ONE WAY OUT
That was a winter of big snow. November opened with rain. Day after day
the sun hid his face behind massed, spitting clouds. Morning, noon, and
night the eaves of the shacks dripped steadily, the gaunt limbs of the
hardwoods were a line of coursing drops, and through all the vast
reaches of fir and cedar the patter of rain kept up a dreary monotone.
Whenever the mist that blew like rolling smoke along the mountains
lifted for a brief hour, there, creeping steadily downward, lay the
banked white.
Rain or shine, the work drove on. From the peep of day till dusk
shrouded the woods, Benton's donkey puffed and groaned, axes thudded,
the thin, twanging whine of the saws rose. Log after log slid down the
chute to float behind the boomsticks; and at night the loggers trooped
home, soaked to the skin, to hang their steaming mackinaws around the
bunkhouse stove. When they gathered in the mess-room they filled it with
the odor of sweaty bodies and profane grumbling about the weather.
Early in December Benton sent out a big boom of logs with a hired
stern-wheeler that was no more than out of Roaring Lake before the snow
came. The sleety blasts of a cold afternoon turned to great, moist
flakes by dark, eddying thick out of a windless night. At daybreak it
lay a foot deep and snowing hard. Thenceforth there was no surcease. The
white, feathery stuff piled up and piled up, hour upon hour and day
after day, as if the deluge had come again. It stood at the cabin eaves
before the break came, six feet on the level. With the end of the storm
came a bright, cold sky and frost,--not the bitter frost of the high
latitudes, but a nipping cold that held off the melting rains and laid a
thin scum of ice on every patch of still water.
Necessarily, all work ceased. The donkey was a shapeless mound of white,
all the lines and gear buried deep. A man could neither walk on that
yielding mass nor wallow through it. The logging crew hailed the
enforced rest with open relief. Benton grumbled. And then, with the
hours hanging heavy on his hands, he began to spend more and more of his
time in the bunkhouse with the "boys," particularly in the long
evenings.
Stella wondered what pleasure he found in their company, but she never
asked him, nor did she devote very much thought to the matter. There was
but small cessation in her labors, and that only because six or eight of
the men drew their pay and went out. Benton managed to hold the others
against the thaw that might open up the woods in twenty-four hours, but
the smaller size of the gang only helped a little, and did not assist
her mentally at all. All the old resentment against the indignity of her
position rose and smoldered. To her the days were full enough of things
that she was terribly weary of doing over and over, endlessly. She was
always tired. No matter that she did, in a measure, harden to her work,
grow callously accustomed to rising early and working late. Always her
feet were sore at night, aching intolerably. Hot food, sharp knives, and
a glowing stove played havoc with her hands. Always she rose in the
morning heavy-eyed and stiff-muscled. Youth and natural vigor alone kept
her from breaking down, and to cap the strain of toil, she was soul-sick
with the isolation. For she was isolated; there was not a human being in
the camp, Katy John included, with whom she exchanged two dozen words a
day.
Before the snow put a stop to logging, Jack Fyfe dropped in once a week
or so. When work shut down, he came oftener, but he never singled Stella
out for any particular attention. Once he surprised her sitting with her
elbows on the kitchen table, her face buried in her palms. She looked up
at his quiet entrance, and her face must have given him his cue. He
leaned a little toward her.
"How long do you think you can stand it?" he asked gently.
"God knows," she answered, surprised into speaking the thought that lay
uppermost in her mind, surprised beyond measure that Be should read that
thought.
He stood looking down at her for a second or two. His lips parted, but
he closed them again over whatever rose to his tongue and passed
silently through the dining room and into the bunkhouse, where Benton
had preceded him a matter of ten minutes.
It lacked a week of Christmas. That day three of Benton's men had gone
in the _Chickamin_ to Roaring Springs for supplies. They had returned in
mid-afternoon, and Stella guessed by the new note of hilarity in the
bunkhouse that part of the supplies had been liquid. This had happened
more than once since the big snow closed in. She remembered Charlie's
fury at the logger who started Matt the cook on his spree, and she
wondered at this relaxation, but it was not in her province, and she
made no comment.
Jack Fyfe stayed to supper that evening. Neither he nor Charlie came
back to Benton's quarters when the meal was finished. While she stacked
up the dishes, Katy John observed:
"Goodness sakes, Miss Benton, them fellers was fresh at supper. They was
half-drunk, some of them. I bet they'll be half a dozen fights before
mornin'."
