Carter shrugged. "Who knows? In the mean time--your traffic will be
suspended?"
Through all the superintendent had fidgeted nervously; now he broke in:
"Pish, man! We'll build round your old train in six hours."
"Will you?" Without even a glance in his direction, Carter ran on,
addressing the manager: "You see, land is that cheap since the boom that
we took options on a right of way from Prairie clean up to the north
pole and down to the American border. No, you won't go around us, but
we shall go round you and come into this burg south of your tracks."
"But you're out of law," the superintendent angrily persisted. "You
haven't the shadow of a right--"
"Oh, shut up, Sparks," the manager impatiently interrupted. "What has
right to do with it? He's got us in the door and it's no use squealing.
Now"--the glance he turned on Carter was evenly compounded of hostility
and admiration--"terms? You'll release our train--"
"When you cede our legal crossing, and call off your dogs. We'll hold
Prairie till every man Jack of your guards is shipped out of the city."
"Could you have the papers drawn--" He had intended "to-night," but he
paused as Greer drew them from an inner pocket and his iron calm
dissolved in comical disgust. "Hum! You're not timid about grabbing
time by the forelock. But, let me see!"
Once more the arc lights could be heard sputtering. In that tense moment
their own fortunes swung in the balance with the welfare of a province,
and while the manager read they waited in silence. Trimming the end of
a cigar with careful precision, Carter masked all feeling, but the
partners could not hide their nervousness--Smythe fidgeted, Greer locked
and unlocked clasped fingers. Both held their breath till the manager's
pen made a rough scratch on the silence.
A good loser, he said, as Greer rose after buttoning his coat over the
precious document: "Don't go, gentlemen--at least till we have drunk the
occasion. I see another bottle there in the ice."
And his toast, "To our next merry meeting," formed the premise of the
deduction which Carter returned to Greer's relieved exclamation when
they stood, at last, alone in the street.
"Thank God! It is over!"
"On the contrary, it is just begun."
Passing under a street lamp, its white light revealed the pale
disturbance which banished the senior partner's flushed content.
Stopping dead, he agitatedly seized Carter's arm.
"You don't suppose he will go back on his--"
"Signature? No, he won't repeat. He's done with the crossing."
"Then we can weather through," Greer said, and Smythe echoed his sigh of
relief.
"But--" Carter quoted the bucolic proverb which recites the many ways in
which a pig may be killed other than by a surfeit of butter.
"But what _can_ he do?" Greer persisted.
"Don't know," Carter slowly answered. "Only a man don't have to look at
that bull-dog jaw of his a second time to know that he'll do it, and do
it quick."
"I'd give a good deal to know," Smythe frowned, then smoothed his
knotted brow as he laughed at Carter's rejoinder.
"I'd give three cents myself."
Not feeling sleepy, Carter walked on after he had dropped the partners
at their respective doors, aimlessly threading the dark streets that
gave back his hollow foot-fall; and so passing, by chance, under Helen's
window, he brought a pause in the anxious meditation which had kept her
restlessly tossing, and set her to momentary speculations as to the
owner of that firm and heavy tread. She listened, listened till it grew
fainter and died as he turned the corner. Keeping on in the cool
silence, he presently came to the Red River suspension bridge, where he
paused and leaned on the parapet at the very spot from which she loved
to watch Indians and chattering squaws float beneath in quaint birch
canoes. There was, of course, nothing to warn him of the fact any more
than she could have guessed him as owner of the solitary foot-fall. He
thought of her, to be sure. Always she stood in the background, ready
to claim him whenever press of affairs permitted reflection; and now she
thrust in between him and the twinkling lights of the sleeping city.
Where was she? And doing--what? How much longer before he could go in
search of her? After long musing he swept the weary intervening days
away with an impatient gesture, and his longing took form in muttered
speech:
"How long? My God! how much longer?"
The thought brought him back to his work and the events of the evening.
What would be the manager's next move? He gazed down into the dark
river intently, as though he expected its hoarse voice to give answer.
But though he canvassed, as he thought, every possibility, the
reality--which presented itself a week or so after he resumed operations
in the Silver Creek forests--was beyond the range of his thought.
*XXVIII*
*THE STRIKE*
As aforesaid, it was the unexpected that opposed Carter with a visage of
stony calm when he came from Winnipeg out to the "Ragged Lands" a week
or so later. For whereas he had left the camp convulsed in throes of
constructive labor, the whistle of his engine raised piercing echoes; no
other sounds disturbed the sleeping forest. In the cut south of the
camp he passed the big digger, at rest from the roar, rattle, and clank
of chains, hiss of escaping steam. The pile-driver loomed idly on a
distant trestle. When engine and caboose stopped opposite the
cook-house, he saw that the camp--which ought to have been empty--teemed
with men.
He shrugged when Hart, who was with him, exclaimed in wonder: "Can't
prove it by me. But we'll soon know. There's Bender--coming from the
office."
"Strike," the giant replied to their questioning. "Teamsters, graders,
bridge and track men, all went out at noon. What for? God knows; but I
allow that Buckle could tell. He wasn't hanging round the Winnipeg camp
for nothing. I'm sorry now--" His bunched fists, big as mauls, fully
explained his regret, and indicating a group which was arranging its
progress so as to make the office door with Carter, he finished: "But if
you're hankering for reasons, consult them gentlemen. It's a
depytation--by its scowl. An' it's loaded to the muzzle with statistics
to fire at you."
Following his finger, Carter noted that Michigan Red was of the
deputation, but when it ranged up at the tent door in sheepish yet
defiant array, that worthy hung modestly in the rear, permitting a big
teamster from the Silver Creek settlements to act as spokesman. Blunt,
honest, tenacious as a bull-dog in holding to an idea, the man was an
ideal tool for unscrupulous hands; but though he instantly divined the
reasons behind his leadership, Carter listened quietly to his tale--the
old tale--overwork, poor food, underpay.
His answer was equally quiet. "You are certainly to be pitied, Bill;
breaks me all up just to think of your wrongs. I've always admired your
thrift, and I sympathize with your desire to raise the mortgage off your
farm. Took you five years to put it on, didn't it, Bill? And you are
calculating to pay it off in the next two months. Well, perhaps--but
you'll have to screw it out of some one else than me."
Shuffling uneasily, the teamster glanced at his backers, who, equally
nonplussed, gazed at one another. For where an angry, or even a plain
answer would have merely incited them to dogged opposition, this quiet
ridicule sapped conceit in their cause, besides conveying an alarming
suggestion of strength in reserve.
"Then you don't allow to fall in with our notions?" The spokesman
returned after a whispered conference.
"Meaning--an hour less and a dollar more? You're sure a psychic, Bill;
plumb wasted on railroading. Open an office in town and go to
fortune-telling and you'd pull that plaster off your homestead inside a
month."
Assured that there was no hurry, that he could take a week to consider
the matter, he gravely added: "Obliged to you, Bill; but I don't allow
to require it. The world, you'll remember, was made in six days, and
this isn't near such a big job. No time like the present, and here's my
answer--same hours, same grub, same pay. It's fortune-telling or
present rates for yours, Bill."
Through all he entirely ignored the delegation, and now he leaned in the
door, idly watching as it made its way across the camp and was swallowed
in the crowd of strikers about the bunk-house. But his face fell as he
stepped inside beyond eye and ear shot. "Serious?" he repeated Hart's
question. "Couldn't be worse. Not one of those fellows could make a
quarter of the wages or live half as well on the farm, but they'd hog it
all if I died in the ditch. But there's more behind this than their
spite and greed. You see, we have just about pulled old Murray in for
funds to make a clean finish, and if he gets wind of this he'll crawfish
like a one-legged crow. I must go back at once. And you, Bender--you,
also, Hart--see to it that not even a dog crawls out of this camp until
I return."
"To keep these chaps guessing," he added, after a moment's dark
reflection, "I'd better slip out after dusk. You go over, Hart, and
whisper the engineer to back out and wait for me at the other side of
the cut. Mystery is good as aces up in any old game, and we can't fog
them too much."
