The Riverman

S >> Stewart Edward White >> The Riverman

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Sure enough, after supper Orde suddenly appeared among them, the
well-known devil of mischief dancing in his eyes and broadening his
good-natured face.

"Get organised, boys," said he briskly. "We've got to get this pond
all sluiced before morning, and there's enough of us here to hustle
it right along."

The men took their places. Orde moved here and there, giving his
directions.

"Sluice through everything but the "H" logs," he commanded. "Work
them off to the left and leave them."

Twilight, then dark, fell. After a few moments the moon, then just
past its full, rose behind the new-budding trees. The sluicing,
under the impetus of a big crew, went rapidly.

"I bet there's mighty near a million an hour going through there,"
speculated Orde, watching the smooth, swift, but burdened waters of
the chute.

And in this work the men distinguished easily the new white blaze-
marks on Heinzman's logs; so they were able without hesitation to
shunt them one side into the smoother water, as Orde had commanded.

About two o'clock the last log shot through.

"Now, boys," said Orde, "tear out the booms."

The chute to the dam was approached, as has been earlier explained,
by two rows of booms arranged in a V, or funnel, the apex of which
emptied into the sluice-way, and the wide, projecting arms of which
embraced the width of the stream. The logs, floating down the pond,
were thus concentrated toward the sluice. Also, the rivermen,
walking back and forth the length of the booms, were able easily to
keep the drive moving.

Now, however, Orde unchained these boom logs. The men pushed them
ashore. There as many as could find room on either side the boom-
poles clamped in their peavies, and, using these implements as
handles, carried the booms some distance back into the woods. Then
everybody tramped back and forth, round and about, to confuse the
trail. Orde was like a mischievous boy at a school prank. When the
last timber had been concealed, he lifted up his deep voice in a
roar of joy, in which the crew joined.

Now let's turn in for a little sleep," said be.

This situation, perhaps a little cloudy in the reader's mind, would
have cleared could he have looked out over the dam pond the
following morning. The blazed logs belonging to Heinzman, drifting
slowly, had sucked down into the corner toward the power canal
where, caught against the grating, they had jammed. These logs
would have to be floated singly, and pushed one by one against the
current across the pond and into the influence of the sluice-gate.
Some of them would be hard to come at.

"I guess that will keep them busy for a day or two," commented Orde,
as he followed the rear down to where it was sacking below the dam.

This, as Orde had said, would be sufficiently annoying to Heinzman,
but would have little real effect on the main issue, which was that
the German was getting down his logs with a crew of less than a
dozen men. Nevertheless, Orde, in a vast spirit of fun, took
delight in inventing and executing practical jokes of the general
sort just described. For instance, at one spot where he had boomed
the deeper channel from the rocks on either side, he shunted as many
of Heinzman's logs as came by handily through an opening he had made
in the booms. There they grounded on the shallows--more work for
the men following. Many of the logs in charge of the latter,
however, catching the free current, overtook the rear, so that the
number of the "H" logs in the drive was not materially diminished.

At first, as has been hinted, these various tactics had little
effect. One day, however, the chore boy, who had been over to
Spruce Rapids after mail, reported that an additional crew of twenty
had been sent in to Heinzman's drive. This was gratifying.

"We're making him scratch gravel, boys, anyway," said Orde.

The men entered into the spirit of the thing. In fact, their
enthusiasm was almost too exuberant. Orde had constantly to
negative new and ingenious schemes.

"No, boys," said he, "I want to keep on the right side of the law.
We may need it later."

Meanwhile the entire length of the river was busy and excited.
Heinzman's logs were all blazed inside a week. The men passed the
hatchets along the line, and slim chance did a marked log have of
rescue once the poor thing fell into difficulties. With the strange
and interesting tendency rivermen and woodsmen have of personifying
the elements of their daily work, the men addressed the helpless
timbers in tones of contempt.

"Thought you'd ride that rock, you ---- ---- ----," said they, "and
got left, did you? Well, lie there and be ---- to you!"

And if chance offered, and time was not pressing, the riverman would
give his helpless victim a jerk or so into a more difficult
position. Times of rising water--when the sluice-gates above had
been opened--were the most prolific of opportunities. Logs rarely
jam on rising water, for the simple reason that constantly the
surface area of the river is increasing, thus tending to separate
the logs. On the other hand, falling water, tending to crowd the
drive closer together, is especially prolific of trouble.
Therefore, on flood water the watchers scattered along the stretches
of the river had little to do--save strand Heinzman's logs for him.
And when flood water had passed, some of those logs were certainly
high and dry.

