat. The overcoat had been
taken away.

When the lunch-sleigh arrived, the men huddled shivering in the lee of
one of the knolls, and tried to eat with benumbed fingers before a fire
that was but a mockery. Often it was nearly dark before their work had
warmed them again. All of the skidways had to be placed on the edges of
the islands themselves, and the logs had to be travoyed over the steep
little knolls. A single misstep out on to the plain meant a mired horse.
Three times heavy snows obliterated the roads, so that they had to be
ploughed out before the men could go to work again. It was a struggle.

Radway was evidently worried. He often paused before a gang to inquire
how they were “making it.” He seemed afraid they might wish to quit,
which was indeed the case, but he should never have taken before them
any attitude but that of absolute confidence in their intentions. His
anxiety was natural, however. He realized the absolute necessity of
skidding and hauling this job before the heavy choking snows of the
latter part of January should make it impossible to keep the roads open.
So insistent was this necessity that he had seized the first respite in
the phenomenal snow-fall of the early autumn to begin work. The cutting
in the woods could wait.

Left to themselves probably the men would never have dreamed of
objecting to whatever privations the task carried with it. Radway's
anxiety for their comfort, however, caused them finally to imagine that
perhaps they might have some just grounds for complaint after all. That
is a great trait of the lumber-jack.

But Dyer, the scaler, finally caused the outbreak. Dyer was an efficient
enough man in his way, but he loved his own ease. His habit was to stay
in his bunk of mornings until well after daylight. To this there could
be no objection--except on the part of the cook, who was supposed to
attend to his business himself--for the scaler was active in his work,
when once he began it, and could keep up with the skidding. But now he
displayed a strong antipathy to the north wind on the plains. Of course
he could not very well shirk the work entirely, but he did a good deal
of talking on the very cold mornings.

“I don't pose for no tough son-of-a-gun,” said he to Radway, “and
I've got some respect for my ears and feet. She'll warm up a little by
to-morrow, and perhaps the wind'll die. I can catch up on you fellows
by hustling a little, so I guess I'll stay in and work on the books
to-day.”

“All right,” Radway assented, a little doubtfully.

This happened perhaps two days out of the week. Finally Dyer hung out a
thermometer, which he used to consult. The men saw it, and consulted it
too. At once they felt much colder.

“She was stan' ten below,” sputtered Baptiste Tellier, the Frenchman who
played the fiddle. “He freeze t'rou to hees eenside. Dat is too cole for
mak de work.”

“Them plains is sure a holy fright,” assented Purdy.

“Th' old man knows it himself,” agreed big Nolan; “did you see him
rammin' around yesterday askin' us if we found her too cold? He knows
damn well he ought not to keep a man out that sort o' weather.”

“You'd shiver like a dog in a briar path on a warm day in July,” said
Jackson Hines contemptuously.

“Shut up!” said they. “You're barn-boss. You don't have to be out in th'
cold.”

This was true. So Jackson's intervention went for a little worse than
nothing.

“It ain't lak' he has nuttin' besides,” went on Baptiste. “He can mak'
de cut in de meedle of de fores'.”

“That's right,” agreed Bob Stratton, “they's the west half of eight
ain't been cut yet.”

So they sent a delegation to Radway. Big Nolan was the spokesman.

“Boss,” said he bluntly, “she's too cold to work on them plains to-day.
She's the coldest day we had.”

Radway was too old a hand at the business to make any promises on the
spot.

“I'll see, boys,” said he.

When the breakfast was over the crew were set to making skidways and
travoy roads on eight. This was a precedent. In time the work on the
plains was grumblingly done in any weather. However, as to this Radway
proved firm enough. He was a good fighter when he knew he was being
imposed on. A man could never cheat or defy him openly without
collecting a little war that left him surprised at the jobber's
belligerency. The doubtful cases, those on the subtle line of
indecision, found him weak. He could be so easily persuaded that he was
in the wrong. At times it even seemed that he was anxious to be proved
at fault, so eager was he to catch fairly the justice of the other man's
attitude. He held his men inexorably and firmly to their work on the
indisputably comfortable days; but gave in often when an able-bodied
woodsman should have seen in the weather no inconvenience, even. As
the days slipped by, however, he tightened the reins. Christmas was
approaching. An easy mathematical computation reduced the question of
completing his contract with Morrison & Daly to a certain weekly quota.
In fact he was surprised at the size of it. He would have to work
diligently and steadily during the rest of the winter.

Having thus a definite task to accomplish in a definite number of days,
Radway grew to be more of a taskmaster. His anxiety as to the completion
of the work overlaid his morbidly sympathetic human interest. Thus
he regained to a small degree the respect of his men. Then he lost it
again.

One morning he came in from a talk with the supply-teamster, and woke
Dyer, who was not yet up.

“I'm going down home for two or three weeks,” he announced to Dyer, “you
know my address. You'll have to take charge, and I guess you'd better
let the scaling go. We can get the tally at the banking grounds when we
begin to haul. Now we ain't got all the time there is, so you want to
keep the boys at it pretty well.”

Dyer twisted the little points of his mustache. “All right, sir,” said
he with his smile so inscrutably insolent that Radway never saw the
insolence at all. He thought this a poor year for a man in Radway's
position to spend Christmas with his family, but it was none of his
business.

“Do as much as you can in the marsh, Dyer,” went on the jobber. “I don't
believe it's really necessary to lay off any more there on account of
the weather. We've simply got to get that job in before the big snows.”

“All right, sir,” repeated Dyer.

The scaler did what he considered his duty. All day long he tramped back
and forth from one gang of men to the other, keeping a sharp eye on the
details of the work. His practical experience was sufficient to solve
readily such problems of broken tackle, extra expedients, or facility
which the days brought forth. The fact that in him was vested the power
to discharge kept the men at work.

Dyer was in the habit of starting for the marsh an hour or so after
sunrise. The crew, of course, were at work by daylight. Dyer heard them
often through his doze, just as he heard the chore-boy come in to build
the fire and fill the water pail afresh. After a time the fire, built of
kerosene and pitchy jack pine, would get so hot that in self-defense he
would arise and dress. Then he would breakfast leisurely.

Thus he incurred the enmity of the cook and cookee. Those individuals
have to prepare food three times a day for a half hundred heavy eaters;
besides which, on sleigh-haul, they are supposed to serve a breakfast
at three o'clock for the loaders and a variety of lunches up to midnight
for the sprinkler men. As a consequence, they resent infractions of the
little system they may have been able to introduce.

Now the business of a foreman is to be up as soon as anybody. He does
none of the work himself, but he must see that somebody else does
it, and does it well. For this he needs actual experience at the work
itself, but above all zeal and constant presence. He must know how a
thing ought to be done, and he must be on hand unexpectedly to see how
its accomplishment is progressing. Dyer should have been out of bed at
first horn-blow.

One morning he slept until nearly ten o'clock. It was inexplicable!
He hurried from his bunk, made a hasty toilet, and started for the
dining-room to get some sort of a lunch to do him until dinner time.
As he stepped from the door of the office he caught sight of two men
hurrying from the cook camp to the men's camp. He thought he heard the
hum of conversation in the latter building. The cookee set hot coffee
before him. For the rest, he took what he could find cold on the table.

On an inverted cracker box the cook sat reading an old copy of the
Police Gazette. Various fifty-pound lard tins were bubbling and steaming
on the range. The cookee divided his time between them and the task of
sticking on the log walls pleasing patterns made of illustrations
from cheap papers and the gaudy labels of canned goods. Dyer sat down,
feeling, for the first time, a little guilty. This was not because of a
sense of a dereliction in duty, but because he feared the strong man's
contempt for inefficiency.

“I sort of pounded my ear a little long this morning,” he remarked with
an unwonted air of bonhomie.

The cook creased his paper with one hand and went on reading; the little
action indicating at the same time that he had heard, but intended to
vouchsafe no attention. The cookee continued his occupations.

“I suppose the men got out to the marsh on time,” suggested Dyer, still
easily.

The cook laid aside his paper and looked the scaler in the eye.

“You're the foreman; I'm the cook,” said he. “You ought to know.”

The cookee had paused, the paste brush in his hand.

Dyer was no weakling. The problem presenting, he rose to the emergency.
Without another word he pushed back his coffee cup and crossed the
narrow open passage to the men's camp

When he opened the door a silence fell. He could see dimly that the room
was full of lounging and smoking lumbermen. As a matter of fact, not a
man had stirred out that morning. This was more for the sake of giving
Dyer a lesson than of actually shirking the work, for a lumber-jack is
honest in giving his time when it is paid for.

“How's this, men!” cried Dyer sharply; “why aren't you out on the
marsh?”

No one answered for a minute. Then Baptiste:

“He mak' too tam cole for de marsh. Meester Radway he spik dat we kip
off dat marsh w'en he mak' cole.”

Dyer knew that the precedent was indisputable.

“Why didn't you cut on eight then?” he asked, still in peremptory tones.

“Didn't have no one to show us where to begin,” drawled a voice in the
corner.

Dyer turned sharp on his heel and went out.

“Sore as a boil, ain't he!” commented old Jackson Hines with a chuckle.

In the cook camp Dyer was saying to the cook, “Well, anyway, we'll have
dinner early and get a good start for this afternoon.”

The cook again laid down his paper. “I'm tending to this job of cook,”
 said he, “and I'm getting the meals on time. Dinner will be on time
to-day not a minute early, and not a minute late.”

Then he resumed his perusal of the adventures of ladies to whom the
illustrations accorded magnificent calf-development.

The crew worked on the marsh that afternoon, and the subsequent days
of the week. They labored conscientiously but not zealously. There is a
deal of difference, and the lumber-jack's unaided conscience is
likely to allow him a certain amount of conversation from the decks of
skidways. The work moved slowly. At Christmas a number of the men “went
out.” Most of them were back again after four or five days, for, while
men were not plenty, neither was work. The equilibrium was nearly exact.

But the convivial souls had lost to Dyer the days of their debauch,
and until their thirst for recuperative “Pain Killer,” “Hinckley” and
Jamaica Ginger was appeased, they were not much good. Instead of keeping
up to fifty thousand a day, as Radway had figured was necessary, the
scale would not have exceeded thirty.

