CHAPTER VII

IN A LOGGING CAMP (_Concluded_)

I slept soundly that night, and was awakened in the morning by the mad clatter of an alarm-clock. It was about four o'clock. I could hear Fitz-Adams getting up in the little chamber which serves him as a sleeping-room and an office. He went below, and soon had the fires roaring fiercely in the kitchen and lobby; and I could hear him call to the women to get up and get breakfast. Next he appeared in the loft, and aroused the teamsters. In an incredibly short time they were dressed, and had lit their lanterns, and were gone to the stable to feed and tend their horses.

I got up with them, and was nearly dressed, when the boss reappeared in the loft. He walked down between the rows of beds, laying heavy hands here and there upon sleeping figures, and raising his voice to the call: "Come, roll out of this, you damn ---- ---- ----!" There was no ill-temper in his manner or tone; it was simply his habitual way of rousing the crew.

I was first at the run, first at the towels and comb, and was sitting in warm comfort behind the stove when the other men came shambling from the loft, their eyes blinking in the sudden light of the lobby.

We had beefsteak and potatoes and bread and coffee for breakfast. As soon as he had finished his meal, I went up to the boss to remind him of my existence, for he had in no way noticed me since Saturday night.

"You'll help the teamsters load bark, Buddy. Have you got any gloves?"

"No," I said.

"Then come this way." We went together to the office, and he spread before me a number of new pairs of heavy skin gloves.

"I don't know which will be best suited to the work that you want me to do," I said. "Won't you select a pair for me?"

"My advice to you, Buddy, is to wear them mits," and he pointed to a pair of white pigskin mittens. "They'll cost you seventy-five cents, which I'll charge to your wages."

There was a cot in the office, and a writing-desk, and in one corner a small stock of woodsmen's furnishing goods: boots, hats, overalls, and blanket-jackets, besides the gloves.

The boss locked the door behind us, and told me to follow him. He carried a lantern, and lit the way to the stables.

Outside it was white and still, almost like a clear, quiet night in the snows of midwinter; for a heavy frost covered everything, and in the thin, unmoving air you could almost hear the crackling formation of frost-crystals. Into the darkness of the forest the stars shone with greater glory, and Orion was just sinking beyond the western mountain.

The four or five teamsters and Old Man Toler and I had gathered in front of the stable, where the bark-wagons stood in the open. These were strong vehicles, each with four massive wheels, and they supported wide-spreading frames within which three or more cords of bark could be loaded.

We "greased" the wagons by lantern-light, and then "hooked up" the horses. The wagon in the van was driven by "Black Bob." Fitz-Adams ordered Old Man Toler and me to go with that teamster and help him get on a load of bark.

Black Bob, muffled to the eyes in a long ulster which was bound about his waist with a piece of rope, stood erect on the loose boards that formed the floor of his wagon, and gathered up the reins, and then started his horses with a ringing oath. Old Man Toler and I followed after, on foot, up a rocky road that had been newly cut to a point on the mountain where strips of hemlock-bark lay piled like cord-wood.

Black Bob swayed to the jolting of the wagon, but kept his balance with the ease of long habit, and swore a running accompaniment to the tugging of his team. He was the tallest man in the camp, almost a giant in height and in proportional development, and he owed his name to his blue-black hair and swarthy complexion. He was a native-born American, and, although he seemed never to discriminate among the other men on grounds of nationality, I thought that some of them did not like him because of a certain domineering manner he had.

He drew up now beside a pile of bark, and Toler and I placed a large stone under each hind wheel to relieve the pull on the horses.

It had been growing light as we climbed the mountain, and now we could see the sunlight on the topmost trees across the ravine.

Toler took up a position facing the bark-pile, with his back to the wagon. He began to pass swiftly the pieces of bark over his head and into the rigging, where Black Bob stood ready to load. I followed Toler's example, imitating his movements as closely as I could, but was painfully aware of my awkwardness.

We had been but a few minutes at work when the boss came driving up behind us; as he turned out in order to pass, he called to me to come with him, and lend a hand at loading.

I had an uncomfortable premonition of the ordeal before me; why, I do not know, for the boss had treated me civilly so far; but I greatly wished to stay in the camp, and I much feared discharge.

The boss drove on for some distance, then branched off on a side-road, and having passed a number of bark-piles, finally turned around with great difficulty, and drew up, as Black Bob had done, beside a cord of bark.

I hastened to place a stone under a hind wheel, and then threw off my coat, and, getting in between the wagon and the pile, I began to pass the bark over my head, as I had learned to do from Toler.

The boss stood on the bottom of the rig, accepting listlessly the bark as I passed it, and tossing it carelessly into place. His whole manner was meant to convey to me the idea of my own inefficiency, as though he was ready to work, even anxious to get warmed up in the frosty air, but my part was so slowly done that his own was reduced to child's play.

The storm brewed for a time in grim silence, but soon it broke into angry shouts of "Faster, faster, damn you!" and then the entire gamut of insults and excommunications.

I had been cursed at West Point, though in terms less hard to bear; and in expectation of the worst, I thought that I had schooled myself to take it philosophically when it came. But I had an awful moment now, for philosophy was clean gone, and in its place was a swift, mad desire to kill; and as the hot blood rushed to my brain, and tingled in my finger-tips, all that I could see for the instant were the handy stones under my feet, and the close range of Fitz-Adams's head.

I do not know what it was that saved me, unless it was the sight of Fitz-Adams flushed with the anger into which he lashed himself, and becoming the more ludicrously impotent in his rage, as I restrained my temper, and showed no sign of fear. Why he did not discharge me on the spot I do not know. With awful imprecations he kept urging me to faster and yet faster work. I quickened my clumsy pace to the swiftest that I could maintain with efficiency, and held it there, careless of his curses; and, exhausted as I was, I yet had the satisfaction at the last of noting that our load was on as quickly as was Black Bob's.

