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THE PENOBSCOT MAN. With Frontis- piece. i6mo, $1.25.
THE WOODPECKERS. With 5 illustra- tions in color by L. A. Fuertes, and many text illustrations. Square i2mo, $1.00.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY Boston and New York.
THE PENOBSCOT MAN
\
RUNNING A LOG
THE
PENOBSCOT MAN
BY
FANNIE HARDY ECKSTORM
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
1904
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
:}rary
COPYRIGHT 1904 BY FANNIE HARDY ECKSTORM ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
FEB iri9S6
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
TO
AND
That you and yours may know From me and mine, how dear a debt We owed you, and are owing yet To you and yours, and still would owe."
I
For something about them, and the idea of them, smote my American heart, and I have never forgotten it, nor ever shall, as long as I live. In their flesh our natural passions ran tumultuous; but in their spirit sat hidden a true nobility, and often beneath its unexpected shining their figures took on heroic stature. — Owen WisTER, The Virginian,
CONTENTS
Introductory ix
I. Lugging Boat on Sowadne-
HUNK I
II. The Grim Tale of Larry Con- nors 23
III. Hymns before Battle ... 49
IV. The Death OF Thoreau's Guide 63 V. The Gray Rock of Abol . . 103
VI. A Clump of Posies 147
VII. Working Nights 183
VIII. The Naughty Pride of Black
Sebat and Others . . . . 217
IX. Rescue 263
X. "Joyfully" 315
And when I went to bid him welcome home, he told me that the history of your worship was already printed in books, under the title of * Don Quixote de la Mancha ; ' and he says it mentions me too by my very name of Sancho Panza, and also the Lady Dul- cinea del Toboso, and several other private matters which passed between us two only ; insomuch that I crossed myself out of pure amazement, to think how the historian who wrote it should come to know them." — The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, Part II. book i. chap. 2.
INTRODUCTORY
The question is sometimes asked why a state like Maine, so sparsely settled, poor, weak in all external aids, can send forth such throngs of masterful men, who, east and west, step to the front to lead, direct, and do. We who were brought up among pine-trees and granite know the secret of their success. It comes not wholly by tak- ing thought: it is in the blood.
Here are stories of men, the kind we have yet a-plenty, who die unknown and unnoticed ; and every tale is a true one, — not the chance report of strangers, the gleanings of recent acquaintance, the after- math of hearsay, the enlargements of a fading tradition ; but the tales of men who tended me in babyhood, who crooned to me old slumber-songs, who brought me gifts from the woods, who wrought me
INTRODUCTORY
little keepsakes, or amused my childish hours, — stories which, having gathered them from this one and that one who saw the deed, I have bound into a garland to lay upon their graves.
Such tales are numberless ; choice be- comes invidious unless rigidly limited, and therefore, since the old West Branch Drive is no more, I have chosen solely among its members, and have strung these tales, like beads of remembrance, upon one thread, — of which we who love it never tire, — the River.
These are stories told with little art. In the long run, the books that lie closest to the facts have the advantage. It is lovely to be beautiful, but it is essential to be true. The events are actual occurrences ; the names, real names ; the places any one may see at any time. Yet each story is not merely personal and solitary, but illustrates typically some trait of the whole class. Their virtues are not magnified, their faults
INTRODUCTORY
are not denied ; in black and white, for good or evil, they stand here as they lived, — as they themselves would prefer to stand on record. So they acted, thus they felt, these were their thoughts upon grave sub- jects : and it may be that the Penobscot man is a better, wiser, more serious man than even his contemporaries have judged him to be.
But one thing, from which we may glimpse the secret of the Maine man's success, cannot fail to impress whoever reads these tales, and that is that he dies so cheerfully. He is not concerned about himself, nor about his future in another world, so much as about his work here. For Death, he does not fear it. Some- times he courts it, sometimes he scoffs it, sometimes he defies it ; but always, always his work comes first. And however low it may seem, however crude, however infe- rior to that of the man of more culture, finer perception, larger opportunity, he
INTRODUCTORY
likewise lives for an Ideal. For honor, for friendship, for emulation, for sport, for duty, for grim, stern, granite obstinacy, he risks his life and wills his will into achieve- ment, or dies for his failure.
His morals — we will not speak of them ; his aspirations — he rarely talks of them ; his religion — well. Heaven send that there be many of us as sound in the righteous- ness of charity as he ! But his real strength is in his devotion to what he sets out to do. As Stevenson says of our late lamented Alan Breck : " Alan's morals were all tail- first ; but he was ready to give his life for them, such as they were." And this is ever the litany of brave men the world over : A clear conscience, a good cause, O Lord, and, if it need me, the chance to die for it.
I
LUGGING BOAT ON SOWAD- NEHUNK
LUGGING BOAT ON SOWAD- NEHUNK
This is a Penobscot story.
When the camp-fire is lighted, and the smoke draws straight up without baffling, and the branches overhead move only as the rising current of heat fans them, then if the talk veers round to stories of crack watermen, and the guides, speaking more to each other than to you, declare that it was Big Sebattis Mitchell who first ran the falls at Sowadnehunk, — though full twenty years before, John Ross himself had put a boat over and come out right side up, — do not, while they are debating whose is the credit of being first, let slip your chance to hear a better tale; bid them go on and tell you how Joe Attien, who was Thoreau's guide, and his men who followed after and who failed, were the ones who made that day memorable.
4 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
And if your guides are Penobscot men, they will tell it as Penobscot men should, as if there were no merit in the deed be- yond what any man might attain to, as if the least a man should do was to throw away his life on a reckless dare, and count it well spent when so lavished. For so are these men made, and as it was in those days of the beginning, so is it yet even to the present among us.
You will have heard, no doubt, of Se- battis, he who from his bulk was called by the whites Big Sebat, and from his lazy shrewdness was nicknamed by his tribesmen Ahwassus^ the Bear. Huge and round he was, like the beast he was named for, but strong and wise, and in his dark, flat face and small, twinkling eyes there were resources, ambitions, schemes.
Scores of you who read this will recollect the place. In memory you will again pass down the West Branch in your canoe, past Ripogenus, past Ambajemackomas, past the Horse Race, into the welcome dead- water above Nesowadnehunk. There, wait- ing in expectancy for that glorious revela-
LUGGING BOAT
5
tion of Katahdin which bursts upon you above Abol, that marvelous picture of the giant towering in majestic isolation, with its white " slide " ascending like a ladder to the heavens, you forgot yourself, did not hear the tumult of falling waters, did not see the smooth lip of the fall sucking down, were unconscious that just before you were the falls of Sowadnehunk. Then, where the river veers sharply to the right, you felt the guide spring on his paddle as he made the carry by a margin, and you realized what it would have been to drift unguided over those falls.
So it has always been, — the sharp bend of the river to the right, blue, smooth, dazzling ; the carry at the left, bare, broad, yellow-earthed. Crossing it forty rods, you cut oflF the river again, and see above you to the right the straight fall, both upper and lower pitches almost as sheer as mill- dams, and in front the angry boil of a swift current among great and thickset rocks. So it always stays in memory,— at one end the blue river, smooth and placid, and the yellow carry ; at the other,
6 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
the white hubbub of tossing rapids below perpendicular falls.
One May day long ago, two boats' crews came down to the carry and lugged across. They had lugged three miles on Ripoge- nus,and a half mile on Ambajemackomas, besides the shorter carry past Chesuncook Dam ; they had begun to know what lug- ging a boat meant. The day was hot, — no breeze, no shade ; it was getting along toward noon, and they had turned out, as usual, at three in the morning. They were tired, — tired, faint, hot; weary with the fatigue that stiffens the back and makes the feet hang heavy ; weary, too, with the monotony of weeks of dangerous toil with- out a single day of rest, the weariness that gets upon the brain and makes the eyes go blurry ; weary because th^y were just where they were, and that old river would keep flowing on to Doomsday, always drowning men and making them chafe their shoulders lugging heavy boats. There was not a man of them who could not show upon his shoulder a great red spot where the pole used in lugging boat, or
LUGGING BOAT 7
the end of an oar on which barrels of pork or flour had been slung in carrying wan- gan, had bruised and abraded it. And now it was more lugging, and ahead were Abol and Pockwockamus and Debsconeag and Passangamet and Ambajejus and Fowler's and — there are, indeed, how many of them ! The over-weary always add to pre- sent burdens that mountain of future toil.
So it was in silence that they took out the oars and seats, the paddles and peavies and pickaroons, drew the boats up and drained them of all water, then, resting a moment, straightened their backs, rubbed the sore shoulders that so soon must take up the burden again, and ran their fingers through their damp hair. One or two swore a little as relieving their minds, and when they bent to lift the boat, one spoke for all the others.
" By jinkey-boy ! " said he, creating a new and fantastic oath, " but I do believe I 'd rather be in hell to-day, with ninety devils around me, than sole-carting on this carry."
That was the way they all felt. It is mighty weary business to lug on carries.
8 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
For a driving-boat is a heavy lady to carry. The great Maynards, wet, weigh eight to nine hundred pounds, and they put on twelve men, a double crew, to carry one. The old two-streakers (that is, boats with two boards to a side where the big May- nards had three) were not nearly so heavy, and on short carries like Sowadnehunk were lugged by their own crews, whether of four men or six; but diminishing the crew left each man with as great a burden. A short man at the bow, another at the stern, with the taller ones amidships under the curve of the gunwale if they were lug- ging without poles, or by twos fore, aft, and amidships for six men lugging with poles, was the usual way they carried their boats ; and it was " Steady, boys, steady ; now hoist her !" — "Easy, now, easy; hold hard I for going downhill she overrode John and Jim at the bow, and going up a rise Jack and Joe at the stern felt her crushing their shoulders, and when the ground was uneven with rocks and cradle- knolls, and she reeled and sagged, then the men at the sides caught the whole
LUGGING BOAT 9
weight on one or the other of them. No- thing on the drive speaks so eloquently of hard work as the purple, sweat-stained cross on the backs of the men's red shirts, where the suspenders have made their mark; they get this in lugging boat on carries.
But they bent their backs to it, wrig- gled the boat up and forward to her place, each crew its own boat, and staggered on, feet bracing out, and spike-soled shoes ploughing the dirt and scratching on the rocks. They looked like huge hundred- leggers, Brobdingnagian insects, that were crawling over that yellow carry with all their legs clawing uncertainly and bracing for a foothold. The head boat crowded Bill Halpin upon a rock so hard that he fell and barked his shins on the granite ; that dropped the weight suddenly upon Jerry Durgan's shoulder, so that a good two inches of skin was rasped off clean where it had been blistered before ; little Tomah Soc stumbled in a hole, and not letting go his grip, threw up the other gunwale so that it half broke his partner's jaw. Those boats took all the mean revenges wherewith a
10 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
driving-boat on land settles scores for the rough treatment it receives in the water.
They were lugging that May morning only because no boat could run those falls with any reasonable expectation of coming out right side up. For up to that time they had chiefly used the Wallace boat, built low and straight in the gunwale, rak- ing only moderately at the bow and low in the side. It is related that when the great high-bowed Maynard batteaus were first put on the river, short old Jack Mann, who was pensioned in his latter days by P. L. D.,' looked with high disfavor on the big, handsome craft, and then, rushing into the boat-shop, demanded an axe, an auger, and a handsaw.
" What 's that for ? " asked the foreman, suspecting that it was but one of Jack's devices for unburdening his mind in some memorable saying.
' The Penobscot Log-Driving Association, known as P. L. D. to distinguish it from P. L. A., the Penobscot Lumbering Association. It is always called either **P. L. D/"* or <<The Company." It owns all dams, booms, etc., and annually sells the drive at auction to the bidder contracting to take the logs down at the low- est rate per thousand.
LUGGING BOAT
" Want 'em to cut armholes in that blasted boat," growled Jack, insinuating that the bows were above the head of a short man like himself.
But the old boat, — you may yet some- times see the bones of one of them bleach- ing about the shores of inland ponds, or lying sun-cracked in the back yards of country farms, — stable and serviceable as she was, was no match for this handsome lady of to-day. They run the Arches of Ripogenus now with all their boats, and have done it for years ; but at the time when Sebattis came down to Sowadnehunk, such water no man ever dreamed of run- ning. It is likely enough that Sebattis, just back from a sixteen years' residence at Quoddy, did not know that it had ever been run successfully.
Be that as it may, when Sebattis and his bowman came down, the last of three boats, and held their batteau at the taking- out place a moment before they dragged her out and stripped her ready to lug, what Sebattis, as he sat in the stern with his paddle across his knees, said in In-
12 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
dian to his bowman was simply revolu- tionary.
" Huh ? " grunted his dark-faced part- ner, turning in great surprise ; " you t'ought you wanted run it dose e'er falls ? Blenty rabbidge water dose e'er falls ! "
The bowman had stated the case con- servatively. That carry was there merely because men were not expected to run those falls and come out alive.
But the bowman's objection was not meant as a refusal : he knew Sebattis, that he was a good waterman, few better. A big, slow man, of tremendous momentum when once in motion, it was likely enough that all the years of his exile at Quoddy he had been planning just how he could run those falls, and if he spoke now, it was because this was the hour striking. In his own mind he had already performed the feat, and was receiving the congratulations of the crowd. It was no small advantage that he knew an audience of two boats' crews was waiting at the lower carry-end to testify, however grudgingly, to the authen- ticity of what he claimed to have done.
LUGGING BOAT
The bowman had faith in Sebattis ; as he listened to the smooth stream of soft- cadenced Indian that cast silvery bonds about his reluctance and left him helpless to refuse (Sebattis being both an orator in a public and a powerful pleader in a private cause), the bowman caught the rhythm of the deed. It was all so easy to take their boat out into midstream, where the current favored them a little, to shoot her bow far out over the fall, and, as the crews ashore gaped in horrified amazement, to make her leap clear, as a horse leaps a hurdle. And then to fight their way through the smother of the whirlpool be- low, man against water, but such men as not every boat can put in bow and stern, such strong arms as do not hold every paddle, such great heads for management, such skill in water-craft as few attain.
This was the oration, with its Indian ap- peal to personal glory. It was, as Sebattis said, " Beeg t'ing^' and he fired his bowman with the desire for glory. The Penob- scot man, white man or Indian, dies with astonishing alacrity when he sees anything
14 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
worth dying for. And the name of "crack waterman " is a shining mark to strive for.
Thus at the upper end of the carry Se- battis and his bowman talked over at their leisure the chances of dying within five minutes. At the other end the two boats' crews lay among the blueberry bushes in the shade of shivering birch saplings and waited for Sebattis. It did not worry them that he was long in coming ; they knew the leisurely Indian ways, and how unwilling, though he weighed hard upon two hundred and sixty, and had strength to correspond, was Big Sebattis to lug an extra pound. They pictured him draining his boat and sopping out with a swab of bracken the last dispensable ounce of water, then tilting her to the sun for a few minutes to steam out a trifle more before he whooped to them to come across and help him. It did not worry them to wait, — it was all one in the end : there would be carries to lug on long after they were dead and gone.
So, looking at the logs ricked up along the shores and cross-piled on the ledges, looking at the others drifting past, wallow-
LUGGING BOAT
ing and thrashing in the wicked boil below the falls, they lounged and chaffed one an- other. Jerry Durgan was surreptitiously laying cool birch leaves on his abraded shoulder, and Bill Halpin was attentively, though silently, regarding his shins : there had been none too much stocking between him and that " big gray." The Indians, stretched out on their backs, gazed at the sky; nothing fretted them much. On* one side, an Indian and an Irishman were hav- ing a passage at wit ; on the other, two or three were arguing the ins and outs of a big fight up at 'Suncook the winter before, and a Province man was colloguing with a Yankee on points of scriptural interpreta- tion. It was such talk as might be over- heard almost any time on the drive when men are resting at their ease.
" It was French Joe that nailed Billy ; Billy he told me so," came from the group under the birches.
From among the Indians out in the sunlight arose a persuasive Irish voice.
"Why is it, Tomah, that when your folks are good Catholics, and our folks
i6 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
are good Catholics, you don't ever name your children Patrick and Bridget?"
And the reply came quick : " 'Cause we hate it Irish so bad, you know ! "
Off at the right they were wrangling about the construction of the Ark.
" And I 'd just like to have seen that bo't when they got her done," said the Yankee ; "just one door an' one win- der, an' vent'lated like Harvey Doane's scho'l'ouse. They caught him nailin' of the winders down. ^ How be ye goin' to vent'late? ' says they. ^ Oh,' says he, afresh air 's powerful circulatin' stuff ; I callate they '11 carry the old air out in their pock- ets, an' bring in enough fresh air in their caps to keep 'em goin' ; ' an' that was all they ever did get 's long 's he was school agent. My scissors ! three stories an' all full of live-stock, an' only one winder, an' that all battened down ! Tell you what ! I 'd 'a' hated to be Mr. Noah's fambly an' had to stay in that ole Ark ten months an' a half before they took the cover off! Fact ! I read it all up onct ! "
Said another: "I don't seem to' member
LUGGING BOAT 17
how she was built, 'ceptin' the way they run her seams. She must have ben a jim- dickey house with the pitch all on the in- side 's well as on the outside o' her. Seems to me a bo't ain't bettered none by a daub o' pitch where the' ain't none needed."
" 'T ain't the Ark as bothers me some/' put in the Province man ; " I reckon that flood business is pretty nigh straight, but I could n't never cipher out about that Tower of Babel thing. Man ask for a hod o' mortar, an' like enough they 'd send him up a barrel of gaspereau ; that 's " —
The religious discussion broke off ab- ruptly.
" Holy Hell ! — Look a-comin' ! " gasped the Yankee.
Man ! but that was a sight to see ! They got up and devoured it with their eyes.
On the verge of the fall hovered the batteau about to leap. Big Sebat and his bowman crouched to help her, like a rider lifting his horse to a leap. And their eyes were set with fierce excitement, their hands cleaved to their paddle handles, they felt
1 8 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
the thrill that ran through the boat as they shot her clear, and, flying out beyond the curtain of the fall, they landed her in the yeasty rapids below.
Both on their feet then ! And how they bent their paddles and whipped them from side to side, as it was " In ! " — " Out ! " — " Right ! — " Left ! " to avoid the logs caught on the ledges and the great rocks that lay beneath the boils and snapped at them with their ugly fangs as they went flying past. The spray was on them ; the surges crested over their gunwales ; they sheered from the rock, but cut the wave that covered it and carried it inboard. And always it was " Right ! " — " Left ! " — " In ! — " Out ! " as the greater danger drove them to seek the less.
But finally they ran her out through the tail of the boil, and fetched her ashore in a cove below the carry-end, out of sight of the men. She was full of water, barely afloat.
Would Sebattis own to the boys who were hurrying down through the bushes that he had escaped with his life only by the greatest luck ? Not Sebattis !
LUGGING BOAT
" Now you bale her out paddles/' said he to his bowman, and they swept her with their paddles as one might with a broom.
" Now you drain her out," commanded Sebattis, when they could lift the remain- ing weight, and they raised the bow and let the water run out over the slanting stern, all but a few pailfuls. " Better you let dat stay,*' said the shrewd Sebattis.
