Big Timber Part 8

Benton chose to ignore the inference.

"If I fall down on this, it'll just about finish me," he continued glumly. "These people are not going to allow me an inch leeway. I'll have to deliver on that contract to the last stipulated splinter before they'll pay over a dollar. If I don't have a million feet for 'em three weeks from to-day, it's all off, and maybe a suit for breach of contract besides. That's the sort they are. If they can wiggle out of taking my logs, they'll be to the good, because they've made other contracts down the coast at fifty cents a thousand less. And the aggravating thing about it is that if I could get by with this deal, I can close a five-million-foot contract with the Abbey-Monohan outfit, for delivery next spring. I must have the money for this before I can undertake the bigger contract."

"Can't you sell your logs if these other people won't take them?" she asked, somewhat alive now to his position--and, incidentally, her own interest therein.

"In time, yes," he said. "But when you go into the open market with logs, you don't always find a buyer right off the reel. I'd have to hire 'em towed from here to Vancouver, and there's some bad water to get over. Time is money to me right now, Stell. If the thing dragged over two or three months, by the time they were sold and all expenses paid, I might not have anything left. I'm in debt for supplies, behind in wages. When it looks like a man's losing, everybody jumps him. That's business. I may have my outfit seized and sold up if I fall down on this delivery and fail to square up accounts right away. d.a.m.n it, if you hadn't given Paul Abbey the cold turn-down, I might have got a boost over this hill. You were certainly a chump."

"I'm not a mere p.a.w.n in your game yet," she flared hotly. "I suppose you'd trade me for logs enough to complete your contract and consider it a good bargain."

"Oh, piffle," he answered coolly. "What's the use talking like that.

It's your game as much as mine. Where do you get off, if I go broke? You might have done a heap worse. Paul's a good head. A girl that hasn't anything but her looks to get through the world on hasn't any business overlooking a bet like that. Nine girls out of ten marry for what there is in it, anyhow."

"Thank you," she replied angrily. "I'm not in the market on that basis."

"All this stuff about ideal love and soul communion and perfect mating is pure bunk, it seems to me," Charlie tacked off on a new course of thought. "A man and a woman somewhere near of an age generally hit it off all right, if they've got common horse sense--and income enough so they don't have to squabble eternally about where the next new hat and suit's coming from. It's the coin that counts most of all. It sure is, Sis. It's me that knows it, right now."

He sat a minute or two longer, again preoccupied with his problems.

"Well," he said at last, "I've got to get action somehow. If I could get about thirty men and another donkey for three weeks, I'd make it."

He went outside. Up in the near woods the whine of the saws and the sounds of chopping kept measured beat. It was late in the forenoon, and Stella was hard about her dinner preparations. Contract or no contract, money or no money, men must eat. That fact loomed biggest on her daily schedule, left her no room to think overlong of other things. Her huff over, she felt rather sorry for Charlie, a feeling accentuated by sight of him humped on a log in the sun, too engrossed in his perplexities to be where he normally was at that hour, in the thick of the logging, working harder than any of his men.

A little later she saw him put off from the float in the _Chickamin's_ dinghy. When the crew came to dinner, he had not returned. Nor was he back when they went out again at one.

Near mid-afternoon, however, he strode into the kitchen, wearing the look of a conqueror.

"I've got it fixed," he announced.

Stella looked up from a frothy ma.s.s of yellow stuff that she was stirring in a pan.

"Got what fixed?" she asked.

"Why, this log business," he said. "Jack Fyfe is going to put in a crew and a donkey, and we're going to everlastingly rip the innards out of these woods. I'll make delivery after all."

"That's good," she remarked, but noticeably without enthusiasm. The heat of that low-roofed shanty had taken all possible enthusiasm for anything out of her for the time being. Always toward the close of each day she was gripped by that feeling of deadly fatigue, in the face of which nothing much mattered but to get through the last hours somehow and drag herself wearily to bed.

Benton playfully tweaked Katy John's ear and went whistling up the trail. It was plain sailing for him now, and he was correspondingly elated.

He tried to talk to Stella that evening when she was through, all about big things in the future, big contracts he could get, big money he could see his way to make. It fell mostly on unappreciative ears. She was tired, so tired that his egotistical chatter irritated her beyond measure. What she would have welcomed with heartfelt grat.i.tude was not so much a prospect of future affluence in which she might or might not share as a lightening of her present burden. So far as his conversation ran, Benton's sole concern seemed to be more equipment, more men, so that he might get out more logs. In the midst of this optimistic talk, Stella walked abruptly into her room.

