Читать книгу King Spruce, A Novel - Holman Day - Страница 11

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“If you don’t like our looks nor ain’t stuck on our kind,

Git back with the dames in the next car behind.”

On and on went the yelping staccato of the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt. The Honorable Pulaski D. was discoursing on his favorite topic, and his voice was heard above the rattle and jangle of the shaky old passenger-coach that jolted behind some freight-cars.

“Forty years ago I rolled nigh onto a million feet into that brook there!” shouted the lumber baron of the Umcolcus. His knotted, hairy fist wagged under the young man’s nose as he pointed at the car window, his unwholesome breath fanned warmly on Wade’s cheek, and when he crowded over to look into the summer-dried stream his bristly chin-whiskers tickled his seat-mate’s ear. The September day was muggy and human contact disquieting. Wade shrank nearer the open window. The Honorable Pulaski did not notice the shrinking. He was accustomed to crowd folks. His self-assertiveness expected them to get out of the way.

“Yes, sir, nigh onto a million in one spring, and half of it ‘down pine’ and sounder’n a hound’s tooth. Nothing here now but sleeper stuff. It’s a good many miles to the nearest saw-log, and that’s where I’m cutting on Jerusalem. I tell you, I’ve peeled some territory in forty years, young man.”

Wade looked at the red tongue licking lustfully between blue lips, and then gazed on the ragged, bush-grown wastes on either side. While he had been crowding men the Honorable Pulaski had been just as industriously crowding the forest off God’s acres. The “chock” of the axe sounded in his abrupt sentences, the rasp of saws in his voice.

“We left big stumps those days.” The hairy fist indicated the rotten monuments of moss-covered punk shouldering over the dwarfed bushes. “There was a lot of it ahead of us. Didn’t have to be economical. Get it down and yanked to the landings—that was the game! We’re cutting as small as eight-inch spruce at Jerusalem. Ain’t a mouthful for a gang-saw, but they taste good to pulp-grinders.”

The train began to groan and jerk to a stand-still, and the old man dove out of his seat and staggered down the aisle, holding to the backs of the seats. At the last station he had spent ten minutes of hand-brandishing colloquy on the platform with a shingle-mill boss whom he had summoned to the train by wire. He was to meet a birch-mill foreman here. Wade looked out at the struggling cedars and the white birches, “the ladies of the forest,” pathetic aftermath which was now falling victim to axe and saw, and wondered with a flicker of grim humor in his thoughts why the Honorable Pulaski did not set crews at work cutting the bushes for hoop-poles and then clean up the last remnant into toothpicks.

“He’s a driver, ain’t he?” sounded a voice in his ear. An old man behind him hung his grizzled whiskers over the seat-back and pointed an admiring finger at the retreating back of the lumber baron.

Wade wished that people would let him alone. He had some thoughts—some very bitter thoughts—to think alone, and the world jarred on him. The yelp of the Honorable Pulaski’s monologue, that everlasting, insistent bellow of voices in the smoking-car ahead, where the ingoing crew of Britt’s hundred men were trying to sing with drunken lustiness, and now this amiable old fool of the grizzled whiskers, stung the dull pain of his resentment at deeper troubles into sudden and almost childish anger.

“Once when I was swamping for him on Telos stream, he says to me, ‘Man,’ he says, ‘remember that the time that’s lost when an axe is slicin’ air ain’t helping me to pay you day’s wages!’ And I says to him, ‘Mister Britt,’ says I—”

Dwight Wade, college graduate, former high-school principal, and at all times in the past a cultured and courteous young gentleman, did the first really rude and unpardonable act of his life. He twisted his chin over his shoulder, scowled into the mild, dim, and watery eyes of his interlocutor, and growled:

“Oh, cut it short! What in—” He checked the expletive, and snapped himself up and across the aisle, and slammed down into another seat. The red came over his face. He did not dare to look back at the old man. He hearkened to the rip-roaring chorus in the smoking-car, and reflected that as the new time-keeper he was now one of “Britt’s Busters,” and that the demoralizing license of the great north woods must have entered into his nature thus early. He grunted his disgust at himself under his breath, and hunched his head down between his shoulders.

In his nasty state of mind he glowered at a passenger who came into the car at the front. It was a girl, and a pretty girl at that. She nodded a cheery greeting to the old man of the grizzled whiskers, and with a smile still dimpling her cheeks flashed one glance at Wade. It was not a bold look, and yet there was the least bit of challenge in it. The sudden pout on her lips might have been at thought of confiding her fresh, crisp skirts to the dusty seat; and yet, when she turned and shot one more quick glance at the young man’s sour countenance, the pout curled into something like disdain, and a little shrug of her shoulders hinted that she had not met the response that she was accustomed to find on the faces of young men who saw her for the first time.

While Wade was gazing gloomily and abstractedly at the fair profile and the nose, tip-tilted a wee bit above the big white bow of her veil tied under her chin, one of the crew lurched from the door of the smoking-car, caught off his hat, and bowed extravagantly. It was Tommy Eye. He had to clutch the brake-wheel to keep himself from falling. But his voice was still his own. He broke out lustily:

“Oh, there ain’t no girl, no pretty little girl,

That I have left behind me.

I’m all cut loose for to wrassle with the spruce,

Way up where she can’t find me.

