The Blazed Trail

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"I've sot up nights with her," said Herrick, "and she's no go. I
think I can fix her when my head gets all right. I got headachy
lately. And somehow that last lot of Babbit metal didn't seem to
act just right."

Thorpe looked out of the window, tapping his desk slowly with the
end of a lead pencil.

"Collins," said he to the bookkeeper, without raising his voice or
altering his position, "make out Herrick's time."

The man stood there astonished.

"But I had hard luck, sir," he expostulated. "She'll go all right
now, I think."

Thorpe turned and looked at him.

"Herrick," he said, not unkindly, "this is the second time this
summer the mill has had to close early on account of that engine.
We have supplied you with everything you asked for. If you can't
do it, we shall have to get a man who can."

"But I had---" began the man once more.

"I ask every man to succeed in what I give him to do," interrupted
Thorpe. "If he has a headache, he must brace up or quit. If his
Babbit doesn't act just right he must doctor it up; or get some more,
even if he has to steal it. If he has hard luck, he must sit up
nights to better it. It's none of my concern how hard or how easy
a time a man has in doing what I tell him to. I EXPECT HIM TO DO IT.
If I have to do all a man's thinking for him, I may as well hire
Swedes and be done with it. I have too many details to attend to
already without bothering about excuses."

The man stood puzzling over this logic.

"I ain't got any other job," he ventured.

"You can go to piling on the docks," replied Thorpe, "if you want to."

Thorpe was thus explicit because he rather liked Herrick. It was
hard for him to discharge the man peremptorily, and he proved the
need of justifying himself in his own eyes.

Now he sat back idly in the clean painted little room with the big
square desk and the three chairs. Through the door he could see
Collins, perched on a high stool before the shelf-like desk. From
the open window came the clear, musical note of the circular saw,
the fresh aromatic smell of new lumber, the bracing air from
Superior sparkling in the offing. He felt tired. In rare moments
such as these, when the muscles of his striving relaxed, his mind
turned to the past. Old sorrows rose before him and looked at him
with their sad eyes; the sorrows that had helped to make him what
he was. He wondered where his sister was. She would be twenty-two
years old now. A tenderness, haunting, tearful, invaded his heart.
He suffered. At such moments the hard shell of his rough woods life
seemed to rend apart. He longed with a great longing for sympathy,
for love, for the softer influences that cradle even warriors
between the clangors of the battles.

The outer door, beyond the cage behind which Collins and his shelf
desk were placed, flew open. Thorpe heard a brief greeting, and
Wallace Carpenter stood before him.

"Why, Wallace, I didn't know you were coming!" began Thorpe, and
stopped. The boy, usually so fresh and happily buoyant, looked ten
years older. Wrinkles had gathered between his eyes. "Why, what's
the matter?" cried Thorpe.

He rose swiftly and shut the door into the outer office. Wallace
seated himself mechanically.

"Everything! everything!" he said in despair. "I've been a fool!
I've been blind!"

So bitter was his tone that Thorpe was startled. The lumberman sat
down on the other side of the desk.

"That'll do, Wallace," he said sharply. "Tell me briefly what is
the matter."

"I've been speculating!" burst out the boy.

"Ah!" said his partner.

"At first I bought only dividend-paying stocks outright. Then I
bought for a rise, but still outright. Then I got in with a fellow
who claimed to know all about it. I bought on a margin. There came
a slump. I met the margins because I am sure there will be a rally,
but now all my fortune is in the thing. I'm going to be penniless.
I'll lose it all."

"Ah!" said Thorpe.

"And the name of Carpenter is so old-established, so honorable!"
cried the unhappy boy, "and my sister!"

"Easy!" warned Thorpe. "Being penniless isn't the worst thing that
can happen to a man."

"No; but I am in debt," went on the boy more calmly. "I have given
notes. When they come due, I'm a goner."

"How much?" asked Thorpe laconically.

"Thirty thousand dollars."

"Well, you have that amount in this firm."

"What do you mean?"

"If you want it, you can have it."

Wallace considered a moment.

"That would leave me without a cent," he replied.

"But it would save your commercial honor."

"Harry," cried Wallace suddenly, "couldn't this firm go on my note
for thirty thousand more? Its credit is good, and that amount
would save my margins."

"You are partner," replied Thorpe, "your signature is as good as
mine in this firm."

