Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
A contract was drawn up in which the firm agreed to pay six dollars a thousand, merchantable scale, for all saw-logs banked at a rollway to be situated a given number of miles from the forks of Cass Branch, while on his side James Bourke, better known as the Rough Red, agreed to put in at least three and one-half million feet.
The men gathered, interested in this record load. "Thirteen thousand two hundred and forty," announced the scaler at last. "Whoopee!" crowed Billy O'Brien, "that'll lay out Rollway Charley by two thousand feet!" The men congratulated him on his victory over the other teamster, Rollway Charley.
Even as they looked the first rollway tore loose; the logs, rolling and tumbling down the steep slope, leaped into the river with a roar and a splash that sent a fountain of white spray flying skyward. Bill set his pole and fairly hurled the boat into the bank well above the rollways. "Good God!" he cried. "Can't he see the drive? They'll jam and my men will be killed!"
Other logs swept in and wedged, forcing the heavy butt and the riven trunk of the huge tree firmly against the rocks at the head of the rapid. Rollway after rollway tore loose and the released logs, swept downward by the resistless push of the current, climbed one upon another and lodged. Higher and higher the jam towered, the interlocking logs piling in hopeless tangle.
Coincident with the snapping of the first toggle-pin, the branches of a gigantic, storm-blasted pine, whose earth-laded butt dragged heavily along the bottom of the river, became firmly entangled in the low-hanging limbs of a sweeper, and swung sluggishly across the current. Against this obstruction crashed the leaping, upending logs of the wrecked rollway.
His jaw wagged weakly, his flabby lips sagged open, exposing the jagged, brown teeth, and he passed his hand uncertainly across his eyes. "It's the greener," he mumbled thickly. "It's the greener hisself." Another rollway rumbled into the river, and Bill leaped into the open. "Stop!" he cried. "It's murder! There are men on that drive!"
Tradition claimed that only once in a long woods life had Shearer been forced to "take water" before a breaking rollway: and then he saved his peavey. History stated that he had never lost a man on the river, simply and solely because he invariably took the dangerous tasks upon himself. As soon as the logs had caught the current, a dozen men urged them on.
Over the thin crust of ice cautious loads of a few thousand feet were drawn to the banks of the river. The road-bed held. Gradually it hardened and thickened. The size of the loads increased. Finally Billy O'Brien drew up triumphantly at the rollway. "There's a rim-racker!" he exclaimed. "Give her all she'll stand, Jimmy." Jimmy Hall, the sealer, laid his flexible rule over the face of each log.
It was a cellar of the oldest pattern, with no step, having an entrance on a level with the road, the same being a "rollway" wide enough to admit barrels of cider and other produce. I don't know how many had been rolled into it during the century or so before we came, but after a casual look I decided that very few had been rolled out.
At daylight men crowded the bank, the bend watchers strung out and took up their positions, and white-water men stood by with sharp axes to break out the rollways. The first rollway broke badly.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking