The Backwoodsmen

McWha again spat accurately into the crack of the grate.

“I ain’t got no fancy for young ’uns in camp, but ye kin do ez ye like, Walley Johnson,” he answered grudgingly. “Only I want it understood, right now, I ain’t no guardeen, an’ won’t be, to nawthin’ that walks in petticoats! What I’m thinkin’ of is the old cow out yonder, an’ them hens o’ Joe’s what I seen a-roostin’ over the cowstall.”

“Them’s all Rosy-Lilly’s, an’ goes with us an’ her to camp to-morrer,” answered Johnson with decision. “We’ll tell the kid as how her daddy had to be took away in the night because he was so sick, an’ couldn’t speak to nobody, an’ we was goin’ to take keer o’ her till he gits back! An’ that’s the truth,” he added, with a sudden passion of tenderness and pity in his tone.

At this hint of emotion McWha laughed sarcastically. Then knocking out his pipe, he proceeded to fill the stove for the night, and spread his blanket on the floor beside it.

“If ye wants to make the camp a baby-farm,” he growled, “don’t mind me!”

II

Under the dominion of Rosy-Lilly fell Conroy’s camp at sight, capitulating unconditionally to the first appeal of her tearful blue eyes, and little, hurt red mouth. Dan Logan, the Boss, happened to know just how utterly alone the death of her father had left the child, and he was the first to propose that the camp should adopt her. Fully bearing out the faith which Walley Johnson had so confidently expressed back in the dead man’s cabin, Jimmy Brackett, the cook, on whom would necessarily devolve the chief care of this new member of his family, jumped to the proposal of the Boss with enthusiastic support.

“We’ll every mother’s son o’ us be guardeen to her!” he declared, with the finality appropriate to his office as autocrat second only to the Boss himself. Every man in camp assented noisily, saving only Red McWha; and he, as was expected of him, sat back and grinned.

From the first, Rosy-Lilly made herself at home in the camp. For a few days she fretted after her father, whenever she was left for a moment to her own devices; but Jimmy Brackett was ever on hand to divert her mind with astounding fairy-tales during the hours when the rest of the hands were away chopping and hauling. Long after she had forgotten to fret, she would have little “cryin’ spells” at night, remembering her father’s good-night kiss. But a baby’s sorrow, happily, is shorter than its remembrance; and Rosy-Lilly soon learned to repeat her phrase: “Poor Daddy had to go ’way-’way-off,” without the quivering lip and wistful look which made the big woodsmen’s hearts tighten so painfully beneath their homespun shirts. Conroy’s Camp was a spacious, oblong cabin of “chinked” logs, with a big stove in the middle. The bunks were arranged in a double tier along one wall, and a plank table (rude, but massive) along the other. Built on at one end, beside the door, was the kitchen, or cookhouse, crowded, but clean and orderly, and bright with shining tins. At the inner end of the main room a corner was boarded off to make a tiny bedroom, no bigger than a cupboard. This was the Boss’s private apartment. It contained two narrow bunks–one for the Boss himself, who looked much too big for it; and one for the only guest whom the camp ever expected to entertain, the devoted missionary-priest, who, on his snowshoes, was wont to make the round of the widely scattered camps once or twice in a winter. This guest-bunk the Boss at once allotted to Rosy-Lilly, but on the strict condition that Johnson should continue to act as nurse and superintend Rosy-Lilly’s nightly toilet.

Rosy-Lilly had not been in the camp a week before McWha’s “ugliness” to her had aroused even the Boss’s resentment, and the Boss was a just man. Of course, it was generally recognized that McWha was not bound, by any law or obligation, to take any notice of the child, still less to “make a fuss over her,” with the rest of the camp. But Jimmy Brackett expressed the popular sentiment when he growled, looking sourly at the back of McWha’s unconscious red head bowed ravenously over his plate of beans–

“If only he’d do something, so’s we c’ld lick some decency inter ’im!”

There was absolutely nothing to be done about it, however; for Red McWha was utterly within his rights.

Rosy-Lilly, as we have seen, was not yet five years old; but certain of the characteristics of her sex were already well developed within her. The adulation of the rest of the camp, poured out at her tiny feet, she took graciously enough, but rather as a matter of course. It was all her due. But what she wanted was that that big, ugly, red-headed man, with the cross grey eyes and loud voice, should be nice to her. She wanted him to pick her up, and set her on his knee, and whittle wonderful wooden dogs and dolls and boats and boxes for her with his jack-knife, as Walley Johnson and the others did. With Walley she would hardly condescend to coquet, so sure she was of his abject slavery to her whims; and, moreover, as must be confessed with regret, so unforgiving was she in her heart toward his blank eye. She merely consented to make him useful, much as she might a convenient and altogether doting but uninteresting grandmother. To all the other members of the camp–except the Boss, whom she regarded with some awe–she would make baby-love impartially and carelessly. But it was Red McWha whose notice she craved.

