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The River Boss

Stewart Edward White

9781465662927
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
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Overview
“Obey orders if you break owners,” is a good motto, but a really efficient river boss knows a better. It runs, “Get the logs out. Get them out peaceably, if you can, but get them out.” He needs no instructions from headquarters to tell him how to live up to this rule. That might involve headquarters. Jimmy was such a river boss. Therefore when Mr. Daly, of the firm of Morrison & Daly, unexpectedly found himself contracted to deliver 5,000,000 feet of logs at a certain date, and the logs an impossible number of miles up-stream, he called in Jimmy. Jimmy was a small man, changeless as the Egyptian Sphinx. A number of years ago a French comic journal published a series of sketches supposed to represent the Shah of Persia influenced by various emotions. Under each was an appropriate label, such as Surprise, Grief, Anger, or Astonishment. The portraits were identically alike, and uniformly impassive. Well, that was Jimmy. He looked always the same. His hair, thick and black, grew low on his forehead; his beard, thick and black, mounted over the ridge of his cheek bones; and his eyebrows, thick and black, extended in an uninterrupted straight line from one temple to the other. Whatever his small, compact, muscular body might be doing, the mask of his black and white imperturbability remained always unchanged. Generally he sat clasping one knee, staring directly in front of him, and puffing regularly on a “meerschaum” pipe he had earned by saving the tags of Spearhead tobacco. Whatever you said to him sank without splash into this almost primal calm, and was lost to view forever. Perhaps after a time he might do something about it, but always without explanation, calmly, with the lofty inevitability of fate. In fact, he never explained himself, even to his employers.

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