第50章

Here and there swaggered a strapping riverman, his small felt hat cocked aggressively over one eye, its brim curled up behind; a cigar stump protruding at an angle from beneath his sweeping moustache; his hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers, "stagged" off at the knee; the spikes of his river boots cutting little triangular pieces from the wooden sidewalk.His eye was aggressively humorous, and the smile of his face was a challenge.

For in the last month he had faced almost certain death a dozen times a day.He had ridden logs down the rapids where a loss of balance meant in one instant a ducking and in the next a blow on the back from some following battering-ram; he had tugged and strained and jerked with his peavey under a sheer wall of tangled timber twenty feet high,--behind which pressed the full power of the freshet,--only to jump with the agility of a cat from one bit of unstable footing to another when the first sharp CRACK warned him that he had done his work, and that the whole mass was about to break down on him like a wave on the shore; he had worked fourteen hours a day in ice-water, and had slept damp; he had pried at the key log in the rollways on the bank until the whole pile had begun to rattle down into the river like a cascade, and had jumped, or ridden, or even dived out of danger at the last second.In a hundred passes he had juggled with death as a child plays with a rubber balloon.No wonder that he has brought to the town and his vices a little of the lofty bearing of an heroic age.No wonder that he fears no man, since nature's most terrible forces of the flood have hurled a thousand weapons at him in vain.His muscles have been hardened, his eye is quiet and sure, his courage is undaunted, and his movements are as quick and accurate as a panther's.

Probably nowhere in the world is a more dangerous man of his hands than the riverman.He would rather fight than eat, especially when he is drunk, as, like the cow-boy, he usually is when he gets into town.A history could be written of the feuds, the wars, the raids instituted by one camp or one town against another.

The men would go in force sometimes to another city with the avowed purpose of cleaning it out.One battle I know of lasted nearly all night.Deadly weapons were almost never resorted to, unless indeed a hundred and eighty pounds of muscle behind a fist hard as iron might be considered a deadly weapon.A man hard pressed by numbers often resorted to a billiard cue, or an ax, or anything else that happened to be handy, but that was an expedient called out by necessity.Knives or six-shooters implied a certain premeditation which was discountenanced.

On the other hand, the code of fair fighting obtained hardly at all.The long spikes of river-boots made an admirable weapon in the straight kick.I have seen men whose faces were punctured as thickly as though by small-pox, where the steel points had penetrated.In a free-for-all knock-down-and-drag-out, kicking, gouging, and biting are all legitimate.Anything to injure the other man, provided always you do not knife him.And when you take a half dozen of these enduring, active, muscular, and fiery men, not one entertaining in his innermost heart the faintest hesitation or fear, and set them at each other with the lightning tirelessness of so many wild-cats, you get as hard a fight as you could desire.And they seem to like it.

One old fellow, a good deal of a character in his way, used to be on the "drive" for a firm lumbering near Six Lakes.He was intensely loyal to his "Old Fellows," and every time he got a little "budge" in him, he instituted a raid on the town owned by a rival firm.So frequent and so severe did these battles become that finally the men were informed that another such expedition would mean instant discharge.The rule had its effect.The raids ceased.

But one day old Dan visited the saloon once too often.He became very warlike.The other men merely laughed, for they were strong enough themselves to recognize firmness in others, and it never occurred to them that they could disobey so absolute a command.

So finally Dan started out quite alone.

He invaded the enemy's camp, attempted to clean out the saloon with a billiard cue single handed, was knocked down, and would have been kicked to death as he lay on the floor if he had not succeeded in rolling under the billiard table where the men's boots could not reach him.As it was, his clothes were literally torn to ribbons, one eye was blacked, his nose broken, one ear hung to its place by a mere shred of skin, and his face and flesh were ripped and torn everywhere by the "corks" on the boots.Any but a riverman would have qualified for the hospital.Dan rolled to the other side of the table, made a sudden break, and escaped.

But his fighting blood was not all spilled.He raided the butcher-shop, seized the big carving knife, and returned to the battle field.

The enemy decamped--rapidly--some of them through the window.Dan managed to get in but one blow.He ripped the coat down the man's back as neatly as though it had been done with shears, one clean straight cut from collar to bottom seam.A quarter of an inch nearer would have split the fellow's backbone.As it was, he escaped without even a scratch.

Dan commandeered two bottles of whisky, and, gory and wounded as he was, took up the six-mile tramp home, bearing the knife over his shoulder as a banner of triumph.

Next morning, weak from the combined effects of war and whisky, he reported to headquarters.

"What is it, Dan?" asked the Old Fellow without turning.

"I come to get my time," replied the riverman humbly.

"What for?" inquired the lumberman.

"I have been over to Howard City," confessed Dan.

The owner turned and looked him over.

"They sort of got ahead of me a little," explained Dan sheepishly.

The lumberman took stock of the old man's cuts and bruises, and turned away to hide a smile.

"I guess I'll let you off this trip," said he."Go to work--when you can.I don't believe you'll go back there again.""No, sir," replied Dan humbly."