Pulling out at dark, he made the run back to town--fifty miles--in an
hour and a quarter, reckless running on unballasted road. Murray _must_
be fully committed before the news leaked out. _We must get him, must
get him, must, must, must_! The wheels clicked it, the steam hissed it,
the fire roared it, the wind shrieked the imperative refrain. But
though Bender lived in the strict letter of his instructions so that a
mosquito could scarce have escaped from the camp; though a man could not
have made the distance in two days on foot, or a wild goose have passed
the throbbing engine as it bounded along that raw track, newsboys were
yet crying the strike as he came out on Main Street.
Feeling certain that the office would be closed at that hour, he
intended to go straight to Greer's house, but seeing a light in the
partners' room as he came opposite the building, he went in and found
Smythe there, alone. With lean legs thrust out before him, hands deep in
his pockets, shoulders hunched to his ears, his attitude incarnated deep
dejection; gloom resided in his nod.
"Greer?" he said. "At home--sick. You see, we were to have closed the
deal with Murray this very evening, and the disappointment just knocked
the old man out. He's been running altogether on his nerve lately;
something had to give. Why _couldn't_ this have happened a day later?"
Answering Carter's question, he went on: "We heard it at noon. Papers
got out an extra. Presses must have been running it off before you
left."
"Noon?" Carter whistled. "Why the men didn't quit till two!" Then as
the significance flashed upon him, he exclaimed: "Brass Bowels for a
million! It was all cut, dried, and laid away for us, and they served
it hot to the minute. Don't--it--beat--hell!"
His comical disgust caused Smythe a wintry grin, but, sobering, he said:
"I wouldn't mind so much for myself. I'm young enough to do it again.
But the old gentleman--with that nice family! You know he was just
about ready to retire; only took up this business from a strong sense of
public duty. And now, in his extremity, every rat financier in this
city runs to his hole in fear of the cat. The poor old man!"
Carter nodded his sympathy. On the occasions that he visited their
house, Greer's wife, a silver-haired old lady, had vied with her two
daughters in pleasant attentions. But it did not require that thought
to stir him to action.
"Oh, here!" he laughed. "We are not dead yet. To-morrow I'll go the
round of the employment offices and--"
Smythe threw up his hands, a gesture eloquent of despair. "Went round
myself--this afternoon. Harvest is on and men scarcer than diamonds.
Besides, Brass Bowels has left an order with every agency in town to
ship every man they can get west to the mountains."
"Um-m!" Carter thought a while. "Then we'll have to play the last
card."
"The last card?" Smythe raised his eyebrows.
"Yes, biggest trump in the pack. How long before--"
"Oh, they can't touch us for two months."
"Good! Now listen." Glancing around as though distrustful of the very
walls, he whispered in Smythe's ear for a minute that saw the latter's
dejection dissolve in new-born hope. "You must go with me," he
finished, aloud. "While you pack your grip, I'll drop round and see
Greer. He must be here to-morrow to carry out the bluff. And
hurry--for we must make it down and back before we are missed."
*XXIX*
*THE BLUFF*
It was the fifth day of the strike, and still no sound of labor
disturbed the sleeping forest. Quiet and calm, like that of the
Sabbath, brooded over the camp, but not its peace, for, being well
rested, the strikers chafed under inaction, moving restlessly among the
buildings. Michigan Red, to be sure, was dealing interminable poker on
a blanket under a tree, while the younger men skylarked or tried one
another out in games, but neither forms of amusement appealed to the
older and more thrifty Canadians. Secret disquiet, moreover, underlay
even the nonchalance of the gamblers, for Bender's mysterious looks and
Carter's continued absence were rapidly disintegrating the strikers'
confidence.
"He ain't here," the giant had answered, when the committee had called
for another conference, and to further questioning he had returned an
irritating grin. "When will he be back? That's for us to know an' you
to find out." And so, shorn of its functions, the committee had
languished like a moulting peacock. In addition, the cook's ominous
visage at meal-times bade the strikers beware that the curse of labor
still clung to the fruits of the earth; and the fact that almost a
month's back pay rested in Carter's hands, served as a text and lent
force to the unpreached sermon. What if he never came back? The
history of Western construction abounded with cases of absconding
contractors, and the hostility of the monopoly lent substance to the
doubt. Most of them would have hailed Carter's advent, just then, with
real if secret pleasure, and the general uneasiness manifested itself in
a grumbling remark made as Michigan Red raked a fat "jack-pot" into his
winnings.
"You're the only one that's making anything these days."
"That's right," another grumbler added. "An' what's more, if we're out
another five days the raise won't pull us even by freeze-up. Ten days
lost at three-fifty is thirty-five dollars. Take the extra dollar seven
weeks to make it up--if the frost holds off that long."
Apparently indifferent, Michigan went on with his deal. "You're hell at
figures, Chalky. Where'd you learn? Figuring interest on your
mortgage? How many cards, Bill?"
But Bill, spokesman of the committee, laid down his hand. "Look here,
Red! Chalky's right. If we hadn't struck we'd have had a pay-day
yesterday, an' if we're standing to lose that much we can't call it off
too soon for me."
"Nor me."
"Nor me." The voices, pitched in altercation, had brought the idlers
crowding, and the support came in from all around.
Michigan's teeth gleamed white through his red beard while his bleak
eyes took stock of the crowding faces as though calculating just how far
envy and avarice would take them. "You don't stand to lose a cent,
Bill. They've got to finish the contrac' before freeze-up to reach the
tie an' lumber-camps. Otherwise the road 'll be idle all winter, an'
what's a few days' pay alongside the freight on a hundred million feet
of lumber. He's got to finish it. If he kain't"--pausing, he
distributed a significant nod around the circle--"there's others as kin
an' will."
"But what if he don't come back?"
To the question which expressed the most pregnant doubt, he returned a
second meaning nod. "Same folks 'll make good."
"Back pay?" Bill pressed.
"Back pay."
"On whose say so?"
"Ain't mine good enough?" Ruffling, he turned a stream of fierce
profanity upon Carrots Smith, his questioner. "Want Bible and oath for
yours, eh? There's some things that kain't be told to idiots--"
"Yes, yes, Red!" Bill soothed. "We know--that's all right, Red. Don't
mind him, he's only a suckling kid."
"Sure, Red! You know what you're talking about. Go on!" others
chorused, and having gained his point by the show of anger, real or
false, the teamster allowed himself to be placated.
"If 'twas necessary," he continued, "we could tie up the road with a
laborer's lien. But 'twon't be--I have somebody's word for it. If
Carter goes under, we jes' go right on."
"With the raise?"
"With the raise."
"But if he comes back?" Chalky raised another doubt. "What about lost
time? Freeze-up is freeze-up, an' we kain't make it up if we're docked
for the lay-off."
"That's easy. Who's to blame for it?" He threw it at the circle.
"Him! He wouldn't give the raise."
"Then let him pay for his fun. We've got him coming or going, an' we
draw time, at the new rates, for every idle day before we touch a tool.
Ain't that right?"
It was not, yet his crooked logic exactly matched their envious
cupidity. Confidence once more returned; the younger men returned to
their sports; Bill picked up his hand, and the game proceeded until
interrupted, a half-hour later, by a sudden shout and shrill neighing
from the horse lines.
"The stallion's loose!"
Shouting, the roustabout tore across the clearing and just escaped the
rush of the vicious brute by nimbly climbing the projecting logs at the
cook-house corners. At his cry, a youth dropped the shot he had poised
for a throw, the gamblers their cards, and, balking in the take-off for
a broad jump, Carrots Smith led the rush for cover. A minute saw them
all on top of cook or bunk houses, and thus defrauded of his preference,
the stallion ran amuck among the horses which were tied at long
hay-racks, kicking, rearing, biting. Though built massively of logs,
the racks gave way with splintering crashes under the combined pull of a
hundred frightened beasts; and bunching, the string tore round the
clearing, squealing their fear.