"But you know I wouldn't do it without your consent," replied
Wallace reproachfully. "Oh, Harry!" cried the boy, "when you
needed the amount, I let you have it!"

Thorpe smiled.

"You know you can have it, if it's to be had, Wallace. I wasn't
hesitating on that account. I was merely trying to figure out where
we can raise such a sum as sixty thousand dollars. We haven't got
it."

"But you'll never have to pay it," assured Wallace eagerly. "If I
can save my margins, I'll be all right."

"A man has to figure on paying whatever he puts his signature to,"
asserted Thorpe. "I can give you our note payable at the end of a
year. Then I'll hustle in enough timber to make up the amount. It
means we don't get our railroad, that's all."

"I knew you'd help me out. Now it's all right," said Wallace, with
a relieved air.

Thorpe shook his head. He was already trying to figure how to
increase his cut to thirty million feet.

"I'll do it," he muttered to himself, after Wallace had gone out
to visit the mill. "I've been demanding success of others for a
good many years; now I'll demand it of myself."

PART IV

THORPE'S DREAM GIRL

Chapter XXXVII

The moment had struck for the woman. Thorpe did not know it, but
it was true. A solitary, brooding life in the midst of grand
surroundings, an active, strenuous life among great responsibilities,
a starved, hungry life of the affections whence even the sister had
withdrawn her love,--all these had worked unobtrusively towards the
formation of a single psychological condition. Such a moment comes
to every man. In it he realizes the beauties, the powers, the
vastnesses which unconsciously his being has absorbed. They rise
to the surface as a need, which, being satisfied, is projected into
the visible world as an ideal to be worshipped. Then is happiness
and misery beside which the mere struggle to dominate men becomes
trivial, the petty striving with the forces of nature seems a little
thing. And the woman he at that time meets takes on the qualities
of the dream; she is more than woman, less than goddess; she is the
best of that man made visible.

Thorpe found himself for the first time filled with the spirit of
restlessness. His customary iron evenness of temper was gone, so
that he wandered quickly from one detail of his work to another,
without seeming to penetrate below the surface-need of any one
task. Out of the present his mind was always escaping to a mystic
fourth dimension which he did not understand. But a week before, he
had felt himself absorbed in the component parts of his enterprise,
the totality of which arched far over his head, shutting out the
sky. Now he was outside of it. He had, without his volition,
abandoned the creator's standpoint of the god at the heart of his
work. It seemed as important, as great to him, but somehow it had
taken on a strange solidarity, as though he had left it a plastic
beginning and returned to find it hardened into the shapes of
finality. He acknowledged it admirable,--and wondered how he had
ever accomplished it! He confessed that it should be finished as
it had begun,--and could not discover in himself the Titan who had
watched over its inception.

Thorpe took this state of mind much to heart, and in combating it
expended more energy than would have sufficed to accomplish the
work. Inexorably he held himself to the task. He filled his mind
full of lumbering. The millions along the bank on section nine must
be cut and travoyed directly to the rollways. It was a shame that
the necessity should arise. From section nine Thorpe had hoped to
lighten the expenses when finally he should begin operations on the
distant and inaccessible headwaters of French Creek. Now there was
no help for it. The instant necessity was to get thirty millions
of pine logs down the river before Wallace Carpenter's notes came
due. Every other consideration had to yield before that. Fifteen
millions more could be cut on seventeen, nineteen, and eleven,--
regions hitherto practically untouched,--by the men in the four
camps inland. Camp One and Camp Three could attend to section nine.

These were details to which Thorpe applied his mind. As he pushed
through the sun-flecked forest, laying out his roads, placing his
travoy trails, spying the difficulties that might supervene to mar
the fair face of honest labor, he had always this thought before
him,--that he must apply his mind. By an effort, a tremendous
effort, he succeeded in doing so. The effort left him limp. He
found himself often standing, or moving gently, his eyes staring
sightless, his mind cradled on vague misty clouds of absolute
inaction, his will chained so softly and yet so firmly that he felt
no strength and hardly the desire to break from the dream that lulled
him. Then he was conscious of the physical warmth of the sun, the
faint sweet woods smells, the soothing caress of the breeze, the
sleepy cicada-like note of the pine creeper. Through his half-closed
lashes the tangled sun-beams made soft-tinted rainbows. He wanted
nothing so much as to sit on the pine needles there in the golden
flood of radiance, and dream--dream on--vaguely, comfortably,
sweetly--dream of the summer---

Thorpe, with a mighty and impatient effort, snapped the silken
cords asunder.

