Big Timber Part 17

"Can you hang on a while longer?" he shouted. "Till I can get my boat bailed?"

"I'm all right," she called back.

She saw him heave up the engine hatch. For a minute or two he bailed rapidly. Then he spun the engine, without result. He straightened up at last, stood irresolute a second, peeled off his coat.

The launch lay heavily in the trough. The canoe, rising and clinging on the crest of each wave, was carried forward a few feet at a time, taking the run of the sea faster than the disabled motorboat. So now only a hundred-odd feet separated them, but they could come no nearer, for the canoe was abeam and slowly drifting past.

Stella saw the man stoop and stand up with a coil of line in his hand.

Then she gasped, for he stepped on the coaming and plunged overboard in a beautiful, arching dive. A second later his head showed glistening above the gray water, and he swam toward her with a slow, overhand stroke. It seemed an age--although the actual time was brief enough--before he reached her. She saw then that there was method in his madness, for the line strung out behind him, fast to a cleat on the launch. He laid hold of the canoe and rested a few seconds, panting, smiling broadly at her.

"Sorry that whopping wave put me out of commission," he said at last.

"I'd have had you ash.o.r.e by now. Hang on for a minute."

He made the line fast to a thwart near the bow. Holding fast with one hand, he drew the swamped canoe up to the launch. In that continuous roll it was no easy task to get Stella aboard, but they managed it, and presently she sat s.h.i.+vering in the c.o.c.kpit, watching the man spill the water out of the Peterboro till it rode buoyantly again. Then he went to work at his engine methodically, wiping dry the ignition terminals, all the various connections where moisture could effect a short circuit. At the end of a few minutes, he turned the starting crank. The multiple cylinders fired with a roar.

He moved back behind the wrecked winds.h.i.+eld where the steering gear stood.

"Well, Miss s.h.i.+p-wrecked Mariner," said he lightly, "where do you wish to be landed?"

"Over there, if you please." Stella pointed to where the red roof of the bungalow stood out against the green. "I'm Mrs. Fyfe."

"Ah!" said he. An expression of veiled surprise flashed across his face.

"Another potential romance strangled at birth. You know, I hoped you were some local maiden before whom I could pose as a heroic rescuer.

Such is life. Odd, too. Linda Abbey--I'm the Monohan tail to the Abbey business kite, you see--impressed me as pilot for a spin this afternoon and backed out at the last moment. I think she smelled this blow. So I went out for a ride by myself. I was glowering at that new house through a gla.s.s when I spied you out in the thick of it."

He had the clutch in now, and the launch was cleaving the seas, even at half speed throwing out wide wings of spray. Some of this the wind brought across the c.o.c.kpit. "Come up into this seat," Monohan commanded.

"I don't suppose you can get any wetter, but if you put your feet through this bulkhead door, the heat from the engine will warm you. By Jove, you're fairly s.h.i.+vering."

"It's lucky for me you happened along," Stella remarked, when she was ensconced behind the bulkhead. "I was getting so cold. I don't know how much longer I could have stood it."

"Thank the good gla.s.ses that picked you out. You were only a speck on the water, you know, when I sighted you first."

He kept silent after that. All his faculties were centered on the seas ahead which rolled up before the sharp cut.w.a.ter of the launch. He was making time and still trying to avoid boarding seas. When a big one lifted ahead, he slowed down. He kept one hand on the throttle control, whistling under his breath disconnected s.n.a.t.c.hes of song. Stella studied his profile, clean-cut as a cameo and wholly pleasing. He was almost as big-bodied as Jack Fyfe, and full four inches taller. The wet s.h.i.+rt clinging close to his body outlined well-knit shoulders, ropy-muscled arms. He could easily have posed for a Viking, so strikingly blond was he, with fair, curly hair. She judged that he might be around thirty, yet his face was altogether boyish.

Sitting there beside him, s.h.i.+vering in her wet clothes, she found herself wondering what magnetic quality there could be about a man that focussed a woman's attention upon him whether she willed it or no. Why should she feel an oddly-disturbing thrill at the mere physical nearness of this fair-haired stranger? She did. There was no debating that. And she wondered--wondered if a bolt of that lightning she had dreaded ever since her marriage was about to strike her now. She hoped not. All her emotions had lain fallow. If Jack Fyfe had no power to stir her,--and she told herself Jack had so failed, without asking herself why,--then some other man might easily accomplish that, to her unutterable grief.