Oh, there ain’t no—”

An angry face appeared over his shoulder in the door of the smoker, two big hands clutched his throat, jammed the melody into a hoarse squawk, and then the songster went tumbling backward into the car and out of sight.

Almost immediately his muscular suppressor crossed the platform and came into the coach, snatching the little round hat off the back of his head as he entered. Wade knew him. His employer had introduced them at the junction as two who should know each other. It was Colin MacLeod, the “boss.”

“And Prince Edward’s Island never turned out a smarter,” the Honorable Pulaski had said, not deigning to make an aside of his remarks. “Landed four million of the Umcolcus logs on the ice this spring, busted her with dynamite, let hell and the drive loose, licked every pulp-wood boss that got in his way with their kindlings, and was the first into Pea Cove boom with every log on the scale-sheet. That’s this boy!” And he fondled the young giant’s arm like a butcher appraising beef.

Wade paid little attention to him then. With his ridged jaw muscles, his hard gray eyes, and the bullying cock of his head, he was only a part of the ruthlessness of the woods.

But now, as he came up the car aisle, his face flushed, his eyes eager, his embarrassment wrinkling on his forehead, Wade looked at him with the sudden thought that the boss of the “Busters” was merely a boy, after all.

“It was only Tommy Eye, Miss Nina,” explained MacLeod, his voice trembling, his abashed admiration shining in his face. “He’s just out of jail, you know.” He looked at Wade and then at the old man of the grizzled whiskers, and raised his voice as though to gain a self-possession he did not feel. “Tommy always gets into jail after the drive is down. He’s spent seventeen summers in jail, and is proud of it.”

“But there ain’t no better teamster ever pushed on the webbin’s,” said the old man, admiration for all the folks of the woods still unflagging.

The girl did not display the same enthusiasm, either for Tommy Eye’s mishaps or for the bashful giant who stood shifting from foot to foot beside her seat.

“Crews going into the woods ought to be nailed up in box-cars, that’s what father says. And when they go through Castonia settlement I wish they were in crates, the same as they ship bears.”

“How is your father since spring?” asked the young boss, stammeringly, trying to appear unconscious of her scorn.

“Oh, he’s all right,” she returned, carelessly, patting her hand on her lips to repress a yawn.

“And is every one in Castonia all right?”

“You can ask them when you get there,” she replied, a bit ungraciously.

“I tell you, I was pretty surprised to see you get aboard the train down here at Bomazeen. I—”

She canted her head suddenly, and looked sidewise at him with an expression half satiric, half indignant.

“Do you think that all the folks who ever go anywhere in this world are river drivers and”—she shot a quick and disparaging glance at the still glowering Wade—“drummers?”

MacLeod noticed the look and its scorn with delight, and grasped at this opportunity to get outside the platitudes of conversation. But in his eagerness to be news-monger he did not soften his “out-door voice,” deepened by many years of bellowing above the roar of white water.

“Oh, that ain’t a drummer! That’s Britt’s new chaney man—the time-keeper and the wangan store clerk.” MacLeod knew that a girl born and bred in Castonia settlement, on the edge of the great forest, needed no explanation of “chaney man,” the only man in a logging crew who could sleep till daylight, and didn’t come out in the spring with callous marks on his hands as big as dimes. But he seemed to be hungry for an excuse to stay beside her, where he could gaze down on the brown hair looped over her forehead and her radiantly fair face, and could catch a glimpse of the white teeth. “Britt was tellin’ me on the side that he’s been teachin’ school or something like that, and—say, you’ve heard of old Barrett, who controls all the stumpage on the Chamberlain waters—that rich old feller? Well, Britt, being hitched up with Barrett more or less, and knowin’ all about it—”

Wade was now upright in his seat, but the absorbed foreman, catching at last a gleam of interest in the gray eyes upraised to his, did not notice.

“—Britt says that Mister School-teacher there went to work and fell in love with Barrett’s girl, and now she’s goin’ to marry a rich feller in the lumberin’ line that her dad picked out for her, and instead of goin’ to war or to sea, like—”

Wade, maddened, sick at heart, furious at the old tattler who had thus canvassed his poor secret with his boss, had tried twice to cry an interruption. But his voice stuck in his throat.

Now he leaped up, leaned far over the seat-back in front of him, and shouted, with face flushed and eyes like shining steel:

“That’s enough of that, you pup!”

In the sudden, astonished silence the old man dragged his fingers through his grizzled whiskers and whined plaintively:

“Ain’t he peppery, though, about anybody talking? He shet me up, too!”

“It’s my business you’re talking!” shouted Wade, beating time with clinched fist. “Drop it.”

MacLeod, primordial in his instincts, lost sight of the provocation, and felt only the rebuff in the presence of the girl he was seeking to attract. He had no apology on his tongue or in his heart.

“It will take a better man than you to trig talk that I’m makin’,” he retorted. “This isn’t a district school, where you are licked if you whisper!” He sneered as he said it, and took one step up the aisle.

With the bitter anger that had been burning in him for many days now fanned into the white-heat of Berserker rage, Wade leaped out of his seat. Between them sat the girl, looking from one to the other, her cheeks paling, her lips apart.

At the moment, with a drunken man’s instinctive knowledge of ripe occasions, Tommy Eye lurched out once more on the smoker platform and began to carol the lay that had consoled him on so many trips from town: