The Promise Read online

  CHAPTER X

  NORTHWARD, HO!

  Buck Moncrossen was a big man with a shrunken, maggoty soul, and noconscience.

  He had learned logging as his horses learned it--by repetition ofunreasoning routine, and after fifteen years' experience in the woodsAppleton had made him a camp boss.

  His camps varied from year to year in no slightest detail. He made nosuggestions for facilitating or systematizing the work, nor would helisten to any. He roared mightily at the substitution of horses foroxen; he openly scoffed at donkey engines, and would have none of them.

  During his years as a sawyer, by the very brute strength and doggednessof him, he had established new records for laying down timber. And now,as boss, he bullied the sawyers who could not equal those records--andhated those who could.

  Arbitrary, jealous, malignant, he ruled his camps with the bluff andbluster of the born coward.

  Among the lumber-jacks, he was known and hated as a hard driver of menand a savage fighter. In the quick, brutish fights of the camps, menwent down under the smashing blows of his huge fists as they would godown to the swing of a derrick-boom, and, once down, would be jumpedupon with calked boots and spiked into submission.

  It was told in the woods that whisky flowed unchallenged in BuckMoncrossen's camps. His crews were known as hard crews; they "hired outfor 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 thebunk-house, and the day started, before breakfast, in a wild orgy ofrough horse-play, poker, and profanity.

  But woe betide the man who allowed overindulgence to interfere with themorrow's work. Evil things were whispered of Moncrossen's man-handlingof "hold-overs."

  In the office, back in Minneapolis, if these things were known theywere winked at. For Moncrossen was a boss who "got out the logs," andthe details of his discipline were unquestioned.

  On the Appleton holdings along Blood River the pine stood tall andstraight and uncut.

  In the years of plenty--those wasteful years of frenzied logging, whenwhite pine lumber brought from twelve to twenty dollars a thousand andrival concerns were laying down only the choicest of logs--Appleton'screws were ordered to clean up as they went.

  Toothpick logging it was called then, and H. D. Appleton wascontemptuously referred to as "the toothpicker."

  Twenty years later, with the market clamoring for white pine at anyprice, Appleton was selling white pine, while in the denuded forest thecrews of his rivals were getting out cull timber and Norway.

  And this fall Appleton sent Buck Moncrossen into the Blood Rivercountry with orders to put ten million feet of logs into the river byspring.

  So it was that the few remaining inhabitants of Hilarity were arousedfrom their habitual apathy one early fall evening by the shrill shrieksof an engine whistle as Moncrossen's ten-car train, carrying crew andsupplies for the new camp, came to a stop at the rusty switch. Therewas something reminiscent in this whistle-sound. It came as a voicefrom the past.

  Time was, some eight or ten years before, when the old No. 9 and hercompanion engine, No. 11, whistled daily and importantly into Hilarity,pushing long strings of "flats" onto the spurs; and then whistled outagain with each car groaning and creaking under its towering pyramid oflogs.

  But that was in the days of Hilarity's prosperity--in the days when thelittle town was the chief loading point for two thousand square milesof timber.

  It had been a live town then--work and wages and the spirit tospend--quick, hot life, and quick, cold death danced hand in hand tothe clink of glasses.

  Everything ran wide open, and all night long rough men sinned abysmallyin their hell-envied play, and, crowding the saloons, laughed andfought and drank red liquor in front of long pine bars, where therattle of chips and the click of pool-balls, mingled with luridprofanity, floated out through the open doors and blended with theincessant tintinnabulation of the dance-hall pianos.

  These were the days of Hilarity's prosperity, when twenty train-loadsof logs were jerked from her spurs by day, and the nights rang loudwith false laughter.

  A vanished prosperity--for now the little town stood all but desertedin its clearing, with the encircling hills denuded of all vegetationsave a tangle of underbrush and a straggling growth of stunted jackpine.

  Even the "pig-iron loggers"--the hardwood men--had gleaned the laststick 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 veryfew--who had undertaken to grub out tiny farms among the stumps.

  Each evening these forlorn remnants were wont to forsake theirstolid-faced wives and yammering offspring and pick their way throughthe solitary stump-dotted street, past windowless, deserted buildingswhich were the saloons and dance-halls of better days, to foregatheraround the huge stove in the rear of Hod Burrage's general store, whichwas decrepit Hilarity's sole remaining enterprise, and there to bragand maunder over the dead town's former glory.

  The fact that certain of Hod's jugs never tilted to the filling of thevinegar bottles or molasses pails of the women, not only served toinsure unflagging attendance, but the sale of their contents affordedthe storekeeper a small but steady income which more than offset anyloss incident to the preoccupied inroads upon his cracker barrel.

  The sound of the once familiar whistle brought the men tumbling fromBurrage's door, while up and down the deserted street aproned formsstood framed in the doorways, beflanked by tousled heads which gazedwonder-eyed from behind tight-gripped skirts.

  Not a person in town, except the very newest citizens, and they weretoo young to care--for nobody ever came to Hilarity except by the storkroute--but recognized old No. 9's whistle.

  Strange, almost apologetic, it sounded after its years of silence; notat 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 thecorroded lock of the unused switch which creaked and jarred to the pullof the lever as old No. 9 headed wheezily onto the rust-eaten rails ofthe rotting spur.

  An hour later she puffed noisily away, leaving Moncrossen's crewencamped in the deserted cabins and dilapidated saloons of the worn-outtown.

  Moncrossen, by making use of old tote-roads, saved about forty of theeighty miles of road building which lay between Hilarity and the BloodRiver.

  Toward the end of October the work was completed, the camp buildingserected, and a brush and log dam thrown across the river at the narrowsof a white water rapid.

  Swampers and axe-men set to work building skidways and cross-hauls, andthe banks of the river were cleared for the roll-ways. The ground wasstill bare of snow, but the sawyers were "laying them down," and thelogs were banked at the skidways.

  Then one morning the snow came.

  Quietly it fell, in big, downy flakes that floated lazily to earth fromthe even gray of the cloud-spread sky, tracing aimless, zigzag patternsagainst the dark green background of the pines, and covering the brownneedles of the forest floor and the torn mold of the skidways with asoft blanket of white.

  The men sprang eagerly to their work--heartened by the feel of thesnow. The tingling air was filled with familiar man-sounds--theresonant stroke of axes, and the long crash of falling trees, themetallic rattle of chains, the harsh rasp of saws, and the good-naturedcalls of men in rude banter; sounds that rang little and thin throughthe mighty silence of the forest.

  Gradually the flakes hardened and the zigzag patterns resolvedthemselves into long, threadlike lines which slanted earthward with asoft, hissing sound.

  Fast it fell, and faster, until the background disappeared, and all theworld was a swift-moving riot of white.

  It was a real snow now--a snow of value which buried the soft blanketof the feathery flakes under a stable covering which would pack hardunder the heavy run
ners of the wide log sleds.

  It lodged in thick masses in the trees whose limbs bent under theweight, and the woods rang to the cries of the sawyers when thetottering of a mighty pine sent a small avalanche hurtling through thelower branches, half-burying them in its white smother.

  As the early darkness of the North country settled about them the menplowed heavily to the bunk-house through a foot and a half offresh-fallen snow--and still it snowed.