The launch shot away down the lake, and the Sophie continued to gather logs. Night fell. This time one boat was sufficient to tow all the day’s take. Jack and Joe sat on the foredeck in the dusk, listening to the soft lap of water alongside.
“I can’t tell you what I felt when I heard the drive had broken, Joe,” said she. “It seemed so safe before, and now—but you’ll make it, Joe, I know you will!”
“I’ll make it or bust—and that’s no figure of speech,” he told her grimly. “Those twenty men your father has lent me will just about turn the scale. The boys are working like demons—each man doing the work of two; but it depends on the weather more than on anything else. A couple of windy days would knock us cold. However, there’s no use worrying about that, and all the weather sharps in the crew, and Congdon as well, say it has set for fair. To-morrow night we’ll work by moonlight. I feel a presentiment amounting to a hunch that you’ll be Mrs. Kent before another moon.”
She nestled closer to him. “If I were a very conventional person I’d insist on three months at least to prepare a trousseau and make sure of a lot of wedding presents—but I’m not. I’ve spoken to dad, and he makes your delivery of these logs the only condition. And now, boy, it’s time you were asleep. You’re working as hard as any of the men.”
The floating logs had all been gathered up. Now the crew attacked those hung in bays and jettisoned on shoals and points. It was slow, hard work, but little by little the broken drive was gathered up. The fine weather held. Nightly tows went down the lake, and each morning the empty-booms trailed back for more.
Joe Kent worked with his men. He was strong, active, and enduring. He developed a fair amount of skill with a peavey, and he derived a fierce satisfaction from each log that he twisted from its resting place and rolled into free water. By just that much he was beating Garwood, Ackerman, Clancys—all the gang who, as principals or tools, had determined to loot his business and strip him of his inheritance.
His young, sinewy body responded to the calls made upon it. Wet to the waist he worked all day and at night until the moon set, cheering on his crew with laugh and joke. Afterward he stumbled aboard the Sophie Green almost too tired to speak, even to Jack; but the first dim light saw him drop over the side eager for the new day’s work.
That week Joe lost twenty pounds—and he was not fleshy to start with. Those days of heartbreaking work and the nerve-strain back of it cut lines in his face which were never wholly erased. It was for him a desperate hand-to-hand grapple with time. Logs, logs, logs! By day he worked with them, and by night they crowded his dreams. He had to lift them, to climb over them, to count millions of them; sometimes piles of them cascaded on him, burying him from the world; sometimes they were about to fall on Jack. He would wake, a cry of warning on his lips and the sweat running from every pore of his iron-hard body.
His men responded nobly to the call. They held a fierce, jealous pride in their drive, in their ability to bring it down, in making good any promise given by their employer. Chronic grumblers over small things, they accepted cheerfully the eighteen hours a day of work, and even stretched it a little. And every minute of every hour they worked. Each man moved with a spring and a jump. There were no laggards—none for the foremen to curse. They took in Bill Crooks’s chosen twenty and fired them with the same fierce energy. But this was not a hard task, for the word passed around somehow that on their success in getting out the logs depended the marriage of Kent and Miss Jack. Every man straightway felt a personal responsibility, and the way they sailed into the job made Kent’s crew hustle to keep pace.
Bill Crooks threw off thirty years, put on a pair of spiked boots, and tramped up and down the shore bellowing encouragement to the rivermen. Most of it took the form of virulent curses directed at the men who had persistently tried to hang Kent’s drive.