Holman Day

“ Lane curled his long legs and tucked himself into the gloom of the lower bunk. His eyes, red-rimmed and glowing with strange fire under their knots of gray brow, noted a rifle lying on wooden braces against a log of the camp wall. He rose, clutched it eagerly, and “broke it down.” Its magazine was full. He jacked in a cartridge, laid the rifle on the bunk between himself and the wall, and lay down again.
Most men, after the vigil of a night and bitter struggle of the day, would have slept. Lane lay with eyes wide-propped. ”

“ But now, as he came up the car aisle, his face flushed, his eyes eager, his embarrassment wrinkling on his forehead, Wade looked at him with the sudden thought that the boss of the “Busters” was merely a boy, after all.
“It was only Tommy Eye, Miss Nina,” explained MacLeod, his voice trembling, his abashed admiration shining in his face. “He’s just out of jail, you know.” He looked at Wade and then at the old man of the grizzled whiskers, and raised his voice as though to gain a self-possession he did not feel. “Tommy always gets into jail after the drive is down. ”

“ Grown ponderous, it marches, slow and dignified, in short stages between terms, and sits and rests and puffs at every cross-road of argument, exception, appeal, and writ of error. Even that exigency of five millions of timber waiting in Blunder valley could not hasten the settlement of the young reformer’s main contention or the big question. But there are in this life some deeper sentiments than enthusiasm in reform. The old college friendship between Dwight Wade, famous centre of Burton’s eleven, and the little quarter-back whom he had shielded was one of those deeper sentiments. ”

“ Already the jaws of the Hulling Machine were gulping down the gobbets of splintered logs.
“How soon can you replace those booms, Mr. Ide?” Wade edged the words through his teeth, as a man stricken with lockjaw might have spoken. And without waiting for reply, he hurried on. “Put ’em in, Mr. Ide, because you’re going to need ’em. And put along this shore all the men in Castonia who can handle guns. Winchesters and dynamite, with ‘Hell on law’ for a battle-cry! That’s what he’s given us. It’s good enough for me. Will you put those booms in, Mr. Ide?” ”

“ On the morning of his departure Rodburd Ide’s daughter walked with Wade to the store, where the stage started. In the days of their late intimacy the girl had grown into his heart. The sincerity of a sister, self-reliance and womanly sympathy had characterized her attitude towards him from the first; and she had welcomed a friendship which lifted her to a comrade’s level. She was as yet an altruist in matters of the heart; she frankly and openly interested herself only in the loves of others. ”

“ In the woods a blowdown is a wreck of trees. On Ide’s platform the loafers are the wrecks of men. Here at the edge of the woods, at the jumping-off place, the forest sets out its grim exhibits and mutely calls, “Beware!” There are men with one leg, men with one arm, men with no arms at all; there are men with hands maimed by every vagary of mischievous axe or saw. There are men with shanks like broomsticks—men who survived the agonies of freezing. ”

“ Looking at her as he did, with his strange thrill of suspicion that another man wanted her and that she loved the man, he saw that his daughter was beautiful, with the brilliancy of type that transcends prettiness. He realized that she had the wit and spirit which make beauty potent, and her eyes and bearing showed poise and self-reliance. Such was John Barrett’s appraisal, and John Barrett’s business was to appraise humankind. ”

“ In this crisis, by right of her intelligence, her daring, her superiority, the girl seemed to take her place at the head of the pathetic herd.
“That’s what we want, Mr. Britt. You’re driving us down to the settlements again. And then some bow-legged old farmer will lose a sheep by bears or a hen by hawks, and we’ll be set upon and driven back once more to the woods. And then you’ll come and huff and puff and blow our house down and chase us away to the settlement. ‘The law! The law!’ you keep braying like a mule. You kick us one way; the settlements kick us another. ”

“ The odor of warm food was good in the nostrils of old “Ladder” Lane, the fire warden of Jerusalem, as he strode down the valley wall towards the camp. He hung his extinguished lantern on a nail outside the cook camp and stooped and entered the low door. Among woodsmen the amenities of a camp are as scant as welcome is plentiful. Lane seized up a tin plate, loaded it with what he saw in sight, and began to eat hastily and voraciously. ”

