<p><SPAN name="link2HCH0047" id="link2HCH0047"></SPAN></p>
<h2> Chapter XLVII </h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"I don't need you boys here any longer," he said quietly.</p>
<p>When the men had all withdrawn, he walked confidently under the front of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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In three days the rollways were broken. Now it became necessary to start
the rear.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And as a man had to be able to ride any kind of a log in any water; to
propel that log by jumping on it, by rolling it squirrel fashion with the
feet, by punting it as one would a canoe; to be skillful in pushing,
prying, and poling other logs from the quarter deck of the same cranky
craft; as he must be prepared at any and all times to jump waist deep into
the river, to work in ice-water hours at a stretch; as he was called upon
to break the most dangerous jams on the river, representing, as they did,
the accumulation which the jam crew had left behind them, it was naturally
considered the height of glory to belong to the rear crew. Here were the
best of the Fighting Forty,—men with a reputation as "white-water
birlers"—men afraid of nothing.</p>
<p>Every morning the crews were divided into two sections under Kerlie and
Jack Hyland. Each crew had charge of one side of the river, with the task
of cleaning it thoroughly of all stranded and entangled logs. Scotty
Parsons exercised a general supervisory eye over both crews. Shearer and
Thorpe traveled back and forth the length of the drive, riding the logs
down stream, but taking to a partly submerged pole trail when ascending
the current. On the surface of the river in the clear water floated two
long graceful boats called bateaux. These were in charge of expert
boatmen,—men able to propel their craft swiftly forwards, backwards
and sideways, through all kinds of water. They carried in racks a great
supply of pike-poles, peaveys, axes, rope and dynamite, for use in various
emergencies. Intense rivalry existed as to which crew "sacked" the
farthest down stream in the course of the day. There was no need to urge
the men. Some stood upon the logs, pushing mightily with the long
pike-poles. Others, waist deep in the water, clamped the jaws of their
peaveys into the stubborn timbers, and, shoulder bent, slid them slowly
but surely into the swifter waters. Still others, lining up on either side
of one of the great brown tree trunks, carried it bodily to its appointed
place. From one end of the rear to the other, shouts, calls, warnings, and
jokes flew back and forth. Once or twice a vast roar of Homeric laughter
went up as some unfortunate slipped and soused into the water. When the
current slacked, and the logs hesitated in their run, the entire crew
hastened, bobbing from log to log, down river to see about it. Then they
broke the jam, standing surely on the edge of the great darkness, while
the ice water sucked in and out of their shoes.</p>
<p>Behind the rear Big Junko poled his bateau backwards and forwards
exploding dynamite. Many of the bottom tiers of logs in the rollways had
been frozen down, and Big Junko had to loosen them from the bed of the
stream. He was a big man, this, as his nickname indicated, built of many
awkwardnesses. His cheekbones were high, his nose flat, his lips thick and
slobbery. He sported a wide, ferocious straggling mustache and long
eye-brows, under which gleamed little fierce eyes. His forehead sloped
back like a beast's, but was always hidden by a disreputable felt hat. Big
Junko did not know much, and had the passions of a wild animal, but he was
a reckless riverman and devoted to Thorpe. Just now he exploded dynamite.</p>
<p>The sticks of powder were piled amidships. Big Junko crouched over them,
inserting the fuses and caps, closing the openings with soap, finally
lighting them, and dropping them into the water alongside, where they
immediately sank. Then a few strokes of a short paddle took him barely out
of danger. He huddled down in his craft, waiting. One, two, three seconds
passed. Then a hollow boom shook the stream. A cloud of water sprang up,
strangely beautiful. After a moment the great brown logs rose suddenly to
the surface from below, one after the other, like leviathans of the deep.
And Junko watched, dimly fascinated, in his rudimentary animal's brain, by
the sight of the power he had evoked to his aid.</p>
<p>When night came the men rode down stream to where the wanigan had made
camp. There they slept, often in blankets wetted by the wanigan's
eccentricities, to leap to their feet at the first cry in early morning.
