THE OPENING GUN
The month of November slid day by day into the limbo of the past. The
rains washed the land unceasingly. Gray veilings of mist and cloud
draped the mountain slopes. As drab a shade colored Stella Fyfe's daily
outlook. She was alone a great deal. Even when they were together, she
and her husband, words did not come easily between them. He was away a
great deal, seeking, she knew, the old panacea of work, hard,
unremitting work, to abate the ills of his spirit. She envied him that
outlet. Work for her there was none. The two Chinamen and Martha the
nurse left her no tasks. She could not read, for all their great store
of books and magazines; the printed page would lie idle in her lap, and
her gaze would wander off into vacancy, into that thought-world where
her spirit wandered in distress. The Abbeys were long gone; her brother
hard at his logging. There were no neighbors and no news. The savor was
gone out of everything. The only bright spot in her days was Jack
Junior, now toddling precociously on his sturdy legs, a dozen steps at a
time, crowing victoriously when he negotiated the passage from chair to
chair.
From the broad east windows of their house she saw all the traffic that
came and went on the upper reaches of Roaring Lake, Siwashes in dugouts
and fishing boats, hunters, prospectors. But more than any other she saw
the craft of her husband and Monohan, the powerful, black-hulled
_Panther_, the smaller, daintier _Waterbug_.
There was a big gasoline workboat, gray with a yellow funnel, that she
knew was Monohan's. And this craft bore past there often, inching its
downward way with swifters of logs, driving fast up-lake without a tow.
Monohan had abandoned work on the old Abbey-Monohan logging-grounds. The
camps and the bungalow lay deserted, given over to a solitary watchman.
The lake folk had chattered at this proceeding, and the chatter had come
to Stella's ears. He had put in two camps at the lake head, so she heard
indirectly: one on the lake shore, one on the Tyee River, a little above
the mouth. He had sixty men in each camp, and he was getting the name of
a driver. Three miles above his Tyee camp, she knew, lay the camp her
husband had put in during the early summer to cut a heavy limit of
cedar. Fyfe had only a small crew there.
She wondered a little why he spent so much time there, when he had
seventy-odd men working near home. But of course he had an able
lieutenant in Lefty Howe. And she could guess why Jack Fyfe kept away.
She was sorry for him--and for herself. But being sorry--a mere
semi-neutral state of mind--did not help matters, she told herself
gloomily.
Lefty Howe's wife was at the camp now, on one of her occasional visits.
Howe was going across the lake one afternoon to see a Siwash whom he had
engaged to catch and smoke a winter's supply of salmon for the camps.
Mrs. Howe told Stella, and on impulse Stella bundled Jack Junior into
warm clothing and went with them for the ride.
Halfway across the six-mile span she happened to look back, and a new
mark upon the western shore caught her eye. She found a glass and
leveled it on the spot. Two or three buildings, typical logging-camp
shacks of split cedar, rose back from the beach. Behind these again the
beginnings of a cut had eaten a hole in the forest,--a slashing
different from the ordinary logging slash, for it ran narrowly, straight
back through the timber; whereas the first thing a logger does is to cut
all the merchantable timber he can reach on his limit without moving his
donkey from the water. It was not more than two miles from their house.
"What new camp is that?" she asked Howe.
"Monohan's," he answered casually.
"I thought Jack owned all the shore timber to Medicine Point?" she said.
Howe shook his head.
"Uh-uh. Well, he does too, all but where that camp is. Monohan's got a
freak limit in there. It's half a mile wide and two miles straight back
from the beach. Lays between our holdin's like the ham in a sandwich.
Only," he added thoughtfully, "it's a blame thin piece uh ham. About the
poorest timber in a long stretch. I dunno why the Sam Hill he's cuttin'
it. But then he's doin' a lot uh things no practical logger would do."
Stella laid down the glasses. It was nothing to her, she told herself.
She had seen Monohan only once since the day Fyfe choked him, and then
only to exchange the barest civilities--and to feel her heart flutter at
the message his eyes telegraphed.
