Holman Day

“The clank of the press and the scream of the saws,
The grunt of the grinder that slavers and chaws
At the fibre o’ pulp-wood, the purr of the plane,
Sing only one song to the big woods o’ Maine.
So here’s for a billion down race-way and sluice—
Hell for the hemlock, the pine, and the spruce.”

—Off for the Woods.

John Barrett was first to break the embarrassed silence that fell upon the four men left at the camp. Rodburd Ide’s brows were wrinkled, and his lips were parting to ask the questions that his curiosity urged. Britt was wrathfully gazing after the insolent Larry. Dwight Wade had taken up his pack and calipers, and was waiting for Ide with some impatience.

“Mr. Wade,” began the Umcolcus baron, nervously, “I hope you will understand my position in this matter, and see why it was necessary to make some change in the plan we discussed on Jerusalem.”

“I sha’n’t try to understand it,” snapped Wade. “You volunteered promises. I took those promises to the person most interested, and you’ve seen fit to drop out from under. That ends our business—all the business we had in common, Mr. Barrett.”

But the baron was anxious to placate. He began guarded explanations, to which Ide was listening intently, but Wade cut them short with a scorn there was no mistaking.

“The only sort of interest I took in that unfortunate girl has been maliciously misinterpreted, Mr. Barrett. She was thrown on my hands in a way that you thoroughly understand. Mr. Ide, as a plantation officer, has relieved me of the responsibility. You can talk with him hereafter.”

“But what—what are you going to say to him?” faltered Barrett, forced to show his anxious fear, since Wade was moving away.

In his physical weakness, in the illness that was sapping his nerve, he became wistfully paltering.

“Nothing,” replied the young man, curtly, but with a decisiveness there was no misunderstanding. “The matter has ceased to be any business of mine. My business hereafter—and I say this to my partner—is concerned wholly and entirely with certain lumbering operations on Enchanted township.”

He went away, following the crew. Rodburd Ide, eager to be gone, and seeing in the affair thus flatly dropped by Wade only a phase of the older animosity between Britt and the young man—a quarrel that might seek any avenue for expression, even a State pauper—demanded of Barrett:

“Do you lay any special claim to the girl?” His tone was that of an official only.

“Of course he doesn’t,” broke in Britt, seeing that his associate was groping for a reply. “We did think of trying to help her, but what’s the use? There isn’t any more gratitude in that sculch than there is in a pine knot. Send her back to the tribe.”

The little Castonia magnate looked relieved.

“She’s all right with my girl till I get home,” he said. “Then the affair will take care of itself, like all those things do.”

Barrett had picked up one of the discarded bludgeons and was supporting himself on it. His legs trembled visibly when he walked to Ide’s side.

“Rodburd,” he said, appealingly, “I can see that you think this thing strange. I don’t want you to have wrong ideas. You and I have known each other too long to get into quarrels. You have seen that I have been trying to smooth matters here to-day. I can’t talk it over with you now. I’m sick—I’m a sick man, Rodburd! I’ve been through a dreadful experience up here.”

“You don’t look well,” returned Ide, solicitously, his ever-ready sympathy enlisted.

Barrett’s face was haggard and his eyes were bloodshot. He wavered on his feet, tipping from heel to toe like a drunken man.

“You ought to get out of these woods as quick as you can,” the Castonia man went on.

Even Britt saw now that his associate was in a bad way. He gave a keen glance at him, and shouted to MacLeod, who was waiting at the edge of the woods, “Send back four of my men!”

“I feel dreadfully,” mourned Barrett. His grit and his excitement had been keeping him up. Now, like most strong men who have to confess that they are conquered, he gave way to his illness with utter abandonment of courage.

“Mr. Barrett,” said Ide, surveying him pityingly, “I can see that you’re a sick man. I don’t want to say that to frighten you, but because you ought to know it. You’d better only try to make Castonia, and have a doctor sent there. My girl will be there as soon as you are. You go to my house, and get doctored up before you tackle the trip down-river. That buckboard ride will kill you if you try it in the shape you’re in now.”

