Chapter 5

The proprietors of these places were a bold and unscrupulous lot. In their everyday business they had to deal with the most dangerous rough-and-tumble fighters this country has ever known; with men bubbling over with the joy of life, ready for quarrel if quarrel also spelled fun, drinking deep, and heavy-handed and fearless in their cups. But each of these rivermen had two or three hundred dollars to “blow” as soon as possible. The pickings were good. Men got rich very quickly at this business. And there existed this great advantage in favour of the dive-keeper: nobody cared what happened to a riverman. You could pound him over the head with a lead pipe, or drug his drink, or choke him to insensibility, or rob him and throw him out into the street, or even drop him tidily through a trap-door into the river flowing conveniently beneath. Nobody bothered--unless, of course, the affair was so bungled as to become public. The police knew enough to stay away when the drive hit town. They would have been annihilated if they had not. The only fly in the divekeeper's ointment was that the riverman would fight back.

And fight back he did, until from one end of his street to the other he had left the battered evidences of his skill as a warrior. His constant heavy lifting made him as hard as nails and as strong as a horse; the continual demand on his agility in riding the logs kept him active and prevented him from becoming muscle-bound; in his wild heart was not the least trace of fear of anything that walked, crawled, or flew. And he was as tireless as machinery, and apparently as indifferent to punishment as a man cast in iron.

Add to this a happy and complete disregard of consequences--to himself or others--of anything he did, and, in his own words, he was a “hard man to nick.”

As yet the season was too early for much joy along Hell's Half-Mile. Orde's little crew, and the forty or fifty men of the drive that had preceded him, constituted the rank and file at that moment in town. A little later, when all the drives on the river should be in, and those of its tributaries, and the men still lingering at the woods camps, at least five hundred woods-weary men would be turned loose. Then Hell's Half-Mile would awaken in earnest from its hibernation. The lights would blaze from day to day. From its opened windows would blare the music, the cries of men and women, the shuffle of feet, the noise of fighting, the shrieks of wild laughter, curses deep and frank and unashamed, songs broken and interrupted. Crews of men, arms locked, would surge up and down the narrow sidewalks, their little felt hats cocked one side, their heads back, their fearless eyes challenging the devil and all his works--and getting the challenge accepted. Girls would flit across the lit windows like shadows before flames, or stand in the doorways hailing the men jovially by name. And every few moments, above the roar of this wild inferno, would sound the sudden crash and the dull blows of combat. Only, never was heard the bark of the pistol. The fighting was fierce, and it included kicking with the sharp steel boot-caulks, biting and gouging; but it barred knives and firearms. And when Hell's Half-Mile was thus in full eruption, the citizens of Redding stayed away from Water Street after dark. “Drive's in,” said they, and had business elsewhere. And the next group of rivermen, hurrying toward the fun, broke into an eager dog-trot. “Taking the old town apart to-night,” they told each other. “Let's get in the game.”

To-night, however, the street was comparatively quiet. The saloons were of modified illumination. In many of them men stood drinking, but in a sociable rather than a hilarious mood. Old friends of the two drives were getting together for a friendly glass. The barkeepers were listlessly wiping the bars. The “pretty waiter-girls” gossiped with each other and yawned behind their hands. From several doorways Orde's little compact group was accosted by the burly saloonkeepers.

“Hullo, boys!” said they invariably, “glad to see you back. Come in and have a drink on me.”

Well these men knew that one free drink would mean a dozen paid for. But the rivermen merely shook their heads.

“Huh!” sneered one of the girls. “Them's no river-jacks! Them's just off the hay trail, I bet!”

But even this time-honoured and generally effective taunt was ignored.

In the middle of the third block Orde wheeled sharp to the left down a dark and dangerous-looking alley. Another turn to the right brought him into a very narrow street. Facing this street stood a three-story wooden structure, into which led a high-arched entrance up a broad half-flight of wooden steps. This was McNeill's.

As Orde and his men turned into the narrow street, a figure detached itself from the shadow and approached. Orde uttered an exclamation.

“You here, Newmark?” he cried.

“Yes,” replied that young man. “I want to see this through.”

