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George Bernard Shaw - "Caesar and Cleopatra"

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Gilbert Parker - "The Seats Of The Mighty, Volume 2."

The Blazed Trail

S >> Stewart Edward White >> The Blazed Trail




"In that case, you will have to hunt up another locality," replied
Thorpe calmly.

Morrison's eyes flashed. But he retained his appearance of geniality,
and appealed to Wallace Carpenter.

"Then you will retain the advantage of our dams and improvements,"
said he. "Is that fair?"

"No, not on the face of it," admitted Thorpe. "But you did your
work in a navigable stream for private purposes, without the consent
of the Board of Control. Your presence on the river is illegal.
You should have taken out a charter as an Improvement Company. Then
as long as you 'tended to business and kept the concern in repair,
we'd have paid you a toll per thousand feet. As soon as you let it
slide, however, the works would revert to the State. I won't hinder
your doing that yet; although I might. Take out your charter and
fix your rate of toll."

"In other words, you force us to stay there and run a little two-by-
four Improvement Company for your benefit, or else lose the value of
our improvements?"

"Suit yourself," answered Thorpe carelessly. "You can always log
your present holdings."

"Very well," cried Morrison, so suddenly in a passion that Wallace
started back. "It's war! And let me tell you this, young man;
you're a new concern and we're an old one. We'll crush you like
THAT!" He crisped an envelope vindictively, and threw it in the
waste-basket.

"Crush ahead," replied Thorpe with great good humor. "Good-day,
Mr. Morrison," and the two went out.

Wallace was sputtering and trembling with nervous excitement. His
was one of those temperaments which require action to relieve the
stress of a stormy interview. He was brave enough, but he would
always tremble in the presence of danger until the moment for
striking arrived. He wanted to do something at once.

"Hadn't we better see a lawyer?" he asked. "Oughtn't we to look
out that they don't take some of our pine? Oughtn't we---"

"You just leave all that to me," replied Thorpe. "The first thing
we want to do is to rustle some money."

"And you can leave THAT to ME," echoed Wallace. "I know a little
of such things, and I have business connections who know more. You
just get the camp running."

"I'll start for Bay City to-night," submitted Thorpe. "There
ought to be a good lot of lumber-jacks lying around idle at this
time of year; and it's a good place to outfit from because we can
probably get freight rates direct by boat. We'll be a little late
in starting, but we'll get in SOME logs this winter, anyway."






PART III


THE BLAZING OF THE TRAIL



Chapter XXVI


A lumbering town after the drive is a fearful thing. Men just
off the river draw a deep breath, and plunge into the wildest
reactionary dissipation. In droves they invade the cities,--wild,
picturesque, lawless. As long as the money lasts, they blow it in.

"Hot money!" is the cry. "She's burnt holes in all my pockets
already!"

The saloons are full, the gambling houses overflow, all the places
of amusement or crime run full blast. A chip rests lightly on
everyone's shoulder. Fights are as common as raspberries in August.
Often one of these formidable men, his muscles toughened and
quickened by the active, strenuous river work, will set out to "take
the town apart." For a time he leaves rack and ruin, black eyes and
broken teeth behind him, until he meets a more redoubtable "knocker"
and is pounded and kicked into unconsciousness. Organized gangs go
from house to house forcing the peaceful inmates to drink from their
bottles. Others take possession of certain sections of the street
and resist "a l'outrance" the attempts of others to pass. Inoffensive
citizens are stood on their heads, or shaken upside down until the
contents of their pockets rattle on the street. Parenthetically,
these contents are invariably returned to their owners. The
riverman's object is fun, not robbery.

And if rip-roaring, swashbuckling, drunken glory is what he is after,
he gets it. The only trouble is, that a whole winter's hard work
goes in two or three weeks. The only redeeming feature is, that he
is never, in or out of his cups, afraid of anything that walks the
earth.

A man comes out of the woods or off the drive with two or three
hundred dollars, which he is only too anxious to throw away by the
double handful. It follows naturally that a crew of sharpers are
on hand to find out who gets it. They are a hard lot. Bold,
unprincipled men, they too are afraid of nothing; not even a
drunken lumber-jack, which is one of the dangerous wild animals
of the American fauna. Their business is to relieve the man of
his money as soon as possible. They are experts at their business.

The towns of Bay City and Saginaw alone in 1878 supported over
fourteen hundred tough characters. Block after block was devoted
entirely to saloons. In a radius of three hundred feet from the
famous old Catacombs could be numbered forty saloons, where drinks
were sold by from three to ten "pretty waiter girls." When the
boys struck town, the proprietors and waitresses stood in their
doorways to welcome them.