“ But brutal force had started the Enchanted drive, brutal force marked its rush, and it had to be brutal force that could keep it going. Brutal force took toll in the logs that were splintered by dynamite, but it was a toll that circumstances demanded. A man unwilling to take the chances that Tommy Eye took would have wasted thousands of feet instead of hundreds, and Wade knew it, and gulped words of gratitude when they met, hurrying on the shore. ”

“ For four days now he had struggled behind old Christopher through tangled undergrowth of striped maple, witch hobble, and mountain holly—Mother Nature’s pathetic attempt to cover with ragged and stunted growth the breast that the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt had stripped bare.
“He cut her three times,” Christopher explained. “First time the virgin black growth—and as handsome a stand of timber as ye ever put calipers to; second time, the battens—all under eleven inches through; third time, even the poles. That’s forestry as he practises it! He’s robbin’ the squirrels!” ”

“ But the Enchanted [Pg 346] drive that spring was a wild beast that never closed its eyes. As it raged along they did not dare to leave it alone for an hour. Men raced beside it, clutched at it, clung as long as they were able, and dropped off, stunned by the stupor of exhaustion.
After a few hours some one’s prodding foot stirred them back to wakefulness, and they stumbled up and began the fight once more. Outside of a charge in battle, there is no place where individual rivalry is so keen and eager as in a driving-crew on hard waters. Men do not require to be urged to do their utmost. ”

“ There stood the nether millstone: the upper was rushing down, and the grist would be flesh of horses and men. No man could see any other alternative. That horses, shaken every now and then on the up-cocked pole as helplessly as kittens, could bring that load around the curve was not a hope; it could be nothing but a dream of desperation.
As to what Tommy Eye dreamed or thought, his passenger had no hint. There was only the patch of cheek showing under the tilted cap. But the reins were just as tight, the out-stretched arms just as steady. Wade crouched low, his eyes on that rigid jaw muscle. ”

“ Wade heard only the yell of the distant saws and the shuffle of the woodsmen’s feet as they paced the big reception-hall of King Spruce.
Between the two men there was too much understanding for empty words of sympathy.
“Lane is dead,” blurted the millionaire, at last. “What will become of the girl?”
“MacLeod is to marry her. She nursed him through his sickness at Castonia; they love each other very sincerely, Mr. Barrett, and you need have no trouble about her future. Neither of them will ever trouble you; in fact, MacLeod asked me to say as much for him.” ”

“ Attean would see that fire leaping past Jerusalem, and would swear and wonder and report too late.
Just now hours were as precious as days.
Men could do nothing at mid-day with the wind lashing behind. MacLeod knew well how that fire should be fought. But with men on the way ready to flank it at nightfall and work ahead of it with pick and shovel and beating branches of green—the winds stilled and the dews condensing—it could be conquered—it must be conquered then, if at all. ”

“ No woman’s hand to make a home.”
Wade did not wake when the cook’s wailing hoot called the camp in the morning. It was black darkness still. He slept through all the clatter of tin dishes, the jangle of bind-chains as the sleds started, the yowl of runners on the dry snow, and the creaking of departing footsteps. The sun quivered in his eyes when he rolled in the bunk at touch of old Christopher’s hand on his shoulder. ”

“ John Barrett, looking into a face which recalled the face of the daughter whom he loved and cherished in his city home, felt one throb of strange emotion, and then realized in all his selfish nature that affection is more a matter of habit and cultivation than an affair of instinct. ”

“ Wade!”
He had thought there could be no worse in human guise than those he had seen. But this huge, hairy, shaggy, almost naked giant, cowering against the side of a shack with all the timidity of a child, marked a climax even to such degeneracy as he had quailed before.
“Mind in him about five years old, and will always stay five years old,” said the guide, pointing to the wistful, simpering face. “Body speaks for itself. Look at them muscles! I’ve seen him ploughin’ hitched with their cow. Clever as a mule. He’s the old woman’s hoss. Hauls her on a jumper clear to Castonia settlement.” ”

