The Blazed Trail

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The jam creaked and groaned in response to the pressure. From its
face a hundred jets of water spurted into the lower stream. Logs
up-ended here and there, rising from the bristling surface slowly,
like so many arms from lower depths. Above, the water eddied back
foaming; logs shot down from the rollways, paused at the slackwater,
and finally hit with a hollow and resounding BOOM! against the tail
of the jam. A moment later they too up-ended, so becoming an integral
part of the "chevaux de frise."

The crew were working desperately. Down in the heap somewhere, two
logs were crossed in such a manner as to lock the whole. They
sought those logs.

Thirty feet above the bed of the river six men clamped their peaveys
into the soft pine; jerking, pulling, lifting, sliding the great logs
from their places. Thirty feet below, under the threatening face, six
other men coolly picked out and set adrift, one by one, the timbers
not inextricably imbedded. From time to time the mass creaked,
settled, perhaps even moved a foot or two; but always the practiced
rivermen, after a glance, bent more eagerly to their work.

Outlined against the sky, big Bryan Moloney stood directing the
work. He had gone at the job on the bias of indirection, picking
out a passage at either side that the center might the more easily
"pull." He knew by the tenseness of the log he stood on that,
behind the jam, power had gathered sufficient to push the whole
tangle down-stream. Now he was offering it the chance.

Suddenly the six men below the jam scattered. Four of them, holding
their peaveys across their bodies, jumped lightly from one floating
log to another in the zigzag to shore. When they stepped on a small
log they re-leaped immediately, leaving a swirl of foam where the
little timber had sunk under them; when they encountered one larger,
they hesitated for a barely perceptible instant. Thus their
progression was of fascinating and graceful irregularity. The other
two ran the length of their footing, and, overleaping an open of
water, landed heavily and firmly on the very ends of two small
floating logs. In this manner the force of the jump rushed the
little timbers end-on through the water. The two men, maintaining
marvellously their balance, were thus ferried to within leaping
distance of the other shore.

In the meantime a barely perceptible motion was communicating
itself from one particle to another through the center of the jam.
A cool and observant spectator might have imagined that the broad
timber carpet was changing a little its pattern, just as the earth
near the windows of an arrested railroad train seems for a moment
to retrogress. The crew redoubled its exertions, clamping its
peaveys here and there, apparently at random, but in reality with
the most definite of purposes. A sharp crack exploded immediately
underneath. There could no longer exist any doubt as to the motion,
although it was as yet sluggish, glacial. Then in silence a log
shifted--in silence and slowly--but with irresistible force. Jimmy
Powers quietly stepped over it, just as it menaced his leg. Other
logs in all directions up-ended. The jam crew were forced continually
to alter their positions, riding the changing timbers bent-kneed, as
a circus rider treads his four galloping horses.

Then all at once down by the face something crashed. The entire
stream became alive. It hissed and roared, it shrieked, groaned and
grumbled. At first slowly, then more rapidly, the very forefront of
the center melted inward and forward and downward until it caught
the fierce rush of the freshet and shot out from under the jam.
Far up-stream, bristling and formidable, the tons of logs, grinding
savagely together, swept forward.

The six men and Bryan Moloney--who, it will be remembered, were
on top--worked until the last moment. When the logs began to cave
under them so rapidly that even the expert rivermen found difficulty
in "staying on top," the foreman set the example of hunting safety.

"She 'pulls,' boys," he yelled.

Then in a manner wonderful to behold, through the smother of foam
and spray, through the crash and yell of timbers protesting the
flood's hurrying, through the leap of destruction, the drivers
zigzagged calmly and surely to the shore.

All but Jimmy Powers. He poised tense and eager on the crumbling
face of the jam. Almost immediately he saw what he wanted, and
without pause sprang boldly and confidently ten feet straight
downward, to alight with accuracy on a single log floating free
in the current. And then in the very glory and chaos of the jam
itself he was swept down-stream.

After a moment the constant acceleration in speed checked, then
commenced perceptibly to slacken. At once the rest of the crew
began to ride down-stream. Each struck the caulks of his river
boots strongly into a log, and on such unstable vehicles floated
miles with the current. From time to time, as Bryan Moloney
indicated, one of them went ashore. There, usually at a bend of
the stream where the likelihood of jamming was great, they took
their stands. When necessary, they ran out over the face of the
river to separate a congestion likely to cause trouble. The rest
of the time they smoked their pipes.

