Big Timber Part 9

But she did not go. Benton left to make his delivery to the mill company, the great boom of logs gliding slowly along in the wake of a tug, the _Chickamin_ in attendance. Benton's crew accompanied the boom.

Fyfe's gang loaded their donkey and gear aboard the scow and went home.

The bay lay all deserted, the woods silent. For the first time in three months she had all her hours free, only her own wants to satisfy. Katy John spent most of her time in the smoky camp of her people. Stella loafed. For two days she did nothing, gave herself up to a physical torpor she had never known before. She did not want to read, to walk about, or even lift her eyes to the bold mountains that loomed ma.s.sive across the lake. It was enough to lie curled among pillows under the alder and stare drowsily at the blue September sky, half aware of the drone of a breeze in the firs, the flutter of birds' wings, and the lap of water on the beach.

Presently, however, the old restless energy revived. The spring came back to her step and she shed that lethargy like a cast-off garment. And in so doing her spirit rose in hot rebellion against being a prisoner to deadening drudgery, against being shut away from all the teeming life that throve and trafficked beyond the solitude in which she sat immured.

When Charlie came back, there was going to be a change. She repeated that to herself with determination. Between whiles she rambled about in the littered clearing, prowled along the beaches, and paddled now and then far outside the bay in a flat-bottomed skiff, restless, full of plans. So far as she saw, she would have to face some city alone, but she viewed that prospect with a total absence of the helpless feeling which hara.s.sed her so when she first took train for her brother's camp.

She had pa.s.sed through what she termed a culinary inferno. Nothing, she considered, could be beyond her after that unremitting drudgery.

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

Altogether it was ten days before the _Chickamin_ whistled up the bay.

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

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

"All right," she answered coolly. "You evidently celebrated your log delivery in the accepted fas.h.i.+on."

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

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

"How many extra?" she asked mechanically.

"Thirty men, all told," Benton returned briskly. "I tell you I'm sure going to rip the heart out of this limit before spring. I've signed up a six-million-foot contract for delivery as soon as the logs'll go over Roaring Rapids in the spring. Remember what I told you when you came?

You stick with me, and you'll wear diamonds. I stand to clean up twenty thousand on the winter's work."

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

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

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

"You look like a peach in that thing." He stood off a pace to admire.

"You're some dame, Stell, when you get on your glad rags."

She frowned at her image in the gla.s.s behind the closed door of her room as she set about unfastening the linen dress she had worn that afternoon. Deep in her trunk, along with much other unused finery, it had reposed all summer. That ingrained instinct to be admired, to be garbed fittingly and well, came back to her as soon as she was rested.

And though there were none but squirrels and bluejays and occasionally Katy John to cast admiring eyes upon her, it had pleased her for a week to wear her best, and wander about the beaches and among the dusky trunks of giant fir, a picture of blooming, well-groomed womanhood. She took off the dress and threw it on the bed with a resentful rush of feeling. The treadmill gaped for her again. But not for long. She was through with that. She was glad that Charlie's prospects pleased him. He could not call on her to help him out of a hole now. She would tell him her decision to-night. And as soon as he could get a cook to fill her place, then good-by to Roaring Lake, good-by to kitchen smells and flies and sixteen hours a day over a hot stove.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IX

JACK FYFE'S CAMP

She was still hot with the spirit of mutiny when morning came, but she cooked breakfast. It was not in her to act like a petulant child.

Morning also brought a different aspect to things, for Charlie told her while he helped prepare breakfast that he was going to take his crew and repay in labor the help Jack Fyfe had given him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She craved, without being wholly aware of it, or altogether admitting it to herself, some human distraction in all that majestic solitude.

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

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