And Fitz-Adams, too, found a curious balm for his troubled feelings. We were at the last cord, and he was cursing hard, while I panted and sweated in my straining efforts to pass the bark aboard. The strips were large and heavy, some of them, and they all lay rough side up; and as you lifted them over your head there fell upon you from each a shower of dust and dirt that had gathered in the crumbling outer bark. This filled your ears and hair, and found its way far down your back. I had blocked the wheel, but we were on a sharp descent, and the load was growing heavy. Evidently Fitz-Adams feared our breaking loose, and so he stopped me suddenly with an order to "make fast the lock-break." Now "the lock-break" conveyed the dimmest notion to my mind, and the boss would give no hint as to what it really was nor how it was to be "made fast;" instead, he stood and watched me, while, with awkward guesses as to its purpose, I succeeded in unhooking one end of a heavy chain that hung under the wagon, and having passed it between two spokes of a hind wheel, I clumsily made fast the hook in a link of the chain drawn taut.

Fitz-Adams stood, meanwhile, in speechless anger, enraged beyond relief from oaths; and then the tension broke, with comical effect, in a sentence which seemed to come to him as a happy inspiration:

"I'm damned, Buddy, if you ain't greener than a green Irishman; _greener than a green Irishman_." He repeated the phrase as though it exactly met the case, and brought him satisfaction far beyond the power of profanity; and then he shouted through the forest:

"Hey, Bob!"

"Hello!"

"This Buddy, he's greener than a green Irishman!" and he laughed aloud, and there came an answering laugh from Bob; and the boss started down the mountain with his load, the locked wheel bounding and crunching among the stones, while he swore to steady the horses.

That was all of the loading for the morning, so Toler and I joined company. Toler had in charge the cutting of roads to the bark-piles, and I was to serve with him.

The piles were, some of them, in most inaccessible places. The hemlock-trees on that side of the mountain had first been felled, then the bark was cut round on the trunks at intervals of four feet. Next the bark was peeled off and carefully heaped near by, while the trees themselves were trimmed and then sawed into logs of desired lengths, and these were "skidded" into piles. From the piles, in the spring, when the streams are high, the logs are sent by "skid ways" into the run, and, once in the water, the lumbermen use their finest skill in floating them to the market at Williamsport.

In the meanwhile the bark must be got out and carted to the tannery, and Toler and I had our work laid out in cutting ways for the wagons.

Supplied each with an axe, a cant-hook, and a grabbing-hoe, we began the work of cutting through the brushwood and clearing away the stumps, and laying rough bridges over the small streams.

I was delighted at my good fortune in being set to work under Toler. My respect for him grew steadily. An experience of nearly forty years as a woodsman had developed his natural gifts to the point of highest skill, and he had a marvellous instinct for directing a course through the maze of tangled undergrowth and logs and stumps which marked the ruins of the forest. I was soon lost, but he turned hither and thither, with the ready familiarity of a gamin to whom there are no intricacies in the East End. He had the inspiring air of knowing what he was about, and the less common possession of actual knowledge, and he did his work in a masterly manner. "A workman that needeth not to be ashamed" constantly recurred to me as a phrase which aptly fitted him. And besides being a clever woodsman, Toler was clean of speech, that is, comparatively clean of speech--he swore, but his oaths were conventional and not usually of the blood-congealing kind of some of the other men.

That was a long morning's work, from earliest dawn until noon, and the ultimate advent of the dinner-hour was hugely welcome. Toler and I knocked off work at the sound of the noon whistle at the tannery four or five miles away. Only a few of us gathered at the camp. Fitz-Adams, with the other teamsters, and "Sam the Book-keeper," who is also the camp carpenter, and Toler and I made up the number. The rest of the crew were too far in the mountains to return at midday, and "Tim the Blacksmith" drove off in the buckboard with a hot dinner for them.

The first work of the afternoon was to help the teamsters get on a second load of bark. Again the boss forced me to his aid, and cursed me as he had done before, only I thought that he had been drinking, and there was certainly an added viciousness in his oaths, and in the threats of sudden death. But I had the consolation now of knowing that, as soon as the load was on, I should work with Toler for the rest of the day. Toler did not curse me, although it was impossible for him to wholly conceal the slender regard in which he held a man who never before had seen a grubbing-hoe, nor a cant-hook, and who handled an axe about as effectively as a girl throws a stone, and to whom the woods were a hopeless labyrinth. But Toler had the instincts of a gentleman; for all his want of respect for a man so ignorant as I, it was clear that there was not a little patient compassion in the feeling which he bore me, and he was at pains to teach me, and he eagerly encouraged any sign of improvement on my part.

But this time I was not done with Fitz-Adams when the afternoon's load was on. Toler and I soon needed a crowbar, and he sent me to fetch one from the blacksmith's shop.

Near the shop there is a depression in the road, and there the soil is somewhat soft. Much noise was coming from that quarter; and as I neared it I could see that Black Bob's wheels were fast in the mud, and that the boss's load was drawn close up behind and blocked.

Black Bob was on the ground beside his team, his reins in hand, and with frantic oaths he was urging his horses to their utmost strength. Fitz-Adams stood by and watched; but at sight of the weakening brutes, he quickly unbolted his own whiffle-trees, and driving his team ahead, made fast to the tongue of Black Bob's wagon. Then both together they started up their horses, lashing them with the far-reaching leather thongs that swung from the short stocks which they carried, and joining in a chorus of furious curses. Slowly the great wheels began to rise from the deep grooves in which they had settled; but in another minute, as the strength of the horses failed, the wheels sunk surely back again. Fitz-Adams was beside himself with rage, and at that moment he caught sight of me.

"What are you doing here?" he shouted with an oath.

