The Greater Power
by Harold Bindloss · English · Gutenberg #29650 · 576,198 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Greater Power
Author: Harold Bindloss
Illustrator: W. Herbert Dunton
Release date: August 9, 2009 [eBook #29650]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29650
Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREATER POWER ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
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THE GREATER POWER
BY SAME AUTHOR
The Cattle Baron's Daughter
Alton Of Somasco
Dust Of Conflict
Winston Of The Prairie
For Jacinta
Delilah Of The Snows
By Right Of Purchase
Lorimer Of The Northwest
[Illustration: "I AM AFRAID I'M GOING TO LOSE HIM, AFTER ALL."
_Page 174_]
THE GREATER POWER
BY HAROLD BINDLOSS
Author of "The Cattle Baron's Daughter," "By Right of Purchase,"
"Lorimer of the Northwest," "Thrice Armed," etc.
With Frontispiece in Colours by
W. HERBERT DUNTON
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1909, By
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
All Rights Reserved
September, 1909
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Overburdened 1
II The Trail 11
III Waynefleet's Ranch 22
IV Laura Waynefleet's Wish 34
V The Flood 45
VI The Breaking of the Dam 56
VII Laura Makes a Dress 66
VIII By Combat 78
IX Gordon Speaks His Mind 89
X The Calling Canon 99
XI The Great Idea 109
XII Wisbech Makes Inquiries 118
XIII On the Trestle 127
XIV In the Moonlight 138
XV Martial's Misadventure 149
XVI Acton's Warning 162
XVII An Eventful Day 174
XVIII Tranquillity 186
XIX Nasmyth Hears the River 195
XX Nasmyth Goes Away 208
XXI The Men of the Bush 218
XXII Nasmyth Sets to Work 228
XXIII The Derrick 239
XXIV Realities 251
XXV Nasmyth Decides 260
XXVI One Night's Task 269
XXVII Timber Rights 278
XXVIII A Painful Duty 287
XXIX A Futile Scheme 297
XXX Second Thoughts 309
XXXI The Last Shot 318
THE GREATER POWER
CHAPTER I
OVERBURDENED
It was winter in the great coniferous forest which rolls about the
rocky hills and shrouds the lonely valleys of British Columbia. A
bitter frost had dried the snow to powder and bound the frothing
rivers; it had laid its icy grip upon the waters suddenly, and the
sound of their turmoil died away in the depths of the rock-walled
canyons, until the rugged land lay wrapped in silence under a sky of
intense, pitiless blueness that seemed frozen too. Man and beast
shrink from the sudden cold snaps, as they call them, in that country,
and the rancher, who has sheep to lose, sits shivering in his log
house through the long forenights with a Marlin rifle handy, while the
famished timber wolves prowl about his clearing. Still, it is the
loggers toiling in the wilderness who feel the cold snaps most, for
the man who labours under an Arctic frost must be generously fed, or
the heat and strength die out of him, and, now and then, it happens
that provisions become scanty when no canoe can be poled up the
rivers, and the trails are blocked with snow.
There were four loggers at work in a redwood forest, one January
afternoon, rolling a great log with peevies and handspikes out of a
chaos of fallen trunks. The Bush, a wall of sombre green, spangled
here and there with frost, and impressively still, closed in about the
little gap they had made. Not a sound came out of the shadowy avenues
between the tremendous colonnades of towering trunks, and the topmost
sprays of the cedars and Douglas firs cut motionless against the blue
high above. There was no wind, and the men's breath went straight up,
a thin white vapour, into the biting air. Still, they were warm and
comparatively well fed, which was a good deal to be thankful for, and
three of them toiled contentedly, with now and then a glance at their
companion, who realized at length that he was beaten. In fact, it was
only by calling up all the resolution that was in him that this fourth
man, Derrick Nasmyth, had held himself to his task since early
morning, for there is no occupation which demands from man more
muscular effort and physical courage than logging, as it is generally
carried on in the forest of Western Canada.
Nasmyth was a tall man, apparently under thirty, and leanly muscular,
as were his companions, for those who swing the axe from dawn to dusk
in that wilderness seldom put on flesh. His bronzed face was also
lean, and a trifle worn. Considering his occupation, it was, perhaps,
too finely chiselled, and there was a certain elusive suggestion of
refinement in it. He had clear blue eyes, and the hair beneath his
battered fur cap was brown. For the rest, he wore a black leather
jacket with several rents in it, ragged duck trousers, and long boots.
His companions were the usual Bush choppers--simple, strong-armed men
of kindly nature--and Nasmyth was quite aware that they had undertaken
most of his share in the work during the last few hours.
"Another heave!" said one of the woodsmen. "Hit her hard, boys, and
away she goes!"
They strained sinewy backs and splendid arms. The great log rolled a
trifle farther, canted, as one of them slipped a handspike under the
butt of it, and landed on the skids, which were laid like railway
sleepers down the slope of a steep declivity. The snow was ground down
and rammed back about the skids, and the worn-out hollow gleamed a
faint blue-grey in the shadow of the firs. The men made another
strenuous effort as the log started, but in another moment it rushed
away, and, like a toboggan, sped downwards through the forest to the
river-ice below. The skids screamed beneath it, the snow flew up like
smoke, and then there was a thunderous crash and stillness again.
Nasmyth gasped heavily, and dropped his handspike.
"Boys," he said, "I'm used up. I'll go along to the shanty and get my
time."
He generally expressed himself much as his comrades did, but now his
clean English intonation was a little more noticeable than usual. One
of the others nodded sympathetically, as he answered:
"Well, I guess I've seen the trouble trailing you for quite a while.
Got to let up or play out. It's one I've been up against myself." He
made a vague gesture. "A little rough on you."
Then he and one of his comrades took up a big crosscut saw, while the
other swung a gleaming axe. Nasmyth walked back wearily through the
silent Bush towards the camp. His back ached, his head ached, and he
felt a trifle dazed. The strength seemed to have gone out of him, and
he fancied that he was not very far from a physical collapse. He was
glad when he reached the shanty, where, after he had shaken the snow
from his dilapidated boots, he sat down by the glowing stove, and
smiled wryly as he looked about him. The shed was rudely built of
logs, and a row of bunks packed with swamp-grass and spruce-twigs,
from some of which there hung portions of greasy blankets, ran down
one side of it. It smelt horribly of acrid tobacco and cookery, but at
least, it was warm, which counted for much, and, during the last few
months, Nasmyth had grown to look on it as home. He knew, also, that
it would cost him something to leave it now, especially as he had
nowhere else to go.
Lying back listlessly in a lounge an ingenious chopper had made out
of a few branches and a couple of sacks, Nasmyth vaguely recalled the
comfort of his London chambers and the great pillared smoking-room of
a certain exclusive club, for he was a man acquainted with the
smoother side of life. He had various gifts which were apparently of
no account in British Columbia, and he had enjoyed an education that
had, it seemed, unfitted him for anything strictly utilitarian. There
are a great many men of his description chopping trees and driving
cattle in Western Canada. Indeed, his story was one which, with slight
variations, may be heard frequently in that country. Financial
disaster had overtaken his family. Friends in high places had regarded
him coldly, and he had been too proud to ask for favours, or to profit
by those that were grudgingly offered him. That was why he had gone
out to Canada and spent several years there earning his board, and,
now and then, a few dollars as well, by bodily labour, until he went
up into the Bush with the loggers.
For a time he had somehow contrived to hold his own with the other
workers, though logging in heavy timber is one of the tasks one could
almost fancy that man was never meant for, and the logger, whose
overtaxed muscle fails him for a moment, is very likely to have the
life crushed out of him by some ponderous, slipping trunk. Perhaps,
his lack of endurance was due to the excessive strain, or the
ill-cooked food, but during the last few weeks he had been conscious
that a slackness was creeping over him. Once or twice the handspike or
peevie had been torn from his grasp, and the lives of his comrades had
been placed in peril. He had found it more and more difficult to drag
himself out to his work each morning, but he had held on until that
afternoon when his strength had suddenly failed him.
Nasmyth was half-asleep when the cook and the leader of the gang came
in. The latter, who was a big, gaunt man with grizzled hair, stopped
close by the stove and looked at him.
"Well," said the gang leader, "what do you figure you're doing here?"
Nasmyth explained with some difficulty, for in the Bush, men
acquire a certain pride in their physical manhood, and it is never
a pleasant thing to own oneself defeated. The logger, however, nodded
comprehendingly. He was a reticent, grim-faced person from Ontario,
where they breed hard men, though some have, also, kindly hearts in
them.
"That's quite right. I've noticed it myself," he commented. "In fact,
I've been figuring on asking you to get out the last week or two."
Nasmyth smiled. Like other men of his description in that country, he
had become accustomed to hearing such remarks addressed to him.
"I wonder," he answered reflectively, "why you didn't."
The logger appeared to consider. It was characteristic of him and the
stock he sprang from that he would never have admitted that he had
borne with Nasmyth as long as possible out of kindness. The thing
would have hurt him.
"Well," he said, "it seemed to me we might start you teaming, if I
could have got a span or two of oxen in, but I'm most afraid I can't
get them at my figure." He changed the subject abruptly. "Where are
you heading for?"
"I don't quite know, though I shall probably land in Victoria sooner
or later. I might strike something a little easier than logging there.
Still, it would be most of a week's march before I could reach the
railroad, and there's not a ranch anywhere near the trail."
The logger nodded. "Well," he said, "I'd head West instead. There'll
be nothing going on along the railroad just now, and the mines are
running easy, while you ought to fetch the settlement south of Butte
Lake on the third day. Guess you might pick up a dollar or two in that
neighbourhood, and, any way, there's a steamer running down the West
Coast to Victoria. Seems to me quite likely one of those Bush-ranchers
would take you in a while, even if he didn't exactly want a hired man;
but they don't do that kind of thing in the city."
Nasmyth smiled. Experience had already taught him that, as a rule, the
stranger who is welcomed in the cities arrives there with money in his
pockets, and that it is the hard-handed men with the axes from whom
the wanderer in that country is most likely to receive a kindness.
Still, though he was naturally not aware of it, a great deal was to
depend upon the fact that he followed the advice of the logger, who
traced out a diagram on the bench upon which they sat.
"There's an Indian trail up the river for the first four leagues," said
the logger. "Then you strike southwest, across the divide--here--and you
come to the Butte River. She's running in a little canyon, and you can't
get over 'cept where a prospector or somebody has chopped a big fir."
The log span across a stream is an old device, and was probably
primitive man's first attempt at bridge-building, though it is one
frequently adopted on the Pacific slope, where a giant tree grows
conveniently close to an otherwise impassable river. It was, however,
important that Nasmyth should be able to find the tree.
"You know exactly where that fir is?" he asked.
"Southwest of the highest ridge of the divide. Once you're over,
you'll fetch the Butte Lake in a long day's march. When d'you figure
you'll start?"
"To-night," said Nasmyth, "after supper. If there's sickness of any
kind hanging round me--and I feel like it--you don't want me here,
and I dare say they'd take me into the hospital at Victoria. Walking's
easier than logging, anyway, and it seems wiser to try for that fir in
daylight."
The logger nodded as if he concurred in this, and, taking a little
book from his pocket, he turned it over, wrinkling his brows while
Nasmyth watched him with a smile.
"Well," he said at length, "we'll count you full time to-day, but
there's the four days off when you got crushed by that redwood, and
the week when you chopped your leg. Then, counting the amount for your
board, that's thirty-six dollars I'm due to you."
"Not quite," answered Nasmyth. "There was the day or two after I fell
through the ice and had the shivers. I'd sooner you knocked off the
few dollars."
The logger was said to be a hard man, and in some respects this was
certainly the case; but a faint flush crept into his grim face.
Perhaps he had noticed the weariness in Nasmyth's voice or the
hollowness of his cheeks.
"All right," he said awkwardly. "Jake will put you up grub for four
days, and we'll call it square."
He counted out the money, which Nasmyth slipped into the receptacle
inside his belt. When the logger moved away the weary man crossed over
to his bunk. Nasmyth had brought his few possessions up in a canoe,
and now, knowing that he could not take them all away, he turned them
over with a curious smile. There were one or two ragged pairs of duck
trousers stained with soil, a few old tattered shirts, and a jacket of
much the same description. He remembered that he had once been
fastidious about his tailoring, as he wondered when he would be able
to replace the things that he left behind. Then he rolled up some of
the garments and his two blankets into a pack that could be strapped
upon his shoulders, and, as he did this, his comrades came trooping
in, stamping to shake the snow off their leggings.
There were about a dozen of them--simple, strenuous, brown-faced
Bush-ranchers for the most part--and they ate in haste, voraciously,
when the abundant but rudely served supper was laid out. Nasmyth had
not much appetite, and the greasy salt pork, grindstone bread,
desiccated apples, flavoured molasses, and flapjacks hot from the pan,
did not tempt him. He preferred to watch his companions, and now and
then his glance was a trifle wistful. He had worked and eaten with
them; they had slept about him, and he knew he had their rude
good-will. When his strength had begun to give way, some of them had
saddled themselves with more than their share of the tasks they were
engaged in, and he knew that it was possible he might not fall in with
comrades of their kind again. Now that the time had come, he, who had
once been welcomed at brilliant London functions, felt that it would
cost him an effort to part with these rough comrades. Perhaps this was
not so astonishing, for, after all, strenuous, valiant manhood and
rude kindliness count for much.
The shanty was cheerfully lighted and cosily warm. Nasmyth had slept
soundly there on the springy spruce-twigs, and there was at least
abundance when the mealtimes came round. Now he was about to be cast
adrift again to face a three days' march in the open, under the bitter
frost, and what might await him at the end of it he did not know. At
length, the meal was cleared away, and when the pipes were lighted, he
told his comrades that he was going. They were not demonstrative in
their expressions of regret, but they thrust upon him little plugs of
tobacco, which could not well be replaced there, and several of them
told him that, if he struck nothing he liked better, all he had to do
was to present himself at this ranch or the other beside blue lake or
frothing river when they went back in the spring. What was more to the
purpose, they meant it.
Among those Western pines men are reared who, in point of primitive
vigour, slow endurance, and the dogged courage that leads them to
attempt, and usually to accomplish, the apparently impossible, are a
match for any in the world, and no wanderer who limps up to their
lonely ranches is turned away. Those who have no claim on them are
honoured with their hospitality, and now and then one new to that
country looks with wonder on their handiwork. Down all the long
Pacific coast, from lonely Wrangel, wrapped in the Northern snow, to
Shasta in the South, it is written on hewn-back forest, rent hillside,
and dammed river. The inhabitants are subduing savage Nature; but, as
time will surely show, their greatest achievement is the rearing of
fearless men.
Though it cost him an effort, Nasmyth contrived to smile as he shook
hands with the loggers. Then he set his lips tight as, with his pack
strapped on his shoulders, he opened the door and looked out at the
dimly shining snow. It was only natural that he hesitated for a
moment. After all, brutal as the toil had been, he at least knew what
he was leaving behind, and his heart sank as he drew the door to. The
cold struck through him to the bone, though there was not a breath of
air astir, and the stillness was almost overwhelming. The frost
cramped his muscles and drove the courage out of him, and, as he
plodded down the trail, he heard Jacques, the French-Canadian cook,
tuning his battered fiddle. A little burst of laughter broke through
the twanging of the strings, and Nasmyth closed one hand hard as he
strode on faster into the darkness. There was as much of the animal in
him as there is in most of us, and he longed for the cheerful light
and the warmth of the stove, while one learns the value of human
companionship when the Frost King lays his grip on that lonely land.
He was once more homeless--an outcast--and it was almost a relief to
him when at length the twanging of the fiddle was lost in the silence
of the pines.
The trees rose about him, towering high into the soft darkness in
serried ranks, and the snow gleamed a cold blue-grey under them. Not a
twig stirred; the tall spires were black, and motionless, and solemn,
and he felt that their stateliness emphasized his own feebleness and
inconsequence. In the meanwhile, though the snow was loose and
frost-dried, it was not much above his ankles, and the trail was
comparatively good. It seemed to him advisable to push on as fast as
possible, for he had only four days' provisions, and he was not sure
of his strength. There was no doubt as to what the result would be if
it failed him in the wilderness that lay between him and the
settlement.
CHAPTER II
THE TRAIL
A half-moon rose above the black tops of the pines, and a faint light,
which the snow flung back, filtered down between the motionless
branches upon the narrow trail that wound sinuously in and out among
fallen trunks and thickets draped with withered fern, for the Siwash
Indians passed that way when the salmon came up the rivers, and the
path an Indian makes is never straight. Over and over again, an Indian
will go around an obstacle through which the Bush-rancher would hew a
passage. This is essentially characteristic of both, for the primitive
peoples patiently fit their lives to their environment, while the
white man grapples with unfavourable conditions, and resolutely
endeavours to alter them.
Until daylight Nasmyth made a tolerable pace. He had been troubled
with a curious lassitude and an unpleasant dizziness, but walking is
considerably easier than rolling ponderous logs, and he knew that it
was advisable for him to push on as fast as possible. At length, the
dawn broke high up in a dingy grey sky, and he stopped to build a
fire. It did not take long to boil a can of strong green tea, and to
prepare a piece of doughy bread, with a little salt pork, for his
breakfast. Then he wrapped one of his blankets around him and took out
his pipe. He did not remember how long he sat there, but it was clear
daylight when he noticed that the fire was burning out, and, somewhat
to his annoyance, he felt curiously reluctant to get up again.
Though it cost him an effort, he rose, and stood a minute or two
shivering in the bitter wind, which now set the dark firs sighing. He
could see the trees roll upwards before him in sombre ranks until
their topmost sprays cut in a thin filigree very high up against the
sky, and he knew that he must now leave the easy trail and cross the
big divide. When he set out he was a little annoyed to find that the
pack-straps hurt his shoulders, and that one of his boots galled his
foot. Knee-boots are not adapted for walking long distances, but the
only other ones that Nasmyth possessed were so dilapidated that he had
left them behind.
He went up for several hours through withered fern and matted
undergrowth, and over horrible tangles of fallen tree-trunks, some of
which were raised high above the snow on giant splintered branches.
The term "virgin forest" probably conveys very little to the average
Englishman, since the woods with which he is acquainted are, for the
most part, cleaned and dressed by foresters; but Nature rules
untrammelled in the pine-bush of the Pacific slope, and her waste
material lies piled in tremendous ruin until it rots away. There are
forests in that country, through which a man accustomed to them can
scarcely make a league in a day. Still, Nasmyth crossed the divide,
struggling against a bitter wind, and then went down the other side,
floundering over fallen branches, and smashing through thickets of
undergrowth and brakes of willows. He wanted to find the river, and,
more especially, the tree that bridged it, as soon as possible. It
was, however, noon when he reached the river, and it frothed and
roared a hundred feet below him in a smooth walled canyon, which had
apparently kept the frost out, for there were only strips of crackling
ice in the eddies.
It was clearly out of the question for him to get down to the river,
even if he had wished to make the descent, and without stopping to
make another fire, he plodded along the bank until the afternoon was
almost spent. There were a good many fallen trees, as he discovered to
his cost, since each one had to be painfully clambered over, but none
of them spanned the chasm. Then, as his foot was becoming very sore,
he decided to camp where a big cedar lay across a little ravine that
rent the bank. It promised to afford him a partial shelter. He had no
axe, but he tore off an armful or two of the thinner branches, with
the twigs attached to them, to form a bed, and then, crawling down to
the river, filled his smoke-blackened can and came back wearily to
make a fire. Man needs very little in those solitudes, but there are
two things he must have, and those are food to keep the strength in
him, and warmth, though there are times when he finds it singularly
difficult to make the effort to obtain them. The most unpleasant hour
of the long day of persistent toil is often the one when worn-out
muscle and jaded intelligence must be forced to the task of providing
the evening meal and shelter for the night.
Nasmyth ate his supper, so far as it went, voraciously, but with a
prudent check upon his appetite, for he had set out with only four
days' provisions, and he could not find the tree. When he had eaten,
he took out his pipe, and crouched a while beside the fire, shivering,
in spite of the blankets wrapped about him. The heat dies out of the
man who has marched for twenty hours, as those who have done it know.
In the meanwhile, darkness crept up from the east, and the pines faded
into sombre masses that loomed dimly against a leaden sky. A mournful
wailing came out of the gloom, and the smoke whirled about the
shivering man in the nipping wind, while the sound of the river's
turmoil and the crash of stream-driven ice drifted up out of the
canyon. Nasmyth listened drowsily, while his thoughts wandered back to
the loggers' shanty. He could see the men with bronzed faces sitting
smoking about the snapping stove, two or three of them dancing, while
Jacques coaxed music full of fire from his battered fiddle.