Some days it rained, in which case they were wet all the time. Almost
invariably there was a jam to break, though strangely enough almost every
one of the old-timers believed implicitly that "in the full of the moon
logs will run free at night."</p>
<p>Thorpe and Tim Shearer nearly always slept in a dog tent at the rear;
though occasionally they passed the night at Dam Two, where Bryan Moloney
and his crew were already engaged in sluicing the logs through the chute.</p>
<p>The affair was simple enough. Long booms arranged in the form of an open V
guided the drive to the sluice gate, through which a smooth apron of water
rushed to turmoil in an eddying pool below. Two men tramped steadily
backwards and forwards on the booms, urging the logs forward by means of
long pike poles to where the suction could seize them. Below the dam, the
push of the sluice water forced them several miles down stream, where the
rest of Bryan Moloney's crew took them in charge.</p>
<p>Thus through the wide gate nearly three-quarters of a million feet an hour
could be run—a quantity more than sufficient to keep pace with the
exertions of the rear. The matter was, of course, more or less delayed by
the necessity of breaking out such rollways as they encountered from time
to time on the banks. At length, however, the last of the logs drifted
into the wide dam pool. The rear had arrived at Dam Two, and Thorpe
congratulated himself that one stage of his journey had been completed.
Billy Camp began to worry about shooting the wanigan through the
sluice-way.</p>
<p><SPAN name="link2HCH0048" id="link2HCH0048"></SPAN></p>
<h2> Chapter XLVIII </h2>
<p>The rear had been tenting at the dam for two days, and was about ready to
break camp, when Jimmy Powers swung across the trail to tell them of the
big jam.</p>
<p>Ten miles along the river bed, the stream dropped over a little half-falls
into a narrow, rocky gorge. It was always an anxious spot for the river
drivers. In fact, the plunging of the logs head-on over the fall had so
gouged out the soft rock below, that an eddy of great power had formed in
the basin. Shearer and Thorpe had often discussed the advisability of
constructing an artificial apron of logs to receive the impact. Here, in
spite of all efforts, the jam had formed, first a little center of a few
logs in the middle of the stream, dividing the current, and shunting the
logs to right and left; then "wings" growing out from either bank, built
up from logs shunted too violently; finally a complete stoppage of the
channel, and the consequent rapid piling up as the pressure of the drive
increased. Now the bed was completely filled, far above the level of the
falls, by a tangle that defied the jam crew's best efforts.</p>
<p>The rear at once took the trail down the river. Thorpe and Shearer and
Scotty Parsons looked over the ground.</p>
<p>"She may 'pull,' if she gets a good start," decided Tim.</p>
<p>Without delay the entire crew was set to work. Nearly a hundred men can
pick a great many logs in the course of a day. Several times the jam
started, but always "plugged" before the motion had become irresistible.
This was mainly because the rocky walls narrowed at a slight bend to the
west, so that the drive was throttled, as it were. It was hoped that
perhaps the middle of the jam might burst through here, leaving the wings
stranded. The hope was groundless.</p>
<p>"We'll have to shoot," Shearer reluctantly decided.</p>
<p>The men were withdrawn. Scotty Parsons cut a sapling twelve feet long, and
trimmed it. Big Junko thawed his dynamite at a little fire, opening the
ends of the packages in order that the steam generated might escape.
Otherwise the pressure inside the oiled paper of the package was capable
of exploding the whole affair. When the powder was warm, Scotty bound
twenty of the cartridges around the end of the sapling, adjusted a fuse in
one of them, and soaped the opening to exclude water. Then Big Junko
thrust the long javelin down into the depths of the jam, leaving a thin
stream of smoke behind him as he turned away. With sinister, evil eye he
watched the smoke for an instant, then zigzagged awkwardly over the jam,
the long, ridiculous tails of his brown cutaway coat flopping behind him
as he leaped. A scant moment later the hoarse dynamite shouted.</p>
<p>Great chunks of timber shot to an inconceivable height; entire logs lifted
bodily into the air with the motion of a fish jumping; a fountain of water
gleamed against the sun and showered down in fine rain. The jam shrugged
and settled. That was all; the "shot" had failed.</p>
<p>The men ran forward, examining curiously the great hole in the log
formation.</p>
<p>"We'll have to flood her," said Thorpe.</p>
<p>So all the gates of the dam were raised, and the torrent tried its hand.