It was quick work, but when the crew broke through the bushes, there stood Se- battis and his bowman leaning on their paddles like bronze caryatids, one on either side of the boat. They might have been standing thus since the days of the Pha- raohs, they were so at ease.
" Well, boys, how did you make it ? queried the first to arrive on the spot.
Sebattis smiled his simple, vacuous smile. " Oh, ver' good ; she took in liir water mebbe."
" By gee, that ain't much water ! Did she strike anything? "
Sebattis helped to turn her over. She had not a scratch upon her.
Then the men all looked again at the
20 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
boat that had been over Sowadnehunk, and they all trooped back to the carry- end without saying much, two full batteau crews and Sebattis and his bowman. They did not talk. No man would have gained anything new by exchanging thoughts with his neighbor.
And when they came to the two boats drying in the sun, they looked one another in the eyes again. It was a foregone con- clusion. Without a word they put their galled shoulders under the gunwales, lifted the heavy batteaus to their places, and started back across that carry forty rods to the end they had just come from.
What for ? It was that in his own esteem a Penobscot man will not stand second to any other man. They would not have it said that Sebattis Mitchell was the only man of them who had tried to run Sowad- nehunk Falls.
So they put in again, six men to a boat, full crews, and in the stern of one stood Joe Attien, who was Thoreau's guide, and in the bow Steve Stanislaus, his cousin. That sets the date, — that it was back in
LUGGING BOAT
1870, — for it became the occasion for another and a sadder tale. If only Steve Stanislaus had held that place for the rest of the drive, it is little likely that we should have to tell the story of the death of Thoreau's guide.
And they pushed out with their two boats and ran the falls.
But the luck that bore Sebattis safely through was not theirs. Both boats were swamped, battered on the rocks into kin- dling wood. Twelve men were thrown into the water, and pounded and swashed about among logs and rocks. Some by swimming, some by the aid of Sebattis and his boat, eleven of them got ashore, " a little damp," as no doubt the least ex- aggerative of them were willing to admit. The unlucky twelfth man they picked up later, quite undeniably drowned. And the boats were irretrievably smashed. Indeed, that was the part of the tale that rankled with Sebattis when he used to tell it.
" Berry much she blame it us " (that is, himself) " that time John Loss." (Always to the Indian mind John Ross, the head
22 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
contractor of the drive, was the power that commanded wind, logs, and weather.) "She don' care so much 'cause drowned it man, 'cause she can get blenty of it men ; but dose e'er boats she talk 'bout berry hard."
That is how they look at such little deeds themselves. The man who led off gets the credit and the blame; he is the only one remembered. But to an outsider, what wins more than passing admiration is not the one man who succeeded, but the many who followed after and failed, who could not let well enough alone when there was a possible better to be achieved, but, on the welcome end of the carry, the end where all their troubles of galls and bruises and heavy burdens in the heat are over, pick up their boats without a word, not one man of them falling out, and lug them back a weary forty rods to fight another round with Death sooner than own themselves outdone.
II
THE GRIM TALE OF LARRY CONNORS
THE GRIM TALE OF LARRY CONNORS
It is hardly conceivable that at noon of a hot summer day, in clear sight and clear sunshine, not a cloud nor a shadow to suggest a mystery, a keen, shrewd, practical business man, one of the head contractors of -a big concern like the West Branch Drive, should think he saw a ghost, more especially when the apparition was topped by a flaming hat of scarlet felt and accom- panied by two manifestly flesh-and-blood woodsmen not unknown to him. But so it fell out at the Dry Way of Ripogenus. And "Jim'* owned up to his scare.
"By gum," said he, when he met me afterwards, " but you had me that time." And there would have been no sense in denying it, for he had given a snort like a startled buck, and even at ten rods away his attitude of surprise and consternation
26 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
betrayed him. " Seeing you come' up out of that hole with that red hat on, I thought for sure you must be the ghost of Larry Connors. I 'd passed there not half a min- ute before, and not seen nothin', the bank 's so steep there. Then I looked back over my shoulder and up pops that red hat ; thought for a secont that the everlastin' ha'nts had got me sure ! "
Years afterward I was talking with a riverman of the old school. "And have you been up there! And do you know the Big Heater, and the Little Heater, and the Big Arches, and the Little Arches ! And say, now, do you know about Larry Connors ! Well, I want t' know, you do know all about Larry Connors ! Smartest man ever was on the West Branch Drive ! " And then the rosy sunset of his recollec- tion burned away to ashen thoughts. " But they never found nothin' of him," he said slowly and sombrely.
" Lewey Ketchum — said L " Yes — Lewey Ketchum — that 's so — down to the Big Eddy," said he, and stopped. It was plain he knew the story.
LARRY CONNORS 27
But this was long since, by virtue of being taken in broad daylight for the ghost of Larry Connors, I came into possession of the facts about his death. One and an- other told it, each one adding something ; bit by bit I patched the whole together till I made the story out.
"Yes, old Jim he got his hoops started all right enough," said one of the men. " He would n't ha' owned up to it, if there had been any other way out. You see, Larry was killed right about that very spot. And the drive had all gone along, and Jim he 'd just come down, — had n't even heerd of your bein' here, — an' most like 's he was just sa'nterin' along the drivin'-path, not expectin' to see no one, he got to thinkin' about Larry. Then he seen your red hat, and that fixed him. You see, Larry alwers wore somethin' red on his head ; that red topknot was his trade-mark ; did n't seem to make much differ what it was, a cap, or a handkerchief, or a red band round his hat, or the end of an old comforter pulled on, — just as far as you could see him, there would be
28 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
Larry's red comb sticking up, and him just whelting into the logs and swearin' to beat seven of a kind. There 's no mistak- in' but Larry was a turrible able man.''
But what was there about Larry Con- nors that, so many years after his death, could conjure up his ghost in broad day, bright sunlight, open spaces, to affright a sober, shrewd, hard-headed business man ? Not, certainly, that he wore a fantastic headdress and died in the Dry Way of Ripogenus. Many are the men that have gone down in the morning to work on the logs in that gorge, men of blood and bone, who at evening, as thin, impalpable ghosts, have stolen up from Ripogenus to what- ever land of shades and twilight duskiness — growing, let us hope, to brighter dawn- ing — is allotted to men, not righteous, nor moral, nor admirable altogether, but yet dying ungrudgingly for their work. Throngs of such have traveled up the gorge of Ripogenus since Larry Connors died there thirty years ago, and yet of them all you will hear no name so often repeated, no story so many times rehearsed.
LARRY CONNORS
as the grim tale of Larry's going. Some- how the men do not seem to forget Larry- Connors. He stands for somewhat more than fantastic headgear and spectacular annihilation.
Larry Connors was an Exchange Street Irishman, and the best of his education he acquired upon the logs at City Point. By the time he was graduated from the super- vision of the truant officer, he was capable of doing anything on logs. He was utterly fearless, thoroughly efficient, a lighting Irishman of the old bulldog type, close- haired, crop-eared, bullet-headed, ready always to show his teeth — less only the front one knocked out in a fight — with reason or without. Yet the men liked him. My father, for whom he worked all one winter in the woods, always had a good word for Larry, that he was a hard worker, a quiet man in camp, and — which is per- haps the most remarkable thing ever said of Larry Connors — that he never heard him swear.
This commendation must stand unique. For I have heard it said by one of his
30 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
mates that Larry was " the wickedest man that ever went on the West Branch Drive/'
" And you had n't better not believe/' my informant went on, sowing his negatives with so lavish a hand that it was doubtful whether the crop would grow up odd or even, " you had n't better not believe that this West Branch Drive ain't not no holy Sunday-school ! " Being bred up to the Maine woods and its speech, I understood him to imply that Larry was notoriously profane ; that was certainly his meaning. Yet had Larry killed a man, or been of vi- cious and irreclaimable temper, or of bestial cruelty, or implacable in revenge, — even then, though he might have been avoided as a " bad " man, he would hardly have been condemned as a "wicked" one. No, the wicked man is the profane swearer, the unprovoked blasphemer.
How does it happen, inquires the stran- ger, that in a country where neither dog, horse, ox, nor log will move till it is prod- ded with an oath, where profanity is general rather than the exception, and there is a variety and ingenuity and artistic finish
LARRY CONNORS 31
about even the commonplace cursing that marks it as the work of no unpracticed tongue, how does it happen that this com- monest vice of all is selected as the most censurable ?
In its common forms it is neither cen- sured nor censurable especially, nor is it a vice ; it is a vulgarity. There is no harm intended by the pleasant maledictions of every-day life, the oath of emphasis, the oath of affection, the oath of good-fellow- ship just to make you feel at home, the picturesque and kindly cursing of the fel- low of scanty vocabulary. But now and then arises a man of different temper, who blasphemes violently, who studies it as an art, who, not using it as a neighborly by- path of speech, so lavishes his energies on purely rhetorical anathemas that he chills the blood of even these seasoned woods- men and rivermen. Such men, they say, will sometimes swear five minutes at a time without stopping, and swear "most hor- rid ; " and these they say are " wicked men,*' because, as they know from dread experi- ence, no man can thus defy the Almighty
32 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
and come out scathless. Hence the over- powering impiousness of those like Larry Connors, upon whom the judgment was swift and sure. This is why the man is still remembered.
Yet if you dare assume that it was not a judgment, no man agrees with you. There were enough that day who heard him say that he would break that jam or go to hell doing it. How many of those who have spoken to me have spoken as eye- witnesses ! " I was right there ! — "I should have been with him on the logs, but I had just gone ashore for my axe.'* — "I saw the whole thing." — "I did n't see it, but I could hear it all, and the man next to me he said, ' There 's some poor fellow gone ; guess it must be Larry.' " — " Yes, he did say just them very words, for I was right by and heard it." One after another, though it is thirty years since and the ranks are thinning, has rehearsed the scene and his words. For they all know how Larry Connors died at the Dry Way of Ripogenus.
In those days the Dry Way was not a
LARRY CONNORS 33
dry way, but a waterway. They have tamed the River since then, and this is one of the places where it wears the curb. Rough as it is to-day, the River is a chained beast beside what it once was. To-day, where channels divide, wing-dams throw all the water into one thoroughfare ; to-day there is a great dam at the head of Ripogenus Gorge, with gates to control the water and the sluicing ; to-day, by night and by light, men stand on every commanding point, waving a firebrand if it is dark, their hands by day (unless already the telephone has superseded these), watching and signaling if the logs catch on ; in two minutes word goes up from the Little Arches three miles below, and the sluicing stops till the jam is cleared. Nolonger do the great sticks come leaping up on the backs of those already stranded, uncounted and uncontrollable. And to-day, if a jam does form, there is a little shed by the dam where dynamite is kept ; enough of that will remove the stubbornest obstruction. But the older men will tell you how in their youth, that is, in Larry Connors' day, they were let
THE PENOBSCOT MAN
down by ropes from the cliffs at the Big Heater, to hang like dangling spiders from a thread when the jam broke under them ; how they watched and warred on the Arches ; how they held the perilous pass by the Little Heater against leaping tim- bers; how they fought for life with the wild logs below the Dry Way. In Larry Con- nors' day it was " We who are about to die, salute you/' They died, — they never surrendered, — that is why the River has been conquered.
There is three miles of this turbulent water, the roughest that the will of man ever brought to heel and made to carry his freights for him. Those who have seen it in the drought of August, when the lakes are emptied and the current is weak and lagging, have no conception of the gran- deur of the spring torrent. " Three miles of Niagara," a lumberman once called it, and the phrase well describes this canyon, ripped out of the solid rock, with sheer and often inaccessible walls, and the rock- ribbed, boulder-studded river-bed, falling more than seventy feet to the mile, down
LARRY CONNORS 35
which rushes a boiling, seething, smoking flood of water, all a-lather in its haste.
The worst place upon it is just at the head of the gorge as the waters leave the lake. Here an island divides the channel, and a great dam is stretched across both branches of the river. The part of the dam on the north is pierced for sluice and gate ways ; the southern portion is a side-dam, without gates, to cut the water off entirely from the lesser channel. Down one side of the island race the white horses of the falls, tossing their manes, thundering, smashing, flying in a smother of foam as they press through the Gorge of the Per- petual Rainbow. Down the other side lies the Dry Way, and here the former river- bed is scraped to the bone, bare of all water but a silvery trickle, with beetling sides of bare and shining rock. What a contrast be- tween this and the waterway the other side of the island ! There they never attempt to clear a jam ; they let it catch and grow, and soon the pressure of the water behind it tears all away, snapping the largest logs like willow wands, tossing them thirty feet
36 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
in air. " We never put a man on there to clear a jam/' Joe Francis told me, and he was boss of the whole drive that year; "we let it form and pile up, and the water tears it all away." Nor would he even let us go to look at it until they were done sluicing, on account of the danger from leaping logs.
Once, before the dam was built, the Dry Way was like that, too. In Larry Con- nors' day, it was not dry but a waterway like the other. It was just here by the foot of the island, where the southern shore sweeps round like an amphitheatre, that a jam had formed that day when Larry made his last bid against death, for the glory of being looked at.
It was not a big jam, only a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand feet of pine ; but it was a bad one, held by a sin- gle key-log. The boss of that crew had been on it and sounded it. He had come ashore with his hand on his chin. He was a Spencer, and if any one knows logs and water it ought to be a Spencer, — Veazie, or Oldtown, or Argyle, they are all river- men. Thirteen springs this one worked on
LARRY CONNORS 37
the West Branch Drive, and it rested with him to say what was to be done now.
" What d' ye think of it, Steve ? " asked one of the men.
" Think ? — 1 think it is a devil of a jam for a Httle one," said he ; "I 'm still thinking."
An old riverman had undertaken to tell the tale, and he went on : —
" Course the fellows was all hangin' round waiting to be ordered on. They had their peavies with them, and was just a-holdin' for the word how to take it.
" ^ It 's all right for a jam,' said Steve ; ^ when she hauls, she '11 go clearn to thun- der, and it won't cost the Comp'ny a red for pickin' up the pieces ; whole thing hangs on one key-log, 's neat and pretty as a basket of chips, and jest about as safe as a berrill of gunpowder on the Fourth o' July ; when she goes, she '11 go tearin'. Sorry to disapp'int ye, boys, but I guess I won't drownd any of ye to-day. We '11 dog-warp this off. Get the tackle and take a hitch around that key-log, and we '11 put on men enough to send her flukin'.'
38 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
" Well, boss is boss, and boss is s'posed to have things his own way ; but there was boys there that would n't listen to this. Safe ways o' doin' things wasn't what they was cryin' for. Out steps Larry, and he did look the able man for sure, calked shoes and a blue shirt, his trousers cut off at the knees and more rags 'n patches. And he had a red handkerchief tied round his head kind o' cocky, so the tails of it flew out. He just swung his peavey up on his shoul- der and planted hisself, with one hand held out — well, they don't make abler men to look at.
" ^ Look a-here, Steve,' says he, ^ I 'm beggin' the chance.'
" ^ I know you are a crack man, Larry,' says Steve ; ' but I 'd ruther drownd a poorer one; mine's the best way, Larry,' says he, kind o' coaxin' him.
" Then Larry turns round to the boys, and sorter smiled at 'em. It was the big dare he was givin' 'em, but he did n't speak it loud, only smilin' like 's if he thought they was an easy crew to beat out.
"It's my job, boys,' says he, sort o' sat-
LARRY CONNORS
isfied ; M 'U go a step beyond any man in this crew.'
"And he had n't not got the words out'n his mouth when out steps Charley RoUins of Veazie, and RolHns says, says he : ' The man that goes a step ahead of me he goes to hell ! ' says he.
" Well, that fixed it. Larry sprung his knees a little 's if to limber 'em, an' he says, ^ That's all right, Charley; that's a bully bluff, but I '11 raise you.'
" There would n't have been any holding them back after that. Them two was in the same bo't together, and they 'd been run- nin' races all the spring to see which could get into the most bad places. No matter who else had volunteered, after that it was betwixt them two to cut that key-log.
" So the rest of the crew took their pea- vies, and they got their axes, and they all went out on the logs. I s'pose it was long 'bout here that Larry went back to camp and got a luncheon, because it was Rol- lins's turn to go first. Anyway, Larry goes up to camp, and he sets down under the bushes and commences to fire bits of waste
40 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
biscuit at a squirrel that was around fiUin' up his wangan on sody bread, an' says he, ^ Say, cooky,' — Furbish was cook that year, he told us all what Larry said arter- wards, — ^ say, cooky, gimme a hatful o' biscuit an' a hunk o' boss ; I 'm hungrier 'n an owl on Friday. Just ben down to the foot o' the Island, an' they 've got the ' — well, he said they had the — the — donno 's I can justly remember what it was that he did say." There was a bland ingenuousness about the evasion which I admired as coming from one whose pho- nographic memory was never known to blur a record. " But he told cook, says he, * I 'm goin' to break that jam, if I go to hell doing it.' Them 's just his words ; mebbe he said more arterwards, I don't know, Larry was quite a hand to talk, he did n't know no better ; but he did say that he would break that jam or go to hell doing it, all the boys testified to that.
" Well, it was Rollins's turn to go on first, as I was sayin'. You see, in a bad place they spell men ; that 's the custom. It don't do to have a man git all tuckered
LARRY CONNORS 41
out with hard work and then have to run for his hfe when he hain't nother lungs nor hmbs to help him ; for the minit she cracks he 's got to jump and run like thun- der. So when the boss thinks that the first one 's done all that 's good for him, he calls him back and sends out another man. O' course the last one has the wust chance. Now Larry made the dare, and he was the one that raised it, and it was his right to get in the last clip at that log — that's what he was biddin' for. And that 's why Rollins went on first.
" OPn an' of 'n in a bad place they would have ropes around the men and pull them out, right up above the danger. But this time the boys knew they 'd got to leg it on their own hook ; and let me tell you, when you 've got five hundred thousand — feet that is, board feet — of big pine pitch-poling after you, why you can run all right if there 's any run in you. Just heave away your axe and strike a bee- line for the shore, and you won't get there then none too soon for your peace o' mind. Breakin' jams is some uncerting work.
42 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
"Well, 'twas Rollins's turn to go first, 's I was sayin'. He looked at that key-log and bit his axe in full clip. Did ye ever hear an axe take into wood that 's under bustin' strain ? Never did ? Well, you lis- ten some day, 'f ever you get the chance.
" And Rollins begun his scarf on the under side of the log. That was a right enough thing to do ; that was good play ; more'n that, it was fair by Larry. After Rollins got his scarf in all in good shape, Spencer calls him back and sends out Larry.
" Out runs Larry, skippin' and swear- in', his kerchief tails flying, and all the boys lookin' on to see him go. A turri- ble reckless fellow was that Larry. And either he did n't stop to think, or else he did n't care, for the fust thing that he done was to put in his sgarf on the upper side of that log.
"What's the trouble with that? All the trouble in the worlds I tell ye, seein' his life might hang on a quarter of a sec- ont! If he 'd 'a' kep' on in Rollins's scarf, that log when it cracked would 'ave
LARRY CONNORS
cr-r-r-2i-B,-acked ! He'd ha' heard it split- tin' long enough to ha' got a start before the jam did. Cuttin' in on the top-side weakened it too sudden. When the log broke, it just i?ust.
