Wallace Carpenter and Hamilton, the journalist, seated against the
sun-warmed bench of Mrs. Hathaway's boarding-house, commented on the
band as it stumbled in to the wash-room.
“Those men don't know how big they are,” remarked the journalist. “That's
the way with most big men. And that man Thorpe belongs to another age.
I'd like to get him to telling his experiences; he'd be a gold mine to
me.”
“And would require about as much trouble to 'work,'” laughed Wallace.
“He won't talk.”
“That's generally the trouble, confound 'em,” sighed Hamilton. “The
fellows who CAN talk haven't anything to say; and those who have
something to tell are dumb as oysters. I've got him in though.” He
spread one of a roll of papers on his knees. “I got a set of duplicates
for you. Thought you might like to keep them. The office tells me,” he
concluded modestly, “that they are attracting lots of attention, but are
looked upon as being a rather clever sort of fiction.”
Wallace picked up the sheet. His eye was at once met by the heading,
“'So long, boys,'” in letters a half inch in height, and immediately
underneath in smaller type, “said Jimmy Powers, and threw his hat in the
face of death.”
“It's all there,” explained the journalist, “--the jam and the break,
and all this magnificent struggle afterwards. It makes a great yarn.
I feel tempted sometimes to help it out a little--artistically, you
know--but of course that wouldn't do. She'd make a ripping yarn, though,
if I could get up some motive outside mere trade rivalry for the blowing
up of those dams. That would just round it off.”
Wallace Carpenter was about to reply that such a motive actually
existed, when the conversation was interrupted by the approach of Thorpe
and Big Junko. The former looked twenty years older after his winter.
His eye was dull, his shoulders drooped, his gait was inelastic. The
whole bearing of the man was that of one weary to the bone.
“I've got something here to show you, Harry,” cried Wallace Carpenter,
waving one of the papers. “It was a great drive and here's something to
remember it by.”
“All right, Wallace, by and by,” replied Thorpe dully. “I'm dead. I'm
going to turn in for a while. I need sleep more than anything else. I
can't think now.”
He passed through the little passage into the “parlor bed-room,” which
Mrs. Hathaway always kept in readiness for members of the firm. There he
fell heavily asleep almost before his body had met the bed.
In the long dining room the rivermen consumed a belated dinner. They had
no comments to make. It was over.
The two on the veranda smoked. To the right, at the end of the sawdust
street, the mill sang its varying and lulling keys. The odor of
fresh-sawed pine perfumed the air. Not a hundred yards away the river
slipped silently to the distant blue Superior, escaping between the
slanting stone-filled cribs which held back the logs. Down the south and
west the huge thunderheads gathered and flashed and grumbled, as they
had done every afternoon for days previous.
“Queer thing,” commented Hamilton finally, “these cold streaks in the
air. They are just as distinct as though they had partitions around
them.”
“Queer climate anyway,” agreed Carpenter.
Excepting always for the mill, the little settlement appeared asleep.
The main booms were quite deserted. Not a single figure, armed with
its picturesque pike-pole, loomed athwart the distance. After awhile
Hamilton noticed something.
“Look here, Carpenter,” said he, “what's happening out there? Have some
of your confounded logs SUNK, or what? There don't seem to be near so
many of them somehow.”
“No, it isn't that,” proffered Carpenter after a moment's scrutiny,
“there are just as many logs, but they are getting separated a little so
you can see the open water between them.”
“Guess you're right. Say, look here, I believe that the river is
rising!”
“Nonsense, we haven't had any rain.”
“She's rising just the same. I'll tell you how I know; you see that
spile over there near the left-hand crib? Well, I sat on the boom this
morning watching the crew, and I whittled the spile with my knife--you
can see the marks from here. I cut the thing about two feet above the
water. Look at it now.”
“She's pretty near the water line, that's right,” admitted Carpenter.
“I should think that might make the boys hot,” commented Hamilton. “If
they'd known this was coming, they needn't have hustled so to get the
drive down.
“That's so,” Wallace agreed.
About an hour later the younger man in his turn made a discovery.
“She's been rising right along,” he submitted. “Your marks are nearer
the water, and, do you know, I believe the logs are beginning to feel
it. See, they've closed up the little openings between them, and they
are beginning to crowd down to the lower end of the pond.”
