The Riverman
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Stewart Edward White >> The Riverman
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"Well," said he at last, "we better make camp. We'll be down in the
jam pretty soon."
The cookees abandoned the sweeps in favour of more pike-poles. By
pushing and pulling on the logs floating about them, they managed to
work the wanigan in close tthe contents of the wanigan to their places. The
cookees saw what
he was about, and came to his assistance. Together they succeeded
in bending the long hickory sweep far enough to catch its handle-end
under another, forward, thwart. The second oar was quickly locked
alongside the first, and not a moment too soon. A rush of water
forced them all to cling for their lives. The poor old wanigan was
almost buried by the river.
But now help was at hand. Two or three rivermen appeared at the
edge of the chute. A moment later old man Reed ran up, carrying a
rope. This, after some difficulty, was made fast to the bow of the
wanigan. A dozen men ran with the end of it to a position of
vantage from which they might be able to pull the bow away from the
sunken obstruction, but Orde, appearing above, called a halt. After
consultation with Reed, another rope was brought and the end of it
tossed down to the shipwrecked crew. Orde pointed to the stern of
the boat, revolving his hands in pantomime to show that the wanigan
would be apt to upset if allowed to get side-on when freed. A short
rope led to the top of the dam allowed the bow to be lifted free of
the obstruction; a cable astern prevented the current from throwing
her broadside to the rush of waters; another cable from the bow led
her in the way she should go. Ten minutes later she was pulled
ashore out of the eddy below, very much water-logged, and manned by
a drenched and disgruntled crew.
But Orde allowed them little chance for lamentation.
"Hard luck!" he said briefly. "Hope you. Even at
the end of that time the wanigan, though dry of loose water, floated
but sluggishly.
"'Bout two ton of water in them bed-rolls and turkeys," grumbled
Charlie. "Well, get at it!"
Newmark soon discovered that the progress of the wanigan was looked
upon in the light of a side-show by the rivermen. Its appearance
was signal for shouts of delighted and ironic encouragement; its
tribulations--which at first, in the white-water, were many--the
occasion for unsympathetic and unholy joy. Charlie looked on all
spectators as enemies. Part of the time he merely glowered. Part
of the time he tried to reply in kind. To his intense disgust, he
was taken seriously in neither case.
In a couple of hours' run the wanigan had overtaken and left far
behind the rear of the drive. All about floated the logs, caroming
gently one against the other, shifting and changing the pattern of
their brown against the blue of the water. The current flowed
strongly and smoothly, but without obstruction. Everything went
well. The banks slipped by silently and mysteriously, like the
unrolling of a panorama--little strips of marshland, stretches of
woodland where the great trees leaned out over the river, thickets
of overflowed swampland with the water rising and draining among
roots in a strange regularity of its own. The sun shone warm.
There was no wind. Newmark wrung out his outer garments, and basko the bank.
Charlie, a coil of rope in
his hand, surveyed the prospects.
"We'll stop right down there by that little knoll," he announced.
He leaped ashore, made a turn around a tree, and braced himself to
snub the boat, but unfortunately he had not taken into consideration
the "two ton" of water soaked up by the cargo. The weight of the
craft relentlessly dragged him forward. In vain he braced and
struggled. The end of the rope came to the tree; he clung for a
moment, then let go, and ran around the tree to catch it before it
should slip into the water.
By this time the wanigan had caught the stronger current at the bend
and was gathering momentum. Charlie tried to snub at a sapling, and
broke the sapling; on a stub, and uprooted the stub. Down the banks
and through the brush he tore at the end of his rope, clinging
desperately, trying at every solid tree to stop the career of his
runaway, but in every instance being forced by the danger of jamming
his hands to let go. Again he lost his derby. The landscape was a
blur. Dimly he made out the howls of laughter as the outfit passed
a group of rivermen. Then abruptly a ravine yawned before him, and
he let go just in time to save himself a fall. The wanigan,
trailing her rope, drifted away.
Nor did she stop until she had overtaken the jam. There, her
momentum reduced by the closer crowding of the logs, she slowed down
enough so that Newmark and the cookees managed to work her to the
bank and make her fast.
That evening, after the wanigan's crew had accomplished a hard
afternoon's work pitching camp and drying blankets, the first of the
rear drifted in very late after a vain search for camp farther up
stream.
"For God's sake, Charlie," growled one, "it's a wonder you wouldn't
run through to Redding and be done with it."
