Big Timber Part 2

"It _is_ big," Charlie declared, "if I could go at it right. I've been trying ever since I got wise to this timber business to make the governor see what a chance there is in it. He was just getting properly impressed with the possibilities when the speed bug got him. He could have trimmed a little here and there at home and put the money to work.

Ten thousand dollars would have done the trick, given me a working outfit along with what I've got that would have put us both on Easy Street. However, the poor old chap didn't get around to it. I suppose, like lots of other business men, when he stopped, everything ran down.

According to Lander's figures, there won't be a thing left when all accounts are squared."

"Don't talk about it, Charlie," she begged. "It's too near, and I was through it all."

"I would have been there too," Benton said. "But, as I told you, I was out of reach of your wire, and by the time I got it, it was all over. I couldn't have done any good, anyway. There's no use mourning. One way and another we've all got to come to it some day."

Stella looked out over the placid, shimmering surface of Roaring Lake for a minute. Her grief was dimming with time and distance, and she had all her own young life before her. She found herself drifting from painful memories of her father's sudden death to a consideration of things present and personal. She found herself wondering critically if this strange, rude land would work as many changes in her as were patent in this bronzed and burly brother.

He had left home a slim, c.o.c.ksure youngster, who had proved more than a handful for his family before he was half through college, which educational finishing process had come to an abrupt stop before it was complete. He had been a problem that her father and mother had discussed in guarded tones. Sending him West had been a hopeful experiment, and in the West that abounding spirit which manifested itself in one continual round of minor escapades appeared to have found a natural outlet. She recalled that latterly their father had taken to speaking of Charlie in accents of pride. He was developing the one ambition that Benton senior could thoroughly understand and properly appreciate, the desire to get on, to grasp opportunities, to achieve material success, to make money.

Just as her father, on the few occasions when he talked business before her, spoke in a big way of big things as the desirable ultimate, so now Charlie spoke, with plans and outlook to match his speech. In her father's point of view, and in Charlie's now, a man's personal life did not seem to matter in comparison with getting on and making money. And it was with that personal side of existence that Stella Benton was now chiefly concerned. She had never been required to adjust herself to an existence that was wholly taken up with getting on to the complete exclusion of everything else. Her work had been to play. She could scarce conceive of any one entirely excluding pleasure and diversion from his or her life. She wondered if Charlie had done so. And if not, what ameliorating circ.u.mstances, what social outlet, might be found to offset, for her, continued existence in this isolated region of towering woods. So far as her first impressions went, Roaring Lake appeared to be mostly frequented by lumberjacks addicted to rude speech and strong drink.

"Are there many people living around this lake?" she inquired. "It is surely a beautiful spot. If we had this at home, there would be a summer cottage on every hundred yards of sh.o.r.e."

"Be a long time before we get to that stage here," Benton returned. "And scenery in B.C. is a drug on the market; we've got Europe backed off the map for tourist attractions, if they only knew it. No, about the only summer home in this locality is the Abbey place at Cottonwood Point.

They come up here every summer for two or three months. Otherwise I don't know of any lilies of the field, barring the hotel people, and they, being purely transient, don't count. There's the Abbey-Monohan outfit with two big logging camps, my outfit, Jack Fyfe's, some hand loggers on the east sh.o.r.e, and the R.A.T. at the head of the lake.

That's the population--and Roaring Lake is forty-two miles long and eight wide."

"Are there any nice girls around?" she asked.

Benton grinned widely.

"Girls?" said he. "Not so you could notice. Outside the Springs and the hatchery over the way, there isn't a white woman on the lake except Lefty Howe's wife,--Lefty's Jack Fyfe's foreman,--and she's fat and past forty. I told you it was a G.o.d-forsaken hole as far as society is concerned, Stell."

"I know," she said thoughtfully. "But one can scarcely realize such a--such a social blankness, until one actually experiences it. Anyway, I don't know but I'll appreciate utter quiet for awhile. But what do you do with yourself when you're not working?"

"There's seldom any such time," he answered. "I tell you, Stella, I've got a big job on my hands. I've got a definite mark to shoot at, and I'm going to make a bull's-eye in spite of h.e.l.l and high water. I have no time to play, and there's no place to play if I had. I don't intend to muddle along making a pittance like a hand logger. I want a stake; and then it'll be time to make a splurge in a country where a man can get a run for his money."

