Holman Day

“Wilderness lord of the olden time,
Stalwart and plumed pine;
They have dragged thee down to the roaring town
From the realms that once were thine.
And he who reigns in thy stately stead
Has never a time o’ truce,
For the axe and saw and the grinder’s maw
Have doomed thee, too, King Spruce.”

—Kin o’ Ktaadn.

At half-past four in the dark of the morning “Dirty-apron Harry’s” nickel alarm-clock purred relentlessly, and he rolled out of his bunk, his eyelids sticking like a blind puppy’s. At seventeen, youth relishes morning naps. But, as cookee of Barnum Withee’s camp on “Lazy Tom” operation, he was chosen to be the earliest bird to crow. His first duty as chanticleer was to wake “Icicle Ike” and “Push Charlie,” the teamsters, whose hungry charges were stamping impatient hoofs in the hovel. He dressed himself while stumbling across the dingle to the men’s camp, his eyes still shut. This feat was not as difficult as it sounds. The difference between Harry’s night-gear and day raiment was merely a Scotch cap and the canvas robe of office that gave him his title.

The teamsters grunted when he shook them, and followed him out of the frowsy, snore-fretted atmosphere of the big camp. They did their morning yawnings and stretching as they walked. When Duty calls “Time!” to a woodsman the body is on the dot, even if the soul lags unwillingly.

The humorists of the woods have it that the cookee pries up the sun when he jacks the big pot out of the bean-hole. For such an important operation, “Dirty-apron Harry” went at it listlessly.

The bean-hole was beyond the horse-hovel, sheltered in the angle of a little palisade of poles whose protection would be needed when the winter’s snows drifted. Harry wearily dragged a hoe in that direction after he had kindled a fire in the cook-house stove. He did not look up to the first pearly sheen of sunrise streaming through the yellow of the frost-touched birches. The glory of the skies would wake him too soon. He gave up the final fuddle of slumber grudgingly, his dull mind still piecing the visions of the night, his soul full of loathing for the workaday world of greasy pots and dirty tins. But when he turned the corner of the bean-hole shelter he dropped out of dreams with the suddenest jolt of his life. A black bear was trying to dig up the bean-pot, growling softly at the heat of the round stones she uncovered. Two cubs sat near by, watching operations with great interest, their round ears up-cocked, their jaws drooling expectantly. The big bear whirled promptly and cuffed the hoe out of Harry’s limp grasp, leaped past him before his trembling legs could move him, and scuffed away into the woods, with her progeny crowding close to her sheltering bulk. The cookee sped in the other direction towards the hovel with as great alacrity.

“Bears?” echoed “Push Charlie,” appearing with his pitchfork at the hovel door. “Stop your squawkin’. I seen half a dozen yistiddy, and all of ’em streakin’ north up this valley. Heard ’em whooffing and barkin’ last night, travellin’ past here on the hemlock benches.” He pointed his fork at the terraced sides of the valley above them.

“It’s only excursion parties bound for the Bears’ Annooal Convention up at Telos Gorge,” suggested “Icicle Ike,” rapping the chaff out of a peck measure.

The cookee, woods-camp traditional butt of jokes, stared from one to the other, trying to recover his composure.

“And Marm Bear there wanted to take along that pot of beans for the picnic dinner,” added Charlie.

“I think it’s goin’ to be a general mass-meetin’ to discuss the game laws,” said Ike. “The boys who were swampin’ the twitch-roads yistiddy told me that deer kept traipsin’ past all day and—well, there goes three now.”

White “flags” flitted through the undergrowth at the edge of the clearing, and a startled “Whick-i-whick!” further up the valley-side hinted at the retreat of still others. Their departure was probably hastened by the cook’s shrill “Who-e-e-e!” the general call for the camp. He came out of the cook-house scrubbing his hands and bare arms with a towel.

“Git that bean-pot here! What are you standin’ round on one foot for?” he demanded, testily. When the cookee began to stutter explanations, brandishing freckled arms to point the route of the fugitives, the cook interrupted, but now there was humor in his tones.