Whereupon Charlie, who had been preternaturally calm all the
afternoon, uttered a shriek of rage, and with a carving-knife chased
that man out into the brush. Nor would he be appeased to the point
of getting supper until Orde himself had intervened.
"Well," said Orde to Newmark later, around the campfire, "how does
river-driving strike you?"
"It is extremely interesting," replied Newmark.
"Like to join the wanigan crew permanently?"
"No, thanks," returned Newmark drily.
"Well, stay with us as long as you're having a good time," invited
Orde heartily, but turning away from his rather uncommunicative
visitor.
"Thank you," Newmark acknowledged this, "I believe I will."
"Well, Tommy," called Orde across the fire to North, "I reckon we've
got to rustle some more supplies. That shipwreck of ours to-day
mighty near cleaned us out of some things. Lucky Charlie held his
head and locked in the bedding with those sweeps, or we'd have been
strapped."
"I didn't do it," grumbled Charlie. " It was him."
"Oh!" Orde congratulated Newmark. "Good work! I'm tickled to death
you belonged to that crew."
"That old mossback Reed was right on deck with his rope," remarked
Johnny Simms. "That was pretty decent of him."
"Old skunk!" growled North. "He lost us two days with his damn
nonsense. You let him off too easy, Jack."
"Oh, he's a poor old devil," replied Orde easily. "He means well
enough. That's the way the Lord made him. He can't help how he's
made."
VI
During the thirty-three days of the drive, Newmark, to the surprise
of everybody, stayed with the work. Some of these days were very
disagreeable. April rains are cold and persistent--rd cook.
"And you had fifty in your turkey, camping with this outfit of hard
citizens!" he cried. "You ought to lose it."
Johnny Challan was explaining to his companions exactly how the game
was played.
"It's a case of keep your eye on the card, I should think," said big
Tim Nolan. "If you got a quick enough eye to see him flip the card
around, you ought to be able to pick her."
"That's what this sport said," agreed Challan. "'Your eye agin my
hand,' says he."
"Well, I'd like to take a try at her," mused Tim.
But at this point Newmark broke into the discussion. "Have you a
pack of cards?" he asked in his dry, incisive manner.
Somebody rummaged in a turkey and produced the remains of an old
deck.
"I don't believe this is a full deck," said he, "and I think they's
part of two decks in it."
"I othe proverbs as
to showers were made for another latitude. Drenched garments are
bad enough when a man is moving about and has daylight; but when
night falls, and the work is over, he likes a dry place and a change
with which to comfort himself. Dry places there were none. Even
the interior of the tents became sodden by continual exits and
entrances of dripping men, while dry garments speedily dampened in
the shiftings of camp which, in the broader reaches of the lower
river, took place nearly every day. Men worked in soaked garments,
slept in damp blankets. Charlie cooked only by virtue of
persistence. The rivermen ate standing up, as close to the
sputtering, roaring fires as they could get. Always the work went
forward.
But there were other times when a golden sun rose each morning a
little earlier on a green and joyous world. The river ran blue.
Migratory birds fled busily northward--robins, flute-voiced blue-
birds, warblers of many species, sparrows of different kinds, shore
birds and ducks, the sweet-songed thrushes. Little tepid breezes
wandered up and down, warm in contrast to the faint snow-chill that
even yet lingered in the shadows. Sounds carried clearly, so that
the shouts and banter of the rivermen were plainly audible up the
reaches of the river. Ashore moist and aggressive green things were
pushing up through the watery earth from which, in shade, the last
frost had not yet departed. At camp the fires roaed invitingly.
Charlie's grub was hot and grateful. The fir beds gave dreamless
sleep.
Newmark followed the work of the log-drive with great interest. All
day long he tramped back and forth--on jam one day, on rear the
next. He never said much, but watched keenly, and listened to the
men's banter both on the work and about the evening's fire as though
he enjoyed it. Gradually the men got used to him, and ceased to
treat him as an outsider. His thin, eager face, his steel-blue,
inquiring eyes behind the glasses, his gray felt hat, his lank,
tense figure in its gray, became a familiar feature. They threw
remarks to him, to which he replied briefly and drily. When
anything interesting was going on, somebody told him about it. Then
he hurried to the spot, no matter how distant it might be. He used
always the river trail; he never attempted to ride the logs.
