Blazed Trail Stories | Page 3

ever higher excitement. Then it forgot its manners utterly and groaned when it made out that a sudden splash represented its favourite, while the indomitable Darrell still trod the quarter-deck as champion birler for the year.
I must confess I was as sorry as anybody. I climbed down from my cormorant roost, and picked my way between the alleys of aromatic piled lumber in order to avoid the press, and cursed the little gods heartily for undue partiality in the wrong direction. In this manner I happened on Jimmy Powers himself seated dripping on a board and examining his bared foot.
"I'm sorry," said I behind him. "How did he do it?"
He whirled, and I could see that his laughing boyish face had become suddenly grim and stern, and that his eyes were shot with blood.
"Oh, it's you, is it?" he growled disparagingly. "Well, that's how he did it."
He held out his foot. Across the instep and at the base of the toes ran two rows of tiny round punctures from which the blood was oozing. I looked very inquiring.
"He corked me!" Jimmy Powers explained. "Jammed his spikes into me! Stepped on my foot and tripped me, the----" Jimmy Powers certainly could swear.
"Why didn't you make a kick?" I cried.
"That ain't how I do it," he muttered, pulling on his heavy woollen sock.
"But no," I insisted, my indignation mounting. "It's an outrage! That crowd was with you. All you had to do was to say something----"
He cut me short. "And give myself away as a damn fool--sure Mike. I ought to know Dickey Darrell by this time, and I ought to be big enough to take care of myself." He stamped his foot into his driver's shoe and took me by the arm, his good humour apparently restored. "No, don't you lose any hair, bub; I'll get even with Roaring Dick."
That night, having by the advice of the proprietor moved my bureau and trunk against the bedroom door, I lay wide awake listening to the taking of the town apart. At each especially vicious crash I wondered if that might be Jimmy Powers getting even with Roaring Dick.
The following year, but earlier in the season, I again visited my little lumber town. In striking contrast to the life of that other midsummer day were the deserted streets. The landlord knew me, and after I had washed and eaten approached me with a suggestion.
"You got all day in front of you," said he; "why don't you take a horse and buggy and make a visit to the big jam? Everybody's up there more or less."
In response to my inquiry, he replied:
"They've jammed at the upper bend, jammed bad. The crew's been picking at her for near a week now, and last night Darrell was down to see about some more dynamite. It's worth seein'. The breast of her is near thirty foot high, and lots of water in the river."
"Darrell?" said I, catching at the name.
"Yes. He's rear boss this year. Do you think you'd like to take a look at her?"
"I think I should," I assented.
The horse and I jogged slowly along a deep sand road, through wastes of pine stumps and belts of hardwood beautiful with the early spring, until finally we arrived at a clearing in which stood two huge tents, a mammoth kettle slung over a fire of logs, and drying racks about the timbers of another fire. A fat cook in the inevitable battered derby hat, two bare-armed cookees, and a chore "boy" of seventy-odd summers were the only human beings in sight. One of the cookees agreed to keep an eye on my horse. I picked my way down a well-worn trail toward the regular clank, clank, click of the peavies.
I emerged finally to a plateau elevated some fifty or sixty feet above the river. A half-dozen spectators were already gathered. Among them I could not but notice a tall, spare, broad-shouldered young fellow dressed in a quiet business suit, somewhat wrinkled, whose square, strong, clean-cut face and muscular hands were tanned by the weather to a dark umber-brown. In another moment I looked down on the jam.
The breast, as my landlord had told me, rose sheer from the water to the height of at least twenty-five feet, bristling and formidable. Back of it pressed the volume of logs packed closely in an apparently inextricable tangle as far as the eye could reach. A man near informed me that the tail was a good three miles up stream. From beneath this wonderful chevaux de frise foamed the current of the river, irresistible to any force less mighty than the statics of such a mass.
A crew of forty or fifty men were at work. They clamped their peavies to the reluctant timbers, heaved, pushed, slid, and rolled them