The St. Isidor Contract and Pierre

DOWN in the city it was spring. Daffodils and lilacs were cried at street corners. Baby carriages were out in the squares, and gauze hats blossomed on tall stalks in shop windows. Up in the mountains the floods were let loose, the Moccasin and the Racquette rivers roared between banks of honeycombed ice, and in the deep woods the bare trees dropped moss on the pockmarked snow. The thin little summer fawns began to follow the camp trails in desperation, not knowing how soon spring was to be the Moon of Budding Leaves. Ice had just broken in the Upper Moccasin, and the river drives were on.

The men from the St. Isidor and the X Y Z were about to start their logs, but on different branches of the Upper Moccasin. It happened that the timber lands of the two companies adjoined, with a creek as boundary. Their drives would unite where Eel Brook and Bear Creek rushed together into the Upper Moccasin, making the Forks. Five miles below were the Rapids.

The president of the St. Isidor Lumber Company, in New York, sent out a dispatch to the mill superintendent, at Lower Moccasin: —

“Big contract on. Get estimate on 800,000 square timber by June 1st.

HOLLISTER.”

The mill superintendent sent his scaler out to estimate the square timber in the sheds, and the round in the dump. The stuff at their disposal would not fill the contract, and they would have to depend on that spring’s river drive. And the river drive depended on the weather, and the weather was not under the control of the mill superintendent. A few hours’ relenting in the middle of the day operates but slowly on the accumulated frosts and snows of a winter. He whistled and sat down to think.

A second dispatch came from New York: —

“Get lumber for freighting by June 15th. X Y Z competing. $5000 if you win out. HOLLISTER.”

This meant that the logs must be floated to the mills by June 1st. It would take, at the lowest estimate, two weeks to scale and square-saw them. It was a long drive from the mountain tributaries of the Upper Moccasin down through the Rapids into Moccasin Pond, across to Lower Moccasin, and so to the mills. June 1st! Five thousand dollars ! It must be done. And Abel Swinger was the man to do it, if it were within the limits of possibility. Gunnison, the mill superintendent, sent a man on horseback to Camp No. 1, twenty miles into the mountains, by the side of Eel Brook. He carried this note : —

“Logs must be got to the mills by June 1st. Big contract up. X Y Z competing. $1000 in your pocket if you beat them. GUNNISON.”

Abel Swinger, boss of the river drivers, thrust his finger along the blotted lines, following them also with sibilant whisper, as he sought their meaning. But even this double method of connotation failed to impress their import. He thrust out his lip combatively and gazed with a frown at the red face of the messenger, who wiped his sweating brow with his sleeve and stamped the wet snow from his boots on the floor of the shanty. Abel turned to the note again, re-read it, and when the meaning burst on his astonished senses he pushed back his bench from an unfinished supper and rose to his feet. The veins on his temples bulged and his great eyebrows gathered together in bushy interrogation.

“God bless your soul and body, man,” he roared, “what baby talk is Gunnison giving us? Don’t he know Eel Brook is froze tight as a watchcase, and Upper Moccasin broke just the other day? Thera logs cayn’t go down no sooner nor God A’mighty hes his say-so. Thet’s a purty song and dance fer you to bring me all these twenty miles, Mart.”

“ Gunnison told me to fetch back your answer, ” said young Mart sullenly, spitting into the wood box to relieve himself of responsibility.

“He did, did he? ” bellowed Abel. “By Gosh, you tell him it ’s the devil against God if I get them logs to the dump ahead of the freshets! Tell him that, and don’t minch it none. Now out with ye.”

Abel turned to his meal again, while the young messenger, disregarding Abel’s obviously rhetorical dismissal, sat down to a huge slab of pie that the cook put before him. The woodsman talked to himself as he ate, in a way that he had.

“ One thousand dollars, Abel! Thet ’ s a pile of dust. And Gunnison don’t plank down his promises on no chunk of ice. X Y Z to beat! Dammy, I ’d like fust - rate to beat that Canuck, Boudry. Dammy if I don’t! ”

Mart made cheerful guzzling sounds as he washed down his pie with strong black coffee, while the others who had finished their supper watched Abel with curiosity. Each in his several way had an interest in the proposition up, and each had his manner of showing it. If there were extra dollars in it, they would come in for their share; for Abel Swinger was never the man to keep the whole of the stakes.

Abel’s hard, leathery face showed no sign of the tender thoughts that stirred him. In his mind, he held his newest grandson on his knee; he heard the pretty, pleading voice of Eudora, his youngest daughter, supported in idleness at a young ladies’ seminary.

“Some pennies, g’an’pa.”