He seemed to depend most on observation, for he rarely asked any
questions. What few queries he had to proffer, he made to Orde
himself, waiting sometimes until evening to interview that busy and
good-natured individual. Then his questions were direct and to the
point. They related generally to the advisability of something he
had seen done; only rarely did they ask for explanation of the work
itself. That Newmark seemed capable of puzzling out for himself.
The drive, as has been said, went down as far as Redding in thirty-
three days. It had its share of tribulation. The men worked
fourteen and sixteen hours at times. Several bad jams relieved the
monotony. Three dams had to be sluiced through. Problems of
mechanics arose to be solved on the spot; problems that an older
civilisation would have attacked deliberately and with due respect
for the seriousness of the situation and the dignity of engineering.
Orde solved them by a rough-and-ready but very effective rule of
thumb. He built and abandoned structures which would have furnished
opportunity for a winter's discussion to some committees; just as,
earlier in the work, the loggers had built through a rough country
some hundreds of miles of road better than railroad grade, solid in
foundation, and smooth as a turnpike, the quarter of which would
have occupied the average county board of supervisors for five
years. And while he was at it, Orde kept his men busy and
satisfied. Your white-water birler is not an easy citizen to
handle. Yet never once did the boss appear hurried or flustered.
Always he wandered about, his hands in his pockets, chewing a twig,
his round, wind-reddened face puckered humorously, his blue eyes
twinkling, his square, burly form lazily relaxed. He seemed to meet
his men almost solely on the plane of good-natured chaffing. Yet
the work was done, and done efficiently, and Orde was the man
responsible.
The drive of which Orde had charge was to be delivered at the booms
of Morrison and Daly, a mile or so above the city of Redding.
Redding was a thriving place of about thirty thousand inhabitants,
situated on a long rapids some forty miles from Lake Michigan. The
water-power developed from the rapids explained Redding's existence.
Most of the logs floated down the river were carried through to the
village at the lake coast, where, strung up the river for eight or
ten miles, stood a dozen or so big saw-mills, with concomitant
booms, yards, and wharves. Morrison and Daly, however, had built a
saw and planing mill at Redding, where they supplied most of the
local trade and that of the surrounding country-side.
The drive, then, was due to break up as soon as the logs should be
safely impounded.
The last camp was made some six or eight miles above the mill. From
that point a good proportion of the rivermen, eager for a taste of
the town, tramped away down the road, to return early in the
morning, more or less drunk, but faithful to their job. One or two
did not return.
Among the revellers was the cook, Charlie, commonly called The
Doctor. The rivermen early worked off the effects of their rather
wild spree, and turned up at noon chipper as larks. Not so the
cook. He moped about disconsolately all day; and in the evening,
after his work had been finished, he looked so much like a chicken
with the pip that Orde's attention was attracted.
"Got that dark-brown taste, Charlie?" he inquired with mock
solicitude.
The cook mournfully shook his head.
"Large head? Let's feel your pulse. Stick out your tongue, sonny."
"I ain't been drinking, I tell you!" growled Charlie.
"Drinking!" expostulated Orde, horrified. "Of course not! I hope
none of MY boys ever take a drink! But that lemon-pop didn't agree
with your stomach--now did it, Charlie?"
"I tell you I only had two glasses of beer!" cried Charlie, goaded,
"and I can prove it by Johnny Challan."
Orde turned to survey the pink-cheeked, embarrassed young boy thus
designated.
"How many glasses did Johnny Challan have?" he inquired.
"He didn't drink none to speak of," spoke up the boy.
"Then why this joyless demeanour?" begged Orde.
Charlie grumbled, fiercely inarticulate; but Johnny Challan
interposed with a chuckle of enjoyment.
"He got 'bunked.'"
"Tell us!" cried Orde delightedly.
"It was down at McNeill's place," explained Johnny Challan;
encouraged by the interest of his audience. "They was a couple of
sports there who throwed out three cards on the table and bet you
couldn't pick the jack. They showed you where the jack was before
they throwed, and it surely looked like a picnic, but it wasn't."
"Three-card monte," said Newmark.
"How much?" asked Simms.
"About fifty dollars," replied the boy.
Orde turned on the disgruntlenly want three," assured Newmark, reaching his hand
for the
pack.
The men crowded around close, those in front squatting, those behind
looking over their shoulders.
Newmark cleared a cracker-box of drying socks and drew it to him.
"These three are the cards," he said, speaking rapidly. "There is
the jack of hearts. I pass my hands--so. Pick the jack, one of
you," he challenged, leaning back from the cracker-box on which lay
the three cards, back up. "Any of you," he urged. "You, North."
Thus directly singled out, the foreman leaned forward and rather
hesitatingly laid a blunt forefinger on one of the bits of
pasteboard.
Without a word, Newmark turned it over. It was the ten of spades.
"Let me try," interposed Tim Nolan, pressing his big shoulders
forward. "I bet I know which it was that time; and I bet I can pick
her next time."
"Oh, yes, you BET!" shrugged Newmark. "And that's where the card-
sharps get you fellows every time. Well, pick it," said he, again
deftly flipping the cards.
Nolan, who had watched keenly, indicated one without hesitation.
Again it proved to be the ten of spades.
"Anybody else ambitious?" inquired Newmark. Everybody was
ambitious; and the young man, with inexhaustible patience, threw out
the cards, the corners of his mouth twitching sardonically at each
wrong guess.
At length he called a halt.
"By this time I'd have had all your money," he pointed out. "Now,
I'll pick the jack."
For the last time he made his swift passes and distributed the
cards. Then quite calmly, without disturbing the three on the
cracker-box, he held before their eyes the jack of hearts.
An exclamation broke from the interested group. Tim Nolan, who was
the nearest, leaned forward and turned over the three on the board.
They were the eight of diamonds and two tens of spades.
"That's how the thing is worked nine times out of ten," announced
Newmark. "Once in a while you'll run against a straight game, but
not often."
"But you showed us the jack every time before you throwed them!"
puzzled Johnny Simms.
"Sleight of hand," explained Newmark. "The simplest kind of
palming."
"Well, Charlie," said big Tim, "looks to me as if you had just about
as much chance as a snowball in hell."
"Where'd you get onto doing all that, Newmark?" inquired North.
"You ain't a tin horn yourself?"
Newmark laughed briefly. "Not I," said he. "I learned a lot of
those tricks from a travelling magician in college."
During this demonstration Orde had sat well in the background, his
chin propped on his hand, watching intently all that was going on.
After the comment and exclamations following the exposure of the
method had subsided, he spoke.
"Boys," said he, "how game are you to get Charlie's money back--and
then some?"
"Try us," returned big Tim.
"This game's at McNeill's, and McNeill's is a tough hole," warned
Orde. "Maybe everything will go peaceful, and maybe not. And you
boys that go with me have got to keep sober. There isn't going to
be any row unless I say so, and I'm not taking any contract to
handle a lot of drunken river-hogs as well as go against a game."
"All right," agreed Nolan, "I'm with you."
The thirty or so men of the rear crew then in camp signified their
intention to stay by the procession.
"You can't make those sharps disgorge," counselled Newmark. "At the
first look of trouble they will light out. They have it all fixed.
Force won't do you much good--and may get some of you shot."
"I'm not going to use force," denied Orde. "I'm just going to play
their game. But I bet I can make it go. Only I sort of want the
moral support of the boys."
"I tell you, you CAN'T win!" cried Newmark disgustedly. "It's a
brace game pure and simple."
"I don't know about it's being pure," replied Orde drolly, "but it's
simple enough, if you know how to make the wheels go 'round. How is
it, boys--will you back my play?"
And such was their confidence that, in face of Newmark's
demonstration, they said they would.
VII
After the men had been paid off, perhaps a dozen of them hung around
the yards awaiting evening and the rendezvous named by Orde. The
rest drifted away full of good intentions, but did not show up
again. Orde himself was busy up to the last moment, but finally
stamped out of the office just as the boarding-house bell rang for
supper. He surveyed what remained of his old crew and grinned.
"Well, boys, ready for trouble?" he greeted them. "Come on."
They set out up the long reach of Water Street, their steel caulks
biting deep into the pitted board-walks.
For nearly a mile the street was flanked solely by lumber-yards,
small mills, and factories. Then came a strip of unimproved land,
followed immediately by the wooden, ramshackle structures of Hell's
Half-Mile.
In the old days every town of any size had its Hell's Half-Mile, or
the equivalent. Saginaw boasted of its Catacombs; Muskegon, Alpena,
Port Huron, Ludington, had their "Pens," "White Rows," "River
Streets," "Kilyubbin," and so forth. They supported row upon row of
saloons, alike stuffy and squalid; gambling hells of all sorts;
refreshment "parlours," where drinks were served by dozens of
"pretty waiter-girls," and huge dance-halls.
