"Now," said Jack softly, "be more careful, my friend, or next time I'll
_hit_ you." Or of a little Irishman who shouted to his friends
about to pull a big man from pounding the life quite out of him, "Let
him alone! let him alone! I may be on top myself in a few minutes!" And
of Dave Walker, who fought to a standstill with his bare fists alone
five men who had sworn to kill him. And again of that doughty knight of
the peavie who, when attacked by an axe, waved aside interference with
the truly dauntless cry, "Leave him be, boys; there's an axe between
us!"
I tried to sketch, too, the drive, wherein a dozen times in an hour
these men face death with a smile or a curse--the raging untamed river,
the fierce rush of the logs, the cool little human beings poising with
a certain contemptuous preciosity on the edge of destruction as they
herd their brutish multitudes.
There was Jimmy, the river boss, who could not swim a stroke, and who
was incontinently swept over a dam and into the boiling back-set of the
eddy below. Three times, gasping, strangling, drowning, he was carried
in the wide swirl of the circle, sometimes under, sometimes on top.
Then his knee touched a sand-bar, and he dragged himself painfully
ashore. He coughed up a quantity of water, and gave vent to his
feelings over a miraculous escape. "Damn it all!" he wailed, "I lost my
peavie!"
"On the Paint River drive one spring," said I, "a jam formed that
extended up river some three miles.
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