"Toler sent me for a crowbar."

"He did, did he? Then I'll send you to hell!" and with that he seized an axe which lay near, and swinging it above his head, he rushed at me. It was a menacing figure that he made, with the axe held aloft by his giant arms, his eyes flashing, and his nostrils dilating with the childish passion which mastered him; but he was as harmless as a child at any show of fearlessness, and there was the oddest anticlimax in his mild command to "get that damn crowbar and hurry back to Toler," which I was glad enough to do; for my part was a mere pretence of courage; in reality I felt scared out of a year's growth, and my legs were trembling violently.

Through the following days there was little variation for Toler and me in the programme of work. We loaded bark until the teamsters were off, and then cut ways to the piles.

There is, however, an incident of Tuesday morning which will linger in my memory. It was the fulfilment of Dick the Kid's prophecy. I heard a man swear.

The boss anticipated the usual time of the morning cursing, and gave me an initial one that day in the dark in front of the stables, while the teamsters stood by with their lanterns in hand, and listened critically with sober faces, as though they were determining, with a nice sense of the possible, whether Fitz-Adams was doing himself justice. At the last he turned to them:

"Will I kill him now, or let him live one day more?"

"Let the damn dog live," came from Black Bob.

"Then you'll take him," said the boss, "and dray out that bar." So Black Bob and I set off in company.

I was not a little perplexed by the puerility of Fitz-Adams's rage. It seemed singularly out of keeping with the sturdy manliness of the fellow. If he wished to get rid of me, why did he not discharge me? I began to suspect that the cause lay in tenderness of heart, of which he was secretly ashamed. To him I was _avis rara_ in a lumber-camp. No doubt he thought me some hitherto unknown species of immigrant; and being too tender-hearted to assume the responsibility of turning me adrift, he hoped to frighten me away. Black Bob soon puzzled me almost as much. He was driving the dray, which is a rude, low sledge, used to draw out bark from points that are inaccessible to the wagons. We were walking together at the side of the road, and neither of us spoke. Presently Bob stopped his horses to give them breath, and then he turned to me. His speech was halting, and there was an uncomfortable, apologetic quality in his voice, but the feeling was evidently sincere. To my surprise he was bidding me, with utmost kindness, not to mind Fitz-Adams's curses, and he added that the boss meant nothing by them, that he really knew no better. It seemed to me an act of truest friendliness on Black Bob's part, involving charity and moral courage of high order, and I was far more grateful than my acknowledgment implied. It produced a comfortable elation, which lasted while we got on a towering load of bark in silence in the earliest dawn, and started for the road. We had almost reached it, and the horses were pulling hard, when, with the suddenness of a pistol-shot, the dray came sharply against the stump of a stubborn sapling that rose unseen in the way, and in an instant the horses were plunging forward in broken harness, and half the load was sliding gently to the ground.

Black Bob brought the horses to a stand, and then stood still himself. I was filled with admiration for his self-control, for I dreamt that he was making a successful effort to restrain himself. In reality he was summoning all his powers; and in another moment, with face uplifted to the pale stars, he broke forth in blasphemies so hellish, that for the next full minute I might have been listening to the outcries of a tormented fiend, held tight in the grip of remorseless agony.

Thursday morning brought the crisis in the history of my stay in camp. In the course of the midday cursing of the day before, Fitz-Adams told me that he was giving me my last chance. I tried hard to show my fitness for the place, and our load was the first to start for the tannery; but to all appearances Fitz-Adams was not placated. I thought that the last hour of my stay in camp was surely come, and with a heavy heart I began to plan the next move. But for some reason nothing further was said to me about leaving, and Thursday morning found me again helping the boss.

His mood had strangely changed; it was very early, and the skies were overcast, and in the clouded twilight we could scarcely see to do our work. Fitz-Adams seemed to be in no hurry; he was silent, and moved nervously. I wondered what this might portend, and braced myself for finality. It was very hard. I was learning to know the men; they ignored me still, but I was sure that I understood them better, and my liking for them grew each day, and earnestly I wished to stay, in the hope of winning a footing in the camp, and some terms of fellowship with the men.

Fitz-Adams had stopped working now, and he stood leaning on the rigging as he spoke to me. There was a mildness in his tone and a tentative expectancy, as though an uncomfortable suspicion had dawned upon him, and he feared to verify it.

"Say, Buddy, have you ever been to school?"

"Yes," I said.

There was silence for a minute, and the tone in which Fitz-Adams broke it was awestruck.

"Say, Buddy, have you got a education?"

"I've had good advantages."

And then eagerly from him:

"Major, can you figure?"

It was my inning now, and I liked it, and I was guilty of saying that, within narrow limits, I could.

"Will you do my accounts for me, Major?"

"I will, with pleasure."

Fitz-Adams drew a deep breath, and his voice fell to a lower tone.

"Well, that'll be a good thing for me. I never had no schooling, and Sam the Book-keeper, he don't seem to know much more'n me. I guess I lost pretty nigh on to two thousand dollars on my contracts last year, on account of not knowing how to figure. Say, Major, this is pretty hard work for you; you suit yourself about this work, and help me with the accounts. Of course, I--I--I--didn't know----"

"Oh, drop it, Fitz-Adams!" I said. "We understand each other. I'll be glad to look after the accounts as long as I stay; but it's growing light now, and let's get on this load."

And so I won a place in the camp, and got myself on human terms with the boss. Fitz-Adams never referred to the matter again, but treated me in a perfectly manly, straightforward way, taking patiently my clumsy work as a woodsman, and accepting, as a matter of course, my help with the accounts, and even consulting me, at times, in certain details of the work. It was one of these consultations which brought a rare opportunity.

