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Big Timber: A Story of the Northwest

by Bertrand W. Sinclair · English · Gutenberg #11223 · 483,864 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Big Timber: A Story of the Northwest

Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11223]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11223

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIG TIMBER: A STORY OF THE NORTHWEST ***

[Illustration: She, too, had seen Monohan seated on the after deck.
FRONTISPIECE.]



                  BIG TIMBER

           A Story of the Northwest

           By BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR





              With Frontispiece
               By DOUGLAS DUER


                    1916




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I.     GREEN FIELDS AND PASTURES NEW
II.    MR. ABBEY ARRIVES
III.   HALFWAY POINT
IV.    A FORETASTE OF THINGS TO COME
V.     THE TOLL OF BIG TIMBER
VI.    THE DIGNITY (?) OF TOIL
VII.   SOME NEIGHBORLY ASSISTANCE
VIII.  DURANCE VILE
IX.    JACK FYFE'S CAMP
X.     ONE WAY OUT
XI.    THE PLUNGE
XII.   AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED
XIII.  IN WHICH EVENTS MARK TIME
XIV.   A CLOSE CALL AND A NEW ACQUAINTANCE
XV.    A RESURRECTION
XVI.   THE CRISIS
XVII.  IN WHICH THERE IS A FURTHER CLASH
XVIII. THE OPENING GUN
XIX.   FREE AS THE WIND
XX.    ECHOES
XXI.   AN UNEXPECTED MEETING
XXII.  THE FIRE BEHIND THE SMOKE
XXIII. A RIDE BY NIGHT
XXIV.  "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME"





CHAPTER I


GREEN FIELDS AND PASTURES NEW

The Imperial Limited lurched with a swing around the last hairpin curve
of the Yale canyon. Ahead opened out a timbered valley,--narrow on its
floor, flanked with bold mountains, but nevertheless a valley,--down
which the rails lay straight and shining on an easy grade. The river
that for a hundred miles had boiled and snarled parallel to the tracks,
roaring through the granite sluice that cuts the Cascade Range, took a
wider channel and a leisurely flow. The mad haste had fallen from it as
haste falls from one who, with time to spare, sees his destination near
at hand; and the turgid Fraser had time to spare, for now it was but
threescore miles to tidewater. So the great river moved placidly--as an
old man moves when all the headlong urge of youth is spent and his race
near run.

On the river side of the first coach behind the diner, Estella Benton
nursed her round chin in the palm of one hand, leaning her elbow on the
window sill. It was a relief to look over a widening valley instead of a
bare-walled gorge all scarred with slides, to see wooded heights lift
green in place of barren cliffs, to watch banks of fern massed against
the right of way where for a day and a night parched sagebrush, brown
tumble-weed, and such scant growth as flourished in the arid uplands of
interior British Columbia had streamed in barren monotony, hot and dry
and still.

She was near the finish of her journey. Pensively she considered the end
of the road. How would it be there? What manner of folk and country?
Between her past mode of life and the new that she was hurrying toward
lay the vast gulf of distance, of custom, of class even. It was bound to
be crude, to be full of inconveniences and uncouthness. Her brother's
letters had partly prepared her for that. Involuntarily she shrank from
it, had been shrinking from it by fits and starts all the way, as
flowers that thrive best in shady nooks shrink from hot sun and rude
winds. Not that Estella Benton was particularly flower-like. On the
contrary she was a healthy, vigorous-bodied young woman, scarcely to be
described as beautiful, yet undeniably attractive. Obviously a daughter
of the well-to-do, one of that American type which flourishes in
families to which American politicians unctuously refer as the backbone
of the nation. Outwardly, gazing riverward through the dusty pane, she
bore herself with utmost serenity. Inwardly she was full of misgivings.

Four days of lonely travel across a continent, hearing the drumming
clack of car wheels and rail joint ninety-six hours on end, acutely
conscious that every hour of the ninety-six put its due quota of miles
between the known and the unknown, may be either an adventure, a bore,
or a calamity, depending altogether upon the individual point of view,
upon conditioning circumstances and previous experience.

Estella Benton's experience along such lines was chiefly a blank and the
conditioning circumstances of her present journey were somber enough to
breed thought that verged upon the melancholy. Save for a natural
buoyancy of spirit she might have wept her way across North America. She
had no tried standard by which to measure life's values for she had
lived her twenty-two years wholly shielded from the human maelstrom,
fed, clothed, taught, an untried product of home and schools. Her head
was full of university lore, things she had read, a smattering of the
arts and philosophy, liberal portions of academic knowledge, all tagged
and sorted like parcels on a shelf to be reached when called for. Buried
under these externalities the ego of her lay unaroused, an incalculable
quantity.

All of which is merely by way of stating that Miss Estella Benton was a
young woman who had grown up quite complacently in that station of life
in which--to quote the Philistines--it had pleased God to place her, and
that Chance had somehow, to her astonished dismay, contrived to thrust a
spoke in the smooth-rolling wheels of destiny. Or was it Destiny? She
had begun to think about that, to wonder if a lot that she had taken for
granted as an ordered state of things was not, after all, wholly
dependent upon Chance. She had danced and sung and played
lightheartedly accepting a certain standard of living, a certain
position in a certain set, a pleasantly ordered home life, as her
birthright, a natural heritage. She had dwelt upon her ultimate destiny
in her secret thoughts as foreshadowed by that of other girls she knew.
The Prince would come, to put it in a nutshell. He would woo gracefully.
They would wed. They would be delightfully happy. Except for the matter
of being married, things would move along the same pleasant channels.

Just so. But a broken steering knuckle on a heavy touring car set things
in a different light--many things. She learned then that death is no
respecter of persons, that a big income may be lived to its limit with
nothing left when the brain force which commanded it ceases to function.
Her father produced perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a year in
his brokerage business, and he had saved nothing. Thus at one stroke she
was put on an equal footing with the stenographer in her father's
office. Scarcely equal either, for the stenographer earned her bread and
was technically equipped for the task, whereas Estella Benton had no
training whatsoever, except in social usage. She did not yet fully
realize just what had overtaken her. Things had happened so swiftly, to
ruthlessly, that she still verged upon the incredulous. Habit clung
fast. But she had begun to think, to try and establish some working
relation between herself and things as she found them. She had
discovered already that certain theories of human relations are not
soundly established in fact.

She turned at last in her seat. The Limited's whistle had shrilled for
a stop. At the next stop--she wondered what lay in store for her just
beyond the next stop. While she dwelt mentally upon this, her hands were
gathering up some few odds and ends of her belongings on the berth.

Across the aisle a large, smooth-faced young man watched her with covert
admiration. When she had settled back with bag and suitcase locked and
strapped on the opposite seat and was hatted and gloved, he leaned over
and addressed her genially.

"Getting off at Hopyard? Happen to be going out to Roaring Springs?"

Miss Benton's gray eyes rested impersonally on the top of his head,
traveled slowly down over the trim front of his blue serge to the
polished tan Oxfords on his feet, and there was not in eyes or on
countenance the slightest sign that she saw or heard him. The large
young man flushed a vivid red.

Miss Benton was partly amused, partly provoked. The large young man had
been her vis-à-vis at dinner the day before and at breakfast that
morning. He had evinced a yearning for conversation each time, but it
had been diplomatically confined to salt and other condiments, the
weather and the scenery. Miss Benton had no objection to young men in
general, quite the contrary. But she did not consider it quite the thing
to countenance every amiable stranger.

Within a few minutes the porter came for her things, and the blast of
the Limited's whistle warned her that it was time to leave the train.
Ten minutes later the Limited was a vanishing object down an aisle
slashed through a forest of great trees, and Miss Estella Benton stood
on the plank platform of Hopyard station. Northward stretched a flat,
unlovely vista of fire-blackened stumps. Southward, along track and
siding, ranged a single row of buildings, a grocery store, a shanty with
a huge sign proclaiming that it was a bank, dwelling, hotel and
blacksmith shop whence arose the clang of hammered iron. A dirt road ran
between town and station, with hitching posts at which farmers' nags
stood dispiritedly in harness.

To the Westerner such spots are common enough; he sees them not as
fixtures, but as places in a stage of transformation. By every side
track and telegraph station on every transcontinental line they spring
up, centers of productive activity, growing into orderly towns and
finally attaining the dignity of cities. To her, fresh from trim
farmsteads and rural communities that began setting their houses in
order when Washington wintered at Valley Forge, Hopyard stood forth
sordid and unkempt. And as happens to many a one in like case, a wave of
sickening loneliness engulfed her, and she eyed the speeding Limited as
one eyes a departing friend.

"How could one live in a place like this?" she asked herself.

But she had neither Slave of the Lamp at her beck, nor any Magic Carpet
to transport her elsewhere. At any rate, she reflected, Hopyard was not
her abiding-place. She hoped that her destination would prove more
inviting.

Beside the platform were ranged two touring cars. Three or four of
those who had alighted entered these. Their baggage was piled over the
hoods, buckled on the running boards. The driver of one car approached
her. "Hot Springs?" he inquired tersely.

She affirmed this, and he took her baggage, likewise her trunk check
when she asked how that article would be transported to the lake. She
had some idea of route and means, from her brother's written
instruction, but she thought he might have been there to meet her. At
least he would be at the Springs.

So she was whirled along a country road, jolted in the tonneau between a
fat man from Calgary and a rheumatic dame on her way to take hot sulphur
baths at St. Allwoods. She passed seedy farmhouses, primitive in
construction, and big barns with moss plentifully clinging on roof and
gable. The stretch of charred stumps was left far behind, but in every
field of grain and vegetable and root great butts of fir and cedar rose
amid the crops. Her first definitely agreeable impression of this land,
which so far as she knew must be her home, was of those huge and
numerous stumps contending with crops for possession of the fields.
Agreeable, because it came to her forcibly that it must be a sturdy
breed of men and women, possessed of brawn and fortitude and high
courage, who made their homes here. Back in her country, once beyond
suburban areas, the farms lay like the squares of a chess board, trim
and orderly, tamely subdued to agriculture. Here, at first hand, she saw
how man attacked the forest and conquered it. But the conquest was
incomplete, for everywhere stood those stubborn roots, six and eight and
ten feet across, contending with man for its primal heritage, the soil,
perishing slowly as perish the proud remnants of a conquered race.

Then the cleared land came to a stop against heavy timber. The car
whipped a curve and drove into what the fat man from Calgary facetiously
remarked upon as the tall uncut. Miss Benton sighted up these noble
columns to where a breeze droned in the tops, two hundred feet above.
Through a gap in the timber she saw mountains, peaks that stood bold as
the Rockies, capped with snow. For two days she had been groping for a
word to define, to sum up the feeling which had grown upon her, had been
growing upon her steadily, as the amazing scroll of that four-day
journey unrolled. She found it now, a simple word, one of the simplest
in our mother tongue--bigness. Bigness in its most ample sense,--that
was the dominant note. Immensities of distance, vastness of rolling
plain, sheer bulk of mountain, rivers that one crossed, and after a
day's journey crossed again, still far from source or confluence. And
now this unending sweep of colossal trees!

At first she had been overpowered with a sense of insignificance utterly
foreign to her previous experience. But now she discovered with an
agreeable sensation of surprise she could vibrate to such a keynote. And
while she communed with this pleasant discovery the car sped down a
straight stretch and around a corner and stopped short to unload sacks
of mail at a weather-beaten yellow edifice, its windows displaying
indiscriminately Indian baskets, groceries, and hardware. Northward
opened a broad scope of lake level, girt about with tremendous peaks
whose lower slopes were banked with thick forest.

Somewhere distant along that lake shore was to be her home. As the car
rolled over the four hundred yards between store and white-and-green St.
Allwoods, she wondered if Charlie would be there to meet her. She was
weary of seeing strange faces, of being directed, of being hustled
about.

But he was not there, and she recalled that he never had been notable
for punctuality. Five years is a long time. She expected to find him
changed--for the better, in certain directions. He had promised to be
there; but, in this respect, time evidently had wrought no appreciable
transformation.

She registered, was assigned a room, and ate luncheon to the melancholy
accompaniment of a three-man orchestra struggling vainly with Bach in an
alcove off the dining room. After that she began to make inquiries.
Neither clerk nor manager knew aught of Charlie Benton. They were both
in their first season there. They advised her to ask the storekeeper.

"MacDougal will know," they were agreed. "He knows everybody around
here, and everything that goes on."

The storekeeper, a genial, round-bodied Scotchman, had the information
she desired.

"Charlie Benton?" said he. "No, he'll be at his camp up the lake. He was
in three or four days back. I mind now, he said he'd be down Thursday;
that's to-day. But he isn't here yet, or his boat'd be by the wharf
yonder."

"Are there any passenger boats that call there?" she asked.

MacDougal shook his head.

"Not reg'lar. There's a gas boat goes t' the head of the lake now an'
then. She's away now. Ye might hire a launch. Jack Fyfe's camp tender's
about to get under way. But ye wouldna care to go on her, I'm thinkin'.
She'll be loaded wi' lumberjacks--every man drunk as a lord, most like.
Maybe Benton'll be in before night."

She went back to the hotel. But St. Allwoods, in its dual capacity of
health-and-pleasure resort, was a gilded shell, making a brave outward
show, but capitalizing chiefly lake, mountains, and hot, mineral
springs. Her room was a bare, cheerless place. She did not want to sit
and ponder. Too much real grief hovered in the immediate background of
her life. It is not always sufficient to be young and alive. To sit
still and think--that way lay tears and despondency. So she went out and
walked down the road and out upon the wharf which jutted two hundred
yards into the lake.

It stood deserted save for a lone fisherman on the outer end, and an
elderly couple that preceded her. Halfway out she passed a slip beside
which lay moored a heavily built, fifty-foot boat, scarred with usage, a
squat and powerful craft. Lakeward stretched a smooth, unrippled
surface. Overhead patches of white cloud drifted lazily. Where the
shadows from these lay, the lake spread gray and lifeless. Where the
afternoon sun rested, it touched the water with gleams of gold and pale,
delicate green. A white-winged yacht lay offshore, her sails in slack
folds. A lump of an island lifted two miles beyond, all cliffs and
little, wooded hills. And the mountains surrounding in a giant ring
seemed to shut the place away from all the world. For sheer wild, rugged
beauty, Roaring Lake surpassed any spot she had ever seen. Its quiet
majesty, its air of unbroken peace soothed and comforted her, sick with
hurry and swift-footed events.

She stood for a time at the outer wharf end, mildly interested when the
fisherman drew up a two-pound trout, wondering a little at her own
subtle changes of mood. Her surrounding played upon her like a virtuoso
on his violin. And this was something that she did not recall as a trait
in her own character. She had never inclined to the volatile--perhaps
because until the motor accident snuffed out her father's life she had
never dealt in anything but superficial emotions.

After a time she retraced her steps. Nearing the halfway slip, she saw
that a wagon from which goods were being unloaded blocked the way. A
dozen men were stringing in from the road, bearing bundles and bags and
rolls of blankets. They were big, burly men, carrying themselves with a
reckless swing, with trousers cut off midway between knee and ankle so
that they reached just below the upper of their high-topped, heavy,
laced boots. Two or three were singing. All appeared unduly happy,
talking loudly, with deep laughter. One threw down his burden and
executed a brief clog. Splinters flew where the sharp calks bit into the
wharf planking, and his companions applauded.

It dawned upon Stella Benton that these might be Jack Fyfe's drunken
loggers, and she withdrew until the way should be clear, vitally
interested because her brother was a logging man, and wondering if these
were the human tools he used in his business, if these were the sort of
men with whom he associated. They were a rough lot--and some were very
drunk. With the manifestations of liquor she had but the most shadowy
acquaintance. But she would have been little less than a fool not to
comprehend this.

Then they began filing down the gangway to the boat's deck. One slipped,
and came near falling into the water, whereat his fellows howled
gleefully. Precariously they negotiated the slanting passage. All but
one: he sat him down at the slip-head on his bundle and began a
quavering chant. The teamster imperturbably finished his unloading, two
men meanwhile piling the goods aboard.

The wagon backed out, and the way was clear, save for the logger sitting
on his blankets, wailing his lugubrious song. From below his fellows
urged him to come along. A bell clanged in the pilot house. The exhaust
of a gas engine began to sputter through the boat's side. From her after
deck a man hailed the logger sharply, and when his call was unheeded, he
ran lightly up the slip. A short, squarely-built man he was, light on
his feet as a dancing master.

He spoke now with authority, impatiently.

"Hurry aboard, Mike; we're waiting."

The logger rose, waved his hand airily, and turned as if to retreat down
the wharf. The other caught him by the arm and spun him face to the
slip.

"Come on, Slater," he said evenly. "I have no time to fool around."

The logger drew back his fist. He was a fairly big man. But if he had in
mind to deal a blow, it failed, for the other ducked and caught him with
both arms around the middle. He lifted the logger clear of the wharf,
hoisted him to the level of his breast, and heaved him down the slip as
one would throw a sack of bran.

The man's body bounced on the incline, rolled, slid, tumbled, till at
length he brought up against the boat's guard, and all that saved him a
ducking was the prompt extension of several stout arms, which clutched
and hauled him to the flush after deck. He sat on his haunches,
blinking. Then he laughed. So did the man at the top of the slip and the
lumberjacks clustered on the boat. Homeric laughter, as at some
surpassing jest. But the roar of him who had taken that inglorious
descent rose loudest of all, an explosive, "Har--har--har!"

He clambered unsteadily to his feet, his mouth expanded in an amiable
grin.

"Hey, Jack," he shouted. "Maybe y' c'n throw m' blankets down too, while
y'r at it."