To give the beast ease with his oats, Michigan had removed the iron
muzzle according to his custom, and now, a free, wild thing, he bounded
along in hot pursuit, curveting, caracoling, satanic in his jet-black
beauty. Tossing his wild mane, he would call the mares with stridulous
cachinnations, yet for all his exultant passion left them to chase a
belated teamster, nose lowered, ears wickedly pricked, thrice around the
cook-house. Balked again, he reared, kicked, and was plunging once more
after the string when a whistle outshrilled his neigh, and an engine
with caboose attached rolled out of the cut south of the camp.
But for the pounding hoofs, the collective whisper, "It's the boss!"
would have carried to Carter, who, with Smythe, stood looking out at the
door of the caboose; and his first remark, "Regular circus, isn't it?"
was eminently applicable to the situation. Upholding the sky's blue
roof, black spruce cones formed bulky pillars for the natural
amphitheatre in which the horses circled and recircled, a kicking,
squealing stream, before the audience on the roofs.
"Where are you going?" Smythe exclaimed, as Carter leaped to the ground.
"To rope that beast before he runs a season's flesh off the teams.
There's a riata in the office."
"Better shoot him," Smythe counselled. "Here! come back!" But he was
already half-way across the clearing.
Choosing his time, he passed from the smithy to the bunk-house, thence
to the cook-house, and so working from building to building under the
eyes of his men, he gained the office at last and shot in, barely
escaping the mad cavalcade. As he emerged, coiling the riata, Smythe's
gaze drew to a second actor in this woodland drama.
When the poker players broke for cover, Michigan Red had paused long
enough to pocket the stakes along with his winnings, then picking up the
blanket he walked over to the cook-house, and had watched all from the
angle formed by the jutting corner logs. "A bit closer would have
suited better," he had grumbled, as Carter's last rush carried him from
under the hoofs. Now he commented: "Going to rope him, are you? Not if
I know it." Knowledge of his fellows' liability to lapses of
hero-worship inhered in his conclusion. "If there's to be gran'stan'
plays I'll make 'em myself."
"Fools!" he snarled, as the beat of feet warned him that the strikers on
the roof were watching Carter, who had taken position behind the next
corner. He heard also the swish of the circling noose, its quickened
whir as the horses swooped around on the next lap; then, just as the
band passed, he sprang out, uttering a sudden harsh command, directly in
the stallion's path.
A desperate play, it drew gambler's luck. A frontier superstition has
it that the equine eye magnifies objects, and whether or no the red
teamster with his pale-green face loomed in the stallion's sight as some
huge and passionate fiend, he reared back on strung haunches, ploughing
the sod in a desperate effort to stop; and while he hung in mid-air,
Michigan stepped and threw his blanket, matador-fashion, over the ugly
head. As the brute settled on all-fours and stood shivering, Michigan
turned, grinning, to reap the fruit of his daring.
But his grin quickly faded, for, flashing on to his purpose, Carter had
swung and roped the rat-tailed mare, the stallion's mate, as the band
flew by. Worse! Michigan choked. Almost every man in camp had a grudge
against the mare, some vicious lunge or graze from her snapping teeth,
so a dozen strikers had jumped and were helping Carter to choke her
down, while the others cheered them on with approving laughter.
Furious, he yelled: "What's the matter with you chaps up there? Taken
to roosting like chickens? I'd like a picture of the bunch, it ud pass
anywhere for a Methodist convention. An' you fellows quit yanking that
mare. 'Tain't tug-o'-war you're playing." But he made small headway
against the uproarious tide of yells and laughter, and, remembering his
snub, Carrots Smith shouted back, "She's doin' most of the pulling, an'
if she wants to hang, why let her."
Worst of all, it was Carter who finally interfered on behalf of the
struggling brute, and Michigan chafed at the ready obedience accorded
his orders.
"Thought you fellows was on strike?" he growled at Brady, the Irish
teamster, as he retied the stallion in the horse lines.
But wrathfully indicating a bloody bruise on his own horse, the Irishman
hotly retorted, "Faith, thin, an' that's no sign that we'll be lettin'
them murthering brutes av yourn chew the necks av our teams? If they
was mine, I'd make wolf-meat av the pair before supper."
Michigan sneered. "Didn't I ketch him myself? An' then you fellows had
to go running your legs off to suit him. Keep it up, an' it's you an'
your strike that'll be made into hash for his supper."
While Michigan thus tried to scotch incipient sympathy with rough
sarcasm, Carter carried with him to the office the comfortable assurance
that fortune had turned down to him this accidental trick in a difficult
game. Shrugging deprecation of Hart's admiring comments on his skill
with the riata, he returned a reminiscence of his cowpunching days to
Smythe's chidings, asserting that the stallion was not a circumstance to
a long-horn steer on an open prairie. While talking, he helped to
arrange the contents of Smythe's grip on the rough table, piling
greenbacks by denominations between flanking columns of silver, an
imposing array.
"No hurry," he said, when Hart asked if he should call the men, and,
lighting a cigar, he drawled a story which at one time explained his
reason and illumined his plan. "I remember a kid who won three sizes
out of his class by a little judicious waiting. His dad had set him a
spading stint in the back lot, and when this other boy brings-to on the
sidewalk and begins to heave belligerencies over the fence, he answers,
that calm and deliberate that you'd never think he was burying his heart
under every spadeful, 'Jes' you wait till I finish my patch.' And he
goes on digging so cheerfully that the other kid is a mite staggered.
As I say, he was about three sizes to the good, but as you'll remember,
Napoleon's Old Guard could put it all over a young lady's seminary for
hysteria if it was kept too long waiting. Watching that slow spade, this
lad's imagination went to working so hard that he fought that fight
thirteen times in as many minutes, and felt that used up he just ran
like a March hare when the other kid stuck his spade in the trench. The
wise kid?" He twinkled on Hart. "I was that glad, I played hookey from
school an' won a licking from the old man five sizes larger than I'd
have got from the boy. But it was worth it. I learned that it always
pays to give it time to soak in."
Outside the strikers furnished a vivid illustration of that lesson
during the next three hours he kept them waiting. Grouping, they made
loud mouths at first, over supposititious wrongs or affected
indifference that was belied by uneasy glances officeward. Less
loquacious at the end of the first hour, the second left them sullen and
silent; the third, eaten by suspense. They started, as at a sudden
explosion, when Bender finally came out; stared blankly when he
announced that the boss was waiting to pay off the camp.
Affording no time for recovery, Hart called the first name on the
pay-roll, and Bender's stentorian bass sent it rolling into the woods.
"Anderson! Anderson! Hurry up, Anderson!"
The name chanced to be the property of Bill, the spokesman, but though
used as little as his Sunday clothes, there was more than unfamiliarity
behind his slowness. More tenacious of idea, as aforesaid, than quick
of wit, Bill now found himself without plan, precedent, or time for
counsel in these unexpected premises, nor could he draw inspiration from
the blank looks of his fellows.
"Hurry up, Anderson!" Bender crossly repeated; and starting as though
touched in some secret spring, Bill lurched forward and in, and so found
himself facing Carter, Hart, and Smythe behind an awesome financial
array.
Never before had Bill seen so much money at once--even in dreams; it
totalled more than the hard earnings of his forty-odd years; would have
paid his mortgage ten times over. The substance of modern power, its
glitter challenged the loud-mouthed assertions of him and his fellows
that, given the same luck, they could have done as well as Carter. By
the light of its golden glow, Bill saw himself very weak and small and
foolish. At home he seldom saw a dollar; had trouble in scraping up
currency enough to pay his taxes, and effected his barterings at the
store in truck and trade. With his doubts settled as to the solvency of
the firm, Bill was suddenly afflicted with a suspicion that he had made
the biggest kind of a fool of himself.
Correctly interpreting his glance at the table, Carter gave him a genial
smile. "Yes, Bill; but you don't get it by laying off. Here's your
bit. Touch the pen and-- Five dollars short? Board and feed for five
days, Bill. Man earns his bread by the sweat of his brow, you know. Pass
on, and don't forget to remember me to your wife when you gain home."