Then his thoughts went farther back to the chambers that he had once
occupied in London, and he saw himself and Frobisher, who shared them
with him, sitting at a little table daintily furnished with choice
glass and silver covers. There were big candles upon it--Frobisher,
who was a fastidious man, had insisted upon them. After that, the
artistically furnished room faded out of his memory, and he recalled a
larger one in which he had now and then dined. He could picture the
wine, and lights, and costly dresses, the smiling faces of those who
had at that time expected a great deal from him, and he saw the girl
who usually sat at his side. She had a delicate beauty and a dainty
mind, and he had sometimes fancied they might be drawn closer when he
had made his mark, which in those days appeared a very probable thing.
He wondered vaguely what she was doing then, or if she ever thought of
him. After all, as she had not answered the one letter which he wrote,
it scarcely seemed likely that she remembered him. Those who fail, he
reflected, are soon forgotten.
Then, as he was falling forward into the fire, he roused himself, and
smiled wryly. He was once more an outcast, shivering, half-asleep in
the wilderness, worn out, ragged, and aching, with a foot that was now
distinctly painful. It is, however, fortunate for such men as he, and
others among the heavily burdened, that the exhaustion of the body has
its deadening effect upon the mind. Rolling the blankets round him, he
lay down on the cedar branches and went to sleep.
He did not hear the timber wolves howling in the blackness of the
night, though several that got wind of him flitted across the ravine
after the fire burned low, and, when at length he awakened, it was
with the fall of a wet flake upon his face, and he saw the dim dawn
breaking through a haze of sliding snow. It seemed a little warmer,
and, as a matter of fact, it was so, for the cold snaps seldom last
very long near the coast; but the raw damp struck through him as he
raked the embers of the fire together. Again he felt singularly
reluctant to start when he had finished breakfast, and he found that
he could hardly place one foot upon the ground; but haste was
imperative now, so he set off limping, with the pack-straps galling
his shoulders cruelly. He also felt a little dizzy, but he pushed on
all that day beside the river through a haze of snow without coming
upon the tree. The dusk was creeping up across the forest when at
length the river emerged from the canyon, and he ventured out upon the
ice in a slacker pool. The ice heaved and crackled under him with the
pulsations of the stream, but he got across, and roused himself with
difficulty for the effort to make another fire. He was an hour
gathering fuel, and then, after a sparing supper, he lay down in his
wet clothing.
The snow that eddied about him whitened his spongy blankets, but he
got a little sleep, and, awakening, found the fire out. He tried to
light it and failed. His fingers seemed useless. He was cramped and
chilled all through, and there was in one hip-joint the gnawing pain
that those who sleep on wet ground are acquainted with. Sometimes it
goes away when one gets warmed up, but just as often it does not.
Nasmyth, who found it a difficult matter to straighten himself, ate a
little damp bread, and then, strapping his pack upon his shoulders,
stumbled on into the forest. He afterwards fancied it did not snow
very much that day, but he was not sure of anything except that he
fell over many rotten branches, and entangled himself frequently in
labyrinths of matted willows. Night came and he went to sleep without
a fire. He contrived to push on next day, walking during most of it
half asleep. Indeed, now and then he would stagger along for minutes
after consciousness of what he was doing had deserted him, for there
are men in that Bush, at least, who know what it is to stop with
suddenly opened eyes on the verge of a collapse, and find that they
have wandered from the path--only in Nasmyth's case there was no path
at all.
He was never sure whether it was that day or the next when,
floundering through an undergrowth of willows, he came upon a break in
the forest that was covered with sawn-off stumps. As he made for it,
he fell into a split-rail fence, some of which he knocked down until
he could climb over it. There was a faint smell of burning fir-wood in
the air, and it was evident to him that there was a house somewhere in
the vicinity. The snow was not deep in the clearing, and he plodded
through it, staggering now and then, until he came to a little slope,
and fell down it headlong. This time he did not seem able to get up
again, and it was fortunate that, when he flung the split fence down,
the crash made by the falling rails rang far through the silence of
the woods.
While Nasmyth lay in the slushy snow, a girl came out from among the
firs across the clearing, and walked down the little trail that led
to a well. She was tall, and there was something in her face and
the way she held herself which suggested that she was not a native of
the Bush, though everything she wore had been made by her own
fingers--that is, except the little fur cap, whose glossy brown
enhanced the lustre of her hair. This was of a slightly lighter
tint, and had gleams of ruddy gold in it. Her eyes were large and
brown, and there was a reposeful quietness in the face, which
suggested strength. It was significant that her hands were a trifle
hard, as well as shapely, and that her wrists were red.
She came to the top of the slope near the foot of which Nasmyth, who
had now raised himself on one elbow, lay, and though this might well
have startled her, she stood quietly still, looking down on him.
Nasmyth raised himself a trifle further, and blinked at her stupidly,
and she noticed that his face was drawn and grey.
"I heard the rails fall," she said. "What are you doing there?"
It did not appear strange to Nasmyth that she should speak in
well-modulated English, for there are probably as many insular English
as Canadians in parts of that country. Besides, he was scarcely in a
condition to notice a point of that kind just then.
"I think I upset the fence," he answered. "You see, I couldn't get
over. Then I must have fallen down."
It naturally struck the girl as significant that he did not seem sure
of what had happened, but the explanation that would have suggested
itself to anyone fresh from England did not occur to her. There was
not a saloon or hotel within eight or nine miles of the spot.
"Can you get up?" she asked.
"I'll try," said Nasmyth; but the attempt he made was not a complete
success, for, although he staggered to his feet, he reeled when he
stood upon them, and probably would have fallen had she not run down
the slope and taken hold of him.
"You can rest on me," she said, laying a firm and capable hand upon
his shoulder.
With her assistance, Nasmyth staggered up the slope, and there were
afterwards times when he remembered the next few minutes with somewhat
mixed feelings. Just then, however, he was only glad to have someone
to lean upon, and her mere human presence was a relief, since Nature
had come very near to crushing the life out of him.
"This is your ranch?" he inquired, looking at her with half-closed
eyes, when at length she moved away from him, a pace or two, and,
gasping a little, stood still, beneath a colonnade of towering firs.
"It is," she said simply; and a moment or two later he saw a little
house of logs half hidden among the trees.
They reached it in another minute, and, staggering in, he sank into
the nearest chair. A stove snapped and crackled in the middle of the
little log-walled room, which in spite of its uncovered, split-boarded
floor, seemed to possess a daintiness very unusual in the Bush. He did
not, however, know what particular objects in it conveyed that
impression, for the whole room seemed to be swinging up and down; but
he was definitely conscious of a comforting smell of coffee and pork,
which came from the stove. He sat still, shivering, and blinking at
the girl, while the water trickled from his tattered clothing. He
fancied from the patter on the shingle roof, that it was raining
outside.
"I wonder if you would let me camp in the barn to-night," he said.
The girl's eyes had grown compassionate as she watched him, for there
was a suggestive greyness in his face. It was evident to her that he
was utterly worn-out.
"Go in there," she said, pointing to a door. "You will find some dry
clothes. Put them on."
Nasmyth staggered into a very small room, which had a rude wooden bunk
in it, and with considerable difficulty sloughed off his wet things
and put on somebody else's clothing. Then he came back and sank into a
deer-hide lounge at the table. The girl set a cup of coffee, as well
as some pork and potatoes, before him. He drank the coffee, but
finding, somewhat to his astonishment, that he could scarcely eat, he
lay back in his chair and looked at the girl deprecatingly with
half-closed eyes.
"Sorry I can't do the supper justice. I think I'm ill," he said.
Then his head fell back against the deer-hide lounge, and, while the
girl watched him with a natural consternation, he sank into sleep or
unconsciousness. She was not sure which it was, but he certainly
looked very ill, and, being a capable young woman, she remembered that
within the next hour, the weekly mail-carrier would strike a trail
which passed within a mile of the ranch. Rising, she touched Nasmyth's
shoulder.
"Stay there, and don't try to get up until I come back," she commanded
in a kindly tone.
Nasmyth, as she had half-expected, said nothing, and, slipping into
another room--there were three in the house--she returned, wearing
a jacket of coarse fur, and went quietly out into the rain. It was
dark now, but she had, as it happened, not long to wait for the
mail-carrier.
"I want you to call at Gordon's ranch, Dave," she told the man. "Tell
him he is to come along as soon as he can. There's a stranger here who
seems very ill."
The mail-carrier would have asked questions, but she cut him short.
"How long will it be before you can tell Gordon?" she asked.
"Well," answered the man reflectively, "I'm heading right back for the
settlement, but it's a league to Gordon's, anyway. He could be here in
two hours, if he starts right off, and, considering what the trail's
like, that's blamed fast travelling."
He disappeared into the darkness, and the girl went back to the ranch.
It was, perhaps, significant that she should feel sure that the man
she had sent for would obey the summons, but she grew anxious while
the two hours slipped by. At last, a man opened the door and walked
in, with the water dripping from the long outer garment he flung off.
He was a young man, with a bronzed face and keen grey eyes, and he had
swung the axe, as one could see by his lithe carriage and the hardness
of his hands, but there was something professional in his manner as he
stooped down, regarding Nasmyth closely while he gripped the
stranger's wrist. Then he turned to the girl.
"He's very sick," Gordon said. "Guess you have no objections to my
putting him in your father's bunk. First, we'll warm the blankets."
The girl rose to help him, and--for she was strong--they stripped off
most of Nasmyth's garments and lifted him into the bunk in the next
room. Then Gordon sent her for the blankets, and, when he had wrapped
them round Nasmyth, he sat down and looked at her.
"Pneumonia," he said. "Anyway, in the meanwhile, I'll figure on it as
that, though there's what one might call a general physical collapse
as well. Where did he come from?"
"I don't know," said the girl.
"Your father won't be back for a week?"
"It's scarcely likely."
The man appeared to reflect for a moment or two. Then he made a little
expressive gesture.
"Well," he said, "it's up to us to do what we can. First thing's a
poultice. I'll show you how to fix it; but while we're here, I guess
we might as well run through his things."
"Is that needful?" and the girl glanced at Nasmyth compassionately.
"Well," said the man with an air of reflection, "it might be. This
thing's quick. Leaves you or wipes you out right away. There's very
little strength in him."
He turned out the pockets of Nasmyth's clothes, which were, however,
empty of anything that might disclose his identity.
"Not a scrap of paper, not a dollar; but I guess that wasn't always
the case with him--you can see it by his face," he said. Then he
laughed. "He's probably like a good many more of us--not very anxious
to let folks know where he came from."
The girl, though he did not notice it, winced at this; but next moment
he touched her shoulder.
"Get some water on," he said. "After we've made the poultice, I'll
take charge of him. We may get Mrs. Custer round in the morning."
The girl merely smiled and went out with him. She was aware that it
was in some respects an unusual thing which she was doing, but that
did not greatly trouble her. They are not very conventional people in
that country.
CHAPTER III
WAYNEFLEET'S RANCH
Though he afterwards endeavoured to recall them, Nasmyth had never
more than a faint and shadowy recollection of the next few days.
During most of the time, he fancied he was back in England, and the
girl he had left there seemed to be hovering about him. Now and then,
she would lay gentle hands upon him, and her soothing touch would send
him off to sleep again; but there was a puzzling change in her
appearance. He remembered her as slight in figure--sylph-like he had
sometimes called her--fastidious and dainty, and always artistically
dressed. Now, however, she seemed to have grown taller, stronger, more
reserved, and, as he vaguely realized, more capable, while her
garments were of a different and coarser fashion. What was still more
curious, she did not seem to recognize her name, though he addressed
her by it now and then. He pondered over the matter drowsily once or
twice, and then ceased to trouble himself about it. There were several
other things that appeared at least as incomprehensible.
After a long time, however, his senses came back to him, and one
evening, as he lay languidly looking about him in his rude wooden
bunk, he endeavoured to recall what had passed since he left the
loggers' camp. The little room was comfortably warm, and a plain tin
lamp burned upon what was evidently a home-made table. There was
nothing, except a rifle, upon the rough log walls, and nothing upon
the floor, which was, as usual, rudely laid with split boards, for
dressed lumber is costly in the Bush. Looking through the open door
into the general living-room, which was also lighted, he could see a
red twinkle beneath the register of the stove, beside which a woman
was sitting sewing. She was a hard-featured, homely person in coarsely
fashioned garments, which did not seem to fit her well, and Nasmyth
felt slightly disconcerted when he glanced at her, for she was not the
woman whom he had expected to see. Then his glance rested on a man,
who had also figured in his uncertain memories, and now sat not far
away from him. The man, who was young, was dressed in plain blue duck,
and, though Nasmyth noticed that his hands were hard, and that he had
broken nails, there was something in his bronzed face that suggested
mental capacity.
"I suppose," the sick man said, "you are the doctor who has evidently
taken care of me?"
He was not quite himself yet, and he spoke clean colloquial English,
without any trace of the Western accentuation he usually considered it
advisable to adopt, though, as a matter of fact, the accent usually
heard on the Pacific slope is not unduly marked. The other man
naturally noticed it, and laughed somewhat curiously.
"I have some knowledge of medicine and surgery," Gordon answered. "Now
and then I make use of it, though I don't, as a rule, get a fee." Then
he looked rather hard at Nasmyth. "Quite a few of us find it advisable
to let our professions go when we come to this country."
Nasmyth nodded, for this was a thing he had discovered already. Many
of the comrades he had made there were outcasts--men outside the
pale--and they were excellent comrades, too.
"Well," he said, "I have evidently been very sick. How did I get here?
I don't seem to remember."
"Miss Waynefleet found you lying in the snow in the clearing."
"Ah!" said Nasmyth--"a tall girl with a quiet voice, big brown eyes,
and splendid hair?"
Gordon smiled. "Well," he said, "that's quite like her."
"Where is she now?" asked Nasmyth; and though he was very feeble
still, there was a certain expectancy in his manner.
"In the barn, I believe. The working oxen have to be fed. It's very
probable that you will see her in the next half-hour. As to your other
question--you were very sick indeed--pneumonia. Once or twice it
seemed a sure thing that you'd slip through our fingers. Where were
you coming from when you struck the clearing?"
Nasmyth, who had no reason for reticence, and found his mind rapidly
growing clearer, briefly related what had led him to set out on his
journey through the Bush, and his companion nodded.
"It's very much as I expected," he said. "They paid you off before you
left that logging camp?"
"They did," said Nasmyth, who was pleased to recall the fact. "I had
thirty-two dollars in my belt."
His companion looked at him steadily. "When you came here you hadn't a
belt on. There was not a dollar in your pockets, either."
This was naturally a blow to Nasmyth. He realized that it would
probably be several weeks at least before he was strong enough to work
again, and he had evidently been a charge upon these strangers for
some little time. Still, he did not for a moment connect any of them
with the disappearance of his belt. He was too well acquainted with
the character of the men who are hewing the clearings out of the great
forests of the Pacific slope. As a matter of fact, he never did
discover what became of his belt.
"Well," he said, "I suppose I forgot to put it on, one of those
mornings on the march. Still, it's not very astonishing that the
thing should worry me. I can't expect to stay on at this ranch. When
do you think I can get up and set out again?"
"How long have you been out here?"
"Been out?"
Gordon laughed. "You're from the Old Country--that's plain enough."
"Several years."
"In that case I'm not going to tell you we're not likely to turn you
out until you have some strength in you. I believe I'm speaking for
Miss Waynefleet now."
Nasmyth lay still and considered this. It was, at least, quite evident
that he could not get up yet, but there were one or two other points
that occurred to him.
"Does the ranch belong to Miss Waynefleet?" he inquired. "She can't
live here alone."
"She runs the concern. She has certainly a father, but you'll
understand things more clearly when you see him. He's away in
Victoria, which is partly why Mrs. Custer from the settlement is now
in yonder room. Her husband is at present building a trestle on the
Dunsmore track. I come up here for only an hour every day."
Nasmyth afterwards discovered that this implied a journey of three or
four miles either way over a very indifferent trail, but at the moment
he was thinking chiefly of Miss Waynefleet, who had given him
shelter.
"You practise at the settlement?" he asked.
"Yes," said his companion dryly, "chopping big trees. I've a ranch
there. Still, I don't know that you could exactly call it practising.
By this time, I've acquired a certain proficiency in the thing."
Nasmyth fancied that he must have gone to sleep soon after this, for
when he opened his eyes again there was no sign of the doctor, and a
girl was quietly moving about the room. She sat down, when she saw
that he was awake, and looked at him with a little smile, and it was
only natural that Nasmyth should also look at her. It struck him once
more that she had wonderful hair. In the lamp-light, it seemed to glow
with curious red-gold gleams. She had also quiet brown eyes, and a
face that was a trifle darkened by sun and wind. He guessed that she
was tall. She looked so as she moved about the room with a supple
gracefulness that had a suggestion of strength in it. That was all he
noticed in detail, for he was chiefly conscious of the air of quiet
composure that characterized her. He was a trifle fanciful that night,
and, while he looked her, he felt as he had sometimes felt when he
stood at sunset in the silence of the shadowy Bush, or gazed down into
the depths of some still river pool. Only her gleaming red-gold hair
and her full red lips slightly counteracted this impression. There was
in them at least a hint of fire and passion.
"You are much better," she said, and her softly modulated voice fell
pleasantly on his ears. He contrived to raise himself a trifle.
"I believe I am," he answered, "In any case, I know I owe it to you
that I'm alive at all. Still"--and he hesitated--"I can't help feeling
a bit uncomfortable. You see, I have really no claim on you."
Laura Waynefleet laughed. "Did you expect me to leave you out in the
snow?"
"If you had, I couldn't have complained. There wasn't the least
obligation upon you to look after a penniless stranger."
"Ah!" said the girl, with a little smile which was curiously
expressive, "after all, many of us are in one sense strangers in the
Bush."
Nasmyth pondered over this, for, in view of what he had noticed in her
voice and manner, he fancied he understood her meaning.
"Well," he said, "it's evident that I can do nothing in return for all
your kindness, except take myself off your hands as soon as possible.
That's partly why I'm particularly anxious to get better."
He stopped a moment, with a faint flush in his hollow face. "It sounds
very ungracious, doesn't it? But, after all, it's sense. Besides, I
scarcely feel up to expressing myself very neatly."
The girl moved across the room, and gently pressed him down again on
the pillow.
"Go to sleep again at once," she said.
Nasmyth did as he was bidden, which, since he felt that he wanted to
lie awake and watch her, was in one way significant. As a matter of
fact, what Laura Waynefleet considered advisable was usually done.
Nasmyth's head was clearer next morning, and, during the week that
followed, he grew stronger rapidly, until one night, as he sat beside
the stove, he realized that he could, in all probability, set out
again on his journey in a day or two. While he talked to Laura
Waynefleet, there were footsteps outside, and she ran towards the door
as a man came into the room. Nasmyth fancied the newcomer was her
father, for he was grey-haired and elderly, but he did not look in the
least like a Bush-rancher. Beneath the fur coat, which he flung off
when he had kissed his daughter, he was dressed as one who lived in
the cities, though his garments were evidently far from new. He was
tall, but his spareness suggested fragility, and his face, which
emphasized this impression, had a hint of querulous discontent in it.
"I didn't expect to get through until to-morrow, but they've altered
the running of the stage," he said. "Wiston drove me up from the
settlement, and said he'd send my things across to-morrow. I was glad
to get out of Victoria. The cooking and accommodation at the hotel I
stayed at were simply disgusting."
Nasmyth glanced at the speaker in amused astonishment, for the
Bush-ranchers of the Pacific slope are not, as a rule, particular.
They can live on anything, and sleep more or less contentedly among
dripping fern, or even in a pool of water, as, indeed, they not
infrequently have to do, when they go up into the forests surveying,
or undertake a road-making contract. Laura Waynefleet directed her
father's attention to her convalescent guest.
"This is Mr. Nasmyth," she said. "You will remember I mentioned him in
my letter."
Waynefleet made the young man a little inclination that was formally
courteous. "I am glad to see you are evidently recovering," he said.
"I hope they have made you at home here." Then he turned to his
daughter. "If you could get me some supper----"
Laura busied herself about the stove, while Waynefleet sat down and
talked to Nasmyth about generalities. Waynefleet appeared to be a
politician, and he criticized the Government, which, in his opinion,
was neglecting the Bush-ranchers shamefully. It was evident that he
considered it the duty of the Government to contribute indirectly
towards the support of settlers. Then the supper was laid out. As he
ate fastidiously, he made a few faintly sardonic observations about
the cookery, and, after the girl had brought in a pot of coffee, he
frowned at the cup he put down.
