“Colonel, darlin’, wake up.” O’Malley bent over Tom, a wide smile on his ruddy face. He touched the toe of his boot to the sleeping man’s shoulder. “Colonel?”
Tom cracked one eye open. “What is it, O’Malley?”
“’Tis past four o’clock, Tom. Time for breakfast before the first cut.”
“Yeah. I’m coming.”
The sergeant surveyed him curiously. “If you don’t mind me askin’, boyo, what the devil are you doin’ up here?”
Tom sat up. “Minding my own business.”
O’Malley’s russet eyebrows went up. “I see, now. Like that, is it?”
“Like nothing.” He unfolded his boots and jammed his foot into one. “Lady drank too much whiskey last night. And the door—” he sent an accusing look toward his sergeant “—can only be latched from the inside.”
O’Malley looked blank for a fraction of a second. “Ah, I see the way of it now. She’s drunk, can’t lock her door, so you… ’Scuse me, Colonel, but why didn’t you just latch the damn thing and crawl out the window?”
Tom grunted. Now that O’Malley mentioned it, he had to wonder the same thing. “Pie dough,” he muttered. “Her damned piecrust was on the windowsill.” He jammed his other foot into the remaining boot.
“That’s not like you, Tom, bein’ stopped by a little blob of pastry.”
“No,” he acknowledged. “It’s not.” He got to his feet and waved his hand at the door. “Get some coffee, will you, Mick? She’s going to need a whole potful.”
“Right away, Colonel.” He peered at Tom. “You look like you could use—”
“Save it!” Tom snapped. “Time to cut timber.”
Meggy woke when a shaft of hot sunlight fell across her face. With a blink, she sat up and groaned. Her head felt like the inside of a ringing church bell.
Oh, Lord, she was sick! She sank back down on the cot and stared up at the split-log ceiling, then shut her eyes. She couldn’t afford to be sick. She had a pie to bake!
Forcing her lids open, she looked about the cabin. An unfamiliar enamelware coffeepot sat on her stove. Next to it was a thick white china mug. The stove was cold, of course; no one in his right mind would build a fire on a day this hot.
Very well, she would drink it lukewarm, and bless the kind soul who’d brought it. Maybe Sergeant O’Malley, who had fixed her front latch.
Her gaze flew to the door. Merciful heavens, it wasn’t latched! It wasn’t even fully closed. Warm air flowed through the opening, and poured through the window as well.
Her piecrust! By now the sun would have all but melted it. She stumbled off the cot and headed for the window.
The lump of dough was gone. “Oh, not again,” she moaned. “I cannot shoot a deer whenever I want to bake.” She clutched her head as pain pinched her temples and pounded in back of her eyes. Her skull felt as if it had shrunk during the night.
Tears sprang into her eyes. “I can’t,” she sobbed. “I’ll be sick if I even bend over.”
Her vision blurry, she sat down on the cot, then looked down at her knees. Mercy, all she had on was her shimmy! Her white shirtwaist, the sleeves still rolled up, lay at the foot of her bed.
Memory returned in a rush. Last night she had sampled some whiskey, and—had she dreamed this?—the colonel had come and she’d told him all about Charlotte and Charity and—
She clapped one hand over her mouth. She’d gotten herself tiddly! She, Mary Margaret Hampton, daughter of a man of the cloth, a Methodist, no less! Oh, whatever would he think of her?
Who, Meggy? Not Papa. Papa is gone. You mean Colonel Randall, do you not?
“Certainly not! Why, I don’t give one green fig for what that Yankee ruffian thinks of me,” she said out loud.
But to be truthful, she would be easier in her mind if she could remember what had happened next. And how she’d ended up in bed with her clothes off. She closed her eyes in mortification.
When she opened them, her gaze fell on something rolled up in a tea towel and carefully set in a shaded corner of the counter. Next to it were six ripe apples from Fong’s pantry. Inside the towel she found her pie dough. Someone, perhaps whoever had brought the coffee, had kindly rescued it from the beating sun. She could still make her pie!
The thought of building a fire in the stove when the heat in the cabin was already suffocating made her feel ill. She retreated once more to the cot. When she lay perfectly still, she didn’t feel like throwing up.
To buoy up her spirits, she tried to sing, but what came out was a raspy whisper.
