The Blazed Trail

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Chapter XI

As soon as loading began, the cook served breakfast at three
o'clock. The men worked by the light of torches, which were often
merely catsup jugs with wicking in the necks. Nothing could be more
picturesque than a teamster conducting one of his great pyramidical
loads over the little inequalities of the road, in the ticklish
places standing atop with the bent knee of the Roman charioteer,
spying and forestalling the chances of the way with a fixed eye and
an intense concentration that relaxed not one inch in the miles of
the haul. Thorpe had become a full-fledged cant-hook man.

He liked the work. There is about it a skill that fascinates. A
man grips suddenly with the hook of his strong instrument, stopping
one end that the other may slide; he thrusts the short, strong stock
between the log and the skid, allowing it to be overrun; he stops
the roll with a sudden sure grasp applied at just the right moment
to be effective. Sometimes he allows himself to be carried up
bodily, clinging to the cant-hook like an acrobat to a bar, until
the log has rolled once; when, his weapon loosened, he drops
lightly, easily to the ground. And it is exciting to pile the logs
on the sleigh, first a layer of five, say; then one of six smaller;
of but three; of two; until, at the very apex, the last is dragged
slowly up the skids, poised, and, just as it is about to plunge
down the other side, is gripped and held inexorably by the little
men in blue flannel shirts.

Chains bind the loads. And if ever, during the loading, or
afterwards when the sleigh is in motion, the weight of the logs
causes the pyramid to break down and squash out;--then woe to the
driver, or whoever happens to be near! A saw log does not make a
great deal of fuss while falling, but it falls through anything that
happens in its way, and a man who gets mixed up in a load of twenty-
five or thirty of them obeying the laws of gravitation from a height
of some fifteen to twenty feet, can be crushed into strange shapes
and fragments. For this reason the loaders are picked and careful
men.

At the banking grounds, which lie in and about the bed of the river,
the logs are piled in a gigantic skidway to await the spring freshets,
which will carry them down stream to the "boom." In that enclosure
they remain until sawed in the mill.

Such is the drama of the saw log, a story of grit, resourcefulness,
adaptability, fortitude and ingenuity hard to match. Conditions
never repeat themselves in the woods as they do in the factory. The
wilderness offers ever new complications to solve, difficulties to
overcome. A man must think of everything, figure on everything,
from the grand sweep of the country at large to the pressure on a
king-bolt. And where another possesses the boundless resources of
a great city, he has to rely on the material stored in one corner
of a shed. It is easy to build a palace with men and tools; it is
difficult to build a log cabin with nothing but an ax. His wits
must help him where his experience fails; and his experience must
push him mechanically along the track of habit when successive
buffetings have beaten his wits out of his head. In a day he must
construct elaborate engines, roads, and implements which old
civilization considers the works of leisure. Without a thought
of expense he must abandon as temporary, property which other
industries cry out at being compelled to acquire as permanent.
For this reason he becomes in time different from his fellows.
The wilderness leaves something of her mystery in his eyes, that
mystery of hidden, unknown but guessed, power. Men look after him
on the street, as they would look after any other pioneer, in vague
admiration of a scope more virile than their own.

Thorpe, in common with the other men, had thought Radway's vacation
at Christmas time a mistake. He could not but admire the feverish
animation that now characterized the jobber. Every mischance was as
quickly repaired as aroused expedient could do the work.

The marsh received first attention. There the restless snow drifted
uneasily before the wind. Nearly every day the road had to be
plowed, and the sprinklers followed the teams almost constantly.
Often it was bitter cold, but no one dared to suggest to the
determined jobber that it might be better to remain indoors. The
men knew as well as he that the heavy February snows would block
traffic beyond hope of extrication.

As it was, several times an especially heavy fall clogged the way.
The snow-plow, even with extra teams, could hardly force its path
through. Men with shovels helped. Often but a few loads a day, and
they small, could be forced to the banks by the utmost exertions of
the entire crew. Esprit de corps awoke. The men sprang to their
tasks with alacrity, gave more than an hour's exertion to each of
the twenty-four, took a pride in repulsing the assaults of the
great enemy, whom they personified under the generic "She." Mike
McGovern raked up a saint somewhere whom he apostrophized in a
personal and familiar manner.

He hit his head against an overhanging branch.