Dyer saw all this plainly enough, but was not able to remedy it. That
was not entirely his fault. He did not dare give the delinquents their
time, for he would not have known where to fill their places. This lay
in Radway's experience. Dyer felt that responsibilities a little too
great had been forced on him, which was partly true. In a few days the
young man's facile conscience had covered all his shortcomings with the
blanket excuse. He conceived that he had a grievance against Radway!



Chapter X


Radway returned to camp by the 6th of January. He went on snowshoes over
the entire job; and then sat silently in the office smoking “Peerless”
 in his battered old pipe. Dyer watched him amusedly, secure in his
grievance in case blame should be attached to him. The jobber looked
older. The lines of dry good-humor about his eyes had subtly changed to
an expression of pathetic anxiety. He attached no blame to anybody, but
rose the next morning at horn-blow, and the men found they had a new
master over them.

And now the struggle with the wilderness came to grapples. Radway was as
one possessed by a burning fever. He seemed everywhere at once, always
helping with his own shoulder and arm, hurrying eagerly. For once luck
seemed with him. The marsh was cut over; the “eighty” on section eight
was skidded without a break. The weather held cold and clear.

Now it became necessary to put the roads in shape for hauling. All
winter the blacksmith, between his tasks of shoeing and mending, had
occupied his time in fitting the iron-work on eight log-sleighs
which the carpenter had hewed from solid sticks of timber. They were
tremendous affairs, these sleighs, with runners six feet apart, and
bunks nine feet in width for the reception of logs. The bunks were so
connected by two loosely-coupled rods that, when emptied, they could be
swung parallel with the road, so reducing the width of the sleigh. The
carpenter had also built two immense tanks on runners, holding each some
seventy barrels of water, and with holes so arranged in the bottom and
rear that on the withdrawal of plugs the water would flood the entire
width of the road. These sprinklers were filled by horse power. A chain,
running through blocks attached to a solid upper framework, like the
open belfry of an Italian monastery, dragged a barrel up a wooden track
from the water hole to the opening in the sprinkler. When in action this
formidable machine weighed nearly two tons and resembled a moving house.
Other men had felled two big hemlocks, from which they had hewed beams
for a V plow.

The V plow was now put in action. Six horses drew it down the road,
each pair superintended by a driver. The machine was weighted down by
a number of logs laid across the arms. Men guided it by levers, and
by throwing their weight against the fans of the plow. It was a gay,
animated scene this, full of the spirit of winter--the plodding,
straining horses, the brilliantly dressed, struggling men, the
sullen-yielding snow thrown to either side, the shouts, warnings, and
commands. To right and left grew white banks of snow. Behind stretched a
broad white path in which a scant inch hid the bare earth.

For some distance the way led along comparatively high ground. Then,
skirting the edge of a lake, it plunged into a deep creek bottom between
hills. Here, earlier in the year, eleven bridges had been constructed,
each a labor of accuracy; and perhaps as many swampy places had been
“corduroyed” by carpeting them with long parallel poles. Now the first
difficulty began.

Some of the bridges had sunk below the level, and the approaches had to
be corduroyed to a practicable grade. Others again were humped up like
tom-cats, and had to be pulled apart entirely. In spots the “corduroy”
 had spread, so that the horses thrust their hoofs far down into
leg-breaking holes. The experienced animals were never caught, however.
As soon as they felt the ground giving way beneath one foot, they threw
their weight on the other.

Still, that sort of thing was to be expected. A gang of men who followed
the plow carried axes and cant-hooks for the purpose of repairing
extemporaneously just such defects, which never would have been
discovered otherwise than by the practical experience. Radway himself
accompanied the plow. Thorpe, who went along as one of the “road
monkeys,” saw now why such care had been required of him in smoothing
the way of stubs, knots, and hummocks.

Down the creek an accident occurred on this account. The plow had
encountered a drift. Three times the horses had plunged at it, and three
times had been brought to a stand, not so much by the drag of the V plow
as by the wallowing they themselves had to do in the drift.

“No use, break her through, boys,” said Radway. So a dozen men hurled
their bodies through, making an opening for the horses.

“Hi! YUP!” shouted the three teamsters, gathering up their reins.

The horses put their heads down and plunged. The whole apparatus moved
with a rush, men clinging, animals digging their hoofs in, snow flying.
Suddenly there came a check, then a CRACK, and then the plow shot
forward so suddenly and easily that the horses all but fell on their
noses. The flanging arms of the V, forced in a place too narrow, had
caught between heavy stubs. One of the arms had broken square off.

There was nothing for it but to fell another hemlock and hew out another
beam, which meant a day lost. Radway occupied his men with shovels in
clearing the edge of the road, and started one of his sprinklers over
the place already cleared. Water holes of suitable size had been blown
in the creek bank by dynamite. There the machines were filled. It was
a slow process. Stratton attached his horse to the chain and drove him
back and forth, hauling the barrel up and down the slideway. At the
bottom it was capsized and filled by means of a long pole shackled to
its bottom and manipulated by old man Heath. At the top it turned over
by its own weight. Thus seventy odd times.

Then Fred Green hitched his team on and the four horses drew the
creaking, cumbrous vehicle spouting down the road. Water gushed in fans
from the openings on either side and beneath; and in streams from two
holes behind. Not for an instant as long as the flow continued dared
the teamsters breathe their horses, for a pause would freeze the runners
tight to the ground. A tongue at either end obviated the necessity of
turning around.

While the other men hewed at the required beam for the broken V plow,
Heath, Stratton, and Green went over the cleared road-length once. To do
so required three sprinklerfuls. When the road should be quite free,
and both sprinklers running, they would have to keep at it until after
midnight.

And then silently the wilderness stretched forth her hand and pushed
these struggling atoms back to their place.

That night it turned warmer. The change was heralded by a shift of wind.
Then some blue jays appeared from nowhere and began to scream at their
more silent brothers, the whisky jacks.

“She's goin' to rain,” said old Jackson. “The air is kind o' holler.”

“Hollow?” said Thorpe, laughing. “How is that?”

“I don' no,” confessed Hines, “but she is. She jest feels that way.”

In the morning the icicles dripped from the roof, and although the snow
did not appreciably melt, it shrank into itself and became pock-marked
on the surface.

Radway was down looking at the road.

“She's holdin' her own,” said he, “but there ain't any use putting more
water on her. She ain't freezing a mite. We'll plow her out.”

So they finished the job, and plowed her out, leaving exposed the wet,
marshy surface of the creek-bottom, on which at night a thin crust
formed. Across the marsh the old tramped road held up the horses, and
the plow swept clear a little wider swath.

“She'll freeze a little to-night,” said Radway hopefully. “You sprinkler
boys get at her and wet her down.”

Until two o'clock in the morning the four teams and the six men creaked
back and forth spilling hardly-gathered water--weird, unearthly, in the
flickering light of their torches. Then they crept in and ate sleepily
the food that a sleepy cookee set out for them.

By morning the mere surface of this sprinkled water had frozen, the
remainder beneath had drained away, and so Radway found in his road
considerable patches of shell ice, useless, crumbling. He looked in
despair at the sky. Dimly through the gray he caught the tint of blue.

The sun came out. Nut-hatches and wood-peckers ran gayly up the warming
trunks of the trees. Blue jays fluffed and perked and screamed in the
hard-wood tops. A covey of grouse ventured from the swamp and strutted
vainly, a pause of contemplation between each step. Radway, walking out
on the tramped road of the marsh, cracked the artificial skin and thrust
his foot through into icy water. That night the sprinklers stayed in.

The devil seemed in it. If the thaw would only cease before the ice
bottom so laboriously constructed was destroyed! Radway vibrated between
the office and the road. Men were lying idle; teams were doing the same.
Nothing went on but the days of the year; and four of them had already
ticked off the calendar. The deep snow of the unusually cold autumn had
now disappeared from the tops of the stumps. Down in the swamp the covey
of partridges were beginning to hope that in a few days more they might
discover a bare spot in the burnings. It even stopped freezing during
the night. At times Dyer's little thermometer marked as high as forty
degrees.

“I often heard this was a sort 'v summer resort,” observed Tom
Broadhead, “but danged if I knew it was a summer resort all the year
'round.”

The weather got to be the only topic of conversation. Each had his
say, his prediction. It became maddening. Towards evening the chill of
melting snow would deceive many into the belief that a cold snap was
beginning.

“She'll freeze before morning, sure,” was the hopeful comment.

And then in the morning the air would be more balmily insulting than
ever.

“Old man is as blue as a whetstone,” commented Jackson Hines, “an' I
don't blame him. This weather'd make a man mad enough to eat the devil
with his horns left on.”

By and by it got to be a case of looking on the bright side of the
affair from pure reaction.

“I don't know,” said Radway, “it won't be so bad after all. A couple of
days of zero weather, with all this water lying around, would fix things
up in pretty good shape. If she only freezes tight, we'll have a good
solid bottom to build on, and that'll be quite a good rig out there on
the marsh.”

The inscrutable goddess of the wilderness smiled, and calmly,
relentlessly, moved her next pawn.

It was all so unutterably simple, and yet so effective. Something there
was in it of the calm inevitability of fate. It snowed.

All night and all day the great flakes zig-zagged softly down through
the air. Radway plowed away two feet of it. The surface was promptly
covered by a second storm. Radway doggedly plowed it out again.

This time the goddess seemed to relent. The ground froze solid. The
sprinklers became assiduous in their labor. Two days later the road was
ready for the first sleigh, its surface of thick, glassy ice, beautiful
to behold; the ruts cut deep and true; the grades sanded, or sprinkled
with retarding hay on the descents. At the river the banking ground
proved solid. Radway breathed again, then sighed. Spring was eight days
nearer. He was eight days more behind.



Chapter XI


As soon as loading began, the cook served breakfast at three o'clock.
The men worked by the light of torches, which were often merely catsup
jugs with wicking in the necks. Nothing could be more picturesque than
a teamster conducting one of his great pyramidical loads over the little
inequalities of the road, in the ticklish places standing atop with the
bent knee of the Roman charioteer, spying and forestalling the chances
of the way with a fixed eye and an intense concentration that relaxed
not one inch in the miles of the haul. Thorpe had become a full-fledged
cant-hook man.