“‘Strong are we and brave, like patriots of old; We’ll fight…’”
Her head throbbing, she dragged herself off the cot and staggered across the floor to the counter. If she had to bake a pie, she would bake a pie.
“Aw, Tom, have a heart.” Swede Jensen tipped his head up and surveyed the towering fir tree Tom indicated.
“You heard me, Swede. I’ll lay it right at your feet. All you have to do is slice it up.”
“Slice it up,” Swede muttered. “By golly, you make buckin’ that there tree sound like cuttin’ up one of Fong’s carrots.”
Tom tied his double-edge ax to the rope dangling from his belt. “Hell, I’m doing the hard part. You’re the bucker—your job is to cut up that log.”
The Swede continued to grumble as Tom checked his spiked boots and prepared to climb the tall fir.
“I’ll limb it on the way up, then take the top down. Be ready for it.” He cast a swift glance at the rest of the crew, gathered in a loose semicircle around him.
Mick O’Malley sidled close to Tom. “Looks like a widowmaker to me, Tom. You know you don’t haffta go up that sucker.”
“Sure I do. I won’t ask another man to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.”
“I don’t like the look of it near the top. What with the wind comin’ up, it could start swayin’ like a sassy lady and pop you right off into thin air.”
“I’ll make the undercut lower than where you’re looking, Mick. And anyway, I won’t pop off. I’ll tie onto the trunk and hang on like a treed bear.” He turned back to the men. “Any other questions?”
“Yeah,” Vergil Price growled. “How the hell we gonna get them logs down this mountain? Trail’s too steep for a man, let alone a bunch of scab-barked timber.”
“We’ll cold deck the logs close by so Sam can haul them out on the skid road with his bull team.”
“Skid road!” Price spat into the pine brush. “What skid road? Only road we got is clear t’other side of the creek.”
Tom grinned at the peeler. “Glad to see some intelligence in that thick head of yours, Verg. Damn smart of you to figure out we’ll have to build a skid road this side of the creek.”
“Oh. ’Course, Tom. I seed that right off.”
The men guffawed. “Seed that right off,” someone echoed in a falsetto voice. Vergil, a Kansas boy, was often the butt of the crew’s heavy-handed humor.
The peeler glowered and moved a step closer to Tom. “It’s just that, well, you know….”
Tom gazed at the man who’d taken Walter Peabody’s job. What ailed the fellow? For the last month he’d been bucking for a promotion, and now that he’d gotten it, he didn’t want to work?
“Afraid the log’s gonna roll over on you, Verg?”
Vergil straightened to his full six feet. “N-no. I could peel the skin off a live rattlesnake if I had to.”
“Then a straight hunk of Douglas fir that’s gonna hold still for you shouldn’t be a problem, should it?” When he didn’t answer, Tom repeated the question. “Should it? What’s eating you, Verg?”
“It’s that woman,” the peeler said in a pinched voice.
Tom’s head came up. “What about her?”
“Oh, Lordy, here it comes,” someone intoned.
Here comes what? Tom wondered. What was going on in the camp this time that he didn’t know about?
“Well?”
“I seen her, Tom. An’ I can’t get her outta my mind. I ain’t had a woman in four months, and she’s hauntin’ me like a demon.”
“Hold it! Miss Hampton is a respectable woman. You get your mind off her and back to the timber.”
“I watched her in the river yesterday. She’s got the prettiest little patch of hair between her—”
Tom’s fist connected with the man’s jaw, and he went down like a poleaxed cow. Tom bent, grabbed a handful of flannel shirt and hauled him to his feet. “Keep your eyes on your logs, Price, or I’ll beat you until you look like one of Fong’s rotten tomatoes. You understand?”
Vergil gave him a sullen nod and edged away, refusing to meet Tom’s eyes. He hated to lean too hard on the man; Vergil took more than his share of the crew’s ribbing.
“All right, now, let’s cut timber.”
The men dispersed. Sam Turner and a short, muscular man called Eight-Bit Orrin charged off into the woods and began clearing brush for the skid road. The two young Claymore brothers and the other men—Swede, Indian Joe, Vergil Price and O’Malley—moved into position near the fir. When the high rigger brought the tree down, they would crawl over it like ants, cutting it into thirty-foot lengths and skinning off the bark.
When every man was in place, Tom looped his manila lifeline around the thick tree trunk and started to climb.