"There is one place in Victoria where you can get coffee, as it ought
to be, but this is merely roasted wheat," he said. "You will excuse me
from drinking any more of it. As you have probably discovered, Mr.
Nasmyth, one has to put up with a good deal in this country. It is in
many respects a barbarous land."
Nasmyth saw the faint flush in Laura Waynefleet's face, and said
nothing. He fancied that he knew the establishment in Victoria to
which Waynefleet referred, but it was not one which he had ever
visited, or which the smaller Bush-ranchers usually frequented.
Soon after supper, Nasmyth withdrew to the bed, which he had insisted
on preparing for himself in the loft above the stables, and it was
next day when he spoke to Laura Waynefleet alone.
"I can't abuse your kindness any longer," he said. "I must go away."
The girl looked at him quietly. "You are far from strong yet, and--it
must be mentioned--there was not a dollar in your pockets."
"That is certainly the case;" and Nasmyth flushed a little. "Still, I
can get as far as the settlement, and I dare say somebody, who won't
be too hard on me at first, may want a hand. I am really rather a good
chopper."
Laura smiled as she glanced at his face, but it was not its hollowness
she was thinking of. Nasmyth had not the appearance of the average
chopper.
"Well," she said, "perhaps you had better see my father. I think he
has something to say to you."
She left him, and, half an hour later, Waynefleet came up to Nasmyth,
who was sunning himself outside the ranch-house. Like many other
houses in that country, it stood beneath a few great firs on the edge
of a desolate clearing, round which the primeval forest rose in an
unbroken wall. Behind it, and a little farther back among the trees,
was the rude barn, built of big notched logs, and roofed with cedar
shingles. In front there lay some twenty acres of cleared land, out of
which rose the fir-stumps, girdled with withered fern, for a warm wind
from the Pacific had swept the snow away. Beyond that, in turn, and
outside the split-rail fence, rows of giant trunks lay piled in the
tremendous ruin usually called the "slashing." Some day, these would
be sawn up and burnt, and the clearing driven farther back into the
Bush. The little gap into which the sunlight shone, however, had been
hewn out at the cost of several years of strenuous labour, and
Nasmyth, who was aware of this, felt inclined to smile as the man who
owned it strolled up to him. It was a little difficult to imagine that
he had had any great share in the making of that clearing.
Waynefleet was dressed in duck, but it was whole and unsoiled, and
Nasmyth made his own deductions from a glance at the delicate hands.
As a rule, Waynefleet's expression was discontented and querulous, but
for the time being his manner was gracious. In fact, he was generally
more or less courteous to Nasmyth.
"Miss Waynefleet tells me you are thinking of going away," said the
owner of the ranch.
Nasmyth replied that he intended to leave the ranch, and was
explaining that he felt he had already abused his host's kindness,
when Waynefleet cut him short.
"We have been glad to have you here," he said; "in fact, I have been
wondering if you might feel disposed to stay. It is probably evident
to you that I cannot do all that is necessary about this place with
one pair of hands."
Nasmyth knew, from what he had seen on other and larger ranches, that
one man could do the work, though he felt that it was more than one
could reasonably have expected from Waynefleet. It was, however, clear
that somebody did a great deal, and he fancied that it was the
rancher's daughter.
"Well," continued Waynefleet, "I am disposed to spend a little upon
the ranch. They are talking of building a pulp-mill near the
settlement. That will make land more valuable, and probably lead to a
demand for produce. With that in view, I wish to raise a larger crop,
and I'm open to hire somebody." He made a little gesture. "My strength
scarcely permits me to undertake any severe physical effort, and I
may confess that my faculty is rather that of administration. Now I
will make you an offer."
Nasmyth considered it gravely. As it happened, he was feeling sorry
for the rancher's daughter, and it was this fact chiefly which led him
to come to terms with the man, since it seemed to him that there were
tasks the girl must shrink from--tasks of which he could relieve her.
Though he was quite aware that when his strength came back, he could
probably earn more than Waynefleet offered him, he accepted the chance
to stay at the ranch. Moreover, the varied work was likely to be much
easier than logging.
"It's a bargain. I'll make a start now, and haul one or two of those
logs out with the oxen," he said. "Still, I'm afraid you must not
expect too much from me for a week or two."
Waynefleet made no objections. There was, as a matter of fact, a great
deal to be done, and Nasmyth went back to his new quarters over the
stable almost too weary to hold himself upright that night. He,
however, gathered strength rapidly, and a few days later he was
chopping a great tree, standing on a narrow plank notched into the
trunk of it several feet from the ground as he swung the axe, when the
man who had instructed Miss Waynefleet how to nurse him came up the
trail. Gordon sat down on a log close by, and looked at Nasmyth.
"I was coming round to make sure I was quite through with your case,
but it's tolerably evident you have no more use for me," he said.
"Stopping here?"
Nasmyth said he was, and Gordon nodded.
"Well," he said, "in several ways I'm rather glad. It's going to make
things easier for Miss Waynefleet. Guess you understand what I meant
when I said she ran the ranch?"
Nasmyth said he thought he did, and then, with a certain diffidence,
he changed the subject.
"You must have spent a good deal of time looking after
men--professionally," he said.
Gordon laughed in a somewhat curious fashion. "We'll let that go. In
one sense, I've dropped my profession. I had to, and it's scarcely
likely that I shall take it up again."
"I wonder," said Nasmyth reflectively, "if it's admissible for me to
mention that I had fancied something of the kind. You see, in the
Bush, I have naturally come across a good many men who have turned
their backs upon the cities."
Gordon made a little gesture. "It's a sure thing you'll hear a good
deal about me at the settlement, where, though the boys don't cast it
up to me, I'm credited with having killed somebody back East, and as
I've had an idea that I could hit it rather well with you, I'd sooner
tell you the thing myself. Well, I was making my mark in a big city,
several years ago, when I lost my head. When success comes too
quickly, it's a thing you're rather apt to do. The trouble is that you
have usually to face the results of it."
He broke off for a moment with a little wry smile. "In my case they
were serious. There was a woman of hysterical temperament with a
diseased imagination. I was overworked and a trifle overwrought, and
had a glass of brandy too much at a certain committee lunch. Then
there was a rather delicate operation in a hospital, and though I'm
not sure yet that I blundered, it was suggested that I did, and the
thing was complicated by what the woman said when the committee took
it up. It didn't matter that the patient recovered, for when he took
action against the woman, the thing made a sensation in the Eastern
papers."
He looked at Nasmyth with a question in his eyes.
"Now," he said, "you more or less understand my reasons for ranching
here. How's it going to affect you?"
Nasmyth gazed reflectively towards the East. "I think," he replied,
"there are more of us who have left a good deal behind back yonder.
Perhaps it's fortunate that the thing is possible."
Then he swung his axe again, and Gordon, who saw Waynefleet
approaching, strolled away towards the ranch-owner.
CHAPTER IV
LAURA WAYNEFLEET'S WISH
It was a hot summer evening, and a drowsy, resinous fragrance stole
out of the shadowy bush when Nasmyth, who had now spent six months at
Waynefleet's ranch, lay among the wineberries by the river-side.
Across the strip of sliding water the sombre firs rose in a great
colonnade from the grey rock's crest, with the fires of sunset blazing
behind their wide-girthed trunks. The river was low and very clear,
and the sound of it seemed to intensify the solemn stillness of the
Bush. Nasmyth had come there to fish, after a long day of tolerably
arduous labour, but he did not expect much success, though the trout
rise freely just after sunset in those rivers. Indeed, he had almost
forgotten that the rod and net lay near his side, for his employer's
daughter sat on a fallen cedar not far away from him.
She had laid her hat aside, and, as it happened, two humming-birds
that flashed, bejewelled, in a ray of ruddy light hung poised on
invisible wings about the clustered blossoms of an arrow-bush that
drooped above her head. She was, however, not looking at them, but
watching Nasmyth with thoughtful eyes. Everything she wore was the
work of her own fingers, but the light print dress became her
curiously well.
"You have been here six months now," she said.
"I have," answered Nasmyth, with a little laugh. "I almost venture to
think I do you credit, in view of the state I was in when I reached
the ranch. If you hadn't taken me in hand, two or three days would
probably have been the length of my stay."
The girl made no disclaimer. She was one who admitted facts, even
when they did not chime with her wishes, and she still regarded
Nasmyth thoughtfully. He certainly did her credit, so far as his
physical appearance went, for his strength had fully come back to him,
and, as he lay among the wineberries in an easy pose, his thin duck
garments displayed the fine proportions of a figure that had been
trained almost to muscular perfection by strenuous labour. The light
of the paling sunset was on his bronzed face, and it revealed the
elusive delicacy that characterized it. Nasmyth was certainly a
well-favoured man, but there were respects in which his companion was
not altogether satisfied with him. She had, as she admitted, restored
him to bodily health, but, after all, that was only going so far, and
she felt it was possible that she might accomplish a little more,
though there was no very evident reason why she should wish to do so.
Still, she was conscious of the wish.
"I was wondering," she said, "how long you would be content to stay."
Nasmyth gazed at her in evident astonishment. "Stay!" he exclaimed.
"Oh, you can call it twenty years, if one must be precise."
"Ah!" replied Laura, "in one sense, that is an admission I'm not
exactly pleased that you should make."
The man raised himself slowly, and his face became intent as he strove
to grasp her meaning. He was not in the least astonished that she
should speak to him as she did, for there are few distinctions drawn
between the hired man and those who employ him on the Pacific slope,
and he had discovered already that the girl was at least his equal in
intelligence and education. In fact, he had now and then a suspicion
that her views of life were broader than his. In the meanwhile it was
in one respect gratifying to feel that she could be displeased at
anything he might think or do.
"I'm not quite sure I see the drift of that," he said.
"You would be content to continue a ranch-hand indefinitely?"
"Why not?" Nasmyth asked, with a smile.
Laura once more looked at him with an almost disconcerting steadiness,
and she had, as he was already aware, very fine eyes. She, however,
noticed the suggestive delicacy of his face, which had, as it
happened, more than once somewhat displeased her, and a certain
languidness of expression, with which she had also grown almost
impatient. This man, she had decided, was too readily acquiescent.
"That," she continued, "is rather a big question, isn't it?"
"Ah!" said Nasmyth reflectively. "Now I begin to understand. Well, I
don't mind admitting that I once had ambitions and the means of
gratifying them, as well as an optimistic belief in myself. That,
however, was rudely shattered when the means were withdrawn, and a man
very soon learns of how little account he is in Western Canada. Why
shouldn't I be content to live as the ranch-hands do, especially when
it's tolerably evident that I can't do anything else?"
"You are forgetting that most of them were born to it. That counts for
a good deal. Have you noticed how far some of the others drift?" A
faint trace of heightened colour crept into her cheeks. "Perhaps one
couldn't blame them when they have once acquired the whisky habit and
a Siwash wife."
Nasmyth lay very still for a few moments, resting on one elbow among
the wineberries, for she had, after all, only suggested a question
that had once or twice troubled him. It was, however, characteristic
of him that he had temporized, and, though he knew it must be answered
some day, had thrust it aside.
"Ah!" he exclaimed, "you want to send me away. Now, I had almost
fancied I had made things easier in various ways for you, and we have
been good comrades, haven't we? One could call it that?"
"Yes," agreed Laura slowly; "I think one could call it that."
"Then," returned Nasmyth, "why do you want me to go?"
It was difficult to answer, and, to begin with, Laura did not exactly
know she desired him to leave the ranch--in fact, she was willing to
admit that there were several reasons why she wished him to stay.
Still, perhaps because she had watched over him in his sickness, and,
so Gordon said, had snatched him back to life again, she had a certain
pride in him, and vaguely felt that. In one sense, he belonged to her.
She would not have him throw away the life she had saved, and she had
recognized, as many of his English friends had not, the perilously
acquiescent side of his character. He was, she feared, one who had an
unfortunate aptitude for drifting.
"That," she said, "is rather more than I could explain either to
myself or to you, but I will tell you something. They are going to
build the pulp-mill down the valley, and they are now asking for
tenders for the construction of the dam. The thing, I have heard, is
not big enough to interest contractors from the cities, and most of
the men round here have their hands full with their ranches."
Nasmyth became a trifle more intent. "Still," he remarked, "I have
never built a dam."
"You told me you were rather a good chopper, and I think you are. You
have made roads, too, and know how to handle giant-powder in the
rock-cutting, and how to use the drill."
"There are shoals of men in this country who know considerably more
about those things than I do."
Laura made a little impatient gesture. "Yes," she admitted, "there
are, but they are simple Bushmen for the most part; and does intellect
count for nothing at all? Are a trained understanding and a quick
comprehension of no use when one builds a dam?"
Nasmyth frowned, though she saw a little glow kindle in his eyes. "I'm
by no means sure that I possess any of those desirable qualities.
Besides, there's a rather serious objection--that of finance."
Then Laura Waynefleet made it clear that she had considered the
question, and she favoured the man with a glimpse of the practical
side of her character.
"The stores give long credit, and partial payments are generally made
as a work of that kind goes on. Then it is not a very unusual thing
for workmen to wait for their wages until the contract is carried
through."
Nasmyth lay still for at least another minute. He had gradually lost
his ambition during the few years he had wandered through the Bush of
British Columbia. The aimless life was often hard, but it had its
compensations, and he had learned to value its freedom from
responsibility and care. When he did not like a task he had
undertaken, he simply left it and went on again. Still, he had had
misgivings now and then when he noticed how far some of his comrades
had drifted. Presently he rose slowly to his feet.
"Well," he said, "you're right, I think, and, if I'm given an
opportunity, I'll undertake the thing. The credit will be yours if I'm
successful."
The girl rose. "Then," she admonished, with a faint smile, "don't tell
me that you have failed."
She turned away and left him somewhat abruptly, but Nasmyth did not
resume his fishing, though he could hear the big trout splashing in
the pool as the sunset light faded off the water. He lay down among
the wineberries, which were scattered among the glossy leaves like
little drops of blood, to think harder than he had thought for a
considerable time. An hour ago, as he had told Laura Waynefleet, he
would have been well content to stay on at the ranch, and, though she
had roused him, he knew that it would cost him an effort to leave it.
He was not, he fancied, in love with her. Indeed, he now and then
admitted that she would probably look for more from the man who won
her favour than there was in him, but the camaraderie--he could think
of no better word for it--that had existed between them had been very
pleasant to him.
He realized that he was in one sense hers to dispose of. She had, in
all probability, saved his life, and now she was endeavouring to
arouse his moral responsibility. She was sending him out to play a
man's part in the battle of life. He admitted that he had shrunk from
it, of late, or, at least, had been content to sink back among the
rank and file. He had made the most of things, but that, he was
beginning to realize, was, after all, a somewhat perilous habit. Laura
Waynefleet evidently considered that a resolute attempt to alter
conditions was more becoming than to accept them, even though one was
likely to be injured while making it. He heard footsteps, and, looking
up, saw Gordon sit down upon the cedar-log.
"I came to look at Wiston's hand, and walked across when I heard that
Waynefleet hadn't been about," he explained. "I don't think you need
feel any particular anxiety about your employer."
Nasmyth grinned at this. Waynefleet had spent part of one day chopping
a big balsam, and was apparently feeling the effects of the very
unusual exertion. Then Gordon took out his pipe.
"I guess you're fishing?" he observed.
"I came here to get a trout for breakfast."
"You look like it." Gordon smiled. "As it happened, I saw Miss
Waynefleet crossing the clearing. It occurs to me that she may have
said something that set you thinking."
"I wonder," said Nasmyth reflectively, "what made you fancy that?"
Gordon regarded him with a little twinkle in his eyes. "Well," he
replied, "I have the honour of Miss Waynefleet's acquaintance, and
have some little knowledge of her habits."
Men make friends with one another quickly in the Western forests, and
Nasmyth had acquired a curious confidence in his companion, in spite
of the story Gordon had told him. As the result of this he related
part, at least, of what the girl had said. Gordon nodded.
"It's quite likely you'll get that contract if you apply for it. The
folks about the settlement haven't sent an offer in," he said. "The
notion is naturally Miss Waynefleet's. It's the kind of thing that
would appeal to her, and, in a way, it's fortunate you have fallen
into her hands. She's one of the protesters."
"The protesters?"
"Yes," answered Gordon; "I can't think of a better name for them,
though it doesn't exactly convey all I mean. To make the thing a
little clearer, we'll take the other kind--in this country they're
best typified by the Indians. The Siwash found it a wilderness, and
made the most of it as such. They took their toll of the salmon, and
fed their ponies on the natural prairie grass. If we'd left it to them
for centuries it would have remained a wilderness. We came, and found
Nature omnipotent, but we challenged her--drove the steel road down
the great canyon to bring us provisions in, dyked the swamp meadows,
ploughed up the forest, and rent the hills. We made our protest, and,
quite often, it was no more than that, for the rivers were too strong
for us, and the Bush crept back upon our little clearings. Still, we
never let go, and it's becoming evident that we have done more than
hold our own."
He paused, and laughed in a deprecatory fashion before he went on
again. "Now and then I have an outbreak of this kind," he added
lightly. "The thing would make an epic, but, if one could write it, it
wouldn't be worth while. The protest that counts in this land is made
with the axe and drill."
The outbreak was comprehensible, for it must be remembered that the
average Westerner, either by birth or adoption, is seldom a reticent
man. He is, in fact, usually characterized by a daring optimism, and
not infrequently filled to overflowing with the clean pride of
achievement. One can hear this new-world enthusiasm bubble over on
public platforms and at brilliant functions, as well as in second-rate
saloons, but it is most forcibly expressed where men toil waist-deep
in icy water building dyke and dam, or blast their waggon roads out of
the side of the gloomy canyons. Their handiwork is not always
beautiful, but one wonders to see what they have made of that great
desolation.
Nasmyth lay still among the wineberries, for a minute or two, and,
though a cold green transparency had replaced the fires of sunset
behind the tall trunks now, and the trout were splashing furiously in
the pool, he forgot all about the rod beside him as he pondered over a
question which had often occurred to him.
"How is it that Miss Waynefleet is content to stay here?" he asked.
"You would hardly expect her to leave her father."
"No," said Nasmyth. "Any way, that is scarcely an answer. What keeps
Waynefleet here? One wouldn't fancy he likes living in the Bush."
"It's a little curious that you haven't heard. Anyway, somebody is
bound to tell you. Waynefleet had to get out of the Old Country. Some
trouble about trust-money. He came out to Victoria and set up in the
land agency business, but it was his misfortune that he couldn't keep
out of politics. There are folks like that. When they can't handle
their own affairs, they're anxious to manage those of the community.
Somebody found out the story and flung it in his face. The man hadn't
the grit in him to live it down; he struck up into the Bush and bought
the half-cleared ranch."
For the next minute or two Nasmyth gazed straight in front of him with
a very thoughtful face, for he had now a vague recollection of hearing
or reading of the affair in which his employer had played a
discreditable part. He had already decided that he was not in love
with Laura Waynefleet--in fact, it was perhaps significant that he had
done so more than once, but he had a warm regard for the girl who had
saved his life, and, after all, his ideas were not quite so liberal as
he fancied they had become in the Western forest. It was a trifle
disconcerting to discover that she was the daughter of a swindler.
"It hurts?" inquired Gordon dryly.
Nasmyth rose. "To be frank," he admitted, "it does. Still, though the
subject's a rather delicate one, I don't want you to misunderstand me.
After all, Miss Waynefleet is not in the least responsible for
anything her father may have done."
"That," said Gordon, "is a sure thing. Well, I must be hitting the
trail home. Aren't you going to try for some of those trout in the
pool?"
"No," answered Nasmyth, and his smile was a trifle grim; "I don't
think I am."
He watched Gordon stride away through the undergrowth, and then, in
the creeping dusk, went slowly back to the ranch. Waynefleet was out
when he reached it, but Laura was sitting sewing by the lamp, and she
looked at him sharply when he came in. He was unpleasantly conscious
that the light was on his face. Then the girl laid down her sewing and
turned fully towards him.
"I saw Mr. Gordon cross the clearing. He has told you why we are
living here?" she said.
"I think," said Nasmyth, with a slowness that was very expressive, "it
was not done out of unkindness."
"Oh, no," and Laura smiled in a rather curious fashion, "he had
probably quite another motive." Then she leaned forward a little,
looking at him steadily. "I knew that he would tell you."
Nasmyth stood still, with his forehead deeply furrowed, and an unusual
gravity in his eyes. The girl's courage and serenity appealed to him,
and he was conscious that his heart was beating rapidly. He said
nothing, for a moment or two, and afterwards remembered how still the
little room was, and how the sweet, resinous scent of the firs flowed
in through the open window. Then he made a vague gesture.