“ I want more spending money, papa. All the girls ” —

The old unreasonable argument, so unreasonably effective, “all the girls.” One thousand dollars,— half that sum, — it would mean much.

Pierre, the French driver, sat and sang softly to himself: —

“Well, boys,” Abel’s husky voice broke in upon the musings of them all, “what d’ ye say? Kin we git onto the drive, willy-nilly, and float them logs down to the mill ? ”

“ It depends on the weather, not us, ” said Paul Lawless coolly.

“Go to Halifax with your weather! Kin we do it ? ”

“And on the freshets, ” Lawless continued, as if he had not been interrupted.

“How’s the ice on Bear Creek? You been up there this morning, Pierre: how ’s the ice holding out ? ”

As Pierre did not answer, but continued singing softly to himself, Davy, the “infiddle, ” replied : “ Plenty of ice, Abel; stock below par this evenin’. Ain’t goin’ to be a corner in the ice market just yet, I guess.”

“ Boudry’s men is working over on Bear Creek, ” said Lawless, smiling, and whittling a stick aimlessly.

“ The devil they are! ” snapped Abel savagely. “How d’ ye know? ”

“He told me.” Lawless jerked his thumb to indicate Pierre, who, with his head tipped back against the wall and his large glassy eyes rolled upward, still chanted: —

“If Boudry can start his logs, we ’ll start ours, tarnation quick. Pierre, where’d you see Boudry’s? ”

“Choke that hymn in your throat. Answer me.”

Pierre brought down the fore legs of his chair with a crash.

he lilted joyously. Then : “ W’at we go to get eef we stan’ in ees wataire to ze necks of us to start one time queek zem damn logs of you? W’at we go get ? One man heem not love ees wataire none zo ver’ great.”

Pierre stretched out his long yellow fingers like a beggar’s for alms. He was the best driver in the gang, and the one of them all who had seemed to care nothing for his stakes and everything for glory. No one could account for Pierre.

Abel’s look grew black. He had meant to offer a bonus, but to be forced into it by a crazy Canuck! However, now was not the time to start a fracas nor to hang back, with the men waiting on his word.

“Five hundred dollars to the feller that strikes his peavey into the forrardest log below the Rapids! ”

That meant the van of the drive after the perilous part was over.

“And the devil take the hindmost! ” cried Davy, whose atheistic views did not debar the archfiend from familiar converse.

“Voilà donc, Boudry,” prophesied Pierre.

“You bet! ” chorused the men blithely, their spirits elated by the prospect of a sharp race and a money goal.

The work was started the next morning in dead earnest. Beneath the thin armor of ice over the mountain brooks there was a rapid current rushing, and every day under the mild suns of May the snow melted in the ravines, and the ice grew thinner; where the beetling banks or the dense underbrush made an impenetrable shade, and the ice-bound stream seemed a very fortress against the besieging spring, Abel directed his dynamite fuses, blowing up the ice into crumbling ruins, and setting great fires ablaze over the castles of frost. The snow sank amazingly, as, when the thaw once begins, it always does in those northern forests, till the greenness seemed to glow upward through the watery snow and the sap was running in the hard maples.

Four days had passed, and the St. Isidor drive had almost reached the confluence of the two creeks into the Upper Moccasin. The lower streams were swelling rapidly, and but a little more warmth was needed to bring a tremendous current that would bear the logs down with resistless speed upon the wide waters of the pond. Boudry’s men also were at their job on Bear Creek, and across the forest ranges, as the creeks converged, Pierre could hear the voices of his fellow countrymen in the mellow habitant songs of Quebec, and the mellifluous oaths of Boudry, on whose account he had left the X Y Z and gone to the St. Isidor.

There had been a bitter feud between the two men, — all over a girl, Alcée, whom neither had won at the end. Pierre pretended to himself he had forgotten her; but a man like Pierre does not love a girl like Alcée to forget. Boudry had married, since, and Pierre hated him more than ever.

One night there was an amicable arrangement made between Boudry and Abel, that if their drives should happen to meet at the Forks, the man who got his logs first down to the Rapids should have precedence the rest of the way. The stream was narrow, easily blocked by a log jam. The loser would have to hold back his drive by letting it jam at the Forks. Stray logs carried to the Rapids, but unaccompanied by a driver, would not fulfill the condition of success. The men on both streams worked with a will, pushing and poling and extricating with their long poles, up to their thighs in water; half hoping, half dreading, the expected freshet that would take the work out of their hands.

