The Boss of Wind River/Chapter 18

OE stood on the jam, watching the crew dry-picking out the logs and throwing them into the water, burrowing down for a place to use more powder, when his name was shouted. He looked up, and his heart gave a decided thump. Above him stood William Crooks and Jack.

Joe leaped the logs and ran up the bank. “How did you get here?” he cried. “Why didn't you let me know you were coming?”

“We thought we'd surprise you,” said Jack sedately. “I persuaded dad. I wanted to see how our drive was coming down.”

“It isn't coming down just now,” Joe observed. “We can't stir it. Here, come over to my tent and make yourselves at home. Oh, Jimmy,” he called to the cook, “rustle a good meal, will you? Spread yourself on something fancy, now.”

The cook grinned amiably, and became suddenly shamefaced as Jack smiled at him. “I ain't got much fixin's,” he apologized. “If th' lady, there, 'd tell me what she'd like”

“Why, you're Jimmy Bowes!” cried Jack. “I remember you, twelve years ago on dad's camp on the Little Canoe. You used to give me lumps from the brown sugar barrel. Jimmy, I'll always love you for that.”

Jimmy Bowes blushed to the top of his bald head as he shook hands. “You've growed,” said he. “Sure, I remember, but I didn't think you'd know the old bull-cook. You'reyou're real purty!” Suddenly embarrassed by his own candour and Joe's laughter he retreated to his own domain where, cursing his cookee, he plunged into preparations for a magnificent meal.

McKenna and MacNutt came ashore and met Crooks.

“Well, boys,” said the old lumberman, “she's a teaser, hey!”

“You bet,” replied McKenna. “She's solid as a cellar—froze to the bottom all the way. Still, the water's risin' now, an' she may pull most any time.” He did not believe a word of his statement, but he spoke so that Joe should not be discouraged. Crooks, who did not believe a word of it either, nodded.

“That's the way with big jams. I remember, thirty years ago on Frenchman's Creek” He drew McKenna and MacNutt out of earshot, relating his story. Suddenly he stopped. “Look here, Dinny, if this jam don't break mighty soon young Kent goes out of business.”

“Well, I wish t' God I knew how to break her,” said McKenna. “The boys can't work harder than they're doing. We've put in shots 't'd rip a mountain loose, and she just lays back her ears and sits tighter.”

Meanwhile Jack and Joe walked upstream along the bank. Here and there on the flanks of the wooden monster crews of men picked away with peavies. The clean smell of the millions of feet of freshly cut, wet timber struck the nostrils. The water tore and snarled at the wedged logs, and little streams shot through the mass, hissing and gurgling; the voice of the checked river was deep and angry.

“To-morrow we're going to fill it up with powder and see what that does,” said Joe. “With the rising water it may start things. If it does not” He shrugged his shoulders. If the jam did not “pull” soon he was broken, and he knew it.

Jack slid her arm in his. “Dad says the big jams go when you least expect it. This will. You have time yet, Joey-boy.”

He patted her hand. “It's good of you, Jack. Anyway, I've done my best, and if I'm downed this time I can make a fresh start. I know something about the business now.”

Jack looked at him and nodded. He was quite unlike the neatly tailored Joe Kent of a year before. He wore a battered felt hat, a gray shirt, trousers cut off below the knees, and heavy woollen stockings. On his feet were the “cork boots” of the riverman. Already he had mastered the rudiments of “birling,” and could run across floating logs, if not gracefully at least with slight chance of a ducking. He was bronzed and hard, and his hands were rough and calloused. But the difference went deeper than outward appearance. He was stronger, graver, more self-reliant, and the girl recognized and approved of the change.

The day faded into dusk. Big fires were lighted at the camp. Crooks and his daughter remained for supper; afterward they were to drive back to the little town, coming back the next morning to see the big shots let off.

Crooks lit a cigar and joined the foremen, to discuss the jam and the probability of breaking it, and yarn of his own experiences with mighty rivermen whose names were now but traditions. The men lay about the fires, smoking and talking. They were tired, and the popular vocalists, shy because there was a girl in the camp, hung back and muttered profane refusals when asked to sing. Jack was disappointed. “I haven't heard a shanty song sung by a crew in ages. I wish they would wake up. Am I the wet-blanket?”