"Why, Jack!" one would cry, "when did you drift in? Tickled to
death to see you! Come in an' have a drink. That your chum? Come
in, old man, and have a drink. Never mind the pay; that's all right."

And after the first drink, Jack, of course, had to treat, and then
the chum.

Or if Jack resisted temptation and walked resolutely on, one of the
girls would remark audibly to another.

"He ain't no lumber-jack! You can see that easy 'nuff! He's jest
off th' hay-trail!"

Ten to one that brought him, for the woodsman is above all things
proud and jealous of his craft.

In the center of this whirlpool of iniquity stood the Catacombs as
the hub from which lesser spokes in the wheel radiated. Any old
logger of the Saginaw Valley can tell you of the Catacombs, just
as any old logger of any other valley will tell you of the "Pen,"
the "White Row," the "Water Streets" of Alpena, Port Huron,
Ludington, Muskegon, and a dozen other lumber towns.

The Catacombs was a three-story building. In the basement were
vile, ill-smelling, ill-lighted dens, small, isolated, dangerous.
The shanty boy with a small stake, far gone in drunkenness, there
tasted the last drop of wickedness, and thence was flung unconscious
and penniless on the streets. A trap-door directly into the river
accommodated those who were inconsiderate enough to succumb under
rough treatment.

The second story was given over to drinking. Polly Dickson there
reigned supreme, an anomaly. She was as pretty and fresh and
pure-looking as a child; and at the same time was one of the most
ruthless and unscrupulous of the gang. She could at will exercise
a fascination the more terrible in that it appealed at once to her
victim's nobler instincts of reverence, his capacity for what might
be called aesthetic fascination, as well as his passions. When she
finally held him, she crushed him as calmly as she would a fly.

Four bars supplied the drinkables. Dozens of "pretty waiter girls"
served the customers. A force of professional fighters was maintained
by the establishment to preserve that degree of peace which should
look to the preservation of mirrors and glassware.

The third story contained a dance hall and a theater. The character
of both would better be left to the imagination.

Night after night during the season, this den ran at top-steam.

By midnight, when the orgy was at its height, the windows brilliantly
illuminated, the various bursts of music, laughing, cursing, singing,
shouting, fighting, breaking in turn or all together from its open
windows, it was, as Jackson Hines once expressed it to me, like hell
let out for noon.

The respectable elements of the towns were powerless. They could
not control the elections. Their police would only have risked
total annihilation by attempting a raid. At the first sign of
trouble they walked straightly in the paths of their own affairs,
awaiting the time soon to come when, his stake "blown-in," the
last bitter dregs of his pleasure gulped down, the shanty boy would
again start for the woods.



Chapter XXVII


Now in August, however, the first turmoil had died. The "jam" had
boiled into town, "taken it apart," and left the inhabitants to
piece it together again as they could; the "rear" had not yet
arrived. As a consequence, Thorpe found the city comparatively
quiet.

Here and there swaggered a strapping riverman, his small felt hat
cocked aggressively over one eye, its brim curled up behind; a
cigar stump protruding at an angle from beneath his sweeping
moustache; his hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers,
"stagged" off at the knee; the spikes of his river boots cutting
little triangular pieces from the wooden sidewalk. His eye was
aggressively humorous, and the smile of his face was a challenge.

For in the last month he had faced almost certain death a dozen
times a day. He had ridden logs down the rapids where a loss of
balance meant in one instant a ducking and in the next a blow on
the back from some following battering-ram; he had tugged and
strained and jerked with his peavey under a sheer wall of tangled
timber twenty feet high,--behind which pressed the full power of
the freshet,--only to jump with the agility of a cat from one bit
of unstable footing to another when the first sharp CRACK warned him
that he had done his work, and that the whole mass was about to
break down on him like a wave on the shore; he had worked fourteen
hours a day in ice-water, and had slept damp; he had pried at the
key log in the rollways on the bank until the whole pile had begun
to rattle down into the river like a cascade, and had jumped, or
ridden, or even dived out of danger at the last second. In a
hundred passes he had juggled with death as a child plays with a
rubber balloon. No wonder that he has brought to the town and his
vices a little of the lofty bearing of an heroic age. No wonder
that he fears no man, since nature's most terrible forces of the
flood have hurled a thousand weapons at him in vain. His muscles
have been hardened, his eye is quiet and sure, his courage is
undaunted, and his movements are as quick and accurate as a panther's.
Probably nowhere in the world is a more dangerous man of his hands
than the riverman. He would rather fight than eat, especially when
he is drunk, as, like the cow-boy, he usually is when he gets into
town. A history could be written of the feuds, the wars, the raids
instituted by one camp or one town against another.

