JACK FYFE'S CAMP
She was still hot with the spirit of mutiny when morning came, but she
cooked breakfast. It was not in her to act like a petulant child.
Morning also brought a different aspect to things, for Charlie told her
while he helped prepare breakfast that he was going to take his crew and
repay in labor the help Jack Fyfe had given him.
"While we're there, Jack's cook will feed all hands," said he. "And by
the time we're through there, I'll have things fixed so it won't be such
hard going for you here. Do you want to go along to Jack's camp?"
"No," she answered shortly. "I don't. I would much prefer to get away
from this lake altogether, as I told you last night."
"You might as well forget that notion," he said stubbornly. "I've got a
little pride in the matter. I don't want my sister drudging at the only
kind of work she'd be able to earn a living at."
"You're perfectly willing to have me drudge here," she flashed back.
"That's different," he defended. "And it's only temporary. I'll be
making real money before long. You'll get your share if you'll have a
little patience and put your shoulder to the wheel. Lord, I'm doing the
best I can."
"Yes--for yourself," she returned. "You don't seem to consider that I'm
entitled to as much fair play as you'd have to accord one of your men. I
don't want you to hand me an easy living on a silver salver. All I want
of you is what is mine, and the privilege of using my own judgment. I'm
quite capable of taking care of myself."
If there had been opportunity to enlarge on that theme, they might have
come to another verbal clash. But Benton never lost sight of his primary
object. The getting of breakfast and putting his men about their work
promptly was of more importance to him than Stella's grievance. So the
incipient storm dwindled to a sullen mood on her part. Breakfast over,
Benton loaded men and tools aboard a scow hitched beside the boat. He
repeated his invitation, and Stella refused, with a sarcastic reflection
on the company she would be compelled to keep there.
The _Chickamin_ with her tow drew off, and she was alone again.
"Marooned once more," Stella said to herself when the little steamboat
slipped behind the first jutting point. "Oh, if I could just be a man
for a while."
Marooned seemed to her the appropriate term. There were the two old
Siwashes and their dark-skinned brood. But they were little more to
Stella than the insentient boulders that strewed the beach. She could
not talk to them or they to her. Long since she had been surfeited with
Katy John. If there were any primitive virtues in that dusky maiden they
were well buried under the white man's schooling. Katy's demand upon
life was very simple and in marked contrast to Stella Benton's. Plenty
of grub, no work, some cheap finery, and a man white or red, no matter,
to make eyes at. Her horizon was bounded by Roaring Lake and the mission
at Skookumchuck. She was therefore no mitigation of Stella's loneliness.
Nevertheless Stella resigned herself to make the best of it, and it
proved a poor best. She could not detach herself sufficiently from the
sordid realities to lose herself in day-dreaming. There was not a book
in the camp save some ten-cent sensations she found in the bunkhouse,
and these she had exhausted during Charlie's first absence. The uncommon
stillness of the camp oppressed her more than ever. Even the bluejays
and squirrels seemed to sense its abandonment, seemed to take her as
part of the inanimate fixtures, for they frisked and chattered about
with uncommon fearlessness. The lake lay dead gray, glassy as some great
irregular window in the crust of the earth. Only at rare intervals did
sail or smoke dot its surface, and then far offshore. The woods stood
breathless in the autumn sun. It was like being entombed. And there
would be a long stretch of it, with only a recurrence of that deadly
grind of kitchen work when the loggers came home again.
Some time during the next forenoon she went southerly along the lake
shore on foot without object or destination, merely to satisfy in some
measure the restless craving for action. Colorful turns of life, the
more or less engrossing contact of various personalities, some new thing
to be done, seen, admired, discussed, had been a part of her existence
ever since she could remember. None of this touched her now. A dead
weight of monotony rode her hard. There was the furtive wild life of the
forest, the light of sun and sky, and the banked green of the forest
that masked the steep granite slopes. She appreciated beauty, craved it
indeed, but she could not satisfy her being with scenic effects alone.
She craved, without being wholly aware of it, or altogether admitting it
to herself, some human distraction in all that majestic solitude.
