THE B.C. LUMBER WORKER

March 5, 1941

‘One Logger ~ Five Millionaires’

A Tale of the British Columbia Coast

By OL’ BILL

(Continued from Last Issue)

The last of the millionaire quintuplets
was Richard B. Crook, corporation
lawyer, whose talents and genius were
at the disposal of his millionaire frat-
ernity at all times, to show them how to
keep within the law or to evade it, as the
case required.

He was one of those “rapacious hell-
hounds that growl in the kennels of
justice,” of whom Rabbie Burns once
‘wrote. Besides the United States Con-
stitution, he had made a close study of
the methods of the judicial vampires who
wrote the Criminal Syndicalist laws of
California and had learned all there was
to know about the “frame-up,” for deal-
ing with labor agitators, an extra-legal
device which had its origin in that sunny
land of oranges, the Los Angeles Times,
vigilantes and earthquakes. He con-
tended that in North America we had
some of the best judges that money could
buy—and he knew just how much money
it took to buy them. “The law and the
prophets,” too, he studied on Sundays,
but he spelled it “profits.” And when
the preacher sald, “Brethren, let us pray,”
in his mind’s eye it stood out like a red
neon sign, “PREY.”

His knowledge of the law was used, not
to advise his capitalist friends of the
legal limits beyond which they must not
go, but to find for them the loopholes
which had been placed there by other
cunning lawyers and through which the
purpose of the law could be dodged. He
knew how politicians could be corrupted
and how reactionary trade union leaders
could be bought over. This latter process
was usually accomplished by getting
them appointed to well-paid government
jobs on boards and commissions and was
referred to by Crook as “making friendly
advances to labor.”

He knew how to organize goon-squads
and finks and enlist the help of the police
and military forces to relentlessly trample
out of existence, any working class or-
ganization whose leaders could not be
corrupted and to set up _strike-proof
unions in their place.

To muster the judges and the courts
for the legal extermination of the small
business men and operators who stood
in the way of Big Biz. was another of
his jobs. He was one of those whose
efforts are building a ferocious atmos-
phere in civilized life more terrible than
the ferocious environment of the wild
in which Joe Burton was trying to scratch
a living from nature.

The wealth he acquired in this way
was not wages, fees, salaries, emolu-
ments or honorariums, but his legitimate
share of the spoils, He, too, was “inter-
ested” in industry, He drew dividends
from many industrial undertakings. He
liked to think of himself as a logger; for
he was a logger in the same way that
Bagger was a fisherman. He was a large
shareholder in Georgia pine camps where
chain-gang prison labor was used to har-
vest the turpentine crop. In a lesser de-
gree, he was “interested” in fir and cedar
through stock he held in a vast Middle
West timber octupus, whose tentacles
reached out to Washington and British
Columbia.

He did not know Douglas fir from
devil's club, so every tree he saw through
his binoculars as the yacht passed along
the coast, gave him a thrill. Maybe it
‘was one of his trees and in time would
contribute something to his bankroll.

"Their relations on the trip were genial,
Over them the spirit of Rotary hovered,
although its wings were not wide enough
to cover the crew or the old man, Fish,
who was kept busy attending to their
wants, and who, if he had had nothing
else to do, had a good day's work every
day, picking up the matches they threw
on the deck of the cabin. “Fish, do thi:
“Fish, do that,” kept him moving all of
his waking hours. Captain, engineer and
cook, the form of address used when
speaking to the crew members, prevented

any further embarrassment of the spirit
of Rotary, however. Cal, Ham, Josh,
Hosk and Dick: so they addressed each
other and the urgent demands of the
great ideals of service a la Rotary were
satisfied.

But the spirit of Rotary went into
hiding on those occasions, which were
numerous, when they sat down at the
table to a game of draw poker or stud.
‘Then the steely glint in their eyes showed
that they had become the great business
executives again and Cal and Ham and
Josh and Hosk and Dick, forgot that
the other fellow had a name at all and
became interested only in skinning the
hide off him in true business style.

The one-word description applied to
the host is equally descriptive of the
guests—capitalist.

The Navajo was a creditable job to her
builders, Without being pushed, she was
capable of doing twenty-five knots. From
Puget Sound up the Coast, her crew had
worked her from point to point during
the daylight hours, Towards nightfall
they would make some sheltered cove or
inlet and drop the hook. There they
would lay to until daybreak. While the
afterguard relaxed over the contents of
the few cases of imported goods that
constituted the cargo, the crew made
things ship-shape for the start in the
morning, before turning in for a well-
earned rest.

