Big Timber Part 7

"You'll get those potatoes peeled sooner if you don't talk quite so much, Katy," Miss Benton made reply.

There was that way out, as the Siwash girl broadly indicated. Paul Abbey had grown into the habit of coming there rather more often than mere neighborliness called for, and it was palpable that he did not come to hold converse with Benton or Benton's gang, although he was "hail fellow" with all woodsmen. At first his coming might have been laid to any whim. Latterly Stella herself was unmistakably the attraction. He brought his sister once, a fair-haired girl about Stella's age. She proved an exceedingly self-contained young person, whose speech during the hour of her stay amounted to a dozen or so drawling sentences. With no hint of condescension or superciliousness, she still managed to arouse in Stella a mild degree of resentment. She wore an impeccable pongee silk, simple and costly, and _her_ hands had evidently never known the roughening of work. In one way and another Miss Benton straightway conceived an active dislike for Linda Abbey. As her reception of Paul's sister was not conducive to chumminess, Paul did not bring Linda again.

But he came oftener than Stella desired to be bothered with him. Charlie was beginning to indulge in some rather broad joking, which offended and irritated her. She was not in the least attracted to Paul Abbey. He was a nice enough young man; for all she knew, he might be a concentration of all the manly virtues, but he gave no fillip to either her imagination or her emotions. He was too much like a certain type of young fellow she had known in other embodiments. Her instinct warned her that stripped of his worldly goods he would be wholly commonplace. She could be friends with the Paul Abbey kind of man, but when she tried to consider him as a possible lover, she found herself unresponsive, even amused. She was forced to consider it, because Abbey was fast approaching that stage. It was heralded in the look of dumb appeal that she frequently surprised in his gaze, by various signs and tokens, that Stella Benton was too sophisticated to mistake. One of these days he would lay his heart, and hand at her feet.

Sometimes she considered what her life might be if she should marry him.

Abbey was wealthy in his own right and heir to more wealth. But--she could not forbear a wry grimace at the idea. Some fateful hour love would flash across her horizon, a living flame. She could visualize the tragedy if it should be too late, if it found her already bound--sold for a mess of pottage at her ease. She did not mince words to herself when she reflected on this matter. She knew herself as a creature of pa.s.sionate impulses, consciously resenting all restraint. She knew that men and women did mad things under the spur of emotion. She wanted no shackles, she wanted to be free to face the great adventure when it came.

Yet there were times during the weeks that flitted past when it seemed to her that no bondage could be meaner, more repugnant, than that daily slavery in her brother's kitchen; that transcendent conceptions of love and marriage were vain details by comparison with aching feet and sleep-heavy eyes, with the sting of burns, the smart of sweat on her face, all the never-ending trifles that so irritated her. She had been spoiled in the making for so sordid an existence. Sometimes she would sit amid the array of dishes and pans and cooking food and wonder if she really were the same being whose life had been made up of books and music, of teas and dinners and plays, of light, inconsequential chatter with genial, well-dressed folk. There was no one to talk to here and less time to talk. There was nothing to read except a batch of newspapers filtering into camp once a week or ten days. There was not much in this monster stretch of giant timber but heat and dirt and flies and hungry men who must be fed.

If Paul Abbey had chanced to ask her to marry him during a period of such bodily and spiritual rebellion, she would probably have committed herself to that means of escape in sheer desperation. For she did not harden to the work; it steadily sapped both her strength and patience.

But he chose an ill time for his declaration. Stella had overtaken her work and snared a fleeting hour of idleness in mid-afternoon of a hot day in early August. Under a branchy alder at the cook-house-end she piled all the pillows she could commandeer in their quarters and curled herself upon them at grateful ease. Like a tired animal, she gave herself up to the pleasure of physical relaxation, staring at a perfect turquoise sky through the whispering leaves above. She was not even thinking. She was too tired to think, and for the time being too much at peace to permit thought that would, in the very nature of things, be disturbing.

Abbey maintained for his own pleasure a fast motorboat. He slid now into the bay unheard, tied up beside the float, walked to the kitchen, glanced in, then around the corner, and smilingly took a seat on the gra.s.s near her.

"It's too perfect a day to loaf in the shade," he observed, after a brief exchange of commonplaces. "Won't you come out for a little spin on the lake? A ride in the _Wolf_ will put some color in your cheeks."

"If I had time," she said, "I would. But loggers must eat though the heavens fall. In about twenty minutes I'll have to start supper. I'll have color enough, goodness knows once I get over that stove."

Abbey picked nervously at a blade of gra.s.s for a minute.

"This is a regular dog's life for you," he broke out suddenly.

"Oh, hardly that," she protested. "It's a little hard on me because I haven't been used to it, that's all."

"It's Chinaman's work," he said hotly. "Charlie oughtn't to let you stew in that kitchen."

Stella said nothing; she was not moved to the defence of her brother.

She was loyal enough to her blood, but not so intensely loyal that she could defend him against criticism that struck a responsive chord in her own mind. She was beginning to see that, being useful, Charlie was making use of her. His horizon had narrowed to logs that might be trans.m.u.ted into money. Enslaved himself by his engrossing purposes, he thought nothing of enslaving others to serve his end. She had come to a definite conclusion about that, and she meant to collect her wages when he sold his logs, collect also the ninety dollars of her money he had coolly appropriated, and try a different outlet. If one must work, one might at least seek work a little to one's taste. She therefore dismissed Abbey's comment carelessly:

"Some one has to do it."