The man at the slip-head caught up the roll, poised it high, and cast it
from him with a quick twist of his body. The woolen missile flew like a
well-put shot and caught its owner fair in the breast, tumbling him
backwards on the deck--and the Homeric laughter rose in double strength.
Then the boat began to swing, and the man ran down and leaped the
widening space as she drew away from her mooring.

Stella Benton watched the craft gather way, a trifle shocked, her breath
coming a little faster. The most deadly blows she had ever seen struck
were delivered in a more subtle, less virile mode, a curl of the lip, an
inflection of the voice. These were a different order of beings. This,
she sensed was man in a more primitive aspect, man with the conventional
bark stripped clean off him. And she scarcely knew whether to be amused
or frightened when she reflected that among such her life would
presently lie. Charlie had written that she would find things and people
a trifle rougher than she was used to. She could well believe that.
But--they were picturesque ruffians.

Her interested gaze followed the camp tender as it swung around the
wharf-end, and so her roaming eyes were led to another craft drawing
near. This might be her brother's vessel. She went back to the outer
landing to see.

Two men manned this boat. As she ranged alongside the piles, one stood
forward, and the other aft with lines to make fast. She cast a look at
each. They were prototypes of the rude crew but now departed,
brown-faced, flannel-shirted, shod with calked boots, unshaven for days,
typical men of the woods. But as she turned to go, the man forward and
almost directly below her looked her full in the face.

"Stell!"

She leaned over the rail.

"Charlie Benton--for Heaven's sake."

They stared at each other.

"Well," he laughed at last. "If it were not for your mouth and eyes,
Stell, I wouldn't have known you. Why, you're all grown up."

He clambered to the wharf level and kissed her. The rough stubble of his
beard pricked her tender skin and she drew back.

"My word, Charlie, you certainly ought to shave," she observed with
sisterly frankness. "I didn't know you until you spoke. I'm awfully glad
to see you, but you do need _some one_ to look after you."

Benton laughed tolerantly.

"Perhaps. But, my dear girl, a fellow doesn't get anywhere on his
appearance in this country. When a fellow's bucking big timber, he
shucks off a lot of things he used to think were quite essential. By
Jove, you're a picture, Stell. If I hadn't been expecting to see you, I
wouldn't have known you."

"I doubt if I should have known you either," she returned drily.




CHAPTER II


MR. ABBEY ARRIVES

Stella accompanied her brother to the store, where he gave an order for
sundry goods. Then they went to the hotel to see if her trunks had
arrived. Within a few yards of the fence which enclosed the grounds of
St. Allwoods a man hailed Benton, and drew him a few steps aside. Stella
walked slowly on, and presently her brother joined her.

The baggage wagon had brought the trunks, and when she had paid her
bill, they were delivered at the outer wharf-end, where also arrived at
about the same time a miscellaneous assortment of supplies from the
store and a Japanese with her two handbags. So far as Miss Estella
Benton could see, she was about to embark on the last stage of her
journey.

"How soon will you start?" she inquired, when the last of the stuff was
stowed aboard the little steamer.

"Twenty minutes or so," Benton answered. "Say," he went on casually,
"have you got any money, Stell? I owe a fellow thirty dollars, and I
left the bank roll and my check book at camp."

Miss Benton drew the purse from her hand bag and gave it to him. He
pocketed it and went off down the wharf, with the brief assurance that
he would be gone only a minute or so.

The minute, however, lengthened to nearly an hour, and Sam Davis had his
blow-off valve hissing, and Stella Benton was casting impatient glances
shoreward before Charlie strolled leisurely back.

"You needn't fire up quite so strong, Sam," he called down. "We won't
start for a couple of hours yet."

"Sufferin' Moses!" Davis poked his fiery thatch out from the engine
room. "I might 'a' known better'n to sweat over firin' up. You generally
manage to make about three false starts to one get-away."

Benton laughed good-naturedly and turned away.

"Do you usually allow your men to address you in that impertinent way?"
Miss Benton desired to know.

Charlie looked blank for a second. Then he smiled, and linking his arm
affectionately in hers, drew her off along the wharf, chuckling to
himself.

"My dear girl," said he, "you'd better not let Sam Davis or any of Sam's
kind hear you pass remarks like that. Sam would say exactly what he
thought about such matters to his boss, or King George, or to the first
lady of the land, regardless. Sabe? We're what you'll call primitive out
here, yet. You want to forget that master and man business, the servant
proposition, and proper respect, and all that rot. Outside the English
colonies in one or two big towns, that attitude doesn't go in B.C.
People in this neck of the woods stand pretty much on the same class
footing, and you'll get in bad and get me in bad if you don't remember
that. I've got ten loggers working for me in the woods. Whether they're
impertinent or profane cuts no figure so long as they handle the job
properly. They're men, you understand, not servants. None of them would
hesitate to tell me what he thinks about me or anything I do. If I don't
like it, I can fight him or fire him. They won't stand for the sort of
airs you're accustomed to. They have the utmost respect for a woman, but
a man is merely a two-legged male human like themselves, whether he
wears mackinaws or broadcloth, has a barrel of money of none at all.
This will seem odd to you at first, but you'll get used to it. You'll
find things rather different out here."

"I suppose so," she agreed. "But it sounds queer. For instance, if one
of papa's clerks or the chauffeur had spoken like that, he'd have been
discharged on the spot."

"The logger's a different breed," Benton observed drily. "Or perhaps
only the same breed manifesting under different conditions. He isn't
servile. He doesn't have to be."

"Why the delay, though?" she reverted to the point. "I thought you were
all ready to go."

"I am," Charlie enlightened. "But while I was at the store just now,
Paul Abbey 'phoned from Vancouver to know if there was an up-lake boat
in. His people are big lumber guns here, and it will accommodate him and
won't hurt me to wait a couple of hours and drop him off at their camp.
I've got more or less business dealings with them, and it doesn't hurt
to be neighborly. He'd have to hire a gas-boat otherwise. Besides,
Paul's a pretty good head."

This, of course, being strictly her brother's business, Stella forbore
comment. She was weary of travel, tired with the tension of eternally
being shunted across distances, anxious to experience once more that
sense of restful finality which comes with a journey's end. But, in a
measure her movements were no longer dependent upon her own volition.

They walked slowly along the broad roadway which bordered the lake until
they came to a branchy maple, and here they seated themselves on the
grassy turf in the shadow of the tree.

"Tell me about yourself," she said. "How do you like it here, and how
are you getting on? Your letters home were always chiefly remarkable for
their brevity."

"There isn't a great lot to tell," Benton responded. "I'm just beginning
to get on my feet. A raw, untried youngster has a lot to learn and
unlearn when he hits this tall timber. I've been out here five years,
and I'm just beginning to realize what I'm equal to and what I'm not.
I'm crawling over a hump now that would have been a lot easier if the
governor hadn't come to grief the way he did. He was going to put in
some money this fall. But I think I'll make it, anyway, though it will
keep me digging and figuring. I have a contract for delivery of a
million feet in September and another contract that I could take if I
could see my way clear to finance the thing. I could clean up thirty
thousand dollars net in two years if I had more cash to work on. As it
is, I have to go slow, or I'd go broke. I'm holding two limits by the
skin of my teeth. But I've got one good one practically for an annual
pittance. If I make delivery on my contract according to schedule it's
plain sailing. That about sizes up my prospects, Sis."

"You speak a language I don't understand," she smiled. "What does a
million feet mean? And what's a limit?"

"A limit is one square mile--six hundred and forty acres more or
less--of merchantable timber land," he explained. "We speak of timber as
scaling so many board feet. A board foot is one inch thick by twelve
inches square. Sound fir timber is worth around seven dollars per
thousand board feet in the log, got out of the woods, and boomed in the
water ready to tow to the mills. The first limit I got--from the
government--will scale around ten million feet. The other two are nearly
as good. But I got them from timber speculators, and it's costing me
pretty high. They're a good spec if I can hang on to them, though."

"It sounds big," she commented.

"It _is_ big," Charlie declared, "if I could go at it right. I've been
trying ever since I got wise to this timber business to make the
governor see what a chance there is in it. He was just getting properly
impressed with the possibilities when the speed bug got him. He could
have trimmed a little here and there at home and put the money to work.
Ten thousand dollars would have done the trick, given me a working
outfit along with what I've got that would have put us both on Easy
Street. However, the poor old chap didn't get around to it. I suppose,
like lots of other business men, when he stopped, everything ran down.
According to Lander's figures, there won't be a thing left when all
accounts are squared."

"Don't talk about it, Charlie," she begged. "It's too near, and I was
through it all."

"I would have been there too," Benton said. "But, as I told you, I was
out of reach of your wire, and by the time I got it, it was all over. I
couldn't have done any good, anyway. There's no use mourning. One way
and another we've all got to come to it some day."

Stella looked out over the placid, shimmering surface of Roaring Lake
for a minute. Her grief was dimming with time and distance, and she had
all her own young life before her. She found herself drifting from
painful memories of her father's sudden death to a consideration of
things present and personal. She found herself wondering critically if
this strange, rude land would work as many changes in her as were patent
in this bronzed and burly brother.

He had left home a slim, cocksure youngster, who had proved more than a
handful for his family before he was half through college, which
educational finishing process had come to an abrupt stop before it was
complete. He had been a problem that her father and mother had discussed
in guarded tones. Sending him West had been a hopeful experiment, and in
the West that abounding spirit which manifested itself in one continual
round of minor escapades appeared to have found a natural outlet. She
recalled that latterly their father had taken to speaking of Charlie in
accents of pride. He was developing the one ambition that Benton senior
could thoroughly understand and properly appreciate, the desire to get
on, to grasp opportunities, to achieve material success, to make money.

Just as her father, on the few occasions when he talked business before
her, spoke in a big way of big things as the desirable ultimate, so now
Charlie spoke, with plans and outlook to match his speech. In her
father's point of view, and in Charlie's now, a man's personal life did
not seem to matter in comparison with getting on and making money. And
it was with that personal side of existence that Stella Benton was now
chiefly concerned. She had never been required to adjust herself to an
existence that was wholly taken up with getting on to the complete
exclusion of everything else. Her work had been to play. She could
scarce conceive of any one entirely excluding pleasure and diversion
from his or her life. She wondered if Charlie had done so. And if not,
what ameliorating circumstances, what social outlet, might be found to
offset, for her, continued existence in this isolated region of towering
woods. So far as her first impressions went, Roaring Lake appeared to be
mostly frequented by lumberjacks addicted to rude speech and strong
drink.

"Are there many people living around this lake?" she inquired. "It is
surely a beautiful spot. If we had this at home, there would be a summer
cottage on every hundred yards of shore."

"Be a long time before we get to that stage here," Benton returned. "And
scenery in B.C. is a drug on the market; we've got Europe backed off the
map for tourist attractions, if they only knew it. No, about the only
summer home in this locality is the Abbey place at Cottonwood Point.
They come up here every summer for two or three months. Otherwise I
don't know of any lilies of the field, barring the hotel people, and
they, being purely transient, don't count. There's the Abbey-Monohan
outfit with two big logging camps, my outfit, Jack Fyfe's, some hand
loggers on the east shore, and the R.A.T. at the head of the lake.
That's the population--and Roaring Lake is forty-two miles long and
eight wide."

"Are there any nice girls around?" she asked.

Benton grinned widely.

"Girls?" said he. "Not so you could notice. Outside the Springs and the
hatchery over the way, there isn't a white woman on the lake except
Lefty Howe's wife,--Lefty's Jack Fyfe's foreman,--and she's fat and past
forty. I told you it was a God-forsaken hole as far as society is
concerned, Stell."

"I know," she said thoughtfully. "But one can scarcely realize such
a--such a social blankness, until one actually experiences it. Anyway, I
don't know but I'll appreciate utter quiet for awhile. But what do you
do with yourself when you're not working?"

"There's seldom any such time," he answered. "I tell you, Stella, I've
got a big job on my hands. I've got a definite mark to shoot at, and I'm
going to make a bull's-eye in spite of hell and high water. I have no
time to play, and there's no place to play if I had. I don't intend to
muddle along making a pittance like a hand logger. I want a stake; and
then it'll be time to make a splurge in a country where a man can get a
run for his money."

"If that's the case," she observed, "I'm likely to be a handicap to you,
am I not?"

"Lord, no," he smiled. "I'll put you to work too, when you get rested up
from your trip. You stick with me, Sis, and you'll wear diamonds."

She laughed with him at this, and leaving the shady maple they walked up
to the hotel, where Benton proposed that they get a canoe and paddle to
where Roaring River flowed out of the lake half a mile westward, to kill
the time that must elapse before the three-thirty train.

The St. Allwoods' car was rolling out to Hopyard when they came back. By
the time Benton had turned the canoe over to the boathouse man and
reached the wharf, the horn of the returning machine sounded down the
road. They waited. The car came to a stop at the abutting wharf. The
driver handed two suitcases off the burdened hood of his machine. From
out the tonneau clambered a large, smooth-faced young man. He wore an
expansive smile in addition to a blue serge suit, white Panama, and
polished tan Oxfords, and he bestowed a hearty greeting upon Charlie
Benton. But his smile suffered eclipse, and a faint flush rose in his
round cheeks, when his eyes fell upon Benton's sister.




CHAPTER III


HALFWAY POINT

Miss Benton's cool, impersonal manner seemed rather to heighten the
young man's embarrassment. Benton, apparently observing nothing amiss,
introduced them in an offhand fashion.

"Mr. Abbey--my sister."

Mr. Abbey bowed and murmured something that passed for acknowledgment.
The three turned up the wharf toward where Sam Davis had once more got
up steam. As they walked, Mr. Abbey's habitual assurance returned, and
he directed part of his genial flow of conversation to Miss Benton. To
Stella's inner amusement, however, he did not make any reference to
their having been fellow travelers for a day and a half.

Presently they were embarked and under way. Charlie fixed a seat for her
on the after deck, and went forward to steer, whither he was straightway
joined by Paul Abbey. Miss Benton was as well pleased to be alone. She
was not sure she should approve of young men who made such crude efforts
to scrape acquaintance with women on trains. She was accustomed to a
certain amount of formality in such matters. It might perhaps be laid to
the "breezy Western manner" of which she had heard, except that Paul
Abbey did not impress her as a Westerner. He seemed more like a type of
young man she had encountered frequently in her own circle. At any rate,
she was relieved when he did not remain beside her to emit polite
commonplaces. She was quite satisfied to sit by herself and look over
the panorama of woods and lake--and wonder more than a little what
Destiny had in store for her along those silent shores.

The Springs fell far behind, became a few white spots against the
background of dusky green. Except for the ripples spread by their wake,
the water laid oily smooth. Now, a little past four in the afternoon,
she began to sense by comparison the great bulk of the western
mountains,--locally, the Chehalis Range,--for the sun was dipping behind
the ragged peaks already, and deep shadows stole out from the shore to
port. Beneath her feet the screw throbbed, pulsing like an overdriven
heart, and Sam Davis poked his sweaty face now and then through a window
to catch a breath of cool air denied him in the small inferno where he
stoked the fire box.

The _Chickamin_ cleared Echo Island, and a greater sweep of lake opened
out. Here the afternoon wind sprang up, shooting gustily through a gap
between the Springs and Hopyard and ruffling the lake out of its noonday
siesta. Ripples, chop, and a growing swell followed each other with that
marvellous rapidity common to large bodies of fresh water. It broke the
monotony of steady cleaving through dead calm. Stella was a good sailor,
and she rather enjoyed it when the _Chickamin_ began to lift and yaw off
before the following seas that ran up under her fantail stern.

After about an hour's run, with the south wind beginning to whip the
crests of the short seas into white foam, the boat bore in to a landing
behind a low point. Here Abbey disembarked, after taking the trouble to
come aft and shake hands with polite farewell. Standing on the float,
hat in hand, he bowed his sleek blond head to Stella.

"I hope you'll like Roaring Lake, Miss Benton," he said, as Benton
jingled the go-ahead bell. "I tried to persuade Charlie to stop over
awhile, so you could meet my mother and sister, but he's in too big a
hurry. Hope to have the pleasure of meeting you again soon."

Miss Benton parried courteously, a little at a loss to fathom this bland
friendliness, and presently the widening space cut off their talk. As
the boat drew offshore, she saw two women in white come down toward the
float, meet Abbey, and turn back. And a little farther out through an
opening in the woods, she saw a white and green bungalow, low and
rambling, wide-verandahed, set on a hillock three hundred yards back
from shore. There was an encircling area of smooth lawn, a place
restfully inviting.

Watching that, seeing a figure or two moving about, she was smitten with
a recurrence of that poignant loneliness which had assailed her fitfully
in the last four days. And while the _Chickamin_ was still plowing the
inshore waters on an even keel, she walked the guard rail alongside and
joined her brother in the pilot house.

"Isn't that a pretty place back there in the woods?" she remarked.

"Abbey's summer camp; spells money to me, that's all," Charlie
grumbled. "It's a toy for their women,--up-to-date cottage, gardeners,
tennis courts, afternoon tea on the lawn for the guests, and all that.
But the Abbey-Monohan bunch has the money to do what they want to do.
They've made it in timber, as I expect to make mine. You didn't
particularly want to stay over and get acquainted, did you?"

"I? Of course not," she responded.

"Personally, I don't want to mix into their social game," Charlie
drawled. "Or at least, I don't propose to make any tentative advances.
The women put on lots of side, they say. If they want to hunt us up and
cultivate you, all right. But I've got too much to do to butt into
society. Anyway, I didn't want to run up against any critical females
looking like I do right now."

Stella smiled.

