They left Seattle at six o’clock that afternoon, riding north in darkness on the day coaches of a little train—forty lumberjacks, their quarterly blast in town over now, most of them with freshly-emptied pockets and surly with hangovers. At midnight they disembarked at a hamlet high in the hills where wagons drawn by mule teams waited. The hangovers were not helped by the jolting over rough roads which had been corduroyed in spots. As always in such circumstances, Fargo slept while he could, like a huge cat, gathering rest.
Higher into the mountains they climbed, the mules straining in their harness. Daybreak found them in big timber but it had been cut over. In the gray light Fargo judged that this was the beginning of the Wolf’s Head; the cutting had been selective and good stands of smaller trees were left to reseed and preserve the wilderness.
Then they descended into a valley swirling with mist. As it cleared briefly, Fargo saw the logging camp below them: five long log bunkhouses in a semi-circle, a cook shack, mess hall, office and tool sheds. Beyond the Wolf’s Head River had been dammed and a chute ran down its steep flank into the big pond thus formed. There, cut logs floated in rafts, waiting until there was enough accumulated timber to warrant blowing the dam and starting the drive.
Men came awake as the wagons rattled down the hill, stopped in the middle of the camp. From the lead wagon Duke Hotchkiss leaped down, clad in mackinaw, stagged pants, caulked boots. “Awright, you farmers!” he bellowed at the dozing men. “Daybreak in the swamps. Roust out! You got two hours to git settled and eat; then we start highballin’.”
Beside Fargo, a young, blocky redhead with wide shoulders beneath his mackinaw grinned sourly. “Good ole Duke, he’s all heart.” He picked up a bedroll, slung it over his shoulder. “You need help with that trunk, feller?”
“I can manage.” Fargo jumped from the wagon, hooked one strap of the trunk with a hand and carried it easily on his shoulder, his other hand occupied with rolled blankets. The redhead leaped down beside him. “That’s a might big turkey.”
A turkey was what loggers called a man’s bag of possessions. The man went on, full of curiosity. “What you got in there—crown jools?”
“Somethin’ like that.”
“My name’s Milligan, Jerry Milligan. I’m a faller on Side Number Three.”
“Fargo. I’m hired on as faller, too.”
“Good. Likely you and me’ll work together.” Milligan’s grin vanished. “There’s a vacancy. I lost my partner jest before we got paid off and went outside.”
“Lost him?” Fargo looked sharply at Milligan as they entered a bunkhouse. He set the trunk down, stowed it under a bunk next to the one on which Milligan tossed his bedroll.
“That’s right.” Milligan nodded. “But nothin’ I could help. In fact, we ain’t figgered out yet how it happened. We found him floatin’ out there in the pond one mornin’. All we can make out is that he musta tried to cross on the logs in the dark and fell in and a log bounced up against him and crushed his skull.”
“What was he doin’ crossin’ the river in the dark?” Fargo untied his bedroll, spread his blankets on the cheap straw mattress.
“That’s what we don’t know. Maybe goin’ for a walk, maybe—” Milligan smirked “—he figgered on tryin’ his luck with Barbara.”
“Barbara? Oh, you mean the Government Inspector’s daughter.”
“You’ve heard about her, huh?” Milligan whistled, made an expressive curving gesture with his hands. “Yeah, Charlie Ross always did figger himself as God’s gift to women. She and her daddy live over across the river in the clearin’, out of camp where she won’t be exposed to us roughnecks. That’s supposed to be off-limits to us, but Charlie, he’d git a sniff of perfume and away he’d go and to hell with everything.” Then he sobered. “Expensive sniff.”
Other men were spreading out their beds. Milligan dropped his voice. “That ain’t been the only accident, either. I tell you, Fargo, Duke’s a good boss, but this seems to be a jinxed job. You got to watch your step around here. I never seen so many men killed or crippled on one operation in all my life. And no accountin’ for it. Duke takes every safety precaution, right by the book, and these are all experienced men, no greenhorns. And still, there’s always somethin’ happenin’.”
He straightened up, moved closer to Fargo, his pale blue eyes serious.