“With those clothes?” marvelled Orde. “It's a wonder some of these thugs haven't held you up long ago! I'll get Johnny here to go back with you to the main street.”

“No,” argued Newmark, “I want to go in with you.”

“It's dangerous,” explained Orde. “You're likely to get slugged.”

“I can stand it if you can,” returned Newmark.

“I doubt it,” said Orde grimly. “However, it's your funeral. Come on, if you want to.”

McNeill's lower story was given over entirely to drinking. A bar ran down all one side of the room. Dozens of little tables occupied the floor. “Pretty waiter-girls” were prepared to serve drinks at these latter--and to share in them, at a commission. The second floor was a theatre, and the third a dance-hall. Beneath the building were still viler depths. From this basement the riverman and the shanty boy generally graduated penniless, and perhaps unconscious, to the street. Now, your lumber-jack did not customarily arrive at this stage without more or less lively doings en route; therefore McNeill's maintained a force of fighters. They were burly, sodden men, in striking contrast to the clean-cut, clear-eyed rivermen, but strong in their experience and their discipline. To be sure, they might not last quite as long as their antagonists could--a whisky training is not conducive to long wind--but they always lasted plenty long enough. Sand-bags and brass knuckles helped some, ruthless singleness of purpose counted, and team work finished the job. At times the storm rose high, but up to now McNeill had always ridden it.

Orde and his men entered the lower hall, as though sauntering in without definite aim. Perhaps a score of men were in the room. Two tables of cards were under way--with a great deal of noisy card-slapping that proclaimed the game merely friendly. Eight or ten other men wandered about idly, chaffing loudly with the girls, pausing to overlook the card games, glancing with purposeless curiosity at the professional gamblers sitting quietly behind their various lay-outs. It was a dull evening.

Orde wandered about with the rest, a wide, good-natured smile on his face.

“Start your little ball to rolling for that,” he instructed the roulette man, tossing down a bill. “Dropped again!” he lamented humorously. “Can't seem to have any luck.”

He drifted on to the crap game.

“Throw us the little bones, pardner,” he said. “I'll go you a five on it.”

He lost here, and so found himself at the table presided over by the three-card monte men. The rest of his party, who had according to instructions scattered about the place, now began quietly to gravitate in his direction.

“What kind of a lay-out is this?” inquired Orde.

The dealer held up the three cards face out.

“What kind of an eye have you got, bub?” he asked.

“Oh, I don't know. A pretty fair eye. Why?”

“Do you think you could pick out the jack when I throw them out like this?” asked the dealer.

“Sure! She's that one.”

“Well,” exclaimed the gambler with a pretence of disgust, “damn if you didn't! I bet you five dollars you can't do it again.”

“Take you!” replied Orde. “Put up your five.”

Again Orde was permitted to pick the jack.

“You've got the best eye that's been in this place since I got here,” claimed the dealer admiringly. “Here, Dennis,” said he to his partner, “try if you can fool this fellow.”

Dennis obligingly took the cards, threw them, and lost. By this time the men, augmented by the idlers not busy with the card games, had drawn close.

“Sail into 'em, bub,” encouraged one.

Whether it was that the gamblers, expert in the reading of a man's mood and intentions, sensed the fact that Orde might be led to plunge, or whether, more simply, they were using him as a capper to draw the crowd into their game, it would be difficult to say, but twice more they bungled the throw and permitted him to win.

Newmark plucked him at the sleeve.

“You're twenty dollars ahead,” he muttered. “Quit it! I never saw anybody beat this game that much before.”

Orde merely shrugged him off with an appearance of growing excitement, while an HABITUE of the place, probably one of the hired fighters, growled into Newmark's ear.

“Shut up, you damn dude!” warned this man. “Keep out of what ain't none of your business.”

“What limit do you put on this game, anyway?” Orde leaned forward, his eyes alight.

The two gamblers spoke swiftly apart.

“How much do you want to bet?” asked one.

“Would you stand for five hundred dollars?” asked Orde.

