University of Virginia Library

35. CHAPTER XXXV.
ALMOST A DEATH-BLOW.

The next morning, Ruth watched for
Brent's appearance with an anxiety almost
impossible to conceal, but to her infinite
relief, the night had brought him at least
the semblance of peace, and although a little
paler, a little brighter-eyed, and graver than
his wont, there was nothing in his looks or his
demeanor that would have attracted the attention
of an observer.

Breakfast over, he followed his men out of
doors.

“You will finish that clump at the east side
of the hill where you were yesterday,” said
he, “and I will come along too.”

“That's right, Cap'n. The fellers work just
twice as smart when you're'round,” said Richard
aside; and Ruth, creeping up at the other
hand, softly asked:

“May I go too?”

“What, into the woods, Comfort? Why,
yes, if you like, and Zilpah will spare you,”
said Brent, looking kindly down at the girl,
who darted back into the house.

“I am going out for a little while, Zilpah—
Mr. Brent said that I might—and I will do my
work when I come back; you can leave it all
for me,” said she, snatching her hat from the
wooden peg where it hung, and hurrying away
before the old woman could remonstrate.

“Well, I declare!” exclaimed she, following
as far as the door, and standing there with
arms akimbo, to watch the procession of oxen
and drags—accompanied by the lumberers in
the picturesque costume of the woods, and
followed by Brent's stately form, with Ruth
tripping lightly beside him—as it wound slowly
in among the trees, which presently hid all
but now the glimpse of a scarlet shirt, now
the glint of an axe-blade, or the polished balls
upon the oxen's horns, now Brent's towering
head, or his Comfort's floating skirts.

“Well, I declare!” repeated Zilpah. “Trapseing
off to the woods again, and leaving me
with all the work to do! And Marston won't
let any one say a word to her, more than if

[ILLUSTRATION]

"Brent's stately form, with Ruth tripping beside him."

[Description: 454EAF. Page 094. In-line image of four hunters walking through the forest, axes on shoulder, with a woman beside them.] she was a feather and would blow away in the
wind. I don't see what Paul Freeman's thinking
on, if he calc'lates to have the charge of
her, to let her be following round after Brent
this fashion. Any way, I didn't stretch it
much, only just a leetle mite, when I wrote
Nancy that they was going to be married some
time, for I shouldn't be took aback any day to
hear that it was so. She's most fifteen, and
my aunt Polly Jane's sister was married when
she was sixteen. All I hope is, them stuck-up
Barstow folks and Beatrice Wansted heard of
it. That's all I want.”

So Zilpah went back to the dishes, and the
procession, winding through the wood, fresh
with the cool purity of the summer morning,
came at last to the hillside, already half stripped
of timber, where the day's work had been
appointed. The ground above was strewn
with felled timber, chips, branches, and sheets
of bark, left as the men had abandoned them
upon the previous evening; and while a certain
number of choppers attacked fresh trees,
others applied themselves to peeling those already
felled, cutting them into lengths, and
hauling away the logs to be piled beside the
principal road of the forest, there to lie until
the next winter's snow afforded facility for
sledding them to the river.

Ruth watched all these operations with interest—always,
however, keeping close to
Brent, who superintended every thing with a
sharp decision of manner which induced from
Richard the remark:

“Tell you what, Paul, the old man's wide
awake to-day. There a'n't no chance for
shirking, I can tell you.”

“I don't know as any one wants to shirk,”
replied Paul rather sullenly. “I don't, for
one; nor I don't want to be drove round as if
I was a nigger, neither.”

“Seems to me you got out o' bed wrong foot
foremost, young one,” replied Richard good-naturedly;
and shouldering his axe, he walked
from the tree he had just felled to the next
one, a monster hemlock, three feet in diameter
and at least two hundred in height.

“Four, maybe five market-logs in you, old
fellow, if there's an inch,” remarked Richard,
softly whistling as he measured the giant with
his eye, and calculated its contents.

“Here, Jebson,” continued he, calling to his
especial mate, who was still busy with the last
tree. “You come and peel a section of bark
off this thumper, while I fix a bed for him to
tumble into.”

Jebson, obedient to the call, approached, silently
measured the tree as the other had done,
and then shortening his keen axe in his
hand, cut a ring through the bark of the hemlock
close to its roots, and another four feet
above it; the next movement was to connect
these by a perpendicular line; and then throwing
down his axe, Jebson took up a spud, an
instrument resembling a chisel, but curved to
fit the boll of a tree, and proceeded to loosen
the bark, which he did so nicely that it presently
fell, an entire sheet, beside the tree, and
was carefully removed to a pile of similar
sheets close at hand.

Richard meantime had felled and laid side by
side a couple of middling-sized birch-trees,
growing near the hemlock, and now so disposed
as to receive it in its fall and prevent its
imbedding itself in the earth, as it otherwise
would have done.