“There’s somethin’ in the air. You know how it is when there’s a forest fire a long ways off, a big one, a crown fire roarin’ through the tree tops? Even miles away, when you can’t really see it or smell the smoke, you know it’s there, a kind of stingin’ in your nose, a taste on your tongue. Whatever is goin’ on here is like that—like a crown fire.” He spat into the sandbox under the cold stove in the center of the room. “I reckon I’m spooky. I swore when we went out to Seattle that I wasn’t coming back in to the Wolf’s Head. I changed my mind but now I wish I hadn’t. Seems like to me I can feel and taste whatever it is all over again, and it scares me.”
“Loggin’s always dangerous,” Fargo said.
“Sure. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m just losin’ my nerve. All I know is I’ve worked from New Brunswick to Maine to North Michigan and all through Oregon and Washin’ton, and I ain’t felt like this since the Tillamook Burn started and looked like it was gonna burn up the whole Northwest. Well, hell, let’s go eat.”
~*~
The mess hall was big, with trestle tables. The bull-cook—cook’s helper, swamper, and general man of all work—was kept busy hauling platters laden with food. Meals in a lumber camp were always enormous, and with good reason. Fargo stuffed himself, well knowing how much fuel a man could burn in a hard day’s work in the Douglas fir.
Then the meal was over; Hotchkiss slammed on the end table and jumped to his feet. “All right, you hay-shakers! Playtime’s over, it’s back to work. We got to git out a pile of timber between now and the drive and anybody I see doggin’ it, I’ll take apart in little bitty pieces and forgit to put him back together again! Side One and Two, move out! Side Three, we’re gonna re-rig and start a new cut. Fargo, you’re on Side Three, workin’ with Milligan. Stick with him and he’ll show you around!”
The men filed out of the mess hall, went to the tool houses, were issued tools by the clerk. Between them, Fargo and Milligan drew two double-bit axes, a file, wedges, a crosscut saw, and a small can of kerosene. The mist had lifted and Fargo got a better view of the surroundings. Mountains towered all around them clad in a thick shag of fir. Roads spiked out in all directions from the camp, penetrating the cut-over woods. The men of the first two sides piled into wagons, were hauled into the forest. In the distance Fargo heard the sputtering snort and then slow, steady thunder of donkey engines.
Other wagons were brought up. With Hotchkiss and ten other men, Fargo and Milligan loaded up. The last one to climb aboard was a lean, wiry man of about thirty, who, despite the fact that he stood nearly six-feet six, moved as smoothly and fluidly as a cat. He carried a belt and a coiled rope over one arm, stowed ax and saw, and put on top of them a pair of climbing irons, brace-like frames to fit over his boots, long spikes, razor-sharp to bite into the wood of a tree trunk. Fargo recognized immediately the gear of the high-climber.
Milligan introduced them. “Chuck Hoskins, Neal Fargo.”
Hoskins’ hand was hard and strong; the tremendous muscles required for his job—the hardest, most dangerous in logging—rippled under his shirt. But his smile was warm, friendly, and unassuming. “Glad to know you, Fargo.” Then his eyes widened, “Ah hah, looks like we got company.”
Fargo followed the direction of his gaze. Two riders had splashed across the shallows below the dam; now their horses crested the edge of the bank and loped toward the wagons. One was a burly man in his mid-forties, in a battered Forest Service hat, not unlike Fargo’s cavalry hat, mackinaw, and jodhpurs. The girl beside him wore a jacket, tight blue jeans, and her coppery hair glinted in the sun. When they pulled up alongside the wagon Fargo got a better look at her and whistled soundlessly.
Jonah, Hotchkiss had said. Right, Fargo thought. Any girl that looks like that in a camp full of horny men is about the worst bad medicine there is.
As if to underscore the thought, she took off her jacket and stuffed it between her thighs and the saddle horn, as Fargo’s eyes raked over big round breasts bulging against a shirt just a shade too tight—and deliberately so. He heard Milligan make a sound in his throat, and Hoskins was beginning to wear a silly smile. “Hello, Miss Mannix,” he said.
She looked at the men in the wagon and smiled back. Her hair was indeed the color of copper, with maybe a tinge of gold. Her forehead was high, eyes huge and sea green, with long lashes; her skin ivory, her nose short and straight, her mouth lush and red. She drew in a breath that made the breasts move under the straining fabric, shifted one superb leg, not an inch of its outline blurred by denim that might have been painted on. “Hello, boys,” She sat like that, almost posing, for a second more—giving us all a thrill, Fargo thought wryly—and then she spurred up to rein in beside her father.