"Under certain circumstances, appearances do count then, in this
country," she remarked. "Has your Mr. Abbey got a young and be-yutiful
sister?"

"He has, but that's got nothing to do with it," Charlie retorted.
"Paul's all right himself. But their gait isn't mine--not yet. Here, you
take the wheel a minute. I want to smoke. I don't suppose you ever
helmed a forty-footer, but you'll never learn younger."

She took the wheel and Charlie stood by, directing her. In twenty
minutes they were out where the run of the sea from the south had a fair
sweep. The wind was whistling now. All the roughened surface was spotted
with whitecaps. The _Chickamin_ would hang on the crest of a wave and
shoot forward like a racer, her wheel humming, and again the roller
would run out from under her, and she would labor heavily in the trough.

It began to grow insufferably hot in the pilot house. The wind drove
with them, pressing the heat from the boiler and fire box into the
forward portion of the boat, where Stella stood at the wheel. There were
puffs of smoke when Davis opened the fire box to ply it with fuel. All
the sour smells that rose from an unclean bilge eddied about them. The
heat and the smell and the surging motion began to nauseate Stella.

"I must get outside where I can breathe," she gasped, at length. "It's
suffocating. I don't see how you stand it."

"It does get stuffy in here when we run with the wind," Benton admitted.
"Cuts off our ventilation. I'm used to it. Crawl out the window and sit
on the forward deck. Don't try to get aft. You might slip off, the way
she's lurching."

Curled in the hollow of a faked-down hawser with the clean air fanning
her, Stella recovered herself. The giddiness left her. She pitied Sam
Davis back in that stinking hole beside the fire box. But she supposed
he, like her brother, was "used to it." Apparently one could get used to
anything, if she could judge by the amazing change in Charlie.

Far ahead loomed a ridge running down to the lake shore and cutting off
in a bold promontory. That was Halfway Point, Charlie had told her, and
under its shadow lay his camp. Without any previous knowledge of camps,
she was approaching this one with less eager anticipation than when she
began her long journey. She began to fear that it might be totally
unlike anything she had been able to imagine, disagreeably so. Charlie,
she decided, had grown hard and coarsened in the evolution of his
ambition to get on, to make his pile. She was but four years younger
than he, and she had always thought of herself as being older and wiser
and steadier. She had conceived the idea that her presence would have a
good influence on him, that they would pull together--now that there
were but the two of them. But four hours in his company had dispelled
that illusion. She had the wit to perceive that Charlie Benton had
emerged from the chrysalis stage, that he had the will and the ability
to mold his life after his elected fashion, and that her coming was a
relatively unimportant incident.

In due course the _Chickamin_ bore in under Halfway Point, opened out a
sheltered bight where the watery commotion outside raised but a faint
ripple, and drew in alongside a float.

The girl swept lake shore, bay, and sloping forest with a quickening
eye. Here was no trim-painted cottage and velvet lawn. In the waters
beside and lining the beach floated innumerable logs, confined by
boomsticks, hundreds of trunks of fir, forty and sixty feet long, four
and six feet across the butt, timber enough, when it had passed through
the sawmills, to build four such towns as Hopyard. Just back from the
shore, amid stumps and littered branches, rose the roofs of divers
buildings. One was long and low. Hard by it stood another of like type
but of lesser dimension. Two or three mere shanties lifted level with
great stumps,--crude, unpainted buildings. Smoke issued from the pipe of
the larger, and a white-aproned man stood in the doorway.

Somewhere in the screen of woods a whistle shrilled. Benton looked at
his watch.

"We made good time, in spite of the little roll," said he. "That's the
donkey blowing quitting time--six o'clock. Well, come on up to the
shack, Sis. Sam, you get a wheelbarrow and run those trunks up after
supper, will you?"

Away in the banked timber beyond the maples and alder which Stella now
saw masked the bank of a small stream flowing by the cabins, a faint
call rose, long-drawn:

"Tim-ber-r-r-r!"

They moved along a path beaten through fern and clawing blackberry vine
toward the camp, Benton carrying the two grips. A loud, sharp crack
split the stillness; then a mild swishing sound arose. Hard on the heels
of that followed a rending, tearing crash, a thud that sent tremors
through the solid earth under their feet. The girl started.

"Falling gang dropped a big fir," Charlie laughed. "You'll get used to
that. You'll hear it a good many times a day here."

"Good Heavens, it sounded like the end of the world," she said.

"Well, you can't fell a stick of timber two hundred feet high and six or
eight feet through without making a pretty considerable noise," her
brother remarked complacently. "I like that sound myself. Every big tree
that goes down means a bunch of money."

He led the way past the mess-house, from the doorway of which the
aproned cook eyed her with frank curiosity, hailing his employer with
nonchalant air, a cigarette resting in one corner of his mouth. Benton
opened the door of the second building. Stella followed him in.

It had the saving grace of cleanliness--according to logging-camp
standards. But the bareness of it appalled her. There was a rusty box
heater, littered with cigar and cigarette stubs, a desk fabricated of
undressed boards, a homemade chair or two, sundry boxes standing about.
The sole concession to comfort was a rug of cheap Axminster covering
half the floor. The walls were decorated chiefly with miscellaneous
clothing suspended from nails, a few maps and blue prints tacked up
askew. Straight across from the entering door another stood ajar, and
she could see further vistas of bare board wall, small, dusty
window-panes, and a bed whereon gray blankets were tumbled as they fell
when a waking sleeper cast them aside.

Benton crossed the room and threw open another door.

"Here's a nook I fixed up for you, Stella," he said briskly. "It isn't
very fancy, but it's the best I could do just now."

She followed him in silently. He set her two bags on the floor and
turned to go. Then some impulse moved him to turn back, and he put both
hands on her shoulders and kissed her gently.

"You're home, anyway," he said. "That's something, if it isn't what
you're used to. Try to overlook the crudities. We'll have supper as soon
as you feel like it."

He went out, closing the door behind him.

Miss Estella Benton stood in the middle of the room fighting against a
swift heart-sinking, a terrible depression that strove to master her.

"Good Lord in Heaven," she muttered at last. "What a place to be
marooned in. It's--it's simply impossible."

Her gaze roved about the room. A square box, neither more nor less,
fourteen by fourteen feet of bare board wall, unpainted and unpapered.
There was an iron bed, a willow rocker, and a rude closet for clothes in
one corner. A duplicate of the department-store bargain rug in the other
room lay on the floor. On an upturned box stood an enamel pitcher and a
tin washbasin. That was all.

She sat down on the bed and viewed it forlornly. A wave of sickening
rebellion against everything swept over her. To herself she seemed as
irrevocably alone as if she had been lost in the depths of the dark
timber that rose on every hand. And sitting there she heard at length
the voices of men. Looking out through a window curtained with
cheesecloth she saw her brother's logging gang swing past, stout
woodsmen all, big men, tall men, short-bodied men with thick necks and
shoulders, sunburned, all grimy with the sweat of their labors,
carrying themselves with a free and reckless swing, the doubles in type
of that roistering crew she had seen embark on Jack Fyfe's boat.

In so far as she had taken note of those who labored with their hands in
the region of her birth, she had seen few like these. The chauffeur, the
footman, the street cleaner, the factory workers--they were all
different. They lacked something,--perhaps nothing in the way of
physical excellence; but these men betrayed in every movement a subtle
difference that she could not define. Her nearest approximation and the
first attempt she made at analysis was that they looked like pirates.
They were bold men and strong; that was written in their faces and the
swing of them as they walked. And they served the very excellent purpose
of taking her mind off herself for the time being.

She watched them cluster by a bench before the cookhouse, dabble their
faces and hands in washbasins, scrub themselves promiscuously on towels,
sometimes one at each end of a single piece of cloth, hauling it back
and forth in rude play.

All about that cookhouse dooryard spread a confusion of empty tin cans,
gaudily labeled, containers of corn and peas and tomatoes. Dishwater and
refuse, chips, scraps, all the refuse of the camp was scattered there in
unlovely array.

But that made no more than a passing impression upon her. She was
thinking, as she removed her hat and gloves, of what queer angles come
now and then to the human mind. She wondered why she should be
sufficiently interested in her brother's hired men to drive off a
compelling attack of the blues in consideration of them as men.
Nevertheless, she found herself unable to view them as she had viewed,
say, the clerks in her father's office.

She began to brush her hair and to wonder what sort of food would be
served for supper.




CHAPTER IV


A FORETASTE OF THINGS TO COME

Half an hour later she sat down with her brother at one end of a table
that was but a long bench covered with oilcloth. Chairs there were none.
A narrow movable bench on each side of the fixed table furnished seating
capacity for twenty men, provided none objected to an occasional nudging
from his neighbor's elbow. The dishes, different from any she had ever
eaten from, were of enormously thick porcelain, dead white, variously
chipped and cracked with fine seams. But the food, if plain, was of
excellent quality, tastily cooked. She discovered herself with an
appetite wholly independent of silver and cut glass and linen. The tin
spoons and steel knives and forks harrowed her aesthetic sense without
impairing her ability to satisfy hunger.

They had the dining room to themselves. Through a single shiplap
partition rose a rumble of masculine talk, where the logging crew loafed
in their bunkhouse. The cook served them without any ceremony, putting
everything on the table at once,--soup, meat, vegetables, a bread
pudding for dessert, coffee in a tall tin pot. Benton introduced him to
his sister. He withdrew hastily to the kitchen, and they saw no more of
him.

"Charlie," the girl said plaintively, when the man had closed the door
behind him, "I don't quite fathom your social customs out here. Is one
supposed to know everybody that one encounters?"

"Just about," he grinned. "Loggers, Siwashes, and the natives in
general. Can't very well help it, Sis. There's so few people in this
neck of the woods that nobody can afford to be exclusive,--at least,
nobody who lives here any length of time. You can't tell when you may
have to call on your neighbor or the fellow working for you in a matter
of life and death almost. A man couldn't possibly maintain the same
attitude toward a bunch of loggers working under him that would be
considered proper back where we came from. Take me, for instance, and my
case is no different from any man operating on a moderate scale out
here. I'd get the reputation of being swell-headed, and they'd put me in
the hole at every turn. They wouldn't care what they did or how it was
done. Ten to one I couldn't keep a capable working crew three weeks on
end. On the other hand, take a bunch of loggers on a pay roll working
for a man that meets them on an equal footing--why, they'll go to hell
and back again for him. They're as loyal as soldiers to the flag.
They're a mighty self-sufficient, independent lot, these lumberjacks,
and that goes for most everybody knocking about in this
country,--loggers, prospectors, miners, settlers, and all. If you're
what they term 'all right,' you can do anything, and they'll back you
up. If you go to putting on airs and trying to assert yourself as a
superior being, they'll go out of their way to hand you packages of
trouble."

"I see," she observed thoughtfully. "One's compelled by circumstances to
practice democracy."

"Something like that," he responded carelessly and went on eating his
supper.

"Don't you think we could make this place a lot more homelike, Charlie?"
she ventured, when they were back in their own quarters. "I suppose it
suits a man who only uses it as a place to sleep, but it's bare as a
barn."

"It takes money to make a place cosy," Benton returned. "And I haven't
had it to spend on knickknacks."

"Fiddlesticks!" she laughed. "A comfortable chair or two and curtains
and pictures aren't knickknacks, as you call them. The cost wouldn't
amount to anything."

Benton stuffed the bowl of a pipe and lighted it before he essayed
reply.

"Look here, Stella," he said earnestly. "This joint probably strikes you
as about the limit, seeing that you've been used to pretty soft
surroundings and getting pretty nearly anything you wanted whenever you
expressed a wish for it. Things that you've grown into the way of
considering necessities _are_ luxuries. And they're out of the question
for us at present. I got a pretty hard seasoning the first two years I
was in this country, and when I set up this camp it was merely a place
to live. I never thought anything about it as being comfortable or
otherwise until you elected to come. I'm not in a position to go in for
trimmings. Rough as this camp is, it will have to go as it stands this
summer. I'm up against it for ready money. I've got none due until I
make delivery of those logs in September, and I have to have that
million feet in the water in order to make delivery. Every one of these
men but the cook and the donkey engineer are working for me with their
wages deferred until then. There are certain expenses that must be met
with cash--and I've got all my funds figured down to nickels. If I get
by on this contract, I'll have a few hundred to squander on house
things. Until then, it's the simple life for us. You can camp for three
or four months, can't you, without finding it completely unbearable?"

"Why, of course," she protested. "I wasn't complaining about the way
things are. I merely voiced the idea that it would be nice to fix up a
little cosier, make these rooms look a little homelike. I didn't know
you were practically compelled to live like this as a matter of
economy."

"Well, in a sense, I am," he replied. "And then again, making a place
away out here homelike never struck me as being anything but an
inconsequential detail. I'm not trying to make a home here. I'm after a
bundle of money. A while ago, if you had been here and suggested it, you
could have spent five or six hundred, and I wouldn't have missed it. But
this contract came my way, and gave me a chance to clean up three
thousand dollars clear profit in four months. I grabbed it, and I find
it's some undertaking. I'm dealing with a hard business outfit, hard as
nails. I might get the banks or some capitalist to finance me, because
my timber holdings are worth money. But I'm shy of that. I've noticed
that when a logger starts working on borrowed capital, he generally goes
broke. The financiers generally devise some way to hook him. I prefer to
sail as close to the wind as I can on what little I've got. I can get
this timber out--but it wouldn't look nice, now, would it, for me to be
buying furniture when I'm standing these boys off for their wages till
September?"

"I should have been a man," Miss Estella Benton pensively remarked.
"Then I could put on overalls and make myself useful, instead of being a
drone. There doesn't seem to be anything here I can do. I could keep
house--only you haven't any house to keep, therefore no need of a
housekeeper. Why, who's that?"

Her ear had caught a low, throaty laugh, a woman's laugh, outside. She
looked inquiringly at her brother. His expression remained absent, as of
one concentrated upon his own problems. She repeated the question.

"That? Oh, Katy John, I suppose, or her mother," he answered. "Siwash
bunch camping around the point. The girl does some washing for us now
and then. I suppose she's after Matt for some bread or something."

Stella looked out. At the cookhouse door stood a short, plump-bodied
girl, dark-skinned and black-haired. Otherwise she conformed to none of
Miss Benton's preconceived ideas of the aboriginal inhabitant. If she
had been pinned down, she would probably have admitted that she
expected to behold an Indian maiden garbed in beaded buckskin and brass
ornaments. Instead, Katy John wore a white sailor blouse, a brown
pleated skirt, tan shoes, and a bow of baby blue ribbon in her hair.

"Why, she talks good English," Miss Benton exclaimed, as fragments of
the girl's speech floated over to her.

"Sure. As good as anybody," Charlie drawled. "Why not?"

"Well--er--I suppose my notion of Indians is rather vague," Stella
admitted. "Are they all civilized and educated?"

"Most of 'em," Benton replied. "The younger generation anyhow. Say,
Stell, can you cook?"

"A little," Stella rejoined guardedly. "That Indian girl's really
pretty, isn't she?"

"They nearly all are when they're young," he observed. "But they are old
and tubby by the time they're thirty."

Katy John's teeth shone white between her parted lips at some sally from
the cook. She stood by the door, swinging a straw hat in one hand.
Presently Matt handed her a parcel done up in newspaper, and she walked
away with a nod to some of the loggers sitting with their backs against
the bunkhouse wall.

"Why were you asking if I could cook?" Stella inquired, when the girl
vanished in the brush.

"Why, your wail about being a man and putting on overalls and digging in
reminded me that if you liked you may have a chance to get on your apron
and show us what you can do," he laughed. "Matt's about due to go on a
tear. He's been on the water-wagon now about his limit. The first man
that comes along with a bottle of whisky, Matt will get it and quit and
head for town. I was wondering if you and Katy John could keep the gang
from starving to death if that happened. The last time I had to get in
and cook for two weeks myself. And I can't run a logging crew from the
cook shanty very well."

"I daresay I could manage," Stella returned dubiously. "This seems to be
a terrible place for drinking. Is it the accepted thing to get drunk at
all times and in public?"

"It's about the only excitement there is," Benton smiled tolerantly. "I
guess there is no more drinking out here than any other part of this
North American continent. Only a man here gets drunk openly and
riotously without any effort to hide it, and without it being considered
anything but a natural lapse. That's one thing you'll have to get used
to out here, Stell--I mean, that what vices men have are all on the
surface. We don't get drunk secretly at the club and sneak home in a
taxi. Oh, well, we'll cross the bridge when we come to it. Matt may not
break out for weeks."

He yawned openly.

"Sleepy?" Stella inquired.

"I get up every morning between four and five," he replied. "And I can
go to sleep any time after supper."

"I think I'll take a walk along the beach," she said abruptly.

"All right. Don't hike into the woods and get lost, though."

She circled the segment of bay, climbed a low, rocky point, and found
herself a seat on a fallen tree. Outside the lake heaved uneasily, still
dotted with whitecaps whipped up by the southerly gale. At her feet
surge after surge hammered the gravelly shore. Far through the woods
behind her the wind whistled and hummed among swaying tops of giant fir
and cedar. There was a heady freshness in that rollicking wind, an odor
resinous and pungent mingled with that elusive smell of green growing
stuff along the shore. Beginning where she sat, tree trunks rose in
immense brown pillars, running back in great forest naves, shadowy
always, floored with green moss laid in a rich, soft carpet for the
wood-sprites' feet. Far beyond the long gradual lower slope lifted a
range of saw-backed mountains, the sanctuary of wild goat and bear, and
across the rolling lake lifted other mountains sheer from the water's
edge, peaks rising above timber-line in majestic contour, their pinnacle
crests grazing the clouds that scudded before the south wind.