I had won my way with the boss, not by virtue of an education, but actually upon the basis of an acquaintance with elementary arithmetic. When I came to look at the accounts, it was not a question of book-keeping that was involved, but simple addition and multiplication and division, in all of which branches both Fitz-Adams and Sam the Book-keeper were lamentably weak, so weak, in fact, that they felt no real confidence in their results.

But my way with the men was yet to make. They were not uncivil, but they would none of me. To them I was still an outsider, "an inharmonious figure in their club," and, whatever may have been the change in my relations with the boss, the men were in no way bound to recognize me.

One morning Fitz-Adams and I stood together in his rig, as he was driving up the "corduroy road" to the place on the mountain where the crew were at work. Presently he pointed out to me, about forty yards up the steep ascent no our left, some long, straggling piles of bark that perched there, like peasants' huts over a precipice in the Alps.

"I don't know how to go at that bark," he said with a frown. "You can't get a wagon there, nor yet a dray; and it's so brittle that if you slide it down, you'll have nothing but chips to cart to the tannery, and the man that tries to carry it down--well, it's a three or four days' job, and he'll have his neck broke sure."

I said that I would look at it. I was "piling bark" now on my own account, and Toler had another "Buddy," a big, bouncing Irish Hercules, who had lately come to camp, and who soon won distinction by reason of the songs he sung. They were wonderful songs; long beyond belief, and they told the loves and woes of truly wonderful people.

Buddy had early made known his talent, and on his first evening in camp he was peremptorily told to sing. It was after supper. He was sitting, much at home, on the bench behind the stove, and was smoking. Instantly he took his pipe from his mouth, and cleared his throat; then, laying his hands on his knees, he sang, swaying meanwhile in time with the monotonous cadences of that strange verse, which went on and on and on for quite half an hour, while the men listened open-eyed, and punctuated the sentiment with profane approval.

When I examined the bark-piles I found that transferring them to the "corduroy road" below was a matter of carrying the bark in small loads on one's back, and of having a secure footing for the descent.

On the next morning I took a pick and spade, and first cut a series of steps to the ledge where the bark lay piled. After a little practice, I learned to make up a load, by selecting a broad, stout slab of bark and packing the smaller pieces upon it. Then stooping under the load, as it lay ready on the edge of a pile, I easily shifted it to my back and head; and holding it with one hand, while the other was free to help maintain my balance, I carefully picked a way down the steep decline.

It probably appeared a far more difficult and dangerous feat than it really was; and with a load of bark upon my back, I was more than ever an outlandish figure to the men, more in keeping with the Königsstuhl and the valley of the Neckar than with Fitz-Adams's Camp in the Alleghanies. But the actual accomplishment of the work seemed to interest them, and the teamsters used to stop and watch me in silence, and then drive off, swearing in low tones.

One evening the whole returning crew caught me at the job. The men stood still, and having watched a descent, they examined the bark piled high at the roadside, and then walked on, commenting among themselves. That night in Camp several of them spoke to me, calling me "Major" after Fitz-Adams's manner.

It was the beginning of more personal acquaintance with the men. I can but like them. In the fortnight and more of my stay I cannot lay claim to having got on intimate terms with them. But they seem to me a truthful, high-spirited, hard-working, generous set of men. They swear like fiends incarnate, and when they can, they drink, and they all have "rogued and ranged in their time." On grounds of high morality there is no possible justification for them. But these are men who were born and bred to vicious living; and the wonder is not that they are bad, but that in all their blasting departure from the good, there yet survives in them the vital power of return.

There is Old Man Toler. He is certainly an exception in point of birth and earliest breeding, but he has been in the lumber business more or less, he tells me, since he was a boy of fourteen. There was one important period taken out, when, as a young man, he enlisted, and served in the Army of the Potomac, from the spring of 1862 until the end of the Civil War. He is native-born, and has the intelligent patriotism of a true American. In our walks together to and from our work, I delighted in his talk about the war period in his life. His perspective as a private soldier was so true, so thoroughly free from the towering obtrusion of his own experiences. These were almost lost in his absorbing interest in the working out of great events. He knew the war thoroughly from the point of view of the army. He knew the service, and had borne his part in hardship and in action with a distinct sense of personal responsibility to the subject and aim of it all. This was luminous in what he said, and never from his declaration of it, but in the absence of such declaration, and in the loss of self in the large action of which he felt himself a part.

There was much in Toler that rang true, and I regretted the more that he evidently preferred to talk little about himself, and almost never of his personal views. My wonder at his being a common hand in camp grew, until one day, in talking with Black Bob, I learned a reason. Black Bob, quite of his own accord, had instituted a series of comparisons among the men.

"There's Fitz-Adams and his brother," he was saying, "they're about as good a pair of lumbermen as you'll find. But they ain't the best in this camp. There's a man here that knows more about this business than any three other men, and that's Old Man Toler. His father was a big lumberman before him, and Toler was brought up thorough to the work, and he's had many a camp of his own, and made lots of money in his time. But he ain't ever kept none, and he never will." And Black Bob winked significantly, and ostentatiously wiped his mouth.

There is an "old soldier" of quite another type in camp. It is Sam the Book-keeper. Work on the accounts has brought me into close relations with Sam. He is a large, good-humored, fair-haired and ruddy-faced American, who by no means shows his more than fifty years. It is pathetic to watch his struggles with the lines of figures, as he tries to add them up; and the situation is really serious, for almost never can he get the same result twice.

He and I were working one evening in the office, and had straightened matters out to a certain point. Sam was in high spirits as a result. He wished to talk. There was a handy explanation of his ignorance of figures, and he wanted me to know it. He chiefly played truant from school, he said, when he was a boy at home on his father's farm; and at the age of eleven he ran away for good, allured by the fascination of life on a canal-boat; and ever since that time he had shifted for himself.