He liked the work. There is about it a skill that fascinates. A man
grips suddenly with the hook of his strong instrument, stopping one end
that the other may slide; he thrusts the short, strong stock between the
log and the skid, allowing it to be overrun; he stops the roll with
a sudden sure grasp applied at just the right moment to be effective.
Sometimes he allows himself to be carried up bodily, clinging to the
cant-hook like an acrobat to a bar, until the log has rolled once; when,
his weapon loosened, he drops lightly, easily to the ground. And it is
exciting to pile the logs on the sleigh, first a layer of five, say;
then one of six smaller; of but three; of two; until, at the very apex,
the last is dragged slowly up the skids, poised, and, just as it is
about to plunge down the other side, is gripped and held inexorably by
the little men in blue flannel shirts.

Chains bind the loads. And if ever, during the loading, or afterwards
when the sleigh is in motion, the weight of the logs causes the pyramid
to break down and squash out;--then woe to the driver, or whoever
happens to be near! A saw log does not make a great deal of fuss while
falling, but it falls through anything that happens in its way, and a
man who gets mixed up in a load of twenty-five or thirty of them obeying
the laws of gravitation from a height of some fifteen to twenty feet,
can be crushed into strange shapes and fragments. For this reason the
loaders are picked and careful men.

At the banking grounds, which lie in and about the bed of the river, the
logs are piled in a gigantic skidway to await the spring freshets, which
will carry them down stream to the “boom.” In that enclosure they remain
until sawed in the mill.

Such is the drama of the saw log, a story of grit, resourcefulness,
adaptability, fortitude and ingenuity hard to match. Conditions never
repeat themselves in the woods as they do in the factory. The wilderness
offers ever new complications to solve, difficulties to overcome. A man
must think of everything, figure on everything, from the grand sweep of
the country at large to the pressure on a king-bolt. And where another
possesses the boundless resources of a great city, he has to rely on the
material stored in one corner of a shed. It is easy to build a palace
with men and tools; it is difficult to build a log cabin with nothing
but an ax. His wits must help him where his experience fails; and his
experience must push him mechanically along the track of habit when
successive buffetings have beaten his wits out of his head. In a day
he must construct elaborate engines, roads, and implements which old
civilization considers the works of leisure. Without a thought of
expense he must abandon as temporary, property which other industries
cry out at being compelled to acquire as permanent. For this reason
he becomes in time different from his fellows. The wilderness leaves
something of her mystery in his eyes, that mystery of hidden, unknown
but guessed, power. Men look after him on the street, as they would look
after any other pioneer, in vague admiration of a scope more virile than
their own.

Thorpe, in common with the other men, had thought Radway's vacation at
Christmas time a mistake. He could not but admire the feverish animation
that now characterized the jobber. Every mischance was as quickly
repaired as aroused expedient could do the work.

The marsh received first attention. There the restless snow drifted
uneasily before the wind. Nearly every day the road had to be plowed,
and the sprinklers followed the teams almost constantly. Often it was
bitter cold, but no one dared to suggest to the determined jobber that
it might be better to remain indoors. The men knew as well as he that
the heavy February snows would block traffic beyond hope of extrication.

As it was, several times an especially heavy fall clogged the way. The
snow-plow, even with extra teams, could hardly force its path through.
Men with shovels helped. Often but a few loads a day, and they small,
could be forced to the banks by the utmost exertions of the entire crew.
Esprit de corps awoke. The men sprang to their tasks with alacrity, gave
more than an hour's exertion to each of the twenty-four, took a pride in
repulsing the assaults of the great enemy, whom they personified under
the generic “She.” Mike McGovern raked up a saint somewhere whom he
apostrophized in a personal and familiar manner.

He hit his head against an overhanging branch.

“You're a nice wan, now ain't ye?” he cried angrily at the unfortunate
guardian of his soul. “Dom if Oi don't quit ye! Ye see!”

“Be the gate of Hivin!” he shouted, when he opened the door of mornings
and discovered another six inches of snow, “Ye're a burrd! If Oi
couldn't make out to be more of a saint than that, Oi'd quit the
biznis! Move yor pull, an' get us some dacint weather! Ye awt t' be road
monkeyin' on th' golden streets, thot's what ye awt to be doin'!”

Jackson Hines was righteously indignant, but with the shrewdness of the
old man, put the blame partly where it belonged.

“I ain't sayin',” he observed judicially, “that this weather ain't hell.
It's hell and repeat. But a man sort've got to expec' weather. He looks
for it, and he oughta be ready for it. The trouble is we got behind
Christmas. It's that Dyer. He's about as mean as they make 'em. The only
reason he didn't die long ago is becuz th' Devil's thought him too mean
to pay any 'tention to. If ever he should die an' go to Heaven he'd pry
up th' golden streets an' use the infernal pit for a smelter.”

With this magnificent bit of invective, Jackson seized a lantern and
stumped out to see that the teamsters fed their horses properly.

“Didn't know you were a miner, Jackson,” called Thorpe, laughing.

“Young feller,” replied Jackson at the door, “it's a lot easier to tell
what I AIN'T been.”

So floundering, battling, making a little progress every day, the strife
continued.

One morning in February, Thorpe was helping load a big butt log. He was
engaged in “sending up”; that is, he was one of the two men who stand
at either side of the skids to help the ascending log keep straight and
true to its bed on the pile. His assistant's end caught on a sliver,
ground for a second, and slipped back. Thus the log ran slanting across
the skids instead of perpendicular to them. To rectify the fault, Thorpe
dug his cant-hook into the timber and threw his weight on the stock. He
hoped in this manner to check correspondingly the ascent of his end. In
other words, he took the place, on his side, of the preventing sliver,
so equalizing the pressure and forcing the timber to its proper
position. Instead of rolling, the log slid. The stock of the cant-hook
was jerked from his hands. He fell back, and the cant-hook, after
clinging for a moment to the rough bark, snapped down and hit him a
crushing blow on the top of the head.

Had a less experienced man than Jim Gladys been stationed at the other
end, Thorpe's life would have ended there. A shout of surprise or horror
would have stopped the horse pulling on the decking chain; the heavy
stick would have slid back on the prostrate young man, who would have
thereupon been ground to atoms as he lay. With the utmost coolness
Gladys swarmed the slanting face of the load; interposed the length of
his cant-hook stock between the log and it; held it exactly long enough
to straighten the timber, but not so long as to crush his own head and
arm; and ducked, just as the great piece of wood rumbled over the end of
the skids and dropped with a thud into the place Norton, the “top” man,
had prepared for it.

It was a fine deed, quickly thought, quickly dared. No one saw it. Jim
Gladys was a hero, but a hero without an audience.

They took Thorpe up and carried him in, just as they had carried Hank
Paul before. Men who had not spoken a dozen words to him in as many days
gathered his few belongings and stuffed them awkwardly into his satchel.
Jackson Hines prepared the bed of straw and warm blankets in the bottom
of the sleigh that was to take him out.

“He would have made a good boss,” said the old fellow. “He's a hard man
to nick.”

Thorpe was carried in from the front, and the battle went on without
him.



Chapter XII


Thorpe never knew how carefully he was carried to camp, nor how tenderly
the tote teamster drove his hay-couched burden to Beeson Lake. He had no
consciousness of the jolting train, in the baggage car of which Jimmy,
the little brakeman, and Bud, and the baggage man spread blankets, and
altogether put themselves to a great deal of trouble. When finally he
came to himself, he was in a long, bright, clean room, and the sunset
was throwing splashes of light on the ceiling over his head.

He watched them idly for a time; then turned on his pillow. At once he
perceived a long, double row of clean white-painted iron beds, on which
lay or sat figures of men. Other figures, of women, glided here and
there noiselessly. They wore long, spreading dove-gray clothes, with a
starched white kerchief drawn over the shoulders and across the breast.
Their heads were quaintly white-garbed in stiff winglike coifs, fitting
close about the oval of the face. Then Thorpe sighed comfortably, and
closed his eyes and blessed the chance that he had bought a hospital
ticket of the agent who had visited camp the month before. For these
were Sisters, and the young man lay in the Hospital of St. Mary.

Time was when the lumber-jack who had the misfortune to fall sick or to
meet with an accident was in a sorry plight indeed. If he possessed a
“stake,” he would receive some sort of unskilled attention in one of the
numerous and fearful lumberman's boarding-houses,--just so long as his
money lasted, not one instant more. Then he was bundled brutally into
the street, no matter what his condition might be. Penniless, without
friends, sick, he drifted naturally to the county poorhouse. There he
was patched up quickly and sent out half-cured. The authorities were
not so much to blame. With the slender appropriations at their disposal,
they found difficulty in taking care of those who came legitimately
under their jurisdiction. It was hardly to be expected that they
would welcome with open arms a vast army of crippled and diseased men
temporarily from the woods. The poor lumber-jack was often left broken
in mind and body from causes which a little intelligent care would have
rendered unimportant.

With the establishment of the first St. Mary's hospital, I think at Bay
City, all this was changed. Now, in it and a half dozen others conducted
on the same principles, the woodsman receives the best of medicines,
nursing, and medical attendance. From one of the numerous agents who
periodically visit the camps, he purchases for eight dollars a ticket
which admits him at any time during the year to the hospital, where he
is privileged to remain free of further charge until convalescent. So
valuable are these institutions, and so excellently are they maintained
by the Sisters, that a hospital agent is always welcome, even in
those camps from which ordinary peddlers and insurance men are rigidly
excluded. Like a great many other charities built on a common-sense
self-supporting rational basis, the woods hospitals are under the Roman
Catholic Church.

In one of these hospitals Thorpe lay for six weeks suffering from a
severe concussion of the brain. At the end of the fourth, his fever had
broken, but he was pronounced as yet too weak to be moved.

His nurse was a red-cheeked, blue-eyed, homely little Irish girl,
brimming with motherly good-humor. When Thorpe found strength to talk,
the two became friends. Through her influence he was moved to a bed
about ten feet from the window. Thence his privileges were three roofs
and a glimpse of the distant river.

The roofs were covered with snow. One day Thorpe saw it sink into itself
and gradually run away. The tinkle tinkle tank tank of drops sounded
from his own eaves. Down the far-off river, sluggish reaches of ice
drifted. Then in a night the blue disappeared from the stream. It became
a menacing gray, and even from his distance Thorpe could catch the swirl
of its rising waters. A day or two later dark masses drifted or shot
across the field of his vision, and twice he thought he distinguished
men standing upright and bold on single logs as they rushed down the
current.

