Lost Farm Camp Part 37

"I'm on, Red," replied the cookee, dodging a lunge from the lumberman and pocketing the quarter. "Fix up purty, for she'll be lookin' at you."

The cookee sped or rather fled on his errand. Smeaton looked about, then went to his bunk and drew out a soft, pearl-gray hat with silk-bound edges and wide band. He had purchased it in a moment of exuberance when the possibility of Swickey's saying "yes" was unclouded. He straightened it out, gazed at it admiringly for a moment, and then, flinging his old hat in the corner, he set the pearl-gray felt jauntily on his shock of red hair.

"'T ain't every day a feller gits his picture tooken by a gal, or thet kind of a gal," he muttered, as he strode from the camp with a fine swagger.

"And look who's here!" cried one of the men, as he joined them at the riverside.

"Whoo-pee!" came in a Piute chorus from the boys.

"Where you goin' to preach nex' Sunday?" cried one.

"President of the new railroad!" shouted another.

"Oh, mother, but ain't she a lovely lid!"

Smeaton jammed the hat down about his eyes, grinned sheepishly, and held his peace. Meanwhile the cookee was retailing to Swickey the recent happenings at Camp Fifteen-Two, including a vivid account of the "sc.r.a.p," in which his share, he emphasized, was not the least.

"Hit me when I wasn't lookin'," he concluded, with a tone which suggested that had he been looking some one else would have regretted it. "But Joe Smeaton, he fixed him. Slammed him one and Andy went to sleep on it. Said you was to come down to the jam and take his picture,"

he added untruthfully, "with Joe Smeaton's compliments-fer a quarter."

"Thank you, Mr. --?"

"Hines is my name."

"Mr. Hines."

The cookee, feeling that he had been rather abruptly dismissed, returned to camp to finish his morning's work. Swickey locked the cabin and, tapping a farewell to Smoke, who stood watching her at the window, she walked briskly down the road, swinging her camera and humming. Harrigan had called her father early that morning. Avery had handled the dynamite for the Great Western for years before he came to Lost Farm, and although practically retired from this cla.s.s of work, his ability to "get things moving" was appreciated by Harrigan, who was an experienced driver himself. The old man was sitting on a log, bending busily over something, when Swickey appeared.

"h.e.l.lo, Swickey. Thought mebby you'd be comin' along. Joe Smeaton jest went by with some of the boys."

"Yes, I want to see Joe. I've got something to say to him."

Avery looked at her for a moment, scratched his elbow, and mumbled, "M-m-um, ya-a-s, p.u.s.s.ibly you have."

He was toying carelessly with a bundle of dynamite sticks. He would unwrap one, punch a hole in it with his knife, insert a fuse, and wrap up the soapy-looking stuff again. He attached one stick to another until he had a very impressive-looking giant firecracker. This he tied to a long maple sapling, round which he wound the loose end of the black fuse. Swickey appreciated her father's society, but not enough to tarry with him just then. Their ideas regarding Providence were dissimilar in a great many details.

Avery liked to tease her. "If you ain't in a hurry to see Joe, you kin carry one of these here fireworks down to the jam fur me. I'll take this one. You kin take the one you're settin' on."

She heard her father guffawing as she walked away. Suddenly he choked and spluttered. "Swallowed his tobacco, and I'm glad of it." With this unfilial expression she hurried toward the river.

The jam lay in an angle of the gorge like a heap of t.i.tanic jackstraws.

Behind it the water was backing up and widening. Every few minutes the upper edge would start forward, crowding the ma.s.s ahead. The river, meeting stubborn resistance, would lift a fringe of logs up on the slant of the jam and then the whole fabric would settle down with a grinding heave and a groan. Once in a while a single log would shoot into the air and fall back with a thump. Up on the edges of the gorge the birches were twinkling in the sun, and vivid, quick pine warblers were flitting about. Below was chaos, and groups of little men-pygmies-tugged and strained at their peaveys, striving to rearrange things as they thought they should be. The choked river growled and vomited spurts of yellow water from the face of the jam. Gray-shirted men leaped from log to log, gained the centre beneath that tangled, sagging wall of destruction, and labored with a superb unconsciousness of the all-too-evident danger.

Some one shouted. The pygmies sprang away from the centre, each in a different direction like young quail running for cover. The mountain of timbers moved a few feet, settled, and locked again. Harrigan looked worried.

"Did you meet your Dad comin' down?" he asked Swickey, who sat perched on a ledge overlooking the river.

"Yes. He asked me to help him carry his 'fireworks'."

"Here, Bill!" shouted Harrigan, "you go up and help Hoss. You know where he is."

