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
snowdrift 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 with a
keen comprehension of “pleasure after pain,” I took
off my furs and moccasins, and stretched 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 labor. The owners of the extensive
forests, destined to become so valuable, are
mostly men of large speculation, living in cities, 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 neighborhood
of miles of apparently unclaimed land, 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 labor 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
labor is run to the cities for their common advantage.
The only enemies of this class of men are the agents
who are sometimes sent out in the winter to defect
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 busy
“lumbering for themselves,” unless it 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 scrutiny 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 to-morrow.”
“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 Canadian
pony, scarce larger than a Newfoundland 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 accommodated 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 unwilingly 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 inconvenient, cover your face.”
And with this laconic advice, the Picker and Piler
turned on his heel, and once more strode 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 disembarrassed 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,
when, rounding a shelvy point of rock, we stood 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 barricade 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 venison
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 Picker and Piler
ate in silence, leaving me to be 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 disappeared.
“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, at one moment the conflagration
of an eastern city, 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 summer, I lay down on the
rivulet's bank, and 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 toward 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 “shakedown”
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 my friends should
be made acquainted with my 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 labor 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 together in one
place—the centre like this of a burning 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 awhile, 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, he
paced for a few minutes up and down the platform 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 awhile, “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 brilliancy of a torch.
I took up one of its broken 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 toward 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 water-fall,
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 with stealthy pace looking back occasionally
to the 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 supernatural
shrillness! and as I caught sight of the Picker
and Piler standing enveloped in smoke upon the burning
tree, with his axe high in the air, the truth 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 upward 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 long, sharp cry had gone
out echoing through the 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.
