CHAPTER XIX
The moon lighted Jim Ashe to the spot where Tim Bennett and his company of lumberjacks waited. It must be confessed that Jim’s thoughts on the way had more to do with Marie Ducharme than with the enterprise of the night. He thought of Michael Moran, too; hoped in a vague sort of way that the night might bring him face to face with Moran in not peaceful circumstances, for he was young enough to feel the need of settling scores in a physical manner.
Bennett and the men were awaiting him impatiently, though he arrived a full half-hour before his time. They crowded about him, appraising him as a leader, for many of them had never seen him before. He satisfied them. Bennett had told them stories of Sudden Jim which they approved. The result was that they were willing, eager to follow wherever he might lead, careless of consequences to themselves.
“I worked for your dad,” shouted a huge Irishman. “Then you worked for a better man than I,” said Jim.
“It’s a proper son that admits the same,” replied the man.
“Boys,” said Jim, “we may have a tough job this night and we may have an easy one. We’ll figure it at its toughest. You came without knowing why you were coming. I’ll tell you. We’re going to seize the Diversity Hardwood Company’s logging railroad; we’re going to take charge of the rolling stock. We’re going to capture Camp One with all the logs we can get, and enough standing timber to cut what we need. There’s a fair gang in Camp One, but mostly Poles and Hunkies and Italians.”
“L’ave us at ’em!” bellowed the big Irishman. “Shut up and listen,” said Jim, sharply; and the Irishman grinned delightedly. That was the way to speak up to a man.
“The engine is in the roundhouse. Ten trucks stand on the siding near it. There are twenty more trucks at the landings by Camp One. Can anybody here run a locomotive?”
“Me,” said a stocky Dane.
“There’ll be nobody there but a watchman or so. Take ten men and make for town. Land on that roundhouse at eleven o’clock. Hitch on to the trucks and scoot for the woods with them. Pick your own men and start now. The rest of us hike across lots to Camp One. You didn’t forget peavey handles, I see.” Jim grinned down at them and leaped from his buggy.
The parties separated, one moving townward, the other into the woods in the direction of the Diversity Company’s cuttings. With the latter went Jim.
They marched through the moonlit woods gaily as to a merrymaking, but withal as silently as such men could march. They jostled one another, slyly tripped one another, found delight in holding down springy saplings so they would spring back to switch the ears of the man coming behind. It was a picnic of big boys—which would be no picnic when they stripped and got down to business.
For half an hour they stumbled along. An unexpected voice called from the obscurity ahead.
“Mr. Ashe.”
“What is it?” Jim demanded. He knew here was none of his own men; wondered who else was abroad in the woods at that time of night. “Who is it?”
“Gilders,” said the man, stepping into view. The rifle, which seemed as much a part of his usual costume as his floppy hat, was under his arm. He stopped, was surrounded by Jim’s lumberjacks.
“What are you doing here at this time of night?” Jim demanded.
“I am here—many places—at what time of night is best,” said Gilders. “Night or day—what’s the difference?” He shrugged his shoulders. “I cut across from town to catch you. Moran’s warned. He’s got a dozen men at the roundhouse. They’ve telephoned the camps.”
Moran warned! It seemed impossible. Who could have given warning? Jim named over mentally those who knew what was afoot. Zaanan Frame—he had not talked. Allen—he, too, was a safe man. Grierson—oxen could not have drawn a word from him. Marie Ducharme? She knew. Jim had seen Moran going to her but an hour before. Marie Ducharme. He would not believe she could be guilty of such a betrayal of confidence. It was not in her to commit such an act. Yet she had not seemed herself. Something had happened. She had been afraid. Jim closed his eyes, bit his under lip. No one else who knew could have given the warning. The opportunity had been hers. The logic of events bore against her.
Jim turned to Gilders.
“Can you lead me to town the way you came?”
“Yes.”
“Tim Bennett, you’re boss of the gang that goes to the camp. I’ll take ten men away from you. You’ll have thirty—it ought to be enough. You”—he pointed to a man—“come with me, and you and you and you.” He selected his men. “On the jump,” he said to Gilders, and at the heels of their guide they plunged headlong to re-enforce the party that had gone before.
Jim held a match to his watch. It was fifteen minutes past ten. They had three-quarters of an hour to reach a point that could not be reached in less than an hour. When they arrived the battle for the roundhouse would have been on a quarter of an hour. If Moran’s party were strong enough that quarter of an hour might spell defeat for the whole enterprise. If the first attacking party could hold out until Jim arrived—
“Hustle,” Jim said, briefly, and saved his breath for the exertion before him.
