Big Timber Part 34

"Because I love you," he said. "You know well enough why."

She lifted her one free hand to his shoulder. Her face turned up to his.

A warm wave of blood dyed the round, white neck, shot up into her cheeks. Her eyes were suddenly aglow, lips tremulous.

"Kiss me, then," she whispered. "That's what I came for. Kiss me, Jack."

If she had doubted, if she had ever in the last few hours looked with misgiving upon what she felt herself impelled to do, the pressure of Jack Fyfe's lips on hers left no room for anything but an amazing thrill of pure gladness. She was happy in his arms, content to rest there, to feel his heart beating against hers, to be quit of all the uncertainties, all the useless regrets. By a roundabout way she had come to her own, and it thrilled her to her finger tips. She could not quite comprehend it, or herself. But she was glad, weeping with gladness, straining her man to her, kissing his face, murmuring incoherent words against his breast.

"And so--and so, after all, you do care." Fyfe held her off a little from him, his sinewy fingers gripping gently the soft flesh of her arms.

"And you were big enough to come back. Oh, my dear, you don't know what that means to me. I'm broke, and I'd just about reached the point where I didn't give a d.a.m.n. This fire has cleaned me out. I've--"

"I know," Stella interrupted. "That's why I came back. I wouldn't have come otherwise, at least not for a long time--perhaps never. It seemed as if I ought to--as if it were the least I could do. Of course, it looks altogether different, now that I know I really want to. But you see I didn't know that for sure until I saw you standing here. Oh, Jack, there's such a lot I wish I could wipe out."

"It's wiped out," he said happily. "The slate's clean. Fair weather didn't get us anywhere. It took a storm. Well, the storm's over."

She stirred uneasily in his arms.

"Haven't you got the least bit of resentment, Jack, for all this trouble I've helped to bring about?" she faltered.

"Why, no" he said thoughtfully. "All you did was to touch the fireworks off. And they might have started over anything. Lord no! put that idea out of your head."

"I don't understand," she murmured. "I never have quite understood why Monohan should attack you with such savage bitterness. That trouble he started on the Tyee, then this criminal firing of the woods. I've had hints, first from your sister, then from Linda. I didn't know you'd clashed before. I'm not very clear on that yet. But you knew all the time what he was. Why didn't you tell me, Jack?"

"Well, maybe I should have," Fyfe admitted. "But I couldn't very well.

Don't you see? He wasn't even an incident, until he bobbed up and rescued you that day. I couldn't, after that, start in picking his character to pieces as a mater of precaution. We had a sort of an armed truce. He left me strictly alone. I'd trimmed his claws once or twice already. I suppose he was acute enough to see an opportunity to get a whack at me through you. You were just living from day to day, creating a world of illusions for yourself, nourishing yourself with dreams, smarting under a stifled regret for a lot you thought you'd pa.s.sed up for good. _He_ wasn't a factor, at first. When he did finally stir in you an emotion I had failed to stir, it was too late for me to do or say anything. If I'd tried, at that stage of the game, to show you your idol's clay feet, you'd have despised me, as well as refused to believe.

I couldn't do anything but stand back and trust the real woman of you to find out what a quicksand you were building your castle on. I purposely refused to let you to, when you wanted to go away the first time,--partly on the kid's account, partly because I could hardly bear to let you go. Mostly because I wanted to make him boil over and show his teeth, on the chance that you'd be able to size him up.

"You see, I knew him from the ground up. I knew that nothing would afford him a keener pleasure than to take away from me a woman I cared for, and that nothing would make him squirm more than for me to check-mate him. That day I cuffed him and choked him on the Point really started him properly. After that, you--as something to be desired and possessed--ran second to his feeling against me. He was bound to try and play even, regardless of you. When he precipitated that row on the Tyee, I knew it was going to be a fight for my financial life--for my own life, if he ever got me foul. And it was not a thing I could talk about to you, in your state of mind, then. You were through with me.

Regardless of him, you were getting farther and farther away from me. I had a long time to realize that fully. You had a grudge against life, and it was sort of crystallizing on me. You never kissed me once in all those two years like you kissed me just now."

She pulled his head down and kissed him again.

"So that I wasn't restraining you with any hope for my own advantage,"

he went on. "There was the kid, and there was you. I wanted to put a brake on you, to make you go slow. You're a complex individual, Stella.

Along with certain fixed, fundamental principles, you've got a streak of divine madness in you, a capacity for reckless undertakings. You'd never have married me if you hadn't. I trusted you absolutely. But, I was afraid in spite of my faith. You had draped such an idealistic mantle around Monohan. I wanted to rend that before it came to a final separation between us. It worked out, because he couldn't resist trying to take a crack at me when the notion seized him.

"So," he continued, after a pause, "you aren't responsible, and I've never considered you responsible for any of this. It's between him and me, and it's been shaping for years. Whenever our trails crossed there was bound to be a clash. There's always been a natural personal antagonism between us. It began to show when we were kids, you might say. Monohan's nature is such that he can't acknowledge defeat, he can't deny himself a gratification. He's a supreme egotist. He's always had plenty of money, he's always had whatever he wanted, and it never mattered to him how he gratified his desires.

"The first time we locked horns was in my last year at high school.

