XIV The Red Teamster
As Bender prophesied, Michigan Red came back “right smartly.”
The following Sunday was one of those rare winter days when the mercury crawls out of its ball sufficiently to register a point or two. At noon the silver column indicated only four below zero, and, accustomed to sterner temperatures, the men lolled about the camp bare-headed and shirt-sleeved. One hardy group was running a poker game on a blanket under the sunny lea of a bunkhouse; the younger men, choppers and teamsters, skylarked about the camp essaying feats of strength: some tossed the caber, others put the shot, a third squad startled the forest with the platoon fire of a whip-cracking contest. Standing in his doorway, the cook, autocrat of the camp, remarked patronizingly on the latter performance.
“Pretty fair,” he judicially observed, as one young fellow raised the echoes—“pretty fair, Carrots, but Sliver there has you beat. Needn’t to look so cocky, though, Sliver,” he qualified his praise, “or I’ll call up Michigan to teach you how to crack a whip.”
“Oh, shucks! I ain’t scared o’ him,” Sliver grinned. Then, rising to his slim height, he writhed body and arm and let forth a veritable feu de joie.
“You would, would you?” the cook warned. “Here, Red!” he called to the gamblers. “Get up an’ give this kid a lesson.”
“You go plumb to—” The location was drowned by Sliver’s second volley.
“Oh, come, Red!” the cook urged. “This kid makes me tired.”
The red teamster went on playing, and would, no doubt, have indefinitely continued the game but that, looking up to curse the importunate cook, he saw the stable roustabout interestedly watching the whip-crackers. A man in years, the latter was a child in intellect, simple to the point of half-wittedness. Picking him up, starving, in Winnipeg, Carter had brought him up to the camp early in the winter, and ever since he had served as a butt for the camp’s jokes.
Michigan rose. “Lend me your whip, Carrots!”
“Now you’ll see!” the cook confidently affirmed, as the long lash writhed about Michigan’s head. Exploding, it sent a trail of echoes coursing through the forest. As is the pop of a pistol to the roar of a cannon, so was his volley compared to that of Sliver. Then, to prove himself in accuracy, Michigan snapped a fly from the cook’s bare arm.
“A trifle close,” he exclaimed, rubbing the spot. “Do it ag’in, Red, an’ I cut out your Sunday pudding.”
Grinning, Michigan swung again, turned, as the lash writhed in mid-air, and cracked it explosively within an inch of the roustabout’s ear. “Stan’ still, you son of a gun!” he swore, as the poor simpleton flinched. “Keep him in, boys. Stan’ still, or I’ll take it clean off nex’ crack.... Now we’ll play you’ve a fly on the tip of your nose.”
The play was too realistic, drawing a spot of blood. Yelling with pain, the roustabout swore, begged, pleaded piteously to be let alone. But a circle of grinning teamsters hedged him in on all sides save where the red teamster stood with his whip. Man, in the aggregate, is always cruel. Let a few hundred blameless citizens, fathers of families, husbands, brothers, be gathered together and flicked with passion’s whip, and you have a mob equal to the barbarities of Caligula. And these men were raw, wild as the woods. Shoving the simpleton back whenever he tried to break, they stood grinning while Michigan cut cracking circles about his head. Sometimes his hair moved under the wind of the lash; sometimes it grazed his nose. There was no telling where it would explode. He could not dodge it. Trying, the whip drew blood from his neck.
“Stan’ still, then!” the red teamster answered his yell of pain. “I ain’t responsible for your cavortings.”
“Spoiling Red’s aim!” the cook admonished, severely. “I never seed your like!”
“Now open your mouth wide,” the tormentor went on. “I’m agoin’ to put the tip in your mouth without techin’ your lips—if you don’t move. Open wide!”
But the man’s small wits were now completely gone. He opened his mouth obediently, then, uttering a scream, a raucous, animal cry, he sprang at his tormentor. But a dozen hands seized and dragged him back.
