Chapter XV. A CAT AND HER KITTENS
That was a breakfast long to be remembered by Nan Sherwood, not particularly because of its quality, but for the quantity served. She had never seen men like these lumbermen eat before, save for the few days she had been at Uncle Henry's house.
Great platters of baked beans were placed on the table, flanked by the lumps of pork that had seasoned them. Fried pork, too, was a “main-stay” on the bill-of-fare. The deal table was graced by no cloth or napery of any kind. There were heaps of potatoes and onions fried together, and golden cornbread with bowls of white gravy to ladle over it.
After riding twenty-five miles through such a frosty air, Nan would have had to possess a delicate appetite indeed not to enjoy these viands. She felt bashful because of the presence of so many rough men; but they left her alone for the most part, and she could listen and watch.
“Old Toby Vanderwiller tell you what Ged's been blowin' about, Henry?” asked one of the men at the table, busy ladling beans into his mouth with a knife, a feat that Nan thought must be rather precarious, to say the least.
“Says he's going to jail me if I go on to the Perkins Tract,” growled Uncle Henry, with whom the matter was doubtless a sore subject.
“Yaas. But he says more'n that,” said this tale bearer.
“Oh, Ged says a whole lot besides his prayers,” responded Uncle Henry, good-naturedly. Perhaps he saw they were trying to bait him.
“Wal, 'tain't nothin' prayerful he's sayin',” drawled the first speaker, after a gulp of coffee from his thick china cup. “Some of the boys at Beckett's, you know, they're a tough crowd, was riggin' him about what you said to him down to the Forks, and Ged spit out that he'd give a lump of money to see you on your back.”
“Huh!” grunted Uncle Henry.
“And some of 'em took him up, got the old man right down to cases.”
“That so?” asked Mr. Sherwood curiously. “What's Ged going to do? Challenge me to a game of cat's cradle? Or does he want to settle the business at draughts, three best out o' five?”
“Now you know dern well, Hen,” said the other, as some of the listeners laughed loudly at Mr. Sherwood's sally, “that old Ged Raffer will never lock horns with you 'ceptin' it's in court, where he'll have the full pertection of the law, and a grain the best of it into the bargain.”
“Well, I s'pose that's so,” admitted Nan's uncle, rather gloomily, she thought.
“So, if Beckett's crowd are int'rested in bumping you a whole lot, you may be sure Ged's promised 'em real money for it.”
“Pshaw!” exclaimed Uncle Henry. “You're fooling now. He hasn't hired any half-baked chip-eaters and Canucks to try and beat me up?”
“I ain't foolin'.”
“Pshaw!”
“You kin 'pshaw' till the cows come home,” cried the other heatedly. “I got it straight.”
“Who from?”
“Sim Barkis, him what's cookin' for Beckett's crew.”
“Good man, Sim. Never caught him in a lie yet. You are beginning to sound reasonable, Josh,” and Mr. Sherwood put down his knife and fork and looked shrewdly at his informant. “Now tell me,” he said, “how much is Sim going to get for helping to pay Ged Raffer's debts?”
“Har!” ejaculated the other man. “You know Sim ain't that kind.”
“All right, then. How much does he say the gang's going to split between 'em after they've done me up brown according to contract?” scoffed Uncle Henry, and Nan realized that her giant relative had not the least fear of not being able to meet any number of enemies in the open.
“Sim come away before they got that far. Of course Ged didn't say right out in open meetin' that he'd give so many dollars for your scalp. But he got 'em all int'rested, and it wouldn't surprise him, so Sim said, if on the quiet some of those plug-uglies had agreed to do the job.”
Nan shuddered, and had long since stopped eating. But nobody paid any attention to her at the moment.
Uncle Henry drawled: “They're going to do the hardest day's job for the smallest pay that they ever did on this Michigan Peninsula. I'm much obliged to you, Josh, for telling me. I never go after trouble, as you fellows all know; but I sha'n't try to dodge it, either.”
He picked up his knife and fork and went quietly on with his breakfast. But Nan could not eat any more at all.
It seemed to the gently nurtured girl from Tillbury as though she had fallen in with people from another globe. Even the mill-hands, whom Bess Harley so scorned, were not like these great, rough fellows whose minds seemed continually to be fixed upon battle. At least, she had never seen or heard such talk as had just now come to her ears.
The men began, one by one, to push back the benches and go out. There was a great bustle of getting under way as the teams started for the woods, and the choppers, too, went away. Tom hurried to start his big pair of dapple grays, and Nan was glad to bundle up again and run out to watch the exodus.
They were a mighty crew. As Uncle Henry had said, the Big Woods did not breed runts.
