That was a breakfast long to be remembered by Nan Sherwood, not
particularly because of its quality, but for the quantity served. She
had never seen men like these lumbermen eat before, save for the few
days she had been at Uncle Henry's house.
Great platters of baked beans were placed on the table, flanked by the
lumps of pork that had seasoned them. Fried pork, too, was a “main-stay”
on the bill-of-fare. The deal table was graced by no cloth or napery of
any kind. There were heaps of potatoes and onions fried together, and
golden cornbread with bowls of white gravy to ladle over it.
After riding twenty-five miles through such a frosty air, Nan would have
had to possess a delicate appetite indeed not to enjoy these viands. She
felt bashful because of the presence of so many rough men; but they left
her alone for the most part, and she could listen and watch.
“Old Toby Vanderwiller tell you what Ged's been blowin' about, Henry?”
asked one of the men at the table, busy ladling beans into his mouth
with a knife, a feat that Nan thought must be rather precarious, to say
the least.
“Says he's going to jail me if I go on to the Perkins Tract,” growled
Uncle Henry, with whom the matter was doubtless a sore subject.
“Yaas. But he says more'n that,” said this tale bearer.
“Oh, Ged says a whole lot besides his prayers,” responded Uncle Henry,
good-naturedly. Perhaps he saw they were trying to bait him.
“Wal, 'tain't nothin' prayerful he's sayin',” drawled the first speaker,
after a gulp of coffee from his thick china cup. “Some of the boys at
Beckett's, you know, they're a tough crowd, was riggin' him about what
you said to him down to the Forks, and Ged spit out that he'd give a
lump of money to see you on your back.”
“Huh!” grunted Uncle Henry.
“And some of 'em took him up, got the old man right down to cases.”
“That so?” asked Mr. Sherwood curiously. “What's Ged going to do?
Challenge me to a game of cat's cradle? Or does he want to settle the
business at draughts, three best out o' five?”
“Now you know dern well, Hen,” said the other, as some of the listeners
laughed loudly at Mr. Sherwood's sally, “that old Ged Raffer will never
lock horns with you 'ceptin' it's in court, where he'll have the full
pertection of the law, and a grain the best of it into the bargain.”
“Well, I s'pose that's so,” admitted Nan's uncle, rather gloomily, she
thought.
“So, if Beckett's crowd are int'rested in bumping you a whole lot, you
may be sure Ged's promised 'em real money for it.”
“Pshaw!” exclaimed Uncle Henry. “You're fooling now. He hasn't hired any
half-baked chip-eaters and Canucks to try and beat me up?”
“I ain't foolin'.”
“Pshaw!”
“You kin 'pshaw' till the cows come home,” cried the other heatedly. “I
got it straight.”
“Who from?”
“Sim Barkis, him what's cookin' for Beckett's crew.”
“Good man, Sim. Never caught him in a lie yet. You are beginning to
sound reasonable, Josh,” and Mr. Sherwood put down his knife and fork
and looked shrewdly at his informant. “Now tell me,” he said, “how much
is Sim going to get for helping to pay Ged Raffer's debts?”
“Har!” ejaculated the other man. “You know Sim ain't that kind.”
“All right, then. How much does he say the gang's going to split between
'em after they've done me up brown according to contract?” scoffed Uncle
Henry, and Nan realized that her giant relative had not the least fear
of not being able to meet any number of enemies in the open.
“Sim come away before they got that far. Of course Ged didn't say right
out in open meetin' that he'd give so many dollars for your scalp. But
he got 'em all int'rested, and it wouldn't surprise him, so Sim said, if
on the quiet some of those plug-uglies had agreed to do the job.”
Nan shuddered, and had long since stopped eating. But nobody paid any
attention to her at the moment.
Uncle Henry drawled: “They're going to do the hardest day's job for the
smallest pay that they ever did on this Michigan Peninsula. I'm much
obliged to you, Josh, for telling me. I never go after trouble, as you
fellows all know; but I sha'n't try to dodge it, either.”
He picked up his knife and fork and went quietly on with his breakfast.
But Nan could not eat any more at all.
It seemed to the gently nurtured girl from Tillbury as though she had
fallen in with people from another globe. Even the mill-hands, whom Bess
Harley so scorned, were not like these great, rough fellows whose minds
seemed continually to be fixed upon battle. At least, she had never seen
or heard such talk as had just now come to her ears.
The men began, one by one, to push back the benches and go out. There
was a great bustle of getting under way as the teams started for the
woods, and the choppers, too, went away. Tom hurried to start his big
pair of dapple grays, and Nan was glad to bundle up again and run out to
watch the exodus.
They were a mighty crew. As Uncle Henry had said, the Big Woods did not
breed runts.