"There is, perhaps, a good deal one could say; but I fancy most of it
would savour of impertinence," he said. "After all, the thing doesn't
affect you in any way."
Laura glanced down at her hands, and Nasmyth guessed what she was
thinking, for they were hard, and work-roughened. The toil that her
hands showed was, as he realized, only a part of her burden.
"I think it affects me a very great deal," she declared slowly.
Then a curious compassion for her troubled the man. She was young and
very comely, and it was, he felt, cruelly hard on her that, bearing
her father's shame, she must lead a life of hard labour at that
desolate ranch. He felt an almost uncontrollable desire to comfort
her, and to take her cares upon himself, but that was out of the
question, since he was merely a ranch-hand, a Bush-chopper, who owed
even the food he ate and the clothes he wore to her. There is, as he
realized then, after all, very little one can do to lighten another's
load, but in that moment the half-formed aspirations that she had
called into existence in his mind expanded suddenly. There was, he
felt, no reason why he should not acquire money and influence, once he
made the effort.
"Miss Waynefleet," he said haltingly, "I can only offer you my sincere
sympathy. Still"--and perhaps he did not recognize how clear the
connection of ideas was--"I am going down to see about that
dam-building contract to-morrow."
Then Laura smiled, and took up her sewing again. Her burden, as she
realized, was hers alone, but she knew that this man would no longer
drift. She had called up his latent capacities, and he would prove his
manhood.
CHAPTER V
THE FLOOD
The autumn afternoon was oppressively hot when Gordon, floundering
among the whitened driftwood piled along the river-bank, came upon
Nasmyth, who lay upon a slope of rock, with his hands, which were
badly bruised, clenched upon a drill. Another man, who stood upon a
plank inserted into a crevice, swung a hammer, and its ponderous head
came ringing down upon the drill, which Nasmyth jerked round at every
stroke, so many times to the minute, with rhythmic regularity. As
Nasmyth was apparently too busily engaged just then to trouble about
him, Gordon sat down on a big log, and taking out his pipe, looked
about him when he had lighted it.
The river had made a gap for itself in the great forest that filled
the valley, and the sombre firs that rose in serried ranks upon its
farther bank rolled back up the hillside, streaked here and there with
a little thin white mist. A mile or so away, and lower down the
valley, there was an opening in their shadowy masses, out of which
rose the ringing of hammers and a long trail of smoke, for workmen
from the cities were building the new wood-pulp mill there. In the
foreground the river swirled by, frothing at flood level, for a week's
fierce sunshine had succeeded a month of torrential rain, and the snow
high up on a distant peak was melting fast.
Nobody about the little settlement at the head of the deep inlet had
seen the water quite so high at that season, and Gordon noticed how it
frothed and boiled about the row of stone-backed piles that stretched
out from either bank. As he listened to the hoarse roar of the pent-up
torrent, he understood what that partly completed dam must have cost
Nasmyth. After a little time Nasmyth rose, and, stepping on the plank,
wearily straightened his back.
"We're down far enough," he announced. "Let me have the two sticks of
giant-powder, and then tell the boys to jump for cover."
The other man, who sprang down from his perch, handed him what
appeared to be two thick sticks of yellow wax, and Gordon watched him
as he carefully nipped a copper detonator down on a length of snaky
fuse, and embedded it in the plastic material. Then he cautiously
tamped the two yellow rolls down into the drilled-out hole. After that
he lighted the fuse, and, clambering down the slope of rock, saw
Gordon.
"We'll get out of this. It's a short fuse," he said.
Gordon, who was acquainted with the action of giant-powder, had no
desire to stay, and they floundered as fast as possible over the
driftwood and masses of shattered rock until Nasmyth drew his
companion behind a towering fir. Then there was a sharp detonation, a
crash, and a shower of flying stones went smashing through the forest
and into the river. One, which Gordon fancied must have weighed about
two hundred pounds, drove close past them, and struck a young cedar,
which snapped off beneath the impact. Then there was a sudden silence,
and Nasmyth stretched out his arms with a suggestive weariness before
he sat down and took out his pipe.
"No one could have expected that stone to come this way," he remarked,
with a little laugh. "It's an example of how contrary things can be.
In fact, they've been about as contrary as it's possible the last
month or so. As no doubt you have noticed, one very seldom gets much
encouragement when he takes the uphill trail. It's very rarely made
any easier for him."
Gordon grinned, though he realized that the trail his companion had
set out upon was very steep indeed. He had secured the dam-building
contract, which was not astonishing, since nobody else appeared
anxious to undertake it, and he had already acquired a certain
proficiency with the axe and drill. There is as yet very little
specialization in that land, which is in many respects fortunate for
those who live in it, and the small rancher cheerfully undertakes any
kind of primitive engineering that seems likely to provide him with a
few dollars, from building timber bridges to blasting waggon roads out
of the hardest rock. What is more, he usually makes a success of it.
In Nasmyth's case, however, the rise of water had made his task almost
insuperably difficult, and it had already left a certain mark on him.
Gordon, who was, after all, a doctor, naturally noticed this as he
watched him.
Nasmyth was very lean now, but he was also hard and muscular, and the
old blue shirt, which hung open at the neck, and torn duck trousers,
which clung about him still wet with river-water, accentuated the wiry
suppleness of his frame; but it was in his face that Gordon noticed
the greatest change. The good-humoured, tolerant indifference he
remembered had melted out of it, the lips seemed set more firmly, and
the eyes were resolute and keen. Nasmyth, so Gordon noticed, had grown
since he first took up his duties as Waynefleet's hired hand. Still,
though it was less apparent, the stamp of refinement and what Gordon
called, for want of a better term, "sensibility," clung to him, and it
seemed to the trained observer that the qualities it suggested might
yet handicap his comrade in a country where the struggle with
primitive forces chiefly demands from man an unreasoning animal
courage. In that land the small contractor and Bush-rancher must bear
the brunt on his body every day, toiling waist-deep in icy waters, or
gripping the drill with bleeding hands, while each fresh misfortune
that follows flood and frost is met with a further strain on weary
muscles and sterner resolution. It is a fight that is usually hardest
for the man who thinks, and in which the one thing that counts is the
brutal, bulldog valour that takes hold and holds on in spite of each
crushing blow.
"This high water," said Gordon, "has kept you back considerably."
"It has," Nasmyth replied with emphasis. "It has cost me more money
that I care to figure up the last month, and we're considerably
behind. The dam's still at the mercy of the next big flood."
"It's a little curious that you seem to stand it better than you did
the logging," said Gordon, with a quick glance at him.
Nasmyth appeared to consider this. "I do, and that's a fact. For one
thing, I'm fighting for my own hand, and no doubt that counts, though,
perhaps, it doesn't go quite far enough. After all, it's a point you
ought to know more about than I do."
His companion smiled. "I can describe the mechanical connection
between the thought in a man's brain and the movement of his muscles.
It's comparatively simple; but when you understand that, you're only
beginning. There's much more behind. To particularize, if you had done
what you're doing now when you were logging, it would, in all
probability, have broken you up again."
Nasmyth fancied that this was correct, though, as he had admitted, he
could give no reason for it. He was only conscious that he was being
constrained by some new influence, and, under the pressure it laid
upon him, he became almost insensible to physical weariness. He had
now a motive for fighting, in place of drifting, that no mere hired
hand can possess. His indolent content had been rudely dissipated, and
something that had lain dormant in the depths of his nature had come
uppermost. It was certainly Laura Waynefleet who had given it the
first impulse, but why he had permitted her to impose her will on him
was a matter that was still incomprehensible to him. Seeing that he
did not answer, Gordon changed the subject.
"Some of the boys and I have been wondering how you contrived to
finance the thing," he said.
Nasmyth smiled, though there was just a trace of darker colour in his
face. "Well," he replied, "one can get tolerably long credit from most
of the Bush stores, and Clipton has let me have provisions for the
boys on quite reasonable terms. Besides, as it happens, there is money
in the family. There was a time when one might have considered it
almost the duty of certain relatives of mine to give me a lift, but I
didn't offer them the opportunity. I came out here and set about
driving cows and chopping trees instead."
"You felt you'd sooner cut your hand off than give them a gentle
hint," remarked Gordon. "It's not an uncommon feeling, but, when you
give way to it, it clears the other people. Won't you go on?"
"When I undertook this affair, I laid the opportunity before them, and
one--the last I expected anything of that kind from--sent me out a
draft. He kindly pointed out that there appeared to be in me certain
capabilities, which he had never supposed I possessed, and added that,
if I ever really succeeded in building a dam or anything else useful,
he would be pleased to take a share in my next venture. In the
meanwhile, he would charge me interest on the amount of that draft.
Perhaps I may mention that the man in question was naturally the one
the rest of them rather looked down upon."
Gordon laughed. "Oh, yes," he said, "I like that, naturally. I guess
you would have taken their view of him once. Well, since you can put
your pride in your pocket, you're evidently growing. There's just one
way of putting anything through here, and that's to take hold and hang
right on, no matter what it costs. I guess there's one of the boys
wanting you."
A man stood knee-deep in the river waving his hand. Nasmyth rose and
stretched himself.
"They seem to want me all the time from sun-up until it's dark," he
said. "In one way it's a little curious, since there's reason to
believe that most of them know a good deal more about what we're doing
than I do myself. You'll excuse me."
Gordon smiled as his comrade strode away. He was one who had studied
human nature, and because he was well acquainted with the Bushman's
capabilities, he knew that there were also limitations to them. Even
in such matters as the splitting of hard rock and the driving of
massive piles into the river-bed, the higher intelligence of the man
of intellect had its effect. Gordon smoked his pipe out as he watched
Nasmyth flounder into the stream among the other men, pushing a little
car loaded with broken rock that apparently ran along a submerged
track. Then he strolled back toward the settlement.
Nasmyth toiled on in the river until the camp-cook hammered upon a
suspended iron sheet as a signal that supper was ready. The summons
was answered without delay. With the water running from their clothing
Nasmyth and his men went back to the little log shanty. One or two
changed their dripping garments, but the rest left their clothes to
dry upon them, as their employer did. When the plentiful, warm supper
had been eaten, Nasmyth went back to the little hut that served him as
store and sleeping quarters. A big, grizzled man from Mattawa,
Ontario, went in with him, and lounged upon the table while he sat in
his bunk, which was filled with fresh spruce twigs.
"I'm pretty well played out, and if I'm to work to-morrow, I've got to
sleep to-night," said Nasmyth.
The grizzled axeman nodded. "Well," he volunteered, "I'll stand watch.
I was in the last two nights, and I guess it's up to me to see you
through. We're going to have trouble, if one of those big logs fetches
up across the sluiceway. The river's full of them, and she's risen
'most a foot since sun-up."
Nasmyth held up one hand, and both heard the deep roar of frothing
water that came in with the smell of the firs through the open door.
The Bush was very still outside, and that hoarse, throbbing note flung
back by the rock slope and climbing pines filled the valley. Nasmyth
smiled grimly, for it was suggestive of the great forces against which
he had pitted his puny strength. Then there was a crash, and, a few
moments later, a curious thud, and both men listened, intent and
strung up, until the turmoil of the river rose alone again.
"A big log," said the older man. "She has gone through the run. Guess
we'll get one by-and-by long enough to jamb. Now, if you'd run out
those wing-frames I was stuck on, she'd have took them straight
through, every one."
"The trouble was that I hadn't the money, Mattawa," said Nasmyth
dryly.
His companion nodded, for this was a trouble he could understand.
"Well," he answered, "when you haven't got it you have to face the
consequences. I'll roust you out if a big log comes along."
Mattawa went out, and soon afterwards Nasmyth, whose clothes were now
partly dry, lay down, dressed as he was, in his twig-packed bunk, with
his pipe in his hand. It was growing a little colder, and a keen air,
which had in it the properties of an elixir, blew in, but that was a
thing Nasmyth scarcely noticed, and the dominant roar of the river
held his attention. He wondered again why he had been drawn into the
conflict with it, or, rather, why he had permitted Laura Waynefleet to
set him such a task, and the answer that it was because he desired to
hold her good opinion, and, as he had said, to do her credit, did not
seem to go far enough. It merely suggested the further question why he
should wish to keep her friendship. Still, there was no disguising the
fact that, once he had undertaken the thing, it had got hold of him,
and he felt he must go on until his task was successfully accomplished
or he was crushed and beaten. It seemed very likely, then, that utter
defeat would be his fate. While he pondered, the pipe fell from his
hand, and the river's turmoil rang in deep pulsations through his
dreams. He was awakened suddenly by a wet hand on his shoulder, and,
scrambling out of his bunk on the instant, he saw Mattawa with a
lantern in his hand.
"Log right across the sluice-run," said the watcher. "More coming
along behind it. They'll sure get piling up."
Nasmyth did not remember that he gave any directions when he sprang,
half asleep, out of the shanty. The roar of water had a different note
in it, and the clangour of the iron sheet one of the men was pounding
rang out harshly. A half-moon hung above the black pines, and
dimly-seen men were flitting like shadows toward the waterside. They
appeared to know what it was advisable to do, but they stopped just a
moment on the edge of the torrent, for which nobody could have blamed
them. The water, streaked with smears of froth and foam, swirled by,
and there was a tumultuous white seething where the flood boiled
across the log in the midst of the stream. The log blocked the gap
left open to let the driftwood through, and, as Nasmyth knew, great
trees torn up in distant valleys were coming down with the flood. It
seemed to him that he could not reasonably have expected to clear that
obstacle with a battalion of log-drivers, and he had only a handful of
weary men. Still the men went in, floundering knee-deep in the flood,
along the submerged pile of stone and clutching at the piles that
bound it to save themselves when the stream threatened to sweep their
feet from under them, until they came to the gap where the great tree,
rolling in the grip of the torrent, thrashed its grinding branches
against the stone.
Then, though it was difficult to see how a man of them found a
foothold, or kept it on the heaving trunk, the big axes flashed and
fell, while a few shadowy figures ran along the top of the log to
attack the massy butt across the opening. It would have been arduous
labour in daylight and at low-water, but these were men who had faced
the most that flood and frost could do. They set about their task in
the dark, for that land would have been a wilderness still if the men
in it had shown themselves unduly careful of either life or limb.
The great branches yielded beneath the glinting blades, and went on
down river again, but Nasmyth, who felt the axe-haft slip in his
greasy hands, did not try to lead. It was sufficient if he could keep
pace with the rest of the wood-choppers, which was, after all, a thing
most men, reared as he had been, would certainly not have done. The
lust of conflict was upon him that night, and, balancing himself
ankle-deep in water on the trunk that heaved and dipped beneath him,
he swung the trenchant steel. He felt that he was pitted against great
primeval forces, and, with the gorged veins rising on his forehead and
the perspiration dripping from him, man's primitive pride and passions
urged him to the struggle.
How long it was before they had stripped the tree to a bare log he did
not know, but twice, as they toiled on, he saw a man splash into the
river, and, rising in the eddy beneath the submerged dam, crawl,
dripping, out again, and at length he found himself beside Mattawa,
whirling his axe above a widening notch, and keeping rhythmic stroke.
He knew he was acquitting himself creditably then, for Mattawa had
swung the axe since he could lift it, and there are men, and
mechanics, too, who cannot learn to use it as the Bushmen do in a
lifetime; but he also knew that he could not keep pace with his
comrade very long. In the meanwhile, he held his aching muscles to
their task, and the gleaming blades whirled high above their shoulders
in the pale light of the moon. As each left the widening gap the other
came shearing down.
The other men were now plying peevie and handspike at the butt of the
log, and he and Mattawa toiled on alone, two dim and shadowy figures
in the midst of the flood, until at last there was a rending of
fibres, and Mattawa leapt clear.
"Jump!" he gasped. "She's going."
Nasmyth jumped. He went down in four or five feet of water, and had
the sense to stay there while the log drove over him. Then he came up,
and clutching it, held on while it swept downstream into a slacker
eddy. There were several other figures apparently clinging to the butt
of it, and when he saw them slip off into the river one by one, he let
go, too. He was swung out of the eddy into a white turmoil, which
hurled him against froth-lapped stones, but at length he found sure
footing, and crawled up the bank, which most of his companions had
reached before him. When the others came up, he found that he was
aching all over, and evidently was badly bruised. He stood still,
shivering a little, and blinked at them.
"You're all here?" he said. "Where are those axes?"
It appeared that most of them were in the river, which was not very
astonishing, for a man cannot reasonably be expected to swim through a
flood with a big axe in his hand, and when somebody said so, Nasmyth
made a little gesture of resignation.
"Well," he said, "the logs will just have to pile up, if another big
one comes along before the morning."
This was evident. They were all dead weary, and most of them were
badly bruised, as well, and they trooped back to the shanty, while
Nasmyth limped into his hut. Nasmyth sloughed off his dripping
garments, and was asleep in five minutes after he had crawled into his
bunk.
CHAPTER VI
THE BREAKING OF THE DAM
A faint grey light was creeping into the shanty when Nasmyth awoke
again, and lay still for a minute or two, while his senses came slowly
back to him. The first thing of which he was definitely conscious was
a physical discomfort that rendered the least movement painful. He
felt sore all over, and there was a distressful ache in one hip and
shoulder, which he fancied was the result of falling on the log, or
perhaps of having been hurled against the boulders by the rapids
through which he had reached the bank. His physical condition did not
trouble him seriously, for he had grown more or less accustomed to
muscular weariness, and the cramping pains which spring from toiling
long hours in cold water, and, although he made a grimace, as he
raised himself a trifle, it was the sound outside that occupied most
of his attention.
The door stood open, as he had left it, and a clean, cold air that
stirred his blood came in, with the smell of fir and cedar, but what
he noticed was the deeper tone in the roar of the river that seemed
flung back in sonorous antiphones by the climbing pines. It had
occurred to him on other occasions when he was in a fanciful mood
that they were singing a majestic _Benedicite_, but just then he
was uneasily conscious that there was a new note in the great
reverberating harmonies. Stately pine and towering cedar had raised
their voices, too, and a wild wailing fell through the long waves of
sound from the highest of them on the crest of the hill. It was
evident that a fresh breeze was blowing down the valley, and, as it
must have swept the hollow farther up among the ranges, which was
filled with a deep blue lake, Nasmyth realized that it would drive
at least another foot of water into the river as well as set adrift
the giant logs that lay among the boulders. Even then they were, he
fancied, in all probability driving down upon his half-finished dam.
Rousing himself with an effort, he clambered out of his bunk, and then
gripped the little table hard, for his hip pained him horribly as his
weight came upon it. Then, as he struggled into his clothing, there
was a heavy thud outside, that was followed by a crashing and
grinding, and a gasping man appeared in the door of the shanty.
"Big log across the run," he cried, "three or four more of them coming
along."
Nasmyth, who said nothing, set his lips tight, and was out of the
shanty in another moment or two. A glance at the river showed him that
any effort he could make would, in all probability, be futile; but he
and the others waded out into the flood and recommenced the struggle.
That, at least, was a thing they owed to themselves, and they toiled
for an hour or two very much as they had done in the darkness; only
that fresh logs were now coming down on them every few minutes, and at
last they recognized that they were beaten. Then they went back
dejectedly, and Nasmyth sat down to breakfast, though he had very
little appetite. He felt that all the strength he had would be needed
that day.
After breakfast he lay among the boulders gnawing his unlighted pipe
and watching the growing mass of driftwood that chafed and ground
against the piles of the dam. Nothing, he recognized, could save the
dam now. It was bound to go, for the piles were only partly backed
with stone, and, in any case, men do not build in that new country as
they do in England. Their needs are constantly varying, and their
works are intended merely to serve the purpose of the hour. It is a
growing country, and the men in it know that the next generation will
not be content with anything that they can do, and, what is more to
the purpose, they themselves will want something bigger and more
efficient in another year or two. Hence the dam was a somewhat frail
and temporary structure of timber as well as stone, but it would
probably have done what was asked of it had it been completed before
the floods set in. As it was, Nasmyth knew that he would see the end
of it before another hour slipped by.
It came even sooner than he had expected. There was a dull crash; the
piles that rose above the flood collapsed, and the mass of grinding
timber drove on across the ruined dam. Then Nasmyth rose, and,
stretching himself wearily, went back to his shanty. He felt he could
not face the sympathy of his workmen. He was still sitting there in a
state of utter physical weariness and black dejection, when, towards
the middle of the afternoon, the door was quietly opened, and Laura
Waynefleet came in. She looked at him as he remembered she had done
once or twice at the ranch, with compassion in her eyes, and he was a
little astonished to feel that, instead of bringing him consolation,
her pity hurt him. Then he felt the blood rise to his face, and he
looked away from her.