Beauty? Yes. A wild, imposing grandeur that stirred some responsive
chord in her. If only one could live amid such surrounding with a
contented mind, she thought, the wilderness would have compensations of
its own. She had an uneasy feeling that isolation from everything that
had played an important part in her life might be the least depressing
factor in this new existence. She could not view the rough and ready
standards of the woods with much equanimity--not as she had that day
seen them set forth. These things were bound to be a part of her daily
life, and all the brief span of her years had gone to forming habits of
speech and thought and manner diametrically opposed to what she had so
far encountered.

She nursed her chin in her hand and pondered this. She could not see how
it was to be avoided. She was there, and perforce she must stay there.
She had no friends to go elsewhere, or training in the harsh business of
gaining a livelihood if she did go. For the first time she began dully
to resent the manner of her upbringing. Once she had desired to enter
hospital training, had been properly enthusiastic for a period of months
over a career in this field of mercy. Then, as now, marriage, while
accepted as the ultimate state, was only to be considered through a haze
of idealism and romanticism. She cherished certain ideals of a possible
lover and husband, but always with a false sense of shame. The really
serious business of a woman's life was the one thing to which she made
no attempt to apply practical consideration. But her parents had had
positive ideas on that subject, even if they were not openly expressed.
Her yearnings after a useful "career" were skilfully discouraged,--by
her mother because that worthy lady thought it was "scarcely the thing,
Stella dear, and so unnecessary"; by her father because, as he bluntly
put it, it would only be a waste of time and money, since the chances
were she would get married before she was half through training, and
anyway a girl's place was at home till she did get married. That was his
only reference to the subject of her ultimate disposition that she
could recall, but it was plain enough as far as it went.

It was too late to mourn over lost opportunities now, but she did wish
there was some one thing she could do and do well, some service of value
that would guarantee self-support. If she could only pound a typewriter
or keep a set of books, or even make a passable attempt at sewing, she
would have felt vastly more at ease in this rude logging camp, knowing
that she could leave it if she desired.

So far as she could see things, she looked at them with measurable
clearness, without any vain illusions concerning her ability to march
triumphant over unknown fields of endeavor. Along practical lines she
had everything to learn. Culture furnishes an excellent pair of wings
wherewith to soar in skies of abstraction, but is a poor vehicle to
carry one over rough roads. She might have remained in Philadelphia, a
guest among friends. Pride forbade that. Incidentally, such an
arrangement would have enabled her to stalk a husband, a moneyed
husband, which did not occur to her at all. There remained only to join
Charlie. If his fortunes mended, well and good. Perhaps she could even
help in minor ways.

But it was all so radically different--brother and all--from what she
had pictured that she was filled with dismay and not a little foreboding
of the future. Sufficient, however, unto the day was the evil thereof,
she told herself at last, and tried to make that assurance work a change
of heart. She was very lonely and depressed and full of a futile wish
that she were a man.

Over across the bay some one was playing an accordeon, and to its
strains a stout-lunged lumberjack was roaring out a song, with all his
fellows joining strong in the chorus:

  "Oh, the Saginaw Kid was a cook in a camp, way up on the Ocon-to-o-o.
  And the cook in a camp in them old days had a damn hard row to hoe-i-oh!
  Had a damn hard row to hoe."

There was a fine, rollicking air to it. The careless note in their
voices, the jovial lilt of their song, made her envious. They at least
had their destiny, limited as it might be and cast along rude ways,
largely under their own control.

Her wandering gaze at length came to rest on a tent top showing in the
brush northward from the camp. She saw two canoes drawn up on the beach
above the lash of the waves, two small figures playing on the gravel,
and sundry dogs prowling alongshore. Smoke went eddying away in the
wind. The Siwash camp where Katy John hailed from, Miss Benton supposed.

She had an impulse to skirt the bay and view the Indian camp at closer
range, a notion born of curiosity. She debated this casually, and just
as she was about to rise, her movement was arrested by a faint crackle
in the woods behind. She looked away through the deepening shadow among
the trees and saw nothing at first. But the sound was repeated at odd
intervals. She sat still. Thoughts of forest animals slipped into her
mind, without making her afraid. At last she caught sight of a man
striding through the timber, soundlessly on the thick moss, coming
almost straight toward her.

He was scarcely fifty yards away. Across his shoulders he bore a
reddish-gray burden, and in his right hand was a gun. She did not move.
Bowed slightly under the weight, the man passed within twenty feet of
her, so close that she could see the sweat-beads glisten on that side of
his face, and saw also that the load he carried was the carcass of a
deer.

Gaining the beach and laying the animal across a boulder, he
straightened himself up and drew a long breath. Then he wiped the sweat
off his face. She recognized him as the man who had thrown the logger
down the slip that day at noon,--presumably Jack Fyfe. A sturdily built
man about thirty, of Saxon fairness, with a tinge of red in his hair and
a liberal display of freckles across nose and cheek bones. He was no
beauty, she decided, albeit he displayed a frank and pleasing
countenance. That he was a remarkably strong and active man she had seen
for herself, and if the firm round of his jaw counted for anything, an
individual of considerable determination besides. Miss Benton conceived
herself to be possessed of considerable skill at character analysis.

He put away his handkerchief, took up his rifle, settled his hat, and
strode off toward the camp. Her attention now diverted from the
Siwashes, she watched him, saw him go to her brother's quarters, stand
in the door a minute, then go back to the beach accompanied by Charlie.

In a minute or so he came rowing across in a skiff, threw his deer
aboard, and pulled away north along the shore.

She watched him lift and fall among the waves until he turned a point,
rowing with strong, even strokes. Then she walked home. Benton was
poring over some figures, but he pushed aside his pencil and paper when
she entered.

"You had a visitor, I see," she remarked.

"Yes, Jack Fyfe. He picked up a deer on the ridge behind here and
borrowed a boat to get home."

"I saw him come out of the woods," she said. "His camp can't be far from
here, is it? He only left the Springs as you came in. Does he hunt deer
for sport?"

"Hardly. Oh, well, I suppose it's sport for Jack, in a way. He's always
piking around in the woods with a gun or a fishing rod," Benton
returned. "But we kill 'em to eat mostly. It's good meat and cheap. I
get one myself now and then. However, you want to keep that under your
hat--about us fellows hunting--or we'll have game wardens nosing around
here."

"Are you not allowed to hunt them?" she asked.

"Not in close season. Hunting season's from September to December."

"If it's unlawful, why break the law?" she ventured hesitatingly. "Isn't
that rather--er--"

"Oh, bosh," Charlie derided. "A man in the woods is entitled to venison,
if he's hunter enough to get it. The woods are full of deer, and a few
more or less don't matter. We can't run forty miles to town and back and
pay famine prices for beef every two or three days, when we can get it
at home in the woods."

Stella digested this in silence, but it occurred to her that this mild
sample of lawlessness was quite in keeping with the men and the
environment. There was no policeman on the corner, no mechanism of law
and order visible anywhere. The characteristic attitude of these
woodsmen was of intolerance for restraint, of complete self-sufficiency.
It had colored her brother's point of view. She perceived that whereas
all her instinct was to know the rules of the game and abide by them,
he, taking his cue from his environment, inclined to break rules that
proved inconvenient, even to formulate new ones to apply.

"And suppose," said she, "that a game warden should catch you or Mr.
Jack Fyfe killing deer out of season?"

"We'd be hauled up and fined a hundred dollars or so," he told her. "But
they don't catch us."

He shrugged his shoulders, and smiling tolerantly upon her, proceeded to
smoke.

Dusk was falling now, the long twilight of the northern seasons
gradually deepening, as they sat in silence. Along the creek bank arose
the evening chorus of the frogs. The air, now hushed and still, was
riven every few minutes by the whir of wings as ducks in evening flight
swept by above. All the boisterous laughter and talk in the bunkhouse
had died. The woods ranged gloomy and impenetrable, save only in the
northwest, where a patch of sky lighted by diffused pink and gray
revealed one mountain higher than its fellows standing bald against the
horizon.

"Well, I guess it's time to turn in." Benton muffled a yawn. "Pleasant
dreams, Sis. Oh, here's your purse. I used part of the bank roll. You
won't have much use for money up here, anyway."

He flipped the purse across to her and sauntered into his bedroom.
Stella sat gazing thoughtfully at the vast bulk of Mount Douglas a few
minutes longer. Then she too went into the box-like room, the bare
discomfort of which chilled her merely to behold.

With a curious uncertainty, a feeling of reluctance for the proceeding
almost, she examined the contents of her purse. For a little time she
stood gazing into it, a queer curl to her full red lips. Then she flung
it contemptuously on the bed and began to take down her hair.

"'A rich, rough, tough country, where it doesn't do to be finicky about
anything,'" she murmured, quoting a line from one of Charlie Benton's
letters. "It would appear to be rather unpleasantly true. Particularly
the last clause."

In her purse, which had contained one hundred and ten dollars, there now
reposed in solitary state a twenty-dollar bill.




CHAPTER V


THE TOLL OF BIG TIMBER

Day came again, in the natural sequence of events. Matt, the cook,
roused all the camp at six o'clock with a tremendous banging on a piece
of boiler plate hung by a wire. Long before that Stella heard her
brother astir. She wondered sleepily at his sprightliness, for as she
remembered him at home he had been a confirmed lie-abed. She herself
responded none too quickly to the breakfast gong, as a result of which
slowness the crew had filed away to the day's work, her brother striding
in the lead, when she entered the mess-house.

She killed time with partial success till noon. Several times she was
startled to momentary attention by the prolonged series of sharp cracks
which heralded the thunderous crash of a falling tree. There were other
sounds which betokened the loggers' activity in the near-by forest,--the
ringing whine of saw blades, the dull stroke of the axe, voices calling
distantly.

She tried to interest herself in the camp and the beach and ended up by
sitting on a log in a shady spot, staring dreamily over the lake. She
thought impatiently of that homely saw concerning Satan and idle hands,
but she reflected also that in this isolation even mischief was
comparatively impossible. There was not a soul to hold speech with
except the cook, and he was too busy to talk, even if he had not been
afflicted with a painful degree of diffidence when she addressed him.
She could make no effort at settling down, at arranging things in what
was to be her home. There was nothing to arrange, no odds and ends
wherewith almost any woman can conjure up a homelike effect in the
barest sort of place. She beheld the noon return of the crew much as a
shipwrecked castaway on a desert shore might behold a rescuing sail, and
she told Charlie that she intended to go into the woods that afternoon
and watch them work.

"All right," said he. "Just so you don't get in the way of a falling
tree."

A narrow fringe of brush and scrubby timber separated the camp from the
actual work. From the water's edge to the donkey engine was barely four
hundred yards. From donkey to a ten-foot jump-off on the lake shore in a
straight line on a five per cent. gradient ran a curious roadway, made
by placing two logs in the hollow scooped by tearing great timbers over
the soft earth, and a bigger log on each side. Butt to butt and side to
side, the outer sticks half their thickness above the inner, they formed
a continuous trough the bottom and sides worn smooth with friction of
sliding timbers. Stella had crossed it the previous evening and wondered
what it was. Now, watching them at work, she saw. Also she saw why the
great stumps that rose in every clearing in this land of massive trees
were sawed six and eight feet above the ground. Always at the base the
firs swelled sharply. Wherefore the falling gangs lifted themselves
above the enlargement to make their cut.

Two sawyers attacked a tree. First, with their double-bitted axes, each
drove a deep notch into the sapwood just wide enough to take the end of
a two-by-six plank four or five feet long with a single grab-nail in the
end,--the springboard of the Pacific coast logger, whose daily business
lies among the biggest timber on God's footstool. Each then clambered up
on his precarious perch, took hold of his end of the long, limber saw,
and cut in to a depth of a foot or more, according to the size of the
tree. Then jointly they chopped down to this sawed line, and there was
the undercut complete, a deep notch on the side to which the tree would
fall. That done, they swung the ends of their springboards, or if it
were a thick trunk, made new holding notches on the other side, and the
long saw would eat steadily through the heart of the tree toward that
yellow, gashed undercut, stroke upon stroke, ringing with a thin,
metallic twang. Presently there would arise an ominous cracking. High in
the air the tall crest would dip slowly, as if it bowed with manifest
reluctance to the inevitable. The sawyers would drop lightly from their
springboards, crying:

"Tim-ber-r-r-r!"

The earthward swoop of the upper boughs would hasten till the air was
full of a whistling, whishing sound. Then came the rending crash as the
great tree smashed prone, crushing what small timber stood in its path,
followed by the earth-quivering shock of its impact with the soil. The
tree once down, the fallers went on to another. Immediately the
swampers fell upon the prone trunk with axes, denuding it of limbs; the
buckers followed them to saw it into lengths decreed by the boss logger.
When the job was done, the brown fir was no longer a stately tree but
saw-logs, each with the square butt that lay donkeyward, trimmed a
trifle rounding with the axe.

Benton worked one falling gang. The falling gang raced to keep ahead of
the buckers and swampers, and they in turn raced to keep ahead of the
hook tender, rigging slinger, and donkey, which last trio moved the logs
from woods to water, once they were down and trimmed. Terrible,
devastating forces of destruction they seemed to Stella Benton, wholly
unused as she was to any woodland save the well-kept parks and little
areas of groomed forest in her native State. All about in the ravaged
woods lay the big logs, scores of them. They had only begun to pull with
the donkey a week earlier, Benton explained to her. With his size gang
he could not keep a donkey engine working steadily. So they had felled
and trimmed to a good start, and now the falling crew and the swampers
and buckers were in a dingdong contest to see how long they could keep
ahead of the puffing Seattle yarder.

Stella sat on a stump, watching. Over an area of many acres the ground
was a litter of broken limbs, ragged tops, crushed and bent and broken
younger growth, twisted awry by the big trees in their fall. Huge stumps
upthrust like beacons in a ruffled harbor, grim, massive butts. From all
the ravaged wood rose a pungent smell of pitch and sap, a resinous,
pleasant smell. Radiating like the spokes of a wheel from the head of
the chute ran deep, raw gashes in the earth, where the donkey had hauled
up the Brobdingnagian logs on the end of an inch cable.

"This is no small boy's play, is it, Stell?" Charlie said to her once in
passing.

And she agreed that it was not. Agreed more emphatically and with
half-awed wonder when she saw the donkey puff and quiver on its anchor
cable, as the hauling line spooled up on the drum. On the outer end of
that line snaked a sixty-foot stick, five feet across the butt, but it
came down to the chute head, brushing earth and brush and small trees
aside as if they were naught. Once the big log caromed against a stump.
The rearward end flipped ten feet in the air and thirty feet sidewise.
But it came clear and slid with incredible swiftness to the head of the
chute, flinging aside showers of dirt and small stones, and leaving one
more deep furrow in the forest floor. Benton trotted behind it. Once it
came to rest well in the chute, he unhooked the line, freed the choker
(the short noosed loop of cable that slips over the log's end), and the
haul-back cable hurried the main line back to another log. Benton
followed, and again the donkey shuddered on its foundation skids till
another log laid in the chute, with its end butted against that which
lay before. One log after another was hauled down till half a dozen
rested there, elongated peas in a wooden pod.

Then a last big stick came with a rush, bunted these others powerfully
so that they began to slide with the momentum thus imparted, slowly at
first then, gathering way and speed, they shot down to the lake and
plunged to the water over the ten-foot jump-off like a school of
breaching whales.

All this took time, vastly more time than it takes in the telling. The
logs were ponderous masses. They had to be maneuvered sometimes between
stumps and standing timber, jerked this way and that to bring them into
the clear. By four o'clock Benton and his rigging-slinger had just
finished bunting their second batch of logs down the chute. Stella
watched these Titanic labors with a growing interest and a dawning
vision of why these men walked the earth with that reckless swing of
their shoulders. For they were palpably masters in their environment.
They strove with woodsy giants and laid them low. Amid constant dangers
they sweated at a task that shamed the seven labors of Hercules.
Gladiators they were in a contest from which they did not always emerge
victorious.

When Benton and his helper followed the haul-back line away to the
domain of the falling gang the last time, Stella had so far unbent as to
strike up conversation with the donkey engineer. That greasy individual
finished stoking his fire box and replied to her first comment.

"Work? You bet," said he. "It's real graft, this is. I got the easy end
of it, and mine's no snap. I miss a signal, big stick butts against
something solid; biff! goes the line and maybe cuts a man plumb in two.
You got to be wide awake when you run a loggin' donkey. These woods is
no place for a man, anyway, if he ain't spry both in his head and feet."

"Do many men get hurt logging?" Stella asked. "It looks awfully
dangerous, with these big trees falling and smashing everything. Look at
that. Goodness!"

From the donkey they could see a shower of ragged splinters and broken
limbs fly when a two-hundred-foot fir smashed a dead cedar that stood in
the way of its downward swoop. They could hear the pieces strike against
brush and trees like the patter of shot on a tin wall.

The donkey engineer gazed calmly enough.

"Them flyin' chunks raise the dickens sometimes," he observed. "Oh, yes,
now an' then a man gets laid out. There's some things you got to take a
chance on. Maybe you get cut with an axe, or a limb drops on you, or you
get in the way of a breakin' line,--though a man ain't got any business
in the bight of a line. A man don't stand much show when the end of a
inch 'n' a quarter cable snaps at him like a whiplash. I seen a feller
on Howe Sound cut square in two with a cable-end once. A broken block's
the worst, though. That generally gets the riggin' slinger, but a piece
of it's liable to hit anybody. You see them big iron pulley blocks the
haul-back cable works in? Well, sometimes they have to anchor a snatch
block to a stump an' run the main line through it at an angle to get a
log out the way you want. Suppose the block breaks when I'm givin' it to
her? Chunks uh that broken cast iron'll fly like bullets. Yes, sir,
broken blocks is bad business. Maybe you noticed the boys used the
snatch block two or three times this afternoon? We've been lucky in this
camp all spring. Nobody so much as nicked himself with an axe. Breaks
in the gear don't come very often, anyway, with an outfit in first-class
shape. We got good gear an' a good crew--about as _skookum_ a bunch as I
ever saw in the woods."