Noon of the next day brought the _Panther_ coughing into the bay, flanked on the port side by a scow upon which rested a twin to the iron monster that jerked logs into her brother's chute. To starboard was made fast a like scow. That was housed over, a smoking stovepipe stuck through the roof, and a capped and ap.r.o.ned cook rested his arms on the window sill as they floated in. Men to the number of twenty or more cl.u.s.tered about both scows and the _Panther's_ deck, busy with pipe and cigarette and rude jest. The clatter of their voices uprose through the noon meal. But when the donkey scow thrust its blunt nose against the beach, the chaff and laughter died into silent, capable action.

"A Seattle yarder properly handled can do anything but climb a tree,"

Charlie had once boasted to her, in reference to his own machine.

It seemed quite possible to Stella, watching Jack Fyfe's crew at work.

Steam was up in the donkey. They carried a line from its drum through a s.n.a.t.c.h block ash.o.r.e and jerked half a dozen logs crosswise before the scow in a matter of minutes. Then the same cable was made fast to a st.u.r.dy fir, the engineer stood by, and the ponderous machine slid forward on its own skids, like an up-ended barrel on a sled, down off the scow, up the bank, smas.h.i.+ng brush, branches, dead roots, all that stood in its path, drawing steadily up to the anchor tree as the cable spooled up on the drum.

A dozen men tailed on to the inch and a quarter cable and bore the loose end away up the path. Presently one stood clear, waving a signal. Again the donkey began to puff and quiver, the line began to roll up on the drum, and the big yarder walked up the slope under its own power, a locomotive unneedful of rails, making its own right of way. Upon the platform built over the skids were piled the tools of the crew, sawed blocks for the fire box, axes, saws, grindstones, all that was necessary in their task. At one o'clock they made their first move. At two the donkey was vanished into that region where the chute-head lay, and the great firs stood waiting the slaughter.

By mid-afternoon Stella noticed an acceleration of numbers in the logs that came hurtling lakeward. Now at shorter intervals arose the grinding sound of their arrival, the ponderous splash as each leaped to the water. It was a good thing, she surmised--for Charlie Benton. She could not see where it made much difference to her whether ten logs a day or a hundred came down to the boomsticks.

Late that afternoon Katy vanished upon one of her periodic visits to the camp of her kindred around the point. Bred out of doors, of a tribe whose immemorial custom it is that the women do all the work, the Siwash girl was strong as an ox, and nearly as bovine in temperament and movements. She could lift with ease a weight that taxed Stella's strength, and Stella Benton was no weakling, either. It was therefore a part of Katy's routine to keep water pails filled from the creek and the wood box supplied, in addition to was.h.i.+ng dishes and carrying food to the table. Katy slighted these various tasks occasionally. She needed oversight, continual admonition, to get any job done in time. She was slow to the point of exasperation. Nevertheless, she lightened the day's labor, and Stella put up with her slowness since she needs must or a.s.sume the entire burden herself. This time Katy thoughtlessly left with both water pails empty.

Stella was just picking them up off the bench when a shadow darkened the door, and she looked around to see Jack Fyfe.

"How d' do," he greeted.

He had seemed a short man. Now, standing within four feet of her, she perceived that this was an illusion created by the proportion and thickness of his body. He was, in fact, half a head taller than she, and Stella stood five feet five. His gray eyes met hers squarely, with a cool, impersonal quality of gaze. There was neither smirk nor embarra.s.sment in his straightforward glance. He was, in effect, "sizing her up" just as he would have looked casually over a logger asking him for a job. Stella sensed that, and resenting it momentarily, failed to match his manner. She flushed. Fyfe smiled, a broad, friendly grin, in which a wide mouth opened to show strong, even teeth.

"I'm after a drink," he said quite impersonally, and coolly taking the pails out of her hands, walked through the kitchen and down to the creek. He was back in a minute, set the filled buckets in their place, and helped himself with a dipper.

"Say," he asked easily, "how do you like life in a logging camp by this time? This is sure one hot job you've got."

"Literally or slangily?" she asked in a flippant tone. Fyfe's reputation, rather vividly colored, had reached her from various sources. She was not quite sure whether she cared to countenance him or not. There was a disturbing quality in his glance, a subtle suggestion of force about him that she felt without being able to define in understandable terms. In any case she felt more than equal to the task of squelching any effort at familiarity, even if Jack Fyfe were, in a sense, the convenient G.o.d in her brother's machine. Fyfe chuckled at her answer.

"Both," he replied shortly and went out.

