“The real purpose of the lumberjack’s corks . . . only came to light when the drive was ‘in’ and the veteran had retired to the nearest saloon to celebrate his return. Here it was you could see the deadly skill with which the lumberjack, as he entered the door, was wont to set his heel down firmly on the pine floor, twist his foot dexterously, and rip out an entire board without batting an eye. After a couple of hearty jolts of bottled sunshine, one snort of which has been known to blow a man’s collar buttons a distance of forty feet, it was his custom to kick a two-foot splinter out of the wooden bar rail just to hear it crack. Every kind of hardwood obtainable has been tried out in backwoods saloons for bar rails and floors, but nothing grows that can withstand the joyful ravages of a lumberjack on vacation. Some years ago an American genius retired to the seclusion of his laboratory, and when he came up for air he had the plans and specifications of an entirely new thing in that line. He had invented the modem brass bar rail which cannot be splintered, and it is my personal opinion that the decline and fall of the old-time lumberjack dates from this event. The brass bar has done more to tame the lumberjack and cramp his style than any other one thing, including prohibition. It practically ruined him. If you’re a logger there’s no use in getting drunk if you can’t break something.
“. . . If a man had gone into the woods early in the fall and worked right through on the job he sometimes had as much as $150 in the spring, $149 of which he immediately spent for rum. The remaining dollar was sometimes used in the purchase of a new hat.
“If he was a good, careful buyer and a conservative drinker his winter wages sometimes lasted three or four days, but most of the boys were not conservative. They were, on the other hand, astonishingly willing, not to say eager, carousers, and it was not unusual for the old-timer to wake up without a dime the day after he was paid off, to find himself in a very poorly equipped jail, where he usually spent the summer.
“When our hero started on a spree he did it in a wholehearted manner that left no room for doubt in the minds of the citizenry as to where he was going. The police force never had any doubts about the matter, either, although it was the custom of the local gendarmes to leave the city when the drive struck town so as not to get involved in anything. Experienced lumberjacks usually confined themselves to misdemeanors and the lighter crimes—not counting manslaughter, as this wasn’t considered much of a crime—in the hope that they could get out of jail in time to go to work in the fall, but now and then even an old-timer was apt to overestimate his capacity and get a little too rough with the mayor or some other personage of power, with the result that he got nicked for six months. This was usually disastrous, as by the time he got out all the good jobs were gone and he would be forced to ship out as a bullcook for the winter and make the last ten miles into camp on snowshoes.”
People in Bend are glad to tell the inquiring visitor that Clark Gable once worked in a mill here, and that Don Blanding was a cashier in one of the banks. The third time I heard this last item I ventured to remark (it was in the library, a charming building of native woods, suited admirably to the land out of which it rises) that Mr. Blanding might better have remained behind the bars of a cashier’s cage instead of fluttering middle-aged ladies with his romantic banalities. This sentiment seemed to endear me to the member of the library staff to whom I spoke. We fell at once into intimate conversation and she offered to telephone Klondike Kate and ask if I might come to call. Unfortunately “Aunt” Kate was not in town, but I learned some further details about her. Aunt Kate, it seems, is the firemen’s friend. Whenever a fire siren sounds in Bend she puts on the coffeepot, knowing that her pals will come past when the blaze is out. The firemen’s brass band, in return for this service, meets her at the station whenever she returns from any junkets to the world outside. She loves stories about herself and frequently visits the library to inquire if anything new has appeared about her.
Bend’s outstanding landmark is the isolated bit of mountain called Pilot Butte, from which the local hotel has taken its name. The Pilot Butte Inn is one of the most comfortable and pleasant hotels in all this eastern Oregon land. The food is good, really good, and there is a genial air of comfort and even of a sort of bourgeois, bad-taste, expansive luxury which soothes the spirit at the end of a long day of naked open spaces. The building itself rambles pleasantly across a green lawn. It is built fittingly of local stone and wood. Inside are rooms full of comfortable soft furniture and some really fearful and wonderful “art.” There is a very handsome large piece in one of the foyers, setting forth, as the clerk told me—not without a certain embarrassment—The Temptation of Hercules. Hercules—foreshortened in a manner that might well breed envy in Picasso—gazes at his own face in a mirror held by a buxom blonde. What there might have been tempting to Hercules in his own face is a subject I did not take up with the clerk; but his club and the aggressive draping of his tiger skin indicate that he is not going to linger in spite of lures. In the dining room there is also A Large Picture. This is of a lady, in flowing white garments, with her head resting on the base of an organ and a broken flute at her feet. This is St. Cecilia, symbolically represented as forsaking worldly music (the flute) for celestial music (the organ). I hope with all my heart that neither of these fanciful conceits is ever removed from the walls.
Bend has some very conservative inhabitants who live along the river and if you meet them and no others, visit the library, and stay at the Pilot Butte Inn, you may never see the other face of Bend’s coin. But it does have another face. I sat for several hours beside GILBRIDES PASTIME— MIXERS, HOT DOGS, COFFEE and saw this other side. Old drunks held rambling conversations bristling with non sequiturs; making shrewd lewd comments about a recent drowning in a nearby lake. A young woman in a fetching get-up of pink cotton slacks and black cowboy hat with a cord under the chin went by on mysterious errands. At the end of one of her brief journeys she entered Gilbrides and took a great many heavy clinking silver dollars out of a cigar box. A synthetic cowboy, with incomparable languorous grief, sang (Drop in a nickel for this one!) “You left me in sorrow, you drifted away.” All Gilbrides’ habitués found this a most moving sentiment presumably. I heard nothing else in the time I sat at the curb.
CHAPTER III
Among the Basques with a Scotchman
When we went to visit the Basques in Jordan Valley we stopped in Vale to pick up the judge of Malheur County to take with us as guide and raconteur. Judge David Graham from “Auld Glesca on the Clyde” over forty years ago, and proud of it, is a tall man with a slight stoop and the burriest of Scotch accents. He obligingly changed into riding trousers and boots, took his overcoat and a safety razor and set out with us.
All the way down and back he never stopped talking and we were glad he didn’t. Although Vale, Oregon, lies in the midst of one of those open white patches on the map that I so enjoy looking at, the judge of this remote county had read, apparently, every book of any worth published in English. He began young and has kept at it ever since. As we rode he said, looking off to the right: “When I first came out here from Scotland, just a young laddie tending my uncle’s sheep, I lost Nicholas Nickleby on the ridge between Juntura and Drewsey.” I looked. The “ridge” appeared to be a stretch of some seven rolling hills. “Carrying everything I had in a flour sack,” he said, “those were the days when . . .”
He was off. “When” so many things: Sheep coming in to take the place of cattle; life getting tough in towns like Lakeview; memories of “cat houses” in Ontario run by a cross-eyed blonde named Trixie Bennett, alias Rose Hanley, and her villainous French boy friend. Yarns and more yarns, and swift telling comment on the things we were seeing.
“Old woman lives here. Great rock collector. No children and every day’s the same to her.” Of a man, disappearing with swift slinking motion into a shack beside the road: “Murderer, but we can’t pin it on him. . . . Murdered his partner in a mine fight.” “No, Bob wasn’t immoral, just non-moral; been among livestock all his life and