Part 65

“How about them booms?” asked the Rough Red.

“I did own them,” explained Orde, “and I had a right to take them up when I had finished with them.”

This hint was enough. The men did not cease from a labour that tickled them mightily, but they adopted a code of signals. Strangers were not uncommon. Spectators came out often from the little towns and from the farms round-about. When one of these appeared the riverman nearest raised a long falsetto cry. This was taken up by his next neighbour and passed on. In a few minutes all that section of the drive knew that it would be wise to “lie low.” And inside of two weeks Orde had the great satisfaction of learning that Heinzman was working--and working hard--a crew of fifty men.

“A pretty fair crew, even if he was taking out his whole drive,” commented Orde.

The gods of luck seemed to be with the new enterprise. Although Orde had, of course, taken the utmost pains to foresee every contingency possible to guard against, nevertheless, as always when dealing with Nature's larger forces, he anticipated some of those gigantic obstacles which continually render uncertain wilderness work. Nothing of the kind happened. There formed none of the tremendous white-water jams that pile up several million feet of logs, tax every resource of men, horses, and explosives, and require a week or so to break. No men were killed, and only two injured. No unexpected floods swept away works on which the drive depended. The water held out to carry the last stick of timber over the shallowest rapids. Weather conditions were phenomenal--and perfect. All up and down the river the work went with that vim and dash that is in itself an assurance of success. The Heinzman affair, which under auspices of evil augury might have become a serious menace to the success of the young undertaking, now served merely to add a spice of humour to the situation. Among the men gained currency a half-affectionate belief in “Orde's luck.”

After this happy fashion the drive went, until at last it entered the broad, deep, and navigable stretches of the river from Redding to the lake. Here, barring the accident of an extraordinary flood, the troubles were over. On the broad, placid bosom of the stream the logs would float. A crew, following, would do the easy work of sacking what logs would strand or eddy in the lazy current; would roll into the faster waters the component parts of what were by courtesy called jams, but which were in reality pile-ups of a few hundred logs on sand bars mid-stream; and in the growing tepid warmth of summer would tramp pleasantly along the river trail. Of course, a dry year would make necessary a larger crew and more labour; of course, a big flood might sweep the logs past all defences into the lake for an irretrievable loss. But such floods come once in a century, and even the dryest of dry years could not now hang the drive. As Orde sat in his buckboard, ready to go into town for a first glimpse of Carroll in more than two months, he gazed with an immense satisfaction over the broad river moving brown and glacier-like as though the logs that covered it were viscid and composed all its substance. The enterprise was practically assured of success.

For a while now Orde was to have a breathing spell. A large number of men were here laid off. The remainder, under the direction of Jim Denning, would require little or no actual supervision. Until the jam should have reached the distributing booms above Monrovia, the affair was very simple. Before he left, however, he called Denning to him.

“Jim,” said he, “I'll be down to see you through the sluiceways at Redding, of course. But now that you have a good, still stretch of river, I want you to have the boys let up on sacking out those “H” logs. And I want you to include in our drive all the Heinzman logs from above you possibly can. If you can fix it, let their drive drift down into ours.

“Then we'll have to drive their logs for them,” objected Denning.

“Sure,” rejoined Orde, “but it's easy driving; and if that crew of his hasn't much to do, perhaps he'll lay most of them off here at Redding.”

Denning looked at his principal for a moment, then a slow grin overspread his face. Without comment he turned back to camp, and Orde took up his reins.

XXV

“Oh, I'm so GLAD to get you back!” cried Carroll over and over again, as she clung to him. “I don't live while you're away. And every drop of rain that patters on the roof chills my heart, because I think of it as chilling you; and every creak of this old house at night brings me up broad awake, because I hear in it the crash of those cruel great timbers. Oh, oh, OH! I'm so glad to get you! You're the light of my life; you're my whole life itself!”--she smiled at him from her perch on his knee--“I'm silly, am I not?” she said. “Dear heart, don't leave me again.”

“I've got to support an extravagant wife, you know,” Orde reminded her gravely.

“I know, of course,” she breathed, bending lightly to him. “You have your work in the world to do, and I would not have it otherwise. It is great work--wonderful work--I've been asking questions.”

Orde laughed.

“It's work, just like any other. And it's hard work,” said he.

She shook her head at him slowly, a mysterious smile on her lips. Without explaining her thought, she slipped from his knee and glided across to the tall golden harp, which had been brought from Monrovia. The light and diaphanous silk of her loose peignoir floated about her, defining the maturing grace of her figure. Abruptly she struck a great crashing chord.

Then, with an abandon of ecstasy she plunged into one of those wild and sea-blown saga-like rhapsodies of the Hungarians, full of the wind in rigging, the storm in the pines, of shrieking, vast forces hurtling unchained through a resounding and infinite space, as though deep down in primeval nature the powers of the world had been loosed. Back and forth, here and there, erratic and swift and sudden as lightning the theme played breathless. It fell.

“What is that?” gasped Orde, surprised to find himself tense, his blood rioting, his soul stirred.

She ran to him to hide her face in his neck.

“Oh, it's you, you, you!” she cried.

He held her to him closely until her excitement had died.

“Do you think it is good to get quite so nervous, sweetheart?” he asked gently, then. “Remember--”

“Oh, I do, I do!” she broke in earnestly. “Every moment of my waking and sleeping hours I remember him. Always I keep his little soul before me as a light on a shrine. But to-night--oh! to-night I could laugh and shout aloud like the people in the Bible, with clapping of hands.” She snuggled herself close to Orde with a little murmur of happiness. “I think of all the beautiful things,” she whispered, “and of the noble things, and of the great things. He is going to be sturdy, like his father; a wonderful boy, a boy all of fire--”

“Like his mother,” said Orde.

She smiled up at him. “I want him just like you, dear,” she pleaded.

XXVI