And now Sam was fairly started in his history; but the narrative leaped suddenly to his career as a soldier. His war experiences included the battle of Bull Run and the capture of Savannah. Sam's knowledge of campaigns was not exhaustive, and his most vivid memories of historic events were all of a personal nature, which is certainly not unnatural.

From his own frank statement, he seems to have been among the first to leave the field at Bull Run. With another member of his company he reached Washington, rather worn and dusty, but really none the worse for a cross-country sprint.

Once in the city, they were soon hailed by an acquaintance, who took them in hand with the remark that "he knew just the thing for them."

They were simply to follow him to Pennsylvania Avenue, and obey his directions. His first was that they should limp, and they limped; and he led them, limping, to certain rooms on the avenue, where thoughtful preparation had been made for the care of the wounded. Here they were received with marked attention, and after having been asked as to whether they were "just from the front," and to which regiment they belonged, they were put in the care of certain volunteer nurses. These ladies, with their own hands, bared the soldiers' feet, and washed them, and then dressed them in clean socks and comfortable slippers, which the men were to wear until quite well again. At this refuge Sam and his companion, and many another soldier "from the front," were given bed and board as long as they found it convenient to remain.

With cheerful appreciation of the humor of it, Sam described the labored way in which his partner and he would limp down the avenue each morning, until they had turned a corner; and then, instantly restored to perfect soundness, they would make for the nearest saloon. They played this game until their cash was gone; then they felt compelled to rejoin their regiment, which was encamped near Arlington.

That was the beginning of Sam's career as a soldier. It ended at Savannah. After the capture of the city, and as General Sherman's army was setting out on the march to Richmond, Sam found himself one of a squad ordered to remain behind, for the purpose of assisting the United States Excise Officers.

The men had quarters in a large stone building, which was given over entirely to their use. The work was much to their taste. Every day they shrewdly searched the city for contraband liquor, and not infrequently they unearthed a den where kegs of whiskey were concealed. Some of these they always smuggled to their own quarters, and the rest they handed over to the excise officers. Orgies that were fired with unfailing rum consumed the greater part of every night, and formed an epoch in Sam's history upon which he reflects with lasting satisfaction.

Most of the men in camp are younger than Old Man Toler and Sam the Book-keeper, and of the younger set I have made the acquaintance of "Long-nosed Harry." Harry is barely thirty and already a man of considerable experience. When fairly started, he can tell capital tales of how he has "beat his way" on long journeys through the country, and of narrow escapes from the "cops," and of other occasions when he has not escaped. Wherever in this country the railways have penetrated, Harry seems to have gone, and he has gathered on his wanderings a fund of curious information, as though there were a nether side of things, and he had grown familiar with that in contrast with the surface that is exposed to the eye of the ordinary traveller.

Harry's face confirms his account of a career not unfamiliar with the police. A long thin face it is, with small dark eyes set close together, a narrow, thin-lipped mouth, a receding chin, and an abnormally long nose, which has gained nothing in point of beauty by having been broken in a fight with a negro at Atlantic City.

He is of glib speech, and he has at command a long repertory of songs of the vaudeville variety, and this enhances his standing among the men. Besides, Harry can read aloud, as I learned one day when a stray newspaper found its way into the camp. He read with a certain swift readiness that held your interest, and you soon grew excited in an effort to recognize old acquaintances in the strangely accented longer words, which were plainly unintelligible to Harry and his hearers, while yet the general sense of what was read was obviously clear.

Harry and I sat talking together one Sunday evening. We had a corner of the lobby to ourselves. Suddenly, without apparent connection with what we had been saying, he gave me one of those rare confidences which reveal, as by a flash of supernatural light, the very heart of a man's life, and then leave you awed and speechless, in the presence of eternal verities.

It was a fragment of personal history, very short, and it was told with the directness and simplicity of truth itself. He had been married six years before. His wife was a delicate girl who lived for only two years after Harry married her. He was a brakeman on a freight-train then. He used to look forward to his "off-day" with a feeling, he said, that "made life worth living." And they were convenient, too, those "off-days"; for in them he did the washing, and the scrubbing, and whatever else of accumulated housework he could spare his wife. But she died. And there was nothing more in life for Harry; so he drifted back into the old way, the way of all the men, a life of alternate work and debauch.

* * * * * * * *

"Karl the Swede" is the only Scandinavian in the crew, which, like the other gangs of workmen which I have known, is exceedingly heterogeneous in character. There is nothing remarkable about Karl. He is a fair-haired, blue-eyed, stocky youth of one-and-twenty, and as hard-drinking, hard-working a woodsman as any of them. But Karl happens to be the only man who, during my stay in camp, has met with an accident. It was yesterday morning. The men were trimming logs, and "skidding" them at a point on the mountain a mile or more from camp, and I was piling bark not far from the "skid-ways." At a little before noon I heard the buckboard go jolting over the bowlders on the mountain-road; and a few minutes later there rang through the forest Fitz-Adams's call to dinner.

I set out for the nearest skid-way, where the men were gathering, when suddenly I came upon Karl lying at length in a clump of myrtle, with one foot extended upon a rock, and bare, except for a woollen sock that was bound tightly around the instep. What had happened was clear in an instant. The sock was saturated with blood, and a dark, clotted stream stained the foot, and a pool of blood had formed on the surface of the rock. I sat down beside him, and Karl first showed me in his boot a clean cut three inches long, where the axe-blade had entered. Then he unwrapped the sock, and lifting from the wound a quid of pulpy tobacco, he exposed a gash where the skin and shallow flesh lay open to the bone. The flow of blood had nearly ceased, for the tobacco had acted as a styptic; and Karl quickly reapplied it, and again bound the wound tightly with his sock.

