A Woman of Business
NELL was very happy, and prospering beyond her wildest dreams.
Fortunately for her the early part of the winter was exceptionally mild
and open, so that mining operations went busily forward, and she had no
lack of customers nightly to consume the food which she spent her days
in cooking.
The great burden of maintaining the family rested almost entirely upon
her, for Mrs. Lorimer was so ill that most of Gertrude’s time was taken
up in nursing and caring for the poor invalid. Patsey was away all day
at Bratley, except on Saturdays, when he was chopping and hauling wood,
or on Sundays, when he took Teddy and Flossie over to the Settlement in
the wood-truck, to attend the Sunday School which was held there in the
tin-roofed mission hall by the smelter works.
Despite her hard work, and the drudgery of her days, Nell carried a
bright face all the time, feeling herself supremely blessed in having so
many depending on her, so many to love, and to love her in return.
She possessed, too, the happy knack of finding employment for everyone,
so Teddy, aged five, and little Abe, the baby, both had their accustomed
tasks, which they performed with a zest and energy worthy of great
undertakings.
Abe was two years and a half old now, a fine sturdy youngster, who loved
nothing better than movement of some kind, so he and Teddy between them
dragged wood into the kitchen from the wood shed, with much snorting and
hissing, in imitation of the engines arriving and starting at the depot.
Both of the small boys yielded Nell a whole-hearted devotion, and
followed her about nearly all day long. But it was Flossie’s love which
was the most precious to Nell, and had her life been twice as hard, she
would still have felt herself amply repaid in the affection she received
from her adopted family.
Dr. Russell came regularly once a week to see Mrs. Lorimer, who grew
rather worse than better as the weeks went on.
Mrs. Nichols had been to see them once, but she was ailing herself, and
not able to get out much.
When Christmas had passed, and the new year had begun, a heavy snow
fell, and lay for three weeks. Then came a check in Nell’s business, so
many of her customers took holiday, and went off to the towns until the
weather broke again.
She was rather glad of the slack time, since it gave her a breathing
spell, and enabled her to do many things which were so impossible when
in full tide of work.
Sometimes she sighed a little ruefully over her inability to find more
time for reading, and told herself that she would soon forget what
little she had learned before. But in reality she was making great
strides in all sorts of knowledge, and learning some of the deep lessons
of life, which no books could have taught her.
The loft where she and Flossie slept was almost as bare, although more
weather-tight than the one in which she had slept at the Lone House. But
Nell had put her bed near the pipe of the kitchen stove, which came up
through the loft, and so she and Flossie were comfortably warm even in
the bitterest weather.
One use Nell made of her spare time was to rearrange her premises for
the greater convenience of her work. She got Sam Peters to make her a
big store cupboard, which was placed in one corner of the kitchen, and
saved her endless runs into the sitting-room, where formerly she had
been obliged to keep her groceries, tubs of lard, and that sort of
thing. Then she made a great stock of marmalade, for the huckleberry jam
was almost gone, and her store of apples, which had been brought from
Lorimer’s Clearing, was dwindling fast.
The wood shed was getting empty too, for although Patsey worked hard all
day Saturday, he could not in one day supply the drain of seven. So,
drawing a pair of old woollen stockings over her shoes, Nell sallied out
to the clear crisp cold of the winter afternoons, armed with an axe, a
saw, and an old box on runners which did duty for a sledge, and enjoyed
blissful hours in chopping and sawing among the dead wood on the slope
behind the house.
“Nell, dear, you have all the drudgery; it is too bad! I would come and
help, only I can’t leave mother,” Gertrude said, on the first afternoon
when Nell returned, flushed and sparkling, from her labours in the snow.
“It isn’t drudgery, it is a real holiday, only I wish the children could
enjoy it too,” Nell answered wistfully, for the two little boys and
Flossie had bad colds, and were not able to stir out of doors.
“I’m afraid I should not think it such a treat as you do,” said
Gertrude, shivering a little.
She was looking pale and thin, while there were dark rings round her
eyes, brought there by overmuch confinement in a sick-room.
“Then it is a very good thing that I am the one who is free to go. I had
been feeling rather mean, because I was having all the fun, but this, of
course, restores the balance,” laughed Nell, as she divested herself of
her outdoor garments.
Every day for a week she went wood-hauling in the afternoons. Then a
thaw set in, her customers came back, and the old rush began.
One evening, when February was well on its way, a member of the
Syndicate dropped in late to buy his supper, and then remained to talk.
He was an elderly man, who should have been rich enough by this time to
have ceased living such a toilsome life, only the trouble was that
although he could earn as much money as any man, he could not save it.
This individual went by the name of Ike, and Nell could never discover
that he had any other. She always called him Mr. Ike, a circumstance
which appeared to afford him great amusement. But she had long since
found that “With what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you
again,” was as true in the simple things of life as in the great issues
of the soul; and because she always treated her customers with a
ceremonious civility, she invariably received from them a similar
courtesy in return.
“Good evening, Miss Hamblyn,” said the miner, lifting his cap with a
flourish when he entered the room, then dropping it back on his head
with a weary air as he subsided on to the bench near the door.
“Good evening, Mr. Ike. Have you been taking a holiday?” she asked; for
she had not seen Ike, who was one of her most regular customers, for
nearly a fortnight.
“Yes; and I’ve been quite a considerable way too. Had a run down to
Vancouver City, and spent ten days or more loafing round hearing the
news.”
“You must have found the city pretty lively after Camp’s Gulch,”
remarked Nell, as she ladled a pint of soup into the miner’s tin can.
“It was a sight too lively for me. I suppose I must be getting old and
rusty, for I find I ain’t half nimble enough to keep up with city folks
nowadays,” he answered, rather gruffly; by which she understood that he
had been gambling, and had probably lost almost all the cash he had
taken with him, and had returned with empty pockets.
“You would not find it so cold in Vancouver City as here among the
hills?” she asked.
“It was cold enough. A sharper spell of winter weather than we often get
in these parts,” he answered. Then, suddenly remembering an item of news
which might interest her, he lifted his head and became talkative. “I
heard a little about a friend of yours away down in the city,” he said,
with a short gruff laugh.
“A friend of mine? But I don’t know anyone in Vancouver City,” she said,
in surprise, then suddenly shivered, thinking that he might be referring
to Doss Umpey.
“Not by sight, perhaps, for I don’t think you saw him, not that time
when you had most to do with him, leastwise.” And Ike paused to relieve
his feelings with a rumbling laugh.
“What do you mean?” demanded Nell, in a bewildered tone.
“I mean that I happened on news of Dick Brunsen, and he’s dead,” said
Ike, stating the fact rather as if it were good news than otherwise.
But Nell turned ghastly white, and seized hold of the table to keep
herself from falling, while she echoed faintly—
“Dead? How?”
[Illustration: “I HEARD A LITTLE ABOUT A FRIEND OF YOURS
AWAY DOWN IN THE CITY,” HE SAID.]
Ike was sampling his soup, so failed to notice her agitation. Taking a
deep draught from the tin can, he then wiped his lips on his jacket
sleeve, and proceeded to answer her questions.
“Oh, he died real game. I always said he was a lad of parts, only the
trouble was he’d got such a lot of misdirected energy that it was bound
to get him into trouble sooner or later. He’d got two pals, one was his
father, the veriest old hypocrite that ever drew breath, and the other
was a chap they called Doss Umpey, a pretty good match for Brunsen
senior by all accounts. A long time ago, when I was a young man, they
two and an Irishman named Logan were up to no end of law-breaking,
smuggling across the border, setting up coaches, and all that sort of
thing; then Logan got pinched, and the other two turned virtuous, or
pretended to.”
Nell nodded. So much of Doss Umpey’s past she already knew from Mrs.
Nichols, but she was wondering what fresh revelations were to be made by
Ike, or what he would say if she were to tell him that she had lived so
long at the Lone House with the old man, believing him to be really her
grandfather, and not merely the stepfather of her mother.
Ike had paused for another draught of soup; when it was swallowed he
went on with his story.
“It seems that when we lifted Master Dick out of that Chinaman’s coffin,
where you’d chained him up so secure, and he had paid back that little
lump of dollars out of which he had cheated us, he and the two old chaps
tracked off to Nelson, and worked there for awhile, with the eyes of the
police on them all the time. Then suddenly they disappeared, and when
next they were heard of, it was at Skeena, and they were giving it out
that they had struck it rich on the shores of the Babine Lake, an
uncertain number of miles from Skeena, and in a district pretty thickly
sprinkled with Tacla Indians.”
“But Skeena is very cold, isn’t it?” asked Nell, thinking how Doss Umpey
used to grumble about the cold during the long winters on Blue Bird
Ridge.
“Rayther nippy, but it doesn’t count for much if you’ve wintered at
Klondike, as I have,” replied Ike, taking another pull at the soup,
which nearly emptied the can.
Nell shivered. She had the feeling of wanting to pull the information
out of him, but Ike was not the sort of man to be hurried over any story
he had to tell, so she was forced to wait patiently, and let him go his
own way.
“There was a man stopping at Carter’s—he was working at Cate’s shipyard
just then, but he had been in Skeena a month before, and had left the
day after the thing happened,” went on Ike.
“What happened?” asked Nell, with a little stamp of her foot, for his
slowness of narration thoroughly exasperated her.
“The way young Dick pegged out game, of course. The three of them had
been showing round a couple of nuggets, and talking big about the
bucketfuls of the same stuff that might be picked up for the asking on a
little stream that emptied into the Babine Lake, and, of course, they
pretty soon got a crowd together to go with them, every man armed, for
the Tacla Indians are an awkward lot to deal with. So they started, and
were three days out from Skeena when trouble began, for a rumour went
round that the nuggets hadn’t been found on the Babine at all, but had
been stolen from a man what had brought them down from Juneau, and taken
too much liquor on board at Skeena to be able to look after his own
property. The crowd was a pretty rough one, and they pretty soon made
the three stand out.”
“What is that?” asked Nell, faintly.
Ike gave another rumbling laugh. “It about amounts to standing up to be
shot at. The old men hadn’t got much fight left in them, but young Dick
wasn’t made like that, and they say he fought like ten men rolled in
one, and knocked the crowd over in so many places all at once, that at
last they just bowled him over in self-defence, as you may say.”
“Do you mean he was shot?” asked Nell, in a horrified whisper.
“That is what it amounts to, I suppose, though I never heard anyone give
it a name. In fact, it might prove extremely awkward for some of that
crowd, if it could be proved which of them had let off their revolvers
on that occasion. Law is law in Canada, you know; and the police are
about as smart as they make ’em, but they haven’t got eyes in the back
of their heads, and they can’t be in fifty different places at once, so
accidents do occur once in a while,” said Ike, with a big sigh; after
which he finished his soup, and decided to have another pint to take
away with him.
“Were they all killed?” asked Nell, whose very teeth were chattering.
Ike shook his head. “There was no particulars come through regarding the
old’uns. But the worst of it was that the story about gold on the Babine
was true, as the crowd found when they got there, only the Indians was
there too, and had their eyes skinned. So that of the thirty or forty
what went, only five came back to Skeena.”
Nell covered her face with her hands, and sobbed from sheer horror, and
sympathy with the poor victim of such a tragic fate. She had no especial
pity for the crowd so nearly wiped out by Tacla Indians, for their end
had in it a sort of retributive justice which appealed to her ideas of
fitness.
“There now, don’t you take on about a fellow being wiped out as was born
to be hanged, and only missed his destiny by a fluke, as you may say.”
There was considerable consternation in Ike’s tone, and he gazed at her
with so much concern that she must have laughed at his lugubrious
expression had her mood not been so far removed from merriment just
then.
“It is such a dreadful story!” she gasped, her voice broken and
unsteady.
“There are worse things happening in the world every day. Mind you, if
the fellow had not cheated people before, they would not have been so
likely to think he was cheating them then,” said Ike, rising to his
feet, and laying some money on the kitchen table, which served Nell as a
counter.
She opened the stout leather bag which hung from her waist to give him
change, while words from Holy Writ beat themselves out in her brain,
“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
“Now, don’t you go a-crying yourself blind over Dick Brunsen, because,
as I said before, he wasn’t worth it,” said Ike, as he took his change
and prepared to depart.
Nell shook her head in a dubious fashion, which might have been
translated in several ways, but she made no other remark, save a polite
good evening; and Ike went away pondering on the soft-heartedness of
girls in general, and of this one in particular, who could sob over the
end of a low-down cheat like young Dick Brunsen.
Nell shed a good many tears during the next few days over that story of
wilderness tragedy, and there was no doubt at all in her own mind that
Doss Umpey and the elder Brunsen must have shared the fate of young
Dick; or at any rate had they escaped being shot as he was, most
probably they fell victims to the Indians later.
She said no word to Gertrude about the incident. There had never been
any inducement to speak much of her past to the Lorimers. Since she
could say so little in praise of Doss Umpey, she had carefully refrained
from speaking of him at all to anyone, except Mrs. Nichols, who already
knew more about him than Nell did herself.
Just now, too, Gertrude had enough sorrow of her own to bear, for Dr.
Russell had spoken plainly of Mrs. Lorimer’s condition, and said that a
few weeks would probably end the poor woman’s sufferings. He was very
kind to them, doing everything in his power for the comfort of the
invalid; but he could not lift or lessen the strain of Gertrude’s life,
and Nell often looked at her in fear and trembling, wondering what they
would do if she broke down.
Then, one day, just when it seemed the strain was as great as it could
be, Mrs. Nichols came up from Bratley and announced that she had come on
a good long visit, because she felt that she needed change of air and
scene.
Nothing could have been more opportune than her coming, and if the
doctor was at the bottom of it, neither he nor Mrs. Nichols ever
mentioned the fact.
So the days wore on. Each week the sun shone with more strength; the sap
rose in the forests, and the millions of leaf buds grew and swelled in
token that summer was coming.
Meanwhile Nell toiled steadily for her adopted family, so content with
the love that was her daily and hourly reward, as never to guess or to
speculate concerning the future, and what it might bring her.