“If my gang don’t get here pretty soon, and I have to put up with this crowd of bohunks much longer, I won’t be fit to live with,” growled Gillis.
Gillis’s gang of “redshirts” were known the length and breadth of British Columbia. Employers bid high for their services, but for many years they had stuck loyally with Gillis and the R. C. & L. Co. At present they were employed by the Company in one of their camps up the coast, but, at Gillis’s earnest request, Robert Rennie had promised to send them to Summit Lake.
Gillis’s “redshirts” had the well-earned reputation of being the wildest crew of lumber-jacks west of the Rockies. “They’re wild, all right,” Gillis had admitted; “a swearin’, drinkin’, fightin’ gang of roughnecks. But holy mackerel! How them boys can log!”
That night Gillis confided his troubles to Donald. “I don’t know what in tarnation’s to become of loggin’ in years to come if things keep on as they are now,” he began in a despondent tone. “It used to be that when you sent down town for loggers you got loggers. But now,” with a gesture of disgust, “you git a lot of silk-stockin’d, mandolin-playin’, gum-chewin’, smooth-haired guys, or else a bunch of snuff-chewin’, garlic-smellin’, macaroni-eatin’ bohunks, whose names sound like a war in Central Europe.”
Sighing reminiscently, he continued: “I often wonder if it’s because I’m gittin’ old; but, you know, when I look back on the days, when we logged with bull teams, it seems to me that the men at that time liked to work. I can still see the old timers in their whiskers, and their big black hats and flannel shirts, as they sailed out on the old Comox or the Cassiar.” He shook his head sadly. “Ah! there was only one kind of logger in them days.”
Seeing that Donald was interested, he went on: “Yes, there’s two kinds of loggers nowadays, Donnie, the ‘single-breasted’ and the ‘double-breasted.’ And there’s a hell of a lot of difference between the two. The ‘single-breasted’ logger is a man that don’t speak anythin’ but English, an’ he don’t belong to the ‘I won’t works’ neither. He knows loggin’ from A to Z; don’t mind sleepin’ in a bunk, and always carries his own blankets. If he borrows a ten-spot off you, as soon as he earns it he comes lookin’ for you, slips you the money, grabs you by the hand, and lookin’ you straight in the eye, says: ‘Thanks, friend, come and have a drink.’ At night, when he is through work, he’ll smoke his pipe, grind his axe, talk about the next day’s work with the boss, read the paper and go to bed. In the mornin’ he’ll swallow a big load of prunes and ham and eggs and go to work a-singin’.
“But this ‘double-breaster’,” he snorted disgustedly, “he’s a mixture of a taxi-driver, bartender and soap-box orator, and just because he lives in B.C., he thinks he is a logger. He knows the difference between a fallin’ saw and a bucket’s saw, and that just about lets him out. If he borrows a dollar off you, the minute the bill slips out of your hand you can see a look in his eye that says, ‘You’re hooked.’ And the devil of it is that he won’t cross to the other side of the street when he sees you comin’, but he’ll walk right up to you a-smilin’ and ask you for another buck.
“When he gets through at night he cleans his finger-nails and picks on a mandolin while he tells how many Janes is stuck on him in Vancouver; gives an opinion that the shower-bath was not hot enough, and how we sufferin’ workers should rise against the capitalists. He’ll kick at the breakfast table because there is only oranges and no grape-fruit. When he goes in the woods he’ll throw a few tools away so’s to help the cause of the workers.
“Workers!” he exploded, as he came to his feet and walked the floor, “we’ve got too many ‘double-breasteds’ and ‘hunks’ in this camp right now, Donnie. A hunk will work if you show him a pick and shovel, but these other guys are trouble-breeders. Did you see that big brute that came in to-day?”
Donald remembered seeing an enormous man with narrow, piggish eyes, in the crowd of men sent by the employment agency.