It was Construction Foreman Cassidy
who gave the place its name when he answered his employer’s
laconic telegram. Stirling, the great contractor,
frequently expressed himself with forcible terseness;
but when he flung the message across to his secretary
as he sat one morning in his private room in an Ottawa
hotel, the latter raised his eyebrows questioningly.
He knew his employer in all his moods; and he was
not in the least afraid of him. There was, though
most of those who did business with him failed to
perceive it, a vein of almost extravagant generosity
in Stirling’s character.
“Well,” said the latter, “isn’t
the thing plain enough?”
The secretary smiled.
“Oh, yes,” he said.
“Still, I’m not sure they’ll send
it over the wires in quite that form.”
His employer agreed to the modification
he suggested, and the message as despatched to Cassidy
read simply, “Why are you stopping?”
After that the famous contractor busied
himself about other matters until he got the answer,
“No bottom to this swamp.”
Then his indignation boiled over,
as it sometimes did, for Stirling was a thick-necked,
red-faced man with a fiery temper and an indomitable
will. He had undertaken a good deal of difficult
railroad work in western Canada and never yet had
been beaten. What was more to the purpose, he
had no intention of being beaten now, or even delayed,
by a swamp that had no bottom. He had grappled
with hard rock and sliding snow, had overcome professional
rivals, and had made his influence felt by politicians;
and, though he had left middle-age behind, he still
retained his full vigor of body and freedom of speech.
When he had explained what he thought of Cassidy he
turned again to his secretary.
“Arrange for a private car,”
he said. “I’ll go along to-morrow
and make them jump.”
The secretary, who fancied there would
be trouble in the construction camp during the next
few days, felt inclined to be sorry for Cassidy as
he went out to make the necessary arrangements for
his employer’s journey west.
Stirling had spent a busy morning
when he met his daughter Ida and her friends at lunch.
He did not belong to Ottawa. His offices were
in Montreal; but as Ottawa is the seat of the government
he had visited it at the request of certain railroad
potentates and other magnates of political influence.
With him he had brought his daughter and three of
her English friends, for Ida had desired to show them
the capital. He had no great opinion of the man
and the two women in question. He said that they
made him tired, and sometimes in confidence to his
secretary he went rather further than that; but at
the same time he was willing to bear with them, if
the fact that he did so afforded Ida any pleasure.
Ida Stirling was an unusually fortunate young woman,
in so far, at least, as that she had only to mention
any desire that it was in her father’s power
to gratify. He was a strenuous man, whose work
was his life; subtle where that work was concerned
when force, which he preferred, was not advisable,
but crudely direct and simple as regards almost everything
else.
“I’m going west across
the Rockies to-morrow,” he said. “We’ll
have a private car on the Pacific express. You’d
better bring these folk along and show them the Mountain
Province.”
Ida was pleased with the idea; and
Stirling and his party started west on the morrow.
In the meanwhile, Construction Foreman
Cassidy was spending an anxious time. He was
red-haired and irascible, Canadian by adoption and
Hibernian by descent, a man of no ideas beyond those
connected with railroad building, which was, however,
very much what one would have expected, for the chief
attribute of the men who are building up the western
Dominion is their power of concentration. Though
there were greater men above Cassidy who would get
the credit, it was due chiefly to his grim persistency
that the branch road had been blasted out of the mountainside,
made secure from sliding snow, and flung on dizzy
trestles over thundering rivers, until at last it reached
the swamp which, in his own simple words, had no bottom.
There are other places like it in
the Mountain Province of British Columbia. Giant
ranges, whose peaks glimmer with the cold gleam of
never-melting snow, shut in the valley. Great
pine forests clothe their lower slopes, and a green-stained
river leaps roaring out of the midst of them.
The new track wound through their shadow, a double
riband of steel, until it broke off abruptly where
a creek that poured out of the hills had spread itself
among the trees. The latter dwindled and rotted,
and black depths of mire lay among their crawling
roots, forming what is known in that country as a muskeg.
There was a deep, blue lake on the one hand, and on
the other scarped slopes of rock that the tract could
not surmount; and for a time Cassidy and his men had
floundered knee-deep, and often deeper, among the roots
while they plied the ax and saw. Then they dumped
in carload after carload of rock and gravel; but the
muskeg absorbed it and waited for more. It was
apparently insatiable; and, for Cassidy drove them
savagely, the men’s tempers grew shorter under
the strain, until some, who had drawn a sufficient
proportion of their wages to warrant it, rolled up
their blankets and walked out reviling him. Still,
most of them stayed with the task and toiled on sullenly
in the mire under a scorching heat, for it was summer
in the wilderness.