The men went silently now, grimly. The smell of imminent battle was in their noses. Ahead of them were comrades facing uneven odds. It was not simply to fight that they hurried, but to succor their friends. Jim’s legs, untrained to woods travel, cried out for rest, but his will compelled them on.
At last lights shone below them, the black tube of the Diversity Company’s smokestack lifted into the star-shimmering sky—ten minutes would take them to it. They heard a sudden, distant shout, other shouts, a babel of sounds subdued by distance. The fight for the roundhouse was on. The attacking party had struck, had met surprising resistance.
“Run!” shouted Jim.
They ran, stumbling, falling headlong. Men’s breath came pantingly; bruised shins were paid for in brief oaths. Each man sought to outdistance his fellows, to be first to add his weight to the tide of battle.
Down the last gully they charged, across the flat before the mills, over the tracks. Before them loomed the roundhouse, now bright with electric light. Before the big doors swayed and writhed a group of men. Other dark figures, two and two, quaintly intertwined, moved and struggled and smote like living silhouettes. Hoarse shouts arose; the thud of blows; the shuffling of feet came to Jim’s ears. Then he was in the midst of it.
Even with the addition of Jim’s reinforcements his party was outnumbered; but Moran’s men, under the shock and surprise of the charge, gave way, but only for an instant. Inside, Jim saw the engine, steam up, a man in the cab. They were getting ready to bring it out. Why? he asked himself, even as the sight of it was shut out and he was hemmed in by fighting men.
It was Jim’s first real fight. It came to him suddenly that he could fight, that he was worthy to stand side by side with these lumberjacks, to give blows where they gave blows, and he was glad.
Again he caught a brief glimpse of the interior of the roundhouse as a man before him went down under a blow from his fist. On the tender he saw Michael Moran—not fighting, but watching, directing. He saw a man break away from the melee and leap toward the engine, recognized Gilders. His teeth were bared, his hands empty. Jim struggled forward, shot another look, saw Moran, his face distorted with rage, raise a chunk of coal above his head and hurl it. Whether it found its mark or not Jim could not tell.
Jim’s men were holding their own. Though outnumbered, they were trained to battle of this sort, with inherited talent for it, against men not bred to fight with their hands. But Moran’s men fought, and fought well. Numbers made them even, if not superior.
It was apparent they had been told to guard the big door, for as best they could they remained solidly before it. They were not men to take the offensive on their own initiative, nor, Jim thought, would they assume it under orders unless the enemy were in actual retreat. It was a point to be taken advantage of. He wormed and wriggled out of the fight, marked the Dane who could drive an engine, and hauled him out, struggling. At random the two of them separated two others from the confusion.
“The engine,” Jim panted. “Side door. Come on!”
They scurried to a small door left unguarded, and plunged through. The engine was before them, Moran still on the tender. On the ground lay Gilders. Moran’s missile had flown true. The Dane with his companions stormed the cab. In an instant they had hurled down the engineer, hurled him so ungently that he did not rise. Jim dodged a lump of coal which Moran hurled, and himself threw a peavey handle which he had picked up somewhere in the fight. It caught Moran amidships so that he crumpled up on the coal, the breath knocked from his overnourished, undertrained body. Jim scrambled to his side, lifted him and dumped him off with scant regard for how or where he fell.
“Toot the whistle!” he yelled. “Back her out.”
The whistle screeched, and in that confined space its voice was the voice of many demons. The wheels began to turn.
“One man up here,” Jim ordered, and when the man came he set an example by lifting his voice in battle-cry, by hurling lumps of coal at the backs of the defenders.
They turned. Taken in the rear by a new enemy, menaced by a down-bearing locomotive, their morale departed, they scattered to each side, broke, some even turned in sudden flight. Jim’s lumberjacks did the rest.
The locomotive moved out on a clear track, backed to the switch where stood the empty trucks. It was Jim who coupled them to the engine.
“We’ve done the job here,” he said to the big Irishman who was his companion on the tender. “Collect the boys and load ’em on the trucks. We’re off for the woods. Maybe Bennett’s gang is chewing on more than it can swallow. Somebody see to Gilders inside there.”
A few moments more saw the little army perched precariously on the trucks. They were bruised, bleeding, clothing was in tatters, eyes were draped in black, clearings appeared where once had grown strong white teeth. But they were jubilant, for victory had been theirs. They celebrated it noisily.
Slowly, with great rattling and jangling, with song and cheer, they moved away from the roundhouse, out of the yard and out upon the narrow-gauge track which led back into the woods. Five miles of uncomfortable travel lay between them and Camp One, but its discomforts were not detectable by them. They had won. It had been a fight worth while, and they had won. Another fight lay before them perhaps. They hoped so.