Meanwhile the men loafed round in little groups, joking and laughing, apparently unconscious of having done anything unusual. Their quarrel with the river was one of long-standing and regular recurrence. They were used to it. They leaned on their peaveys or squatted on the rocks, watching the river nonchalantly. Hardened by habit to any acute sense of danger, and keyed to a pitch of daring by pride in their physical ability, they more than defied destruction,-they ignored it. Yet each riverman knew when he stepped out on the logs beneath the face of the jam that the next moment might be his last. Undiluted courage raced in their veins and shone in their steady eyes.

"Here comes Hoss, fellers. Give him the stage. We's only the awjence now;" and the boys, with much jesting and make-believe ceremony, made way for the old "giant-powder deacon," as they called him. Hoss carried his grotesque sky-rocket with the business end held before him. He walked out on the slippery logs easily, inspecting the conglomeration with an apparently casual eye. Presently he hitched one suspender, rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, and inserted the dynamite in a crevice between the logs, pushing it down slowly with the sapling. He fumbled with the fuse a minute, and then hastened to sh.o.r.e.

Swickey, kneeling, snapped the camera as the rock beneath her trembled, and up rose a geyser of brown foam and logs, pieces of logs, splinters, bark, and stones. The jam moved forward, hesitated, and locked again. A second and third shot produced no apparent effect.

"Three times and out," said Harrigan. "Hey, Andy! Where's Andy Sloc.u.m?"

"Over talkin' to Hoss," said a driver, as he went for a new peavey. His was at the bottom of the river, pinched from his hands by two herculean pine fingers.

"Thought that last shot would fetch her," said Harrigan, as he came up to Sloc.u.m and Avery. "But she's got her back up. Now, see if you can coax her along, my buck. She didn't even smile when Hoss persented his bokay."

Avery grinned. "Thet's right. I was just tellin' Andy mebby if he was to go out and _sing_ to her, she might walk right along a'ter him like thet gal up in-"

But the rest of what promised to be of entertainment to the boys remained untold. Sloc.u.m skirmished among the men, quietly picking out six of them to go with him and "loosen her up."

They strode deliberately out on the logs, laughing and talking. Swickey noticed that Joe Smeaton was one of those chosen.

They tried timber after timber, working carefully. There was a directness and unity in their movements that showed they meant to "pick her or bust," as Avery expressed it. Swickey, pale and trembling so that she could scarcely hold the camera steady enough to find the men, followed with glowing eyes the little band as they moved from spot to spot. Their evident peril reacted on her till even she, used to such things, felt like calling to them to come back. She felt rather than saw their danger. Presently Sloc.u.m and Joe Smeaton were working shoulder to shoulder. Smeaton paused to wipe his face on his sleeve. Evidently he said something, for Andy Sloc.u.m laughed.

"They's goin' to fetch her," said Avery, as he came to where his daughter stood.

She questioned him with a look.

"I can't jest explain, Swickey, but git your camera ready. They got a grip on her now."

Then, amid shouts from the men on the bank there came a crack like a rifle-shot. The entire fabric bulged up and out. A long roar, a thundering and groaning of tons of liberated logs and water, and five of the seven men ran like squirrels from log to log toward sh.o.r.e. Where were the other two? Joe was coming-no, he was going back. Swickey raised her arms and shrieked to him. He turned as though he had heard and flung out one arm in an indescribable gesture of salutation and farewell to the blue-gowned figure on the rocks above him. Then he ran down a careening log and reached for something in the water. He caught an upraised arm and struggled to another log. He stooped to lift the inert something he had tried so fearlessly to save, but before he could straighten up, the loosened b.u.t.tress of timbers charged down upon him and brushed him from sight. The crest of the jam sunk and dissolved in the leaping current.

"Gone, by G.o.d!" said Avery.

Men looked at each other and then turned away.

Above, the pine warblers darted back and forth across the chasm in the sun.

Swickey slid from the rock where she had been standing and grasped her father's arm. "It was Joe, wasn't it?" she gasped, although she knew.

"Yes-and Andy," replied Avery. "Joe might of got out, but Andy slipped and Joe went back to git the leetle skunk. Thet was Joe all over-dam his ole hide."

She dropped to her knees and crossed her arms before her face. With one accord the rivermen turned and walked away. Avery stooped and lifted her to her feet.

"Thar, thar, leetle gal-"

"Oh, father," she sobbed, "I thought mean of Joe this morning-I didn't understand-and I can't tell him now."

"If G.o.d-A'mighty's what we think He be," said Avery reverently, "He'll make it up to Joe."