At noon they ate from little canvas bags which had been filled
that morning by the cookee. At sunset they rode other logs down
the river to where their camp had been made for them. There they
ate hugely, hung their ice-wet garments over a tall framework
constructed around a monster fire, and turned in on hemlock
branches.

All night long the logs slipped down the moonlit current, silently,
swiftly, yet without haste. The porcupines invaded the sleeping
camp. From the whole length of the river rang the hollow BOOM,
BOOM, BOOM, of timbers striking one against the other.

The drive was on.

Chapter XLVII

In the meantime the main body of the crew under Thorpe and his
foremen were briskly tumbling the logs into the current. Sometimes
under the urging of the peaveys, but a single stick would slide
down; or again a double tier would cascade with the roar of a
little Niagara. The men had continually to keep on the tension of
an alert, for at any moment they were called upon to exercise their
best judgment and quickness to keep from being carried downward with
the rush of the logs. Not infrequently a frowning sheer wall of
forty feet would hesitate on the brink of plunge. Then Shearer
himself proved his right to the title of riverman.

Shearer wore caulks nearly an inch in length. He had been known
to ride ten miles, without shifting his feet, on a log so small
that he could carry it without difficulty. For cool nerve he was
unexcelled.

"I don't need you boys here any longer," he said quietly.

When the men had all withdrawn, he walked confidently under the front
of the rollway, glancing with practiced eye at the perpendicular wall
of logs over him. Then, as a man pries jack-straws, he clamped his
peavey and tugged sharply. At once the rollway flattened and toppled.
A mighty splash, a hurl of flying foam and crushing timbers, and the
spot on which the riverman had stood was buried beneath twenty feet
of solid green wood. To Thorpe it seemed that Shearer must have been
overwhelmed, but the riverman always mysteriously appeared at one
side or the other, nonchalant, urging the men to work before the
logs should have ceased to move. Tradition claimed that only once
in a long woods life had Shearer been forced to "take water" before
a breaking rollway: and then he saved his peavey. History stated
that he had never lost a man on the river, simply and solely because
he invariably took the dangerous tasks upon himself.

As soon as the logs had caught the current, a dozen men urged them
on. With their short peaveys, the drivers were enabled to prevent
the timbers from swirling in the eddies--one of the first causes of
a jam. At last, near the foot of the flats, they abandoned them to
the stream, confident that Moloney and his crew would see to their
passage down the river.

In three days the rollways were broken. Now it became necessary to
start the rear.

For this purpose Billy Camp, the cook, had loaded his cook-stove, a
quantity of provisions, and a supply of bedding, aboard a scow. The
scow was built of tremendous hewn timbers, four or five inches thick,
to withstand the shock of the logs. At either end were long sweeps
to direct its course. The craft was perhaps forty feet long, but
rather narrow, in order that it might pass easily through the chute
of a dam. It was called the "wanigan."

Billy Camp, his cookee, and his crew of two were now doomed to
tribulation. The huge, unwieldy craft from that moment was to
become possessed of the devil. Down the white water of rapids it
would bump, smashing obstinately against boulders, impervious to
the frantic urging of the long sweeps; against the roots and
branches of the streamside it would scrape with the perverseness
of a vicious horse; in the broad reaches it would sulk, refusing
to proceed; and when expediency demanded its pause, it would drag
Billy Camp and his entire crew at the rope's end, while they tried
vainly to snub it against successively uprooted trees and stumps.
When at last the wanigan was moored fast for the night,--usually
a mile or so below the spot planned,--Billy Camp pushed back his
battered old brown derby hat, the badge of his office, with a sigh
of relief. To be sure he and his men had still to cut wood,
construct cooking and camp fires, pitch tents, snip browse, and
prepare supper for seventy men; but the hard work of the day was
over. Billy Camp did not mind rain or cold--he would cheerfully
cook away with the water dripping from his battered derby to his
chubby and cold-purpled nose--but he did mind the wanigan. And the
worst of it was, he got no sympathy nor aid from the crew. From
either bank he and his anxious struggling assistants were greeted
with ironic cheers and facetious remarks. The tribulations of the
wanigan were as the salt of life to the spectators.

