rel if quarrel also spelled
fun, drinking deep, and heavy-handed and fearless in their cups. But
each of these rivermen had two or three hundred dollars to "blow" as
soon as possible. The pickings were good. Men got rich very quickly at
this business. And there existed this great advantage in favour of the
dive-keeper: nobody cared what happened to a riverman. You could pound
him over the head with a lead pipe, or drug his drink, or choke him to
insensibility, or rob him and throw him out into the street, or even
drop him tidily through a trap-door into the river flowing conveniently
beneath. Nobody bothered--unless, of course, the affair was so bungled
as to become public. The police knew enough to stay away when the drive
hit town. They would have been annihilated if they had not. The only fly
in the divekeeper's ointment was that the riverman would fight back.

And fight back he did, until from one end of his street to the other he
had left the battered evidences of his skill as a warrior. His constant
heavy lifting made him as hard as nails and as strong as a horse; the
continual demand on his agility in riding the logs kept him active and
prevented him from becoming muscle-bound; in his wild heart was not the
least trace of fear of anything that walked, crawled, or flew. And
he was as tireless as machinery, and apparently as indifferent to
punishment as a man cast in iron.

Add to this a happy and complete disregard of consequences--to himself
or others--of anything he did, and, in his own words, he was a "hard man
to nick."

As yet the season was too early for much joy along Hell's Half-Mile.
Orde's little crew, and the forty or fifty men of the drive that had
preceded him, constituted the rank and file at that moment in town. A
little later, when all the drives on the river should be in, and those
of its tributaries, and the men still lingering at the woods camps, at
least five hundred woods-weary men would be turned loose. Then Hell's
Half-Mile would awaken in earnest from its hibernation. The lights would
blaze from day to day. From its opened windows would blare the music,
the cries of men and women, the shuffle of feet, the noise of fighting,
the shrieks of wild laughter, curses deep and frank and unashamed, songs
broken and interrupted. Crews of men, arms locked, would surge up and
down the narrow sidewalks, their little felt hats cocked one side,
their heads back, their fearless eyes challenging the devil