“Hold him, boys! I’ll skin the tip of his nose for that.”
As Michigan swung his whip the roustabout sent forth scream on scream. Foam gathered on his lips. Terror had driven him insane.
“No, no!” the cook remonstrated. “That’s enough, Red—that’s enough!”
Unheeding, the teamster took aim, swung, then—another lash tangled in his. Yelling with the sudden pain of a twisted wrist, he swung round on Carter. Unobserved, he had run across from his office, snatched up Sliver’s whip, tangled Michigan’s lash, and jerked it over his shoulder.
“Boys”—he now faced the flushed crowd—“I don’t allow to mix up with your fun, but what do you call this?”
One glance at the bloody weal on the roustabout’s neck and the brutal mob resolved into its individual components, each a unit of sorrow for its share in the torture.
“Jest a poor fool at that.” Carter laid his hand on the simpleton’s shoulder.
“Shore, shore! Yes!” the cook agreed. “It’s too bad. We didn’t go to do that. No. We jest calculated to have a little fun, an’ carried it a leetle too far.”
“That’s so! That’s so!” Carrots, Smith, and Sliver all seconded the cook, all voicing repentant public opinion.
“No, Red didn’t go to do that,” the cook continued. “He moved. Red didn’t mean it; did you, Red?”
After that one yell of pain the red teamster’s eyes had glued to a handspike which lay near by. But the useless wrist checked the impulse, and he stood, sullenly noting changed opinion.
“Is this a Sunday-school?” he answered, sneering. “Or mebbe a Young Folks’ Christian Endeavor? Sliver, what’s the golden text?”
“Oh, shore, Red!” Sliver remonstrated.
“It’s this.” Carter looked round the group. “Any man who lays a hand on this poor lad again gets his time.” His glance fixed on Michigan Red.
The red teamster shrugged. His chance had gone by, and he was acute enough to recognize the fact. Not that he lacked courage or strength to try it out, man for man—bite, gouge, kick, in the brutal fashion of the lumber woods. Taken by surprise, he had lost his vantage, and now saw that his adversary had cleverly ranged against him an adverse opinion.
“It’s not him I’m laying for,” he growled. “Some other day!”
The “other day” came a week later. Entering the stables at noon in search of Brady, the water-hauler, Carter saw the red teamster perched on the top rail of the black stallion’s stall, in his hand the iron muzzle which he had unstrapped that the brute might feed with ease. As the beast snapped, rather than ate, his oats, he cast vicious, uneasy glances from the tail of his eye at Red; but, indifferent to the brute’s mood and the anxious glances of his fellows, the teamster calmly chewed his tobacco.
It was by just such tricks that he had gained ascendency over his fellows. Whereas it was worth another man’s life to step into their stall, the blacks would stand and sweat in rage and fear while Michigan slapped and poked their ribs. The devil in the beasts seemed to recognize a superior in the pale-green fiend in the man.
“Brady here?” Carter asked. “Oh, there you are!”
He stood immediately behind the stallion, and as he spoke Michigan brought the iron muzzle down with a thwack an the brute’s ribs. Snorting, it lashed out, just missing Carter. One huge, steel-shod heel, indeed, passed on either side of his head. Under such circumstances a start was a little more than justifiable; yet after that tribute to surprise Carter stepped quietly beyond range and went on talking to Brady.
“This afternoon you can hitch to the water-cart an’ ice the track in to them new skidways.”
Then, turning, he eyed Michigan Red. “That’s a techy beast of yourn, friend.”
“Techy?” Michigan sneered. “There ain’t another man in this camp as kin put the leathers on him!”
“No?”
“No!” Swinging his heels against the stall, Michigan added, “Not a damned man.”
Picking up a spear of hay, Carter chewed it while he looked over the beast, now foaming with rage. It was a dare. He knew it—saw also the amused interest in the on-lookers. They felt Michigan had him in the door. “The leathers,” he remarked, “are on him.”