Affairs were in this condition when
Clarence Weston crawled out of the swamp one evening
and sat down on a cedar log before he followed his
comrades up the track, though he supposed that supper
would shortly be laid out in the sleeping-shanty.
The sunlight that flung lurid flecks of color upon
the western side of the fir trunks beat upon his dripping
face, which, though a little worn and grim just then,
was otherwise a pleasant face of the fair English
type. In fact, though he had been some years
in the country, Englishman was unmistakably stamped
upon him. He was attired scantily and simply in
a very old blue shirt, and trousers, which also had
once been blue, of duck; and just then he was very
weary, and more than a little lame.
He had cut himself about the ankle
when chopping a week earlier, and though the wound
had partly healed his foot was still painful.
There were also a good many other scars and bruises
upon his body, for the cost of building a western
railroad is usually heavy. Still, he had an excellent
constitution, and was, while not particularly brilliant
as a rule, at least whimsically contented in mind.
His comrades called him the Kid, or the English Kid,
perhaps on account of a certain delicacy of manner
and expression which he had somehow contrived to retain,
though he had spent several years in logging camps,
and his age was close onto twenty-five.
While he sat there with the shovel
that had worn his hands hard lying at his feet, Cassidy,
who had not recovered from the interview he had had
with Stirling that morning, strode by, hot and out
of temper, and then stopped and swung round on him.
“Too stiff to get up hustle
before the mosquitoes eat you, when supper’s
ready?” he said.
Weston glanced down at his foot.
“I was on the gravel bank all
afternoon. It’s steep. Seemed to wrench
the cut.”
“Well,” said Cassidy,
“I’ve no kind of use for a man who doesn’t
know enough to keep himself from getting hurt.
You have got to get that foot better right away or
get out.”
He shook a big, hard fist at the swamp.
“How’m I going to fill
up that pit with a crowd of stiffs and deadbeats like
those I’m driving now? You make me tired!”
He did not wait for an answer to the
query, but plodded away; and Weston sat still a few
minutes longer, with a wry smile in his eyes.
He resented being over-driven, though he was more or
less used to it, and now and then he found his superior’s
vitriolic comments upon his efforts almost intolerably
galling. Still he had sense enough to realize
that the remedy open to him was a somewhat hazardous
one, because, while it would be easy to walk out of
the construction camp, industrial activity just then
was unusually slack in the Mountain Province.
Besides, he was willing to admit that there were excuses
for Cassidy, and there was a certain quiet tenacity
in him. He was also aware that the man with little
money has generally a good deal to bear, for Weston
was one who could learn by experience, though that
faculty was not one that hitherto had characterized
the family from which he sprang.
None of the Westons had ever been
remarkable for genius a fact of which they
were rather proud than otherwise. They had for
several generations been content to be men of local
importance in a secluded nook of rural England, which
is not the kind of life that is conducive to original
thought or enterprising action. They had chosen
wives like themselves from among their neighbors,
and it was perhaps in several respects not altogether
fortunate for Clarence Weston that his mother had
been ultra-conservative in her respect for traditions,
since he had inherited one side of her nature.
Still, in her case, at least, the respect had been
idealistic, and the traditions of the highest; and
though she had died when he was eighteen she had instilled
into him a certain delicacy of sentiment and a simple,
chivalrous code that had somewhat hampered him in
the rough life he had led in the Canadian Dominion.
As a very young man he had quarreled
with his father over a matter trifling in itself,
but each had clung to his opinions with the obstinacy
of men who have few ideas to spare, and Clarence had
gone out to seek his fortune in western Canada.
He had naturally failed to find it, and the first
discovery that there was apparently nobody in that
wide country who was ready to appraise either his mental
attainments or his bodily activity at the value of
his board was a painful shock to the sanguine lad.
