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Unknown - "The Bible, King James version, Book 33: Micah"

Alexander Pushkin and other authors - "The Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems"

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Chippings With A Chisel (From Twice Told Tales)"

G.A. Henty - "By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic"

The Blazed Trail

S >> Stewart Edward White >> The Blazed Trail




Scotty Parsons, Jack Hyland, Red Jacket, and the forty or fifty top
men had reached the shore. By the wriggling activity which is a
riverman's alone, they succeeded in pulling themselves beyond the
snap of death's jaws. It was a narrow thing for most of them, and
a miracle for some.

Jimmy Powers, Archie Harris, Long Pine Jim, Big Nolan, and Mike
Moloney, the brother of Bryan, were in worse case. They were,
as has been said, engaged in "flattening" part of the jam about
eight or ten rods below the face of it. When they finally
understood that the affair was one of escape, they ran towards
the jam, hoping to climb out. Then the crash came. They heard
the roar of the waters, the wrecking of the timbers, they saw the
logs bulge outwards in anticipation of the break. Immediately
they turned and fled, they knew not where.

All but Jimmy Powers. He stopped short in his tracks, and threw
his battered old felt hat defiantly full into the face of the
destruction hanging over him. Then, his bright hair blowing in
the wind of death, he turned to the spectators standing helpless
and paralyzed, forty feet above him.

It was an instant's impression,--the arrested motion seen in the
flash of lightning--and yet to the onlookers it had somehow the
quality of time. For perceptible duration it seemed to them they
stared at the contrast between the raging hell above and the yet
peaceable river bed below. They were destined to remember that
picture the rest of their natural lives, in such detail that each
one of them could almost have reproduced it photographically by
simply closing his eyes. Yet afterwards, when they attempted to
recall definitely the impression, they knew it could have lasted
but a fraction of a second, for the reason that, clear and distinct
in each man's mind, the images of the fleeing men retained definite
attitudes. It was the instantaneous photography of events.

"So long, boys," they heard Jimmy Powers's voice. Then the rope
Thorpe had thrown fell across a caldron of tortured waters and of
tossing logs.



Chapter XLIX


During perhaps ten seconds the survivors watched the end of Thorpe's
rope trailing in the flood. Then the young man with a deep sigh
began to pull it towards him.

At once a hundred surmises, questions, ejaculations broke out.

"What happened?" cried Wallace Carpenter.

"What was that man's name?" asked the Chicago journalist with the
eager instinct of his profession.

"This is terrible, terrible, terrible!" a white-haired physician
from Marquette kept repeating over and over.

A half dozen ran towards the point of the cliff to peer down stream,
as though they could hope to distinguish anything in that waste of
flood water.

"The dam's gone out," replied Thorpe. "I don't understand it.
Everything was in good shape, as far as I could see. It didn't
act like an ordinary break. The water came too fast. Why, it was
as dry as a bone until just as that wave came along. An ordinary
break would have eaten through little by little before it burst,
and Davis should have been able to stop it. This came all at once,
as if the dam had disappeared. I don't see."

His mind of the professional had already began to query causes.

"How about the men?" asked Wallace. "Isn't there something I can
do?"

"You can head a hunt down the river," answered Thorpe. "I think
it is useless until the water goes down. Poor Jimmy. He was one
of the best men I had. I wouldn't have had this happen---"

The horror of the scene was at last beginning to filter through
numbness into Wallace Carpenter's impressionable imagination.

"No, no!" he cried vehemently. "There is something criminal about
it to me! I'd rather lose every log in the river!"

Thorpe looked at him curiously. "It is one of the chances of war,"
said he, unable to refrain from the utterance of his creed. "We all
know it."

"I'd better divide the crew and take in both banks of the river,"
suggested Wallace in his constitutional necessity of doing something.

"See if you can't get volunteers from this crowd," suggested Thorpe.
"I can let you have two men to show you trails. If you can make it
that way, it will help me out. I need as many of the crew as
possible to use this flood water."

"Oh, Harry," cried Carpenter, shocked. "You can't be going to work
again to-day after that horrible sight, before we have made the
slightest effort to recover the bodies!"

"If the bodies can be recovered, they shall be," replied Thorpe
quietly. "But the drive will not wait. We have no dams to depend
on now, you must remember, and we shall have to get out on freshet
water."

"Your men won't work. I'd refuse just as they will!" cried
Carpenter, his sensibilities still suffering.

