King Spruce Part 52

"Wait till to-morrow?" he mumbled, as he scrambled back up the knoll.

"Wait till to-morrow, when I've got a two-hoss load of canned thunder planted under Blunder dam, and the devil helpin' me by puttin' them two to sleep ev'ry night, snorin' like quill-pigs?" He waited until Wade had stumbled out of sight, then cinched upon his horse the blankets that had served for couch during his vigil, mounted, and urged the animal through the woods, kicking heels into its flanks.

There were men of the crew who heard an unwonted sound in the midnight hush of the Enchanted camp. It was a dull, heavy, earth-thudding noise that swept down from the north over the tree-tops and travelled on through the forest. Men awoke and asked themselves what had awakened them, and went to sleep again, and knew not what it meant.

Wade did not hear the sound. Exhaustion had fettered his senses when he crawled into his bunk in the office camp. What he did hear, as he roused himself in the gray of early dawn to set his hand to the desperate task he was resolved upon, was the splattering rush of a horse's feet in the spring ooze of the tote road and a human voice that shrieked, hysterically: "Man the river, d.a.m.n ye! Man the river!"

It was Tommy Eye. He was crouched on the back of his horse when the men came tumbling out. His little eyes were like fire-points. The wattles of his neck were blood-gorged. He spat froth as he raved at them.

"Man the river, I tell ye! She's b'ilin' full from bank to bank. Ben Rodliff's injunction busted to blazes and the Enchanted drive started slam-whoopin', and it's me that's done it!"

"You h.e.l.lion, have you blowed Blunder dam?" shouted the chopping-boss, while Dwight Wade was still gasping for words.

"Blowed Blunder dam!" shrieked Tommy, "Why, I've blowed Blunder dam so high that Ben Rodliff's injunction can't get to it in a balloon. I've blowed a gouge ten feet deep in the bed-rock. I've let the innards out of Blunder Lake. She's runnin' valley-full, ice-cakes dancin' jigs on the black water! And when they ask who done it, tell 'em it was me--Tommy Eye, the outlaw! Tommy Eye, with a two-hoss load of canned thunder!" He tried to shake his fists above his head, but groaned, and one arm dropped as though it were helpless. Blood was caked on his hand and wrist. He did not wait for Wade to ask the question.

"It's the pay I got for wakin' 'em up in time to run, Mr. Wade. I give 'em a chance. They give me a thirty-thirty! They'd have give me more if they could have shot straighter. I'm an outlaw, but there ain't no blood on my head, Mr. Wade."

He slid off the horse and staggered towards the cook camp.

"Gimme mine in my hand, cook!" he called. "I'll eat it while I'm runnin'. For it's man the river, boys!"

And the rest of them ate running, too. Wade led them, determined that no one should head him in the race. He heard the husky breathing of the hundred runners at his back when he swept around the granite dome of Enchanted and came in view of the valley. They stopped, panting, and surveyed the scene for a moment. They saw the tumbling waters, yeasty and brown. They heard the groan and grunt of dissolving log-piles as the fierce tide tore at them and bore away the logs. And each man took a new grip on his cant-dog handle and loped on.

It was plain that Tommy Eye had spoken the truth. That flood was not the mere outrush through shattered dam-gates. Blunder Lake was emptying itself through a rent deeper than nature had set in its side. In a stream-bed of intervales and broad levels the Enchanted drive would have been scattered to its own disaster. But Blunder valley was slashed deep between the hills. The turbid flood that raced there was penned. The log-herds could only b.u.t.t the granite cliffs and surge on. There was but one outlet--the mad current of Blunder Stream pouring down to its junction with the Umcolcus.

They "manned the river," scattering along, one man posted at a curve in sight of another. A hat waved meant that a jam was forming and called for help. And when timber jack-strawed too wildly to be readily loosened by cant-dog and pick-pole they dynamited. There was no time for "knittin'-work" on that drive.

Tommy Eye, with meal-sack slung over his shoulder, made himself custodian of the "canned thunder." It was Larry Gorman, woodsman poet, who first called him "Tommy Thunder." If you go into the north country you can probably find some one to sing you the song that Larry Gorman composed, the first verse running:

"Come, listen, good white-water chaps. Who was that man, I wonder, Who turned himself to an outlaw bold and put the bang-juice under?

Who was it cracked the neck of her, 'way up at old Lake Blunder, When h.e.l.l broke loose and sluiced our spruce?

'Twere done by Tommy Thunder!"