“What is the date?” he asked of the Sister.

“The eleventh of March.”

“Isn't it early for the thaw?”

“Listen to 'im!” exclaimed the Sister delightedly. “Early is it! Sure
th' freshet co't thim all. Look, darlint, ye kin see th' drive from
here.”

“I see,” said Thorpe wearily, “when can I get out?”

“Not for wan week,” replied the Sister decidedly.

At the end of the week Thorpe said good-by to his attendant, who
appeared as sorry to see him go as though the same partings did not come
to her a dozen times a year; he took two days of tramping the little
town to regain the use of his legs, and boarded the morning train for
Beeson Lake. He did not pause in the village, but bent his steps to the
river trail.



Chapter XIII


Thorpe found the woods very different from when he had first traversed
them. They were full of patches of wet earth and of sunshine; of dark
pine, looking suddenly worn, and of fresh green shoots of needles,
looking deliciously springlike. This was the contrast everywhere--stern,
earnest, purposeful winter, and gay, laughing, careless spring. It was
impossible not to draw in fresh spirits with every step.

He followed the trail by the river. Butterballs and scoters paddled
up at his approach. Bits of rotten ice occasionally swirled down the
diminishing stream. The sunshine was clear and bright, but silvery
rather than golden, as though a little of the winter's snow,--a last
ethereal incarnation,--had lingered in its substance. Around every bend
Thorpe looked for some of Radway's crew “driving” the logs down the
current. He knew from chance encounters with several of the men in Bay
City that Radway was still in camp; which meant, of course, that the
last of the season's operations were not yet finished. Five miles
further Thorpe began to wonder whether this last conclusion might not be
erroneous. The Cass Branch had shrunken almost to its original limits.
Only here and there a little bayou or marsh attested recent freshets.
The drive must have been finished, even this early, for the stream in
its present condition would hardly float saw logs, certainly not in
quantity.

Thorpe, puzzled, walked on. At the banking ground he found empty skids.
Evidently the drive was over. And yet even to Thorpe's ignorance, it
seemed incredible that the remaining million and a half of logs had been
hauled, banked and driven during the short time he had lain in the Bay
City hospital. More to solve the problem than in any hope of work, he
set out up the logging road.

Another three miles brought him to camp. It looked strangely wet and
sodden and deserted. In fact, Thorpe found a bare half dozen people
in it,--Radway, the cook, and four men who were helping to pack up the
movables, and who later would drive out the wagons containing them. The
jobber showed strong traces of the strain he had undergone, but greeted
Thorpe almost jovially. He seemed able to show more of his real nature
now that the necessity of authority had been definitely removed.

“Hullo, young man,” he shouted at Thorpe's mud-splashed figure, “come
back to view, the remains? All well again, heigh? That's good!”

He strode down to grip the young fellow heartily by the hand. It was
impossible not to be charmed by the sincere cordiality of his manner.

“I didn't know you were through,” explained Thorpe, “I came to see if I
could get a job.”

“Well now I AM sorry!” cried Radway, “you can turn in and help though,
if you want to.”

Thorpe greeted the cook and old Jackson Hines, the only two whom he
knew, and set to work to tie up bundles of blankets, and to collect
axes, peavies, and tools of all descriptions. This was evidently the
last wagon-trip, for little remained to be done.

“I ought by rights to take the lumber of the roofs and floors,” observed
Radway thoughtfully, “but I guess she don't matter.”

Thorpe had never seen him in better spirits. He ascribed the older man's
hilarity to relief over the completion of a difficult task. That evening
the seven dined together at one end of the long table. The big room
exhaled already the atmosphere of desertion.

“Not much like old times, is she?” laughed Radway. “Can't you just shut
your eyes and hear Baptiste say, 'Mak' heem de soup one tam more for
me'? She's pretty empty now.”

Jackson Hines looked whimsically down the bare board. “More room than
God made for geese in Ireland,” was his comment.

After supper they even sat outside for a little time to smoke their
pipes, chair-tilted against the logs of the cabins, but soon the chill
of melting snow drove them indoors. The four teamsters played seven-up
in the cook camp by the light of a barn lantern, while Thorpe and the
cook wrote letters. Thorpe's was to his sister.

“I have been in the hospital for about a month,” he wrote. “Nothing
serious--a crack on the head, which is all right now. But I cannot get
home this summer, nor, I am afraid, can we arrange about the school this
year. I am about seventy dollars ahead of where I was last fall, so you
see it is slow business. This summer I am going into a mill, but the
wages for green labor are not very high there either,” and so on.

When Miss Helen Thorpe, aged seventeen, received this document she
stamped her foot almost angrily. “You'd think he was a day-laborer!”
 she cried. “Why doesn't he try for a clerkship or something in the city
where he'd have a chance to use his brains!”

The thought of her big, strong, tanned brother chained to a desk rose to
her, and she smiled a little sadly.

“I know,” she went on to herself, “he'd rather be a common laborer
in the woods than railroad manager in the office. He loves his
out-of-doors.”

“Helen!” called a voice from below, “if you're through up there, I wish
you'd come down and help me carry this rug out.”

The girl's eyes cleared with a snap.

“So do I!” she cried defiantly, “so do I love out-of-doors! I like
the woods and the fields and the trees just as much as he does, only
differently; but I don't get out!”

And thus she came to feeling rebelliously that her brother had been a
little selfish in his choice of an occupation, that he sacrificed her
inclinations to his own. She did not guess,--how could she?--his dreams
for her. She did not see the future through his thoughts, but through
his words. A negative hopelessness settled down on her, which soon her
strong spirit, worthy counterpart of her brother's, changed to more
positive rebellion. Thorpe had aroused antagonism where he craved only
love. The knowledge of that fact would have surprised and hurt him, for
he was entirely without suspicion of it. He lived subjectively to so
great a degree that his thoughts and aims took on a certain tangible
objectivity,--they became so real to him that he quite overlooked the
necessity of communication to make them as real to others. He assumed
unquestioningly that the other must know. So entirely had he thrown
himself into his ambition of making a suitable position for Helen, so
continually had he dwelt on it in his thoughts, so earnestly had he
striven for it in every step of the great game he was beginning to play,
that it never occurred to him he should also concede a definite outward
manifestation of his feeling in order to assure its acceptance. Thorpe
believed that he had sacrificed every thought and effort to his sister.
Helen was becoming convinced that he had considered only himself.

After finishing the letter which gave occasion to this train of thought,
Thorpe lit his pipe and strolled out into the darkness. Opposite the
little office he stopped amazed.

Through the narrow window he could see Radway seated in front of the
stove. Every attitude of the man denoted the most profound dejection. He
had sunk down into his chair until he rested on almost the small of his
back, his legs were struck straight out in front of him, his chin rested
on his breast, and his two arms hung listless at his side, a pipe half
falling from the fingers of one hand. All the facetious lines had turned
to pathos. In his face sorrowed the anxious, questing, wistful look of
the St. Bernard that does not understand.

“What's the matter with the boss, anyway?” asked Thorpe in a low voice
of Jackson Hines, when the seven-up game was finished.

“H'aint ye heard?” inquired the old man in surprise.

“Why, no. What?”

“Busted,” said the old man sententiously.

“How? What do you mean?”

“What I say. He's busted. That freshet caught him too quick. They's
more'n a million and a half logs left in the woods that can't be got out
this year, and as his contract calls for a finished job, he don't get
nothin' for what he's done.”

“That's a queer rig,” commented Thorpe. “He's done a lot of valuable
work here,--the timber's cut and skidded, anyway; and he's delivered
a good deal of it to the main drive. The M. & D. outfit get all the
advantage of that.”

“They do, my son. When old Daly's hand gets near anything, it cramps.
I don't know how the old man come to make such a contrac', but he did.
Result is, he's out his expenses and time.”

To understand exactly the catastrophe that had occurred, it is necessary
to follow briefly an outline of the process after the logs have been
piled on the banks. There they remain until the break-up attendant
on spring shall flood the stream to a freshet. The rollways are then
broken, and the saw logs floated down the river to the mill where they
are to be cut into lumber.

If for any reason this transportation by water is delayed until the
flood goes down, the logs are stranded or left in pools. Consequently
every logger puts into the two or three weeks of freshet water a
feverish activity which shall carry his product through before the ebb.

The exceptionally early break-up of this spring, combined with the fact
that, owing to the series of incidents and accidents already sketched,
the actual cutting and skidding had fallen so far behind, caught Radway
unawares. He saw his rollways breaking out while his teams were still
hauling in the woods. In order to deliver to the mouth of the Cass
Branch the three million already banked, he was forced to drop
everything else and attend strictly to the drive. This left still, as
has been stated, a million and a half on skidways, which Radway knew he
would be unable to get out that year.

In spite of the jobber's certainty that his claim was thus annulled, and
that he might as well abandon the enterprise entirely for all he would
ever get out of it, he finished the “drive” conscientiously and saved to
the Company the logs already banked. Then he had interviewed Daly. The
latter refused to pay him one cent. Nothing remained but to break
camp and grin as best he might over the loss of his winter's work and
expenses.

The next day Radway and Thorpe walked the ten miles of the river trail
together, while the teamsters and the cook drove down the five teams.
Under the influence of the solitude and a certain sympathy which Thorpe
manifested, Radway talked--a very little.

“I got behind; that's all there is to it,” he said. “I s'pose I ought
to have driven the men a little; but still, I don't know. It gets pretty
cold on the plains. I guess I bit off more than I could chew.”

His eye followed listlessly a frenzied squirrel swinging from the tops
of poplars.

“I wouldn't 'a done it for myself,” he went on. “I don't like the
confounded responsibility. They's too much worry connected with it all.
I had a good snug little stake--mighty nigh six thousand. She's all gone
now. That'd have been enough for me--I ain't a drinkin' man. But then
there was the woman and the kid. This ain't no country for woman-folks,
and I wanted t' take little Lida out o' here. I had lots of experience
in the woods, and I've seen men make big money time and again, who
didn't know as much about it as I do. But they got there, somehow. Says
I, I'll make a stake this year--I'd a had twelve thousand in th' bank,
if things'd have gone right--and then we'll jest move down around
Detroit an' I'll put Lida in school.”

