Handsome Sim

All-Story Weekly, July 26, 1919

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IM HART, boss-piler at the Jim-pole job, was the homeliest man in Swango, and that’s saying something, for there were many battered, scarred, lop-eared riverrats in Swango, working for Raoul Lefevre, timber-boss. Logging-camp and barroom fights deliver up some unlovely relics whose scars not even the fingers of time can heal. Peaveys, steel calks, teeth and nails are legitimate weapons of offense and defense along the Swango. Sim Hart came on the drive just as it started down the river in the spring and, so far, he had kept to himself the secret of his scars. They called him “Handsome Sim,” but not to his face. Limpy Lou, boom-man at the Jimpole, had once asked Sim out of sympathy, because Lou himself had a crooked leg, how he came to get so mashed up in the features. “You ought to see the other fellow,” replied Sim, with a wicked gleam in his steely blue eyes. “He was an inquisitive cuss, too.” After that there were no more questions. The river-rats decided that Sim had once been a dynamiter and had got caught in a blast. This theory was borne out by the fact that Sim was, frankly, afraid of dynamite, and never could be induced to use it to break a jam.

When they blasted a hole in the riverbed in which to set the base of the Jim-pole, Sim Hart quit the job, temporarily, drew his “time” and stayed away until the pole was all set and guyed and ready for the hauling out of the hemlock. Then he came back and took his place at the top of the log-pile, the most dangerous job on the Jim-pole side of the bridge. Sim’s accidental markings completed an ugliness of face that had been quite remarkable to start with. He had a brick-red complexion from the sun and wind instead of tan, and his tow-head and blond eyebrows formed an odd frame for a ruin that was picturesque but scarcely pictorial. The first time Marian Lefevre saw Sim Hart was when he peered down over the edge of the pile and scowled and swore at her when she poled her bateau across the forbidden territory between Jim-pole and shore, just above the bridge. Sim had seen her coming, far up-stream, as she shot the saw-mill rapids and the narrow, boiling stretch of raceway that rushed through between the two wings of the jam. Both were feats that required skill and daring. Sim naturally expected that the girl would

All-Story Weekly cross the angle-boom that cut across the current from Jim-pole outward, spreading a wide mouth to catch the loose logs as they were broken out from the Jam. But far upstream Marian swerved close to shore, under the lee of the long row of log-piles and was hidden from the sight of the decking crew atop the pile at the bridge. Then suddenly, she reappeared, and the prow of her bateau cut across that forbidden stretch. Handsome Sim had just pounded the hooks of the double-looped decking-chain into the top log with his peavey. Limpy Lou, the boom-man, with his long, sharp-pointed pikepole, had just floated a big hemlock over the submerged loops, and Sim shouted back to Joe Graham, driver of the blacks: “All right here! Go ahead!” The bight of the decking-chain was spliced to a heavy rope that ran clear to the top of the thirty-foot pole, through a pulley lashed to the top, then down along the pole to another pulley, a few feet above the water. From that bottom pulley the rope ran at right-angles to the shore and to the whiffle-trees of the team. Rope above, water and chain below, presented a double menace to any one who poled a boat through. As Joe started the team the rope tightened, waist-high, above the water, and the chain began to rise out of the water, coming up beneath the floating log to catch it and hoist it, rolling over and over and teetering in mid air, in the giant sling, to the top of the deck. Sim was poised, with one foot on the top log of the rip-rapped face of the pile, his peavey ready to grip the rolling hemlock and steady it over. It was part of his job to ease the logs over; sometimes to hold the top log in place if the load was very heavy, and at the same time, as the log came bowling over, he must dodge the flying hooks of the chain as they were ripped loose by the straining team. Sim looked down, a casual glance, to see

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that everything was all right below. He saw the prow of Marian’s boat crossing the first loop of the submerged chain, saw her bend low to avoid the rope, saw the chain come rippling out of water as the blacks set off at a fast walk, taking up the slack swiftly for a strong, hard pull. Limpy Lou stood and stared, openmouthed. He was neither agile of foot nor of wit. Marian was a privileged character among the river-rats of Swango, and Lou was temporarily paralyzed by the danger she was in. Not a word of warning issued from his gaping mouth. Another instant and the chain would catch her bateau, and log and boat would be lifted together from the water. Handsome Sim did three things in swift succession. He yelled down at Marian: “Get to h—l out of that!” and to the same breath shouted to Joe Graham: “Hold up, Joe!” Two flashes of his peavey and he had pried out the hooks from where he had securely lodged them in the top log. The chain slid down into the water and was drawn harmlessly against the pole—for the blacks were not so easily stopped. They were lunging into their collars in expectation of the deadweight of the log. Marian rode unharmed between pole and pile, beneath the bridge, to safety. But she was furious at Sim. She had not fully realized the danger she had just escaped, and Sim’s rough warning, his ugly face, looking down so unexpectedly from above had startled her and made her angry. But she was also curious. In the instant she looked up and caught the profile of Sim’s ugly face she saw him also limned against the sky in splendid action, bare forearms like corded bronze, shoulders bulging under his coarse flannel shirt, thighs swelling out beneath his water-shrunken overalls, as he knelt, prying with his peavey-