She had told herself many a time that no more terrible plight could overtake her than to love and be loved and sit with hands folded, foregoing it all. She shrank from so tragic an evolution. It meant only pain, the ache of unfulfilled, unattainable desires. If, she reflected cynically, this man beside her stood for such a motif in her life, he might better have left her out in the swamped canoe.

While she sat there, drawn-faced with the cold, thinking rather amazedly these things which she told herself she had no right to think, the launch slipped into the quiet nook of Cougar Bay and slowed down to the float.

Monohan helped her out, threw off the canoe's painter, and climbed back into the launch.

"You're as wet as I am," Stella said. "Won't you come up to the house and get a change of clothes? I haven't even thanked you."

"Nothing to be thanked for," he smiled up at her. "Only please remember not to get offsh.o.r.e in a canoe again. I mightn't be handy the next time--and Roaring Lake's as fickle as your charming s.e.x. All smiles one minute, storming the next. No, I won't stay this time, thanks. A little wet won't hurt me. I wasn't in the water long enough to get chilled, you know. I'll be home in half an hour. Run along and get dressed, Mrs.

Fyfe, and drink something hot to drive that chill away. Good-by."

Stella went up to the house, her hand tingling with his parting grip.

Over and above the peril she had escaped rose an uneasy vision of a greater peril to her peace of mind. The plat.i.tudes of soul-affinity, of irresistible magnetic attraction, of love that leaped full-blown into reality at the touch of a hand or the glance of an eye, she had always viewed with distrust, holding them the weaknesses of weak, volatile natures. But there was something about this man which had stirred her, nothing that he said or did, merely some elusive, personal attribute.

She had never undergone any such experience, and she puzzled over it now. A chance stranger, and his touch could make her pulse leap. It filled her with astonished dismay.

Afterward, dry-clad and warm, sitting in her pet chair, Jack Junior cooing at her from a nest among cus.h.i.+ons on the floor, the natural reaction set in, and she laughed at herself. When Fyfe came home, she told him lightly of her rescue.

He said nothing at first, only sat drumming on his chair-arm, his eyes steady on her.

"That might have cost you your life," he said at last. "Will you remember not to drift offsh.o.r.e again?"

"I rather think I shall," she responded. "It wasn't a pleasant experience."

"Monohan, eh?" he remarked after another interval. "So he's on Roaring Lake again."

"Do you know him?" she asked.

"Yes," he replied briefly.

For a minute or so longer he sat there, his face wearing its habitual impa.s.siveness. Then he got up, kissed her with a queer sort of intensity, and went put. Stella gazed after him, mildly surprised. It wasn't quite in his usual manner.

CHAPTER XV

A RESURRECTION

It might have been a week or so later that Stella made a discovery which profoundly affected the whole current of her thought. The long twilight was just beginning. She was curled on the living-room floor, playing with the baby. Fyfe and Charlie Benton sat by a window, smoking, conversing, as they frequently did, upon certain phases of the timber industry. A draft from an open window fluttered some sheet music down off the piano rack, and Stella rescued it from Jack Junior's tiny, clawing hands. Some of the Abbeys had been there the evening before. One bit of music was a song Linda had tried to sing and given up because it soared above her vocal range. Stella rose to put up the music. Without any premeditated idea of playing, she sat down at the piano and began to run over the accompaniment. She could play pa.s.sably.

"That doesn't seem so very hard," she thought aloud. Benton turned at sound of her words.

"Say, did you never get any part of your voice back, Stell?" he asked.

"I never hear you try to sing."

"No," she answered. "I tried and tried long after you left home, but it was always the same old story. I haven't sung a note in five years."

"Linda fell down hard on that song last night," he went on. "There was a time when that wouldn't have been a starter for you, eh? Did you know Stella used to warble like a prima donna, Jack?"

Fyfe shook his head.

"Fact. The governor spent a pot of money cultivating her voice. It was some voice, too. She--"

He broke off to listen. Stella was humming the words of the song, her fingers picking at the melody instead of the accompaniment.

"Why, you can," Benton cried.

"Can what?" She turned on the stool.

"Sing, of course. You got that high trill that Linda had to screech through. You got it perfectly, without effort."

"I didn't," she returned. "Why, I wasn't singing, just humming it over."