Earth's Enigmas Part 8

"I reckon he does well to be scared of him," said Laurette, with her head very high in the air.

By this time Goodine had formed his plans, and had got to work. At first he called in the a.s.sistance of two other axemen, to cut certain of the piles which had no great strain upon them. This done, the a.s.sistants returned to safe quarters; and then Bill warily reviewed the situation.

"He knows what he's about," murmured McElvey, with approbation, as Bill attacked another pile, cut it two-thirds through, and left it so. Then he severed completely a huge timber far on the left front of the landing. There remained but two piles to withstand the main push of the logs. One of these was in the centre, the other a little to the right,--on which side the chopper had to make his escape when the logs began to go. This latter pile Goodine now cut half-way through. Feeling himself the hero of the hour, he handled his axe brilliantly, and soon forgot his indignation against Laurette. At length he attacked the centre pile, the key to the whole structure.

Everybody, at this point, held his breath. Loud sounded the measured axe-strokes over the rush of the swollen river. No one moved but Reddin, and no one but Laurette noticed his movement. His skilled eye had detected a danger which none of the rest perceived. He drew close to the brow, and moved a little way down the bank.

"What can he be up to?" wondered Laurette; and then she sniffed angrily because she had thought about him at all.

Goodine dealt a few cautious strokes upon the central pile, paused a moment or two to reconnoitre, and then renewed his attack. Reddin became very fidgety. He watched the logs, and shouted earnestly,--

"Better come out o' that right now and finish on this 'ere nigh pile."

Goodine looked up, eyed first his adviser, then very narrowly the logs, and answered, tersely, "Go to h--ll!"

"That's just like the both of 'em," muttered McElvey, as Goodine turned and resumed his chopping.

At this moment there came a sullen, tearing sound; and the top of the near pile, which had been half cut through, began to lean slowly, slowly. A yell of desperate warning arose. Goodine dropped his axe, turned like lightning, and made a tremendous leap for safety. He gained the edge of the landing-front, slipped on an oozy stone, and fell back with a cry of horror right beneath the toppling ma.s.s of logs.

As his cry re-echoed from every throat, Jim Reddin dropped beside him as swiftly and almost miraculously as a sparrow-hawk flashes upon its prey.

With a terrific surge he swung Goodine backward and outward into the raging current, but away from the face of the impending avalanche. Then, as the logs all went with a gathering roar, he himself sprang outward in a superb leap, splashed mightily into the stream, disappeared, and came up some yards below. Side by side the two men struck out st.u.r.dily for sh.o.r.e, and in a couple of minutes their comrades' eager hands were dragging them up the bank.

"Didn't I _tell_ you Jim Reddin wasn't no coward?" said McElvey, with glistening eyes, to Laurette; and Laurette, having no other way to relieve her excitement and give vent to her revulsion of feelings, sat down on a sled and cried most illogically.

As the two dripping men approached the camp, she looked up to see a reconciliation. Presently Goodine emerged from a little knot of his companions, approached Reddin, and held out his hand.

"I ask yer pardon," said he. "You're a man, an' no mistake. It is my life I owe to you; an' I'm proud to owe it to sech as you!"

But Reddin took no notice of the outstretched hand. The direct and primitive movements of the backwoodsman's mind may seem to the sophisticated intelligence peculiar; but they are easy to comprehend.

Jim Reddin quite overlooked the opportunity now offered for a display of exalted sentiment. In a harsh, deliberate voice he said,--

"An' now, Bill Goodine, you've got to stand up to me, an' we'll see which is the better man, you or me. Ever sence you growed up to be a man you've used me just as mean as you knowed how; an' now we'll fight it out right here."

At this went up a chorus of disapproval: and Goodine said, "I'll be d--d if I'm a-goin to strike the man what's jest saved my life!"

"You needn't let _that_ worry you, Bill," replied Reddin. "We're quits there. I reckon you forget as how your mother, G.o.d bless her, saved my life, some twenty year back, when you was jest a-toddlin'. An' I vowed to her I'd be good to you the very best I knowed how. An' I've kep' my vow. But now I reckon I'm quit of it; an' if you ain't a-goin' to give me satisfaction now my hands is free, then you ain't no man at all, an'

I'll try an' find some way to _make_ you fight!"

"Jim's right!--You've got to fight, Bill!--That's fair!" and many more exclamations of like character, showed the drift of popular sentiment so plainly that Goodine exclaimed, "Well, if you sez so, it's got to be!

But I don't want to hurt you, Jim Reddin; an' lick you I kin, every day in the week, an' you know it!"

"You're a liar!" remarked Jim Reddin, in a business-like voice, as the hands formed a ring.

At this some of the hands laughed, and Goodine, glancing around, caught the ghost of a smile on Laurette's face. This was all that was needed.

The blood boiled up to his temples, and with an oath under his breath he sprang upon his adversary.

Smoothly and instantaneously as a shadow Reddin eluded the attack. And now his face lost its set look of injury and a.s.sumed a smile of cheerful interest. Bill Goodine, in spite of his huge bulk, had the elasticity and dash of a panther; but his quickness was nothing to that of Reddin.

Once or twice the latter parried, with seeming ease, his most destructive lunges, but more often he contented himself with moving aside like a flash of light. Presently Goodine cried out,--

"Why don't yer _fight_, like a man, stidder skippin' out o' the road like a flea?"

"'Cause I don't want to hurt you," laughed Reddin.

But that little boastful laugh delayed his movements, and Goodine was upon him. Two or three terrible short-arm blows were exchanged, and then the two men grappled.

"Let 'em be," ordered McElvey. "They'd better wrastle than fight."

For a second or two, nay, for perhaps a whole minute, it looked to the spectators as if Reddin must be crushed helpless in Bill's tremendous embrace. Then it began to dawn on them that Reddin had captured the more deadly hold. Then the dim rumors of Reddin's marvellous strength began to gather credence, as it was seen how his grip seemed to dominate that of his great opponent.

For several minutes the straining antagonists swayed about the ring.

Then suddenly Reddin straightened himself, and Bill's hold slipped for an instant. Before he could recover it Reddin had stooped, secured a lower grip, and in a moment hurled his adversary clear over his shoulder. A roar of applause went up from the spectators; and Goodine, after trying to rise, lay still and groaned, "I'm licked, Jim. I've had enough."

The boss soon p.r.o.nounced that Bill's shoulder was dislocated, and that he'd have to go back to the settlements to be doctored. This being the case, Laurette said to him benevolently, after her horse was harnessed to the pung, "I'm sorry I can't ask you to drive me home, though you _did_ cut out the logs, Bill. But I reckon it'll be the next best thing fur you if _I_ drive _you_ home. An' Jim Reddin'll come along, maybe, to kind of look after the both of us."

To which proposition poor Bill grinned a rather ghastly a.s.sent.

An Experience of Jabez Batterpole.

One February afternoon a tremendous snow-storm was raging about the camp on the Upper Keswick. The air was so thick with driving flakes that one could scarcely see five feet ahead of him. It fell dark in the woods by the middle of the afternoon, and the chopping and the hauling came to an end. Lamps were soon lighted in camp, and the lumbermen, in their steaming homespuns, gathered about the roaring stove to sing, smoke, swap yarns and munch gingerbread. The wind screamed round the gables of the camp, rattled at the door and windows, and roared among the tree-tops like the breaking of great waves on an angry coast. From the stables close by came ever and anon the neighing of a nervous horse.

Andy Mitch.e.l.l had been detailing with tireless minuteness the virtues of his magnificent team of stallions, Tom and Jerry, and had described (as was his wont on all possible occasions) the manner in which they had once saved his life when he was attacked by a tremendous Indian Devil.

This Indian Devil (as the Northern Panther is called in Canada) had been literally pounded to pieces under the hoofs of the angry stallions. As Mitch.e.l.l concluded, there came a voice from the other side of the stove, and a tall Woodstocker spoke up. This was a chopper very popular in the camp, and known by the name of Jabe. His real name, seldom used except on Sundays, was Jabez Ephraim Batterpole.

"_I'll_ tell yez a leetle yarn, boys," said Jabe, "about a chap ez warn't _eg_zackly an Injun Devil, but he was half Injun, an' I'm a-thinkin t' other half must 'a' been a devil. I run agin him las' June, three year gone, an' he come blame near a-doin' fur me. I haint sot eyes on him sence, fur which the same I ain't a-goin' to complain.

"I'd been up to the Falls, an' was a-takin' a raft down the river fur Gibson. Sandy Beale was along o' me, an' I dunno ez ever I enjoyed raftin' more 'n on the first o' thet trip. Doubtless yez all knows what purty raftin' it is in them parts. By gum, it kinder makes a chap lick his lips when he rickolecks it, a-slidin' along there in the sun, not too hot an' not too cold, a-smokin' very comfortable, with one's back braced agin a saft spruce log, an' smellin' the leetle catspaws what comes blowin' off the sh.o.r.es jest ez sweet an' saft ez a gal's currls a-brushin' of a feller's face."

"_What_ gal's currls be you referrin' to Jabe?" interrupted Andy Mitch.e.l.l.

"Suthin' finer 'n horse-hair, anyways!" was the prompt retort; and a laugh went round the camp at Andy's expense. Then Batterpole continued:--

"When we come to Hardscrabble it was sundown, so we tied up the raft an'

teetered up the hill to Old Man Peters's fur the night. Yez all knows Old Man Peters's gal Nellie, ez there ain't no tidier an honester slip on the hull river. Nellie was purty glad to see Sandy an' me, ef I does say it that shouldn't; an' she chinned with us so ez she didn't hev no time to talk to some other chaps ez was puttin' up there that night. An'

this, ez I mighty soon ketched onter, didn't seem nohow to suit one of the fellers. He was a likely-lookin' chap enough, but very dark-complected an' sallow-like, with a bad eye, showin' a lot o' the white. An eye like that's a bad thing in a horse, an' I reckon 't ain't a heap better in a man.

"Sez I to Nellie, sez I: 'Nellie, who's yer yaller friend over there by the windy, which looks like he'd like to make sa.s.sage-meat o' my head?'

"Nellie's eyes flashed, an' she answered up right sharp: ''T ain't no friend of mine. 'T ain't no sort of a _man_ at all. It's only somethin'

the freshet left on the sh.o.r.e, an' the pigs wouldn't eat nohow.'

"You bet I laffed, an' so did Sandy. Ez I heern later on, the chap had ben a-botherin' roun' Nellie all winter, fur all she'd gin him the mitten straight an' sent him about his bizness heaps o' times. I reckon the feller suspicioned we was a-laffin' at him, fur he squinted at me blacker 'n ever.

"Purty soon Nellie got fussin' roun' the room, over nigh to where the yaller chap was a-settin', an' he spoke to her, saft-like, so ez we couldn't hear what he was a-gittin' at. Nellie she jest sniffed kinder scornful; an' then, _what_ would yez suppose that chap done? He reached out suddent, grabbed her leetle wrist so hard 'at she cried out, an'

_slapped_ her--yes, slapped her right across the mouth. Nellie jest stood there white, like a image, an' never said one word; an' I seed the red marks o' the blackguard's fingers come out acrost her cheek. Next minit yaller face jumped fur the door,--an' me arter him, you kin bet yer life! He was a-makin' tracks purty lively, but I kin run a leetle myself, an' I was onter him 'gin Sandy an' the rest was outer the door.

An' didn't I whale him, now? I twisted his knife outer his hand, an' I laced him till I was clean tuckered out. But the feller was grit, an'

never hollered oncet. When I quit he laid still a bit. Then he riz up slowly, started to walk away, turned half round, an' hissed at me jest like a big snake er 'n old sa.s.sy gander:--