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Updated: June 14, 2025
There it is, and the more I look at it the clearer it grows, and to think he has died there !! And beneath there he is buried, and the raftsmen will pass within a few hundred yards of him where he lies, and will sing the same strain that so fascinated him, but he will not hear it, and learn it and bring it back for Lady Violet, the loveliest woman in England!
"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."
For the heavy booming of cannon rose the "quauk!" of ducks and the cackling of hens. We went to the spot which tradition points out as the place where Jane McCrea met her death. River flowed, and raftsmen sang below; women stood at their washing-tubs, and white-headed children stared at us from above; nor from the unheeding river or the forgetful weeds came or cry or faintest wail of pain.
Then come the wood-cutters in the spring, and lop off the branches, and roll the great logs down to the torrent below, and float them away in long flexible rafts, which spin down the smooth water-ways at a giddy speed, or float silently along the broad, still reaches of the widening river, or dash over the dangerous rapids, skillfully guided by the wild raftsmen, bare-legged and armed with long poles, whose practiced feet support them as safely on the slippery, rolling timber as ours would carry us on the smoothest pavement.
Of course there was a booming current; and of course that boat started her engines again ten seconds after she stopped them, for they never cared much for raftsmen; so now she was churning along up the river, out of sight in the thick weather, though I could hear her.
Hence we put "in requisition all who have anything to do with handling, transporting or selling provisions and articles of prime necessity," especially combustibles and food wood-choppers, carters, raftsmen, millers, reapers, threshers, wine-growers, movers, field-hands, "country people" of every kind and degree.
While tarrying here I heard young voices upstream, and looking in that direction saw two boys coming down the rapids on rude floats. They were racing along at a lively pace, each with a pole in his hand, dexterously avoiding the rocks and the breakers, and schooling themselves thus early in the duties and perils of the raftsmen. As they saw me one observed to the other,
The night before I had gone up and had been pretty lucky, so I resolved to try and reach New Orleans in time for the next evening's packet. McGawley, my partner at the time, was along; and as we took a survey of the passengers, we noticed that most of them were raftsmen who had just been paid off.
Under us the rowers slipped the wherries and the yawls; in the channel the rafts floated down a slow freight from the sweet and savage pine-forests, and the fire they carried on their breasts, and the flames of their pitch-knots, threw out strange shadows of the steering raftsmen, and a wild bandrol of smoke flaring and streaming on the night behind them; and yet away far up on the yonder side, beneath the hanging alders and the cedar-trees, the gundalows dropped down, great laden barges; and perhaps a lantern, hung high in the stern of some huge East-Indiaman at the wharves of the other town quite across the stream, showed us all its tracery and spires, dim webs of shadow stretched and woven against the solemn ground of the starlit sky, and taught us the limit of the shores.
The raftsmen were always glad to meet Paul and converse with him as long as he would paddle alongside. Below Davenport, the Doctor's passion for hunting was again displayed, much to the disgust of his dusky boatman. He insisted on firing at some blackbirds and the promise of a quarter to the negro, persuaded that worthy to row him close in shore.
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