The proprietors of these places were a bold and unscrupulous lot.
In their everyday business they had to deal with the most dangerous
rough-and-tumble fighters this country has ever known; with men
bubbling over with the joy of life, ready for quarrel if quarrel
also spelled fun, drinking deep, and heavy-handed and fearless in
their cups. But each of these rivermen had two or three hundred
dollars to "blow" as soon as possible. The pickings were good. Men
got rich very quickly at this business. And there existed this
great advantage in favour of the dive-keeper: nobody cared what
happened to a riverman. You could pound him over the head with a
lead pipe, or drug his drink, or choke him to insensibility, or rob
him and throw him out into the street, or even drop him tidily
through a trap-door into the river flowing conveniently beneath.
Nobody bothered--unless, of course, the affair was so bungled as to
become public. The police knew enough to stay away when the drive
hit town. They would have been annihilated if they had not. The
only fly in the divekeeper's ointment was that the riverman would
fight back.
And fight back he did, until from one end of his street to the other
he had left the battered evidences of his skill as a warrior. His
constant heavy lifting made him as hard as nails and as strong as a
horse; the continual demand on his agility in riding the logs kept
him active and prevented him from becoming muscle-bound; in his wild
heart was not the least trace of fear of anything that walked,
crawled, or flew. And he was as tireless as machinery, and
apparently as indifferent to punishment as a man cast in iron.
Add to this a happy and complete disregard of consequences--to
himself or others--of anything he did, and, in his own words, he was
a "hard man to nick."
As yet the season was too early for much joy along Hell's Half-Mile.
Orde's little crew, and the forty or fifty men of the drive that had
preceded him, constituted the rank and file at that moment in town.
A little later, when all the drives on the river should be in, and
those of its tributaries, and the men still lingering at the woods
camps, at least five hundred woods-weary men would be turned loose.
Then Hell's Half-Mile would awaken in earnest from its hibernation.
The lights would blaze from day to day. From its opened windows
would blare the music, the cries of men and women, the shuffle of
feet, the noise of fighting, the shrieks of wild laughter, curses
deep and frank and unashamed, songs broken and interrupted. Crews
of men, arms locked, would surge up and down the narrow sidewalks,
their little felt hats cocked one side, their heads back, their
fearless eyes challenging the devil and all his works--and getting
the challenge accepted. Girls would flit across the lit windows
like shadows before flames, or stand in the doorways hailing the men
jovially by name. And every few moments, above the roar of this
wild inferno, would sound the sudden crash and the dull blows of
combat. Only, never was heard the bark of the pistol. The fighting
was fierce, and it included kicking with the sharp steel boot-
caulks, biting and gouging; but it barred knives and firearms. And
when Hell's Half-Mile was thus in full eruption, the citizens of
Redding stayed away from Water Street after dark. "Drive's in,"
said they, and had business elsewhere. And the next group of
rivermen, hurrying toward the fun, broke into an eager dog-trot.
"Taking the old town apart to-night," they told each other. "Let's
get in the game."
To-night, however, the street was comparatively quiet. The saloons
were of modified illumination. In many of them men stood drinking,
but in a sociable rather than a hilarious mood. Old friends of the
two drives were getting together for a friendly glass. The
barkeepers were listlessly wiping the bars. The "pretty waiter-
girls" gossiped with each other and yawned behind their hands. From
several doorways Orde's little compact group was accosted by the
burly saloonkeepers.
"Hullo, boys!" said they invariably, "glad to see you back. Come in
and have a drink on me."
Well these men knew that one free drink would mean a dozen paid for.
But the rivermen merely shook their heads.
"Huh!" sneered one of the girls. "Them's no river-jacks! Them's
just off the hay trail, I bet!"
But even this time-honoured and generally effective taunt was
ignored.
In the middle of the third block Orde wheeled sharp to the left down
a dark and dangerous-looking alley. Another turn to the right
brought him into a very narrow street. Facing this street stood a
three-story wooden structure, into which led a high-arched entrance
up a broad half-flight of wooden steps. This was McNeill's.
As Orde and his men turned into the narrow street, a figure detached
itself from the shadow and approached. Orde uttered an exclamation.
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