It had no effect. Evidently the affair was not one of violence, but of
patience. The crew went doggedly to work.</p>
<p>Day after day the CLANK, CLANK, CLINK of the peaveys sounded with the
regularity of machinery. The only practicable method was to pick away the
flank logs, leaving a long tongue pointing down-stream from the center to
start when it would. This happened time and again, but always failed to
take with it the main jam. It was cruel hard work; a man who has lifted
his utmost strength into a peavey knows that. Any but the Fighting Forty
would have grumbled.</p>
<p>Collins, the bookkeeper, came up to view the tangle. Later a photographer
from Marquette took some views, which, being exhibited, attracted a great
deal of attention, so that by the end of the week a number of curiosity
seekers were driving over every day to see the Big Jam. A certain Chicago
journalist in search of balsam health of lungs even sent to his paper a
little item. This, unexpectedly, brought Wallace Carpenter to the spot.
Although reassured as to the gravity of the situation, he remained to see.</p>
<p>The place was an amphitheater for such as chose to be spectators. They
could stand or sit on the summit of the gorge cliffs, overlooking the
river, the fall, and the jam. As the cliff was barely sixty feet high, the
view lacked nothing in clearness.</p>
<p>At last Shearer became angry.</p>
<p>"We've been monkeying long enough," said he. "Next time we'll leave a
center that WILL go out. We'll shut the dams down tight and dry-pick out
two wings that'll start her."</p>
<p>The dams were first run at full speed, and then shut down. Hardly a drop
of water flowed in the bed of the stream. The crews set laboriously to
work to pull and roll the logs out in such flat fashion that a head of
water should send them out.</p>
<p>This was even harder work than the other, for they had not the floating
power of water to help them in the lifting. As usual, part of the men
worked below, part above.</p>
<p>Jimmy Powers, curly-haired, laughing-faced, was irrepressible. He badgered
the others until they threw bark at him and menaced him with their
peaveys. Always he had at his tongue's end the proper quip for the
occasion, so that in the long run the work was lightened by him. When the
men stopped to think at all, they thought of Jimmy Powers with very kindly
hearts, for it was known that he had had more trouble than most, and that
the coin was not made too small for him to divide with a needy comrade. To
those who had seen his mask of whole-souled good-nature fade into serious
sympathy, Jimmy Powers's poor little jokes were very funny indeed.</p>
<p>"Did 'je see th' Swede at the circus las' summer?" he would howl to Red
Jacket on the top tier.</p>
<p>"No," Red Jacket would answer, "was he there?"</p>
<p>"Yes," Jimmy Powers would reply; then, after a pause—"in a cage!"</p>
<p>It was a poor enough jest, yet if you had been there, you would have found
that somehow the log had in the meantime leaped of its own accord from
that difficult position.</p>
<p>Thorpe approved thoroughly of Jimmy Powers; he thought him a good
influence. He told Wallace so, standing among the spectators on the
cliff-top.</p>
<p>"He is all right," said Thorpe. "I wish I had more like him. The others
are good boys, too."</p>
<p>Five men were at the moment tugging futilely at a reluctant timber. They
were attempting to roll one end of it over the side of another projecting
log, but were continually foiled, because the other end was jammed fast.
Each bent his knees, inserting his shoulder under the projecting peavey
stock, to straighten in a mighty effort.</p>
<p>"Hire a boy!" "Get some powder of Junko!" "Have Jimmy talk it out!" "Try
that little one over by the corner," called the men on top of the jam.</p>
<p>Everybody laughed, of course. It was a fine spring day, clear-eyed and
crisp, with a hint of new foliage in the thick buds of the trees. The air
was so pellucid that one distinguished without difficulty the straight
entrance to the gorge a mile away, and even the West Bend, fully five
miles distant.</p>
<p>Jimmy Powers took off his cap and wiped his forehead.</p>
<p>"You boys," he remarked politely, "think you are boring with a mighty big
auger."</p>
<p>"My God!" screamed one of the spectators on top of the cliff.</p>
<p>At the same instant Wallace Carpenter seized his friend's arm and pointed.</p>
<p>Down the bed of the stream from the upper bend rushed a solid wall of
water several feet high. It flung itself forward with the headlong impetus
of a cascade. Even in the short interval between the visitor's exclamation
and Carpenter's rapid gesture, it had loomed into sight, twisted a dozen
trees from the river bank, and foamed into the entrance of the gorge. An
instant later it collided with the tail of the jam.</p>
<p>Even in the railroad rush of those few moments several things happened.
