Riding the Flume

by Patricia Curtis Pfitsch

  The land sloped precipitously up toward the pass, and she forced herself to walk faster. The noise was intense, but so far, she hadn’t seen any evidence of logging, only the trampled road where they had moved the equipment. The trees still stood tall, crowding out the sunlight.

  But as she reached the top of the pass and looked down into the opposite valley, she saw that here the world had changed. On Sunday there had been peace in this place. Birds called to each other. Squirrels chattered. The trees had been so tall and close together that they had blocked out the sunlight. The forest floor had been covered with a soft carpet of old roots and pine needles.

  Now the place looked like the aftermath of a hurricane. Naked tree trunks lay all tumbled on the hillsides; some had fractured as they fell, some had been dynamited into more manageable pieces. The forest floor had been chopped and carved by the weight of the fallen trees chained together and dragged down the skidroad to the chute and then on down the mountain to the mill.

  Carrie’s tree was still untouched, but where on Sunday it had been surrounded by a thick forest, now it stood alone amid a rubble of wood chips and twisted branches. The loggers had gathered brush and the willowy trunks of saplings into an enormous pile that stretched out from the base of the sequoia—it looked like a kind of shaggy shadow of the tree. This was what the loggers called the featherbed—they hoped it would cushion the tree when it hit the earth and stop it from shattering. It worked, sometimes.

  Francie clenched her fists, trying to ignore the sadness that threatened to overwhelm her. “Look for Granger,” she told herself. “He’s the one who can stop this.” She scanned the valley, searching among the busy figures for his strange ape-shaped body and balding head.

  She saw him at the same time that he saw her—he shook the shoulder of the man he was speaking with and then pointed up to where she was standing. He was close enough that she could read the expression on his face—he certainly wasn’t happy to see her there.

  Well, she thought, I didn’t expect him to be happy. She took a few steps down the path into the valley and looked at Granger again. He was holding up his hand, motioning her to stop. She did, and he went back to his conversation—obviously something about the giant train of logs they were getting ready to send down the chute.

  Francie waited a few moments and then realized that Granger wasn’t going to come up to speak to her. He just didn’t want her in the valley. “Well,” she said, “that’s just too bad.” She headed down the path again.

  A shout she could hear above the donkey engine made her look up. Granger was yelling at her and pointing back up to the pass. He wanted her to go back.

  Francie watched him for a moment, but it was clear that he wasn’t moving toward her. So she smiled politely at him and took another step forward.

  That did it. His face turned dark with anger. He jammed his hat onto his head and marched toward her, raising dust with each furious step he took. Francie imagined she could almost hear his feet pounding in the dirt.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Miss Cavanaugh?” Granger roared when he got close enough for her to hear. “Children are absolutely forbidden on the logging site.” He grabbed her shoulders, spun her around, and shoved her back toward the pass. “You will leave immediately, and you can be sure that I will report this to your father.”

  Francie stumbled a few steps up the path before she could stop herself. Then she whirled back to face him, as furious as he. “This land doesn’t belong to the lumber company,” she shouted back at him. “It belongs to us, and if you don’t get your men off our land immediately, I’m going to call the sheriff!” She heard her own words as if they’d been spoken by someone else, and bit her lip. Now she was in for it. No well brought up young lady ever spoke like that!

  Granger stared at her. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “How old are you, Miss Cavanaugh?” And his voice sounded almost kind.

  Francie rubbed her shoulder where his fingers had gripped her hard enough to bruise. “Fifteen,” she said. “But that doesn’t matter. I—”

  He interrupted her. “You go home to your parents and stop trying to meddle in affairs that don’t concern you.”

  The noise from the logging had lessened somewhat. Francie looked down and saw that some of the loggers had stopped their work to watch them. She closed her eyes, as the heat rose in her cheeks. What am I doing? Father will be so angry. But out of the corner of her eye, she saw that one of the loggers was Charlie, and somehow his presence gave her courage. She turned back to Granger. “This does concern me,” she said more quietly. “I found the tree. If my father hadn’t told you about it, you wouldn’t be here now.”