Thorpe noticed a break in the man's voice, and glancing suddenly
toward him was astounded to catch his eyes brimming with tears. Radway
perceived the surprise.

“You know when I left Christmas?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I was gone two weeks, and them two weeks done me. We was going slow
enough before, God knows, but even with the rank weather and all, I
think we'd have won out, if we could have held the same gait.”

Radway paused. Thorpe was silent.

“The boys thought it was a mighty poor rig, my leaving that way.”

He paused again in evident expectation of a reply. Again Thorpe was
silent.

“Didn't they?” Radway insisted.

“Yes, they did,” answered Thorpe.

The older man sighed. “I thought so,” he went on. “Well, I didn't go to
spend Christmas. I went because Jimmy brought me a telegram that Lida
was sick with diphtheria. I sat up nights with her for 'leven days.”

“No bad after-effects, I hope?” inquired Thorpe.

“She died,” said Radway simply.

The two men tramped stolidly on. This was too great an affair for Thorpe
to approach except on the knees of his spirit. After a long interval,
during which the waters had time to still, the young man changed the
subject.

“Aren't you going to get anything out of M. & D.?” he asked.

“No. Didn't earn nothing. I left a lot of their saw logs hung up in the
woods, where they'll deteriorate from rot and worms. This is their last
season in this district.”

“Got anything left?”

“Not a cent.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Do!” cried the old woodsman, the fire springing to his eye. “Do! I'm
going into the woods, by God! I'm going to work with my hands, and be
happy! I'm going to do other men's work for them and take other men's
pay. Let them do the figuring and worrying. I'll boss their gangs and
make their roads and see to their logging for 'em, but it's got to be
THEIRS. No! I'm going to be a free man by the G. jumping Moses!”



Chapter XIV


Thorpe dedicated a musing instant to the incongruity of rejoicing over a
freedom gained by ceasing to be master and becoming servant.

“Radway,” said he suddenly, “I need money and I need it bad. I think
you ought to get something out of this job of the M. & D.--not much, but
something. Will you give me a share of what I can collect from them?”

“Sure!” agreed the jobber readily, with a laugh. “Sure! But you won't
get anything. I'll give you ten per cent quick.”

“Good enough!” cried Thorpe.

“But don't be too sure you'll earn day wages doing it,” warned the
other. “I saw Daly when I was down here last week.”

“My time's not valuable,” replied Thorpe. “Now when we get to town I
want your power of attorney and a few figures, after which I will not
bother you again.”

The next day the young man called for the second time at the little
red-painted office under the shadow of the mill, and for the second time
stood before the bulky power of the junior member of the firm.

“Well, young man, what can I do for you?” asked the latter.

“I have been informed,” said Thorpe without preliminary, “that you
intend to pay John Radway nothing for the work done on the Cass Branch
this winter. Is that true?”

Daly studied his antagonist meditatively. “If it is true, what is it to
you?” he asked at length.

“I am acting in Mr. Radway's interest.”

“You are one of Radway's men?”

“Yes.”

“In what capacity have you been working for him?”

“Cant-hook man,” replied Thorpe briefly.

“I see,” said Daly slowly. Then suddenly, with an intensity of energy
that startled Thorpe, he cried: “Now you get out of here! Right off!
Quick!”

The younger man recognized the compelling and autocratic boss addressing
a member of the crew.

“I shall do nothing of the kind!” he replied with a flash of fire.

The mill-owner leaped to his feet every inch a leader of men. Thorpe did
not wish to bring about an actual scene of violence. He had attained his
object, which was to fluster the other out of his judicial calm.

“I have Radway's power of attorney,” he added.

Daly sat down, controlled himself with an effort, and growled out, “Why
didn't you say so?”

“Now I would like to know your position,” went on Thorpe. “I am not here
to make trouble, but as an associate of Mr. Radway, I have a right
to understand the case. Of course I have his side of the story,” he
suggested, as though convinced that a detailing of the other side might
change his views.

Daly considered carefully, fixing his flint-blue eyes unswervingly on
Thorpe's face. Evidently his scrutiny advised him that the young man was
a force to be reckoned with.

“It's like this,” said he abruptly, “we contracted last fall with this
man Radway to put in five million feet of our timber, delivered to
the main drive at the mouth of the Cass Branch. In this he was to act
independently except as to the matter of provisions. Those he drew from
our van, and was debited with the amount of the same. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly,” replied Thorpe.

“In return we were to pay him, merchantable scale, four dollars a
thousand. If, however, he failed to put in the whole job, the contract
was void.”

“That's how I understand it,” commented Thorpe. “Well?”

“Well, he didn't get in the five million. There's a million and a half
hung up in the woods.”

“But you have in your hands three million and a half, which under the
present arrangement you get free of any charge whatever.”

“And we ought to get it,” cried Daly. “Great guns! Here we intend to saw
this summer and quit. We want to get in every stick of timber we own so
as to be able to clear out of here for good and all at the close of the
season; and now this condigned jobber ties us up for a million and a
half.”

“It is exceedingly annoying,” conceded Thorpe, “and it is a good deal of
Radway's fault, I am willing to admit, but it's your fault too.”

“To be sure,” replied Daly with the accent of sarcasm.

“You had no business entering into any such contract. It gave him no
show.”

“I suppose that was mainly his lookout, wasn't it? And as I already told
you, we had to protect ourselves.”

“You should have demanded security for the completion of the work. Under
your present agreement, if Radway got in the timber, you were to pay him
a fair price. If he didn't, you appropriated everything he had already
done. In other words, you made him a bet.”

“I don't care what you call it,” answered Daly, who had recovered his
good-humor in contemplation of the security of his position. “The fact
stands all right.”

“It does,” replied Thorpe unexpectedly, “and I'm glad of it. Now let's
examine a few figures. You owned five million feet of timber, which
at the price of stumpage” (standing trees) “was worth ten thousand
dollars.”

“Well.”

“You come out at the end of the season with three million and a half of
saw logs, which with the four dollars' worth of logging added, are worth
twenty-one thousand dollars.”

“Hold on!” cried Daly, “we paid Radway four dollars; we could have done
it ourselves for less.”

“You could not have done it for one cent less than four-twenty in that
country,” replied Thorpe, “as any expert will testify.”

“Why did we give it to Radway at four, then?”

“You saved the expense of a salaried overseer, and yourselves some
bother,” replied Thorpe. “Radway could do it for less, because, for some
strange reason which you yourself do not understand, a jobber can always
log for less than a company.”

“We could have done it for four,” insisted Daly stubbornly, “but get on.
What are you driving at? My time's valuable.”

“Well, put her at four, then,” agreed Thorpe. “That makes your saw logs
worth over twenty thousand dollars. Of this value Radway added thirteen
thousand. You have appropriated that much of his without paying him one
cent.”

Daly seemed amused. “How about the million and a half feet of ours HE
appropriated?” he asked quietly.

“I'm coming to that. Now for your losses. At the stumpage rate your
million and a half which Radway 'appropriated' would be only three
thousand. But for the sake of argument, we'll take the actual sum you'd
have received for saw logs. Even then the million and a half would only
have been worth between eight and nine thousand. Deducting this purely
theoretical loss Radway has occasioned you, from the amount he has
gained for you, you are still some four or five thousand ahead of the
game. For that you paid him nothing.”

“That's Radway's lookout.”

“In justice you should pay him that amount. He is a poor man. He has
sunk all he owned in this venture, some twelve thousand dollars, and he
has nothing to live on. Even if you pay him five thousand, he has lost
considerable, while you have gained.”

“How have we gained by this bit of philanthropy?”

“Because you originally paid in cash for all that timber on the stump
just ten thousand dollars and you get from Radway saw logs to the value
of twenty,” replied Thorpe sharply. “Besides you still own the million
and a half which, if you do not care to put them in yourself, you can
sell for something on the skids.”

“Don't you know, young man, that white pine logs on skids will spoil
utterly in a summer? Worms get into em.”

“I do,” replied Thorpe, “unless you bark them; which process will
cost you about one dollar a thousand. You can find any amount of small
purchasers at reduced price. You can sell them easily at three dollars.
That nets you for your million and a half a little over four thousand
dollars more. Under the circumstances, I do not think that my request
for five thousand is at all exorbitant.”

Daly laughed. “You are a shrewd figurer, and your remarks are
interesting,” said he.

“Will you give five thousand dollars?” asked Thorpe.

“I will not,” replied Daly, then with a sudden change of humor, “and now
I'll do a little talking. I've listened to you just as long as I'm going
to. I have Radway's contract in that safe and I live up to it. I'll
thank you to go plumb to hell!”

“That's your last word, is it?” asked Thorpe, rising.

“It is.”

“Then,” said he slowly and distinctly, “I'll tell you what I'll do.
I intend to collect in full the four dollars a thousand for the three
million and a half Mr. Radway has delivered to you. In return Mr. Radway
will purchase of you at the stumpage rates of two dollars a thousand the
million and a half he failed to put in. That makes a bill against you,
if my figuring is correct, of just eleven thousand dollars. You will pay
that bill, and I will tell you why: your contract will be classed in
any court as a gambling contract for lack of consideration. You have no
legal standing in the world. I call your bluff, Mr. Daly, and I'll fight
you from the drop of the hat through every court in Christendom.”

“Fight ahead,” advised Daly sweetly, who knew perfectly well that
Thorpe's law was faulty. As a matter of fact the young man could have
collected on other grounds, but neither was aware of that.

“Furthermore,” pursued Thorpe in addition, “I'll repeat my offer before
witnesses; and if I win the first suit, I'll sue you for the money we
could have made by purchasing the extra million and a half before it had
a chance to spoil.”

This statement had its effect, for it forced an immediate settlement
before the pine on the skids should deteriorate. Daly lounged back with
a little more deadly carelessness.

“And, lastly,” concluded Thorpe, playing his trump card, “the suit
from start to finish will be published in every important paper in this
country. If you do not believe I have the influence to do this, you are
at liberty to doubt the fact.”