“Thunderation, you gents is sartinly slow to understand what’s before your eyes! Don’t you know why all these animiles is runnin’ away from down there?” He jerked a red thumb over his shoulder towards the south. “Ain’t ‘Stumpage John’ Barrett down there with Withee, lookin’ over that tract where we operated last season?”

Sly grins of appreciation appeared on the faces of the teamsters.

“Ain’t you got any notion of what particular kind of language ‘Stumpage John’ has been lettin’ out of himself for the last twenty-four hours?”

“Well, the idee is,” said the cook, “he is down there cussin’ to that extent that he’s cussed every animile off’n Square-hole township. Animiles is natcherally timid, delicate in the ears, and hates cussin’. The deer come first because they can run fastest. Bears left as soon as they could, and is hurryin’. Rabbits will come next, and the quill-pigs are on the way. Then I reckon Barnum Withee will fetch up the rear. Oh, it must be somethin’ awful down there!” He faced the south with grave mien. His listeners guffawed.

But a moment later “Push Charlie” stepped clear of the hovel and sniffed with canine eagerness. There was a subtle, elusive, acrid odor in the air. It seemed to billow up the valley, whose shoulders circumscribed their vision so narrowly.

“I reckon,” he stated, “that he’s throwed so much brimstone around him reckless that he’s set fire to the woods.”

“That’s the way with some of these big timber-owners,” remarked the cook, still in humorous mood. “They raise tophet with a sport because he throws down a cigar-butt, and they themselves will go out right in a dry time and spit cuss words that’s just so much blue flame. It’s dretful careless!” he sighed.

“But when you come to think of what he found there on that township,” said Charlie, “you have to make allowances. More’n a third of the board measure left right there on the ground as slash, and slash that’s propped on the branches of the tops like powder-houses on stilts. And the whole township only devilled over at that! Barn only took the stuff that would roll downhill into the water when it was joggled.”

“You ain’t blamin’ your own boss, be ye?” demanded the cook.

“Not by a darned sight!” rejoined Charlie, stoutly. “If I was an operator, doin’ all the hard liftin’, with a rich stumpage-owner with a rasp file goin’ at me on one end and a log-buyer whittlin’ me at the other, I’d figger to save myself. But I’ve always lived and worked in the old woods, gents. I ain’t one of those dudes that never want to see an axe put in. The old woods need the axe to keep ’em healthy. We, here, need the money, and the folks outside need the lumber. But when I see enough of the old woods wasted on every winter operation to make me rich, and all because the men that are gettin’ the most out of it are fightin’ each other so as to hog profits, it makes me sorry for the old woods and sick of human nature.”

The morning bustle of the camp began in earnest now. Men crowded at the tin wash-basins on the long shelf outside the log wall. As fast as they slicked their wet hair with the broken comb they hurried into the meal camp. There they heaped their tin plates with beans steaming from the hole where they had simmered overnight, devoured huge chunks of brown bread deluged with molasses, and “sooped” hot coffee.

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.

“Fire?” inquired the cook.

Lane jerked a nod of affirmation.

“Where?”

“Misery.”

“Big?”

Another nod.

“Talk about your bounty on wildcats and porky-pines,” raged the cook, slamming on a stove-cover to emphasize his remarks, “the State treasurer ought to offer twenty-five dollars for the scalp and thumbs of every Skeet and Bushee brought in.”

The fire warden ran his last bit of brown bread around his plate, stuffed it dripping into his mouth, and stood up after sixty seconds devoted to his breakfast.

“Where’s Withee?” he asked the boss chopper, who had lounged to the camp door and was stuffing tobacco into his pipe.

“Off on Square-hole,” replied the boss, with a sideways cant of his head to show direction.

“Fire on Misery eating north towards the Notch,” reported Lane, with laconic sourness. “Withee ought to send twenty-five men.” He was already starting away.

“He’ll probably be back by night,” said the boss chopper, “if ‘Stumpage John’ Barrett gets through swearin’ at him about that last season’s operation.”

Lane stopped and whirled suddenly, the lineman’s climbers at his belt clanking dully.

“John Barrett in this region!” he blurted.

“For the first time in a lot o’ years,” returned the boss, with a grin. “Suspected that Barn devilled Square-hole and wasted in the cuttin’s as much as he landed in the yards. I reckon it ain’t suspicion any more! He’s been down there on the grounds two days. But he don’t get any of my sympathy. A man who stole these lands at twenty cents an acre, buying tax titles, and has squat on his haunches and made himself rich sellin’ stumpage,[1] has got more’n he deserved, even if half the timber is rottin’ in the tops on the ground.”

The gaunt jaws of “Ladder” Lane set themselves out like elbows akimbo. He whirled and started away again as though he had fresh cause for haste.

“I don’t want to take any responsibility for sending off any of the crew,” called the boss. “What particular word do you want to leave for Withee?”

Lane settled into his woods lope and darted into the Attean trail without reply.

“I’ll be here with my own word,” he muttered, talking aloud, after the habit of the recluse.

“And what do you make of that now?” asked the cook of the boss, scaling Lane’s discarded plate into the cookee’s soapy water. “Why ain’t he up on his Jerusalem fire station instead of rampagin’ round here in the woods?”

“He was rigged out to climb a pole and had a telephone thingumajig with him,” suggested the boss.

“He’s strikin’ acrost to tap the Attean telephone and send in an alarm, that’s what he’s doin’. Prob’ly his old lookin’-glass telegraft is busted,” he added, with slighting reference to the Jerusalem helio. He followed his men, who were streaming up the tote road towards the cuttings. Far ahead trudged the horses, drawing jumpers. From the cross-bars the bind-chains dragged jangling over the roots and rocks.

In five minutes only three men were in sight about the camps—the cook, making ready a baking of ginger-cakes; the cookee, rattling the tins from the breakfast-table and whistling shrill accompaniment to the clatter; and the blacksmith, busy at his forge in the “dingle,” the roofed space between the cook-house and the main camp.

It was just before second “bean-time” when Lane came back along the Attean trail and staggered, rather than walked, into the “Lazy Tom” clearing. His face was gray with exertion, and sweat coursed in the wrinkles of his emaciated features.

“Shouldn’t wonder from your looks that you’d made time,” suggested the cook, cheerfully, as the warden stumbled up to the door. “From here to the Attean telephone-line and back before eleven is what I call humpin’. You’ve been to Attean, hey?”

“Yes,” snapped the old man. “I’ve reported that fire and done my duty.”

“In that case, you’ve prob’ly got a better appetite than you had this mornin’,” remarked “Beans,” hospitably. He started to ladle from the steaming kettle of “smother” on the stove.

“Nothing to eat for me!” broke in Lane, sullenly. “Are Withee and John Barrett back yet?”

“Oh, they’ll stay out till dark all right. Barrett will want to count trees as long as he can see.”

“I’ll wait, then!” Lane started towards the men’s camp, but the cook stopped him.

“If you’re reck’nin’ to lie down for a nap, warden, don’t get into them bunks. Them Quedaws have brought in the usual assortment of ‘travellers’ this season, and I don’t want to see a neat man like you accumulate a menagerie. Now you just go right across there into Withee’s private camp. He’d say so if he was here. I’ll do that much honors when he ain’t here. You won’t wake up scratchin’.”

Without a word Lane turned and strode across to the office camp, went in, and slammed the door shut after him.

“He’s about as sour and crabbed an old cuss to do a favor for as I ever see,” remarked the cook, fiddling a smutty finger under his nose. “But a man never ought to git discouraged in this world about bein’ polite.” He caught sight of the advance-guard of returning choppers up the road, and whirled on the cookee. “You freckle-faced, hump-backed, dead-and-alive son of a clam fritter, here come them empty nail-kags! Get to goin’, now, or I’ll pour a dish of hot water down your back.”

“Is that what you call bein’ polite?” growled the cookee.

The cook kicked at him as he fled into the meal camp with a pan of biscuits.

“They don’t use politeness on cookees any more than they put bay-winders onto pig-pens!” he shouted.

There were two bunks in the little office camp, one above the other. “Ladder” 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. His mind seemed to be wrestling with a mighty problem. Once in awhile he groaned. At other times his teeth ground together. Twice he put the rifle back on the wall, shuddering as though it were some fearsome object. Twice he got up and retook it, and the last time muttered as though his resolution were clinched.