" Well, then she hauled !
"And by Judas' hemp, an' two select- men, a yoke of oxen, an' an old snag throwed in, but p'raps that wa'n't no sight to see ! And to hear, too ! Every lad in sight raised a yell, and those on shore danced and flung up their hats. And those on the logs they cut and run like the rd'cess bell had rung and they did n't want to be late in. ^nd the logs they started, jumping and squealing and thrash- ing and grinding, like seventeen sawmills runnin' full-blast of a Sunday. You never hearn anything in your life like a big jam of logs let loose. You ain't no idee of the noise and hubbub one of them will make when she hauls.
" The men got a pretty good start, but for all o' that they was tumbled in amongst the logs and used pretty rough. Two or three of 'em had to lay down in the cracks
44 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
of the laidge and let the logs roll over 'em; but they lAanaged to cling a-holt of the alders, and they all got out 'ceptin' Larry.
"He was quicker 'n- Mr^^ cats, Larry was, but he wa'n't quite up to the gait them logs set him, just flyin' through the air and up-endin' every which way. And o' course he had the wust chance ; that 's what he bid for. They tell the story dif- ferent about Larry. Some says that he made a laidge all right, and a big log squirled and caught him, and they see a red streak just like you 'd hit a mosquito there. But what / see was that he was on the jam a-runnin', and a big pine lept an' struck him in the back. Head and heels met in the air as it flung him clean. And he fell amongst the logs and they rid over him. But we never see no more of Larry Connors. He said he was goin' to break that jam, if he went to hell for it, and he broke it all right enough."
So that was all there was to it. A brave man — a great dare — a wager won, or lost, as you will — and then all is snuffed out as irrecoverably as the flame of a candle.
LARRY CONNORS 45
They looked for the body far and near, but there was nothing to be found. Babb was the head contractor of the drive that year, and he took charge of the dead man's kit. I have been told that when it was overhauled before being packed to send out to his friends, the men stood round in silence, not so much curious as respectful, wondering how that little bag of worthless duffle turned out on a blanket to be sorted by the head man kneeling beside it could be all that was left of so brave a man as Larry ; silent for the most part, or when they did speak, speaking briefly and to the point; for they could not forget that say- ing of old Jack Mann's, that " Larry was 60 fond of stealing that when he could n't get anything else he would steal the stock- ing off from one foot and put it on the other."
" Says one : ^ If you find a knife with a boot-leg sheath, it 's mine ; Larry borried it mebbe.'
" And another says : VI 'm short two pair o' socks, blue yarn footed down with gray, lookin' like that pair there.'
46 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
" And another and another steps up with his claim.
" So they laid out all the things that was called for. And there was a cardigan marked ^ Newell/ and a vest with a hand- kerchief in it marked ' Myra Spencer/ and other things that did n't seem rightly to belong to his folks. And all the boys looked on it as a judgment on swearing.
" You see there is such things as judg- ments. Never knew a man to say that God Almighty could n't drownd him but he went and got drownded within the hour. There was one up to Telos Cut was rode under by two logs just as soon as he said it. And there was one down to the Gray Rock of Abol, slipped off 'n a perfectly safe place and went downstream like lead, and him a good swimmer. And there was John Goddard's barn that he said he built so firm that the Almighty could n't fetch wind enough to shake it. He 'd had two blow down before that, and he built that one to stand. And then there came a harricane that just sifted that barn into toothpicks, and eight good driving-bo'ts in it, but they
LARRY CONNORS
never found hide nor hair of 'em. And then there was Larry. Them 's judgments.
" Did n't no one ever find no sign of him ? M-m-m-no ! That is, we did n't. He just went out like the smoke of a dand'Ii'n blossom ; did n't leave no trace. But next spring, when Lewey Ketchum an' Joe Dimon was up on their spring hunt arter bears, down by the Big Eddy, — that's good three mile below the Dry Way ; you know, you ben there times enough, — in back mebbe a quarter of a mile from the eddy, in open secont growth, I heerd tell that they found a huming skull, and it had the marks of bears' teeth on it.
" They was skinnin' a bear at the time that they 'd just taken out o' their trap, and Joe he sa'ntered off in the woods while Lewey finished oflT the skin. And bime-by he sung out, ' Lewey — Lewey, there 's the funniest skull here you ever see ; a,wful round it is.'
" ^ Lucivee,' I guess,' says Lewey, keepin' right on at the skin ; ^ they 've got the roundest skull of anything.'
I That is, loup-cervier, or Canada lynx, but the hunters pronounce it lucivee or loucerfee.
48 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
" ^ But its front teeth are flat/ sings out Joe.
" ^ Then it 's a man^ says Lewey, and he goes and looks.
" And he saw that it had one front tooth gone just like Larry, so they had n't no great of a doubt who it was to. They stuck it up in the fork of a tree and spotted a line in to it, so 's his friends could find it again if they wanted it, and that 's the last that ever I heerd of it."
After this manner the man who broke the jam at the Dry Way came finally, as a bare and eyeless skull, — that blasphem- ing skull that once had a tongue in it, — to sit like some foul bird in a tree-fork through wintry storms ; wherefore the men who had known him felt that even the judgment which had fallen upon him was insufficient, and this strange dismember- ment was by the hand of God ordained as a warning against profane swearing. No wonder that they thought his ghost un- quiet, and that even on a hot June day it might be out in a red felt hat for a stroll along the Dry Way.
Ill
HYMNS BEFORE BATTLE
HYMNS BEFORE BATTLE^
The golden noon of a young June day, and fourteen strong men swinging down the carry-path to the " putting-in place ; " on each man's shoulder his heavy peavey, clanking its iron jaw as he jolted over rocks and hollows ; on each man's feet heavy shoes, studded, heel and sole, with inch- long calks of sharpened steel ; on each man's body rags and tatters, worn and weathered from their first monotony of aniline and shoddy into gear indescribably barbarous and fantastic.
^ This story is reprinted from the Bangor Daily Com- mercialy 1897, at the request of several who have desired its republication among these later stories. Though true in spirit, it does not deal with an actual occurrence at the place named, and therefore is not entitled to admission among these matter-of-fact stories. And yet the owner of another " Nancy," the late Roderick R. Park, when contractor of the Mattawamkeag Drive, used sometimes to call his men off for a dance just like this one, and the good old tune of Roy's Wife'' was known wherever he and his fiddle went.
52 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
There was a jam forming below on the Horse Race, — a great upreared mass of logs, like a pile of gigantean jackstraws or the side-swath of a cyclone, where all the wreck is flung, up-ended, interlaced, triply bound and welded, a confusion which seemed inextricable. And volunteers were called to pick the jam.
These were the men, whose armed heels smote fire from the rocks, whose peavies jangled a battle-note, whose short step lengthened to a stride as they saw the river sweeping past and their boats before them, saw the rapids race at the tail of Ambajemackomas and heard on the up- stream draught of air the ominous war of a full flood growling on the Horse Race below, and (either you dread it or it draws you, when you hear the River calling so) came swinging down the carry in haste to meet their foe. It is a pretty sight to see a phalanx of picked watermen rally, as if by bugle call, to face their ancient enemy, the River.
Yet there, in sight of the river, one of them fell out.
BEFORE BATTLE
" Ho, hi ! See here ! " he called to those ahead.
The fourteen men with peavies on their shoulders, clustering together, stood stock- still, like old herons round a fishing-pool, their necks craned over, and gazed at something in the damp, black soil.
" Gee whipperty ! " said one, " that there 's a woman's track !
Then, as if contradicted, though no one spoke, — " Yes, sir, that is ! There 's been a woman here.''
Women were unknown in that place at that season. Yet there, under the over- arch of an alder, was a slender footprint. They could tell you to-day, those men, though it is twenty years since, just how long and how wide was that woman's track, carelessly imprinted in the mud beside the carry-path.
Very unchivalrous the world counts these woodsmen; — very little the world knows about their ways and romances, for nowhere does romance bear a more fra- grant blossom or bloom so long. The sprig of cedar, many years preserved,
54 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
because with it a woman crowned an act of daring ; the wild flower, pressed in the crumpled corner of a greasy pocketbook, because a woman called it beautiful ; the chance track in the roadway where a week before an unknown woman stepped, kept from obliteration just because she was a woman, — no line of life that men follow to-day comes so close to the high mark of mediaeval chivalry with its superb faith in womankind, regardless of the faults of individual women.
But the life is rough ? So surely was chivalry ! Rougher than we know for. Its faith saved it ; and what grew into mari- olatry in the past is still, in the unromantic present, the better part of many other rough men's religion.
"Yes, sir," said the bearded man; "there was a woman here wunst. Jee-e-e-roozlum, there wuz ! "
Confronted by this evidence of a woman's presence, his speech underwent a sudden censorship, and, like rags in a broken win- dow, any inoffensive word was stuflfed in to fill the gaps.
BEFORE BATTLE
" There was ; gee-e-e-whittaker, there wuz ! It 's somethin' to make account of. The wangan chist 's this end the carry, and there ain't nothin' can't wait. Hike out old Nancy, and let 's break her down."
The speaker was boss of his crew, a man possessed of a little authority over those below him and of more over those above him, who had learned to let him take his own way without meddling ; for he was one of those men who, discountenancing the maritime maxim, can break orders and defy owners. It has always been the glory of the West Branch Drive that it had so many such men, every one of whom placed the welfare of those logs above his own life, could have handled the whole drive if there were need, and whose insubordi- nation would never have gone so far as to endanger the least part of their trust. No matter how mutinously they spoke, they never failed to be where they were needed, and that was all P. L. D. asked of them.
There is neither time nor room for fid- dles on the drive, but this man had wanted Nancy, and he carried Nancy. If he had
56 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
wanted the moon, he would have put it in the wangan chest just as boldly. And now, when called to pick off a jam, he coolly halts his men in the face of danger and death — because the occasion is notable — to have a scrape at the old fiddle.
In the faces of some there is question- ing what John Ross will say. Whom he rebukes.
" What '11 John Ross say ? Don't care what John Ross '11 say ! Ain't this a free country? What did old Jack Mann say to his boss when he knocked off at noon with all his crew because it looked like sprinklin' ? — that he 'd ^ a sight ruther have the good-will of a whole crew than of one man, any day.' 'N' so 'd I ! John Ross ain't a-runnin' this crew now ; / be ! There ain't nothin' in partic'lar 'bout a little side jam that can't wait. Stick up your darts, boys ; rowse a boat out, an' all hands bow to pardners."
In a trice they were ready. The peavies plunged their iron beaks into the earth, the driving-boat turned bottom up in a twinkling, and while the boss was still
BEFORE BATTLE
groping in the wangan chest for his fiddle- case, the two supplest men had unbuckled and cast aside their spiked driving-shoes. It was a dance on the drive — a dance by- proxy ; for the pitchy, flat bottom of a driving-boat is an area too limited for a general engagement. So while the fiddler sawed and tightened his strings, and the bare-footed dancers sprung their knees to get them in condition, the audience dis- posed itself to watch.
The fiddle tuned, the fiddler seated, he touches the horse-hair to his cheek, then holds the bow upright and Nancy tucked beneath his chin, waiting for them to call the tune.
" ' Money Musk ' ! "
" ' Fisher's Hornpipe ' ! "
" ^ Irish Washerwoman ' ! "
" Somethin' 't we sing out in the States," cries a dissenting basso ; " give us a real Christian tune ! "
There is rough water below them and a jam to pick; and — are they moved to sing hymns of prayer and praise ?
O innocent, the fiddler knows them
58 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
better. He bends his head a moment to catch the humor of his audience moved to retrospection by the sight of a woman's footprint, and away whisk jigs and "penny- royals " while the expectant dancers stand agape.
Up and down plays his wrist, in and out works his elbow, forward and back sways his body ; he treads his foot ; a musical ecstasy carries him beyond the bounds of his own mean accomplishments, and he plays with fervor what his men have called for — a most Christian song. It begins, —
I 'm lonesome since I crossed the hill. And o'er the moor and valley."
And they sang. Of course they sang, — bass and tenor, how they sang, for they all knew that, — sang till the clearer voices floated high above the slender birch-tops and the bass swam midway in the clear June sunshine, and beneath, mingling with the roll of the rapids, rumbled the un- dertone of those who could not sing, yet would not refuse to try. It came like rain in drought, freshening dusty foliage and
BEFORE BATTLE 59
slaking the thirst of parching hillsides — this most Christian song of women re- membered in the face of danger.
The bee shall honey taste no more. The dove become a ranger. The falling waves shall cease to roar. Ere I shall seek to change her. • The vows we register' d above Shall ever cheer and bind me. In constancy to her I love. The girl I 've left behind me."
The logs slipped past by twos and threes and half-dozens, going to throw themselves upon the abattisof the ever-increasing jam below. And still the fiddler bent above , his fiddle. Young men have sweethearts, older men have wives, and once more the bow is laid to the catgut, to draw from it a tribute to the wives at home.
" Roy's Wife of Valdevally " nods the bow-paddle to the stroke-oar. They did not know the words, nor that it had words, nor that they were not altogether a com- pliment, — that lay all in the title, — but the fine old tune of " Roy's Wife of Aldi- valloch " was known wherever Nancy felt
6o THE PENOBSCOT MAN
the bow. It had been played many times before on that river, though never when John Ross was waiting for a crew.
That ended, once more the bow hugged the fiddle. To young men, sweethearts ; to their seniors, wives ; but men old enough to handle the bow of a driving-boat have children and homes as well, and the ficMler played once more while John Ross waited.
Up through the tangle of undergrowth by the river's edge, hastening from the jam below, jingling his dippers as he ran, puffed and sweated the luncheon-boy, with orders to " swear them into a two-forty ; for it had caught on at the middle and formed clear across the river, was rolling up all the time, and would hold till everything under- ground froze stiff" (so the message ran), " if they did n't shove a crew down double quick and break the jam ; and why in — in all hemlock, had n't they been there long before ? "
An order enjoining unlimited, idiomatic, artistic swearing is a commission of honor to any luncheon-boy, and this one, as he posted up the drivers' path by the river-
BEFORE BATTLE 6i
bank, was marshaling his vocabulary so as to do him credit, when, though full of his errand, he heard the fiddle, soft and sweet, — for the bow itself crooned the words to silent listeners, —
In mansions or palaces, where'er I roam.
Be it never so humble, there 's no place like home."
The luncheon-boy loitered along at a walk, then sauntered, and finally, in spite of his hot haste, waited till the last slow stave had sung itself away to an echo.
" Middle jam," said he, shamefully neg- lecting the opportunity for elegant pro- fanity ; " everything piling up chock-full. Run down lively ; them 's John Ross's orders."
Fourteen men sprang to their feet and ran out the batteaus ; the fiddle shut it- self up in the case ; the peavies leaped into the boats ; oars, axes, paddles, and all flew into position, and the two driving-boats, fully manned, with bowmen and steersmen standing in their places, darted out into the swirling current that tails down from Ambajemackomas. Behind them were
62 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
songs of sweetheart, wife, and home ; and ahead, around the bend whence the up- stream draught of air brought the growl of the rapids. Death and Danger sat waiting for them on the middle jam. Were their chances for life and victory less for that quarter hour's devotion at the one shrine all woodsmen worshipfuUy recognize, — the memory of home and woman ?
IV
DEATH OF THOREAU'S GUIDE
THE DEATH OF THOREAU'S GUIDE
The strangest monument a man ever had in sacred memory, — a pair of old boots. For a token of respect and admiration, love and lasting grief, — just a pair of old river- driver's boots hung on the pin-knot of a pine. Big and buckled ; bristling all over the sole with wrought steel calks ; gashed at the toes to let the water out ; slashed about the tops into fringes with the tally of his season's work, less only the day which saw him die ; reddened by water ; cracked by the sun, — worn-out, weather- rotting old boots, hanging for years on the pine-tree, disturbed by no one. The river- drivers tramped back and forth beneath them, a red-shirted multitude ; they boated along the pond in front and drove their logs past, year after year ; they looked at the tree with the big cross cut deep in its
66 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
scaly bark, and always left the boots hang- ing on the limb. They were the Gov- ernor's boots, Joe Attien's boots, they belonged to Thoreau's guide.'
The pine-tree had seen the whole. It was old and it was tall. Its head stretched up so high that it could look over the crest of Grand Pitch, tremendous fall though it is, right up where Grand Falls come churning down to their final leap into Shad Pond. It had been looking up the river in the sunshine of that summer morning and had seen the whole, — the overloaded boat that set out to run the falls, the wreck in the rapids, the panic of the crew, the men struggling among logs and rocks, the brave attempt at rescue, and the dead, drowned bulk, which had once been the Governor, as it was tumbled down over the Grand Pitch into the pond be- low. The pine-tree had stood guard over it for days, and when, from its four days
' Thoreau spells the name "Aitteonj'' I have pre- ferred the form found on his tombstone, " Attien," be- cause it indicates both the pronunciation and the deri- vation. For it is not Indian, but the French fitienne, or Stephen.
THOREAU'S GUIDE 67
in the grave of the waters, it rose again, the pine-tree still kept watch over it, until, on the sixth morning, the searchers found it there. " And when they found his body they cut a cross into a tree by the side of the pond, and they hung up his boots in the tree and they stayed there always, because everybody knew that they was the Governor's boots."
If ever Henry David Thoreau showed himself lacking in penetration, it was when he failed to get the measure of Joseph Attien. True, Joe was young then — he never lived to be old ; yet a man who, dy- ing at forty-one, is so long remembered, must have shown some signs of promise at twenty-four.' But Thoreau hired an Indian to be aboriginal. One who said " By George ! " and made remarks with a Yankee flavor was contrary to his hypo- thesis of what a barbarian ought to be. It
^ The newspapers said he was thirty-five when he died, but his gravestone says plainly, "forty years and seven months."" It is interesting to learn that one who lived so well and died so generously was born on Christmas Day.
68 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
did not matter that this was the sort of man who gave up his inside seat and rode sixty- miles on the top of the stage in the rain that a woman might be sheltered; — all the cardinal virtues without aboriginality would not have sufficed Mr. Thoreau for a text. He missed his opportunity to tell us what manner of man this was, and so Joe Attien's best chance of being remembered lies, not in having been Henry Thoreau's guide on a brief excursion, but in being just brave, honest, upright Joseph Attien, a man who was loved and lamented be- cause he had the quality of goodness. " His death just used the men all up," said a white ri verm an years afterward ; " after that some of the best men wa'n't good for anything all the rest of the drive."
I could give, as I have gleaned it here and there, the testimony to his worth, the statements of one and another that he was not only brave but good, an open-hearted, patient, forbearing sort of a man, renowned for his courage and skill in handling a boat, but loved for his mild justness. " He was just like a father to us," said a white man
THOREAU'S GUIDE 69
who had been in his boat. Thirty-three years after his death I heard a head lum- berman, who also had served two years in his boat, a very silent man, break out into voluble reminiscence at merely seeing Joe Attien's picture. But there is a story, in- disputably authentic, which shows better than anything else the largeness of the man.