When she returned from the launch trip, Fyfe was home, and Charlie
Benton with him. She crossed the heavy rugs on the living room floor
noiselessly in her overshoes, carrying Jack Junior asleep in her arms.
And so in passing the door of Fyfe's den, she heard her brother say:
"But, good Lord, you don't suppose he'll be sap-head enough to try such
fool stunts as that? He couldn't make it stick, and he brings himself
within the law first crack; and the most he could do would be to annoy
you."
"You underestimate Monohan," Fyfe returned. "He'll play safe,
personally, so far as the law goes. He's foxy. I advise you to sell if
the offer comes again. If you make any more breaks at him, he'll figure
some way to get you. It isn't your fight, you know. You unfortunately
happen to be in the road."
"Damned if I do," Benton swore. "I'm all in the clear. There's no way he
can get me, and I'll tell him what I think of him again if he gives me
half a chance. I never liked him, anyhow. Why should I sell when I'm
just getting in real good shape to take that timber out myself? Why, I
can make a hundred thousand dollars in the next five years on that block
of timber. Besides, without being a sentimental sort of beggar, I don't
lose sight of the fact that you helped pull me out of a hole when I sure
needed a pull. And I don't like his high-handed style. No, if it comes
to a showdown, I'm with you, Jack, as far as I can go. What the hell
_can_ he do?"
"Nothing--that I can see." Fyfe laughed unpleasantly. "But he'll try. He
has dollars to our cents. He could throw everything he's got on Roaring
Lake into the discard and still have forty thousand a year fixed income.
Sabe? Money does more than talk in this country. I think I'll pull that
camp off the Tyee."
"Well, maybe," Benton said. "I'm not sure--"
Stella passed on. She wanted to hear, but it went against her grain to
eavesdrop. Her pause had been purely involuntary. When she became
conscious that she was eagerly drinking in each word, she hurried by.
Her mind was one urgent question mark while she laid the sleeping
youngster in his bed and removed her heavy clothes. What sort of
hostilities did Monohan threaten? Had he let a hopeless love turn to the
acid of hate for the man who nominally possessed her? Stella could
scarcely credit that. It was too much at variance with her idealistic
conception of the man. He would never have recourse to such littleness.
Still, the biting contempt in Fyfe's voice when he said to Benton: "You
underestimate Monohan. He'll play safe ... he's foxy." That stung her to
the quick. That was not said for her benefit; it was Fyfe's profound
conviction. Based on what? He did not form judgments on momentary
impulse. She recalled that only in the most indirect way had he ever
passed criticism on Monohan, and then it lay mostly in a tone, suggested
more than spoken. Yet he knew Monohan, had known him for years. They had
clashed long before she was a factor in their lives.
When she went into the big room, Benton and Fyfe were gone outdoors. She
glanced into Fyfe's den. It was empty, but a big blue-print unrolled on
the table where the two had been seated caught her eye. She bent over
it, drawn by the lettered squares along the wavy shore line and the
marked waters of creeks she knew.
She had never before possessed a comprehensive idea of the various
timber holdings along the west shore of Roaring Lake, since it had not
been a matter of particular interest to her. She was not sure why it now
became a matter of interest to her, unless it was an impression that
over these squares and oblongs which stood for thousands upon thousands
of merchantable logs there was already shaping a struggle, a clash of
iron wills and determined purposes directly involving, perhaps arising
because of her.
She studied the blue-print closely. Its five feet of length embraced all
the west shore of the lake, from the outflowing of Roaring River to the
incoming Tyee at the head. Each camp was lettered in with pencil. But
her attention focussed chiefly on the timber limits ranging north and
south from their home, and she noted two details: that while the limits
marked A-M Co. were impartially distributed from Cottonwood north, the
squares marked J.H. Fyfe lay in a solid block about Cougar Bay,--save
for that long tongue of a limit where she had that day noted the new
camp. That thrust like the haft of a spear into the heart of Fyfe's
timberland.