Billy Camp tried to keep back of the rear in clear water, but when
the wanigan so disposed, he found himself jammed close in the logs.
There he had a chance in his turn to become spectator, and so to
repay in kind some of the irony and facetiousness.

Along either bank, among the bushes, on sandbars, and in trees,
hundreds and hundreds of logs had been stranded when the main
drive passed. These logs the rear crew were engaged in restoring
to the current.

And as a man had to be able to ride any kind of a log in any water;
to propel that log by jumping on it, by rolling it squirrel fashion
with the feet, by punting it as one would a canoe; to be skillful
in pushing, prying, and poling other logs from the quarter deck of
the same cranky craft; as he must be prepared at any and all times
to jump waist deep into the river, to work in ice-water hours at a
stretch; as he was called upon to break the most dangerous jams on
the river, representing, as they did, the accumulation which the jam
crew had left behind them, it was naturally considered the height
of glory to belong to the rear crew. Here were the best of the
Fighting Forty,--men with a reputation as "white-water birlers"--
men afraid of nothing.

Every morning the crews were divided into two sections under Kerlie
and Jack Hyland. Each crew had charge of one side of the river, with
the task of cleaning it thoroughly of all stranded and entangled
logs. Scotty Parsons exercised a general supervisory eye over both
crews. Shearer and Thorpe traveled back and forth the length of the
drive, riding the logs down stream, but taking to a partly submerged
pole trail when ascending the current. On the surface of the river
in the clear water floated two long graceful boats called bateaux.
These were in charge of expert boatmen,--men able to propel their
craft swiftly forwards, backwards and sideways, through all kinds
of water. They carried in racks a great supply of pike-poles,
peaveys, axes, rope and dynamite, for use in various emergencies.
Intense rivalry existed as to which crew "sacked" the farthest down
stream in the course of the day. There was no need to urge the
men. Some stood upon the logs, pushing mightily with the long
pike-poles. Others, waist deep in the water, clamped the jaws of
their peaveys into the stubborn timbers, and, shoulder bent, slid
them slowly but surely into the swifter waters. Still others,
lining up on either side of one of the great brown tree trunks,
carried it bodily to its appointed place. From one end of the
rear to the other, shouts, calls, warnings, and jokes flew back
and forth. Once or twice a vast roar of Homeric laughter went up
as some unfortunate slipped and soused into the water. When the
current slacked, and the logs hesitated in their run, the entire
crew hastened, bobbing from log to log, down river to see about
it. Then they broke the jam, standing surely on the edge of the
great darkness, while the ice water sucked in and out of their shoes.

Behind the rear Big Junko poled his bateau backwards and forwards
exploding dynamite. Many of the bottom tiers of logs in the
rollways had been frozen down, and Big Junko had to loosen them
from the bed of the stream. He was a big man, this, as his nickname
indicated, built of many awkwardnesses. His cheekbones were high,
his nose flat, his lips thick and slobbery. He sported a wide,
ferocious straggling mustache and long eye-brows, under which
gleamed little fierce eyes. His forehead sloped back like a
beast's, but was always hidden by a disreputable felt hat. Big
Junko did not know much, and had the passions of a wild animal,
but he was a reckless riverman and devoted to Thorpe. Just now
he exploded dynamite.

The sticks of powder were piled amidships. Big Junko crouched over
them, inserting the fuses and caps, closing the openings with soap,
finally lighting them, and dropping them into the water alongside,
where they immediately sank. Then a few strokes of a short paddle
took him barely out of danger. He huddled down in his craft,
waiting. One, two, three seconds passed. Then a hollow boom shook
the stream. A cloud of water sprang up, strangely beautiful. After
a moment the great brown logs rose suddenly to the surface from below,
one after the other, like leviathans of the deep. And Junko watched,
dimly fascinated, in his rudimentary animal's brain, by the sight of
the power he had evoked to his aid.

When night came the men rode down stream to where the wanigan had
made camp. There they slept, often in blankets wetted by the
wanigan's eccentricities, to leap to their feet at the first cry
in early morning. Some days it rained, in which case they were
wet all the time. Almost invariably there was a jam to break,
though strangely enough almost every one of the old-timers believed
implicitly that "in the full of the moon logs will run free at night."

Thorpe and Tim Shearer nearly always slept in a dog tent at the
rear; though occasionally they passed the night at Dam Two, where
Bryan Moloney and his crew were already engaged in sluicing the
logs through the chute.

