The Riverman
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Stewart Edward White >> The Riverman
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"I hear the drip of water," she whispered, her finger on her lips.
"It's the tank," said Orde.
"And has it a Dark Place behind it?" she begged.
"That's just what it has," said he.
"And--tell me--are there real hair trunks with brass knobs on 'em?"
"Yes, mother has two or three."
"O-o-h!" she breathed softly. "Don't tell me what's in them. I
want to believe in brocades and sashes. Do you know," she looked at
him soberly, "I never had any dark places behind the tank, nor
mysterious trunks, when I was a child."
"You might begin now," suggested Orde.
"Do you mean to insinuate I haven't grown up?" she mocked. "Thank
you! Look OUT!" she cried suddenly, "the Boojum will catch us," and
picking up her skirts she fairly flew down the narrow stairs. Orde
could hear the light swish of her draperies down the hall, and then
the pat of her feet on the stair carpet of the lower flight.
He followed rather dreamily. A glance into the sitting-room showed
the group gathered close around the fire listening to Lem Collin's
attempt at a ghost story. She was not there. He found her, then,
in the parlour. She was kneeling on the floor before the glass
cabinet of curiosities, and she had quite flattened her little nose
against the pane. At his exclamation she looked up with a laugh.
"This is the proper altitude from which to view a cabinet of
curiosities," said she, "and something tells me you ought to flatten
your nose, too." She held out both hands to be helped up. "Oh,
WHAT a house for a child!" she cried.
After the company had gone, Orde stood long by the front gate
looking up into the infinite spaces. Somehow, and vaguely, he felt
the night to be akin to her elusive spirit. Farther and farther his
soul penetrated into its depths; and yet other depths lay beyond,
other mysteries, other unguessed realms. And yet its beauty was the
simplicity of space and dark and the stars.
The next time he saw her was at her own house--or rather the house
of the friend she visited. Orde went to call on Friday evening and
was lucky enough to find the girls home and alone. After a decent
interval Jane made an excuse and went out. They talked on a great
variety of subjects, and with a considerable approach toward
intimacy. Not until nearly time to go did Orde stumble to write to young men."
"Oh!" he cried, believing himself enlightened. "Will you answer if
I write you?"
"That depends."
"On what?"
"On whether there is a reply to make."
"But may I write you?"
"I suppose I couldn't very well prevent you, if you were sure to put
on a three-cent stamp."
"Do you want me to?" persisted Orde.
She began gently to laugh, quite to herself, as though enjoying a
joke entirely within her own personal privilege.
"You are so direct and persistent and boy-like," said she presently.
"Now if you'll be very good, and not whisper to the other little
pupils, I'll tell you how they do such things usually." She sat up
straight from the depths of her chair, her white, delicately
tapering forearms resting lightly on her knees. "Young men desiring
to communicate with young ladies do not ask them bluntly. They make
some excuse, like sending a book, a magazine, a marked newspaper, or
even a bit of desired information. At the same time, they send
notes informing the girl of the fact. The girl is naturally
expected to acknowledge the politeness. If she wishes the
correspondence to continue, she asks a question, or in some other
way leaves an opening. Do you see?"
"Yes, I see," said Orde, slightly crestfallen. "But that's a long
time to wait. I like to feel settled about a thing. I wanted to
know."
She dropped back against the cushioned slant of her easy chair, and
laughed again.
"And so you just up and asked!" she teased.
"I beg your pardon if I was rude," he said humbly.
The laughter died slowly from her eyes.
"Don't," she said. "It would be asking pardon for being yourself.
You wanted to know: so you asked. And I'm going to answer. I shall
be very glad to correspond with you and tell you about my sort of
things, if you happen to be interested in them. I warn you: they
are not very exciting."
"They are yours," said he.
She half rose to bow in mock graciousness, caught herself, and sank
back.
"No, I won't," she said, more than half to herself. She sat
brooding for a moment; then suddenly her mood changed. She sprang
up, shook her skirts free, and seated herself at the piano. To
Orde, who had also arisen, she made a quaint grimace over her
shoulder.