Remembering the stunted, quick-moving, chattering French Canadians, and
the scattering of American-born employees among them, who worked in the
Tillbury mills, Nan was the more amazed by the average size of
these workmen. The woodsmen were a race of giants beside the
narrow-shouldered, flat-chested pygmies who toiled in the mills.
Tom strode by with his timber sled. Rafe leaped on to ride and Tom
playfully snapped his whiplash at him. Nan was glad to see that the
two brothers smiled again at each other. Their recent tiff seemed to be
forgotten.
Some of the choppers had already gone on ahead to the part of the tract
where the marked trees were being felled. Now the pluck, pluck, pluck of
the axe blows laid against the forest monarchs, reached the girl's ears.
She thought the flat stuttering sound of the axes said “pluck” very
plainly, and that that was just the word they should say.
“For it does take lots of pluck to do work of this kind,” Nan
confided to her uncle, who walked up and down on the porch smoking an
after-breakfast pipe.
“Yes. No softies allowed on the job,” said he, cheerfully. “Some of the
boys may be rough and hard nuts to crack; but it is necessary to have
just such boys or we couldn't get out the timber.”
“But they want to fight so much!” gasped Nan.
“Sho!” said her uncle, slowly. “It's mostly talk. They feel the itch
for hard work and hard play, that's all. You take lively, full-muscled
animals, and they are always bucking and quarreling--trying to see which
one is the best. Take two young, fat steers they'll lock horns at the
drop of a hat. It's animal spirits, Nan. They feel that they've got
to let off steam. Where muscle and pluck count for what they do in the
lumber camps, there's bound to be more or less ructions.”
Perhaps this might be; but Nan was dreadfully sorry, nevertheless, that
Uncle Henry had this trouble with Mr. Gedney Raffer. The girl feared
that there had been something besides “letting off steam” in the
challenge her uncle had thrown down to his enemy, or to the men that
enemy could hire to attack him.
The timber sledges soon began to drift back, for some of the logs had
been cut before the big storm, and had only to be broken out of the
drifts and rolled upon the sleds with the aid of the men's canthooks. It
was a mystery at first to Nan how they could get three huge logs, some
of them three feet in diameter at the butt, on to the sled; two at the
bottom and one rolled upon them, all being fastened securely with the
timber-chain and hook.
How the horses strained in their collars to start the mighty load! But
once started, the runners slipped along easily enough, even through the
deep snow, packing the compressible stuff in one passage as hard as ice.
Nan followed in this narrow track to the very bank of the river where
the logs were heaped in long windrows, ready to be launched into the
stream when the waters should rise at the time of the spring freshet.
Tom managed his team alone, and unloaded alone, too. It was marvelous
(so Nan thought) that her cousin could start the top log with the great
canthook, and guide it as it rolled off the sled so that it should lie
true with timbers that had been piled before. The strain of his work
made him perspire as though it were midsummer. He thrust the calks on
his bootsoles into the log and the shreds of bark and small chips flew
as he stamped to get a secure footing for his work. Then he heaved
like a giant, his shoulders humping under the blue jersey he wore, and
finally the log turned. Once started, it was soon rolled into place.
Nan ran into the cook shed often to get warm. Her uncle was busy with
the boss of the camp, so she had nobody but the cook and his helper to
speak to for a time. Therefore it was loneliness that made her start
over the half-beaten trail for the spot where the men were at work,
without saying a word to anybody.
None of the teams had come by for some time; but she could hear faintly
the sound of the axes and the calling of the workmen to each other and
their sharp commands to the horses.
She went away from the camp a few hundred yards and then found that the
trail forked. One path went down a little hill, and as that seemed easy
to descend, Nan followed it into a little hollow. It seemed only one
sled had come this way and none of the men were here. The voices and
axes sounded from higher up the ridge.
Suddenly she heard something entirely different from the noise of the
woodsmen. It was the snarling voice of a huge cat and almost instantly
Nan sighted the creature which stood upon a snow-covered rock beside the
path. It had tasseled ears, a wide, wicked “smile,” bristling whiskers,
and fangs that really made Nan tremble, although she was some yards from
the bobcat.
As she believed, from what her cousins had told her, bobcats are not
usually dangerous. They never seek trouble with man, save under certain
conditions; and that is when a mother cat has kittens to defend.
This was a big female cat, and, although the season was early, she had
littered and her kittens, three of them, were bedded in a heap of leaves
blown by the wind into a hollow tree trunk.
The timberman driving through the hollow had not seen the bobcat and her
three blind babies; but he had roused the mother cat and she was now all
ready to spring at intruders.
That Nan was not the person guilty of disturbing her repose made no
difference to the big cat. She saw the girl standing, affrighted and
trembling, in the path and with a ferocious yowl and leap she crossed
the intervening space and landed in the snow within almost arm's reach
of the fear-paralyzed girl.