Big Timber Part 3

The girl swept lake sh.o.r.e, bay, and sloping forest with a quickening eye. Here was no trim-painted cottage and velvet lawn. In the waters beside and lining the beach floated innumerable logs, confined by boomsticks, hundreds of trunks of fir, forty and sixty feet long, four and six feet across the b.u.t.t, timber enough, when it had pa.s.sed through the sawmills, to build four such towns as Hopyard. Just back from the sh.o.r.e, amid stumps and littered branches, rose the roofs of divers buildings. One was long and low. Hard by it stood another of like type but of lesser dimension. Two or three mere shanties lifted level with great stumps,--crude, unpainted buildings. Smoke issued from the pipe of the larger, and a white-ap.r.o.ned man stood in the doorway.

Somewhere in the screen of woods a whistle shrilled. Benton looked at his watch.

"We made good time, in spite of the little roll," said he. "That's the donkey blowing quitting time--six o'clock. Well, come on up to the shack, Sis. Sam, you get a wheelbarrow and run those trunks up after supper, will you?"

Away in the banked timber beyond the maples and alder which Stella now saw masked the bank of a small stream flowing by the cabins, a faint call rose, long-drawn:

"Tim-ber-r-r-r!"

They moved along a path beaten through fern and clawing blackberry vine toward the camp, Benton carrying the two grips. A loud, sharp crack split the stillness; then a mild swishing sound arose. Hard on the heels of that followed a rending, tearing crash, a thud that sent tremors through the solid earth under their feet. The girl started.

"Falling gang dropped a big fir," Charlie laughed. "You'll get used to that. You'll hear it a good many times a day here."

"Good Heavens, it sounded like the end of the world," she said.

"Well, you can't fell a stick of timber two hundred feet high and six or eight feet through without making a pretty considerable noise," her brother remarked complacently. "I like that sound myself. Every big tree that goes down means a bunch of money."

He led the way past the mess-house, from the doorway of which the ap.r.o.ned cook eyed her with frank curiosity, hailing his employer with nonchalant air, a cigarette resting in one corner of his mouth. Benton opened the door of the second building. Stella followed him in.

It had the saving grace of cleanliness--according to logging-camp standards. But the bareness of it appalled her. There was a rusty box heater, littered with cigar and cigarette stubs, a desk fabricated of undressed boards, a homemade chair or two, sundry boxes standing about.

The sole concession to comfort was a rug of cheap Axminster covering half the floor. The walls were decorated chiefly with miscellaneous clothing suspended from nails, a few maps and blue prints tacked up askew. Straight across from the entering door another stood ajar, and she could see further vistas of bare board wall, small, dusty window-panes, and a bed whereon gray blankets were tumbled as they fell when a waking sleeper cast them aside.

Benton crossed the room and threw open another door.

"Here's a nook I fixed up for you, Stella," he said briskly. "It isn't very fancy, but it's the best I could do just now."

She followed him in silently. He set her two bags on the floor and turned to go. Then some impulse moved him to turn back, and he put both hands on her shoulders and kissed her gently.

"You're home, anyway," he said. "That's something, if it isn't what you're used to. Try to overlook the crudities. We'll have supper as soon as you feel like it."

He went out, closing the door behind him.

Miss Estella Benton stood in the middle of the room fighting against a swift heart-sinking, a terrible depression that strove to master her.

"Good Lord in Heaven," she muttered at last. "What a place to be marooned in. It's--it's simply impossible."

Her gaze roved about the room. A square box, neither more nor less, fourteen by fourteen feet of bare board wall, unpainted and unpapered.

There was an iron bed, a willow rocker, and a rude closet for clothes in one corner. A duplicate of the department-store bargain rug in the other room lay on the floor. On an upturned box stood an enamel pitcher and a tin washbasin. That was all.