That first year was a bad one to him, but he set his
teeth and quietly bore all that befell him; the odd,
brutal task, paid for at half the usual wages, the
frequent rebuffs, the long nights spent shelterless
in the bush, utter weariness, and often downright
hunger. It was a hard school, but it taught him
much, and he graduated as a man, strong and comely
of body, and resolute of mind. What was more,
he had, though he scarcely realized it, after all,
only left behind in England a cramped life embittered
by a steady shrinkage in the rent roll and as steady
an increase in taxation and expenses. His present
life was clean, and governed by a code of crude and
austere simplicity. His mother’s spirit
was in him, and, being what he was, there were things
he could not do. He did not attempt to reason
about them. The knowledge was borne in upon him
instinctively.
He rose, by and by, and, for he was
hungry, limped on to the sleeping-shanty of the construction
gang. It was built of logs and roofed with rough
cedar shingles hand-split on the spot. The sun
beat hot upon them, and they diffused a faint aromatic
fragrance, refreshing as the scent of vinegar, into
the long, unfloored room, which certainly needed something
of the kind. It reeked with stale tobacco-smoke,
the smell of cookery, and the odors of frowsy clothes.
A row of bunks, filled with spruce twigs and old brown
blankets, ran down one side of it, a very rude table
down the other, and a double row of men with bronzed
faces, in dusty garments, sat about the latter, eating
voraciously. Fifteen minutes was, at the outside,
the longest time they ever wasted on a meal.
That evening, however, they were singularly
short of temper, for Cassidy had driven them mercilessly
all day, and, though not usually fastidious, the supper
was not to their liking. The hash was burnt;
the venison, for one of them had shot a deer, had been
hung too long; while the dessert, a great pie of desiccated
fruits, had been baked to a flinty hardness.
That was the last straw; for in the Mountain Province
the lumber and railroad gangs as a rule work hard and
live well; and when the cans of green tea had been
emptied the growls culminated in a call for the cook.
He came forward and stood before them,
a little, shaky, gray-haired wreck of a man, with
the signs of indulgence plain upon him. Whisky
is scarce in that country, but it is obtainable, and
Grenfell generally procured a good deal of it.
The man was evidently in a state of apprehension,
and he shrank back a little when a big, grim-faced
chopper ladled out a great plateful of the burnt stew
from a vessel on the stove.
“Now,” he said, “you’ve
been spoiling supper too often lately, and I guess
we’ve got to teach you plain, cookery. Sit
right down and get that hash inside you.”
The man protested that he had had
his supper before they came in; whereupon the other
seized him by the shoulders and thrust him down roughly
into a seat at the table.
“Well,” he said, “you’ve
got to have a little more. If it’s good
enough for us, boys, it’s not going to hurt him.”
There was a murmur of concurrence
when he looked around at the rest; and the cook, seeing
no help for it, made a valiant attempt to eat a little
of the greasy mess. Then he revolted from it and
glanced at his companions supplicatingly.
“I can’t do it, boys. You’ll
let me off?” he pleaded.
None of the rest showed any sign of
relenting. They were inclined to be pitiless
then, and the rude justice of the chopper’s idea
appealed to them.
“When you’ve cleaned up that plate,”
said one.
The victim made a second futile attempt,
and, after waiting some minutes for him to proceed,
they decided that it was too hot in the shed, so,
conveying him outside, they seated him on a great fir
stump sawed off several feet above the ground, with
the plate beside him. Then they took out their
pipes and sat around to enjoy the spectacle.
As a rule there is very little cruelty in men of their
kind; but they were very human, and the cook had robbed
them of a meal somewhat frequently of late. Besides,
they had smarted all day under Cassidy’s bitter
tongue, and they felt that they must retaliate upon
somebody. No one said anything for several minutes,
and then the big chopper once more approached his
victim.
“Now,” he said, “since
you have to go through with it, you may as well start
in. If you don’t, I’ll put the blame
stuff down your throat.”
It was, perhaps, no more than justice,
for the cook was paid well; but there was one man
in the assembly to whom this did not altogether appeal.
The victim was frail and helpless, a watery-eyed, limp
bundle of nerves, with, nevertheless, a pitiful suggestion
of outward dignity still clinging to him, though his
persecutors would have described him aptly as a whisky
tank. The former fact was sufficient for Weston,
who did not stop to think out the matter, but rose
and strode quietly toward the fir stump.
“I think this thing has gone
far enough, boys. You’ll have to let him
off,” he said.
“No, sir,” said the big
chopper. “He’s going right through.