“I'll go over and tell them to sing anything you like,” Joe offered promptly.

“No, that wouldn't do. Some of them are going to their blankets already. To-morrow night—when the jam is broken—we'll have a celebration. I'll sing to them myself.”

“If it is broken!”

“Now, Joe,” she reproved him severely, “you brace up. We're going to break that jam to-morrow; and we're going to deliver our logs on time, and don't you dare to even think we're not. I tell you we are! Don't get discouraged, for we're going to win out.”

“You're a good booster, Jack” he said, smothering a sigh. “Of course we are. And once we get through here we'll have plain sailing.”

He pressed her hand gratefully. It was something to receive encouragement, even if it was plainly labelled, and he would not be so ungracious as to tell her so. Crooks loomed out of the darkness and called for his team. Half an hour afterward Joe was the only man awake in camp, and he drifted into slumber with the memory of the soft touch of Jack's lips as they lay for a moment on his.

In the morning the jam was sown with dynamite, planted deep beneath the logs at points approved by McKenna. Crooks and Jack arrived. The men came ashore and waited anxiously.

Almost simultaneously, columns of water, strips of bark and twisted, riven wood shot high in the air, and the detonations thundered back from the rocks. A rumbling growl issued from the inwards of the wooden monster. It heaved and rose. Logs toppled down the face of it, and then the whole front cascaded in wild confusion. Just when it seemed that the whole thing must go motion ceased. The shaggy, bristling brute settled back into immobility. The shots had failed.

Bosses and men swore fervently. These continued failures were blots on their records as rivermen. Their employer needed those logs badly, and it was up to them not to disappoint him. The jam was big and ugly, but it must be broken. Doggedly they climbed out on the logs again and set to work.

When the jam failed to “pull,” Kent looked at Jack, reading the bitter disappointment in her face. Somehow it helped him to conceal his own.

“Better luck next time, girlie,” he said. “Anyway, we made a lot of noise.”

She smiled back at him, but her lips quivered, “Of course it will pull next time; it can't help it.”

“Of course not,” he agreed, being quite convinced to the contrary.

They fell silent, gloomily watching the crew at work. Below them a man clamped his peavey into a log at the base of the pile and swung back on it so that the tough stock bent like a whip. Failing to move it he called a comrade. They pried and boosted, their clinging shirts bulging with the swell of their back-muscles. Suddenly the log came away. Immediately a groan rose from the timbers. The men sprang to alertness. Crackings and complainings ran through the mass.

The girl caught Joe's arm.

“It's going out, Joe! It's going out! Oh, see it pull!”

There was no doubt of it. The jam “pulled” with the bellow of a maddened beast. Logs shot outward, upward, downward—every way, rolling over and over, smashing, up-ending, grinding. Through them the white, torn water boiled madly. The core of the jam seemed to leap bodily downstream and then split into fragments.

Over the turmoil the rivermen fled for shore, each man balancing himself with his peavey, held low across his body. Their flight was swift, but unhurried and calculated. In face of the deadliest peril of the riverman—the breaking jam—they were cool and wary, timing to a nicety leap from tossing log to tossing log.

Suddenly, opposite the watchers, a man lost his footing and pitched forward. Another, twenty feet away, cleared the space with two leaps, caught the first by the collar and dragged him upright, but the man sagged down, evidently badly hurt. The other dropped his peavey, heaved him up in his arms and, thus burdened, made for shore. He sprang once, twice, hampered by his load. Then a wave of smashing timber surged down and over them. They were blotted from the world, effaced without even a stain on the torn water.

Jack, deadly white, with shining eyes and parted lips, stared at the spot where they had been.

“Oh, the brave boy—the poor, brave boy!” she cried. “Who was he, Joe?”

“Ward—Ward and McClung, two of my best men—chums,” Joe told her bitterly. “I wouldn't have—Jack! Jack, look there!”