Thorpe smiled proudly. "You do not know them. They are mine. I
hold them in the hollow of my hand!"

"By Jove!" cried the journalist in sudden enthusiasm. "By Jove!
that is magnificent!"

The men of the river crew had crouched on their narrow footholds
while the jam went out. Each had clung to his peavey, as is the
habit of rivermen. Down the current past their feet swept the
debris of flood. Soon logs began to swirl by,--at first few, then
many from the remaining rollways which the river had automatically
broken. In a little time the eddy caught up some of these logs, and
immediately the inception of another jam threatened. The rivermen,
without hesitation, as calmly as though catastrophe had not thrown
the weight of its moral terror against their stoicism, sprang,
peavey in hand, to the insistent work.

"By Jove!" said the journalist again. "That is magnificent! They
are working over the spot where their comrades died!"

Thorpe's face lit with gratification. He turned to the young man.

"You see," he said in proud simplicity.

With the added danger of freshet water, the work went on.

At this moment Tim Shearer approached from inland, his clothes
dripping wet, but his face retaining its habitual expression of
iron calmness. "Anybody caught?" was his first question as he
drew near.

"Five men under the face," replied Thorpe briefly.

Shearer cast a glance at the river. He needed to be told no more.

"I was afraid of it," said he. "The rollways must be all broken
out. It's saved us that much, but the freshet water won't last
long. It's going to be a close squeak to get 'em out now. Don't
exactly figure on what struck the dam. Thought first I'd go right
up that way, but then I came down to see about the boys."

Carpenter could not understand this apparent callousness on the
part of men in whom he had always thought to recognize a fund of
rough but genuine feeling. To him the sacredness of death was
incompatible with the insistence of work. To these others the
two, grim necessity, went hand in hand.

"Where were you?" asked Thorpe of Shearer.

"On the pole trail. I got in a little, as you see."

In reality the foreman had had a close call for his life. A
toughly-rooted basswood alone had saved him.

"We'd better go up and take a look," he suggested. "Th' boys has
things going here all right."

The two men turned towards the brush.

"Hi, Tim," called a voice behind them.

Red Jacket appeared clambering up the cliff.

"Jack told me to give this to you," he panted, holding out a chunk
of strangely twisted wood.

"Where'd he get this?" inquired Thorpe, quickly. "It's a piece
of the dam," he explained to Wallace, who had drawn near.

"Picked it out of the current," replied the man.

The foreman and his boss bent eagerly over the morsel. Then they
stared with solemnity into each other's eyes.

"Dynamite, by God!" exclaimed Shearer.



Chapter L


For a moment the three men stared at each other without speaking.

"What does it mean?" almost whispered Carpenter.

"Mean? Foul play!" snarled Thorpe. "Come on, Tim."

The two struck into the brush, threading the paths with the ease
of woodsmen. It was necessary to keep to the high inland ridges for
the simple reason that the pole trail had by now become impassable.
Wallace Carpenter, attempting to follow them, ran, stumbled, and
fell through brush that continually whipped his face and garments,
continually tripped his feet. All he could obtain was a vanishing
glimpse of his companions' backs. Thorpe and his foreman talked
briefly.

"It's Morrison and Daly," surmised Shearer. "I left them 'count
of a trick like that. They wanted me to take charge of Perkinson's
drive and hang her a purpose. I been suspecting something--they've
been layin' too low."

Thorpe answered nothing. Through the site of the old dam they
found a torrent pouring from the narrowed pond, at the end of which
the dilapidated wings flapping in the current attested the former
structure. Davis stood staring at the current.

Thorpe strode forward and shook him violently by the shoulder.

"How did this happen?" he demanded hoarsely. "Speak!"

The man turned to him in a daze. "I don't know," he answered.

"You ought to know. How was that 'shot' exploded? How did they
get in here without you seeing them? Answer me!"

"I don't know," repeated the man. "I jest went over in th' bresh
to kill a few pa'tridges, and when I come back I found her this
way. I wasn't goin' to close down for three hours yet, and I
thought they was no use a hangin' around here."

"Were you hired to watch this dam, or weren't you?" demanded the
tense voice of Thorpe. "Answer me, you fool."

"Yes, I was," returned the man, a shade of aggression creeping
into his voice.

"Well, you've done it well. You've cost me my dam, and you've
killed five men. If the crew finds out about you, you'll go over
the falls, sure. You get out of here! Pike! Don't you ever let
me see your face again!"