“Thought I’d be on hand when you start the new side, Duke.” Mannix’s voice was deep. “Barbara always likes to watch the high-climber work, anyhow.”
“That’s the Government Inspector,” Milligan whispered to Fargo. “Forest Service.”
“Glad to have yuh, Mannix,” Hotchkiss rumbled. “Okay, let’s move out!”
The wagons lumbered ahead. They entered a road that led through forest where raw stumps gleamed—the butts of giant firs that had taken hundreds of years to attain their soaring heights of up to two hundred feet. Now they were gone, to be turned into houses for an exploding population that, Fargo thought bitterly, was eating up the wilderness like a bunch of termites. Or like sheep, he thought with the wolf’s contempt for animals that could be herded. Again Fargo felt sympathy with The Colonel’s concern for the cutting of this tract. When he’d been President, The Colonel had, in 1907, established the first system of National Forests, setting aside sixteen million acres in six far Western states. This was part of it; The Colonel hated to see it logged at all, but if it had to be logged, better that it be done right.
Hotchkiss and MacKenzie had been doing it right so far. They’d got the timber out, Fargo noted, with the minimum amount of destruction of the remaining woods. Again his mouth twisted, thinking of what he knew of Saul Lasher’s method of operation. This vast tract of fir was worth a fortune but it would be worth double to Lasher what MacKenzie would get from it. Lasher would cut everything that could possibly be worth a nickel and rip up the rest getting out his cut. That way he’d double MacKenzie’s quarter of a million, maybe triple it—and a man like Saul Lasher would stop at nothing for money like that. Fargo knew what Milligan had meant. Along with the sharp, clean tang of fir, it seemed to him he could smell trouble, bitter and acrid, like the taint of a distant, invisible fire …
As the wagon lurched over the rough road, straining uphill, then banging down steep slopes, the girl let her mount drop back slightly. She wanted to give the men another good look at her, Fargo guessed. He took one, raking his eyes insolently over her from head to toe, letting them pause at the bouncing breasts joggling to the gait of her horse, the rounded rump planted in the saddle. She felt the pressure of his eyes, and when he looked up again her own were fastened on his scarred and ugly face. Something seemed to swirl in them as he met them directly, and he thought she smiled faintly, and not without invitation.
Presently they entered a level, cut-over clearing of considerable size within a great, forested bowl. Here sat the yarder, a big donkey engine on skids, its several drums wound with heavy cables. Its operator and fireman had already gotten up steam and it was chugging rhythmically.
“We’ll skid the yarder into place first!” Duke called out as the teams stopped. After that, for a long time, the morning was a nightmare.
The loggers had eaten out all the timber around the clearing. The spar tree, naked now of the blocks and cables that had formerly been rigged on it, towered nearly two hundred feet into the air. Presently it would be taken down, converted into lumber, but for the moment it would still be needed, later. Meanwhile, the donkey engine had to be gotten to the new location where the cutting was to take place.
That was accomplished by letting it winch itself along with its own cables, fastened to trees ahead of it. But a path had to be cleared for it, and, as Hotchkiss had warned, this country was all straight up and down. They spent four hours moving the donkey, downhill and up, with Duke yelling and driving like a madman and Fargo re-establishing his acquaintance with an ax and cross cut.
He was thoroughly expert with both, but they used special muscles, certain ones he had not called into play in years. He knew he had put in a morning’s work by the time Hotchkiss was satisfied. When the wagon from the cook shack came with hot tea and coffee and huge meat sandwiches, he was ready for the chow. Soaked in sweat, he sat cross-legged with Milligan and Hoskins under a huge fir and wolfed the food ravenously.
Then a shadow fell across him, and, surprisingly, he thought he caught a tinge of perfume. He looked up to see Barbara Mannix standing over them, cup in one hand, sandwich in the other. “Hello, boys,” she said in a deep and husky voice. “Would it jinx you if I ate here?”
Milligan blinked his eyes. “Duke might not like it much ...”
She laughed and sat down cross-legged, soft flesh of thighs straining at the tight denim. “I can handle Duke.” Her green eyes went to Fargo. “You’re new.”
“That’s right.” He met her gaze levelly.
“White haired. You’re not that old.”
“I’ve led a hard life,” he said.