A dead silence fell on the group. Plainly could be heard the men's quickened breathing. The shouts and noise from the card parties blundered through the stillness. Some one tiptoed across and whispered in the ear of the nearest player. A moment later the chairs at the two tables scraped back. One of them fell violently to the floor. Their occupants joined the tense group about the monte game. All the girls drew near. Only behind the bar the white-aproned bartenders wiped their glasses with apparent imperturbability, their eyes, however, on their brass knuckles hanging just beneath the counter, their ears pricked up for the riot call.

The gambler pretended to deliberate, his cool, shifty eyes running over the group before him. A small door immediately behind him swung slowly ajar an inch or so.

“Got the money?” he asked.

“Have you?” countered Orde.

Apparently satisfied, the man nodded.

“I'll go you, bub, if I lose,” said he. “Lay out your money.”

Orde counted out nine fifty-dollar bills and five tens. Probably no one in the group of men standing about had realised quite how much money five hundred dollars meant until they saw it thus tallied out before them.

“All right,” said the gambler, taking up the cards.

“Hold on!” cried Orde. “Where's yours?”

“Oh, that's all right,” the gambler reassured him. “I'm with the house. I guess McNeill's credit is good,” he laughed.

“That may all be,” insisted Orde, “but I'm putting up my good money, and I expect to see good money put up in return.”

They wrangled over this point for some time, but Orde was obstinate. Finally the gamblers yielded. A canvass of the drawer, helped out by the bar and the other games, made up the sum. It bulked large on the table beside Orde's higher denominations.

The interested audience now consisted of the dozen men comprised by Orde's friends; nearly twice as many strangers, evidently rivermen; eight hangers-on of the joint, probably fighters and “bouncers”; half a dozen professional gamblers, and several waitresses. The four barkeepers still held their positions. Of these, the rivermen were scattered loosely back of Orde, although Orde's own friends had by now gathered compactly enough at his shoulder. The mercenaries and gamblers had divided, and flanked the table at either side. Newmark, a growing wonder and disgust creeping into his usually unexpressive face, recognised the strategic advantage of this arrangement. In case of difficulty, a determined push would separate the rivermen from the gamblers long enough for the latter to disappear quietly through the small door at the back.

“Satisfied?” inquired the gambler briefly.

“Let her flicker,” replied Orde with equal brevity.

A gasp of anticipation went up. Quite coolly the gambler made his passes. With equal coolness and not the slightest hesitation, Orde planted his great red fist on one of the cards.

“That is the jack,” he announced, looking the gambler in the eye.

“Oh, is it?” sneered the dealer. “Well, turn it over and let's see.”

“No!” roared Orde. “YOU TURN OVER THE OTHER TWO!”

A low oath broke from the gambler, and his face contorted in a spasm. The barkeepers slid out from behind the bar. For a moment the situation was tense and threatening. The dealer with a sweeping glance again searched the faces of those before him. In that moment, probably, he made up his mind that an open scandal must be avoided. Force and broken bones, even murder, might be all right enough under colour of right. If Orde had turned up for a jack the card on which he now held his fist, and then had attempted to prove cheating, a cry of robbery and a lively fight would have given opportunity for making way with the stakes. But McNeill's could not afford to be shown up before thirty interested rivermen as running an open-and-shut brace-game. However, the gambler made a desperate try at what he must have known was a very forlorn hope.

“That isn't the way this game is played,” said he. “Show up your jack.”

“It's the way I play it,” replied Orde sternly. “These gentlemen heard the bet.” He reached over and dexterously flipped over the other two cards. “You see, neither of these is the jack; this must be.”

“You win,” assented the gambler, after a pause.

Orde, his fist still on the third card, began pocketing the stakes with the other hand. The gambler reached, palm up, across the table.

“Give me the other card,” said he.

Orde picked it up, laughing. For a moment he seemed to hesitate, holding the bit of pasteboard tantalisingly outstretched, as though he were going to turn also this one face up. Then, quite deliberately he looked to right and to left where the fighters awaited their signal, laughed again, and handed the card to the gambler.

At once pandemonium broke loose. The rivermen of Orde's party fairly shouted with joy over the unexpected trick; the employees of the resort whispered apart; the gambler explained, low-voiced and angry, his reasons for not putting up a fight for so rich a stake.

“All to the bar!” yelled Orde.