The man blanched as he thus learned of his comrades' deaths. Thorpe
thrust his face at him, lashed by circumstances beyond his habitual
self-control.

"It's men like you who make the trouble," he stormed. "Damn fools
who say they didn't mean to. It isn't enough not to mean to. They
should MEAN NOT TO! I don't ask you to think. I just want you to
do what I tell you, and you can't even do that."

He threw his shoulder into a heavy blow that reached the dam watcher's
face, and followed it immediately by another. Then Shearer caught his
arm, motioning the dazed and bloody victim of the attack to get out of
sight. Thorpe shook his foreman off with one impatient motion, and
strode away up the river, his head erect, his eyes flashing, his
nostrils distended.

"I reckon you'd better mosey," Shearer dryly advised the dam watcher;
and followed.

Late in the afternoon the two men reached Dam Three, or rather the
spot on which Dam Three had stood. The same spectacle repeated
itself here, except that Ellis, the dam watcher, was nowhere to
be seen.

"The dirty whelps," cried Thorpe, "they did a good job!"

He thrashed about here and there, and so came across Ellis
blindfolded and tied. When released, the dam watcher was
unable to give any account of his assailants.

"They came up behind me while I was cooking," he said. "One of
'em grabbed me and the other one kivered my eyes. Then I hears
the 'shot' and knows there's trouble."

Thorpe listened in silence. Shearer asked a few questions. After
the low-voiced conversation Thorpe arose abruptly.

"Where you going?" asked Shearer.

But the young man did not reply. He swung, with the same long,
nervous stride, into the down-river trail.

Until late that night the three men--for Ellis insisted on
accompanying them--hurried through the forest. Thorpe walked
tirelessly, upheld by his violent but repressed excitement. When
his hat fell from his head, he either did not notice the fact, or
did not care to trouble himself for its recovery, so he glanced
through the trees bare-headed, his broad white brow gleaming in
the moonlight. Shearer noted the fire in his eyes, and from the
coolness of his greater age, counselled moderation.

"I wouldn't stir the boys up," he panted, for the pace was very
swift. "They'll kill some one over there, it'll be murder on
both sides."

He received no answer. About midnight they came to the camp.

Two great fires leaped among the trees, and the men, past the idea
of sleep, grouped between them, talking. The lesson of twisted
timbers was not lost to their experience, and the evening had
brought its accumulation of slow anger against the perpetrators of
the outrage. These men were not given to oratorical mouthings, but
their low-voiced exchanges between the puffings of a pipe led to a
steadier purpose than that of hysteria. Even as the woodsmen joined
their group, they had reached the intensity of execution. Across
their purpose Thorpe threw violently his personality.

"You must not go," he commanded.

Through their anger they looked at him askance.

"I forbid it," Thorpe cried.

They shrugged their indifference and arose. This was an affair of
caste brotherhood; and the blood of their mates cried out to them.

"The work," Thorpe shouted hoarsely. "The work! We must get those
logs out! We haven't time!"

But the Fighting Forty had not Thorpe's ideal. Success meant a
day's work well done; while vengeance stood for a righting of the
realities which had been unrighteously overturned. Thorpe's dry-
eyed, burning, almost mad insistence on the importance of the
day's task had not its ordinary force. They looked upon him from
a standpoint apart, calmly, dispassionately, as one looks on a
petulant child. The grim call of tragedy had lifted them above
little mundane things.

Then swiftly between the white, strained face of the madman trying
to convince his heart that his mind had been right, and the
fanatically exalted rivermen, interposed the sanity of Radway.
The old jobber faced the men calmly, almost humorously, and somehow
the very bigness of the man commanded attention. When he spoke,
his coarse, good-natured, everyday voice fell through the tense
situation, clarifying it, restoring it to the normal.

"You fellows make me sick," said he. "You haven't got the sense
God gave a rooster. Don't you see you're playing right in those
fellows' hands? What do you suppose they dynamited them dams for?
To kill our boys? Don't you believe it for a minute. They never
dreamed we was dry pickin' that jam. They sent some low-lived whelp
down there to hang our drive, and by smoke it looks like they was
going to succeed, thanks to you mutton-heads.