Daly was cogitating many things. He knew that publicity was the last
thing to be desired. Thorpe's statement had been made in view of the
fact that much of the business of a lumber firm is done on credit. He
thought that perhaps a rumor of a big suit going against the firm might
weaken confidence. As a matter of fact, this consideration had no weight
whatever with the older man, although the threat of publicity actually
gained for Thorpe what he demanded. The lumberman feared the noise of an
investigation solely and simply because his firm, like so many others,
was engaged at the time in stealing government timber in the upper
peninsula. He did not call it stealing; but that was what it amounted
to. Thorpe's shot in the air hit full.

“I think we can arrange a basis of settlement,” he said finally. “Be
here to-morrow morning at ten with Radway.”

“Very well,” said Thorpe.

“By the way,” remarked Daly, “I don't believe I know your name?”

“Thorpe,” was the reply.

“Well, Mr. Thorpe,” said the lumberman with cold anger, “if at any time
there is anything within my power or influence that you want--I'll see
that you don't get it.”



Chapter XV


The whole affair was finally compromised for nine thousand dollars.
Radway, grateful beyond expression, insisted on Thorpe's acceptance
of an even thousand of it. With this money in hand, the latter felt
justified in taking a vacation for the purpose of visiting his sister,
so in two days after the signing of the check he walked up the straight
garden path that led to Renwick's home.

It was a little painted frame house, back from the street, fronted by
a precise bit of lawn, with a willow bush at one corner. A white picket
fence effectually separated it from a broad, shaded, not unpleasing
street. An osage hedge and a board fence respectively bounded the side
and back.

Under the low porch Thorpe rang the bell at a door flanked by two long,
narrow strips of imitation stained glass. He entered then a little dark
hall from which the stairs rose almost directly at the door, containing
with difficulty a hat-rack and a table on which rested a card tray with
cards. In the course of greeting an elderly woman, he stepped into the
parlor. This was a small square apartment carpeted in dark Brussels,
and stuffily glorified in the bourgeois manner by a white marble
mantel-piece, several pieces of mahogany furniture upholstered in
haircloth, a table on which reposed a number of gift books in celluloid
and other fancy bindings, an old-fashioned piano with a doily and a
bit of china statuary, a cabinet or so containing such things as ore
specimens, dried seaweed and coins, and a spindle-legged table or two
upholding glass cases garnished with stuffed birds and wax flowers. The
ceiling was so low that the heavy window hangings depended almost from
the angle of it and the walls.

Thorpe, by some strange freak of psychology, suddenly recalled a wild,
windy day in the forest. He had stood on the top of a height. He saw
again the sharp puffs of snow, exactly like the smoke from bursting
shells, where a fierce swoop of the storm struck the laden tops of
pines; the dense swirl, again exactly like smoke but now of a great
fire, that marked the lakes. The picture super-imposed itself silently
over this stuffy bourgeois respectability, like the shadow of a dream.
He heard plainly enough the commonplace drawl of the woman before him
offering him the platitudes of her kind.

“You are lookin' real well, Mr. Thorpe,” she was saying, “an' I just
know Helen will be glad to see you. She had a hull afternoon out to-day
and won't be back to tea. Dew set and tell me about what you've been
a-doin' and how you're a-gettin' along.”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Renwick,” he replied, “I'll come back later. How is
Helen?”

“She's purty well; and sech a nice girL I think she's getting right
handsome.”

“Can you tell me where she went?”

But Mrs. Renwick did not know. So Thorpe wandered about the maple-shaded
streets of the little town.

For the purposes he had in view five hundred dollars would be none
too much. The remaining five hundred he had resolved to invest in his
sister's comfort and happiness. He had thought the matter over and come
to his decision in that secretive, careful fashion so typical of him,
working over every logical step of his induction so thoroughly that
it ended by becoming part of his mental fiber. So when he reached the
conclusion it had already become to him an axiom. In presenting it as
such to his sister, he never realized that she had not followed with
him the logical steps, and so could hardly be expected to accept the
conclusion out-of-hand.

Thorpe wished to give his sister the best education possible in the
circumstances. She was now nearly eighteen years old. He knew likewise
that he would probably experience a great deal of difficulty in finding
another family which would afford the young girl quite the same equality
coupled with so few disadvantages. Admitted that its level of intellect
and taste was not high, Mrs. Renwick was on the whole a good influence.
Helen had not in the least the position of servant, but of a daughter.
She helped around the house; and in return she was fed, lodged and
clothed for nothing.

So though the money might have enabled Helen to live independently in a
modest way for a year or so, Thorpe preferred that she remain where she
was. His game was too much a game of chance. He might find himself at
the end of the year without further means. Above all things he wished
to assure Helen's material safety until such time as he should be quite
certain of himself.

In pursuance of this idea he had gradually evolved what seemed to him an
excellent plan. He had already perfected it by correspondence with Mrs.
Renwick. It was, briefly, this: he, Thorpe, would at once hire a servant
girl, who would make anything but supervision unnecessary in so small a
household. The remainder of the money he had already paid for a year's
tuition in the Seminary of the town. Thus Helen gained her leisure
and an opportunity for study; and still retained her home in case of
reverse.

Thorpe found his sister already a young lady. After the first delight of
meeting had passed, they sat side by side on the haircloth sofa and took
stock of each other.

Helen had developed from the school child to the woman. She was a
handsome girl, possessed of a slender, well-rounded form, deep hazel
eyes with the level gaze of her brother, a clean-cut patrician face,
and a thorough-bred neatness of carriage that advertised her good blood.
Altogether a figure rather aloof, a face rather impassive; but with the
possibility of passion and emotion, and a will to back them.

“Oh, but you're tanned and--and BIG!” she cried, kissing her brother.
“You've had such a strange winter, haven't you?”

“Yes,” he replied absently.

Another man would have struck her young imagination with the wild, free
thrill of the wilderness. Thus he would have gained her sympathy and
understanding. Thorpe was too much in earnest.

“Things came a little better than I thought they were going to, toward
the last,” said he, “and I made a little money.”

“Oh, I'm so glad!” she cried. “Was it much?”

“No, not much,” he answered. The actual figures would have been so much
better! “I've made arrangements with Mrs. Renwick to hire a servant
girl, so you will have all your time free; and I have paid a year's
tuition for you in the Seminary.”

“Oh!” said the girl, and fell silent.

After a time, “Thank you very much, Harry dear.” Then after another
interval, “I think I'll go get ready for supper.”

Instead of getting ready for supper, she paced excitedly up and down her
room.

“Oh, why DIDN'T he say what he was about?” she cried to herself. “Why
didn't he! Why didn't he!”


Next morning she opened the subject again.

“Harry, dear,” said she, “I have a little scheme, and I want to see if
it is not feasible. How much will the girl and the Seminary cost?”

“About four hundred dollars.”

“Well now, see, dear. With four hundred dollars I can live for a year
very nicely by boarding with some girls I know who live in a sort of
a club; and I could learn much more by going to the High School and
continuing with some other classes I am interested in now. Why see,
Harry!” she cried, all interest. “We have Professor Carghill come twice
a week to teach us English, and Professor Johns, who teaches us history,
and we hope to get one or two more this winter. If I go to the Seminary,
I'll have to miss all that. And Harry, really I don't want to go to the
Seminary. I don't think I should like it. I KNOW I shouldn't.”

“But why not live here, Helen?” he asked.

“Because I'm TIRED of it!” she cried; “sick to the soul of the
stuffiness, and the glass cases, and the--the GOODNESS of it!”

Thorpe remembered his vision of the wild, wind-tossed pines, and
sighed. He wanted very, very much to act in accordance with his sister's
desires, although he winced under the sharp hurt pang of the sensitive
man whose intended kindness is not appreciated. The impossibility of
complying, however, reacted to shut his real ideas and emotions the more
inscrutably within him.

“I'm afraid you would not find the girls' boarding-club scheme a good
one, Helen,” said he. “You'd find it would work better in theory than in
practice.”

“But it has worked with the other girls!” she cried.

“I think you would be better off here.”

Helen bravely choked back her disappointment.

“I might live here, but let the Seminary drop, anyway. That would save
a good deal,” she begged. “I'd get quite as much good out of my work
outside, and then we'd have all that money besides.”

“I don't know; I'll see,” replied Thorpe. “The mental discipline of
class-room work might be a good thing.”

He had already thought of this modification himself, but with his
characteristic caution, threw cold water on the scheme until he could
ascertain definitely whether or not it was practicable. He had already
paid the tuition for the year, and was in doubt as to its repayment. As
a matter of fact, the negotiation took about two weeks.

During that time Helen Thorpe went through her disappointment and
emerged on the other side. Her nature was at once strong and adaptable.
One by one she grappled with the different aspects of the case, and
turned them the other way. By a tour de force she actually persuaded
herself that her own plan was not really attractive to her. But what
heart-breaks and tears this cost her, only those who in their youth have
encountered such absolute negations of cherished ideas can guess.

Then Thorpe told her.

“I've fixed it, Helen,” said he. “You can attend the High School and the
classes, if you please. I have put the two hundred and fifty dollars out
at interest for you.”

“Oh, Harry!” she cried reproachfully. “Why didn't you tell me before!”

He did not understand; but the pleasure of it had all faded. She no
longer felt enthusiasm, nor gratitude, nor anything except a dull
feeling that she had been unnecessarily discouraged. And on his side,
Thorpe was vaguely wounded.

The days, however, passed in the main pleasurably for them both. They
were fond of one another. The barrier slowly rising between them was not
yet cemented by lack of affection on either side, but rather by lack of
belief in the other's affection. Helen imagined Thorpe's interest in
her becoming daily more perfunctory. Thorpe fancied his sister cold,
unreasoning, and ungrateful. As yet this was but the vague dust of a
cloud. They could not forget that, but for each other, they were alone
in the world. Thorpe delayed his departure from day to day, making all
the preparations he possibly could at home.

Finally Helen came on him busily unpacking a box which a dray had left
at the door. He unwound and laid one side a Winchester rifle, a variety
of fishing tackle, and some other miscellanies of the woodsman. Helen
was struck by the beauty of the sporting implements.

“Oh, Harry!” she cried, “aren't they fine! What are you going to do with
them?”

“Going camping,” replied Thorpe, his head in the excelsior.

“When?”

“This summer.”

Helen's eyes lit up with a fire of delight. “How nice! May I go with
you?” she cried.

Thorpe shook his head.