It was forthcoming. When she returned to camp at two o'clock, driven in
by hunger, Jack Fyfe sat on the doorstep.
"How-de-do. I've come to bring you over to my place," he announced quite
casually.
"Thanks. I've already declined one pressing invitation to that effect,"
Stella returned drily. His matter-of-fact assurance rather nettled her.
"A woman always has the privilege of changing her mind," Fyfe smiled.
"Charlie is going to be at my camp for at least three weeks. It'll rain
soon, and the days'll be pretty gray and dreary and lonesome. You might
as well pack your war-bag and come along."
She stood uncertainly. Her tongue held ready a blunt refusal, but she
did not utter it; and she did not know why. She did have a glimpse of
the futility of refusing, only she did not admit that refusal might be
of no weight in the matter. With her mind running indignantly against
compulsion, nevertheless her muscles involuntarily moved to obey. It
irritated her further that she should feel in the least constrained to
obey the calmly expressed wish of this quiet-spoken woodsman. Certain
possible phases of a lengthy sojourn in Jack Fyfe's camp shot across her
mind. He seemed of uncanny perception, for he answered this thought
before it was clearly formed.
"Oh, you'll be properly chaperoned, and you won't have to mix with the
crew," he drawled. "I've got all kinds of room. My boss logger's wife is
up from town for a while. She's a fine, motherly old party, and she
keeps us all in order."
"I haven't had any lunch," she temporized. "Have you?"
He shook his head.
"I rowed over here before twelve. Thought I'd get you back to camp in
time for dinner. You know," he said with a twinkle in his blue eyes, "a
logger never eats anything but a meal. A lunch to us is a snack that you
put in your pocket. I guess we lack tone out here. We haven't got past
the breakfast-dinner-supper stage yet; too busy making the country fit
to live in."
"You have a tremendous job in hand," she observed.
"Oh, maybe," he laughed. "All in the way you look at it. Suits some of
us. Well, if we get to my camp before three, the cook might feed us.
Come on. You'll get to hating yourself if you stay here alone till
Charlie's through."
Why not? Thus she parleyed with herself, one half of her minded to stand
upon her dignity, the other part of her urging acquiescence in his wish
that was almost a command. She was tempted to refuse just to see what he
would do, but she reconsidered that. Without any logical foundation for
the feeling, she was shy of pitting her will against Jack Fyfe's.
Hitherto quite sure of herself, schooled in self-possession, it was a
new and disturbing experience to come in contact with that subtle,
analysis-defying quality which carries the possessor thereof straight to
his or her goal over all opposition, which indeed many times stifles all
opposition. Force of character, overmastering personality, emanation of
sheer will, she could not say in what terms it should be described.
Whatever it was, Jack Fyfe had it. It existed, a factor to be reckoned
with when one dealt with him. For within twenty minutes she had packed a
suitcase full of clothes and was embarked in his rowboat.
He sent the lightly built craft easily through the water with regular,
effortless strokes. Stella sat in the stern, facing him. Out past the
north horn of the bay, she broke the silence that had fallen between
them.
"Why did you make a point of coming for me?" she asked bluntly.
Fyfe rested on his oars a moment, looking at her in his direct,
unembarrassed way.
"I wintered once on the Stickine," he said. "My partner pulled out
before Christmas and never came back. It was the first time I'd ever
been alone in my life. I wasn't a much older hand in the country than
you are. Four months without hearing the sound of a human voice. Stark
alone. I got so I talked to myself out loud before spring. So I
thought--well, I thought I'd come and bring you over to see Mrs. Howe."
Stella sat gazing at the slow moving panorama of the lake shore, her
chin in her hand.
"Thank you," she said at last, and very gently.
Fyfe looked at her a minute or more, a queer, half-amused expression
creeping into his eyes.
"Well," he said finally, "I might as well tell the whole truth. I've
been thinking about you quite a lot lately, Miss Stella Benton, or I
wouldn't have thought about you getting lonesome."
He smiled ever so faintly, a mere movement of the corners of his mouth,
at the pink flush which rose quickly in her cheeks, and then resumed his
steady pull at the oars.
