The Promise Part 9

"No," he said; "there is no one to tell." She leaned over and laid soft fingers on his bandaged brow.

"Isn't--isn't there a real Ethel--somewhere?" He did not resent the question of the sweet-faced nurse.

"Yes," he answered, "there _is_ a real Ethel--but she would not care.

n.o.body cares."

CHAPTER X

NORTHWARD, HO!

Buck Moncrossen was a big man with a shrunken, maggoty soul, and no conscience.

He had learned logging as his horses learned it--by repet.i.tion of unreasoning routine, and after fifteen years' experience in the woods Appleton had made him a camp boss.

His camps varied from year to year in no slightest detail. He made no suggestions for facilitating or systematizing the work, nor would he listen to any. He roared mightily at the subst.i.tution of horses for oxen; he openly scoffed at donkey engines, and would have none of them.

During his years as a sawyer, by the very brute strength and doggedness of him, he had established new records for laying down timber. And now, as boss, he bullied the sawyers who could not equal those records--and hated those who could.

Arbitrary, jealous, malignant, he ruled his camps with the bluff and bl.u.s.ter of the born coward.

Among the lumber-jacks, he was known and hated as a hard driver of men and a savage fighter. In the quick, brutish fights of the camps, men went down under the smashing blows of his huge fists as they would go down to the swing of a derrick-boom, and, once down, would be jumped upon with calked boots and spiked into submission.

It was told in the woods that whisky flowed unchallenged in Buck Moncrossen's camps. His crews were known as hard crews; they "hired out for tough hands, and it was up to them to play their string out."

At the first cry of "gillon" (stormy days when the crews cannot work) flat flasks and round black bottles circulated freely in the bunk-house, and the day started, before breakfast, in a wild orgy of rough horse-play, poker, and profanity.

But woe betide the man who allowed overindulgence to interfere with the morrow's work. Evil things were whispered of Moncrossen's man-handling of "hold-overs."

In the office, back in Minneapolis, if these things were known they were winked at. For Moncrossen was a boss who "got out the logs," and the details of his discipline were unquestioned.

On the Appleton holdings along Blood River the pine stood tall and straight and uncut.

In the years of plenty--those wasteful years of frenzied logging, when white pine lumber brought from twelve to twenty dollars a thousand and rival concerns were laying down only the choicest of logs--Appleton's crews were ordered to clean up as they went.

Toothpick logging it was called then, and H. D. Appleton was contemptuously referred to as "the toothpicker."

Twenty years later, with the market clamoring for white pine at any price, Appleton was selling white pine, while in the denuded forest the crews of his rivals were getting out cull timber and Norway.

And this fall Appleton sent Buck Moncrossen into the Blood River country with orders to put ten million feet of logs into the river by spring.

So it was that the few remaining inhabitants of Hilarity were aroused from their habitual apathy one early fall evening by the shrill shrieks of an engine whistle as Moncrossen's ten-car train, carrying crew and supplies for the new camp, came to a stop at the rusty switch. There was something reminiscent in this whistle-sound. It came as a voice from the past.

Time was, some eight or ten years before, when the old No. 9 and her companion engine, No. 11, whistled daily and importantly into Hilarity, pushing long strings of "flats" onto the spurs; and then whistled out again with each car groaning and creaking under its towering pyramid of logs.

But that was in the days of Hilarity's prosperity--in the days when the little town was the chief loading point for two thousand square miles of timber.

It had been a live town then--work and wages and the spirit to spend--quick, hot life, and quick, cold death danced hand in hand to the clink of gla.s.ses.

Everything ran wide open, and all night long rough men sinned abysmally in their h.e.l.l-envied play, and, crowding the saloons, laughed and fought and drank red liquor in front of long pine bars, where the rattle of chips and the click of pool-b.a.l.l.s, mingled with lurid profanity, floated out through the open doors and blended with the incessant tintinnabulation of the dance-hall pianos.

