Big Timber Part 32

Yet she was helpless. The matter was wholly out of her hands, and she stood aghast before it, much as the small child stands aghast before the burning house he has fired by accident.

Fyfe next. That was the ultimate, the culmination, which would leave her forever transfixed with remorseful horror. The fact that already the machinery of the law which would eventually bring Monohan to book for the double lawlessness of arson and attempted homicide must be in motion, that the Provincial police would be hard on his trail, did not occur to her. She could only visualize him progressing step by step from one lawless deed to another. And in her mind every step led to Jack Fyfe, who had made a mock of him. She found her hands clenching till the nails dug deep.

Linda's head drooped over the teacup. Her eyelids blinked.

"Dear," Stella said tenderly, "come and lie down. You're worn out."

"Perhaps I'd better," Linda muttered. "There's another room in there."

Stella tucked the weary girl into the bed, and went back to the kitchen, and sat down in the willow rocker. After another hour the nurse came out and prepared her own breakfast. Benton was still sleeping. He was in no danger, the nurse told Stella. The bullet had driven cleanly through his body, missing as by a miracle any vital part, and lodged in the muscles of his back, whence the surgeon had removed it. Though weak from shock, loss of blood, excitement, he had rallied splendidly, and fallen into a normal sleep.

Later the doctor confirmed this. He made light of the wound. One couldn't kill a young man as full of vitality as Charlie Benton with an axe, he informed Stella with an optimistic smile. Which lifted one burden from her mind.

The night nurse went away, and another from the hospital took her place.

Benton slept; Linda slept. The house was very quiet. To Stella, brooding in that kitchen chair, it became oppressive, that funeral hush. When it was drawing near ten o'clock, she walked up the road past the corner store and post-office, and so out to the end of the wharf.

The air was hot and heavy, pungent, gray with the smoke. Farther along, St. Allwoods bulked mistily amid its grounds. The crescent of sh.o.r.e line half a mile distant was wholly obscured. Up over the eastern mountain range the sun, high above the murk, hung like a b.l.o.o.d.y orange, rayless and round. No hotel guests strolled by pairs and groups along the bank.

She could understand that no one would come for pleasure into that suffocating atmosphere. Caught in that great bowl of which the lake formed the watery bottom, the smoke eddied and rolled like a cloud of mist.

She stood a while gazing at the gla.s.sy surface of the lake where it spread to her vision a little way beyond the piles. Then she went back to the green cottage.

Benton lifted alert, recognizing eyes when she peeped in the bedroom door.

"h.e.l.lo, Sis," he greeted in strangely subdued tones. "When did you blow in? I thought you'd deserted the sinking s.h.i.+p completely. Come on in."

She winced inwardly at his words, but made no outward sign, as she came up to his bedside. The nurse went out.

"Perhaps you'd better not talk?" she said.

"Oh, nonsense," he retorted feebly. "I'm all right. Sore as the mischief and weak. But I don't feel as bad as I might. Linda still asleep?"

"I think so," Stella answered.

"Poor kid," he breathed; "it's been tough on her. Well, I guess it's been tough on everybody. He turned out to be some bad actor, this Monohan party. I never did like the beggar. He was a little too high-handed in his smooth, kid-glove way. But I didn't suppose he'd try to burn up a million dollars' worth of timber to satisfy a grudge. Well, he put his foot in it proper at last. He'll get a good long jolt in the pen, if the boys don't beat the constables to him and take him to pieces."

"He did start the fire then?" Stella muttered.

"I guess so," Benton replied. "At any rate, he kept it going. Did it by his lonesome, too. Jack suspected that. We were watching for him as well as fighting fire. He'd come down from the head of the lake in that speed boat of his, and this time daylight caught him before he could get back to where he had her cached, after starting a string of little fires in the edge of my north limit. He had it in for me, too, you know; I batted him over the head with a pike-pole here at the wharf one day this spring, so he plunked me as soon as I hollered at him. I wish he'd done it earlier in the game. We might have saved a lot of good timber. As it was, we couldn't do much. Every time the wind changed, it would break out in a new place--too often to be accidental. d.a.m.n him!"