"You have heard already?" he asked.
"Yes," said the girl softly. "I was at the settlement, and they told
me there. I am so sorry."
Nasmyth winced, but he contrived to say, "Thank you," and then glanced
round the untidy shanty, which was strewn with dripping clothes. "Of
course," he added, "it is something to know that I have your sympathy;
but I must not keep you here."
It was not a tactful speech, but Laura smiled. "I meant to take you
out," she said. "You have been sitting here brooding since the dam
went, and from what Mattawa told me, you haven't had any dinner."
"No," said Nasmyth; "now I come to think of it, I don't believe I
have. I'm not sure it's very astonishing."
"Then we'll go away somewhere and make tea among the pines."
Nasmyth glanced suggestively at his attire. His duck jacket had shrunk
with constant wetting, and would not button across the old blue shirt,
which fell apart at his bronzed neck. The sleeves had also drawn up
from his wrists, and left the backs of his hands unduly prominent. His
hands were scarred, and the fingers were bruised where the hammer-head
had fallen on them in wet weather as it glanced from the drill. The
girl was immaculate in a white hat and a dress of light flowered
print.
"Do I look like going on a picnic with you?" he said. "The few other
things I possess are in much the same condition."
Laura had naturally noticed the state of his attire, but it was his
face that troubled her. It was haggard and his eyes were heavy. As she
had decided long before, it was a face of Grecian type, and she would
sooner have had it Roman. This man, she felt, was too sensitive, and
apt to yield to sudden impulses, and just then her heart ached over
him. Still, she contrived to laugh.
"Pshaw!" she said. "I told Mattawa to get me a few things ready."
Nasmyth followed her out of the shanty, and when he had picked up the
basket and kettle somebody had left at the door, she turned to him.
"Where shall we go?" she asked.
"Anywhere," said Nasmyth, "that is, as long as it's away from the
river."
Laura saw the shrinking in his eyes as he gazed at the swirling flood,
and though she was sorry for him, it roused in her a momentary spark
of anger. Then she went with him up the hillside beneath the climbing
pines until they reached a shadowy hollow near the crest of it, out of
which a little stream trickled down.
"Now light a fire, while I see what there is in the basket," she
said.
She found a splendid trout, a packet of tea, and a little bag of
self-raising flour, among other sundries, and for the next half-hour
she kept Nasmyth busy making flapjacks and frying the trout. Then they
sat down to a simple meal, and when it was over, Nasmyth laughed.
"It's a little astonishing, in view of how I felt at breakfast, but
there's nothing left," he sighed. "In one way the admission's a little
humiliating, but I almost feel myself again."
"It's supposed to be a very natural one in the case of a man," said
Laura. "You can smoke if you like. I want to talk to you."
Nasmyth stretched himself out on the other side of the fire, and
Laura, leaning forward a little, looked at him. Without knowing
exactly why, he felt somewhat uneasy beneath her gaze.
"Now," she said, "I would like to hear what you are going to do."
The man made a little rueful gesture. "I don't know. Chop trees again
for some rancher, most probably--in fact, I was wondering whether you
would have me back as a ranch-hand."
"Ah!" cried the girl sharply, while a trace of hardness crept into her
eyes, "that is very much what I expected. As it happens, I am far from
satisfied with the man we have, but I should not think of replacing
him with you just now."
Nasmyth winced, and it was characteristic of him that he endeavoured
to beguile her away from the object she evidently had in view.
"What's the matter with the man?" he asked.
"A diversity of gifts. Among other things, he appears to possess an
extensive acquaintance with Colonial politics, and he and my father
discuss the regeneration of the Government when they might with
advantage be doing something else."
Nasmyth frowned. "I understand. That's one reason why I wanted to come
back. After all, there is a good deal I could save you from. In fact,
I get savage now and then when I think of what you are probably being
left to do upon the ranch. I ventured a hint or two to your father,
but he seemed impervious." He hesitated for a moment. "No doubt it's a
delicate subject, but it's a little difficult quietly to contemplate
the fact that, while those men talk politics, you--"
"I do their work?" suggested Laura with a lifting of her arched
eyebrows. "After all, isn't that or something like it what generally
happens when men turn their backs upon their task?"
Nasmyth flushed. "I admit that I was trying to break away from mine,
but it seems you have undertaken to head me off and drive me back to
it again."
"That was more or less what I wished," said Laura quietly.
"Well," Nasmyth replied, "as I think you're a little hard on me, I'll
try to put my views before you. To begin with, the dam is done for."
"You are quite sure? You built it so far once. Is it altogether out of
the question for you to do as much again?"
Nasmyth felt his face grow hot. She was looking at him with quiet
eyes, which had, however, the faintest suggestion of disdain in them.
"The question is why I should want to do it," he said.
"Ah!" rejoined Laura, "you have no aspirations at all? Still, I'm not
quite sure that is exactly what I mean--in fact, I think I mean
considerably more. You are quite content to throw away your
birthright, and relinquish all claim to the station you were born
in?"
The man smiled somewhat bitterly. "I think you understand that it's a
custom of this country not to demand from any man an account of what
he may have done before he came out to it. In my particular case it
was, however, nothing very discreditable, and I once had my
aspirations, or, as you prefer to consider it, I recognized my
obligations. Then the blow fell unexpectedly, and I came out here and
became a hired man--a wandering chopper. After all, one learns to be
content rather easily, which is in several ways fortunate. Then you
instilled fresh aspirations--it's the right word in this case--into
me, and I made another attempt, only to be hurled back again. There
doesn't seem to be much use in attempting the impossible."
"Then a thing is to be considered impossible after one fails twice?
There are men who fail--and go on again--all their lives long."
"I'm afraid," Nasmyth declared in a dull tone, "I am not that kind of
man. After all, to be flung down from the station you were born
to--I'm using your own words--and turned suddenly adrift to labour
with one's hands takes a good deal of the courage out of one. I almost
think if you could put yourself in my place you would understand."
Laura smiled in a suggestive fashion, and looked down at the hands she
laid upon her knee. They were capable, as well as shapely, and, as he
had noticed more than once, the signs of toil were very plain on
them.
"I never did an hour's useful work before I came out West," she said.
She had produced the effect she probably desired, for in the midst of
his sudden pity for her Nasmyth was troubled with a sense of shame.
This girl, he realized, had been reared as gently as he had been
himself, and he knew that she now toiled most of every day at what in
the older country would have been considered most unwomanly tasks.
Still, she had borne with it cheerfully, and had courage to spare for
others whose strength was less than hers.
He sat silent for almost a minute, looking down between the great
pines into the valley, and, as he did so, he vaguely felt the
influence of the wilderness steal over him. The wind had fallen now,
and there was a deep stillness in the climbing forest which the roar
of the river emphasized. Those trees were vast of girth, and they were
very cold. In spite of whirling snow, and gale, and frost, they had
grown slowly to an impressive stateliness. In Nature, as he
recognized, all was conflict, and it was the fine adjustment of
opposing forces that made for the perfection of grace, and strength,
and beauty. Then it seemed to him that his companion was like the
forest--still, and strong, and stately--because she had been through
the stress of conflict too. These were, however, fancies, and he
turned around again to her with a sudden resolution expressed in his
face and attitude.
"There's an argument you might have used, Miss Waynefleet," he told
her. "I said I would try to do you credit, and it almost seems as if I
had forgotten it. Well, if you will wait a little, I will try again."
He rose, and, crossing over, stood close beside her, with his hand
laid gently on her shoulder, looking down on her with a quiet smile.
"After all," he added, "there's a good deal you might have said that
you haven't--in fact, it's one of your strong points that, as a rule,
you content yourself with going just far enough. Well, because you
wish it, I am somehow going to build that dam again."
She looked up at him swiftly with a gleam in her eyes, and Nasmyth
stooped a little, while his hand closed hard upon her shoulder.
"You saved my life, and you have tried to do almost as much in a
different way since then," he went on. "It is probably easier to bring
a sick man back to health than it is to make him realize his
obligations and to imbue him with the courage to face them when it's
evident that he doesn't possess it. Still, you can't do things of that
kind without results, and I think you ought to know that I belong to
you."
There was a trace of colour in Laura Waynefleet's face, and she
quivered a little under his grasp, but she looked at him steadily, and
read his mind in his eyes. The man was stirred by sudden, evanescent
passion and exaggerated gratitude, while pity for her had, she
fancied, also its effect on him; but that was the last thing she
desired, and, with a swift movement, she shook off his hand.
"Ah!" she said; "don't spoil things."
Her tone was quiet, but it was decisive, and Nasmyth, whose face
flushed darkly, let his hand fall back to his side. Then she rose, and
turned to him.
"If we are to be friends, this must never happen again," she added.
Then they went down the hillside and back to the settlement, where
Nasmyth harnessed the team, which the rancher who lived near
occasionally placed at Waynefleet's disposal, to a dilapidated waggon.
When she gathered the reins up, Laura smiled down on him.
"After all," she reminded him, "you will remember that I expect you to
do me credit."
She drove away, and Nasmyth walked back to his camp beside the dam,
where the men were awaiting the six o'clock supper. He leaned upon a
pine-stump, looking at them gravely, when he had called them
together.
"Boys," he said, "the river, as you know, has wiped out most of the
dam. Now, it was a tight fit for me to finance the thing, and I
don't get any further payment until the stone-work's graded to a
certain level. Well, if you leave me now, I've just enough money in
hand to square off with each of you. You see, if you go you're sure of
your pay. If you stay, most of the money will go to settle the
storekeeper's and the powder bills, and should we fail again, you'll
have thrown your time away. I'd like you to understand the thing;
but whether you stay or not, I'm holding on."
There was silence for half a minute, and then the men, gathering into
little groups, whispered to one another, until Mattawa stood forward.
"All you have to do is to go straight ahead. We're coming along with
you solid--every blame one of us," he said.
A red flush crept into Nasmyth's face.
"Thank you, boys. After that I've got to put this contract through,"
he answered.
CHAPTER VII
LAURA MAKES A DRESS
The frost had grown keener as darkness crept over the forest, and the
towering pines about the clearing rose in great black spires into the
nipping air, but it was almost unpleasantly hot in the little general
room of Waynefleet's ranch. Waynefleet, who was fond of physical
comfort, had gorged the snapping stove, and the smell of hot iron
filled the log-walled room. There was also a dryness in its atmosphere
which would probably have had an unpleasant effect upon anyone not
used to it. The rancher, however, did not appear to feel it. He lay
drowsily in a big hide chair, and his old velvet jacket and evening
shoes were strangely out of harmony with his surroundings. Waynefleet
made it a rule to dress for the six o'clock meal, which he persisted
in calling dinner.
He had disposed of a quantity of potatoes and apples at the settlement
of late, and had now a really excellent cigar in his hand, while a
little cup of the Mocha coffee, brought from Victoria for his especial
use, stood on the table beside him. Waynefleet had cultivated tastes,
and invariably gratified them, when it was possible, while it had not
occurred to him that there was anything significant in the fact that
his daughter confined herself to the acrid green tea provided by the
settlement store. He never did notice a point of that kind, and, if
anyone had ventured to call his attention to it, he would probably
have been indignant as well as astonished. As a rule, however, nobody
endeavours to impress unpleasant facts upon men of Waynefleet's
character. In their case it is clearly not worth while.
"Do you intend to go on with that dressmaking much longer?" he asked
petulantly. "The click of your scissors has an irritating effect on
me, and, as you may have noticed, I cannot spread my paper on the
table. It cramps one's arms to hold it up."
Laura swept part of the litter of fabric off the table, and it was
only natural that she did it a trifle abruptly. She had been busy with
rough tasks, from most of which her father might have relieved her had
he possessed a less fastidious temperament, until supper, and there
were reasons why she desired an hour or two to herself.
"I will not be longer than I can help," she said.
Waynefleet lifted his eyebrows sardonically as he glanced at the
scattered strips of fabric. "This," he said, "is evidently in
preparation for that ridiculous pulp-mill ball. In view of the
primitive manners of the people we shall be compelled to mix with, I
really think I am exercising a good deal of self-denial in consenting
to go at all. Why you should wish to do so is, I confess, altogether
beyond me."
"I understood that you considered it advisable to keep on good terms
with the manager," said Laura, with a trace of impatience. "He has
bought a good deal of produce from you to feed his workmen with."
Her father made a gesture of resignation. "One has certainly to put up
with a good deal that is unpleasant in this barbarous land--in fact,
almost everything in it jars upon one," he complained. "You, however,
I have sometimes wondered to notice, appear almost content here."
Laura looked up with a smile, but said nothing. She, at least, had the
sense and the courage to make the most of what could not be changed.
It was a relief to her when, a minute or two later, the hired man
opened the door.
"If you've got the embrocation, I guess I'll give that ox's leg a
rub," he said.
Waynefleet rose and turned to the girl. "I'll put on my rubber
overshoes," he announced. "As I mentioned that I might have to go out,
it's a pity you didn't think of laying out my coat to warm."
Laura brought the overshoes, and he permitted her to fasten them for
him and to hold his coat while he put it on, after which he went out
grumbling, and she sat down again to her sewing with a strained
expression in her eyes, for there were times when her father tried her
patience severely. She sighed as she contemplated the partly rigged-up
dress stretched out on the table, for she could not help remembering
how she had last worn it at a brilliant English function. Then she had
been flattered and courted, and now she was merely an unpaid toiler on
the lonely ranch. Money was, as a rule, signally scarce there, but
even when there were a few dollars in Waynefleet's possession, it
seldom occurred to him to offer any of them to his daughter. It is
also certain that nobody could have convinced him that it was only
through her efforts he was able to keep the ranch going at all. She
never suggested anything of the kind to him, but she felt now and then
that her burden was almost beyond her strength.
She quietly went on with her sewing. There was to be a dance at the
new pulp-mill, which had just been roofed, and, after all, she was
young, and could take a certain pleasure in the infrequent festivities
of her adopted country. Besides, the forest ranchers dance well, and
there were men among them who had once followed other occupations;
while she knew that Nasmyth would be there--in fact, having at length
raised his dam to the desired level, he would be to a certain extent
an honoured guest. She was not exactly sure how she regarded him,
though it was not altogether as a comrade, and she felt there was, in
one sense, some justice in his admission that he belonged to her. She
had, in all probability, saved his life, and--what was, perhaps, as
much--had roused him from supine acquiescence, and inspired him with a
sustaining purpose. After the day when she had saved him from abject
despair over his ruined dam, he had acquitted himself valiantly, and
she had a quiet pride in him. Moreover, she was aware of a natural
desire to appear to advantage at the approaching dance.
There was, however, difficulty to be grappled with. The dress was old,
and when remade in a later style would be unfortunately plain. The few
pairs of gloves she had brought from England were stained and spotted
with damp, and her eyes grew wistful as she turned over the stock list
of a Victoria dry goods store. The thing would be so easy, if she had
only a little more money, but she sighed as she glanced into her
purse. Then she took up the gloves and a strip of trimming, and looked
at them with a little frown, but while she did so there were footsteps
outside, and the door was opened. A man, whom she recognized as a
hired hand from a ranch in the neighbourhood, stood in the entrance
with a packet in his hand.
"I won't come in," he said. "I met Nasmyth down at the settlement.
He'd just come back from Victoria, and he asked me to bring this
along."
He went away after he had handed her the packet, and a gleam of
pleasure crept into Laura's eyes when she opened it. There was first
of all a box of gloves of various colours, and then inside another
packet a wonderful piece of lace. The artistic delicacy of the lace
appealed to her, for though she possessed very few dainty things she
was fond of them, and she almost fancied that she had not seen
anything of the kind more beautiful in England.
As she unfolded it a strip of paper fell out, and the warm blood
swept into her face as she read the message on it.
"Considering everything, I really don't think you could regard it as a
liberty," it ran. "You have given me a good deal more than this."
Then for just a moment her eyes grew hazy. In proportion to the man's
means, it was a costly gift, and, except for him, nobody had shown her
much consideration since she had left England. She was a trifle
perplexed, for she did not think there was lace of that kind on sale
often in Victoria, and, in regard to the gloves, it was not evident
how he had known her size. Then she remembered that one of the cotton
ones she sometimes wore had disappeared some little time before, and
once more the flush crept into her cheeks. That almost decided her not
to wear his lace, but she felt that to refrain from doing so would
raise the question as to how they stood with regard to one another,
which was one she did not desire to think out closely then; and, after
all, the lace was exactly what she wanted to complete the dress. She
rolled it together, and put it and the gloves away, but she treasured
the little note.
It was a week later when her father drove her to the pulp-mill in a
jolting waggon, and arrived there a little earlier than he had
expected. A dance usually begins with a bountiful supper in that
country, but Waynefleet, who was, as a rule, willing to borrow
implements or teams from his Bush neighbours, would seldom eat with
them when he could help it. He was accordingly not quite pleased to
find the supper had not yet been cleared away, but Laura, who
understood what he was feeling, contrived to lead him into a vacant
place at one of the tables. Then she sat down, and looked about her.
The great room was hung with flags and cedar boughs, and the benches
down the long uncovered tables were crowded. The men's attire was
motley--broadcloth and duck; white shirts, starched or limp, and blue
ones; shoes with the creeper-spikes filed down, and long boots to the
knees. There were women present also, and they wore anything from
light print, put together for the occasion, to treasured garments made
in Montreal or Toronto perhaps a dozen years before, but for all that
the assembly was good to look upon. There was steadfast courage in the
bronzed faces, and most of those who sat about the long tables had
kindly eyes. The stamp of a clean life of effort was upon them, and
there was a certain lithe gracefulness in the unconscious poses of the
straight-limbed men. There was no sign of limp slovenliness about
them. Even in their relaxation they were intent and alert, and, as she
watched them, Laura realized something of their restless activity and
daring optimism. They believe in anything that is good enough in that
country, and are in consequence cheerfully willing to attempt
anything, even if to other men it would appear altogether visionary
and impossible, and simple faith goes a long way when supplemented by
patient labour. Laura suddenly became conscious that the manager of
the pulp-mill, a little wiry man, in white shirt and store clothes,
was speaking at the head of the table.
"In one way, it's not a very big thing we have done, boys," he said;
and Laura was quick to notice the significance of the fact, which was
also characteristic of the country, that he counted himself as one of
them. "We've chopped a hole in the primeval forest, held back the
river, and set up our mill. That's about all on the face of it, but
there's rather more behind. It's another round with Nature, and we've
got her down again. It's a thing you have to do west of the Rockies,
or she'll crush the life out of you. There are folks in the Eastern
cities who call her beneficent; but they don't quite understand what
was laid on man in Eden long ago. Here he's up against flood and frost
and snow. Well, I guess we've done about all we can, and now that
I've paid my respects to the chopper and carpenter-gang, there's
another man I want to mention. He took hold of the contract to put us
up our dam, and kept hold through the blamedest kind of luck. There's
hard grit in him and the boys he led, and the river couldn't wash it
out of them. Well, when the big turbines are humming and the mill's
grinding out money for all of you, I guess you're going to remember
the boys who built the dam."
There was a shout which shook the wooden building, and Laura sat very
still when Nasmyth stood up. There was no doubt that he was a
favourite with everybody there, and she knew that she had nerved him
to the fight. He did not appear altogether at ease, and she waited
with a curious expectancy for what he had to say. It was very little,
but she appreciated the tact which made him use the speech his
audience was accustomed to.
"I had a good crowd," he said. "With the boys I had behind me I
couldn't back down." Then his voice shook a little. "Still, I was
mighty near it once or twice. It was the boys' determination to hold
on--and another thing--that put new grit in me."
Without being conscious of what he was doing, he swept his glance down
the long table until it rested on Laura Waynefleet's face. She felt
the blood creep into her cheeks, for she knew what he meant, but she
looked at him steadily, and her eyes were shining. Then he spread his
hands out.
"I felt I daren't shame boys of that kind," he said, and hastily sat
down.
His observations were certainly somewhat crude, but the little quiver
in his voice got hold of those who heard him, and once more the big
building rang with cheering. As the sound of hearty acclamation died
away there was a great clatter of thrust-back benches through which
the tuning of a fiddle broke. Then out of the tentative twang of
strings rose, clear and silvery, the lament of Flora Macdonald,
thrilling with melancholy, and there were men and women there whose
hearts went back to the other wild and misty land of rock and pine and
frothing river which they had left far away across the sea. It may be
that the musician desired a contrast, or that he was merely feeling
for command of the instrument, for the plaintive melody that ran from
shift to shift into a thin elfin wailing far up the sobbing strings
broke off suddenly, and was followed by the crisp jar of crashing
chords. Then "The Flowers of Edinburgh" rang out with Caledonian verve
in it and a mad seductive swing, and the guests streamed out to the
middle of the floor. That they had just eaten an excellent supper was
a matter of no account with them.