There was the Abbey-Monohan cottage, the three limits her brother
controlled lying up against Fyfe's southern boundary. Up around the
mouth of the Tyee spread the vast checkerboard of Abbey-Monohan limits,
and beyond that, on the eastern bank of the river, a single
block,--Fyfe's cedar limit,--the camp he thought he would close down.
Why? Immediately the query shaped in her mind. Monohan was concentrating
his men and machinery at the lake head. Fyfe proposed to shut down a
camp but well-established; established because cedar was climbing in
price, an empty market clamoring for cedar logs. Why?
Was there aught of significance in that new camp of Monohan's so near
by; that sudden activity on ground that bisected her husband's property?
A freak limit of timber so poor that Lefty Howe said it could only be
logged at a loss.
She sighed and went out to give dinner orders to Sam Foo. If she could
only go to her husband and talk as they had been able to talk things
over at first. But there had grown up between them a deadly restraint.
She supposed that was inevitable. Both chafed under conditions they
could not change or would not for stubbornness and pride.
It made a deep impression on her, all these successive, disassociated
finger posts, pointing one and all to things under the surface, to
motives and potentialities she had not glimpsed before and could only
guess at now.
Fyfe and Benton came to dinner more or less preoccupied, an odd mood for
Charlie Benton. Afterwards they went into session behind the closed door
of Fyfe's den. An hour or so later Benton went home. While she listened
to the soft _chuff-a-chuff-a-chuff_ of the _Chickamin_ dying away in the
distance, Fyfe came in and slumped down in a chair before the fire where
a big fir stick crackled. He sat there silent, a half-smoked cigar
clamped in one corner of his mouth, the lines of his square jaw in
profile, determined, rigid. Stella eyed him covertly. There were times,
in those moods of concentration, when sheer brute power seemed his most
salient characteristic. Each bulging curve of his thick upper arm, his
neck rising like a pillar from massive shoulders, indicated his power.
Yet so well-proportioned was he that the size and strength of him was
masked by the symmetry of his body, just as the deliberate immobility of
his face screened the play of his feelings. Often Stella found herself
staring at him, fruitlessly wondering what manner of thought and feeling
that repression overlaid. Sometimes a tricksy, half-provoked desire to
break through the barricade of his stoicism tempted her. She told
herself that she ought to be thankful for his aloofness, his
acquiescence in things as they stood. Yet there were times when she
would almost have welcomed an outburst, a storm, anything rather than
that deadly chill, enduring day after day. He seldom spoke to her now
except of most matter-of-fact things. He played his part like a
gentleman before others, but alone with her he withdrew into his shell.
Stella was sitting back in the shadow, still studying him, measuring him
in spite of herself by the Monohan yardstick. There wasn't much basis
for comparison. It wasn't a question of comparison; the two men stood
apart, distinctive, in every attribute. The qualities in Fyfe that she
understood and appreciated, she beheld glorified in Monohan. Yet it was
not, after all, a question of qualities. It was something more subtle,
something of the heart which defied logical analysis.
Fyfe had never been able to set her pulse dancing. She had never craved
physical nearness to him, so that she ached with the poignancy of that
craving. She had been passively contented with him, that was all. And
Monohan had swept across her horizon like a flame. Why couldn't Jack
Fyfe have inspired in her that headlong sort of passion? She smiled
hopelessly. The tears were very close to her eyes. She loved Monohan;
Monohan loved her. Fyfe loved her in his deliberate, repressed fashion
and possessed her, according to the matrimonial design. And although now
his possession was a hollow mockery, he would never give her up--not to
Walter Monohan. She had that fatalistic conviction.
How would it end in the long run?
She leaned forward to speak. Words quivered on her lips. But as she
struggled to shape them to utterance, the blast of a boat whistle came
screaming up from the water, near and shrill and imperative.
Fyfe came out of his chair like a shot. He landed poised on his feet,
lips drawn apart, hands clenched. He held that pose for an instant, then
relaxed, his breath coming with a quick sigh.
