Big Timber Part 24

"d.a.m.ned 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 h.e.l.l _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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e 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, disa.s.sociated 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 ma.s.sive 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 sh.e.l.l.

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 a.n.a.lysis.

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 pa.s.sively 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 pa.s.sion? 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 att.i.tude.

"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.