Especially is it true of the camp boss, the foreman. A firm that knows
its business knows this and so never considers merely what sort of a
character a candidate may bear in town. He may drink or abstain, may
exhibit bravery or cowardice, strength or weakness—it is all one to the
lumbermen who employ him. In the woods his quality must appear. So often
the man most efficient and trusted in the especial environment of his
work is the most disreputable outside it. The mere dignifying quality
of labor raises his value to the _n_th power. In it he discovers the
self-respect which, in one form or another, is absolutely necessary
to the man who counts. His resolution to succeed has back of it this
necessity of self-respect, and so is invincible. A good boss gives back
before nothing which will further his job.
Most people in the North Country understand this double standard; but
occasionally someone, either stupid or inexperienced or unobservant,
makes the mistake of concluding that the town-character and the
woods-character are necessarily the same. If he acts in accordance with
that erroneous idea, he gets into trouble. Take the case of Silver
Jack and the walking boss of Morrison & Daly, for instance. Silver
Jack imagined his first encounter with Richard Darrell in Bay City
indicated the certainty of like results to his second encounter with that
individual in Camp Thirty. His mistake was costly; but almost anybody
could have told him better. To understand the case, you must first meet
Richard Darrell.
The latter was a man about five feet six inches in height, slenderly
built, yet with broad, hanging shoulders. His face was an exact triangle,
beginning with a mop of red-brown hair, and ending with a pointed chin.
Two level quadrilaterals served him as eyebrows, beneath which a strong
hooked nose separated his round, brown, chipmunk’s eyes. When he walked,
he threw his heavy shoulders slightly forward. This, in turn, projected
his eager, nervous countenance. The fact that he was accustomed to
hold his hands half open, with the palms square to the rear, lent him
a peculiarly ready and truculent air. His name, as has been said, was
Richard Darrell; but men called him Roaring Dick.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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