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The deck was covered with heavy planks, surplus chains were coiled over the most vulnerable parts of the boat, an eleven-inch hawser was wound around the pilot-house as high as the windows; barriers of cordwood were built about the boilers. After sunset, the atmosphere became hazy and the sky overcast. Guns were run back, ports closed, and the sailors armed to resist boarders.
The center of the room was occupied by a tremendous stove capable of burning whole logs of cordwood. A stovepipe led from the stove here and there in wire suspension to a final exit near the other corner. On the wall were two sporting chromos, and a good variety of lithographed calendars and illuminated tin signs advertising beers and spirits.
Then you don't care to sit and drink after dinner as you do at an hotel of an idle day, for you want to go on deck, light your cigar, take a sweep round the horizon with your glass to see if there is any sail in sight, glance at the sky to ascertain if the breeze is likely to hold, and then bring yourself to anchor on a seat, and have a dish of chat for a dessert with the captain, if he is a man of books like you, Cutler, or a man of reefs, rocks, and sandbars, fish, cordwood, and smugglin', or collisions, wracks, and salvage, like the pilot.
And it took six Indians to get them off, two pulling on each boot, and two to hold Whitey. And when they were off, Whitey borrowed a pair of moccasins, and raced to the ranch house, with Injun and Sitting Bull. Now, in the living-room of the Bar O ranch house in winter and in every other ranch house in that part of the country was a big stove that held a stick of cordwood three feet long.
"My father's master's name was Jick Street. He owned, to my knowing, my father, Bill Street; Henry Street, and Ed Street. He might have owned more but I heard my father say he owned those. "My father said his white people weren't very wealthy. He and his brother had to go and cut cordwood, both summer and winter. And they was allowed so much work for a task.
He rode on, wishing the light were better, for the faint gleam of the moon among the trees confused his sight and made it difficult to distinguish the trail, while to leave it might lead to his plunging down some precipitous gully. At length he saw a yellow glow ahead, and soon afterward came upon a shack in an opening. Small logs were strewn about it and among them stood tall piles of cordwood.
In addition, several large ricks of cordwood standing at the edge of the clearing gave sign that the men had not been idle during the spring. At the same time, there were many evidences of a lack of thrift to be seen in the debris left from the cabin building. No arrangements had been made for a boat landing and Colonel Howell's canoe was lying carelessly against the steep bank.
The crew turned out with shovels, farmers in the neighborhood helped, and part of a lately arrived section gang joined in to shovel the snow away from the stalled engine and train. Cordwood had been bought of Peleg Morton and hauled over to the locomotive for fuel. With this the engineer and fireman managed to make sufficient steam to heat the Pullman coach and the smoking car.
By a fire of my own acre's "dead and down" I write these lines. I never buy cordwood.
Indeed, with all her agent's care, it not unfrequently happened that a lodger, securing a job in one of the cordwood camps, would disappear, leaving behind him only his empty space upon the floor and his debt upon the books, which Rosenblatt kept with scrupulous care. Occasionally it happened, however, that, as in all bookkeeping, a mistake would creep in.
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