When supper was over, and pipes filled and lighted, some one would strike up a “chantey”–one of those interminable, monotonous ballad-songs which are peculiar to the lumber camps.

These “chanteys,” however robust their wordings or their incidents, are always sung in a plaintive minor which goes oddly with the large-moulded virility of the singers. Some are sentimental, or religious, to the last degree, while others reek with an indecency of speech that would shroud the Tenderloin in blushes. Both kinds are equally popular in the camps, and both are of the most astounding naïveté. Of the worst of them, even, the simple-minded woodsmen are not in the least ashamed. They seem unconscious of their enormity. Nevertheless, it came about that, without a word said by any one, from the hour of Rosy-Lilly’s arrival in camp, all the indecent “chanteys” were dropped, as if into oblivion, from the woodsmen’s repertoire.

During the songs, the smoking, and the lazy fun, Rosy-Lilly would slip from one big woodsman to another, an inconspicuous little figure in the smoke-gloomed light of the two oil-lamps. Man after man would snatch her up to his knee, lay by his pipe, twist her silky, yellow curls about his great blunt fingers, and whisper wood-folk tales or baby nonsense into her pink little ear. She would listen solemnly for a minute or two, then wriggle down and move on to another of her admirers. But before long she would be standing by the bench on which sat Red McWha, with one big knee usually hooked high above the other, and his broad back reclined against the edge of a bunk. For a few minutes the child would stand there smiling with a perennial confidence, waiting to be noticed. Then she would come closer, without a word from her usually nimble little tongue, lean against McWha’s knee, and look up coaxingly into his face. If McWha chanced to be singing, for he was a “chanter” of some note, he would appear so utterly absorbed that Rosy-Lilly would at last slip away, with a look of hurt surprise in her face, to be comforted by one of her faithful. But if McWha were not engrossed in song, it would soon become impossible for him to ignore her. He would suddenly look down at her with his fierce eyes, knit his shaggy red brows, and demand harshly: “Well, Yaller Top, an’ what d’you want?”

From the loud voice and angry eye the child would retreat in haste, clear to the other end of the room, and sometimes a big tear would track its way down either cheek. After such an experiment she would usually seek Jimmy Brackett, who would console her with some sticky sweetmeat, and strive to wither McWha with envenomed glances. McWha would reply with a grin, as if proud of having routed the little adventurer so easily. He had discovered that the name “Yaller Top” was an infallible weapon of rebuff, as Rosy-Lilly considered it a term of indignity. To his evil humour there was something amusing in abashing Rosy-Lilly with the title she most disliked. Moreover, it was an indirect rebuke to the “saft” way the others acted about her.

If Rosy-Lilly felt rebuffed for the moment by McWha’s rudeness, she seemed always to forget it the next time she saw him. Night after night she would sidle up to his knee, and sue for his notice; and night after night she would retire discomfited. But on one occasion the discomfiture was McWha’s. She had elicited the customary rough demand–

“Well, Yaller Top, what d’you want?”

But this time she held her ground, though with quivering lips.

“Yaller Top ain’t my name ’tall,” she explained with baby politeness. “It’s Rosy-Lilly; ’n’ I jes’ thought you might want me to sit on yer knee a little, teeny minit.”

Much taken aback, McWha glanced about the room with a loutish grin. Then he flushed angrily, as he felt the demand of the sudden silence. Looking down again, with a scowl, at the expectant little face of Rosy-Lilly, he growled: “Well, not as I knows of!” and rose to his feet, thrusting her brusquely aside.

“Ain’t he uglier’n hell?” murmured Bird Pigeon to Walley Johnson, spitting indignantly on the stove-leg. “He’d ’a’ cuffed the kid ef he da’st, he glared at her that ugly!”

“Like to see ’im try it!” responded Johnson through his teeth, with a look to which his blank eye lent mysterious menace.

The time soon came, however, when McWha resumed his old seat and his old attitude on the bench. Rosy-Lilly avoided him for two evenings, but on the third the old fascination got the better of her pique. McWha saw her coming, and, growing self-conscious, he hurriedly started up a song with the full strength of his big voice.

The song was a well-known one, and nothing in it to redden the ear of a maiden; but it was profane with that rich, ingenious amplitude of profanity which seems almost instinctive among the lumbermen–a sort of second mother-tongue to them. Had it been any one but McWha who started it, nothing would have been said; but, as it was, Walley Johnson took alarm on the instant. To his supersensitive watchfulness, McWha was singing that song “jest a purpose to be ugly to the kid.” The fact that “the kid” would hardly understand a word of it, did not occur to him. Rising up from his bench behind the stove he shouted out across the smoky room: “Shet up that, Red!”

The song stopped. Every one looked inquiringly at Johnson. For several moments there was silence, broken only by an uneasy shuffling of feet. Then McWha got up slowly, his eyebrows bristling, his angry eyes little pin-points. First he addressed himself to Johnson.

“What the – business is’t o’ yourn what I sing?” he demanded, opening and shutting his big fingers.

“I’ll show ye what,” began Johnson, in a tense voice. But the Boss interrupted. Dave Logan was a quiet man, but he ruled his camp. Moreover, he was a just man, and Johnson had begun the dispute.

“Chuck that, Walley!” he snapped, sharp as a whip. “If there’s to be any row in this here camp, I’ll make it myself, an’ don’t none o’ you boys forgit it!”

McWha turned upon him in angry appeal.

“You’re Boss, Dave Logan, an’ what you sez goes, fer’s I’m concerned,” said he. “But I ax you, as Boss, be this here camp a camp, er a camp-meetin’? Walley Johnson kin go straight to hell; but ef you sez we ’ain’t to sing nawthin’ but hymns, why, o’ course, it’s hymns for me–till I kin git away to a camp where the hands is men, an’ not wet-nurses!”

“That’s all right, Red!” said the Boss. “I kin make allowances for yer gittin’ riled, considerin’ the jolt Walley’s rude interruption give ye! He hadn’t no right to interrupt, nor no call to. This ain’t no camp-meetin’. The boys have a right to swear all they like. Why, ’twouldn’t be noways natural in camp ef the boys couldn’t swear! somethin’d hev to bust before long. An’ the boys can’t be expected to go a-tiptoe and talk prunes an’ prisms, all along o’ a little yaller-haired kid what’s come to brighten up the old camp fer us. That wouldn’t be sense! But all we’ve got to mind is jest this–nothin’ vile! That’s all, boys. We’ll worry along without that!”

When the Boss spoke, he liked to explain himself rather fully. When he ceased, no one had a word to say. Every one was satisfied but Johnson; and he was constrained to seem so. There was an oppressive silence for some seconds. It was broken by the soft treble of Rosy-Lilly, who had been standing before the Boss and gazing up into his face with awed attention throughout the harangue.

“What did you say, Dave?” she piped, her hands clasped behind her back.

“Somethin’ as shall never tech you, Rosy-Lilly!” declared Johnson, snatching up the child and bearing her off to bed, amid a roar of laughter which saved Dave Logan the embarrassment of a reply.

For a time, now, Rosy-Lilly left McWha alone, so markedly that it looked as if Walley Johnson or Jimmy Brackett had admonished her on the subject. She continued, indeed, to cast at him eyes of pleading reproach, but always from a distance, and such appeals rolled off McWha’s crude perception like water off a musk rat’s fur. He had nothing “agin her,” as he would have put it, if only she would keep out of his way. But Rosy-Lilly, true to her sex, was not vanquished by any means, or even discouraged. She was only biding her time. Bird Pigeon, who was something of a beau in the Settlements, understood this, and stirred the loyal wrath of Walley Johnson by saying so.

“There ain’t nawthin’ about Red McWha to make Rosy-Lilly keer shucks fer ’im, savin’ an’ except that she can’t git him!” said Bird. “She’s that nigh bein’ a woman a’ready, if she be but five year old!”

Johnson fixed him with his disconcerting eye, and retorted witheringly–

“Ye thinks ye knows a pile about women, Bird Pigeon. But the kind ye knows about ain’t the kind Rosy-Lilly’s agoin’ to be!”

Nearly a week went by before Rosy-Lilly saw another chance to assail McWha’s forbidding defences. This time she made what her innocent heart conceived to be a tremendous bid for the bad-tempered woodsman’s favour. Incidentally, too, she revealed a secret which the Boss and Walley Johnson had been guarding with guilty solicitude ever since her coming to the camp.

It chanced that the Boss and Johnson together were kept away from camp one night till next morning, laying out a new “landing” over on Fork’s Brook. When it came time for Rosy-Lilly to be put to bed, the honour fell, as a matter of course, to Jimmy Brackett. Rosy-Lilly went with him willingly enough, but not till after a moment of hesitation, in which her eyes wandered involuntarily to the broad, red face of McWha behind its cloud of smoke.