"You're a nice wan, now ain't ye?" he cried angrily at the
unfortunate guardian of his soul. "Dom if Oi don't quit ye!
Ye see!"

"Be the gate of Hivin!" he shouted, when he opened the door of
mornings and discovered another six inches of snow, "Ye're a
burrd! If Oi couldn't make out to be more of a saint than that,
Oi'd quit the biznis! Move yor pull, an' get us some dacint
weather! Ye awt t' be road monkeyin' on th' golden streets, thot's
what ye awt to be doin'!"

Jackson Hines was righteously indignant, but with the shrewdness of
the old man, put the blame partly where it belonged.

"I ain't sayin'," he observed judicially, "that this weather ain't
hell. It's hell and repeat. But a man sort've got to expec' weather.
He looks for it, and he oughta be ready for it. The trouble is we
got behind Christmas. It's that Dyer. He's about as mean as they
make 'em. The only reason he didn't die long ago is becuz th'
Devil's thought him too mean to pay any 'tention to. If ever he
should die an' go to Heaven he'd pry up th' golden streets an' use
the infernal pit for a smelter."

With this magnificent bit of invective, Jackson seized a lantern
and stumped out to see that the teamsters fed their horses properly.

"Didn't know you were a miner, Jackson," called Thorpe, laughing.

"Young feller," replied Jackson at the door, "it's a lot easier
to tell what I AIN'T been."

So floundering, battling, making a little progress every day, the
strife continued.

One morning in February, Thorpe was helping load a big butt log.
He was engaged in "sending up"; that is, he was one of the two
men who stand at either side of the skids to help the ascending log
keep straight and true to its bed on the pile. His assistant's end
caught on a sliver, ground for a second, and slipped back. Thus the
log ran slanting across the skids instead of perpendicular to them.
To rectify the fault, Thorpe dug his cant-hook into the timber and
threw his weight on the stock. He hoped in this manner to check
correspondingly the ascent of his end. In other words, he took the
place, on his side, of the preventing sliver, so equalizing the
pressure and forcing the timber to its proper position. Instead of
rolling, the log slid. The stock of the cant-hook was jerked from
his hands. He fell back, and the cant-hook, after clinging for a
moment to the rough bark, snapped down and hit him a crushing blow
on the top of the head.

Had a less experienced man than Jim Gladys been stationed at the
other end, Thorpe's life would have ended there. A shout of
surprise or horror would have stopped the horse pulling on the
decking chain; the heavy stick would have slid back on the
prostrate young man, who would have thereupon been ground to atoms
as he lay. With the utmost coolness Gladys swarmed the slanting
face of the load; interposed the length of his cant-hook stock
between the log and it; held it exactly long enough to straighten
the timber, but not so long as to crush his own head and arm; and
ducked, just as the great piece of wood rumbled over the end of the
skids and dropped with a thud into the place Norton, the "top" man,
had prepared for it.

It was a fine deed, quickly thought, quickly dared. No one saw it.
Jim Gladys was a hero, but a hero without an audience.

They took Thorpe up and carried him in, just as they had carried
Hank Paul before. Men who had not spoken a dozen words to him in
as many days gathered his few belongings and stuffed them awkwardly
into his satchel. Jackson Hines prepared the bed of straw and warm
blankets in the bottom of the sleigh that was to take him out.

"He would have made a good boss," said the old fellow. "He's a
hard man to nick."

Thorpe was carried in from the front, and the battle went on
without him.

Chapter XII

Thorpe never knew how carefully he was carried to camp, nor how
tenderly the tote teamster drove his hay-couched burden to Beeson
Lake. He had no consciousness of the jolting train, in the baggage
car of which Jimmy, the little brakeman, and Bud, and the baggage
man spread blankets, and altogether put themselves to a great deal
of trouble. When finally he came to himself, he was in a long,
bright, clean room, and the sunset was throwing splashes of light
on the ceiling over his head.

He watched them idly for a time; then turned on his pillow. At once
he perceived a long, double row of clean white-painted iron beds, on
which lay or sat figures of men. Other figures, of women, glided
here and there noiselessly. They wore long, spreading dove-gray
clothes, with a starched white kerchief drawn over the shoulders
and across the breast. Their heads were quaintly white-garbed in
stiff winglike coifs, fitting close about the oval of the face.
Then Thorpe sighed comfortably, and closed his eyes and blessed the
chance that he had bought a hospital ticket of the agent who had
visited camp the month before. For these were Sisters, and the
young man lay in the Hospital of St. Mary.