Stella stared at him. Nerves! She knew the symptoms too well. Nerves at
terrible tension in that big, splendid body. A slight quiver seemed to
run over him. Then he was erect and calmly himself again, standing in a
listening attitude.
"That's the _Panther_?" he said. "Pulling in to the _Waterbug's_
landing. Did I startle you when I bounced up like a cougar, Stella?" he
asked, with a wry smile. "I guess I was half asleep. That whistle jolted
me."
Stella glanced out the shaded window.
"Some one's coming up from the float with a lantern," she said. "Is
there--is there likely to be anything wrong, Jack?"
"Anything wrong?" He shot a quick glance at her. Then casually: "Not
that I know of."
The bobbing lantern came up the path through the lawn. Footsteps
crunched on the gravel.
"I'll go see what he wants," Fyfe remarked, "Calked boots won't be good
for the porch floor."
She followed him.
"Stay in. It's cold." He stopped in the doorway.
"No. I'm coming," she persisted.
They met the lantern bearer at the foot of the steps.
"Well, Thorsen?" Fyfe shot at him. There was an unusual note of
sharpness in his voice, an irritated expectation.
Stella saw that it was the skipper of the _Panther_, a big and burly
Dane. He raised the lantern a little. The dim light on his face showed
it bruised and swollen. Fyfe grunted.
"Our boom is hung up," he said plaintively. "They've blocked the river.
I got licked for arguin' the point."
"How's it blocked?" Fyfe asked.
"Two swifters uh logs strung across the channel. They're drivin' piles
in front. An' three donkeys buntin' logs in behind."
"Swift work. There wasn't a sign of a move when I left this morning,"
Fyfe commented drily. "Well, take the _Panther_ around to the inner
landing. I'll be there."
"What's struck that feller Monohan?" the Dane sputtered angrily. "Has he
got any license to close the Tyee? He says he has--an' backs his
argument strong, believe me. Maybe you can handle him. I couldn't. Next
time I'll have a cant-hook handy. By jingo, you gimme my pick uh Lefty's
crew, Jack, an' I'll bring that cedar out."
"Take the _Panther_ 'round," Fyfe replied. "We'll see."
Thorsen turned back down the slope. In a minute the thrum of the boat's
exhaust arose as she got under way.
"Come on in. You'll get cold standing here," Fyfe said to Stella.
She followed him back into the living room. He sat on the arm of a big
leather chair, rolling the dead cigar thoughtfully between his lips,
little creases gathering between his eyes.
"I'm going up the lake," he said at last, getting up abruptly.
"What's the matter, Jack?" she asked. "Why, has trouble started up
there?"
"Part of the logging game," he answered indifferently. "Don't amount to
much."
"But Thorsen has been fighting. His face was terrible. And I've heard
you say he was one of the most peaceable men alive. Is it--is Monohan--"
"We won't discuss Monohan," Fyfe said curtly. "Anyway, there's no danger
of _him_ getting hurt."
He went into his den and came out with hat and coat on. At the door he
paused a moment.
"Don't worry," he said kindly. "Nothing's going to happen."
But she stood looking out the window after he left, uneasy with a
prescience of trouble. She watched with a feverish interest the stir
that presently arose about the bunkhouses. That summer a wide space had
been cleared between bungalow and camp. She could see moving lanterns,
and even now and then hear the voices of men calling to each other. Once
the _Panther's_ dazzling eye of a searchlight swung across the landing,
and its beam picked out a file of men carrying their blankets toward the
boat. Shortly after that the tender rounded the point. Close behind her
went the _Waterbug_, and both boats swarmed with men.
Stella looked and listened until there was but a faint thrum far up the
lake. Then she went to bed, but not to sleep. What ugly passions were
loosed at the lake head she did not know. But on the face of it she
could not avoid wondering if Monohan had deliberately set out to cross
and harass Jack Fyfe. Because of her? That was the question which had
hovered on her lips that evening, one she had not brought herself to
ask. Because of her, or because of some enmity that far preceded her?