"Admire your handiwork!" she told him. "You are rapidly bringing me
to 'tell the truth and shame the devil.' Oh, he must be dying of
mortification this evening!" She struck a great crashing chord,
holding the keys while the strings reverberated and echoed down
slowly into silence again. "It isn't fair," she went on, "for you
big simple men to disarm us. I don't care! I have my private
opinion of such brute strength. JE ME MOQUE!"
She wrinkled her nose and narrowed her eyes. Then ruthlessly she
drowned his reply in a torrent of music. Like mad she played,
rocking her slender body back and forth along the key-board; holding
rigid her fingers, her hands, and the muscles of her arms. The bass
notes roared like the rumbling of thunder; the treble flashed like
the dart of lightnings. Abruptly she muted the instrument. Silence
fell as something that had been pent and suddenly released. She
arose from the piano stool quite naturally, both hands at her hair.
"Aren't Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard dear old people?" said she.
"What is your address in New York?" demanded Orde. She sank into a
chair nearby with a pretty uplifted gesture of despair.
"I surrender!" she cried, and then she laughed until the tears
started from her eyes and she had to brush them away with what
seemed to Orde an absurd affair to call a handkerchief. "Oh, you
are delicious!" she said at last. "Well, listen. I live at 12 West
Ninth Street. Can you remember that?" Orde nodded. "And now any
other questions the prisoner can reply to without incriminating
herself, she is willing to answer." She folded her hands demurely
in her lap.
Two days later Orde saw the train carry her away. He watched the
rear car disappear between the downward slopes of two hills, and
then finally the last smoke from the locomotive dissipate in the
clear blue.
Declining Jane's kindly meant offer of a lift, he walked back to
town.
XV
The new firm plunged busily into its more pressing activities. Orshovels, axes,
and
scrapers were cutting out and levelling a road which would, when
finished, meet the county road to town. The numerous bayous of
great marsh were crossed by "float-bridges," lying flat on the
surface of the water, which spurted up in rhythmical little jets
under the impact of hoofs. Down stream eight miles, below the
mills, and just beyond where the drawbridge crossed over to
Monrovia, Duncan McLeod's shipyards clipped and sawed, and steamed
and bent and bolted away at two tugboats, the machinery for which
was already being stowed in the hold of a vessel lying at wharf in
Chicago. In the storerooms of hardware firms porters carried and
clerks checked off chains, strap iron, bolts, spikes, staples, band
iron, bar iron, peavies, cant-hooks, pike-poles, sledge-hammers,
blocks, ropes, and cables.
These things took time and attention to details; also a careful
supervision. The spring increased, burst into leaf and bloom, and
settled into summer. Orde was constantly on the move. As soon as
low water came with midsummer, however, he arranged matters to run
themselves as far as possible, left with Newmark minute instructions
as to personal supervision, and himself departed to Redding. Here
he joined a crew which Tom North had already collected, and betook
himself to the head of the river.
He knew exactly what he intended to do. Far back on the head-waters
he built a dam. The construction of it was crude, consisting merely
of log cribs filled with stone and debris placed at intervals across
the bed of the stream, against which slanted logs made a face. The
gate operated simply, and could be raised to let loose an entire
flood. And indeed this was the whole purpose of the dam. It
created a reservoir from which could be freed new supplies of water
to eke out the dropping spring freshets.
Having accomplished this formidable labour--for the trees had to be
cut and hauled, the stone carted, and the earth shovelled--the crew
next moved down a good ten miles to where the river dropped over a
rapids rough and full of boulders. Here were built and placed a row
of stone-filled log cribs in a double row down stream to define the
channel and to hold the drive in it and away from the shallows near
either bank. The profile of these cribs was that of a right-angled
triangle, the slanting side up stream. Booms chained between them
helped deflect the drive from the shoals. Their more important
office, however, was to give footing to the drivers.
For twenty-five miles then nothing of importance was undertaken.
Two or three particularly bad boulders were split out by the
explosion of powder charges; a number of snags and old trees were
cut away and disposed of; the channel was carefully examined for
obstructions of any kind whatever. Then the party came to the
falls.
Here Orde purposed his most elaborate bit of rough engineering. The
falls were only about fifteen feet high, but they fell straight down
to a bed of sheer rock. This had been eaten by the eddies into pot-
holes and crannies until a jagged irregular scoop-hollow had formed
immediately underneath the fall. Naturally this implied a ledge
below.