Nasmyth, in the meanwhile, elbowed his way through the crowd of
dancers until he stood at Laura's side, and as he looked at her, there
was a trace of embarrassment in his manner. She wore his lace, but
until that moment her attire had never suggested the station to which
she had been born. Now she seemed to have stepped, fresh and
immaculate, untouched by toil, out of the world to which he had once
belonged. She was, for that night at least, no longer an impoverished
rancher's daughter, but a lady of station. With a twinkle in his eyes,
he made her a little formal inclination, and she, knowing what he was
thinking, answered with an old-world curtsey, after which a grinning
ox-teamster of habitant extraction turned and clapped Nasmyth's
shoulder approvingly.
"V'la la belle chose!" he said. "Mamselle Laura is altogether
ravissante. Me, I dance with no one else if she look at me like dat."
Then Nasmyth and Laura laughed, and glided into the dance, though, in
the case of most of their companions, "plunged" would have been the
better word for it. English reserve is not esteemed in that land, and
the axemen danced with the mingled verve of grey Caledonia and
light-hearted France, while a little man with fiery hair from the
misty Western Isles shrieked encouragement at them, and maddened them
with his fiddle. Even Nasmyth and Laura gave themselves up to the
thrill of it, but as they swung together through the clashing of the
measure, which some of their companions did not know very well,
confused recollections swept through their minds, and they recalled
dances in far different surroundings. Now and then they even fell back
into old tricks of speech, and then, remembering, broke off with a
ringing laughter. They were young still, and the buoyancy of the
country they had adopted was in both of them.
The dance ended too soon, and, when the music broke off with a crash
of clanging chords, Nasmyth led his partner out of the press into a
little log-walled room where the half-built dynamos stood. It was
lighted, but a sharp cool air and the fret of the river came in
through a black opening in one wall. Laura sat upon a large deal case,
and Nasmyth, looking down upon her, leaned against a dynamo. He smiled
as he recognized that she grasped the significance of the throbbing
roar of water.
"It was very pleasant while it lasted, but--and it's a pity--the music
has stopped," he said. "What we are now listening to is the turmoil of
a Canadian river."
Laura laughed, though there was a wistfulness in her eyes. "Oh, I
understand, but couldn't you have let me forget it just for to-night?"
she said. "I suppose that privilege was permitted to Cinderella."
The man felt curiously sorry for her as he remembered how hard her
life was at the lonely ranch, but he knew she would not be pleased if
he expressed his thoughts.
"Well," he observed reflectively, "a thing often looks most
attractive when it's forbidden you, or a long way off, and, you see,
there are always compensations. In fact, I'm beginning to come across
quite a few of them."
He broke off for a moment, and Laura, who noticed that he looked at
her, fancied she understood in what direction his thoughts were
drifting; but he went on again with a laugh.
"After all," he said, "there are exiles who realize that they are in
various ways better off than in all probability they would have been
had they stayed in the land they were driven out of."
"Ah," answered Laura, "would you go back if you were given the
opportunity?"
"No," Nasmyth asserted slowly, "I don't think I should do that--now."
Again she understood him, the more clearly because she saw by the
slight wrinkling of his forehead, during the significant pause, that
he had grappled with the question. She did not think he was altogether
in love with her, but she knew, at least, that he did not wish to go
away while she was left behind in Canada. It seemed desirable to
change the subject, and she touched the lace.
"I have to thank you for this," she said. "It has given me pleasure."
Then--and the words were wholly unpremeditated--she added: "I wanted
to look well--just for once--to-night."
She was sorry, a moment later, when she saw the quick change in the
man's expression, for she remembered that they had always seemed to
understand what the other meant. It was clear that the qualification
just for once had not misled him, but, after all, it seemed to her
that he must presently realize that the admission was not one a
reticent woman really in love with him would have made.
"Oh," he said, "you are always beautiful." Then his manner became
deprecatory. "I didn't think you'd mind. In one way what I owe you
makes me a privileged person. I felt that I could venture----"
This, too, was clear to her, and though she considered his attitude
the correct one, it jarred a little upon her. She was content that
they should be merely comrades, or, at least, that was what she had
endeavoured to convince herself, but, after all, there was no reason
why he should emphasize the fact.
"Yes," she replied quickly, "I think I understand." Then once more she
changed the subject. "I want to compliment you on building the dam."
Nasmyth laughed, but there was a light in his eyes. "I should never
have built it, if it hadn't been for you. Still"--and he made her a
reverent bow--"I owe you a good deal more than that."
Laura made no response to this. She had thrilled at his achievement,
when she had heard the manager's speech, and it became still plainer
that there was a certain hazard in dwelling upon his success. She
could also be practical.
"In one way," she said, "I suppose the result was not quite so
satisfactory?"
"It certainly wasn't. Of course, the work is not quite completed yet,
but after settling up everything, the interim payment left me with
about fifteen dollars in hand."
Laura was not astonished at this, but she was more than a little
perplexed, for she fancied that the lace she was wearing must have
cost a good deal more than fifteen dollars. Still, she had no wish to
make it evident that he had been extravagant; and, while she
considered the matter, a man appeared in the doorway.
"I guess you two have got to come right out," he said. "What d'you
figure you were asked here for?"
Nasmyth held his arm out, but when Laura would have laid her hand
upon it, the man broke in with a grin.
"No, sir," he said severely, "Miss Waynefleet's going right round. Now
you're coming along with me, and we'll show them how to waltz."
Laura smiled good-humouredly, and he swept her into the dance, while
Nasmyth was seized upon by a girl, who drove him through it much as
she did her brother's steers in the Bush.
"A bump or two don't count for much. What you want to do is to hump
yourself and make things hum," said Nasmyth's partner, when another
couple jostled them.
Nasmyth expressed his concurrence in a gasp, and contrived to save her
from another crash, but when the dance was over, he felt limp, and was
conscious that his partner was by no means satisfied with him.
"I'm sorry," he said. "Still, I really think I did what I could."
The girl regarded him half compassionately. "Well," she said, "it
wasn't very much, but I guess you played yourself out building that
blamed dam."
CHAPTER VIII
BY COMBAT
Nasmyth's partner condescended, as she said, to give him another show,
but he escaped from that dance with only a few abrasions, and, though
he failed to obtain another with Laura, he contrived to enjoy himself.
All his Bush friends were not primitive. Some of them had once played
their parts in much more brilliant functions. They had cultivated
tastes, and he had learned to recognize the strong points of those who
had not. After all, kindly hearts count for much, and it was not
unnatural that, like other exiles who have plodded up and down that
rugged land, he should think highly of the hard-handed men and patient
women who willingly offer a night's shelter and a share of their dried
apples, salt pork, and grindstone bread to the penniless wanderer.
What was more to the purpose, a number of the guests at the dance had
swung the axe by his side, and fought the river with him when the
valley was filled with the roar of water.
They had done their work gallantly, when it seemed out of the question
that they would ever receive the money he had promised them, from
sheer pride in their manhood, and to keep their word, and now they
danced as determinedly.
There are no cramping conventions and very few shams--and the shams in
those forests, it must be confessed, are as a rule imported ones. In
fact, there was that evening, among all those in the pulp-mill, only
one man who seemed to disassociate himself from the general good-will.
That man was Waynefleet. He wore his old velvet jacket as a cloak of
superciliousness--or, at least, that was how it seemed to the
Bush-ranchers, who recognized and resented an effete pride in the
squeak of his very ancient lacquered shoes. It is possible that he did
not mean to make himself in any way offensive, and merely desired to
indicate that he was graciously willing to patronize their bucolic
festivities. There would have been something almost pathetic in his
carefully preserved dignity had it not been so obtrusively out of
place; and when they stood watching him for a moment or two, Gordon
expressed Nasmyth's thoughts.
"How a man of that kind ever came to be Laura Waynefleet's father is
more than I can figure out!" he said. "It's a question that worries me
every time I look at him. Guess she owes everything to her mother; and
Mrs. Waynefleet must have been a mighty patient woman."
Nasmyth smiled, but Gordon went on reflectively: "You folks show your
sense when you dump your freaks into this country," he said. "It never
seems to strike you that it's a little rough on us. What's the matter
with men like Waynefleet is that you can't teach them sense. I'd have
told him what I thought of him once or twice when I saw the girl doing
his work up at the ranch if I'd figured it would have made any
impression."
"I expect it would have been useless," remarked Nasmyth. "After all,
I'm not sure that it's exactly your business."
Gordon watched Laura Waynefleet as she swung through a waltz on the
arm of a sinewy rancher, and his eyes softened curiously.
"Only on the girl's account," he admitted. "I'm sorry for her. Stills
the blamed old image isn't actively unkind."
Then he saw the sudden contraction of Nasmyth's face, and turned
toward him. "Now," he said, "I want you to understand this thing. If
it would be any comfort to her, I'd let Miss Waynefleet wipe her boots
on me, and in one way that's about all I'm fit for. I know enough to
realize that she'd never waste a moment thinking of a man like me,
even if I hadn't in another way done for myself already."
"Still," Nasmyth replied quietly, "some women can forgive a good
deal."
Gordon's face hardened, and he seemed to straighten himself. "Well,
there are men--any way, in this country--who have too much grit in
them to go crawling, broken, to any woman's feet, and to expect her to
pick them up and mend them. Now you have heard me, and I guess you
understand."
Nasmyth merely made a little gesture of sympathy. After all, he had
the average Englishman's reticence, and the free speech of that
country still jarred upon him now and then. He knew what Gordon had
meant to impress on him, and he was touched by generosity of the
motive, but for all that he felt relieved when Gordon abruptly moved
away. He danced another dance, and then sauntered towards the dynamo
room, where the manager had set up a keg or two of heady Ontario
cider. Several men were refreshing themselves there, but they did not
see him when he approached the door.
"The only thing that's out of tone about this show is Waynefleet,"
said one of them who had once worked for the rancher. "What do we want
that blamed old dead-beat round here for, when he can't speak to
anyone but the Crown land-agent and the mill manager?"
One of the others laughed, but Nasmyth saw venomous hatred in the big
axeman's face. It was, however, not his business, and Waynefleet was a
man for whom he had no great liking. He was about to turn away when
the chopper went on again.
"Waynefleet's a blamed old thief, as everybody knows," he said. "Him
being what he is, I guess you couldn't blame his daughter----"
Nasmyth, whom they had not noticed yet, could not quite hear what
followed; but when somebody flung a sharp, incredulous question at the
speaker, he stood fast in the doorway, with one hand clenched.
"Well," said the man, with a suggestive grin, "what I mean's quite
plain. Is there any other girl, round this settlement who'd make up to
that dam-builder as she's doing, and slip quietly into his shanty
alone?"
Nasmyth never learned what grievance against Waynefleet or his
daughter had prompted this virulence, nor did it appear to matter.
There was just sufficient foundation for the man's insinuation to
render it perilous if it was once permitted to pass unchallenged, and
Nasmyth realized that any attempt to handle the affair delicately was
not likely to be successful. He was afterwards greatly astonished that
he could think clearly and impose a certain command upon himself; but
he understood exactly what it was most advisable for him to do, and he
set about it with a curious cold quietness which served his purpose
well.
There was a gasp of astonishment from one of the group as he stepped
forward into the light and looked with steady eyes at the man who had
spoken.
"Jake," he said, "you are a d---- liar."
It was what the others had expected, and they rose and stood back a
little from the pair, watching expectantly; for they recognized that
the affair was serious, and, though Nasmyth had their sympathy, an
impartial attitude was the correct one now. Jake was tall and lean and
muscular; but perhaps the dam-builder's quietness disconcerted him, or
his bitterness had only extended to the rancher.
"Now," Jake growled, "you light out of this. I don't know that I've
anything against--you."
Nasmyth had his back to the door, and he did not see the grizzled
Mattawa, who was supposed to be one of the strongest choppers about
the settlement, standing a little behind him, and watching him and
Jake attentively. Still, one of the others did, and made a sign to
Mattawa that any support he might feel disposed to offer his employer
would not be tolerated in the meanwhile. Nasmyth, however, realized
that there was only one course open to him, and he drew back one hand
as he met the uneasy eyes of the man in front of him.
"You are going to back down on what you said?" he asked, with incisive
quietness.
"Not a d---- word," the other man assured him.
"Then," said Nasmyth, "you must take the consequences."
He swung forward on his left foot, and there was a thud as his scarred
knuckles landed heavily in the middle of the detractor's face. He
struck with an unexpected swiftness and all the force that was in him,
for he had learned that the rules of the trial by combat are by no
means so hard and fast in British Columbia as they are in England. As
a matter of fact, it is not very frequently resorted to there; but
when men do fight, their one object is to disable their opponents as
soon as possible and by any means available.
Jake reeled backwards a pace or two, and the spectators said
afterwards there was no reason why Nasmyth should have permitted him
to recover himself, as he did. Two axes which the carpenters had been
using stood against the wall, and Jake caught up the nearest of them.
He swung the gleaming blade high, while the blood trickled from his
cut lips and the swollen veins rose on his forehead. This, however,
was going further than the others considered admissible, and there was
a protesting shout, while one sturdy fellow cautiously slid along the
wall to get in behind the man who had the axe.
Still, for a second or two, which might have proved fatal to him,
Nasmyth had only his own resources to depend upon, and he did the one
thing that was possible. The Canadian axe-haft is long, and he sprang
straight in at the man. As he did so, the big blade came down, and
flashed by a hand's breadth behind his shoulders. He felt a burning
pain on the outside of his thigh, but that did not seem to matter, and
he was clutching at his opponent's throat when he was bodily flung
aside. Then, as he fell against the log wall, he had a momentary
glimpse of Jake bent backwards in Mattawa's arms. There was a brief
floundering scuffle as the two men reeled towards the black opening in
the wall, and after that a splash in the darkness outside, and Mattawa
stepped back into the room alone.
"The d---- hog is in the flume," he said.
That did not appear to trouble any of the others. The sluice was not
deep, and, though it was certainly running hard, it was scarcely
likely that a stalwart Bushman would suffer greatly from being washed
along it.
"Guess it will cool him off," said one of them. "If it doesn't, and he
comes back to make a fuss, we'll heave him in again."
Then they turned and looked at Nasmyth, who sat down somewhat limply
on a cider keg. The blood, which was running down his leg, made a
little pool at his feet. Mattawa, who crossed over to him, asked for a
knife, and when a man produced one, he slit Nasmyth's trousers up to
the hip. Then he nodded.
"Boys," he said, "one of you will slip out kind of quiet and bring Mr.
Gordon along. Two more of you will stand in the door there and not let
anybody in."
They obeyed him, and Mattawa looked down at Nasmyth again.
"I guess the thing's not serious," he commented.
"Well," said Nasmyth ruefully, "in one way, I think it is. You see,
store clothes are dear, and this is the only pair of trousers I've
got."
There was a little laugh from the others, and he knew he had done
wisely, when they clumsily expressed their satisfaction at his escape.
He had, at least, discredited Jake, and it was evident that if the man
made any more assertions of a similar nature, which was very unlikely,
no one would listen to them.
In the meanwhile, nobody else seemed to be aware that anything unusual
was going on. All had happened in a minute or two, and the clanging of
the fiddle and the patter of the dancers' feet had drowned any sound
that rose from the dynamo-room. Nasmyth had not long to wait before
Gordon stepped in and quietly set about his surgical work, after
someone had dipped up a little water from the sluice.
"Yes," said Gordon, "it's quite a nice clean slice, and I guess it's
not going to trouble you much, though you won't walk very far for a
week or two. As soon as we can get you to the dam, I'll put a proper
dressing on." Then he looked up sharply. "In the meanwhile, I don't
quite see how you cut yourself like that."
"As a matter of fact, I didn't," said Nasmyth, with evident
reluctance. "I suppose you will have to be told." He looked round at
the others. "Boys, I particularly don't want this thing to go any
further."
He related what had happened, and one of the men stood up. "I wouldn't
worry over that," he replied. "We're not going to talk, and if Jake
does, one of us will pound a little sense into him. Now I'll slip out
and get Highton's team."
After that they gave Nasmyth some cider, and a few minutes later he
limped out through the opening in the wall and across the plank they
laid above the sluice to the waiting waggon. It was not far to the
dam, and before very long Gordon was back again at the mill. It
naturally happened, though he was anxious to avoid her, that Laura
Waynefleet was the first person who accosted him.
"Have you seen Mr. Nasmyth?" she asked.
"Oh, yes," said Gordon. "I saw him a little while ago. You are wanting
him?"
Laura laughed. "I believed I promised him another dance. It's a little
curious he hasn't come for it."
"In one way it's deplorably bad taste."
The girl was quick to notice that his gaze was not quite frank, and he
winced when for a moment she laid her hand upon his arm, for he saw
the veiled anxiety in her eyes.
"Something has been going on," she said. "You don't want to tell me
where Mr. Nasmyth is."
"He has just gone back to the dam. He got hurt--a trifling cut--nothing
more than that. Still, I insisted on tying it up."
"Ah," cried Laura sharply, "you evidently don't wish me to know how he
got it!"
"It is just what I don't mean to do. Any way, it's not worth while
troubling about. Nasmyth's injury isn't in the least serious."
"It doesn't seem to strike you that I could ask him myself."
Gordon would have liked to warn her to keep away from the dam, but he
did not see how it could be done unless he offered some reason, and
that was a thing he shrank from.
"Oh, yes," he said, "you certainly could." Then he glanced down at her
hands. "Those are unusually pretty gloves you have on."
His answer was, as it happened, almost as injudicious as he could have
rendered it, since it left the girl determined to sift the matter
thoroughly. She, however, only smiled just then.
"I think there isn't a nicer pair of gloves in Canada than these," she
said.
Gordon took himself away, wondering what she could have meant by that;
and Laura waited until next day, when, although there was, as usual, a
good deal to be done about the ranch, she went down to find out what
was the matter with Nasmyth.
The injured man was sitting in his shanty, with his foot upon a chair,
but he rose when she came in, and stood leaning rather hard upon the
table.
"It is very kind of you to come," he said, taking her hand. He made
shift to limp to the door, whence he called for Mattawa.
"Bring those two chairs out, Tom, and put them in the sun," he said.
The old axeman shook his head severely. "You sit right down again.
What in the name of wonder are you on your legs for, any way?" he
asked. Then he saw Laura, and made a little gesture of resignation.
"Well, I guess it will have to be done."
The sudden change in his attitude was naturally not lost upon the
girl, but she kept her astonishment to herself, and waited until
Mattawa had made Nasmyth as comfortable as possible. Then she turned
to him.
"I am very sorry you are hurt," she said. "I understand it was an axe
cut. How did it happen?"
Nasmyth appeared to reflect. "Well," he answered, "I suppose I was a
little careless--in fact, I must have been. You see, some of the
building gang had left their axes in the dynamo-room."
"That," said Laura dryly, "certainly accounts for the axe being there.
I'm not sure it goes very much further."
"It really wasn't very much of a cut." Nasmyth's desire to escape
from the topic was a trifle too plain, as he added, "Isn't it nice out
here?"
It occurred to Laura that it was uncomfortably cold, for there was a
nip of frost in the air, though the sun hung coppery red above the
sombre pines.
"I almost fancied you were not overjoyed to see me," she remarked.
Nasmyth appeared momentarily embarrassed, but his expression suddenly
changed, and Laura felt a faint thrill when he laid his hand upon her
arm.
"That," he said, "is a fancy you must never entertain again."
In one respect Laura was fully satisfied, and, though there was still
a great deal upon which she meant to be enlightened, she talked about
other matters for almost half an hour, and then rose with a little
shiver.
"I must get back to the settlement, where I have left the team," she
said, and glanced down at him for a moment with solicitude in her
eyes. "You will be very careful."
Nasmyth let her go, but he did not know that she signed to Mattawa,
who was then busy hewing out a big redwood log. The axeman strolled
after her into the Bush, and then stopped to look hard at her as he
uttered an inquiring, "Well?"
"Tom," said the girl, "can't you understand that it would be very much
wiser if somebody told me exactly how Mr. Nasmyth got hurt?"
The axeman nodded. "Yes," he admitted, with a wink, "that's just how
it strikes me, and I'm going to. The boss has no more arms and legs
than he's a use for anyway."
Laura gazed at him in bewilderment, but the man's expression was
perfectly grave. "Now," he added, "I guess one can talk straight sense
to you, and the fact is I can't have you coming round here again. Just
listen about two minutes, and I'll try to make the thing clear to
you."