It was a skilful move, throwing the initiative back to the teamster. Not one whit fazed, however, he exclaimed, in mock surprise, “Why, damme, so they are!” Sliding down, he laid a hand on the stallion’s crest. Instantly the brute ceased his plunging, uneasy stepping, and while the man stripped off the harness only long, slow shivers told of smothered fury.
“There you are!” He threw collar and harness at Carter’s feet.
“Look here, boss!” Brady remonstrated, as Carter picked them up. “I wouldn’t go to do it. Shure I wouldn’t. The baste is a man-killer be Red’s own word. Luk at him for the proof.”
Ears laid flat to his neck, glossy hide shivering, the whites of his eyes showing viciously, chisel teeth protruding through grinning lips, the stallion’s appearance bore out his reputation.
“I wouldn’t!” a dozen teamsters chorused.
Unheeding, Carter entered the stall. As he ranged alongside, the stallion tried to rear, but was snapped back by his halter-chain. So foiled, he humped his shoulders, dropping his head between his knees; then, just when the teamsters expected to see the sixteen hundred pounds of him grind Carter against the stall, he suddenly straightened and stood still as before, save for the slow shivers.
“Mother of God!” Brady exclaimed. “What ’ll that mane?”
Carter’s hand rested on the beast’s crest. What did it mean? Only the red teamster knew. But whether the animal shook to the memory of some torture, or merely mistook the firm hand for that of his master, he moved but once while Carter adjusted and buckled the harness. That was at the cinching of the bellyband; but he quickly quieted. The click of the breeching-snaps sounded like breaking sticks through the stable, and as he stepped out from the stall a score of breaths issued in one huge sigh.
“Now hurry, Brady,” he said. “The job will keep you humping till sundown.”
Respectful glances followed him away from the stable. He had touched his men in a vulnerable spot, and though, hereafter, they might growl and grumble—the lumberman’s sole relaxation—he could count on a fair amount of obedience from all but such malingerers as Shinn and Hines, or a natural anarchist like Michigan Red. The latter took on the yoke of authority only to defy it; and though even his bleak face lit up as sunlight struggles through frost of a winter’s morning, he soon found cause for further trouble.
Dropping into the smith’s shop a few days later, Carter found Seebach, the German smith, ruefully contemplating a half-dozen disabled sleds. “Herr Gott!” he exclaimed. “In one half-day these haf come in. Alretty yet I works like t’ree tefils, an’ this iss the leedle games they play on me. It is that you gifs me a helper or I quit—eh?”
Too surprised to laugh over the other’s ludicrous anger, Carter puzzled over the breakage. As aforesaid, the sleds had been built on his own plans to carry enormous loads. To four-by-six runners, shod with an inch of steel, hardwood bunkers a foot square were fastened with solid iron knees braced with inch iron. Every bolt and pin was on the same massive plan. The best of a dozen patterns of as many logging-camps had gone into the making of those sleds. Yet, though they ought to have been good for twenty tons oh the roughest kind of a road, they were racked, split, or twisted, bunkers torn off, ironwork on all badly sprung.
Carter whistled. “How did they do it?”
“Brady, he says it vas the new roat into the pridge timbers. In one place it goes like hell over a pank down to a lake, with a quick turn at the pottom. ‘The Pig Glide,’ Brady calls it.”
“I’ll go out an’ look at it.”
A half-hour’s walk brought him to the hill. Debouching from heavy timber, the trail inclined for two hundred yards, then sheered down at an angle of forty-five degrees to a lake below. As the smith had said, an abrupt turn at the bottom added to the trail’s difficulties. Too steep for ice-sledding, hay had been spread over the face of the hill, and with this to ease the descent Carter could see no reason for the broken sleds.
A man had been told off to respread the hay after each passage, and he grinned at Carter’s question. “Bust ’em here? You bet! How? Well, they come down on a gallop. Teams is coming now, so if you set down in the scrub there you’ll see ’em do it.”