From the minute they started in the
morning there was no let-up for them.
The engineer ate his meals in the engine
room, with one eye on the mulligan and
the other on the telegraph and the cook
did a trick at the wheel long enough to
let the captain feed his face. None of
them engaged much in conversation, but
at one time or other, each had made it
public that he did not belong to, or have
any use for, a trade union,

It was late October. A short spell of
Indian Summer had ended a few days
before. The warm color of the British
Columbia bush, the red peeling bark of
the arbutus, the russet and red and gold
of the fading maples, the varying greens
of the willows, the hemlocks, the balsams
and the cedars, was offset by the cold
steel-blue of the cloudless sky in which
a bleary, heatless sun was sinking in the
west. A wind that tasted of snow was
blowing from the northeast and kicking
up white horses that a groundswell car-
ried in to batter against a one-hundred-
foot high wall of iron-stained, granite
rock which began just beyond the en-
trance to Ten-Spot Cove where Joe had
his booming ground. The nip of shiver-
ing winter was in sky and air, and on
land and water. Even the most enthusi-
astic bather would admit that swimming
days were over.

It was four o'clock now. In a couple
of hours it would be pitch dark. So Joe
decided to see that his boom was OK
and call it a day. While engaged in that
job, he heard the dull, muffled roar
of an explosion and wondered if some
new settler had come in and was clear-
ing the ground for another home in the
bush. He had not heard of any, but he
had not been to the post office for a week
and anything could happen in that time
—even another war might break out.

He turned the boat’s head for home.
His house stood on the south side of the
Cove, just above high-water-mark, and
commanded a good view of the coast-
line and the islands that dotted the gulf.
It was hidden from where his boom lay
by a large, jutting rock that some imag-
inative English surveyor had christened
Gibralter, the name it bore on the charts,
but which the materialist settleis per-
sisted in calling Clam Point.

Rounding the point he saw his wife
and children all outside on the beach.
‘They were apparently interested in some-
thing that was happening beyond the
point of land on the other side of the
Cove, When they saw him, they became
quite excited and from their actions he
Imew they were shouting some warning

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or information to him. But, because of
the throb of his engine and the wind
which was coming over his starboard
quarter and blowing directly towards the
house, he could hear nothing. From their
gesticulations, however, he knew that
something was wrong, so he gave her all
the gas she would take.

When he had cleared the Cove mouth
he found out what it was all about.
About two miles away and at least a mile
off shore was the beautiful yacht that
had passed a few minutes before. But she
was different now. She was a mass of
flame, burning like a piece of the forest
fire that had swept through the bush
behind his home last summer. The ex-
plosion he had heard, This was where
it came from—gasoline!

The men on her? What about them’
If they had not been able to get into
their boat they were threatened with
the most terrible death that hovers over
the men who make their living on the
bosom of old Mother Ocean. Joe's
thoughts, naturally, were for the crew
members, men like himself, who fought
the sea in an eternal struggle that they
might spend a small part of their life
ashore in peace and comfort. He did
not know that there were a boatload of
millionaires on that blazing furnace that
had once been the Navajo.

Joe was not a replica of Rodin’s famous
study in stone of man in a pensive mood.
All his life he had been given more to
acting than to cogitating. Thinking and
acting with him were practically co-inci-
dental and even while he was sizing up
the situation, his boat was headed for
the Navajo as fast as her engines would

drive her. He hoped he would not be
too late.

While still about two hundred yards
from her, he heard a tired voice crying
for help, somewhere close to his boat.
Scanning the water, he saw the head and
little more, of a man who apparently had
been swimming, but by this time was fin-
ished. He spun the wheel to take her
close, threw the clutch out and got the
pike-pole handy. The’ swimmer seemed
to have given up hope and was now wast-
ing what little strength he had left, try-
ing to make the sign of the cross on that

part of himself that remained out of the
water,

With the hook of the pike skilfully in-
serted in the waist of his pants, he was
pulled towards the boat and lifted aboard.
When he had recovered his breath suf-
ficiently to speak, Joe asked him if there
were any others on the yacht. “Yes,” he
was told, “there are seven others. I was
swimming to get help.” “Swimmin’ to
bring help, was you?” asked Joe. “What
help did you expect to get from that there
wall'a granite rock? How was you gonna
get out a’ the salt chuck? That there
cliff is a hundred an’ fifty feet from the
water straight up an’ they ain’t no toe-
holt even for a woodpecker along the
hull six miles of it, even if you would of
did the swim. An’ you don’t look like
no English Channel swimmer to me.”
“I know,” replied the other, “but I knew
God would not desert us and you see he
has guided you right to where I was in
the water.” “That's as may be,” said Joe,
“an’ pickin’ you up may of cost the other
seven their lives.”

(To be Continued in Next Issue)

An end to millionaires’ profits
and luxuries! .. . A decent life for
Tabor!

LADYSMITH

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