“You’d better do as he says, John,” advised Britt, checking the timber baron’s feeble protests. “I’m going to have these four men make a litter for you and lug you. You can stand that sort of ridin’, but unless you are in better shape when you get to Castonia you wouldn’t be good for that stage ride. Use common-sense, and rest up at Rodburd’s house.”

“Give the men their orders,” whispered the little Castonia magnate in an aside to Britt. “It’s fever, and a bad one if I ain’t mistaken. By the time he’s got to my place he’ll probably be too sick to give any orders of his own. I never saw a man grow sick so fast. Tell the men to leave him there.” He talked impatiently, for his crew had disappeared up the trail. “I’ve got to be hurryin’,” he added. “Mr. Barrett, make my home yours!” he cried over his shoulder, as he trotted off. “I’ll be back in a few days—as soon as I get this crew of mine located.”

The four men were already at work securing poles and boughs for the litter.

Barrett sat down upon a tussock, and held his throbbing head in his hands. He began weakly to complain that Britt had made a mistake in bringing his men and insisting on possession of the girl.

The Honorable Pulaski promptly checked the incoherent expostulations of the stumpage baron.

“No, I haven’t committed you, either,” he blurted. “Bluff it out! It’s the only way to do. It’s the way I advised you to do in the first place. The thing looks big to you here in the woods. You’re down on the level with it. Get back into the city, and get your tail-coat on and your dignity, and sit up on top of that governor’s boom of yours, and the story will only be political blackmail if they try it on you. But they won’t. That Wade fellow is one of those righteous sort of asses that like to read moral lessons to other people, and especially to you, so he can work out his grudge. But he’s all done. I know the sort. The thing began to scorch his fingers and he chucked it. He’s got enough to attend to in these woods. Don’t you worry.”

“But I do worry,” mourned Barrett. “And there’s the girl to consider. God save me, Pulaski, she’s mine! Her looks show it. I can’t sleep nights after this, unless she is taken care of in a decent way.”

“There’ll be a dozen methods of doin’ it when the time is ripe,” urged the other, consolingly. “As it is now, you get out of these woods and stay out, and attend to your business—which is my business, too, when it comes to the governor matter. By ——, you’ve seen enough in this trip to understand that we haven’t got any too safe timber laws as it is. If the farmers get control next trip it means trouble for such of us as take to the tall timber. Buck up, man! Don’t believe for a minute that we’re goin’ to let a college dude and a State pauper queer you. The thing will work itself out.”

He uttered a sudden snort of disgust, gazing over Barrett’s shoulder.

“Foolish Abe” of the Skeets had edged out of the bush, the silence after the uproar of voices and conflict encouraging him. He seemed pitifully bewildered. An instinct almost canine prompted him to take the trail to the south, for his only friend, the girl of the tribe, had gone that way. But a strange female had gone with her, and of strange females he entertained unspeakable fear.

“Here, you cross-eyed baboon,” called the Honorable Pulaski, “go! Scoot!” He pointed north in the direction in which the Enchanted crew had disappeared. “Young man want you. Follow him. Stay with him. Run!” He picked up his discarded sled-stake, and the fool hurried away towards the Notch. “I’d like to see that human nail-keg plastered onto the Enchanted crew for the winter,” remarked Britt, with malice. “There’s no fillin’ him up. He’ll eat as much as three men, and that Wade is just enough of a soft thing not to turn him out. If I can’t bore an enemy with a pod-auger, John, I’ll do it with a gimlet—a gimlet will let more or less blood.”

Five minutes later Barrett was borne on his way south, his courage braced by some final arguments from his iron associate, his mind made up to adopt the course of indignant bluff suggested by the belligerent Britt.

And Britt was stumping north, driving the blubbering Abe before him with sundry hoots and missiles.

