Big Timber Part 11

And with that idea to guide her, she found the days slide by smoothly.

She got on famously with Mrs. Howe, finding that woman full of virtues unsuspected in her type. Charlie was in his element. His prospects looked so rosy that they led him into egotistic outlines of what he intended to accomplish. To him the future meant logs in the water, big holdings of timber, a growing bank account. Beyond that,--what all his concentrated effort should lead to save more logs and more timber,--he did not seem to go. Judged by his talk, that was the ultimate, economic power,--money and more money. More and more as Stella listened to him, she became aware that he was following in his father's footsteps; save that he aimed at greater heights and that he worked by different methods, juggling with natural resources where their father had merely juggled with prices and tokens of product, their end was the same--not to create or build up, but to grasp, to acquire. That was the game. To get and to hold for their own use and benefit and to look upon men and things, in so far as they were of use, as p.a.w.ns in the game.

She wondered sometimes if that were a characteristic of all men, if that were the big motif in the lives of such men as Paul Abbey and Jack Fyfe, for instance; if everything else, save the struggle of getting and keeping money, resolved itself into purely incidental phases of their existence? For herself she considered that wealth, or the getting of wealth, was only a means to an end.

Just what that end might be she found a little vague, rather hard to define in exact terms. It embraced personal leisure and the good things of life as a matter of course, a broader existence, a large-handed generosity toward the less fortunate, an intellectual elevation entirely unrelated to gross material things. Life, she told herself pensively, ought to mean something more than ease and good clothes, but what more she was chary of putting into concrete form. It hadn't meant much more than that for her, so far. She was only beginning to recognize the flinty facts of existence. She saw now that for her there lay open only two paths to food and clothing: one in which, lacking all training, she must earn her bread by daily toil, the other leading to marriage. That, she would have admitted, was a woman's natural destiny, but one didn't pick a husband or lover as one chose a gown or a hat. One went along living, and the thing happened. Chance ruled there, she believed. The morality of her cla.s.s prevented her from prying into this question of mating with anything like critical consideration. It was only to be thought about sentimentally, and it was easy for her to so think. Within her sound and vigorous body all the heritage of natural human impulses bubbled warmly, but she recognized neither their source nor their ultimate fruits.

Often when Charlie was holding forth in his accustomed vein, she wondered what Jack Fyfe thought about it, what he masked behind his brief sentences or slow smile. Latterly her feeling about him, that involuntary bracing and stiffening of herself against his personality, left her. Fyfe seemed to be more or less self-conscious of her presence as a guest in his house. His manner toward her remained always casual, as if she were a man, and there was no question of s.e.x attraction or masculine reaction to it between them. She liked him better for that; and she did admire his wonderful strength, the tremendous power invested in his magnificent body, just as she would have admired a tiger, without caring to fondle the beast.

Altogether she spent a tolerably pleasant three weeks. Autumn's gorgeous paintbrush laid wonderful coloring upon the maple and alder and birch that lined the lake sh.o.r.e. The fall run of the salmon was on, and every stream was packed with the silver horde, thres.h.i.+ng through shoal and rapid to reach the sp.a.w.ning ground before they died. Off every creek mouth and all along the lake the seal followed to prey on the salmon, and sea-trout and lakers alike swarmed to the sp.a.w.ning beds to feed upon the roe. The days shortened. Sometimes a fine rain would drizzle for hours on end, and when it would clear, the saw-toothed ranges flanking the lake would stand out all freshly robed in white,--a mantle that crept lower on the fir-clad slopes after each storm. The winds that whistled off those heights nipped sharply.

Early in October Charlie Benton had squared his neighborly account with Jack Fyfe. With crew and equipment he moved home, to begin work anew on his own limit.

Katy John and her people came back from the salmon fis.h.i.+ng. Jim Renfrew, still walking with a p.r.o.nounced limp, returned from the hospital.

Charlie wheedled Stella into taking up the cookhouse burden again.

Stella consented; in truth she could do nothing else. Charlie spent a little of his contract profits in piping water to the kitchen, in a few things to brighten up and make more comfortable their own quarters.

"Just as soon as I can put another boom over the rapids, Stell," he promised, "I'll put a cook on the job. I've got to sail a little close for a while. With this crew I ought to put a million feet in the water in six weeks. Then I'll be over the hump, and you can take it easy. But till then--"

"Till then I may as well make myself useful," Stella interrupted caustically.

"Well, why not?" Benton demanded impatiently. "n.o.body around here works any harder than I do."

And there the matter rested.

CHAPTER X

ONE WAY OUT

That was a winter of big snow. November opened with rain. Day after day the sun hid his face behind ma.s.sed, spitting clouds. Morning, noon, and night the eaves of the shacks dripped steadily, the gaunt limbs of the hardwoods were a line of coursing drops, and through all the vast reaches of fir and cedar the patter of rain kept up a dreary monotone.

Whenever the mist that blew like rolling smoke along the mountains lifted for a brief hour, there, creeping steadily downward, lay the banked white.

