CHAPTER X
NORTHWARD, HO!
Buck Moncrossen was a big man with a shrunken, maggoty soul, and no conscience.
He had learned logging as his horses learned it—by repetition of unreasoning routine, and after fifteen years' experience in the woods Appleton had made him a camp boss.
His camps varied from year to year in no slightest detail. He made no suggestions for facilitating or systematizing the work, nor would he listen to any. He roared mightily at the substitution of horses for oxen; he openly scoffed at donkey engines, and would have none of them.
During his years as a sawyer, by the very brute strength and doggedness of him, he had established new records for laying down timber. And now, as boss, he bullied the sawyers who could not equal those records—and hated those who could.
Arbitrary, jealous, malignant, he ruled his camps with the bluff and bluster of the born coward.
Among the lumber-jacks, he was known and hated as a hard driver of men and a savage fighter. In the quick, brutish fights of the camps, men went down under the smashing blows of his huge fists as they would go down to the swing of a derrick-boom, and, once down, would be jumped upon with calked boots and spiked into submission.
It was told in the woods that whisky flowed unchallenged in Buck Moncrossen's camps. His crews were known as hard crews; they "hired out for tough hands, and it was up to them to play their string out."