As a nursemaid, Jimmy Brackett flattered himself that he was a success–till the moment came when Rosy-Lilly was to be tucked into her bunk. Then she stood and eyed him with solemn question.

“What’s wrong, me honey-bug?” asked Brackett, anxiously.

“You hain’t heard me my prayers!” replied Rosy-Lilly, with a touch of severity in her voice.

“Eh? What’s that?” stammered Brackett, startled quite out of his wonted composure.

“Don’t you know little girls has to say their prayers afore they goes to bed?” she demanded.

“No!” admitted Brackett, truthfully, wondering how he was going to get out of the unexpected situation.

“Walley Johnson hears me mine!” continued the child, her eyes very wide open as she weighed Brackett’s qualifications in her merciless little balance.

Here, Brackett was misguided enough to grin, bethinking him that now he “had the laugh” on the Boss and Walley. That grin settled it.

“I dess you don’t know how to hear me say ’em, Jimmy!” she announced inexorably. And picking up the skirt of her blue homespun “nightie,” so that she showed her little red woollen socks and white deer-hide moccasins, she tripped forth into the big, noisy room.

At the bright picture she made, her flax-gold hair tied in a knob on top of her head that it might not get tangled, the room fell silent instantly, and every eye was turned upon her. Nothing abashed by the scrutiny, she made her way sedately down the room and across to McWha’s bench. Unable to ignore her, and angry at the consciousness that he was embarrassed, McWha eyed her with a grim stare. But Rosy-Lilly put out her hands to him confidingly.

“I’m goin’ to let you hear me my prayers,” she said, her clear, baby voice carrying every syllable to the furthest corner of the room.

An ugly light flamed into McWha’s eyes, and he sprang to his feet, brushing the child rudely aside.

“That’s some o’ Jimmy Brackett’s work!” he shouted. “It’s him put ’er up to it, curse him!”

The whole room burst into a roar of laughter at the sight of his wrath. Snatching his cap from its peg, he strode furiously out to the stable, slamming the door behind him.

In their delight over McWha’s discomfiture the woodsmen quite forgot the feelings of Rosy-Lilly. For a second or two she stood motionless, her lips and eyes wide open with amazement. Then, hurt as much by the laughter of the room as by McWha’s rebuff, she burst into tears, and stood hiding her face with both hands, the picture of desolation.

When the men realized that she thought they were laughing at her, they shut their mouths with amazing promptitude, and crowded about her. One after another picked her up, striving to console her with caresses and extravagant promises. She would not uncover her eyes, however, for any one, and her heart-broken wailing was not hushed till Brackett thrust his way through the crowd, growling inarticulate blasphemies at them all, and bore her back to her room. When he emerged twenty minutes later no one asked him about Rosy-Lilly’s prayers. As for Rosy-Lilly, her feelings were this time so outraged that she would no longer look at McWha.

III

The long backwoods winter was now drawing near its end, and the snow in the open spaces was getting so soft at midday as to slump heavily and hinder the work of the teams. Every one was working with feverish haste to get the logs all out to the “landings,” on the river banks before the hauling should go to pieces. At night the tired lumbermen would tumble into their bunks as soon as supper was over, too greedy of sleep to think of songs or yarns. And Rosy-Lilly began to feel a little aggrieved at the inadequate attention which she was now receiving from all but Jimmy Brackett and the ever-faithful Johnson. She began to forgive McWha, and once more to try her baby wiles upon him. But McWha was as coldly unconscious as a stone.

One day, however, Fate concluded to range herself on Rosy-Lilly’s side. A dead branch, hurled through the air by the impact of a falling tree, struck Red McWha on the head, and he was carried home to the cabin unconscious, bleeding from a long gash in his scalp. The Boss, something of a surgeon in his rough and ready way, as bosses need to be, washed the wound and sewed it up. Then he handed over his own bunk to the wounded man, declaring optimistically that McWha would come round all right, his breed being hard to kill.

It was hours later when McWha began to recover consciousness, and just then, as it happened, there was no one near him but Rosy-Lilly. Smitten with pity, the child was standing beside the bunk, murmuring: “Poor! poor! I so sorry!” and slowly shaking her head and lightly patting the big, limp hand where it lay outside the blanket.

McWha half opened his eyes, and their faint glance fell on the top of Rosy-Lilly’s head as she bent over his hand. With a wry smile he shut them again, but to his surprise, he felt rather gratified. Then Jimmy Brackett came in and whisked the child away. “’S if he thought I’d bite ’er!” mused McWha, somewhat inconsistently.