Two hundred yards distant Charlie Benton rose on a stump and semaphored
with his arms. The engineer whistled answer and stood to his levers; the
main line began to spool slowly in on the drum. Another signal, and he
shut off. Another signal, after a brief wait, and the drum rolled
faster, the line tautened like a fiddle-string, and the ponderous
machine vibrated with the strain of its effort.

Suddenly the line came slack. Stella, watching for the log to appear,
saw her brother leap backward off the stump, saw the cable whip
sidewise, mowing down a clump of saplings that stood in the bight of the
line, before the engineer could cut off the power. In that return of
comparative silence there rose above the sibilant hiss of the blow-off
valve a sudden commotion of voices.

"Damn!" the donkey engineer peered over the brush. "That don't sound
good. I guess somebody got it in the neck."

Almost immediately Sam Davis and two other men came running.

"What's up?" the engineer called as they passed on a dog trot.

"Block broke," Davis answered over his shoulder. "Piece of it near took
a leg off Jim Renfrew."

Stella stood a moment, hesitating.

"I may be able to do something. I'll go and see," she said.

"Better not," the engineer warned. "Liable to run into something
that'll about turn your stomach. What was I tellin' about a broken
block? Them ragged pieces of flyin' iron sure mess a man up. They'll
bring a bed spring, an' pack him down to the boat, an' get him to a
doctor quick as they can. That's all. You couldn't do nothin'."

Nevertheless she went. Renfrew was the rigging slinger working with
Charlie, a big, blond man who blushed like a schoolboy when Benton
introduced him to her. Twenty minutes before he had gone trotting after
the haul-back, sound and hearty, laughing at some sally of her
brother's. It seemed a trifle incredible that he should lie mangled and
bleeding among the green forest growth, while his fellows hurried for a
stretcher.

Two hundred yards at right angles from where Charlie had stood giving
signals she found a little group under a branchy cedar. Renfrew lay on
his back, mercifully unconscious. Benton squatted beside him, twisting a
silk handkerchief with a stick tightly above the wound. His hands and
Renfrew's clothing and the mossy ground was smeared with blood. Stella
looked over his shoulder. The overalls were cut away. In the thick of
the man's thigh stood a ragged gash she could have laid both hands in.
She drew back.

Benton looked up.

"Better keep away," he advised shortly. "We've done all that can be
done."

She retreated a little and sat down on a root, half-sickened. The other
two men stood up. Benton sat back, his first-aid work done, and rolled a
cigarette with fingers that shook a little. Off to one side she saw the
fallers climb up on their springboards. Presently arose the ringing
whine of the thin steel blade, the chuck of axes where the swampers
attacked a fallen tree. No matter, she thought, that injury came to one,
that death might hover near, the work went on apace, like action on a
battlefield.

A few minutes thereafter the two men who had gone with Sam Davis
returned with the spring from Benton's bed and a light mattress. They
laid the injured logger on this and covered him with a blanket. Then
four of them picked it up. As they started, Stella heard one say to her
brother:

"Matt's jagged."

"What?" Benton exploded. "Where'd it come from?"

"One uh them Hungry Bay shingle-bolt cutters's in camp," the logger
answered. "Maybe he brought a bottle. I didn't stop to see. But Matt's
sure got a tank full."

Benton ripped out an angry oath, passed his men, and strode away down
the path. Stella fell in behind him, wakened to a sudden uneasiness at
the wrathful set of his features. She barely kept in sight, so rapidly
did he move.

Sam Davis had smoke pouring from the _Chickamin's_ stack, but the
kitchen pipe lifted no blue column, though it was close to five o'clock.
Benton made straight for the cookhouse. Stella followed, a trifle
uncertainly. A glimpse past Charlie as he came out showed her Matt
staggering aimlessly about the kitchen, red-eyed, scowling, muttering
to himself. Benton hurried to the bunkhouse door, much as a hound might
follow a scent, peered in, and went on to the corner.

On the side facing the lake he found the source of the cook's
intoxication. A tall and swarthy lumberjack squatted on his haunches,
gabbling in the Chinook jargon to a _klootchman_ and a wizen-featured
old Siwash. The Indian woman was drunk beyond any mistaking, affably
drunk. She looked up at Benton out of vacuous eyes, grinned, and
extended to him a square-faced bottle of Old Tim gin. The logger rose to
his feet.

"H'lo, Benton," he greeted thickly. "How's every-thin'?"

Benton's answer was a quick lurch of his body and a smashing jab of his
clenched fist. The blow stretched the logger on his back, with blood
streaming from both nostrils. But he was a hardy customer, for he
bounced up like a rubber ball, only to be floored even more viciously
before he was well set on his feet. This time Benton snarled a curse and
kicked him as he lay.

"Charlie, Charlie!" Stella screamed.

If he heard her, he gave no heed.

"Hit the trail, you," he shouted at the logger. "Hit it quick before I
tramp your damned face into the ground. I told you once not to come
around here feeding booze to my cook. I do all the whisky-drinking
that's done in this camp, and don't you forget it. Damn your eyes, I've
got troubles enough without whisky."

The man gathered himself up, badly shaken, and holding his hand to his
bleeding nose, made off to his rowboat at the float.

"G'wan home," Benton curtly ordered the Siwashes. "Get drunk at your own
camp, not in mine. _Sabe?_ Beat it."

They scuttled off, the wizened little old man steadying his fat
_klootch_ along her uncertain way. Down on the lake the chastised logger
stood out in his boat, resting once on his oars to shake a fist at
Benton. Then Charlie faced about on his shocked and outraged sister.

"Good Heavens!" she burst out. "Is it necessary to be so downright
brutal in actions as well as speech?"

"I'm running a logging camp, not a kindergarten," he snapped angrily. "I
know what I'm doing. If you don't like it, go in the house where your
hyper-sensitive tastes won't be offended."

"Thank you," she responded cuttingly and swung about, angry and
hurt--only to have a fresh scare from the drunken cook, who came reeling
forward.

"I'm gonna quit," he loudly declared. "I ain't goin' to stick 'round
here no more. The job's no good. I want m' time. Yuh hear me, Benton.
I'm through. Com-pletely, ab-sho-lutely through. You bet I am. Gimme m'
time. I'm a gone goose."

"Quit, then, hang you," Benton growled. "You'll get your check in a
minute. You're a fine excuse for a cook, all right--get drunk right on
the job. You don't need to show up here again, when you've had your jag
out."

"'S all right," Matt declared largely. "'S other jobs. You ain't the
whole Pacific coast. Oh, way down 'pon the Swa-a-nee ribber--"

He broke into dolorous song and turned back into the cookhouse. Benton's
hard-set face relaxed. He laughed shortly.

"Takes all kinds to make a world," he commented. "Don't look so
horrified, Sis. This isn't the regular order of events. It's just an
accumulation--and it sort of got me going. Here's the boys."

The four stretcher men set down their burden in the shade of the
bunkhouse. Renfrew was conscious now.

"Tough luck, Jim," Benton sympathized. "Does it pain much?"

Renfrew shook his head. White and weakened from shock and loss of blood,
nevertheless he bravely disclaimed pain.

"We'll get you fixed up at the Springs," Benton went on. "It's a nasty
slash in the meat, but I don't think the bone was touched. You'll be on
deck before long. I'll see you through, anyway."

They gave him a drink of water and filled his pipe, joking him about
easy days in the hospital while they sweated in the woods. The drunken
cook came out, carrying his rolled blankets, began maudlin sympathy, and
was promptly squelched, whereupon he retreated to the float, emitting
conversation to the world at large. Then they carried Renfrew down to
the float, and Davis began to haul up the anchor to lay the _Chickamin_
alongside.

While the chain was still chattering in the hawse pipe, the squat black
hull of Jack Fyfe's tender rounded the nearest point.

"Whistle him up, Sam," Benton ordered. "Jack can beat our time, and this
bleeding must be stopped quick."

The tender veered in from her course at the signal. Fyfe himself was at
the wheel. Five minutes effected a complete arrangement, and the
_Panther_ drew off with the drunken cook singing atop of the pilot
house, and Renfrew comfortable in her cabin, and Jack Fyfe's promise to
see him properly installed and attended in the local hospital at Roaring
Springs.

Benton heaved a sigh of relief and turned to his sister.

"Still mad, Stell?" he asked placatingly and put his arm over her
shoulders.

"Of course not," she responded instantly to this kindlier phase. "Ugh!
Your hands are all bloody, Charlie."

"That's so, but it'll wash off," he replied. "Well, we're shy a good
woodsman and a cook, and I'll miss 'em both. But it might be worse.
Here's where you go to bat, Stella. Get on your apron and lend me a hand
in the kitchen, like a good girl. We have to eat, no matter what
happens."




CHAPTER VI


THE DIGNITY (?) OF TOIL

By such imperceptible degrees that she was scarce aware of it, Stella
took her place as a cog in her brother's logging machine, a unit in the
human mechanism which he operated skilfully and relentlessly at top
speed to achieve his desired end--one million feet of timber in
boomsticks by September the first.

From the evening that she stepped into the breach created by a drunken
cook, the kitchen burden settled steadily upon her shoulders. For a week
Benton daily expected and spoke of the arrival of a new cook. Fyfe had
wired a Vancouver employment agency to send one, the day he took Jim
Renfrew down. But either cooks were scarce, or the order went astray,
for no rough and ready kitchen mechanic arrived. Benton in the meantime
ceased to look for one. He worked like a horse, unsparing of himself,
unsparing of others. He rose at half-past four, lighted the kitchen
fire, roused Stella, and helped her prepare breakfast, preliminary to
his day in the woods. Later he impressed Katy John into service to wait
on the table and wash dishes. He labored patiently to teach Stella
certain simple tricks of cooking that she did not know.

Quick of perception, as thorough as her brother in whatsoever she set
her hand to do, Stella was soon equal to the job. And as the days
passed and no camp cook came to their relief, Benton left the job to her
as a matter of course.

"You can handle that kitchen with Katy as well as a man," he said to her
at last. "And it will give you something to occupy your time. I'd have
to pay a cook seventy dollars a month. Katy draws twenty-five. You can
credit yourself with the balance, and I'll pay off when the contract
money comes in. We might as well keep the coin in the family. I'll feel
easier, because you won't get drunk and jump the job in a pinch. What do
you say?"

She said the only possible thing to say under the circumstances. But she
did not say it with pleasure, nor with any feeling of gratitude. It was
hard work, and she and hard work were utter strangers. Her feet ached
from continual standing on them. The heat and the smell of stewing meat
and vegetables sickened her. Her hands were growing rough and red from
dabbling in water, punching bread dough, handling the varied articles of
food that go to make up a meal. Upon hands and forearms there stung
continually certain small cuts and burns that lack of experience over a
hot range inevitably inflicted upon her. Whereas time had promised to
hang heavy on her hands, now an hour of idleness in the day became a
precious boon.

Yet in her own way she was as full of determination as her brother. She
saw plainly enough that she must leave the drone stage behind. She
perceived that to be fed and clothed and housed and to have her wishes
readily gratified was not an inherent right--that some one must foot
the bill--that now for all she received she must return equitable value.
At home she had never thought of it in that light; in fact, she had
never thought of it at all. Now that she was beginning to get a
glimmering of her true economic relation to the world at large, she had
no wish to emulate the clinging vine, even if thereby she could have
secured a continuance of that silk-lined existence which had been her
fortunate lot. Her pride revolted against parasitism. It was therefore a
certain personal satisfaction to have achieved self-support at a stroke,
insofar as that in the sweat of her brow,--all too literally,--she
earned her bread and a compensation besides. But there were times when
that solace seemed scarcely to weigh against her growing detest for the
endless routine of her task, the exasperating physical weariness and
irritations it brought upon her.

For to prepare three times daily food for a dozen hungry men is no mean
undertaking. One cannot have in a logging camp the conveniences of a
hotel kitchen. The water must be carried in buckets from the creek near
by, and wood brought in armfuls from the pile of sawn blocks outside.
The low-roofed kitchen shanty was always like an oven. The flies swarmed
in their tens of thousands. As the men sweated with axe and saw in the
woods, so she sweated in the kitchen. And her work began two hours
before their day's labor, and continued two hours after they were done.
She slept, like one exhausted and rose full of sleep-heaviness, full of
bodily soreness and spiritual protest when the alarm clock raised its
din in the cool morning.

"You don't like thees work, do you, Mees Benton?" Katy John said to her
one day, in the soft, slurring accent that colored her English. "You
wasn't cut out for a cook."

"This isn't work," Stella retorted irritably. "It's simple drudgery. I
don't wonder that men cooks take to drink."

Katy laughed.

"Why don't you be nice to Mr. Abbey," she suggested archly. "He'd like
to give you a better job than thees--for life. My, but it must be nice
to have lots of money like that man's got, and never have to work."

"You'll get those potatoes peeled sooner if you don't talk quite so
much, Katy," Miss Benton made reply.

There was that way out, as the Siwash girl broadly indicated. Paul Abbey
had grown into the habit of coming there rather more often than mere
neighborliness called for, and it was palpable that he did not come to
hold converse with Benton or Benton's gang, although he was "hail
fellow" with all woodsmen. At first his coming might have been laid to
any whim. Latterly Stella herself was unmistakably the attraction. He
brought his sister once, a fair-haired girl about Stella's age. She
proved an exceedingly self-contained young person, whose speech during
the hour of her stay amounted to a dozen or so drawling sentences. With
no hint of condescension or superciliousness, she still managed to
arouse in Stella a mild degree of resentment. She wore an impeccable
pongee silk, simple and costly, and _her_ hands had evidently never
known the roughening of work. In one way and another Miss Benton
straightway conceived an active dislike for Linda Abbey. As her
reception of Paul's sister was not conducive to chumminess, Paul did not
bring Linda again.

But he came oftener than Stella desired to be bothered with him. Charlie
was beginning to indulge in some rather broad joking, which offended and
irritated her. She was not in the least attracted to Paul Abbey. He was
a nice enough young man; for all she knew, he might be a concentration
of all the manly virtues, but he gave no fillip to either her
imagination or her emotions. He was too much like a certain type of
young fellow she had known in other embodiments. Her instinct warned her
that stripped of his worldly goods he would be wholly commonplace. She
could be friends with the Paul Abbey kind of man, but when she tried to
consider him as a possible lover, she found herself unresponsive, even
amused. She was forced to consider it, because Abbey was fast
approaching that stage. It was heralded in the look of dumb appeal that
she frequently surprised in his gaze, by various signs and tokens, that
Stella Benton was too sophisticated to mistake. One of these days he
would lay his heart, and hand at her feet.

Sometimes she considered what her life might be if she should marry him.
Abbey was wealthy in his own right and heir to more wealth. But--she
could not forbear a wry grimace at the idea. Some fateful hour love
would flash across her horizon, a living flame. She could visualize the
tragedy if it should be too late, if it found her already bound--sold
for a mess of pottage at her ease. She did not mince words to herself
when she reflected on this matter. She knew herself as a creature of
passionate impulses, consciously resenting all restraint. She knew that
men and women did mad things under the spur of emotion. She wanted no
shackles, she wanted to be free to face the great adventure when it
came.

Yet there were times during the weeks that flitted past when it seemed
to her that no bondage could be meaner, more repugnant, than that daily
slavery in her brother's kitchen; that transcendent conceptions of love
and marriage were vain details by comparison with aching feet and
sleep-heavy eyes, with the sting of burns, the smart of sweat on her
face, all the never-ending trifles that so irritated her. She had been
spoiled in the making for so sordid an existence. Sometimes she would
sit amid the array of dishes and pans and cooking food and wonder if she
really were the same being whose life had been made up of books and
music, of teas and dinners and plays, of light, inconsequential chatter
with genial, well-dressed folk. There was no one to talk to here and
less time to talk. There was nothing to read except a batch of
newspapers filtering into camp once a week or ten days. There was not
much in this monster stretch of giant timber but heat and dirt and flies
and hungry men who must be fed.

If Paul Abbey had chanced to ask her to marry him during a period of
such bodily and spiritual rebellion, she would probably have committed
herself to that means of escape in sheer desperation. For she did not
harden to the work; it steadily sapped both her strength and patience.
But he chose an ill time for his declaration. Stella had overtaken her
work and snared a fleeting hour of idleness in mid-afternoon of a hot
day in early August. Under a branchy alder at the cook-house-end she
piled all the pillows she could commandeer in their quarters and curled
herself upon them at grateful ease. Like a tired animal, she gave
herself up to the pleasure of physical relaxation, staring at a perfect
turquoise sky through the whispering leaves above. She was not even
thinking. She was too tired to think, and for the time being too much at
peace to permit thought that would, in the very nature of things, be
disturbing.

Abbey maintained for his own pleasure a fast motorboat. He slid now into
the bay unheard, tied up beside the float, walked to the kitchen,
glanced in, then around the corner, and smilingly took a seat on the
grass near her.

"It's too perfect a day to loaf in the shade," he observed, after a
brief exchange of commonplaces. "Won't you come out for a little spin on
the lake? A ride in the _Wolf_ will put some color in your cheeks."

