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They set out up the long reach of Water Street, their steel caulks biting deep into the pitted board-walks. For nearly a mile the street was flanked solely by lumber-yards, small mills, and factories. Then came a strip of unimproved land, followed immediately by the wooden, ramshackle structures of Hell's Half-Mile.
Inquiries of lumber-yards developing the disconcerting fact that four dollars and seventy-five cents was inadequate to buy the material itself, to say nothing of the cost of steaming and bending the ribs, I reluctantly abandoned the ideal of the graceful craft I had sketched, and compromised on a flat bottom.
Down by the riverside I see some large lumber-yards, indicative of a considerable timber trade. The wharves were dirty, as wharves generally are; but they were busy with traffic. The town seemed well laid out, in broad streets; the houses being built widely apart, each with its garden about it; while long lines of trees run along most of the streets.
Presently a branch of the filthy, arrogant, self-sufficient little Chicago River came into view, with its mass of sputtering tugs, its black, oily water, its tall, red, brown, and green grain-elevators, its immense black coal-pockets and yellowish-brown lumber-yards. Here was life; he saw it at a flash. Here was a seething city in the making.
A little further are lumber-yards and wharfs, and mud and sawdust, and dealers in old nails and rags and bones, and rotten posts and rails, and attempts at grass. Here are old barrel-hoops, and patches of old sails, and dead bushes and dead dogs, and old saucepans, and little plots of ground where cabbages and pumpkins drag on a pining existence.
To-day a boulevard rises from the land-locked harbour and goes over the heights to the river-mouth like the arc of a bow; the finest residences of the Canadian Pacific coast stand there; and the river is lined with mile upon mile of lumber-yards and saw-mills. Where the rock projects like a hand into the turbid waters stands a crowded city, built like New York on what is almost an island.
Those who saw her in those days, going about the lumber-yards and doing a man's work, would hardly have recognized in her the merry Glitter-Brita, who in times of old trod the spring-dance so gayly in the well-lighted halls of the Blakstad mansion. And, indeed, she was sadly changed! Her features had become sharper, and the firm lines about her mouth expressed severity, almost sternness.
The saffron and golden lights in the sky diffused themselves over the surface of the water, and spread from the bow of the canoe in deeper waves of purple and orange, as he paddled swiftly up stream. The pale yellow gas-lamps of the town faded behind him. The lumber-yards and factories and disconsolate little houses of the outskirts seemed to melt away.
There's work to do there. It's pay-day in the lumber-yards on the Island, so please come. Will you?" Carnac laughed. "Yes, there's no engagement to prevent it." He thanked Junia and Sibyl for all they had done for him, and added: "I'd like a couple of hours among the rivermen. Where's the boat?"
"Go away, Carnac, please now," she said softly. A moment afterwards he was gone. John Grier's business had beaten all past records. Tarboe was everywhere: on the river, in the saw-mills, in the lumber-yards, in the office. Health and strength and goodwill were with him, and he had the confidence of all men in the lumber-world.
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