Adventure Magazine Cover — page 74: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

64 accept it as a sort of talisman, assuring him he would return to the Goulais. So with the signing of the armistice, he headed back for Crozier’s camp, bringing with him the harvest of more than four dis- gruntled years in the army. He found reason to grumble the day he arrived at Crozier’s. Old Peterson, who had been foreman when he left, had gone and in his stead was a swarthy French- Canadian, who went by the name of Jules. “So that’s what a guy gets,isit? Gives his blighted soul away for God and Coun- try and comes back to be bulled around by a dirty frog! Well, we’ll see what we’ll see,” McKendrick addressed the shanty in general. The murmurs of approval that went the rounds of the bunks told him he - had hit upon a popular chord. The men looked on Jules i, a hard man to work under. It was just at the beginning of the Spring drive. The Winter’s cut of timber lay piled high on skidways all up and down Shep- herd’s Creek. With the breaking up of the ice the logs would be sent tumbling down into the creek. . Then the drive would be on in earnest, down Shepherd’s Creek to the Goulais and down the Goulais to Lake Superior, where the huge log-rafts were fash- ioned and towed to the big pulp mills at the “Soo.” Crozier’s was a spruce camp, the price of paper was soaring and there had been a record cut. “With the thaw comin’ on I guess the old ¢reek’ll be kinda choked up with this big cut unless the logs are kept humpin’. Might make it a trifle uneasy for old Peasoup’s jeb if there came a real man-sized jam.” McKendrick’s hint at trouble was seized upon with avidity. ’ Vou tell ’em, Mac!” shouted a voice from the corner of the long shanty. ““An’ seein’ Frenchy knows so all-fired much about runnin’ a crew o’ lumberjohn- nies I s’pose he could teach a class on how to ride a balky log.” One accomplishment McKendsick prided himself on was his ability to ride a log. It is one thing to spin a log in comparatively quiet water and an entirely different matter to ride an obstreperous forty-foot timber that breaks away from a jam and goes crashing down in a surge of boiling foam. McKendrick had done just that, times with- out number, There wasn’t another river- Adventure man in the whole Goulais district who could hold a candle to him at that game. More- over, McKendrick knew it.- So did the others in the shanty. As he had predicted, with the thaw, the drive began in earnest. herd’s Creek the logs went tumbling down the skidways into the slush ice to rise again in the swelling current. The job was to keep them moving. Grumbling as usual, but doing the work of half a dozen men, McKendrick had been going up and down the creek all day; freeing logs from snags, breaking little jams that threatened to choke the creek, spinning a log now and then for sheer joy of it. THE second day of the drive, things did not go so well. Two or three skidways down near the mouth of the creek loosed the logs of their own accord. With no one to see that they were kept straightened out and headed down-streaam into the Goulais, the logs began the usual process of piling up. This, combined with the timber coming down from up above, soon had the whole creek choked. There is a rapid fall just where Shep- herd’s Creek enters the Goulais. Two long natural flumes have been worn by, the cur- rent on either side. In the middle of the stream one rock after another rears ‘its rugged head above the surface. It was just at the beginning of this fall of water the jam occurred. Logs, turned lengthwise, began by gath- ering in others. A little while of that and both flumes were blocked. Then came a giant timber fully three feet across the butt. In some strange whim of the current this big one was caught head-down. Slowly the logs coming down up-ended it. Other logs were woven in from the sides until there - was a wall of spruce extending from bank to bank. When McKendrick, swinging down the creek, sighted it, the big log was reared fully twenty feet in the air. He saw the season’s cut of timber piling up on this huge dam or else slipping aimlessly off into the back- water. Unless the jam was cleared at once the drive would be held up. Hopping from log to log, McKendrick reached the jam and clambered up until he stood on the big up-turned timber. He surveyed the havoc with a practised eye and All along Shep- cS Eomichoo Gol