All the while he acted in a perfectly impersonal manner, as though he were in no way directly concerned in the accident, which was simply a phenomenon of common interest to us both. He betrayed no trace of suffering nor even of annoyance at the discomfort of the mishap; and soon he began to speak of it, in his broken English, with like impersonality.

"Fitz-Adams, you know, would take him to camp in the buckboard after dinner, and would see that he got safe to English Centre, where the doctor would dress the wound. That would do very well until he reached Williamsport; but he must go to Williamsport, and that was the worst of it; for it would be several weeks before he could get back to camp, and then, between drunks and the doctor's bills, his savings would be all gone."

This taken-for-granted attitude toward riotous living is strikingly characteristic. I have noticed it repeatedly among the men. They speak of past and prospective debauches with the _naïveté_ of callow undergraduates, except that among the lumbermen there is no sense of credit or distinction attaching to vice; it is simply inherent in the order of things. This is by no means a professed creed. Profession, when there is any, is all in the other direction, and is of the nature of the "homage that vice pays to virtue." It is simply in the natural and unpremeditated speech and action of the men that you detect this attitude of mind.

The time spent at the camp is, in one aspect of it, a course of training, a cumulative storage of energy, financial and physical, against a future expenditure in the sudden outburst of a grand carouse.

It has been interesting to notice what have appeared to be the instinctive precautions of the men. There seems to be an established custom of great strength that prohibits the keeping of spirits in camp. And gambling is strangely infrequent. I have heard hints of memorable epochs, when, like an epidemic, gambling has swept the camp with fearful force, and there is a wholesome fear of its return. I was struck with this one night, when, without apparent warning, the customary "High, Low, Jack and the Game" gave place to poker, and an excited crowd stood round the table and watched; and Fitz-Adams had to go up to the office to bring down wages due to the players. But the outbreak spent itself without becoming epidemic this time, and you could feel the relief among the men when "Phil the Farmer" and "Irish Mike" agreed to stand their loss of about ten dollars each, and not continue the game.

"High, Low, Jack" is invariable after supper, and lends itself with singular sociability to the pleasure of the men. There is but one pack of cards, and only one table in the lobby. A four-handed game is begun immediately after supper, the opposite men playing partners. A game is not long; and at its end the beaten partners give place to a new pair, and this course continues until all the members of the crew have had a hand.

* * * * * * * *

In looking over this chapter I see that I have drawn a very inadequate picture of Fitz-Adams. A hard swearer he certainly is, but Black Bob was right in assuring me that there is more ignorance than malice in his habitual maledictions.

First of all, Fitz-Adams is an admirable workman. To any department of the work of lumbermen he can lend a hand of highest efficiency. And his, in a marked degree, are the manual skill and resourceful ingenuity which are characteristic of the men. Only Fitz-Adams is exceptional in these particulars, like Old Man Toler. With them this manual skill, for instance, is like the sure touch of a master handicraftsman.

One morning, while at work with Old Man Toler, I openly admired his handling of an axe. Toler was standing on a log which obstructed our way, and which he was about to cut in two. He drew the axe-blade up the side of the log between his feet. "Do you see that scratch?" he said, and then he swung the axe above his head, and brought it down with a sweeping stroke. The blade entered the bark exactly where the scratch had been. Five times running, Toler performed this feat, never missing his mark by the fraction of an inch, and then he turned to me. "I've used an axe so long, Buddy," he said, "that I can split hairs with a good one now."

But even more than a thorough woodsman, Fitz-Adams is a superb overseer. Under his shrewd foresight and direction, the whole work of the crew is urged forward with resistless energy. He knows exactly what each man is doing, and whether or not the work is well done.

His planning of the work and his effective organizing and directing toward its accomplishment are, no doubt, his strongest points; but dramatically considered, although he is perfectly unconscious of the effect, he shows to greatest advantage when he is personally leading the crew in an attack upon a difficult situation. All his powers are well in evidence then, and not least of all his power of speech. You have actual sight at such times of one of Carlyle's heroes, a "captain of industry," to whom there are no insurmountable difficulties, no "impossibilities," but who brings order out of chaos, by the sheer force of indomitable energy.

With this high efficiency his ignorance is in striking contrast. He can write his name, and there his educational equipment ends. His helplessness in the presence of figures is as pathetic and quite as serious as is Sam the Book-keeper's. But Fitz-Adams is a young man, barely thirty, I should say. Almost his earliest memory is that of being a mule-driver in one of the mines near Wilkesbarre. From this he went to picking slate in a breaker. Now he is a jobber, employing a large crew, and undertaking contracts which involve considerable sums of money. There has been offered to him, and it is still open, the position of overseer in a far larger enterprise than his own, where, personally, he would run none of the business risk; but he has confided to me that he does not dare to accept the place owing to his lack of even elementary education. In this connection he once asked me whether I thought that he might yet go to school. I did think so with emphasis, and I gave him so many reasons for this opinion, and cited so many examples of men as old as he and older who were at school, that he really warmed to it as a practicable plan.

* * * * * * * *

The rain stopped hours ago, and it is turning very cold, and snow has begun to fall. Fitz-Adams got back from English Centre long before dinner, and there is evidence that he has not been drinking. I have consulted him on the matter of leaving, and he has urged me to stay, and has offered me permanent employment; but he says that, if I must be off, and am bent on going westward, I would better get as far as Hoytville as soon as possible, else I may run the risk of encountering roads blocked with snow. Then, for the first time, he introduced the subject of wages, and asked me what I thought was "right." I said that before coming to the camp, I had worked for a farmer, and had been given seventy-five cents a day and my keep; and I added that, if this rate of wage seemed fair to him, it would suit me perfectly. He agreed at once, and now I am a capitalist. Soon I shall set out for Hoytville, which is, I judge, a matter of two or three hours' walk from here. Fitz-Adams has given me careful directions about the road, and has shown the deepest interest in my plan of getting West, and has urged me to write to him.