A faint flush crept slowly up into his round, boyish face. He looked at her with disconcerting steadiness. Perhaps something in his expression gave her the key to his thought, or it may have been that peculiar psychical receptiveness which in a woman we are pleased to call intuition; but at any rate Stella divined what was coming and would have forestalled it by rising. He prevented that move by catching her hands.

"Look here, Stella," he blurted out, "it just grinds me to death to see you slaving away in this camp, feeding a lot of roughnecks. Won't you marry me and cut this sort of thing out? We'd be no end good chums."

She gently disengaged her hands, her chief sensation one of amus.e.m.e.nt, Abbey was in such an agony of blushing diffidence, all fl.u.s.tered at his own temerity. Also, she thought, a trifle precipitate. That was not the sort of wooing to carry her off her feet. For that matter she was quite sure nothing Paul Abbey could do or say would ever stir her pulses. She had to put an end to the situation, however. She took refuge in a flippant manner.

"Thanks for the compliment, Mr. Abbey," she smiled. "But really I couldn't think of inflicting repentance at leisure on you in that offhand way. You wouldn't want me to marry you just so I could resign the job of chef, would you?"

"Don't you like me?" he asked plaintively.

"Not that way," she answered positively.

"You might try," he suggested hopefully. "Honest, I'm crazy about you.

I've liked you ever since I saw you first. I wouldn't want any greater privilege than to marry you and take you away from this sort of thing.

You're too good for it. Maybe I'm kind of sudden, but I know my own mind. Can't you take a chance with me?"

"I'm sorry," she said gently, seeing him so sadly in earnest. "It isn't a question of taking a chance. I don't care for you. I haven't got any feeling but the mildest sort of friendliness. If I married you, it would only be for a home, as the saying is. And I'm not made that way. Can't you see how impossible it would be?"

"You'd get to like me," he declared. "I'm just as good as the next man."

His smooth pink-and-white skin reddened again.

"That sounds a lot like tooting my own horn mighty strong," said he.

"But I'm in dead earnest. If there isn't anybody else yet, you could like me just as well as the next fellow. I'd be awfully good to you."

"I daresay you would," she said quietly. "But I couldn't be good to you.

I don't want to marry you, Mr. Abbey. That's final. All the feeling I have for you isn't enough for any woman to marry on."

"Maybe not," he said dolefully. "I suppose that's the way it goes. Hang it, I guess I was a little too sudden. But I'm a stayer. Maybe you'll change your mind some time."

He was standing very near her, and they were both so intent upon the momentous business that occupied them that neither noticed Charlie Benton until his hail startled them to attention.

"h.e.l.lo, folks," he greeted and pa.s.sed on into the cook shanty, bestowing upon Stella, over Abbey's shoulder, a comprehensive grin which nettled her exceedingly. Her peaceful hour had been disturbed to no purpose. She did not want to love or be loved. For the moment she felt old beyond her years, mature beyond the comprehension of any man. If she had voiced her real att.i.tude toward Paul Abbey, she would have counseled him to run and play, "like a good little boy."

Instead she remarked: "I must get to work," and left her downcast suitor without further ceremony.

As she went about her work in the kitchen, she saw Abbey seat himself upon a log in the yard, his countenance wreathed in gloom. He was presently joined by her brother. Glancing out, now and then, she made a guess at the meat of their talk, and her lip curled slightly. She saw them walk down to Abbey's launch, and Charlie delivered an encouraging slap on Paul's shoulder as he embarked. Then the speedy craft tore out of the bay at a headlong gait, her motor roaring in unm.u.f.fled exhaust, wide wings of white spray arching off her flaring bows.

"The desperate recklessness of thwarted affection--fiddlesticks!" Miss Benton observed in sardonic mood. Her hands were deep in pie dough. She thumped it viciously. The kitchen and the flies and all the rest of it rasped at her nerves again.

Charlie came into the kitchen, hunted a cookie out of the tin box where such things were kept, and sat swinging one leg over a corner of the table, eying her critically while he munched.

"So you turned Paul down, eh?" he said at last. "You're the prize chump.

You've missed the best chance you'll ever have to put yourself on Easy Street."

CHAPTER VII

SOME NEIGHBORLY a.s.sISTANCE

For a week thereafter Benton developed moods of sourness, periods of scowling thought. He tried to speed up his gang, and having all spring driven them at top speed, the added straw broke the back of their patience, and Stella heard some sharp interchanges of words. He quelled one incipient mutiny through sheer dominance, but it left him more short of temper, more crabbedly moody than ever. Eventually his ill-nature broke out against Stella over some trifle, and she--being herself an aggrieved party to his transactions--surprised her own sense of the fitness of things by retaliating in kind.

"I'm slaving away in your old camp from daylight till dark at work I despise, and you can't even speak decently to me," she flared up. "You act like a perfect brute lately. What's the matter with you?"

Benton gnawed at a finger nail in silence.

"Hang it, I guess you're right," he admitted at last. "But I can't help having a grouch. I'm going to fall behind on this contract, the best I can do."

"Well," she replied tartly. "I'm not to blame for that. I'm not responsible for your failure. Why take it out on me?"

"I don't, particularly," he answered. "Only--can't you _sabe_? A man gets on edge when he works and sweats for months and sees it all about to come to nothing."

"So does a woman," she made pointed retort.