They made a rush, and lined up and ordered their drinks. Orde poured his on the floor and took the glass belonging to the man next him.

“Get them to give you another, Tim,” said he. “No knock-out drops, if I can help it.”

The men drank, and some one ordered another round.

“Tim,” said Orde, low-voiced, “get the crowd together and we'll pull out. I've a thousand dollars on me, and they'll sand-bag me sure if I go alone. And let's get out right off.”

Ten minutes later they all stood safely on the lighted thoroughfare of Water Street.

“Good-night, boys,” said Orde. “Go easy, and show up at the booms Monday.”

He turned up the street toward the main part of the town. Newmark joined him.

“I'll walk a little ways with you,” he explained. “And I say, Orde, I want to apologise to you. 'Most of the evening I've been thinking you the worst fool I ever saw, but you can take care of yourself at every stage of the game. The trick was good, but your taking the other fellow's drink beat it.”

VIII

Orde heard no more of Newmark--and hardly thought of him--until over two weeks later.

In the meantime the riverman, assuming the more conventional garments of civilisation, lived with his parents in the old Orde homestead at the edge of town. This was a rather pretentious two-story brick structure, in the old solid, square architecture, surrounded by a small orchard, some hickories, and a garden. Orde's father had built it when he arrived in the pioneer country from New England forty years before. At that time it was considered well out in the country. Since then the town had crept to it, so that the row of grand old maples in front shaded a stone-guttered street. A little patch of corn opposite, and many still vacant lots above, placed it, however, as about the present limit of growth.

Jack Orde was the youngest and most energetic of a large family that had long since scattered to diverse cities and industries. He and Grandpa and Grandma Orde dwelt now in the big, echoing, old-fashioned house alone, save for the one girl who called herself the “help” rather than the servant. Grandpa Orde, now above sixty, was tall, straight, slender. His hair was quite white, and worn a little long. His features were finely chiselled and aquiline. From them looked a pair of piercing, young, black eyes. In his time, Grandpa Orde had been a mighty breaker of the wilderness; but his time had passed, and with the advent of a more intensive civilisation he had fallen upon somewhat straitened ways. Grandma Orde, on the other hand, was a very small, spry old lady, with a small face, a small figure, small hands and feet. She dressed in the then usual cap and black silk of old ladies. Half her time she spent at her housekeeping, which she loved, jingling about from cellar to attic store-room, seeing that Amanda, the “help,” had everything in order. The other half she sat in a wooden “Dutch” rocking-chair by a window overlooking the garden. Her silk-shod feet rested neatly side by side on a carpet-covered hassock, her back against a gay tapestried cushion. Near her purred big Jim, a maltese rumoured to weigh fifteen pounds. Above her twittered a canary.

And the interior of the house itself was in keeping. The low ceilings, the slight irregularities of structure peculiar to the rather rule-of-thumb methods of the earlier builders, the deep window embrasures due to the thickness of the walls, the unexpected passages leading to unsuspected rooms, and the fact that many of these apartments were approached by a step or so up or a step or so down--these lent to it a quaint, old-fashioned atmosphere enhanced further by the steel engravings, the antique furnishings, the many-paned windows, and all the belongings of old people who have passed from a previous generation untouched by modern ideas.

To this house and these people Orde came direct from the greatness of the wilderness and the ferocity of Hell's Half-Mile. Such contrasts were possible even ten or fifteen years ago. The untamed country lay at the doors of the most modern civilisation.

Newmark, reappearing one Sunday afternoon at the end of the two weeks, was apparently bothered. He examined the Orde place for some moments; walked on beyond it; finding nothing there, he returned, and after some hesitation turned in up the tar sidewalk and pulled at the old-fashioned wire bell-pull. Grandma Orde herself answered the door.

At sight of her fine features, her dainty lace cap and mitts, and the stiffness of her rustling black silks, Newmark took off his gray felt hat.

“Good-afternoon,” said he. “Will you kindly tell me where Mr. Orde lives?”

“This is Mr. Orde's,” replied the little old lady.

“Pardon me,” persisted Newmark, “I am looking for Mr. Jack Orde, and I was directed here. I am sorry to have troubled you.”

