Other Main-Travelled Roads Part 45

"h.e.l.lo, Sandy!"

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. Ridgeley!"

"Ready for company?"

"Am always ready for company," he said, with a Scotch accent.

"Well, we're coming in to get warm."

"Vera weel."

As they went in, under the roofed shed between the cook's shanty and the other and larger shanty, Mrs. Field sniffed. Sandy led them past a large pyramid composed of the sc.r.a.ps of beef bones, egg-sh.e.l.ls, cans, and tea grounds left over during the winter. In the shed itself hung great slabs of beef.

It was all as untidy and suggestive of slaughter as the nest of a brood of eagles.

Sandy was beginning dinner on a huge stove spotted with rust and pancake batter. All about was the litter of his preparation. Beef--beef on all sides, and tin dishes and bare benches and huge iron cooking-pans.

Mrs. Field was glad to get out into the sunlight again. "What a horrible place! Are they all like that?"

"No, my camps are not like that--or, I should say, _our_ camps,"

Ridgeley added, with a smile.

"Not a gay place at all," said Field, in exaggerated reserve.

But Mrs. Field found her own camps not much better. True, the refuse was not raised in pyramidal shape before the front door, and the beef was a little more orderly, but the low log huts, the dim cold light, the dingy walls and floors, the lack of any womanly or home touch, the tin dishes, the wholesale cooking, all struck upon her with terrible force.

"Do human beings live here?" she asked Ridgeley, when he opened the door of the main shanty of No. 6.

"Forty creatures of the men kind sleep and house here," he replied.

"To which the socks and things give evidence," said Field, promptly, pointing toward the huge stove which sat like a rusty-red cheese in the centre of the room. Above it hung scores of ragged gray and red socks and Mackinac boots and jackets which had been washed by the men themselves.

Around were the grimy bunks where the forty men slept like tramps in a steamer's hold. The quilts were grimy, and the posts greasy and shining with the touch of hands. There were no chairs--only a kind of rude stool made of boards. There were benches near the stove, nailed to the rough floor. In each bunk, hanging to a peg, was the poor little imitation-leather hand-bag which contained the whole wardrobe of each man, exclusive of the tattered socks and shirts hanging over the stove.

The room was chill and cold and gray. It had only two small windows. Its doors were low. Even Mrs. Field was forced to stoop in entering. This helped to make it seem like a den. There were roller-towels in the corner and wash-basins, and a grindstone which made it seem like a barn. It was, in fact, more cheerless than a barn, and less wholesome.

"Doesn't that hay in the bunks get a--a--sometimes?" asked Field.

"Well, yes, I shouldn't wonder, though the men are pretty strict about that. They keep pretty free from bugs, I think. However, I shouldn't want to run no river chances on the thing myself." Ridgeley smiled at Mrs. Field's shudder of horror.

"Is this the place?" The men laughed. She had asked that question so many times before.

"Yes, _this_ is where Mr. Williams hangs out. Say, Field, you'll need to make some new move to hold your end up against Williams."

Mrs. Field felt hurt and angry at his rough joke. In the dim corner a cough was heard, and as a yellow head raised itself over the bunk-board a man presented a ghastly face. His big blue eyes fixed themselves on the lovely woman with a look of childish wonder.

"h.e.l.lo, Gus--didn't see you! What's the matter--sick?"

"Yah, ai baen hwick two days. Ai tank ai lack to hav doketer."

"All right, I'll send him up. What seems the matter?"

As they talked, Mrs. Field again chilled with the cold gray comfortlessness of it all: to be sick in such a place! The silent appearance of the man out of his grim corner was startling. She was glad when they drove out into the woods again, where the clear sunshine fell and the pines stood against the blazing winter sky motionless as iron trees. Her pleasure in the ride was growing less. To her delicate sense this life was sordid, not picturesque. She wondered how Williams endured it. They arrived at No. 8 just as the men were trailing down the road to work, after eating their dinner. Their gay-colored jackets of Mackinac wool stood out like trumpet notes in the prevailing white and blue and bronze-green.

The boss and the sealer came out and met them, and after introductions they went into the shanty to dinner. The cook was a deft young Norwegian--a clean, quick, gentlemanly fellow with a fine brown mustache. He cleared a place for them at one end of the long table, and they sat down.