In flood time the water boiled and roared through this obstruction
in a torrent. The saw logs, caught in the rush, plunged end on into
the scoop-hollow, hit with a crash, and were spewed out below more
or less battered, barked, and stripped. Sometimes, however, when
the chance of the drive brought down a hundred logs together, they
failed to shoot over the barrier of the ledge. Then followed a jam,
a bad jam, difficult and dangerous to break. The falls had taken
her usurious share of the lives the river annually demands as her
toll.
This condition of affairs Orde had determined, if possible, to
obviate. From the thirty-five or forty miles of river that lay
above, and from its tributaries would come the bulk of the white and
Norway pine for years to follow. At least two thirds of each drive
Orde figured would come from above the fall.
"If," said he to North, "we could carry an apron on a slant from
just under the crest and over the pot-holes, it would shoot both the
water and the logs off a better angle."
"Sure," agreed North, "but you'll have fun placing your apron with
all that water running through. Why, it would drown us!"
"I've got a notion on that," said Orde. "First thing is to get the
material together."
A hardwood forest topped the slope. Into this went the axe-men.
The straightest trees they felled, trimmed, and dragged, down travoy
trails they constructed, on sleds they built for the purpose, to the
banks of the river. Here they bored the two holes through either
end to receive the bolts when later they should be locked together
side by side in their pawhorses and piled them also for a
possible future use; blocked the temporary channel with a tree or
so--and earth. The river, restored to its immemorial channel by
these men who had so nonchalantly turned it aside, roared on,
singing again the song it had until now sung uninterruptedly for
centuries. Orde and his crew tramped back to the falls, and gazed
on their handiwork with satisfaction. Instead of plunging over an
edge into a turmoil of foam and eddies, now the water flowed
smoothly, almost without a break, over an incline of thirty degrees.
"Logs'll slip over that slick as a gun barrel," said Tom North.
"How long do you think she'll last?"
"Haven't an idea," replied Orde. "We may have to do it again next
summer, but I don't think it. There's nothing but the smooth of the
water to wear those logs until they begin to rot."
Quite cheerfulllaces. As fast as they were prepared, men
with cant-hooks rolled them down the slope to a flat below the
falls. They did these things swiftly and well, because they were
part of the practised day's work, but they shook their heads at the
falls.
After the trees had been cut in sufficient number--there were
seventy-five of them, each twenty-six feet long--Orde led the way
back up stream a half mile to a shallows, where he commanded the
construction of a number of exaggerated sawhorses with very
widespread slanting legs. In the meantime the cook-wagon and the
bed-wagon had evidently been making many trips to Sand Creek,
fifteen miles away, as was attested by a large pile of heavy planks.
When the sawhorses were completed, Orde directed the picks and
shovels to be brought up.
At this point the river, as has been hinted, widened over shoals.
The banks at either hand, too, were flat and comparatively low. As
is often the case in bends of rivers subject to annual floods, the
banks sloped back for some distance into a lower black-ash swamp
territory.
Orde set his men to digging a channel through this bank. It was no
slight job, from one point of view, as the slope down into the swamp
began only at a point forty or fifty feet inland; but on the other
hand the earth was soft and free from rocks. When completed the
channel gave passage to a rather feeble streamlet from the outer
fringe of the river. The men were puzzled, but Orde, by the strange
freak of his otherwise frank and open nature, as usual told nothing
of his plans, even to Tom North.
"He can't expect to turn that river," said Tim Nolan, who was once
more with the crew. "He'd have to dig a long ways below that level
to catch the main current--and then some."
"Let him alone," advised North, puffing at his short pipe. "He's
wiser than a tree full of owls."
Next Orde assigned two men to each of the queer-shaped sawhorses,
and instructed them to place the horses in a row across the
shallowest part of the river, and broadside to the stream. This was
done. The men, half-way to their knees in the swift water, bore
down heavily to keep their charges in place. Other men immediately
began to lay the heavy planks side by side, perpendicular to and on
the up-stream side of the horses. The weight of the water clamped
them in place; big rocks and gravel shovelled on in quantity
prevented the lower ends from rising; the wide slant of the legs
directed the pressure so far downward that the horses were prevented
from floating away. And slowly the bulk of the water, thus raised a
good three feet above its former level, turned aside into the new
channel and poured out to inundate the black-ash swamp beyond.