Remembering the stunted, quick-moving, chattering French Canadians, and the scattering of American-born employees among them, who worked in the Tillbury mills, Nan was the more amazed by the average size of these workmen. The woodsmen were a race of giants beside the narrow-shouldered, flat-chested pygmies who toiled in the mills.
Tom strode by with his timber sled. Rafe leaped on to ride and Tom playfully snapped his whiplash at him. Nan was glad to see that the two brothers smiled again at each other. Their recent tiff seemed to be forgotten.
Some of the choppers had already gone on ahead to the part of the tract where the marked trees were being felled. Now the pluck, pluck, pluck of the axe blows laid against the forest monarchs, reached the girl's ears. She thought the flat stuttering sound of the axes said “pluck” very plainly, and that that was just the word they should say.
“For it does take lots of pluck to do work of this kind,” Nan confided to her uncle, who walked up and down on the porch smoking an after-breakfast pipe.
“Yes. No softies allowed on the job,” said he, cheerfully. “Some of the boys may be rough and hard nuts to crack; but it is necessary to have just such boys or we couldn't get out the timber.”
“But they want to fight so much!” gasped Nan.
“Sho!” said her uncle, slowly. “It's mostly talk. They feel the itch for hard work and hard play, that's all. You take lively, full-muscled animals, and they are always bucking and quarreling—trying to see which one is the best. Take two young, fat steers they'll lock horns at the drop of a hat. It's animal spirits, Nan. They feel that they've got to let off steam. Where muscle and pluck count for what they do in the lumber camps, there's bound to be more or less ructions.”
Perhaps this might be; but Nan was dreadfully sorry, nevertheless, that Uncle Henry had this trouble with Mr. Gedney Raffer. The girl feared that there had been something besides “letting off steam” in the challenge her uncle had thrown down to his enemy, or to the men that enemy could hire to attack him.
The timber sledges soon began to drift back, for some of the logs had been cut before the big storm, and had only to be broken out of the drifts and rolled upon the sleds with the aid of the men's canthooks. It was a mystery at first to Nan how they could get three huge logs, some of them three feet in diameter at the butt, on to the sled; two at the bottom and one rolled upon them, all being fastened securely with the timber-chain and hook.
How the horses strained in their collars to start the mighty load! But once started, the runners slipped along easily enough, even through the deep snow, packing the compressible stuff in one passage as hard as ice. Nan followed in this narrow track to the very bank of the river where the logs were heaped in long windrows, ready to be launched into the stream when the waters should rise at the time of the spring freshet.
Tom managed his team alone, and unloaded alone, too. It was marvelous (so Nan thought) that her cousin could start the top log with the great canthook, and guide it as it rolled off the sled so that it should lie true with timbers that had been piled before. The strain of his work made him perspire as though it were midsummer. He thrust the calks on his bootsoles into the log and the shreds of bark and small chips flew as he stamped to get a secure footing for his work. Then he heaved like a giant, his shoulders humping under the blue jersey he wore, and finally the log turned. Once started, it was soon rolled into place.
Nan ran into the cook shed often to get warm. Her uncle was busy with the boss of the camp, so she had nobody but the cook and his helper to speak to for a time. Therefore it was loneliness that made her start over the half-beaten trail for the spot where the men were at work, without saying a word to anybody.
None of the teams had come by for some time; but she could hear faintly the sound of the axes and the calling of the workmen to each other and their sharp commands to the horses.
She went away from the camp a few hundred yards and then found that the trail forked. One path went down a little hill, and as that seemed easy to descend, Nan followed it into a little hollow. It seemed only one sled had come this way and none of the men were here. The voices and axes sounded from higher up the ridge.
Suddenly she heard something entirely different from the noise of the woodsmen. It was the snarling voice of a huge cat and almost instantly Nan sighted the creature which stood upon a snow-covered rock beside the path. It had tasseled ears, a wide, wicked “smile,” bristling whiskers, and fangs that really made Nan tremble, although she was some yards from the bobcat.
As she believed, from what her cousins had told her, bobcats are not usually dangerous. They never seek trouble with man, save under certain conditions; and that is when a mother cat has kittens to defend.
This was a big female cat, and, although the season was early, she had littered and her kittens, three of them, were bedded in a heap of leaves blown by the wind into a hollow tree trunk.
The timberman driving through the hollow had not seen the bobcat and her three blind babies; but he had roused the mother cat and she was now all ready to spring at intruders.
That Nan was not the person guilty of disturbing her repose made no difference to the big cat. She saw the girl standing, affrighted and trembling, in the path and with a ferocious yowl and leap she crossed the intervening space and landed in the snow within almost arm's reach of the fear-paralyzed girl.