Anyway, it’s not your trouble. Light out
before we rope you in too.”
Weston did not move until three or
four more strode forward hastily, when he stooped
for an ax that lay handy and swung it round his head.
It came down with a crash on the plate, and the hash
was scattered over the withered redwood twigs.
Then, while a growl expressive of astonishment as
well as anger went up, the chopper scraped up part
of the stew with red soil and fir twigs mixed in it.
“He has got to eat it, and then
I’ll tend to you. You’ll see that
they don’t get away, boys,” he said.
Weston clearly had no intention of
attempting to do so, and the cook would have found
it hopeless, for the rest closed round the stump in
a contracting ring. While they knew that Cassidy
had been summoned to Stirling’s car, they were
unaware that there were other spectators of the little
drama. Two young women had, however, just emerged
from among the towering firs that hemmed in the muskeg.
One was attired elaborately in light garments and
a big hat that appeared very much out of place in
that aisle of tremendous forest, but there was a difference
between her and her companion. The latter knew
the bush, and was dressed simply in a close-fitting
robe of gray. She held herself well, and there
was something that suggested quiet imperiousness in
her attitude and expression. This was, perhaps,
not altogether unnatural, for hitherto when Ida Stirling
desired anything that her father’s money could
obtain her wish was gratified. She laid her hand
warningly on her companion’s arm, and drew her
back into the shadow of the firs.
“I really don’t think
we need go away,” she said. “They
won’t notice us, and you will probably see something
that is supposed to be characteristically western,
though I’m not sure that it really is.”
The meaning of the scene was tolerably
plain to both of them. The little cleared space
formed a natural amphitheater walled in by somber
ranks of pines; and, standing higher, they could see
over the heads of the clustering men. There was
no difficulty in identifying the victim, the persecutor
and the champion, for Weston stood stripped to blue
shirt and trousers, with the big ax in his hand and
his head thrown back a trifle, gazing with curiously
steady eyes at the expectant faces before him.
Then as two or three of the men drew in closer he
raised his free hand.
“This thing lies between Jake
and me, and I’m open to deal with him,”
he said. “Still, I’ve got the ax here
if more of you stand in.”
The man scarcely raised his voice,
but it was clear that he was quietly and dangerously
resolute. Indeed, his attitude rather pleased
some of the rest, for there was a fresh murmuring,
and a cry of, “Give the Kid a show!”
Then, and nobody was afterward quite
certain who struck first, the trial by combat suddenly
commenced. There are very few rules attached
to it in that country, where men do not fight by formula
but with the one purpose of deciding the matter in
the quickest way possible; and in another moment the
two had clinched. They fell against the tree
stump and reeled clear again, swaying, gasping, and
striking when they could. It is probable that
the Canadian was the stronger man, but, as it happened,
his antagonist had been born among the dales of northern
England, where wrestling is still held as an art.
In a few minutes he hurled the chopper off his feet,
and a hoarse clamor went up, through which there broke
a shout:
“The Kid has him!”
Then the two men went down together,
heavily, and rolled over and over, until Cassidy came
running down the track and burst through the ring
of onlookers. In one hand he carried a peevie,
a big wooden lever with an iron hook on it, such as
men use in rolling fir logs. He belabored the
pair with it impartially, and it was evident that he
was not in the least particular as to whether he hurt
them or not. Loosing their hold on each other
they staggered to their feet with the red dust thick
on their flushed faces.
Cassidy flourished the peevie.
“Now,” he cried, “is it fighting
ye want?”
There was a burst of laughter; and
the assembly broke up when Cassidy hustled the chopper
off the field. The cook, with commendable discretion,
had slipped away quietly in the meanwhile, and the
two young women, whom nobody had noticed, turned back
among the firs. The girl in the elaborate draperies
laughed.
“I suppose it was a little brutal,
and we shouldn’t have stayed,” she said.
“Still, in a sense the attitude of the one they
called the Kid was rather fine. I could have
made quite a striking sketch of him.”
Ida Stirling made no direct reply
to this, but, as she found afterward, the scene had
fixed itself on her memory. Still it was not
the intent men or the stately clustering pines that
she recalled most clearly; it was the dominant central
figure, standing almost statuesque, with head tilted
slightly backward, and both hands clenched on the
big ax haft.
“The man they were tormenting
must have done something to vex them. They really
are not quarrelsome,” she said.