Blazed Trail — 13 - Part 4, Chapters 37, 38, & 39

Chapter XXXVII

The moment had struck for the woman.

Thorpe did not know it, but it was true.

A solitary, brooding life in the midst of grand surroundings, an active, strenuous life among great responsibilities, a starved, hungry life of the affections whence even the sister had withdrawn her love,--all these had worked unobtrusively towards the formation of a single psychological condition.

Such a moment comes to every man.

In it he realizes the beauties, the powers, the vastnesses which unconsciously his being has absorbed.

They rise to the surface as a need, which, being satisfied, is projected into the visible world as an ideal to be worshipped.

Then is happiness and misery beside which the mere struggle to dominate men becomes trivial, the petty striving with the forces of nature seems a little thing.

And the woman he at that time meets takes on the qualities of the dream; she is more than woman, less than goddess; she is the best of that man made visible.

Thorpe found himself for the first time filled with the spirit of restlessness.

His customary iron evenness of temper was gone, so that he wandered quickly from one detail of his work to another, without seeming to penetrate below the surface-need of any one task.

Out of the present his mind was always escaping to a mystic fourth dimension which he did not understand.

But a week before, he had felt himself absorbed in the component parts of his enterprise, the totality of which arched far over his head, shutting out the sky.

Now he was outside of it.

He had, without his volition, abandoned the creator's standpoint of the god at the heart of his work.

It seemed as important, as great to him, but somehow it had taken on a strange solidarity, as though he had left it a plastic beginning and returned to find it hardened into the shapes of finality.

He acknowledged it admirable,--and wondered how he had ever accomplished it!

He confessed that it should be finished as it had begun,--and could not discover in himself the Titan who had watched over its inception.

Thorpe took this state of mind much to heart, and in combating it expended more energy than would have sufficed to accomplish the work.

Inexorably he held himself to the task.

He filled his mind full of lumbering.

The millions along the bank on section nine must be cut and travoyed directly to the rollways.

It was a shame that the necessity should arise.

From section nine Thorpe had hoped to lighten the expenses when finally he should begin operations on the distant and inaccessible headwaters of French Creek.

Now there was no help for it.

The instant necessity was to get thirty millions of pine logs down the river before Wallace Carpenter's notes came due.

Every other consideration had to yield before that.

Fifteen millions more could be cut on seventeen, nineteen, and eleven,--regions hitherto practically untouched,--by the men in the four camps inland.

Camp One and Camp Three could attend to section nine.

These were details to which Thorpe applied his mind.

As he pushed through the sun-flecked forest, laying out his roads, placing his travoy trails, spying the difficulties that might supervene to mar the fair face of honest labor, he had always this thought before him,--that he must apply his mind.

By an effort, a tremendous effort, he succeeded in doing so.

The effort left him limp.

He found himself often standing, or moving gently, his eyes staring sightless, his mind cradled on vague misty clouds of absolute inaction, his will chained so softly and yet so firmly that he felt no strength and hardly the desire to break from the dream that lulled him.

Then he was conscious of the physical warmth of the sun, the faint sweet woods smells, the soothing caress of the breeze, the sleepy cicada-like note of the pine creeper.

Through his half-closed lashes the tangled sun-beams made soft-tinted rainbows.

He wanted nothing so much as to sit on the pine needles there in the golden flood of radiance, and dream--dream on--vaguely, comfortably, sweetly--dream of the summer-- Thorpe, with a mighty and impatient effort, snapped the silken cords asunder.

“Lord, Lord!

” he cried impatiently.

“What's coming to me?

I must be a little off my feed!

” And he hurried rapidly to his duties.

After an hour of the hardest concentration he had ever been required to bestow on a trivial subject, he again unconsciously sank by degrees into the old apathy.

“Glad it isn't the busy season!

” he commented to himself.

“Here, I must quit this!

Guess it's the warm weather.

I'll get down to the mill for a day or two.

” There he found himself incapable of even the most petty routine work.

He sat to his desk at eight o'clock and began the perusal of a sheaf of letters, comprising a certain correspondence, which Collins brought him.

The first three he read carefully; the following two rather hurriedly;

of the next one he seized only the salient and essential points; the seventh and eighth he skimmed; the remainder of the bundle he thrust aside in uncontrollable impatience.

Next day he returned to the woods.

The incident of the letters had aroused to the full his old fighting spirit, before which no mere instincts could stand.

He clamped the iron to his actions and forced them to the way appointed.

Once more his mental processes became clear and incisive, his commands direct and to the point.