His was the recklessness of mania. Men who saw him coming along the sh.o.r.e with his horrid burden dodged into the woods. Where and when he slept no one knew. Daytime and night-time he was racing to where logs had cob-piled. Roars that boomed among the hills told that he had arrived. In the first gray of morning men saw him warming his dynamite over a camp-fire, and shuddered and hurried away. To find the king log of a jam and drop his cartridge where it would have instant effect, he took chances that made men turn their backs. It isn't pleasant to see a man macerated by grinding logs or scattered across the sky.

No word pa.s.sed between Tommy Eye and Dwight Wade. Those days and nights when the Enchanted drive was on its roaring way down Blunder Stream towards the Umcolcus River were not the sort of days that invited conversation. On the ordinary stream-drives to the main river, in the desperate hurry of the driving-pitch, men work as many hours as they can stand up. With the drive under control, they can at least stop sluicing in the dead hours of the night. But the Enchanted drive that spring was a wild beast that never closed its eyes. As it raged along they did not dare to leave it alone for an hour. Men raced beside it, clutched at it, clung as long as they were able, and dropped off, stunned by the stupor of exhaustion.

After a few hours some one's prodding foot stirred them back to wakefulness, and they stumbled up and began the fight once more. Outside of a charge in battle, there is no place where individual rivalry is so keen and eager as in a driving-crew on hard waters. Men do not require to be urged to do their utmost. "Coward" and "shirk" are sneers that cut deeply down-river.

Wade, rushing from point to point, cant-dog in hand, his shoes mere pulp, his clothes in tatters, saw men asleep with their faces in the tin plates that the cookee had heaped with food. They had gone to sleep with the first mouthful, hungry as demons, but overcome the moment their feet stopped moving.

Some he found asleep where they were posted to "card"[6] certain ledges.

He beat them about the head with the flat of his hand, and they awoke and thanked him with wistful smiles that touched his heart. But brutal force had started the Enchanted drive, brutal force marked its rush, and it had to be brutal force that could keep it going. Brutal force took toll in the logs that were splintered by dynamite, but it was a toll that circ.u.mstances demanded. A man unwilling to take the chances that Tommy Eye took would have wasted thousands of feet instead of hundreds, and Wade knew it, and gulped words of grat.i.tude when they met, hurrying on the sh.o.r.e.

[Footnote 6: To disentangle and set free logs caught in the rocks.]

Half-way to the Umcolcus, Lazy Tom Stream enters Blunder, and here Wade found Barnum Withee rushing in his logs and eager to accept an invitation to join drives. Withee was asking no questions. He did not need to. He understood. What had been done upstream was none of his business. He could declare that much when he got his drive down, and could defend himself from complicity. In the mean time he would take advantage of the situation.

There were now one hundred and sixty herders of the wild flock, with Barnum Withee, one of the best men on the river, to take command of the rear.

So Wade went to the front--to Castonia, sweeping down the swollen Umcolcus in one of Withee's bateaux with four men at the oars. He had played violence against violence in the big game. It was natural to suppose that Pulaski Britt by this time had his fists clinched ready to retaliate.

On either side of his bateau as he hurried to Castonia the logs ran free. But they were all his own logs, this advance-guard, marked with the double diamond and cross.

Had Rodburd Ide done his part, and were they being held at Castonia?

He found the booms set again, Rodburd Ide in command at the sorting-gap, and various members of the "It-'ll-git-ye Club" sitting along the sh.o.r.e with guns across their knees. Every able-bodied man in Castonia was on the booms with a pick-pole, and already the double-diamond logs were swirling and herding in the logan.

"It's done, and they'll have us into court, but, by ----, we'll have some ready money to fight 'em with!" screamed the little man, grasping Wade's hand as the bateau swung broadside to the sorting-gap platform.

And when he had heard the story of "Tommy Thunder, outlaw," that his partner hurriedly related, his mouth parted in a grin, even though his forehead puckered with apprehension.

"But will it let us out, Wade?" he asked. "The man took it on himself out of his grudge against Britt. But will it let us out?"

"It's your money that is in this thing, and not mine," returned the young man, "and I suppose it's natural for you to think of your property first. But as for me, Mr. Ide, I'll take what profits are coming to me from this operation, and I'll stand in with poor old Tommy Eye, jointly indicted, jointly in the dock, jointly in jail, till the last dollar is spent. For he did just what I meant to do!"

For an instant Ide's eyes flickered. Then they became shiny.

"My boy," he said, "the Enchanted Township Lumber Company is incorporated, and you and I own the stock. With your consent, I'm goin'

to make over ten shares of that stock to Thomas Eye before I sleep to-night. I reckon this company stands ready to fight its battles and protect its members."