"'Spose you go over and take 'em apart; what then? You have a
scrap; probably you lick 'em." The men growled ominously, but did
not stir. "You whale daylights out of a lot of men who probably
don't know any more about this here shooting of our dams than a hog
does about a ruffled shirt. Meanwhile your drive hangs. Well?
Well? Do you suppose the men who were back of that shooting, do
you suppose Morrison and Daly give a tinker's dam how many men of
theirs you lick? What they want is to hang our drive. If they
hang our drive, it's cheap at the price of a few black eyes."

The speaker paused and grinned good-humoredly at the men's attentive
faces. Then suddenly his own became grave, and he swung into his
argument all the impressiveness of his great bulk,

"Do you want to know how to get even?" he asked, shading each word.
"Do you want to know how to make those fellows sing so small you
can't hear them? Well, I'll tell you. TAKE OUT THIS DRIVE! Do
it in spite of them! Show them they're no good when they buck up
against Thorpe's One! Our boys died doing their duty--the way a
riverman ought to. NOW HUMP YOURSELVES! Don't let 'em die in vain!"

The crew stirred uneasily, looking at each other for approval of the
conversion each had experienced. Radway, seizing the psychological
moment, turned easily toward the blaze.

"Better turn in, boys, and get some sleep," he said. "We've got a
hard day to-morrow." He stooped to light his pipe at the fire. When
he had again straightened his back after rather a prolonged interval,
the group had already disintegrated. A few minutes later the cookee
scattered the brands of the fire from before a sleeping camp.

Thorpe had listened non-committally to the colloquy. He had
maintained the suspended attitude of a man who is willing to allow
the trial of other methods, but who does not therefore relinquish
his own. At the favorable termination of the discussion he turned
away without comment. He expected to gain this result. Had he
been in a more judicial state of mind he might have perceived at
last the reason, in the complicated scheme of Providence, for his
long connection with John Radway.



Chapter LI


Before daylight Injin Charley drifted into the camp to find Thorpe
already out. With a curt nod the Indian seated himself by the fire,
and, producing a square plug of tobacco and a knife, began leisurely
to fill his pipe. Thorpe watched him in silence. Finally Injin
Charley spoke in the red man's clear-cut, imitative English, a
pause between each sentence.

"I find trail three men," said he. "Both dam, three men. One man
go down river. Those men have cork-boot. One man no have cork-boot.
He boss." The Indian suddenly threw his chin out, his head back,
half closed his eyes in a cynical squint. As by a flash Dyer, the
scaler, leered insolently from behind the Indian's stolid mask.

"How do you know?" said Thorpe.

For answer the Indian threw his shoulders forward in Dyer's nervous
fashion.

"He make trail big by the toe, light by the heel. He make trail
big on inside."

Charley arose and walked, after Dyer's springy fashion, illustrating
his point in the soft wood ashes of the immediate fireside.

Thorpe looked doubtful. "I believe you are right, Charley," said
he. "But it is mighty little to go on. You can't be sure."

"I sure," replied Charley.

He puffed strongly at the heel of his smoke, then arose, and without
farewell disappeared in the forest.

Thorpe ranged the camp impatiently, glancing often at the sky. At
length he laid fresh logs on the fire and aroused the cook. It was
bitter cold in the early morning. After a time the men turned out
of their own accord, at first yawning with insufficient rest, and
then becoming grimly tense as their returned wits reminded them of
the situation.

From that moment began the wonderful struggle against circumstances
which has become a by-word among rivermen everywhere. A forty-day
drive had to go out in ten. A freshet had to float out thirty
million feet of logs. It was tremendous; as even the men most
deeply buried in the heavy hours of that time dimly realized.
It was epic; as the journalist, by now thoroughly aroused, soon
succeeded in convincing his editors and his public. Fourteen,
sixteen, sometimes eighteen hours a day, the men of the driving
crew worked like demons. Jams had no chance to form. The phenomenal
activity of the rear crew reduced by half the inevitable sacking.
Of course, under the pressure, the lower dam had gone out. Nothing
was to be depended on but sheer dogged grit. Far up-river Sadler &
Smith had hung their drive for the season. They had stretched heavy
booms across the current, and so had resigned themselves to a
definite but not extraordinary loss. Thorpe had at least a clear
river.

Wallace Carpenter could not understand how human flesh and blood
endured. The men themselves had long since reached the point of
practical exhaustion, but were carried through by the fire of their
leader. Work was dogged until he stormed into sight; then it became
frenzied. He seemed to impart to those about him a nervous force
and excitability as real as that induced by brandy. When he looked
at a man from his cavernous, burning eyes, that man jumped.