“ You know what I owe to one child, and you have brought me word that I can never pay her. You know just as well what I owe to another child—I have taken from her most of her faith and love and happiness. Thank God, I can pay that debt in part, and I know the human heart well enough now to understand that I shall be paying the greater part.”
He left Wade abruptly, and walked to the window and looked down into the street. He beckoned to the young man without turning his head. Wade, coming to his side, saw Elva Barrett’s pony phaeton. ”

“ Woods fires sleep at night. The men who fight them may as well sleep at mid-day.
With the dropping of the sun and the sinking of the winds the fires drowse and flicker and smoulder. Then must one attack the monster; for at daybreak he is up, ravening and roaring and hungry.
And now—not even Britt’s own crew of loggers at the foot of Jerusalem had word and warning. MacLeod bellowed appeals to be let out. He besought Lane to hurry down the mountain to camp. ”

“ This is only in advice, MacLeod—only in advice,” he cried, flapping a big hand to check impatient interruption. “You saw when Tommy Eye, the drunken fool, fell under the train at the junction to-day, as he is always doing, that feller Wade picked him up with one hand and lugged him like a pound of sausage-meat—saved the fool’s life, and didn’t turn a hair over it. So, talk a little softer about killing, my boy, and, best of all, wait till you find out that he wants the girl or the girl wants you!” ”

“ Roof and walls had attached themselves to his sentiency, even as the shell of the snail is attached to its pulp.
But the next moment Larry Gorman started a song, and the rollicking hundred men about him took it up and toiled with merry thoughtlessness of all except that God’s good greenwood was about them and God’s sky above them, and Wade bent again to labor, ashamed that he had counted shingles and plaster as standing for so much.
They put up eight-log walls for the main camp, notching the ends. A hundred willing men made the buildings grow like toadstools. ”

“ A woodman’s lope is not impressive, viewed with a sprinter’s eye. Nor is a camel’s stride. But either is a great devourer of distance. So it happened that Tommy Eye, sweat-streaked and breathing hard, caught up with the sluggish Castonia stage while it was negotiating the last rock-strewn hill a half-mile outside the settlement.
Dwight Wade, time-keeper of the Busters, heard the stertorous puffing, and looked around to see Tommy Eye clinging to the muddy axle and towing behind. Tommy divided an amiable and apologetic grin between Wade and the girl beside him. ”

“ Oh, what an idiot MacLeod is! This stranger will think we’re all fools up here!” Tears of rage and shame filled her eyes.
Ide’s gaze, wandering from her face to Wade and then to the loafers, saw one of Britt’s great wagons topping the distant rise, and he heard a wild chorus of hailing yells.
“You run up to the house, girl,” he said.
“I’ll not,” she replied. And when he began to frown at her she clasped his arm with both her hands and murmured: “He’s a stranger and a gentleman, father, and they’re abusing him. He is nothing to me. He’s in love with another girl. ”

“ And Death had marked his forehead: ‘To a Woman. Kindly Rush!’”
When Christopher and Wade started up and hurried into the lean-to, the cook of the “Lazy Tom” camp went ahead carrying a lamp to light the place whose rude interior had so suddenly been made mystic by death.
“‘Yes, s’r,’ says I to him,” he repeated, with queer, bewildered, hysterical sort of chuckle. “I says to him, jolly as a chipmunk in a beech-nut tree, I says, ‘Set up and have a doughnut all fresh laid,’ and I’ll be bunga-nucked if he wa’n’t dead! ”

“ Lane had accumulated companions of his loneliness, to wit:
One bull moose, captured in calfhood in deep snow; two bear cubs; a raccoon; a three-legged bobcat, victim of an excited hunter; two horned owls; and a fisher cat.
On this menagerie, variously tethered or crated in sapling cages, the visitor with the disabled arm bestowed a contemptuous side glance while he blinked at the tall figure on the cabin’s flat roof.
Without haste Lane worked himself through the roof-scuttle like an angle-worm drawing into his hole ”