After the resolution had been formed he may have dozed. At any rate, the first he heard of Barrett and Withee they had sat down on the steps of the office camp, and the loud, brusque, and authoritative voice of one of them went on in some harangue that had evidently been progressing for a long time previously.

“Damme, Withee, I tell you again that you’ve robbed me right and left! You left tops in the woods to rot that had a pulp log scale in ’em. You devilled the township without sense or system. You cut out the stands near the waterways without leaving a tree for new seed. You left strips standing that will go down like a row of bricks in the first big gale we have. But what’s the use in going over all that again? You know you haven’t used me right. The sum and substance is, you pay me a lump sum and square me for damages to that township or I’ll cancel this season’s stumpage contract. I’m using you just as I propose to use the rest of the thieves up here.”

There was silence for a little time. The voice of the other man was subdued, even disheartened.

“I’ve said about all I can say, Mr. Barrett,” he ventured. “Of course, you’re rich and I’m poor, and if you cancel the contract I can’t afford to go to law. But I’ve borrowed ten thousand dollars to put into this season’s operation, and I’ve got it tied up in supplies and outfit. I’ve just got located and my camps finished. The way things have worked for me, I ain’t made any money for three years, and I’ve put my shoulder to the wheel and my own hands to the axe. The operator can’t make money, Mr. Barrett, the way he’s ground between the owners of stumpage and the men down-river who buy his logs in the boom. You talk of closing your contract with me! Do you know of a man who can afford to do any better by you than I have—just as long as things are the way they are now?”

“Oh, I reckon you’re about all alike,” returned the lumber baron, ungraciously. “I’ve been a fool to believe anything stumpage buyers have told me. I ought to have come up here every year and looked after my property. But that would be prowling around in these woods that aren’t fit for a human being to live in, and neglecting my other business to keep you fellows from stealing. Not for me! I’ve got something better to do. Clod-hoppers that don’t want to stay in their fields all day with a gun kill one crow and hang it on a stake for the live ones to see. I’m sorry for you, Withee, but I’m going to make a special example of you.”

“It don’t seem hardly fair to pick me out of all the rest, Mr. Barrett.”

“Well, it’s business!” snapped the other. “And business in these days isn’t conducted on the lines of a Sunday-school picnic.”

“Ladder” Lane, who had been staring straight up at the poles of the bunk above his head, had not moved or glanced to right or left since the brusque, tyrannical voice outside had begun to declaim. Now he swung his feet off the bunk and sat on its edge. He fumbled behind him for the rifle and dragged it across his knees.

The night had fallen. The one window of the office camp admitted a sallow light. From the main camp came the drone of an accordion and the mumble of many voices. Lane realized that supper had been eaten.

“You’re right about business, Mr. Barrett,” Withee went on, a touch of resentment in his voice. “Your Bangor scale is ‘business.’ You talk about wasting tops! If an operator leaves the taper of the top on a log, he’s hauling a third more weight to the landing, and then your Bangor scale gives him a third less measure than on the short log.”

“The legislature established the scale; I didn’t,” retorted Barrett.

“Yes, but you rich folks can tell the legislature what to do, and it does it! We fellows that wear larrigans haven’t anything to say about it.” In his grief and despair he allowed himself to taunt his tyrant. “Your legislature has peddled away all the rights on the river to men with power enough to grab ’em. Look here, Mr. Barrett, while you toasted your shins last winter we worked here like niggers, in the cold and the snow, the frost and the wet—and the first man to get his drag out of our work was you. You got your stumpage-money. And when my logs were in the water, first the Driving Association that you’re a director in, with its legislative charter all right and tight, took its toll. Then the River Dam and Improvement Company took its toll, and you’re a director in that. Then the Lumbering Association, owned by your bunch, had its boomage tolls. Then the little private inside clique had its pay for ‘taking care of logs,’ as they call it. Then on top of all the rest, the gang had its tolls for running and shoring logs in the round-up boom, and finally the man who bought ’em scaled down the landing-measure on which you drew stumpage. I couldn’t help myself. None of us fellows that operate can help ourselves. It’s all tied up. We had to take what was given. Your tolls for this, that, and the other figured up about as much as stumpage. And when the last and final drag was made out of my little profits—there were no profits! I came out in debt, Mr. Barrett. That’s all there was to show for a winter’s hard work away from my home and family, in these woods that you say ain’t fit for a human bein’ to live in. That’s what you’re doin’ to us—and you’re all standin’ together against us poor fellows to do it.”