She had thought him big enough to do as she had done, as Fyfe was
tacitly doing,--make the best of a grievous matter.
But if he had allowed his passions to dictate reprisals, she trembled
for the outcome. Fyfe was not a man to sit quiet under either affront or
injury. He would fight with double rancor if Monohan were his adversary.
"If anything happens up there, I'll hate myself," she whispered, when
the ceaseless turning of her mind had become almost unendurable. "I was
a silly, weak fool to ever let Walter Monohan know I cared. And I'll
hate him too if he makes me a bone of contention. I elected to play the
game the only decent way there is to play it. So did he. Why can't he
abide by that?"
Noon of the next day saw the _Waterbug_ heave to a quarter mile abeam of
Cougar Point to let off a lone figure in her dinghy, and then bore on,
driving straight and fast for Roaring Springs. Stella flew to the
landing. Mother Howe came puffing at her heels.
"Land's sake, I been worried to death," the older woman breathed. "When
men git to quarrellin' about timber, you never can tell where they'll
stop, Mrs. Jack. I've knowed some wild times in the woods in the past."
The man in the dink was Lefty Howe. He pulled in beside the float. When
he stepped up on the planks, he limped perceptibly.
"Land alive, what happened yuh, Lefty?" his wife cried.
"Got a rap on the leg with a peevy," he said. "Nothin' much."
"Why did the _Waterbug_ go down the lake?" Stella asked breathlessly.
The man's face was serious. "What happened up there?"
"There was a fuss," he answered quietly. "Three or four of the boys got
beat up so they need patchin'. Jack's takin' 'em down to the hospital.
Damn that yeller-headed Monohan!" his voice lifted suddenly in
uncontrollable anger. "Billy Dale was killed this mornin', mother."
Stella felt herself grow sick. Death is a small matter when it strikes
afar, among strangers. When it comes to one's door! Billy Dale had
piloted the _Waterbug_ for a year, a chubby, round-faced boy of twenty,
a foster-son, of Mother Howe's before she had children of her own.
Stella had asked Jack to put him on the _Waterbug_ because he was such a
loyal, cheery sort of soul, and Billy had been a part of every
expedition they had taken around the lake. She could not think of him as
a rigid, lifeless lump of clay. Why, only the day before he had been
laughing and chattering aboard the cruiser, going up and down the cabin
floor on his hands and knees, Jack Junior perched triumphantly astride
his back.
"What happened?" she cried wildly. "Tell me, quick."
"It's quick told," Howe said grimly. "We were ready at daylight.
Monohan's got a hard crew, and they jumped us as soon as we started to
clear the channel. So we cleared them, first. It didn't take so long.
Three of our men was used bad, and there's plenty of sore heads on both
sides. But we did the job. After we got them on the run, we blowed up
their swifters an' piles with giant. Then we begun to put the cedar
through. Billy was on the bank when somebody shot him from across the
river. One mercy, he never knew what hit him. An' you'll never come so
close bein' a widow again, Mrs. Fyfe, an' not be. That bullet was meant
for Jack, I figure. He was sittin' down. Billy was standin' right behind
him watchin' the logs go through. Whoever he was, he shot high, that's
all. There, mother, don't cry. That don't help none. What's done's
done."
Stella turned and walked up to the house, stunned. She could not credit
bloodshed, death. Always in her life both had been things remote. And as
the real significance of Lefty Howe's story grew on her, she shuddered.
It lay at her door, equally with her and Monohan, even if neither of
their hands had sped the bullet,--an indirect responsibility but
gruesomely real to her.
God only knows to what length she might have gone in reaction. She was
quivering under that self-inflicted lash, bordering upon hysteria when
she reached the house. She could not shut out a too-vivid picture of
Billy Dale lying murdered on the Tyee's bank, of the accusing look with
which Fyfe must meet her. Rightly so, she held. She did not try to
shirk. She had followed the line of least resistance, lacked the dour
courage to pull herself up in the beginning, and it led to this. She
felt Billy Dale's blood wet on her soft hands. She walked into her own
house panting like a hunted animal.
And she had barely crossed the threshold when back in the rear Jack
Junior's baby voice rose in a shrill scream of pain.
* * * * *
Stella scarcely heard her husband and the doctor come in. For a weary
age she had been sitting in a low rocker, a pillow across her lap, and
on that the little, tortured body swaddled with cotton soaked in olive
oil, the only dressing she and Mrs. Howe could devise to ease the pain.
All those other things which had so racked her, the fight on the Tyee,
the shooting of Billy Dale, they had vanished somehow into thin air
before the dread fact that her baby was dying slowly before her
anguished eyes. She sat numbed with that deadly assurance, praying
without hope for help to come, hopeless that any medical skill would
avail when it did come. So many hours had been wasted while a man rowed
to Benton's camp, while the _Chickamin_ steamed to Roaring Springs,
while the _Waterbug_ came driving back. Five hours! And the skin, yes,
even shreds of flesh, had come away in patches with Jack Junior's
clothing when she took it off. She bent over him, fearful that every
feeble breath would be his last.
She looked up at the doctor. Fyfe was beside her, his calked boots
biting into the oak floor.
"See what you can do, doc," he said huskily. Then to Stella: "How did it
happen?"
"He toddled away from Martha," she whispered. "Sam Foo had set a pan of
boiling water on the kitchen floor. He fell into it. Oh, my poor little
darling."
They watched the doctor bare the terribly scalded body, examine it,
listen to the boy's breathing, count his pulse. In the end he re-dressed
the tiny body with stuff from the case with which a country physician
goes armed against all emergencies. He was very deliberate and
thoughtful. Stella looked her appeal when he finished.
"He's a sturdy little chap," he said, "and we'll do our best. A child
frequently survives terrific shock. It would be mistaken kindness for me
to make light of his condition simply to spare your feelings. He has an
even chance. I shall stay until morning. Now, I think it would be best
to lay him on a bed. You must relax, Mrs. Fyfe. I can see that the
strain is telling on you. You mustn't allow yourself to get in that
abnormal condition. The baby is not conscious of pain. He is not
suffering half so much in his body as you are in your mind, and you
mustn't do that. Be hopeful. We'll need your help. We should have a
nurse, but there was no time to get one."
They laid Jack Junior amid downy pillows on Stella's bed. The doctor
stood looking at him, then drew a chair beside the bed.
"Go and walk about a little, Mrs. Fyfe," he advised, "and have your
dinner. I'll want to watch the boy a while."
But Stella did not want to walk. She did not want to eat. She was
scarcely aware that her limbs were cramped and aching from her long
vigil in the chair. She was not conscious of herself and her problems,
any more. Every shift of her mind turned on her baby, the little mite
she had nursed at her breast, the one joy untinctured with bitterness
that was left her. The bare chance that those little feet might never
patter across the floor again, that little voice never wake her in the
morning crying "Mom-mom," drove her distracted.
She went out into the living room, walked to a window, stood there
drumming on the pane with nervous fingers. Dusk was falling outside; a
dusk was creeping over her. She shuddered.
Fyfe came up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, and turned her
so that she faced him.
"I wish I could help, Stella," he whispered. "I wish I could make you
feel less forlorn. Poor little kiddies--both of you."
She shook off his hands, not because she rebelled against his touch,
against his sympathy, merely because she had come to that nervous state
where she scarce realized what she did.
"Oh," she choked, "I can't bear it. My baby, my little baby boy. The one
bright spot that's left, and he has to suffer like that. If he dies,
it's the end of everything for me."
Fyfe stared at her. The warm, pitying look on his face ebbed away,
hardened into his old, mask-like absence of expression.
"No," he said quietly, "it would only be the beginning. Lord God, but
this has been a day."
He whirled about with a quick gesture of his hands, a harsh, raspy laugh
that was very near a sob, and left her. Twenty minutes later, when
Stella was irresistibly drawn back to the bedroom, she found him sitting
sober and silent, looking at his son.
A little past midnight Jack Junior died.