He had been slandered by a white man -whom he had thought his friend, in a way which not only caused him distress of mind, but was calculated to interfere materially with his election to the office of tribal gov- ernor, the most coveted honor within an Indian's grasp, and that year elective for the first time.' The incident occurred just
' His epitaph is wrong in asserting that he inherited the title of governor. The office had been a life-office, hereditary in the Attien family, who were chiefs 5 but at Joseph's father's death it was made annual and elec- tive. Joseph Attien won his elections by popular vote against great opposition, and he carried seven out of the eight elections held up to the time of his death. The eighth — by the intervention of the so-called << Special Law," passed by the state to reduce the friction between the parties — was the New Party's first election, none of Joseph Attien' s party, the Old Party, or Conservatives, voting that year.
70 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
before his first election in 1862, — for he was governor seven times. Hurt to the quick, he avoided his former friend, yet said nothing. When he discovered that the false accusation had arisen from a wholly innocent and most natural mistake, with- out a word in his own justification, leaving the charge to stand undenied, he renewed the old friendship, and his friend never knew what just cause he had given for resentment till, years after Joe's death, it was accidentally revealed by one who had heard the misunderstanding explained. Such was the man.
If you ask the men who were there at the time how Joseph Attien died, they will never suggest that it was accident or the hand of God. More or less emphatically, according to their natures and the vivid- ness of their recollection, they will say right out, " Dingbat Prouty did it ; it was Ding- bat Prouty drownded Joe Attien." They will cheerfully admit that this is not a man to be spoken of slightingly, because he is a great waterman ; but upon this point
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there is only one opinion, — that he forced Joe Attien to run a bad place against his better judgment, for the mere sake of showing off. " He pushed himself in/' — "He had n't no business in that boat at all." — " Prouty drownded Joe Attien, everybody who was there says so." — " He had n't no business in that boat and did n't belong there anyway, but he said he was going to run them falls, and he did run 'em."
It is very hard to tell a true story, and the more one knows about the facts, the harder it is to make a story of them. Here was a simple tale of how the inordinate am- bition of one man to win a name for him- self brought grief upon the whole drive. The next turn of the kaleidoscope gave a wholly different combination. For I took what I had gathered to John Ross himself. " Is this straight? " And he said : " No ; you are all wrong there. Prouty belonged in that boat ; he had been bowman of it about two days. It was my orders for them to go down and pick a jam on the Heater, and they were going. I was right there and
72 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
saw the whole of it, and I never blamed Prouty."
But why, then, should the men have blamed him ? No exculpation could be more complete than this. There is no appeal from what John Ross says he ordered and saw executed. Why do not the men know this ? Instead of telHng a simple tale, are we undertaking to square the mental circle ? For, with nearly two hundred men close at hand, it seems pre- posterous that the facts should not have become generally known ; it is still more incredible to suppose that, thinking inde- pendently, they could all have reached the same false conclusion ; but that, having been cross-examined in all sorts of ways for four and thirty years, they should never have varied from their first error is inconceivable. Why do the men still hold Charles Prouty responsible, if he was not to blame ?
From being a study of facts, the story turns into a question of psychology. Why is it that when one has been looking at red too long he sees green and keeps on seeing green, even when there is no green there?
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That is the clue. A man does not get a name like "Dingbat" and keep it all his life for nothing. Therefore, after the men had gazed fixedly upon the commanding excellence of Joseph Attien ; after they had seen him pass beyond their ken, " all the trumpets," as it were, " sounding for him on the other side; " when they turned away and looked at the man whom fate had elected to stand beside him that day, what would one expect them to see by contrast ? Green ! very green ! And to keep right on seeing — green!
Having affirmed the worth of Joseph Attien and the warm esteem in which all held him, it remains to show how, because he was placed in too sharp a contrast with such a man, Charles Prouty incurred a blame which his chief says was none of his.
We come now to the story. Chance gave to it a fitting frame — grand scenery, bright sunshine, a date of distinction, the eye of the master. You are never to for- get that up on a log-jam, just below where this happened, stood himself — John Ross.
74 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
He ordered the boat down ; he saw it go; he sent another to the rescue; he reported this to me ; it stands authenticated. But what the men saw and felt, that which is unofficial, that which represents the cur- rent of the story and carries us on to the end, I gathered for myself among them.
On the drive there is no distinction of days. Holidays or Sundays, the drivers know no difference ; one week's end and the next one's beginning are all the same to them. The Fourth of July now is marked for them by no other suitable re- cognition than extremely early rising.
But it used not so to be. In the old days, when it was a point of pride to have the logs in boom by the last of June, the men were free to celebrate on the Fourth. To them the Fourth of July was the great- est day of all the year. Like boys just out of school, they were free from work, free from restraint, free to make just as much noise as they pleased, and, having plenty of money in their pockets wherewith to purchase all sorts of a good time, they
THOREAU'S GUIDE 75
enjoyed a glorious liberty. The Fourth was never a quiet day in Bangor, if the drives were in the boom.
However, the year of our Lord 1870 is distinctly chronicled as one of the most un- eventful ever known ; nothing at all going on but a church levee across the river in Brewer, so that the police loafed out the Fourth in weary and unwonted idleness. The drives were late that year, so very late that, though the head of the West Branch Drive was some miles downstream, the rear of it rested on the Grand Falls of the Indian Purchase. The hands had been leaving the day before, so as to get home for the Fourth; the water was falling; the whole drive was belated and short-handed ; the head men were worrying ; no one had any time to remember that it was a legal holiday.
That is, no one remembered it except the Chronic Shirk. His rights had been assailed, and, having found a Temporary Cripple, who could not escape by flight from his unwelcome company, he insisted on arguing the case, and volleyed back his
76 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
opinions of working on a legal holiday with an explosiveness which reminded one of the reports of a bunch of fire-crackers.
It was "Rip — rip — rip — bang! But he did n't like this workin' on a Fourth er Ju/y/ The Declaration of Independuns had said — that it was a man's right — on the Fourth er July — to git as tight as Lewey's cow ; and he did rip — rip — rip — object — to bein' defrauded out of his constitoot'nal rights ! "
He was a sun-baked, stubble-faced fel- low; less troubled with clothes than with the want of patches, but with shirt and skin about one color where the sun had toned them to each other around the more ancient rents ; and he sat in a niche in the log-jam, expectorating tobacco forcibly and to great distances, and swore voluminously about his ill-luck in not being somewhere else. Just then he had nothing to do. He was an expert at picking out jobs where there was nothing to do. This time he was waiting for his mate, who had gone for an axe, and not a stroke of work had he done since his mate left him. There it was, a
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bright sunny morning about seven o'clock, a good time to work, and the logs ricked up like jackstraws on both sides of the falls ; the whole river in that confusion which the rear has to clean up and leave tidy ; plenty of work for this fellow to do with his peavey in picking off singles and rolling in little handfuls caught along the edges, and helping to do his share of the setting to rights ; but instead, he sat on a log-jam in the sun, and spat more vigor- ously and swore more violently as it grew upon him how ill the world was using him in making him work on the Fourth of July.
The Cripple, unable to escape, tried to divert him from his melancholy. " Well, Tobias Johnson's bo't got down all right," he remarked.
Tobias Johnson and his crew had but just run the Blue Rock Pitch. It was to see the boats go down that the Cripple had crawled out upon the logs. The water being very bad that morning, what Tobias Johnson had done was bound to be a topic of conversation all that hot day among little
78 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
groups of men working on the logs. Even the Shirk ought to have whirled at such a glittering conversational lure. Instead he sulked.
" I 'd be rip — rip — ripped, if I was seen runnin' these here falls to-day. It 's a damned shame to have to work on the Fourth er July anyway. Head men that knowed beans from bedbugs would ha' had the whole jim-bang drive in long ago/' and he exploded a whole bunch of crackers on the heads of the offending contractors of the drive. " Here we be a-swillin' sow-belly an' Y. E. B.'s/ an' down to Bangor, don't I know jes' 's well as can be, Deacon Spooner has brought up a thousand pounds o' salmon to Low's Market, an' is reportin' all about the sun- stroke to the schoolhouse, an' the camp- meetin'they are gettin'up down to Whisgig on Shoo-Fly, an' salmon enough for all hands an' the cook."
' That is, yellow -eyed beans. Pork and beans are the river-driver's staple of diet, as well as the lumberman's, and not as much relished in midsummer as in the colder season.
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(Deacon Spooner was a sort of summer Santa Claus, who purveyed imaginary in- formation and real Penobscot River salmon. He was held in high local esteem, but he went out of print about this time, and the great volley of oaths which the Shirk shot off at the merry and inoffensive deacon, though they may not account for his dis- appearance, would provide good reason for looking for him among the damned.)
The Cripple tried to get away, but he was too closely followed. Then, deciding that talking was better than listening, he took the reins of conversation. " Bi must have found it awful rough water," said he. " Don't believe there '11 be not another bo't attempt it to-day, with the water slacking so. Say, did you hear that yis- terday Joe Attien tried to git Con Murphy to leave Tobias's crew an' come into his bo't ? An' Con said he liked his own crew, an' did n't want to change, not even to be in Joe's bo't. I heerd that he got Ed Con- ley out of Lewey Ketchum's bo't, now Lewey 's left the drive. Speaks pretty well for Tobias, though, don't it ? "
8o THE PENOBSCOT MAN
The discontented one turned impar- tially from Deacon Spooner and damned Tobias.
" Jim Hill ! " said the other, " how them logs has took to runnin' ! They 're goin' it high, wide, an' lively. .That stops all bo't capers for one while. Any bo't that had it in mind to rival Bi Johnson had better think twice about it before they get out into this mix-up on slack water. Guess our fun 's up an' I mought 's well be crawlin' back to camp."
" Guess I mought 's well stay right here where I be," said the Shirk ; " John Ross is up there on that dry jam east side, an' I 'd jes' 's soon be where I can keep an eye on him."
The Cripple made a few painful, hobbling steps over the logs and had reached the crest of the jam, when he turned with his hand shading his eyes and looked down toward the Blue Rock Pitch, where a boat was drawn up on the shore and the crew stood waiting.
" Say, though," he shouted to the Shirk, trying to make himself heard above the
THOREAU'S GUIDE 8i
water, " looks like they was talkin' about runnin' after all ! Who is it ? make 'em out ? "
The grumbler put up his head cau- tiously to make sure that John Ross was attending to his own business, before he ran briskly to the peak of the jam, and announced that it was that ding-ding- danged Injun, Joe Attien ; could tell him by his bigness.
" Hain't he the perfect figure of a man, though ! " broke in the other in admiration; " pity his heft keeps him from his rightful place in the bow."
Joe Attien weighed two hundred and twenty-live and, because of his great weight and strength, always captained his boat from the stern, although in running down quick water the bow is the place of honor.
The leisurely one, having made sure that he was getting the right man, proceeded to curse Joe Attien and all his forbears. Then he sat down upon the logs and resumed his original lamentation. " Now down Bangor way to-day they 'd be doin' somp'n wuth lookin' at — boss races an' bo't races an' " —
82 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
" Joe 'd be in the canoe race sure," in- terrupted the other.
" Not by a long chalk ! " said the grumbler ; " don't you see he 's governor agin ? Don't you rec'lect that last time, when they made him a ding-danged, no- good judge, an' him one of the best pad- dles in the tribe, a rip — rip — rip — split- ting good man on a paddle, all because he was a ding-dang-donged governor ? "
The other man admitted the cogency of the argument. " But say," said he, " that 's the real thing there. Ain't that Dingbat talkin' up to Joe ? "
They watched the rapid, incisive move- ments of a slender, agile young fellow, out- lined against Joe's bulk. " Dinged little weasel," muttered the grumbler, identify- ing him ; " so durn spry 't he don't cast no shadder ! "
Then he relapsed once more into his reflective mood. " Now down Bangor way now, you bet, — oh, boss races an' bo't races an' canoe races, an' ^ Torrent ' and ^ Delooge ' a-squirtin' out in the Square, an' cirkiss an' greased pig, an' tub races
THOREAU'S GUIDE 83
an' velocerpede races, — there '11 be somp'n down there to-day wuth lookin' at, an' up here nothin' but this dod-blasted ol' river an' a ding-dang passel o' logs ! "
" Say," said the other, " I can't quite make that out yet. I ain't a-catchin' on to that performance. There 's McCausland an' Tomer an' Joe Solomon an' Curran an' Conley, they all belong — but where 's Steve Stanislaus ? An' that little Dingbat — what 's he doin' with a paddle there ? "
" Wants Joe to run the falls."
" Well, but he ain't in Joe's bo't ! "
" Course not, little rumscullion ! That 's it ! He 's failed to get his own crew in, most like, an' now he 's stumpin' Joe to take him along o' his crew. You watch an' see him do it. He ain't a-goin' to let Bi Johnson have the name of bein' the only man that dares to run these falls to-day, not if he can help it. He '11 shake the rafters o' heaven but he '11 show us that he 's every bit as good a waterman as To- bias Johnson."
" What makes him light on Joe ? and where 's Steve ? "
84 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
The men did not know as yet that the day before, when the crews reorganized at the Lower Lakes, Steve Stanislaus, who was Joe Attien's friend and cousin and physical counterpart, had left Joe's boat. But all sorts of low cunning being read- able to the Shirk, he was not at loss for an explanation.
" Well, don't you see, he 's cut Steve out some ways. Joe handlin' stern, that gives him a chance to go in the bow, and that 's right on the way to a bo't of his own, and what he could n't get with no other man. He don't ship to be no midshipman in the maulin' they are goin' to git. He 's figgerin' how to put hisself at a premum as a crack man."
" Reel Dingbat trick," muttered the other. " Joe knows that this ain't no run- nin' water to-day ; just wicked to try to run here, the way things is now."
" Don't want to, don't have to," retorted the swearer, for once omitting the garnish of his speech. And it was more true than most epigrams. Joe's orders to go down with a boat did not imply that he was to
THOREAU'S GUIDE 85
run the Blue Rock Pitch against his judg- ment. A waterman of his reputation could dare to be prudent. All the spectators thought that he intended to take out above the pitch and carry by. Then they saw him pick up his long paddle.
The Shirk pricked up his ears and began to be more cheerful. " Looks like somp'n was goin' to happen now ! he chippered. " There they are a-gettin' of her ready. Now they 're runnin' her out. There 's Dingbat takin' bow. Wonder what they are goin' to do with that spare man? Which one of them rip — rip — rippin' galoots do you s'pose Joe '11 be leavin' behind ? "
That seventh man in the boat was what the men never understood ; it gave the color to the accusation that Prouty pushed himself in. Seven men is a boat's crew when working on logs, but in running dangerous places they carry but six or even four men. It would seem as if, planning not to run, Joe had his log-working crew, and then, changing his mind suddenly, forgot to leave behind the extra man.
86 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
" Gosh ! how rough the water is ! said the Cripple ; " all choked up with jams both sides, and the logs running to beat hell. They don't stand one chance not in — My soul! — but he's puttin' that spare man in on the lazy seat ! Well, what you must do you will do." It was the inbred fatalism of his class, which makes them stoical.
Simultaneously the grumbler fired off a volley of curses which made the air smoke. " Rip — rip — rip — bang ! — bang ! ! If that Go-donged Injun ain't a-shippin' a Maddywamkeag crew ! " (In the cant of the river a "Mattawamkeag crew" means all the men a boat will hold.)
The Shirk was fully alive now. He jumped up and took his peavey from the log side of him. " Guess I '11 be moseyin' right along down now," he chirped. Then he set out running over the logs at a lively pace, trailing his peavey behind him. He anticipated seeing something fully equal to greased pig and velocipede races.
There was not much to see that time. The catastrophe came at once, before they
THOREAU'S GUIDE 87
were fairly started. The water was very rough that morning — on a falling driving- pitch it is always roughest. There was that crowning current heaped up in the middle that would push a boat up on the shore ; there were the log-jams making the chan- nels narrow and crooked ; there were the loose logs running free that would elbow and ram a boat and crowd her off when she tried to avoid them ; there were the doubtful, treacherous channels, creatures of the log-jams along the banks and of the fickle current, new with every differing condition, never to be fully memorized ; there were the rocks, not less cruel be- cause cushioned with great boils of water; and there were the boat's own weight and tremendous momentum. No thorough- bred waterman will ever undertake to say how fast a boat can run in a rapid ; for he does not know himself. He says, " Very fast,'' and turns the topic to all-day records.
Still the great sharp-nosed boat had as little cause to apprehend disaster as any boat could have had. She bore a picked crew ; she obeyed Joe Attien ; and she was
88 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
a staunch and trusty boat, very wise about all the ways of water. She knew all kinds and how to take them. There were the huge boils, those frightful, brandy-colored boils, streaked full of yellow foam-threads spinning from a hissing centre ; and there were the slicks, where a great rock be- trayed his lurking-place only by the tail of glassy current below, — safe are such places, for the rock lies above them ; and there were the ridgy manes of white water- curls, where the slopes of two great rocks met and rolled the water backward; — but she knew how to take them all ; she was prepared for perils on all sides, danger unintermittent, whether she took it slick, or bit into the foam with her long beak, or caught it raw and crosswise beneath her flaring gunwales. What she did not expect was that her peril would come before she had caught the set of the current at all ; no one looked for that, not even the Shirk, who was running fast so as to be right on hand when she swamped, and was address- ing to them various select remarks not in- tended to be heard above the roar of the
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water, such as, " Guess you got your belly full this time, old fellow ; " and, " Go it, boys, you '11 get plumb to hell this trip/' It was nothing to one of his kind that seven men stood in deadly peril, and the show of the moment he was craftily neg- lecting that he might the better witness the closing spectacle ; but he never dreamed that it would come as it did.
It was a very simple accident ; the dragon-fly, with bulging eyes, rustling in zigzag flight along the river's brink, might have reported what he saw as well as could a man. There was the long, lean boat, blue without and painted white within, lying with pointed stern and longer, tapering snout, steeving sharply, like a huge fish half out of water ; within her the line of red-shirted men, their finny oars fringing her battered sides, the stripling Prouty high up in the bow, too eager to snatch the honors of which he has won so many fairly since ; then the row of seated men — ragged red shirts, sorely weathered ; hard red knuckles, tense on the oar-butts ; sun-burned faces under torn brims, or hatless ; sun-scorched eyes.
90 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
winking through sun-bleached lashes; all, Yankee and Irishman and Province-man, black-eyed Indian and blue-eyed Indian, waiting on big Joe Attien towering in the stern, confident that what he did would be done right. Seven men, and four were looking backward to the shore and three were facing forward toward the water, four one way and three the other, as if emblem- atic of the coming moment when they should be divided by three and by four, for life, for death. What they thought and how they felt, who could tell now ? but out of all those there, the man's heart which would have been best worth reading was that spare man's on the lazy seat, who knew rough water, and could see ahead, and who had nothing at all to do. If he unbuckled his stout, calked brogans, and slipped them off his feet, who could say whether it was done from fear or from foresight ?
Then the poles dip, the long spruce iron-shod poles at bow and stern, the oars sweep shallow water, and, splashing and gritting gravel as they push oflF, the poles
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dipping one side and the other, abreast and backward, Hke the long legs of an un- certain-minded crane-fly, they shove her out.