"If I had time," she said, "I would. But loggers must eat though the
heavens fall. In about twenty minutes I'll have to start supper. I'll
have color enough, goodness knows once I get over that stove."

Abbey picked nervously at a blade of grass for a minute.

"This is a regular dog's life for you," he broke out suddenly.

"Oh, hardly that," she protested. "It's a little hard on me because I
haven't been used to it, that's all."

"It's Chinaman's work," he said hotly. "Charlie oughtn't to let you stew
in that kitchen."

Stella said nothing; she was not moved to the defence of her brother.
She was loyal enough to her blood, but not so intensely loyal that she
could defend him against criticism that struck a responsive chord in her
own mind. She was beginning to see that, being useful, Charlie was
making use of her. His horizon had narrowed to logs that might be
transmuted into money. Enslaved himself by his engrossing purposes, he
thought nothing of enslaving others to serve his end. She had come to a
definite conclusion about that, and she meant to collect her wages when
he sold his logs, collect also the ninety dollars of her money he had
coolly appropriated, and try a different outlet. If one must work, one
might at least seek work a little to one's taste. She therefore
dismissed Abbey's comment carelessly:

"Some one has to do it."

A faint flush crept slowly up into his round, boyish face. He looked at
her with disconcerting steadiness. Perhaps something in his expression
gave her the key to his thought, or it may have been that peculiar
psychical receptiveness which in a woman we are pleased to call
intuition; but at any rate Stella divined what was coming and would have
forestalled it by rising. He prevented that move by catching her hands.

"Look here, Stella," he blurted out, "it just grinds me to death to see
you slaving away in this camp, feeding a lot of roughnecks. Won't you
marry me and cut this sort of thing out? We'd be no end good chums."

She gently disengaged her hands, her chief sensation one of amusement,
Abbey was in such an agony of blushing diffidence, all flustered at his
own temerity. Also, she thought, a trifle precipitate. That was not the
sort of wooing to carry her off her feet. For that matter she was quite
sure nothing Paul Abbey could do or say would ever stir her pulses. She
had to put an end to the situation, however. She took refuge in a
flippant manner.

"Thanks for the compliment, Mr. Abbey," she smiled. "But really I
couldn't think of inflicting repentance at leisure on you in that
offhand way. You wouldn't want me to marry you just so I could resign
the job of chef, would you?"

"Don't you like me?" he asked plaintively.

"Not that way," she answered positively.

"You might try," he suggested hopefully. "Honest, I'm crazy about you.
I've liked you ever since I saw you first. I wouldn't want any greater
privilege than to marry you and take you away from this sort of thing.
You're too good for it. Maybe I'm kind of sudden, but I know my own
mind. Can't you take a chance with me?"

"I'm sorry," she said gently, seeing him so sadly in earnest. "It isn't
a question of taking a chance. I don't care for you. I haven't got any
feeling but the mildest sort of friendliness. If I married you, it would
only be for a home, as the saying is. And I'm not made that way. Can't
you see how impossible it would be?"

"You'd get to like me," he declared. "I'm just as good as the next man."

His smooth pink-and-white skin reddened again.

"That sounds a lot like tooting my own horn mighty strong," said he.
"But I'm in dead earnest. If there isn't anybody else yet, you could
like me just as well as the next fellow. I'd be awfully good to you."

"I daresay you would," she said quietly. "But I couldn't be good to you.
I don't want to marry you, Mr. Abbey. That's final. All the feeling I
have for you isn't enough for any woman to marry on."

"Maybe not," he said dolefully. "I suppose that's the way it goes. Hang
it, I guess I was a little too sudden. But I'm a stayer. Maybe you'll
change your mind some time."

He was standing very near her, and they were both so intent upon the
momentous business that occupied them that neither noticed Charlie
Benton until his hail startled them to attention.

"Hello, folks," he greeted and passed on into the cook shanty, bestowing
upon Stella, over Abbey's shoulder, a comprehensive grin which nettled
her exceedingly. Her peaceful hour had been disturbed to no purpose. She
did not want to love or be loved. For the moment she felt old beyond her
years, mature beyond the comprehension of any man. If she had voiced her
real attitude toward Paul Abbey, she would have counseled him to run and
play, "like a good little boy."

Instead she remarked: "I must get to work," and left her downcast
suitor without further ceremony.

As she went about her work in the kitchen, she saw Abbey seat himself
upon a log in the yard, his countenance wreathed in gloom. He was
presently joined by her brother. Glancing out, now and then, she made a
guess at the meat of their talk, and her lip curled slightly. She saw
them walk down to Abbey's launch, and Charlie delivered an encouraging
slap on Paul's shoulder as he embarked. Then the speedy craft tore out
of the bay at a headlong gait, her motor roaring in unmuffled exhaust,
wide wings of white spray arching off her flaring bows.

"The desperate recklessness of thwarted affection--fiddlesticks!" Miss
Benton observed in sardonic mood. Her hands were deep in pie dough. She
thumped it viciously. The kitchen and the flies and all the rest of it
rasped at her nerves again.

Charlie came into the kitchen, hunted a cookie out of the tin box where
such things were kept, and sat swinging one leg over a corner of the
table, eying her critically while he munched.

"So you turned Paul down, eh?" he said at last. "You're the prize chump.
You've missed the best chance you'll ever have to put yourself on Easy
Street."




CHAPTER VII


SOME NEIGHBORLY ASSISTANCE

For a week thereafter Benton developed moods of sourness, periods of
scowling thought. He tried to speed up his gang, and having all spring
driven them at top speed, the added straw broke the back of their
patience, and Stella heard some sharp interchanges of words. He quelled
one incipient mutiny through sheer dominance, but it left him more short
of temper, more crabbedly moody than ever. Eventually his ill-nature
broke out against Stella over some trifle, and she--being herself an
aggrieved party to his transactions--surprised her own sense of the
fitness of things by retaliating in kind.

"I'm slaving away in your old camp from daylight till dark at work I
despise, and you can't even speak decently to me," she flared up. "You
act like a perfect brute lately. What's the matter with you?"

Benton gnawed at a finger nail in silence.

"Hang it, I guess you're right," he admitted at last. "But I can't help
having a grouch. I'm going to fall behind on this contract, the best I
can do."

"Well," she replied tartly. "I'm not to blame for that. I'm not
responsible for your failure. Why take it out on me?"

"I don't, particularly," he answered. "Only--can't you _sabe_? A man
gets on edge when he works and sweats for months and sees it all about
to come to nothing."

"So does a woman," she made pointed retort.

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. Damn 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 pawn 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 mass 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 gratitude 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 aproned cook rested his arms on the
window sill as they floated in. Men to the number of twenty or more
clustered 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
snatch block ashore and jerked half a dozen logs crosswise before the
scow in a matter of minutes. Then the same cable was made fast to a
sturdy 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, smashing 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 washing 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
assume 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
embarrassment 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 god 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_ dink,
standing up in the little boat, making long, graceful casts with a
pliant rod. She perceived that this manner of fishing 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 fishing 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 grass 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.

But she did not go. Benton left to make his delivery to the mill
company, the great boom of logs gliding slowly along in the wake of a
tug, the _Chickamin_ in attendance. Benton's crew accompanied the boom.
Fyfe's gang loaded their donkey and gear aboard the scow and went home.
The bay lay all deserted, the woods silent. For the first time in three
months she had all her hours free, only her own wants to satisfy. Katy
John spent most of her time in the smoky camp of her people. Stella
loafed. For two days she did nothing, gave herself up to a physical
torpor she had never known before. She did not want to read, to walk
about, or even lift her eyes to the bold mountains that loomed massive
across the lake. It was enough to lie curled among pillows under the
alder and stare drowsily at the blue September sky, half aware of the
drone of a breeze in the firs, the flutter of birds' wings, and the lap
of water on the beach.

Presently, however, the old restless energy revived. The spring came
back to her step and she shed that lethargy like a cast-off garment. And
in so doing her spirit rose in hot rebellion against being a prisoner to
deadening drudgery, against being shut away from all the teeming life
that throve and trafficked beyond the solitude in which she sat immured.
When Charlie came back, there was going to be a change. She repeated
that to herself with determination. Between whiles she rambled about in
the littered clearing, prowled along the beaches, and paddled now and
then far outside the bay in a flat-bottomed skiff, restless, full of
plans. So far as she saw, she would have to face some city alone, but
she viewed that prospect with a total absence of the helpless feeling
which harassed her so when she first took train for her brother's camp.
She had passed through what she termed a culinary inferno. Nothing, she
considered, could be beyond her after that unremitting drudgery.

But Benton failed to come back on the appointed day. The four days
lengthened to a week. Then the _Panther_, bound up-lake, stopped to
leave a brief note from Charlie, telling her business had called him to
Vancouver.

Altogether it was ten days before the _Chickamin_ whistled up the bay.
She slid in beside the float, her decks bristling with men like a
passenger craft. Stella, so thoroughly sated with loneliness that she
temporarily forgot her grievances, flew to meet her brother. But one
fair glimpse of the disembarking crew turned her back. They were all in
varying stages of liquor--from two or three who had to be hauled over
the float and up to the bunkhouse like sacks of bran, to others who were
so happily under the influence of John Barleycorn that every move was
some silly antic. She retreated in disgust. When Charlie reached the
cabin, he himself proved to be fairly mellow, in the best of
spirits--speaking truly in the double sense.

"Hello, lady," he hailed jovially. "How did you fare all by your
lonesome this long time? I didn't figure to be gone so long, but there
was a lot to attend to. How are you, anyway?"

"All right," she answered coolly. "You evidently celebrated your log
delivery in the accepted fashion."

"Don't you believe it," he grinned amiably. "I had a few drinks with the
boys on the way up, that's all. No, sir, it was straight business with
a capital B all the time I was gone. I've got a good thing in hand,
Sis--big money in sight. Tell you about it later. Think you and Katy can
rustle grub for this bunch by six?"

"Oh, I suppose so," she said shortly. It was on the tip of her tongue to
tell him then and there that she was through,--like Matt, the cook, that
memorable afternoon, "completely an' ab-sho-lutely through." She
refrained. There was no use in being truculent. But that drunken crowd
looked formidable in numbers.

"How many extra?" she asked mechanically.

"Thirty men, all told," Benton returned briskly. "I tell you I'm sure
going to rip the heart out of this limit before spring. I've signed up a
six-million-foot contract for delivery as soon as the logs'll go over
Roaring Rapids in the spring. Remember what I told you when you came?
You stick with me, and you'll wear diamonds. I stand to clean up twenty
thousand on the winter's work."

"In that case, you should be able to hire a real cook," she suggested, a
spice of malice in her tone.

"I sure will, when it begins to come right," he promised largely. "And
I'll give you a soft job keeping books then. Well, I'll lend you a hand
for to-night. Where's the Siwash maiden?"

"Over at the camp; there she comes now," Stella replied. "Will you start
a fire, Charlie, while I change my dress?"

"You look like a peach in that thing." He stood off a pace to admire.
"You're some dame, Stell, when you get on your glad rags."

She frowned at her image in the glass behind the closed door of her
room as she set about unfastening the linen dress she had worn that
afternoon. Deep in her trunk, along with much other unused finery, it
had reposed all summer. That ingrained instinct to be admired, to be
garbed fittingly and well, came back to her as soon as she was rested.
And though there were none but squirrels and bluejays and occasionally
Katy John to cast admiring eyes upon her, it had pleased her for a week
to wear her best, and wander about the beaches and among the dusky
trunks of giant fir, a picture of blooming, well-groomed womanhood. She
took off the dress and threw it on the bed with a resentful rush of
feeling. The treadmill gaped for her again. But not for long. She was
through with that. She was glad that Charlie's prospects pleased him. He
could not call on her to help him out of a hole now. She would tell him
her decision to-night. And as soon as he could get a cook to fill her
place, then good-by to Roaring Lake, good-by to kitchen smells and flies
and sixteen hours a day over a hot stove.

She wondered why such a loathing of the work afflicted her; if all who
earned their bread in the sweat of their brow were ridden with that
feeling,--woodsmen, cooks, chauffeurs, the slaves of personal service
and the great industrial mills alike? Her heart went out to them if they
were. But she was quite sure that work could be otherwise than
repellent, enslaving. She recalled that cooks and maids had worked in
her father's house with no sign of the revolt that now assailed her. But
it seemed to her that their tasks had been light compared with the job
of cooking in Charlie Benton's camp.

Curiously enough, while she changed her clothes, her thoughts a jumble
of present things she disliked and the unknown that she would have to
face alone in Vancouver, she found her mind turning on Jack Fyfe. During
his three weeks' stay, they had progressed less in the direction of
acquaintances than she and Paul Abbey had done in two meetings. Fyfe
talked to her now and then briefly, but he looked at her more than he
talked. Where his searching gaze disturbed, his speech soothed, it was
so coolly impersonal. That, she deemed, was merely another of his odd
contradictions. He was contradictory. Stella classified Jack Fyfe as a
creature of unrestrained passions. She recognized, or thought she
recognized, certain dominant, primitive characteristics, and they did
not excite her admiration. Men admired him--those who were not afraid of
him. If he had been of more polished clay, she could readily have
grasped this attitude. But in her eyes he was merely a rude, masterful
man, uncommonly gifted with physical strength, dominating other rude,
strong men by sheer brute force. And she herself rather despised sheer
brute force. The iron hand should fitly be concealed beneath the velvet
glove.

Yet in spite of the bold look in his eyes that always confused and
irritated her, Fyfe had never singled her out for the slightest
attention of the kind any man bestows upon an attractive woman. Stella
was no fool. She knew that she was attractive, and she knew why. She had
been prepared to repulse, and there had been nothing to repulse. Once
during Charlie's absence he had come in a rowboat, hailed her from the
beach, and gone away without disembarking when she told him Benton was
not back. He was something of an enigma, she confessed to herself, after
all. Perhaps that was why he came so frequently into her mind. Or
perhaps, she told herself, there was so little on Roaring Lake to think
about that one could not escape the personal element. As if any one ever
could. As if life were made up of anything but the impinging of one
personality upon another. That was something Miss Stella Benton had yet
to learn. She was still mired in the rampant egotism of untried youth,
as yet the sublime individualist.

That side of her suffered a distinct shock later in the evening. When
supper was over, the work done, and the loggers' celebration was slowly
subsiding in the bunkhouse, she told Charlie with blunt directness what
she wanted to do. With equally blunt directness he declared that he
would not permit it. Stella's teeth came together with an angry little
click.

"I'm of age, Charlie," she said to him. "It isn't for you to say what
you will or will not _permit_ me to do. I want that money of mine that
you used--and what I've earned. God knows I _have_ earned it. I can't
stand this work, and I don't intend to. It isn't work; it's slavery."

"But what can you do in town?" he countered. "You haven't the least idea
what you'd be going up against, Stell. You've never been away from home,
and you've never had the least training at anything useful. You'd be on
your uppers in no time at all. You wouldn't have a ghost of a chance."

"I have such a splendid chance here," she retorted ironically. "If I
could get in any position where I'd be more likely to die of sheer
stagnation, to say nothing of dirty drudgery, than in this forsaken
hole, I'd like to know how. I don't think it's possible."

"You could be a whole lot worse off, if you only knew it," Benton
returned grumpily. "If you haven't got any sense about things, I have. I
know what a rotten hole Vancouver or any other seaport town is for a
girl alone. I won't let you make any foolish break like that. That's
flat."

From this position she failed to budge him. Once angered, partly by her
expressed intention and partly by the outspoken protest against the
mountain of work imposed on her, Charlie refused point-blank to give her
either the ninety dollars he had taken out of her purse or the three
months' wages due. Having made her request, and having met with this--to
her--amazing refusal, Stella sat dumb. There was too fine a streak in
her to break out in recrimination. She was too proud to cry.

So that she went to bed in a ferment of helpless rage. Virtually she was
a prisoner, as much so as if Charlie had kidnaped her and held her so by
brute force. The economic restraint was all potent. Without money she
could not even leave the camp. And when she contemplated the daily
treadmill before her, she shuddered.

At least she could go on strike. Her round cheek flushed with the
bitterest anger she had ever known, she sat with eyes burning into the
dark of her sordid room, and vowed that the thirty loggers should die of
slow starvation if they did not eat until she cooked another meal for
them.




CHAPTER IX


JACK FYFE'S CAMP

She was still hot with the spirit of mutiny when morning came, but she
cooked breakfast. It was not in her to act like a petulant child.
Morning also brought a different aspect to things, for Charlie told her
while he helped prepare breakfast that he was going to take his crew and
repay in labor the help Jack Fyfe had given him.

"While we're there, Jack's cook will feed all hands," said he. "And by
the time we're through there, I'll have things fixed so it won't be such
hard going for you here. Do you want to go along to Jack's camp?"

"No," she answered shortly. "I don't. I would much prefer to get away
from this lake altogether, as I told you last night."

"You might as well forget that notion," he said stubbornly. "I've got a
little pride in the matter. I don't want my sister drudging at the only
kind of work she'd be able to earn a living at."

"You're perfectly willing to have me drudge here," she flashed back.

"That's different," he defended. "And it's only temporary. I'll be
making real money before long. You'll get your share if you'll have a
little patience and put your shoulder to the wheel. Lord, I'm doing the
best I can."

"Yes--for yourself," she returned. "You don't seem to consider that I'm
entitled to as much fair play as you'd have to accord one of your men. I
don't want you to hand me an easy living on a silver salver. All I want
of you is what is mine, and the privilege of using my own judgment. I'm
quite capable of taking care of myself."