He did so with a certain graphic force that she had not expected from
him, and the colour crept into her cheeks. Then, to Mattawa's
astonishment, she smiled.
"Thank you," she said simply. "But the other man?"
"Well," replied Mattawa, "if he goes round talking, somebody will
'most pound the life out of him."
Then he swung round abruptly, for he was shrewd, and had his primitive
notions of delicacy; and Laura went on through the stillness of the
Bush, with a curious softness in her eyes. Mattawa had been terse,
and, in some respects, his observations had not been tactful, but
nobody could have impressed her more in Nasmyth's favour. Indeed, at
the moment, she scarcely remembered how the aspersions Jake had made
might affect herself. As it happened, she met Gordon near the
settlement, and he stopped a moment. He had come upon her suddenly,
and had looked at her with a suggestive steadiness, but she smiled.
"Yes," she said, "I have been to the dam. After the way in which you
made it evident that you didn't want me to go there, it was, perhaps,
no more than you could have expected."
"Ah!" rejoined Gordon, with a look of anxiety, "you probably got hold
of Mattawa. Well, after all, I guess he has done the wise thing." Then
after a pause he observed, "There is very little the matter with your
courage."
"I fancy," observed Laura half wistfully, "that is, in several
respects, fortunate."
Then she went on again, and though Gordon felt exceedingly compassionate,
he frowned and closed one hand.
"It's a sure thing I'll have to tell Waynefleet what kind of a man he
is," he said.
CHAPTER IX
GORDON SPEAKS HIS MIND
It was a nipping morning, and the clearing outside the ranch was
flecked with patches of frozen snow, when Waynefleet sat shivering in
a hide chair beside the stove. The broken viands upon the table in
front of him suggested that he had just made a tolerable breakfast,
but his pose was expressive of limp resignation, and one could have
fancied from the look in his thin face that he was feeling very sorry
for himself. Self-pity, in fact, was rather a habit of his, and,
perhaps, because of it, he had usually very little pity to spare for
anybody else. He looked up when, flushed and gasping, his daughter
came in with two heavy pails of water. She shivered visibly.
"It would be a favour if you would shut that door as soon as you can,"
said Waynefleet. "As I fancy I have mentioned, this cold goes right
through me. It occurred to me that you might have come in a little
earlier to see if I was getting my breakfast properly."
Laura, who glanced at the table, thought that he had acquitted himself
reasonably well, but she refrained from pointing out the fact, and,
after shutting the door, crossed the room to her store-cupboard, and
took out a can of fruit which she had set aside for another purpose.
Waynefleet watched her open it and made a little sign of impatience.
"You are very clumsy this morning," he said.
The girl's hands were wet and stiff with cold, but she quietly laid
another plate upon the table before she answered him.
"Charly is busy in the slashing, and I don't want to take him away,
but there are those logs in the wet patch that ought to be hauled out
now the ground is hard," she said. "I suppose you don't feel equal to
doing it to-day?"
"No," said Waynefleet with querulous incisiveness, "it is quite out of
the question. Do I look like a man who could reasonably be expected to
undertake anything of that kind just now?"
It occurred to Laura that he did not look as if there was very much
the matter with him, and she stood still a minute considering. As
Gordon had said, it was she who managed the ranch, and she recognized
that it was desirable that the trees in question should be dragged out
of the soft ground while the frost lasted. Still, there was the baking
and washing, and it would be late at night before she could accomplish
half she wished to do, if she undertook the task in question. While
she thought over it her father spoke again.
"I wish you would sit down," he said. "I feel I must have quietness,
and your restless habits jar upon me horribly."
That decided her, and slipping into her own room, she put on an old
blanket coat, and went out quietly. She walked through the orchard to
the little log stable where the working oxen stood, and, after patting
the patient beasts, shackled a heavy chain to the yoke she laid upon
their brawny necks. Then, picking up a handspike, she led them out,
and for an hour walked beside them, tapping them with a long pointed
stick, while they dragged the big logs out of the swamp. Now and then
it taxed all her strength to lift the thinner end of a log on the
chain-sling with a handspike, but she contrived to do it until at
length one heavier than the others proved too much for her. She could
hear the ringing of the hired man's axe across the clearing, but there
was a great deal for him to do, and, taking up the handspike again,
she strained at it.
She heard footsteps behind her, and she straightened herself suddenly.
She turned and saw Gordon watching her with a curious smile. Tall and
straight and supple, with a ruddy, half-guilty glow on her face, she
stood near the middle of the little gap in the Bush, the big dappled
oxen close at her side. The wintry sunlight, which struck upon her,
tinted the old blanket dress a shining ochre, and the loose tress of
red-gold hair, which had escaped from beneath her little fur cap,
struck a dominant tone of glowing colour among the pale reds and
russets of the fir-trunks and withered fern.
Gordon shook his head reproachfully. "Sit down a minute or two, and
I'll heave that log on to the sling," he said. "This is not the kind
of thing you ought to be doing."
Laura, who was glad of the excuse, sat down on one of the logs, while
the man leaned against a fir and gravely regarded her.
"The work must be done by somebody, and my father is apparently not
very well again," she explained. "Charly has his hands full in the
slashing. We must get it cleaned up, if it is to be ploughed this
spring."
"Nasmyth contrived to look after all these things. Why didn't you keep
him? The man didn't want to go away."
The colour deepened in Laura's face, and Gordon, who saw it, made a
sign of comprehension. "Well," he added, "I suppose that wasn't a
thing one could expect you to tell me, though I don't quite see why
you shouldn't think of yourself now and then. You know it wasn't on
your own account you sent him away."
"How does this concern you?" she asked.
Gordon flung one hand out. "Ah," he said, "how does it concern me?"
Then he seemed to lay a restraint upon himself. "Well, it does in one
sense, anyway. After all, I am a doctor, and a friend of yours, and
I'm going to warn you against attempting things women weren't meant
to do. If that doesn't prove efficacious, I'll say a word or two to
Nasmyth, and you'll have him back here again. It's a sure thing your
father would be glad to get him."
"If you do, I shall never forgive you," warned Laura, with a flash in
her eyes.
She was sorry she had spoken so plainly when she saw that Gordon
winced. She had guessed more or less correctly what the man felt for
her, and she had no wish to pain him. Except for that, however, the
admission she had made did not greatly matter, since she fancied that
he was quite aware why she had sent Nasmyth away. Gordon changed the
subject abruptly.
"There are very few of those blanket dresses this side of the
Rockies," he said. "You probably got it back East."
The girl's eyes had a wistful look as she answered: "We spent our
first winter in Montreal, and we had some friends who were very kind
to us. I like to look back upon those first few months in Canada."
Gordon nodded. "Oh, yes," he replied. "I know--sleigh-rides, snowshoe
meets, skating-rinks, toboggan-slides. Quite as lively as a London
season, and considerably more invigorating; I guess you've been
through that, too. In one way it's a pity you didn't stay in
Montreal."
He saw her sudden embarrassment, and fancied that she could have
stayed there, if she had wished to do so, but he felt that he must
speak frankly, and he shook his head severely.
"Do you never think of your own advantage at all?" he inquired. "Have
you none of the ambitions that most women seem to have?"
"Aren't you forgetting?" Laura asked with sudden quietness. "My father
found it would not be advisable for him to settle in Montreal--for the
same reason that afterwards led us to leave Victoria--and we went
West. Perhaps he could have faced the trouble and lived it down, but I
could not leave him alone."
Gordon sat silent a moment or two. He knew, though she very rarely
mentioned it, how heavy was the burden that had been laid upon her,
and he was divided between a great pity for her and anger against her
father. Then he rose slowly to his feet.
"Miss Waynefleet," he said, "if I have said anything that hurt you,
I'm sorry, but there are times when I must talk. I feel I have to. In
the meanwhile I'll heave those logs up on a skid so that you can slip
the chain round them."
For the next half-hour he exerted himself savagely, and when at last
he dropped the handspike, his face was damp with perspiration. He
smiled grimly when Laura, who had hauled one or two of the logs away,
came back tapping the plodding oxen.
"Now," he said, "I'm going in to see your father. Custer happened to
tell me he was feeling low again, and it's going to afford me a good
deal of pleasure to prescribe for him."
He swung off his wide hat, and, when he turned away, Laura wondered
with a few misgivings what had brought the little snap into his eyes.
Three or four minutes later he entered the house, where Waynefleet lay
beside the stove with a cigar in his hand.
"I ran across Custer at the settlement, and I came along to see how
you were keeping," said Gordon.
Waynefleet held out a cigar-box. "Make yourself comfortable," he
answered hospitably. "We'll have dinner a little earlier than usual."
The sight of the label on the box came near rousing Gordon to an
outbreak of indignation. "I'm not going to stay," he declared. "It
seems to me Miss Waynefleet has about enough to do already."
He saw Waynefleet raise his eyebrows, and he added: "I guess it's not
worth while troubling to point out that it's not my affair. Now, if
you'll get ahead with your symptoms."
Waynefleet looked hard at him for a moment. The older man was not
accustomed to being addressed in that brusque fashion, and it jarred
upon him, but, as a matter of fact, he was not feeling well, and, as
he not infrequently pointed out, he had discovered that one had to put
up with many unpleasant things in that barbarous country. He described
his symptoms feelingly, and was rather indignant when Gordon expressed
neither astonishment nor sympathy.
"That's all right," said Gordon. "The thing's quite plain--especially
the general lassitude you complain of. The trouble is that if you
don't make an effort it's going to become chronic."
Again Waynefleet looked at him in astonishment, for Gordon's tone was
very suggestive.
"Yes," added the medical adviser, "it's a complaint a good many men,
who haven't been raised to work, are afflicted with. Well, I'll mix
you up a tonic, and you'll drive down for it yourself. The thing won't
be half as efficacious if you send the hired man. Then you'll set to
every morning soon as breakfast's over, and do a couple of hours'
smart chopping for a week. By that time you'll find it easy, and you
can go on an hour or two in the afternoon. Nobody round here will
recognize you, if you keep it up for the next three months."
Waynefleet's thin face grew red, but Gordon's imperturbable demeanour
restrained him from betraying his indignation.
"You don't understand that I couldn't swing an axe for five minutes
together," he objected.
"The trouble," answered Gordon, "is that you don't want to."
Waynefleet made an attempt to rise, but his companion laid a hand
upon his arm and pressed him down again.
"You were anxious for my advice, and now I'm going to prescribe,"
Gordon continued. "Two hours' steady chopping every day, to be raised
by degrees to six. Then I'd let up on smoking cigars of that kind, and
practise a little more self-denial in one or two other respects. You
could make things easier for Miss Waynefleet with the money you
save."
He rose with a laugh. "Well, I'm going. All you have to do is to carry
out my suggestions, and you may still make yourself and your ranch a
credit to the district. In the meanwhile, this place would be
considerably improved by a little ventilation."
He went out, and left Waynefleet gazing in indignant astonishment at
the door he carefully fixed open. It seemed to Waynefleet almost
incredible that such words should have been spoken to him, and the
suggestion that at the cost of a painful effort he should endeavour to
make himself a credit to that barbarous neighbourhood rankled most of
all. He had felt, hitherto, that he had conferred a favour on the
community by settling there. He lay still until his daughter came in
and glanced at him inquiringly.
"You have seen Mr. Gordon?" she queried.
"I have," answered Waynefleet with fine disdain. "You will understand
that if he comes back here, he must be kept away from me. The man is
utterly devoid of refinement or consideration."
In the meanwhile Gordon was riding, circumspectly, down the rutted
trail, and it was an hour later when he dismounted at the shanty of
Nasmyth's workmen, and shared a meal with the gang employed on the
dam. After that he sat with Nasmyth, who still limped a little, in the
hut, from which, as the door stood open, they could see the men stream
up into the Bush and out along the dam. The dam now stood high above
the water-level, for the frost had bound fast the feeding snow upon
the peaks above, though the stream roared and frothed through the two
big sluice-gates. By-and-by, the ringing of axes and the clink of
drills broke through the sound of the rushing waters. Gordon, who
stretched himself out on a deer-hide lounge, smiled at Nasmyth as he
lighted his pipe.
"I've been talking a little sense to Waynefleet this morning. I felt I
had to, though I'm afraid it's not going to be any use," he
announced.
"Whether you were warranted or not is, of course, another matter,"
said Nasmyth. "Perhaps you were, if you did it on Miss Waynefleet's
account. Anyway, I don't altogether understand why you should be sure
it will have no effect."
Gordon looked at him with a grin. "Well," he remarked oracularly,
"it's easy to acquire an inflated notion of one's own importance,
though it's quite often a little difficult to keep it. Something's
very apt to come along and prick you, and you collapse flat when it
lets the inflation out. In some cases one never quite gets one's
self-sufficiency back. The scar the prick made is always there, but
it's different with Waynefleet. He is made of self-closing jelly, and
when you take the knife out the gap shuts up again. It's quite hard to
fancy it was ever there."
Nasmyth nodded gravely, for there was an elusive something in his
comrade's tone that roused his sympathy.
"Gordon," he said, "is it quite impossible for you to go back East
again?"
Gordon leaned back in his chair, and glanced out across the toiling
men upon the dam, at the frothing river and rugged hillside, with a
look of longing in his eyes.
"In one way it is, but I want you to understand," he replied. "I might
begin again in some desolate little town--but I aimed higher--and was
once very nearly getting there. As it is, if I made my mark, the thing
I did would be remembered against me. We'll let it go. As a surgeon of
any account I'm done for."
"Still, it's a tolerably big country, and folks forget. You might, at
least, go so far, and that would, after all, give you a good deal--a
competence, the right to marry."
Gordon laughed, but his voice was harsh.
"This is one of the days on which I must talk. I feel like that, now
and then," he said. Then he looked at Nasmyth hard. "Well, I've seen
the one woman I could marry, and it's certain that, if I dare make her
the offer, she would never marry me."
"Ah," said Nasmyth, "you seem quite sure of that?"
"Quite," declared Gordon, and there was, for a moment or two, an
almost uncomfortable silence in the shanty.
Then he made a little forceful gesture as he turned to his companion
again.
"Well," he said, "after all, what does it count for? Is it man's one
and only business to marry somebody? Of course, we have folks back
East, who seem to act on that belief, and in your country half of them
appear to spend their time and energies philandering."
"I don't think it's half," said Nasmyth dryly.
"It's not a point of any importance, and we'll let it go. Anyway, it
seems perilously easy for a man who gets the woman he sets his mind
upon to sink into a fireside hog in the civilized world. Now and then,
when things go wrong with folks of that kind, they come out here, and
nobody has any use for them. What can you do with the man who gets
sick the first time he sleeps in the rain, and can't do without his
dinner? Oh, I know all about the preservation of the species, but
west of the Great Lakes we've no room for any species that isn't tough
and fit."
He broke off for a moment. "After all, this is the single man's
country, and--we--know that it demands from him the best that he was
given, from the grimmest toil of his body to the keenest effort of his
brain. Marriage is a detail--an incident; we're here to fight, to
grapple with the wilderness, and to break it in, and that burden
wasn't laid upon us only for the good of ourselves. When we've flung
our trestles over the rivers, and blown room for the steel track out
of the canyon's side, the oat-fields and the orchards creep up the
valleys, and the men from the cities set up their mills. Prospector,
track-layer, chopper, follow in sequence here, and then we're ready to
hold out our hands to the thousands you've no use or food for back
yonder. I'm not sure it matters that the men who do the work don't
often share the results of it. We bury them beside our bridge trestles
and under tons of shattered rock, and, perhaps, when their time comes,
some of them aren't sorry to have done with it. Anyway, they've stood
up to man's primeval task."
He rose with another half-deprecatory laugh, but his eyes snapped.
"You don't talk like that in your country--it would hurt some of
you--but if we spread ourselves now and then, you can look round and
see the things we do." Then he touched Nasmyth's shoulder. "Oh, yes,
you understand--for somebody has taught you--and by-and-by, you're
going to feel the thing getting hold of you."
He moved towards the doorway, but turned as he reached it. "Talking's
cheap, and I have several dozen blamed big firs to saw up, as well as
Waynefleet's tonic to mix. He'll come along for it when that prick I
gave him commences to heal."
CHAPTER X
THE CALLING CANON
There were four wet and weary men in the Siwash canoe that Nasmyth,
who crouched astern, had just shot across the whirling pool with the
back feathering stroke of his paddle which is so difficult to acquire.
Tom from Mattawa, grasping a dripping pole, stood up in the bow.
Gordon and Wheeler, the pulp-mill manager, knelt in the middle of the
boat. Wheeler's hands were blistered from gripping the paddle-haft,
and his knees were raw, where he had pressed them against the bottom
of the craft to obtain a purchase. It was several years since he had
undertaken any severe manual labour, though he was by no means unused
to it, and he was cramped and aching in every limb. He had plied pole
or paddle for eight hours, during which his companions had painfully
propelled the craft a few miles into the canyon. He gasped with relief
when Mattawa ran the bow of the canoe in upon the shingle, and then
rose and stretched himself wearily. The four men stepped ashore.
Curiously they looked about them, for they had had little opportunity
for observation. Those who undertake to pole a canoe up the rapids of
a river on the Pacific slope usually find it advisable to confine
their attention strictly to the business in hand.
Immediately in front of them the river roared and seethed amid giant
boulders, which rose out of a tumultuous rush of foam, but while it
was clearly beyond the power of flesh and blood to drive the canoe up
against the current, a strip of shingle, also strewn with boulders and
broken by ledges of dripping rock, divided the water from the wall of
the canyon. The canyon, a tremendous slope of rock with its dark crest
overhanging them, ran up high above their heads; but they could see
the pines clinging to the hillside which rose from the edge of the
other wall across the river, so steep that it appeared impossible to
find a foothold upon it.
The four men were down in the bottom of a great rift in the hills,
and, though it would be day above for at least two hours, the light
was faint in the hollow and dimmed by drifting mist. It was a spot
from which a man new to that wild country might well have shrunk, and
the roar of water rang through it in tremendous, nerve-taxing
pulsations. Nasmyth and his companions, however, had gone there with
no particular purpose--merely for relaxation--though it had cost them
hours of arduous labour, and the journey had been a more or less
hazardous one. Wheeler, the pulp-mill manager, was waiting for his
machinery, and, Nasmyth had finished the dam. When they planned the
journey for pleasure, Mattawa and Gordon had gone with them ostensibly
on a shooting trip. There are game laws, which set forth when and
where a man may shoot, and how many heads he is entitled to, but it
must be admitted that the Bush-rancher seldom concerns himself greatly
about them. When he fancies a change of diet, he goes out and kills a
deer. Still, though all the party had rifles no one would have cared
very much if they had not come across anything to shoot at.
Now and then a vague unrest comes upon the Bushman, and he sets off
for the wilderness, and stays there while his provisions hold out. He
usually calls it prospecting, but as a rule he comes back with his
garments rent to tatters, and no record of any mineral claim or timber
rights, but once more contentedly he goes on with his task. It may be
a reawakening of forgotten instincts, half-conscious lust of
adventure, or a mere desire for change, that impels him to make the
journey, but it is at least an impulse with which most men who toil
in those forests are well acquainted.
Nasmyth and Mattawa pulled the canoe out, and when they sat down and
lighted their pipes, Wheeler grinned as he drew up his duck trousers
and surveyed his knees, which were raw and bleeding. Then he held up
one of his hands that his comrades might notice the blisters upon it.
He was a little, wiry man with dark eyes, which had a snap in them.
"Well," he observed, "we're here, and I guess any man with sense
enough to prefer whole bones to broken ones would wonder why we are.
It's most twelve years since I used to head off into the Bush this way
in Washington."
Gordon glanced at him with a twinkle in his eyes. "Now," he observed,
"you've hit the reason the first time. When you've done it once,
you'll do it again. You have to. Perhaps it's Nature's protest against
your axiom that man's chief business is dollar-making. Still, I'm
admitting that this is a blamed curious place for Nasmyth to figure on
killing a wapiti in. Say, are you going to sleep here to-night,
Derrick?"
It was very evident that none of the big wapiti--elks, as the Bushman
incorrectly calls them--could have reached that spot, but Nasmyth
laughed.
"I felt I'd like to see the fall--I don't know why," he said. "It's
scarcely another mile, and I've been up almost that far with an Indian
before. There's a ravine with young spruce in it where we could
sleep."
"Then," announced Wheeler resolutely, "we're starting right now. When
I pole a canoe up a place of this kind I want to see where I'm going.
I once went down a big rapid with the canoe-bottom up in front of me
in the dark, and one journey of that kind is quite enough."