Stella passed that over in silence, with a mental turning up of her
nose. It was something she could neither defend nor excuse. It was a
disgusting state of affairs, but nothing she could change. She kept
harking back to it, though, when she was in her own quarters, and Katy
John had vanished for the night into her little room off the kitchen.
Tired as she was, she remained wakeful, uneasy. Over in the bunkhouse
disturbing sounds welled now and then into the cold, still
night,--incoherent snatches of song, voices uproariously raised, bursts
of laughter. Once, as she looked out the door, thinking she heard
footsteps crunching in the snow, some one rapped out a coarse oath that
drove her back with burning face.
As the evening wore late, she began to grow uneasily curious to know in
what manner Charlie and Jack Fyfe were lending countenance to this minor
riot, if they were even participating in it. Eleven o'clock passed, and
still there rose in the bunkhouse that unabated hum of voices.
Suddenly there rose a brief clamor. In the dead silence that followed,
she heard a thud and the clinking smash of breaking glass, a panted
oath, sounds of struggle.
Stella slipped on a pair of her brother's gum boots and an overcoat, and
ran out on the path beaten from their cabin to the shore. It led past
the bunkhouse, and on that side opened two uncurtained windows, yellow
squares that struck gleaming on the snow. The panes of one were broken
now, sharp fragments standing like saw teeth in the wooden sash.
She stole warily near and looked in. Two men were being held apart; one
by three of his fellows, the other _by_ Jack Fyfe alone. Fyfe grinned
mildly, talking to the men in a quiet, pacific tone.
"Now you know that was nothing to scrap about," she heard him say,
"You're both full of fighting whisky, but a bunkhouse isn't any place to
fight. Wait till morning. If you've still got it in your systems, go
outside and have it out. But you shouldn't disturb our game and break up
the furniture. Be gentlemen, drunk or sober. Better shake hands and call
it square."
"Aw, let 'em go to it, if they want to."
Charlie's voice, drink-thickened, harsh, came from a earner of the room
into which she could not see until she moved nearer. By the time she
picked him out, Fyfe resumed his seat at the table where three others
and Benton waited with cards in their hands, red and white chips and
money stacked before them.
She knew enough of cards to realize that a stiff poker game was on the
board when she had watched one hand dealt and played. It angered her,
not from any ethical motive, but because of her brother's part in it. He
had no funds to pay a cook's wages, yet he could afford to lose on one
hand as much as he credited her with for a month's work. She could slave
at the kitchen job day in and day out to save him forty-five dollars a
month. He could lose that without the flicker of an eyelash, but he
couldn't pay her wages on demand. Also she saw that he had imbibed too
freely, if the redness of his face and the glassy fixedness of his eyes
could be read aright.
"Pig!" she muttered. "If that's his idea of pleasure. Oh, well, why
should I care? I don't, so far as he's concerned, if I could just get
away from this beast of a place myself."
Abreast of her a logger came to the broken window with a sack to bar out
the frosty air. And Stella, realizing suddenly that she was shivering
with the cold, ran back to the cabin and got into her bed.
But she did not sleep, save in uneasy periods of dozing, until midnight
was long past. Then Fyfe and her brother came in, and by the sounds she
gathered that Fyfe was putting Charlie to bed. She heard his deep,
drawly voice urging the unwisdom of sleeping with calked boots on, and
Beaton's hiccupy response. The rest of the night she slept fitfully,
morbidly imagining terrible things. She was afraid, that was the sum
and substance of it. Over in the bunkhouse the carousal was still at its
height. She could not rid herself of the sight of those two men
struggling to be at each other like wild beasts, the bloody face of the
one who had been struck, the coarse animalism of the whole
whisky-saturated gang. It repelled and disgusted and frightened her.
The night frosts had crept through the single board walls of Stella's
room and made its temperature akin to outdoors when the alarm wakened
her at six in the morning. She shivered as she dressed. Katy John was
blissfully devoid of any responsibility, for seldom did Katy rise first
to light the kitchen fire. Yet Stella resented less each day's bleak
beginning than she did the enforced necessity of the situation; the fact
that she was enduring these things practically under compulsion was what
galled.
A cutting wind struck her icily as she crossed the few steps of open
between cabin and kitchen. Above no cloud floated, no harbinger of
melting rain. The cold stars twinkled over snow-blurred forest, struck
tiny gleams from stumps that were now white-capped pillars. A night
swell from the outside waters beat, its melancholy dirge on the frozen
beach. And, as she always did at that hushed hour before dawn, she
experienced a physical shrinking from those grim solitudes in which
there was nothing warm and human and kindly, nothing but vastness of
space upon which silence lay like a smothering blanket, in which she,
the human atom, was utterly negligible, a protesting mote in the
inexorable wilderness. She knew this to be merely a state of mind, but
situated as she was, it bore upon her with all the force of reality. She
felt like a prisoner who above all things desired some mode of escape.