It was all willing enough work. Several definite causes, each
adequate alone to something extraordinary, focussed to the necessity.
His men worshipped Thorpe; the idea of thwarting the purposes of
their comrade's murderers retained its strength; the innate pride
of caste and craft--the sturdiest virtue of the riverman--was in
these picked men increased to the dignity of a passion. The great
psychological forces of a successful career gathered and made head
against the circumstances which such careers always arouse in
polarity.

Impossibilities were puffed aside like thistles. The men went at
them headlong. They gave way before the rush. Thorpe always led.
Not for a single instant of the day nor for many at night was he
at rest. He was like a man who has taken a deep breath to reach
a definite goal, and who cannot exhale until the burst of speed be
over. Instinctively he seemed to realize that a let-down would
mean collapse.

After the camp had fallen asleep, he would often lie awake half of
the few hours of their night, every muscle tense, staring at the
sky. His mind saw definitely every detail of the situation as he
had last viewed it. In advance his imagination stooped and sweated
to the work which his body was to accomplish the next morning.
Thus he did everything twice. Then at last the tension would relax.
He would fall into uneasy sleep. But twice that did not follow.
Through the dissolving iron mist of his striving, a sharp thought
cleaved like an arrow. It was that after all he did not care. The
religion of Success no longer held him as its devoutest worshiper.
He was throwing the fibers of his life into the engine of toil, not
because of moral duty, but because of moral pride. He meant to
succeed in order to prove to himself that he had not been wrong.

The pain of the arrow-wound always aroused him from his doze with a
start. He grimly laughed the thought out of court. To his waking
moments his religion was sincere, was real. But deep down in his
sub-consciousness, below his recognition, the other influence was
growing like a weed. Perhaps the vision, not the waking, had been
right. Perhaps that far-off beautiful dream of a girl which Thorpe's
idealism had constructed from; the reactionary necessities of
Thorpe's harsh life had been more real than his forest temples
of his ruthless god! Perhaps there were greater things than to
succeed, greater things than success. Perhaps, after all, the
Power that put us here demands more that we cleave one to the other
in loving-kindness than that we learn to blow the penny whistles it
has tossed us. And then the keen, poignant memory of the dream girl
stole into the young man's mind, and in agony was immediately thrust
forth. He would not think of her. He had given her up. He had
cast the die. For success he had bartered her, in the noblest, the
loftiest spirit of devotion. He refused to believe that devotion
fanatical; he refused to believe that he had been wrong. In the
still darkness of the night he would rise and steal to the edge of
the dully roaring stream. There, his eyes blinded and his throat
choked with a longing more manly than tears, he would reach out
and smooth the round rough coats of the great logs.

"We'll do it!" he whispered to them--and to himself. "We'll do it!
We can't be wrong. God would not have let us!"



Chapter LII


Wallace Carpenter's search expedition had proved a failure, as
Thorpe had foreseen, but at the end of the week, when the water
began to recede, the little beagles ran upon a mass of flesh
and bones. The man was unrecognizable, either as an individual or
as a human being. The remains were wrapped in canvas and sent for
interment in the cemetery at Marquette. Three of the others were
never found. The last did not come to light until after the drive
had quite finished.

Down at the booms the jam crew received the drive as fast as it
came down. From one crib to another across the broad extent of the
river's mouth, heavy booms were chained end to end effectually to
close the exit to Lake Superior. Against these the logs caromed
softly in the slackened current, and stopped. The cribs were very
heavy with slanting, instead of square, tops, in order that the
pressure might be downwards instead of sidewise. This guaranteed
their permanency. In a short time the surface of the lagoon was
covered by a brown carpet of logs running in strange patterns like
windrows of fallen grain. Finally, across the straight middle
distance of the river, appeared little agitated specks leaping
back and forth. Thus the rear came in sight and the drive was
all but over.

Up till now the weather had been clear but oppressively hot for
this time of year. The heat had come suddenly and maintained itself
well. It had searched out with fierce directness all the patches of
snow lying under the thick firs and balsams of the swamp edge, it
had shaken loose the anchor ice of the marsh bottoms, and so had
materially aided the success of the drive by increase of water.
The men had worked for the most part in undershirts. They were as
much in the water as out of it, for the icy bath had become almost
grateful. Hamilton, the journalist, who had attached himself
definitely to the drive, distributed bunches of papers, in which
the men read that the unseasonable condition prevailed all over
the country.

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