A Michigan Man | Page 2

and stood waiting. In
the distance he saw two men hewing a log. The axe-man sent them a
shout and threw up his arms for them to look.
The tree stood out clear and beautiful against the gray sky; the men
ceased their work and watched it. The vibrations became more violent,
and the sounds they produced grew louder and louder till they reached
a shrill wild cry. There came a pause; then a deep shuddering groan.
The topmost branches began to move slowly, the whole stately bulk
swayed, and then shot toward the ground. The gigantic trunk bounded
from the stump, recoiled like a cannon, crashed down, and lay
conquered, with a roar as of an earthquake, in a cloud of flying twigs
and chips.

When the dust had cleared away, the men at the log on the outside of
the clearing could not see Luther. They ran to the spot, and found him
lying on the ground with his chest crushed in. His fearful eyes had not
rightly calculated the distance from the stump to the top of the pine, nor
rightly weighed the power of the massed branches, and so, standing
spell-bound, watching the descending trunk as one might watch his
Nemesis, the rebound came and left him lying worse than dead.
Three months later, when the logs, lopped of their branches, drifted
down the streams, the woodman, a human log lopped of his strength,
drifted to a great city. A change, the doctor said, might prolong his life.
The lumbermen made up a purse, and he started out, not very definitely
knowing his destination. He had a sister, much younger than himself,
who at the age of sixteen had married and gone, he believed, to
Chicago. That was years ago, but he had an idea that he might find her.
He was not troubled by his lack of resources: he did not believe that
any man would want for a meal unless he were "shiftless." He had
always been able to turn his hand to something.
He felt too ill from the jostling of the cars to notice much of anything
on the journey. The dizzy scenes whirling past made him faint, and he
was glad to lie with closed eyes. He imagined that his little sister in her
pink calico frock and bare feet (as he remembered her) would be at the
station to meet him. "Oh, Lu!" she would call from some hiding-place,
and he would go and find her.
The conductor stopped by Luther's seat and said that they were in the
city at last; but it seemed to the sick man as if they went miles after that,
with a multitude of twinkling lights on one side and a blank darkness
that they told him was the lake on the other. The conductor again
stopped by his seat.
"Well, my man," said he, "how are you feel-ing?"
Luther, the possessor of the toughest muscles in the gang, felt a sick
man's irritation at the tone of pity.
"Oh, I'm all right!" he said, gruffly, and shook off the assistance the

conductor tried to offer with his overcoat. "I'm going to my sister's," he
explained, in answer to the inquiry as to where he was going. The man,
somewhat piqued at the spirit in which his overtures were met, left him,
and Luther stepped on to the platform. There was a long vista of
semi-light, down which crowds of people walked and baggagemen
rushed. The building, if it deserved the name, seemed a ruin, and
through the arched doors Luther could see men--hackmen--dancing and
howling like dervishes. Trains were coming and going, and the whistles
and bells kept up a ceaseless clangor. Luther, with his small satchel and
uncouth dress, slouched by the crowd unnoticed, and reached the street.
He walked amid such an illumination as he had never dreamed of, and
paused half blinded in the glare of a broad sheet of electric light that
filled a pillared entrance into which many people passed. He looked
about him. Above on every side rose great, many-windowed buildings;
on the street the cars and carriages thronged, and jostling crowds
dashed headlong among the vehicles. After a time he turned down a
street that seemed to him a pandemonium filled with madmen. It went
to his head like wine, and hardly left him the presence of mind to
sustain a quiet exterior. The wind was laden with a penetrating
moisture that chilled him as the dry icy breezes from Huron never had
done, and the pain in his lungs made him faint and dizzy. He wondered
if his red-cheeked little sister could live in one of those vast,
impregnable buildings. He thought of stopping some of those
serious-looking men and asking them if they knew her, but