The men would go in force sometimes to another city with the avowed
purpose of cleaning it out. One battle I know of lasted nearly all
night. Deadly weapons were almost never resorted to, unless indeed
a hundred and eighty pounds of muscle behind a fist hard as iron
might be considered a deadly weapon. A man hard pressed by numbers
often resorted to a billiard cue, or an ax, or anything else that
happened to be handy, but that was an expedient called out by
necessity. Knives or six-shooters implied a certain premeditation
which was discountenanced.

On the other hand, the code of fair fighting obtained hardly at
all. The long spikes of river-boots made an admirable weapon in the
straight kick. I have seen men whose faces were punctured as thickly
as though by small-pox, where the steel points had penetrated. In a
free-for-all knock-down-and-drag-out, kicking, gouging, and biting
are all legitimate. Anything to injure the other man, provided
always you do not knife him. And when you take a half dozen of these
enduring, active, muscular, and fiery men, not one entertaining in
his innermost heart the faintest hesitation or fear, and set them at
each other with the lightning tirelessness of so many wild-cats, you
get as hard a fight as you could desire. And they seem to like it.

One old fellow, a good deal of a character in his way, used to be
on the "drive" for a firm lumbering near Six Lakes. He was
intensely loyal to his "Old Fellows," and every time he got a
little "budge" in him, he instituted a raid on the town owned by
a rival firm. So frequent and so severe did these battles become
that finally the men were informed that another such expedition
would mean instant discharge. The rule had its effect. The raids
ceased.

But one day old Dan visited the saloon once too often. He became
very warlike. The other men merely laughed, for they were strong
enough themselves to recognize firmness in others, and it never
occurred to them that they could disobey so absolute a command.
So finally Dan started out quite alone.

He invaded the enemy's camp, attempted to clean out the saloon with
a billiard cue single handed, was knocked down, and would have been
kicked to death as he lay on the floor if he had not succeeded in
rolling under the billiard table where the men's boots could not
reach him. As it was, his clothes were literally torn to ribbons,
one eye was blacked, his nose broken, one ear hung to its place by
a mere shred of skin, and his face and flesh were ripped and torn
everywhere by the "corks" on the boots. Any but a riverman would
have qualified for the hospital. Dan rolled to the other side of
the table, made a sudden break, and escaped.

But his fighting blood was not all spilled. He raided the butcher-
shop, seized the big carving knife, and returned to the battle field.

The enemy decamped--rapidly--some of them through the window. Dan
managed to get in but one blow. He ripped the coat down the man's
back as neatly as though it had been done with shears, one clean
straight cut from collar to bottom seam. A quarter of an inch
nearer would have split the fellow's backbone. As it was, he
escaped without even a scratch.

Dan commandeered two bottles of whisky, and, gory and wounded as he
was, took up the six-mile tramp home, bearing the knife over his
shoulder as a banner of triumph.

Next morning, weak from the combined effects of war and whisky, he
reported to headquarters.

"What is it, Dan?" asked the Old Fellow without turning.

"I come to get my time," replied the riverman humbly.

"What for?" inquired the lumberman.

"I have been over to Howard City," confessed Dan.

The owner turned and looked him over.

"They sort of got ahead of me a little," explained Dan sheepishly.

The lumberman took stock of the old man's cuts and bruises, and
turned away to hide a smile.

"I guess I'll let you off this trip," said he. "Go to work--when
you can. I don't believe you'll go back there again."

"No, sir," replied Dan humbly."

And so the life of alternate work and pleasure, both full of personal
danger, develops in time a class of men whose like is be found only
among the cowboys, scouts, trappers, and Indian fighters of our other
frontiers. The moralists will always hold up the hands of horror at
such types; the philosopher will admire them as the last incarnation
of the heroic age, when the man is bigger than his work. Soon the
factories, the machines, the mechanical structures and constructions,
the various branches of co-operation will produce quasi-automatically
institutions evidently more important than the genius or force of
any one human being. The personal element will have become nearly
eliminated. In the woods and on the frontier still are many whose
powers are greater than their works; whose fame is greater than their
deeds. They are men, powerful, virile, even brutal at times; but
magnificent with the strength of courage and resource.