Thorpe leaped for a rope. The crew working on top of the jam ducked
instinctively to right and left and began to scramble towards safety. The
men below, at first bewildered and not comprehending, finally understood,
and ran towards the face of the jam with the intention of clambering up
it. There could be no escape in the narrow canyon below, the walls of
which rose sheer.</p>
<p>Then the flood hit square. It was the impact of resistible power. A great
sheet of water rose like surf from the tail of the jam; a mighty cataract
poured down over its surface, lifting the free logs; from either wing
timbers crunched, split, rose suddenly into wracked prominence, twisted
beyond the semblance of themselves. Here and there single logs were even
projected bodily upwards, as an apple seed is shot from between the thumb
and forefinger. Then the jam moved.</p>
<p>Scotty Parsons, Jack Hyland, Red Jacket, and the forty or fifty top men
had reached the shore. By the wriggling activity which is a riverman's
alone, they succeeded in pulling themselves beyond the snap of death's
jaws. It was a narrow thing for most of them, and a miracle for some.</p>
<p>Jimmy Powers, Archie Harris, Long Pine Jim, Big Nolan, and Mike Moloney,
the brother of Bryan, were in worse case. They were, as has been said,
engaged in "flattening" part of the jam about eight or ten rods below the
face of it. When they finally understood that the affair was one of
escape, they ran towards the jam, hoping to climb out. Then the crash
came. They heard the roar of the waters, the wrecking of the timbers, they
saw the logs bulge outwards in anticipation of the break. Immediately they
turned and fled, they knew not where.</p>
<p>All but Jimmy Powers. He stopped short in his tracks, and threw his
battered old felt hat defiantly full into the face of the destruction
hanging over him. Then, his bright hair blowing in the wind of death, he
turned to the spectators standing helpless and paralyzed, forty feet above
him.</p>
<p>It was an instant's impression,—the arrested motion seen in the
flash of lightning—and yet to the onlookers it had somehow the
quality of time. For perceptible duration it seemed to them they stared at
the contrast between the raging hell above and the yet peaceable river bed
below. They were destined to remember that picture the rest of their
natural lives, in such detail that each one of them could almost have
reproduced it photographically by simply closing his eyes. Yet afterwards,
when they attempted to recall definitely the impression, they knew it
could have lasted but a fraction of a second, for the reason that, clear
and distinct in each man's mind, the images of the fleeing men retained
definite attitudes. It was the instantaneous photography of events.</p>
<p>"So long, boys," they heard Jimmy Powers's voice. Then the rope Thorpe had
thrown fell across a caldron of tortured waters and of tossing logs.</p>
<p><SPAN name="link2HCH0049" id="link2HCH0049"></SPAN></p>
<h2> Chapter XLIX </h2>
<p>During perhaps ten seconds the survivors watched the end of Thorpe's rope
trailing in the flood. Then the young man with a deep sigh began to pull
it towards him.</p>
<p>At once a hundred surmises, questions, ejaculations broke out.</p>
<p>"What happened?" cried Wallace Carpenter.</p>
<p>"What was that man's name?" asked the Chicago journalist with the eager
instinct of his profession.</p>
<p>"This is terrible, terrible, terrible!" a white-haired physician from
Marquette kept repeating over and over.</p>
<p>A half dozen ran towards the point of the cliff to peer down stream, as
though they could hope to distinguish anything in that waste of flood
water.</p>
<p>"The dam's gone out," replied Thorpe. "I don't understand it. Everything
was in good shape, as far as I could see. It didn't act like an ordinary
break. The water came too fast. Why, it was as dry as a bone until just as
that wave came along. An ordinary break would have eaten through little by
little before it burst, and Davis should have been able to stop it. This
came all at once, as if the dam had disappeared. I don't see."</p>
<p>His mind of the professional had already began to query causes.</p>
<p>"How about the men?" asked Wallace. "Isn't there something I can do?"</p>
<p>"You can head a hunt down the river," answered Thorpe. "I think it is
useless until the water goes down. Poor Jimmy. He was one of the best men
I had. I wouldn't have had this happen—"</p>
<p>The horror of the scene was at last beginning to filter through numbness
into Wallace Carpenter's impressionable imagination.</p>
<p>"No, no!" he cried vehemently. "There is something criminal about it to
me! I'd rather lose every log in the river!"</p>
<p>Thorpe looked at him curiously. "It is one of the chances of war," said
he, unable to refrain from the utterance of his creed. "We all know it."</p>
<p>"I'd better divide the crew and take in both banks of the river,"
suggested Wallace in his constitutional necessity of doing something.</p>
<p>"See if you can't get volunteers from this crowd," suggested Thorpe. "I
can let you have two men to show you trails. If you can make it that way,
it will help me out. I need as many of the crew as possible to use this
flood water."</p>
<p>"Oh, Harry," cried Carpenter, shocked. "You can't be going to work again
to-day after that horrible sight, before we have made the slightest effort
to recover the bodies!"</p>
<p>"If the bodies can be recovered, they shall be," replied Thorpe quietly.
