 | Romance of travel |  |
The Picker and Piler.
ROMANCE OF TRAVEL.
THE PICKER AND PILER.
The nature of the strange incident I have to relate
forbids me to record either place or time.
On one of the wildest nights in which I had ever
been abroad, I drove my panting horses through a
snow drift breast high, to the door of a small tavern
in the western country. The host turned out unwillingly
at the knock of my whip handle on the
outer door, and, wading before the tired animals to
the barn, which was nearly inaccessible from the
banks of snow, he assisted me in getting off their
frozen harnesses, and bestowing them safely for the
night.
The “bar-room” fire burnt brightly, and never was
fire more welcome. Room was made for me by
four or five rough men who sat silent around it, and
I took off my furs and moccasins, and streched my
cold contracted limbs to the blaze. When, a few
minutes after, a plate of cold salt beef was brought
me, with a corn cake and a mug of “flip” hissing
from the poker, it certainly would have been hard to
convince me that I would have put on my coats and
moccasins again to have ridden a mile to Paradise.
The faces of my new companions, which I had
not found time to inspect very closely while my supper
lasted, were fully revealed by the light of a pitch-pine
knot, thrown on the hearth by the landlord,
and their grim reserve and ferocity put me in mind,
for the first time since I had entered the room, of my
errand in that quarter of the country.
The timber-tracts which lie convenient to the
rivers of the west, offer to the refugee and desperado
of every description, a resource from want, and, (in
their own opinion,) from crime, which is seized upon
by all at least who are willing to labour. The owners
of the extensive forests, destined to become so
valuable, are mostly men of large speculation, living
in citeis, who, satisfied with the constant advance in
the price of lumber, consider their pine-trees as liable
to nothing but the laws of nature, and leave them
unfenced and unprotected, to increase in size and
value till the land beneath them is wanted for culture.
It is natural enough that solitary settlers, living in the
should think seldom of the owner, and in time grow
to the opinion of the Indian, that the Great Spirit
gave the land, the air, and the water, to all his
children, and they are free to all alike. Furnishing
the requisite teams and implements therefore, the
inhabitants of these tracts collect a number of the
stragglers through the country, and forming what
is called a “bee,” go into the nearest woods, and
for a month or more, work laboriously at selecting,
and felling the tallest and straightest pines. In their
rude shanty at night they have bread, pork, and
whiskey, which hard labour makes sufficiently palatable,
and the time is passed merrily till the snow is
right for sledding. The logs are then drawn to the
water sides, rafts are formed, and the valuable
lumber, for which they paid nothing but their labour,
is run to the cites for their common advantage.
The only enemies of this class of men are the agents
who are sometimes sent out in the winter to detect
them in the act of felling or drawing off timber, and
in the dark countenances around the fire, I read this
as the interpretation of my own visit to the woods.
They soon brightened and grew talkative when they
discovered that I was in search of hands to fell and
burn, and make clearing for a farm; and after a
talk of an hour or two, I was told in answer to my
inquiries, that all the “men people” in the country
were—the “Picker and Piler.”
As the words were pronounced, a shrill neigh
outside the door pronounced the arrival of a new
comer.
“Talk of the devil”—said the man in a lower tone.
and without finishing the proverb he rose with a
respect which he had not accorded to me, to make
room for the Picker and Piler.
A man of rather low stature entered, and turned to
drive back his horse, who had followed him nearly
in. I observed that the animal had neither saddle
nor bridle. Shutting the door upon him without
violence, he exchanged nods with one or two of the
men, and giving the landlord a small keg which he
had brought, he pleaded haste for refusing the
offered chair, and stood silent by the fire. His features
were blackened with smoke, but I could see
that they were small and regular, and his voice,
though it conveyed in its deliberate accents an
indefinable resolution, was almost femininely soft
and winning.
“That stranger yonder has got a job for you,”
said the landlord, as he gave him back the keg and
received the money.
Turning quickly upon me, he detected me in a
very eager scrunity of himself, and for a moment I
was thrown too much off my guard to address him.
“Is it you, sir?” he asked, after waiting a moment.
“Yes,—I have some work to be done hereabouts,
but—you seem in a hurry. Could you call here tomorrow.”
