It was plain that Tommy Eye had spoken the truth. That flood was not the mere outrush through shattered dam-gates. Blunder Lake was emptying itself through a rent deeper than nature had set in its side. In a stream-bed of intervales and broad levels the Enchanted drive would have been scattered to its own disaster. But Blunder valley was slashed deep between the hills. The turbid flood that raced there was penned. The log-herds could only butt the granite cliffs and surge on. There was but one outlet—the mad current of Blunder Stream pouring down to its junction with the Umcolcus.
They “manned the river,” scattering along, one man posted at a curve in sight of another. A hat waved meant that a jam was forming and called for help. And when timber jack-strawed too wildly to be readily loosened by cant-dog and pick-pole they dynamited. There was no time for “knittin’-work” on that drive.
Tommy Eye, with meal-sack slung over his shoulder, made himself custodian of the “canned thunder.” It was Larry Gorman, woodsman poet, who first called him “Tommy Thunder.” If you go into the north country you can probably find some one to sing you the song that Larry Gorman composed, the first verse running:
“Come, listen, good white-water chaps. Who was that man, I wonder,
Who turned himself to an outlaw bold and put the bang-juice under?
Who was it cracked the neck of her, ’way up at old Lake Blunder,
When hell broke loose and sluiced our spruce?
’Twere done by Tommy Thunder!”
His was the recklessness of mania. Men who saw him coming along the shore with his horrid burden dodged into the woods. Where and when he slept no one knew. Daytime and night-time he was racing to where logs had cob-piled. Roars that boomed among the hills told that he had arrived. In the first gray of morning men saw him warming his dynamite over a camp-fire, and shuddered and hurried away. To find the king log of a jam and drop his cartridge where it would have instant effect, he took chances that made men turn their backs. It isn’t pleasant to see a man macerated by grinding logs or scattered across the sky.
No word passed between Tommy Eye and Dwight Wade. Those days and nights when the Enchanted drive was on its roaring way down Blunder Stream towards the Umcolcus River were not the sort of days that invited conversation. On the ordinary stream-drives to the main river, in the desperate hurry of the driving-pitch, men work as many hours as they can stand up. With the drive under control, they can at least stop sluicing in the dead hours of the night. But the Enchanted drive that spring was a wild beast that never closed its eyes. As it raged along they did not dare to leave it alone for an hour. Men raced beside it, clutched at it, clung as long as they were able, and dropped off, stunned by the stupor of exhaustion.
After a few hours some one’s prodding foot stirred them back to wakefulness, and they stumbled up and began the fight once more. Outside of a charge in battle, there is no place where individual rivalry is so keen and eager as in a driving-crew on hard waters. Men do not require to be urged to do their utmost. “Coward” and “shirk” are sneers that cut deeply down-river.
Wade, rushing from point to point, cant-dog in hand, his shoes mere pulp, his clothes in tatters, saw men asleep with their faces in the tin plates that the cookee had heaped with food. They had gone to sleep with the first mouthful, hungry as demons, but overcome the moment their feet stopped moving.
Some he found asleep where they were posted to “card”[6] certain ledges. He beat them about the head with the flat of his hand, and they awoke and thanked him with wistful smiles that touched his heart. But brutal force had started the Enchanted drive, brutal force marked its rush, and it had to be brutal force that could keep it going. Brutal force took toll in the logs that were splintered by dynamite, but it was a toll that circumstances demanded. A man unwilling to take the chances that Tommy Eye took would have wasted thousands of feet instead of hundreds, and Wade knew it, and gulped words of gratitude when they met, hurrying on the shore.
Half-way to the Umcolcus, Lazy Tom Stream enters Blunder, and here Wade found Barnum Withee rushing in his logs and eager to accept an invitation to join drives. Withee was asking no questions. He did not need to. He understood. What had been done upstream was none of his business. He could declare that much when he got his drive down, and could defend himself from complicity. In the mean time he would take advantage of the situation.