The Promise Part 26

The boss added a substantial bonus for each day's "top cut," and in the lengthening days an intense rivalry sprang up between the sawyers; not infrequently Bill and Fallon were "in on the money."

It was nearly two weeks after the incident, that Creed came to Moncrossen with his own story of what happened that night at Melton's No. 8, and the boss knew that he lied.

As they talked in the little office the greener, accompanied by Fallon, pa.s.sed close to the window.

At the sight of the man the spotter's face became pasty, and he shrank trembling and wide-eyed, as from the sight of a ghost, and Moncrossen knew that his abject terror was not engendered by physical fear.

He flew into a rage, cursing and bullying the craven, but failed utterly to dispel the unwholesome fear or to shake the other's repeated statement that at a few minutes past ten o'clock that night he had seen the greener lying hopelessly drunk upon the floor of the shack with the flames roaring about him, and at six o'clock the next evening had seen him hobble into Burrage's store, forty miles to the southward, fresh and apparently unharmed save for his injured foot.

Moncrossen's hatred of the greener rested primarily upon the fear that one day he would expose him to Appleton; added to this was a mighty jealousy of his rapid rise to proficiency and the rankling memory of the scene of their first meeting in the grub-shack.

But his fear of him was a physical fear--a fear born of the certain knowledge that, measured by his own standards, the greener was the better man.

And now came the perplexing question as to how the man had reached Hilarity when Creed was known to have arrived there with the team eight hours after the burning of the shack.

The boss had carefully verified so much of Creed's story by a guarded pumping of Dunnigan, and the crafty old Irishman took keen delight in so wording his answers, and interspersing them with knowing winks and quirks of the head, as to add nothing to the boss's peace of mind.

While not sharing Creed's belief in the greener's possession of uncanny powers, nevertheless he knew that, whatever happened that night, the greener knew more than he chose to tell, and as his apprehension deepened his rage increased.

Hate smoldered in the swinish eyes as, in the seclusion of the office, he glowered and planned and rumbled his throaty threats.

"The drive," he muttered. "My Bucko Bill, you're right now picked for the drive, an' I'll see to it myself that you git yourn in the river."

CHAPTER XXIV

THE LOG JAM

The feel of spring filled the air; the sun swung higher and higher; and the snow turned dark and lay soggy with water. With the increasing warmth of the longer days, men's thoughts turned to the drive.

They talked of water-front streets, with their calk-riddled plank sidewalks and low-fronted bars; of squalid back wine-rooms, where for a week they would be allowed to bask, sodden, in the smiles of the painted women--then, drugged, beaten, and robbed, would wake up in a filthy alley and hunt up a job in the mills.

It was all in a lifetime, this annual spring debauch. The men accepted it as part of the ordered routine of their lives; accepted it without shame or regret, boasting and laughing unblushingly over past episodes--facing the future gladly and without disgust.

"You mind Jake Sonto's place, where big Myrtle hangs out? They frisked Joe Manning fer sixty bucks last year. I seen 'em do it. What! Me? I was too sleepy to give a cuss--they got mine, too."

And so the talk drifted among them. Revolting details of abysmal man-failings, brutal reminiscences of knock-out drops, robbery, and even murder, furnished the themes for jest and gibe which drew forth roars of laughter.

And none sought to avoid the inevitable; rather, they looked forward to it in brutish antic.i.p.ation, accepting it as a matter of course.

For so had lumber-jacks been drugged, beaten, and robbed since the first pine fell--and so will they continue to be drugged, beaten, and robbed until the last log is jerked, dripping, from the river and the last white board is sawed.

On the night of the 8th of April the cut was complete, and on the morning of the 9th ten million feet of logs towered on the rollways along the river, ready for the breaking up of the ice.

Stromberg had banked the bird's-eye to his own satisfaction, and Moncrossen selected his crew for the drive--white-water men, whose boast it was that they never had walked a foot from the timber to the mills; bateau men, who laughed in the face of death as they swarmed over a jam; key-log men, who scorned dynamite; bend watchers, whose duty it is to stay awake through the long, warm days and prevent the formation of jams as the drive shoots by--each selected with an eye to previous experience and physical fitness.

For, among all occupations of men, log driving stands unique for its hardships of peril, discomfort, and bone-racking toil.

From the breaking out of the rollways until the last log slips smoothly into its place in the boom-raft, no man's life is safe.

