Big Timber Part 10

"Thanks. I've already declined one pressing invitation to that effect,"

Stella returned drily. His matter-of-fact a.s.surance 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, a.n.a.lysis-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, unembarra.s.sed 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 s.e.x for company. What Mrs. Howe lacked in the higher culture she made up in homely perception and una.s.suming 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 gra.s.s 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 n.o.ble 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 sh.o.r.e. A vaporous wisp of cloud hung along the top of the slide, and above this aerial 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 gra.s.sy 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 pa.s.sable enough, she thought, if she kept her mind strictly on it alone.