The affair was simple enough. Long booms arranged in the form of an
open V guided the drive to the sluice gate, through which a smooth
apron of water rushed to turmoil in an eddying pool below. Two men
tramped steadily backwards and forwards on the booms, urging the
logs forward by means of long pike poles to where the suction could
seize them. Below the dam, the push of the sluice water forced them
several miles down stream, where the rest of Bryan Moloney's crew
took them in charge.

Thus through the wide gate nearly three-quarters of a million feet
an hour could be run--a quantity more than sufficient to keep pace
with the exertions of the rear. The matter was, of course, more or
less delayed by the necessity of breaking out such rollways as they
encountered from time to time on the banks. At length, however, the
last of the logs drifted into the wide dam pool. The rear had
arrived at Dam Two, and Thorpe congratulated himself that one stage
of his journey had been completed. Billy Camp began to worry about
shooting the wanigan through the sluice-way.

Chapter XLVIII

The rear had been tenting at the dam for two days, and was about
ready to break camp, when Jimmy Powers swung across the trail to
tell them of the big jam.

Ten miles along the river bed, the stream dropped over a little
half-falls into a narrow, rocky gorge. It was always an anxious
spot for the river drivers. In fact, the plunging of the logs
head-on over the fall had so gouged out the soft rock below, that
an eddy of great power had formed in the basin. Shearer and Thorpe
had often discussed the advisability of constructing an artificial
apron of logs to receive the impact. Here, in spite of all efforts,
the jam had formed, first a little center of a few logs in the
middle of the stream, dividing the current, and shunting the logs
to right and left; then "wings" growing out from either bank, built
up from logs shunted too violently; finally a complete stoppage of
the channel, and the consequent rapid piling up as the pressure of
the drive increased. Now the bed was completely filled, far above
the level of the falls, by a tangle that defied the jam crew's
best efforts.

The rear at once took the trail down the river. Thorpe and Shearer
and Scotty Parsons looked over the ground.

"She may 'pull,' if she gets a good start," decided Tim.

Without delay the entire crew was set to work. Nearly a hundred
men can pick a great many logs in the course of a day. Several
times the jam started, but always "plugged" before the motion
had become irresistible. This was mainly because the rocky walls
narrowed at a slight bend to the west, so that the drive was
throttled, as it were. It was hoped that perhaps the middle of
the jam might burst through here, leaving the wings stranded. The
hope was groundless.

"We'll have to shoot," Shearer reluctantly decided.

The men were withdrawn. Scotty Parsons cut a sapling twelve feet
long, and trimmed it. Big Junko thawed his dynamite at a little
fire, opening the ends of the packages in order that the steam
generated might escape. Otherwise the pressure inside the oiled
paper of the package was capable of exploding the whole affair.
When the powder was warm, Scotty bound twenty of the cartridges
around the end of the sapling, adjusted a fuse in one of them, and
soaped the opening to exclude water. Then Big Junko thrust the long
javelin down into the depths of the jam, leaving a thin stream of
smoke behind him as he turned away. With sinister, evil eye he
watched the smoke for an instant, then zigzagged awkwardly over the
jam, the long, ridiculous tails of his brown cutaway coat flopping
behind him as he leaped. A scant moment later the hoarse dynamite
shouted.

Great chunks of timber shot to an inconceivable height; entire logs
lifted bodily into the air with the motion of a fish jumping; a
fountain of water gleamed against the sun and showered down in fine
rain. The jam shrugged and settled. That was all; the "shot" had
failed.

The men ran forward, examining curiously the great hole in the log
formation.

"We'll have to flood her," said Thorpe.

So all the gates of the dam were raised, and the torrent tried
its hand. It had no effect. Evidently the affair was not one
of violence, but of patience. The crew went doggedly to work.

Day after day the CLANK, CLANK, CLINK of the peaveys sounded with
the regularity of machinery. The only practicable method was to
pick away the flank logs, leaving a long tongue pointing down-
stream from the center to start when it would. This happened time
and again, but always failed to take with it the main jam. It was
cruel hard work; a man who has lifted his utmost strength into a
peavey knows that. Any but the Fighting Forty would have grumbled.