All this may seem a digression from the thread of our tale, but as
a matter of fact it is necessary that you understand the conditions
of the time and place in which Harry Thorpe had set himself the duty
of success.

He had seen too much of incompetent labor to be satisfied with
anything but the best. Although his ideas were not as yet
formulated, he hoped to be able to pick up a crew of first-class
men from those who had come down with the advance, or "jam," of the
spring's drive. They should have finished their orgies by now, and,
empty of pocket, should be found hanging about the boarding-houses
and the quieter saloons. Thorpe intended to offer good wages for
good men. He would not need more than twenty at first, for during
the approaching winter he purposed to log on a very small scale
indeed. The time for expansion would come later.

With this object in view he set out from his hotel about half-past
seven on the day of his arrival, to cruise about in the lumber-jack
district already described. The hotel clerk had obligingly given him
the names of a number of the quieter saloons, where the boys "hung
out" between bursts of prosperity. In the first of these Thorpe was
helped materially in his vague and uncertain quest by encountering
an old acquaintance.

From the sidewalk he heard the vigorous sounds of a one-sided
altercation punctuated by frequent bursts of quickly silenced
laughter. Evidently some one was very angry, and the rest amused.
After a moment Thorpe imagined he recognized the excited voice. So
he pushed open the swinging screen door and entered.

The place was typical. Across one side ran the hard-wood bar with
foot-rest and little towels hung in metal clasps under its edge.
Behind it was a long mirror, a symmetrical pile of glasses, a
number of plain or ornamental bottles, and a miniature keg or so of
porcelain containing the finer whiskys and brandies. The bar-keeper
drew beer from two pumps immediately in front of him, and rinsed
glasses in some sort of a sink under the edge of the bar. The
center of the room was occupied by a tremendous stove capable of
burning whole logs of cordwood. A stovepipe led from the stove here
and there in wire suspension to a final exit near the other corner.
On the wall were two sporting chromos, and a good variety of
lithographed calendars and illuminated tin signs advertising beers
and spirits. The floor was liberally sprinkled with damp sawdust,
and was occupied, besides the stove, by a number of wooden chairs
and a single round table.

The latter, a clumsy heavy affair beyond the strength of an ordinary
man, was being deftly interposed between himself and the attacks of
the possessor of the angry voice by a gigantic young riverman in the
conventional stagged (i.e., chopped off) trousers, "cork" shoes, and
broad belt typical of his craft. In the aggressor Thorpe recognized
old Jackson Hines.

"Damn you!" cried the old man, qualifying the oath, "let me get at
you, you great big sock-stealer, I'll make you hop high! I'll snatch
you bald-headed so quick that you'll think you never had any hair!"

"I'll settle with you in the morning, Jackson," laughed the riverman.

"You want to eat a good breakfast, then, because you won't have no
appetite for dinner."

The men roared, with encouraging calls. The riverman put on a
ludicrous appearance of offended dignity.

"Oh, you needn't swell up like a poisoned pup!" cried old Jackson
plaintively, ceasing his attacks from sheer weariness. "You know
you're as safe as a cow tied to a brick wall behind that table."

Thorpe seized the opportunity to approach.

"Hello, Jackson," said he.

The old man peered at him out of the blur of his excitement.

"Don't you know me?" inquired Thorpe.

"Them lamps gives 'bout as much light as a piece of chalk,"
complained Jackson testily. "Knows you? You bet I do! How are
you, Harry? Where you been keepin' yourself? You look 'bout as
fat as a stall-fed knittin' needle."

"I've been landlooking in the upper peninsula," explained Thorpe,
"on the Ossawinamakee, up in the Marquette country."

"Sho'" commented Jackson in wonder, "way up there where the moon
changes!"

"It's a fine country," went on Thorpe so everyone could hear, "with
a great cutting of white pine. It runs as high as twelve hundred
thousand to the forty sometimes."

"Trees clean an' free of limbs?" asked Jackson.

"They're as good as the stuff over on seventeen; you remember that."

"Clean as a baby's leg," agreed Jackson.

"Have a glass of beer?" asked Thorpe.

"Dry as a tobacco box," confessed Hines.

"Have something, the rest of you?" invited Thorpe.

So they all drank.

On a sudden inspiration Thorpe resolved to ask the old man's advice
as to crew and horses. It might not be good for much, but it would
do no harm.

Jackson listened attentively to the other's brief recital.

"Why don't you see Tim Shearer? He ain't doin' nothin' since the
jam came down," was his comment.

"Isn't he with the M. & D. people?" asked Thorpe.

"Nope. Quit."

"How's that?"

"'Count of Morrison. Morrison he comes up to run things some. He
does. Tim he's getting the drive in shape, and he don't want to be
bothered, but old Morrison he's as busy as hell beatin' tan-bark.
Finally Tim, he calls him. "'Look here, Mr. Morrison,' says he,
'I'm runnin' this drive. If I don't get her there, all right; you
can give me my time. 'Till then you ain't got nothin' to say.'

"Well, that makes the Old Fellow as sore as a scalded pup. He's
used to bossin' clerks and such things, and don't have much of an
idea of lumber-jacks. He has big ideas of respect, so he 'calls'
Tim dignified like.

"Tim didn't hit him; but I guess he felt like th' man who met the
bear without any weapon,--even a newspaper would 'a' come handy. He
hands in his time t' once and quits. Sence then he's been as mad as
a bar-keep with a lead quarter, which ain't usual for Tim. He's been
filin' his teeth for M. & D. right along. Somethin's behind it all,
I reckon."

"Where'll I find him?" asked Thorpe.

Jackson gave the name of a small boarding-house. Shortly after,
Thorpe left him to amuse the others with his unique conversation,
and hunted up Shearer's stopping-place.



Chapter XXVIII


The boarding-house proved to be of the typical lumber-jack class, a
narrow "stoop," a hall-way and stairs in the center, and an office
and bar on either side. Shearer and a half dozen other men about
his own age sat, their chairs on two legs and their "cork" boots on
the rounds of the chairs, smoking placidly in the tepid evening air.
The light came from inside the building, so that while Thorpe was
in plain view, he could not make out which of the dark figures on
the piazza was the man he wanted. He approached, and attempted an
identifying scrutiny. The men, with the taciturnity of their class
in the presence of a stranger, said nothing.

"Well, bub," finally drawled a voice from the corner, "blowed that
stake you made out of Radway, yet?"

"That you, Shearer?" inquired Thorpe advancing. "You're the man I'm
looking for."

"You've found me," replied the old man dryly.

Thorpe was requested elaborately to "shake hands" with the owners
of six names. Then he had a chance to intimate quietly to Shearer
that he wanted a word with him alone. The riverman rose silently
and led the way up the straight, uncarpeted stairs, along a narrow,
uncarpeted hall, to a square, uncarpeted bedroom. The walls and
ceiling of this apartment were of unpainted planed pine. It
contained a cheap bureau, one chair, and a bed and washstand to
match the bureau. Shearer lit the lamp and sat on the bed.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I have a little pine up in the northern peninsula within walking
distance of Marquette," said Thorpe, "and I want to get a crew of
about twenty men. It occurred to me that you might be willing to
help me."

The riverman frowned steadily at his interlocutor from under his
bushy brows.

"How much pine you got?" he asked finally.

"About three hundred millions," replied Thorpe quietly.

The old man's blue eyes fixed themselves with unwavering steadiness
on Thorpe's face.

"You're jobbing some of it, eh?" he submitted finally as the only
probable conclusion. "Do you think you know enough about it? Who
does it belong to?"

"It belongs to a man named Carpenter and myself."

The riverman pondered this slowly for an appreciable interval, and
then shot out another question.

"How'd you get it?"

Thorpe told him simply, omitting nothing except the name of the firm
up-river. When he had finished, Shearer evinced no astonishment nor
approval.

"You done well," he commented finally. Then after another interval:

"Have you found out who was the men stealin' the pine?"

"Yes," replied Thorpe quietly, "it was Morrison & Daly."

The old man flickered not an eyelid. He slowly filled his pipe and
lit it.

"I'll get you a crew of men," said he, "if you'll take me as foreman."

"But it's a little job at first," protested Thorpe. "I only want
a camp of twenty. It wouldn't be worth your while."

"That's my look-out. I'll take th' job," replied the logger grimly.
"You got three hundred million there, ain't you? And you're goin'
to cut it? It ain't such a small job."

Thorpe could hardly believe his good-fortune in having gained so
important a recruit. With a practical man as foreman, his mind
would be relieved of a great deal of worry over unfamiliar detail.
He saw at once that he would himself be able to perform all the
duties of scaler, keep in touch with the needs of the camp, and
supervise the campaign. Nevertheless he answered the older man's
glance with one as keen, and said:

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