A light burned in the kitchen. She thanked her stars that this bitter
cold morning she would not have to build a fire with freezing fingers
while her teeth chattered, and she hurried in to the warmth heralded by
a spark-belching stovepipe. But the Siwash girl had not risen to the
occasion. Instead, Jack Fyfe sat with his feet on the oven door, a cigar
in one corner of his mouth. The kettle steamed. Her porridge pot bubbled
ready for the meal.
"Good morning," he greeted. "Mind my preempting your job?"
"Not at all," she answered. "You can have it for keeps if you want."
"No, thanks," he smiled. "I'm sour on my own cooking. Had to eat too
much of it in times gone by. I wouldn't be stoking up here either, only
I got frozen out. Charlie's spare bed hasn't enough blankets for me
these cold nights."
He drew his chair aside to be out of the way as she hurried about her
breakfast preparations. All the time she was conscious that his eyes
were on her, and also that in them lurked an expression of keen
interest. His freckled mask of a face gave no clue to his thoughts; it
never did, so far as she had ever observed. Fyfe had a gambler's
immobility of countenance. He chucked the butt of his cigar in the stove
and sat with hands clasped over one knee for some time after Katy John
appeared and began setting the dining room table with a great clatter
of dishes.
He arose to his feet then. Stella stood beside the stove, frying bacon.
A logger opened the door and walked in. He had been one to fare ill in
the night's hilarity, for a discolored patch encircled one eye, and his
lips were split and badly swollen. He carried a tin basin.
"Kin I get some hot water?" he asked.
Stella silently indicated the reservoir at one end of the range. The man
ladled his basin full. The fumes of whisky, the unpleasant odor of his
breath offended her, and she drew back. Fyfe looked at her as the man
went out.
"What?" he asked.
She had muttered something, an impatient exclamation of disgust. The
man's appearance disagreeably reminded her of the scene she had observed
through the bunkhouse window. It stung her to think that her brother was
fast putting himself on a par with them--without their valid excuse of
type and training.
"Oh, nothing," she said wearily, and turned to the sputtering bacon.
Fyfe put his foot up on the stove front and drummed a tattoo on his
mackinaw clad knee.
"Aren't you getting pretty sick of this sort of work, these more or less
uncomfortable surroundings, and the sort of people you have to come in
contact with?" he asked pointedly.
"I am," she returned as bluntly, "but I think that's rather an
impertinent question, Mr. Fyfe."
He passed imperturbably over this reproof, and his glance turned
briefly toward the dining room. Katy John was still noisily at work.
"You hate it," he said positively. "I know you do. I've seen your
feelings many a time. I don't blame you. It's a rotten business for a
girl with your tastes and bringing up. And I'm afraid you'll find it
worse, if this snow stays long. I know what a logging camp is when work
stops, and whisky creeps in, and the boss lets go his hold for the time
being."
"That may be true," she returned gloomily, "but I don't see why you
should enumerate these disagreeable things for my benefit."
"I'm going to show you a way out," he said softly. "I've been thinking
it over for quite a while. I want you to marry me."
Stella gasped.
"Mr. Fyfe."
"Listen," he said peremptorily, leaning closer to her and lowering his
voice. "I have an idea that you're going to say you don't love me. Lord,
_I_ know that. But you _hate_ this. It grates against every inclination
of yours like a file on steel. I wouldn't jar on you like that. I
wouldn't permit you to live in surroundings that would. That's the
material side of it. Nobody can live on day dreams. I like you, Stella
Benton, a whole lot more than I'd care to say right out loud. You and I
together could make a home we'd be proud of. I want you, and you want to
get away from this. It's natural. Marry me and play the game fair, and I
don't think you'll be sorry. I'm putting it as baldly as I can. You
stand to win everything with nothing to lose--but your domestic
chains--" the gleam of a smile lit up his features for a second. "Won't
you take a chance?" "No," she declared impulsively. "I won't be a party
to any such cold-blooded transaction."
"You don't seem to understand me," he said soberly. "I don't want to
hand out any sentiment, but it makes me sore to see you wasting yourself
on this sort of thing. If you must do it, why don't you do it for
somebody who'll make it worth while? If you'd use the brains God gave
you, you know that lots of couples have married on flimsier grounds than
we'd have. How can a man and a woman really know anything about each
other till they've lived together? Just because we don't marry with our
heads in the fog is no reason we shouldn't get on fine. What are you
going to do? Stick here at this till you go crazy? You won't get away.
You don't realize what a one-idea, determined person this brother of
yours is. He has just one object in life, and he'll use everything and
everybody in sight to attain that object. He means to succeed and he
will. You're purely incidental; but he has that perverted, middle-class
family pride that will make him prevent you from getting out and trying
your own wings. Nature never intended a woman like you to be a celibate,
any more than I was so intended. And sooner or late you'll marry
somebody--if only to hop out of the fire into the frying pan."
"I hate you," she flashed passionately, "when you talk like that."
"No, you don't," he returned quietly. "You hate what I say, because
it's the truth--and it's humiliating to be helpless. You think I don't
_sabe?_ But I'm putting a weapon into your hand. Let's put it
differently; leave out the sentiment for a minute. We'll say that I want
a housekeeper, preferably an ornamental one, because I like beautiful
things. You want to get away from this drudgery. That's what it is,
simple drudgery. You crave lots of things you can't get by yourself, but
that you could help me get for you. There's things lacking in your life,
and so is there in mine. Why shouldn't we go partners? You think about
it."
"I don't need to," she answered coolly. "It wouldn't work. You don't
appear to have any idea what it means for a woman to give herself up
body and soul to a man she doesn't care for. For me it would be plain
selling myself. I haven't the least affection for you personally. I
might even detest you."
"You wouldn't," he said positively.
"What makes you so sure of that?" she demanded.
"It would sound conceited if I told you why," he drawled. "Listen. We're
not gods and goddesses, we human beings. We're not, after all, in our
real impulses, so much different from the age when a man took his club
and went after a female that looked good to him. They mated, and raised
their young, and very likely faced on an average fewer problems than
arise in modern marriages supposedly ordained in Heaven. You'd have the
one big problem solved,--the lack of means to live decently,--which
wrecks more homes than anything else, far more than lack of love.
Affection doesn't seem to thrive on poverty. What is love?"
His voice took on a challenging note.
Stella shook her head. He puzzled her, wholly serious one minute, a
whimsical smile twisting up the corners of his mouth the next. And he
surprised her too by his sureness of utterance on subjects she had not
supposed would enter such a man's mind.
"I don't know," she answered absently, turning over strips of bacon with
the long-handled fork.
"There you are," he said. "I don't know either. We'd start even, then,
for the sake of argument. No, I guess we wouldn't either, because you're
the only woman I've run across so far with whom I could calmly
contemplate spending the rest of my life in close contact. That's a
fact. To me it's a highly important fact. You don't happen to have any
such feeling about me, eh?"
"No. I hadn't even thought of you in that way," Stella answered
truthfully.
"You want to think about me," he said calmly. "You want to think about
me from every possible angle, because I'm going to come back and ask you
this same question every once in a while, so long as you're in reach and
doing this dirty work for a thankless boss. You want to think of me as a
possible refuge from a lot of disagreeable things. I'd like to have you
to chum with, and I'd like to have some incentive to put a big white
bungalow on that old foundation for us two," he smiled. "I'll never do
it for myself alone. Go on. Take a gambling chance and marry me, Stella.
Say yes, and say it now."
But she shook her head resolutely, and as Katy John came in just then,
Fyfe took his foot off the stove and went out of the kitchen. He threw a
glance over his shoulder at Stella, a broad smile, as if to say that he
harbored no grudge, and nursed no wound in his vanity because she would
have none of him.
Katy rang the breakfast gong. Five minutes later the tattoo of knives
and forks and spoons told of appetites in process of appeasement.
Charlie came into the kitchen in the midst of this, bearing certain
unmistakable signs. His eyes were inflamed, his cheeks still bearing the
flush of liquor. His demeanor was that of a man suffering an intolerable
headache and correspondingly short-tempered. Stella barely spoke to him.
It was bad enough for a man to make a beast of himself with whisky, but
far worse was his gambling streak. There were so many little ways in
which she could have eased things with a few dollars; yet he always
grumbled when she spoke of money, always put her off with promises to be
redeemed when business got better.
Stella watched him bathe his head copiously in cold water and then seat
himself at the long table, trying to force food upon an aggrieved and
rebellious stomach. Gradually a flood of recklessness welled up in her
breast.
"For two pins I would marry Jack Fyfe," she told herself savagely.
"_Anything_ would be better than this."