Strung along the jam as the men were when it pulled, some of them had no direct route for shore. Among these were McKenna, Dave Cottrell, and Hill and Laflamme of Deever's crew. The last three were noted “white water birlers,” experts upon logs under any and all conditions, and McKenna, the old walking boss, in his best days had never found a man who could put him off a stick of pine.

When the jam began to pull they were opposite a stretch of rocky bank that offered no way of escape.

“Boys,” said McKenna, “it's a bad chance, but we've got to take it—we've got to ride her down.”

As he spoke the log on which he stood pitched sideways beneath him. He left it as a bird leaves a bough, alighting on another, and ran the tossing mass downstream. Cottrell, active as a squirrel, kept close to him. Hill and Laflamme, too, kept together but without premeditation, for each instinctively took the course that looked best to him. They dodged over and across the up-ending, smashing timbers, avoiding death at each spring by the thickness of a hair. It was this sight which had caused Joe Kent's exclamation.

Hill was the first to go. Just once he miscalculated by the fraction of an inch. He disappeared without a sound. Laflamme, just behind him, sprang across the spot where his companion had been, his eyes widening, his teeth bared and set, his gaudy voyageur's sash streaming from his waist, a bright flag fluttering in the face of destruction. Suddenly an up-ending log brushed his thigh. It was little, but it threw him from his stride. His shriek soared high above the roar of wood and water as the great logs nipped out his life.

Neither McKenna nor Cottrell looked back, though they heard the cry. Their own case was too perilous. A log thrust up suddenly beneath Cottrell's feet and threw him into the air as if he had been shot from a springboard. He alighted on his feet again by the purest of luck, and seeing an opening of water and a free log, leaped on it, whence he made his way to shore. McKenna, dead-beat, gained the outlying logs and fell as he reached solid earth.

Behind them the jam swept by in tossing, foaming grandeur, the backed-up water scouring all before it. McKenna staggered to his feet and waved a gaunt arm.

“Into her, boys, and keep her hustling!” he shouted.

But MacNutt and Deever were already on their way upstream. Tobin and his crew attacked the outlying logs and flung them into the current. Soon the channel was brown with the shooting sticks, flashing by in the racing water.

Jack, pale and shaken, sat and watched them go by. The bright sun, the dancing water, the bird songs from the woods, and the fierce activity of the rivermen were all at variance with the vision of sudden death which she had beheld. Joe, grave and silent, came up accompanied by her father.

“I guess we'd better be going, daughter,” said Crooks gently.

She shook her head. “No, dad, I'd like to stay, please. Just leave me here. Joe has the work to see to, and you'd like to be there, too.” The men looked at each other, and her father nodded silently. They went upstream to where the rear was working ferociously.

Jack, left alone, stared at the river, reconstructing the scene, which she was never to entirely forget. It was the first time she had seen men, rejoicing in the pride of their strength, wiped from life as dust is wiped up by a damp cloth. From her childhood she had spent days and even weeks in her father's camps, meeting the big, rough shantymen who one and all adored her; getting glimpses of their life, but only touching the outer shell of it; seeing them against a background of cheerful labour, ringing axes, song and jest, as real and yet as unreal as a stage setting—a background which in her eyes surrounded them with the elements of romance. Of their vices she knew nothing save by hearsay; of the tragedy of their lives she knew even less. Now, before her young eyes, Fate had swooped and struck instantly and without warning. Small wonder that she was shocked.

And she was shocked, also, by the apparent callousness of the dead men's comrades. They worked carelessly, as it seemed, about the very spot where the others had died. But here common sense came to her aid. The logs—Joe's logs, their logs—must be got out. No matter what toll the river claimed the drive must go down and to market.

It was the way of the world. In this as in other things, human life was the cheapest of commodities; its loss the least important hindrance, of less practical moment than the breakage of an ingenious man-made machine. She sighed as the realization came to her. It seemed heartless, yet she could not escape it. Sitting on the log, staring at the river, her lips moved in almost unconscious prayer for the men who had died like men, doing the work they were paid to do.