These were the days of Hilarity's prosperity, when twenty train-loads of logs were jerked from her spurs by day, and the nights rang loud with false laughter.

A vanished prosperity--for now the little town stood all but deserted in its clearing, with the encircling hills denuded of all vegetation save a tangle of underbrush and a straggling growth of stunted jack pine.

Even the "pig-iron loggers"--the hardwood men--had gleaned the last stick from the ridges, and Hilarity had become but a name on the map.

Only those remained who were old or crippled, and a few--a very few--who had undertaken to grub out tiny farms among the stumps.

Each evening these forlorn remnants were wont to forsake their stolid-faced wives and yammering offspring and pick their way through the solitary stump-dotted street, past windowless, deserted buildings which were the saloons and dance-halls of better days, to foregather around the huge stove in the rear of Hod Burrage's general store, which was decrepit Hilarity's sole remaining enterprise, and there to brag and maunder over the dead town's former glory.

The fact that certain of Hod's jugs never tilted to the filling of the vinegar bottles or mola.s.ses pails of the women, not only served to insure unflagging attendance, but the sale of their contents afforded the storekeeper a small but steady income which more than offset any loss incident to the preoccupied inroads upon his cracker barrel.

The sound of the once familiar whistle brought the men tumbling from Burrage's door, while up and down the deserted street ap.r.o.ned forms stood framed in the doorways, beflanked by tousled heads which gazed wonder-eyed from behind tight-gripped skirts.

Not a person in town, except the very newest citizens, and they were too young to care--for n.o.body ever came to Hilarity except by the stork route--but recognized old No. 9's whistle.

Strange, almost apologetic, it sounded after its years of silence; not at all like the throaty bellow of derision with which the long, vestibuled coast trains thundered through the forsaken village.

A brakeman leaped from the cab and ran ahead. Stooping, he cursed the corroded lock of the unused switch which creaked and jarred to the pull of the lever as old No. 9 headed wheezily onto the rust-eaten rails of the rotting spur.

An hour later she puffed noisily away, leaving Moncrossen's crew encamped in the deserted cabins and dilapidated saloons of the worn-out town.

Moncrossen, by making use of old tote-roads, saved about forty of the eighty miles of road building which lay between Hilarity and the Blood River.

Toward the end of October the work was completed, the camp buildings erected, and a brush and log dam thrown across the river at the narrows of a white water rapid.

Swampers and axe-men set to work building skidways and cross-hauls, and the banks of the river were cleared for the roll-ways. The ground was still bare of snow, but the sawyers were "laying them down," and the logs were banked at the skidways.

Then one morning the snow came.

Quietly it fell, in big, downy flakes that floated lazily to earth from the even gray of the cloud-spread sky, tracing aimless, zigzag patterns against the dark green background of the pines, and covering the brown needles of the forest floor and the torn mold of the skidways with a soft blanket of white.

The men sprang eagerly to their work--heartened by the feel of the snow. The tingling air was filled with familiar man-sounds--the resonant stroke of axes, and the long crash of falling trees, the metallic rattle of chains, the harsh rasp of saws, and the good-natured calls of men in rude banter; sounds that rang little and thin through the mighty silence of the forest.

Gradually the flakes hardened and the zigzag patterns resolved themselves into long, threadlike lines which slanted earthward with a soft, hissing sound.

Fast it fell, and faster, until the background disappeared, and all the world was a swift-moving riot of white.

It was a real snow now--a snow of value which buried the soft blanket of the feathery flakes under a stable covering which would pack hard under the heavy runners of the wide log sleds.

It lodged in thick ma.s.ses in the trees whose limbs bent under the weight, and the woods rang to the cries of the sawyers when the tottering of a mighty pine sent a small avalanche hurtling through the lower branches, half-burying them in its white smother.

As the early darkness of the North country settled about them the men plowed heavily to the bunk-house through a foot and a half of fresh-fallen snow--and still it snowed.