“I may not be here again in a week.”
“Do you live far from here?” He smiled.
“I scarce know where I live, but I am burning a
piece of wood a mile or two up the run, and if you
would like a warmer bed than the landlord will give
you—”
That personage decided the question for me by
telling me in so many words that I had better go.
His beds were all taken up, and my horses should
be taken care of till my return. I saw that my presence
had interrupted something, probably the formation
of a “bee,” and more willingly than I would
have believed possible an hour before, I resumed my
furs and wrappers, and declared that I was ready.
The Picker and Piler had inspired me, and I knew
not why, with an involuntary respect and liking.
“It is a rough night, sir,” said he, as he shouldered
a rifle he had left outside, and slung the keg by
a leather strap over the neck of his horse, “but I
will soon show you a better climate. Come, sir,
jump on!”
“And you?” I said inquisitively, as he held his
horse by the mane for me to mount. It was a
dog.
“I am more used to the road, sir, and will walk.
Come?”
“It was no time to stand upon etiquette, even if
it had been possible to resist the strange tone of
authority with which he spoke. So without more
ado, I sprang upon the animal's back, and holding
on by the long tuft upon his withers, suffered him
passively to plunge through the drift after his
master.
Wondering at the readiness with which I had
entered upon this equivocal adventure, but never for
an instant losing confidence in my guide, I shut my
eyes to the blinding cold, and accommodating my
limbs as well as I could to the bare back and scrambling
paces of the Canadian. The Picker and
Piler strode on before, the pony following like a
spaniel at his heels, and after a half hour's tramp,
during which I had merely observed that we were
rounding the base of a considerable hill, we turned
short to the right, and were met by a column of
smoke, which, lifting, the moment after, disclosed
the two slopes of a considerable valley enveloped
in one sea of fire. A red, lurid cloud, overhung it
at the tops of the tallest trees, and far and wide,
above that spread a covering of black smoke, heaving
upward in vast and billowy masses, and rolling
away on every side into the darkness.
We approached a pine of gigantic height, on fire
to the very peak, not a branch left on the trunk,
and its pitchy knots distributed like the eyes of the
lamprey, burning pure and steady amid the irregular
flame. I had once or twice, with an instinctive
wish to draw rein, pulled hard upon the tangled
tuft in my hand, but master and horse kept on.
This burning tree, however, was the first of a thousand,
and as the pony turned his eyes away from
the intense heat to pass between it and a bare rock,
I glanced into the glowing labyrinth beyond, and
my faith gave way. I jumped from his back and
hailed the Picker and Piler, with a halloo scarcely
audible amid the tumult of the crackling branches.
My voice did not evidently reach his ear, but the
pony, relieved from my weight, galloped to his side,
and rubbed his muzzle against the unoccupied hand
of his master.
He turned back immediately. “I beg pardon,”
he said, “I have that to think of just now which
makes me forgetful. I am not surprised at your
hesitation, but mount again and trust the pony.”
The animal turned rather unwillingly at his master's
bidding, and a little ashamed of having shown
fear, while a horse would follow, I jumped again
on his back.
“If you find the heat inconvienent, cover your
face.” And with this laconic advice, the Picker
away before us.
Sheltering the sides of my face by holding up the
corners of my wrapper with both hands, I abandoned
myself to the horse. He overtook his master
with a shuffling canter, and putting his nose as
close to the ground as he could carry it without
stumbling, followed closely at his heels. I observed,
by the green logs lying immediately along our path,
that we were following an avenue of prostrate
timber which had been felled before the wood was
fired; but descending presently to the left, we
struck at once into the deep bed of a brook, and
by the lifted head and slower gait of the pony, as
well as my own easier respiration, I found that the
hollow through which it ran, contained a body
of pure air unreached by the swaying curtains of
smoke or the excessive heat of the fiery currents
above. The pony now picked his way leisurely
along the brookside, and while my lungs expanded
with the relief of breathing a more temperate
atmosphere, I raised myself from my stooping posture
in a profuse perspiration, and one by one disembarassed
myself from my protectives against the
cold.