If there had been opportunity to enlarge on that theme, they might have
come to another verbal clash. But Benton never lost sight of his primary
object. The getting of breakfast and putting his men about their work
promptly was of more importance to him than Stella's grievance. So the
incipient storm dwindled to a sullen mood on her part. Breakfast over,
Benton loaded men and tools aboard a scow hitched beside the boat. He
repeated his invitation, and Stella refused, with a sarcastic reflection
on the company she would be compelled to keep there.

The _Chickamin_ with her tow drew off, and she was alone again.

"Marooned once more," Stella said to herself when the little steamboat
slipped behind the first jutting point. "Oh, if I could just be a man
for a while."

Marooned seemed to her the appropriate term. There were the two old
Siwashes and their dark-skinned brood. But they were little more to
Stella than the insentient boulders that strewed the beach. She could
not talk to them or they to her. Long since she had been surfeited with
Katy John. If there were any primitive virtues in that dusky maiden they
were well buried under the white man's schooling. Katy's demand upon
life was very simple and in marked contrast to Stella Benton's. Plenty
of grub, no work, some cheap finery, and a man white or red, no matter,
to make eyes at. Her horizon was bounded by Roaring Lake and the mission
at Skookumchuck. She was therefore no mitigation of Stella's loneliness.

Nevertheless Stella resigned herself to make the best of it, and it
proved a poor best. She could not detach herself sufficiently from the
sordid realities to lose herself in day-dreaming. There was not a book
in the camp save some ten-cent sensations she found in the bunkhouse,
and these she had exhausted during Charlie's first absence. The uncommon
stillness of the camp oppressed her more than ever. Even the bluejays
and squirrels seemed to sense its abandonment, seemed to take her as
part of the inanimate fixtures, for they frisked and chattered about
with uncommon fearlessness. The lake lay dead gray, glassy as some great
irregular window in the crust of the earth. Only at rare intervals did
sail or smoke dot its surface, and then far offshore. The woods stood
breathless in the autumn sun. It was like being entombed. And there
would be a long stretch of it, with only a recurrence of that deadly
grind of kitchen work when the loggers came home again.

Some time during the next forenoon she went southerly along the lake
shore on foot without object or destination, merely to satisfy in some
measure the restless craving for action. Colorful turns of life, the
more or less engrossing contact of various personalities, some new thing
to be done, seen, admired, discussed, had been a part of her existence
ever since she could remember. None of this touched her now. A dead
weight of monotony rode her hard. There was the furtive wild life of the
forest, the light of sun and sky, and the banked green of the forest
that masked the steep granite slopes. She appreciated beauty, craved it
indeed, but she could not satisfy her being with scenic effects alone.
She craved, without being wholly aware of it, or altogether admitting it
to herself, some human distraction in all that majestic solitude.

It was forthcoming. When she returned to camp at two o'clock, driven in
by hunger, Jack Fyfe sat on the doorstep.

"How-de-do. I've come to bring you over to my place," he announced quite
casually.

"Thanks. I've already declined one pressing invitation to that effect,"
Stella returned drily. His matter-of-fact assurance rather nettled her.

"A woman always has the privilege of changing her mind," Fyfe smiled.
"Charlie is going to be at my camp for at least three weeks. It'll rain
soon, and the days'll be pretty gray and dreary and lonesome. You might
as well pack your war-bag and come along."

She stood uncertainly. Her tongue held ready a blunt refusal, but she
did not utter it; and she did not know why. She did have a glimpse of
the futility of refusing, only she did not admit that refusal might be
of no weight in the matter. With her mind running indignantly against
compulsion, nevertheless her muscles involuntarily moved to obey. It
irritated her further that she should feel in the least constrained to
obey the calmly expressed wish of this quiet-spoken woodsman. Certain
possible phases of a lengthy sojourn in Jack Fyfe's camp shot across her
mind. He seemed of uncanny perception, for he answered this thought
before it was clearly formed.

"Oh, you'll be properly chaperoned, and you won't have to mix with the
crew," he drawled. "I've got all kinds of room. My boss logger's wife is
up from town for a while. She's a fine, motherly old party, and she
keeps us all in order."

"I haven't had any lunch," she temporized. "Have you?"

He shook his head.

"I rowed over here before twelve. Thought I'd get you back to camp in
time for dinner. You know," he said with a twinkle in his blue eyes, "a
logger never eats anything but a meal. A lunch to us is a snack that you
put in your pocket. I guess we lack tone out here. We haven't got past
the breakfast-dinner-supper stage yet; too busy making the country fit
to live in."

"You have a tremendous job in hand," she observed.

"Oh, maybe," he laughed. "All in the way you look at it. Suits some of
us. Well, if we get to my camp before three, the cook might feed us.
Come on. You'll get to hating yourself if you stay here alone till
Charlie's through."

Why not? Thus she parleyed with herself, one half of her minded to stand
upon her dignity, the other part of her urging acquiescence in his wish
that was almost a command. She was tempted to refuse just to see what he
would do, but she reconsidered that. Without any logical foundation for
the feeling, she was shy of pitting her will against Jack Fyfe's.
Hitherto quite sure of herself, schooled in self-possession, it was a
new and disturbing experience to come in contact with that subtle,
analysis-defying quality which carries the possessor thereof straight to
his or her goal over all opposition, which indeed many times stifles all
opposition. Force of character, overmastering personality, emanation of
sheer will, she could not say in what terms it should be described.
Whatever it was, Jack Fyfe had it. It existed, a factor to be reckoned
with when one dealt with him. For within twenty minutes she had packed a
suitcase full of clothes and was embarked in his rowboat.

He sent the lightly built craft easily through the water with regular,
effortless strokes. Stella sat in the stern, facing him. Out past the
north horn of the bay, she broke the silence that had fallen between
them.

"Why did you make a point of coming for me?" she asked bluntly.

Fyfe rested on his oars a moment, looking at her in his direct,
unembarrassed way.

"I wintered once on the Stickine," he said. "My partner pulled out
before Christmas and never came back. It was the first time I'd ever
been alone in my life. I wasn't a much older hand in the country than
you are. Four months without hearing the sound of a human voice. Stark
alone. I got so I talked to myself out loud before spring. So I
thought--well, I thought I'd come and bring you over to see Mrs. Howe."

Stella sat gazing at the slow moving panorama of the lake shore, her
chin in her hand.

"Thank you," she said at last, and very gently.

Fyfe looked at her a minute or more, a queer, half-amused expression
creeping into his eyes.

"Well," he said finally, "I might as well tell the whole truth. I've
been thinking about you quite a lot lately, Miss Stella Benton, or I
wouldn't have thought about you getting lonesome."

He smiled ever so faintly, a mere movement of the corners of his mouth,
at the pink flush which rose quickly in her cheeks, and then resumed his
steady pull at the oars.

Except for a greater number of board shacks and a larger area of stump
and top-littered waste immediately behind it, Fyfe's headquarters,
outwardly, at least, differed little from her brother's camp. Jack led
her to a long, log structure with a shingle roof, which from its more
substantial appearance she judged to be his personal domicile. A plump,
smiling woman of forty greeted her on the threshold. Once within, Stella
perceived that there was in fact considerable difference in Mr. Fyfe's
habitation. There was a great stone fireplace, before which big
easy-chairs invited restful lounging. The floor was overlaid with thick
rugs which deadened her footfalls. With no pretense of ornamental
decoration, the room held an air of homely comfort.

"Come in here and lay off your things," Mrs. Howe beamed on her. "If
I'd 'a' known you were livin' so close, we'd have been acquainted a week
ago; though I ain't got rightly settled here myself. My land, these men
are such clams. I never knowed till this mornin' there was any white
woman at this end of the lake besides myself."

She showed Stella into a bedroom. It boasted an enamel washstand with
taps which yielded hot and cold water, neatly curtained windows, and a
deep-seated Morris chair. Certainly Fyfe's household accommodation was
far superior to Charlie Benton's. Stella expected the man's home to be
rough and ready like himself, and in a measure it was, but a comfortable
sort of rough and readiness. She took off her hat and had a critical
survey of herself in a mirror, after which she had just time to brush
her hair before answering Mrs. Howe's call to a "cup of tea."

The cup of tea resolved itself into a well-cooked and well-served meal,
with china and linen and other unexpected table accessories which
agreeably surprised, her. Inevitably she made comparisons, somewhat
tinctured with natural envy. If Charlie would fix his place with a few
such household luxuries, life in their camp would be more nearly
bearable, despite the long hours of disagreeable work. As it was--well,
the unrelieved discomforts were beginning to warp her out-look on
everything.

Fyfe maintained his habitual sparsity of words while they ate the food
Mrs. Howe brought on a tray hot from the cook's outlying domain. When
they finished, he rose, took up his hat and helped himself to a handful
of cigars from a box on the fireplace mantel.

"I guess you'll be able to put in the time, all right," he remarked.
"Make yourself at home. If you take a notion to read, there's a lot of
books and magazines in my room. Mrs. Howe'll show you."

He walked out. Stella was conscious of a distinct relief when he was
gone. She had somehow experienced a recurrence of that peculiar feeling
of needing to be on her guard, as if there were some curious, latent
antagonism between them. She puzzled over that a little. She had never
felt that way about Paul Abbey, for instance, or indeed toward any man
she had ever known. Fyfe's more or less ambiguous remark in the boat had
helped to arouse it again. His manner of saying that he had "thought a
lot about her" conveyed more than the mere words. She could quite
conceive of the Jack Fyfe type carrying things with a high hand where a
woman was concerned. He had that reputation in all his other dealings.
He was aggressive. He could drink any logger in the big firs off his
feet. He had an uncanny luck at cards. Somehow or other in every
undertaking Jack Fyfe always came out on top, so the tale ran. There
must be, she reasoned, a wide streak of the brute in such a man. It was
no gratification to her vanity to have him admire her. It did not dawn
upon her that so far she had never got over being a little afraid of
him, much less to ask herself why she should be afraid of him.

But she did not spend much time puzzling over Jack Fyfe. Once out of her
sight she forgot him. It was balm to her lonely soul to have some one
of her own sex for company. What Mrs. Howe lacked in the higher culture
she made up in homely perception and unassuming kindliness. Her husband
was Fyfe's foreman. She herself was not a permanent fixture in the camp.
They had a cottage at Roaring Springs, where she spent most of the time,
so that their three children could be in school.

"I was up here all through vacation," she told Stella. "But Lefty he got
to howlin' about bein' left alone shortly after school started again, so
I got my sister to look after the kids for a spell, while I stay. I'll
be goin' down about the time Mr. Benton's through here."

Stella eventually went out to take a look around the camp. A hard-beaten
path led off toward where rose the distant sounds of logging work, the
ponderous crash of trees, and the puff of the donkeys. She followed that
a little way and presently came to a knoll some three hundred yards
above the beach. There she paused to look and wonder curiously.

For the crest of this little hillock had been cleared and graded level
and planted to grass over an area four hundred feet square. It was
trimmed like a lawn, and in the center of this vivid green block stood
an unfinished house foundation of gray stone. No stick of timber, no
board or any material for further building lay in sight. The thing stood
as if that were to be all. And it was not a new undertaking temporarily
delayed. There was moss creeping over the thick stone wall, she
discovered when she walked over it. Whoever had laid that foundation had
done it many a moon before. Yet the sward about was kept as if a
gardener had it in charge.

A noble stretch of lake and mountain spread out before her gaze.
Straight across the lake two deep clefts in the eastern range opened on
the water, five miles apart. She could see the white ribbon of foaming
cascades in each. Between lifted a great mountain, and on the lakeward
slope of this stood a terrible scar of a slide, yellow and brown, rising
two thousand feet from the shore. A vaporous wisp of cloud hung along
the top of the slide, and above this aërial banner a snow-capped
pinnacle thrust itself high into the infinite blue.

"What an outlook," she said, barely conscious that she spoke aloud. "Why
do these people build their houses in the bush, when they could live in
the open and have something like this to look at. They would, if they
had any sense of beauty."

"Sure they haven't? Some of them might have, you know, without being
able to gratify it."

She started, to find Jack Fyfe almost at her elbow, the gleam of a
quizzical smile lighting his face.

"I daresay that might be true," she admitted.

Fyfe's gaze turned from her to the huge sweep of lake and mountain
chain. She saw that he was outfitted for fishing, creel on his shoulder,
unjointed rod in one hand. By means of his rubber-soled waders he had
come upon her noiselessly.

"It's truer than you think, maybe," he said at length. "You don't want
to come along and take a lesson in catching rainbows, I suppose?"

"Not this time, thanks," she shook her head.

"I want to get enough for supper, so I'd better be at it," he remarked.
"Sometimes they come pretty slow. If you should want to go up and watch
the boys work, that trail will take you there."

He went off across the grassy level and plunged into the deep timber
that rose like a wall beyond. Stella looked after.

"It is certainly odd," she reflected with some irritation, "how that man
affects me. I don't think a woman could ever be just friends with him.
She'd either like him a lot or dislike him intensely. He isn't anything
but a logger, and yet he has a presence like one of the lords of
creation. Funny."

Then she went back to the house to converse upon domestic matters with
Mrs. Howe until the shrilling of the donkey whistle brought forty-odd
lumberjacks swinging down the trail.

Behind them a little way came Jack Fyfe with sagging creel. He did not
stop to exhibit his catch, but half an hour later they were served hot
and crisp at the table in the big living room, where Fyfe, Stella and
Charlie Benton, Lefty Howe and his wife, sat down together.

A flunkey from the camp kitchen served the meal and cleared it away. For
an hour or two after that the three men sat about in shirt-sleeved ease,
puffing at Jack Fyfe's cigars. Then Benton excused himself and went to
bed. When Howe and his wife retired, Stella did likewise. The long
twilight had dwindled to a misty patch of light sky in the northwest,
and she fell asleep more at ease than she had been for weeks. Sitting in
Jack Fyfe's living room through that evening she had begun to formulate
a philosophy to fit her enforced environment--to live for the day only,
and avoid thought of the future until there loomed on the horizon some
prospect of a future worth thinking about. The present looked passable
enough, she thought, if she kept her mind strictly on it alone.

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 pawns 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 class 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 sex 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 shore. The fall run of the salmon was on, and every
stream was packed with the silver horde, threshing through shoal and
rapid to reach the spawning 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 spawning 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 fishing. Jim Renfrew,
still walking with a pronounced 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. "Nobody 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 massed, 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 shine, the work drove on. From the peep of day till dusk
shrouded the woods, Benton's donkey puffed and groaned, axes thudded,
the thin, twanging 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
latitudes, but a nipping cold that held off the melting rains and laid a
thin scum 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 mass 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 assist
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.

"God 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 passed
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 passed 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 snatches 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 coarse 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 participating in it. Eleven o'clock passed, 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 glass, 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 shore. 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 scrap 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 glassy 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 shivering
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 bloody face of the
one who had been struck, the coarse 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 shivered 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
space 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 butt 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.

"Kin I get some hot water?" he asked.

Stella silently indicated the reservoir at one end of the range. The man
ladled his basin full. The fumes of whisky, the unpleasant odor of his
breath offended her, and she drew back. Fyfe looked at her as the man
went out.

"What?" he asked.

She had muttered something, an impatient exclamation of disgust. The
man's appearance disagreeably reminded her of the scene she had observed
through the bunkhouse window. It stung her to think that her brother was
fast putting himself on a par with them--without their valid excuse of
type and training.

"Oh, nothing," she said wearily, and turned to the sputtering bacon.

Fyfe put his foot up on the stove front and drummed a tattoo on his
mackinaw clad knee.

"Aren't you getting pretty sick of this sort of work, these more or less
uncomfortable surroundings, and the sort of people you have to come in
contact with?" he asked pointedly.

"I am," she returned as bluntly, "but I think that's rather an
impertinent question, Mr. Fyfe."

He passed imperturbably over this reproof, and his glance turned
briefly toward the dining room. Katy John was still noisily at work.

"You hate it," he said positively. "I know you do. I've seen your
feelings many a time. I don't blame you. It's a rotten business for a
girl with your tastes and bringing up. And I'm afraid you'll find it
worse, if this snow stays long. I know what a logging camp is when work
stops, and whisky creeps in, and the boss lets go his hold for the time
being."

"That may be true," she returned gloomily, "but I don't see why you
should enumerate these disagreeable things for my benefit."

"I'm going to show you a way out," he said softly. "I've been thinking
it over for quite a while. I want you to marry me."

Stella gasped.

"Mr. Fyfe."

"Listen," he said peremptorily, leaning closer to her and lowering his
voice. "I have an idea that you're going to say you don't love me. Lord,
_I_ know that. But you _hate_ this. It grates against every inclination
of yours like a file on steel. I wouldn't jar on you like that. I
wouldn't permit you to live in surroundings that would. That's the
material side of it. Nobody can live on day dreams. I like you, Stella
Benton, a whole lot more than I'd care to say right out loud. You and I
together could make a home we'd be proud of. I want you, and you want to
get away from this. It's natural. Marry me and play the game fair, and I
don't think you'll be sorry. I'm putting it as baldly as I can. You
stand to win everything with nothing to lose--but your domestic
chains--" the gleam of a smile lit up his features for a second. "Won't
you take a chance?" "No," she declared impulsively. "I won't be a party
to any such cold-blooded transaction."