And then was their black fate close upon them : she did not swing to the current ; she was too heavy ; the crew were raw to one another and to the boat; bow and stern did not respond as they always had done when Steve Stanislaus and Joe handled boat, as their old crews still say, "just like one man." Logy and bewildered, instead of turning promptly to the current, the old boat let the water catch her under- neath her side. It shot her straight across the channel, right among the ugly rocks on the other shore, close above the Blue Rock Pitch. Before she could be straight- ened, the River took her in his giant hands and smashed her side against a rock, smote her down with such a crash that the men along the banks who saw and heard it cannot be convinced that she was not wrecked ; and some who saw her fill so suddenly still declare that her whole bottom was torn off as you rip the peel
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from a mandarin orange. That is not true ; she was not much hurt. But eigh- teen hundred pounds of boat and men were hurled upon that sunken rock with the full force of the River. The port side buckled fearfully ; the ribs groaned and gave ; the nails screamed as the sharp rock sheared off their heads, and a long yellow shaving, ploughed out of her side, went writhing down the foaming current. Down to the water's edge dipped the up- stream gunwale ; in poured the water in a flood, and before she settled squarely, the lifted port side showed that long and ugly scar. What of the shock that sent the man upon the lazy seat reeling backward, that tumbled the men at the oars forward upon their faces, that wrenched their oars from their hands and threw the batteau seats from the cleats and sent the spare man's driving-shoes adrift among the litter of unshipped seats and useless men ? Un- manned, unmanageable, full to the lips of water, and just on the brink of the Blue Rock Pitch, what could the old boat do? Joe dropped his useless pole and took his
THOREAU'S GUIDE
paddle, but she could not answer to it, and bow-heavy with the weight of water run- ning forward as she felt the incline of the fall, her stern reeling high in air, her crew, disarmed and helpless, crowding on the bowman, she wallowed down that wicked water among rocks and logs.
So much is fairly certain, but beyond this no one seems quite sure ; for I can find no one who saw it. Tobias Johnson's crew could not, not having eyes in the backs of their heads, for they had sprung at once to the rescue in their own boat. The Shirk, who would have been glad to see, was out of the running. In his haste to be on hand, he had tripped him- self on his peavey and had been plunged headforemost into a hole in the jam, where, kicking and clawing, he went off like Mother Hoyt's powder-horn. (Cursing his own awkwardness ? No, not a bit ! Damning the men who were struggling in the water, because they had tripped him up and hadn't given him a fair chance to see them die !) Nor did John Ross on his log-jam see it, though he was so near.
THE PENOBSCOT MAN
" I was on a dry jam right there, but I had kept Levi Hathorn's boat with me in case any one should tumble in or any- thing should happen, and I sent it down to them — and I don't know any more. I saw that they were going to have a hard time, and — and I turned and looked the other way.'* (Ladies and gentlemen, — tender-hearted ladies, high-minded gentle- men,— pause and consider whether, stand- ing there, yours would have been the tran- scendent grace that " turned and looked the other way ! ")
One thing everybody knows, — there were men in that boat who could not swim ; there are such in every boat. The others leaped and swam ; these clung to the boat. And Joe Attien stayed with them, — not clinging as they did, buried in water; not crouching and abject, waiting for the death that faced him,. — not a coward now, never, but paddle in hand, because the water ran too deep for pole-hold, standing astride his sunken boat, a big, calked foot upon either gunwale, working to the last ounce that was in him to drive the sunken wreck
THOREAU'S GUIDE 95
and the men clinging to it into some eddy or cleft of the log-jams before they were carried down over the Heater and that thundering fall of the Grand Pitch. It is the last one sees of Joe Attien, no one has reported anything after that; one remem- bers him always as standing high in the stern of his boat, dying with and for his men.
The Humane Society gives no medals for rescues made along the river ; our men have nothing to show for anything they have done ; but when all the paeans of brave deeds are chanted, let some one re- member to sing the praises of Tobias John- son's crew. We do not speak of them — this is not their day. Enough that when they saw Joe Attien's boat swamp, they all leaped into their places and swept out to the rescue. Man after man they pulled in, heedless of their own safety. The last one they caught when they were just on the verge of the Heater, and then somehow, overloaded as they were, on the brink of sure death, they swung in and crept back to the landing-place.
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Ashore they looked over the saved and called the names of the dead. They had three, McCausland and Joe Solomon and Curran. Joe Attien was gone, and Stephen Tomer, an Indian lad, and Edward Con- ley of Woodstock, and Dingbat Prouty. They still hoped-for these, — hope dies hard, and they knew how difficult it is to drown a man who resolutely prefers to try his chances of being hanged. So they and all who had flocked in to them at the fly- ing rumor of disaster took up pick-poles, pickaroons, peavies, whatever might be used to save a living man or to recover the body of a drowned one, and set oflF down the drivers' path which skirts the falls.
There was little hope of finding Joe. When they saw him go, they all understood that, dead or alive, they would find him with his men. But Dingbat had been seen swimming strongly. If the logs had not crushed him nor the rocks broken him, he might yet be picked up in some inshore cove, where the eddy played, clinging to the alders, too fordone to pull himself out, but still alive.
THOREAU'S GUIDE 97
They searched well, and they searched some time before they found him, — for I had it from one who was there, — and when they did discover him, it was the rescuers who were scant of breath.
" Ga-w-d ! but don't he seem to be takin' it easy ! " said one.
For a man who had just been through what he had been through, he certainly was taking it very easy. He was sitting on a log out in an eddy, a great huUing-ma- chine log, peeled by the rocks in rapids, with tatters of bark hanging to its scarred sides, bitten to the quick by the ledges, broomed at the ends by being tumbled over falls. There in the eddy it was drift- ing, because it was too big to be dislodged until some driver prodded it out and over the Grand Pitch. Unable to escape, it went sailing round and round, sometimes butting other logs and ramming the weaker ones out into the rapids, sometimes nos- ing up against the line of the current, and always drawing back again into its quiet haven, swimming slowly, but swinging often, ever a little beyond the line of the
98 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
bushes, ever a little inside the line of the current. The falls-spume gathered in clots against the side farthest from the eddy's vortex, and the torrent, as it rushed past, threw up wavelets that lapped its flanks. There in the warm morning sunshine, wet as a drowned rat, his hair plastered over his sharp-cut face, and the wrinkles round his nose showing clearer than common, sat the missing bowman, dripping from every edge and elbow, but stolidly sucking his pipe.
"Well, I call that nerve!'' remarked one of the rescuers, viewing him from be- hind a screen of bushes. He appreciated the self-command it took for a man con- siderably more than half drowned and en- tirely soaked to get out his old pipe, dig her clean, and clamp her under his spiked shoe to dry while he peeled his wet to- bacco down to the solid heart of it, got out his matches from his little water-tight vial, and filled and lit her up. They admired his young bravado and waited a moment watching him, as, theatrically unconscious of their presence, which he well enough observed, he drew at his pipe and swung
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with the eddy, his shadow now falling to the front, now to the rear.
" Ain't he a James Dickey-bird ! " said another beneath his breath.
Then Dingbat overdid the matter.
"Where's that damned Injun?" he demanded, suddenly acknowledging their presence.
The ichor of swift resentment coursed through their veins; already it was settled in their minds who was responsible for this disaster. Here he was, safe enough, hav- ing saved himself ; Joe Attien was dead trying to save his crew. As the lightning- flash sometimes photographs indelibly the objects nearest where it strikes, so on the minds of these men that unfeeling ques- tion branded forevermore the pictures that stood for those two lives, — Dingbat float- ing at his ease in the eddy, having looked out for himself, Joe Attien drowned and battered and lost among logs and ledges, willing to lose himself if he might save his crew. They have never forgotten, never will forget that diff^erence. To this day, when you ask one of them who was
100 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
there at the time how Joe Attien died, this contrast leaps before him, and he says that Dingbat Prouty did it.
The rapids give place to river meadows, the meadows grow into salt shore-marshes, the marshes lose themselves at the verge of ocean, and a mist creeps up out of the sea. Time levels and softens all, and draws a veil of haze across to hide what is un- pleasantly harsh. So be it ! Let all that is unworthy, low, or mean be blotted out, provided that the lights we steer by, the beacons across the wide waste waters, be not dimmed; — leave us, O Time, the memory of men like this !
I was a tiny child when Joe Attien died. He had been a familiar friend, and often, no doubt, he fondled me as he did his own babies. But I do not remember him. Instead I recall — not clearly, though I somehow know that it was they — the del- egation of Indians who came down to ask my father where they should go to look for his body. They were tall, and I looked
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through their legs as between tree-trunks, and the shadow of grief on their dark faces made them like the heavy tops of the pine-trees, trees of mournfulness and sighing.
"Spos'n' gov'nor could got pole-holt, she could saved 'em."
And, " She could saved it herself gov'- nor, 'cause she strong man and could swim, but she want to preservation crew."
So my father pondered the problem, and told them where to look for the body. " A brick would swim in that water, it is so strong," said he. " The governor was a heavy man, but unless he is jammed under logs or wedged between rocks, he will be carried right down over Grand Pitch. As soon as the current slackens, it will drop him and he will sink in shallow water at the inlet to the pond. It is hot weather now, and the water being shoal there, by the time you can get up river the body will have risen ; you will find it in the upper end of Shad Pond."
It all came out as he had predicted. The body of Edward Conley had been
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picked up above the falls several days be- fore, but the two Indians they found to- gether in Shad Pond on Sunday, the sixth day. They took both the bodies ashore, and where they landed they cut a deep cross into a tree ; and because they could not treat lightly anything which had be- longed to so brave a man, Joe Attien's boots they hung upon a limb of the tree. There the river-drivers left them till they wasted away, a strange but sincere memo- rial of a good man.
THE GRAY ROCK OF ABOL
THE GRAY ROCK OF ABOL
The region of which I speak is a dreary region ... by the borders of the river . . . and there is no quiet there, nor silence. . . . The waters of the river . . . palpitate forever and forever beneath the red eye of the sun. . . . But there is a boundary to their realm — the boundary of the dark, horrible, lofty forest. . . .
And mine eyes fell upon a huge gray rock which stood by the shore of the river. . . . And the rock was gray, and ghastly, and tall, — and the rock was gray. . . .
" And I looked, . . . and there stood a man upon the sum- mit of the rock. . . .
"And mine eyes fell upon the countenance of the man, and his countenance was wan with terror. . . . And the man shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, in haste, so that I beheld him no more. ' ' — Poe.
This is the story of the man who was drowned at the Gray Rock of Abol. Here is the whole story — all sides of it : make of it what you will.
"The Indian thought that we should lie by on Sunday/' writes Thoreau, and it is not the only instance where Thoreau naively chronicles some attempt on the part of Joe Polls to bring his manners up
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to the standards of woods etiquette. " Said he,^ We come here lookum things, look all round; but come Sunday, lock up all that, and then Monday look again.' He spoke of an Indian of his acquaintance who had been with some ministers to Ktaadn, and had told him how they conducted. This he described in a low and solemn voice. ' They make a long prayer every morning and night, and at every meal. Come Sun- day,' said he, * they stop 'em, no go at all that day, — keep still, — preach all day, — first one, then another, just like church. Oh, ver good men.' "
Here evidently comes a gap in the con- versation. It is plain that the hermit of Walden was not impressed by this improv- ing example, or said something slighting, and Joe Polls, ever a stout debater, sought to strengthen his own argument for Sab- bath-keeping by some unanswerable proof of the goodness of these men. Ordinarily, would Joe Polls have told the story that follows ? He must have known many such, but he never told another to Thoreau. However, the proof of these men's piety
THE GRAY ROCK 107
being irrefutable, he brings it forth. " ^ One day/ said he, ' going along a river, they came to the body of a man in the water, drowned good while, all ready fall to pieces. They go right ashore, — stop there, go no farther that day, — they have meeting there, preach and pray just like Sunday. Then they get poles and lift up the body, and they go back and carry the body with them. Oh, they ver good men.' " Not a very cor- rect account of what happened, as we shall see, but what Joe Polis thought he had heard from John Franceway,' who was there. The two Indians had agreed that to give Christian burial to this man was a sure proof of goodness.
But is the poet-naturalist impressed with the beauty of this act of piety to the un- known dead, the mere body of corruption now, but once a man, —
Cut off even in the blossoms of his sin, Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd" ?
" I judged," said he, " from this account that their every camp was a camp-meeting,
^ Francois, of course, but called Franceway when it was not made into Plassoway, Brassway, or Brassua.
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and they had mistaken their route, — they should have gone to Eastham ; that they wanted an opportunity to preach more than to see Ktaadn. I read of a similar party that seem to have spent their time there singing the songs of Zion. I was glad that I did not go to that mountain with such slow coaches."
The reverse of the shield presents a very different picture.
The only one of this party whom I have known personally was, at the time of this little woods excursion in 1857, already something of a veteran in adventure. He had hunted big game on the coast of Africa and pirates in the China seas ; he had been harried and almost annihilated by such a typhoon as comes but twice in a century, and he was one of those who, with Commo- dore Perry, turned a leaf of destiny by ran- ging Japan with the nations of the West.'
By his friendly courtesy, I have under my hand an unpublished autograph ac-
I Professor John S. Sewall of the Bangor Theological Seminary.
THE GRAY ROCK 109
count of this trip, written before Mr. Tho- reau had ever set pen to paper upon his own record. Such a vivacious little nar- rative as it is, effervescing with puns and bright word-play, turning all the hardships of a toilsome cruise into the most laugh- able of adventures. Not even Theodore Winthrop's boyish account of his trip down the West Branch touches the fun and frolic of these psalm-singing ministers.
There were eighteen in the party, — ten theological students, two friends of theirs, and six boatmen, with three batteaus. They made the trip from Bangor to the top of Katahdin and back in ten days, com- ing from the summit of Katahdin into Bangor in just three days, which must be very near a record, there being no railroad then above Oldtown. It was an uncom- monly rainy year, and they suffered tor- tures from black flies and mosquitoes. The bulk of their food was hard-tack and dried herring. They made forced marches, and had totally insufficient tent-room. But there is not the suspicion of a complaint all through this little history, not even that
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first night in a rainstorm, when eighteen men are trying to decide how they are all to sleep in a shelter tent but twenty feet long, and the problems of stowage are so great that one of the boatmen inquires whether "the long ones will take the tent lengthwise or crawl in twice." The meagreness of their outfit they made up for by the mock splendor of their titles, being officially known as the Grand Mufti, the Bivalvular Purveyor, the Drum Major, Esculapius, and the Bashaw of Two Tails, " who was no tale-bearer in spite of his slanderous title, whose duty it was to keep the stragglers up, to preserve the caudal ex- tremity of the line in due proportions, and bring the tour at last to a successful ter- mination/' Upon the top of Katahdin the Grand Mufti fell to calculating " how large a constabulary would be required to put down such a rising of the mass," and the shivering Drum Major " broke out into demi-semi-quavers all over ; in fact, his music only made to achieve alternately a ^ shake ' and a ^rest/ " Thus it is all, ex- cellent fooling, not a bit like the " road to
THE GRAY ROCK iii
Eastham." Mr. Thoreau need have had no fears that he would not have been put quite upon his mettle to keep up with either the wit or the paces of this party.
In due place mention is made of that Sunday spent in a camp of green boughs just below the timber-line of Katahdin, — " a Sabbath among the clouds, long to be remembered as most like to the Sabbath above the clouds. There were songs of Zion — and meetings — even a sermon in our gypsy camp. Had we climbed so far toward heaven, yet not to get a glimpse of the pearly gates ? . . . Katahdin was to us as were the Delectable Mountains to Christian and Hopeful, whence could be seen with telescopic faith some of the glory of the Celestial City." (One has the right to meditate upon what one wills ; the curi- ous may compare Mr. Thoreau's profitable cogitations, when on the same spot, upon Titans, Chaos, Vulcan, and Prometheus.)
Forty-seven years after that was written, another member of the same party recalls the day : —
" You remember the Sabbath we spent
112
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upon Katahdin, the glorious outlook from the mountain, the serious, but grotesque appearance of our company as we joined in the Sabbath services, Parker in his shirt- sleeves and gloves, with mosquito netting over his head, preaching the sermon, while the rest of us, a number of whom have gone to worship in a grander temple, were recHning in positions which we would hardly commend to the congregations whom we have ministered to since in the House of God.
" One of my pleasantest memories of that Sabbath is of our boatmen, who seemed the most interested participants in that service, two of whom, I was told, not long after were convertedand took a manly stand for Christ, one of them joining the church in Oldtown, and both dating the beginning of their religious interest from that Sab- bath and the way we kept it, so different from any they had ever witnessed in that region. All of our party on that trip have seemed very near and dear to me, and not the least precious to my memory are the men who so kindly, and in such a bro-
THE GRAY ROCK 113
therly way, guided and cared for us. How faithfully and nobly our Indian guide led us ! Those rivermen are more serious and thoughtful than they usually have credit for. They are sharp and quick to read character, especially to know who is inter- ested in them, and no men, I believe, are more faithful to a trust which has been committed to them in confidence."
The records are full, but upon one point there is not a word, and that is how they found and buried the body of that dead river-driver. Had not Thoreau recorded it, I, who have inquired somewhat closely into woods history ^nd for many years have known the chronicler of the expedition, though hearing often enough of the man who was drowned at the Gray Rock of Abol, might never have heard the sequel to the story. The only public mention any of the twelve seems ever to have made of the incident was some time after Tho- reau's thrust was published, when one of the party printed a brief statement of the facts in the " Congregationalist" for August 17,1866. He says: —
114 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
" The body which we found near the head of Lake Pockwockamus was that of a poor lumberman, drowned some four or five weeks before, in driving logs. The spot was so near the ground where we had determined to halt for dinner, that we kept on, dined, and then a party of volunteers went back to perform the last rites of sepul- ture. A rudely carved fragment of slate was nailed to a tree at the head of the grave, and served to tell the occasional hunter in these trackless wilds of the disaster which had befallen the sleeper beneath. A brief prayer at the grave, with a few passages from the Book of Books, was the simple service which committed dust to dust.
"It was not because we were a party of ^ slow coaches ' that we halted for this act of respect to the remains of a brother man. The incident was certainly a sobering one; and yet there was a degree of satisfaction in being able to carry back to the friends the tidings that the body of him whom they mourned, and for whom they had twice sent parties in search, had been found and had received Christian burial."
THE GRAY ROCK 115
These are the documents on both sides, for whose discrepancies in fact and feel- ing the two Indians, Polis and Franceway, are accountable. They are more than the mere papers in a case. Here, on either side, drawn up as if in review, are the two parties to the difference, men with the best that culture, learning, and philosophy could give, yet neither seeing in the incident anything deeply significant ; and between them files this little column of woods-bred men who read in it so much more, who are so struck by its rarity and beauty that they listen gladly to sermons and change the current of their lives. They speak of it to each other and, as it flies, the story grows until what seems truth to Joseph Polis is quite unlike the facts.