It was as he said. One after the other the teams emerged from the forest, gathered speed on the incline, and came flying down the hill, the great sleds cracking and groaning under the strain of enormous loads as they skidded around the bottom turn. Michigan Red came last, and Carter’s anger could not altogether drown a thrill as he watched the red teamster take the hill. Whooping, whip-cracking, blacks stretched on the gallop, he tore down that plumb hill-side and skidded round the turn, load balanced on one runner. It split, with a pistol report, but the steel shoe held and he passed safely on and down the lake.
“He was the first to cut loose,” the trackman explained. “T’others followed his dare.”
“Well, they’ll have to quit it. Warn each man, Joe, an’ report all to me that disobey.”
When, that evening, Joe reported that all but Michigan Red had obeyed the order, he sensed hot anger under the boss’s calm. Expecting an explosion, he was the more surprised when, after a thoughtful pause, Carter dismissed him with an order to take a couple of hand-rakes out on the job the following morning. To the Cougar he gave orders that the red teamster was to load last. Obedient, the Cougar sent Michigan Red to break track into a new skidway; thus all of his fellows had passed on down the glide while Michigan was still loading.
“Load him light—dry logs, an’ not too many,” Carter had ordered. But, incensed at the delay, the teamster indulged in such sarcastic allusions to the frailty of the loaders’ female ancestors that the ribald crew piled the logs on till his load bulked like a hay-stack. None other than the blacks could have started the sled out from the skids; and while, with jerks and sudden snatches, the fierce brutes worked it out of deep snow to the iced tracks, the loaders looked admiringly on. It was a triumph in driving. Man and team worked like a clock, and, returning blasphemous answers to the loaders’ compliments, Michigan slid off down the trail.
To make up for his lost time, he urged the blacks to a trot, and so came swinging down the incline at twice his usual speed. Not till he reached the very edge did he see that the hay had been raked off the face of the hill. A mask of ice, it glittered in the sun.
Half-way down Carter stood with Joe. Looking up, they saw Michigan poised on the top log, a red, sinister figure against the sky. He seemed to pause, throw back on his lines—a quick, involuntary movement. Then, craning forward, he glanced down that glittering stretch—a comprehensive look that took in Carter, Joe, and their plan.
“Give him a forkful under the runners as he goes by,” Carter whispered. “Otherwise we’ll kill his team.”
A second, as aforesaid, the red teamster paused; then, loosing his lines, he leaned over and lashed the stallion under the soft of the belly.
“My God!” Joe cried.
He saw the black brute rear, snorting—saw the blacksnake bite the mare’s flank—saw the pair plunge over the grade; then water bathed his eyes. He heard, however—heard the rush and roar, a thunder of hoofs as the long, steel calkings cut through the ice and struck fire from the face of the hill. He felt the wind as the sled passed, and waited for the crash—which did not come.
A voice, cold, deliberate, restored his vision. “I didn’t think it was in horse-flesh.” Carter was gazing after team and sled, now a black patch on the snow of the lake. “Beat us this time, Joe,” he continued; “but we’ll fix him to-morrow.”
That evening, however, the red teamster enjoyed the fruits of his exploit. It seasoned the beans at supper, sweetened the stable choring. Opinion agreed that it was now “up” to the boss, but split on his probable action, one-half the stable agreeing with Hines that Michigan surely earned his discharge, the other half holding that settlement by battle would be the certain ending. Neither event, however, had come to pass by bedtime, and the mystery was intensified by the chucklings of the road gang, which came in from work long after the teamsters retired. Next morning, too, the loaders—evidently in the secret—added to the suspense by asking the teamsters if they intended to toboggan down the glide that trip.
“Bet you don’t!” they yelled after Michigan Red.
