第88章

After a moment the constant acceleration in speed checked, then commenced perceptibly to slacken.At once the rest of the crew began to ride down-stream.Each struck the caulks of his river boots strongly into a log, and on such unstable vehicles floated miles with the current.From time to time, as Bryan Moloney indicated, one of them went ashore.There, usually at a bend of the stream where the likelihood of jamming was great, they took their stands.When necessary, they ran out over the face of the river to separate a congestion likely to cause trouble.The rest of the time they smoked their pipes.

At noon they ate from little canvas bags which had been filled that morning by the cookee.At sunset they rode other logs down the river to where their camp had been made for them.There they ate hugely, hung their ice-wet garments over a tall framework constructed around a monster fire, and turned in on hemlock branches.

All night long the logs slipped down the moonlit current, silently, swiftly, yet without haste.The porcupines invaded the sleeping camp.From the whole length of the river rang the hollow BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, of timbers striking one against the other.

The drive was on.

Chapter XLVII

In the meantime the main body of the crew under Thorpe and his foremen were briskly tumbling the logs into the current.Sometimes under the urging of the peaveys, but a single stick would slide down; or again a double tier would cascade with the roar of a little Niagara.The men had continually to keep on the tension of an alert, for at any moment they were called upon to exercise their best judgment and quickness to keep from being carried downward with the rush of the logs.Not infrequently a frowning sheer wall of forty feet would hesitate on the brink of plunge.Then Shearer himself proved his right to the title of riverman.

Shearer wore caulks nearly an inch in length.He had been known to ride ten miles, without shifting his feet, on a log so small that he could carry it without difficulty.For cool nerve he was unexcelled.

"I don't need you boys here any longer," he said quietly.

When the men had all withdrawn, he walked confidently under the front of the rollway, glancing with practiced eye at the perpendicular wall of logs over him.Then, as a man pries jack-straws, he clamped his peavey and tugged sharply.At once the rollway flattened and toppled.

A mighty splash, a hurl of flying foam and crushing timbers, and the spot on which the riverman had stood was buried beneath twenty feet of solid green wood.To Thorpe it seemed that Shearer must have been overwhelmed, but the riverman always mysteriously appeared at one side or the other, nonchalant, urging the men to work before the logs should have ceased to move.Tradition claimed that only once in a long woods life had Shearer been forced to "take water" before a breaking rollway: and then he saved his peavey.History stated that he had never lost a man on the river, simply and solely because he invariably took the dangerous tasks upon himself.

As soon as the logs had caught the current, a dozen men urged them on.With their short peaveys, the drivers were enabled to prevent the timbers from swirling in the eddies--one of the first causes of a jam.At last, near the foot of the flats, they abandoned them to the stream, confident that Moloney and his crew would see to their passage down the river.

In three days the rollways were broken.Now it became necessary to start the rear.

For this purpose Billy Camp, the cook, had loaded his cook-stove, a quantity of provisions, and a supply of bedding, aboard a scow.The scow was built of tremendous hewn timbers, four or five inches thick, to withstand the shock of the logs.At either end were long sweeps to direct its course.The craft was perhaps forty feet long, but rather narrow, in order that it might pass easily through the chute of a dam.It was called the "wanigan."Billy Camp, his cookee, and his crew of two were now doomed to tribulation.The huge, unwieldy craft from that moment was to become possessed of the devil.Down the white water of rapids it would bump, smashing obstinately against boulders, impervious to the frantic urging of the long sweeps; against the roots and branches of the streamside it would scrape with the perverseness of a vicious horse; in the broad reaches it would sulk, refusing to proceed; and when expediency demanded its pause, it would drag Billy Camp and his entire crew at the rope's end, while they tried vainly to snub it against successively uprooted trees and stumps.

When at last the wanigan was moored fast for the night,--usually a mile or so below the spot planned,--Billy Camp pushed back his battered old brown derby hat, the badge of his office, with a sigh of relief.To be sure he and his men had still to cut wood, construct cooking and camp fires, pitch tents, snip browse, and prepare supper for seventy men; but the hard work of the day was over.Billy Camp did not mind rain or cold--he would cheerfully cook away with the water dripping from his battered derby to his chubby and cold-purpled nose--but he did mind the wanigan.And the worst of it was, he got no sympathy nor aid from the crew.From either bank he and his anxious struggling assistants were greeted with ironic cheers and facetious remarks.The tribulations of the wanigan were as the salt of life to the spectators.

Billy Camp tried to keep back of the rear in clear water, but when the wanigan so disposed, he found himself jammed close in the logs.

There he had a chance in his turn to become spectator, and so to repay in kind some of the irony and facetiousness.

Along either bank, among the bushes, on sandbars, and in trees, hundreds and hundreds of logs had been stranded when the main drive passed.These logs the rear crew were engaged in restoring to the current.