The clouds raced over the night sky; the riverbanks gazed at the flowing water, at the heavy timber floating slowly over its surface. "Let it come!" cried the long stretch of wild rapids below.
Under the lee of a steep bank, just at the point where the eddy begins, flickered a small camp-fire. The lumbermen sat round it—four of them there were. The boom had just been drawn aside, the baulks from above came floating down in clean rows, needing no helping hand, and for the past two hours there had been no block in the river. The lumbermen were having an easy time to-night.
"The farmer he sleeps in a cosy cot,
With a roof above his head;
The lumberman lies out under the stars,
With the dew to soften his bed.
But we'd not change our life so free
For all the farmer's gold,
Let clodhoppers snore at their ease o'nights,
But we be lumbermen bold!"
The river woke from its dreams.
The river-guard, seated on piles of baulks by the waterside, shifted a little.
"But we be lumbermen bold!"
cried the nearest. And the song was passed on from one point to another, from shore to shore, all down the rapids, to the gangs below.
Then all was silent again, for midnight loves not song, though it does demand a call from man to man through the dark. It loves better to listen, while the river tells of the dread sea-monster that yearly craves a human life, whether grown or child, but always a life a year.
All things solemn and still now. The moon sits quiet as if in church, and jesting dies on the roughest lips. Many call to mind things seen at such a time—a man drawn down by an invisible grasp, to rise no more, a widow wringing her hands and wailing, fatherless children crying and sobbing. Some there are who have seen the marks of the water-spirits on a drowned man's body, or maybe seen the thing itself rise up at midnight, furrowing the water with a gleam of light where it moves. Whose turn next? None can say, but the danger is never far off.
The little camp-fire flickered, the roar of the rapids grew fainter. The moon sits listening to the legends of the river, and gazing down into the water.