They dumped out their camp gear, and took hold of the canoe, a
beautifully modelled, fragile thing, hollowed out of a cedar log, and
for the next half-hour hauled it laboriously over some sixty yards of
boulders and pushed it, walking waist-deep, across rock-strewn pools.
Then they went back for their wet tent, axes, rifles, blankets, and a
bag of flour, and when they had reloaded the canoe, they took up the
poles again. It was the hardest kind of work, and demanded strength
and skill, for a very small blunder would have meant wreck upon some
froth-lapped boulder, or an upset into the fierce white rush of the
river, but at length they reached a deep whirling pool, round which
long smears of white froth swung in wild gyrations. The smooth rock
rose out of the pool without even a cranny one could slip a hand into,
and the river fell tumultuously over a ledge into the head of it. The
water swept out of a veil of thin white mist, and the great rift rang
with a bewildering din. One felt that the vast primeval forces were
omnipotent there. As the men looked about them with the spray on their
wet faces and the white mist streaming by, Mattawa, who stood up
forward, dropped suddenly into the bottom of the canoe.
"In poles," he said. "Paddle! Get a move on her!" Nasmyth, who felt
his pole dip into empty water, flung it in and grabbed his paddle, for
the craft shot forward suddenly with the swing of the eddy towards the
fall. He did not know whether the stream would sweep them under it,
but he was not desirous of affording it the opportunity. For perhaps a
minute they exerted themselves furiously, gasping as they strained
aching arms and backs, and meanwhile, in spite of them, beneath the
towering fall of rock, the canoe slid on toward the fall. It also drew
a little nearer to the middle of the pool, where there was a curious
bevelled hollow, round which the white foam spun. It seemed to Nasmyth
that the stream went bodily down.
"Paddle," said Mattawa hoarsely. "Heave her clear of it."
They drove furiously between the white-streaked shoot of the fall and
that horribly suggestive whirling; then, as they went back towards the
outrush from the pool, they made another desperate, gasping effort.
For several moments it seemed that they must be swept back again, and
then they gained a little, and, with a few more strokes, reached the
edge of the rapid. They let the canoe drive down the rapid while the
boulders flashed by them, for there was the same desire in all of
them, and that was to get as far as possible away from that horrible
pool. At last Mattawa, standing up forward, poled the canoe in where a
deep ravine rent the dark rock's side, and the party went ashore, wet
and gasping. Wheeler looked back up the gorge and solemnly shook his
head.
"If you want to see any more of it, you've got to do it alone. I've
had enough," he declared. "A man who runs a pulp-mill has no use for
paddling under that kind of fall. I'm not going back again."
Mattawa and Gordon set the tent up in the hollow of the ravine, while
Wheeler hewed off spruce branches with which to make the beds; but
Nasmyth did nothing to assist any of them. Thinking hard, he sat on a
boulder, with his unlighted pipe in his hand. The throbbing roar of
water rang about him; and it was then that the great project crept
into his mind. It was rapidly growing dark in the bottom of the great
rift, but he could still see the dim white flashing of the fall and
the vast wall of rock and rugged hillside that ran up in shadowy
grandeur, high above his head, and as he gazed at it all he felt his
heart throb fast. He was conscious of a curious thrill as he watched
and listened to that clash of stupendous forces. The river had spent
countless ages cutting out that channel, hurling down mighty boulders
and stream-driven shingle upon the living rock; but it was, it seemed
to him, within man's power to alter it in a few arduous months. He
sat very still, astonished at the daring of his own conception, until
Wheeler strolled up to him.
"How much does the river drop at the fall?" he asked.
"About eight feet in the fall itself," answered Wheeler. "Seems to me
it falls much more in the rush above. Still, I can't say I noticed it
particularly--I had something else to think about."
"It's a short rapid," remarked Nasmyth reflectively. "There is, no
doubt, a great deal of the hardest kind of rock under it, which is, in
one or two respects, unfortunate. I suppose you don't know very much
about geology?"
"I don't," confessed the pulp-miller. "Machines are my specialty."
"Well," said Nasmyth, "I'm afraid I don't either, and I believe one or
two of these canyons have puzzled wiser folks than I. You see, the
general notion is that the rivers made them, but it doesn't seem quite
reasonable to imagine a river tilting at a solid range and splitting
it through the middle. In fact, it seems to me that some of the canyons
were there already, and the rivers just ran into them. One or two
Indians have come down from the valley close to the fall, and they
told me the river was quite deep there. The rock just holds it up at
the fall. It's a natural dam--a dyke, I think they call it."
"I don't quite understand what all this is leading to," observed
Wheeler.
Nasmyth laughed, though there was, as his companion noticed, a curious
look in his eyes. "I'll try to make it clearer when we get into the
valley. We're going there to-morrow."
It was almost dark now, and they went back together to the little fire
that burned redly among the spruces in the ravine. There Mattawa and
Gordon had a simple supper ready. The others stretched themselves
out, rolled in their blankets, soon after they had eaten, but Nasmyth
lay propped up on one elbow, wide awake, listening to the roar of
water until well into the night. The stream drowned the faint rustling
of the spruces in a great dominant note, and he set his lips as he
recognized its depth of tone and volume. He had once more determined
to pit all his strength of mind and body against the river. Still, he
went to sleep at last, and awakening some time after it was dawn on
the heights above, roused his comrades. When breakfast was over he
started with them up the ravine to cross the range.
It was afternoon before they accomplished the climb, though the height
was not great and a ravine pierced the crest, and they had rent most
of their clothes to tatters when they scrambled down the slope into
the valley. Those pine-shrouded hillsides are strewn with mighty
fallen trees, amid which the tangled underbrush grows tall and rank,
and, where the pines are less thickly spaced, there are usually matted
groves of willows, if the soil is damp. They pitched camp on the edge
of the valley, and Gordon and Nasmyth prepared supper, while Wheeler
cut firewood and Mattawa went out to prospect for the tracks of
feeding deer. The axeman came back to say there were no signs of any
wapiti, though the little Bush deer were evidently about, and it was
decided to try for one that night with the pitlight, a mode of
shooting now and then adopted when the deer are shy.
They ate their supper, and afterwards lay down with their blankets
rolled about them, for it grew very cold as darkness crept up the
valley. Like most of the other valleys, this one was walled in by
steep-sided, pine-shrouded hills; but in this case there were no trees
in the bottom of it, which, while very narrow, appeared several miles
long. It was also nearly level, and the river wound through it in
deep, still bends. There are not many valleys in that country in
which heavy timber fails to grow, and those within reach of a market
have been seized upon; for all ranch produce is in excellent demand,
and the clearing of virgin forest is a singularly arduous task. In
fact, there was only one reason why this strip of natural prairie had
not already been claimed. Most of it was swamp. Nasmyth, who was
quieter than usual, watched the filmy mist creep about it as the soft
darkness rolled down the hillsides.
Gordon rose and hooked a pitlight into his hat. This pitlight
consists simply of a little open miner's-lamp, which has fixed beneath
it a shield cut out of any convenient meat-can. The lamp is filled
with seal oil. Once a man has fastened it upon his head, the light is
cut off from his person, so that he stands invisible, and the little
flame appears unsupported. Deer of any kind are endued with an
inquisitiveness which frequently leads to their destruction, and
when they notice the twinkling light flitting through the air they
approach it to ascertain the reason for such an unusual thing. Then
the rancher shoots, as soon as their shining eyes become visible.
The party divided. Gordon and Nasmyth, who kept near each other, fell
over several rotting trees, and into what appeared to be crumbling
drains. They floundered knee-deep through withered timothy, which is
not a natural grass. For an hour or two nobody saw any deer. Then
Gordon, who was cautiously skirting another drain, closed in on
Nasmyth until he touched his comrade. Nasmyth heard a crackling rustle
among the withered grass. Gordon made a little abrupt movement.
"If we both blaze off, we double the odds on our getting it," he
said.
Nasmyth only just heard him, for his heart was beating with
excitement; but as he stood knee-deep in the grass, with both hands
ready to pitch the heavy rifle up, it seemed to him that Mattawa could
not have been correct when he said that there were only the Bush deer
about. Judging by the noise it was making, the approaching beast, he
thought, must be as big as a wapiti. Then he saw two pale spots of
light, which seemed curiously high above the ground.
"I'm shooting," he said, and in another moment the butt was into his
shoulder.
He felt the jar of it, but, as usual in such cases, he heard no
detonation, though the pale flash from Gordon's rifle was almost in
his eyes. He, however, heard the thud of the heavy bullet, and a
moment or two later, a floundering amidst the grass.
"That can't be a Bush deer!" he cried.
"It sounds 'way more like an elephant," said Gordon, with a gasp.
They ran forward until they stopped a few yards short of something
very big and shadowy that was still struggling in the grass. Gordon
cautiously crept up a little nearer.
"Those aren't deer's horns, anyway," he announced. "Plug it quick. The
blamed thing's getting up."
Nasmyth flung the rifle up to his shoulder, and twice jerked a fresh
cartridge into the chamber, but this time there was silence when the
crash of the heavy Marlin died away among the woods. They crept
forward a little further circumspectly, until Gordon stopped again
with a gasp of consternation.
"Well," he said, "I guess it couldn't be either a Bush deer or a
wapiti."
They were still standing there when their comrades came running up,
and Mattawa, who took down his light, broke into a great hoarse
laugh.
"A steer!" he said, and pointed to a mark on the hide. "One of
Custer's stock. Guess he'll charge you quite a few dollars for killing
it."
Nasmyth smiled somewhat ruefully, for he was by no means burdened
with wealth, but he was, after all, not greatly astonished. Few of the
small ranchers can feed their stock entirely on their little patches
of cleared land, and it is not an unusual thing for most of the herd
to run almost wild in the Bush. Now and then, the cattle acquire a
somewhat perilous fondness for wrecking road-makers' and prospectors'
tents, which explains why a steer occasionally fails to be found and
some little community of axemen is provided with more fresh meat than
can well be consumed.
"I'm afraid it's rather more than likely I'll have to pay a good
price," said Nasmyth. "Do you feel anxious for any more shooting
to-night, Wheeler?"
"No," said the pulp-miller, with a grin, as he surveyed his bemired
clothes. "Guess it's going to prove expensive, and I've had 'most
enough. I don't feel like poling that canoe any farther up-river,
either. What's the matter with camping right where we are until we eat
the steer?"
There was, however, as Mattawa pointed out, a good deal to be done
before they could make their first meal off the beast, and none of
them quite relished the task, especially as they had only an axe and a
couple of moderately long knives. Still, it was done, and when they
carried a portion of the meat out of the swamp, and had gone down to
wash in the icy river, they went wearily back to their tent among the
firs.
CHAPTER XI
THE GREAT IDEA
The night was cold, and a frost-laden wind set the fir branches
sighing as Nasmyth and his comrades sat about a snapping fire. The red
light flickered upon their faces, and then grew dim again, leaving
their blurred figures indistinct amid the smoke that diffused pungent,
aromatic odours as it streamed by and vanished between the towering
tree-trunks.
The four men were of widely different type and training, though it was
characteristic of the country that they sat and talked together on
terms of perfect equality. Two of them were exiles, by fault and
misfortune, from their natural environment. One had forced himself
upwards by daring and mechanical genius into a station to which, in
one sense, he did not belong, and Mattawa, the chopper, alone, pursued
the occupation which had always been familiar to him. Still, it was as
comrades that they lived together in the wilderness, and, what was
more, had they come across one another afterwards in the cities, they
would have resumed their intercourse on exactly the same footing.
After all, they were, in essentials, very much the same, and, when
that is the case, the barriers men raise between themselves do not
count for much in the West, at least. Wheeler, the pulp-mill builder,
who had once sold oranges on the railroad cars, led up to a
conversation that gave Nasmyth an opportunity for which he had been
waiting.
"You and Mattawa are about through with that slashing contract," he
said. "You will not net a great pile of money out of it, I suppose?"
"My share is about thirty," answered Nasmyth, with a little laugh. "My
partner draws a few dollars more. He got in a week when the big log
that rolled on my cut leg lamed me. I seem to have a particularly
unfortunate habit of hurting myself. Are you going back to Ontario
when we get that money, Mattawa?"
"No," the big axeman replied slowly; "anyway, not yet, though I was
thinking of it. The ticket costs too much. They've been shoving up
their Eastern rates."
"You ought to have a few dollars in hand," remarked Nasmyth, who was
quite aware that this was not exactly his business. "Are you going to
start a ranch?"
Mattawa appeared to smile. "I have one half cleared back in Ontario."
"Then what d'you come out here for?" Gordon broke in.
"To give the boy a show. He's quite smart, and we were figuring we
might make a doctor or a surveyor of him. That costs money, and wages
are 'way higher here than they are back East."
It was a simple statement, made very quietly by a simple man, but it
appealed forcibly to those who heard it, for they could understand
what lay behind it. Love of change or adventure, it was evident, had
nothing to do with sending the grizzled Mattawa out to the forests
of the West. He had, as he said, merely come there that his son might
be afforded opportunities that he had never had, and this was
characteristic, for it is not often that the second generation stays
on the land. Though teamsters and choppers to the manner born are busy
here and there, the Canadian prairie is to a large extent broken and
the forest driven back by young men from the Eastern cities and by
exiled Englishmen. Their life is a grim one, and when they marry they
do not desire their children to continue it. Yet, they do not
often marry, since the wilderness, in most cases, would crush the
wives they would choose. The men toil on alone, facing flood, and
drought, and frost, and some hate the silence of the winter nights
during which they sit beside the stove.
"Then," inquired Wheeler, "who runs the ranch?"
"The wife and the boy. That is, when the boy's not chopping or
ploughing for somebody."
There were reasons why Nasmyth was stirred by what he had heard, and
with his pipe he pointed to Mattawa, as the flickering firelight fell
upon the old axeman's face.
"That," he said, "is the man who didn't want his wages when I offered
them to him, though he knew it was quite likely he would never get
them afterwards unless I built the dam. He'd been working for me two
or three months then, in the flooded river, most of the while. Now, is
there any sense in that kind of man?"
Mattawa appeared disconcerted, and his hard face flushed. "Well," he
explained, "I felt I had to see you through." He hesitated for a
moment with a gesture which seemed deprecatory of his point of view.
"It seemed up to me."
"You've heard him," said Gordon dryly. "He's from the desolate Bush
back East, and nobody has taught him to express himself clearly. The
men of that kind are handiest with the axe and drill, but it has
always seemed to me that the nations are going to sit round and listen
when they get up and speak their mind some day."
He saw the smile in Nasmyth's eyes, and turned to Wheeler, who was
from the State of Washington. "It's a solid fact that you, at least,
can understand. It's not so very long since your folks headed West
across the Ohio, and it's open to anyone to see what you have done."
Then he flung his hand out towards the east. "They fancy back yonder
we're still in the leading-strings, and it doesn't seem to strike them
that we're growing big and strong."
It was characteristic that Wheeler did not grin, as Nasmyth certainly
did. What Gordon had said was, no doubt, a trifle flamboyant, but it
expressed the views of others in the West, and after all it was more
or less warranted. Mattawa, however, gazed at them both as if such
matters were beyond him, and Wheeler, who turned to Nasmyth, changed
the subject.
"Well," he said, "what are you going to strike next?"
Nasmyth took out his pipe, and carefully filled it before he answered,
for he knew that his time had come, and he desired greatly to carry
his comrades along with him.
"I have," he said quietly, "a notion in my mind, or, anyway, the germ
of one, for the thing will want some worrying out. It's quite a
serious undertaking. To begin with, I'll ask Gordon who cut these
drains we've been falling into, and what he did it for?"
"An Englishman," Gordon answered. "Nobody knew much about him. He was
probably an exile, too. Anyway, he saw this valley, and it seemed to
strike him that he could make a ranch in it."
"Why should he fix on this particular valley?"
"The thing's plain enough. How many years does a man usually spend
chopping a clearing out of the Bush? Isn't there a demand for anything
that you can eat from our miners and the men on our railroads and in
our mills? Why do we bring carloads of provisions in? Can't you get
hold of the fact that a man can start ranching right away on natural
prairie, if he can once get the water out of it?"
"Oh, yes," assented Nasmyth. "The point is that one has to get the
water out of it. I would like Mattawa and Wheeler to notice it. You
can go on."
"Well," said Gordon, "that man pitched right in, and spent most of two
years cutting four-foot trenches through and dyking up the swamp. He
went on every day from sun-up to dark, but every time the floods came
they beat him. When he walked over the range to the settlement, the
boys noticed he was getting kind of worn and thin, but there was clean
grit in that man. He'd taken hold of the contract, and he stayed with
it. Then one day a prospector went into the valley after a big freshet
and came across his wrecked shanty. The river had got him."
Wheeler nodded gravely. "It seems to me this country was made by men
like that," he commented. "They're the kind they ought to put up
monuments to."
There was silence for a moment or two after that, except for the
sighing of the wind among the firs and the hoarse murmur that came up,
softened by the distance, from the canyon. It was not an unusual story,
but it appealed to those who heard it, for they had fought with rock
and river and physical weariness, and they could understand the grim
patience and unflinching valour of the long struggle that had
resulted, as such struggles sometimes do, only in defeat. Still, the
men who take those tasks in hand seldom capitulate. Gordon glanced at
Nasmyth.
"Now," he said, "if you have anything to say, you can get it out."
Nasmyth raised himself on one elbow. "That Englishman put up a good
fight, but he didn't start quite right," he said. "I want to point out
that, in my opinion, the river has evidently just run into the canyon.
It's slow and deep until you reach the fall, where it's merely held up
by the ridge of rock the rapid runs across. Well, we'll call the
change of level twelve to sixteen feet, and, as Gordon has suggested,
a big strip of natural prairie is apt to make a particularly desirable
property, once you run the water out of it. You can get rid of a lot
of water when you have a fall of sixteen feet."
"How are you going to get it?" asked Wheeler.
"By cutting the strip of rock that holds the river up at the fall. I
think one could do it with giant-powder."
Again there was silence for a few moments, and Nasmyth looked at his
comrades quietly, with the firelight on his face and a gleam in his
eyes. They sat still and stared at him, for the daring simplicity of
his conception won their admiration. Mattawa slowly straightened
himself.
"It's a great idea," he declared. "Seen something quite like it in
Ontario; I guess it can be done." He turned to Nasmyth. "You can count
me in."
Wheeler made a sign of concurrence. "It seems to me that Mattawa is
right. In a general way, I'm quite open to take a share in the thing,
but there's a point you have to consider. Most of the work could be
done only at low water, and a man might spend several years on it."
"Well?" said Nasmyth simply.
Wheeler waved his hand. "Oh," he said, "you're like that other
Englishman, but you want to look at this thing from a business point
of view. Now, as you know, the men who do the toughest work on this
Pacific slope are usually the ones who get the least for it. Well, if
you run the river down, you'll dry out the whole valley, and you'll
have every man with a fancy for ranching jumping in, or some d----
land agency's dummies grabbing every rod of it. It's Crown land.
Anybody can locate a ranch on it."
"You have to buy the land," said Nasmyth. "You can't pre-empt it
here."
"How does that count?" Wheeler persisted. "If you started clearing a
Bush ranch, you'd spend considerably more."
Nasmyth smiled. "I fancy our views coincide. The point is that the
Crown agents charge the usual figure for land that doesn't require
making, which is not the case in this particular valley. Well, before
I cut the first hole with the drill, they will either have to sell me
all I can take up on special terms, or make me a grant for the work I
do."
Gordon laughed. "Are you going to hammer your view of the matter into
the Crown authorities? Did you ever hear of anyone who got them to
sanction a proposition that was out of the usual run?"
"Well," said Nasmyth, "I'm going to try. If they won't hear reason,
I'll start a syndicate round the settlement."
Wheeler, leaning forward, dropped a hand on his shoulder. "Count on me
for a thousand dollars when you want the money." He turned and looked
at Gordon. "It's your call."
"I'll raise the same amount," said Gordon, "though I'll have to put a
mortgage on the ranch."
Mattawa made a little diffident gesture. "A hundred--it's the most I
can do--but there's the boy," he said.
Nasmyth smiled in a curious way, for he knew this offer was, after
all, a much more liberal one than those the others had made.
"You," he said severely, "will be on wages. Yet, if we put the thing
through, you will certainly get your share."
He looked round at the other two, and after they had expressed their
approval, they discussed the project until far into the night, and
finally decided to recross the range, and look at the fall again,
early next morning. It happened, however, that Mattawa, who went down
to the river for water, soon after sunrise, found a Siwash canoe
neatly covered with cedar branches. This was not an astonishing thing,
since the Indians, who come up the rivers
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