I had lost sight for several minutes of the Picker
and Piler, and presumed by the pony's desultory
movements that he was near the end of his journey,
suddenly upon the brink of a slight waterfall, where
the brook leaped four or five feet into a shrunken
dell, and after describing a half circle on a rocky
platform, resumed its onward course in the same
direction as before. This curve of the brook and
the platform it enclosed lay lower than the general
level of the forest, and the air around and within it,
it seemed to me, was as clear and genial as the
summer noon. Over one side, from the rocky wall,
a rude and temporary roof of pine slabs drooped
upon a barricado of logs, forming a low hut, and
before the entrance of this, at the moment of my
appearance, stood a woman and a showily dressed
young man, both evidently confused at the sudden
apparition of the Picker and Piler. My eyes had
scarce rested on the latter, when, from standing at
his fullest height with his rifle raised as if to beat
the other to the earth, he suddenly resumed his
stooping and quiet mien, set his rifle against the
rock, and came forward to give me his hand.
“My daughter!” he said, more in the way of
explanation than introduction, and without taking
further notice of the young man whose presence
seemed so unwelcome, he poured me a draught
from the keg he had brought, pointed to the water
falling close at my hand, and threw himself at his
length upon the ground.
The face and general appearance of the young
man, now seated directly opposite me, offered no
temptation for more than a single glance, and my
whole attention was soon absorbed by the daughter
of my singular host, who, crossing from the platform
to the hut, divided her attention between a
haunch of vension roasting before a burning log of
hickory, and the arrangement of a few most primitive
implements for our coming supper. She was
slight, like her father, in form, and as far as I had
been able to distinguish his blackened features,
resembled him in the general outline. But in the
place of his thin and determined mouth, her lips were
round and voluptuous, and though her eye looked
as if it might wake, it expressed, even in the presence
of her moody father, a drowsy and soft indolence,
common enough to the Asiatics, but seldom
seen in America. Her dress was coarse and
careless, but she was beautiful with every possible
disadvantage, and, whether married or not, evidently
soon to become a mother.
The venison was placed before us on the rock,
and the young man, uninvited, and with rather an
air of bravado, cut himself a steak from the haunch
and broiled it on the hickory coals, while the daughter
kept as near him as her attention to her father's
wants would permit, but neither joined us in eating,
nor encouraged my attempts at conversation. The
my own carver, and finishing his repast by a deep
draught from the keg which had been the means of
our acquaintance, he sprang upon his feet and disppaeared.
“The wind has changed,” said the daughter,
looking up at the smoke, “and he has gone to the
western edge to start a new fire. It's a full half
mile, and he'll be gone an hour.”
This was said with a look at me which was anything
but equivocal. I was de trop. I took up the
rifle of the Picker and Piler, forgetting that there
was probably nothing to shoot in a burning wood,
and remarking that I would have a look for a deer,
jumped up the water-fall side, and was immediately
hidden by the rocks.
I had no conception of the scene that lay around
me. The natural cave or hollow of rock in which
the hut lay embosomed, was the centre of an area
of perhaps an acre, which had been felled in the
heart of the wood before it was set on fire. The
forest encircled it with blazing columns, whose
capitals were apparently lost in the sky, and curtains
of smoke and flame, which flew as if lashed
into ribands by a whirlwind. The grandeur, the
violence, the intense brightness of the spectacle,
outran all imagination. The pines, on fire to the
peak, and straight as arrows, seemed to resemble,
with innumerable minarets abandoned to the devouring
element. At the next moment, the wind,
changing its direction, swept out every vestige of
smoke, and extinguished every tongue of flame,
and the tall trees, in clear and flameless ignition,
standing parallel in thousands, resembled some
blinding temple of the genii, whose columns of
miraculous rubies, sparkling audibly, outshone the
day. By single glances, my eye penetrated into
aisles of blazing pillars, extending far into the forest,
and the next instant, like a tremendous surge
alive with serpents of fire, the smoke and flame
swept through it, and it seemed to me as if some
glorious structure had been consumed in the passing
of a thought. For a minute, again, all would be
still except the crackling of the fibres of the wood,
and with the first stir of the wind, like a shower of
flashing gems, the bright coals rained down
through the forest, and for a moment the earth
glowed under the trees as if its whole crust were
alive with one bright ignition.