Hollister sent out a special man, a green one, from the city, to investigate the work being done at the driving camps in the woods. He found Abel lighting a minute giant fuse to break up a jam in Eel Brook. He saw the logs scatter and fly to pieces as the jam started, and drew down his mouth at this reckless destruction of good timber. He stamped on his patentleather boots, incased in thin rubbers to keep them warm, and blew on his pinched fingers, protected by copperred dogskin gloves of the newest cut. He reported to the New York office that weather and conditions were absolutely unfit for driving, and that the foreman was recklessly destroying the property of the company. This was when the logs were just above the Forks, with an almost open channel below, held in check by débris of ice that would be carried away any hour by the spring thaws.

A dispatch was sent to Gunnison, and forwarded by him to Abel. Mart handed it to him from horseback, on the end of a peavey. Abel read it standing up to his waist in ice water, looking for the key log that had obstructed a hundred others.

“From the New York office,” said Mart jauntily. “Stop the drive.”

The yellow scrap, tossed from Abel’s hand, was sucked under in a swirl of water as the released log pushed its nose savagely downstream. Pierre and Paul, apoise of a raft that trembled beneath their spiked feet, held their peaveys expectantly, awaiting Abel’s order.

“To hell with the New York office, ” he shouted, “and on with the drive! ”

That night was a full moon, and the sky, faint and bare, arched above the great mystery of the forest. The driving camps were abed and asleep early, after the long day’s labor. Masses of logs lay like sleeping pythons piled up at the Forks where the streams ran together. The X Y Z and the St. Isidor jostled each other, end to end, locked inextricably, waiting only for the morrow’s sun and the stimulus of the driving poles to start them whirling on their career to the mills. Some of them were still glazed with ice or caked with snow from the upper mountain sides whence they had come. The moon shone peacefully down on their dark rotundities, on a gray haze of treetops, on the spirited stream below, curveting and flashing in lathery foam through the hours of the vacant night. If the barriers that held the logs in leash were to give way, if one should prod the key logs ever so gently, what a disorderly avalanche sucked down and swung away by the hungry Moccasin!

Pierre had crept to bed in his clothes, and he alone lay awake, staring into the darkness of the log - built room. Bunked about him were his mates, wrapped in the profound sleep of healthy animals. Pierre had finished the third version of an imaginary meeting with Alcée. It was such a tiny rift that had come between them, and then she had thought him a coward; and cowardice was to Pierre the last degree of degradation, but he could not explain. Alcée loved a brave man.

“ Alcée,” he murmured aloud, “after all, you do believe in me.”

“Toujours,” answered the dreamvoice repentantly; and then Pierre began over again.

He was far off in Quebec, at the Lake of the Three Pines, and Aleve’s hand was on his shoulder, when a noise from the real world tore across the thin woof of his musings. His breast vibrated to a long jarring. He sat up in bed. The logs had started. He could hear them grating against each other as they piled forward. Pierre pulled on his great boots, seized his pole, and dashed out into the camp trail. Something had started the X Y Z, and the two rafts were pitching along together into the stream. They would not go far; they would block each other soon, midstream, interlocked from shore to shore. A few of the foremost logs, perhaps, would be carried over the Rapids.

Thud, thud, thud! Across the Upper Moccasin Pierre saw a horseback figure, ebony in the clear moonlight, emerge from the deep woods and strike the tote road that led downstream for perhaps a mile. It was Boudry following his logs, prepared to join them at sunrise below the Rapids, and to claim right of way, in the presence of Camp No. 2, then awake, for the rest of the drive.

“Jamais de la vie! ” Pierre could heel a log better than any one else in the mountains. He had ridden many a mile, heel and toe, midstream, on the top of a vicious, plunging, slippery stick of spruce. Like a circus rider tiptoe on a furious steed, he had reveled in mastery of an angry wild thing. But to ride alone at night, no help near, down a swift mountain stream ; to make the boiling Rapids and come up a man, and not splinters and jelly! Pierre, Pierre, even a “ little Christ ” can put his life in hopeless jeopardy. But Boudry the victor ! Jamais de la vie! Here is the hour for distinction. He has waited for this; so has Alcée. But she will never know. Will she not? In the remote depths of a confused imagination Pierre had a vague inspiration as of another self always with him, and that self was Alcée, knowing ever his keen longings and daring enterprise, while the real Alcée was many miles away, forgetting and scorning.

Pierre, now midstream, astride of his logs like Colossus, waved his river pole exultantly. The horseback figure was arrested by the strange sight. What nightmare was this that troubled his eyes ? What ouf, what goblin, what devil, followed him, jeered at him, on the Moccasin River ?

“Bon so’uar! ” called Pierre blithely, leaping from one log to another, as he left behind him the clumsy multitude and rode on the foremost sticks.