Deep impressions imply adequate causes: what was sufficient so to impress Joe Po- lis ? For he did not get his version of the story from John Franceway. John knew that only a part of his company went back to bury this man. The chronicler, cross- examined, says that he was washing dishes for eighteen men ; others also were ab-
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sent. John knew that they made no unnecessary delay, for on that day, the twenty-sixth of June, they covered the whole distance from the foot of Ambajejus Carry to the mouth of Abol Stream. Doubtless he told Joe Polls this, and Joe, knowing the country well, could not for- get it. Only twenty-four days elapsed be- tween the date of John Franceway's return and the day upon which Thoreau wrote in his journal, not time enough for a woods- man to forget anything which had been told him ; yet here is Joseph Polls, fully convinced of its truth, telling Thoreau, "in a low and solemn voice," that the \yhole party stopped a full half day on Pockwockamus Carry, about midway of their actual day's journey, in order to do honor to the grave of an unknown man, and the implication is strong that the most of this time was filled with religious ser- vices on his behalf. No wonder that to Thoreau it touched on the grotesque !
How is this to be accounted for ? Fraud it is not ; it cannot be forgetfulness ; lack of information is hardly possible ; it can-
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117
not be from a pious reverence for masses for the dead — for Joe Polis v/as a Pro- testant Indian.' It is sheer artistic instinct, the human trait of wishing to inclose what is uniquely excellent in the rarest and cost- liest setting. Joseph Polis had improved the story unconsciously.
Thoreau, who had come into the Maine woods to study the Indian, might well have taken time to probe this subtle mat- ter, for here is something truly strange. However, with his luckless knack of blundering when he came in contact with men, in his own phrase, he "improved his opportunity to be ignorant." The most significant incident that ever came under his observation while he was in the Maine woods he bungled utterly. Once, indeed, he had been hot on the trail of a solution. In camp at Kineo he had seen for the first time a bit of phosphorescent wood, and kindled by its cold fire, he writes four pages about the phenomenon. " It sug- gested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a be-
I So he told Thoreau 5 but he died a Catholic.
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liever of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as my- self any day.'' ' But in just two days from that time Thoreau was shutting the mouth of the man who could have told him all he wanted to know. Joe Polis knew all about the man who was drowned on the Gray Rock of Abol ; Joe Polis could have shown him all the spirits he wanted to see!
Ah, the graves in the woods that one who knows can tell of, lying singly, by twos, by threes, by half-dozens ! This One, That One, The Other, — then, as recollection must travel back of the limits of one man's life. Some One, Nobody- Knows-Who, but it must have been a grave, for the ground is springy and hol- lowed, and about there is a line of mould as if long back a fence of logs had guarded a little space. So many of them ! and every one doomed to be obliterated within
I Pp. 244-248, Maine Woods, New Riverside Edition. The context is well worth looking up.
THE GRAY ROCK 119
the lifetime of the men who knew all about them. That is what gets upon a man's mind and gnaws it like a bone, the know- ing that where he falls he will lie, like a log in the forest, unburied or lost to recol- lection. The quiet cemetery with white palings and neat headstones ; the narrow, orderly streets ; the heaped-up mounds grown with grass ; the society of kindred and acquaintance although in perpetual si- lence, and the undisturbed possession of even a narrow plot of earth come to him in his visions with a desire as strong as the longing for life itself. He knows how it will be with him, — to be jammed in the rapids under rocks, to float in some dark eddy, to be cast out under the toss- ing, creaking flowage of some lake, never to be found, or to be buried by the path- way, even so near that the passing will soon go on over his head, and the men who come after and curse the hollow in the road that fills up with water will not know that it is his grave. It was so with those three buried at Howe Falls on Nahma- kanta, where supplies were hauled over
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the graves on purpose that the men might not know and lose their courage. He re- members at Pollywog Pond the eight graves in one place, and one in another, of those drowned on Nigger Pitch; two at the mouth of Bean Brook ; seven at Howe Falls Deadwater, of those who died of smallpox, and six more at Logan Joe Mary, dead of the same scourge. There are all those who have died at Ripogenus, and those down by Grand Falls, where their names are scratched upon the rocks, the only enduring memorial in all the woods. How many he knows of here and there, lying singly, unmarked, buried in silence to wait in awful solitude. Every grave is his own in possibility : he never thinks of it slightingly. Death is still Death in the woods, though outside now it may be nothing but death.
Yet not even the solemnity of a death in the wilderness explains why John France- way and those other five, some of whom knew this man and were near at hand when he was drowned, regarded this incident as so deeply solemn. For it was not the
THE GRAY ROCK
prayers and preaching upon the mountain, it was something else that so impressed them. Behind the stage on which they were but players was the terrifying hell-fire of Calvinism, Methodism, Wesleyanism, mingling in contiguous incongruity with the Romanist's purging flames ; and before that lurid background they were all play- ing in a drama of redemption and damna- tion, not knowing when any one of them was to leave the stage, nor what he was or- dained to do upon it. But this man's part was clear : he had played it out to damna- tion, and made his exit, and no man might deny that the doom was warrantable. It was the tragic rightness of his fate, than which the greatest of the playwrights have conceived nothing more sternly just, that conquered their imaginations.
For they knew the whole story ; they had witnessed the man's sin and his prompt, almost miraculous punishment ; and they knew that his ghost cried unburied ; yet now they saw him redeemed from the damned into purgatorial hope, and, by a special providence of God, given what no
122 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
man buried in those woods had ever had before, the rites of Christian sepulture, — a man who died under the curse of God, by a just judgment ; who was lost irre- coverably ; who was found at the last pos- sible moment, his grave consecrated, his spirit set at rest.
Moreover, because the Indian who saw it chanced to tell another within three weeks of his return, and because that one by a still rarer chance told it to a man who wrote everything down, even the things he did not understand, the man who died for- saken and alone has had the whole world come to his obsequies. So far from being placed obscurely in the wilderness, that Gray Rock of Abol stands in the eyes and sight of all.
These are strange stories, but they well up out of the hearts of men, and in them are the issues of Hfe. Men do not perish alone, unknown, forsaken, forgotten. The constitution of the universe forbids. The truth about them must leap out some time, and be written on the skies like the flashes of the midnight Aurora ; somewhere it is
THE GRAY ROCK 123
to be known what they were, where they failed, wherein they made their conquests, — their treachery, their faithfulness — their cowardice, their courage — their shameless- ness, their honor — but most of all and longest enduring, their better parts.
We come now to the story, no more the facts about the story, but the story itself.
There are many gray rocks on Abol : Mount Katahdin put them there. Ka- tahdin rules over all that West Branch country, a calm despot. Mute, massive, immense, hard-featured, broad-shouldered, nowhere can you get in that country where the broad forehead of Katahdin is not turned upon you. Snow and rain it sends to that region ; it floods the river from its flanks ; its back cuts ofi^ the north wind, making the valley hot ; the road of the farmer it has closed, and the way of the lumberman it makes unduly difficult, by sowing the whole country with millions of tons of granite chipped from its sides. From Abol all
124 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
the way down those many falls, Pockwock- amus, Katepskonhegan, called more often Debsconeag, Pescongamoc, which we now call Passangamet, and Ambajejus, the river in half a dozen places is choked with these great granite boulders, quarried by the frost from the sides of Katahdin,and by the ice transported all over the country. Katah- din makes all that region what it is ; it made the falls, and, indirectly, the back- breaking carries around them ; it made the sand on Abol, the first place on the way downstream where you notice clear sand above freshet level ; it turned the course of the glaciers and so directed the horse- backs of the glacial drift ; it made the Nor- way pines ' that grow on the horsebacks, with their hearse-like plumes switching in the breeze like stiff, rustling silk ; and it made all the gray rocks. In this region a "gray rock," or a "great gray," is the accepted synonym for a boulder of Katah- din granite.
Abol is the first fall upon which Katah- *
I Pinus resinosa, the red pine, wrongly called Nor- way pine,"" says Gray, but here always so misnamed.
THE GRAY ROCK 125
din has laid a heavy finger/ being the nearest to the mountain. It goes by many names, according as the Indian has been twisted into forms more or less easy for the lumberman's tongue, — Aboljecarme- guscook, Abolje^^rmegus, Aboljackne^d'- sic, Aboljacko;;?d'gus, Aboljackarne^<^jsic, — but it means just the same to say simply Abol. The signification is not " smooth ledge falls,*' as Thoreau gives it — that is Sowadabscook, a hundred miles farther down. The name means " place where the water laughs in coming down," and be- longs to two streams of crystal water, blue as ice, that spring from the side of Katah- din and enter the river just above the falls, which by Indian custom take their name from the stream.
The fall at Abol is nothing stupendous. There is half a mile of very rough water, but no sharp pitch. At the head, on the right, lies a low, sandy island overgrown
I Not to be construed as meaning that there is no gran- ite above this point. Loose granite appears on the lower end of Ripogenus, and ledge granite not far below, but the drift boulders are not aggressively conspicuous till near to Abol.
126 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
with inferior brushwood, and, like the rest of the carry, bearing a few scattered Nor- way pines. The passage behind it is closed by a wing dam, making a dry way ; one might go upon the island without thinking that it had ever been parted from the shore.
Here by the head of the island are the gray rocks of Abol. They lie close to the water, at some stages under it, great slabs of granite, as true as if split out by the hand of man. Most of them are from fif- teen to eighteen feet long, about four and a half feet deep, and of a thickness varying from that of a thin slab of nine or ten inches to one of two and a half feet mean width. Several lie parallel, their fractures curving coincidently, showing that they have been split since they arrived. All are large, but one ranks all the others. It is thirty-six and a half feet long, five feet and ten inches at its widest point, and four feet and nine inches at its greatest thickness, with mean dimensions not very consider- ably less, perfect in shape, the most tre- mendous natural obelisk anywhere to be found. These are the gray rocks of Abol,
THE GRAY ROCK 127
rifted out of the side of old Katahdin, which crouches lion-Hke only six miles off, watching them as the Sphinx watches the little shrine between his paws, looking out over the desolation of the wilderness.
When the water is at its height, most of these slabs are submerged, but there is one rock that is always above the surface. This is the one that has a name. Old men sometimes call it the Goodwin Rock, but those who are younger and those who came before, for fifty, sixty, perhaps al- most a hundred years, have known it as the Gray Rock of Abol. Standing where it does, within the suck of the current, though so near inshore, — for the current draws upon the head of the island, — a man is always stationed upon it when the logs are running, to prevent jams from forming. There is not the slightest danger in working upon the Gray Rock. It is about three feet out of water at driving- pitch, dry always ; it is close inshore ; the water is not yet rough, only strong; and it is the coarse granite from Katahdin, upon which a man's foot cannot slip. There is
128 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
no danger at all upon the Gray Rock, no more than upon a ball-room floor.
But now it is almost fifty years since Goodwin of Stetson found that rock his doom. Of a May morning, too, when the little wintergreen sprouts, tender and red, were coming up on the cradle-knolls, and the bees were in the blueberry blooms, and here and there a wild woods-straw- berry, blossoming white, made the drivers think of home. There was such a bright stillness on the morning, and Katahdin, the old giant, still snow^-capped, looked down benignly, as if he had waked up good-natured, and, throwing off his blan- ket of clouds, had put up his head before doffing his nightcap. " Good-morning to you ! " he called out to the river-drivers working on the foaming river a full mile below his crown. They waved him back a salute. They yelled as they worked. It was great fun to work on such a clean, crisp morning, and as they felt the strength of the current and rode down to the head of the falls, balancing on a single log, they yelled at Goodwin on the Gray Rock.
THE GRAY ROCK 129
That was not Goodwin's day to be merry. Something had gone wrong with him, and he stood on that gray granite from the mist-time of early morning till luncheon-time, when they lost him, a sombre figure wrapped in sullen thoughts, lunging spitefully with his pick-pole at every log, however innocent of evil inten- tions of jamming, that ran out a blunt nose by his rock just to have a look at him. Whenever they came near him, the poor dumb logs, he prodded them viciously with his pick-pole, and drove them off into the slick of the current and cursed them for their stupidity. Not even the brightness of the morning beguiled him from his evil humor. No man knew what the matter was. He did not have a bad name, his mates spoke well of him ; it might have been homesickness; it might have been the toothache ; it might have been the wave of world-woe that surges over a man now and then from depths he cannot sound ; but there he stood, all alone on the gray granite, stretching out his fist in wanton perversity of spirit, and
130 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
with blackening oaths cursed God Al- mighty, damning God to God's own face in the wilderness all alone.
" There ain't no sense in talkin' that way/' said one man to another in disap- proval as they rode down past on their logs.
"It's darin' too much, even in a safe place like he 's in, it is," replied the other, riding his log right into the white of the rapid ; " I would n't do it, not here, not for no money."
Still the man on the shore station cursed, swore, damned with imprecations every- thing that came near him, and no one knew, no one ever knew, what was the trouble with him.
For he disappeared. He was in a safe place, and he fell off. He was in quiet water, strong, not bad, and he did not reach the shore. He was a good swimmer, but he never struck out. One man saw above the slope of the current downstream of the rock, a pair of hands reaching up toward heaven, — just a pair of hands, never anything more.
THE GRAY ROCK 131
The man who had seen this told the others. " 1 seen him stand there like he was on a barn floor, and I seen him lift up his fist an' shake it -right stret in the face of old Katahdin, an' I hearn him holler like his voice would rattle lead inside him, ' To hell with God ! ' An' then when I looked the Gray Rock was all empty, an' in the water I seen only his two sets of fin- gers movin' slow-like in the mist that sticks close to the black slick of the falls. I seen 'em open once, an' then they shut an' was gone."
" That was a judgment," said the men one to another.
" That was sure a judgment for swear- in'," they answered solemnly, continuing their search for his body.
But the body was not to be found.
" And it ain't to be expected it ever will be. It ain't often that you do find 'em when they dies so by a judgment," said one of the wise ones who could remember much that had happened on the river. " Lucky for you fellows if everything keeps quiet around here. I 'm glad I 'm goin' right
132 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
along with the head of the drive and shan't have to camp none on this carry."
The man next to him — who was to stay — looked at him a Httle startled — and kept silent.
It was as they had predicted, nothing was ever found of the man, though two parties were sent up on purpose to search after the drive had passed down. " He left a mother/' as the phrase is, which means in woods talk that he was the only son of a widow, and for his mother's sake all was done that could be. But the search was fruitless.
" I knew it would be just that way," said the wise one ; " it 's always so with judgments; that 's a part of it — they can't never be quiet till they are buried, and they don't never get buried, not that kind, when they die damning God that way."
What of the weeks that followed in the desolation of the wilderness ? * The little flowers sprouted leaves and buds, and the buds grew to blossoms; the pine pollen drifted down in golden showers, and the
THE GRAY ROCK 133
tree swallow built her nest. Everything alive was happy and moving. There was no foot of man, however, on those carries. Showers fell and the damp they left dried up, and never a human foot-track was im- printed upon the softened soil. But round about the rocks of Abol, under the pines on the carry, those tall and funereal Nor- ways, what was it that wailed and cried ?
Crushed by the waves upon the crag was I,
Who still must hear these waves among the dead.
Breaking and brawling on the promontory. Sleepless ; and sleepless is my weary head!
Nor Death that lulleth all, can lull my ghost. One sleepless soul among the souls that sleep ! ' '
" And I would n't not want to camp on that carry, not now," says the hunter; " for mebbe I should be for seein' things."
Your guide is not superstitious. Ask him if he believes in ghosts, and he will look straight through and beyond you. " No," says he, as short and sharp as a rifle-crack.
But then your guide knows many things
134 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
which it is not to be expected that he will impart to you. When the wind sobs out- side and the rain is on the roof, the fall rain that brings down the withered leaves, and you sit by the fire listening to the wailing wind, then will be the time you choose to talk to him of things you know yourself. It was your father's cousin who had warning when his friend's ship went down in the China seas ; the day and the hour he knew. Did his friend not appear at his bedside at the edge of dawn, his hat crushed down over his eyes and a gray ship's blanket drawn around his shoulders, just as he had sprung up the companion- way when the ship reeled under her last blow and foundered ? It was two days after they had cleared from Hong Kong, and he always knew what he saw. Your uncle, he had seen things too. Once, when he was sitting in his cabin in mid-ocean, in the calm of evening, a woman passed through the room wringing her hands, and she passed through again and wrung her hands, and a third time, still wringing her hands, and he never knew what it meant, only he saw it.
THE GRAY ROCK 135
" And it 's lucky he did n't ask her no questions/' says the guide, speaking up promptly ; " for any one that talks to a ghost, they don't Hve the year out, they don't live long mostly. I knowed a man — and it was my father — he was follered by a ghost, and she spoke. She asked him for a cup of salt he had borrered, and he said he 'd pay it back, and he did, but he did n't live long after that."
Your guide is not superstitious, but he has seen some strange things. He knows, for one, that murdered men and suicides and men who have died under a judgment are never easy till something is done for them. "If a man kills himself, his ghost is bound to stay around the place he did it *s long 's the house is there; there was Frank Black killed himself in a camp up by Grant Farm, year the war broke out, and they did n't have no peace nor quiet long as them camps stayed. And if a man is murdered, he will stay round till his body is found ; if you want to know for sure, there 's the way Dudley Maxfield's ghost ha'nts round that poke-logan hole up to
136 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
Ayers's Rips. But if a man dies under a judgment, then they don't never find his body, not at all, and that was how it was with Larry Connors."
Up and down that carry at Abol all that month and the next ranged the spirit of the man who was drowned at the Gray Rock. That is the name he has come to be known by, not his own, but as " the man who was drowned at the Gray Rock of Abol."
In the rain beneath the Norways, in the moonlight by the sandy carry-end, he paced till cock-crow. The nights were short then, but he paced till daybreak. In the cloud of the falls-mist he wandered, more impalpable than that, searching among the rocks for his former habitation. When he had found it, down along the tangled shores of the deadwater below Abol, he traveled, slowly, each night a trifling jour- ney, following what he must not lose sight of, desiring infinitely the burial which was to be denied him. "To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad ?"
Shorter still grew the nights, yet longer
THE GRAY ROCK 137
grew his journeyings, for the stream be- came stronger and talked louder, and threw up spray and beat among the rocks of the ragged Pockwockamus. It is a rough and terrible journey down among those rocks, and the lost soul might well have shud- dered as he saw what happened to the tenantless and battered body, useless, yet still so precious, which he was following. On the shortest night of the year, it came safely out of the current of the deadwater into an eddy some distance below the fall.
It was, and doubtless still is, a pretty spot, with tall trees overarching and a sandy shore, so quiet and beautiful, and yet not far above are the great gray rocks and the thunder of the falls. There by the moonlight, upon the sandy shore, all night long and many nights paced the tortured spirit. The current does not move that eddy, — and the sun beats down upon it,
— and the days of grace are numbered,
— and no one comes.
Then the woods resound with singing. All up and down the river the shores
138 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
reverberate, and Katahdin smiles grimly, his head bare and bald now to the summer sun, to see the joyous troop that comes along. What jokes they make, what mer- riment on the hot, hard carries, what a pace they travel at ! The woods at that day had never seen such a throng of pleasure- seekers. Eighteen men of them, and all singing !
