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Updated: June 28, 2025
Supplies would have to be toted in to last the entire winter, for when the snow came, communication over fifty miles of forest road would be as good as cut off. Whom could they trust among the lesser foremen of their woods force? Whom could they spare among the greater? At this juncture they called to them Tim Shearer, their walking boss and the greatest riverman in the State.
Newmark, watching, thought it impracticable. The current rendered footing impossible, so all the work had to be done from above. Wet wood gripped the long saws vice-like, so that a man's utmost strength could scarcely budge them. The water deadened the force of axe-blows. Nevertheless, with the sure persistence of the riverman, they held to it.
Blood splashed down his front and reddened the trampled snow, then he fell heavily backward, and MacNair saw that his whole throat had been shot away by the close fired charge of a shotgun. With a roar, MacNair scrambled up the ladder, automatic in hand. On the firing ledge's narrow rim a riverman snapped together the breech of his shotgun, and looked up his face close to the face of MacNair.
"I push the chisel and use the brush," answered Carnac, smilingly correcting him. "That's a good thing. Is it yours?" asked Tarboe, nodding and pointing to the statue of the riverman. Carnac nodded. "Yes, I did that one day. I'd like to do you, if you'd let me." The young giant waved a brawny hand and laughed.
The man appeared tiny around the upper bend, momently growing larger as he approached. His progress was jerky and on an uneven zigzag, according as the logs lay, by leaps, short runs, brief pauses, as a riverman goes. Finally he stepped ashore just below the camp, stamped his feet vigorously free of water, and approached the group around the cooking-fire.
A mighty splash, a hurl of flying foam and crushing timbers, and the spot on which the riverman had stood was buried beneath twenty feet of solid green wood. To Thorpe it seemed that Shearer must have been overwhelmed, but the riverman always mysteriously appeared at one side or the other, nonchalant, urging the men to work before the logs should have ceased to move.
Not for nothing was it, however, that the woodsman had learned to "run the logs" in many a tangled boom and racing "drive." His foot barely touched the treacherous floe ere he leaped again and yet again, till he had gained, by a path which none but a riverman could ever have dreamed of traversing, an ice-cake broad and firm enough to give him foothold.
The Captain used to send in the wagon to bring men out, but refused absolutely to let any man ride in anything going the other way. Nevertheless the hand, when the wanderlust hit him, trudged cheerfully the long distance to town. I am not sure that a new type is not thus developing, a type as distinct in its way as the riverman or the cowboy.
"Boys," said he, "while you're on the work, I want you all to keep a watch-out for these "H" logs, and whenever you strike one I want you to blaze it plainly, so there won't be any mistake about it." "What for?" asked one of the Saginaw men as he received his hatchet. But the riverman who squatted next nudged him with his elbow. "The less questions you ask Jack, the more answers you'll get.
"Tom," said Orde to the old riverman, "I'm going to send Marsh down for the pile-drivers and some cable. The barge company has some fifteen inch manilla." North laughed. "What in blazes do you expect to do with that?" he inquired. "We may need them," Orde stated with conviction. "Everything's safe enough now; and probably will continue so; but I can't afford to take chances.
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