Perhaps Jim Ashe did not know it, but he had tied these men to him with bonds of admiration. From this day they were his friends, would work for him, fight for him. He had fought shoulder to shoulder with them. His quick thought had turned the day in their favor. He was a man who dared, a man who stood on his two feet and wielded fist or peavey handle like a man—he was one of them.
“What’s the matter with Sudden Jim?” somebody yelled.
“He’s all right,” answered back a tumultuous shout, and Jim was more than pleased. He had been tendered an honor which he knew how to appreciate.
“Look out for Crab Creek Trestle,” the Irishman said. “If Moran was on the job he’d jerk a rail and treat us to a drop into the marsh.”
“Slack down at Crab Creek,” Jim shouted to his engineer. He scrambled forward to the cab, and sat looking forward where the headlight peered ahead, illuminating the track.
“She’s bane joost ahead,” said the engineer. In a moment the trestle came into view. As the light rested on it two black figures emerged from the underbrush to run out upon the structure, where they stopped. The sound of sledge striking steel came back distinctly through the clear air.
Jim leaped from the engine, half a dozen men at his heels. Out upon the trestle they ran, all undesirable risks for an accident insurance company at the minute. The sledge continued to rise and fall, but when Jim was within fifty feet of the men they dropped their implements over the edge and ran. Jim stopped to appraise the damage. His men kept up the pursuit with success, for in a moment he heard a shout of glee and saw a man performing antics in the air as he descended into the marsh muck below.
Moran’s men had been too slow. Another minute or so and a rail would have been loosened, but their few blows had not sufficed. The trestle was safe to pass.
“Four men stop here,” Jim said, and motioned the train on.
Ten minutes more and they were at Camp One. There were noises of frolic, but none of battle.
“Get cheated out of your fight?” Jim asked Tim Bennett as the cant-dog man hurried up to the engine.
“Not what you could notice,” grinned Tim, displaying a split lip and barked knuckles. “But they was Wops or somethin’. We chased ’em into the cook-shanty, where they bide in fear and tremblin’.”
“Is there enough moon to load those trucks?”
Tim looked at Jim and grinned broadly.
“There wouldn’t be for anybody but you, Mr. Ashe, but these here boys ’u’d work for you if it was so dark you couldn’t feel a pin stick into you.”
“Leave enough men to hold the gang in the cook-shanty. Take the rest and load. How many trucks can that engine haul down?”
“Twenty, on a pinch.”
“Pick as much maple as you can,” said Jim. “You’re boss.”
Given landings, twoscore men who know how to use cant-hooks can handle an astonishing number of logs in an hour. Twenty trucks were not filled in sixty minutes, but the train was ready before dawn—twenty trucks carrying thirty-five thousand feet of hardwood logs.
“Now the cook-shanty,” said Jim. “We need it.”
The crew rollicked to the log house which was cook-shanty at one end, bunkhouse at the other. Jim parleyed.
“Come out and we’ll let you go,” he called.
Thoroughly frightened, the foreigners emerged.
“Hit for town,” Jim told them. “Your job’s gone. Start walking and keep it up—we’ll be behind you and it won’t be healthy if we catch up.”
Half an hour later Jim’s crew were breakfasting on Moran’s coffee and salt pork. It was a species of humor they could enjoy. The night, with its incidents, had furnished them a story to be told on many evenings in diverse places.
“Fifteen men on the train,” Jim ordered. “The rest load the other ten trucks. We’ll be back for ’em if Moran doesn’t eat us somewhere along the road.”
Jim rode back in the engine cab, tired, but filled with a notable satisfaction. He knew he had scored heavily, though his victory was by no means permanent. Altogether, perhaps, he was more pleased with himself than the state of affairs quite warranted. The engineer reminded him of this by asking what they were to do for coal when the supply in the tender was exhausted. Jim could give no reply.
However, he gave his reply after the train of logs had passed the Diversity Company’s mills, passed them to an accompaniment of cheers and jeers from the men riding on the trucks. For Jim had seen two cars of coal standing on a siding.
“There’s our coal,” he said to the engineer. “We’ll borrow it on the way back.”
And borrow it they did, calmly, under the noses of the enemy.
One more trip to Camp One and return Jim made that day. Another thirty-odd thousand feet of timber was unloaded in his log-yard. He left Tim Bennett in charge, directing him to handle logs as he had never handled them before, and himself went to his office.
Beam and Nelson followed him gleefully. But the surprise of the day was supplied by Grierson, who emerged from his bookkeeping lair, his eyes not free from a moisture the origin of which was open to suspicion, and grasped Jim’s hand.
“I wish your father could have been here to see it,” he said, and retreated hastily behind his barrier again.