“Well, it’s the gospel truth. So’s the rest of it. Sides and bottom a third of the way down were burned black from the friction — black as coal. On cold mornings you could see smoke from the logs going down: that’s how fast they traveled. Went even faster when there was frost, so the river crew had to drive spikes in the chute’s bottom end to slow ’em up. Even so, sometimes a log would hit the river with enough force to split it in half, clean, like it’d gone through a buzz saw. But I expect you don’t believe none of that, either.”
Poley grunted. “Not hardly.”
I said, “Well, I believe it, Cass. Man can do just about anything he sets his mind to, like you said, if he wants it bad enough. That chute must of been something. I can sure see why it was the damnedest thing you ever saw.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Cass said.
“What? But you said—”
“No, I didn’t. McIntosh’s chute was a wonder but not the damnedest thing I ever saw.”
“Then what is?” Poley demanded.
“If I wasn’t interrupted every few minutes, you’d of found out by now.” Cass glared at him. “You going to be quiet and let me get to it or you intend to keep flapping your gums so this here story takes all night?”
Poley wasn’t cowed, but he did button his lip. And surprised us all — maybe even himself — by keeping it buttoned for the time being.
I thought I might get put on one of the wheel crews [Cass resumed], but I’d made the mistake of telling Nilson I’d worked a yarding crew up at Coos Bay, so a yarding crew was where I got put on Black Mountain. Working as a choke-setter in the slash out back of the camp — man that sets heavy cable chokers around the end of a log that’s fallen down a hillside or into a ravine so the log can be hauled out by means of a donkey engine. Hard, sweaty, dangerous work in the best of camps, and McIntosh’s was anything but the best. The rumors had been right about that too. We worked long hours for our pay, seven days a week. And if a man dropped from sheer exhaustion, he was expected to get up under his own power — and docked for the time he spent lying down.
Johnny Cline got put on the same crew, as a whistle-punk on the donkey, and him and me took up friendly. He was a Californian, from down near San Francisco; young and feisty and too smart-ass for his own good... some like you, Poley. But decent enough, underneath. His brother was a logger somewhere in Canada, and he’d determined to try his hand too. He was about as green as me, but you could see that logging was in his blood in a way that it wasn’t in mine. I knew I’d be moving on to other things one day; he knew he’d be a logger till the day he died.
I got along with Nilson and most of the other timber beasts, but Saginaw Tom McIntosh was another matter. If anything, he was worse than his reputation — mean clear through, with about as much decency as a vulture on a fence post waiting for something to die. Giant of a man, face weathered the color of heartwood, droopy yellow mustache stained with juice from the quids of Spearhead tobacco he always kept stowed in one cheek, eyes like pale fire that gave you the feeling you’d been burned whenever they touched you. Stalked around camp in worn cruisers, stagged corduroy pants, and steel-calked boots, yelling out orders, knocking men down with his fists if they didn’t ask how high when he hollered jump. Ran that camp the way a hardass warden runs a prison. Everybody hated him, including me and Johnny Cline before long. But most of the jacks feared him, too, which was how he kept them in line.
He drove all his crews hard, demanding that a dozen turns of logs go down his chute every day to feed the saws working twenty-four hours at the mill. Cut lumber was fetching more than a hundred dollars per thousand feet at the time and he wanted to keep production at a fever pitch before the heavy winter rains set in. There was plenty of grumbling among the men, and tempers were short, but nobody quit the camp. Pay was too good, even with all the abuse that went along with it.
I’d been at the Black Mountain camp three weeks when the real trouble started. One of the gold miners down on the Klamath, man named Coogan, got drunk and decided to tear up a holding crib because he blamed McIntosh for ruining his claim. McIntosh flew into a rage when he heard about it. He ranted and raved for half a day about how he’d had enough of those goddamn miners. Then, when he’d worked himself up enough, he ordered a dozen jacks down on a night raid to bust up Coogan’s wing dam and raise some hell with the other miners’ claims. The jacks didn’t want to do it but he bullied them into it with threats and promises of bonus money.
But the miners were expecting retaliation; had joined forces and were waiting when the jacks showed up. There was a riverbank brawl, mostly with fists and ax handles, but with a few shots fired too. Three timber stiffs were hurt bad enough so that they had to be carried back to camp and would be laid up for a while.
The county law came next day and threatened to close McIntosh down if there was any more trouble. That threw him into another fit. Kind of man he was, he took it out on the men in the raiding party.
“What kind of jack lets a gold-grubber beat him down?” he yelled at them. “You buggers ain’t worth the name timberjack. If I didn’t need your hands and backs, I’d send the lot of you packing. As is, I’m cutting your pay. And you three that can’t work — you get no pay at all until you can hoist your peaveys and swing your axes.”
One of the jacks challenged him. McIntosh kicked the man in the crotch, knocked him down, and then gave him a case of logger’s smallpox: pinned his right arm to the ground with those steel calks of his. There were no other challenges. But in all those bearded faces you could see the hate that was building for McIntosh. You could feel it too; it was in the air, crackles of it like electricity in a storm.
Another week went by. There was no more trouble with the miners, but McIntosh drove his crews with a vengeance. Up to fifteen turns of logs down the chute each day. The big-wheel crews hauling until their horses were ready to drop; and two did drop dead in harness, while another two had to be destroyed when logs crushed their hind legs on the drag. Buckers and fallers working the slash from dawn to dark, so that the skirl of crosscuts and bucksaws and the thud of axes rolled like constant thunder across the face of Black Mountain.
Some men can stand that kind of killing pace without busting down one way or another, and some men can’t. Johnny Cline was one of those who couldn’t. He was hotheaded, like I said before, and ten times every day and twenty times every night he cursed McIntosh and damned his black soul. Then, one day when he’d had all he could swallow, he made the mistake of cursing and damning McIntosh to the boss logger’s face.
The yarding crew we were on was deep in the slash, struggling to get logs out of a small valley. It was coming on dusk and we’d been at it for hours; we were all bone-tired. I set the choker around the end of yet another log, and the hook-tender signaled Johnny Cline, who stood behind him with one hand on the wire running to the whistle on the donkey engine. When Johnny pulled the wire and the short blast sounded, the cable snapped tight and the big log started to move, its nose plowing up dirt and crushing saplings in its path. But as it came up the slope it struck a sunken log, as sometimes happens, and shied off. The hook-tender signaled for slack, but Johnny didn’t give it fast enough to keep the log from burying its nose in the roots of a fir stump.
McIntosh saw it. He’d come catfooting up and was ten feet from the donkey engine. He ran up to Johnny yelling, “You stupid goddamn greenhorn!” and gave him a shove that knocked the kid halfway down to where the log was stumped.