“Depêche done, Boudry, c’est moi! ” he called out across the tumbling water to the motionless figure on shore.

Then he broke gloriously into a stave of “Au clair de la lune.”

“Madman! Fool!” snarled Boudry, whipping his horse to a run.

The snow had melted entirely from the open trails, leaving the black, spongy duff to rebound delightfully under the horse’s tread. But none of the delight of it thrilled Boudry, — only a superstitious terror. Pierre’s long hair streaming in the moonlight was like a visible incantation, Pierre’s singular intrepidity and apparent immunity from harm, along with a moody and unintelligible personality, had won for him the sobriquet of the “little Christ.” Boudry was loudest in openly expressed contempt for the strange young fellow, and secretly most in dread of his supernatural power.

chanted Pierre, dancing up and down as if he trod on hot irons while he kept his balance on the constantly turning logs beneath. He and they sped onward through the water.

The grave forest viewed passionlessly the mad race. The large yellow moon looked weird understanding as it hung above the black edge of trees. Pierre’s face was carved for an instant against it like a black onyx head on a white cameo. Then the moon slipped down behind the lacery, still peering watchfully at the two figures. Only the Moccasin raged and gnashed its teeth at the insolence of this human creature who rode so carelessly to death.

With an even footing and a solid trail Boudry on horseback might easily have won; but against the windings of the river was offset the dark road through the half-cleared forest, with its bogs and its pitfalls. Now the trail and the river part company.

sings Pierre.

“For God’s sake, Pierre, remember the Rapids! ” cries Boudry, as he turns his horse into the woods. Was he smit with sudden compunction for Pierre’s certain doom, or did he gloat over it in anticipation ? “ Pour 1’amour de Dieu ! ”

sings Pierre. “I will remember the Rapids for His sake and for Alcée’s.”

Pierre is alone, and the solitude unnerves him. He always plays better before an audience. Look, the moon is still with him, crouching low at the very horizon’s edge, squat like a giant toadstool above that cleared knoll on the river bank.

“ Come here, then, thou! ” he cries, poling toward him the companion spruce to the giant stick that his feet clutch. Side by side they float downstream. Here the water is wide and quiet.

“One might almost dream,” says Pierre, shutting his eyes for an instant, as if indeed he were behind the footlights. When he opens his eyes the moon is gone, and the loneliness strikes to his soul like a damp fog to the marrow of one’s bones. He is midway between Camp No. 1 and Camp No. 2. There are the Sister Pines on the hilltop. In a mile, the Rapids.

“Alcée, if you were but there to meet me at end of the race! How gayly we would kiss, au clair de la lune ! Drenched with foam, cut by the rocks, my hair gray with the hoar frost of dawn, would you run to meet me and put your dear arms about me ? ”

Pierre remembered the short cut through the woods and Boudry a-gallop,— hard mouth and gleaming eyes. Ah, but how quickly Moccasin speeds down her long stairs! He would cling to the log lengthwise. He hears the roaring: he has come to the stairs. Would the driving camp be on shore to

see him ? Boudry would have aroused them. But no; he would be there ahead of Boudry, he would win the race. They would send the boats off to bring in his body. His body! How they would shout and cry! (Look out! a rock.)

“Pour le Dieu d’amour.” (Safely by.)

The sky grows pink. On the shore a bird sings, piercing the cataract, — “Pea, pea, peabody.” He cannot think for the roaring in his ears. Are these the Rapids ? Now for the leap downstairs. The lather is in his eyes. (Oh, Alcée!)

The sun was just rising above the black roofs of Driving Camp No. 2, on the quiet shore of the Upper Moccasin Pond, and the blue jays had begun to scream in social rivalry, when a man who had dipped his head into a bucket of water by the door called to the cook in the shanty, “Hey, there, they’ve started the logs from Camp No. 1! ”

The men ran down to the shore. Some logs bobbed up from the spumy pool below the riffles, went down again, came up farther out on the smooth lake.

“Body of me, what ’s that? ”

The men rubbed their eyes and looked again. Pierre struggled to his feet on one of those same bobbing logs. They sent out a boat to bring him ashore. As they approached he waved a swollen hand. The foam on his clothes was salmon-red from the blood of his cuts, but he sang them a stave,

“ ' Ouvrez votre porte
Pour le Dieu d’amour,’ ”

and then fell over, senseless, into the bottom of the boat,

“All for the St. Isidor contract,” said Abel Swinger gently, as he bent over Pierre’s bunk in the shanty.

“And five hundred,” winked Paul Lawless.

Pierre opened on them his pale, transparent eyes. They did not know about Alcée.

Florence Wilkinson.