Love stories; Lumber trade -- Fiction; Maine -- Fiction
Tommy Eye, with meal-sack slung over his shoulder, made himself
custodian of the "canned thunder." It was Larry Gorman, woodsman poet,
who first called him "Tommy Thunder." If you go into the north country
you can probably find some one to sing you the song that Larry Gorman
composed, the first verse running:
"Come, listen, good white-water chaps. Who was that man, I wonder,
Who turned himself to an outlaw bold and put the bang-juice under?
Who was it cracked the neck of her, 'way up at old Lake Blunder,
When hell broke loose and sluiced our spruce?
'Twere done by Tommy Thunder!"
His was the recklessness of mania. Men who saw him coming along the
shore with his horrid burden dodged into the woods. Where and when he
slept no one knew. Daytime and night-time he was racing to where logs
had cob-piled. Roars that boomed among the hills told that he had
arrived. In the first gray of morning men saw him warming his dynamite
over a camp-fire, and shuddered and hurried away. To find the king log
of a jam and drop his cartridge where it would have instant effect, he
took chances that made men turn their backs. It isn't pleasant to see a
man macerated by grinding logs or scattered across the sky.
No word passed between Tommy Eye and Dwight Wade. Those days and nights
when the Enchanted drive was on its roaring way down Blunder Stream
towards the Umcolcus River were not the sort of days that invited
conversation. On the ordinary stream-drives to the main river, in the
desperate hurry of the driving-pitch, men work as many hours as they can
stand up. With the drive under control, they can at least stop sluicing
in the dead hours of the night. But the Enchanted drive that spring was
a wild beast that never closed its eyes. As it raged along they did not
dare to leave it alone for an hour. Men raced beside it, clutched at it,
clung as long as they were able, and dropped off, stunned by the stupor
of exhaustion.
After a few hours some one's prodding foot stirred them back to
wakefulness, and they stumbled up and began the fight once more. Outside
of a charge in battle, there is no place where individual rivalry is so
keen and eager as in a driving-crew on hard waters. Men do not require
to be urged to do their utmost. "Coward" and "shirk" are sneers that cut
deeply down-river.
Wade, rushing from point to point, cant-dog in hand, his shoes mere
pulp, his clothes in tatters, saw men asleep with their faces in the tin
plates that the cookee had heaped with food. They had gone to sleep with
the first mouthful, hungry as demons, but overcome the moment their feet
stopped moving.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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