Time was when the lumber-jack who had the misfortune to fall sick
or to meet with an accident was in a sorry plight indeed. If he
possessed a "stake," he would receive some sort of unskilled
attention in one of the numerous and fearful lumberman's boarding-
houses,--just so long as his money lasted, not one instant more.
Then he was bundled brutally into the street, no matter what his
condition might be. Penniless, without friends, sick, he drifted
naturally to the county poorhouse. There he was patched up quickly
and sent out half-cured. The authorities were not so much to blame.
With the slender appropriations at their disposal, they found
difficulty in taking care of those who came legitimately under their
jurisdiction. It was hardly to be expected that they would welcome
with open arms a vast army of crippled and diseased men temporarily
from the woods. The poor lumber-jack was often left broken in mind
and body from causes which a little intelligent care would have
rendered unimportant.

With the establishment of the first St. Mary's hospital, I think at
Bay City, all this was changed. Now, in it and a half dozen others
conducted on the same principles, the woodsman receives the best of
medicines, nursing, and medical attendance. From one of the numerous
agents who periodically visit the camps, he purchases for eight
dollars a ticket which admits him at any time during the year to
the hospital, where he is privileged to remain free of further
charge until convalescent. So valuable are these institutions, and
so excellently are they maintained by the Sisters, that a hospital
agent is always welcome, even in those camps from which ordinary
peddlers and insurance men are rigidly excluded. Like a great many
other charities built on a common-sense self-supporting rational
basis, the woods hospitals are under the Roman Catholic Church.

In one of these hospitals Thorpe lay for six weeks suffering from
a severe concussion of the brain. At the end of the fourth, his
fever had broken, but he was pronounced as yet too weak to be moved.

His nurse was a red-cheeked, blue-eyed, homely little Irish girl,
brimming with motherly good-humor. When Thorpe found strength to
talk, the two became friends. Through her influence he was moved
to a bed about ten feet from the window. Thence his privileges were
three roofs and a glimpse of the distant river.

The roofs were covered with snow. One day Thorpe saw it sink into
itself and gradually run away. The tinkle tinkle tank tank of drops
sounded from his own eaves. Down the far-off river, sluggish reaches
of ice drifted. Then in a night the blue disappeared from the stream.
It became a menacing gray, and even from his distance Thorpe could
catch the swirl of its rising waters. A day or two later dark masses
drifted or shot across the field of his vision, and twice he thought
he distinguished men standing upright and bold on single logs as they
rushed down the current.

"What is the date?" he asked of the Sister.

"The eleventh of March."

"Isn't it early for the thaw?"

"Listen to 'im!" exclaimed the Sister delightedly. "Early is it!
Sure th' freshet co't thim all. Look, darlint, ye kin see th' drive
from here."

"I see," said Thorpe wearily, "when can I get out?"

"Not for wan week," replied the Sister decidedly.

At the end of the week Thorpe said good-by to his attendant, who
appeared as sorry to see him go as though the same partings did not
come to her a dozen times a year; he took two days of tramping the
little town to regain the use of his legs, and boarded the morning
train for Beeson Lake. He did not pause in the village, but bent
his steps to the river trail.

Chapter XIII

Thorpe found the woods very different from when he had first
traversed them. They were full of patches of wet earth and of
sunshine; of dark pine, looking suddenly worn, and of fresh green
shoots of needles, looking deliciously springlike. This was the
contrast everywhere--stern, earnest, purposeful winter, and gay,
laughing, careless spring. It was impossible not to draw in fresh
spirits with every step.

He followed the trail by the river. Butterballs and scoters paddled
up at his approach. Bits of rotten ice occasionally swirled down the
diminishing stream. The sunshine was clear and bright, but silvery
rather than golden, as though a little of the winter's snow,--a
last ethereal incarnation,--had lingered in its substance. Around
every bend Thorpe looked for some of Radway's crew "driving" the
logs down the current. He knew from chance encounters with several
of the men in Bay City that Radway was still in camp; which meant,
of course, that the last of the season's operations were not yet
finished. Five miles further Thorpe began to wonder whether this
last conclusion might not be erroneous. The Cass Branch had
shrunken almost to its original limits. Only here and there a
little bayou or marsh attested recent freshets. The drive must
have been finished, even this early, for the stream in its present
condition would hardly float saw logs, certainly not in quantity.

