NORTHWARD, HO!
Buck Moncrossen was a big man with a shrunken, maggoty soul, and no
conscience.
He had learned logging as his horses learned it--by repetition of
unreasoning routine, and after fifteen years' experience in the woods
Appleton had made him a camp boss.
His camps varied from year to year in no slightest detail. He made no
suggestions for facilitating or systematizing the work, nor would he
listen to any. He roared mightily at the substitution of horses for
oxen; he openly scoffed at donkey engines, and would have none of them.
During his years as a sawyer, by the very brute strength and doggedness
of him, he had established new records for laying down timber. And now,
as boss, he bullied the sawyers who could not equal those records--and
hated those who could.
Arbitrary, jealous, malignant, he ruled his camps with the bluff and
bluster of the born coward.
Among the lumber-jacks, he was known and hated as a hard driver of men
and a savage fighter. In the quick, brutish fights of the camps, men
went down under the smashing blows of his huge fists as they would go
down to the swing of a derrick-boom, and, once down, would be jumped
upon with calked boots and spiked into submission.
It was told in the woods that whisky flowed unchallenged in Buck
Moncrossen's camps. His crews were known as hard crews; they "hired out
for tough hands, and it was up to them to play their string out."
At the first cry of "gillon" (stormy days when the crews cannot work)
flat flasks and round black bottles circulated freely in the
bunk-house, and the day started, before breakfast, in a wild orgy of
rough horse-play, poker, and profanity.
But woe betide the man who allowed overindulgence to interfere with the
morrow's work. Evil things were whispered of Moncrossen's man-handling
of "hold-overs."
In the office, back in Minneapolis, if these things were known they
were winked at. For Moncrossen was a boss who "got out the logs," and
the details of his discipline were unquestioned.
On the Appleton holdings along Blood River the pine stood tall and
straight and uncut.
In the years of plenty--those wasteful years of frenzied logging, when
white pine lumber brought from twelve to twenty dollars a thousand and
rival concerns were laying down only the choicest of logs--Appleton's
crews were ordered to clean up as they went.
Toothpick logging it was called then, and H. D. Appleton was
contemptuously referred to as "the toothpicker."
Twenty years later, with the market clamoring for white pine at any
price, Appleton was selling white pine, while in the denuded forest the
crews of his rivals were getting out cull timber and Norway.
And this fall Appleton sent Buck Moncrossen into the Blood River
country with orders to put ten million feet of logs into the river by
spring.
So it was that the few remaining inhabitants of Hilarity were aroused
from their habitual apathy one early fall evening by the shrill shrieks
of an engine whistle as Moncrossen's ten-car train, carrying crew and
supplies for the new camp, came to a stop at the rusty switch. There
was something reminiscent in this whistle-sound. It came as a voice
from the past.
Time was, some eight or ten years before, when the old No. 9 and her
companion engine, No. 11, whistled daily and importantly into Hilarity,
pushing long strings of "flats" onto the spurs; and then whistled out
again with each car groaning and creaking under its towering pyramid of
logs.
But that was in the days of Hilarity's prosperity--in the days when the
little town was the chief loading point for two thousand square miles
of timber.
It had been a live town then--work and wages and the spirit to
spend--quick, hot life, and quick, cold death danced hand in hand to
the clink of glasses.
Everything ran wide open, and all night long rough men sinned abysmally
in their hell-envied play, and, crowding the saloons, laughed and
fought and drank red liquor in front of long pine bars, where the
rattle of chips and the click of pool-balls, mingled with lurid
profanity, floated out through the open doors and blended with the
incessant tintinnabulation of the dance-hall pianos.
These were the days of Hilarity's prosperity, when twenty train-loads
of logs were jerked from her spurs by day, and the nights rang loud
with false laughter.
A vanished prosperity--for now the little town stood all but deserted
in its clearing, with the encircling hills denuded of all vegetation
save a tangle of underbrush and a straggling growth of stunted jack
pine.
Even the "pig-iron loggers"--the hardwood men--had gleaned the last
stick from the ridges, and Hilarity had become but a name on the map.
Only those remained who were old or crippled, and a few--a very
few--who had undertaken to grub out tiny farms among the stumps.
Each evening these forlorn remnants were wont to forsake their
stolid-faced wives and yammering offspring and pick their way through
the solitary stump-dotted street, past windowless, deserted buildings
which were the saloons and dance-halls of better days, to foregather
around the huge stove in the rear of Hod Burrage's general store, which
was decrepit Hilarity's sole remaining enterprise, and there to brag
and maunder over the dead town's former glory.
The fact that certain of Hod's jugs never tilted to the filling of the
vinegar bottles or molasses pails of the women, not only served to
insure unflagging attendance, but the sale of their contents afforded
the storekeeper a small but steady income which more than offset any
loss incident to the preoccupied inroads upon his cracker barrel.
The sound of the once familiar whistle brought the men tumbling from
Burrage's door, while up and down the deserted street aproned forms
stood framed in the doorways, beflanked by tousled heads which gazed
wonder-eyed from behind tight-gripped skirts.
Not a person in town, except the very newest citizens, and they were
too young to care--for nobody ever came to Hilarity except by the stork
route--but recognized old No. 9's whistle.
Strange, almost apologetic, it sounded after its years of silence; not
at all like the throaty bellow of derision with which the long,
vestibuled coast trains thundered through the forsaken village.
A brakeman leaped from the cab and ran ahead. Stooping, he cursed the
corroded lock of the unused switch which creaked and jarred to the pull
of the lever as old No. 9 headed wheezily onto the rust-eaten rails of
the rotting spur.
An hour later she puffed noisily away, leaving Moncrossen's crew
encamped in the deserted cabins and dilapidated saloons of the worn-out
town.
Moncrossen, by making use of old tote-roads, saved about forty of the
eighty miles of road building which lay between Hilarity and the Blood
River.
Toward the end of October the work was completed, the camp buildings
erected, and a brush and log dam thrown across the river at the narrows
of a white water rapid.
Swampers and axe-men set to work building skidways and cross-hauls, and
the banks of the river were cleared for the roll-ways. The ground was
still bare of snow, but the sawyers were "laying them down," and the
logs were banked at the skidways.
Then one morning the snow came.
Quietly it fell, in big, downy flakes that floated lazily to earth from
the even gray of the cloud-spread sky, tracing aimless, zigzag patterns
against the dark green background of the pines, and covering the brown
needles of the forest floor and the torn mold of the skidways with a
soft blanket of white.
The men sprang eagerly to their work--heartened by the feel of the
snow. The tingling air was filled with familiar man-sounds--the
resonant stroke of axes, and the long crash of falling trees, the
metallic rattle of chains, the harsh rasp of saws, and the good-natured
calls of men in rude banter; sounds that rang little and thin through
the mighty silence of the forest.
Gradually the flakes hardened and the zigzag patterns resolved
themselves into long, threadlike lines which slanted earthward with a
soft, hissing sound.
Fast it fell, and faster, until the background disappeared, and all the
world was a swift-moving riot of white.
It was a real snow now--a snow of value which buried the soft blanket
of the feathery flakes under a stable covering which would pack hard
under the heavy runners of the wide log sleds.
It lodged in thick masses in the trees whose limbs bent under the
weight, and the woods rang to the cries of the sawyers when the
tottering of a mighty pine sent a small avalanche hurtling through the
lower branches, half-burying them in its white smother.
As the early darkness of the North country settled about them the men
plowed heavily to the bunk-house through a foot and a half of
fresh-fallen snow--and still it snowed.