The crew are all gone to work, and I shall not see them. They were off as soon as the storm slackened. All were keen to go, and so be spared the misery of a day of enforced idleness, all except "Old Pete," and he is past being keen. He is over sixty, and has a strongly marked Celtic face, deeply furrowed with the lines of age and pain. He works with the crew, but in camp he sits alone on the bench opposite the stove, with the overalls and shirts hanging over him. When not at work he sits there hour after hour, his large, muscular frame bent forward, and his elbows resting on his knees, and there he endures, in the dumb agony of animal pain, the torment of rheumatism in his legs. He seldom speaks, and never of his sufferings--only sometimes in comically sententious response to something that has interested him. And the men let him alone, knowing by a true intuition that he prefers it so.

After the rain let up I happened to pass through the lobby as the men were starting for their work. Old Pete was the last to move. I watched him rising slowly to his feet. In spite of him, his face drew the picture of the hideous pain he bore, but through it shone the clear courage of a man, and his eyes reflected the grim humor of a thought that touched his native sense, and he smiled as he said:

"We don't have to work; we can starve."

* * * * * * * *

I have spent three Sundays in the woods. On the first I fled cravenly into the forest, hugging a book from out my pack, and the hours flew swiftly along the pages. The second Sunday was another glorious autumn day. By that time I had won a modest place in camp, and could hold up my head with due respect among the men. I asked several of them whether there was any church service at English Centre. They thought that there was, but they would take no stock at all in my plan of discovery.

Alone I set out for the village. There was perfect quiet in the mountains, no sound of axe or saw, nor crash of falling trees, nor rumble of bark-wagons; only the tuneful flow and splash of the run, which caught the living sunlight, and flashed it back in radiance through the flushing air, that quivered in the ecstasy of buoyant life. The fire of life flamed in the glowing hues of autumn, and burned with white heat in the hoar-frost which clung to the shaded crevices in the rocks, and along the blades of seared grass, and on the fringe of fallen leaves. And I was free, as free and careless as the mountain-stream, and before me was a blessed day of rest!

Every foot of the road was strangely familiar, but the familiarity lay in an intimate association with some distant past, as of earliest childhood. There was the camp by the dam, and there the Irishman's cabin, where the cow was still munching straw, and the sow wallowing in the mire. Then I came to the fork in the road, where one way led to Wolf's Run. It was a lifetime since I had gone up that way, feeling as cocky as a wedding-guest, and soon had come down again "a sadder and a wiser man." I felt like another Rip Van Winkle as I re-entered the village, but the marvel lay in there being no change at all, except in the Sunday calm which now possessed the place.

The post-office is in a private house, and I knocked in some uncertainty of being able to get my letters; but the postmistress gave them to me with obliging readiness, and with them a cordial invitation to attend the Sunday-school, which, she said, was the only service of that morning. Her invitation was more welcome than she knew, for it was the first of its kind to reach me as a proletaire.

I read my letters, and then went to the church, which stands at the end of the village street. The service was beginning. As superintendent the postmistress was in charge. There were no men present. About thirty women and girls, and half a dozen boys, made up the school. The conduct of the service I thought intensely interesting. The superintendent was entirely at home in her place, and she valued the opportunity.

When the classes grouped themselves for the study of the lesson, a teacher was lacking. I was asked to take the place, and was startled at finding myself in charge of a class of village belles. What their feeling toward the arrangement was, I could only guess; but it was clear that they were not accustomed to being taught by an unshaven, unshorn woodsman, in rough clothes, and boots covered with patches. But the lesson was in my favor; it was the incident of the washing of the disciples' feet at the last Passover. I soon forgot my embarrassment in the interest of the text, and in an atmosphere of serious study.

Last Sunday I went again to the Sunday-school, and I had my former class to teach. Some preparation had been possible during the week, and the hour passed successfully. Among the announcements was one of a prayer-meeting to be held that night.

I reached the church at the hour of the evening service. I opened the door, and there sat a crowded congregation in waiting. The back seats on both sides of the aisle were solid ranks of men, lumbermen, and teamsters, and tannery hands, many of them in their working-clothes. There were women and children scattered through the pews farther up, and some boys had overflowed upon the pulpit steps, but most of the company were men.

There was no one in the minister's seat, but the postmistress was in place at the organ, and as I entered, she nodded to me in evident expectation of my joining her. I walked forward, and she stepped out into the aisle to meet me.

"It's time to begin," she said, quietly.

"Is your minister not come yet?" I asked.

"Oh, you're going to speak to-night, you know."

I did not know. For an instant I knew only that there was a cold, hard grip upon my heart which seemed to hold it still, and that in my brain there had begun a mad dance of all that I ever thought I knew. But from out the turmoil a sane thought emerged: "This is a company of working-people who are come to hear a fellow-workman speak to them about our deepest needs." In another moment I was cooler, and a strange, unreasoning peace ensued.

I asked the postmistress to select some hymns. She handed me a list, chosen with perfect knowledge of those which the congregation most enjoyed. The people were soon singing, thinly at first; but the familiar melody spread, and carried with it a sense of solidarity, in which self was merged and lost, and the swelling sound rolled on, deepening with the voices of the men. Soon it recalled college-chapel, with the students in a mood to sing, and "Ein' Feste Burg" mounting in the majesty of that deep-toned hymn, until the vaulted ceilings rock, and the archangels above the chancel seem to join in the splendid volume of high praise!

But more helpful to me than the singing was the sight of familiar faces. Black Bob stood towering like another Saul above the mass of men; and at his side was one of our teamsters who lives in the village, and with whom I had often loaded bark. Near the door--I was not quite sure at first, but there could be no mistake--near the door was Fitz-Adams, and not far from him Long-nosed Harry and Phil the Farmer stood together.

