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There could be no mistaking the passionate emotion which the other had stirred. The two men gazed into each other's eyes. Then with a curiously expressive gesture of his great hands Bull turned to the chair standing near, and flung himself into it. The lumberman's eyes twinkled. He had done the thing he desired. "An' you don't want her to?" he said deliberately.
We got to give 'im lumberman's shift, till the Boss kin send and take 'im back to the Settlement for the parson to do 'im up right an' proper."
Such is generally the life in a lumber-camp: hard, wholesome labour in the day, loud revelling at night. The rough, adventurous life, with no home charm or female influence to refine or restrain, is probably the principal reason of such low practice of life in the lumberman's camp.
He had been lumbering all his life, and there was nothing that fell to the lumberman's experience with which he was not perfectly familiar. Yet it is doubtful if he ever had a more difficult or dangerous task than that before him now. The "key-piece" of the jam was fully exposed, and once it was cut in two it would no longer hold the accumulation of logs together.
"At least," Nan agreed, "Laura is right. Curfew will not ring to-night. But Mrs. Cupp will find some other way of making it known that retiring hour has arrived. We'd best get to work if we are going to have a procession of the sawneys." "Girls," suddenly asked Bess, "who ever started that lumberman's slang of 'sawney' for 'greenhorn' up in this hall of acquired good English?"
"What cat?" the children's mother wanted to know. "It was the red-haired lumberman's cat," Russ went on. "We went to his cabin, over at Green Pond, where Mr. Barker lives. His name is Mike Gannon the tramp lumberman, I mean. Mr. Hurd told us about him, and we went to see him and " "I forgot to ask him a riddle!" broke in Laddie. "Never mind about riddles now, my dear," said Mother Bunker softly.
Few things were less improbable. Milly, like some vast virgin stretch of pine woods, was made to catch the lumberman's eye. And well we knew the habits of the Badgers, once fortune smiled upon them. Straight to New York they hie, and lay their goods at the feet of the girl who serves them beans in a beanery. Why, the alphabet itself connives. The Sunday newspaper's headliner's work is cut for him.
Men had tried to kill him more than once, and had perished ingloriously in the attempt. His coolness and courage were indisputable. There are moments in a lumberman's business when nothing will save an almost impossible situation but the instant exercise of the most daring and devil-may-care pluck, determination, and skill. Tom was never found wanting at such moments.
From that moment all Welton's anxiety seemed to vanish. It became unbearably evident that he looked on all this as the romance of youth. Bob felt himself suddenly reduced, in the lumberman's eyes, to the status of the small boy who wants to be a cowboy, or a sailor, or an Indian fighter. Welton looked on him with an indulgent eye as on one who would soon get enough of it.
The revolvers were, as on previous journeys into the wilder sections of their native country, a part of their regular equipment and for use in great emergencies only. The lumberjacks with one accord rushed at the Overland Riders, uttering yells and jeers. They carried no weapons in their hands, but, as Grace knew to be their practice, each jack wore a lumberman's knife. "Clubs!"
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