A good volume still poured over the top of the temporary dam and
down to the fall; but it was by this expedient so far reduced that
work became possible.
"Now, boys!" cried Orde. "Lively, while we've got the chance!"
By means of blocks and tackles and the team horses the twenty-six-
foot logs were placed side by side, slanting from a point two feet
below the rim of the fall to the ledge below. They were bolted
together top and bottom through the four holes bored for that
purpose. This was a confusing and wet business. Sufficient water
still flowed in the natural channel of the river to dash in spray
over the entire work. Men toiled, wet to the skin, their garments
clinging to them, their eyes full of water, barely able to breathe,
yet groping doggedly at it, and arriving at last. The weather was
warm with the midsummer. They made a joke of the difficulty, and
found inexhaustible humour in the fact that one of their number was
an Immersion Baptist. When the task was finished, they pried the
flash-boards from the improvised dam; piled them neatly beyond reach
of high water; rescued the sy they took up their long, painstaking journey back
down the river.
Travel down the river was at times very pleasant, and at times very
disagreeable. The ground had now hardened so that a wanigan boat
was unnecessary. Instead, the camp outfit was transported in
waggons, which often had to journey far inland, to make
extraordinary detours, but which always arrived somehow at the
various camping places. Orde and his men, of course, took the river
trail.
The river trail ran almost unbroken for over a hundred miles of
meandering way. It climbed up the high banks at the points, it
crossed the bluffs along their sheer edges, it descended to the
thickets in the flats, it crossed the swamps on pole-trails, it
skirted the great, solemn woods. Sometimes, in the lower reaches,
its continuity was broken by a town, but always after it recovered
from its confusion it led on with purpose unvarying. Never did it
desert for long the river. The cool, green still reaches, or the
tumbling of the white-water, were always within its sight, sometimes
beneath its very tread. When occasionally it cut in across a very
long bend, it always sent from itself a little tributary trail which
traced all the curves, and returned at last to its parent,
undoubtedly with a full report of its task. And the trail was
beaten hard by the feet of countless men, who, like Orde and his
crew, had taken grave, interested charge of the river from her birth
to her final rest in the great expanses of the Lake. It is there
to-day, although the life that brought it into being has been gone
from it these many years.
In midsummer Orde found the river trail most unfamiliar in
appearance. Hardly did he recognise it in some places. It
possessed a wide, leisurely expansiveness, an indolent luxury, a
lazy invitation born of broad green leaves, deep and mysterious
shadows, the growth of ferns, docks, and the like cool in the shade
of the forest, the shimmer of aspens and poplars through the heat,
the green of tangling vines, the drone of insects, the low-voiced
call of birds, the opulent splashing of sun-gold through the woods,
quite lacking to the hard, tight season in which his river work was
usually performed. What, in the early year, had been merely a whip
of brush, now had become a screen through whose waving, shifting
interstices he caught glimpses of the river flowing green and cool.
What had been bare timber amongst whose twigs and branches the full
daylight had shone unobstructed, now had clothed itself in foliage
and leaned over to make black and mysterious the water that flowed
beneath. Countless insects hovered over the polished surface of
that water. Dragon-flies cruised about. Little birds swooped
silently down and fluttered back, intent on their tiny prey. Water-
bugs skated hither and thither in apparently purposeless diagonals.
Once in a great while the black depths were stirred. A bass rolled
lazily over, carrying with him his captured insect, leaving on the
surface of the water concentric rings which widened and died away.
The trail led the crew through many minor labours, all of which
consumed time. At Reed's Mill Orde entered into diplomatic
negotiations with Old Man Reed, whom he found singularly amenable.
The skirmish in the spring seemed to have taken all the fight out of
him; or perhaps, more simply, Orde's attitude toward him at that
time had won him over to the young man's side. At any rate, as soon
as he understood that Orde was now in business for himself, he
readily came to an agreement. Thereupon Orde's crew built a new
sluiceway and gate far enough down to assure a good head in the pond
above. Other dam owners farther down the stream also signed
agreements having to do with supplying water over and above what the
law required of them. Above one particularly shallow rapid Orde
built a dam of his own.