“I'm afraid not, little girl. It's going to be a hard trip a long ways
from anywhere. You couldn't stand it.”

“I'm sure I could. Try me.”

“No,” replied Thorpe. “I know you couldn't. We'll be sleeping on the
ground and going on foot through much extremely difficult country.”

“I wish you'd take me somewhere,” pursued Helen. “I can't get away this
summer unless you do. Why don't you camp somewhere nearer home, so I can
go?”

Thorpe arose and kissed her tenderly. He was extremely sorry that he
could not spend the summer with his sister, but he believed likewise
that their future depended to a great extent on this very trip. But he
did not say so.

“I can't, little girl; that's all. We've got our way to make.”

She understood that he considered the trip too expensive for them both.
At this moment a paper fluttered from the excelsior. She picked it up. A
glance showed her a total of figures that made her gasp.

“Here is your bill,” she said with a strange choke in her voice, and
left the room.

“He can spend sixty dollars on his old guns; but he can't afford to let
me leave this hateful house,” she complained to the apple tree. “He
can go 'way off camping somewhere to have a good time, but he leaves me
sweltering in this miserable little town all summer. I don't care if he
IS supporting me. He ought to. He's my brother. Oh, I wish I were a man;
I wish I were dead!”

Three days later Thorpe left for the north. He was reluctant to go. When
the time came, he attempted to kiss Helen good-by. She caught sight of
the rifle in its new leather and canvas case, and on a sudden impulse
which she could not explain to herself, she turned away her face and
ran into the house. Thorpe, vaguely hurt, a little resentful, as the
genuinely misunderstood are apt to be, hesitated a moment, then trudged
down the street. Helen too paused at the door, choking back her grief.

“Harry! Harry!” she cried wildly; but it was too late.

Both felt themselves to be in the right. Each realized this fact in the
other. Each recognized the impossibility of imposing his own point of
view over the other's.




PART II. THE LANDLOOKER



Chapter XVI


In every direction the woods. Not an opening of any kind offered
the mind a breathing place under the free sky. Sometimes the pine
groves,--vast, solemn, grand, with the patrician aloofness of the
truly great; sometimes the hardwood,--bright, mysterious, full of life;
sometimes the swamps,--dark, dank, speaking with the voices of the
shyer creatures; sometimes the spruce and balsam thickets,--aromatic,
enticing. But never the clear, open sky.

And always the woods creatures, in startling abundance and tameness. The
solitary man with the packstraps across his forehead and shoulders had
never seen so many of them. They withdrew silently before him as
he advanced. They accompanied him on either side, watching him with
intelligent, bright eyes. They followed him stealthily for a little
distance, as though escorting him out of their own particular territory.
Dozens of times a day the traveller glimpsed the flaunting white flags
of deer. Often the creatures would take but a few hasty jumps, and then
would wheel, the beautiful embodiments of the picture deer, to snort and
paw the leaves. Hundreds of birds, of which he did not know the name,
stooped to his inspection, whirred away at his approach, or went about
their business with hardy indifference under his very eyes. Blase
porcupines trundled superbly from his path. Once a mother-partridge
simulated a broken wing, fluttering painfully. Early one morning the
traveller ran plump on a fat lolling bear, taking his ease from the new
sun, and his meal from a panic stricken army of ants. As beseemed two
innocent wayfarers they honored each other with a salute of surprise,
and went their way. And all about and through, weaving, watching, moving
like spirits, were the forest multitudes which the young man never saw,
but which he divined, and of whose movements he sometimes caught for a
single instant the faintest patter or rustle. It constituted the mystery
of the forest, that great fascinating, lovable mystery which, once it
steals into the heart of a man, has always a hearing and a longing when
it makes its voice heard.

The young man's equipment was simple in the extreme. Attached to a heavy
leather belt of cartridges hung a two-pound ax and a sheath knife. In
his pocket reposed a compass, an air-tight tin of matches, and a map
drawn on oiled paper of a district divided into sections. Some few of
the sections were colored, which indicated that they belonged to private
parties. All the rest was State or Government land. He carried in his
hand a repeating rifle. The pack, if opened, would have been found to
contain a woolen and a rubber blanket, fishing tackle, twenty pounds or
so of flour, a package of tea, sugar, a slab of bacon carefully wrapped
in oiled cloth, salt, a suit of underwear, and several extra pairs of
thick stockings. To the outside of the pack had been strapped a frying
pan, a tin pail, and a cup.

For more than a week Thorpe had journeyed through the forest without
meeting a human being, or seeing any indications of man, excepting
always the old blaze of the government survey. Many years before,
officials had run careless lines through the country along the
section-boundaries. At this time the blazes were so weather-beaten that
Thorpe often found difficulty in deciphering the indications marked
on them. These latter stated always the section, the township, and the
range east or west by number. All Thorpe had to do was to find the same
figures on his map. He knew just where he was. By means of his compass
he could lay his course to any point that suited his convenience.

The map he had procured at the United States Land Office in Detroit. He
had set out with the scanty equipment just described for the purpose of
“looking” a suitable bunch of pine in the northern peninsula, which, at
that time, was practically untouched. Access to its interior could be
obtained only on foot or by river. The South Shore Railroad was already
engaged in pushing a way through the virgin forest, but it had as yet
penetrated only as far as Seney; and after all, had been projected more
with the idea of establishing a direct route to Duluth and the copper
districts than to aid the lumber industry. Marquette, Menominee, and a
few smaller places along the coast were lumbering near at home; but they
shipped entirely by water. Although the rest of the peninsula also was
finely wooded, a general impression obtained among the craft that it
would prove too inaccessible for successful operation.

Furthermore, at that period, a great deal of talk was believed as to the
inexhaustibility of Michigan pine. Men in a position to know what they
were talking about stated dogmatically that the forests of the southern
peninsula would be adequate for a great many years to come. Furthermore,
the magnificent timber of the Saginaw, Muskegon, and Grand River valleys
in the southern peninsula occupied entire attention. No one cared
to bother about property at so great a distance from home. As a
consequence, few as yet knew even the extent of the resources so far
north.

Thorpe, however, with the far-sightedness of the born pioneer, had
perceived that the exploitation of the upper country was an affair of a
few years only.

The forests of southern Michigan were vast, but not limitless, and they
had all passed into private ownership. The north, on the other hand,
would not prove as inaccessible as it now seemed, for the carrying
trade would some day realize that the entire waterway of the Great Lakes
offered an unrivalled outlet. With that elementary discovery would begin
a rush to the new country. Tiring of a profitless employment further
south he resolved to anticipate it, and by acquiring his holdings before
general attention should be turned that way, to obtain of the best.

He was without money, and practically without friends; while Government
and State lands cost respectively two dollars and a half and a dollar
and a quarter an acre, cash down. But he relied on the good sense of
capitalists to perceive, from the statistics which his explorations
would furnish, the wonderful advantage of logging a new country with the
chain of Great Lakes as shipping outlet at its very door. In return for
his information, he would expect a half interest in the enterprise. This
is the usual method of procedure adopted by landlookers everywhere.

We have said that the country was quite new to logging, but the
statement is not strictly accurate. Thorpe was by no means the first to
see the money in northern pine. Outside the big mill districts already
named, cuttings of considerable size were already under way, the logs
from which were usually sold to the mills of Marquette or Menominee.
Here and there along the best streams, men had already begun operations.

But they worked on a small scale and with an eye to the immediate
present only; bending their efforts to as large a cut as possible each
season rather than to the acquisition of holdings for future operations.
This they accomplished naively by purchasing one forty and cutting a
dozen. Thorpe's map showed often near the forks of an important stream a
section whose coloring indicated private possession. Legally the owners
had the right only to the pine included in the marked sections; but if
anyone had taken the trouble to visit the district, he would have found
operations going on for miles up and down stream. The colored squares
would prove to be nothing but so many excuses for being on the ground.
The bulk of the pine of any season's cut he would discover had been
stolen from unbought State or Government land.

This in the old days was a common enough trick. One man, at present a
wealthy and respected citizen, cut for six years, and owned just one
forty-acres! Another logged nearly fifty million feet from an eighty! In
the State to-day live prominent business men, looked upon as models in
every way, good fellows, good citizens, with sons and daughters proud
of their social position, who, nevertheless, made the bulk of their
fortunes by stealing Government pine.

“What you want to-day, old man?” inquired a wholesale lumber dealer of
an individual whose name now stands for domestic and civic virtue.

“I'll have five or six million saw logs to sell you in the spring, and I
want to know what you'll give for them.”

“Go on!” expostulated the dealer with a laugh, “ain't you got that forty
all cut yet?”

“She holds out pretty well,” replied the other with a grin.

An official, called the Inspector, is supposed to report such stealings,
after which another official is to prosecute. Aside from the fact that
the danger of discovery is practically zero in so wild and distant a
country, it is fairly well established that the old-time logger found
these two individuals susceptible to the gentle art of “sugaring.”
 The officials, as well as the lumberman, became rich. If worst came
to worst, and investigation seemed imminent, the operator could still
purchase the land at legal rates, and so escape trouble. But the
intention to appropriate was there, and, to confess the truth, the
whitewashing by purchase needed but rarely to be employed. I have time
and again heard landlookers assert that the old Land Offices were rarely
“on the square,” but as to that I cannot, of course, venture an opinion.

Thorpe was perfectly conversant with this state of affairs. He knew,
also, that in all probability many of the colored districts on his map
represented firms engaged in steals of greater or less magnitude. He was
further aware that most of the concerns stole the timber because it was
cheaper to steal than to buy; but that they would buy readily enough
if forced to do so in order to prevent its acquisition by another. This
other might be himself. In his exploration, therefore, he decided to
employ the utmost circumspection. As much as possible he purposed to
avoid other men; but if meetings became inevitable, he hoped to mask his
real intentions. He would pose as a hunter and fisherman.

During the course of his week in the woods, he discovered that he
would be forced eventually to resort to this expedient. He encountered
quantities of fine timber in the country through which he travelled, and
some day it would be logged, but at present the difficulties were too
great. The streams were shallow, or they did not empty into a good
shipping port. Investors would naturally look first for holdings along
the more practicable routes.

A cursory glance sufficed to show that on such waters the little red
squares had already blocked a foothold for other owners. Thorpe surmised
that he would undoubtedly discover fine unbought timber along their
banks, but that the men already engaged in stealing it would hardly be
likely to allow him peaceful acquisition.

