From the peep of day till dusk
shrouded the woods, Benton's donkey puffed and groaned, axes thudded,
the thin, twanging whine of the saws rose. Log after log slid down the
chute to float behind the boomsticks; and at night the loggers trooped
home, soaked to the skin, to hang their steaming mackinaws around the
bunkhouse stove. When they gathered in the mess-room they filled it with
the odor of sweaty bodies and profane grumbling about the weather.
Early in December Benton sent out a big boom of logs with a hired
stern-wheeler that was no more than out of Roaring Lake before the snow
came. The sleety blasts of a cold afternoon turned to great, moist
flakes by dark, eddying thick out of a windless night. At daybreak it
lay a foot deep and snowing hard. Thenceforth there was no surcease. The
white, feathery stuff piled up and piled up, hour upon hour and day
after day, as if the deluge had come again. It stood at the cabin eaves
before the break came, six feet on the level. With the end of the storm
came a bright, cold sky and frost,--not the bitter frost of the high
latitudes, but a nipping cold that held off the melting rains and laid a
thin scum of ice on every patch of still water.
Necessarily, all work ceased. The donkey was a shapeless mound of white,
all the lines and gear buried deep. A man could neither walk on that
yielding mass nor wallow through it. The logging crew hailed the
enforced rest with open relief. Benton grumbled. And then, with the
hours hanging heavy on his hands, he began to spend more and more of his
time in the bunkhouse with the "boys," particularly in the long
evenings.
Pages:
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119