But the guides were thoughtful at times, and sometimes they looked at one another or passed a quiet word. It had begun at Ambajejus that morning, when one boat- man slyly nudged another and asked pri- vately, " Where '11 we be campin' down to-night ? "
" Head of Pockwockamus most likely," was the answer. " It 's a strong pull from there to the top of the mountain in one day, but seein' they want to camp on top, that 's the easiest thing to do. We 'd better save our backs on these carries what we can to-day, and take it out of our legs to-morrow."
" You can count me out on that Pock- wockamus bough-down," said the first, and
THE GRAY ROCK 139
he made a pretext of looking at the pitch on the boats to draw the other away with him out of ear-shot of the rest. " Think a minit/' he said ; " where do you s'pect that that Gooding has got to ? You can just bet your money that it 's no bone to camp downstream of himr
" It ought to be all right with ten min- isters along to keep the boogers off/' de- murred the first ; " and it 's too hard a trip to try to make all these carries in one day, with three boats and only six of us fit to lug boat. It 's two miles of solid carry, and that makes 'most six miles of lugging boat, too much for one day, and it 's most as hard poling up over them rocky hell-holes ; and then that dratted old mountain to-morrow. Tell you, flesh and blood has some rights, I guess, as well as dead folks ! "
" You '11 find me campin' just upstream of Abol when you come to hunt me up to-mor' morninV' said the first quietly.
" Oh, they don't do folks no hurt that ever I heerd of," remarked the other.
" Well, I seen him alive mebbe last of
140 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
any one, and I ain't a-goin' to take no risks. I ain't lost no ghosts, an' I don't want nobody's else's huntin' me up an' bein' sociable. What 's to hender droppin' some of our boats along ? We can leave the little wangan-boat right here at the foot of Am- bajejus, and drop one of the big ones at the foot of Pockwockamus, and let them fellers farm it from there up. That makes only one boat on the last two carries, an' two on Debsconeag an' this, and saves a whole barrel of backaches. Tip the wink to John an' we '11 do it."
" Think them fellers will suspicion any- thing ? " asked the other.
"Them? " retorted the other. "They '11 be blind as bats that has lost their spetta- cles ; lots of things left for them to I'arn arter they get 'em all booked up down to the Institootion ! This ain't no place for us to be stoppin' to eddicate them^ 'less we show 'em how to ride shank's mare on these blasted carries."
The plan was adopted ; the boatmen breathed more freely. It was just at dinner- time, a quarter of a mile below the foot of
THE GRAY ROCK 141
Pockwockamus Carry, where the beach is sandy and the water shoals inshore, that they came upon the body of the man who for five weeks had been missing.
There they gave him Christian burial, close by the water, very close, as it had to be, and yet above the line of the fresh- ets. " Two of our boatmen knew him," writes he who headed the burial party," " and spoke very kindly and feelingly of him. The body was much swollen, and so decomposed that we could only dig a shallow grave in the sand close beside it, which the boatmen made with their pad- dles. The men gently and reverently lifted the body into its resting-place ; we had a funeral service ; one of the men covered the remains with sheets of birch bark which he cut from a tree, and we all seemed to be brothers united by more than any earthly tie, as we proceeded on in our journey."
For the first time ever known within these woods, a man had received Christian burial.
' The Rev. F. P. Chapin of Hudson, N. H.
142 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
The boatmen did not talk much about it then. It was not till they were camped by the mouth of the lower Abol, the fire blazing and supper eaten, that two of them, by a common inclination, wandered off to the shore of the clear stream and sat there in the sunset afterglow, which turned Ka- tahdin to a purple amethyst and flushed the water pink beyond the dark reflection of the further bank.
They sat silent. One had a bit of hard- tack, and he crumbled it slowly to toss to the fishes, watching the lunges that the white chevin, ever active at twilight, made for the flakes as they settled.
" Them 's awful spry fish, them chubs," said he, as if natural history were all that weighed upon his mind ; " I Ve seen 'em 'fore now peel a raw potato all white just jumpin' at it that way, s' sharp in their jaws. And the' 's eels, too, they 're all for — they 're i^ady' said he, suddenly check- ing himself. " You seen how it was to- day ? Tou understood? "
The other shook his shoulders, but did not reply.
THE GRAY ROCK 143
The one who found a relief in words went on. " One minister is enough to do the job for most of us ; he ought n't to be so very bad off with ten of 'em — think so ? "
" Guess he needed most of 'em," re- sponded the other, not too hopeful.
" But don't ye think that 'mongst 'em they could menege to git him his ^ Come- all-yer'? " It was a free woods rendering of the Scripture invitation, " Come unto me, all ye that labor, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
"Well," he went on, not insisting on an answer, " it was an awful lucky thing for him that they chanceted to come along just now, for he could n't have fleeted much longer. No one can't say that Fri- day wa'n't no lucky day for him."
The other did not speak. The silence suited him. He sat with his hands around his knees, looking at the red glow of the evening sky and the twinkling evening star. " Say," said he at length, " how hot do you s'pose hell is anyhow ? "
The next day was Saturday and they
144 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
climbed the mountain. By the next this man was ripe to listen to sermons, and it is reported that they did him no harm.
The next day they all came flying down and pushed far along on their road to the settlements. On the way they paused. It was by the grave of the man whom they had buried. One of them — it was Chapin, who had headed the burial party — brought forth a piece of slate that he had with him and nailed it to the tree at the head of the grave. It said only : —
George Goodwin, June 26, 1857.
More they did not know, neither age, nor home, nor the day he died.
It was almost certainly Sunday labor by which that rude inscription was scratched with a jack-knife upon the bit of slate, — found upon the granite side of Katahdin where slate is rare, and carefully treasured under many difficulties against this use, — but it was labor to be justified by the strict- est Pharisee. Never again would they have opportunity to mark that lonely grave with any sign that it was consecrated
THE GRAY ROCK 145
ground. So they nailed it to the tree at the head of the sleeper, who did not stir, nor moan, nor attempt to talk to them, and they left him there to sleep until the Judgment.
Tree and tablet are both gone now, I am told ; a simple post marks the place, just opposite the head of the second island in Pockwockamus Deadwater, on the right shore, directly across from Ben Harris's camp. An Indian guide tells me that he now and then clears out about it to keep the forest from encroaching, and after his day some one else will take up the task. It is consecrated ground, the only hallowed spot in all that limitless forest. There, two rods from the water, three at most, close by the place where they found him, still rest the bones of the man who was drowned on the Gray Rock of Abol and, by a miracle of God, after death found mercy.
VI
A CLUMP OF POSIES
A CLUMP OF POSIES
I NEVER met the lady face to face, and none of the men ever told me whether they thought her plain or pretty, though they gave out that she was " all right,'' and that they were Amici usque ad araSy or its woods equivalent. However, there can be ho question about the truth of the story : for we were in the woods that year and had the same guide, Wilbur Webster, who was drowned that winter in the lake behind Kineo. Were he alive, he would vouch for all I say ; but I heard enough of it from others. On the whole it is a pretty story.
Down on Ripogenus, where the little knoll springs in the road to give you a view over the treetops of that rounded moun- tain with the shining patches of ledge near its summit, from which all hunters long have called it the Squaw's Bosom, — just about halfway across the carry, a natural
150 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
resting-place, and delightful withal because it is so cosy and yet so open, is the Put- ting-in Place, where in spring the river- drivers launch their boats for the adventur- ous passage of the other mile and a half of Ripogenus. It is delightful there in springtime, hedged with birches, carpeted with bracken, murmuring with the hum of bees and of the rushing river many rods below.
There the batteaus are laid out bottom up ; there the fire smokes under the sear- ing-irons and the keg of pitch is kept hot, while the old batteau-pitcher, deft and wise at his trade, goes over the sides and bot- tom of each one, and daubs and smears and sears with his irons until he has made ready each boat for her ordeal by water, soon to be undergone. Here he sings to himself and smokes, runs his left hand lightly but searchingly over the smooth surface, scan- ning it with close-bent head, before he lifts himself with hands on hips to straighten his bowed back. He is an old man, used to the River ; he likes his calling, but he does not meddle much with young and little
POSIES
things, either to notice or to molest. The brown hare thumps up and sniffs at him and thumps off again ; the vireos and red- starts carol to him without his hearing; and the little flowers grow bravely, unpicked and perhaps unseen. Even the coy lady's- slipper," that wanton, wayward flower, who spreads her skirts and flutters her ribbons, curtsying and coquetting, playing fast-and- loose with all her lovers ; who hides herself in the forest and turns invisible and every year seeks a new home, — even she did not try to fascinate the old man by her capriciousness, but grew boldly out in the sunshine, in a great clump, as thickset as a garden plant, and almost within the cart- track of the carry road. These, however, were the demurest little flowers, not blush- ing pinkish like their coquettish sisters, but immaculately white and as staid as Quaker- esses ; they raised their eleven little heads — a very large family for their tribe — and lifted their great waxen lips and spread their fluttering pennons in purest inno-
" Cypripedium acaule, the stemless lady' s-slipper, our only common species here.
152 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
cence and childlikeness. There was never a prettier bunch of lady's-slippers, and yet of the almost two hundred men who passed there several times a day, not one seemed to have any more eyes than the old batteau- pitcher, not one had ever given them the compliment of a glance. It took some- thing very like a miracle to make those men see what one would have supposed that they could not help seeing ; for the little clump of posies is the beginning and the middle and the ending of this story.
A miracle is, literally, something which excites astonishment. The cause may be decried as commonplace, but there was certainly no deficiency in the effect when the men came dragging in at dusk from their outposts to the camp at the upper end of Ripogenus, and found a new tent there pitched right among their own, and in it a Woman.
"Well, that does beat all hell!" was their frank comment, and there followed interrogations very much to the point, in satisfaction of which those who were lucky
POSIES
153
enough to have been at the upper end of the carry that afternoon, and therefore possessed of the news, announced that though she wa'n't quite a pullet, she wa'n't no old hen neither.
" Schoolma 'am
" Naw ! Not a bittee ! "
" Glasses an' short hair ? "
" Naw ! " (more viciously). " All right, I tell ye, all right, an' Wilbur Webster backs the deal. Friends of Joe Francis's an' Steve's, an' come up the Lake' with the Old Man, who 's comin' down to-morrer. Stands to the West Branch Drive to do the pretty thing by 'em."
Up in the carpenter shop, which was built on an extravagant scale, with the sky for a roof and the whole earth for a floor, and nothing else in it but a litter of shav- ings and a tall horse for making poles and peavey handles, some of the older men discussed the incident without approval.
The grumbler, who was not young, swore about the folly of bringing a woman on the drive where men had to work and
I "The Lake'' always meant Moosehead.
154 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
did n't want to be side-stepping, and where they mebbe might Hke to talk some to their blame selves all on the quiet when the blank logs was contrairy, 'thout havin' to stop and think who was by.
One of the others suggested that at the worst she could n't be everywhere to once, — which was axiomatic, — and as there was a hunderd an' seventy-five of them against her alone, they could gamble on at least a hunderd and seventy-four chances in their favor, which was long odds.
Still the grumbler allowed that it was rank inconsiderate to come their way at all ; that the drive wa'n't no place for a woman anyways, and folks that knowed when they was well oflF stayed to home and let men work ; and if the women took to comin' there so thick, they 'd be just 'bliged to leave the logs in the woods to rot all by their blank selves. He was right, too. Tourists have no more business on the drive than Sunday-school picnics have between firing-lines, and if anything un- pleasant happens, they may blame them- selves.
POSIES
155
There was no rejoicing among the old men over the advent of a woman. Down the hill, in the two long rows of open- fronted tents, with the fires between, the younger fellows also sat in gloom. It did seem a little homey, perhaps, to have a girl around, especially to know that there was a nice girl around, whom one could look at without speaking to, and who would be as much above the reek of their daily life as if living on the top of Katahdin. (She had on a red dress? Well, just like a red-bird in a glass case, to be looked at respectfully without touching.) Ripogenus was hard enough to get logs and boats over ; and the life was monotonous in spite of its dangers. This would be some- thing different, something like going to church, thought one or two. Maybe she might speak to some of them, to a few of them, to one or two of them anyway.
Then they looked across the fire at the fellows on the other side of it. And they saw themselves ! Such a set of tatterde- malions never graced a corn-field. They looked from man to man and saw hardly
156 the; PENOBSCOT MAN.
a whole garment apiece. They saw rags, and they saw holes, and they saw scriptural patches of new cloth upon old garments, producing the prophesied rents. There were men with trousers abbreviated to a sort of trunks, or cut off just below the knee to prevent " calking," and some sen- sitive souls, who abhorred setness of de- sign, wore their nether garments with one leg cut below and the other above the knee. There were some without coat, vest, or trousers, or any part of them, but attired in full suits of underwear. This economical and attractive costume, sometimes white, but oftener originally a vivid scarlet, re- duced by rains and perspiration to a whit- ish red, once whole perhaps, but now pinned together with huge horse safety- pins and variously adorned with patches of old mittens, was an ultra style which would have attracted attention in the most exclusive circles. There were men in rigs in which they would not have let their own mothers see them, and men who, tired and hungry as they were, would not have come down the carry-path till after dark.
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had they known beforehand that there was a woman on the carry. Oh, the dove- cote of the West Branch Drive got flut- tered that time !
But what cause had they to look for such a calamity ? It was thunder out of a clear sky, — everything all right in the morning when they left, and then the thunderbolt ! No human foresight could have warded off^ the stroke, for never within the memory of the oldest man, not of the log-marker, nor the carpenter, nor fhe batteau-pitcher, not of the men who had almost outlived their usefulness, had there ever been a woman on the drive.
" And to have my broadcloth suit to home ! lamented one of the most out at elbows, breaking the gloom.
" And that Chinyman ain't sent back my shiny collars yet this week," said an- other, the joke being that there was not a Celestial within a hundred miles as the crow flew, nor a starched collar within two days' woods journey.
" Well, you 'd ort to see me in my pay- tent leathers and high dickey and ram-
158 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
beaver/' put in a third; "I reckon I 'm just scrum when I do get fixed up ; but it hain't no use ; this here toney underwear that I 'm a-sportin' is too far ahead o' the spring styles for this northern climate ; makes me look like a last year's bird's nest."
" I count a old swamp robin's nest ' a heap tidier lookin' set o' tatters 'n them clo'es what you have on. Bill. It don't look quite so all fallin' to pieces ; but the wangan bills on this drive 's goin' to be somethin' hijjus. I was hopesin' to come out with a dollar or two to the good, time we got into boom, but I guess I sh'll blow it all in for wangan, and come out in the Comp'ny's debt same 's ush'al."
The man next to him was looking at his feet stretched out to the fire. There were neither heels nor toes to the socks he had on, but still he accounted them presenta- ble ; anything is that has an inch or two of the top left.
I "Swamp robin" is the vernacular name for the hermit thrush and also for the olive-backed, the two not being distinguished by woodsmen ; but as the former nests on the ground, this man must have meant the olive- backed thrush's or even the catbird's nest.
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" Guess I sh'll hev to give 'em their time, boys; they '11 do for patches anyhow. If there was more pairs of 'em, it would be easier to shingle 'em on over the wust o' the holes. Say, can't I swap my jack-knife for a pair of old mittens ? "
Thereupon the price of old mittens and stockings went up by jumps, till the mar- ket in worn-out socks was the firmest ever known on the drive. No danger of its being suddenly beared by some one with a reserve of foot and hand gear. That year there was n't a cast-off garment left upon the end of the carry, and every one knows that usually the path of the drive is littered with old clothes and old shoes. The de- mand for thread and needles was lively also, and had any one been playing Peep- ing Polly that night, long after their usual hour for turning in, the West Branch Drive might have been seen bending over their work, patching by firelight, in weariness of soul, but with the honest intention of being presentable on the morrow.
But when they got a chance at the wan- gan chest and could endow themselves in
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its glories, what a brave array of aniline they did present ! Even Solomon might have studied their attire to the profitable neglect of the lily of the field. To attempt to describe the styles at Ripogenus that year would beggar the describer. Full suits of underwear went out of fashion with a bound, and a kaleidoscope of cut and color followed, — red, blue, green, yel- low, stripes, plaids, patches. The Girl had known a little of the rainbow attractions of Epstein's and of Pretto's, but such cheerful combinations of color were wholly new ; she wondered where is the Zeit- geist's shop and the roaring loom which wove such clothes. Some no doubt they brought into the woods with them ; some they purchased from the wangan chest; but some must have come straight from Tom a Bedlam's. It would have turned the head of any girl who thought that so much was done on her account. This one never dreamed of that, — I have thought since then that she was rather stupid, for a girl. She was pleased with the fantastic costumes and with their picturesqueness
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against the green background, she found O'Connor a good comrade, and she for- got that she was either part of the show herself — or the sole spectator. Least of all did she imagine that she and the gen- tlemen of the extraordinary clothes were taking parts in a little comedy of courtesy, chivalry, and sentiment as pretty as it was light. Something of it she perceived while she was with them ; a part she did not learn till after she had left them ; and the prettiest part of all she would never have known anything .about, had not the clump of posies at the Putting-in Place stopped her to tell a dolorous tale.
When the Girl went up to visit O'Con- nor on the drive, it was in the face of some friendly expostulation. O'Connor is known to be a noisy lad, and quiet folk are sometimes aghast at his perform- ances.
You could hear him when he started from the Rapo- genus Chutes, You could hear the cronching-cranching of his swashing, spike-sole boots.
i62 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
You could even hear the colors in the flannel shirt he wore.
And the forest fairly shivered at the v^ay O'Connor swore.
'Twas averred that in the city, full a hundred miles av^ay.
They felt a Httle tremor when O'Connor drew his pay.
O'Connor reached the city and he reached it with ajar.
He had piled up all the cushions in the centre of the car.
— Had set them all on fire, and around the blazing pile
He was dancing * dingle breakdowns ' in a very jovial style.
And before they got him cornered they had rung in three alarms.
And it took the whole department to tie his legs and arms." '
Of course the drive is not all O'Connor ; no one estimates, at the highest figure, that it will yield more than nine hundred and twenty-five one thousandths pure O'Con- nor, the remainder being an alloy of the virtues. Even Bangor is philistine to this
' O'Connor from the Drive," in Mr. Holman F. Day's Pine Tree Ballads,
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extent ; for the wisdom of Bangor about woodsmen is largely the fruit plucked from the tree of police-court knowledge. So Bangor had said, and said seriously : " Why do you take your daughter up there? How dare you do it — among all those rough men ? Do you really think it is — ? " But he thought it was. Bangor does not real- ize that, next to his courage, what most distinguishes O'Connor is his respectful behavior to women. He may be drunk, but he is never insolent to a lady, never affronts her by look or comment, never makes it unpleasant for her to pass through the streets that he frequents.
When in the woods and lacking all the temptations which make city life so briefly but uproariously happy, O'Connor shows his more attractive side, and the Girl was pleased to see how charming it was. The men on that drive were probably not se- lected for their good clothes or their supe- rior morals, but with an eye solely to their ability to get the logs along. They were officially classified as "white men. Irish- men, Province men, Bluenoses, Prince
i64 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
Edward Islanders/ Canadian French, St. Francis, Micmac, Penobscot, and Passa- maquoddy Indians ; " but among all this mixed crew, in almost a week of familiar intercourse, not a man failed to be honest, orderly, and civil. Not a man was heard to swear, and the only impropriety of any sort was unwitting, and was promptly re- buked by several who could see, what the speaker did not, that it must be overheard. Boxes of camera plates, which would have been unbribable tell-tales to any meddling with the tent during long hours of absence, showed that not even an innocent curios- ity ever went so far as to look at what was left in their keeping. In all ways they proved their good-will.