  “That doesn’t mean you own this land,” Granger answered her with exaggerated patience.

  “No, sir,” said Francie, trying belatedly to be more polite, “but this does.” She held up the tattered oilskin.

  “And what is that,” Granger said, as if he were talking to a very young child. He looked around at the loggers who were watching them, grinned, and shrugged as if he didn’t know why he was wasting time talking to this youngster.

  “It’s a will,” she said, stepping one more step away from him. “And the deed to this section of land.” And she had the satisfaction of seeing Granger’s superior expression fall into confusion.

  “Where did you find that?” he growled. He was trying for the same haughty tone, but Francie could hear the sudden current of uncertainty in his voice.

  “In the rubble of Old Robert’s fireplace,” she said, gesturing behind her in the direction of the burned cabin. “The deed is made out to Robert Granger, and the will is in favor of Mary Carolyn Cavanaugh. My sister.” She paused. “I think Robert Granger must be related to you,” she added. “Is he?”

  Granger took a step toward Francie. “Let me see that,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Francie saw Charlie’s worried face as he glanced up at them. He began to move purposefully up the hill. She looked at Granger. Should she give him the will? Would he give it back to her?

  “Robert Granger was my brother.” Granger tried to grab the packet from her. “Give me those papers!” She stepped back, avoiding his hands, but she realized she didn’t have any choice. He was an adult, and as he had pointed out, she was only a child. She took the deed out of the pouch and handed it to him but kept the will. “Old Robert must have gotten this land long before the lumber company was here,” she said, noticing that Granger’s hands unfolding the paper were not quite steady.

  He read the deed in silence. Francie watched Charlie come up the path and stop about fifteen feet from where they were standing. He raised his eyebrows and Francie shook her head ever so slightly.

  “This deed is no good,” Granger said. “Let me see the will.”

  Francie felt her face go hot again. The words burst out of her. “How do you know it’s no good?”

  Granger’s face turned almost purple. Spit foamed at the corners of his mouth. “Give me that will!” he sputtered. He lunged at Francie.

  Francie spun around and took off running. She heard Granger’s heavy breathing, almost like a growl, and the sudden exclamations of the loggers.

  “Come back here!” Granger’s voice was right behind her, his breath coming in gasps. She lifted her skirts with one hand, gripped the will tightly in the other hand, and sprinted up the hill.

  “Run, Francie!” Charlie cheered her on. “You’ve got him!”

  As she reached the pass, she glanced back. Charlie was waving. “We’re starting to cut tomorrow!” he shouted.

  Granger was still chasing her—she was only about twenty-five feet ahead of him. She raced across the flat saddle between the high peaks, and followed the path into the forest on the south side of the pass. It was downhill almost all the way into town now, she thought. That made it easier for her to run, but it would be easier for Granger, too. She could hear his pounding feet and ragged breaths, but she couldn’t tell how far ahead she was, an
d she wouldn’t take the time to look back.

  “I wish I could take off my boots,” she said between clenched teeth. But there wasn’t time for that, either. She forced her legs to move even faster down the trail, past the dogwood that marked Old Robert’s cabin. Now the track got steep and slippery. Francie veered off the path and ran almost silently in the pine needles beside it where there was less chance of slipping. The steep incline forced her to slow down, and she let her breath fall into the familiar rhythm. She could no longer hear Granger’s feet or his harsh breathing. “But I can’t stop,” she said.

  She was past the steepest part of the trail and running on the flat at the north end of Connor’s Basin when she heard Granger’s shout. Without meaning to, she glanced back. He was at least a quarter mile behind her, right at the steepest and slipperiest part of the track. Suddenly his feet flew out from underneath him and he fell. His shout turned into a high-pitched yell, almost a scream. For an instant, Francie stopped, watching him tumble over and over down the hill toward her.

  “No!” she shouted aloud, and took off again. But she couldn’t stop herself from looking back once more. In a quick glimpse, she thought she saw Granger pulling himself to his feet at the bottom of the hill. She faced forward and put on even more speed as she wove her way between the giant sequoia stumps in the basin. She didn’t stop until she reached the road into town.

