Билл Пронзини - The Cemetery Man and Other Darkside Tales

He had two kinds of reputation. First, as a demon logger — a man who could get timber cut faster and turned into board lumber quicker than any other boss jack. And second, as a ruthless cold-hearted son of a bitch who bullied his men, worked them like animals, and wasn’t above using fists, peaveys, calks, and any other handy weapon if the need arose. Rumor had it that he—

What’s that, boy? No, I ain’t going to say any more about that chute just yet. I’ll get to it in good time. You just keep your pants on and let me tell this my own way.

Well, rumor had it that McIntosh was offering top dollar because it was the only way he could get jacks to work steady for him. That and his reputation didn’t bother me one way or another. I’d dealt with hard cases before, and have since. So I determined to see what Saginaw Tom and his chute and Black Mountain were all about.

I quit the Coos Bay outfit and traveled down to McIntosh’s settlement on the Klamath. Turned out to be bigger than I’d expected. The sawmill was twice the size of the one up at Coos Bay, and there was a blacksmith shop, a box factory, a hotel and half a dozen boardinghouses, two big stores, a school, two churches, and a lodge hall. McIntosh may have been a son of a bitch, but he sure did know how to get maximum production and how to provide for his men and their families.

I hired on at the mill, and the next day a crew chief named Lars Nilson drove me and another new man, a youngster called Johnny Cline, upriver to the Black Mountain camp. Long, hot trip in the back of a buckboard, up steep grades and past gold-mining claims strung along the rough-water river. Nilson told us there was bad blood between McIntosh and those miners. They got gold out of the sand by trapping silt in wing dams, and they didn’t like it when McIntosh’s river drivers built holding cribs along the banks or herded long chains of logs downstream to the cribs and then on to the mill. There hadn’t been any trouble yet, but it could erupt at any time; feelings were running high on both sides.

Heat and flies and hornets deviled us all the way up into scrub timber: lodgepole, jack, and yellow pine. The bigger trees — white sugar pine — grew higher up, and what fine old trees they were. Clean-growing, hardly any underbrush. Huge trunks that rose up straight from brace roots close to four feet broad, and no branches on ’em until thirty to forty feet above the ground. Every lumberman’s dream, the cut-log timber on that mountain.

McIntosh was taking full advantage of it too. His camp was twice the size of most — two enormous bunkhouses, a cookshack, a barn and blacksmith shop, clusters of sheds and shanties and heavy wagons, corrals full of work horses and oxen. Close to a hundred men, altogether. And better than two dozen big wheels, stinger-tongue and slip-tongue both—

What’s a big wheel? Just that, boy — wheels ten and twelve feet high, some made of wood and some of iron, each pair connected by an axle that had a chain and a long tongue poking back from the middle. Four-horse team drew each one. Man on the wheel crew dug a shallow trench under one or two logs, depending on their size; loader pushed the chain through it under the logs and secured it to the axle; driver lunged his team ahead and the tongue slid forward and yanked on the chain to lift the front end of the logs off the ground. Harder the horses pulled, the higher the logs hung. When the team came to a stop, the logs dropped and dragged. Only trouble was, sometimes they didn’t drop and drag just right — didn’t act as a brake like they were supposed to — and the wheel horses got their hind legs smashed. Much safer and faster to use a steam lokey to get cut logs out of the woods, but laying narrow-gauge track takes time and so does ordering a lokey and having it packed in sections up the side of a wilderness mountain. McIntosh figured to have his track laid and a lokey operating by the following spring. Meanwhile, it was the big wheels and the teams of horses and oxen and men that had to do the heavy work.

Now then. The chute — McIntosh’s chute.

First I seen of it was across the breadth of the camp, at the edge of a steep drop-off: the chute head, a big two-level platform built of logs. Cut logs were stacked on the top level as they came off the big wheels, by jacks crowhopping over the deck with cant hooks. On the lower level other jacks looped a cable around the foremost log, and a donkey engine wound up the cable and hauled the log forward into a trough built at the outer edge of the platform. You follow me so far?

Well, that was all I could see until Nilson took Johnny Cline and me over close to the chute head. From the edge of the drop-off you had a miles-wide view — long snaky stretches of the Klamath, timberland all the way south to the California border. But it wasn’t the vista that had my attention; it was the chute itself. An engineering marvel, all right, that near took my breath away.

McIntosh and his crew had cut a channel in the rocky hillside straight on down to the riverbank, and lined the sides and bottom with flat-hewn logs — big ones at the sides and smaller ones on the bottom, all worn glass-smooth. Midway along was a short trestle that spanned an outcrop and acted as a kind of speed-brake. Nothing legendary about that chute: it was the longest built up to that time, maybe the longest ever. More than twenty-six hundred feet of timber had gone into the construction, top to bottom.

While I was gawking down at it, somebody shouted, “Clear back!” and right away Nilson herded Johnny Cline and me onto a hummock to one side. At the chute head a chain of logs was lined and ready, held back by an iron bar wedged into the rock. Far down below one of the river crew showed a white flag, and as soon as he did the chute tender yanked the iron bar aside and the first log shuddered through and down.

After a hundred feet or so, it began to pick up speed. You could hear it squealing against the sides and bottom of the trough. By the time it went over the trestle and into the lower part of the chute, it was a blur. Took just eighteen seconds for it to drop more than eight hundred feet to the river, and when it hit the splash was bigger than a barn and the fan of water drenched trees on both banks —

“Hell!” young Poley interrupted. “I don’t believe none of that. You’re funning us, Cass.”

“Be damned if I am. What don’t you believe?”

“None of it. Chute made of twenty-six hundred feet of timber, logs shooting down over eight hundred feet in less than twenty seconds, splashes bigger than a barn...”

“Well, it’s the gospel truth. So’s the rest of it. Sides and bottom a third of the way down were burned black from the friction — black as coal. On cold mornings you could see smoke from the logs going down: that’s how fast they traveled. Went even faster when there was frost, so the river crew had to drive spikes in the chute’s bottom end to slow ’em up. Even so, sometimes a log would hit the river with enough force to split it in half, clean, like it’d gone through a buzz saw. But I expect you don’t believe none of that, either.”

Poley grunted. “Not hardly.”

I said, “Well, I believe it, Cass. Man can do just about anything he sets his mind to, like you said, if he wants it bad enough. That chute must of been something. I can sure see why it was the damnedest thing you ever saw.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Cass said.

“What? But you said—”

“No, I didn’t. McIntosh’s chute was a wonder but not the damnedest thing I ever saw.”

“Then what is?” Poley demanded.

“If I wasn’t interrupted every few minutes, you’d of found out by now.” Cass glared at him. “You going to be quiet and let me get to it or you intend to keep flapping your gums so this here story takes all night?”