For a week, then, he journeyed through magnificent timber without
finding what he sought, working always more and more to the north, until
finally he stood on the shores of Superior. Up to now the streams had
not suited him. He resolved to follow the shore west to the mouth of a
fairly large river called the Ossawinamakee.* It showed, in common with
most streams of its size, land already taken, but Thorpe hoped to find
good timber nearer the mouth. After several days' hard walking with this
object in view, he found himself directly north of a bend in the river;
so, without troubling to hunt for its outlet into Superior, he turned
through the woods due south, with the intention of striking in on the
stream. This he succeeded in accomplishing some twenty miles inland,
where also he discovered a well-defined and recently used trail leading
up the river. Thorpe camped one night at the bend, and then set out to
follow the trail.

     * Accent the last syllable.


It led him for upwards of ten miles nearly due south, sometimes
approaching, sometimes leaving the river, but keeping always in its
direction. The country in general was rolling. Low parallel ridges of
gentle declivity glided constantly across his way, their valleys sloping
to the river. Thorpe had never seen a grander forest of pine than that
which clothed them.

For almost three miles, after the young man had passed through a
preliminary jungle of birch, cedar, spruce, and hemlock, it ran without
a break, clear, clean, of cloud-sweeping altitude, without underbrush.
Most of it was good bull-sap, which is known by the fineness of
the bark, though often in the hollows it shaded gradually into the
rough-skinned cork pine. In those days few people paid any attention to
the Norway, and hemlock was not even thought of. With every foot of the
way Thorpe became more and more impressed.

At first the grandeur, the remoteness, the solemnity of the virgin
forest fell on his spirit with a kind of awe. The tall, straight trunks
lifted directly upwards to the vaulted screen through which the sky
seemed as remote as the ceiling of a Roman church. Ravens wheeled and
croaked in the blue, but infinitely far away. Some lesser noises wove
into the stillness without breaking the web of its splendor, for the
pine silence laid soft, hushing fingers on the lips of those who might
waken the sleeping sunlight.

Then the spirit of the pioneer stirred within his soul. The wilderness
sent forth its old-time challenge to the hardy. In him awoke that
instinct which, without itself perceiving the end on which it is bent,
clears the way for the civilization that has been ripening in old-world
hot-houses during a thousand years. Men must eat; and so the soil must
be made productive. We regret, each after his manner, the passing of
the Indian, the buffalo, the great pine forests, for they are of the
picturesque; but we live gladly on the product of the farms that have
taken their places. Southern Michigan was once a pine forest: now the
twisted stump-fences about the most fertile farms of the north alone
break the expanse of prairie and of trim “wood-lots.”

Thorpe knew little of this, and cared less. These feathered trees,
standing close-ranked and yet each isolate in the dignity and gravity
of a sphinx of stone set to dancing his blood of the frontiersman.
He spread out his map to make sure that so valuable a clump of timber
remained still unclaimed. A few sections lying near the headwaters were
all he found marked as sold. He resumed his tramp light-heartedly.

At the ten-mile point he came upon a dam. It was a crude dam,--built of
logs,--whose face consisted of strong buttresses slanted up-stream, and
whose sheer was made of unbarked timbers laid smoothly side by side at
the required angle. At present its gate was open. Thorpe could see
that it was an unusually large gate, with a powerful apparatus for the
raising and the lowering of it.

The purpose of the dam in this new country did not puzzle him in the
least, but its presence bewildered him. Such constructions are often
thrown across logging streams at proper intervals in order that the
operator may be independent of the spring freshets. When he wishes to
“drive” his logs to the mouth of the stream, he first accumulates a head
of water behind his dams, and then, by lifting the gates, creates an
artificial freshet sufficient to float his timber to the pool formed by
the next dam below. The device is common enough; but it is expensive.
People do not build dams except in the certainty of some years of
logging, and quite extensive logging at that. If the stream happens to
be navigable, the promoter must first get an Improvement Charter from a
board of control appointed by the State. So Thorpe knew that he had to
deal, not with a hand-to-mouth-timber-thief, but with a great company
preparing to log the country on a big scale.

He continued his journey. At noon he came to another and similar
structure. The pine forest had yielded to knolls of hardwood separated
by swamp-holes of blackthorn. Here he left his pack and pushed ahead
in light marching order. About eight miles above the first dam, and
eighteen from the bend of the river, he ran into a “slashing” of the
year before. The decapitated stumps were already beginning to turn brown
with weather, the tangle of tops and limbs was partially concealed by
poplar growths and wild raspberry vines. Parenthetically, it may be
remarked that the promptitude with which these growths succeed the
cutting of the pine is an inexplicable marvel. Clear forty acres at
random in the very center of a pine forest, without a tract of poplar
within an hundred miles; the next season will bring up the fresh shoots.
Some claim that blue jays bring the seeds in their crops. Others incline
to the theory that the creative elements lie dormant in the soil,
needing only the sun to start them to life. Final speculation is
impossible, but the fact stands.

To Thorpe this particular clearing became at once of the greatest
interest. He scrambled over and through the ugly debris which for a
year or two after logging operations cumbers the ground. By a rather
prolonged search he found what he sought,--the “section corners” of
the tract, on which the government surveyor had long ago marked the
“descriptions.” A glance at the map confirmed his suspicions. The
slashing lay some two miles north of the sections designated as
belonging to private parties. It was Government land.

Thorpe sat down, lit a pipe, and did a little thinking.

As an axiom it may be premised that the shorter the distance logs have
to be transported, the less it costs to get them in. Now Thorpe had that
very morning passed through beautiful timber lying much nearer the mouth
of the river than either this, or the sections further south. Why had
these men deliberately ascended the stream? Why had they stolen timber
eighteen miles from the bend, when they could equally well have stolen
just as good fourteen miles nearer the terminus of their drive?

Thorpe ruminated for some time without hitting upon a solution. Then
suddenly he remembered the two dams, and his idea that the men in charge
of the river must be wealthy and must intend operating on a large scale.
He thought he glimpsed it. After another pipe, he felt sure.

The Unknowns were indeed going in on a large scale. They intended
eventually to log the whole of the Ossawinamakee basin. For this reason
they had made their first purchase, planted their first foot-hold, near
the headwaters. Furthermore, located as they were far from a present or
an immediately future civilization, they had felt safe in leaving for
the moment their holdings represented by the three sections already
described. Some day they would buy all the standing Government pine
in the basin; but in the meantime they would steal all they could at a
sufficient distance from the lake to minimize the danger of discovery.
They had not dared to appropriate the three mile tract Thorpe had passed
through, because in that locality the theft would probably be remarked,
so they intended eventually to buy it. Until that should become
necessary, however, every stick cut meant so much less to purchase.

“They're going to cut, and keep on cutting, working down river as fast
as they can,” argued Thorpe. “If anything happens so they have to,
they'll buy in the pine that is left; but if things go well with them,
they'll take what they can for nothing. They're getting this stuff out
up-river first, because they can steal safer while the country is
still unsettled; and even when it does fill up, there will not be much
likelihood of an investigation so far in-country,--at least until after
they have folded their tents.”

It seems to us who are accustomed to the accurate policing of our
twentieth century, almost incredible that such wholesale robberies
should have gone on with so little danger of detection. Certainly
detection was a matter of sufficient simplicity. Someone happens along,
like Thorpe, carrying a Government map in his pocket. He runs across a
parcel of unclaimed land already cut over. It would seem easy to lodge a
complaint, institute a prosecution against the men known to have put in
the timber. BUT IT IS ALMOST NEVER DONE.

Thorpe knew that men occupied in so precarious a business would be
keenly on the watch. At the first hint of rivalry, they would buy in the
timber they had selected. But the situation had set his fighting blood
to racing. The very fact that these men were thieves on so big a
scale made him the more obstinately determined to thwart them. They
undoubtedly wanted the tract down river. Well, so did he!

He purposed to look it over carefully, to ascertain its exact boundaries
and what sections it would be necessary to buy in order to include it,
and perhaps even to estimate it in a rough way. In the accomplishment of
this he would have to spend the summer, and perhaps part of the fall,
in that district. He could hardly expect to escape notice. By the
indications on the river, he judged that a crew of men had shortly
before taken out a drive of logs. After the timber had been rafted and
towed to Marquette, they would return. He might be able to hide in
the forest, but sooner or later, he was sure, one of the company's
landlookers or hunters would stumble on his camp. Then his very
concealment would tell them what he was after. The risk was too great.
For above all things Thorpe needed time. He had, as has been said, to
ascertain what he could offer. Then he had to offer it. He would be
forced to interest capital, and that is a matter of persuasion and
leisure.

Finally his shrewd, intuitive good-sense flashed the solution on him.
He returned rapidly to his pack, assumed the straps, and arrived at the
first dam about dark of the long summer day.

There he looked carefully about him. Some fifty feet from the water's
edge a birch knoll supported, besides the birches, a single big hemlock.
With his belt ax, Thorpe cleared away the little white trees. He stuck
the sharpened end of one of them in the bark of the shaggy hemlock,
fastened the other end in a crotch eight or ten feet distant, slanted
the rest of the saplings along one side of this ridge pole, and turned
in, after a hasty supper, leaving the completion of his permanent camp
to the morrow.



Chapter XVII


In the morning he thatched smooth the roof of the shelter, using for
the purpose the thick branches of hemlocks; placed two green spruce logs
side by side as cooking range; slung his pot on a rod across two forked
sticks; cut and split a quantity of wood; spread his blankets; and
called himself established. His beard was already well grown, and his
clothes had become worn by the brush and faded by the sun and rain.
In the course of the morning he lay in wait very patiently near a spot
overflowed by the river, where, the day before, he had noticed lily-pads
growing. After a time a doe and a spotted fawn came and stood ankle-deep
in the water, and ate of the lily-pads. Thorpe lurked motionless behind
his screen of leaves; and as he had taken the precaution so to station
himself that his hiding-place lay downwind, the beautiful animals were
unaware of his presence.

By and by a prong-buck joined them. He was a two-year-old, young,
tender, with the velvet just off his antlers. Thorpe aimed at his
shoulder, six inches above the belly-line, and pressed the trigger. As
though by enchantm

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