  By this time Granger had been left far behind, she was sure of it. She leaned against a tree by the side of the road and let her breath return to normal. She glanced back now and then, but from the quiet she knew he was no longer following her. She looked at the oilskin packet in her hand. Granger had the deed, but she still had the will.

  She fingered it. Who would know if it were legal? Father?

  “But I can’t show it to him,” she said. “What if he takes it back to Granger?”

  Would Mrs. Mansfield, the would-be senator’s wife, help her? “Not likely,” she said, sniffing. She wouldn’t defy her husband, any more than Francie’s mother would defy Father. “Thank goodness I haven’t got a husband yet,” Francie whispered. She grinned ruefully. The way she’d been acting, it would be a long while before anyone would want to marry her!

  What about Mr. Court? Francie folded her lips down into a thin line. A lot of help he’d been so far! He hadn’t paid any attention to her letter anyway. “If he got it,” Francie added, startling a robin that had just perched on the branch above her head. He flew off, chirping his “cheerio” call. Francie thought it sounded as if the bird were laughing at her.

  She sighed and began the walk back to town, trying not to think of how angry her mother and father would be by now. “It must be almost noon,” she said, searching the sky. But low clouds were now covering the sun—she couldn’t tell what time it was.

  “Tomorrow,” she whispered. “Less than twenty-four hours.” If only she could walk into Mr. Court’s office in St. Joseph and plunk the will down on his desk. Then he’d have to do something.

  “But how could I get to St. Joseph?” The stage didn’t come until tomorrow—much too late. On horseback? It took most of a day to ride down the winding and sometimes treacherous road out of the mountains to St. Joseph, but Francie considered borrowing her father’s mare and trying to make the trip. “I probably can’t get in any more trouble than I’m in now,” she said aloud. But then she remembered that the mare was lame. And borrowing anyone else’s horse was truly unthinkable. “That would be stealing,” she said, and not worth it, since the chances of getting to St. Joseph in time on horseback were slim, anyway.

  If only she could jump on a bundle of boards and ride the flume down to St. Joseph, she thought. That would truly be the fastest way—riding the flume. She laughed out loud, imagining Charlie’s face if she indeed rode the flume to St. Joseph.

  What a crazy idea! She’d only heard of two men riding the flume successfully—those two last summer. They had been arrested as soon as they got to St. Joseph. Two others had tried before that. One had ended up in the hospital, and the other man had been killed—he’d fallen where the flume scaffolding was one hundred feet from the boulder-strewn hillside.

  “But that man was drunk,” Francie remembered. O’Brien and Murphy, the two who made it all the way to St. Joseph, were both small, wiry men, fast on their feet and with good balance. O’Brien was a wrestler—nobody had ever beaten him in a match. And Murphy always won the footraces held every Fourth of July.

  “Charlie thought I could beat him,” Francie said, thinking that she was also fast on her feet. And she had good balance, too. Carrie had said so in her diary. Her heart began to beat in slow, painful thuds. Was it such a crazy idea? Did she dare try it? Could she ride the flume to St. Joseph?

  She glanced at the sky again and rubbed her shaking hand on her skirt. “Is there any other way to get there in time?” she asked herself. Not by horseback, and not by stagecoach. And certainly not walking—it was forty miles to St. Joseph.

  Maybe someone else could go on horseback. She could send the will and a letter explaining everything. She held the oilskin pouch on her palm, and then clutched it to her. She couldn’t trust it to anybody else. There was the telegraph office, but even if the operator would let her telegraph to Mr. Court—“Not likely,” she grunted—what if Mr. Court ignored her telegram the way he’d ignored her letter? She needed to talk to him, face-to-face.

  Thoughts spun around in Francie’s head so fast she felt dizzy. Was riding the flume the only way to get to St. Joseph? Could she do it?