“All ready now Jebson,” said Richard briefly,
and swinging his axe high above his head,
he buried it in the bared trunk of the hemlock;
as he withdrew it, Jebson's fell; and so
with swift alternation, the murderers, as Ruth
mentally styled them, pursued their work until

the slender tip of the hemlock, lying like
a finger upon the sky, trembled visibly, and a
shiver ran through the stately trunk to its remotest
plumy branch.

“Hold on, Jebson! She wants trimming a
little; we aren't falling her square on the
bed,” said Richard, pausing to wipe his streaming
brow and glance anxiously aloft. Then
while Jebson waited, the experter woodsman
cut deeper into the heart of the tree in the
desired direction, hesitated, looked aloft, and
then dropping his axe-head to the ground,
stood leaning upon the handle, attentively regarding
the tree, whose topmost branches, still
thrilling as if with their death-agony, slowly
began to describe upon the cloudless sky the
first line of the great are in which they were
to sweep earthward; at the same moment, the
sharp sound of rending the fibres knit by
years of deliberate growth became audible,
and its heart-strings snapped at last, the great
tree came plunging and crashing to the earth,
tearing through the branches of such smaller
growth as stood in its path, and falling fairly
at the last upon the bed prepared for it.

“A good stick of timber that, Cap'n; five
good markets if there's one, as I said before
I struck it,” said Richard, viewing his work
complacently, while Ruth, hardly yet able to
draw a full breath after the emotion of the
scene, came timidly forward, and looked at the
great stump with its fresh-cut wounds.

“Poor tree! It had been so long growing,
and maybe knew that it was growing, and
now it is nothing but wood for burning,” said
she in a low voice.

“Not wood for burning, Ruthie,” said Paul
Freeman, who, with a spud in one hand and an
axe in the other, was approaching the tree on
the same side with herself. “These hemlocks
are cut full as much for the bark as any thing
else; they use it at the tannery, you know,
and the logs are floated down the river and
sawed into boards. It wouldn't pay to cut
such timber as this for firewood.”

“And what part do you do, Paul?” asked
the girl, feeling with a little remorse that she
had not been as attentive of late to her old
friend as he had a right to expect.

“I'm a peeler. First come the fellers—that's
the ones that cut down the tree, you know—
and then the peelers cut the bark into lengths
and peel it off, just as Jebson did before he
and Richard felled this tree; and then the
hewers cut the trunk into logs about fifteen
foot long; and then the teamsters carry off logs
and bark, and skid them up, ready to be sleded
off next winter.”

“Yes, I have seen almost all those things
done this morning,” said Ruth, “and I always
wanted to come out with the men before, but
Zilpah never would let me. I only come now
because I asked Mr. Brent first.”

“You might have come with me most any
time,” said Paul jealously, and just then Brent
approached the spot, saying:

“Comfort, I am going to look at the new
skids the men are laying up on the road to
the river: do you want to come? It is about
half a mile from here.”

“Oh! yes, sir,” said Ruth hastily; and Paul,
looking after her as she followed Brent with
glad alacrity, threw down his tools, and
snatched the goad from the hand of a teamster
just guiding his oxen with the faintly
traced path the drags had worn.

“Here, Jim,” said he hurriedly. “You
help those fellows get their loads aboard, and
I'll team this to the skids for you. You said
you didn't want to walk on that sore foot.”

“All right, mate, no more I don't,” said the
man, a little astonished, but well content; and
resigning his place to Paul, he picked up an
iron bar and turned to help his comrades roll
the logs prepared for transportation upon their
drags.

“I don't know as you'll be able to help up
these logs, Freeman; it's man's work, I can
tell you,” said the brawny fellow who
slouched along at the other side of the drag.

“I've rolled logs before to-day,” said Paul,
rather contemptuously, as he hurried the oxen
down the road Brent and Ruth had taken.

“Yes, but there a'n't much roll to these, I
can tell you. They've got to be h'isted up on
top of the pile. I tell you, we've got a harn-some
skid, me and my mate have, about
twenty logs, and these will just top it off
pooty. It's the biggest one in the job, I
reckon.”

“I heard the Cap'n say he didn't like those
great skids, and wouldn't have them,” said
Paul. “It does make awful hard work, getting
the logs on and off.”

“Yes, there's some lift in it, I tell you, and
I reckon you'd better go back now, and send
Jim along. I'm dog sure you can't handle
'em.”

“You see,” replied Paul briefly; and the
other, sinking his hands deeper into the waistband

of his trowsers, and whistling softly as
he went, slouched along without farther remark.

Through the forest-path, flecked here and
there with sunshine, but for the most part
lying in the heavy shadow of the hemlocks,
through the clearing whence one might look
far over valley and stream to the majestic
morntains upon the horizon, wound the wood-path,
until, near the brow of the hill, where
the road descended to the valley, Paul halted
his oxen beside a pile of great logs laid across
a platform of small sticks, technically called
skids, and designed to raise the logs above
the deep snow, in which they would otherwise
be hidden. Some twenty logs already were
piled upon these skids, and the four now to
be added would, as Paul's companion remarked,
just make up two dozen, which was
“a pooty lot to see together.”

