Big Timber Part 31

She was her own mistress, free as the wind. Fyfe had said that. She looked out into the smoky veil that shrouded the water front and the hills across the Inlet, that swirled and eddied above the giant fir in Stanley Park, and her mind flicked back to Roaring Lake where the Red Flower of Kipling's _Jungle Book_ bloomed to her husband's ruin. Did it?

She wondered. She could not think of him as beaten, bested in any undertaking. She had never been able to think of him in those terms.

Always to her he had conveyed the impression of a superman. Always she had been a little in awe of him, of his strength, his patient, inflexible determination, glimpsing under his habitual repression certain tremendous forces. She could not conceive him as a broken man.

Staring out into the smoky air, she wondered if the fires at Roaring Lake still ravaged that n.o.ble forest; if Fyfe's resources, like her brother's, were wholly involved in standing timber, and if that timber were doomed? She craved to know. Secured herself by that green slip in her hand against every possible need, she wondered if it were ordained that the two men whose possession of material resources had molded her into what she was to-day should lose all, be reduced to the same stress that had made her an unwilling drudge in her brother's kitchen. Then she recalled that for Charlie there was an equivalent sum due,--a share like her own. At the worst, he had the nucleus of another fortune.

Curled among the pillows of her bed that night, she looked over the evening papers, read with a swift heart-sinking that the Roaring Lake fire was a.s.suming terrific proportions, that nothing but a deluge of rain would stay it now. And more significantly, except for a minor blaze or two, the fire raged almost wholly upon and around the Fyfe block of limits. She laid aside the papers, switched off the lights, and lay staring wide-eyed at the dusky ceiling.

At twenty minutes of midnight she was called to the door of her room to receive a telegram. It was from Linda, and it read:

"Charlie badly hurt. Can you come?"

Stella reached for the telephone receiver. The night clerk at the C.P.R.

depot told her the first train she could take left at six in the morning. That meant reaching the Springs at nine-thirty. Nine and a half hours to sit with idle hands, in suspense. She did not knew what tragic denouement awaited there, what she could do once she reached there. She knew only that a fever of impatience burned in her. The message had strung her suddenly taut, as if a crisis had arisen in which w.i.l.l.y-nilly she must take a hand.

So, groping for the relief of action, some method of spanning that nine hours' wait, her eye fell upon a card tucked beside the telephone case.

She held it between, finger and thumb, her brows puckered.

TAXIS AND TOURING CARS Anywhere . . . Anytime

She took down the receiver again and asked for Seymour 9X.

"Western Taxi," a man's voice drawled.

"I want to reach Roaring Hot Springs in the shortest time possible," she told him rather breathlessly. "Can you furnish me a machine and a reliable chauffeur?"

"Roaring Springs?" he repeated. "How many pa.s.sengers?"

"One. Myself."

"Just a minute."

She heard a faint burble of talk away at the other end of the wire. Then the same voice speaking crisply.

"We gotta big six roadster, and a first-cla.s.s driver. It'll cost you seventy-five dollars--in advance."

"Your money will be waiting for you here," she answered calmly. "How soon can you bring the car around to the Hotel Granada?"

"In ten minutes, if you say so."

"Say twenty minutes, then."

"All right."

She dressed herself, took the elevator down to the lobby, instructed the night clerk to have a maid pack her trunk and send it by express to Hopyard, care of St. Allwoods Hotel on the lake. Then she walked out to the broad-stepped carriage entrance.

A low-hung long-hooded, yellow car stood there, exhaust purring faintly.

She paid the driver, sank into the soft upholstering beside him, and the big six slid out into the street. There was no traffic. In a few minutes they were on the outskirts of the city, the long asphalt ribbon of King's Way lying like a silver band between green, bushy walls. They crossed the last car track. The driver spoke to her out of one corner of his mouth.

"Wanna make time, huh?"

"I want to get to Roaring Lake as quickly as you can drive, without taking chances."

"I know the road pretty well," he a.s.sured her. "Drove a party clear to Rosebud day before yesterday. I'll do the best I can. Can't drive too fast at night. Too smoky."

She could not gage his conception of real speed if the gait he struck was not "too fast." They were through New Westminster and rolling across the Fraser bridge before she was well settled in the seat, breasting the road with a lurch and a swing at the curves, a noise under that long hood like giant bees in an empty barrel.

Ninety miles of road good, bad and indifferent, forest and farm and rolling hill, and the swamps of Sumas Prairie, lies between Vancouver and Roaring Lake. At four in the morning, with dawn an hour old, they woke the Rosebud ferryman to cross the river. Twenty minutes after that Stella was stepping stiffly out of the machine before Roaring Springs hospital. The doctor's Chinaman was abroad in the garden. She beckoned him.

"You sabe Mr. Benton--Charlie Benton?" she asked. "He in doctor's house?"

The Chinaman pointed across the road. "Mist Bentle obah dah," he said.

"Velly much sick. Missa Bentle lib dah, all same gleen house."

Stella ran across the way. The front door of the green cottage stood wide. An electric drop light burned in the front room, though it was broad day. When she crossed the threshold, she saw Linda sitting in a chair, her arms folded on the table-edge, her head resting on her hands.

She was asleep, and she did not raise her head till Stella shook her shoulder.

Linda Abbey had been a pretty girl, very fair, with apple-blossom skin and a wonderfully expressive face. It gave Stella a shock to see her now, to gage her suffering by the havoc it had wrought. Linda looked old, haggard, drawn. There was a weary droop to her mouth, her eyes were dull, lifeless, just as one might look who is utterly exhausted in mind and body. Oddly enough, she spoke first of something irrelevant, inconsequential.

"I fell asleep," she said heavily. "What time is it?"

Stella looked at her watch.

"Half-past four," she answered. "How is Charlie? What happened to him?"

"Monohan shot him."

Stella caught her breath. She hadn't been prepared for that.

"Is he--is he--" she could not utter the words.

"He'll get better. Wait." Linda rose stiffly from her seat. A door in one side of the room stood ajar. She opened it, and Stella, looking over her shoulder, saw her brother's tousled head on a pillow. A nurse in uniform sat beside his bed. Linda closed the door silently.

"Come into the kitchen where we won't make a noise," she whispered.

A fire burned in the kitchen stove. Linda sank into a willow rocker.

"I'm weary as Atlas," she said. "I've been fretting for so long. Then late yesterday afternoon they brought him home to me--like that. The doctor was probing for the bullet when I wired you. I was in a panic then, I think. Half-past four! How did you get here so soon? How could you? There's no train."

Stella told her.

"Why should Monohan shoot him?" she broke out. "For G.o.d's sake, talk, Linda!"

There was a curious impersonality in Linda's manner, as if she stood aloof from it all, as if the fire of her vitality had burned out. She lay back in her chair with eyelids drooping, speaking in dull, lifeless tones.

"Monohan shot him because Charlie came on him in the woods setting a fresh fire. They've suspected him, or some one in his pay, of that, and they've been watching. There were two other men with Charlie, so there is no mistake. Monohan got away. That's all I know. Oh, but I'm tired.

I've been hanging on to myself for so long. About daylight, after we knew for sure that Charlie was over the hill, something seemed to let go in me. I'm awful glad you came, Stella. Can you make a cup of tea?"

Stella could and did, but she drank none of it herself. A dead weight of apprehension lay like lead in her breast. Her conscience pointed a deadly finger. First Billy Dale, now her brother, and, sandwiched in between, the loosed fire furies which were taking toll in bodily injury and ruinous loss.