  “They’d never let me near it,” Francie whispered, knowing that the mill workers in Connorsville wouldn’t let her even enter the yard. She imagined sneaking into the yard after dark, but she discarded the notion immediately. “The courthouse would be closed,” she said, “and so would the newspaper office.”

  Somehow those thoughts calmed her. “It’s impossible,” she said, firmly tucking the pouch into the bodice of her dress. “Even if I could ride it, I won’t have the chance.”

  She had begun walking back to town when she remembered Two Creek Mill. It had been abandoned years earlier when the loggers moved their operations to the opposite end of Connor’s Basin. But at one time, Two Creek Mill had been the beginning of the flume line.

  Francie’s steps got slower, until she was standing absolutely still in the middle of the dirt road. “I’ll just go look at it,” she said. “I won’t get on—I’ll just look. There probably won’t even be a flume boat there.”

  • Chapter Seventeen •

  But there was an old flume boat. In fact, there were two of them sitting beside the flume. The V-shaped track was close to the ground here, built low so the mill workers could slide the bundles of boards into the water without too much trouble. She shut out all thoughts and watched the clear water in the track swirl by—the day was warm and it looked as inviting as a cool mountain stream.

  She placed one foot on the X-shaped trestle that formed the flume scaffolding, stepped up and put her hand into the water, cupping her palm to feel the strength of the current. The land here was flat, so the water tugged only gently on her fingers. On the mountainside’s steep grades, however, she knew that the water ran faster than a steam locomotive.

  “Don’t think about that,” Francie told herself, hopping down from the scaffolding. She bent down to examine the flume boats. They looked like animal drinking troughs with one end missing; they were V-shaped to fit into the flume. A flat board fit just inside the top of the V; that was the seat. Two narrow boards had been nailed crosswise across the top as extra protection to keep the contents of the boat from sliding out. She picked up the splintery end of one boat. It was heavy, but she raised it up about two feet and then dropped it—letting it thump down into the dirt. Then she sat in it, bracing her hips on one side and her feet on the other. She rocked back and forth, trying to push the two boards that formed the V-shape apart, but they held fast. The boat appeared perfectly sound.

  Francie’s cheek
s were burning and her heart was pounding. She traced the outline of the pouch, hidden inside her bodice. Even if she got soaked, the oilskin would protect the will, she thought. “But the boat’s too heavy. I can’t even lift it up into the flume,” she said aloud.

  A sudden gurgle and splash to her right made her turn and look up as a bundle of lumber slid past her heading for St. Joseph. She imagined its trip to St. Joseph, floating down the flume just as logs float down a stream. It would be prodded and pushed by the flume herders, stationed in their little houses along the flume track. But once a load of lumber was put into the flume, not even the flume herders could stop it. She could feel her knees trembling, and she walked across the abandoned mill yard away from the flume. “I can’t do it,” she said. Her eyes filled with tears. They would begin cutting Carrie’s tree tomorrow and nobody would be there to stop them.

  “If only there were another way!” She cried out and the sound of her voice came echoing back to her. “But there isn’t,” she whispered, and she heard no echo of that soft sound.

  Biting her lip she turned back to the flume. “At least I should see if I can get that boat into the flume,” she said. She gritted her teeth, grabbed the edge of the flume boat, and dragged it to the scaffolding. She lifted one end up until the boat stood with one end on the ground—the end in her hands just cleared the edge of the flume track. She hooked her fingers around the end of the boat that rested on the ground, and with a mighty heave, she pushed it up. It rose up in the air like a breaching whale, and then fell forward, resting cross-wise on the flume. The water rushed under it on its way to St. Joseph.

  “I did it!” A rush of pride pushed away her fears. An image of her father’s face crowded into her mind, but she forced it away. “Think only of riding this boat,” she said, wondering if it would buck like an unbroken horse. Well, she had ridden an unbroken horse once, if it came to that. She and Carrie and Charlie had tried to ride Father’s mare before she’d been broken to the saddle. Carrie had borne the brunt of the punishment for that adventure, she remembered. But Francie had stayed on the horse the longest.