To all outward appearance Thorpe was as before.

He opened Camp One, and the Fighting Forty came back from distant drinking joints.

This was in early September, when the raspberries were entirely done and the blackberries fairly in the way of vanishing.

That able-bodied and devoted band of men was on hand when needed.

Shearer, in some subtle manner of his own, had let them feel that this year meant thirty million or “bust.

” They tightened their leather belts and stood ready for commands.

Thorpe set them to work near the river, cutting roads along the lines he had blazed to the inland timber on seventeen and nineteen.

After much discussion with Shearer the young man decided to take out the logs from eleven by driving them down French Creek.

To this end a gang was put to clearing the creekbed.

It was a tremendous job.

Centuries of forest life had choked the little stream nearly to the level of its banks.

Old snags and stumps lay imbedded in the ooze;

decayed trunks, moss-grown, blocked the current; leaning tamaracks, fallen timber, tangled vines, dense thickets gave to its course more the appearance of a tropical jungle than of a north country brook-bed.

All these things had to be removed, one by one, and either piled to one side or burnt.

In the end, however, it would pay.

French Creek was not a large stream, but it could be driven during the time of the spring freshets.

Each night the men returned in the beautiful dreamlike twilight to the camp.

There they sat, after eating, smoking their pipes in the open air.

Much of the time they sang, while Phil, crouching wolf-like over his violin, rasped out an accompaniment of dissonances.

From a distance it softened and fitted pleasantly into the framework of the wilderness.

The men's voices lent themselves well to the weird minor strains of the chanteys.

These times--when the men sang, and the night-wind rose and died in the hemlock tops--were Thorpe's worst moments.

His soul, tired with the day's iron struggle, fell to brooding.

Strange thoughts came to him, strange visions.

He wanted something he knew not what; he longed, and thrilled, and aspired to a greater glory than that of brave deeds, a softer comfort than his old foster mother, the wilderness, could bestow.

The men were singing in a mighty chorus, swaying their heads in unison, and bringing out with a roar the emphatic words of the crude ditties written by some genius from their own ranks.

“Come all ye sons of freedom throughout old Michigan, Come all ye gallant lumbermen, list to a shanty man.

On the banks of the Muskegon, where the rapid waters flow, OH!

--we'll range the wild woods o'er while a-lumbering we go.

” Here was the bold unabashed front of the pioneer, here was absolute certainty in the superiority of his calling,--absolute scorn of all others.

Thorpe passed his hand across his brow.

The same spirit was once fully and freely his.

“The music of our burnished ax shall make the woods resound, And many a lofty ancient pine will tumble to the ground.

At night around our shanty fire we'll sing while rude winds blow, OH!

--we'll range the wild woods o'er while a-lumbering we go!

” That was what he was here for.

Things were going right.

It would be pitiful to fail merely on account of this idiotic lassitude, this unmanly weakness, this boyish impatience and desire for play.

He a woodsman!

He a fellow with these big strong men!

A single voice, clear and high, struck into a quick measure: “I am a jolly shanty boy, As you will soon discover;

To all the dodges I am fly, A hustling pine-woods rover.

A peavey-hook it is my pride, An ax I well can handle.

To fell a tree or punch a bull, Get rattling Danny Randall.

” And then with a rattle and crash the whole Fighting Forty shrieked out the chorus: “Bung yer eye!

bung yer eye!

” Active, alert, prepared for any emergency that might arise; hearty, ready for everything, from punching bulls to felling trees--that was something like!

Thorpe despised himself.

The song went on.

“I love a girl in Saginaw, She lives with her mother.

I defy all Michigan To find such another.

She's tall and slim, her hair is red, Her face is plump and pretty.

She's my daisy Sunday best-day girl, And her front name stands for Kitty.

” And again as before the Fighting Forty howled truculently: “Bung yer eye!

bung yer eye!

” The words were vulgar, the air a mere minor chant.

Yet Thorpe's mind was stilled.

His aroused subconsciousness had been engaged in reconstructing these men entire as their songs voiced rudely the inner characteristics of their beings.

Now his spirit halted, finger on lip.

Their bravery, pride of caste, resource, bravado, boastfulness,--all these he had checked off approvingly.

Here now was the idea of the Mate.

Somewhere for each of them was a “Kitty,” a “daisy Sunday best-day girl”; the eternal feminine; the softer side; the tenderness, beauty, glory of even so harsh a world as they were compelled to inhabit.

At the present or in the past these woods roisterers, this Fighting Forty, had known love.

Thorpe arose abruptly and turned at random into the forest.