“Mr. Jack Orde lives here,” returned Grandma Orde. “He is my son. Would you like to see him?”

“If you please,” assented Newmark gravely, his thin, shrewd face masking itself with its usual expression of quizzical cynicism.

“Step this way, please, and I'll call him,” requested his interlocutor, standing aside from the doorway.

Newmark entered the cool, dusky interior, and was shown to the left into a dim, long room. He perched on a mahogany chair, and had time to notice the bookcases with the white owl atop, the old piano with the yellowing keys, the haircloth sofa and chairs, the steel engravings, and the two oil portraits, when Orde's large figure darkened the door.

For an instant the young man, who must just have come in from the outside sunshine, blinked into the dimness. Newmark, too, blinked back, although he could by this time see perfectly well.

Newmark had known Orde only as a riverman. Like most Easterners, then and now, he was unable to imagine a man in rough clothes as being anything but essentially a rough man. The figure he saw before him was decently and correctly dressed in what was then the proper Sunday costume. His big figure set off the cloth to advantage, and even his wind-reddened face seemed toned down and refined by the change in costume and surroundings.

“Oh, it's you, Mr. Newmark!” cried Orde in his hearty way, and holding out his hand. “I'm glad to see you. Where you been? Come on out of there. This is the 'company place.'” Without awaiting a reply, he led the way into the narrow hall, whence the two entered another, brighter room, in which Grandma Orde sat, the canary singing above her head.

“Mother,” said Orde, “this is Mr. Newmark, who was with us on the drive this spring.”

Grandma Orde laid her gold-bowed glasses and her black leather Bible on the stand beside her.

“Mr. Newmark and I spoke at the door,” said she, extending her frail hand with dignity. “If you were on the drive, Mr. Newmark, you must have been one of the High Privates in this dreadful war we all read about.”

Newmark laughed and made some appropriate reply. A few moments later, at Orde's suggestion, the two passed out a side door and back into the remains of the old orchard.

“It's pretty nice here under the trees,” said Orde. “Sit down and light up. Where you been for the last couple of weeks?”

“I caught Johnson's drive and went on down river with him to the lake,” replied Newmark, thrusting the offered cigar in one corner of his mouth and shaking his head at Orde's proffer of a light.

“You must like camp life.”

“I do not like it at all,” negatived Newmark emphatically, “but the drive interested me. It interested me so much that I've come back to talk to you about it.”

“Fire ahead,” acquiesced Orde.

“I'm going to ask you a few questions about yourself, and you can answer them or not, just as you please.”

“Oh, I'm not bashful about my career,” laughed Orde.

“How old are you?” inquired Newmark abruptly.

“Thirty.”

“How long have you been doing that sort of thing--driving, I mean?”

“Off and on, about six years.”

“Why did you go into that particular sort of thing?”

Orde selected a twig and carefully threw it at a lump in the turf.

“Because there's nothing ahead of shovelling but dirt,” he replied with a quaint grin.

“I see,” said Newmark, after a pause. “Then you think there's more future to that sort of thing than the sort of thing the rest of your friends go in for--law, and wholesale groceries, and banking and the rest of it?”

“There is for me,” replied Orde simply.

“Yet you're merely river-driving on a salary at thirty.”

Orde flushed slowly, and shifted his position.

“Exactly so--Mr. District Attorney,” he said drily.

Newmark started from his absorption in his questioning and shifted his unlighted cigar.

“Does sound like it,” he admitted; “but I'm not asking all this out of idle curiosity. I've got a scheme in my head that I think may work out big for us both.”

“Well,” assented Orde reservedly, “in that case--I'm foreman on this drive because my outfit went kerplunk two years ago, and I'm making a fresh go at it.”

“Failed?” inquired Newmark.

“Partner skedaddled,” replied Orde. “Now, if you're satisfied with my family history, suppose you tell me what the devil you're driving at.”

He was plainly restive under the cross-examination to which he had been subjected.

“Look here,” said Newmark, abruptly changing the subject, “you know that rapids up river flanked by shallows, where the logs are always going aground?”

“I do,” replied Orde, still grim.

“Well, why wouldn't it help to put a string of piers down both sides, with booms between them to hold the logs in the deeper water?”