The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards Page B

frozen snow, Gravellier and Nolan came out. A few of the two sleds were already loaded, a few weren’t.
    Owen helped harness the Clydesdales for Nolan. It took five men to dig his two sled free from a hard night’s crust of snow and get it turned. The two sled weighed almost twelve hundred pounds before it was loaded, and it ran on slick runners with a great timber and block and chains in the middle. One of those chains could be wrapped about the crazy wheel, a contraption welded to a tree that would stop the sled on the downhill run if anything went wrong. Some of Gravellier’s men used the crazy wheel. Nolan’s men did not—but on the devil’s back there was nothing to attach a wheel to.
    “Who is lead teamster?” Gravellier said, throwing the question back over his shoulder, into the dark smelling now of back bacon and tea.
    “You will be, if you don’t mind,” Owen said.
    Nolan looked at his boss. His happy-go-lucky expression never wavered, though his eyes showed less mirth. Nolan was certain of his position and did not like being challenged. This was as true with his friends as his enemies—for anyone to tell him that his best friends Richardson and Trethewey were better teamsters was enough to make him mute for two days.
    Owen was aware, and so were they, that any of these men could die, and that to haul for four to five months from this position, over a mountain, it was almost a certainty someone would be injured. And that further to this thought, they were already predicting calamity in town. So the bottles he had found last night in the bear hides he left to the designs of those who put them there, the beer hidden from him in the storeroom too.
    After breakfast Richardson jumped aboard the Clydesdales heading out behind Gravellier and the Belgians. Miss Maggie Wade and Mr. Stewart teamed by Nolan. Then Colson and Davies and Choyce.
    Two hours later, just as sunlight was flushing cold against the far ridges and flaring red on the one-paned window, the Belgians came back with the first load—six feet higher than the heads of the horses, which seemed dwarfed and puny—all big logs, placed vertically but flattened like an accordion squeezebox toward the base. That made it square and stable for the teamster and the horses to pull. The great two sleds almost disappeared under the weight of the wood. Each load was supported by heavy cross-chains.
    This would be the best Jameson cut and haul since long before the war.
    It was still just light and they moved past the hovels as silent as a nineteenth-century painting of some other place and time—heavy with logs and moving under a fresh snowfall, the very essence of romance those painted pictures seemed to illustrate.
    They had to come off a mountain with these logs. It was what Will, when he was only fifteen and in argumentative fashion with his father, just before Byron died, said he would never allow his men to do. He would quit before he worked men on Good Friday Mountain, no matter how the trees grew up there.
    The Jamesons now had no choice. So they sent this second son high, to do what the favorite son warned against a few years before he died.
    With Lear tucked into his parka pocket and his chest still half bare, and the light from a lantern he carried lighting his shoulder bone as he swung it forward, Owen yelled, in a voice almost too shrill, as if he was giving something away about the hidden worry in his nature: “We have much to catch up with if we are to get our fuckin’ pay!”
    And he swung the lantern in the black air, as snow still came down on the exposed shoulder, and melted there against a patch of white skin. He walked forward swinging the lantern, as if at a runaway train. But this train was on eight sturdy legs, buckled by harness and twitching in the cold.
    To get them down such a steep run, Owen ordered Stretch (Tomcat) Tomkins, along with some swampers, to get out with the shovels and sand and chaff the downhill as smooth as they