She saw him a little later out on the bay in the _Panther's_ d.i.n.k, standing up in the little boat, making long, graceful casts with a pliant rod. She perceived that this manner of fis.h.i.+ng was highly successful, insomuch as at every fourth or fifth cast a trout struck his fly, breaking water with a vigorous splash. Then the bamboo would arch as the fish struggled, making sundry leaps clear of the water, gleaming like silver each time he broke the surface, but coming at last tamely to Jack Fyfe's landing net. Of outdoor sports she knew most about angling, for her father had been an ardent fly-caster. And she had observed with a true angler's scorn the efforts of her brother's loggers to catch the lake trout with a baited hook, at which they had scant success. Charlie never fished. He had neither time nor inclination for such fooling, as he termed it. Fyfe stopped fis.h.i.+ng when the donkeys whistled six. It happened that when he drew in to his cookhouse float, Stella was standing in her kitchen door. Fyfe looked up at her and held aloft a dozen trout strung by the gills on a stick, gleaming in the sun.

"Vanity," she commented inaudibly. "I wonder if he thinks I've been admiring his skill as a fisherman?"

Nevertheless she paid tribute to his skill when ten minutes later he sent a logger with the entire catch to her kitchen. They looked toothsome, those lakers, and they were. She cooked one for her own supper and relished it as a change from the everlasting bacon and ham.

In the face of that million feet of timber, Benton hunted no deer. True, the Siwashes had once or twice brought in some venison. That, with a roast or two of beef from town, was all the fresh meat she had tasted in two months. There were enough trout to make a breakfast for the crew.

She ate hers and mentally thanked Jack Fyfe.

Lying in her bed that night, in the short interval that came between undressing and wearied sleep, she found herself wondering with a good deal more interest about Jack Fyfe than she had ever bestowed upon--well, Paul Abbey, for instance.

She was quite positive that she was going to dislike Jack Fyfe if he were thrown much in her way. There was something about him that she resented. The difference between him and the rest of the rude crew among which she must perforce live was a question of degree, not of kind.

There was certainly some compelling magnetism about the man. But along with it went what she considered an almost brutal directness of speech and action. Part of this conclusion came from hearsay, part from observation, limited though her opportunities had been for the latter.

Miss Stella Benton, for all her poise, was not above jumping at conclusions. There was something about Jack Fyfe that she resented. She irritably dismissed it as a foolish impression, but the fact remained that the mere physical nearness of him seemed to put her on the defensive, as if he were in reality a hunter and she the hunted.

Fyfe joined Charlie Benton about the time she finished work. The three of them sat on the gra.s.s before Benton's quarters, and every time Jack Fyfe's eyes rested on her she steeled herself to resist--what, she did not know. Something intangible, something that disturbed her. She had never experienced anything like that before; it tantalized her, roused her curiosity. There was nothing occult about the man. He was nowise fascinating, either in face or manner. He made no bid for her attention.

Yet during the half hour he sat there, Stella's mind revolved constantly about him. She recalled all that she had heard of him, much of it, from her point of view, highly discreditable. Inevitably she fell to comparing him with other men she knew.

She had, in a way, unconsciously been prepared for just such a measure of concentration upon Jack Fyfe. For he was a power on Roaring Lake, and power,--physical, intellectual or financial,--exacts its own tribute of consideration. He was a fighter, a dominant, hard-bitten woodsman, so the tale ran. He had gathered about him the toughest crew on the Lake, himself, upon occasion, the most turbulent of all. He controlled many square miles of big timber, and he had gotten it all by his own effort in the eight years since he came to Roaring Lake as a hand logger. He was slow of speech, chain-lightning in action, respected generally, feared a lot. All these things her brother and Katy John had sketched for Stella with much verbal embellishment.

There was no ignoring such a man. Brought into close contact with the man himself, Stella felt the radiating force of his personality. There it was, a thing to be reckoned with. She felt that whenever Jack Fyfe's gray eyes rested impersonally on her. His pleasant, freckled face hovered before her until she fell asleep, and in her sleep she dreamed again of him throwing that drunken logger down the Hot Springs slip.

CHAPTER VIII

DURANCE VILE

By September first a growing uneasiness hardened into distasteful certainty upon Stella. It had become her firm resolve to get what money was due her when Charlie marketed his logs and try another field of labor. That camp on Roaring Lake was becoming a nightmare to her. She had no inherent dislike for work. She was too vibrantly alive to be lazy. But she had had an overdose of unaccustomed drudgery, and she was growing desperate. If there had been anything to keep her mind from continual dwelling on the manifold disagreeableness she had to cope with, she might have felt differently, but there was not. She ate, slept, worked,--ate, slept, and worked again,--till every fibre of her being cried out in protest against the deadening round. She was like a flower striving to attain its destiny of bloom in soil overrun with rank weeds. Loneliness and hard, mean work, day after day, in which all that had ever seemed desirable in life had neither place nor consideration, were twin evils of isolation and flesh-wearying labor, from which she felt that she must get away, or go mad.