Bunch Grass Part 63

She caught at his arm.

"You ain't a-goin' to leave the inlet?"

"It's a mighty big country, this," Dennis replied austerely; "but I've a notion it ain't quite big enough for Barker an' me. So long!"

"I'm comin' up to-morrer, Dennis, to see 'em run the last rapid. Mebbe you was fullish to leave the range?"

He marked the interrogation in her tone, and answered, for him, almost roughly--

"Mebbe I was, but not so fullish as you by a long sight!"

With that he returned to the bunk-house.

Not half a mile from the inlet the Coho gathers itself together for its last wild rush to salt water. And here there is a huge pool where logs lie peacefully as alligators in the sun. At the end of the pool the river flows gently in a channel free from rocks and snags. Then the channel narrows, and a little farther on you behold the head of the rapid, and half-way down the Coho Falls thunder everlastingly.

When the logs reach the falls they are meat for the mills. Nothing can stop them then. One after another they rise on end to take the final plunge. Some twist and writhe as if in agony, as if conscious that the river and forest shall know them no more. Thousands have travelled the self-same way; not one has ever returned. The lower rapid of the Coho hardly deserves its name. Half a mile farther on it is an estuary across which stretches the boom.

The crews a.s.sembled on each side of the pool. The logs were p.r.i.c.ked into slow movement. This being duffers' work was a.s.signed to the less experienced. The picked river-drivers stood upon the rocks of the upper rapid, pole in hand. And here, watching them with a lack-l.u.s.tre eye, stood Mamie in the shade of a dogwood tree in full blossom. Now and again a soft white petal would fall upon the water and be swept away. Above the hemlocks soughed softly. At her feet the giant maidenhair raised its delicate fronds till they touched her cheek.

She watched the logs go by in a never-ending procession. The scene fascinated her, although, in a sense, she was singularly devoid of either imagination or perception. Movement beguiled a woman whose own life had been stagnant for five-and-twenty years. Deep down in her heart was the unformulated but inevitable conviction that the logs were moving and that she was standing still. Tom loomed large in the immediate foreground. He, too, moved so swiftly that his huge form lacked definition. She saw him s.n.a.t.c.h a pole from one of the men and stab viciously at a log which refused to budge; and every time that his arm rose and fell a little shudder trickled down her spinal column. The log seemed to receive the blows apathetically. A bad jam was imminent. She could hear Tom swearing, and the other logs floating on and on seemed to hear him also, and tremble. His bull's voice rose loud above the roar of the falls. Mamie looked down. At her feet crouched Dennis, the dog, and he also was trembling at those raucous sounds, and Mamie could feel his thin ribs pressing against her own thin legs.

At that moment light came to her obscure mind. She was like the log.

She refused to budge, funked the plunge, submitting to unending blows, and words which were almost worse than blows. And by her obstinacy and apathy she was driving the best man on G.o.d's earth to premeditated murder.

That morning, let us remember, Tom had beaten the dog, and because she had interfered with a pitiful protest her husband had struck her close to the temple. Ever since this blow she had heard the roar of the falls with increasing intensity.

"Why don't it move?" she asked herself.

As she put the question the log did move, borne away by the full current. Mamie, followed by the dog, ran after it, with her eyes aflame with excitement. Dennis barked, divining something uncanny, eager to distract the mind of his mistress from what seemed to be engrossing it. Still she ran on, with her eyes upon the log. The dog knew that she must stop in a moment, that no one could pa.s.s the falls unless they went over them. Did he divine also that she meant to go over them--that at last, with her poor, imperfect vision, she had seen that way out of captivity?

She reached the point where farther advance was impossible. To her right rose a solid wall of stone; opposite rose its twin; between the two the river rushed tumultuously, tossing the great logs. .h.i.ther and thither as if they were spilikins.

Mamie watched her own log. After its goadings it kept a truer course than most of its fellows. But she had outstripped it. Standing upon the edge of the precipice, feeling the cold spray upon her face, hearing the maddening roar of the monster below, less to be feared than that other monster from whom she realised that she had escaped, she waited for the final plunge....

What was pa.s.sing in her mind at this supreme moment? We may well believe that she saw clearly the past through the mists which obscured the future. Always she had been a log at the mercy of a drunken father. Her mother had died in giving birth to her, but she knew vaguely that this mother was a Church member. She did not know--and, knowing, could never have understood--that from her she had inherited a conscience--or shall we call it an ineradicable instinct?--which constrained her to turn aside, shuddering, from certain temptations, to obey, without reasoning, certain ethical laws, solemnly expounded to her by a Calvinistic grandmother. But Nature had been too much for her. Even as she had turned instinctively and with horror from the breaking of a commandment, so also she had selected the mate who possessed in excess the physical qualities so conspicuously lacking in her. She had fallen a victim, and a reluctant victim, to the law of compensation. When Tom Barker held up his finger and whistled, she crawled to him.

The log, slightly rolling, as if intoxicated, neared the brink of the falls. And then it stopped again, where the river was narrowest and the current strongest. No log had stopped in this place before; Mamie saw that it was caught by a small rock, and held fast by the other logs behind it.

"It won't go over," she murmured.

Within a minute a terrific jam impended. Across the river Tom was swearing horribly; and between husband and wife rose a filmy cloud of spray upon which were imprinted the mysterious colours of the rainbow, which, long ago, Mamie had been taught to regard as the most wonderful symbol in the world--G.o.d's promise that in the end good should triumph over evil.

Afraid to move, fascinated, she stood still, staring at the rainbow.

Presently Tom disappeared. When he returned Mamie could see him very plainly. He had a stick of dynamite and a fuse. Mamie saw him glance at his watch and measure the fuse. Then, leaping from log to log, he approached the one in midstream which lay pa.s.sive, blocking the advance of all the others. With splendid skill and daring he adjusted the dynamite upon the small rock which held the log, and lit the fuse.

He returned as he had come, and Mamie could hear the cheers of the men upon the opposite bank.

"It'll hev to go now," she reflected.

At this moment Dennis, the dog, must have realised that his master had left something behind on the rock. Mamie saw him spring from log to log, and then, holding the dynamite between his teeth, with the spluttering fuse still attached, follow his master.

"Tom!" she screamed. "Look out!"

Tom turned and saw! And the others--Dennis Brown, Mamie, the river- drivers--saw also and trembled. Tom began to curse the dog, adjuring him to go back, to drop it, _drop IT_, DROP IT!

But the faithful creature, who had risked life to retrieve sticks thrown into fierce rapids, ran steadily on. Mamie saw the face of her husband crumble into an expression of hideous terror and palsy. His lips mouthed inarticulately, with his huge hands he tried to push back the monstrous fate that was overtaking him.

The dog laid the dynamite at his master's feet at the moment when it exploded.

And the man whose name was Dennis knew that his turn had come at last.