With the pungency of the smoke and heat, and
the variety and bewilderment of the spectacle, I
found my eyes and brain growing giddy. The
brook ran cool below, and the heat had dried the
leaves in the small clearing, and with the abandonment
of a man overcome with the sultriness of
dipped my head and bathed my eyes in the running
water. Close to its surface there was not a particle
of smoke in the air, and, exceedingly refreshed
with its temperate coolness, I lay for sometime in
luxurious ease, trying in vain to fancy the winter
that howled without. Frost and cold were never
more difficult to realize in midsummer, though
within a hundred rods, probably, a sleeping man
would freeze to death in an hour.
“I have a better bed for you in the shanty,” said
the Picker and Piler, who had approached unheard
in the noise of the fires, and suddenly stood over
me.
He took up his rifle, which I had laid against a
prostrate log, and looked anxiously towards the
descent to the hut.
“I am little inclined for sleep,” I answered, “and
perhaps you will give me an hour of conversation
here. The scene is new to me”—
“I have another guest to dispose of,” he answered,
“and we shall be more out of the smoke
near the shanty.”
I was not surprised, as I jumped upon the
platform, to find him angrily separating his daughter
and the stranger. The girl entered the hut,
and with a decisive gesture, he pointed the young
man to a “shake-down” of straw in the remotest
corner of the rocky enclosure.
“With your leave, old gentleman,” said the
intruder, after glancing at his intended place of
repose, “I'll find a crib for myself.” And springing
up the craggy rock opposite the door of the shanty
he gathered a slight heap of brush, and threw it
into a hollow left in the earth by a tree, which,
though full grown and green, had been borne to the
earth and partly uprooted by the falling across it of
an overblown and gigantic pine. The earth and
stones had followed the uptorn mass, forming a
solid upright wall, from which, like struggling
fingers, stretching back in agony to the ground
from which they had parted, a few rent and naked
roots pointed into the cavity. The sequel will
show why I am so particular in this description.
“When peace was declared between England
and this country,” said the Picker and Piler (after
an hour's conversation, which had led insensibly to
his own history,) I was in command of a privateer.
Not choosing to become a pirate, by continuing the
cruise, I was set ashore in the West Indies by a
crew in open mutiny. My property was all on
board, and I was left a beggar. I had one child, a
daughter, whose mother died in giving her birth.
“Having left a sufficient sum for her education
in the hands of a brother of my own, under whose
roof she had passed the first years of her life, I
determined to retrieve my fortunes before she or
disaster.
“Ten years passed over, and I was still a wanderer
and a beggar.
“I determined to see my child, and came back,
like one from the dead, to my brother's door. He
had forgotten me, and abused his trust. My
daughter, then seventeen, and such as you see her
here, was the drudge in the family of a stranger—
ignorant and friendless. My heart turned against
mankind with this last drop in a bitter cup, and,
unfitted for quiet life, I looked around for some
channel of desperate adventure. But my daughter
was the perpetual obstacle. What to do with her?
She had neither the manners nor the education of a
lady, and to leave her a servant was impossible. I
started with her for the West, with the vague
design of joining some tribe of Indians, and chance
and want have thrown me into the only mode of
life on earth that could now be palatable to me.”
“Is it not lonely,” I asked, “after your stirring
adventures?”
“Lonely! If you knew the delight with which I
live in the wilderness, with a circle of fire to shut
out the world! The labour is hard it is true, but I
need it, to sleep and forget. There is no way else
in which I could seclude my daughter. Till lately,
she has been contented, too. We live a month
wood. I can bear hardship, but I love a high
temperature—the climate of the tropics—and I have
it here. For weeks I forget that it is winter, tending
my fires and living on the game I have stored
up. There is a hollow or a brook—a bed or a
cave, in every wood, where the cool air, as here,
sinks to the bottom, and there I can put up my
shanty, secure from all intrusion—but such as I
bring upon myself.”
The look he gave to the uprooted ash and the
sleeper beneath it, made an apology for this last
clause unnecessary. He thought not of me.
