“I forgot one thing, though. I went back after I’d got started a quarter of a mile to say 249 good-bye to the horses. I always liked horses, and old Bill and Jerry and I had been good friends. I rode the pilot of that engine and got into Kansas City the next morning. That was the second stage.... Still interested, are you, Elice?”
“Yes.”
“Next, I landed in the hardwood region of Missouri, the north edge of the Ozarks. It was the old story of one having to live, and I’d seen an ad in the papers for ‘loggers wanted.’ I had answered it, and the man in charge dropped on me like a hawk and gave me transportation by the first train. Evidently men for the job were not in excess, and when I’d been there a day I knew why. It was the most God-forsaken country I’d ever known, away back in the mountains, where civilization had ceased advancing fifty years before. The job was a contract to deliver so many thousand feet of lumber in the log daily at the mill on the nearest railway. There was a five-mile haul, and we worked under a boss in crews of four. Each crew had to deliver eight big logs a day, seven days in the week, three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. How it was done, when they were cut, when hauled, was not the boss’s affair—just 250 so the logs came. When we of the crews ate or slept was no one’s affair—just so we kept on the job. No single man could handle one of those big cuts, no single mule team haul it in places over those cursed mountain roads. That’s why we worked in crews. On the average we worked eighteen hours a day. In summer this was long, in winter it seemed perpetual; but I was in it and I was going to stick—or thought I was. The other three in my gang were middle-aged men,—hard drinkers, good swearers, tough as oak themselves. The boss was a little tobacco-eating, bow-legged Irishman. I never, before or since, knew a man who could swear as he could, or drink so when he struck town. It seems to go with the logging business; but he was a master.
“I struck this place in the winter. It was in the winter following, again by chance on a holiday, but Christmas this time, that I quit. They don’t have much cold down in that country and usually but little snow; but this year there had been a lot,—soft, wet snow, half rain, that melted on the ground and made the roads almost impassable. For that reason we’d been getting behind in our contract. We simply could not make two trips a day; and Murphy, 251 the boss, grew black and blacker. He swore that if we couldn’t make but one trip a day on that one haul we’d have to carry two logs each instead of one. The thing was barely possible on good roads, wholly impossible with the ground softened; but he was the boss, his word law, and before daylight on this Christmas morning we were loaded and on the road.
“I was on the head wagon with Murphy behind me, the other three following. The first half-mile was down grade and we got along all right. Then came the inevitable up grade following and the team began to flounder. They were mules, of course,—horses could never have stood for a day the grief of that mountain hauling,—great big-framed, willing fellows that in condition would pull anything any team could pull; but now they were weak and tired, and so thin that their bones almost stuck through their hides from the endless grind. They did their best, though, and struggled along for a few rods. The wheels struck a rock in the road and they stopped. I urged them on and they tried again, but the load wouldn’t budge. There was but one thing to do,—to double with the team behind, and I slid off to make the coupling. 252
“Murphy had been watching it all in silence,—a bad sign with him. When he saw what I was going to do he held up his hand to the rear team, which meant:‘Stay where you are.’ ‘Give over the lines,’ he said to me.
“I knew what that meant. I’d seen him cripple animals before; but that was when I first came. Since then I’d had another year to grow and to get hard and tough. I was going on eighteen and as big as I am now almost; and I wasn’t afraid of him then or of any human being alive.
“‘It’s no use,’ I answered. ‘We may as well double and save time.’
“He said something then, no matter what; I was used to being sworn at.
“‘No,’ I said.