"If that's the case," she observed, "I'm likely to be a handicap to you, am I not?"

"Lord, no," he smiled. "I'll put you to work too, when you get rested up from your trip. You stick with me, Sis, and you'll wear diamonds."

She laughed with him at this, and leaving the shady maple they walked up to the hotel, where Benton proposed that they get a canoe and paddle to where Roaring River flowed out of the lake half a mile westward, to kill the time that must elapse before the three-thirty train.

The St. Allwoods' car was rolling out to Hopyard when they came back. By the time Benton had turned the canoe over to the boathouse man and reached the wharf, the horn of the returning machine sounded down the road. They waited. The car came to a stop at the ab.u.t.ting wharf. The driver handed two suitcases off the burdened hood of his machine. From out the tonneau clambered a large, smooth-faced young man. He wore an expansive smile in addition to a blue serge suit, white Panama, and polished tan Oxfords, and he bestowed a hearty greeting upon Charlie Benton. But his smile suffered eclipse, and a faint flush rose in his round cheeks, when his eyes fell upon Benton's sister.

CHAPTER III

HALFWAY POINT

Miss Benton's cool, impersonal manner seemed rather to heighten the young man's embarra.s.sment. Benton, apparently observing nothing amiss, introduced them in an offhand fashion.

"Mr. Abbey--my sister."

Mr. Abbey bowed and murmured something that pa.s.sed for acknowledgment.

The three turned up the wharf toward where Sam Davis had once more got up steam. As they walked, Mr. Abbey's habitual a.s.surance returned, and he directed part of his genial flow of conversation to Miss Benton. To Stella's inner amus.e.m.e.nt, however, he did not make any reference to their having been fellow travelers for a day and a half.

Presently they were embarked and under way. Charlie fixed a seat for her on the after deck, and went forward to steer, whither he was straightway joined by Paul Abbey. Miss Benton was as well pleased to be alone. She was not sure she should approve of young men who made such crude efforts to sc.r.a.pe acquaintance with women on trains. She was accustomed to a certain amount of formality in such matters. It might perhaps be laid to the "breezy Western manner" of which she had heard, except that Paul Abbey did not impress her as a Westerner. He seemed more like a type of young man she had encountered frequently in her own circle. At any rate, she was relieved when he did not remain beside her to emit polite commonplaces. She was quite satisfied to sit by herself and look over the panorama of woods and lake--and wonder more than a little what Destiny had in store for her along those silent sh.o.r.es.

The Springs fell far behind, became a few white spots against the background of dusky green. Except for the ripples spread by their wake, the water laid oily smooth. Now, a little past four in the afternoon, she began to sense by comparison the great bulk of the western mountains,--locally, the Chehalis Range,--for the sun was dipping behind the ragged peaks already, and deep shadows stole out from the sh.o.r.e to port. Beneath her feet the screw throbbed, pulsing like an overdriven heart, and Sam Davis poked his sweaty face now and then through a window to catch a breath of cool air denied him in the small inferno where he stoked the fire box.

The _Chickamin_ cleared Echo Island, and a greater sweep of lake opened out. Here the afternoon wind sprang up, shooting gustily through a gap between the Springs and Hopyard and ruffling the lake out of its noonday siesta. Ripples, chop, and a growing swell followed each other with that marvellous rapidity common to large bodies of fresh water. It broke the monotony of steady cleaving through dead calm. Stella was a good sailor, and she rather enjoyed it when the _Chickamin_ began to lift and yaw off before the following seas that ran up under her fantail stern.

After about an hour's run, with the south wind beginning to whip the crests of the short seas into white foam, the boat bore in to a landing behind a low point. Here Abbey disembarked, after taking the trouble to come aft and shake hands with polite farewell. Standing on the float, hat in hand, he bowed his sleek blond head to Stella.

"I hope you'll like Roaring Lake, Miss Benton," he said, as Benton jingled the go-ahead bell. "I tried to persuade Charlie to stop over awhile, so you could meet my mother and sister, but he's in too big a hurry. Hope to have the pleasure of meeting you again soon."

Miss Benton parried courteously, a little at a loss to fathom this bland friendliness, and presently the widening s.p.a.ce cut off their talk. As the boat drew offsh.o.r.e, she saw two women in white come down toward the float, meet Abbey, and turn back. And a little farther out through an opening in the woods, she saw a white and green bungalow, low and rambling, wide-verandahed, set on a hillock three hundred yards back from sh.o.r.e. There was an encircling area of smooth lawn, a place restfully inviting.

Watching that, seeing a figure or two moving about, she was smitten with a recurrence of that poignant loneliness which had a.s.sailed her fitfully in the last four days. And while the _Chickamin_ was still plowing the insh.o.r.e waters on an even keel, she walked the guard rail alongside and joined her brother in the pilot house.

"Isn't that a pretty place back there in the woods?" she remarked.

"Abbey's summer camp; spells money to me, that's all," Charlie grumbled. "It's a toy for their women,--up-to-date cottage, gardeners, tennis courts, afternoon tea on the lawn for the guests, and all that.

But the Abbey-Monohan bunch has the money to do what they want to do.

They've made it in timber, as I expect to make mine. You didn't particularly want to stay over and get acquainted, did you?"

"I? Of course not," she responded.

"Personally, I don't want to mix into their social game," Charlie drawled. "Or at least, I don't propose to make any tentative advances.

The women put on lots of side, they say. If they want to hunt us up and cultivate you, all right. But I've got too much to do to b.u.t.t into society. Anyway, I didn't want to run up against any critical females looking like I do right now."

Stella smiled.

"Under certain circ.u.mstances, appearances do count then, in this country," she remarked. "Has your Mr. Abbey got a young and be-yutiful sister?"

"He has, but that's got nothing to do with it," Charlie retorted.

"Paul's all right himself. But their gait isn't mine--not yet. Here, you take the wheel a minute. I want to smoke. I don't suppose you ever helmed a forty-footer, but you'll never learn younger."

She took the wheel and Charlie stood by, directing her. In twenty minutes they were out where the run of the sea from the south had a fair sweep. The wind was whistling now. All the roughened surface was spotted with whitecaps. The _Chickamin_ would hang on the crest of a wave and shoot forward like a racer, her wheel humming, and again the roller would run out from under her, and she would labor heavily in the trough.

It began to grow insufferably hot in the pilot house. The wind drove with them, pressing the heat from the boiler and fire box into the forward portion of the boat, where Stella stood at the wheel. There were puffs of smoke when Davis opened the fire box to ply it with fuel. All the sour smells that rose from an unclean bilge eddied about them. The heat and the smell and the surging motion began to nauseate Stella.

"I must get outside where I can breathe," she gasped, at length. "It's suffocating. I don't see how you stand it."

"It does get stuffy in here when we run with the wind," Benton admitted.

"Cuts off our ventilation. I'm used to it. Crawl out the window and sit on the forward deck. Don't try to get aft. You might slip off, the way she's lurching."

Curled in the hollow of a faked-down hawser with the clean air fanning her, Stella recovered herself. The giddiness left her. She pitied Sam Davis back in that stinking hole beside the fire box. But she supposed he, like her brother, was "used to it." Apparently one could get used to anything, if she could judge by the amazing change in Charlie.

Far ahead loomed a ridge running down to the lake sh.o.r.e and cutting off in a bold promontory. That was Halfway Point, Charlie had told her, and under its shadow lay his camp. Without any previous knowledge of camps, she was approaching this one with less eager antic.i.p.ation than when she began her long journey. She began to fear that it might be totally unlike anything she had been able to imagine, disagreeably so. Charlie, she decided, had grown hard and coa.r.s.ened in the evolution of his ambition to get on, to make his pile. She was but four years younger than he, and she had always thought of herself as being older and wiser and steadier. She had conceived the idea that her presence would have a good influence on him, that they would pull together--now that there were but the two of them. But four hours in his company had dispelled that illusion. She had the wit to perceive that Charlie Benton had emerged from the chrysalis stage, that he had the will and the ability to mold his life after his elected fashion, and that her coming was a relatively unimportant incident.

In due course the _Chickamin_ bore in under Halfway Point, opened out a sheltered bight where the watery commotion outside raised but a faint ripple, and drew in alongside a float.