The song pursued him as he went, but he heard only the clear sweet tones, not the words.

And yet even the words would have spelled to his awakened sensibilities another idea,--would have symbolized however rudely, companionship and the human delight of acting a part before a woman.

“I took her to a dance one night, A mossback gave the bidding-- Silver Jack bossed the shebang, and Big Dan played the fiddle.

We danced and drank the livelong night With fights between the dancing, Till Silver Jack cleaned out the ranch And sent the mossbacks prancing.

” And with the increasing war and turmoil of the quick water the last shout of the Fighting Forty mingled faintly and was lost.

“Bung yer eye!

bung yer eye!

” Thorpe found himself at the edge of the woods facing a little glade into which streamed the radiance of a full moon.

Chapter XXXVIII

There he stood and looked silently, not understanding, not caring to inquire.

Across the way a white-throat was singing, clear, beautiful, like the shadow of a dream.

The girl stood listening.

Her small fair head was inclined ever so little sideways and her finger was on her lips as though she wished to still the very hush of night, to which impression the inclination of her supple body lent its grace.

The moonlight shone full upon her countenance.

A little white face it was, with wide clear eyes and a sensitive, proud mouth that now half parted like a child's. Here eyebrows arched from her straight nose in the peculiarly graceful curve that falls just short of pride on the one side and of power on the other, to fill the eyes with a pathos of trust and innocence.

The man watching could catch the poise of her long white neck and the molten moon-fire from her tumbled hair,--the color of corn-silk, but finer.

And yet these words meant nothing.

A painter might have caught her charm, but he must needs be a poet as well,--and a great poet, one capable of grandeurs and subtleties.

To the young man standing there rapt in the spell of vague desire, of awakened vision, she seemed most like a flower or a mist.

He tried to find words to formulate her to himself, but did not succeed.

Always it came back to the same idea--the flower and the mist.

Like the petals of a flower most delicate was her questioning, upturned face; like the bend of a flower most rare the stalk of her graceful throat; like the poise of a flower most dainty the attitude of her beautiful, perfect body sheathed in a garment that outlined each movement, for the instant in suspense.

Like a mist the glimmering of her skin, the shining of her hair, the elusive moonlike quality of her whole personality as she stood there in the ghost-like clearing listening, her fingers on her lips.

Behind her lurked the low, even shadow of the forest where the moon was not, a band of velvet against which the girl and the light-touched twigs and bushes and grass blades were etched like frost against a black window pane.

There was something, too, of the frost-work's evanescent spiritual quality in the scene,--as though at any moment, with a puff of the balmy summer wind, the radiant glade, the hovering figure, the filagreed silver of the entire setting would melt into the accustomed stern and menacing forest of the northland, with its wolves, and its wild deer, and the voices of its sterner calling.

Thorpe held his breath and waited.

Again the white-throat lifted his clear, spiritual note across the brightness, slow, trembling with.

The girl never moved.

She stood in the moonlight like a beautiful emblem of silence, half real, half fancy, part woman, wholly divine, listening to the little bird's message.

For the third time the song shivered across the night, then Thorpe with a soft sob, dropped his face in his hands and looked no more.

He did not feel the earth beneath his knees, nor the whip of the sumach across his face; he did not see the moon shadows creep slowly along the fallen birch; nor did he notice that the white-throat had hushed its song.

His inmost spirit was shaken.

Something had entered his soul and filled it to the brim, so that he dared no longer stand in the face of radiance until he had accounted with himself.

Another drop would overflow the cup.

Ah, sweet God, the beauty of it, the beauty of it!

That questing, childlike starry gaze, seeking so purely to the stars themselves!

That flower face, those drooping, half parted lips!

That inexpressible, unseizable something they had meant!

Thorpe searched humbly--eagerly--then with agony through his troubled spirit, and in its furthermost depths saw the mystery as beautifully remote as ever.

It approached and swept over him and left him gasping passion-racked.

Ah, sweet God, the beauty of it!

the beauty of it!

the vision!

the dream!

He trembled and sobbed with his desire to seize it, with his impotence to express it, with his failure even to appreciate it as his heart told him it should be appreciated.

He dared not look.

At length he turned and stumbled back through the moonlit forest crying on his old gods in vain.

At the banks of the river he came to a halt.

There in the velvet pines the moonlight slept calmly, and the shadows rested quietly under the breezeless sky.

Near at hand the river shouted as ever its cry of joy over the vitality of life, like a spirited boy before the face of inscrutable nature.

All else was silence.

Then from the waste boomed a strange, hollow note, rising, dying, rising again, instinct with the spirit of the wilds.

It fell, and far away sounded a heavy but distant crash.

The cry lifted again.

It was the first bull moose calling across the wilderness to his mate.

And then, faint but clear down the current of a chance breeze drifted the chorus of the Fighting Forty.

“The forests so brown at our stroke go down, And cities spring up where they fell;

While logs well run and work well done Is the story the shanty boys tell.

” Thorpe turned from the river with a thrust forward of his head.

He was not a religious man, and in his six years' woods experience had never been to church.

Now he looked up over the tops of the pines to where the Pleiades glittered faintly among the brighter stars.

“Thanks, God,” said he briefly.

Chapter XXXIX

For several days this impression satisfied him completely.

He discovered, strangely enough, that his restlessness had left him, that once more he was able to give to his work his former energy and interest.

It was as though some power had raised its finger and a storm had stilled, leaving calm, unruffled skies.

He did not attempt to analyze this; he did not even make an effort to contemplate it.

His critical faculty was stricken dumb and it asked no questions of him.

At a touch his entire life had changed.

Reality or vision, he had caught a glimpse of something so entirely different from anything his imagination or experience had ever suggested to him, that at first he could do no more than permit passively its influences to adjust themselves to his being.

Curiosity, speculation, longing,--all the more active emotions remained in abeyance while outwardly, for three days, Harry Thorpe occupied himself only with the needs of the Fighting Forty at Camp One.

In the early morning he went out with the gang.

While they chopped or heaved, he stood by serene.

Little questions of expediency he solved.

Dilemmas he discussed leisurely with Tim Shearer.

Occasionally he lent a shoulder when the peaveys lacked of prying a stubborn log from its bed.

Not once did he glance at the nooning sun.

His patience was quiet and sure.

When evening came he smoked placidly outside the office, listening to the conversation and laughter of the men, caressing one of the beagles, while the rest slumbered about his feet, watching dreamily the night shadows and the bats.

At about nine o'clock he went to bed, and slept soundly.

He was vaguely conscious of a great peace within him, a great stillness of the spirit, against which the metallic events of his craft clicked sharply in vivid relief.

It was the peace and stillness of a river before it leaps.

Little by little the condition changed.

The man felt vague stirrings of curiosity.

He speculated aimlessly as to whether or not the glade, the moonlight, the girl, had been real or merely the figments of imagination.

Almost immediately the answer leaped at him from his heart.

Since she was so certainly flesh and blood, whence did she come?

what was she doing there in the wilderness?

His mind pushed the query aside as unimportant, rushing eagerly to the essential point: When could he see her again?

How find for the second time the vision before which his heart felt the instant need of prostrating itself.

His placidity had gone.

That morning he made some vague excuse to Shearer and set out blindly down the river.

He did not know where he was going, any more than did the bull moose plunging through the trackless wilderness to his mate.

Instinct, the instinct of all wild natural creatures, led him.

And so, without thought, without clear intention even,--most would say by accident,--he saw her again.

It was near the “pole trail”; which was less like a trail than a rail-fence.

For when the snows are deep and snowshoes not the property of every man who cares to journey, the old-fashioned “pole trail” comes into use.

It is merely a series of horses built of timber across which thick Norway logs are laid, about four feet from the ground, to form a continuous pathway.

A man must be a tight-rope walker to stick to the pole trail when ice and snow have sheathed its logs.

If he makes a misstep, he is precipitated ludicrously into feathery depths through which he must flounder to the nearest timber horse before he can remount.

In summer, as has been said, it resembles nothing so much as a thick one-rail fence of considerable height, around which a fringe of light brush has grown.

Thorpe reached the fringe of bushes, and was about to dodge under the fence, when he saw her.

So he stopped short, concealed by the leaves and the timber horse.

She stood on a knoll in the middle of a grove of monster pines.

There was something of the cathedral in the spot.

A hush dwelt in the dusk, the long columns lifted grandly to the Roman arches of the frond, faint murmurings stole here and there like whispering acolytes.

The girl stood tall and straight among the tall, straight pines like a figure on an ancient tapestry.

She was doing nothing--just standing there--but the awe of the forest was in her wide, clear eyes.

The great sweet feeling clutched the young man's throat again.

But while the other,--the vision of the frost-work glade and the spirit-like figure of silence,--had been unreal and phantasmagoric, this was of the earth.

He looked, and looked, and looked again.

He saw the full pure curve of her cheek's contour, neither oval nor round, but like the outline of a certain kind of plum.