As with Bill, so the others. Filing in, they testified, one by deeper
sullenness, others by attempts at a swagger, to the influences which had
wrought on him. Few attained the easy insolence of Michigan Red, who
demanded an itemized account of his store bill and insisted on signing
the roll with his own hand. Touching the pen, railroad fashion, they
passed out, while Hart signed for them, to add their doubtings to the
general mystification.
What was forward? Had Carter obtained new crews, or would the company
close down work? As the line still fell thirty miles short of the
northern settlements, the latter thought filled the minds of the Silver
Creek men, who saw themselves left marketless by their own act, with
sick misery; brought pause to their envious cupidity, despite Michigan's
assurances that it was all a bluff.
"'Tain't," Bill Anderson contradicted him. "I was just over to the
cook-house for a drink, an' the cook has orders to serve no meals after
breakfast to-morrow morning."
"That so?" a dozen voices questioned.
"Ask for yourselves. He's at the door now calling to supper."
And the cook confirmed the report, adding, moreover, his mite to their
discomfiture by malignantly animadverting upon the menages to which they
were about to return. "My cooking don't suit, eh?" demanded the
offended artist. "It's pertatoes an' sow-belly for yours after this.
In a month you won't be able to tell your ribs from a rail corral." And
truth so flavored his railings that they saw, in fancy, themselves
looking back from their prairie farms upon his rude but plentiful
fleshpots--at which ripe moment the door opened to admit Carter, Smythe,
and Bender.
Pausing at the end of the centre table, Carter glanced over the rows of
faces which turned curiously up to him as on the occasion that marked
the beginnings of his fight for mastery in the cook-house at the winter
camp. Very fittingly, setting and persona for this last act of a long
struggle were almost the same as the first. Hines and the Cougar, to be
sure, were gone over the Great Divide. Strangers sat in place of Shinn
and the handful that returned to their farms after the log-drive. But
here were the tables, a-bristle with tinware; dim lanterns, dependent
from the low pole-roof; the faces, peering from Rembrandt shadows,
fiercely animal, pregnant with possibilities such as have reddened the
snows of many a forest camp. Overlooking them now, at the climax of a
year-long play, he could not but thrill to the thought that whereas they
had opposed him at every turn, those iron _impresarios_, the Fates, had
left choice of endings with him, author of the drama. It was his to
crush or spare--to crush and gain the cringing respect which they
accorded to frost, drought, pestilence, stern henchmen of the
illimitable; to spare and attain next place to a fair potato-crop in
their esteem; to manage them for their and his own good.
To the latter end he bent his words, addressing them, half jocularly, in
their own argot. "Well, boys, we've played our game to a finish, but
before we throw away the deck let's count tricks. I don't blame you for
striking. You have a right to sell your labor in the dearest market as
I have to buy mine in the cheapest. You simply asked more than I felt
able to pay, so while you rested I took a jaunt down to the States to
see how you stood on the market. What did I find? First let us take a
look at your hand.
"What do you hold? Harvest is half over and the wheat farmers from the
Portage to Brandon and down to the Pipestone have hired their help at
two dollars a day. No betterment there. You can't break prairie in the
fall, so there's nothing at home except eating, and the lumber-camps
don't open up before the snows. On the other hand, your stake in this
line is as big as mine. Unfinished, you are without the markets you have
been shouting for these years; finished, it lets in American competition
and trebles your values in land." Pausing, he shook his head, and
smiling, went on: "Looks as if some one had dealt you a miserable hand,
and I wonder if it wouldn't pay you to shuffle, cut, and try another
deal? Now before I bring in new crews--"
"New crews? Where kin you get them?"
All through the men had given close attention, and after a single
impatient glance at Michigan Red the faces turned back to Carter, who
ignored the interruption. Leaning eagerly forward, they took the words
from his mouth as he ran on roughly outlining his own plans, prospecting
the coming years. Few of them, perhaps none, were given to looking
beyond the present, and the vista to which he turned their dull eyes
glimmered like sunshine on the prairies. This was to be no casual job!
The province, ay, and the whole Northwest, required branch roads; would
be gridironed with them before the finish! So what of construction in
summer, logging in winter, they could look for profitable employment the
round of the seasons!
"So talk it over among yourselves," he finished, "and those who feel
that a fresh deal is in order can call round at the office after
supper."
Long before that, nods and approving murmurs had testified to his
victory, and as the burr of hot tongues followed them out through the
open windows, Bender exclaimed: "Whipped to a finish! But what about
them new crews?" Then catching Carter's grin, he burst out in
uproarious laughter. "What a bluff!"
"Not a man in Minneapolis," Carter confirmed. "But that wasn't what we
went down for. So it didn't matter."
"But will they believe it?" Smythe asked.
"Believe it?" Bender took it upon himself to answer it. "A frightened
man will run from his shadow, an' they're that badly scared 'twon't take
them five minutes to locate them crews."
He gave them, indeed, too much time, for, as he said, fear destroys
perspective and the strikers were almost ready to believe that Carter
could conjure men from the trackless forest.
Carrots Smith led the panic with a theory, even as he had headed the run
from Michigan's horse. "Said he'd been prospectin' down in the States?
Minneapolis, I'll bet you, an' the place jes' rotten with whaleback
Swedes."
"Sawyer's gang is through with the N.P.'s Devil's Lake extension,"
another added. "I read it in the paper Sunday. Old Sawyer ud on'y be
too glad for a chance to finish out the fall."
Other theories were not wanting, nor could Michigan Red stem the rout.
Just twenty minutes thereafter a sheepish delegation presented itself at
the office door and delivered itself through the mouth of Bill of the
Anderson ilk.
"We've concluded," said Bill, "as 'twouldn't hardly be right to leave
you ditched."
Albeit Carter's eyes returned Hart's twinkle, he replied in kind. "I'm
real tickled to think that you won't desert me."
And so, with this bit of diplomatic comedy, ended not only the strike,
but also the bitter fight which he, like every village Hampden, had had
to wage against the envious ignorance of his fellows. For a while, to
be sure, their stiff necks would balk at the homage secret consciousness
dictated as his meed. They would refuse it, indeed, till the world
outside sealed his success; whereafter every man of them would proclaim
himself as the particular prophet who had discerned greatness in his
humble beginnings. But in the mean time they would refrain from further
hostilities.
"What about that Red man?" Smythe said, as the delegation made its
jubilant way back to its fellows. "You'll surely discharge _him_?"
"Michigan Red?" Carter said. "Not if he wants to stay. His team is
worth any two in camp, and his teeth are drawn for good. But he won't
stay."
"That's a cinch," Bender echoed. "He's due in Winnipeg to report his
failure sometime in the next three days."
*XXX*
*FIRE*
Dawn saw the strikers going about their chores with a cheerful alacrity
that was as gall to Michigan Red, who chewed the bitter cud of
unsuccessful leadership as he sat drumming his heels on a block by the
cook-house door. He had come to the end of his rope--rather, dangled
there, an object of contemptuous pity in the eyes of his fellows. Had
he doubted the fact, it was to be easily read in their studied
avoidance; but he knew that he had failed--in what? He could hardly
have answered the question himself; for whether or no he had plotted in
the monopoly's interest, the strike was merely incidental to the
persistent war he had waged against Carter, to the dogged opposition
which had root in the turbulent anarchism of his nature. Sufficient
that though his weird face held its usual bleak calm, he writhed,
mentally, under defeat, while the few who ventured within range of his
tongue sensed the lava beneath the crust.
"Not with this crowd. I draw the color line," he rasped, when Anderson
inquired if he were not going to work, while Carrots Smith drew a curse
along with the information, "It's me for a better job. I'm tired of
herding sheep." So now he was left strictly alone, though speculative
glances travelled often his way.
"He's waiting for the boss," a teamster remarked to his neighbor. "Say,
I'd like to see 'em at grips!"
"Rather him nor me," the other said, expressing general opinion. "The
boss is a tough proposition. They say he beat Shinn up so badly that
he'll never be more 'n half a man again. Red ain't no slouch, though.
Bet you I'd like to see it."
However, as tools had to be reissued and a hundred details despatched,
the men were all at work before Carter could come to breakfast, so only
Smythe and the cook witnessed that meeting.
