Part 92

“No more piles,” they said briefly.

“Get 'em,” said Orde with equal brevity. “Newmark will have enough here shortly. In the meantime, get them.”

North and his friend disappeared, taking with them the crews of the drivers and the two tugs. After an interval they returned towing small rafts of the long timbers. Orde did not make any inquiries; nor until days later did he see a copy of the newspaper telling how a lawless gang of rivermen had driven away the railroad men and stolen the railroad's property. These piles lasted five or six hours. Tom North placed and drove them accurately and deliberately, quite unmindful of the constant danger. A cold fire seemed to consume the man, inflaming his courage and his dogged obstinacy. Once a wing of the jam broke suddenly just as his crew had placed a pile in the carrier. The scow was picked up, whirled around, carried bodily a hundred feet, and deposited finally with a crash. The instant the craft steadied and even before any one could tell whether or no the danger was past, Tom cut loose the hammer and drove that pile!

“I put you in that carrier to be DROVE!” he shouted viciously, “and drove you'll be, if we ARE goin' to hell!”

When the SPRAY shouldered the scow back to position that one pile was left standing upright in the channel, a monument to the blind determination of the man.

Fortunately the wing break carried with it but a few logs; but it sufficed to show, if demonstration were needed, what would happen if any more serious break should occur.

Orde was everywhere. Long since he had lost his hat; and over his forehead and into his eyes the strands of his hair whipped tousled and unkempt. Miles and miles he travelled; running along the tops of the booms, over the surface of the jam, spying the weakening places, and hurrying to them a rescue. He seemed tireless, omnipresent, alive to every need. It was as though his personality alone held in correlation these struggling forces; as though were he to relax for an instant his effort they would burst forth with the explosion of long-pent energies.

Toward noon the piles gave out again.

“Where in HELL is Newmark!” exploded Orde, and immediately was himself again, controlled and resourceful. He sent North and a crew of men to cut piles from standing timber in farm wood lots near the river.

“Haul them out with your winch,” said he. “If the owners object, stand them off with your peavies. Get them anyway.”

About three of the afternoon the LUCY BELLE splattered up stream from the village, carrying an excursion to see the jam. Captain Simpson brought her as close in as possible. The waves raised by her awkward paddle-wheel and her clumsy lines surged among the logs and piles. Orde looked on this with distrust.

“Go tell him to pull out of that,” he instructed Jimmy Powers “The confounded old fool ought to know better than that. Tell him it's dangerous. If the jam goes out, it'll carry him to Kingdom Come.”

Jimmy Powers returned red-faced from his interview.

“He told me to go to hell,” he said shortly.

“Oh, he did,” snapped Orde. “I should think we had enough without that old idiot!”

With the short nervous leaps of a suppressed anger he ran down to where the SPRITE had just towed the Number One driver into a new position.

“Lay me alongside the LUCY BELLE,” he told Marsh.

But Simpson, in a position of importance at last, was disinclined to listen. He had worn his blue clothes and brass buttons for a good many years in charge only of boxes and barrels. Now at a stroke he found himself commander over tenscore people. Likewise, at fifty cents a head, he foresaw a good thing as long as high water should last. He had risen nobly to the occasion; for he had even hoisted his bunting and brought with him the local brass band. Orde, brusque in his desire to hurry through an affair of minor importance, rubbed the man the wrong way.

“I reckon I've some rights on this river,” Captain Simpson concluded the argument, “and I ain't agoin' to be bulldozed out of them.”

The excursionists, typical “trippers” from Redding, Holland, Monrovia and Muskegon, cheered this sentiment and jeered at Orde.

Orde nodded briefly.

“Marsh,” said he to his captain in a low voice, “get a crew and take them in charge. Run 'em off.”

As soon as the tug touched the piling, he was off and away, paying no further attention to a matter already settled. Captain Marsh called a dozen rivermen to him; laid the SPRITE alongside the LUCY BELLE, and in spite of Simpson's scandalised protests and an incipient panic among the passengers, thrust aside the regular crew of the steamship and took charge. Quite calmly he surveyed the scene. From the height of the steamer's bridge he could see abroad over the country. A warm June sun flooded the landscape which was filled with the peace of early summer. The river seemed to flow smoothly and quietly enough, in spite of the swiftness of its current and the swollen volume of its waters. Only up stream where the big jam shrugged and groaned did any element jar on the peace of the scene; and even that, in contrast to the rest of the landscape, afforded small hint to the inexperienced eye of the imminence of a mighty destruction.

Captain Marsh paid little attention to all this. His eye swept rapidly up and down where the banks used to be until he saw a cross current deeper than the rest sweeping in athwart the inundated fields. He swung over the wheel and rang to the engine-room for half speed ahead. Slowly the LUCY BELLE answered. Quite calmly Captain Marsh rammed her through the opening and out over the cornfields. The LUCY BELLE was a typical river steamboat, built light in the draught in order to slide over the numerous shifting bars to be encountered in her customary business. When Captain Marsh saw that he had hit the opening, he rang for full speed, and rammed the poor old LUCY BELLE hard aground in about a foot of water through which a few mournful dried cornstalks were showing their heads. Then, his hands in his pockets, he sauntered out of the pilot-house to the deck.

“Now if you want to picnic,” he told the astonished and frightened excursionists, “go to it!”

With entire indifference to the water, he vaulted over the low rail and splashed away. The rivermen and the engineer who had accompanied him lingered only long enough to start up the band.

“Now you're safe as a cow tied to a brick wall,” said the Rough Red, whose appearance alone had gone far toward overawing the passengers. “Be joyful. Start up the music. Start her up, I tell you!”

The band hastily began to squawk, very much out of time, and somewhat out of tune.