Page Six

THE B.C. LUMBER WORKER

February 7, 1941

‘One Logger ~ Five Millionaires’

A Tale of the British Columbia Coast

By OL’ BILL

Editor's Note—We are pleased to in-
troduce to our readers in this issue, the
first installment of a new exclusive
serial written especially for B.C. log-
gers. The characters in this story are
purely fictitious and any similarity to
any millionaire, cannery operator, log-
_ging superintendent, bull-of-the-woods
or side-push, is entirely intentional.

* * *

Joe Burton had just poled a half-dozen
logs into his boom that was to be. He
was closing the boom-sticks, when, look-
ing up, his eye caught the flush of a
yacht passing the mouth of the Cove.
“What a beauty!” he thought, “and only
a plaything for some idle parasite who
gets his money without earning it.” He
was satisfied that no man could earn
enough money by his own labor to buy
or maintain such a craft.

His conjecture was right. It not only
came near to being the truth, it was the
whole truth, The Navajo was well
equipped for navigation and seamanship,
except in one respect. She was fitted out
with every gadget devised by inventors
to provide for the comfort and to tickle
the jaded appetites of the gilded masters
of modern society.

She was a small boat as yachts go.
She had a complement of three men to
handle her: a captain who took his trick
at being deck hand on occasion; an en-
gineer who coaxed the gas engines along
and helped to take stores aboard when
he wasn’t jerking levers or squirting oil,
and a cook, who, besides sweating over
the galley range, had to act as a deck
hand, paint scrubber, lamp trimmer,
watchman and mess boy.

They had a fourth man aboard. He
would have been rated a domestic in the
nayy although the captain called him a
steward, The navy rating suited him
better, however ,as he was really a per-
sonal servant of the Big Noise and his
job was to look after the creature com-
forts of the millionaire owner and his
cronies, Since he was sea sick most of
the time he hated the job.

The crew did not match the luxurious,
well found furnishings of the boat, for
the payroll was the only expense item
about which the owner displayed any
tendency to parsimony, He had slathers
of money for shiny brass, chrome steel
and even silver dinguses that would flash
and sparkle in the sun, He had lashings
of money to spend on the downy mat-
tresses, the silk curtains, the Persian
earpets and the other things that con-
tributed to the pleasures of himself and
his guests; but when he came to paying
the crew who worked the ship, he could
hardly get enough slack on the strings
of his purse to squeeze out the miserly
wages on which they were invited to
grow rich.

Calhoun K, Bagger, the owner, was a
millionaire more than a score of times
over, To him, the Navajo was only a sort
of second string. When he desired to
stage a real party, he had another craft
that would have made Joe think of the
Capercailzie, the White Ladye, the
Nourmahal, the Livadia, and other float-
ing palaces that he had seen and ad-
mired in his youth when he was a deep-
water sailor and knew the. European
coast from Cape North to the Levant.

On this trip, however, Bagger was
“roughing it” with a few millionaire
friends. He came from the Middle West,
where his name was a magic symbol in
the “public utilities field.” ‘To the sale of
power he owed his social position and by
the use of power he maintained himself
in the position to sell power—a very beau-
tiful and judicious arrangement for him.

In his business dealings he was typical
of the class to which he belonged; tender-
hearted as a jackal, generous as a wolf,
mereiful as an anaconda, socially-frag-
rant as a pole cat, public spirited as a
Chicago gangster and possessed of the
high ideals of a 17th century Caribbean
pirate, In one word, he was a capitalist.

"The ‘public utilities field” was his prin-

cipal interest. Beside that he had other
“interests” bringing him profits. Amongst
these were some shares in B.C. canneries.
‘These canneries, he and his guests, mil-
lionaires like himself, intended to look
over while they were on the Coast.

Of the others in the party, Hamilton
Beastie had made his millions in land
speculation, Others might make hobbies
of nonsensical things like postage stamps,
the verdigris-encrusted coins of dead
and gone empires, the musty and moth-
eaten tapestries of Feudal age needle-
women, the scribbling of Mediaeval monks
or the rickety furniture of Queen Anne
period craftsmen; Hamilton Beastie’s
hobby was mortgages.

He was a stern, upright, respectable
passer of the plate on Sundays and an
enthusiastic mortgage forecloser the
rest of the week. He deplored the fact
that an unsympathetic government had
declared Sunday to be not a legal day,
which prevented him pursuing his hobby
on the the seventh day also.

As was the custom in Scotland at one
time for the common people, out of a
mixture of fear and hatred, never to
mention the devil by his given name,
Satan, but always as "Auld Clootie,” or

“Horny,” so, in the little debt-ridden
farm towns of Minnesota and Wisconsin
where his “interests” were centered, his

name was seldom mentioned. He was
always spoken of as “the land shark.”
And always a curse went with it. If
they could not curse him in English, they
cursed him in some of the Scandinavian
tongues. And as their curses increased
in volume, so also did his land holdings.

Hoskins P. Naylor acquired his share
by selling the munitions of death to both
sides where war was the determining
factor in deciding questions of foreign
policy. He was not discriminating in his
business policies. He agred absolutely in
principle with Lord MacGowan, head of
the British Chemical Industries, when
he was asked during a Royal Commission
hearing in London, if he would sell to
both sides. On that occasion, the noble
lord admitted that he certainly would,
saying in extenuation, “I am not a purist
in these things.” Hoskins P. Naylor might
have been the one to make the statement
himself, for it expressed his business
ethics to a “T.”

Rights or wrongs; lofty ideals and pro-
gress or deadening reaction; the peace
and quiet of the New Jerusalem or the
bloody glare of battle and the red horror
of war; contented, happy, smiling lands
or turmoil, misery and desolation; these
things meant nothing in the business life
of Hoskins P. Naylor in comparison with
the realization of his invested capital
through the sale of the instruments of
death and destruction.

The sublime symphonic musical com-
positions of Beethoven, of Tchaikovsky,
of Sibellius, had no meaning for him.
The thunderous diapasons of Handel
oratorias he would not admit to compari-
son with the harmonious rumble of artil-
lery drumfire. To him variations on the
melodius theme of the crackle of machine
guns far surpassed the celestial fugues
of Johann Sebastian Bach. The scream
of bursting shells and the whistling of
exploding bombs were musical master-
pieces, to his mind, excelling the arias,
the sonatas, the dances, the andantes,
allegros and scherzos of Mozart, Brahms,
Verdi, Gounod, Grieg or Mendelssohn.
The sibilant trills and quavering pings
of rifle and pistol volleys, for him,
eclipsed in rhythmic and measured
beauty the entrancing waltzes of Johann
Strauss, the bewitching minuets of Boc-
cherini or the blood-stirring mazurkas
of Chopin.

All these he considered but the artistic
pretensions and cultural embellishments
of a worn-out age, But the clangingdis-
sonance of weapons, the shrieks, the
moans, of maimed and murdered victims
and the wails of the widowed and or-
phaned, was an elysian chant to his dis-
cerning ear, because their savage, piti-

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less and bloody fantasia led up to his
greatest inspiration, the inspiration
which came from symphonies of clink-
ing gold pieces and concertos of rustling
greenbacks.

Joshua D. Rockerbilt was an “oil man.”
He boasted that he was the self-made
man of the group—and he was proud
of his handiwork. He had the good for-
tune, many years before he met Bagger
and while he was making a living as a
stool-pigeon for a “private detective
agency,” to stumble accidentally on to
the knowledge that there was oil under
a farm in his neighborhood. The farm
belonged to an old widowed woman whose
grandfather had turned the first sod on
that section of the bald-headed prairie.
‘A month or two later, he bought the farm
at a tax sale and so laid the foundation
for his present millions.

Like Naylor, he had no qualms about
selling to both sides; he played no fav-
orites provided they were not social-
istic. He sold oil to anybody for their
war machines so long as they held reason-
able views about profit-making, but he
put up the barriers gainst all whom he
called Bolsheviks, whether in Spain,
China, or Soviet Russia, even though it
was for the protection of the democracy
in which he professed to believe .

Although he screamed aloud his in-
dignation at the very thought of any
ignorant “furriner” butting into the in-
ternal affairs of “the greatest democracy
on earth,” his money was always avail-
able to any reactionary bandit bent on
overthrowing the peaceful governments
of other countries, particularly neighbor-
ing countries like Mexico, where a limit
was placed on the exploitation of workers
by “oil men,” like himself,

When such disputes over oil lands in
foreign countries became public property,
he donned the trappings of patriotism
and became flambuoyantly verbose in
calling upon his Uncle Sam to get his
marines into action and mouthing the
phrases of “dee-mocracy,” but his real
motto always remained, “where oil is,
there is the fatherland.”

HOTEL VANCOUVER

(Continued from Page 1)

to the elimination of myself. In contra-
diction to this is the fact that four
chambermaids, two of whom have had
over 20 years’ service with the C.P.R,
have been fired with no reason given
but the inference by Mylett that they
were sympathetic to the strikers. An-
other instance is Mylett’s refusal to re-
employ a busboy because of his appear-
ance as a witness on the board of arbi-
tration. So, it would appear that if there
is going to be an organization of the
employees of the Hotel Vancouver, Mylett
wants to be able to control it with the
assistance of Bengough and Jamieson,

“On the arrival here of J. Weinberger,
international representative, I was in-
formed by him that the T.&L.C. execu-
tive would not re-affillate Local 28 to the
council as long as I remained an officer.
This being the case, and not wishing to
be associated with the sell-out of the 15
waiters and 18 busboys who were dis-
criminated against, I tendered by resigna-
tion as secretary of the union. On so
doing, the rest of the executive board
immediately placed their resignations in
Mr, Weinberger’s hands.

“In conclusion, I charge and brand
Bengough, Jamieson and Couper as be-
ing organized labor's Fifth Column; that
they connived with the enemy in true
Quisling style to defeat the aim and ob-
jects of the people they supposedly rep-
resent, and I challenge the three, or any
one of the three to an open debate to
refute that they are labor's Fifth
Column.”

W. STEWART.

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DENTISTS

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Phone SEy. 5577

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SPECIAL WEEKLY
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