“I don't know anything about this business,” hazarded the journalist,
“but by the mere look of the thing I should think there was a good deal
of pressure on that same lower end. By Jove, look there! See those logs
up-end? I believe you're going to have a jam right here in your own
booms!”
“I don't know,” hesitated Wallace, “I never heard of its happening.”
“You'd better let someone know.”
“I hate to bother Harry or any of the rivermen. I'll just step down to
the mill. Mason--he's our mill foreman--he'll know.”
Mason came to the edge of the high trestle and took one look.
“Jumping fish-hooks!” he cried. “Why, the river's up six inches and
still a comin'! Here you, Tom!” he called to one of the yard hands, “you
tell Solly to get steam on that tug double quick, and have Dave hustle
together his driver crew.”
“What you going to do?” asked Wallace.
“I got to strengthen the booms,” explained the mill foreman. “We'll
drive some piles across between the cribs.”
“Is there any danger?”
“Oh, no, the river would have to rise a good deal higher than she is now
to make current enough to hurt. They've had a hard rain up above. This
will go down in a few hours.”
After a time the tug puffed up to the booms, escorting the pile driver.
The latter towed a little raft of long sharpened piles, which it at once
began to drive in such positions as would most effectually strengthen
the booms. In the meantime the thunder-heads had slyly climbed the
heavens, so that a sudden deluge of rain surprised the workmen. For an
hour it poured down in torrents; then settled to a steady gray beat.
Immediately the aspect had changed. The distant rise of land was veiled;
the brown expanse of logs became slippery and glistening; the river
below the booms was picked into staccato points by the drops; distant
Superior turned lead color and seemed to tumble strangely athwart the
horizon.
Solly, the tug captain, looked at his mooring hawsers and then at the
nearest crib.
“She's riz two inches in th' las' two hours,” he announced, “and
she's runnin' like a mill race.” Solly was a typical north-country tug
captain, short and broad, with a brown, clear face, and the steadiest
and calmest of steel-blue eyes. “When she begins to feel th' pressure
behind,” he went on, “there's goin' to be trouble.”
Towards dusk she began to feel that pressure. Through the rainy twilight
the logs could be seen raising their ghostly arms of protest. Slowly,
without tumult, the jam formed. In the van the logs crossed silently; in
the rear they pressed in, were sucked under in the swift water, and came
to rest at the bottom of the river. The current of the river began to
protest, pressing its hydraulics through the narrowing crevices. The
situation demanded attention.
A breeze began to pull off shore in the body of rain. Little by little
it increased, sending the water by in gusts, ruffling the already
hurrying river into greater haste, raising far from the shore dimly
perceived white-caps. Between the roaring of the wind, the dash of rain,
and the rush of the stream, men had to shout to make themselves heard.
“Guess you'd better rout out the boss,” screamed Solly to Wallace
Carpenter; “this damn water's comin' up an inch an hour right along.
When she backs up once, she'll push this jam out sure.”
Wallace ran to the boarding house and roused his partner from a heavy
sleep. The latter understood the situation at a word. While dressing, he
explained to the younger man wherein lay the danger.
“If the jam breaks once,” said he, “nothing top of earth can prevent
it from going out into the Lake, and there it'll scatter, Heaven knows
where. Once scattered, it is practically a total loss. The salvage
wouldn't pay the price of the lumber.”
They felt blindly through the rain in the direction of the lights on
the tug and pile-driver. Shearer, the water dripping from his flaxen
mustache, joined them like a shadow.
“I heard you come in,” he explained to Carpenter. At the river he
announced his opinion. “We can hold her all right,” he assured them.
“It'll take a few more piles, but by morning the storm'll be over, and
she'll begin to go down again.”
The three picked their way over the creaking, swaying timber. But when
they reached the pile-driver, they found trouble afoot. The crew had
mutinied, and refused longer to drive piles under the face of the jam.
“If she breaks loose, she's going to bury us,” said they.
“She won't break,” snapped Shearer, “get to work.”
“It's dangerous,” they objected sullenly.
“By God, you get off this driver,” shouted Solly. “Go over and lie down
in a ten-acre lot, and see if you feel safe there!”
He drove them ashore with a storm of profanity and a multitude of kicks,
his steel-blue eyes blazing.
“There's nothing for it but to get the boys out again,” said Tim; “I
kinder hate to do it.”