Up to a certain point this was all very well. Orde took pains not
to countenance it officially, and caused word to be passed about,
that while he did not expect his men to help drive Heinzman's logs,
they must not go out of their way to strand them.

"If things get too bad, he'll have spies down here to collect
evidence on us," said Orde, "and he'll jug some of us for
interference with his property. We don't own the river."

"How about them booms?" asked the Rough Red.

"I did own them," explained Orde, "and I had a right to take them up
when I had finished with them."

This hint was enough. The men did not cease from a labour that
tickled them mightily, but they adopted a code of signals.
Strangers were not uncommon. Spectators came out often from the
little towns and from the farms round-about. When one of these
appeared the riverman nearest raised a long falsetto cry. This was
taken up by his next neighbour and passed on. In a few minutes all
that section of the drive knew that it would be wise to "lie low."
And inside of two weeks Orde had the great satisfaction of learning
that Heinzman was working--and working hard--a crew of fifty men.

"A pretty fair crew, even if he was taking out his whole drive,"
commented Orde.

The gods of luck seemed to be with the new enterprise. Although
Orde had, of course, taken the utmost pains to foresee every
contingency possible to guard against, nevertheless, as always when
dealing with Nature's larger forces, he anticipated some of those
gigantic obstacles which continually render uncertain wilderness
work. Nothing of the kind happened. There formed none of the
tremendous white-water jams that pile up several million feet of
logs, tax every resource of men, horses, and explosives, and require
a week or so to break. No men were killed, and only two injured.
No unexpected floods swept away works on which the drive depended.
The water held out to carry the last stick of timber over the
shallowest rapids. Weather conditions were phenomenal--and perfect.
All up and down the river the work went with that vim and dash that
is in itself an assurance of success. The Heinzman affair, which
under auspices of evil augury might have become a serious menace to
the success of the young undertaking, now served merely to add a
spice of humour to the situation. Among the men gained currency a
half-affectionate belief in "Orde's luck."

After this happy fashion the drive went, until at last it entered
the broad, deep, and navigable stretches of the river from Redding
to the lake. Here, barring the accident of an extraordinary flood,
the troubles were over. On the broad, placid bosom of the stream
the logs would float. A crew, following, would do the easy work of
sacking what logs would strand or eddy in the lazy current; would
roll into the faster waters the component parts of what were by
courtesy called jams, but which were in reality pile-ups of a few
hundred logs on sand bars mid-stream; and in the growing tepid
warmth of summer would tramp pleasantly along the river trail. Of
course, a dry year would make necessary a larger crew and more
labour; of course, a big flood might sweep the logs past all
defences into the lake for an irretrievable loss. But such floods
come once in a century, and even the dryest of dry years could not
now hang the drive. As Orde sat in his buckboard, ready to go into
town for a first glimpse of Carroll in more than two months, he
gazed with an immense satisfaction over the broad river moving brown
and glacier-like as though the logs that covered it were viscid and
composed all its substance. The enterprise was practically assured
of success.

For a while now Orde was to have a breathing spell. A large number
of men were here laid off. The remainder, under the direction of
Jim Denning, would require little or no actual supervision. Until
the jam should have reached the distributing booms above Monrovia,
the affair was very simple. Before he left, however, he called
Denning to him.

"Jim," said he, "I'll be down to see you through the sluiceways at
Redding, of course. But now that you have a good, still stretch of
river, I want you to have the boys let up on sacking out those "H"
logs. And I want you to include in our drive all the Heinzman logs
from above you possibly can. If you can fix it, let their drive
drift down into ours.

"Then we'll have to drive their logs for them," objected Denning.

"Sure," rejoined Orde, "but it's easy driving; and if that crew of
his hasn't much to do, perhaps he'll lay most of them off here at
Redding."

Denning looked at his principal for a moment, then a slow grin
overspread his face. Without comment he turned back to camp, and
Orde took up his reins.

