THE FIRE BEHIND THE SMOKE
This is no intimate chronicle of Charlie Benton and Linda Abbey, save in
so far as they naturally furnish a logical sequence in what transpired.
Therefore the details of their nuptials is of no particular concern.
They were wedded, ceremonially dined as befitted the occasion, and
departed upon their hypothetical honeymoon, surreptitiously abbreviated
from an extravagant swing over half of North America to seventy miles by
rail and twenty by water,--and a month of blissful seclusion, which
suited those two far better than any amount of Pullman touring, besides
leaving them money in pocket.
When they were gone, Stella caught the next boat for Seattle. She had
drawn fresh breath in the meantime, and while she felt tenderly, almost
maternally, sorry for Jack Fyfe, she swung back to the old attitude.
Even granting, she argued, that she could muster courage to take up the
mantle of wifehood where she laid it off, there was no surety that they
could do more than compromise. There was the stubborn fact that she had
openly declared her love for another man, that by her act she had
plunged her husband into far-reaching conflict. Such a conflict existed.
She could put her finger on no concrete facts, but it was in the air.
She heard whispers of a battle between giants--a financial duel to the
death--with all the odds against Jack Fyfe.
Win or lose, there would be scars. And the struggle, if not of and by
her deed, had at least sprung into malevolent activity through her. Men,
she told herself, do not forget these things; they rankle. Jack Fyfe was
only human. No, Stella felt that they could only come safe to the old
port by virtue of a passion that could match Fyfe's own. And she put
that rather sadly beyond her, beyond the possibilities. She had felt
stirrings of it, but not to endure. She was proud and sensitive and
growing wise with bitterly accumulated experience. It had to be all or
nothing with them, a cleaving together complete enough to erase and
forever obliterate all that had gone before. And since she could not see
that as a possibility, there was nothing to do but play the game
according to the cards she held. Of these the trump was work, the inner
glow that comes of something worth while done toward a definite,
purposeful end. She took up her singing again with a distinct relief.
Time passed quickly and uneventfully enough between the wedding day and
the date of her Granada engagement. It seemed a mere breathing space
before the middle of July rolled around, and she was once more aboard a
Vancouver boat. In the interim, she had received a letter from the
attorney who had wound up her father's estate, intimating that there was
now a market demand for that oil stock, and asking if he should sell or
hold for a rise in price which seemed reasonably sure? Stella
telegraphed her answer. If that left-over of a speculative period would
bring a few hundred dollars, it would never be of greater service to her
than now.
All the upper reach of Puget Sound basked in its normal midsummer haze,
the day Stella started for Vancouver. That great region of island-dotted
sea spread between the rugged Olympics and the foot of the Coast range
lay bathed in summer sun, untroubled, somnolent. But nearing the
international boundary, the _Charlotte_ drove her twenty-knot way into a
thickening atmosphere. Northward from Victoria, the rugged shores that
line those inland waterways began to appear blurred. Just north of
Active Pass, where the steamers take to the open gulf again, a vast bank
of smoke flung up blue and gray, a rolling mass. The air was pungent,
oppressive. When the _Charlotte_ spanned the thirty-mile gap between
Vancouver Island and the mainland shore, she nosed into the Lion's Gate
under a slow bell, through a smoke pall thick as Bering fog. Stella's
recollection swung back to Charlie's uneasy growl of a month earlier.
Fire! Throughout the midsummer season there was always the danger of
fire breaking out in the woods. Not all the fire-ranger patrols could
guard against the carelessness of fishermen and campers.
"It's a tough Summer over here for the timber owners," she heard a man
remark. "I've been twenty years on the coast and never saw the woods so
dry."
"Dry's no name," his neighbor responded. "It's like tinder. A cigarette
stub'll start a blaze forty men couldn't put out. It's me that knows it.
I've got four limits on the North Arm, and there's fire on two sides of
me. You bet I'm praying for rain."
"They say the country between Chehalis and Roaring Lake is one big
blaze," the first man observed.
"So?" the other replied. "Pity, too. Fine timber in there. I came near
buying some timber on the lake this spring. Some stuff that was on the
market as a result of that Abbey-Monohan split. Glad I didn't now. I'd
just as soon have _all_ my money out of timber this season."
They moved away in the press of disembarking, and Stella heard no more
of their talk. She took a taxi to the Granada, and she bought a paper in
the foyer before she followed the bell boy to her room. She had scarcely
taken off her hat and settled down to read when the telephone rang.
Linda's voice greeted her when she answered.
"I called on the chance that you took the morning boat," Linda said.
"Can I run in? I'm just down for the day. I won't be able to hear you
sing, but I'd like to see you, dear."
"Can you come right now?" Stella asked. "Come up, and we'll have
something served up here. I don't feel like running the gauntlet of the
dining room just now."
"I'll be there in a few minutes," Linda answered.
Stella went back to her paper. She hadn't noticed any particular stress
laid on forest fires in the Seattle dailies, but she could not say that
of this Vancouver sheet. The front page reeked of smoke and fire. She
glanced through the various items for news of Roaring Lake, but found
only a brief mention. It was "reported" and "asserted" and "rumored"
that fire was raging at one or two points there, statements that were
overshadowed by positive knowledge of greater areas nearer at hand
burning with a fierceness that could be seen and smelled. The local
papers had enough feature stuff in fires that threatened the very
suburbs of Vancouver without going so far afield as Roaring Lake.
Linda's entrance put a stop to her reading, without, however, changing
the direction of her thought. For after an exchange of greetings, Linda
divulged the source of her worried expression, which Stella had
immediately remarked.
"Who wouldn't be worried," Linda said, "with the whole country on fire,
and no telling when it may break out in some unexpected place and wipe
one out of house and home."
"Is it so bad as that at the lake?" Stella asked uneasily. "There's not
much in the paper. I was looking."
"It's so bad," Linda returned, with a touch of bitterness, "that I've
been driven to the Springs for safety; that every able-bodied man on the
lake who can be spared is fighting fire. There has been one man killed,
and there's half a dozen loggers in the hospital, suffering from burns
and other hurts. Nobody knows where it will stop. Charlie's limits have
barely been scorched, but there's fire all along one side of them. A
change of wind--and there you are. Jack Fyfe's timber is burning in a
dozen places. We've been praying for rain and choking in the smoke for a
week."
Stella looked out the north window. From the ten-story height she could
see ships lying in the stream, vague hulks in the smoky pall that
shrouded the harbor.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
"It's devilish," Linda went on. "Like groping in the dark and being
afraid--for me. I've been married a month, and for ten days I've only
seen my husband at brief intervals when he comes down in the launch for
supplies, or to bring an injured man. And he doesn't tell me anything
except that we stand a fat chance of losing everything. I sit there at
the Springs, and look at that smoke wall hanging over the water, and
wonder what goes on up there. And at night there's the red glow, very
faint and far. That's all. I've been doing nursing at the hospital to
help out and to keep from brooding. I wouldn't be down here now, only
for a list of things the doctor needs, which he thought could be
obtained quicker if some one attended to it personally. I'm taking the
evening train back."
"I'm sorry," Stella repeated.
She said it rather mechanically. Her mind was spinning a thread, upon
which, strung like beads, slid all the manifold succession of things
that had happened since she came first to Roaring Lake. Linda's voice,
continuing, broke into her thoughts.
"I suppose I shouldn't be croaking into your ear like a bird of ill
omen, when you have to throw yourself heart and soul into that concert
to-morrow," she said contritely. "I wonder why that Ancient Mariner way
of seeking relief from one's troubles by pouring them into another ear
is such a universal trait? You aren't vitally concerned, after all, and
I am. Let's have that tea, dear, and talk about less grievous things. I
still have one or two trifles to get in the shops too."
After they had finished the food that Stella ordered sent up, they went
out together. Later Stella saw her off on the train.
"Good-by, dear," Linda said from the coach window. "I'm just selfish
enough to wish you were going back with me; I wish you could sit with me
on the bank of the lake, aching and longing for your man up there in the
smoke as I ache and long for mine. Misery loves company."
Stella's eyes were clouded as the train pulled out. Something in Linda
Benton's parting words made her acutely lonely, dispirited, out of joint
with the world she was deliberately fashioning for herself. Into Linda's
life something big and elemental had come. The butterfly of yesterday
had become the strong man's mate of to-day. Linda's heart was
unequivocally up there in the smoke and flame with her man, fighting for
their mutual possessions, hoping with him, fearing for him, longing for
him, secure in the knowledge that if nothing else was left them, they
had each other. It was a rare and beautiful thing to feel like that. And
beyond that sorrowful vision of what she lacked to achieve any real and
enduring happiness, there loomed also a self-torturing conviction that
she herself had set in motion those forces which now threatened ruin for
her brother and Jack Fyfe.
There was no logical proof of this. Only intuitive, subtle suggestions
gleaned here and there, shadowy finger-posts which pointed to Monohan
as a deadly hater and with a score chalked up against Fyfe to which she
had unconsciously added. He had desired her, and twice Fyfe had treated
him like an urchin caught in mischief. She recalled how Monohan sprang
at him like a tiger that day on the lake shore. She realized how bitter
a humiliation it must have been to suffer that sardonic cuffing at
Fyfe's hands. Monohan wasn't the type of man who would ever forget or
forgive either that or the terrible grip on his throat.
Even at the time she had sensed this and dreaded what it might
ultimately lead to. Even while her being answered eagerly to the
physical charm of him, she had fought against admitting to herself what
desperate intent might have lain back of the killing of Billy Dale,--a
shot that Lefty Howe declared was meant for Fyfe. She had long outgrown
Monohan's lure, but if he had come to her or written to make out a case
for himself when she first went to Seattle, she would have accepted his
word against anything. Her heart would have fought for him against the
logic of her brain.
But--she had had a long time to think, to compare, to digest all that
she knew of him, much that was subconscious impression rising late to
the surface, a little that she heard from various sources. The sum total
gave her a man of rank passions, of rare and merciless finesse where his
desires figured, a man who got what he wanted by whatever means most
fitly served his need. Greater than any craving to possess a woman would
be the measure of his rancor against a man who humiliated him, thwarted
him. She could understand how a man like Monohan would hate a man like
Jack Fyfe, would nurse and feed on the venom of his hate until setting a
torch to Fyfe's timber would be a likely enough counterstroke.
She shrank from the thought. Yet it lingered until she felt guilty.
Though it made no material difference to her that Fyfe might or might
not face ruin, she could not, before her own conscience, evade
responsibility. The powder might have been laid, but her folly had
touched spark to the fuse, as she saw it. That seared her like a pain
far into the night. For every crime a punishment; for every sin a
penance. Her world had taught her that. She had never danced; she had
only listened to the piper and longed to dance, as nature had fashioned
her to do. But the piper was sending his bill. She surveyed it wearily,
emotionally bankrupt, wondering in what coin of the soul she would have
to pay.