[Illustration: She, too, had seen Monohan seated on the after deck.
FRONTISPIECE.]
BIG TIMBER
A Story of the Northwest
By BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR
With Frontispiece
By DOUGLAS DUER
1916
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. GREEN FIELDS AND PASTURES NEW
II. MR. ABBEY ARRIVES
III. HALFWAY POINT
IV. A FORETASTE OF THINGS TO COME
V. THE TOLL OF BIG TIMBER
VI. THE DIGNITY (?) OF TOIL
VII. SOME NEIGHBORLY ASSISTANCE
VIII. DURANCE VILE
IX. JACK FYFE'S CAMP
X. ONE WAY OUT
XI. THE PLUNGE
XII. AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED
XIII. IN WHICH EVENTS MARK TIME
XIV. A CLOSE CALL AND A NEW ACQUAINTANCE
XV. A RESURRECTION
XVI. THE CRISIS
XVII. IN WHICH THERE IS A FURTHER CLASH
XVIII. THE OPENING GUN
XIX. FREE AS THE WIND
XX. ECHOES
XXI. AN UNEXPECTED MEETING
XXII. THE FIRE BEHIND THE SMOKE
XXIII. A RIDE BY NIGHT
XXIV. "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME"
CHAPTER I
GREEN FIELDS AND PASTURES NEW
The Imperial Limited lurched with a swing around the last hairpin curve
of the Yale canyon. Ahead opened out a timbered valley,--narrow on its
floor, flanked with bold mountains, but nevertheless a valley,--down
which the rails lay straight and shining on an easy grade. The river
that for a hundred miles had boiled and snarled parallel to the tracks,
roaring through the granite sluice that cuts the Cascade Range, took a
wider channel and a leisurely flow. The mad haste had fallen from it as
haste falls from one who, with time to spare, sees his destination near
at hand; and the turgid Fraser had time to spare, for now it was but
threescore miles to tidewater. So the great river moved placidly--as an
old man moves when all the headlong urge of youth is spent and his race
near run.
On the river side of the first coach behind the diner, Estella Benton
nursed her round chin in the palm of one hand, leaning her elbow on the
window sill. It was a relief to look over a widening valley instead of a
bare-walled gorge all scarred with slides, to see wooded heights lift
green in place of barren cliffs, to watch banks of fern massed against
the right of way where for a day and a night parched sagebrush, brown
tumble-weed, and such scant growth as flourished in the arid uplands of
interior British Columbia had streamed in barren monotony, hot and dry
and still.
She was near the finish of her journey. Pensively she considered the end
of the road. How would it be there? What manner of folk and country?
Between her past mode of life and the new that she was hurrying toward
lay the vast gulf of distance, of custom, of class even. It was bound to
be crude, to be full of inconveniences and uncouthness. Her brother's
letters had partly prepared her for that. Involuntarily she shrank from
it, had been shrinking from it by fits and starts all the way, as
flowers that thrive best in shady nooks shrink from hot sun and rude
winds. Not that Estella Benton was particularly flower-like. On the
contrary she was a healthy, vigorous-bodied young woman, scarcely to be
described as beautiful, yet undeniably attractive. Obviously a daughter
of the well-to-do, one of that American type which flourishes in
families to which American politicians unctuously refer as the backbone
of the nation. Outwardly, gazing riverward through the dusty pane, she
bore herself with utmost serenity. Inwardly she was full of misgivings.
Four days of lonely travel across a continent, hearing the drumming
clack of car wheels and rail joint ninety-six hours on end, acutely
conscious that every hour of the ninety-six put its due quota of miles
between the known and the unknown, may be either an adventure, a bore,
or a calamity, depending altogether upon the individual point of view,
upon conditioning circumstances and previous experience.
Estella Benton's experience along such lines was chiefly a blank and the
conditioning circumstances of her present journey were somber enough to
breed thought that verged upon the melancholy. Save for a natural
buoyancy of spirit she might have wept her way across North America. She
had no tried standard by which to measure life's values for she had
lived her twenty-two years wholly shielded from the human maelstrom,
fed, clothed, taught, an untried product of home and schools. Her head
was full of university lore, things she had read, a smattering of the
arts and philosophy, liberal portions of academic knowledge, all tagged
and sorted like parcels on a shelf to be reached when called for. Buried
under these externalities the ego of her lay unaroused, an incalculable
quantity.
All of which is merely by way of stating that Miss Estella Benton was a
young woman who had grown up quite complacently in that station of life
in which--to quote the Philistines--it had pleased God to place her, and
that Chance had somehow, to her astonished dismay, contrived to thrust a
spoke in the smooth-rolling wheels of destiny. Or was it Destiny? She
had begun to think about that, to wonder if a lot that she had taken for
granted as an ordered state of things was not, after all, wholly
dependent upon Chance. She had danced and sung and played
lightheartedly accepting a certain standard of living, a certain
position in a certain set, a pleasantly ordered home life, as her
birthright, a natural heritage. She had dwelt upon her ultimate destiny
in her secret thoughts as foreshadowed by that of other girls she knew.
The Prince would come, to put it in a nutshell. He would woo gracefully.
They would wed. They would be delightfully happy. Except for the matter
of being married, things would move along the same pleasant channels.
Just so. But a broken steering knuckle on a heavy touring car set things
in a different light--many things. She learned then that death is no
respecter of persons, that a big income may be lived to its limit with
nothing left when the brain force which commanded it ceases to function.
Her father produced perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a year in
his brokerage business, and he had saved nothing. Thus at one stroke she
was put on an equal footing with the stenographer in her father's
office. Scarcely equal either, for the stenographer earned her bread and
was technically equipped for the task, whereas Estella Benton had no
training whatsoever, except in social usage. She did not yet fully
realize just what had overtaken her. Things had happened so swiftly, to
ruthlessly, that she still verged upon the incredulous. Habit clung
fast. But she had begun to think, to try and establish some working
relation between herself and things as she found them. She had
discovered already that certain theories of human relations are not
soundly established in fact.
She turned at last in her seat. The Limited's whistle had shrilled for
a stop. At the next stop--she wondered what lay in store for her just
beyond the next stop. While she dwelt mentally upon this, her hands were
gathering up some few odds and ends of her belongings on the berth.
Across the aisle a large, smooth-faced young man watched her with covert
admiration. When she had settled back with bag and suitcase locked and
strapped on the opposite seat and was hatted and gloved, he leaned over
and addressed her genially.
"Getting off at Hopyard? Happen to be going out to Roaring Springs?"
Miss Benton's gray eyes rested impersonally on the top of his head,
traveled slowly down over the trim front of his blue serge to the
polished tan Oxfords on his feet, and there was not in eyes or on
countenance the slightest sign that she saw or heard him. The large
young man flushed a vivid red.
Miss Benton was partly amused, partly provoked. The large young man had
been her vis-à-vis at dinner the day before and at breakfast that
morning. He had evinced a yearning for conversation each time, but it
had been diplomatically confined to salt and other condiments, the
weather and the scenery. Miss Benton had no objection to young men in
general, quite the contrary. But she did not consider it quite the thing
to countenance every amiable stranger.
Within a few minutes the porter came for her things, and the blast of
the Limited's whistle warned her that it was time to leave the train.
Ten minutes later the Limited was a vanishing object down an aisle
slashed through a forest of great trees, and Miss Estella Benton stood
on the plank platform of Hopyard station. Northward stretched a flat,
unlovely vista of fire-blackened stumps. Southward, along track and
siding, ranged a single row of buildings, a grocery store, a shanty with
a huge sign proclaiming that it was a bank, dwelling, hotel and
blacksmith shop whence arose the clang of hammered iron. A dirt road ran
between town and station, with hitching posts at which farmers' nags
stood dispiritedly in harness.
To the Westerner such spots are common enough; he sees them not as
fixtures, but as places in a stage of transformation. By every side
track and telegraph station on every transcontinental line they spring
up, centers of productive activity, growing into orderly towns and
finally attaining the dignity of cities. To her, fresh from trim
farmsteads and rural communities that began setting their houses in
order when Washington wintered at Valley Forge, Hopyard stood forth
sordid and unkempt. And as happens to many a one in like case, a wave of
sickening loneliness engulfed her, and she eyed the speeding Limited as
one eyes a departing friend.
"How could one live in a place like this?" she asked herself.
But she had neither Slave of the Lamp at her beck, nor any Magic Carpet
to transport her elsewhere. At any rate, she reflected, Hopyard was not
her abiding-place. She hoped that her destination would prove more
inviting.
Beside the platform were ranged two touring cars. Three or four of
those who had alighted entered these. Their baggage was piled over the
hoods, buckled on the running boards. The driver of one car approached
her. "Hot Springs?" he inquired tersely.
She affirmed this, and he took her baggage, likewise her trunk check
when she asked how that article would be transported to the lake. She
had some idea of route and means, from her brother's written
instruction, but she thought he might have been there to meet her. At
least he would be at the Springs.
So she was whirled along a country road, jolted in the tonneau between a
fat man from Calgary and a rheumatic dame on her way to take hot sulphur
baths at St. Allwoods. She passed seedy farmhouses, primitive in
construction, and big barns with moss plentifully clinging on roof and
gable. The stretch of charred stumps was left far behind, but in every
field of grain and vegetable and root great butts of fir and cedar rose
amid the crops. Her first definitely agreeable impression of this land,
which so far as she knew must be her home, was of those huge and
numerous stumps contending with crops for possession of the fields.
Agreeable, because it came to her forcibly that it must be a sturdy
breed of men and women, possessed of brawn and fortitude and high
courage, who made their homes here. Back in her country, once beyond
suburban areas, the farms lay like the squares of a chess board, trim
and orderly, tamely subdued to agriculture. Here, at first hand, she saw
how man attacked the forest and conquered it. But the conquest was
incomplete, for everywhere stood those stubborn roots, six and eight and
ten feet across, contending with man for its primal heritage, the soil,
perishing slowly as perish the proud remnants of a conquered race.
Then the cleared land came to a stop against heavy timber. The car
whipped a curve and drove into what the fat man from Calgary facetiously
remarked upon as the tall uncut. Miss Benton sighted up these noble
columns to where a breeze droned in the tops, two hundred feet above.
Through a gap in the timber she saw mountains, peaks that stood bold as
the Rockies, capped with snow. For two days she had been groping for a
word to define, to sum up the feeling which had grown upon her, had been
growing upon her steadily, as the amazing scroll of that four-day
journey unrolled. She found it now, a simple word, one of the simplest
in our mother tongue--bigness. Bigness in its most ample sense,--that
was the dominant note. Immensities of distance, vastness of rolling
plain, sheer bulk of mountain, rivers that one crossed, and after a
day's journey crossed again, still far from source or confluence. And
now this unending sweep of colossal trees!
At first she had been overpowered with a sense of insignificance utterly
foreign to her previous experience. But now she discovered with an
agreeable sensation of surprise she could vibrate to such a keynote. And
while she communed with this pleasant discovery the car sped down a
straight stretch and around a corner and stopped short to unload sacks
of mail at a weather-beaten yellow edifice, its windows displaying
indiscriminately Indian baskets, groceries, and hardware. Northward
opened a broad scope of lake level, girt about with tremendous peaks
whose lower slopes were banked with thick forest.
Somewhere distant along that lake shore was to be her home. As the car
rolled over the four hundred yards between store and white-and-green St.
Allwoods, she wondered if Charlie would be there to meet her. She was
weary of seeing strange faces, of being directed, of being hustled
about.
But he was not there, and she recalled that he never had been notable
for punctuality. Five years is a long time. She expected to find him
changed--for the better, in certain directions. He had promised to be
there; but, in this respect, time evidently had wrought no appreciable
transformation.
She registered, was assigned a room, and ate luncheon to the melancholy
accompaniment of a three-man orchestra struggling vainly with Bach in an
alcove off the dining room. After that she began to make inquiries.
Neither clerk nor manager knew aught of Charlie Benton. They were both
in their first season there. They advised her to ask the storekeeper.
"MacDougal will know," they were agreed. "He knows everybody around
here, and everything that goes on."
The storekeeper, a genial, round-bodied Scotchman, had the information
she desired.
"Charlie Benton?" said he. "No, he'll be at his camp up the lake. He was
in three or four days back. I mind now, he said he'd be down Thursday;
that's to-day. But he isn't here yet, or his boat'd be by the wharf
yonder."
"Are there any passenger boats that call there?" she asked.
MacDougal shook his head.
"Not reg'lar. There's a gas boat goes t' the head of the lake now an'
then. She's away now. Ye might hire a launch. Jack Fyfe's camp tender's
about to get under way. But ye wouldna care to go on her, I'm thinkin'.
She'll be loaded wi' lumberjacks--every man drunk as a lord, most like.
Maybe Benton'll be in before night."
She went back to the hotel. But St. Allwoods, in its dual capacity of
health-and-pleasure resort, was a gilded shell, making a brave outward
show, but capitalizing chiefly lake, mountains, and hot, mineral
springs. Her room was a bare, cheerless place. She did not want to sit
and ponder. Too much real grief hovered in the immediate background of
her life. It is not always sufficient to be young and alive. To sit
still and think--that way lay tears and despondency. So she went out and
walked down the road and out upon the wharf which jutted two hundred
yards into the lake.
It stood deserted save for a lone fisherman on the outer end, and an
elderly couple that preceded her. Halfway out she passed a slip beside
which lay moored a heavily built, fifty-foot boat, scarred with usage, a
squat and powerful craft. Lakeward stretched a smooth, unrippled
surface. Overhead patches of white cloud drifted lazily. Where the
shadows from these lay, the lake spread gray and lifeless. Where the
afternoon sun rested, it touched the water with gleams of gold and pale,
delicate green. A white-winged yacht lay offshore, her sails in slack
folds. A lump of an island lifted two miles beyond, all cliffs and
little, wooded hills. And the mountains surrounding in a giant ring
seemed to shut the place away from all the world. For sheer wild, rugged
beauty, Roaring Lake surpassed any spot she had ever seen. Its quiet
majesty, its air of unbroken peace soothed and comforted her, sick with
hurry and swift-footed events.
She stood for a time at the outer wharf end, mildly interested when the
fisherman drew up a two-pound trout, wondering a little at her own
subtle changes of mood. Her surrounding played upon her like a virtuoso
on his violin. And this was something that she did not recall as a trait
in her own character. She had never inclined to the volatile--perhaps
because until the motor accident snuffed out her father's life she had
never dealt in anything but superficial emotions.
After a time she retraced her steps. Nearing the halfway slip, she saw
that a wagon from which goods were being unloaded blocked the way. A
dozen men were stringing in from the road, bearing bundles and bags and
rolls of blankets. They were big, burly men, carrying themselves with a
reckless swing, with trousers cut off midway between knee and ankle so
that they reached just below the upper of their high-topped, heavy,
laced boots. Two or three were singing. All appeared unduly happy,
talking loudly, with deep laughter. One threw down his burden and
executed a brief clog. Splinters flew where the sharp calks bit into the
wharf planking, and his companions applauded.
It dawned upon Stella Benton that these might be Jack Fyfe's drunken
loggers, and she withdrew until the way should be clear, vitally
interested because her brother was a logging man, and wondering if these
were the human tools he used in his business, if these were the sort of
men with whom he associated. They were a rough lot--and some were very
drunk. With the manifestations of liquor she had but the most shadowy
acquaintance. But she would have been little less than a fool not to
comprehend this.
Then they began filing down the gangway to the boat's deck. One slipped,
and came near falling into the water, whereat his fellows howled
gleefully. Precariously they negotiated the slanting passage. All but
one: he sat him down at the slip-head on his bundle and began a
quavering chant. The teamster imperturbably finished his unloading, two
men meanwhile piling the goods aboard.