The Girl was charmed with other evi- dences of their kindliness. They were kind always to their great horses, which that year for the first time were used to draw the boats across the carry. The squirrels frisked about the wangan tents almost within arm's length of the cook.
' The last three were called P. I.'s, though, strictly speaking, a P. I. is a Prince Edward Islander.
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The little birds were tame and numerous. The wild hares seemed to know no fear. One day the men found a fawn too young to walk. They petted and talked to it, brought it out to be seen, and then care- fully left it where the mother would find it again. A hermit thrush had built a nest close beside the carry road, within the camp-ground limits. She had selected that spot before she knew that men and horses and dynamite and millions of logs, thun- dering down over the falls, were to shake the earth itself and break the sylvan still- ness. She had not dreamed that twenty-six great boats, drawn by heavy-footed horses, clanking stout harness and straining at the sledge whose runners clung to the bare earth, were to be dragged past her little house under the broken cherry-sprout overarched with last year's bracken. Yet she stoutly held her ground and stayed upon her eggs, though only a rod away passed the bustle of the drive. The nest was pointed out to the men that they might not accidentally crush it, and often they would stand in the road and watch the little
i66 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
bright-eyed mother, but not one of them ever startled her in order to see the eggs. When they were all gone and the carry was quiet again, she was still there under her little house, bright-eyed and confident.
The men were fond of flowers, too. Later in the season, when flowers are more abundant, the drivers will often be seen picking the harebells that grow upon the ledges, or a sprig of cardinal flower from the water's edge. If there is a pond lily to be had, it will be found twined into some driver's hat-band, or looped about his neck by its twisted stem. For some reason they had not noticed that clump of lady's- slippers at the Putting-in Place. There they lifted their heads in brave array, thick- set and green as to leaf, waxen and pure white as to petal. Perhaps the men avoided trampling on them, possibly they admired and left them on their stalks, but for some reason, neglect or conservation, no one disturbed them.
Up, down, and across that carry for al- most a week flitted the Girl and her attend- ants, chatting, observing, photographing,
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fishing, idling in unalloyed delight through the longest and brightest of summer days, the guests of everybody. At any moment and at any point between Chesuncook Pond and Ambajemackomas, they were likely to appear, she with her camera, Wilbur with his rifle, and there was always some one right there ready to be of service. Big Oliver, the cook, had beans and biscuit to spare in any quantity, — and they were good. The men wanted to give her a chance to see how a jam is picked, and twenty of them picking off on the Little Arches insisted on standing still, that she might have a good chance to take their pic- ture, while she as unweariedly waited for them to get into action. The men on the stations were always ready for a visit. There was an Indian boy, tribe and name un- known, who had plenty of time to spend a little hunting for a partridge's nest, which they never found, though they had some fun in hunting. There was a Province lad watching on the Little Arches when she came to wait there for the men to come down and pick a jam. He was on an island.
i68 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
to be reached only by walking a log across to the shore ; but he must go ashore and hunt up the butt end of a log to make her a seat. Then because there was a cold wind drawing down the gorge, in spite of the warm June sunshine, he must go ashore several times to get wood to build a fire for her, by which they sat and chatted until she saw just what is that homesickness which takes a man engaged at dangerous work far off from home. Evenings, Joe Francis and Steve Stanislaus would come dragging wearily up the hill to eat a little supper at the tent, or to drink tea out of tin dippers as they lay about the fire and told stories, such stories that the echoes of their laughter may be heard yet hanging about the bluffs on Ripogenus. The morn- ing after their arrival the Old Man came down, — he was not at all old, being the youngest of the three contractors of the drive that year ; the name was a mere cour- tesy title. Out of his short time with his men he took almost half a day showing points of interest, explaining the technical- ities of the work, telling old stories, acting
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as guide himself all the way across to the Big Eddy, three miles below, that nothing worth seeing should be missed.
Such a perfect excursion in the woods never was, and yet, although it did not trouble her, the Girl had noticed some- thing strange. Wherever she appeared the men, if not too busy, seemed to be a little watchful ; they were very careful of her ; they treated her regardfuUy. She had the strictest orders never to go out of sight of her companions, and Wilbur always carried his heavy Winchester, which she knew was loaded. Is there danger in the house of one's friends ? What possible harm could threaten a girl so protected by a universal good-will ? She knew that she did not even need attendants on that carry, much less a rifle to defend her. There was nothing to shoot at that season. If there had been, they did not wish to shoot it. Moreover, it had been specially arranged not to bring a gun on the excur- sion. The girl was puzzled by this little cloud of apprehension which every one seemed to see except herself. It is the
170 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
custom in the woods to obey orders and ask no questions : one who is keen arrives at conclusions in other ways, and " other ways " is precisely the woman's way.
The afternoon was hot, and it is a long trip down to Ambajemackomas and back to Ripogenus Lake. " What 's the use, Wil- bur, to carry that big forty-four seventy ? " said she. " The camera and plates are load enough ; it 's six miles down there and not a step less back again, and we Ve been down to the Big Eddy and back this morn- ing. Better leave the rifle behind, had n't we?"
There is no wile feminine so hard to fend against as a little friendly interest ; Wilbur was caught unprepared.
" There 's nothing to shoot anyway at this season," said she, helping him out, as one does a trout with a landing-net.
" There 's bears," said he rather desper- ately ; " you know June 's just the season for bears to be running about."
She was entirely satisfied that it was not bears. She was not afraid of bears anyway ; yet she did not know what was the real
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reason for carrying the rifle, not knowing as much as everybody else did.
For Wilbur Webster, when he arrived at the carry, had brought down news ; Mr. Murphy had verified it, and rumor there- with picked up the report and ran with it as only rumor can run, spreading everywhere that the Sunday before, this being Thurs- day, one Jack Russell had sworn openly in the 'Suncook House that if certain people came into the country where he was, he would shoot them on sight. Two days after that they appeared on the very spot where he uttered his threat, and it remained to be seen whether he would back down. The situation was not without interest at any time, but with a woman figuring in the title role, it was unique ; certainly it ap- pealed to the West Branch Drive. To have a scoundrel like Jack Russell threaten to shoot a lady who was their guest passed the limit. They were no longer critical spectators ; the game was their own, and they played it with zeal.
Thereafter Wilbur became the centre of innumerable conferences, all semi-private.
172 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
" Do they know it ? " was always the first question.
" I told him first off," was Wilbur's stereotyped answer. " We did n't want to spoil her good time, so he said to take my rifle, and we 'd see whether the woods was a free country."
" S'pose she suspects anything ? "
" Should n't be so much surprised," re- plied Wilbur. " When she asked me why I lugged that big forty-four, I just floun- dered around in my mind for a minute ; you can't lie to her quite as easy as you can to a sport, so I struck bears. ^ Yes, there 's bears,' says she, kind of cool and twinkling. She knows as well as I do about how much bears are going to be bothering around this whole West Branch Drive.'*
" What 's he got agin her ? " was an- other question.
Then Wilbur explained the origin of the grudge.
" Say, that so ? Can she prove it on him ? "
" I ruther guess she holds a full house on facts," modestly responded Wilbur, not
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stating that he was the man who had sup- plied most of them, at some personal risk.
"Oh, it will stand law all right," said Wilbur. They were waiting at the Put- ting-in Place among the men gathered to meet the luncheon boy. That was why so many men had leisure to stand and talk. It is one of the sights to see the luncheon boy come trotting along with his firkin of salt beef and baking-powder biscuit in one hand, and in the other an immense coffee- pot, carried by a bail, while down his back hang a double row of pint dippers strung together by the handles, reminding one of Jack Mann's saying that the worst load he ever carried was five hundred pint dippers without handles against a head wind. The Girl could very easily amuse herself quest- ing about after birds and flowers, while she waited for a chance to get a photograph of the luncheon boy.
" The law,'' went on Wilbur, the Girl just now being out of range, " is just the thing Jack Russell got too much of out in the States ; it 's more for his health to stay up here to 'Suncook where he ain't
174 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
reminded of jails. Your Old Man has got a warrant out agin him for assault, and the sheriff could have both hands full of papers if the complaints all came in to once. Jack Russell takes his settlements out of court, now you 'd better believe. Maybe what he said to me wa'n't nothing but guff, but maybe I ain't going to keep my eyes peeled for things moving the bushes t' other side the river ! "
" Oh, he ain't looking for trouble ; don't you worry, Wilbur," said one.
" No, I ain't worrying any; I 'm keep- ing my sights up for eighty yards and 2l few extry cartridges in my right-hand pocket."
A hunter's voice is always high-pitched, and a little excitement, which makes him forget his usual caution, will cause it to carry far. The Girl heard this last remark. She was some distance off one side, look- ing at some flowers.
" Oh, come here, Wilbur," she called ; "just look at this bunch of lady's-slippers ! Are n't they the prettiest ones you ever saw ? "
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So Wilbur had to come and admire. It seemed to the Girl that there had been enough of a conversation which carried a man's voice up so high and made him for- get his proper caution. What he was say- ing was very likely only ^^talk for P. I.'s " (which is a sort of buncombe), but that remark about the rifle-sights she bore in mind. She sat down and thought it all out at the next opportunity. She knew the butt end from the muzzle of a rifle, and knew that a hunter would not be likely to have the slide of his sights up for any such range ; but what he had said seemed to have the ring of substantial truth about it, that he was prepared for a long shot. There are no long shots in the woods in June ; one cannot see eighty yards then, unless there is open ground ; here there was no open except along the river. One does n't go prepared to shoot bears across a raging river with inaccessible bluff^s and no means of crossing. Besides, bears would never account for that stringent order never to get out of sight. She was beginning to perceive that here was some mystery.
176 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
What was it which Wilbur had told and Mr. Murphy had corroborated ? That the Sunday before at the 'Suncook House, Jack Russell, " as mad as Mike," had spit forth his spite against certain people.
What was it about ? Oh, about his kill- ing rising twenty moose last summer for their hides ; she had written something about it, and had sent him one of the papers with it in, so as to be fair.
" And if either of them ever puts foot into this country again I 'm going to shoot 'em ! " said Jack Russell.
" Well," spoke up Wilbur, who was among the crowd, " guess you won't have to wait long for your chance. Jack."
" How 's that ? " asked several.
" Oh, I hear," went on Wilbur as non- chalantly as if the letter announcing it were not in his pocket, " that they are coming up the Lake to-morrow, both of 'em."
" Where to ? " asked Jack, wavering.
" Ri' down here^ Jack." And the steel in Wilbur's voice must have rung clear.
" Who 's goin' guide for 'em ? " inquired Russell.
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" / be, Jack ! retorted Wilbur. Blades were out then. Wilbur was a proved man, and there was no mistaking what he meant.
This was too much for Jack Russell. He found it was just the right time to set some bear-traps up Harrington Lake way, which was miles out of the road of all tourists, far back in the woods. The whole of Chesuncook rippled with laughter at the performance, and then all subsided to a calm. What disturbed Wilbur was that Harrington lies on the further side of Ri- pogenus, quite a convenient distance for any one who wanted to stroll down for the day and, in some warm and mossy nook, to lie across an impassable chasm and take pot-shots at photographing tourists scram- bling over the rocks on the other side.
Meantime the Girl knew next to no- thing of what was going on. Here and there she caught some shred of conversa- tion which, when raveled out, always gave the name of Jack Russell, and she won- dered into what sort of stuff it had been woven, and especially what kind of goods could bear Jack Russell's name on every
178 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
yard ; it was considered no guarantee of quality at that time and place, for he came as near being a desperado as any one there in the woods. She did not think anything about Jack Russell, least of all would she have suspected that the drive was taking his threat seriously. It was enough that every- body was so kind, and that no one except once ever did anything which displeased her. That time she was angry — and then she was n't.
It was one noon coming back from the Big Eddy ; it was hot, and to save time they were returning by the carry road instead of by the river-bank. At the Put- ting-in Place she looked for her clump of posies. They were missing. Not one was left.
A flame of anger burst forth at seeing them so despoiled. " It 's a shame ! she cried ; " I would n 't touch one of them, they were so pretty, the prettiest moccasin- flowers that ever were, and now some one has gone and picked all that great bunch ! Can't people ever learn to leave a pretty thing alone ! "
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Her anger had not cooled before there came the dappled dawn of a new idea, and she ceased to blame the spoilers until she should be sure.
Men are fickle creatures, and those she had seen here were about to be fed. If they had picked the flowers to look at, they would gaze at the waxy blooms a moment, then roll them in their fingers and, when the flowers hung limp and their hands were full of meat and drink, they would drop them where they stood. There she would find the wilted, yellowing blos- soms, with flabby, hanging pouch and drag- gled, twisted pennons, telling the world-old story of thoughtless ravage. She looked all about. There were no flowers there.
Then she looked at the plants again, more carefully. Their poor little denuded stems stood up tall and stiflF, full length ; every flower must have been nipped off just beneath its little chin ; it was not done hastily, nor ruthlessly with the whole hand, but deliberately, with thumb and finger.
Then she blushed, neck and ears, red-
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der than her hat. The doubtful dawn of her idea was full day now ; she knew what had happened. For there came to her some chaffer on the way up from the Big Eddy. She had stepped in a muddy spot in the road, and they had told her, Wilbur and her father, that of the men who saw that track not one would ever efface it with his own ; that sentiment still was dear to woodsmen. She had laughed and thereafter avoided the muddy places ; one would not wish to put too great a strain upon sentiment. But now she remembered that when she had called to Wilbur, she had touched the flowers, lifting their heavy heads as she praised their beauty. That had sealed their doom. In eleven different pockets, pressed in the folds of a home letter or crumpled in the corner of a greasy pocketbook, the eleven little lady's-slippers were carried as keep- sakes.
It is many years since that occurred, and yet she can never help feeling guilty for compassing the destruction of those pretty flowers ; though glad that she can give to them a more enduring life.
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That was not all, though she did not know it till long afterwards, when the clerk of the drive told the story. Wilbur's rifle was really not of the slightest consequence ; it might just as well have been left in camp. For the West Branch Drive had taken upon itself to settle everything in its own thoroughgoing way. It decided — that is, enough of it decided, and there was no call for contrary-minded — that it objected to having Jack Russell interfer- ing with its company. Then they dis- cussed the matter of ways and means.
" Send him word," said one, and who so apt to be the man as the very one who had grumbled loudest about having women on the drive, " send him word to leave our company alone. If he don't, tell him we Ve got men enough and we Ve got rope enough " —
The message was somewhat pointed. It is quite a distance from- Ripogenus up to Harrington, all woods, and P. L. D. runs no post-office department ; but it was delivered with dispatch. When Jack Russell ran into us on the upper end of
1 82 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
Chesuncook Carry, a sort of head-on col- lision, before the Smiths of Chesuncook as outside witnesses, and it was fight, run, or be friends, he was entirely civil. Al- though too much must not be inferred from such a statement, we parted quite as cordial as when we met. However, Ch^uncook shook with inextinguishable laughter ; its merriment was both loud and long-continued, and it became so dis- turbing to Jack Russell's ears that by the time the leaves were falling, he turned his canoe prow northward, and was last seen going down the Allegash in search of a climate more congenial to his health.
VII
WORKING NIGHTS
WORKING NIGHTS
It was almost September, time for the logs to have been down in Argyle and Nebraska' and sorted, and here was North Twin Thoroughfare with two big booms choked in it. The little steamer that runs to the head of the lake was forced to lie by and wait for them, and aboard of her two old river-drivers, leaning against the pilot-house, were pouring contempt on all they saw. It was not conversation, but a series of snorts and snarls of disapproval, which, by study, could be disentangled into condemnation of — first, any company that could be so behindhand with their logs (for no such late drive as that of 1901 was ever heard of) ; second, any crew of men who would allow two booms to choke each other in a narrow thoroughfare ; and third, all men so imbecile as not to see the way to unsnarl the tangle.
' At Argyle, Nebraska, and Pea Cove booms, the logs are sorted by the log-marks of the owners.
i86 THE PENOBSCOT MAN
The men upon the logs ran around aimlessly, Hke bewildered ants; they got a piece of spare boom, much too short, and with it lengthened one of the main booms; when it failed to relieve the congestion in the narrows, they did not know what to do ; they tugged and pried and poked and hauled, they went sloshing and spattering and bouncing around on the logs, and no- thing came of their labors. For four hours the little steamer lay there, and still the problem of those two booms was as great as in the beginning*
The veterans on the steamboat were entirely free in giving their opinions about the whole performance to every one but the men at work. To them they oiffered no suggestions. A calm aloofness charac- terized their demeanor.
" Any ten-year-old child could tell 'em what they 'd ought to do," said one of the old men to the other ; " all they 've got to do is just to cut both booms an' jine the ends of 'em, and they 'd slip those logs through them narrers like a cat goin' through a hole. Makes a heap of differ-
WORKING . NIGHTS 187
enceif there 's two cats both bent on gittin' through at the same time !
" Course ! " agreed the other; " any fool could tell 'em that, only half tryin' ; but what do you expect of 'em this year, when there ain't a single man on the drive that knows the river ? "
I took the phrase home with me — not a single man on the West Branch Drive who " knew the river " ! It was sheer im- possibility, for there were always twenty men at least, any one of whom could have carried the whole drive down from Che- suncook to the boom. It had always been the glory of the West Branch Drive that it had so many men who had driven the river for a score, for thirty, some for al- most forty years. The men love that river as they love no other ; it is the most diffi- cult, the most dangerous, the most honor- able post to be found, and the pride and boast of the West Branch Drive has always been, not its supple young foam-walkers, who could traverse the froth of those white rapids without wetting a shoe-tap, but its
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battle-scarred boatmen, who " knew the river." For one who survived, many, it is true, had died young, but these older ones had all been lions in their day.
" Billy," said I, when I got home, speak- ing confidentially to one who had served his three and thirty years on the West Branch Drive, "where were you this spring — West Branch as usual ? "
" Oh, no," said he slowly, " I did n't drive this spring ; I 'm gettin' most too old for that." He began river-driving at the ripe age of thirteen, though it was some years before he qualified as a West Brancher ; and he probably would know how to handle a boat even yet.
" Where was Joe ? where was Steve ? where was Joe Solomon? where was Prouty ? where was this one, that one, the other ? "
These were a dozen names that spelled West Branch in large letters. He shook his head at every name. — Where were they all ? Oh, at home ; all getting old like himself, or at some easier trade than river- driving, or oflF on East Branch working for
WORKING NIGHTS 189
Con Murphy, who was a lumberman from the peavey up.
My sky had fallen. Never had I heard of anything more astonishing. Then light broke through a rift, but it was the light of a gray day. Times had changed. It was P. L. D. no longer ; no longer the old " Company " for which our men had slaved so wilHngly; no longer Ross, Mur- phy, and Smart contracting for the drive; no longer any of the old neighborly names that we had always known