Rain or s.h.i.+ne, the work drove on. From the peep of day till dusk shrouded the woods, Benton's donkey puffed and groaned, axes thudded, the thin, tw.a.n.ging whine of the saws rose. Log after log slid down the chute to float behind the boomsticks; and at night the loggers trooped home, soaked to the skin, to hang their steaming mackinaws around the bunkhouse stove. When they gathered in the mess-room they filled it with the odor of sweaty bodies and profane grumbling about the weather.

Early in December Benton sent out a big boom of logs with a hired stern-wheeler that was no more than out of Roaring Lake before the snow came. The sleety blasts of a cold afternoon turned to great, moist flakes by dark, eddying thick out of a windless night. At daybreak it lay a foot deep and snowing hard. Thenceforth there was no surcease. The white, feathery stuff piled up and piled up, hour upon hour and day after day, as if the deluge had come again. It stood at the cabin eaves before the break came, six feet on the level. With the end of the storm came a bright, cold sky and frost,--not the bitter frost of the high lat.i.tudes, but a nipping cold that held off the melting rains and laid a thin sc.u.m of ice on every patch of still water.

Necessarily, all work ceased. The donkey was a shapeless mound of white, all the lines and gear buried deep. A man could neither walk on that yielding ma.s.s nor wallow through it. The logging crew hailed the enforced rest with open relief. Benton grumbled. And then, with the hours hanging heavy on his hands, he began to spend more and more of his time in the bunkhouse with the "boys," particularly in the long evenings.

Stella wondered what pleasure he found in their company, but she never asked him, nor did she devote very much thought to the matter. There was but small cessation in her labors, and that only because six or eight of the men drew their pay and went out. Benton managed to hold the others against the thaw that might open up the woods in twenty-four hours, but the smaller size of the gang only helped a little, and did not a.s.sist her mentally at all. All the old resentment against the indignity of her position rose and smoldered. To her the days were full enough of things that she was terribly weary of doing over and over, endlessly. She was always tired. No matter that she did, in a measure, harden to her work, grow callously accustomed to rising early and working late. Always her feet were sore at night, aching intolerably. Hot food, sharp knives, and a glowing stove played havoc with her hands. Always she rose in the morning heavy-eyed and stiff-muscled. Youth and natural vigor alone kept her from breaking down, and to cap the strain of toil, she was soul-sick with the isolation. For she was isolated; there was not a human being in the camp, Katy John included, with whom she exchanged two dozen words a day.

Before the snow put a stop to logging, Jack Fyfe dropped in once a week or so. When work shut down, he came oftener, but he never singled Stella out for any particular attention. Once he surprised her sitting with her elbows on the kitchen table, her face buried in her palms. She looked up at his quiet entrance, and her face must have given him his cue. He leaned a little toward her.

"How long do you think you can stand it?" he asked gently.

"G.o.d knows," she answered, surprised into speaking the thought that lay uppermost in her mind, surprised beyond measure that Be should read that thought.

He stood looking down at her for a second or two. His lips parted, but he closed them again over whatever rose to his tongue and pa.s.sed silently through the dining room and into the bunkhouse, where Benton had preceded him a matter of ten minutes.

It lacked a week of Christmas. That day three of Benton's men had gone in the _Chickamin_ to Roaring Springs for supplies. They had returned in mid-afternoon, and Stella guessed by the new note of hilarity in the bunkhouse that part of the supplies had been liquid. This had happened more than once since the big snow closed in. She remembered Charlie's fury at the logger who started Matt the cook on his spree, and she wondered at this relaxation, but it was not in her province, and she made no comment.

Jack Fyfe stayed to supper that evening. Neither he nor Charlie came back to Benton's quarters when the meal was finished. While she stacked up the dishes, Katy John observed:

"Goodness sakes, Miss Benton, them fellers was fresh at supper. They was half-drunk, some of them. I bet they'll be half a dozen fights before mornin'."

Stella pa.s.sed that over in silence, with a mental turning up of her nose. It was something she could neither defend nor excuse. It was a disgusting state of affairs, but nothing she could change. She kept harking back to it, though, when she was in her own quarters, and Katy John had vanished for the night into her little room off the kitchen.

Tired as she was, she remained wakeful, uneasy. Over in the bunkhouse disturbing sounds welled now and then into the cold, still night,--incoherent s.n.a.t.c.hes of song, voices uproariously raised, bursts of laughter. Once, as she looked out the door, thinking she heard footsteps crunching in the snow, some one rapped out a coa.r.s.e oath that drove her back with burning face.

As the evening wore late, she began to grow uneasily curious to know in what manner Charlie and Jack Fyfe were lending countenance to this minor riot, if they were even partic.i.p.ating in it. Eleven o'clock pa.s.sed, and still there rose in the bunkhouse that unabated hum of voices.

Suddenly there rose a brief clamor. In the dead silence that followed, she heard a thud and the clinking smash of breaking gla.s.s, a panted oath, sounds of struggle.

Stella slipped on a pair of her brother's gum boots and an overcoat, and ran out on the path beaten from their cabin to the sh.o.r.e. It led past the bunkhouse, and on that side opened two uncurtained windows, yellow squares that struck gleaming on the snow. The panes of one were broken now, sharp fragments standing like saw teeth in the wooden sash.