Except for a greater number of board shacks and a larger area of stump
and top-littered waste immediately behind it, Fyfe's headquarters,
outwardly, at least, differed little from her brother's camp. Jack led
her to a long, log structure with a shingle roof, which from its more
substantial appearance she judged to be his personal domicile. A plump,
smiling woman of forty greeted her on the threshold. Once within, Stella
perceived that there was in fact considerable difference in Mr. Fyfe's
habitation. There was a great stone fireplace, before which big
easy-chairs invited restful lounging. The floor was overlaid with thick
rugs which deadened her footfalls. With no pretense of ornamental
decoration, the room held an air of homely comfort.
"Come in here and lay off your things," Mrs. Howe beamed on her. "If
I'd 'a' known you were livin' so close, we'd have been acquainted a week
ago; though I ain't got rightly settled here myself. My land, these men
are such clams. I never knowed till this mornin' there was any white
woman at this end of the lake besides myself."
She showed Stella into a bedroom. It boasted an enamel washstand with
taps which yielded hot and cold water, neatly curtained windows, and a
deep-seated Morris chair. Certainly Fyfe's household accommodation was
far superior to Charlie Benton's. Stella expected the man's home to be
rough and ready like himself, and in a measure it was, but a comfortable
sort of rough and readiness. She took off her hat and had a critical
survey of herself in a mirror, after which she had just time to brush
her hair before answering Mrs. Howe's call to a "cup of tea."
The cup of tea resolved itself into a well-cooked and well-served meal,
with china and linen and other unexpected table accessories which
agreeably surprised, her. Inevitably she made comparisons, somewhat
tinctured with natural envy. If Charlie would fix his place with a few
such household luxuries, life in their camp would be more nearly
bearable, despite the long hours of disagreeable work. As it was--well,
the unrelieved discomforts were beginning to warp her out-look on
everything.
Fyfe maintained his habitual sparsity of words while they ate the food
Mrs. Howe brought on a tray hot from the cook's outlying domain. When
they finished, he rose, took up his hat and helped himself to a handful
of cigars from a box on the fireplace mantel.
"I guess you'll be able to put in the time, all right," he remarked.
"Make yourself at home. If you take a notion to read, there's a lot of
books and magazines in my room. Mrs. Howe'll show you."
He walked out. Stella was conscious of a distinct relief when he was
gone. She had somehow experienced a recurrence of that peculiar feeling
of needing to be on her guard, as if there were some curious, latent
antagonism between them. She puzzled over that a little. She had never
felt that way about Paul Abbey, for instance, or indeed toward any man
she had ever known. Fyfe's more or less ambiguous remark in the boat had
helped to arouse it again. His manner of saying that he had "thought a
lot about her" conveyed more than the mere words. She could quite
conceive of the Jack Fyfe type carrying things with a high hand where a
woman was concerned. He had that reputation in all his other dealings.
He was aggressive. He could drink any logger in the big firs off his
feet. He had an uncanny luck at cards. Somehow or other in every
undertaking Jack Fyfe always came out on top, so the tale ran. There
must be, she reasoned, a wide streak of the brute in such a man. It was
no gratification to her vanity to have him admire her. It did not dawn
upon her that so far she had never got over being a little afraid of
him, much less to ask herself why she should be afraid of him.
But she did not spend much time puzzling over Jack Fyfe. Once out of her
sight she forgot him. It was balm to her lonely soul to have some one
of her own sex for company. What Mrs. Howe lacked in the higher culture
she made up in homely perception and unassuming kindliness. Her husband
was Fyfe's foreman. She herself was not a permanent fixture in the camp.
They had a cottage at Roaring Springs, where she spent most of the time,
so that their three children could be in school.
"I was up here all through vacation," she told Stella. "But Lefty he got
to howlin' about bein' left alone shortly after school started again, so
I got my sister to look after the kids for a spell, while I stay. I'll
be goin' down about the time Mr. Benton's through here."