XXV

Oh, I'm so GLAD to get you back!" cried Carroll over and over again,
as she clung to him. "I don't live while you're away. And every
drop of rain that patters on the roof chills my heart, because I
think of it as chilling you; and every creak of this old house at
night brings me up broad awake, because I hear in it the crash of
those cruel great timbers. Oh, oh, OH! I'm so glad to get you!
You're the light of my life; you're my whole life itself!"--she
smiled at him from her perch on his knee--"I'm silly, am I not?" she
said. "Dearg heart, don't leave me again."

"I've got to support an extravagant wife, you know," Orde reminded
her gravely.

"I know, of course," she breathed, bending lightly to him. "You
have your work in the world to do, and I would not have it
otherwise. It is great work--wonderful work--I've been asking
questions."

Orde laughed.

"It's work, just like any other. And it's hard work," said he.

She shook her head at him slowly, a mysterious smile on her lips.
Without explaining her thought, she slipped from his knee and glided
across to the tall golden harp, which had been brought from
Monrovia. The light and diaphanous silk of her loose peignoir
floated about her, defining the maturing grace of her figure.
Abruptly she struck a great crashing chord.

Then, with an abandon of ecstasy she plunged into one of those wild
and sea-blown saga-like rhapsodies of the Hungarians, full of the
wind in rigging, the storm in the pines, of shrieking, vast forces
hurtling unchained through a resounding and infinite space, as
though deep down in primeval nature the powers of the world had been
loosed. Back and forth, here and there, erratic and swift and
sudden as lightning the theme played breathless. It fell.

"What is that?" gasped Orde, surprised to find himself tense, his
blood rioting, his soul stirred.

She ran to him to hide her face in his neck.

"Oh, it's you, you, you!" she cried.

He held her to him closely until her excitement had died.

"Do you think it is good to get quite so nervous, sweetheart?" he
asked gently, then. "Remember--"

"Oh, I do, I do!" she broke in earnestly. "Every moment of my
waking and sleeping hours I remember him. Always I keep his little
soul before me as a light on a shrine. But to-night--oh! to-night I
could laugh and shout aloud like the people in the Bible, with
clapping of hands." She snuggled herself close to Orde with a
little murmur of happiness. "I think of all the beautiful things,"
she whispered, "and of the noble things, and of the great things.
He is going to be sturdy, like his father; a wonderful boy, a boy
all of fire--"

"Like his mother," said Orde.

She smiled up at him. "I want him just like you, dear," she
pleaded.

XXVI

Three days later the jam of the drive reached the dam at Redding.
Orde took Carroll downtown in the buckboard. There a seat by the
dam-watcher's little house was given her, back of the brick factory
buildings next the power canal, whence for hours she watched the
slow onward movement of the sullen brown timbers, the smooth,
polished-steel rush of the waters through the chute, the graceful
certain movements of the rivermen. Some of the latter were brought
up by Orde and introduced. They were very awkward, and somewhat
embarrassed, but they all looked her straight in the eye, and
Carroll felt somehow that back of their diffidence they were quite
dispassionately appraising her. After a few gracious speeches on
her part and monosyllabic responses on theirs, they blundered away.
In spite of the scant communication, these interviews left something
of a friendly feeling on both sides.

"I like your Jim Denning," she told Orde; "he's a nice, clean-cut
fellow. And Mr. Bourke," she laughed. "Isn't he funny with his
fierce red beard and his little eyes? But he simply adores you."

Orde laughed at the idea of the Rough Red's adoring anybody.

"It's so," she insisted, "and I like him for it--only I wish he were
a little cleaner."

She thought the feats of "log-riding" little less than wonderful,
and you may be sure the knowledge of her presence did not discourage
spectacular display. Finally, Johnny Challan, uttering a loud
whoop, leaped aboard a log and went through the chute standing bolt
upright. By a marvel of agility, he kept his balance through the
white-water below, and emerged finally into the lower waters still
proudly upright, and dry above the knees.

Carroll had arisen, the better to see.

"Why," she cried aloud, "it's marvellous! Circus riding is nothing
to it!"

"No, ma'am," replied a gigantic riverman who was working near at
hand, "that ain't nothin'. Ordinary, however, we travel that way on
the river. At night we have the cookee pass us out each a goose-
ha'r piller, and lay down for the night."

Carroll looked at him in reproof. He grinned slowly.

"Don't git worried about me, ma'am," said he, "I'm hopeless. For
twenty year now I been wearin' crape on my hat in memory of my
departed virtues."