"Lord, Lord!" he cried impatiently. "What's coming to me? I must
be a little off my feed!"

And he hurried rapidly to his duties. After an hour of the hardest
concentration he had ever been required to bestow on a trivial
subject, he again unconsciously sank by degrees into the old apathy.

"Glad it isn't the busy season!" he commented to himself. "Here, I
must quit this! Guess it's the warm weather. I'll get down to the
mill for a day or two."

There he found himself incapable of even the most petty routine
work. He sat to his desk at eight o'clock and began the perusal
of a sheaf of letters, comprising a certain correspondence, which
Collins brought him. The first three he read carefully; the
following two rather hurriedly; of the next one he seized only the
salient and essential points; the seventh and eighth he skimmed;
the remainder of the bundle he thrust aside in uncontrollable
impatience. Next day he returned to the woods.

The incident of the letters had aroused to the full his old fighting
spirit, before which no mere instincts could stand. He clamped the
iron to his actions and forced them to the way appointed. Once more
his mental processes became clear and incisive, his commands direct
and to the point. To all outward appearance Thorpe was as before.

He opened Camp One, and the Fighting Forty came back from distant
drinking joints. This was in early September, when the raspberries
were entirely done and the blackberries fairly in the way of
vanishing. That able-bodied and devoted band of men was on hand
when needed. Shearer, in some subtle manner of his own, had let
them feel that this year meant thirty million or "bust." They
tightened their leather belts and stood ready for commands. Thorpe
set them to work near the river, cutting roads along the lines he
had blazed to the inland timber on seventeen and nineteen. After
much discussion with Shearer the young man decided to take out the
logs from eleven by driving them down French Creek.

To this end a gang was put to clearing the creekbed. It was a
tremendous job. Centuries of forest life had choked the little
stream nearly to the level of its banks. Old snags and stumps lay
imbedded in the ooze; decayed trunks, moss-grown, blocked the
current; leaning tamaracks, fallen timber, tangled vines, dense
thickets gave to its course more the appearance of a tropical
jungle than of a north country brook-bed. All these things had to
be removed, one by one, and either piled to one side or burnt. In
the end, however, it would pay. French Creek was not a large stream,
but it could be driven during the time of the spring freshets.

Each night the men returned in the beautiful dreamlike twilight to
the camp. There they sat, after eating, smoking their pipes in the
open air. Much of the time they sang, while Phil, crouching wolf-
like over his violin, rasped out an accompaniment of dissonances.
From a distance it softened and fitted pleasantly into the framework
of the wilderness. The men's voices lent themselves well to the
weird minor strains of the chanteys. These times--when the men sang,
and the night-wind rose and died in the hemlock tops--were Thorpe's
worst moments. His soul, tired with the day's iron struggle, fell
to brooding. Strange thoughts came to him, strange visions. He
wanted something he knew not what; he longed, and thrilled, and
aspired to a greater glory than that of brave deeds, a softer
comfort than his old foster mother, the wilderness, could bestow.

The men were singing in a mighty chorus, swaying their heads in
unison, and bringing out with a roar the emphatic words of the
crude ditties written by some genius from their own ranks.

"Come all ye sons of freedom throughout old Michigan,
Come all ye gallant lumbermen, list to a shanty man.
On the banks of the Muskegon, where the rapid waters flow,
OH!--we'll range the wild woods o'er while a-lumbering we go."

Here was the bold unabashed front of the pioneer, here was absolute
certainty in the superiority of his calling,--absolute scorn of all
others. Thorpe passed his hand across his brow. The same spirit was
once fully and freely his.

"The music of our burnished ax shall make the woods resound,
And many a lofty ancient pine will tumble to the ground.
At night around our shanty fire we'll sing while rude winds blow,
OH!--we'll range the wild woods o'er while a-lumbering we go!"

That was what he was here for. Things were going right. It would
be pitiful to fail merely on account of this idiotic lassitude, this
unmanly weakness, this boyish impatience and desire for play. He a
woodsman! He a fellow with these big strong men!

A single voice, clear and high, struck into a quick measure:

"I am a jolly shanty boy,
As you will soon discover;
To all the dodges I am fly,
A hustling pine-woods rover.
A peavey-hook it is my pride,
An ax I well can handle.
To fell a tree or punch a bull,
Get rattling Danny Randall."