She nodded, almost seriously. “I’ll bet you have. You look it. You look tough as nails. Funny, though. Those legs of yours. You look more like a rider than a lumberjack.”
“I’ve done a lot of things in my time,” said Fargo.
“And will probably do more,” She smiled, showing small white teeth. Then she turned to Hoskins, who immediately smiled that silly grin again.
“Chuck, you’re going to put on a show?”
“Well, ma’am, I’m gonna top a spar tree if that’s a show.”
“It’s the best show I know of.” She put out a hand, touched his belt and coiled rope and spikes. “To go two hundred feet up, work there with nothing to hold you but these. I’d love to try it sometime. I don’t know how you can possibly do it.” She finished her sandwich, washed it down with a swallow of coffee and set down her cup. She picked up one of the heavy climbing irons. “How does it go on?” she asked, trying to fit her own booted foot into it. “Like this?”
“You’ve got it wrong side to,” said Hoskins, his lean face brick red.
“Then show me the right way. Maybe someday I’ll be the world’s only female high-climber.” She smiled at Fargo. “You see, I’m sort of the mascot of this outfit.”
“I can imagine,” said Fargo thinly.
But Hoskins had laid his food aside. When Barbara Mannix held out one small foot, he almost leaped at the opportunity to show her how the climbing iron should fit. He lashed it into place.
She held up the other foot. “Now, the left one.”
He put that one on, too. She got to her feet awkwardly, holding her legs apart to clear the in-pointed spikes. The way she stood emphasized the swell of buttocks beneath the denim, and Fargo heard Hoskins draw in a quick breath. Barbara bent, picked up the leather tool belt and the rope. “Show me how this works.”
“Chuck,” said Jerry Milligan warningly, with a glance toward Duke Hotchkiss. But the Duke was hunkered down with the girl’s father, deep in conversation. Hoskins disregarded Milligan; his huge hands shook as he buckled the heavy belt around the girl’s slender waist, showed her how to snap on one end of the climbing rope.
She ran her hands along it, then went to a small spruce nearby. “Like this?” She looped the rope around the trunk, latched the other end. Then, wrapping her arms around the tree, she tried to sink in the spike, failed, fell back, laughing, into Hoskins’ waiting arms. Fargo did not miss how she leaned into his embrace for a split second longer than necessary to gain her balance. Then she straightened up, pulled free. “Unharness me, Chuck. I’ll never make a high-climber.”
No, thought Fargo, but you tried hard enough.
When she had the gear off she sat down again and drained the coffee cup. “Don’t you get afraid so high in the air?” she asked Hoskins. “What would happen if the rope broke?”
He grinned, “I might come down awful quick. But that rope ain’t gonna break. I checked it this mornin’ myself; I always check it every mornin’, even if I did the night before. It’ll hold an elephant. The only thing I got to worry about is accidentally cuttin’ it when I’m trimmin’ limbs.”
“Aren’t you afraid of that?”
Hoskins laughed. “Not hardly. I been toppin’ timber fer nearly fifteen years. I ain’t come close yet.”
The girl’s face turned serious. “All the same, Chuck,” and she put a hand on his, “be careful when you’re up there. Sometimes my heart just stops when I see you up there; it stops and doesn’t start again until you’re down safely.”
Hoskins’ face reddened deeper. “Golly, Miss Barbara—”
“Barbara!” The summons rang out clearly in the noon silence. Mannix had gotten to his feet. He strode over to her, and Fargo saw him close up for the first time. He saw angry black eyes beneath heavy brows, a nose like a blade, the thin blue veins of the drinking man webbed through the cheeks, the mouth like a slash. Mannix seized his daughter’s wrist, jerked her roughly to her feet. “Listen—” His fierce eyes swept over the trio, Fargo, Milligan, and Hoskins without apology for the interruption. “You know what I told you!”
“Dad!” She twisted in his grasp. “You’re hurting me.”
“I’ll hurt you worse if you don’t start listening to what I tell you.” He shoved her roughly across the clearing in which they had halted, sat her down hard beside the tethered horses. “You stay there.” She looked after him with swirling eyes as he went back to Hotchkiss, squatted, and they conferred for a moment more.
Then the Duke jumped to his feet. “All right, you plow-jockies! You’ve had your break! Time to hit the woods!”