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Updated: May 25, 2025
Next morning the illusion was completed. Here were men with mackinaws and green elk boots; here were cook-houses in which the only difference was that a soldier did the cooking instead of a Chinaman; and above all, here were fir and pines growing out of a golden soil, with a soft wind blowing overhead.
Indian bull boats flocked at the river front beneath the stern adobe walls; moored mackinaws swayed in the current, waiting to be loaded with peltries and loosed for the long drift back to the States; and the keel-boats, looking very fat and lazy, unloaded supplies in the late fall that were loaded at St. Louis in the early spring.
A couple of belated participants in the fray arrived breathlessly, shedding their mackinaws as they ran, and casting them down at Courtland's feet. "Look after those, will you, Court? We've got to get in on this," shouted one as he thrust a noisy bit of flannel head-gear at Courtland. Courtland gave the garments a kick behind him and stood watching.
The Mackinaws were flecked far and wide over the lake, and a dirty smudge on the blue showed where the Far Harbor and Beaverton boat had gone over the horizon. But there, over the point and dangerously close to the land, hung another smudge, gradually pushing its way like a writhing, black serpent, lakewards.
Midnight found him in a shack buried in snow and reached only by a circuitous tunnel, a shack where men no longer Americans, but black-smeared, red-eyed, doddering, stumbling human machines came and went, their frost-caked Mackinaws steaming as they clustered about the red-hot stove, their faces smudged with engine grease to form a coating against the stinging blast of the ice-laden wind, their cheeks raw and bleeding, their mouths swollen orifices which parted only for mumblings; vikings of another age, the fighters of the ice gangs, of which Houston had become a part.
Come on, fellows, get ready; half the morning will be gone before we start," said Bruce, and in a twinkle a half-score of scouts were donning mackinaws and sweaters and making themselves generally secure against a temperature that hovered very close to the zero mark.
The others the old men, and the crippled ones, and the hard-handed grubbers of stumps, who sat about in faded mackinaws and patched overalls he regarded not at all. He deposited his pack-sack on the floor where its canvas sides, outbulging with blankets and duffel, fairly shrieked their newness.
Every dormitory in the quadrangle had been visited, but the buildings outside the hollow square seemed immune. Harvard was about to meet Yale in the annual football game between the freshman teams. The streets were filled with pretty girls, and more pretty girls, with "sporty" chaps in mackinaws, in raglans with all sorts of hats atop of their heads, and some without hats at all.
He wore evening clothes when occasion required as unconcernedly as he wore mackinaws and calked boots among his loggers. She had not yet determined whether his equable poise arose from an unequivocal democracy of spirit, or from sheer egotism. At any rate, where she had set out with subtle misgivings, she had to admit that socially, at least, Jack Fyfe could play his hand at any turn of the game.
It seemed that waste land of which Tennyson sang, "where no man comes nor hath come since the making of the world." I thought of the steamboats and the mackinaws and the keel-boats and the thousands of men who had pushed through this dream-world and the thought was unconvincing.
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