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The next morning Ranier arose, and looked with delight at the work already done; then, speaking again to the ax, it began chopping away as before. Now, it chanced that morning that the chief ranger had started to see how the work was being done, and, on reaching the forest, asked the guards if many wood-cutters had entered.
"He was the last person in the world I expected to see when I left the steamer at Cedar Bluff landing to get ahead of the Yankee cotton-factor in St. Louis," said Rodney. "Tom had been over Cape Girardeau way on business, and got a trifle out of his reckoning when Mr. Westall and his party of Emergency men picked him up and brought him to the wood-cutters' camp.
These curving banks, the rude and solitary huts of the wood-cutters, the vast bars of sand, covered gradually with cane-brake, and the range of impenetrable forest for hundreds of miles, comprise a vast gloomy landscape, which must be seen to be realized.... While the scene is fresh in my memory let me describe to you my last morning upon the Mississippi.
Westall and the rest that they had committed the worst kind of a blunder that they had made as great a mistake in arresting this boy for a horse-thief, as Nels and his fellow wood-cutters had made in suspecting him of being Tom Percival, simply because he happened to have in his possession a watch chain that somewhat resembled Tom's.
"I aint got none of them things to hold me back, and I'll go in your place, Jeff," said one of the wood-cutters. It was the man who had drawn his seat close in front of Rodney, and seemed to be so much interested in the boy's watch chain. "Will you go with me and join Price?" asked the latter, eagerly. "I reckon I might as well," replied the man. "Do you know the country?"
It is long since I have heard of them. Do you know that I left my little Bible with them? I had taught Elsie and Hans to read it, and they promised to go on reading it aloud as I used to do to the wood-cutters on Sunday evenings. It is wonderful how God's Word has been blessed to souls in the Forest. And, Adeline, have I told you how kind your friend Herr Müller has been about Hans?
And I will pay the wood-cutters their hire at whatsoever rate thou shalt determine." And I, rejoicing at these things, will do all that thou hast desired of me.
In the autumn, as usual, the wood-cutters came and cut down several of the tallest trees, and the young fir-tree, which was now grown to its full height, shuddered as the noble trees fell to the earth with a crash. After the branches were lopped off, the trunks looked so slender and bare, that they could scarcely be recognized.
And when a suitable plot of ground has been chosen for erecting a saw-mill, to prepare the boards, 'it is called "pine-land," or a spot where the pine trees predominate. "'A body of wood-cutters unite to form what is called a "lumbering-party," and they are in the employ of a master-lumberman, who pays them wages and finds them in provisions.
We were on deck at the time, and the headman of my wood-cutters, lounging near by, turned upon him his heavy and glittering eyes. I looked around, and I don't know why, but I assure you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.
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