Stella eventually went out to take a look around the camp. A hard-beaten
path led off toward where rose the distant sounds of logging work, the
ponderous crash of trees, and the puff of the donkeys. She followed that
a little way and presently came to a knoll some three hundred yards
above the beach. There she paused to look and wonder curiously.
For the crest of this little hillock had been cleared and graded level
and planted to grass over an area four hundred feet square. It was
trimmed like a lawn, and in the center of this vivid green block stood
an unfinished house foundation of gray stone. No stick of timber, no
board or any material for further building lay in sight. The thing stood
as if that were to be all. And it was not a new undertaking temporarily
delayed. There was moss creeping over the thick stone wall, she
discovered when she walked over it. Whoever had laid that foundation had
done it many a moon before. Yet the sward about was kept as if a
gardener had it in charge.
A noble stretch of lake and mountain spread out before her gaze.
Straight across the lake two deep clefts in the eastern range opened on
the water, five miles apart. She could see the white ribbon of foaming
cascades in each. Between lifted a great mountain, and on the lakeward
slope of this stood a terrible scar of a slide, yellow and brown, rising
two thousand feet from the shore. A vaporous wisp of cloud hung along
the top of the slide, and above this aërial banner a snow-capped
pinnacle thrust itself high into the infinite blue.
"What an outlook," she said, barely conscious that she spoke aloud. "Why
do these people build their houses in the bush, when they could live in
the open and have something like this to look at. They would, if they
had any sense of beauty."
"Sure they haven't? Some of them might have, you know, without being
able to gratify it."
She started, to find Jack Fyfe almost at her elbow, the gleam of a
quizzical smile lighting his face.
"I daresay that might be true," she admitted.
Fyfe's gaze turned from her to the huge sweep of lake and mountain
chain. She saw that he was outfitted for fishing, creel on his shoulder,
unjointed rod in one hand. By means of his rubber-soled waders he had
come upon her noiselessly.
"It's truer than you think, maybe," he said at length. "You don't want
to come along and take a lesson in catching rainbows, I suppose?"
"Not this time, thanks," she shook her head.
"I want to get enough for supper, so I'd better be at it," he remarked.
"Sometimes they come pretty slow. If you should want to go up and watch
the boys work, that trail will take you there."
He went off across the grassy level and plunged into the deep timber
that rose like a wall beyond. Stella looked after.
"It is certainly odd," she reflected with some irritation, "how that man
affects me. I don't think a woman could ever be just friends with him.
She'd either like him a lot or dislike him intensely. He isn't anything
but a logger, and yet he has a presence like one of the lords of
creation. Funny."
Then she went back to the house to converse upon domestic matters with
Mrs. Howe until the shrilling of the donkey whistle brought forty-odd
lumberjacks swinging down the trail.
Behind them a little way came Jack Fyfe with sagging creel. He did not
stop to exhibit his catch, but half an hour later they were served hot
and crisp at the table in the big living room, where Fyfe, Stella and
Charlie Benton, Lefty Howe and his wife, sat down together.
A flunkey from the camp kitchen served the meal and cleared it away. For
an hour or two after that the three men sat about in shirt-sleeved ease,
puffing at Jack Fyfe's cigars. Then Benton excused himself and went to
bed. When Howe and his wife retired, Stella did likewise. The long
twilight had dwindled to a misty patch of light sky in the northwest,
and she fell asleep more at ease than she had been for weeks. Sitting in
Jack Fyfe's living room through that evening she had begun to formulate
a philosophy to fit her enforced environment--to live for the day only,
and avoid thought of the future until there loomed on the horizon some
prospect of a future worth thinking about. The present looked passable
enough, she thought, if she kept her mind strictly on it alone.
And with that idea to guide her, she found the days slide by smoothly.