The wagon backed out, and the way was clear, save for the logger sitting
on his blankets, wailing his lugubrious song. From below his fellows
urged him to come along. A bell clanged in the pilot house. The exhaust
of a gas engine began to sputter through the boat's side. From her after
deck a man hailed the logger sharply, and when his call was unheeded, he
ran lightly up the slip. A short, squarely-built man he was, light on
his feet as a dancing master.
He spoke now with authority, impatiently.
"Hurry aboard, Mike; we're waiting."
The logger rose, waved his hand airily, and turned as if to retreat down
the wharf. The other caught him by the arm and spun him face to the
slip.
"Come on, Slater," he said evenly. "I have no time to fool around."
The logger drew back his fist. He was a fairly big man. But if he had in
mind to deal a blow, it failed, for the other ducked and caught him with
both arms around the middle. He lifted the logger clear of the wharf,
hoisted him to the level of his breast, and heaved him down the slip as
one would throw a sack of bran.
The man's body bounced on the incline, rolled, slid, tumbled, till at
length he brought up against the boat's guard, and all that saved him a
ducking was the prompt extension of several stout arms, which clutched
and hauled him to the flush after deck. He sat on his haunches,
blinking. Then he laughed. So did the man at the top of the slip and the
lumberjacks clustered on the boat. Homeric laughter, as at some
surpassing jest. But the roar of him who had taken that inglorious
descent rose loudest of all, an explosive, "Har--har--har!"
He clambered unsteadily to his feet, his mouth expanded in an amiable
grin.
"Hey, Jack," he shouted. "Maybe y' c'n throw m' blankets down too, while
y'r at it."
The man at the slip-head caught up the roll, poised it high, and cast it
from him with a quick twist of his body. The woolen missile flew like a
well-put shot and caught its owner fair in the breast, tumbling him
backwards on the deck--and the Homeric laughter rose in double strength.
Then the boat began to swing, and the man ran down and leaped the
widening space as she drew away from her mooring.
Stella Benton watched the craft gather way, a trifle shocked, her breath
coming a little faster. The most deadly blows she had ever seen struck
were delivered in a more subtle, less virile mode, a curl of the lip, an
inflection of the voice. These were a different order of beings. This,
she sensed was man in a more primitive aspect, man with the conventional
bark stripped clean off him. And she scarcely knew whether to be amused
or frightened when she reflected that among such her life would
presently lie. Charlie had written that she would find things and people
a trifle rougher than she was used to. She could well believe that.
But--they were picturesque ruffians.
Her interested gaze followed the camp tender as it swung around the
wharf-end, and so her roaming eyes were led to another craft drawing
near. This might be her brother's vessel. She went back to the outer
landing to see.
Two men manned this boat. As she ranged alongside the piles, one stood
forward, and the other aft with lines to make fast. She cast a look at
each. They were prototypes of the rude crew but now departed,
brown-faced, flannel-shirted, shod with calked boots, unshaven for days,
typical men of the woods. But as she turned to go, the man forward and
almost directly below her looked her full in the face.
"Stell!"
She leaned over the rail.
"Charlie Benton--for Heaven's sake."
They stared at each other.
"Well," he laughed at last. "If it were not for your mouth and eyes,
Stell, I wouldn't have known you. Why, you're all grown up."
He clambered to the wharf level and kissed her. The rough stubble of his
beard pricked her tender skin and she drew back.
"My word, Charlie, you certainly ought to shave," she observed with
sisterly frankness. "I didn't know you until you spoke. I'm awfully glad
to see you, but you do need _some one_ to look after you."
Benton laughed tolerantly.
"Perhaps. But, my dear girl, a fellow doesn't get anywhere on his
appearance in this country. When a fellow's bucking big timber, he
shucks off a lot of things he used to think were quite essential. By
Jove, you're a picture, Stell. If I hadn't been expecting to see you, I
wouldn't have known you."
"I doubt if I should have known you either," she returned drily.