And then with a rattle and crash the whole Fighting Forty shrieked
out the chorus:

"Bung yer eye! bung yer eye!"

Active, alert, prepared for any emergency that might arise; hearty,
ready for everything, from punching bulls to felling trees--that
was something like! Thorpe despised himself. The song went on.

"I love a girl in Saginaw,
She lives with her mother.
I defy all Michigan
To find such another.
She's tall and slim, her hair is red,
Her face is plump and pretty.
She's my daisy Sunday best-day girl,
And her front name stands for Kitty."

And again as before the Fighting Forty howled truculently:

"Bung yer eye! bung yer eye!"

The words were vulgar, the air a mere minor chant. Yet Thorpe's
mind was stilled. His aroused subconsciousness had been engaged
in reconstructing these men entire as their songs voiced rudely
the inner characteristics of their beings. Now his spirit halted,
finger on lip. Their bravery, pride of caste, resource, bravado,
boastfulness,--all these he had checked off approvingly. Here now
was the idea of the Mate. Somewhere for each of them was a "Kitty,"
a "daisy Sunday best-day girl"; the eternal feminine; the softer
side; the tenderness, beauty, glory of even so harsh a world as
they were compelled to inhabit. At the present or in the past these
woods roisterers, this Fighting Forty, had known love. Thorpe arose
abruptly and turned at random into the forest. The song pursued
him as he went, but he heard only the clear sweet tones, not the
words. And yet even the words would have spelled to his awakened
sensibilities another idea,--would have symbolized however rudely,
companionship and the human delight of acting a part before a woman.

"I took her to a dance one night,
A mossback gave the bidding--
Silver Jack bossed the shebang,
and Big Dan played the fiddle.
We danced and drank the livelong night
With fights between the dancing,
Till Silver Jack cleaned out the ranch
And sent the mossbacks prancing."

And with the increasing war and turmoil of the quick water the last
shout of the Fighting Forty mingled faintly and was lost.

"Bung yer eye! bung yer eye!"

Thorpe found himself at the edge of the woods facing a little glade
into which streamed the radiance of a full moon.

Chapter XXXVIII

There he stood and looked silently, not understanding, not caring
to inquire. Across the way a white-throat was singing, clear,
beautiful, like the shadow of a dream. The girl stood listening.

Her small fair head was inclined ever so little sideways and her
finger was on her lips as though she wished to still the very hush
of night, to which impression the inclination of her supple body
lent its grace. The moonlight shone full upon her countenance.
A little white face it was, with wide clear eyes and a sensitive,
proud mouth that now half parted like a child's. Here eyebrows
arched from her straight nose in the peculiarly graceful curve
that falls just short of pride on the one side and of power on the
other, to fill the eyes with a pathos of trust and innocence. The
man watching could catch the poise of her long white neck and the
molten moon-fire from her tumbled hair,--the color of corn-silk,
but finer.

And yet these words meant nothing. A painter might have caught
her charm, but he must needs be a poet as well,--and a great poet,
one capable of grandeurs and subtleties.

To the young man standing there rapt in the spell of vague desire,
of awakened vision, she seemed most like a flower or a mist. He
tried to find words to formulate her to himself, but did not succeed.
Always it came back to the same idea--the flower and the mist. Like
the petals of a flower most delicate was her questioning, upturned
face; like the bend of a flower most rare the stalk of her graceful
throat; like the poise of a flower most dainty the attitude of her
beautiful, perfect body sheathed in a garment that outlined each
movement, for the instant in suspense. Like a mist the glimmering
of her skin, the shining of her hair, the elusive moonlike quality
of her whole personality as she stood there in the ghost-like
clearing listening, her fingers on her lips.

Behind her lurked the low, even shadow of the forest where the moon
was not, a band of velvet against which the girl and the light-
touched twigs and bushes and grass blades were etched like frost
against a black window pane. There was something, too, of the
frost-work's evanescent spiritual quality in the scene,--as though
at any moment, with a puff of the balmy summer wind, the radiant
glade, the hovering figure, the filagreed silver of the entire
setting would melt into the accustomed stern and menacing forest
of the northland, with its wolves, and its wild deer, and the voices
of its sterner calling.

Thorpe held his breath and waited. Again the white-throat lifted
his clear, spiritual note across the brightness, slow, trembling
with. The girl never moved. She stood in the moonlight
like a beautiful emblem of silence, half real, half fancy, part
woman, wholly divine, listening to the little bird's message.