All this took time, and the summer months slipped away. Orde had
fallen into the wild life as into a habit. He lived on the river or
the trail. His face took on a ruddier hue than ever; his clothes
faded to a nondescript neutral colour of their own; his hair below
his narrow felt hat bleached three shades. He did his work, and
figured on his schemes, and smoked his pipe, and occasionally took
little trips to the nearest town, where he spent the day at the
hotel desks reading and answering his letters. The weather was
generally very warm. Thunder-storms were not infrequent. Until the
latter part of August, mosquitoes and black flies were bad.
About the middle of September the crew had worked down as far as
Redding, leaving behind them a river tamed, groomed, and harnessed
for their uses. Remained still the forty miles between Redding and
the Lake to be improved. As, however, navigation for light draught
vessels extended as far as that city, Orde here paid off his men. A
few days' work with a pile driver would fence the principal shoals
from the channel.
He stayed over night with his parents, and at once took the train
for Monrovia. There he made his way immediately to the little
office the new firm had rented. Newmark had just come down.
"Hullo, Joe," greeted Orde, his teeth flashing in contrast to the
tan of his face. "I'm done. Anything new since you wrote last?"
Newmark had acquired his articles of incorporation and sold his
stock. How many excursions, demonstrations, representations, and
arguments that implied, only one who has undertaken the floating of
a new and untried scheme can imagine. Perhaps his task had in it as
much of difficulty as Orde's taming of the river. Certainly he
carried it to as successful a conclusion. The bulk of the stock he
sold to the log-owners themselves; the rest he scattered here and
there and everywhere in small lots, as he was able. Some five
hundred and thousand dollar blocks even went to Chicago. His own
little fortune of twenty thousand he paid in for the shares that
represented his half of the majority retained by himself and Orde.
The latter gave a note at ten per cent for his proportion of the
stock. Newmark then borrowed fifteen thousand more, giving as
security a mortgage on the company's newly acquired property--the
tugs, booms, buildings, and real estate. Thus was the financing
determined. It left the company with obligations of fifteen hundred
dollars a year in interest, expenses which would run heavily into
the thousands, and an obligation to make good outside stock worth at
par exactly forty-nine thousand dollars. In addition, Orde had
charged against his account a burden of two thousand dollars a year
interest on his personal debt. To offset these liabilities--outside
the river improvements and equipments, which would hold little or no
value in case of failure--the firm held contracts to deliver about
one hundred million feet of logs. After some discussion the
partners decided to allow themselves twenty-five hundred dollars
apiece by way of salary.
"If we don't make any dividends at first," Orde pointed out, "I've
got to keep even on my interest."
"You can't live on five hundred," objected Newmark.
"I'll be on the river and at the booms six months of the year,"
replied Orde, "and I can't spend much there."
"I'm satisfied," said Newmark thoughtfully, "I'm getting a little
better than good interest on my own investment from the start. And
in a few years after we've paid up, there'll be mighty big money in
it."
He removed his glasses and tapped his palm with their edge.
"The only point that is at all risky to me," said he, "is that we
have only one-season contracts. If for any reason we hang up the
drive, or fail to deliver promptly, we're going to get left the year
following. And then it's B-U-S-T, bust."
"Well, we'll just try not to hang her," replied Orde.
XVI
Orde's bank account, in spite of his laughing assertion to Newmark,
contained some eleven hundred dollars. After a brief but
comprehensive tour of inspection over all the works then forward, he
drew a hundred of this and announced to Newmark that business would
take him away for about two weeks.
"I have some private affairs to attend to before settling down to
business for keeps," he told Newmark vaguely.
At Redding, whither he went to pack his little sole-leather trunk,
he told Grandma Orde the same thing. She said nothing at the time,
but later, when Grandpa Orde's slender figure had departed, very
courteous, very erect, very dignified, with its old linen duster
flapping around it, she came and stood by the man leaning over the
trunk.
"Speak to her, Jack," said she quietly. "She cares for you."
Orde looked up in astonishment, but he did not pretend to deny the
implied accusation as to his destination.
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