“But they can’t do it, boys!” the old logger would roar. “They may blow dams and saw booms, but we’ll do them yet. Birl into her, bullies! All the blasted high-bankers between this and the booms of hell can’t hang us up.” Then the men would bark fierce assent, and whirl into the logs with fury.
And so, by unremitting work by day and night, the big drive was swept up from open water, shoal, point, and bay. On the twenty-eighth of June, at midnight, the last logs were boomed. Half an hour afterward the Sophie Green, the Ada Bell, and the big tug started down the lake with heavy tows. The boats were full of rivermen, proud in the consciousness that they had set a record for the river. Their toil and their weariness of body were forgotten. Only a few days separated them from town, where they would make up for both, according to time-honoured custom. They shouted songs—expurgated editions out of deference to Jack Crooks—and the hoarse cough of the ancient Sophie Green’s exhaust, delivered at exact intervals, chopped the verses in two.
Jack and Joe had arranged a little treat. The cook rustled a wonderful meal. Boxes of good cigars were passed around. A phonograph played in the bow of each boat. The trip down the lake was as good as a moonlight excursion, and the men of Kent’s drives talk of it yet. One by one they lay down on the deck, beside the boilers, anywhere and everywhere, and slept the sleep of exhaustion.
In the morning they let the tows down the rapids. The rivermen debarked, followed down the river, and hustled out the bunches of logs that the few men who had preceded them had not bothered about. It was plain sailing now. That day and the next the channel was brown with logs. Kent’s foremen and Wismer & Holden’s cullers checked them as they came. Joe and Jack stood out on an anchor pier and watched the booms fill. More logs came down and still more.
Far away on the morning of the thirtieth they heard the bellowing whistles of the Sophie Green and Ada Bell, and the deep-throated blast of the tug telling them that the last of the big drive was down. At six o’clock that night the booms closed behind the last log.
Joe drew a long breath. “Thank heaven,” said he. “Now, girlie, we’ll have the best meal they can put up in this little town.”
“We will—but we’ll have it in camp,” she informed him. “I’ve arranged with Jimmy Bowes. This is my treat to the men.”
They occupied the head of an impromptu table of pine boards. Down its length and along similar tables were ranged the rivermen. Huge roasts, fowls, vegetables, and stacks of pies were piled before them, for Jimmy Bowes, having carte blanche from Jack, had raided the shops of the town. When the meal was over Haggarty rose, very red and confused amid low growls of encouragement:
“Go to it, Larry!”
“What are ye waitin’ for?”