"I must not dally on the brink, half hid in the obscure thicket, lest the alert ones below should suspect an ambush and point toward me open-mouthed rifles from their stack near at hand. I was enough out of the woods to halloo, as I did heartily. Klale sprang forward at shout and spur. Antipodes obeyed a comprehensive hint from the whip of Loolowean. We dashed down into the crimson pathway, and across among the astonished road makers—astonished at the sudden alighting down from Nowhere of a pair of cavaliers, Pasaiook and Siwash. What meant this incursion of a strange couple? I became at once the center of a red-flannel-shirted circle. The recumbents stood on end. The cooks let their frying pans bubble over, while, in response to looks of expectation, I hung out my handbill and told the society my brief and simple tale. I was not running away from any fact in my history. A harmless person, asking no favors, with plenty of pork and spongy biscuit in his bags—only going home across the continent, if may be, and glad, gentlemen pioneers, of this unexpected pleasure.
"My quality thus announced, the boss of the road makers, without any dissenting voice, offered me the freedom of their fireside. He called for the fattest pork, that I might be entertained right republicanly. Every cook proclaimed supper ready. I followed my representative host to the windward side of the greenwood pyre, lest smoke wafting toward my eyes should compel me to disfigure the banquet with lachrymose countenance.
"Fronting the coals, and basking in their embrowning beams, were certain diminutive targets, well known to me as defensive armor against darts of cruel hunger—cakes of unleavened bread, light flapjacks in the vernacular, confected of flour and the saline juices of fire-ripened pork, and kneaded well with drops of the living stream. Baked then in frying pan, they stood now, each nodding forward and resting its edge upon a planted twig, toast-crustily till crunching time should come. And now to every man his target! Let supper assail us! No dastards with trencher are we.
"In such a platonic republic as this a man found his place according to his powers. The cooks were no base scullions; they were brothers, whom conscious ability, sustained by universal suffrage, had endowed with the frying pan. Each man's target of flapjacks served him for platter and edible table. Coffee, also, for beverage, the fraternal cooks set before us in infrangible tin pots—coffee ripened in its red husk by Brazilian suns thousands of leagues away, that we, in cool Northern forests, might feel the restorative power of its concentrated sunshine, feeding vitality with fresh fuel.
"But for my gramniverous steeds, gallopers all day long, unflinching steeplechase, what had nature done here in the way of provender? Alas! little or naught. This camp of plenty for me was a starvation camp for them.
"My hosts were a stalwart gang. I had truly divined them from their cleavings on the hooihut (road). It was but play for any one of these to whittle down a cedar five feet in diameter. In the morning this compact knot of comrades would explode into a mitraille of men wielding keen axes, and down would go the dumb, stolid files of the forest. Their talk was as muscular as their arms. When these laughed, as only men fresh and hearty and in the open air can laugh, the world became mainly grotesque; it seemed at once a comic thing to live—a subject for chuckling, that we were bipeds with noses—a thing to roar at; that we had all met there from the wide world to hobnob by a frolicsome fire with tin pots of coffee, and partake of crisped bacon and toasted doughboys in ridiculous abundance. Easy laughter infected the atmosphere. Echoes ceased to be pensive and became jocose. A rattling humor pervaded the feast, and Green River [14] rippled with noise of fantastic jollity. Civilization and its dilettante diners-out sneer when Clodpole at Dive's table doubles his soup, knifes his fish, tilts his plate into his lap, puts muscle into the crushing of his meringue, and tosses off the warm beaker in his finger bowl. Camps by Tacoma sneer not at all, but candidly roar at parallel accidents. Gawkey makes a cushion of his flapjack. Butterfingers drops his red-hot rasher into his bosom, or lets slip his mug of coffee into his boot drying by the fire—a boot henceforth saccharine. A mule, slipping his halter, steps forward unnoticed, puts his nose in the circle and brays resonant. These are the jocular boons of life, and at these the woodsmen guffaw with lusty good nature. Coarse and rude the jokes may be, but not nasty, like the innuendoes of pseudo-refined cockneys. If the woodsmen are guilty of uncleanly wit, it differs from the uncleanly wit of cities as the mud of a road differs from the sticky slime of slums.
"It is a stout sensation to meet masculine, muscular men at the brave point of a penetrating Boston hooihut—men who are mates—men to whom technical culture means naught—men to whom myself am naught, unless I can saddle, lasso, cook, sing and chop; unless I am a man of nerve and pluck, and a brother in generosity and heartiness. It is restoration to play at cudgels of jocoseness with a circle of friendly roughs, not one of whom ever heard the word bore—with pioneers who must think and act and wrench their living from the closed hand of nature.
"* * * While fantastic flashes were leaping up and illuminating the black circuit of forest, every man made his bed, laid his blankets in starry bivouac and slept like a mummy. The camp became vocal with snores; nasal with snores of various calibre was the forest. Some in triumphant tones announced that dreams of conflict and victory were theirs; some sighed in dulcet strains that told of lovers' dreams; some strew shrill whistles through cavernous straits; some wheezed grotesquely and gasped piteously; and from some who lay supine, snoring up at the fretted roof of forest, sound gushed in spasms, leaked in snorts, bubbled in puffs, as steam gushes, leaks and bubbles from yawning valves in degraded steamboats. They died away into the music of my dreams; a few moments seemed to pass, and it was day.
"* * * If horses were breakfastless, not so were their masters. The road makers had insisted that I should be their guest, partaking not only of the fire, air, earth and water of their bivouacs, but an honorable share at their feast. Hardly had the snoring ceased when the frying of the fryers began. In the pearly-gray mist of dawn, purple shirts were seen busy about the kindling pile; in the golden haze of sunrise cooks brandished pans over fierce coals raked from the red-hot jaws of flame that champed their breakfast of fir logs. Rashers, doughboys, not without molasses, and coffee—a bill of fare identical with last night's—were our morning meal. * * *
"And so adieu, gentlemen pioneers, and thanks for your frank, manly hospitality! Adieu, 'Boston tilicum,' far better types of robust Americanism than some of those selected as its representatives by Boston of the Orient, where is too much worship of what is, and not too much uplifting of hopeful looks of what ought to be.