Handsome Sim point at the hooks of the chain. Marian hastened to the chain-trough where her father stood talking with Dr. Jacques Lefevre, his brother, erstwhile Captain Lefevre of the Medical Corps. “Who is that terribly ugly, splendid brute at the Jim-pole pile?” she demanded. Raoul Lefevre, boss of men as well as timber, smiled and sighed at once. “That is Handsome Sim,” he said. “The homeliest, strongest, wildest river-rat on the Swango. What about him?” “Why—he swore at me when I was coming through between the Jim-pole and the deck in my bateau!” exclaimed Marian, flushing. “Oh, he did—you were!” ejaculated Lefevre in a breath. For a moment he hesitated between anger at Sim Hart and impatience with his daughter. “As if it wasn’t bad enough for him to scowl at me with that face,” continued Marian. “He told me to get to—to Hades out of that! And he meant it, too.” “I don’t doubt it a bit,” said her father dryly. “So would I.” Marian had had time to realize her recklessness, and she hastened to smooth over the enormity of Sim’s crime. “There’s a subject for you, Uncle Jacques,” she said to the doctor. “You and your plastic surgery.” “Humph! He wouldn’t stand for that,” put in Raoul Lefevre decidedly. “Sim has a peculiar sort of pride in his battered face. It puzzled me. I don’t think he’d want it fixed over. He’s proud of his looks.” Marian stared at her father unbelieving. Further discussion of Handsome Sim was cut short, however, by the precipitate arrival of the subject himself. Sim was, palpably, in a temper. The reaction to his swift work in saving Marian Lefevre from a spill in the river, perhaps from being crushed between

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bateau and log, was a flash of wrath. He had thrown down his peavey, his eyes flashing, and clambered down from the pile to stride directly for the chain-trough and the boss. “I want my time,” he demanded, speaking directly to Raoul Lefevre and avoiding the gaze of Marian and Dr. Jacques. “What’s wrong now?” inquired the timberboss. “I know you weren’t to blame for what you said—” “The matter is,” cut in Sim, with a swift glance at Marian, “that it gets my nerve when a woman can duck through between the Jimpole and my deck. I’m through, that’s all.” He said it with a strange calm, as if he were repressing something that boiled inside. His voice was strained. “All right,” said Raoul Lefevre. “You can get your time at the office to-night. But go back to the job now. I need you there.” For answer Sim whirled on his heel and strode back to the log-pile, secured his peavey, slammed it into a tool-box at the bridge-end, and stalked off up the hill to town. “ ‘Handsome is as handsome does,’” quoted Marian maliciously. “Humph! You’ve made me lose a good man,” said Raoul Lefevre. “And after what he did—it doesn’t seem quite right!” “I know—oh, you can get him back, can’t you?” exclaimed Marian, suddenly repentant. “Because he really did save me from being decked up like a log myself, I guess.” “You guess!” exclaimed her father, shortly. “What did he do, anyway?” Marian told him exactly. “Humph! That means I’ve got to get him back,” declared Lefevre. “With an apology from both of us. What do you make of the man, Jacques?” he asked suddenly of his brother. “Why—I’ve seen men act like him before,” replied Dr. Jacques thoughtfully. “Nerves, I guess.”

All-Story Weekly Raoul Lefevre found Sim Hart with his fit of temper gone, but in its place there lurked a stubborn determination not to go back to the Jim-pole job. “Let me take the jam-breaking job,” he said. “That’s far enough up-stream, so I won’t be—well, bothered by accidents. Lefevre thought he guessed the reason for Sim’s preference. He thought he could understand what it might mean to a man like Sim to be looked at by a woman like Marian—despite Sim’s pride in his scars. “That dry jam on the left wing is a job for dynamite,” Lefevre reminded Sim. “Let me work the right wing, then,” said Sim with a smile, “I’ll take my chances with a peavey breaking the jam.” The red scar on Sim’s upper lip, a livid furrow that ran from cheek to cheek, stood out like a raw cut when Lefevre mentioned dynamite. Lefevre was puzzled for the ’steenth time at Sim’s strange fear of the explosive which most river-men will handle as if it were tallow candles. “My daughter and I owe you an apology,” went on Lefevre. “We are grateful to you for your quick work. You saved her from a spill— at the least.” “I’ll take your job—on the jam,” said Sim shortly. Lefevre repeated the conversation to Marian that night. “The surly wretch!” she exclaimed, her color rising. But she said nothing more. However, she was thoughtful for a long time. It was nearly a week later when she poled her bateau up-stream, around the right wing of the jam where Sim had cut a channel, close to shore, and made an island of the mass of timber where there had been a peninsula. Above the jam she turned and shot out into midstream, heading for the narrow raceway between the two wings. Sim was working there.