She sat down on the bed and viewed it forlornly. A wave of sickening rebellion against everything swept over her. To herself she seemed as irrevocably alone as if she had been lost in the depths of the dark timber that rose on every hand. And sitting there she heard at length the voices of men. Looking out through a window curtained with cheesecloth she saw her brother's logging gang swing past, stout woodsmen all, big men, tall men, short-bodied men with thick necks and shoulders, sunburned, all grimy with the sweat of their labors, carrying themselves with a free and reckless swing, the doubles in type of that roistering crew she had seen embark on Jack Fyfe's boat.

In so far as she had taken note of those who labored with their hands in the region of her birth, she had seen few like these. The chauffeur, the footman, the street cleaner, the factory workers--they were all different. They lacked something,--perhaps nothing in the way of physical excellence; but these men betrayed in every movement a subtle difference that she could not define. Her nearest approximation and the first attempt she made at a.n.a.lysis was that they looked like pirates.

They were bold men and strong; that was written in their faces and the swing of them as they walked. And they served the very excellent purpose of taking her mind off herself for the time being.

She watched them cl.u.s.ter by a bench before the cookhouse, dabble their faces and hands in washbasins, scrub themselves promiscuously on towels, sometimes one at each end of a single piece of cloth, hauling it back and forth in rude play.

All about that cookhouse dooryard spread a confusion of empty tin cans, gaudily labeled, containers of corn and peas and tomatoes. Dishwater and refuse, chips, sc.r.a.ps, all the refuse of the camp was scattered there in unlovely array.

But that made no more than a pa.s.sing impression upon her. She was thinking, as she removed her hat and gloves, of what queer angles come now and then to the human mind. She wondered why she should be sufficiently interested in her brother's hired men to drive off a compelling attack of the blues in consideration of them as men.

Nevertheless, she found herself unable to view them as she had viewed, say, the clerks in her father's office.

She began to brush her hair and to wonder what sort of food would be served for supper.

CHAPTER IV

A FORETASTE OF THINGS TO COME

Half an hour later she sat down with her brother at one end of a table that was but a long bench covered with oilcloth. Chairs there were none.

A narrow movable bench on each side of the fixed table furnished seating capacity for twenty men, provided none objected to an occasional nudging from his neighbor's elbow. The dishes, different from any she had ever eaten from, were of enormously thick porcelain, dead white, variously chipped and cracked with fine seams. But the food, if plain, was of excellent quality, tastily cooked. She discovered herself with an appet.i.te wholly independent of silver and cut gla.s.s and linen. The tin spoons and steel knives and forks harrowed her aesthetic sense without impairing her ability to satisfy hunger.

They had the dining room to themselves. Through a single shiplap part.i.tion rose a rumble of masculine talk, where the logging crew loafed in their bunkhouse. The cook served them without any ceremony, putting everything on the table at once,--soup, meat, vegetables, a bread pudding for dessert, coffee in a tall tin pot. Benton introduced him to his sister. He withdrew hastily to the kitchen, and they saw no more of him.

"Charlie," the girl said plaintively, when the man had closed the door behind him, "I don't quite fathom your social customs out here. Is one supposed to know everybody that one encounters?"

"Just about," he grinned. "Loggers, Siwashes, and the natives in general. Can't very well help it, Sis. There's so few people in this neck of the woods that n.o.body can afford to be exclusive,--at least, n.o.body who lives here any length of time. You can't tell when you may have to call on your neighbor or the fellow working for you in a matter of life and death almost. A man couldn't possibly maintain the same att.i.tude toward a bunch of loggers working under him that would be considered proper back where we came from. Take me, for instance, and my case is no different from any man operating on a moderate scale out here. I'd get the reputation of being swell-headed, and they'd put me in the hole at every turn. They wouldn't care what they did or how it was done. Ten to one I couldn't keep a capable working crew three weeks on end. On the other hand, take a bunch of loggers on a pay roll working for a man that meets them on an equal footing--why, they'll go to h.e.l.l and back again for him. They're as loyal as soldiers to the flag.

They're a mighty self-sufficient, independent lot, these lumberjacks, and that goes for most everybody knocking about in this country,--loggers, prospectors, miners, settlers, and all. If you're what they term 'all right,' you can do anything, and they'll back you up. If you go to putting on airs and trying to a.s.sert yourself as a superior being, they'll go out of their way to hand you packages of trouble."