After the rear had dropped down river from Redding, Carroll and Orde
returned to their deserted little box of a house at Monrovia.

Orde breathed deep of a new satisfaction in walking again the
streets of this little sandy, sawdust-paved, shantyfied town, with
its yellow hills and its wide blue river and its glimpse of the lake
far in the offing. It had never meant anything to him before. Now
he enjoyed every brick and board of it; he trod the broken, aromatic
shingles of the roadway with pleasure; he tramped up the broad
stairs and down the dark hall of the block with anticipation; he
breathed the compounded office odour of ledgers, cocoa matting, and
old cigar smoke in a long, reminiscent whiff; he took his seat at
his roll-top desk, enchanted to be again in these homely though
familiar surroundings.

"Hanged if I know what's struck me," he mused. "Never experienced
any remarkable joy before in getting back to this sort of truck."

Then, with a warm glow at the heart, the realisation was brought to
him. This was home, and over yonder, under the shadow of the
heaven-pointing spire, a slip of a girl was waiting for him.

He tried to tell her this when next he saw her.

"I felt that I ought to make you a little shrine, and burn candles
to you, the way the Catholics do--"

"To the Mater Dolorosa?" she mocked.

He looked at her dark eyes so full of the sweetness of content, at
her sensitive lips with the quaintly upturned corners, and he
thouht of what her home life had been and of the real sorrow that
even yet must smoulder somewhere down in the deeps of her being.

"No," said he slowly, "not that. I think my shrine will be
dedicated to Our Lady of the Joyous Soul."

The rest of the week Orde was absent up the river, superintending in
a general way the latter progress of the drive, looking into the
needs of the crews, arranging for supplies. The mills were all
working now, busily cutting into the residue of last season's logs.
Soon they would need more.

At the booms everything was in readiness to receive the jam. The
long swing arm slanting across the river channel was attached to its
winch which would operate it. When shut it would close the main
channel and shunt into the booms the logs floating in the river.
There, penned at last by the piles driven in a row and held together
at the top by bolted timbers, they would lie quiet. Men armed with
pike-poles would then take up the work of distribution according to
the brands stamped on the ends. Each brand had its own separate
"sorting pens," the lower end leading again into the open river.
From these each owner's property was rafted and towed to his private
booms at his mill below.

Orde spent the day before the jam appeared in constructing what he
called a "boomerang."

"Invention of my own," he explained to Newmark. Secret invention
just yet. I'm going to hold up the drive in the main river until we
have things bunched, then I'm going to throw a big crew down here by
the swing. Heinzman anticipates, of course, that I'll run the
entire drive into the booms and do all my sorting there. Naturally,
if I turn his logs loose into the river as fast as I run across
them, he will be able to pick them up one at a time, for he'll only
get them occasionally. If I keep them until everything else is
sorted, only Heinzman's logs will remain; and as we have no right to
hold logs, we'll have to turn them loose through the lower sorting
booms, where he can be ready to raft them. In that way he gets them
all right without paying us a cent. See?"

"Yes, I see," said Newmark.

"Well," said Orde, with a laugh, "here is where I fool him. I'm
going to rush the drive into the booms all at once, but I'm going to
sort out Heinzman's logs at these openings near the entrance and
turn them into the main channel."

"What good will that do?" asked Newmark sceptically. "He gets them
sorted just the same, doesn't he?"

"The current's fairly strong," Orde pointed out, "and the river's
almighty wide. When you spring seven or eight million feet on a
man, all at once and unexpected, and he with no crew to handle them,
he's going to keep almighty busy. And if he don't stop them this
side his mill, he'll have to raft and tow them back; and if he don't
stop 'em this side the lake, he may as well kiss them all good bye--
except those that drift into the bayous and inlets and marshes, and
other ungodly places."

"I see," said Newmark drily.

"But don't say a word anywhere," warned Orde. "Secrecy is the
watchword of success with this merry little joke."

The boomerang worked like a charm. The men had been grumbling at an
apparently peaceful yielding of the point at issue, and would have
sacked out many of the blazed logs if Orde had not held them rigidly
to it. Now their spirits flamed into joy again. The sorting went
like clockwork. Orde, in personal charge, watched that through the
different openings in his "boomerang" the "H" logs were shunted into
the river. Shortly the channel was full of logs floating merrily
away down the little blue wavelets. After a while Orde handed over
his job to Tom North.