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She stood erect in the center of her narrow-bottomed craft, poling it along as expertly as an old river-rat. She had rolled up her sleeves, more for the feel of freedom than the actual gaining of it, and she made an attractive picture in her khaki blouse and skirt, a bright ribbon flying at the “V” of her lowcut collar, a felt hat pinned to her black hair, and her eager alert face tanned a delicate brown by the winds of spring. Swiftly and surely, avoiding water-soaked “dead-heads” and straggling logs she made the mouth of the raceway and shot into it for the downward run. Sim Hart was working hard at the lower end of the raceway to consummate the labor of days. He had set out to discover and unlock the key-log of the jam. Sim wanted to show what peavey and man-power could accomplish without the use of dynamite. He did not see Marian until she was bearing down upon him. He had found the key-log, a big knotted hemlock that lay against a jagged, submerged rock in the bed of the rapids. Back of it pressed the weight of the right wing of the jam, an interlocked mass of hemlock and spruce. A stick of dynamite planted close to that log would have rooted it out in splinters and started the jam in a jiffy. But Sim was edging for a peavey-hold upon the log. Just beneath the surface of the white-water that dashed out of the raceway was a tangled mess of logs, and Sim stood ankle-deep in the water, his calks gripping the bark of them, astride the key-log, as he maneuvered for a low grip on it with his peavey-hook. He had bent over, ready for a final lifting twist that would loosen the log from the stone. Already he had tested it and found it would rock slightly back and forth. He looked up to plan a path of escape over the logs when the jam began to move. Then he saw Marian poised in her bateau, half-way down the raceway, her eyes fixed on him, lips parted in a smile.

Handsome Sim A surge of resentment swept over Sim. It flashed upon him that this girl must be deliberately trying to annoy him. Perhaps she was seeking revenge for his rough warning at the Jim-pole. His muscles tautened as he clutched his peavey-handle. The strength of sudden anger made him feel that with one sudden lift of the handle he could close that narrow gap with a grinding, crushing mass of timber. Never before had a woman laughed in his face—his ugly, broken-nosed, scarred face. But, swift as thought, Sim Hart rejected the Impulse. And in that instant he felt a tremor in the handle of his peavey, a warning movement. The work of the past hours had become suddenly effective, without the final lift at the key-log. The log was slowly, almost imperceptibly, turning upward, forced by the terrific weight behind and beneath it. The jam was groaning to a break-out. Sim’s pride came to his rescue now. He undertook a stunt that a veteran river-man would have called sure death. He reversed his peavey-hook and clamped it upside down on the key-log and threw his weight against the uplifting roll. He was matching his fine strength against the jam and river, Marian Lefevre was just about to speak, to offer her apology—for that was what she had come for, after days of battling with her own pride. Sim cut her short with a rasping bark of warning: “Come on!” he shouted. “I can’t hold this long. Use your pole and get out—quick!” For an instant Marian hesitated to bewildered anger, but the next instant she saw and heard the grinding, rending motion of the jam. She stabbed her pike into a log in the face of the jam and shoved with all her might. The current caught her bateau up and sent it shooting out of the raceway into deeper, slower water, like a chip skittered on the surface. Sim saw the maneuver with an agonized

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look on his face as he strained to hold the jam. The girl was not yet safe. She had misunderstood his warning. He had meant for her to use her pike-pole and vault from the bateau to the unbroken surface of the left wing of the jam. She had chosen to use it to send her craft down the raceway ahead of the jam. “Why—didn’t you—get out?” demanded Sim in jerky gasps. His resentment had melted into wild despair for her safety. He held the key-log— but no human power could hold it long. He stuck there too long for his own safety, as it was. When he would have leaped and run back on the jam, using his agile strength to bound from log to log and reach the shore, he found his foothold on the crib below him gone. His peavey-handle, borne upward and outward by the irresistible roll of the key-log, carried him with it in an arc and buried him in the frothing water just beneath the crumbling face of the jam. Above him and behind him rolled and splashed a thousand tons of suddenly released timber. It was caught by the tearing rapids, rolled and swirled and thrust down toward the angle-boom above the bridge. Logs up-ended with the force of giant catapults, crashed down on each other, snapped and plunged to the bottom of the rapids as they fell. Some of them struck the rocks on the river-bottom with a dull boom. It would have been a desperate undertaking for a man to try to ride a free log in that maelstrom, even had he been safely atop of it and in possession of his peavey. Sim Hart, clinging with a river-man’s instinct to his peavey, had been thrown flat by the peavey-handle and thrust under-water. Marian Lefevre, as she flashed by Sim down the rapids, saw him straining at the log, heard the groan of the loosened jam, and knew what Sim was doing. She was riverwise. She turned, at risk to her own safety, and looked

