CHAPTER XII—“US AS DON’T KNOW NOTHIN’”
With the June rains came the drive, thousand after thousand of glistening logs that weltered in the slow rise and fall of the lake, crowding, rolling, blundering against each other, pounding along shore on the rocks, and shouldering incessantly at the chain-linked booms that sagged across the upper end of the conglomeration of timbers. Rain-dappled spaces appeared here and there in that undulating floor of uneasy logs, round which two floating windlasses were slowly worming another boom from shore to shore. Round and round the capstans stepped red-shirt, blue-shirt, gray-shirt, their calked boots gnawing a splintered, circular path on the windlass rafts.
Below the three cabins, and close to the river, stood the smoking wangan of weathered tents, flopping in the wind that whipped the open fireplace smoke across the swinging pots, and on down the gorge, where it hung eddying in the lee of rain-blackened cliffs.
Peaveys stood like patient sentinels, their square steel points thrust in stranded logs. Pike-poles lay here and there, their sharp screw-ends rusting in the rain. They seemed slight and ineffectual compared with the stout peaveys, whose dangling steel fingers hung suggestively ready to grasp with biting spur the slippery timber; and Y-hey! from the men, and the log would grumble over the shingle and plunge in the lake with a surly rolling from side to side. But the peavey’s attenuated brother, the pike-pole, was a worker of miracles in the hands of his master, the driver.
Ross, who had been watching with keen interest the manœuvres of the rivermen, stood with his shoulders against a buttress of the dam, muffled in sou’wester and oilskins. Logs were shooting from the apron of the sluiceway and leaping to the lift of the foaming back-water, like lean hunters taking the billowy top of a wind-tossed hedge. A figure came toward where he stood and called to him, but the roar of the water through the sluiceway drowned his voice. Then Harrigan, brushing the rain from his face, stood before him.
“Here you! get a roll on that log there, or—”
He pointed to where two of the crew were standing, knee-deep in the backwash of the stream, tugging at a balky timber that threatened to hang up the logs that charged at it and swung off in the current again.
“No, you won’t,” said David, turning his face to Harrigan. “Thought I was one of the crew loafing?” A faint twinkle shone beneath his half-closed lids. It vanished as he leveled his clear gray eyes on Harrigan’s. “That’s the fourth mistake you’ve made regarding me. Aren’t you getting tired of it? I am.”
Harrigan had not seen Ross since the shooting, and, taken aback by suddenly coming upon him, he stared at David a little longer than the occasion seemed to warrant.
Coolly the younger man lifted his sou’wester and ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s on this side,” he said, disclosing a red seam above his ear, “if that’s what you are looking for. Shot any deer lately?”