Though not exactly nervous, the mystery yet affected the red teamster. As his load slid through the forest uneasiness manifested itself in thoughtful whistlings, broken song snatches, unnecessary talk to his horses. Not that he was a whit afraid. The half-dozen or so men whom he expected would try to enforce the new order could not have prevented him from at least sending his team at the grade. The fierce soul of him thrilled at the thought of opposition, and, coming out of the forest, he set a pace that would have ridden down opposition.
But he reined in at the hill. Instead of the force of his imaginings, only Joe Legault stood at the foot of the glide. The hay had been respread on its face, but—the road gang had built a rough bridge over a deep gully, and now the glide led, straight as an arrow, out to the lake. The racking curve was utterly abolished.
Grinning, Joe said: “The boss allows that it’s your privilege to kill your own horses. So go it if you wanter. Hain’t going to hurt his sleds none.”
Michigan walked his horses.
Carter had won out. Moreover, he had done it without the loss of prestige that would have ensued by the usual brutal methods in vogue in lumber-camps. Law, of a man or people, cannot endure, of course, without force behind it. Yet behind his imperturbability, quiet taciturnity, the men felt the power to enforce his commands. So his authority was no more called in question. Not that envious spite ceased to dog him. Hines, Shinn, and their coterie stood always ready to stir up discontent, foment trouble.
It was their sympathy that caused the cook to maintain one can of poor baking-powder to be valid excuse for leaving. But Carter disposed of minor troubles with the same easy good-humor that he had given to big ones.
“I reckon you’ve been scandalously mistreated,” he told the cook. “I’m right sorry to lose you. Must you go?”
Mollified, the cook stayed.
Then Baldy, chief of the “tote”-trail teamsters, rose to the point that “thirty hun’red was load enough for drifted trails.”
“Thirty it is, Baldy,” Carter cheerfully answered, and Baldy yanked forty and forty-five hundred all winter over the worst of trails.
He had proved himself in the mastership of men just at the time that opportunity was holding out her hand, and proof and fruit of his winning came the very day that saw the last load delivered at the dumps. “It is a go!” The wire which announced, with this bit of slang, the successful financing of his railroad projects was brought in by Baldy from Lone Tree, and with it buttoned against his heart Carter made his way to the stables where the teamsters were, as they thought, bedding up for the last time.
“We have feed for three months left,” he said, “and I can promise work through the summer. At what?” He turned, smiling, on Brady. “Never mind; all those that want it kin have it till freeze-up. In the mean time I’ll feed an’ care for your teams till the log-drive is down.”
Grumblers from the cradle, kickers born, teamsters and choppers had looked forward to this last day in camp, swearing all that ten dollars a day would not hire them for an hour longer. No, sirree—not an hour! Now they looked their doubt.
“What’s the pay?” Brady asked.
“Half a dollar a day more’n you’re getting.”
“That beats farming in these parts. You kin sign me, boss.”
And me—me—me! The answers floated in from all over the stable. Only a few of the older men elected to return to their farms, and after all had spoken Carter turned to Michigan Red, who occupied his old perch on the stallion’s stall.
“Well, Red?”
“Didn’t s’pose you’d need me.”
Carter went on writing. He could afford to be generous. He had beaten the man at every point; to retain him where another would have discharged him was, indeed, the crowning of his victory, and Michigan knew it. Had he doubted, he had but to read it in the countenances of his fellows. A good gambler, however, he hid resentment, and where a poor loser would have taken his discharge he accepted re-employment.
His red beard split in a sneering grin. “Oh, guess I’ll trouble you for a little longer.”
The day was eventful for another reason. Coming up from a short visit to the settlements, Bender handed Carter a letter that evening, the superscription of which sent the dark blood flooding over his neck, for it was the first he had seen of Helen’s writing these months. Was this the answer of his longing? Had she sent—at last? His fingers trembled as he tore the wrapping, then he paused, staring. It was his last check, returned without an explanatory scrap.
“She’s hired to teach her old school again.” Bender answered his blank look.