"How is it going to end, the fire?" Stella forced herself to ask. "Will you and Jack be able to save any timber?"

"If it should rain hard, and if in the meantime the boys keep it from jumping the fire-trails we've cut, I'll get by with most of mine," he said. "But Jack's done for. He won't have anything but his donkeys and gear and part of a cedar limit on the Tyee which isn't paid for. He had practically everything tied up in that big block of timber around the Point. Monohan made him spend money like water to hold his own. Jack's broke."

Stella's head drooped. Benton reached out an axe-calloused hand, all grimy and browned from the stress of fire fighting, and covered her soft fingers that rested on his bed.

"It's a pity everything's gone to pot like that, Stell," he said softly.

"I've grown a lot wiser in human ways the last two years. You taught me a lot, and Jack a lot, and Linda the rest. It seems a blamed shame you and Jack came to a fork in the road. Oh, he never chirped. I've just guessed it the last few weeks. I owe him a lot that he'll never let me pay back in anything but good will. I hate to see him get the worst of it from every direction. He grins and doesn't say anything. But I know it hurts. There can't be anything much wrong between you two. Why don't you forget your petty larceny troubles and start all over again?"

"I can't," she whispered. "It wouldn't work. There's too many scars. Too much that's hard to forget."

"Well, you know about that better than I do," Benton said thoughtfully.

"It all depends on how you _feel_."

The poignant truth of that struck miserably home to her. It was not a matter of reason or logic, of her making any sacrifice for her conscience sake. It depended solely upon the existence of an emotion she could not definitely invoke. She was torn by so many emotions, not one of which she could be sure was the vital, the necessary one. Her heart did not cry out for Jack Fyfe, except in a pitying tenderness, as she used to feel for Jack Junior when he b.u.mped and bruised himself. She had felt that before and held it too weak a crutch to lean upon.

The nurse came in with a cup of broth for Benton, and Stella went away with a dumb ache in her breast, a leaden sinking of her spirits, and went out to sit on the porch steps. The minutes piled into hours, and noon came, when Linda wakened. Stella forced herself to swallow a cup of tea, to eat food; then she left Linda sitting with her husband and went back to the porch steps again.

As she sat there, a man dressed in the blue s.h.i.+rt and mackinaw trousers and high, calked boots of the logger turned in off the road, a burly woodsman that she recognized as one of Jack Fyfe's crew.

"Well," said he, "if it ain't Mrs. Jack. Say--ah--"

He broke off suddenly, a perplexed look on his face, an uneasiness, a hesitation in his manner.

"What is it, Barlow?" Stella asked kindly. "How is everything up the lake?"

It was common enough in her experience, that temporary embarra.s.sment of a logger before her. She knew them for men with boyish souls, boyish instincts, rude simplicities of heart. Long ago she had revised those first superficial estimates of them as gross, hulking brutes who worked hard and drank harder, coa.r.s.ened and calloused by their occupation. They had their weaknesses, but their virtues of abiding loyalty, their reckless generosity, their simple directness, were great indeed. They took their lives in their hands on skid-road and spring-board, that such as she might flourish. They did not understand that, but she did.

"What is it, Barlow?" she repeated. "Have you just come down the lake?"

"Yes'm," he answered. "Say, Jack don't happen to be here, does he?"

"No, he hasn't been here," she told him.

The man's face fell.

"What's wrong?" Stella demanded. She had a swift divination that something was wrong.

"Oh, I dunno's anythin's wrong, particular," Barlow replied.

"Only--well, Lefty he sent me down to see if Jack was at the Springs. We ain't seen him for a couple uh days."

Her pulse quickened.

"And he has not come down the lake?"

"I guess not," the logger said. "Oh, I guess it's all right. Jack's pretty _skook.u.m_ in the woods. Only Lefty got uneasy. It's desperate hot and smoky up there."

"How did you come down? Are you going back soon?" she asked abruptly.

"I got the _Waterbug_," Barlow told her. "I'm goin' right straight back."

Stella looked out over the smoky lake and back at the logger again, a sudden resolution born of intolerable uncertainty, of a feeling that she could only characterize as fear, sprang full-fledged into her mind.

"Wait for me," she said. "I'm going with you."

CHAPTER XXIV