Collins, the bookkeeper, came up to view the tangle. Later a
photographer from Marquette took some views, which, being
exhibited, attracted a great deal of attention, so that by the end
of the week a number of curiosity seekers were driving over every
day to see the Big Jam. A certain Chicago journalist in search of
balsam health of lungs even sent to his paper a little item. This,
unexpectedly, brought Wallace Carpenter to the spot. Although
reassured as to the gravity of the situation, he remained to see.

The place was an amphitheater for such as chose to be spectators.
They could stand or sit on the summit of the gorge cliffs,
overlooking the river, the fall, and the jam. As the cliff was
barely sixty feet high, the view lacked nothing in clearness.

At last Shearer became angry.

"We've been monkeying long enough," said he. "Next time we'll
leave a center that WILL go out. We'll shut the dams down tight
and dry-pick out two wings that'll start her."

The dams were first run at full speed, and then shut down. Hardly
a drop of water flowed in the bed of the stream. The crews set
laboriously to work to pull and roll the logs out in such flat
fashion that a head of water should send them out.

This was even harder work than the other, for they had not the
floating power of water to help them in the lifting. As usual,
part of the men worked below, part above.

Jimmy Powers, curly-haired, laughing-faced, was irrepressible. He
badgered the others until they threw bark at him and menaced him
with their peaveys. Always he had at his tongue's end the proper
quip for the occasion, so that in the long run the work was
lightened by him. When the men stopped to think at all, they
thought of Jimmy Powers with very kindly hearts, for it was known
that he had had more trouble than most, and that the coin was not
made too small for him to divide with a needy comrade. To those who
had seen his mask of whole-souled good-nature fade into serious
sympathy, Jimmy Powers's poor little jokes were very funny indeed.

"Did 'je see th' Swede at the circus las' summer?" he would howl
to Red Jacket on the top tier.

"No," Red Jacket would answer, "was he there?"

"Yes," Jimmy Powers would reply; then, after a pause--"in a cage!"

It was a poor enough jest, yet if you had been there, you would
have found that somehow the log had in the meantime leaped of its
own accord from that difficult position.

Thorpe approved thoroughly of Jimmy Powers; he thought him a good
influence. He told Wallace so, standing among the spectators on
the cliff-top.

"He is all right," said Thorpe. "I wish I had more like him. The
others are good boys, too."

Five men were at the moment tugging futilely at a reluctant timber.
They were attempting to roll one end of it over the side of another
projecting log, but were continually foiled, because the other end
was jammed fast. Each bent his knees, inserting his shoulder under
the projecting peavey stock, to straighten in a mighty effort.

"Hire a boy!" "Get some powder of Junko!" "Have Jimmy talk it out!"
"Try that little one over by the corner," called the men on top of
the jam.

Everybody laughed, of course. It was a fine spring day, clear-eyed
and crisp, with a hint of new foliage in the thick buds of the trees.
The air was so pellucid that one distinguished without difficulty
the straight entrance to the gorge a mile away, and even the West
Bend, fully five miles distant.

Jimmy Powers took off his cap and wiped his forehead.

"You boys," he remarked politely, "think you are boring with a
mighty big auger."

"My God!" screamed one of the spectators on top of the cliff.

At the same instant Wallace Carpenter seized his friend's arm and
pointed.

Down the bed of the stream from the upper bend rushed a solid wall
of water several feet high. It flung itself forward with the
headlong impetus of a cascade. Even in the short interval between
the visitor's exclamation and Carpenter's rapid gesture, it had
loomed into sight, twisted a dozen trees from the river bank, and
foamed into the entrance of the gorge. An instant later it collided
with the tail of the jam.

Even in the railroad rush of those few moments several things
happened. Thorpe leaped for a rope. The crew working on top
of the jam ducked instinctively to right and left and began to
scramble towards safety. The men below, at first bewildered and
not comprehending, finally understood, and ran towards the face
of the jam with the intention of clambering up it. There could
be no escape in the narrow canyon below, the walls of which rose
sheer.

Then the flood hit square. It was the impact of resistible power.
A great sheet of water rose like surf from the tail of the jam;
a mighty cataract poured down over its surface, lifting the free
logs; from either wing timbers crunched, split, rose suddenly into
wracked prominence, twisted beyond the semblance of themselves.
Here and there single logs were even projected bodily upwards, as
an apple seed is shot from between the thumb and forefinger. Then
the jam moved.

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