It was a beautiful day. Already the heat fulfilled the prediction of a
torrid sunrise, and, like an egg in a pan, the camp fried within the
encircling spruce which, on their part, seemed to lift over surrounding
birch and poplar as though tiptoeing for cooler air. The same errand
had brought the cook out from the bowels of his own particular inferno,
and as certain phases of the encounter could not be set forth in choicer
terms than those in which he delivered himself to an interested audience
that evening, now let him speak.
"I was sitting in the doorway, that close to Red I could have pulled his
ear, when the boss kem along. Stopping opposite, he looked down on Red
with eyes dark and steady as night. They're blue, you know, by rights,
but they seemed to darken to pure black, an' I never felt him so tall
before.
"'Well, Red?' he says, quiet, like that; but Red's eyes stayed down,
though his lip lifted clear of his corner teeth like you've seen a
trapped coyote, and so the pair of 'em remained for a full three
minutes."
Imagine them--the greenish face of the one reflecting murderous passion,
troubled as waves on shaken acid; the other darkly silent, yet, for all
his quiet, oppressing both Smythe and the cook with the loom of imminent
death. So was fought out the silent duel of personalities--one minute,
two; at the third, sweat broke profusely upon the teamster's face, and
the cook breathed once more. Burning with Cain's lust, his glance
travelled but once above the other's knee, to fall as quickly again.
"What's the matter, Red?" Smythe actually started as Carter's voice
broke on the quiet of the camp. "Quitting? What for?"
"No, it isn't _exactly_ my business," he cheerfully answered the
teamster's growl. "If you will, you will." Turning back after
entering, he added: "Heading for Winnipeg, I suppose? Then give my
compliments to Friend Buckle and tell him to please hand them higher
up."
When he came out Michigan was still there, but Carter passed without a
glance, and led Smythe down the right of way into the forest. Even then
Michigan sat on. It was, indeed, almost noon before he loafed over to
the horse lines, after refusing the cook's invitation to wait for
dinner. Without returning a word of thanks for the grub-sack which the
latter sent over by a cookee, he hitched to his wagon and drove slowly
away.
A week's rest had freshened the blacks so much that, if given their
heads, they would have covered half the distance to Winnipeg that day.
But he took a vicious pleasure in balking their inclination. Jerking
the bits, which hinged on a cruel curb, he pulled them down to a
nervous, teetering walk.
For a while the trail paralleled the right of way, then swung on a wide
arc around a morass, and for an hour thereafter ran alternately among
sloughs, sand-hills, muskegs, through a country indescribably desolate
and which teemed with savage life. Myriad frogs set his ears singing
with dismal, persistent croaking; a pole-cat scuttled across the trail,
poisoning the dank air. From brazen skies a hawk shrieked a malediction
upon his head; his horses threw up their heads, snorting, as a lynx
screamed a long way off. Here, too, dark woods shut off errant breezes
and he fell a prey to a curse of sand-flies that stung and envenomed his
flesh. There was no escape. They settled, by hundreds, on the hands
that wiped them off his face; stung his face as he slapped his hands.
Coming back, mad with pain and rage, from this detour, his eyes drew to
a trestle--longest, highest, most expensive of Carter's works--and,
reining in, he allowed his glance to wander lustfully over the stout
timbers which his fancy wrapped in flame. A single match--but reason
urged that the embers would undoubtedly furnish red lights for his
hanging, and he drove on, hotter, madder for the restraint. He was ripe
for any mischief that offered a running chance of escape, when, midway
of the afternoon, he came on wheel-tracks that swung at right angles
from the trail into a chain of sloughs.
"Red River cart," he muttered, noticing the wide gauge; then, furiously
slapping his thigh, "Carter's Cree, by G--!"
He meant the Indian who had brought in the venison which formed the
tidbit at Dorothy Chester's first meal in camp. All through the summer
he had come in with deer-meat twice or thrice a week, but though
Michigan and other teamsters had searched for his tepee during the idle
days of the strike, no one had penetrated to the woodland lake where his
squaw--a young girl, handsome, as Indian women go--was free from rude
glances, safe from insult or worse. Now the trail lay, plain as a
pike-road, under Michigan's nose; and, leaping down, he tied his team to
a tree and followed it along the sloughs.
Through a gully, patch of woodland, the tracks led into a second long
slough, and presently debouched on the strand of a small lake, one of
the thousands that gem that black wilderness. Bird-haunted in spring,
lonesomeness now lay thick upon it. Uttering its weird cry, a loon rose
on swift wing, angling in its flight over the tepee, whose bull's hide,
raw, smoke-blacked, harmonized with that savage setting.
Just then Michigan was in fettle to exact a vicarious revenge. Early in
summer Carter had nipped a disposition on the part of his men to joke
and make free with the Indian, giving strict orders that he was to be
unmolested, coming or going. This girl who lived in his protecting
shadow would have fared ill at Michigan's hands. But the tepee flaps
were thrown wide, and though he strained his eyes from a covert of tall
reeds, he saw no sign of her, without or within. Save the lipping of
waters, sough of a rising wind, no sound broke the solitude that guarded
this, the lair of primitive man. Only those who have experienced its
frightful loneliness can know how terrible a northern solitude can be;
how awesome, oppressive. Some note of it caused the teamster to speak
aloud, heartening himself with sound of his voice.
"They'll be back to-night, sure, for the ashes is banked over the
embers."
Gaining back to his team, he drove on a scant quarter-mile, then turned
into a slough parallel to those he had just left, and which had its end
in a wooded dell. Here high banks would have effectually screened a
fire, yet he endured mosquitoes till dusk smothered his smudge. Then
tying his team in the thick of its reek, he cut across the intervening
bush and followed, as before, along the slough chain till he saw a dim
cloud quivering on the blackness ahead.
Beneath this, smoke from the Cree's fire, presently appeared a rich
incandescence, and after worming the last yards on the flat of his
belly, Michigan peered from thick sedge out at the Cree woman, who sat
and suckled her child by the fire that enriched the bronze of her bosom
with a blush from its glow. A free, wild thing, her deep eyes now
caressed her child, again searched the fire's red mystery, giving back
its flame as forest pools reflect a hunter's flare; sombre and silent,
eons of savagery flickered in her glance.
From her the watcher's evil face turned to the Cree, who was skinning a
deer that hung by the hams from a poplar crotch. The heavy, clammy odor
of fresh blood hung thick in the air, filled his nostrils as he lay,
like primitive man by the mouth of his enemy's cave, watching the knife
slip around the carcass. Savage could not have been more wicked of
intent. Again and again his hand gripped his own knife, always to fall
again at sight of the rifle that leaned against the Red River cart,
close to the Indian's hand. And thus he waited, baleful glance
flickering between man and woman, till the deer was dressed and loaded
upon the cart.
That modified without changing his purpose. "Going to camp first thing
in the morning," he thought, as he crawled away. "Always goes alone."
Back once more with his team, he kicked the wet grass from the smudge,
and after eating ravenously of the cook's provision by its flame, he
spread his blankets and lay down, head propped on his hand, back to his
team. He did not sleep; simply stared into the fire, or listened to the
varied voices of the night. Now there would be a sighing, breathing
among the trees, creaking of branches, soft rustlings. Then the night
would talk loudly on a hush as of death--a loon laughed at the owl's
solemn questioning, a fox barked among the sand-hills; the boom of a
bittern came in from some dark lake; he heard the lynx scream again,
loudly, shrilly, as a tortured child. Then the wind again, or a greater
hush in which he heard only the crackling of his fire as he replenished
its dying flame.
On these occasions a long trail of sparks would fly upward, and one, a
tiny ember, at last wrought a strange thing. Passing over and behind
him, it nested in the frazzle of tow at the knot of the stallion's
frayed halter; where it smoked and glowed, growing larger, brighter.
Lowering his ugly head, the beast sniffed at the strange red flower,
then backed away as it burst into a bouquet of flame under his coaxing
breath.
"Stan' still!" Michigan growled, without, however, looking around.
The stallion stood--till the end of the burned rope dropped to the
ground.
Even then some time elapsed before he realized that he was free; but
when he did--he turned white, wicked eyes on the resting man. Was that
short worm the fiend that had ruled him? He stepped.
"Stan' still!" Michigan growled again.
The familiar voice gave the stallion pause--a moment. For, out of the
tail of his eye, Michigan presently saw and became cognizant of a most
curious thing--of a shadow, huge, black, upreared above himself.
Uttering a hoarse cry, he tried to rise--too late.
So, in the midst of his turbulence, passed Michigan Red, but the evil
that he had done mightily all the days of his life followed him into
death, for the pounding hoofs spread embers of his fire over a leafy
carpet, where the night wind found them. Leaping under its breath,
small flames writhed tortuously across the glade to the thing that had
been a man--touched and tasted its clothing with delicate lickings, then
flashed up and sprang from the smouldering cinder into thick scrub, and
so ran with incredible swiftness through the forest. Crouched, like a
runner, at first, close to the ground, it suddenly straightened and
bounded high over a patch of dry poplar burned by a former fire, cowered
again, to crawl through thick green spruce, and so stole softly on, as
though to catch the Cree in his sleep.
As well try to singe a weasel. Already the Cree was urging his ragged
pony, with squaw and papoose, towards Carter's camp, and, balked there,
the fire swung with the veering wind into poplar woods, and flamed on, a
roaring, ebullient tide, overtopping the tallest trees. Under its
effulgence, black lakes and sullen tarns flashed out of thick night with
scared deer, belly-deep in the water. Huge owls went flapping through
the smoke, leading the ducks, geese, vagrant flocks of the night,
leaving hawks and other day birds to circle, shrieking, ere they whizzed
down to a fiery death. Gaining strength from its own draught and the
freshening wind, it flowed, at an angle, over the railroad and poured
down both sides, licking up bridges, trestles, culverts, leaving the hot
rails squirming like scorched snakes in empty space; and so, about
midnight, roared on to the great trestle at which Michigan had paused
that afternoon, and where Carter had lined up his men.
Roused by the Cree from a dream of Helen to a nightmare of flaming
skies, Carter first sent out a gang under command of Hart and Smythe to
back-fire around the camp, then loaded the remaining crews on flat-cars
and raced the fire down to the trestle. Bender, who was with him in the
engine-cab, leaned to his ear as the train pulled out of the cut.
"Michigan Red?"
"Looks it." Nodding, Carter turned to watch the rails which gleamed
under the sky-glow, running like scarlet lines on black ribbon between
dark, serried ranks of spruce. "Lucky it is coming at an angle," he
said, as the engine thundered over the first bridge.
Bender raised his big shoulders. "If the wind don't shift? But it
generally does about this time o' night. If she slips to the
east--p-s-st! a puff of steam, a crackle, an' we're gone up like flies
in a baker's oven."
Carter returned his shrug. "As good a way as any." He added, grimly
smiling: "And very fit. Give us a chance to get acclimated. But with
luck we ought to be able to wet her down and pull out south. Without it
we can lie down in the creek."
"I like mine wet," Bender grinned. "Drowning ain't exactly comfortable,
but if there's to be any preference I'll take it." And in the face of
danger and disaster, Carter smiled again.
Starting out, it had seemed a toss-up between them and the fire, but the
train rolled over the trestle and drew up in a cut on the southerly
side, a quarter-hour to the good. The creek ran under the northerly
end, with a short approach to the bank, the bulk of the trestle leading
over a quarter-mile of morass to firm ground; so Carter, with Bender,
Carrots Smith, and other half-dozen, dropped buckets from the bridge to
the stream, thirty feet below, and passed them to the men who were
strung along the plates. Dipping, drawing, dashing, they worked
furiously under the glare of the conflagration. While still half a mile
away, its heat set the trestle steaming. At a quarter of a mile, the
furious draught rained embers large as a man's hand upon the men, who
turned their faces away from the blistering heat. Casting uneasy glances
over humped shoulders, they began to increase their distances, edging
along the south approach towards the train; but as they still maintained
communications, neither Carter nor Bender took notice until they
suddenly broke and ran.
"Here! Come back!" Bender's angry roar drowned Carter's shout, and was
lost, in turn, in a shrill whistling; for the engineer had seen that
which had been hid from them.
"My God!" Carrots Smith cried; and Brady broke out in whimpering prayer
to the saints.
They stood, staring.
As aforesaid, the fire was running south and westerly at an acute angle
to--in fact, almost paralleling the railroad, with its extreme point
farthest away but already beyond the trestle. And now, veering swiftly
southeast, as Bender had feared, it swung at right angles and came
broadside on, a fiery tide high over the forest. To the engineer it
seemed that the wind lifted a mass of flame and threw it bodily into a
tangle of poplar-brake, red willow, tall reeds, and sedge at the
trestle's south end. Dry, explosively inflammable from a summer's heat,
it touched off like a magazine, whirling skyward, a twisting water-spout
of flame, and as he jerked wildly on his whistle he saw, as under the
calcium of lurid melodrama, men running like wingless flies along the
wet, black trestle. Careening, the column fell across them.
Only the few who were drawing with Carter escaped that first explosive
flame, and they gained only time to jump as the main fire came hurdling
over the trees. Falling, Carter saw the stream, blood-red; jagged rocks
rising swiftly to meet him. A flash blinded his eyes, then--
He rubbed them--that is, he winked, for he was far too weak for such
robust exercise. Yes, he winked it. Was--could that be Helen's face
bending low over him?
*XXXI*
*WHEREIN THE FATES SUBSTITUTE A CHANGE OF BILL*
Carter winked again. The face, however, did not move. On the contrary,
it lit up with sudden delight and said smile helped his limping
consciousness forward to the idea of a dream. Yes, he was dreaming,
undoubtedly dreaming! No! Here memory took hold and gave him back the
flaming forest; wet rocks, rising swiftly from red water, carried him
back and left him at the precise moment that he had struck a projecting
timber. He was falling! Involuntarily he stiffened, expecting the
shock ... but--ah! a clew! He was dead--of the fall; and this? Must be
heaven, or why Helen? _If_ t'other place? 'Twas not so bad as long as
she was there! Here his eye, through removal of the face, touched the
whitewashed ceiling, then wandered to blank walls, a stand with
medicine, covered glasses and spoons, a linen-press, two chairs--he
arrived at truth, a hospital! Then, tired out by these strenuous mental
exercises, his eyes closed once more, to the ineffable relief of the
anxious watcher, and sleep, natural sleep, replaced the coma that had
held him these two days.
For a while Helen listened to his breathing, then, once sure that he was
really asleep, she tiptoed out to the corridor and, under urge of
relief, ran, fairly flew, with her good news to the head doctor's
office. For these had been days of haggard waiting, as, for the matter
of that, had the last two weeks--Bender's battles, Carter's triumph, the
strike and forest fire had all been packed into ten short days.
Beginning at the morning after she saw Carter at dinner with the general
manager, her joyful prayer had gone with the jubilant roar of press and
people at the ceding of the crossing, and for several following days her
ears drank thirstily of the plaudits which were universal in the
hospital, on the street, at her boarding-house. When, indeed, the topic
cropped up at her first operation, her fingers trembled so over a
bandage that Carruthers excused her, thinking the sight of blood had
turned her sick. At Jean Glaves's table she had to veil the eager
exultance of her eyes. The merchants who were discussing competition in
freight rates on the street would have stared could they have heard the
heart-cry of the pretty nurse then passing.
"He did it! Yes, he is very clever--all that you say! But you cannot
have him, for he is mine! I'll lend him to you--for a while! But I
must have him back! He's mine! mine! mine!"
From breathing the rare atmosphere of these exalted heights, she had
been precipitated by the strike into bottom deeps of despair, and while
agonizing therein over additional rumors of Greer & Smythe's impending
failure, a morning paper came to her breakfast-table with six-inch fire
scareheads and a long tale of burns, bruises, breakages that would have
been longer but for the softness of the morass. Carter, Bender, Brady,
Carrots Smith, all who were on the trestle, had been more or less
injured; and six bridges, five trestles, dozens of culverts had gone up
in smoke, a maleficent memorial to Michigan Red, before the
conflagration back-fired itself out among labyrinthian lakes. But she
paused not at the tale. The injured were on the way to the hospital, and
with that piece of news clutched to her bosom she ran all the way and
broke, at one time, a rule that was as the law of the Medes and Persians
and the privacy of the head doctor's study.
It will be easily seen that under such circumstances her hysterical
gaspings were not exactly informing, but a man does not attain to
headship of a hospital without ability to extract truth from obscure
premises--what else is diagnosis?--and when, indicating the heading that
told of Carter's injuries, she gasped, "My husband!" the Head grasped
every detail of the situation.
"I must nurse him!" she pleaded. "Must! must!"
A man prodigiously dignified and very solemn behind imposing glasses,
the Head offered a stereotyped objection; but it speaks for the feeling
beneath his dessicated exterior that he eventually set rules and
regulations at defiance, and outraged the discipline and morale
maintained by the Scotch head nurse, by appointing her, a novitiate, to
a capital case.
"But remember," he said. "Only if you can forget, for the present, that
he is your husband?"
He did not believe she could, and had been astonished by her quiet,
almost mechanical performance of duty during those two harrowing days.
For he did not see her leaning over the inanimate form when alone in the
ward; her strained watching, desperate listenings for the first flutter
of the returning spirit. Now he did see her flushed delight, and
muttered to himself as Carruthers, the under surgeon, hastened with her
to Carter's bedside: "I suppose I ought to tell _him_! ... What's the
use; he'll hear soon enough."
So her secret was kept, and being uninformed of the matrimonial
complications in the case, the surgeon set her delighted flutterings to
professional interest and so joined her felicitations. "'Twas touch and
go," he whispered. "Few could stand such a crack on the head; must have
made an omelet of his brains and his fever was hot enough to fry it.
But he'll pull through, Mistress Morrill, and it is good that he will,
for he's a gran' character, fine and useful to the province."
To indulge a pleasant conceit, that refreshing sleep may be regarded as
an intimation of the fates that comedy was about to be substituted for
impending tragedy upon the boards; and the opening of Carter's eyes may
very well be considered as the rise of the curtain on the first, and
what would also have been the last, act had he been in the enjoyment of
his usual health and strength. Lacking these, he could only take things
as he found them; chief over all, a demure nurse who administered bitter
draughts or took his pulse without sign of recognition, compunction, or
emotion.
As her shapely back always hid the pencil when she noted her
observations on the chart, he could not see it tremble; and how was he
to know that the pulse-taking was a sham? That she could feel only her
own heart thudding five thousand thuds to the minute? That she had to
guess the pulse by his temperature, which cardinal crime of the nurse's
calendar was partly condoned, because if she _had_ set down its
vibrations at the moments she held his hand, every doctor in the
hospital would have come running as to a lost cause.
Ignorant of all this, he could only lie and watch her moving about the
ward, tantalizingly trim and pretty in her nurse's dress; wait till some
softening of her coldness would justify the clean confession he ached to
make. Always the desire was with him and it waxed with the days. But
whether or no she discerned it lurking behind his surreptitious glances,
she afforded no opportunity, and what can a man do against a fate that
nips every approach to the tender with nasty medicine or chill
phrase--"You are not to talk."
"I believe you like to give me that stuff," he growled one day.
"Doctor's orders," she severely replied, and her stony face effectually
repressed him while indicating that she was not to be drawn from her
vantage-ground by that or a sudden remark--"It seems strange to see you
in that uniform."
"Doesn't feel so to me," she coldly answered, adding, with a spice of
malice, "If it did I should get used to it, for I expect to wear it for
the next three years."
He winced, and he did not see her smile as he gave her his angry
back--that or her droopings over his sleep an hour thereafter. Alone in
the quiet ward, bent so low that her breath moved the hair on his
temples, the occasion vividly recalled the night, long ago, when she had
watched the moon etch with line and shadow the promise of the future
upon his face. It lay there now, under her soft breath, the fulfilment.
For two years stress and struggle had tooled away every roughness and
left the accomplished promise, a man wrought by circumstance to a great
fineness.
She also had changed--from a well-intentioned if careless girl to a
thoughtful woman. Contact with life in the rough had rubbed the scales
from her eyes and now she saw clearly--many things, but all centring on
one. Outside people were declaiming against the vindictive fate that had
joined with the monopoly against this their champion. That morning's
papers had it that Greer & Smythe were surely ruined. Yet she was glad,
overjoyed. Wealthy and honored, it would have been difficult to the
verge of impossibility for her to go back to him. Always she would have
felt that he might doubt her motives. But now--
"It's time to take your medicine!" She sprang up as he opened his eyes,
wondering if he had felt her light kiss.
Had he, it would have been "curtain" there and then, but as he did not
the play went on, and its sequence proves that, however honorable her
intentions, she had by no means relinquished her sex's unalienable right
to bring things about in its own illogical, tantalizing, perversely
charming way. Drooping over his sleep, hoping that he would wake and
catch her, she took care that he should not--assumed a statuesque
coldness at the first quiver of his eyelids. Undoubtedly, and with her
sex's habitual unfairness, she scandalously abused her position,
exercising a tyranny that was as sweet to herself as mortifying to him.
"You must not do that--must do this--now go to sleep." She hugged her
power in place of him, and when he achieved a successful revolt against
her ban of silence by appealing to the Head for permission to talk with
Smythe, she revenged herself by injecting a personal interest into her
dealings with Carruthers. It was madness for him to see their heads
close together over his chart; the shining eyes she brought back from
whispered conferences in the hall. To be sure, it was all about pills
and plasters, but how was he to know that? And it was in revenge for
this shamelessly injurious conduct that he arranged the scene which
opens the second act.
On the morning that he was promoted from spoon-feed to the dignity of a
tray, behold him! head bent, elbows square with his ears, knife and fork
grabbed at their points, proving his indifference to her opinion by the
worst behavior that recent better practice permitted. Alas! he was cast
all through for a losing part. Displaying, before his face, the
irritating curiosity which a child bestows on a feeding lion, she
privately peeped from behind the door-screen, gloated over the old
familiar spectacle. She caught him coming and going. Also she turned a
delighted ear when he dropped into the homely settler speech; listened
for the old locutions; but called his bluff when he overdid the part by
running amuck of the grammar in a manner frightful to behold.
"I really don't see why you talk like that," she remarked,
patronizingly. "You speak quite well, almost correctly, to Dr. Hammand
and Mr. Smythe."
"Yes?" he retorted. "I didn't notice. Mebbe you'll correct me if I
side-step it again?"
But the last case of that man was worse than the first. "Thank you,"
she coldly answered. "I have given up teaching school."
He sniffed sarcastically. "Hum! Shouldn't have known it. I always
heard that the spanking habit stuck through life. But don't give up.
Remember the copybook line, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try
again.'" But she was going out of the door at the time and took care
that he should think she had not heard. "You were speaking?" she
inquired, coming back. And, of course, it would not bear repetition.
He fared just as illy when, next morning, Bender hobbled into the ward
with the aid of a crutch and cane. Having been visited by the lady
protagonist, the giant was fully informed on the situation and so
achieved a sly wink behind his chief's sarcastic introductions. "Mr.
Bender--Mrs. Morrill."
Also her quiet answer was disconcerting. "We have met before. Have you
heard from Jenny lately, Mr. Bender?"
Now Bender had. A letter, small note, simple and direct as Jenny
herself, was even then burning his pocket, and, blushing like a
school-boy caught in the theft of apples, he produced and read it. If
he insisted--was perfectly certain that he couldn't get well without
her--Jenny would!
"'Fraid I took a mean advantage," he confessed. "Reg'lar cold-decked
her. You see, a busted ankle ain't much to spread on, so I hinted at
complications. She sure thinks I'm dyin,' an' when she comes she'll find
me hopping around."