When the poor creature came crawling to the fire on hands and knees at dusk that evening, hairy, pitiable, and drooling with hunger, Rodburd Ide accepted him with resignation, though he recognized Britt’s petty malice; for unless he were driven, Abe Skeet would never have come past a well-stocked lumber-camp to follow wanderers into the wilderness.

That night the Enchanted crew camped on Attean Stream, a short day’s journey from their destination. The tired men snatched supper from their packs and fell back snoring, their heads on their dunnage-bags.

They were away in the first flush of the morning, Rodburd Ide leading with his partner. Wade welcomed the little man’s absorbed interest in the business ahead of them. Ide asked no questions about the incident at Durfy’s. Wade put the hideous topic as far behind other thoughts as he could, and soon other thoughts crowded it out.

As they passed from the zone of striped maple, round-wood, witch-hobble, and mountain holly that Mother Nature had drawn across her naked breast after the rude hand of Pulaski Britt had stripped the virgin growth, his heart lifted. Under the great spruces of Enchanted the town’s bricks, streets, and human passions seemed very far away.

Before he slept that night he had had an experience that thrilled the sense of the primitive self hidden within him, as it is hidden in all men, and covered by conventions.

He had staked the metes and bounds, the corners, the frontage, all the dimensions of a new home, where no roof except the crowns of trees had ever shut sunlight off the earth.

Mankind in general opens eyes within walls that the hands of those coming before have built.

Many have no occasion to seek ever for other quarters than those their fathers have given them. With most the limit of exploration is the quest for a new rental. Mankind who build, build along settled streets, first taking note that sewers and water systems have been installed.

Even in the woods most crews come up to find that the advance skirmishers have builded main camp, meal camp, horse-hovels, and wangan. Owing to the sudden forming of Rodburd Ide’s partnership with the young man whom Fate threw in his way, and his equally sudden determination to operate on virgin Enchanted, there had been no time for preliminaries. Even the tote teams with the first of the winter’s supplies were miles away down the trail, for in the woods the human two-foot outclasses the equine four-foot.

Therefore, Wade, perspiring in the forefront of the toilers, saw the first tree topple, heard it crash outward from the site of the camp, and tugged with the others when it was set into place as the sill. When he stood back and wiped his forehead and gazed on that one lonesome log it made roofless out-doors seem bigger and more threatening. The rain was pattering from a cold sky. The thrall of centuries of housed ancestors was on him. Roof and walls had attached themselves to his sentiency, even as the shell of the snail is attached to its pulp.

But the next moment Larry Gorman started a song, and the rollicking hundred men about him took it up and toiled with merry thoughtlessness of all except that God’s good greenwood was about them and God’s sky above them, and Wade bent again to labor, ashamed that he had counted shingles and plaster as standing for so much.

They put up eight-log walls for the main camp, notching the ends. A hundred willing men made the buildings grow like toadstools. While the walls were going up men laid floors of poles shaved flat on one side. Others brought moss and chinked the spaces between the logs of the walls. The first team up brought tarred paper and the few boards needed for tables and like uses. The tarred paper and cedar splints roofed all comfortably.

The second team brought stove, tin dishes, and raw staples—and cook and cookee walked behind.

And when old Christopher Straight came at the tail of the procession as fast as he could hurry back from Castonia settlement, the camps stood nearly complete under the frown of Enchanted Mountain, Enchanted Stream gurgling over brown rocks at the door.

The distant whick-whack of axes told where the swampers were clearing the way, and the tearing crash of trees punctuated the ceaseless “ur-r rick-raw!” of the cross-cut saws. The only axe scarf on Ide’s trees was the nick necessary to direct their fall. They were felled by the saw.

Two days of exploration on the spruce benches straight back from the stream showed up several million feet of black growth easily available for a first season’s operation.

Ide, Wade, and old Christopher cruised, pacing parallels and counting trees. And when they sat down on an outcropping of ledge the young man made so many sagacious observations that Ide’s eyes opened in amazement.