I was trembling when I began to speak, trembling with awful fear, a fear that was yet a solemn joy; for I had vision then of human hearts hungering to be fed, and, as a sharer in their need, I knew that it was given to me to point them to the Bread of Life.

I could speak to them now, for with greater clearness I could see these fellow-workers as they were--strong, brave men who win the mastery which comes to those who clear the way for progress, giving play, in their natural living, to the forces which make men free, and growing strong in heart and in the will to do, as they grow strong of arm and catch the rough cunning of their trade; men of many races, yet meeting on the common ground of men all free and under equal chance to make their way; knowing no differences but those of personality, and winning their places in the crew, each man according to his kind, and his rewards according to his skill.

Such were they in their outward lives, the physical life within them growing in living ways, and making them the true, efficient workmen that they were. But of the inner life that makes us men, that life wherein we act from choice, and must "give account of the deeds done in the body," that range of action which we call moral, where conscience speaks to us in words of command, there they knew no mastery at all, and, least of all, the mastery of the moralist.

To them God was a moral ruler, dwelling afar from the daily life of men, and righteousness was a slavish obedience to His laws, and religion a mystic somewhat which was good for women and children and weak men.

And yet deep in their own hearts was their supremest need. Life as they knew it brought to them no satisfaction for its craving want. It was not so in other things; they knew their work; and in the overcoming of its difficulties, they had felt the fierce joy of conquest. But confronted with temptations, the difficulties of their inner life, there they had no strength; and lust and passion mastered them, and left their real desire unsatisfied. Here, in respect of mastery, they were slaves, and as regards life, they were dead, having only the need of life.

There, then, was their want; it was for Life, abundant, victorious Life.

And now I could speak to them of God; of Him "who is not far from every one of us, for in Him we live, and move, and have our being;" the living God who reveals Himself in all life, and who became incarnate in the Son of Man, and who speaks to us in human words which go straight to our seeking hearts: "I am the way, the truth, and the life." "I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly." "The words that I speak unto you, they are life."

"Strong Son of God!" whose living words quicken us from the death of sin and set us free. By whose grace we are "renewed in the whole man after His image, and enabled, more and more, to die unto sin and live unto righteousness." Who was "made sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." "Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sin, should live unto righteousness." Whose death was not a reconcilement of God to us, but was "God in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself." Whose Gospel is the glad tidings of this reconciliation, and we are become "ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us; we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God."

And then we prayed, confessing our sinful state, our bondage, our death in sin, and pleading that we might be "transformed by the renewing of our minds, that we might prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God."

* * * * * * * *

Now that I am on the eve of leaving Fitz-Adams's Camp, I cannot hide from myself my eagerness to go. I have real regrets; for while two weeks and as many days do not constitute a long period, yet time is purely relative, and I shall have a livelier memory of the camp and of certain of the men, and a keener interest in them, than I have for places and men with whom my association has been much longer.

But of the feelings of which I am conscious at leaving, I am surprised at the intensity of the longing to know what has happened during the three weeks, nearly, since I have seen a newspaper from the great world. I thought little of it as the days passed, but now I am all aglow with desire for news about the progress of the campaigns in New York and Massachusetts and Ohio. And then the last word from abroad had piqued one's curiosity to the utmost as to possible results. Mr. Smith, the leader of the House of Commons, I know is dead; and as I was leaving Williamsport for the woods, I saw upon the bulletin-boards the announcement of Mr. Parnell's sudden death; but of the political effect of these events no word has reached me. Has Mr. Balfour or Mr. Goschen succeeded to the leadership of the House? And if Mr. Balfour became the First Lord of the Treasury, does he retain the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland? And has the death of Mr. Parnell brought about a reunion between Parnellites and. M'Carthyites, or is the breach as hopeless as ever?

It will be intensely interesting to find answers to these questions and to many more; but after all I am sincerely sorry to leave the camp, and as I go up now to say good-by to Fitz-Adams, who is in his office, it is with the knowledge that I am parting from a man whom it is an inspiration to have known.

The Workers--The East

By WALTER A. WYCKOFF

With five full-page Illustrations. 270 pp. 12mo, $1.25

_CONTENTS:--The Adjustment--A Day-Laborer at West Point--A Hotel Porter--A Hired Man at an Asylum--A Farm Hand--In a Logging Camp._

In this first volume of a college man's narrative of his two years' experience as a day-laborer, he deals entirely with rural occupations and rural conditions. He is a day-laborer in an uncrowded market. He is in close contact with poverty, but not with despair. This is a side of the labor question which has been very much neglected by sociologists, and it forms an invaluable introduction to the more strenuous conditions of the second volume. Professor Wyckoff writes with the literary skill of a novelist, and the scrupulous accuracy of a scientist.

"We doubt if any American of the employer class can read it without a feeling that the picture tells a story of the whole civilization in which he lives. It is a thoroughly American book, and could have been written in no other country."--_The Evening Post_, New York.

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The Workers--The West

By WALTER A. WYCKOFF

With 32 full-page Illustrations by W. R. Leigh 12mo, $1.50

_CONTENTS:--In the Army of the Unemployed (Chicago)--A Factory Hand--Among the Revolutionaries--A Road-Builder of the World's Fair Grounds--From Chicago to Denver--A Burro Puncher on the Plains._

In this volume Mr. Wyckoff continues his "experiment in reality" in the crowded labor-market of Chicago. He suffers with the lowest classes of the unemployed, and works himself to a better condition; he studies organized labor in a great factory; he analyzes social discontent with the anarchists; and he works his way to the Pacific coast through the great wheat farms, toils in deep mines, and drives a burro across the desolate plains. This closes one of the most romantic narratives ever written by a scholar, and one of the most valuable to all classes. It is a contribution to the study of humanity.

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CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers NEW YORK