A PINE forest is nature's expression of solemnity and solitude.Sunlight,rivers,cascades,people,music,laughter,or dancing could not make it gay.With its unceasing reverberations and its eternal shadows,it is as awful and as holy as a cathedral.
Thirty good fellows working together by day and drinking together by night can keep up but a moody imitation of jollity.Spend twenty-five of your forty years,as Luther Dallas did,in this perennial gloom,and your soul --that which enjoys,aspires,competes --will be drugged as deep as if you had quaffed the cup of oblivion.
Luther Dallas was counted one of the most experienced axe-men in the northern camps.
He could fell a tree with the swift surety of an executioner,and in revenge for his many arboral murders the woodland had taken captive his mind,captured and chained it as Prospero did Ariel.The resounding footsteps of Progress driven on so merci-lessly in this mad age could not reach his fastness.It did not concern him that men were thinking,investigating,inventing.
His senses responded only to the sonorous music of the woods;a steadfast wind ring-ing metallic melody from the pine-tops con-tented him as the sound of the sea does the sailor;and dear as the odors of the ocean to the mariner were the resinous scents of the forest to him.Like a sailor,too,he had his superstitions.He had a presentiment that he was to die by one of these trees,--that some day,in chopping,the tree would fall upon and crush him as it did his father the day they brought him back to the camp on a litter of pine boughs.
One day the gang-boss noticed a tree that Dallas had left standing in a most unwood-manlike manner in the section which was allotted to him.
"What in thunder is that standing there for?"he asked.
Dallas raised his eyes to the pine,tower-ing in stern dignity a hundred feet above them.
"Well,"he said feebly,"I noticed it,but kind-a left it t'the last.""Cut it down to-morrow,"was the response.
The wind was rising,and the tree muttered savagely.Luther thought it sounded like a menace,and turned pale.No trou-ble has yet been found that will keep a man awake in the keen air of the pineries after he has been swinging his axe all day,but the sleep of the chopper was so broken with disturbing dreams that night that the beads gathered on his brow,and twice he cried aloud.He ate his coarse flap-jacks in the morning and escaped from the smoky shanty as soon as he could.
"It'll bring bad luck,I'm afraid,"he muttered as he went to get his axe from the rack.He was as fond of his axe as a soldier of his musket,but to-day he shouldered it with reluctance.He felt like a man with his destiny before him.The tree stood like a sentinel.He raised his axe,once,twice,a dozen times,but could not bring himself to make a cut in the bark.He walked backwards a few steps and looked up.
The funereal green seemed to grow darker and darker till it became black.It was the embodiment of sorrow.Was it not shaking giant arms at him?Did it not cry out in angry challenge?Luther did not try to laugh at his fears;he had never seen any humor in life.A gust of wind had some-way crept through the dense barricade of foliage that flanked the clearing,and struck him with an icy chill.He looked at the sky;the day was advancing rapidly.He went at his work with an energy as deter-mined as despair.The axe in his practised hand made clean straight cuts in the trunk,now on this side,now on that.His task was not an easy one,but he finished it with wonderful expedition.After the chopping was finished,the tree stood firm a moment;then,as the tensely-strained fibres began a weird moaning,he sprang aside,and stood waiting.In the distance he saw two men hewing a log.The axe-man sent them a shout and threw up his arms for them to look.The tree stood out clear and beauti-ful against the gray sky;the men ceased their work and watched it.The vibrations became more violent,and the sounds they produced grew louder and louder till they reached a shrill wild cry.There came a pause,then a deep shuddering groan.The topmost branches began to move slowly,the whole stately bulk swayed,and then shot towards the ground.The gigantic trunk bounded from the stump,recoiled like a cannon,crashed down,and lay conquered,with a roar as of an earthquake,in a cloud of flying twigs and chips.
When the dust had cleared away,the men at the log on the outside of the clearing could not see Luther.They ran to the spot,and found him lying on the ground with his chest crushed in.His fearful eyes had not rightly calculated the distance from the stump to the top of the pine,nor rightly weighed the power of the massed branches,and so,standing spell-bound,watching the descending trunk as one might watch his Nemesis,the rebound came and left him lying worse than dead.
Three months later,when the logs,lopped of their branches,drifted down the streams,the woodman,a human log lopped of his strength,drifted to a great city.Achange,the doctor said,might prolong his life.The lumbermen made up a purse,and he started out,not very definitely knowing his destination.He had a sister,much younger than himself,who at the age of six-teen had married and gone,he believed,to Chicago.That was years ago,but he had an idea that he might find her.He was not troubled by his lack of resources;he did not believe that any man would want for a meal unless he were "shiftless."He had always been able to turn his hand to something.
He felt too ill from the jostling of the cars to notice much of anything on the jour-ney.The dizzy scenes whirling past made him faint,and he was glad to lie with closed eyes.He imagined that his little sister in her pink calico frock and bare feet (as he remembered her)would be at the sta-tion to meet him."Oh,Lu!"she would call from some hiding-place,and he would go and find her.