She got on famously with Mrs. Howe, finding that woman full of virtues
unsuspected in her type. Charlie was in his element. His prospects
looked so rosy that they led him into egotistic outlines of what he
intended to accomplish. To him the future meant logs in the water, big
holdings of timber, a growing bank account. Beyond that,--what all his
concentrated effort should lead to save more logs and more timber,--he
did not seem to go. Judged by his talk, that was the ultimate, economic
power,--money and more money. More and more as Stella listened to him,
she became aware that he was following in his father's footsteps; save
that he aimed at greater heights and that he worked by different
methods, juggling with natural resources where their father had merely
juggled with prices and tokens of product, their end was the same--not
to create or build up, but to grasp, to acquire. That was the game. To
get and to hold for their own use and benefit and to look upon men and
things, in so far as they were of use, as pawns in the game.
She wondered sometimes if that were a characteristic of all men, if that
were the big motif in the lives of such men as Paul Abbey and Jack
Fyfe, for instance; if everything else, save the struggle of getting and
keeping money, resolved itself into purely incidental phases of their
existence? For herself she considered that wealth, or the getting of
wealth, was only a means to an end.
Just what that end might be she found a little vague, rather hard to
define in exact terms. It embraced personal leisure and the good things
of life as a matter of course, a broader existence, a large-handed
generosity toward the less fortunate, an intellectual elevation entirely
unrelated to gross material things. Life, she told herself pensively,
ought to mean something more than ease and good clothes, but what more
she was chary of putting into concrete form. It hadn't meant much more
than that for her, so far. She was only beginning to recognize the
flinty facts of existence. She saw now that for her there lay open only
two paths to food and clothing: one in which, lacking all training, she
must earn her bread by daily toil, the other leading to marriage. That,
she would have admitted, was a woman's natural destiny, but one didn't
pick a husband or lover as one chose a gown or a hat. One went along
living, and the thing happened. Chance ruled there, she believed. The
morality of her class prevented her from prying into this question of
mating with anything like critical consideration. It was only to be
thought about sentimentally, and it was easy for her to so think. Within
her sound and vigorous body all the heritage of natural human impulses
bubbled warmly, but she recognized neither their source nor their
ultimate fruits.
Often when Charlie was holding forth in his accustomed vein, she
wondered what Jack Fyfe thought about it, what he masked behind his
brief sentences or slow smile. Latterly her feeling about him, that
involuntary bracing and stiffening of herself against his personality,
left her. Fyfe seemed to be more or less self-conscious of her presence
as a guest in his house. His manner toward her remained always casual,
as if she were a man, and there was no question of sex attraction or
masculine reaction to it between them. She liked him better for that;
and she did admire his wonderful strength, the tremendous power invested
in his magnificent body, just as she would have admired a tiger, without
caring to fondle the beast.
Altogether she spent a tolerably pleasant three weeks. Autumn's gorgeous
paintbrush laid wonderful coloring upon the maple and alder and birch
that lined the lake shore. The fall run of the salmon was on, and every
stream was packed with the silver horde, threshing through shoal and
rapid to reach the spawning ground before they died. Off every creek
mouth and all along the lake the seal followed to prey on the salmon,
and sea-trout and lakers alike swarmed to the spawning beds to feed upon
the roe. The days shortened. Sometimes a fine rain would drizzle for
hours on end, and when it would clear, the saw-toothed ranges flanking
the lake would stand out all freshly robed in white,--a mantle that
crept lower on the fir-clad slopes after each storm. The winds that
whistled off those heights nipped sharply.
Early in October Charlie Benton had squared his neighborly account with
Jack Fyfe. With crew and equipment he moved home, to begin work anew on
his own limit.
Katy John and her people came back from the salmon fishing. Jim Renfrew,
still walking with a pronounced limp, returned from the hospital.
Charlie wheedled Stella into taking up the cookhouse burden again.
Stella consented; in truth she could do nothing else. Charlie spent a
little of his contract profits in piping water to the kitchen, in a few
things to brighten up and make more comfortable their own quarters.
"Just as soon as I can put another boom over the rapids, Stell," he
promised, "I'll put a cook on the job. I've got to sail a little close
for a while. With this crew I ought to put a million feet in the water
in six weeks. Then I'll be over the hump, and you can take it easy. But
till then--"
"Till then I may as well make myself useful," Stella interrupted
caustically.
"Well, why not?" Benton demanded impatiently. "Nobody around here works
any harder than I do."
And there the matter rested.