“Where did you learn lumberin’?” he demanded.

“I wasn’t aware that I knew it—not as it is viewed from a practical stand-point,” replied Wade, humbly. “I was going to ask you in a moment if you wouldn’t like to have me keep still so that you and Christopher could talk sense.”

“I never heard better opinions on a stand of timber and a lay of land,” affirmed his partner. “It looks as though you’d been holdin’ out on me,” he added, with a grim smile.

The young man smiled back. There was a certain grateful pride in his expression.

“I know how old woodsmen look at book-learned chaps, Mr. Ide. Pulaski Britt told me once. I was simply trying on you a bit of an experiment with my little knowledge of books. I was waiting to have you and Christopher pull me up short. I’m rather surprised to find that you think what I said was good sense. But after a book-fellow has bumped against practical men like—like Mr. Britt for a time, he begins to distrust his books. It’s simply this way, Mr. Ide: I had a few young men in my high-school who were interested in forestry of the modern sort, and I worked with them to encourage them as much as I could. It is almost impossible for a reading-man in these days not to take an interest in the protection of our forests, for the folks at Washington are making it the great topic of the times.”

“Well,” remarked Ide, with a sigh of appreciation, “I never read a book on forestry in my life, and I never heard of a lumberman in these parts who ever had. But if you can get facts like those you’ve stated out of books, I reckon some of us better spend our winter evenin’s readin’ instead of playin’ pitch pede.” He got up and gave the young man a complimenting palm. “Wade,” he said, earnestly, “I’ll own up that I’ve been a little prejudiced against book-fellows myself. Instead of givin’ an ignorant man the contents of the book—the juice of it, as you might say—-in a way that won’t hurt, they are so anxious to have him know that it’s book-learnin’ they’ve got, they’ll bang him across the face with it, book-covers and all. I like your knowledge, because it’s goin’ to help us in handlin’ this thing we’ve bit off up here. But I’ll be blamed if I don’t like your modesty best of all.”

He picked up his calipers, stuck them under his arm, and started for camp with a haste that showed full confidence in his partner’s ability.

And the next morning he buttoned the camp letters in his coat, and started south for Castonia with the outgoing tote team.

“I don’t worry about this end,” he said, at parting, “and you needn’t worry about mine. Don’t be afraid of going hungry. There’s nothin’ like full stomachs to make axes and saws run well. It will have to be hand-to-mouth till snow flies, then I’ll slip you in stores enough to fill that wangan to the roof. Good heart, my boy! We’re goin’ to make some money.”

Wade followed him to the edge of the clearing with his first sense of loneliness tugging within him.

“Safe home to you, Mr. Ide,” he said, “and my respectful regards to Miss Nina, if you will take them. I suppose—she will—probably—the girl she took away—” he stammered.

“By thunder mighty!” cried the Castonia magnate, whirling on him, “I’d forgotten all about that Skeet girl, or Arden girl, or whatever they call her.”

He eyed the young man with a dawning of his old curiosity, but Wade met his gaze frankly.

“The affair of the girl is not mine at all,” he said. “Simply because she seemed superior to the tribe she was with, I hoped Mr. Barrett would do as he partly promised—use a few dollars of his money to help her from the muck. Such cases appeal to me, because I’m not accustomed to seeing them, perhaps.”

“If my girl is interested in that poor little wildcat, you needn’t think twice about her bein’ taken good care of,” cried the admiring father.

And gazing into the wholesome eyes and candid face of the little man, Wade reflected that perhaps Fate had handled a problem better for John Barrett’s abandoned daughter than he himself, in his resentful zeal, had planned.

He shook Ide’s hand hard, and, with the picture of John Barrett’s other daughter in his dimming eyes and the love of John Barrett’s other daughter burning in his lonely heart, he turned back towards the woods, whose fronded arms, tossing in the October wind, beckoned him to his duty.