But when the Fighting Forty, half asleep but dauntless, took charge of
the driver, a catastrophe made itself known. One of the ejected men had
tripped the lifting chain of the hammer after another had knocked away
the heavy preventing block, and so the hammer had fallen into the river
and was lost. None other was to be had. The pile driver was useless.
A dozen men were at once despatched for cables, chains, and wire ropes
from the supply at the warehouse.
“I'd like to have those whelps here,” cried Shearer, “I'd throw them
under the jam.”
“It's part of the same trick,” said Thorpe grimly; “those fellows have
their men everywhere among us. I don't know whom to trust.”
“You think it's Morrison & Daly?” queried Carpenter astonished.
“Think? I know it. They know as well as you or I that if we save these
logs, we'll win out in the stock exchange; and they're not such fools as
to let us save them if it can be helped. I have a score to settle with
those fellows; and when I get through with this thing I'll settle it all
right.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“The only thing there is to be done. We'll string heavy booms, chained
together, between the cribs, and then trust to heaven they'll hold. I
think we can hold the jam. The water will begin to flow over the bank
before long, so there won't be much increase of pressure over what we
have now; and as there won't be any shock to withstand, I think our
heavy booms will do the business.”
He turned to direct the boring of some long boom logs in preparation
for the chains. Suddenly he whirled again to Wallace with so strange
an expression in his face that the young man almost cried out. The
uncertain light of the lanterns showed dimly the streaks of rain across
his countenance, and, his eye flared with a look almost of panic.
“I never thought of it!” he said in a low voice. “Fool that I am! I
don't see how I missed it. Wallace, don't you see what those devils will
do next?”
“No, what do you mean?” gasped the younger man.
“There are twelve million feet of logs up river in Sadler & Smith's
drive. Don't you see what they'll do?”
“No, I don't believe--”
“Just as soon as they find out that the river is booming, and that we
are going to have a hard time to hold our jam, they'll let loose
those twelve million on us. They'll break the jam, or dynamite it, or
something. And let me tell you, that a very few logs hitting the tail
of our jam will start the whole shooting match so that no power on earth
can stop it.”
“I don't imagine they'd think of doing that--” began Wallace by way of
assurance.
“Think of it! You don't know them. They've thought of everything. You
don't know that man Daly. Ask Tim, he'll tell you.”
“Well, the--”
“I've got to send a man up there right away. Perhaps we can get there in
time to head them off. They have to send their man over--By the way,” he
queried, struck with a new idea, “how long have you been driving piles?”
“Since about three o'clock.”
“Six hours,” computed Thorpe. “I wish you'd come for me sooner.”
He cast his eye rapidly over the men.
“I don't know just who to send. There isn't a good enough woodsman in
the lot to make Siscoe Falls through the woods a night like this. The
river trail is too long; and a cut through the woods is blind. Andrews
is the only man I know of who could do it, but I think Billy Mason said
Andrews had gone up on the Gunther track to run lines. Come on; we'll
see.”
With infinite difficulty and caution, they reached the shore. Across
the gleaming logs shone dimly the lanterns at the scene of work, ghostly
through the rain. Beyond, on either side, lay impenetrable drenched
darkness, racked by the wind.
“I wouldn't want to tackle it,” panted Thorpe. “If it wasn't for that
cursed tote road between Sadler's and Daly's, I wouldn't worry. It's
just too EASY for them.”
Behind them the jam cracked and shrieked and groaned. Occasionally was
heard, beneath the sharper noises, a dull BOOM, as one of the heavy
timbers forced by the pressure from its resting place, shot into the
air, and fell back on the bristling surface.
Andrews had left that morning.
“Tim Shearer might do it,” suggested Thorpe, “but I hate to spare him.”
He picked his rifle from its rack and thrust the magazine full of
cartridges.
“Come on, Wallace,” said he, “we'll hunt him up.”
They stepped again into the shriek and roar of the storm, bending their
heads to its power, but indifferent in the already drenched condition
of their clothing, to the rain. The saw-dust street was saturated like a
sponge. They could feel the quick water rise about the pressure at their
feet. From the invisible houses they heard a steady monotone of flowing
from the roofs. Far ahead, dim in the mist, sprayed the light of
lanterns.
Suddenly Thorpe felt a touch on his arm. Faintly he perceived at his
elbow the high lights of a face from which the water streamed.
“Injin Charley!” he cried, “the very man!”