For a long time he lay wondering confusedly. At last he opened his eyes wide, felt his bandaged head, and called for a drink of water in a voice which he vainly strove to make sound natural. To his surprise he was answered by Rosy-Lilly, so promptly that it was as if she had been listening for his voice. She came carrying the tin of water in both little hands, and, lifting it very carefully, she tried to hold it to his lips. Neither she nor McWha was quite successful in this, however. While they were fumbling over it, Jimmy Brackett hurried in, followed by the Boss, and Rosy-Lilly’s nursing was superseded. The Boss had to hold him up so that he could drink; and when he had feverishly gulped about a quart, he lay back on his pillow with a huge sigh, declaring weakly that he was all right.

“Ye got off mighty easy, Red,” said the Boss, cheerfully, “considerin’ the heft o’ the knot ’at hit ye. But you McWhas was always hard to kill.”

McWha’s hand was drooping loosely over the edge of the bunk. He felt the child’s tiny fingers brushing it again softly and tenderly. Then he felt her lips upon it, and the sensation was so novel that he quite forgot to reply to the Boss’s pleasantry.

That night McWha was so much better that when he insisted on being removed to his own bunk on the plea that he “didn’t feel at home in a cupboard like,” the Boss consented. Next day he wanted to go back to work, but the Boss was derisively inexorable, and for two days McWha was kept a prisoner.

During this time Jimmy Brackett, with severe and detailed admonition, kept Rosy-Lilly from again obtruding upon the patient’s leisure; and McWha had nothing to do but smoke and whittle. He whittled diligently, but let no one see what he was making. Then, borrowing a small tin cup from the cook, he fussed over the stove with some dark, smelly decoction of tobacco-juice and ink. Rosy-Lilly was consumed with curiosity, especially when she saw him apparently digging beads off an Indian tobacco-pouch which he always carried. But she did not go near enough to get enlightened as to his mysterious occupation.

On the following day McWha went to work again, but not till after breakfast, when the others had long departed. Rosy-Lilly, with one hand twisted in her little apron, was standing in the doorway as he passed out. She glanced up at him with the most coaxing smile in her whole armoury of allurements. McWha would not look at her, and his face was as sullenly harsh as ever; but as he passed he slipped something into her hand. To her speechless delight, it proved to be a little dark-brown wooden doll, daintily carved, and with two white beads, with black centres, cunningly set into its face for eyes.

Rosy-Lilly hugged the treasure to her breast. Her first proud impulse was to run to Jimmy Brackett with it. But a subtler instinct withheld her. The gift had been bestowed in such a surreptitious way that she felt it to be somehow a kind of secret. She carried it away and hid it in her bunk, where she would go and look at it from time to time throughout the day. That night she brought it forth, but with several other treasures, so that it quite escaped comment. She said nothing about it to McWha, but she played with it when he could not help seeing it. And thereafter her “nigger-baby” was always in her arms.

This compliment, however, was apparently all lost on McWha, who had again grown unconscious of her existence. And Rosy-Lilly, on her part, no longer strove to win his attention. She was content either with the victory she had won, or with the secret understanding which, perforce, now existed between them. And things went on smoothly in the camp, with every one now too occupied to do more than mind his own business.

It chanced this year that the spring thaws were early and unusually swift, warm rains alternating with hot, searching sunshine which withered and devoured the snow. The ice went out with a rush in the rapidly rising Ottanoonsis; and from every brookside “landing” the logs came down in black, tumbling swarms. Just below Conroy’s Camp the river wallowed round a narrow bend, tangled with slate ledges. It was a nasty place enough at low water, but in freshet a roaring terror to all the river-men. When the logs were running in any numbers, the bend had to be watched with vigilance lest a jam should form, and the waters be dammed back, and the lumber get “hung up” all over the swamps of the upper reaches.

And here, now, in spite of the frantic efforts of Dave Logan and his crew, the logs suddenly began to jam. Pitching downward as if propelled by a pile-driver, certain great timbers drove their ends between the upstanding strata of the slate, and held against the torrent till others came and wedged them securely. The jam began between two ledges in midstream, where no one could get near it. In a few minutes the interlocked mass stretched from bank to bank, with the torrent spurting and spouting through it in furious milk-white jets. Log after log was chopped free by the axemen along the shore, but the mass remained unshaken. Meanwhile the logs were gathering swiftly behind, ramming down and solidifying the whole structure, and damming back the flood till its heavy thunder diminished to the querulous rattling of a mill-race. In a short time the river was packed solid from shore to shore for several hundred yards above the brow of the jam; and above that again the waters were rising at a rate which threatened in a few hours to flood the valley and sweep away the camp itself.