For the third time the song shivered across the night, then Thorpe
with a soft sob, dropped his face in his hands and looked no more.

He did not feel the earth beneath his knees, nor the whip of the
sumach across his face; he did not see the moon shadows creep
slowly along the fallen birch; nor did he notice that the white-
throat had hushed its song. His inmost spirit was shaken.
Something had entered his soul and filled it to the brim, so that
he dared no longer stand in the face of radiance until he had
accounted with himself. Another drop would overflow the cup.

Ah, sweet God, the beauty of it, the beauty of it! That questing,
childlike starry gaze, seeking so purely to the stars themselves!
That flower face, those drooping, half parted lips! That
inexpressible, unseizable something they had meant! Thorpe searched
humbly--eagerly--then with agony through his troubled spirit, and in
its furthermost depths saw the mystery as beautifully remote as ever.
It approached and swept over him and left him gasping passion-racked.
Ah, sweet God, the beauty of it! the beauty of it! the vision! the
dream!

He trembled and sobbed with his desire to seize it, with his
impotence to express it, with his failure even to appreciate it
as his heart told him it should be appreciated.

He dared not look. At length he turned and stumbled back through
the moonlit forest crying on his old gods in vain.

At the banks of the river he came to a halt. There in the velvet
pines the moonlight slept calmly, and the shadows rested quietly
under the breezeless sky. Near at hand the river shouted as ever
its cry of joy over the vitality of life, like a spirited boy
before the face of inscrutable nature. All else was silence. Then
from the waste boomed a strange, hollow note, rising, dying, rising
again, instinct with the spirit of the wilds. It fell, and far away
sounded a heavy but distant crash. The cry lifted again. It was the
first bull moose calling across the wilderness to his mate.

And then, faint but clear down the current of a chance breeze
drifted the chorus of the Fighting Forty.

"The forests so brown at our stroke go down,
And cities spring up where they fell;
While logs well run and work well done
Is the story the shanty boys tell."

Thorpe turned from the river with a thrust forward of his head. He
was not a religious man, and in his six years' woods experience had
never been to church. Now he looked up over the tops of the pines
to where the Pleiades glittered faintly among the brighter stars.

"Thanks, God," said he briefly.

Chapter XXXIX

For several days this impression satisfied him completely. He
discovered, strangely enough, that his restlessness had left him,
that once more he was able to give to his work his former energy
and interest. It was as though some power had raised its finger
and a storm had stilled, leaving calm, unruffled skies.

He did not attempt to analyze this; he did not even make an effort
to contemplate it. His critical faculty was stricken dumb and it
asked no questions of him. At a touch his entire life had changed.
Reality or vision, he had caught a glimpse of something so entirely
different from anything his imagination or experience had ever
suggested to him, that at first he could do no more than permit
passively its influences to adjust themselves to his being.

Curiosity, speculation, longing,--all the more active emotions
remained in abeyance while outwardly, for three days, Harry Thorpe
occupied himself only with the needs of the Fighting Forty at Camp
One.

In the early morning he went out with the gang. While they chopped
or heaved, he stood by serene. Little questions of expediency he
solved. Dilemmas he discussed leisurely with Tim Shearer.
Occasionally he lent a shoulder when the peaveys lacked of prying a
stubborn log from its bed. Not once did he glance at the nooning
sun. His patience was quiet and sure. When evening came he smoked
placidly outside the office, listening to the conversation and
laughter of the men, caressing one of the beagles, while the rest
slumbered about his feet, watching dreamily the night shadows and
the bats. At about nine o'clock he went to bed, and slept soundly.
He was vaguely conscious of a great peace within him, a great
stillness of the spirit, against which the metallic events of his
craft clicked sharply in vivid relief. It was the peace and
stillness of a river before it leaps.

Little by little the condition changed. The man felt vague
stirrings of curiosity. He speculated aimlessly as to whether or
not the glade, the moonlight, the girl, had been real or merely the
figments of imagination. Almost immediately the answer leaped at him
from his heart. Since she was so certainly flesh and blood, whence
did she come? what was she doing there in the wilderness? His mind
pushed the query aside as unimportant, rushing eagerly to the
essential point: When could he see her again? How find for the
second time the vision before which his heart felt the instant need
of prostrating itself. His placidity had gone. That morning he made
some vague excuse to Shearer and set out blindly down the river.

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