"I see," she observed thoughtfully. "One's compelled by circ.u.mstances to practice democracy."

"Something like that," he responded carelessly and went on eating his supper.

"Don't you think we could make this place a lot more homelike, Charlie?"

she ventured, when they were back in their own quarters. "I suppose it suits a man who only uses it as a place to sleep, but it's bare as a barn."

"It takes money to make a place cosy," Benton returned. "And I haven't had it to spend on knickknacks."

"Fiddlesticks!" she laughed. "A comfortable chair or two and curtains and pictures aren't knickknacks, as you call them. The cost wouldn't amount to anything."

Benton stuffed the bowl of a pipe and lighted it before he essayed reply.

"Look here, Stella," he said earnestly. "This joint probably strikes you as about the limit, seeing that you've been used to pretty soft surroundings and getting pretty nearly anything you wanted whenever you expressed a wish for it. Things that you've grown into the way of considering necessities _are_ luxuries. And they're out of the question for us at present. I got a pretty hard seasoning the first two years I was in this country, and when I set up this camp it was merely a place to live. I never thought anything about it as being comfortable or otherwise until you elected to come. I'm not in a position to go in for tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. Rough as this camp is, it will have to go as it stands this summer. I'm up against it for ready money. I've got none due until I make delivery of those logs in September, and I have to have that million feet in the water in order to make delivery. Every one of these men but the cook and the donkey engineer are working for me with their wages deferred until then. There are certain expenses that must be met with cash--and I've got all my funds figured down to nickels. If I get by on this contract, I'll have a few hundred to squander on house things. Until then, it's the simple life for us. You can camp for three or four months, can't you, without finding it completely unbearable?"

"Why, of course," she protested. "I wasn't complaining about the way things are. I merely voiced the idea that it would be nice to fix up a little cosier, make these rooms look a little homelike. I didn't know you were practically compelled to live like this as a matter of economy."

"Well, in a sense, I am," he replied. "And then again, making a place away out here homelike never struck me as being anything but an inconsequential detail. I'm not trying to make a home here. I'm after a bundle of money. A while ago, if you had been here and suggested it, you could have spent five or six hundred, and I wouldn't have missed it. But this contract came my way, and gave me a chance to clean up three thousand dollars clear profit in four months. I grabbed it, and I find it's some undertaking. I'm dealing with a hard business outfit, hard as nails. I might get the banks or some capitalist to finance me, because my timber holdings are worth money. But I'm shy of that. I've noticed that when a logger starts working on borrowed capital, he generally goes broke. The financiers generally devise some way to hook him. I prefer to sail as close to the wind as I can on what little I've got. I can get this timber out--but it wouldn't look nice, now, would it, for me to be buying furniture when I'm standing these boys off for their wages till September?"

"I should have been a man," Miss Estella Benton pensively remarked.

"Then I could put on overalls and make myself useful, instead of being a drone. There doesn't seem to be anything here I can do. I could keep house--only you haven't any house to keep, therefore no need of a housekeeper. Why, who's that?"

Her ear had caught a low, throaty laugh, a woman's laugh, outside. She looked inquiringly at her brother. His expression remained absent, as of one concentrated upon his own problems. She repeated the question.

"That? Oh, Katy John, I suppose, or her mother," he answered. "Siwash bunch camping around the point. The girl does some washing for us now and then. I suppose she's after Matt for some bread or something."

Stella looked out. At the cookhouse door stood a short, plump-bodied girl, dark-skinned and black-haired. Otherwise she conformed to none of Miss Benton's preconceived ideas of the aboriginal inhabitant. If she had been pinned down, she would probably have admitted that she expected to behold an Indian maiden garbed in beaded buckskin and bra.s.s ornaments. Instead, Katy John wore a white sailor blouse, a brown pleated skirt, tan shoes, and a bow of baby blue ribbon in her hair.