The Man From Glengarry | Page 5

in perfect rhythm with the song that rose and fell with
melancholy but musical cadence. The men on the high bank stood
looking down upon the approaching singers. "You know dem fellers?"
said LeNoir. Murphy nodded. "Ivery divil iv thim--Big Mack Cameron,
Dannie Ross, Finlay Campbell--the redheaded one--the next I don't
know, and yes! be dad! there's that blanked Yankee, Yankee Jim, they
call him, an' bad luck till him. The divil will have to take the poker till
him, for he'll bate him wid his fists, and so he will--and that big black
divil is Black Hugh, the brother iv the boss Macdonald. He'll be up in
the camp beyant, and a mighty lucky thing for you, LeNoir, he is."
"Bah!" spat LeNoir, "Dat beeg Macdonald I mak heem run like one
leetle sheep, one tam at de long Sault, bah! No good!" LeNoir's
contempt for Macdonald was genuine and complete. For two years he
had tried to meet the boss Macdonald, but his rival had always avoided
him.
Meantime, the pointer came swinging along. As it turned the point the
boy uttered an exclamation--"Look there!" The song and the rowing
stopped abruptly; the big, dark man stood up and gazed down the river,
packed from bank to bank with the brown saw-logs; deep curses broke
from him. Then he caught sight of the men on the bank. A word of
command and the pointer shot into the shore, and the next moment
Macdonald Dubh, or Black Hugh, as he was sometimes called,
followed by his men, was climbing up the steep bank.
"What the blank, blank, do these logs mean, Murphy?" he demanded,
without pause for salutation.
"Tis a foine avenin' Misther Macdonald," said Murphy, blandly
offering his hand, "an' Hiven bliss ye."
Macdonald checked himself with an effort and reluctantly shook hands
with Murphy and LeNoir, whom he slightly knew. "It is a fery goot
evening, indeed," he said, in as quiet a voice as he could command,

"but I am inquiring about these logs."
"Shure, an' it is a dhry night, and onpolite to kape yez talking here.
Come in wid yez," and much against his will Black Hugh followed
Murphy to the tavern, the most pretentious of a group of log
buildings--once a lumber camp--which stood back a little distance from
the river, and about which Murphy's men, some sixty of them, were
now camped.
The tavern was full of Murphy's gang, a motley crew, mostly French
Canadians and Irish, just out of the woods and ready for any devilment
that promised excitement. Most of them knew by sight, and all by
reputation, Macdonald and his gang, for from the farthest reaches of the
Ottawa down the St. Lawrence to Quebec the Macdonald gang of
Glengarry men was famous. They came, most of them, from that strip
of country running back from the St. Lawrence through Glengarry
County, known as the Indian Lands--once an Indian reservation. They
were sons of the men who had come from the highlands and islands of
Scotland in the early years of the last century. Driven from homes in
the land of their fathers, they had set themselves with indomitable faith
and courage to hew from the, solid forest, homes for themselves and
their children that none might take from them. These pioneers were
bound together by ties of blood, but also by bonds stronger than those
of blood. Their loneliness, their triumphs, their sorrows, born of their
common life-long conflict with the forest and its fierce beasts, knit
them in bonds close and enduring. The sons born to them and reared in
the heart of the pine forests grew up to witness that heroic struggle with
stern nature and to take their part in it. And mighty men they were.
Their life bred in them hardiness of frame, alertness of sense, readiness
of resource, endurance, superb self- reliance, a courage that grew with
peril, and withal a certain wildness which at times deepened into
ferocity. By their fathers the forest was dreaded and hated, but the sons,
with rifles in hand, trod its pathless stretches without fear, and with
their broad-axes they took toll of their ancient foe. For while in spring
and summer they farmed their narrow fields, and rescued new lands
from the brule; in winter they sought the forest, and back on their own
farms or in "the shanties" they cut sawlogs, or made square timber,

their only source of wealth. The shanty life of the early fifties of last
century was not the luxurious thing of to- day. It was full of privation,
for the men were poorly housed and fed, and of peril, for the making of
the timber and the getting it down the smaller rivers to the big water
was a work of hardship