“Same old whine of the old crowd of operators,” drawled Mr. Barrett. “If you old-fashioned chaps can’t keep up with the modern business conditions you’d better get into something else and give the young fellows a chance.”

“Get into the poor-house, perhaps,” Withee replied, bitterly. “My father lumbered this river. I worked with him, before the big fellows had to have both crusts and the middle of the pie. I don’t know how to do anything else. Every cent I’ve got in the world is tied up in my outfit. For God’s sake, Mr. Barrett, be fair with me!”

It was the pitiful appeal of the toil of the woods at its last stand. But “Stumpage John” Barrett resolutely reflected the autocracy of giant King Spruce.

“This whole matter was gone over at our last directors’ meeting, Withee. We have decided, one and all, that we won’t have our timber lands butchered and gashed and devilled to make profit for you fellows. Our charters give us our rights, and business is business. We’ve got to stand stiff, and we’re going to stand stiff until we show you what’s what. I told my associates I would come up here and make an example, and I’m going to do it. Now, that’s all, Withee! It’s no good to argue. The timber interests can’t afford to do any more fooling.”

“Gents,” broke in the voice of “Dirty-apron Harry,” “cook sent me to say that your supper is ready.”

“Tell cook I’m ready, too,” snapped Barrett, grunting off the step. “I thought your cattle were never going to get out of that meal camp, Withee. You feed ’em too much! That’s where your profits are going to.”

Lane heard him snuffing.

“This smoke seems to be getting thicker, Withee. It must be something more than a bonfire, wherever it is.”

“Cook is waiting to tell you,” said Harry. “He didn’t want to break in on your business talk, seein’ that you was both so much took up with it. Warden from Jerusalem was through here this morning to give alarm and call for fighters. He’s takin’ a nap in the office camp, waitin’ for Mr. Withee.”

“A loafer like the rest of ’em!” snorted Barrett, starting away. “Dig him out, Withee, and send him to me. I’m going to eat.”

At the sound of his retreating footsteps “Ladder” Lane unfolded his gaunt frame, stood up, and swung the rifle into the hook of his arm. He opened the office door and came upon Withee standing where Barrett had left him. In the gloom the operator’s toil-stooped shoulders and bowed legs were outlined by the flare from the cook-camp. He continued his mutterings as he turned his head to look at Lane, his gray beard sweeping his shoulder.

“It’s runnin’ north from Misery, Mr. Withee,” reported the warden. “It’s runnin’ in the slash and goin’ fast. If it gets through Pogey Notch it means a crown fire in the black growth.”

“I hope it’ll burn every spruce-tree between Misery and the Canada line!” barked the furious old operator. “If I could stand here and put it out by spittin’ on it I wouldn’t open my mouth.”

“I’ve ’phoned the alarm through Attean,” went on Lane, calmly, with no apparent thought except his duty. “You ought to send twenty-five men.”

“Not a man!” roared the operator. “Let the infernal hogs save their own timber lands. They want all the profit in ’em; let ’em stand all the loss, then.”

“Look here, Withee,” said the warden, implacably, “you know the law as well as I do. A fire warden has the same right as a sheriff to summon a posse when a fire is to be fought. Every man that is summoned and don’t go pays a fine of ten dollars unless he is sick or disabled, and you’ll have to stand good for your crew.”

“I know it!” bellowed Withee, beside himself. “Some more of the devilish law they’ve cooked up to make us work like slaves for their profits. Talk about monarchies! Talk about freedom, whether it’s in a city or in the woods! We ain’t anything but cattle. The rich men have stood together and made us so.”

“I didn’t make the law, Withee. I’m simply delivering my errand as the State orders me to do. I’ve done my duty. It’s up to you.” He sighed, shifted the rifle to the other arm, and mumbled behind his teeth, “Now I’ll attend to a little matter of business that ain’t the State’s.”

He started for the door of the meal camp, the operator on “Lazy Tom” stumping angrily at his heels.