It was a large camp, but much like the others. On the table were the same cheap iron forks, the tin plates, and the small tin basins (for tea) which made up the dinner-set. Basins of brown sugar stood about.

"Good gracious! Do people still eat brown sugar? Why, I haven't seen any of that for ages!" cried Mrs. Field.

The stew was good and savory, and the bread fair. The tea was not all clover, but it tasted of the tin. Mrs. Field said:

"Beef, beef--everywhere beef. One might suppose a menagerie of desert animals ate here. Edward, we must make things more comfortable for our men. They must have cups to drink out of; these basins are horrible."

It was humorous to the men, this housewifely suggestion.

"Oh, make it napkins, Allie!"

"You can laugh, but I sha'n't rest after seeing this. If you thought I was going to say, 'Oh, how picturesque!' you're mistaken. I think it's barbarous."

She was getting impatient of their patronizing laughter, as if she were a child. They changed their manner to one of acquiescence, but thought of her as a child just the same.

After dinner they all went out to see the crew working. It was the biggest crew anywhere in the neighborhood. Ridgeley got out and hitched the team to a tree, and took Field up to the skidway. Mrs. Field remained in the sleigh.

Near her "the swamping team," a span of big, deep-red oxen, came and went among the green tops of the fallen pines. They crawled along their trails in the snow like some strange machinery, and the boy in a blue jacket moved almost as listlessly. Somewhere in the tangle of refuse boughs the swampers' axes click-clocked, saws uttered their grating, rhythmic snarl, and great trees at intervals shivered, groaned, and fell with soft, rushing, cracking sweeps into the deep snow, and the swampers swarmed upon them like Lilliputians attacking a giant enemy.

There was something splendid (though tragic) in the work, but the thought of the homelessness of the men, their terrible beds, and their long hours of toil oppressed the delicate and refined woman. She began to take on culpability. She was partly in authority now, and this system must be changed. She was deep in plans for improvement, in shanties and in sleeping-places, when the men returned.

Ridgeley was saying: "No, we control about thirty thousand acres of pine as good as that. It ain't what it was twenty years ago, but it's worth money, after all."

It was getting near to dark as they reached No. 6 again, and Ridgeley drew up and helped them out and into the cook's shanty.

Mrs. Field was introduced to the cook, a short, rather sullen, but intelligent man. He stood over the red-hot stove, laying great slices of beef in a huge dripping-pan. He had a taffler, or a.s.sistant, in the person of a half-grown boy, at whom he jerked rough orders like hunks of stove wood. Some hit the boy and produced noticeable effects, others did not.

Meanwhile a triumphant sunset was making the west one splendor of purple and orange and crimson, which came over the cool green rim of the pines like the _Valhalla March_ in Wagner.

Mrs. Field sat there in the dim room by the window, seeing that splendor flush and fade, and thinking how dangerous it was to ask where one's wealth comes from in the world. Outside, the voices of the men thickened; they were dropping in by twos and fours, with teams and on foot.

The a.s.sistant arranged the basins in rows, and put one of the iron forks and knives on either side of each plate, and filled the sugar-basins, and dumped in the cold beans, and split the bread into slabs, and put small pots of tea here and there ready for the hands of the men.

At last, when the big pans of toast, the big plates of beef, were placed steaming on the table, the cook called Field and Ridgeley, and said:

"Set right here at the end." He raised his arm to a ring which dangled on a wire. "Now look out; you'll see 'em come--sidewise." He jerked the ring, and disappeared into the kitchen.

A sudden tumult, shouts, trampling, laughter, and the door burst open and they streamed in: Norwegians, French, half-breeds--dark-skinned fellows, all of them, save the Norwegians. They came like a flood, but they fell silent at sight of a woman, so beautiful and strange to them.

All words ceased. They sank into place beside the table with the thump of falling sand-bags. They were all in their shirt-sleeves, but with faces cleanly washed, and the most of them had combed their hair; but they seemed very wild and hairy to Mrs. Field. She looked at her husband and Ridgeley with a grateful pleasure; it was so restful to have them close beside her.

The men ate like hungry dogs. They gorged in silence. Nothing was heard but the clank of knives on tin plates, the drop of heavy platters of food, and the occasional muttered words of some one asking for the bread or the gravy.