“Now, I tell you what, boy,” continued the
woodsman, taking his hands out of his waistband,
and suddenly a wakening to full activity
and energy, “we've got to fly round and get
these logs h'isted to the top of the pile before
the Cap'n comes along. He took the other
road by the brook, and will go to the lower
skids first, and if we're spry, we'll finish and
be off before he reaches here. If we don't,
he'll let out the worst kind at us for building
so big a skid.”

“Let him. I a'n't afraid of what he'll
say,” replied Paul, whose temper was in its
worst condition this morning.

“Yes, but he's boss, and there a'n't any
getting away from it, he means to stay boss,”
said the other, whose name was Bevis.

Without reply, Paul backed his oxen a step,
so that the sled lay immediately beneath the
towering pile of logs, and seizing one of the
iron bars or handspikes, lashed upon the top
of the load, placed the point of it beneath
the upper stick, and signed to Bevis to imitate
his example. Bevis obeyed as silently, and
the two men, with prodigious effort, much
skill, and a judicious use of the principle of
leverage, succeeded presently in elevating the
great log inch by inch to the top of the pile,
and rolling it to the farther side of the platform
made by the tier below.

“Now the next,” exclaimed Paul, leaping
down the instant this object was effected.

“Don't you want to catch your breath?”
asked Bevis, panting a little.

“No. He'll be along,” said Paul doggedly;
and Bevis resumed the handspike he had just
thrown down. The second log was larger
than the first, and the men less able to manage
it, through need of the moment of rest
they had omitted to take; so that, although
it reached the top of the pile, it was by efforts
that both felt were too severe for prudence.

“Tell you what, boy,” panted Bevis, sinking
down upon the top of the pile. “This
sort of thing don't pay. You and me a'n't
stout enough to handle such logs as these on
such a skid. We'll have to go fetch Jim.”

“There's Brent,” replied Paul in a low
voice, and both men, looking from their elevation,
saw the tall form of the master coming
up the path, with Ruth beside him.

“What is this? Why, men, what under
the sun are you about here?” commenced
he sharply. “Haven't I said, time and again,
that I won't have these immense wood-piles
laid up in place of decent skids? And, Paul
Freeman, what are you doing here? Your
business is peeling, and I won't have you
mixing up in this way. Bevis how came you
to lay up these logs in this fashion, after what
I have said?”

“Well, I don't know, Cap'n,” replied Bevis
slowly. “Jim and me, we're two-fisted fellers,
we are, and we just liked to see what we
could do.”

“Well, I should just like to see what you
can do toward minding what I say,' replied
Brent angrily. “You two get those logs off
again in a hurry, and load them on to your
drag. Then haul them a dozen feet further
on, lay some new skids, and begin a new pile.
Freeman, since you like to meddle with another
man's work, let me see if you can undo
as well as do.”

“I wish't I could undo one job that I was
a fool for doing,” said Paul sullenly; and seizing
his handspike without waiting for Bevis,
he lifted the end of the log nearest to him,
and sent it crashing down upon the load
below, with such force that it rebounded several
feet, and the smaller end springing outward,
struck Brent a heavy blow upon the
breast, felling him to the ground, and toppling
over beside him, but fortunately not upon
him.

“O Paul! You wicked, wicked monster.
You have killed him! You have killed my
darling friend!” cried Ruth, throwing herself
down beside Brent, who, to the astonishment
of all, was already struggling into a sitting

posture. The girl, throwing her arms about
him, with some wild idea of supporting or
raising him, would have poured forth a torrent
of questions, ejaculations, sympathy; but
Brent, with one hand laid heavily upon her
shoulder, silenced her with the one word
“Hush!” and then in a strange, hoarse voice,
hardly louder than a whisper, briefly ordered:

“Get that log upon the drag, then roll
down the other, and do as I told you. If it
isn't done in half an hour, you'll both leave
Wahtahree to-night.”

Without a word, and with white, awe-stricken
faces, the men obeyed; and Brent,
without moving from his position, relaxing
his hold of Ruth's shoulder, or again essaying
to speak, watched their movements with glittering
eyes, set in a face paler than death,
until in less than the prescribed time his
orders were obeyed to the full. Then, while
Bevis turned the oxen into the path, Paul
Freeman approached his wounded employer.

“Mr. Brent,” said he, “I am very sorry you
are hurt. I never meant to do it. Can't we
carry you home on the drag, or won't you let
me help you?”

“Go back to your work, and remember that
you are a peeler, and not a teamster,” whispered
Brent, waving his hand so imperiously
toward the road, that Freeman obeyed without
another word.