“Go ahead, boy,” replied Mr. Thompson. “Any sort of a suggestion will be welcome just now.”
“Well,” said Ed, “we boys used to slide down a hill one winter on skis, and when some warm days came that threatened to spoil our track, we watered it at night, and the coating of ice held where the snow would have melted. I thought—”
“Boy, you’ve hit it! I suspect you’ve saved the contract,” exclaimed Mr. Thompson.
That was a busy afternoon for Lars Olson, the carpenter-blacksmith, but by nine o’clock that night a water-tight tank had been fitted upon a sled, with a rude attachment something like a street sprinkler, under control of the driver.
While the contrivance was open to improvement (which it later received as it took its place in the necessary equipment for logging operations) it enabled Mr. Thompson to give his road a coating of ice before morning, and, with the operation repeated night after night, to defy the sun’s destroying rays a little longer.
It would be interesting to tell how, in the race for the chopping championship, big Olaf grew careless and had a leg crushed by the unexpected side swing of a falling tree; how Mr. Thompson, at the risk of failing on the contract, fixed up a comfortable bed on a pung, and sent Ed with an illy-spared team to carry the wounded man to his home. It would make another story how Ed was lost upon his return trip, in the great snow storm that marked the end of the warm spell, and was saved from death by an old Irishman after he had already become unconscious. We would like to tell how, when the cold days returned, Antoine Ravenstein’s grays beat the bays with a prodigious load, that was talked about for years, as the record for hauling, in those northern camps. We would like to live again with the reader the glorious days of February, in which the contract was completed, and in addition to the agreed wages, each man was given a bonus of ten dollars by Mr. Thompson. But I must leave these stories to be told at another time.
The winter passed; March came with its rains, and finally those of the crew who had elected to remain at the camp in order to be at hand to join the “drive,” one day were startled to hear the report as of a heavy cannon, in the direction of the brows on the river.
When they reached that place they found Bally Tarbox with his crew of brow-breakers loosening up, with charges of dynamite, the great ice-locked dams of logs which were filling the river bed.
“Hullo, you lop-eared nesters!” shouted the boss at the sight of the men from the camp. “Time for you to be hitting the trail and grabbing a peavy. Wangan’s above Big Bull.”
“Where’d you get that woodchuck?” he called as he caught sight of Ed. “Oh, it’s one of the Allen boys, ain’t it. Say, little sawed-off, your big Bud is comin’ down North Fork now.”