"Oh, well." Carter glanced stealthily at Helen. "She has oceans of
time to pay you. With any old luck you are good for eighty-five, and it
doesn't take a loving wife that length of time to get even." For which
insolence he paid instantly and doubly--first by a nasty dose, secondly
by loss of Bender, who was summarily ejected under pretext of its being
the patient's hour for sleep.
So the war ran, and it did seem as though circumstance never tired of
impressing allies for Helen's cause. Take Dorothy Chester, who called
with Hart next day. She, like Carruthers, could only take the situation
at face values, and so enthused over his luck in nurses; to all of
which--in Helen's absence--Carter subscribed till Dorothy reached her
climax.
"And Dr. Carruthers thinks so, too. Wouldn't it be nice if they made a
match of it?"
She was astounded by the heat of his reply. "No! A Scotch dromedary,
suckled on predestination and damnation of infants? Pretty husband he'd
make!" But she solved his vehemence for Hart's benefit on the way home.
"He's in love with her himself."
"Between patient and doctor? What a mix-up!" Hart laughed. "Odds are
on the doctor if he's up to his job. I'd hate to be Carter on the
chance of an overdose." For which flippancy his ears were well pulled.
As he said, things were undoubtedly a little tangled, and if at first
glance it would appear that Dorothy had not assisted in the unravelling,
closer scrutiny shows that her remark helped at least to bring affairs
to a head. For the remainder of the day Carter was very thoughtful, so
preoccupied that he forgot to misbehave over his supper-tray while, time
and again, Helen caught him surveying herself with a dark uneasiness.
Puzzled, she came back to the ward before leaving and stood at the foot
of his bed; but as yet his fever was confined to his mind, and he
replied that he was feeling quite well to her question.
The "good-night" she wished him was not, however, for him. Always
darkness magnifies trouble, and through its black lens he saw suspicions
as facts. Tossing restlessly, he heard the city clock chime the
quarters, halves, hours, until, at twelve, the night nurse's lantern
revealed him wide-eyed, staring, and knowing the efficacy of a change of
thought in producing sleep, she stayed for a chat.
Correct enough in theory, the treatment proved about as successful as
would the application of a blister upon a sore; for he bent the
conversation to his own uses, steering it by a circuitous route through
the girl's own experience to Helen.
She was liked in the hospital?
Indeed she was! The night nurse was emphatic on that, and went on to
say that beauty such as Helen's was not generally conducive of
popularity. No, it wasn't jealousy! The nurse tossed her head at his
question. Simply that pretty girls didn't have to be nice, so usually
left amiability to be assumed with a double chin; and being a frank as
well as a merry creature, she confessed to an accession of that
desirable quality every time she saw her own nose in a glass. But Helen
Morrill? She was sweet as she was pretty!
Dr. Carruthers thought so, too?
Well--the nurse would smile! And everybody in the hospital was glad of
it. They would make such a perfect couple, an ideal match!
It was as good as settled, then?
Well--not given out yet, but every one knew! Her lantern being on the
floor, she could not see his face, and he lay so quiet she thought he
had fallen asleep, and was tiptoeing away when he spoke again.
But--_Mrs._ Morrill? She had been married before! Her husband--dead?
If he wasn't he ought to be--the nurse was sure of that. There was only
one place for a man who could not live with such a nice girl. And if he
were not--divorce was about as good in ridding one of the beast! With
which she picked up her lantern and left him in darkness and despair.
When she came next on her rounds she thought him asleep, but he resumed
his restless tossings as soon as her back was turned. Dawn, however,
betrayed him, and sent her flying to the head doctor with his pulse and
temperature.
"He was all right last night!" the latter exclaimed. "Bring his chart
down to the office." Studying it while he mixed sedatives a little
later, he said: "Awake at midnight--hum! Talked, did he? What about?
Mrs. Morrill?" He snatched truth out of her as though it had been an
appendix. "Spoke of her and Dr. Carruthers?--ah! ha! Well, give him
this and send Mrs. Morrill to me when she comes in."
If short, the interview did not lack excitement when, a couple of hours
later, Helen opposed the freshness of the morning to the Head's angry
glare. Her delicate colors, the eyes cleared by sleep and full of
light, were enough to have softened the heart of a Gorgon, but served
only to irritate him, who looked upon them as so much material gone to
waste.
"What have you done?" he roared after her. "Look at that!" And went on
as her distressed eyes came back from the chart: "You have done
nothing--that's the trouble. Why did I appoint you to this case?
Because of your vast experience? No, because I thought you could
administer something outside of medical practice. And now he's dying--of
jealousy. You have done it; you must cure him." And taking her by the
arm as though she were a medicine-tray, he marched her to Carter's ward,
gave her a shake at the door like a bottle that is to be "well shaken
before taken," and thrust her in with the parting admonition, "Now, do
your duty."
Here was an embarrassing position! Surely never before had nurse such
orders--to administer love, like a dose, that, forsooth, to a patient
who had already turned his broad back on her charms. Now did she pay
toll of blushes for the perversity that had checked his every overture.
How should--how _could_ she begin?
Pleating and unpleating her apron, she stood at the foot of his bed, the
prettiest picture of perplexity ever vouchsafed to gaunt, unshaven man.
A week's stubble did not improve his appearance any more than his
unnatural color, fixed, glazed eyes. But soon as a timid glance gave
her these--she was on her knees beside him.
"Is that you, Helen?" Before she could speak he burst out in a sudden
irruption of speech. "I'm so glad; there's something I want to tell
you." Then it came, in a flood that washed away his natural reserve,
the confession--his remorse for his obstinacy, the sorrow that had tamed
his anger, his yearning through weary months for an overture from her;
his ignorance of the settler's persecution, scorn of scandalous rumors;
his attempts to communicate with and find her; all, down to his
observation of her liking for Carruthers, finishing: "Through all, my
every thought has been of you. But now--I see. It was a mistake, our
marriage. It was wrong to couple roughness with refinement. So if you
wish--" Her face was now buried in her arms, and he gently touched the
golden hair. "Last night I made up my mind to bring no more misery into
your life. But now ... that I see you ... it is difficult; ... but ...
if you wish--"
He got no further, for speech is impossible when a soft hand stoppers
one's mouth. And while he was thus effectually gagged, she took a mean
advantage: told him just what she thought of him. Such a stupid! A big
man, so very strong, but oh, _so_ silly! Did he really think that
she--any girl--would have waited upon him in such circumstances unless--
Here she had to release his mouth to wipe away the streaming tears, and
his question came out like an explosion:
"What?"
She told him, or, rather, conveyed the information in the orthodox way
with lovers. This takes time, and becoming suddenly alive to the fact
that he was sitting up in bed, she resumed her authority to make him lie
down. In view of his condition she was certainly justified in using
force to compel obedience; but was it right, was it proper for her, a
nurse duly accredited to the case, to leave her arms about him? Well,
she did, and--scandalous predicament!--her golden head was lying beside
his on the pillow when the door opened for the matron, Carruthers, and
the Head on their morning rounds.
"Well--I declare! _Fine_ goings on!"
Helen's faint cry of dismay was drowned by the matron's horrified
exclamation, but Carter rose to the situation. "Miss Craig, doctor--my
wife." He could not include Carruthers, who retired precipitously, and
was then just outside the door, swallowing hugely in vain attempts to
get what looked like a monstrous pill, but was really his heart, back to
its proper place.
"Your what?" Having the general objections to matrimony which come with
prim old maidhood, the matron almost screamed: "Good gracious, man!
Couldn't you have waited till you were sure you wouldn't need a minister
to bury you?" And she tossed a high head at his answer.
"No, ma'am. We were that impatient we got married two years ago."
There she slid one in on him with a sniff of disdain. "Two years! Imph!
One would never have thought it. And just look at this ward! Doctors'
rounds and ward unswept, bed unmade; I doubt whether you've had your
medicine! I'll send up another nurse at once. As for you,
Mrs.--Carter"--she paused, flouncing out of the door--"you are--"
She intended "discharged," but the head doctor interposed twinkling
glasses between Helen and destruction. "She was merely giving treatment
according to orders."