Cold Crossover by T.R. Kelly

Author:T.R. Kelly [Kelly, T.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crabman Publishing
Published: 2020-12-28T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

5 p.m., Friday, September 28, 1923

Patrick O’Leary, the youngest son of a legendary boundary hunter mysteriously found murdered on the North Skagit, was well aware that the smell of fresh-cut evergreens was now the smell of money. Everyone wanted a share.

“We’ve got people taking our stumps, gyppos cutting into buffers near the creeks,” O’Leary told his fellow members of the MacTavish & Oliver Lumber Company Board of Directors. “A lot of these guys are family men looking for roof shakes on a Sunday. They bring in a buckboard with the wife, pick through a logged section, then transport a few cedar bolts back home. Fine by me.Then we got larger gyppo outfits like Virgil Knight bringing in lots of men, using handcars on track we still have in use. They cut and run anytime they please and just don’t give a damn about the land.”

Henry Oliver peered down at the new timber contracts he had negotiated with the state of Washington and Skagit County and looked out the window at the huge log dump adjacent to company headquarters at Camp One on the Skagit Flats south of North Fork.

“Remember, we don’t own the land, Patrick, only the trees,” Oliver said. “It’s going to be difficult keeping some people off the land. Not only land where we have been but also areas where we plan to go.”

O’Leary unraveled a crispy, cumbersome parchment from a metal cylinder, unrolled the map onto a massive round oak table, and anchored each corner with a civil engineering manual. He surveyed the company’s progress: each logging camp illustrated by a miniature tent, each stretch of track stenciled across the region like tiny black sutures on a giant’s weathered face. Camp Nine was to be the final stop of the Linnbert Railroad Company’s push into southeastern Skagit County; however the timber adjacent to the camp proved to be of excellent quality and so easy to log that the company decided to extend, establishing three more working camps over the next five years. O’Leary rested his left elbow on the map and pointed out to Oliver the tree symbols and stick-like structures representing the logging camps and successful harvests. O’Leary ran a stout index finger along the recently completed stretch of line to Camp Nine and noted that it had brought the total number of railed miles to more than thirty. Eight more miles—a tedious stretch toward a dragon-shaped muddy puddle known as Knight Lake—were scheduled for 1924. He stepped away from the table, rolled up the sleeves of his buckskin shirt, and placed his hands on his hips. “Now that, that piece of track is going to be interesting.”

It was along this stretch that O’Leary designed and constructed a spectacular trestle, using single pilings from one-hundred-and-ten-foot-long fir trees, cross-braced by twelve-inch-diameter cedar to span one hundred and six yards across Brookens Gorge. The vibration of the huge pile-driving hammer propelled by the donkey steam engine shook the surrounding trees. The heavy iron machine sat on the tracks high above the gorge, gradually extending the railway over the abyss one piling at a time.

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