"I often heard this was a sort 'v summer resort," observed Tom Broadhead, "but danged if I knew it was a summer resort all the year 'round."The weather got to be the only topic of conversation.Each had his say, his prediction.It became maddening.Towards evening the chill of melting snow would deceive many into the belief that a cold snap was beginning.
"She'll freeze before morning, sure," was the hopeful comment.
And then in the morning the air would be more balmily insulting than ever.
"Old man is as blue as a whetstone," commented Jackson Hines, "an'
I don't blame him.This weather'd make a man mad enough to eat the devil with his horns left on."By and by it got to be a case of looking on the bright side of the affair from pure reaction.
"I don't know," said Radway, "it won't be so bad after all.Acouple of days of zero weather, with all this water lying around, would fix things up in pretty good shape.If she only freezes tight, we'll have a good solid bottom to build on, and that'll be quite a good rig out there on the marsh."The inscrutable goddess of the wilderness smiled, and calmly, relentlessly, moved her next pawn.
It was all so unutterably simple, and yet so effective.Something there was in it of the calm inevitability of fate.It snowed.
All night and all day the great flakes zig-zagged softly down through the air.Radway plowed away two feet of it.The surface was promptly covered by a second storm.Radway doggedly plowed it out again.
This time the goddess seemed to relent.The ground froze solid.
The sprinklers became assiduous in their labor.Two days later the road was ready for the first sleigh, its surface of thick, glassy ice, beautiful to behold; the ruts cut deep and true; the grades sanded, or sprinkled with retarding hay on the descents.At the river the banking ground proved solid.Radway breathed again, then sighed.Spring was eight days nearer.He was eight days more behind.
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.Aman 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.