All-Story Weekly back, saw Sim plunged beneath the surface, and then, dropping her pike, took up her broad-bladed paddle and swerved the bateau, about to start back up-stream after Sim. Only a miracle, one of those “white-water miracles” of which the river-rats love to tell, saved her from being thrown out. Her bateau was rammed from beneath and caught by a rising raft of logs and borne on even keel clear down to the boom, where she stood wild-eyed and white, and stared up-stream to where Handsome Sim had gone down. She ran along the boom, then, to where Limpy Lou was poling logs over the deckingchain, and Limpy Lou moved faster for a few moments than he had ever in his life. He went back on the boom to midstream, and as calmly as if he had done it all his life he fished the inert form of Handsome Sim from out the water when it floated to the surface near the boom. Then, with the rough-and-ready firstaid tactics of the river-man, he hung Sim over a spile to drain out, while Marian ran her bateau over the boom and sped downstream for Dr. Jacques. Raoul Lefevre told the men to take Sim up to his own house. There was no hospital in Swango. Dr. Jacques had an operating room in his brother’s house, the big house on the hill. Marian Lefevre insisted on being in the room when Dr. Jacques began an examination. “It’s a wonder every bone in his body wasn’t broken, to say nothing of drowning,” muttered Dr. Jacques. Then he started to turn Sim over on his back—and sent Marian out abruptly. The jagged rocks of the rapids had done their work. Dr. Jacques, as he looked at Sim’s bloody face, described its condition pretty well when he said, almost jubilantly: “What a beautiful chance!” Dr. Jacques was a surgeon, heart and soul. It was a beautiful chance for a surgeon, particularly for one who had seen what Dr.

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Jacques had seen and done—what he had done to men’s faces—or the wreck of them. “I’d like to meet the butcher who got at him first!” he exclaimed aloud a little later as he worked over Sim. The doctor was speaking of members of his own profession, too. Outside the door Marian Lefevre waited, mute and white with suspense, for fear that Handsome Sim might not live, although the doctor said he would. When she could stand waiting no longer she took the wet clothing she had helped remove from Sim’s beautiful body and wrung out the heavy flannel shirt penitently. Her hand struck something hard in the pocket, and she found, securely hidden there and pinned in, a little round piece of bronze. Dr. Jacques came out of the operatingroom almost friskily an hour later. “He’ll be quite a different man,” he informed Marian. “I hate to flatter myself, but I think I’m going to slip something over on Handsome Sim. When he’s all healed up—” The startled look in Marian’s face checked him. She was holding the bit of bronze between the palms of both hands, as if she would warm it comfortingly. “Healed up!” she exclaimed. “His face,” said the doctor. “What have you got there?” Silently Marian let him take it. The doctor looked it over carefully. “I’ve seen one or two of them before,” he said quietly. “But they’re rare. Only a few men get them—living men, I mean. H-m! I thought I had him placed. No wonder he don’t like dynamite. They get that way with shellshock. It hits the nerves.” Marian took the medal back and held it again in her hands. Later, when the doctor said it was all right, she went in to where Sim lay in bed, a smiling mummy with bandages. “The doctor says—” she began, then

Handsome Sim checked herself. “What’s the matter with the doctor?” inquired Sim triumphantly. “He says I’ll be all right to look at after this.” “Oh, you know!” exclaimed Marian, “And you’re glad?” “Sure. Why not? Why, he says I’ll deserve my name—Handsome Sim, I mean, when my face has grown together again.” “Oh!” said Marian. Then she caught his hand and pressed the bit of bronze into the palm. “I’ve been ke-keeping this for you,” she stammered.

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“Oh, that! Well, don’t you want to keep it—any longer?” She tried to look at his eyes, but instead she bowed her face in the palm of his hand. “Yes—if you’ll let me,” she murmured. “Well, what are you crying for?” he demanded. “I’m not crying!” she retorted. “But I’m sort of dis-disappointed. I—I didn’t want you to lose your—your looks.” “Well, what in he-heck do you think of that!” demanded Handsome Sim.