"Can't stand it any longer, boys," said he. "I've got to go down
and see how the Dutchman is making it."

"Come back and tell us!" yelled one of the crew.

"You bet I will!" Orde shouted back.

He drove the team and buckboard down the marsh road to Heinzman's
mill. There he found evidences of the wildest excitement. The mill
had been closed down, and all the men turned in to rescue logs.
Boats plied in all directions. A tug darted back and forth.
Constantly the number of floating logs augmented, however. Many had
already gone by.

"If you think you're busy now," said Orde to himself with a chuckle,
"just wait until you begin to get LOGS."

He watched for a few moments in silence.

"What's he doing with that tug?" thought he. "O-ho! He's stringing
booms across the river to hold the whole outfit."

He laughed aloud, turned his team about, and drove frantically back
to the booms. Every few moments he chuckled. His eyes danced.
Hardly could he wait to get there. Once at the camp, he leaped from
the buckboard, with a shout to the stableman, and ran rapidly out
over the booms to where the sorting of "H" logs was going merrily
forward.

"He's shut down his mill," shouted Orde, "and he's got all that gang
of highbankers out, and every old rum-blossom in Monrovia, and I bet
if you say 'logs' to him, he'd chase his tail in circles."

"Want this job?" North asked him.

"No," said Orde, suddenly fallen solemn, "haven't time. I'm going
to take Marsh and the SPRITE and go to town. Old Heinzman," he
added as an afterthought, "is stringing booms across the river--
obstructing navigation."

He ran down the length of the whole boom to where lay the two tugs.

"Marsh," he called when still some distance away, "got up steam?"

There appeared a short, square, blue-clad man, with hard brown
cheeks, a heavy bleached flaxen moustache, and eyes steady,
unwavering, and as blue as the sky.

"Up in two minutes," he answered, and descended from the pilot house
to shout down a low door leading from the deck into the engine room.

"Harvey," he commanded, "fire her up!"

A tall, good-natured negro reached the upper half of his body from
the low door to seize an armful of the slabs piled along the narrow
deck. Ten minutes later the SPRITE, a cloud of white smoke pouring
from her funnel, was careening down the stretch of the river.

Captain Marsh guided his energetic charge among the logs floating in
the stream with the marvellous second instinct of the expert tugboat
man. A whirl of the wheel to the right, a turn to the left--the
craft heeled strongly under the forcing of her powerful rudder to
avoid by an arm's-length some timbers fairly flung aside by the
wash. The displacement of the rapid running seemed almost to press
the water above the level of the deck on either side and about ten
feet from the gunwale. As the low marshes and cat-tails flew past,
Orde noted with satisfaction that many of the logs, urged one side
by the breeze, had found lodgment among the reeds and in the bayous
and inlets. One at a time, and painfully, these would have to be
salvaged.

In a short time the mills' tall smokestacks loomed in sight. The
logs thickened until it was with difficulty that Captain Marsh could
thread his way among them at all. Shortly Orde, standing by the
wheel in the pilot-house, could see down the stretches of the river
a crowd of men working antlike.

"They've got 'em stopped," commented Orde. "Look at that gang
working from boats! They haven't a dozen 'cork boots' among 'em."

"What do you want me to do?" asked Captain Marsh.

"This is a navigable river, isn't it?" replied Orde. "Run through!"

Marsh rang for half-speed and began to nose his way gently through
the loosely floating logs. Soon the tug had reached the scene of
activity, and headed straight for the slender line of booms hitched
end to end and stretching quite across the river.

"I'm afraid we'll just ride over them if we hit them too slow,"
suggested Marsh.

Orde looked at his watch.

"We'll be late for the mail unless we hurry," said he. Marsh
whirled the spokes of his wheel over and rang the engine-room bell.
The water churned white behind, the tug careened.

"Vat you do! Stop!" cried Heinzman from one of the boatse, his head still out
the door, looked back. "Slow down, Marsh,"
said he. "Let's see the show." Already the logs caught by the
booms had taken their motion and had swept past the opening.
Although the lonesome tug Heinzman had on the work immediately
picked up one end of the broken boom, and with it started out into
the river, she found difficulty in making headway against the sweep
of the logs. After a long struggle she reached the middle of the
river, where she was able to hold her own.

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