He appreciated the half-pathetic downward droop of the corners of her mouth,--her red mouth in dazzling, bewitching contrast to the milk-whiteness of her skin.

He caught the fineness of her nose, straight as a Grecian's, but with some faint suggestion about the nostrils that hinted at piquance.

And the waving corn silk of her altogether charming and unruly hair, the superb column of her long neck on which her little head poised proudly like a flower, her supple body, whose curves had the long undulating grace of the current in a swift river, her slender white hand with the pointed fingers--all these he saw one after the other, and his soul shouted within him at the sight.

He wrestled with the emotions that choked him.

“Ah, God!

Ah, God!

” he cried softly to himself like one in pain.

He, the man of iron frame, of iron nerve, hardened by a hundred emergencies, trembled in every muscle before a straight, slender girl, clad all in brown, standing alone in the middle of the ancient forest.

In a moment she stirred slightly, and turned.

Drawing herself to her full height, she extended her hands over her head palm outward, and, with an indescribably graceful gesture, half mockingly bowed a ceremonious adieu to the solemn trees.

Then with a little laugh she moved away in the direction of the river.

At once Thorpe proved a great need of seeing her again.

In his present mood there was nothing of the awe-stricken peace he had experienced after the moonlight adventure.

He wanted the sight of her as he had never wanted anything before.

He must have it, and he looked about him fiercely as though to challenge any force in Heaven or Hell that would deprive him of it.

His eyes desired to follow the soft white curve of her cheek, to dance with the light of her corn-silk hair, to delight in the poetic movements of her tall, slim body, to trace the full outline of her chin, to wonder at the carmine of her lips, red as a blood-spot on the snow.

These things must be at once.

The strong man desired it.

And finding it impossible, he raged inwardly and tore the tranquillities of his heart, as on the shores of the distant Lake of Stars, the bull-moose trampled down the bushes in his passion.

So it happened that he ate hardly at all that day, and slept ill, and discovered the greatest difficulty in preserving the outward semblance of ease which the presence of Tim Shearer and the Fighting Forty demanded.

And next day he saw her again, and the next, because the need of his heart demanded it, and because, simply enough, she came every afternoon to the clump of pines by the old pole trail.

Now had Thorpe taken the trouble to inquire, he could have learned easily enough all there was to be known of the affair.

But he did not take the trouble.

His consciousness was receiving too many new impressions, so that in a manner it became bewildered.

At first, as has been seen, the mere effect of the vision was enough; then the sight of the girl sufficed him.

But now curiosity awoke and a desire for something more.

He must speak to her, touch her hand, look into her eyes.

He resolved to approach her, and the mere thought choked him and sent him weak.

When he saw her again from the shelter of the pole trail, he dared not, and so stood there prey to a novel sensation,--that of being baffled in an intention.

It awoke within him a vast passion compounded part of rage at himself, part of longing for that which he could not take, but most of love for the girl.

As he hesitated in one mind but in two decisions, he saw that she was walking slowly in his direction.

Perhaps a hundred paces separated the two.

She took them deliberately, pausing now and again to listen, to pluck a leaf, to smell the fragrant balsam and fir tops as she passed them.

Her progression was a series of poses, the one of which melted imperceptibly into the other without appreciable pause of transition.

So subtly did her grace appeal to the sense of sight, that out of mere sympathy the other senses responded with fictions of their own.

Almost could the young man behind the trail savor a faint fragrance, a faint music that surrounded and preceded her like the shadows of phantoms.

He knew it as an illusion, born of his desire, and yet it was a noble illusion, for it had its origin in her.

In a moment she had reached the fringe of brush about the pole trail.

They stood face to face.

She gave a little start of surprise, and her hand leaped to her breast, where it caught and stayed.

Her childlike down-drooping mouth parted a little more, and the breath quickened through it.

But her eyes, her wide, trusting, innocent eyes, sought his and rested.

He did not move.

The eagerness, the desire, the long years of ceaseless struggle, the thirst for affection, the sob of awe at the moonlit glade, the love,--all these flamed in his eyes and fixed his gaze in an unconscious ardor that had nothing to do with convention or timidity.

One on either side of the spike-marked old Norway log of the trail they stood, and for an appreciable interval the duel of their glances lasted,--he masterful, passionate, exigent; she proud, cool, defensive in the aloofness of her beauty.

Then at last his prevailed.

A faint color rose from her neck, deepened, and spread over her face and forehead.

In a moment she dropped her eyes.

“Don't you think you stare a little rudely--Mr. Thorpe?

” she asked.