Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The East — Chapter 7 - Part II - In a Logging Camp (Concluded)

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.

* * * * * * * *