Yet men fight for a place on the drive--for the privilege of being soaked to the bone for days at a time in ice-cold water; of being crushed to a pulp between grinding logs; of being drowned in white-water rapids, where a man must stand, his log moving at the speed of an express train, time and again shooting half out of water to meet the spray of the next rock-tossed wave; of making hair-trigger decisions, when an instant's hesitation means death, as his log rushes under the low-hanging branches of a "sweeper."

For pure love of adventure they fight--and that a few more dollars may find their way into the tills of the Jake Sontos of the water-front dives. For among these men the baiting of death is the excitement of life, and their pleasures are the savage pleasures of firstlings.

Those who were not of the drive were handed their vouchers and hauled to Hilarity, while those who remained busied themselves in the packing and storing of gear; for, in the fall, the crew would return to renew the attack on the timber.

Followed, then, days of waiting.

The two bateaux--the cook's bateau, with its camp stove and store of supplies; and the big bateau, with its thousand feet of inch and a half manila line coiled for instant use, whose thick, flaring sides and floor of selected timber were built to override the shock and battering of a thousand pitching logs--were carried to the bank ready for launching.

The sodden snow settled heavily, and around the base of stumps and the trunks of standing trees appeared rings of bare ground, while the course of the skidways and cross-hauls stood out sharp and black, like great veins in the clearing.

Each sag and depression became a pond, and countless rills and rivulets gurgled riverward, bank-full with sparkling snow-water.

Over the frozen surface of the river it flowed and wore at the sh.o.r.e-bound ice-floor. And then, one night, the ice went out.

t.i.tanically it went, and noisily, with the crash and grind of broken cakes; and in the morning the river rushed black, and deep, and swollen, its roiled waters tearing sullenly at crumbling banks, while upon its muddy surface heaved belated ice-cakes and uprooted trees.

At daylight men crowded the bank, the bend watchers strung out and took up their positions, and white-water men stood by with sharp axes to break out the rollways.

The first rollway broke badly.

A thick-b.u.t.ted log slanted and met the others head-on as they thundered down the bank, tossing them high in the air whence they fell splashing into the river, or crashed backward among the tumbling logs, upending, and hurling them about like jack-straws.

The air was filled with the heavy rumble of rolling logs as other rollways tore loose at the swift blows of the axes, where, at the crack of toggle-pins, men leaped from in front of the rolling, crushing death; and the surface of the river became black with bucking, pitching logs which shot to the opposite bank.

Coincident with the snapping of the first toggle-pin, the branches of a gigantic, storm-blasted pine, whose earth-laded b.u.t.t dragged heavily along the bottom of the river, became firmly entangled in the low-hanging limbs of a sweeper, and swung sluggishly across the current.

Against this obstruction crashed the leaping, upending logs of the wrecked rollway. Other logs swept in and wedged, forcing the heavy b.u.t.t and the riven trunk of the huge tree firmly against the rocks at the head of the rapid.

Rollway after rollway tore loose and the released logs, swept downward by the resistless push of the current, climbed one upon another and lodged. Higher and higher the jam towered, the interlocking logs piling in hopeless tangle.

Moncrossen was beside himself. Up and down the bank he rushed, bellowing orders and hurling curses at the men who, gripping their peaveys, swarmed over the heaving jam like flies.

The bateau men, forty of them, lifted the heavy boat bodily, and working it out to the very forefront of the jam, lowered it into the water, while other men made the heavy cable fast to the trunk of a tree. Close under the towering pile the bateau was snubbed with a short, light line, and the men clambered sh.o.r.eward, leaving only Moncrossen, Stromberg, Fallon, and one other to search for the key-log.

It was a comparatively simple jam, the key to which was instantly apparent to the experienced rivermen, in two large logs wedged in the form of an inverted V. The quick twist of a peavey inserted at the vertex of the angle, and the drive should move.

Fallon and Stromberg, past masters both of the drive made ready while the other stood by to cast off the light line and allow the bateau to swing free on the main cable.

Moncrossen clambered to the top to shout warning to those who swarmed over the body of the jam and along the edges of the river.

At the first bellowed orders of the boss, Bill Carmody had leaped onto the heaving jam and, following in the wake of others, began picking his way to the opposite sh.o.r.e.

New to the game, he had no definite idea of what was expected of him, so, with an eye upon those nearest him, he determined to follow their example.