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Euroclydon Of The Red Head
by
Soon he became boss of the gang, and could contract for men of his own. There was larger life in the land of resin and pine-logs. No tune in all broad Scotland was so merry as the whirr of the sawmill, when the little flashing ribbon of light runs before the swift-cutting edge of the saw. It made Sylvanus remember the pale sunshine his feet used to make on the tan-coloured sands of North Berwick, when he walked two summers before with May Chisholm, when it was low-water at the spring-tides. But most of all he loved the mills, where he saw huge logs lifted out of the water, slid along the runners, and made to fall apart in clean-cut fragrant planks in a few seconds of time.
“That tree took some hundreds of years to grow, but the buzz-saw turns her into plain deal-boards before you can wink. All flesh is grass,” soliloquised the logger preacher.
A winter in a lumber camp is a time when a man can put in loads of thinking. Dried fish and boiled tea do not atrophy a man’s brain. Loggers do not say much except on Sundays, when they wash their shirts. Even then it was Sylvanus who did most of the talking.
Sometimes during the week a comrade would trudge alongside of him as he went out in the uncomfortable morning.
“That was the frozen truth you gave us on Sunday, I guess!” said one who answered placably to the name of Bob Ridley–or, indeed, to any other name if he thought it was meant for him. “I’ve swore off, parson, and I wrote that afternoon to my old mother.”
Such were the preacher’s triumphs.
Thus Sylvanus Cobb learned his lesson in the College of the Silences, to the accompaniment of the hard clang of the logs roaring down the mountain-side, or the sweeter and more continuous ring of his men’s axes. At night he walked about a long time, silent under the thick-spangled roofing of stars. For in that land the black midnight sky is not thin-sprinkled with glistening pointlets as at home, but wears a very cloth of gold. The frost shrewdly nipped his ears, and he heard the musical sound of the water running somewhere under the ice. A poor hare ran to his feet, pursued by a fox which drew off at sight of him, showing an ugly flash of white teeth.
But all the while, among his quietness of thought, and even in the hours when he went indoors to read to the men as they sat on their rugs with their feet to the fire, he thought oftenest of the walks on the North Berwick sands, and of the important fact that May Chisholm had to stop three times to push a rebellious wisp of ringlets under her hat-brim. Strange are the workings of the heart of a man, and there is generally a woman somewhere who pulls the strings.
Euroclydon laid his axe-handle on the leaves of his Hebrew Bible to keep them from turning in the brisk airs which the late Canadian spring brought into the long log-hut, loosening the moss in its crevices. The scent of seaweed on a far-away beach came to him, and a longing to go back possessed him. He queried within himself if it were possible that he could ever settle down to the common quiet of a Scottish parish, and decided that, under certain conditions, the quiet might be far from commonplace. So he threw his bundle over his shoulder, when the camp broke up in the beginning of May, and took the first steamer home.
His first visit was to North Berwick, and there on the sands between the East Terrace and the island promontory which looks towards the Bass, where the salt water lies in the pools and the sea-pinks grow between them, he found May Chisholm walking with a young man. Sylvanus Cobb looked the young man over. He had a pretty moustache but a weak mouth.
“I can best that fellow, if I have a red head!” said Sylvanus, with some of the old Euroclydon fervour.
And he did. Whether it was the red head, of which each individual hair stood up automatically, the clear blue eyes, which were the first thing and sometimes the only thing that most women saw in his face, or the shoulders squared with the axe, that did it, May Chisholm only knows. You can ask her, if you like. But most likely it was his plain, determined way of asking for what he wanted–an excellent thing with women. But, any way, it is a fact that, before eighteen months had gone by, Sylvanus Cobb was settled in the western midlands of Scotland, with the wife whose tangles of hair were only a trifle less distracting than they used to be between the East Cliff and Tantallon. And this is a true tale.