Monohan was a star athlete. I beat him in a pole vault. That irked him so that he sulked and sneered, and generally made himself so insulting that I slapped him. We fought, and I whipped him. I had a temper that I hadn't learned to keep in hand those days, and I nearly killed him. I had nothing but contempt for him, anyway, because even then, when he wasn't quite twenty, he was a woman hunter, preying on silly girls. I don't know what his magic with women is, but it works, until they find him out. He was playing off two or three fool girls that I knew and at the same time keeping a woman in apartments down-town,--a girl he'd picked up on a trip to Georgia,--like any confirmed rounder.

"Well, from that time on, he hated me, always laid for a chance to sting me. We went to Princeton the same year. We collided there, so hard that when word of it got to my father's ears, he called me home and read the riot act so strong that I flared up and left. Then I came to the coast here and got a job in the woods, got to be a logging boss, and went into business on my own hook eventually. I'd just got nicely started when I ran into Monohan again. He'd got into timber himself. I was hand logging up the coast, and I'd hate to tell you the tricks he tried. He kept it up until I got too big to be hara.s.sed in a petty way. Then he left me alone. But he never forgot his grudge. The stage was all set for this act long before you gave him his cue, Stella. You weren't to blame for that, or if you were in part, it doesn't matter now. I'm satisfied.

Paradoxically I feel rich, even though it's a long shot that I'm broke flat. I've got something money doesn't buy. And he has overreached himself at last. All his money and pull won't help him out of this jack pot. Arson and attempted murder is serious business."

"They caught him," Stella said. "The constables took him down the lake to-night. I saw him on their launch as they pa.s.sed the _Waterbug_."

"Yes?" Fyfe said. "Quick work. I didn't even know about the shooting till I came in here to-night about dark. Well," he snapped his fingers, "exit Monohan. He's a dead issue, far as we're concerned. Wouldn't you like something to eat, Stella? I'm hungry, and I was dog-tired when I landed here. Say, you can't guess what I was thinking about, lady, standing there when you came in."

She shook her head.

"I had a crazy notion of touching a match to the house," he said soberly, "letting it go up in smoke with the rest. Yes, that's what I was thinking I would do. Then I'd take the _Panther_ and what gear I have on the scows and pull off Roaring Lake. It didn't seem as if I could stay. I'd laid the foundation of a fortune here and tried to make a home--and lost it all, everything that was worth having. And then all at once there you were, like a vision in the door. Miracles _do_ happen!"

Her arms tightened involuntarily about him.

"Oh," she cried breathlessly. "Our little, white house!"

"Without you," he replied softly, "it was just an empty sh.e.l.l of boards and plaster, something to make me ache with loneliness."

"But not now," she murmured. "It's home, now."

"Yes," he agreed, smiling.

"Ah, but it isn't quite." She choked down a lump in her throat. "Not when I think of those little feet that used to patter on the floor. Oh, Jack--when I think of my baby boy! My dear, my dear, why did all this have to be, I wonder?"

Fyfe stroked her glossy coils of hair.

"We get nothing of value without a price," he said quietly. "Except by rare accident, nothing that's worth having comes cheap and easy. We've paid the price, and we're square with the world and with each other.

That's everything."

"Are you completely ruined, Jack?" she asked after an interval. "Charlie said you were."

"Well," he answered reflectively, "I haven't had time to balance accounts, but I guess I will be. The timber's gone. I've saved most of the logging gear. But if I realized on everything that's left, and squared up everything, I guess I'd be pretty near strapped."

"Will you take me in as a business partner, Jack?" she asked eagerly.

"That's what I had in mind when I came up here. I made up my mind to propose that, after I'd heard you were ruined. Oh, it seems silly now, but I wanted to make amends that way; at least, I tried to tell myself that. Listen. When my father died, he left some supposedly worthless oil stock. But it proved to have a market value. I got my share of it the other day. It'll help us to make a fresh start--together."

She had the envelope and the check tucked inside her waist. She took it out now and pressed the green slip into his hand.

Fyfe looked at it and at her, a little chuckle deep in his throat.

"Nineteen thousand, five hundred," he laughed. "Well, that's quite a stake for you. But if you go partners with me, what about your singing?"

"I don't see how I can have my cake and eat it, too," she said lightly.

"I don't feel quite so eager for a career as I did."

"Well, we'll see," he said. "That light of yours shouldn't be hidden under a bushel. And still, I don't like the idea of you being away from me, which a career implies."

He put the check back in the envelope, smiling oddly to himself, and tucked it back in her bosom. She caught and pressed his hand there, against the soft flesh.

"Won't you use it, Jack?" she pleaded. "Won't it help? Don't let any silly pride influence you. There mustn't ever be anything like that between us again."

"There won't be," he smiled. "Frankly, if I need it, I'll use it. But that's a matter there's plenty of time to decide. You see, although technically I may be broke, I'm a long way from the end of my tether. I think I'll have my working outfit clear, and the country's full of timber. I've got a standing in the business that neither fire nor anything else can destroy. No, I haven't any false pride about the money, dear. But the money part of our future is a detail. With the incentive I've got now to work and plan, it won't take me five years to be a bigger toad in the timber puddle than I ever was. You don't know what a dynamo I am when I get going."

"I don't doubt that," she said proudly. "But the money's yours, if you need it."

"I need something else a good deal more right now," he laughed. "That's something to eat. Aren't you hungry, Stella? Wouldn't you like a cup of coffee?"

"I'm famished," she admitted--the literal truth. The vaulting uplift of spirit, that glad little song that kept lilting in her heart, filled her with peace and contentment, but physically she was beginning to experience acute hunger. She recalled that she had eaten scarcely anything that day.