The Friends of Meager Fortune Read Online Free

Besides, he would trust no one else with the pay orders, or orders at large. Will was loyal to his father’s memory to the point of obsession. Though the Tote Road trailed off and was covered by crust a foot down, almost impossible to see, and the wood path he finally followed was not the Tote Road the portager used, but an old one the Jamesons’ first horses once hauled a supply sled up, he still made it without rest, which many grown men could not do.
    He attained the camp at dark. And after resting and looking into the smoke-filled faces of both young and old, all looking the same in the traces of camp light, all smelling of pine poles and socks, he got to the business at hand. He took the scaler’s measures, and then the pay sheets. Seeing a discrepancy, he ordered the men about him.
    “Dan Auger.”
    Auger looked at him.
    “You’ve had three days out in the last fourteen, and so should be paid three days less.”
    “It comes at the end of the year—if he don’t make it up on the drive, which he always do,” Reggie Glidden said. “So I put in now—it will turn on the same dime.”
    But Will showed fury at this, and told them of his obligation coming on the back of their neglected duty.
    Saying simply: “Dan Auger, you’re to go home.”
    Everyone laughed, more like a titter, and looked at one another. Reggie looked at Will curiously, but it was his best friend and he knew him well enough.
    They stood about him, in hats and coats and boots that people much like Lula Brower said “were worn until they rotted off them.” And they would rot, and many would die in them. Of course the pleasantries of minor middle-class life allowed this assessment.
    There was not another man there who did not think Dan Auger was the best man in the woods that year. Worse, he had come in here out of the same respect for Will’s father that Will himself had.
    “Dan Auger, I said you are to go out—I will not be paying a man for six who worked three.”
    Will’s task was finished. Abruptly, with no lies and no hesitation. He stood in the middle of grown men who were having their supper of pork and potatoes that those loyal Clydesdales had hauled in by the portager, and declined everything himself but tea. Glidden, to soften it, told Auger it was late, and asked him to stay until morning. But Auger, a man almost his father’s age, fired a look of contempt at Will and left though the wind was howling at the door, saying: “Yer father was a man. No man questioned me before—no man does it now.”
    His person soon obliterated by the sound of snow.
    “If he finds his track he will be okay,” Reggie decided. Other men said nothing. It was a hard thing, the woods, and harder a boss who makes a mistake.
    Will remained utterly calm. He sat by himself watching them. Except for Reggie he would not be their friend. Still, he admired them, and wanted to be like them—where no inclemency or danger could cow them. (A romantic view to be sure—many were terrified of the woods, and swallowed that terror because they needed money for their families.)
    Still, Will had proved himself at danger before. He knew there was not a man among them who could not be a hero, and he knew in his wild heart he was to be as great as any.
    He drank the dregs of the tea and went to sleep.
    Reggie sat alone that night at the camp table, silent and worried that this act would cause something against them.
    But the next morning, without sleep himself, he was the first to get the men up for work.
    Back in town, Will took the pay sheets to his mother—spoke of the greatness of the teamsters they had and told an off-color joke.
    “Mom, did you hear about the queer bear?”
    “What?”
    “He laid his pa on the table.”
    Without a word his mother listened, smiled at the joke, and then told him to wash up for supper. Without a word the clock ticked and the snow started to fall out of an iron-gray sky.
    It was on that winter night, long past supper hour, when a