Thorpe, puzzled, walked on. At the banking ground he found empty
skids. Evidently the drive was over. And yet even to Thorpe's
ignorance, it seemed incredible that the remaining million and a
half of logs had been hauled, banked and driven during the short
time he had lain in the Bay City hospital. More to solve the
problem than in any hope of work, he set out up the logging road.

Another three miles brought him to camp. It looked strangely wet
and sodden and deserted. In fact, Thorpe found a bare half dozen
people in it,--Radway, the cook, and four men who were helping to
pack up the movables, and who later would drive out the wagons
containing them. The jobber showed strong traces of the strain he
had undergone, but greeted Thorpe almost jovially. He seemed able
to show more of his real nature now that the necessity of authority
had been definitely removed.

"Hullo, young man," he shouted at Thorpe's mud-splashed figure,
"come back to view, the remains? All well again, heigh? That's
good!"

He strode down to grip the young fellow heartily by the hand. It
was impossible not to be charmed by the sincere cordiality of his
manner.

"I didn't know you were through," explained Thorpe, "I came to see
if I could get a job."

"Well now I AM sorry!" cried Radway, "you can turn in and help
though, if you want to."

Thorpe greeted the cook and old Jackson Hines, the only two whom he
knew, and set to work to tie up bundles of blankets, and to collect
axes, peavies, and tools of all descriptions. This was evidently the
last wagon-trip, for little remained to be done.

"I ought by rights to take the lumber of the roofs and floors,"
observed Radway thoughtfully, "but I guess she don't matter."

Thorpe had never seen him in better spirits. He ascribed the older
man's hilarity to relief over the completion of a difficult task.
That evening the seven dined together at one end of the long table.
The big room exhaled already the atmosphere of desertion.

"Not much like old times, is she?" laughed Radway. "Can't you just
shut your eyes and hear Baptiste say, 'Mak' heem de soup one tam
more for me'? She's pretty empty now."

Jackson Hines looked whimsically down the bare board. "More room
than God made for geese in Ireland," was his comment.

After supper they even sat outside for a little time to smoke their
pipes, chair-tilted against the logs of the cabins, but soon the
chill of melting snow drove them indoors. The four teamsters played
seven-up in the cook camp by the light of a barn lantern, while
Thorpe and the cook wrote letters. Thorpe's was to his sister.

"I have been in the hospital for about a month," he wrote. "Nothing
serious--a crack on the head, which is all right now. But I cannot
get home this summer, nor, I am afraid, can we arrange about the
school this year. I am about seventy dollars ahead of where I was
last fall, so you see it is slow business. This summer I am going
into a mill, but the wages for green labor are not very high there
either," and so on.

When Miss Helen Thorpe, aged seventeen, received this document she
stamped her foot almost angrily. "You'd think he was a day-laborer!"
she cried. "Why doesn't he try for a clerkship or something in the
city where he'd have a chance to use his brains!"

The thought of her big, strong, tanned brother chained to a desk
rose to her, and she smiled a little sadly.

"I know," she went on to herself, "he'd rather be a common laborer
in the woods than railroad manager in the office. He loves his out-
of-doors."

"Helen!" called a voice from below, "if you're through up there, I
wish you'd come down and help me carry this rug out."

The girl's eyes cleared with a snap.

"So do I!" she cried defiantly, "so do I love out-of-doors! I like
the woods and the fields and the trees just as much as he does, only
differently; but I don't get out!"

And thus she came to feeling rebelliously that her brother had been
a little selfish in his choice of an occupation, that he sacrificed
her inclinations to his own. She did not guess,--how could she?--
his dreams for her. She did not see the future through his thoughts,
but through his words. A negative hopelessness settled down on her,
which soon her strong spirit, worthy counterpart of her brother's,
changed to more positive rebellion. Thorpe had aroused antagonism
where he craved only love. The knowledge of that fact would have
surprised and hurt him, for he was entirely without suspicion of
it. He lived subjectively to so great a degree that his thoughts
and aims took on a certain tangible objectivity,--they became so
real to him that he quite overlooked the necessity of communication
to make them as real to others. He assumed unquestioningly that
the other must know. So entirely had he thrown himself into his
ambition of making a suitable position for Helen, so continually
had he dwelt on it in his thoughts, so earnestly had he striven for
it in every step of the great game he was beginning to play, that
it never occurred to him he should also concede a definite outward
manifestation of his feeling in order to assure its acceptance.
Thorpe believed that he had sacrificed every thought and effort to
his sister. Helen was becoming convinced that he had considered
only himself.