He pushed away the image Vergil Price had called up of Mary Margaret Hampton naked in the river, concentrated on tossing his lifeline up another ten feet and scrambling after it. A one-man crosscut saw dangled from the manila rope clipped into his steel safety loop.
He covered the first fifty feet in a little over ten minutes, severing limbs with a single blow of his ax as his spiked boots walked up the tree. The lopped-off branches whooshed down to the ground, where Price and O’Malley dragged them onto the slash pile.
The wind picked up. Another twenty-five or thirty feet higher and the tree began to sway. More limbs swished past his boots and thunked into the forest duff below him. From up here the crew looked doll-sized.
Tom had come to like high rigging, despite the danger. A hundred fifty feet up among the pungent fir branches a man gained a sense of perspective about things. About what kind of life he needed to fulfill his purpose on earth. About Susanna and justice gone awry.
He loved trees. They were beautiful. Clean. They built homes and schools and churches and barns, and the sweet greeny smell reminded him that nature was good. It was men who brought evil.
He climbed up another hitch. “Pretty philosophical way up here at the top of the world,” he murmured. He often talked to himself on a high-rigging job. Sometimes it was the only time he could hear himself think.
Just as he raised his ax, a shout floated up from below. What the—
He glanced down and almost didn’t believe what he saw. A second man was starting up the tree.
Tom let the ax drop and cupped his hands. “Leave off,” he yelled.
The man kept climbing. All Tom could see was the top of his head, covered by a dingy blue wool stocking cap. Good God, it was Vergil Price.
“Off the tree, Verg,” he shouted. “Not safe!”
Vergil kept coming. Had the man gone loco? Two of them on the same tree would…
Cold sweat ran down his neck. The tree began to shake. Tom cinched his lifeline in tight and hugged the bark. Every one of Vergil’s footsteps made the trunk shiver.
He had to do something. One man this high off the ground was risky; two men was suicidal.
And two men with axes…
Holy catfish tails, Price must be off his rocker. Maybe he’d snapped. No time to wonder why now; he’d have to think about it later, Tom decided. One thing he knew for sure, the man wasn’t coming up to help him limb off fir branches.
He’d have to shake the peeler down and try not to get killed in the process.
The tree was shuddering now. Tom loosened his lifeline and moved up another ten feet. Pulling his tethered ax up hand over hand, he grasped the handle and sliced off a thick bough. With a crack and a swish it hurtled down past the peeler. Tom cut another, then two more, let them twist their way to the ground. He hoped one of the limbs would convince Vergil to back down the trunk. Three more limbs and he began to pray that a branch would sweep the peeler down along with it. Verg was only twenty or thirty feet up; Tom was sixty feet from the top.
He heard O’Malley yelling something that sounded like “soap.” No, rope. The Irishman was trying to lasso Price and pull him off the tree.
Twice the lariat grazed the peeler’s shoulder, but he hunched his body close to the tree and the rope fell away. Tom groaned. He would have to climb higher, top the crown and hope the kickback would knock Price away.
Lord God, I don’t want to kill him. I just want to live through this!
Two more hitches in his line brought him fifty feet below the tip. It’d have to be enough. The closer Price got, the more the tree shook. He hauled up the ax and started his undercut.
The tree wobbled. Tom dropped the ax and pulled up the saw. He put his back into his strokes and heard the trunk start to creak. The tree swayed under him.
Just a few more clean pulls…
A sharp snap told him the fall was imminent. “Timber!” he bellowed. His voice echoed back at him from across the canyon. He dropped the saw, flipped the lifeline down a few feet, then scrambled down so his head was below the saw cut in case the top kicked. Another car-rack and then a loud groaning sound filled the air. Tom set his spikes as deep as he could, wrapped his arms around the bark and held on.
The thickly branched crown twisted off the top with a ripping noise and plunged downward. The parent tree jerked, then began snapping violently back and forth. Tom clung tight and prayed.
Below him the severed top screamed through the air and crashed near the base.
Another shout. O’Malley. “Tom,” came the voice again. “Come down, boyo. Whiplash shook Vergil off. He’s out cold.”
“Damn,” Tom muttered. He wanted the man wide-awake so he could beat him into chicken mash. Or fire him. Maybe both.
When the tree stopped shuddering, he flipped his line down a notch and started his descent. In ten hitches his feet hit the ground, and by that time he’d stopped shaking.
He unhitched his line, stepped over his ax and saw, and headed straight for Vergil Price.