"You don't seem to understand me," he said soberly. "I don't want to
hand out any sentiment, but it makes me sore to see you wasting yourself
on this sort of thing. If you must do it, why don't you do it for
somebody who'll make it worth while? If you'd use the brains God gave
you, you know that lots of couples have married on flimsier grounds than
we'd have. How can a man and a woman really know anything about each
other till they've lived together? Just because we don't marry with our
heads in the fog is no reason we shouldn't get on fine. What are you
going to do? Stick here at this till you go crazy? You won't get away.
You don't realize what a one-idea, determined person this brother of
yours is. He has just one object in life, and he'll use everything and
everybody in sight to attain that object. He means to succeed and he
will. You're purely incidental; but he has that perverted, middle-class
family pride that will make him prevent you from getting out and trying
your own wings. Nature never intended a woman like you to be a celibate,
any more than I was so intended. And sooner or late you'll marry
somebody--if only to hop out of the fire into the frying pan."

"I hate you," she flashed passionately, "when you talk like that."

"No, you don't," he returned quietly. "You hate what I say, because
it's the truth--and it's humiliating to be helpless. You think I don't
_sabe?_ But I'm putting a weapon into your hand. Let's put it
differently; leave out the sentiment for a minute. We'll say that I want
a housekeeper, preferably an ornamental one, because I like beautiful
things. You want to get away from this drudgery. That's what it is,
simple drudgery. You crave lots of things you can't get by yourself, but
that you could help me get for you. There's things lacking in your life,
and so is there in mine. Why shouldn't we go partners? You think about
it."

"I don't need to," she answered coolly. "It wouldn't work. You don't
appear to have any idea what it means for a woman to give herself up
body and soul to a man she doesn't care for. For me it would be plain
selling myself. I haven't the least affection for you personally. I
might even detest you."

"You wouldn't," he said positively.

"What makes you so sure of that?" she demanded.

"It would sound conceited if I told you why," he drawled. "Listen. We're
not gods and goddesses, we human beings. We're not, after all, in our
real impulses, so much different from the age when a man took his club
and went after a female that looked good to him. They mated, and raised
their young, and very likely faced on an average fewer problems than
arise in modern marriages supposedly ordained in Heaven. You'd have the
one big problem solved,--the lack of means to live decently,--which
wrecks more homes than anything else, far more than lack of love.
Affection doesn't seem to thrive on poverty. What is love?"

His voice took on a challenging note.

Stella shook her head. He puzzled her, wholly serious one minute, a
whimsical smile twisting up the corners of his mouth the next. And he
surprised her too by his sureness of utterance on subjects she had not
supposed would enter such a man's mind.

"I don't know," she answered absently, turning over strips of bacon with
the long-handled fork.

"There you are," he said. "I don't know either. We'd start even, then,
for the sake of argument. No, I guess we wouldn't either, because you're
the only woman I've run across so far with whom I could calmly
contemplate spending the rest of my life in close contact. That's a
fact. To me it's a highly important fact. You don't happen to have any
such feeling about me, eh?"

"No. I hadn't even thought of you in that way," Stella answered
truthfully.

"You want to think about me," he said calmly. "You want to think about
me from every possible angle, because I'm going to come back and ask you
this same question every once in a while, so long as you're in reach and
doing this dirty work for a thankless boss. You want to think of me as a
possible refuge from a lot of disagreeable things. I'd like to have you
to chum with, and I'd like to have some incentive to put a big white
bungalow on that old foundation for us two," he smiled. "I'll never do
it for myself alone. Go on. Take a gambling chance and marry me, Stella.
Say yes, and say it now."

But she shook her head resolutely, and as Katy John came in just then,
Fyfe took his foot off the stove and went out of the kitchen. He threw a
glance over his shoulder at Stella, a broad smile, as if to say that he
harbored no grudge, and nursed no wound in his vanity because she would
have none of him.

Katy rang the breakfast gong. Five minutes later the tattoo of knives
and forks and spoons told of appetites in process of appeasement.
Charlie came into the kitchen in the midst of this, bearing certain
unmistakable signs. His eyes were inflamed, his cheeks still bearing the
flush of liquor. His demeanor was that of a man suffering an intolerable
headache and correspondingly short-tempered. Stella barely spoke to him.
It was bad enough for a man to make a beast of himself with whisky, but
far worse was his gambling streak. There were so many little ways in
which she could have eased things with a few dollars; yet he always
grumbled when she spoke of money, always put her off with promises to be
redeemed when business got better.

Stella watched him bathe his head copiously in cold water and then seat
himself at the long table, trying to force food upon an aggrieved and
rebellious stomach. Gradually a flood of recklessness welled up in her
breast.

"For two pins I would marry Jack Fyfe," she told herself savagely.
"_Anything_ would be better than this."




CHAPTER XI


THE PLUNGE

Stella went over that queer debate a good many times in the ten days
that followed. It revealed Jack Fyfe to her in a new, inexplicable
light, at odd variance with her former conception of the man. She could
not have visualized him standing with one foot on the stove front
speaking calmly of love and marriage if she had not seen him with her
own eyes, heard him with somewhat incredulous ears. She had continued to
endow him with the attributes of unrestrained passion, of headlong
leaping to the goal of his desires, of brushing aside obstacles and
opposition with sheer brute force; and he had shown unreckoned qualities
of restraint, of understanding. She was not quite sure if this were
guile or sensible consideration. He had put his case logically,
persuasively even. She was very sure that if he had adopted emotional
methods, she would have been repelled. If he had laid siege to her hand
and heart in the orthodox fashion, she would have raised that siege in
short order. As it stood, in spite of her words to him, there was in her
own mind a lack of finality. As she went about her daily tasks, that
prospect of trying a fresh fling at the world as Jack Fyfe's wife
tantalized her with certain desirable features.

Was it worth while to play the game as she must play it for some time
to come, drudge away at mean, sordid work and amid the dreariest sort of
environment? At best, she could only get away from Charlie's camp and
begin along new lines that might perhaps be little better, that must
inevitably lie among strangers in a strange land. To what end? What did
she want of life, anyway? She had to admit that she could not say fully
and explicitly what she wanted. When she left out her material wants,
there was nothing but a nebulous craving for--what? Love, she assumed.
And she could not define love, except as some incomprehensible transport
of emotion which irresistibly drew a man and a woman together, a divine
fire kindled in two hearts. It was not a thing she could vouch for by
personal experience. It might never touch and warm her, that divine
fire. Instinct did now and then warn her that some time it would wrap
her like a flame. But in the meantime--Life had her in midstream of its
remorseless, drab current, sweeping her along. A foothold offered. Half
a loaf, a single slice of bread even, is better than none.

Jack Fyfe did not happen in again for nearly two weeks and then only to
pay a brief call, but he stole an opportunity, when Katy John was not
looking, to whisper in Stella's ear:

"Have you been thinking about that bungalow of ours?"

She shook her head, and he went out quietly, without another word. He
neither pleaded nor urged, and perhaps that was wisest, for in spite of
herself Stella thought of him continually. He loomed always before her,
a persistent, compelling factor.

She knew at last, beyond any gainsaying, that the venture tempted,
largely perhaps because it contained so great an element of the unknown.
To get away from this soul-dwarfing round meant much. She felt herself
reasoning desperately that the frying pan could not be worse than the
fire, and held at least the merit of greater dignity and freedom from
the twin evils of poverty and thankless domestic slavery.

While she considered this, pro and con, shrinking from such a step one
hour, considering it soberly the next, the days dragged past in
wearisome sequence. The great depth of snow endured, was added to by
spasmodic flurries. The frosts held. The camp seethed with the
restlessness of the men. In default of the daily work that consumed
their superfluous energy, the loggers argued and fought, drank and
gambled, made "rough house" in their sleeping quarters till sometimes
Stella's cheeks blanched and she expected murder to be done. Twice the
_Chickamin_ came back from Roaring Springs with whisky aboard, and a
protracted debauch ensued. Once a drunken logger shouldered his way into
the kitchen to leer unpleasantly at Stella, and, himself inflamed by
liquor and the affront, Charlie Benton beat the man until his face was a
mass of bloody bruises. That was only one of a dozen brutal incidents.
All the routine discipline of the woods seemed to have slipped out of
Benton's hands. When the second whisky consignment struck the camp,
Stella stayed in her room, refusing to cook until order reigned again.
Benton grumblingly took up the burden himself. With Katy's help and that
of sundry loggers, he fed the roistering crew, but for his sister it was
a two-day period of protesting disgust.

That mood, like so many of her moods, relapsed into dogged endurance.
She took up the work again when Charlie promised that no more whisky
should be allowed in the camp.

"Though it's ten to one I won't have a corporal's guard left when I want
to start work again," he grumbled. "I'm well within my rights if I put
my foot down hard on any jinks when there's work, but I have no license
to set myself up as guardian of a logger's morals and pocketbook when I
have nothing for him to do. These fellows are paying their board. So
long as they don't make themselves obnoxious to you, I don't see that
it's our funeral whether they're drunk or sober. They'd tell me so quick
enough."

To this pronouncement of expediency Stella made no rejoinder. She no
longer expected anything much of Charlie, in the way of consideration.
So far as she could see, she, his sister, was little more to him than
one of his loggers; a little less important than, say, his donkey
engineer. In so far as she conduced to the well-being of the camp and
effected a saving to his credit in the matter of preparing food, he
valued her and was willing to concede a minor point to satisfy her.
Beyond that Stella felt that he did not go. Five years in totally
different environments had dug a great gulf between them. He felt an
arbitrary sense of duty toward her, she knew, but in its manifestations
it never lapped over the bounds of his own immediate self-interest.

And so when she blundered upon knowledge of a state of affairs which
must have existed under her very nose for some time, there were few
remnants of sisterly affection to bid her seek extenuating
circumstances.

Katy John proved the final straw. Just by what means Stella grew to
suspect any such moral lapse on Benton's part is wholly irrelevant. Once
the unpleasant likelihood came to her notice, she took measures to
verify her suspicion, and when convinced she taxed her brother with it,
to his utter confusion.

"What kind of a man are you?" she cried at last in shamed anger. "Is
there nothing too low for you to dabble in? Haven't you any respect for
anything or anybody, yourself included?"

"Oh, don't talk like a damned Puritan," Benton growled, though his
tanned face was burning. "This is what comes of having women around the
camp. I'll send the girl away."

"You--you beast!" she flared--and ran out of the kitchen to seek refuge
in her own room and cry into her pillow some of the dumb protest that
surged up within her. For her knowledge of passion and the workings of
passion as they bore upon the relations of a man and a woman were at
once vague and tinctured with inflexible tenets of morality, the
steel-hard conception of virtue which is the bulwark of middle-class
theory for its wives and daughters and sisters--with an eye consistently
blind to the concealed lapses of its men.

Stella Benton passed that morning through successive stages of shocked
amazement, of pity, and disgust. As between her brother and the Siwash
girl, she saw little to choose. From her virtuous pinnacle she abhorred
both. If she had to continue intimate living with them, she felt that
she would be utterly defiled, degraded to their level. That was her
first definite conclusion.

After a time she heard Benton come into their living room and light a
fire in the heater. She dried her eyes and went out to face him.

"Charlie," she declared desperately, "I can't stay here any longer. It's
simply impossible."

"Don't start that song again. We've had it often enough," he answered
stubbornly. "You're not going--not till spring. I'm not going to let you
go in the frame of mind you're in right now, anyhow. You'll get over
that. Hang it, I'm not the first man whose foot slipped. It isn't your
funeral, anyway. Forget it."

The grumbling coarseness of this retort left her speechless. Benton got
the fire going and went out. She saw him cross to the kitchen, and later
she saw Katy John leave the camp with all her belongings in a bundle
over her shoulder, trudging away to the camp of her people around the
point.

Kipling's pregnant line shot across her mind:

"For the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skins."

"I wonder," she mused. "I wonder if we are? I wonder if that poor,
little, brown-skinned fool isn't after all as much a victim as I am. She
doesn't know better, maybe; but Charlie does, and he doesn't seem to
care. It merely embarrasses him to be found out, that's all. It isn't
right. It isn't fair, or decent, or anything. We're just for him to--to
use."

She looked out along the shores piled high with broken ice and snow,
through a misty air to distant mountains that lifted themselves
imperiously aloof, white spires against the sky,--over a forest all
draped in winter robes; shore, mountains, and forest alike were chill
and hushed and desolate. The lake spread its forty-odd miles in a
boomerang curve from Roaring Springs to Fort Douglas, a cold, lifeless
gray. She sat a long time looking at that, and a dead weight seemed to
settle upon her heart. For the second time that day she broke down. Not
the shamed, indignant weeping of an hour earlier, but with the essence
of all things forlorn and desolate in her choked sobs.

She did not hear Jack Fyfe come in. She did not dream he was there,
until she felt his hand gently on her shoulder and looked up. And so
deep was her despondency, so keen the unassuaged craving for some human
sympathy, some measure of understanding, that she made no effort to
remove his hand. She was in too deep a spiritual quagmire to refuse any
sort of aid, too deeply moved to indulge in analytical self-fathoming.
She had a dim sense of being oddly comforted by his presence, as if she,
afloat on uncharted seas, saw suddenly near at hand a safe anchorage and
welcoming hands. Afterward she recalled that. As it was, she looked up
at Fyfe and hid her wet face in her hands again. He stood silent a few
seconds. When he did speak there was a peculiar hesitation in his
voice.

"What is it?" he said softly. "What's the trouble now?"

Briefly she told him, the barriers of her habitual reserve swept aside
before the essentially human need to share a burden that has grown too
great to bear alone.

"Oh, hell," Fyfe grunted, when she had finished. "This isn't any place
for you at all."

He slid his arm across her shoulders and tilted her face with his other
hand so that her eyes met his. And she felt no desire to draw away or
any of that old instinct to be on her guard against him. For all she
knew--indeed, by all she had been told--Jack Fyfe was tarred with the
same stick as her brother, but she had no thought of resisting him, no
feeling of repulsion.

"Will you marry me, Stella?" he asked evenly. "I can free you from this
sort of thing forever."

"How can I?" she returned. "I don't want to marry anybody. I don't love
you. I'm not even sure I like you. I'm too miserable to think, even. I'm
afraid to take a step like that. I should think you would be too."

He shook his head.

"I've thought a lot about it lately," he said. "It hasn't occurred to me
to be afraid of how it may turn out. Why borrow trouble when there's
plenty at hand? I don't care whether you love me or not, right now. You
couldn't possibly be any worse off as my wife, could you?"

"No," she admitted. "I don't see how I could."

"Take a chance then," he urged. "I'll make a fair bargain with you. I'll
make life as pleasant for you as I can. You'll live pretty much as
you've been brought up to live, so far as money goes. The rest we'll
have to work out for ourselves. I won't ask you to pretend anything you
don't feel. You'll play fair, because that's the way you're
made,--unless I've sized you up wrong. It'll simply be a case of our
adjusting ourselves, just as mating couples have been doing since the
year one. You've everything to gain and nothing to lose."

"In some ways," she murmured.

"Every way," he insisted. "You aren't handicapped by caring for any
other man."

"How do you know?" she asked.

"Just a hunch," Fyfe smiled. "If you did, he'd have beaten me to the
rescue long ago--if he were the sort of man you _could_ care for."

"No," she admitted. "There isn't any other man, but there might be.
Think how terrible it would be if it happened--afterward."

Fyfe shrugged his shoulders.

"Sufficient unto the day," he said. "There is no string on either of us
just now. We start even. That's good enough. Will you?"

"You have me at a disadvantage," she whispered. "You offer me a lot that
I want, everything but a feeling I've somehow always believed ought to
exist, ought to be mutual. Part of me wants to shut my eyes and jump.
Part of me wants to hang back. I can't stand this thing I've got into
and see no way of getting out of. Yet I dread starting a new train of
wretchedness. I'm afraid--whichever way I turn."

Fyfe considered this a moment.

"Well," he said finally, "that's a rather unfortunate attitude. But I'm
going into it with my eyes open. I know what I want. You'll be making a
sort of experiment. Still, I advise you to make it. I think you'll be
the better for making it. Come on. Say yes."

Stella looked up at him, then out over the banked snow, and all the
dreary discomforts, the mean drudgery, the sordid shifts she had been
put to for months rose up in disheartening phalanx. For that moment Jack
Fyfe loomed like a tower of refuge. She trusted him now. She had a
feeling that even if she grew to dislike him, she would still trust him.
He would play fair. If he said he would do this or that, she could bank
on it absolutely.

She turned and looked at him searchingly a long half-minute, wondering
what really lay behind the blue eyes that met her own so steadfastly. He
stood waiting patiently, outwardly impassive. But she could feel through
the thin stuff of her dress a quiver in the fingers that rested on her
shoulder, and that repressed sign of the man's pent-up feeling gave her
an odd thrill, moved her strangely, swung the pendulum of her impulse.

"Yes," she said.

Fyfe bent a little lower.

"Listen," he said in characteristically blunt fashion. "You want to get
away from here. There is no sense in our fussing or hesitating about
what we're going to do, is there?"

"No, I suppose not," she agreed.

"I'll send the _Panther_ down to the Springs for Lefty Howe's wife," he
outlined his plans unhesitatingly. "She'll get up here this evening.
To-morrow we will go down and take the train to Vancouver and be
married. You have plenty of good clothes, good enough for Vancouver. I
know,"--with a whimsical smile,--"because you had no chance to wear them
out. Then we'll go somewhere, California, Florida, and come back to
Roaring Lake in the spring. You'll have all the bad taste of this out of
your mouth by that time."

Stella nodded acquiescence. Better to make the plunge boldly, since she
had elected to make it.

"All right. I'm going to tell Benton," Fyfe said. "Good-by till
to-morrow."

She stood up. He looked at her a long time earnestly, searchingly, one
of her hands imprisoned tight between his two big palms. Then, before
she was quite aware of his

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