"But the drive will not wait. We have no dams to depend on now, you must
remember, and we shall have to get out on freshet water."</p>
<p>"Your men won't work. I'd refuse just as they will!" cried Carpenter, his
sensibilities still suffering.</p>
<p>Thorpe smiled proudly. "You do not know them. They are mine. I hold them
in the hollow of my hand!"</p>
<p>"By Jove!" cried the journalist in sudden enthusiasm. "By Jove! that is
magnificent!"</p>
<p>The men of the river crew had crouched on their narrow footholds while the
jam went out. Each had clung to his peavey, as is the habit of rivermen.
Down the current past their feet swept the debris of flood. Soon logs
began to swirl by,—at first few, then many from the remaining
rollways which the river had automatically broken. In a little time the
eddy caught up some of these logs, and immediately the inception of
another jam threatened. The rivermen, without hesitation, as calmly as
though catastrophe had not thrown the weight of its moral terror against
their stoicism, sprang, peavey in hand, to the insistent work.</p>
<p>"By Jove!" said the journalist again. "That is magnificent! They are
working over the spot where their comrades died!"</p>
<p>Thorpe's face lit with gratification. He turned to the young man.</p>
<p>"You see," he said in proud simplicity.</p>
<p>With the added danger of freshet water, the work went on.</p>
<p>At this moment Tim Shearer approached from inland, his clothes dripping
wet, but his face retaining its habitual expression of iron calmness.
"Anybody caught?" was his first question as he drew near.</p>
<p>"Five men under the face," replied Thorpe briefly.</p>
<p>Shearer cast a glance at the river. He needed to be told no more.</p>
<p>"I was afraid of it," said he. "The rollways must be all broken out. It's
saved us that much, but the freshet water won't last long. It's going to
be a close squeak to get 'em out now. Don't exactly figure on what struck
the dam. Thought first I'd go right up that way, but then I came down to
see about the boys."</p>
<p>Carpenter could not understand this apparent callousness on the part of
men in whom he had always thought to recognize a fund of rough but genuine
feeling. To him the sacredness of death was incompatible with the
insistence of work. To these others the two, grim necessity, went hand in
hand.</p>
<p>"Where were you?" asked Thorpe of Shearer.</p>
<p>"On the pole trail. I got in a little, as you see."</p>
<p>In reality the foreman had had a close call for his life. A toughly-rooted
basswood alone had saved him.</p>
<p>"We'd better go up and take a look," he suggested. "Th' boys has things
going here all right."</p>
<p>The two men turned towards the brush.</p>
<p>"Hi, Tim," called a voice behind them.</p>
<p>Red Jacket appeared clambering up the cliff.</p>
<p>"Jack told me to give this to you," he panted, holding out a chunk of
strangely twisted wood.</p>
<p>"Where'd he get this?" inquired Thorpe, quickly. "It's a piece of the
dam," he explained to Wallace, who had drawn near.</p>
<p>"Picked it out of the current," replied the man.</p>
<p>The foreman and his boss bent eagerly over the morsel. Then they stared
with solemnity into each other's eyes.</p>
<p>"Dynamite, by God!" exclaimed Shearer.</p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />