SOME NEIGHBORLY ASSISTANCE
For a week thereafter Benton developed moods of sourness, periods of
scowling thought. He tried to speed up his gang, and having all spring
driven them at top speed, the added straw broke the back of their
patience, and Stella heard some sharp interchanges of words. He quelled
one incipient mutiny through sheer dominance, but it left him more short
of temper, more crabbedly moody than ever. Eventually his ill-nature
broke out against Stella over some trifle, and she--being herself an
aggrieved party to his transactions--surprised her own sense of the
fitness of things by retaliating in kind.
"I'm slaving away in your old camp from daylight till dark at work I
despise, and you can't even speak decently to me," she flared up. "You
act like a perfect brute lately. What's the matter with you?"
Benton gnawed at a finger nail in silence.
"Hang it, I guess you're right," he admitted at last. "But I can't help
having a grouch. I'm going to fall behind on this contract, the best I
can do."
"Well," she replied tartly. "I'm not to blame for that. I'm not
responsible for your failure. Why take it out on me?"
"I don't, particularly," he answered. "Only--can't you _sabe_? A man
gets on edge when he works and sweats for months and sees it all about
to come to nothing."
"So does a woman," she made pointed retort.
Benton chose to ignore the inference.
"If I fall down on this, it'll just about finish me," he continued
glumly. "These people are not going to allow me an inch leeway. I'll
have to deliver on that contract to the last stipulated splinter before
they'll pay over a dollar. If I don't have a million feet for 'em three
weeks from to-day, it's all off, and maybe a suit for breach of contract
besides. That's the sort they are. If they can wiggle out of taking my
logs, they'll be to the good, because they've made other contracts down
the coast at fifty cents a thousand less. And the aggravating thing
about it is that if I could get by with this deal, I can close a
five-million-foot contract with the Abbey-Monohan outfit, for delivery
next spring. I must have the money for this before I can undertake the
bigger contract."
"Can't you sell your logs if these other people won't take them?" she
asked, somewhat alive now to his position--and, incidentally, her own
interest therein.
"In time, yes," he said. "But when you go into the open market with
logs, you don't always find a buyer right off the reel. I'd have to hire
'em towed from here to Vancouver, and there's some bad water to get
over. Time is money to me right now, Stell. If the thing dragged over
two or three months, by the time they were sold and all expenses paid, I
might not have anything left. I'm in debt for supplies, behind in
wages. When it looks like a man's losing, everybody jumps him. That's
business. I may have my outfit seized and sold up if I fall down on this
delivery and fail to square up accounts right away. Damn it, if you
hadn't given Paul Abbey the cold turn-down, I might have got a boost
over this hill. You were certainly a chump."
"I'm not a mere pawn in your game yet," she flared hotly. "I suppose
you'd trade me for logs enough to complete your contract and consider it
a good bargain."
"Oh, piffle," he answered coolly. "What's the use talking like that.
It's your game as much as mine. Where do you get off, if I go broke? You
might have done a heap worse. Paul's a good head. A girl that hasn't
anything but her looks to get through the world on hasn't any business
overlooking a bet like that. Nine girls out of ten marry for what there
is in it, anyhow."
"Thank you," she replied angrily. "I'm not in the market on that basis."
"All this stuff about ideal love and soul communion and perfect mating
is pure bunk, it seems to me," Charlie tacked off on a new course of
thought. "A man and a woman somewhere near of an age generally hit it
off all right, if they've got common horse sense--and income enough so
they don't have to squabble eternally about where the next new hat and
suit's coming from. It's the coin that counts most of all. It sure is,
Sis. It's me that knows it, right now."
He sat a minute or two longer, again preoccupied with his problems.
"Well," he said at last, "I've got to get action somehow. If I could get
about thirty men and another donkey for three weeks, I'd make it."
He went outside. Up in the near woods the whine of the saws and the
sounds of chopping kept measured beat. It was late in the forenoon, and
Stella was hard about her dinner preparations. Contract or no contract,
money or no money, men must eat. That fact loomed biggest on her daily
schedule, left her no room to think overlong of other things. Her huff
over, she felt rather sorry for Charlie, a feeling accentuated by sight
of him humped on a log in the sun, too engrossed in his perplexities to
be where he normally was at that hour, in the thick of the logging,
working harder than any of his men.
A little later she saw him put off from the float in the _Chickamin's_
dinghy. When the crew came to dinner, he had not returned. Nor was he
back when they went out again at one.
Near mid-afternoon, however, he strode into the kitchen, wearing the
look of a conqueror.
"I've got it fixed," he announced.
Stella looked up from a frothy mass of yellow stuff that she was
stirring in a pan.
"Got what fixed?" she asked.
"Why, this log business," he said. "Jack Fyfe is going to put in a crew
and a donkey, and we're going to everlastingly rip the innards out of
these woods. I'll make delivery after all."
"That's good," she remarked, but noticeably without enthusiasm. The
heat of that low-roofed shanty had taken all possible enthusiasm for
anything out of her for the time being. Always toward the close of each
day she was gripped by that feeling of deadly fatigue, in the face of
which nothing much mattered but to get through the last hours somehow
and drag herself wearily to bed.
Benton playfully tweaked Katy John's ear and went whistling up the
trail. It was plain sailing for him now, and he was correspondingly
elated.
He tried to talk to Stella that evening when she was through, all about
big things in the future, big contracts he could get, big money he could
see his way to make. It fell mostly on unappreciative ears. She was
tired, so tired that his egotistical chatter irritated her beyond
measure. What she would have welcomed with heartfelt gratitude was not
so much a prospect of future affluence in which she might or might not
share as a lightening of her present burden. So far as his conversation
ran, Benton's sole concern seemed to be more equipment, more men, so
that he might get out more logs. In the midst of this optimistic talk,
Stella walked abruptly into her room.
Noon of the next day brought the _Panther_ coughing into the bay,
flanked on the port side by a scow upon which rested a twin to the iron
monster that jerked logs into her brother's chute. To starboard was made
fast a like scow. That was housed over, a smoking stovepipe stuck
through the roof, and a capped and aproned cook rested his arms on the
window sill as they floated in. Men to the number of twenty or more
clustered about both scows and the _Panther's_ deck, busy with pipe and
cigarette and rude jest. The clatter of their voices uprose through the
noon meal. But when the donkey scow thrust its blunt nose against the
beach, the chaff and laughter died into silent, capable action.
"A Seattle yarder properly handled can do anything but climb a tree,"
Charlie had once boasted to her, in reference to his own machine.
It seemed quite possible to Stella, watching Jack Fyfe's crew at work.
Steam was up in the donkey. They carried a line from its drum through a
snatch block ashore and jerked half a dozen logs crosswise before the
scow in a matter of minutes. Then the same cable was made fast to a
sturdy fir, the engineer stood by, and the ponderous machine slid
forward on its own skids, like an up-ended barrel on a sled, down off
the scow, up the bank, smashing brush, branches, dead roots, all that
stood in its path, drawing steadily up to the anchor tree as the cable
spooled up on the drum.
A dozen men tailed on to the inch and a quarter cable and bore the loose
end away up the path. Presently one stood clear, waving a signal. Again
the donkey began to puff and quiver, the line began to roll up on the
drum, and the big yarder walked up the slope under its own power, a
locomotive unneedful of rails, making its own right of way. Upon the
platform built over the skids were piled the tools of the crew, sawed
blocks for the fire box, axes, saws, grindstones, all that was necessary
in their task. At one o'clock they made their first move. At two the
donkey was vanished into that region where the chute-head lay, and the
great firs stood waiting the slaughter.
By mid-afternoon Stella noticed an acceleration of numbers in the logs
that came hurtling lakeward. Now at shorter intervals arose the grinding
sound of their arrival, the ponderous splash as each leaped to the
water. It was a good thing, she surmised--for Charlie Benton. She could
not see where it made much difference to her whether ten logs a day or a
hundred came down to the boomsticks.
Late that afternoon Katy vanished upon one of her periodic visits to the
camp of her kindred around the point. Bred out of doors, of a tribe
whose immemorial custom it is that the women do all the work, the Siwash
girl was strong as an ox, and nearly as bovine in temperament and
movements. She could lift with ease a weight that taxed Stella's
strength, and Stella Benton was no weakling, either. It was therefore a
part of Katy's routine to keep water pails filled from the creek and the
wood box supplied, in addition to washing dishes and carrying food to
the table. Katy slighted these various tasks occasionally. She needed
oversight, continual admonition, to get any job done in time. She was
slow to the point of exasperation. Nevertheless, she lightened the day's
labor, and Stella put up with her slowness since she needs must or
assume the entire burden herself. This time Katy thoughtlessly left with
both water pails empty.
Stella was just picking them up off the bench when a shadow darkened the
door, and she looked around to see Jack Fyfe.
"How d' do," he greeted.
He had seemed a short man. Now, standing within four feet of her, she
perceived that this was an illusion created by the proportion and
thickness of his body. He was, in fact, half a head taller than she, and
Stella stood five feet five. His gray eyes met hers squarely, with a
cool, impersonal quality of gaze. There was neither smirk nor
embarrassment in his straightforward glance. He was, in effect, "sizing
her up" just as he would have looked casually over a logger asking him
for a job. Stella sensed that, and resenting it momentarily, failed to
match his manner. She flushed. Fyfe smiled, a broad, friendly grin, in
which a wide mouth opened to show strong, even teeth.
"I'm after a drink," he said quite impersonally, and coolly taking the
pails out of her hands, walked through the kitchen and down to the
creek. He was back in a minute, set the filled buckets in their place,
and helped himself with a dipper.