“Some months since,” continued the Picker and
Piler, in a voice husky with suppressed feeling, “I
met the villain who sleeps yonder, accidentally, as I
met you. He is the owner of this land. After
engaging to clear and burn it, I invited him, as I
did yourself, from a momentary fever for company
which sometimes comes over the solitary, to go
with me to the fallow I was clearing. He loitered
in the neighborhood a while, under pretext of hunting,
and twice on my return from the village, I
found that my daughter had seen him. Time has
betrayed the wrong he inflicted on me.
The voice of the agitated father sank almost to
a whisper as he pronounced the last few words,
and, rising from the rock on which we were sitting,
in silence.
The reader must fill up from his own imagination
the drama of which this is but the outline, for the
Picker and Piler was not a man to be questioned
and I can tell but what I saw and heard. In the
narration of his story he seemed but recapitulating
the prominent events for his own self-converse
rather than attempting to tell a tale to me, and it
was hurried over as brokenly and briefly as I have
put it down. I sat in a listening attitude after he
concluded, but he seemed to have unburthened his
bosom sufficiently, and his lips were closed with
stern compression.
“You forget,” he said, after pacing a while, “that
I offered you a place to sleep. The night wears
late. Stretch yourself on that straw, with your
cloak over you. Good night!”
I lay down and looked up at the smoke rolling
heavily into the sky till I slept.
I awoke, feeling chilled, for the rock sheltered me
from the rays of the fire. I stepped out from the
hollow. The fires were pale with the gray of the
morning, and the sky was visible through the smoke.
I looked around for a place to warm myself.
The hickory log had smouldered out, but a fire
had been kindled under the overblown pine, and
its pitchy heart was now flowing with the steady
branches, cracked it on my knee, and stirring up
the coals below, soon sent up a merry blaze, which
enveloped the whole trunk.
Turning my back to the increasing heat, I
started, for, creeping towards me, with a look of
eagerness for which I was at a loss to account,
came the Picker and Piler.
“Twice doomed!” he muttered between his
teeth, “but not by me!”
He threw down a handful of pitch pine knots,
laid his axe against a burning tree, and with a
branch of hemlock, swept off the flame from the
spot where the fire was eating through, as if to see
how nearly it was divided.
I began to think him insane, for I could get no
answer to my questions, and when he spoke, it was
half audible, and with his eyes turned from me
fixedly. I looked in the same direction, but could
see nothing remarkable. The seducer slept soundly
beneath his matted wall, and the rude door of the
shanty was behind us. Leaving him to see phantoms
in the air, as I thought, I turned my eyes to
the drips of the waterfall, and was absorbed in
memories of my own, when I saw the girl steal
from the shanty, and with one bound overleap the
rocky barrier of the platform. I laid my hand on
the shoulder of my host, and pointed after her, as
hut, where she evidently thought her father slept,
she crept round toward her lover.
“He dies!” cried the infuriated man; but as he
jumped from me to seize his axe, the girl crouched
out of sight, and my own first thought was to
awake the sleeper. I made two bounds and looked
back, for I heard no footstep.
“Stand clear!” shouted a voice of almost super-natural
shrillness! and as I caught sight of the
Picker and Piler standing enveloped in smoke upon
the bnrning tree, with his axe high in the air, the
trnth flashed on me.
Down came the axe into the very heart of the
pitchy flame, and trembling with the tremendous
smoke, the trunk slowly bent upwards from the fire.
The Picker and Piler sprang clear, the overborne
ash creaked and heaved, and with a sick giddiness
in my eyes, I look at the unwarned sleeper.
One half of the dissevered pine fell to the earth,
and the shock startled him from his sleep. A
whole age seemed to me elapsing while the other
rose with the slow lift of the ash. As it slid heavily
away, the vigorous tree righted, like a giant
springing to his feet. I saw the root pin the hand
of the seducer to the earth—a struggle—a contortion
and the leafless and waving top of the recovered
and upright tree rocked with its effort, and a
woods, and was still. I felt my brain reel.
Blanched to a livid paleness, the girl moved
about in the sickly daylight when I recovered; but
the Picker and Piler, with a clearer brow than I
had yet seen him wear, was kindling fires beneath
the remnants of the pine.
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