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Arthur saw the operation by and by, and the hardy raftsmen shooting the rapids in what appeared to him circumstances of exciting peril. While he and all the disengaged dwellers at the 'Corner' were as yet looking on, a waggon came in sight from among the trees, and turned their curiosity into another channel.
He could make those dialect-speaking raftsmen understand him, sometimes, when even young Z had failed with them; and young Z was a pretty good German scholar. For one thing, X always spoke with such confidence perhaps that helped. And possibly the raftsmen's dialect was what is called PLATT-DEUTSCH, and so they found his English more familiar to their ears than another man's German.
Marx had only himself to provide for; his wife was dead, and his sons were raftsmen, who took pine logs to Mayence and Cologne, sometimes even as far as Holland.
Our wash sends their dug-out canoe bobbling alongside their raft, and splashes over and between the logs, and the raftsmen have to bustle to keep their herd together, and we pass, and they go and dream, of well I don't know what; that's the worst of being only a visitor in a country without the language, you can only guess what the people think by their expressions.
An' after the war, when he was marshal of Silver City, he cleaned out the bad men an' gun-fighters. He's been in almost every state in the Union. He could wrestle any man at the railings in his day, an' he was bully of the raftsmen of the Susquehanna when he was only a youngster. His father killed a man in a standup fight with a blow of his fist when he was sixty years old.
Hunter rose to his feet and motioned to those working the rope to give the boat greater speed. At the same time he shouted to the raftsmen: "Keep off; don't you see we are in danger?" "Get out of the way, then!" was the reply; "we must go through there." Such manifestly was their right, and the gentleman again waved his hands to those on both shores.
Thus Rollo was left alone, as it were, upon the raft; and for a moment he felt a little appalled at the idea of going down through such a dark and gloomy gorge as the bed of the river here presented to view, on such a strange conveyance, and surrounded with so wild and savage a horde of men as the raftsmen were, especially since, as he supposed, there was not a human being on board with whom he could exchange a word of conversation.
"There!" cried Ulrich, pointing to the snow covered roof of a wooden hut, that stood close before them in a clearing on the edge of the forest. Every face brightened, but Marx shook his head doubtfully, muttering: "No smoke, no barking; the place is empty. Jorg has gone. At Whitsuntide how many years ago is it? the boys left to act as raftsmen, but then he stayed here."
Benyowsky answered that exiles had no news. "Who are you?" an officer demanded bluntly. Always and unconsciously playing the hero part of melodrama, Benyowsky replied "Once a soldier and a general, now a slave." Shouts of laughter broke from the raftsmen.
By eight o'clock the exhibition hall of the Whatnot was packed with an audience that contained a number of raftsmen and steamboat hands from the water-front. These were good-naturedly noisy, and indulged in cat-calls, stampings, and other manifestations of their impatience for the curtain to rise.
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