Afterwards they had many a tilt on this same subject. Smoking in his doorway of evenings, Jimmy would emit sarcasms from the midst of furious clouds, while she, as much for fun as from natural feminine perversity, took the opposite side. And neither knew the other's mind—until too late. But placated by her low answer, he now let the subject rest.
Three feet of green water was slipping over the river ice when they forded Silver Creek, and they had to dodge odd logs, the vanguard of Carter's drive. "Another week," the trustee remarked, "an' we couldn't have crossed."
He was right. That week a warm rain ran the last of the snows off several thousand square miles of watershed, feeding the stream till it waxed fat and kicked like the scriptural ox against the load Carter had saddled upon it. Snarling viciously, it would whirl a timber across a bend, then rush on with mad roar, leaving a mile of logs backed up behind. But such triumph never endured. With axe, pevees, cant-hooks, Bender and his men broke the jams; whereupon, as though peevish at its failure, the river swept out over the level bottoms and stranded timbers in backwaters among dense scrub.
To see this, the first log-drive on Silver Creek, the children who lived near the valley scuttled every day from school, and they would gaze, wide-eyed, at Michigan Red riding a log that spun like a top under his nimble feet, or watch the Cougar, shoulder-deep in snow-water, shoving logs at some ticklish point. Then they would hang about the cook's tent, while that functionary juggled with beans and bacon or made lumberman's cake by the cubic yard. Also there were peeps into the sleeping-tents, where men lay and snored in boots and wet red shirts, just as they had come out of the river. Of all of which they would prattle to Helen next day at school, reciting many tales, chief among them the Homeric narrative of the cutting of a jam—in which she had a special interest, and which proved, among other things, that Michigan Red was again at his old tricks.
It was Susie Flynn who brought this tale. Dipping down, one end of a bridge timber had stuck at an acute angle into the river-bed. A second timber swung broadside on against its end, then, in a trice, the logs had backed up, grinding bark to pulp under their enormous pressure. "Mr. Bender," Susie said, "he was for throwing a rope across from bank to bank so's they ked cut it from above. But one wasn't handy, an' while they was waiting a big red man comes up an' hands Mr. Carter the dare.
"'If you're scairt, gimme the axe an' I'll show you how we trim a jam in Michigan.'
"But Mr. Carter wouldn't give it. 'No,' he says, awful quiet, yet sorter funny, for all the men laughed—'no. They'll need you to show 'em again.' Then he walks out on the jam an' goes to chopping, with Mr. Bender calling for him to come back an' not make a damn fool of himself."
The scene had so impressed the child that she reproduced every detail for her pale audience of one—Carter astride of the key-log; his men, bating their breath with the "huh" of his stroke; Bender's distress; the cynical grin of Michigan Red. Once, she said, a floating chip deflected the axe, and he swore, easily, naturally, turning a smile of annoyance up to the bank. It drew no response from eyes that were glued to the log, now quivering under tons of pressure. A huge baulk, it broke with a thunderous report when cut a quarter through, and loosed a mile of grinding death upon the chopper.
Then came his progress through the welter. As the jam bore down-stream, timbers would dip, somersault, and thrash down on a log that still quivered under the spurn of his leap. Young trees raised on end and swept like battering-rams along the log he rode. Yet, jumping from log to log, he came up from death out of the turmoil in safety to the bank.
"Brought his axe erlong, too!" Susan triumphantly finished. "An' you should have jes' seen that red man—he looked that sick an' green through his wishy-washy smiling. But Mr. Carter! Ain't he a brave one? You must be awful proud of him, ain't you, Miss Helen?"