Before daylight Injin Charley drifted into the camp to find Thorpe
already out. With a curt nod the Indian seated himself by the fire, and,
producing a square plug of tobacco and a knife, began leisurely to fill
his pipe. Thorpe watched him in silence. Finally Injin Charley spoke
in the red man's clear-cut, imitative English, a pause between each
sentence.
“I find trail three men,” said he. “Both dam, three men. One man go down
river. Those men have cork-boot. One man no have cork-boot. He boss.”
The Indian suddenly threw his chin out, his head back, half closed
his eyes in a cynical squint. As by a flash Dyer, the scaler, leered
insolently from behind the Indian's stolid mask.
“How do you know?” said Thorpe.
For answer the Indian threw his shoulders forward in Dyer's nervous
fashion.
“He make trail big by the toe, light by the heel. He make trail big on
inside.”
Charley arose and walked, after Dyer's springy fashion, illustrating his
point in the soft wood ashes of the immediate fireside.
Thorpe looked doubtful. “I believe you are right, Charley,” said he.
“But it is mighty little to go on. You can't be sure.”
“I sure,” replied Charley.
He puffed strongly at the heel of his smoke, then arose, and without
farewell disappeared in the forest.
Thorpe ranged the camp impatiently, glancing often at the sky. At length
he laid fresh logs on the fire and aroused the cook. It was bitter
cold in the early morning. After a time the men turned out of their
own accord, at first yawning with insufficient rest, and then becoming
grimly tense as their returned wits reminded them of the situation.
From that moment began the wonderful struggle against circumstances
which has become a by-word among rivermen everywhere. A forty-day drive
had to go out in ten. A freshet had to float out thirty million feet of
logs. It was tremendous; as even the men most deeply buried in the heavy
hours of that time dimly realized. It was epic; as the journalist, by
now thoroughly aroused, soon succeeded in convincing his editors and his
public. Fourteen, sixteen, sometimes eighteen hours a day, the men of
the driving crew worked like demons. Jams had no chance to form. The
phenomenal activity of the rear crew reduced by half the inevitable
sacking. Of course, under the pressure, the lower dam had gone out.
Nothing was to be depended on but sheer dogged grit. Far up-river Sadler
& Smith had hung their drive for the season. They had stretched heavy
booms across the current, and so had resigned themselves to a definite
but not extraordinary loss. Thorpe had at least a clear river.
Wallace Carpenter could not understand how human flesh and blood
endured. The men themselves had long since reached the point of
practical exhaustion, but were carried through by the fire of their
leader. Work was dogged until he stormed into sight; then it became
frenzied. He seemed to impart to those about him a nervous force and
excitability as real as that induced by brandy. When he looked at a man
from his cavernous, burning eyes, that man jumped.
It was all willing enough work. Several definite causes, each adequate
alone to something extraordinary, focussed to the necessity. His men
worshipped Thorpe; the idea of thwarting the purposes of their
comrade's murderers retained its strength; the innate pride of caste
and craft--the sturdiest virtue of the riverman--was in these picked men
increased to the dignity of a passion. The great psychological forces
of a successful career gathered and made head against the circumstances
which such careers always arouse in polarity.
Impossibilities were puffed aside like thistles. The men went at them
headlong. They gave way before the rush. Thorpe always led. Not for a
single instant of the day nor for many at night was he at rest. He was
like a man who has taken a deep breath to reach a definite goal, and who
cannot exhale until the burst of speed be over. Instinctively he seemed
to realize that a let-down would mean collapse.
After the camp had fallen asleep, he would often lie awake half of the
few hours of their night, every muscle tense, staring at the sky. His
mind saw definitely every detail of the situation as he had last viewed
it. In advance his imagination stooped and sweated to the work which his
body was to accomplish the next morning. Thus he did everything twice.
Then at last the tension would relax. He would fall into uneasy sleep.
But twice that did not follow. Through the dissolving iron mist of his
striving, a sharp thought cleaved like an arrow. It was that after
all he did not care. The religion of Success no longer held him as its
devoutest worshiper. He was throwing the fibers of his life into the
engine of toil, not because of moral duty, but because of moral pride.
He meant to succeed in order to prove to himself that he had not been
wrong.
The pain of the arrow-wound always aroused him from his doze with a
start. He grimly laughed the thought out of court. To his waking
moments his religion was sincere, was real. But deep down in his
sub-consciousness, below his recognition, the other influence was
growing like a weed. Perhaps the vision, not the waking, had been right.
Perhaps that far-off beautiful dream of a girl which Thorpe's idealism
had constructed from; the reactionary necessities of Thorpe's harsh life
had been more real than his forest temples of his ruthless god! Perhaps
there were greater things than to succeed, greater things than success.
Perhaps, after all, the Power that put us here demands more that we
cleave one to the other in loving-kindness than that we learn to blow
the penny whistles it has tossed us. And then the keen, poignant memory
of the dream girl stole into the young man's mind, and in agony was
immediately thrust forth. He would not think of her. He had given
her up. He had cast the die. For success he had bartered her, in the
noblest, the loftiest spirit of devotion. He refused to believe that
devotion fanatical; he refused to believe that he had been wrong. In the
still darkness of the night he would rise and steal to the edge of the
dully roaring stream. There, his eyes blinded and his throat choked with
a longing more manly than tears, he would reach out and smooth the round
rough coats of the great logs.
“We'll do it!” he whispered to them--and to himself. “We'll do it! We
can't be wrong. God would not have let us!”