She stole warily near and looked in. Two men were being held apart; one by three of his fellows, the other _by_ Jack Fyfe alone. Fyfe grinned mildly, talking to the men in a quiet, pacific tone.

"Now you know that was nothing to sc.r.a.p about," she heard him say, "You're both full of fighting whisky, but a bunkhouse isn't any place to fight. Wait till morning. If you've still got it in your systems, go outside and have it out. But you shouldn't disturb our game and break up the furniture. Be gentlemen, drunk or sober. Better shake hands and call it square."

"Aw, let 'em go to it, if they want to."

Charlie's voice, drink-thickened, harsh, came from a earner of the room into which she could not see until she moved nearer. By the time she picked him out, Fyfe resumed his seat at the table where three others and Benton waited with cards in their hands, red and white chips and money stacked before them.

She knew enough of cards to realize that a stiff poker game was on the board when she had watched one hand dealt and played. It angered her, not from any ethical motive, but because of her brother's part in it. He had no funds to pay a cook's wages, yet he could afford to lose on one hand as much as he credited her with for a month's work. She could slave at the kitchen job day in and day out to save him forty-five dollars a month. He could lose that without the flicker of an eyelash, but he couldn't pay her wages on demand. Also she saw that he had imbibed too freely, if the redness of his face and the gla.s.sy fixedness of his eyes could be read aright.

"Pig!" she muttered. "If that's his idea of pleasure. Oh, well, why should I care? I don't, so far as he's concerned, if I could just get away from this beast of a place myself."

Abreast of her a logger came to the broken window with a sack to bar out the frosty air. And Stella, realizing suddenly that she was s.h.i.+vering with the cold, ran back to the cabin and got into her bed.

But she did not sleep, save in uneasy periods of dozing, until midnight was long past. Then Fyfe and her brother came in, and by the sounds she gathered that Fyfe was putting Charlie to bed. She heard his deep, drawly voice urging the unwisdom of sleeping with calked boots on, and Beaton's hiccupy response. The rest of the night she slept fitfully, morbidly imagining terrible things. She was afraid, that was the sum and substance of it. Over in the bunkhouse the carousal was still at its height. She could not rid herself of the sight of those two men struggling to be at each other like wild beasts, the b.l.o.o.d.y face of the one who had been struck, the coa.r.s.e animalism of the whole whisky-saturated gang. It repelled and disgusted and frightened her.

The night frosts had crept through the single board walls of Stella's room and made its temperature akin to outdoors when the alarm wakened her at six in the morning. She s.h.i.+vered as she dressed. Katy John was blissfully devoid of any responsibility, for seldom did Katy rise first to light the kitchen fire. Yet Stella resented less each day's bleak beginning than she did the enforced necessity of the situation; the fact that she was enduring these things practically under compulsion was what galled.

A cutting wind struck her icily as she crossed the few steps of open between cabin and kitchen. Above no cloud floated, no harbinger of melting rain. The cold stars twinkled over snow-blurred forest, struck tiny gleams from stumps that were now white-capped pillars. A night swell from the outside waters beat, its melancholy dirge on the frozen beach. And, as she always did at that hushed hour before dawn, she experienced a physical shrinking from those grim solitudes in which there was nothing warm and human and kindly, nothing but vastness of s.p.a.ce upon which silence lay like a smothering blanket, in which she, the human atom, was utterly negligible, a protesting mote in the inexorable wilderness. She knew this to be merely a state of mind, but situated as she was, it bore upon her with all the force of reality. She felt like a prisoner who above all things desired some mode of escape.

A light burned in the kitchen. She thanked her stars that this bitter cold morning she would not have to build a fire with freezing fingers while her teeth chattered, and she hurried in to the warmth heralded by a spark-belching stovepipe. But the Siwash girl had not risen to the occasion. Instead, Jack Fyfe sat with his feet on the oven door, a cigar in one corner of his mouth. The kettle steamed. Her porridge pot bubbled ready for the meal.

"Good morning," he greeted. "Mind my preempting your job?"

"Not at all," she answered. "You can have it for keeps if you want."

"No, thanks," he smiled. "I'm sour on my own cooking. Had to eat too much of it in times gone by. I wouldn't be stoking up here either, only I got frozen out. Charlie's spare bed hasn't enough blankets for me these cold nights."

He drew his chair aside to be out of the way as she hurried about her breakfast preparations. All the time she was conscious that his eyes were on her, and also that in them lurked an expression of keen interest. His freckled mask of a face gave no clue to his thoughts; it never did, so far as she had ever observed. Fyfe had a gambler's immobility of countenance. He chucked the b.u.t.t of his cigar in the stove and sat with hands clasped over one knee for some time after Katy John appeared and began setting the dining room table with a great clatter of dishes.

He arose to his feet then. Stella stood beside the stove, frying bacon.

A logger opened the door and walked in. He had been one to fare ill in the night's hilarity, for a discolored patch encircled one eye, and his lips were split and badly swollen. He carried a tin basin.