"Mr. Ide," gulped Wade, contritely, "forgive me for that hasty speech.

But G.o.d help me, partner, I've been in h.e.l.l since I saw you last, and I'm full of the fires of it! I think you can understand."

He crouched there in the bateau, clutching the gunwale with hands that trembled until they shook his body to and fro. His face was streaked with the grime of days and nights of toil. His eyes were haggard with sleeplessness. Fasting had hollowed his cheeks. Such lines as only the bitter things of life can set in the human countenance were traced deep upon the brown skin. In his rags and his weariness he was as one who had been conquered instead of one who had fulfilled. The little man of Castonia reached down and patted his shoulder with a hand that had a father's sympathy in its touch.

"Bub," he murmured, "I'm goin' to take some other time to tell you what I think of you. Just now I want you to go down to the house. My Nina will know what to do for you and what to say to you. She has some letters for you to read before you go to sleep, and I reckon they'll give you pleasant dreams."

Kate Arden opened the door and welcomed him with a smile, the first he had ever seen on her face. His heart came into his mouth at sight of her. Never had she seemed so like Elva Barrett. But before he had word with her Nina Ide came running, floury hands outspread, her face alight above her housewife's tire. She stood on tiptoe, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him.

"Brother Dwight! Brother Dwight!" she half sobbed. "Oh, Brother Dwight, I didn't know--I didn't realize--I didn't understand, or I would have held you back until you had torn these two arms from my shoulders. I prayed for you and watched for you. They buy their logs with blood up there. But it shall not be with your blood, Dwight. I have hated father all these days. He knew what you were going back to, and didn't stop you!"

"It was all my own affair, little girl," Wade returned, gently--"my duty, to which I was bound by fair man-promise. And I've got our logs into the river, but it has been the kind of work that blisters souls, Sister Nina!" His voice had a pathetic quaver of weariness.

"I was at the sorting-gap when the first one came, and I knelt and kissed it," she said, smiling at him from misty eyes. "And then I wrote to the one of all the world and told her about a hero."

An hour later he lay asleep in a darkened room, the tense lines gone from his face, his lax hand spread over a letter, finding the sweetest solace in slumber he had known for many a day.

At the first peep of light next morning he was at the sorting-gap in full command, removing a burden of responsibility from Rodburd Ide which had made that little man a quaking wreck of his ordinarily self-reliant self; for in every log that had come spinning around the upper bend of the Umcolcus his fears had seen the peak of Pulaski Britt's rushing bateau.

That the river tyrant would come, furious beyond words, was a fact accepted by Dwight Wade, and Wade was ready to meet him. But every hour that pa.s.sed without bringing the drive-master meant so much more towards the success of the Enchanted drive.

The logs came in stampeding droves. Withee's were mixed among the "double diamonds," but there were no delays at the sorting-gap. Two crews fed them through--one for day and one for night, with a dozen lanterns lighting their work. Wade was resolved that Britt should lack at least one argument in the bitter contention. The sorting should be done faithfully and promptly, and the down-river drive should be hurried on its way. But at the end of four days not one of the logs nicked with the "double hat," Britt's registered mark, had shown up. Nor did Britt himself appear.

A sullen, suffering man of Britt's crew, who came walking into Castonia with hand held above his head to ease the agony of a felon, brought the first news.

Blunder Lake dam had been blown up, he reported, and such a chasm had been opened in the bed-rock that the lake had vomited its waters to the west until the bed of Britt's shallow ca.n.a.l to the east was above the water-line. Britt had only his splash dams along Jerusalem for a driving-head. In the past years the pour of the ca.n.a.l had given him a current in Jerusalem dead-water. Now he was trying to warp his logs across there with head-works and anchor. But the south wind was howling against him, and no human muscle could turn the windla.s.s, even when the oaths of the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt dinned in the ears of his toilers. All this the new-comer related.

"And it's something awful to hear!" said the man. "He walks the platform of that head-works, back and forth and back and forth. He cusses G.o.d and the angels, the wind and all it blows across. And then when he is well worked up to cussin', he 'tends to the case of the devil that blowed up Blunder Lake dam. And his face is as red as my shirt, and the veins stick out on his for'ead as big as a baby's finger. They say that you can't cuss only about so much without somethin' happenin' to you. I've read about the cap'n of a ship that done it too much once, and his ghost is still a-sailin'. All I've got to say is that if Pulaski Britt don't stop, he'll get his."