"Say," he asked easily, "how do you like life in a logging camp by this
time? This is sure one hot job you've got."
"Literally or slangily?" she asked in a flippant tone. Fyfe's
reputation, rather vividly colored, had reached her from various
sources. She was not quite sure whether she cared to countenance him or
not. There was a disturbing quality in his glance, a subtle suggestion
of force about him that she felt without being able to define in
understandable terms. In any case she felt more than equal to the task
of squelching any effort at familiarity, even if Jack Fyfe were, in a
sense, the convenient god in her brother's machine. Fyfe chuckled at
her answer.
"Both," he replied shortly and went out.
She saw him a little later out on the bay in the _Panther's_ dink,
standing up in the little boat, making long, graceful casts with a
pliant rod. She perceived that this manner of fishing was highly
successful, insomuch as at every fourth or fifth cast a trout struck his
fly, breaking water with a vigorous splash. Then the bamboo would arch
as the fish struggled, making sundry leaps clear of the water, gleaming
like silver each time he broke the surface, but coming at last tamely to
Jack Fyfe's landing net. Of outdoor sports she knew most about angling,
for her father had been an ardent fly-caster. And she had observed with
a true angler's scorn the efforts of her brother's loggers to catch the
lake trout with a baited hook, at which they had scant success. Charlie
never fished. He had neither time nor inclination for such fooling, as
he termed it. Fyfe stopped fishing when the donkeys whistled six. It
happened that when he drew in to his cookhouse float, Stella was
standing in her kitchen door. Fyfe looked up at her and held aloft a
dozen trout strung by the gills on a stick, gleaming in the sun.
"Vanity," she commented inaudibly. "I wonder if he thinks I've been
admiring his skill as a fisherman?"
Nevertheless she paid tribute to his skill when ten minutes later he
sent a logger with the entire catch to her kitchen. They looked
toothsome, those lakers, and they were. She cooked one for her own
supper and relished it as a change from the everlasting bacon and ham.
In the face of that million feet of timber, Benton hunted no deer. True,
the Siwashes had once or twice brought in some venison. That, with a
roast or two of beef from town, was all the fresh meat she had tasted in
two months. There were enough trout to make a breakfast for the crew.
She ate hers and mentally thanked Jack Fyfe.
Lying in her bed that night, in the short interval that came between
undressing and wearied sleep, she found herself wondering with a good
deal more interest about Jack Fyfe than she had ever bestowed
upon--well, Paul Abbey, for instance.
She was quite positive that she was going to dislike Jack Fyfe if he
were thrown much in her way. There was something about him that she
resented. The difference between him and the rest of the rude crew among
which she must perforce live was a question of degree, not of kind.
There was certainly some compelling magnetism about the man. But along
with it went what she considered an almost brutal directness of speech
and action. Part of this conclusion came from hearsay, part from
observation, limited though her opportunities had been for the latter.
Miss Stella Benton, for all her poise, was not above jumping at
conclusions. There was something about Jack Fyfe that she resented. She
irritably dismissed it as a foolish impression, but the fact remained
that the mere physical nearness of him seemed to put her on the
defensive, as if he were in reality a hunter and she the hunted.
Fyfe joined Charlie Benton about the time she finished work. The three
of them sat on the grass before Benton's quarters, and every time Jack
Fyfe's eyes rested on her she steeled herself to resist--what, she did
not know. Something intangible, something that disturbed her. She had
never experienced anything like that before; it tantalized her, roused
her curiosity. There was nothing occult about the man. He was nowise
fascinating, either in face or manner. He made no bid for her attention.
Yet during the half hour he sat there, Stella's mind revolved constantly
about him. She recalled all that she had heard of him, much of it, from
her point of view, highly discreditable. Inevitably she fell to
comparing him with other men she knew.
She had, in a way, unconsciously been prepared for just such a measure
of concentration upon Jack Fyfe. For he was a power on Roaring Lake, and
power,--physical, intellectual or financial,--exacts its own tribute of
consideration. He was a fighter, a dominant, hard-bitten woodsman, so
the tale ran. He had gathered about him the toughest crew on the Lake,
himself, upon occasion, the most turbulent of all. He controlled many
square miles of big timber, and he had gotten it all by his own effort
in the eight years since he came to Roaring Lake as a hand logger. He
was slow of speech, chain-lightning in action, respected generally,
feared a lot. All these things her brother and Katy John had sketched
for Stella with much verbal embellishment.
There was no ignoring such a man. Brought into close contact with the
man himself, Stella felt the radiating force of his personality. There
it was, a thing to be reckoned with. She felt that whenever Jack Fyfe's
gray eyes rested impersonally on her. His pleasant, freckled face
hovered before her until she fell asleep, and in her sleep she dreamed
again of him throwing that drunken logger down the Hot Springs slip.