After finishing the letter which gave occasion to this train of
thought, Thorpe lit his pipe and strolled out into the darkness.
Opposite the little office he stopped amazed.

Through the narrow window he could see Radway seated in front of
the stove. Every attitude of the man denoted the most profound
dejection. He had sunk down into his chair until he rested on
almost the small of his back, his legs were struck straight out in
front of him, his chin rested on his breast, and his two arms hung
listless at his side, a pipe half falling from the fingers of one
hand. All the facetious lines had turned to pathos. In his face
sorrowed the anxious, questing, wistful look of the St. Bernard
that does not understand.

"What's the matter with the boss, anyway?" asked Thorpe in a low
voice of Jackson Hines, when the seven-up game was finished.

"H'aint ye heard?" inquired the old man in surprise.

"Why, no. What?"

"Busted," said the old man sententiously.

"How? What do you mean?"

"What I say. He's busted. That freshet caught him too quick. They's
more'n a million and a half logs left in the woods that can't be got
out this year, and as his contract calls for a finished job, he don't
get nothin' for what he's done."

"That's a queer rig," commented Thorpe. "He's done a lot of valuable
work here,--the timber's cut and skidded, anyway; and he's delivered
a good deal of it to the main drive. The M. & D. outfit get all the
advantage of that."

"They do, my son. When old Daly's hand gets near anything, it
cramps. I don't know how the old man come to make such a contrac',
but he did. Result is, he's out his expenses and time."

To understand exactly the catastrophe that had occurred, it is
necessary to follow briefly an outline of the process after the
logs have been piled on the banks. There they remain until the
break-up attendant on spring shall flood the stream to a freshet.
The rollways are then broken, and the saw logs floated down the
river to the mill where they are to be cut into lumber.

If for any reason this transportation by water is delayed until
the flood goes down, the logs are stranded or left in pools.
Consequently every logger puts into the two or three weeks of
freshet water a feverish activity which shall carry his product
through before the ebb.

The exceptionally early break-up of this spring, combined with the
fact that, owing to the series of incidents and accidents already
sketched, the actual cutting and skidding had fallen so far behind,
caught Radway unawares. He saw his rollways breaking out while his
teams were still hauling in the woods. In order to deliver to the
mouth of the Cass Branch the three million already banked, he was
forced to drop everything else and attend strictly to the drive.
This left still, as has been stated, a million and a half on
skidways, which Radway knew he would be unable to get out that year.

In spite of the jobber's certainty that his claim was thus annulled,
and that he might as well abandon the enterprise entirely for all he
would ever get out of it, he finished the "drive" conscientiously
and saved to the Company the logs already banked. Then he had
interviewed Daly. The latter refused to pay him one cent. Nothing
remained but to break camp and grin as best he might over the loss
of his winter's work and expenses.

The next day Radway and Thorpe walked the ten miles of the river
trail together, while the teamsters and the cook drove down the
five teams. Under the influence of the solitude and a certain
sympathy which Thorpe manifested, Radway talked--a very little.

"I got behind; that's all there is to it," he said. "I s'pose I
ought to have driven the men a little; but still, I don't know. It
gets pretty cold on the plains. I guess I bit off more than I could
chew."

His eye followed listlessly a frenzied squirrel swinging from the
tops of poplars.

"I wouldn't 'a done it for myself," he went on. "I don't like the
confounded responsibility. They's too much worry connected with it
all. I had a good snug little stake--mighty nigh six thousand.
She's all gone now. That'd have been enough for me--I ain't a
drinkin' man. But then there was the woman and the kid. This ain't
no country for woman-folks, and I wanted t' take little Lida out o'
here. I had lots of experience in the woods, and I've seen men make
big money time and again, who didn't know as much about it as I do.
But they got there, somehow. Says I, I'll make a stake this year--
I'd a had twelve thousand in th' bank, if things'd have gone right--
and then we'll jest move down around Detroit an' I'll put Lida in
school."

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