The Greater Power Part 12

"You don't understand that I couldn't swing an axe for five minutes together," he objected.

"The trouble," answered Gordon, "is that you don't want to."

Waynefleet made an attempt to rise, but his companion laid a hand upon his arm and pressed him down again.

"You were anxious for my advice, and now I'm going to prescribe,"

Gordon continued. "Two hours' steady chopping every day, to be raised by degrees to six. Then I'd let up on smoking cigars of that kind, and practise a little more self-denial in one or two other respects. You could make things easier for Miss Waynefleet with the money you save."

He rose with a laugh. "Well, I'm going. All you have to do is to carry out my suggestions, and you may still make yourself and your ranch a credit to the district. In the meanwhile, this place would be considerably improved by a little ventilation."

He went out, and left Waynefleet gazing in indignant astonishment at the door he carefully fixed open. It seemed to Waynefleet almost incredible that such words should have been spoken to him, and the suggestion that at the cost of a painful effort he should endeavour to make himself a credit to that barbarous neighbourhood rankled most of all. He had felt, hitherto, that he had conferred a favour on the community by settling there. He lay still until his daughter came in and glanced at him inquiringly.

"You have seen Mr. Gordon?" she queried.

"I have," answered Waynefleet with fine disdain. "You will understand that if he comes back here, he must be kept away from me. The man is utterly devoid of refinement or consideration."

In the meanwhile Gordon was riding, circ.u.mspectly, down the rutted trail, and it was an hour later when he dismounted at the shanty of Nasmyth's workmen, and shared a meal with the gang employed on the dam. After that he sat with Nasmyth, who still limped a little, in the hut, from which, as the door stood open, they could see the men stream up into the Bush and out along the dam. The dam now stood high above the water-level, for the frost had bound fast the feeding snow upon the peaks above, though the stream roared and frothed through the two big sluice-gates. By-and-by, the ringing of axes and the clink of drills broke through the sound of the rushing waters. Gordon, who stretched himself out on a deer-hide lounge, smiled at Nasmyth as he lighted his pipe.

"I've been talking a little sense to Waynefleet this morning. I felt I had to, though I'm afraid it's not going to be any use," he announced.

"Whether you were warranted or not is, of course, another matter,"

said Nasmyth. "Perhaps you were, if you did it on Miss Waynefleet's account. Anyway, I don't altogether understand why you should be sure it will have no effect."

Gordon looked at him with a grin. "Well," he remarked oracularly, "it's easy to acquire an inflated notion of one's own importance, though it's quite often a little difficult to keep it. Something's very apt to come along and p.r.i.c.k you, and you collapse flat when it lets the inflation out. In some cases one never quite gets one's self-sufficiency back. The scar the p.r.i.c.k made is always there, but it's different with Waynefleet. He is made of self-closing jelly, and when you take the knife out the gap shuts up again. It's quite hard to fancy it was ever there."

Nasmyth nodded gravely, for there was an elusive something in his comrade's tone that roused his sympathy.

"Gordon," he said, "is it quite impossible for you to go back East again?"

Gordon leaned back in his chair, and glanced out across the toiling men upon the dam, at the frothing river and rugged hillside, with a look of longing in his eyes.

"In one way it is, but I want you to understand," he replied. "I might begin again in some desolate little town--but I aimed higher--and was once very nearly getting there. As it is, if I made my mark, the thing I did would be remembered against me. We'll let it go. As a surgeon of any account I'm done for."

"Still, it's a tolerably big country, and folks forget. You might, at least, go so far, and that would, after all, give you a good deal--a competence, the right to marry."

Gordon laughed, but his voice was harsh.

"This is one of the days on which I must talk. I feel like that, now and then," he said. Then he looked at Nasmyth hard. "Well, I've seen the one woman I could marry, and it's certain that, if I dare make her the offer, she would never marry me."

"Ah," said Nasmyth, "you seem quite sure of that?"

"Quite," declared Gordon, and there was, for a moment or two, an almost uncomfortable silence in the shanty.

Then he made a little forceful gesture as he turned to his companion again.

"Well," he said, "after all, what does it count for? Is it man's one and only business to marry somebody? Of course, we have folks back East, who seem to act on that belief, and in your country half of them appear to spend their time and energies philandering."

"I don't think it's half," said Nasmyth dryly.

"It's not a point of any importance, and we'll let it go. Anyway, it seems perilously easy for a man who gets the woman he sets his mind upon to sink into a fireside hog in the civilized world. Now and then, when things go wrong with folks of that kind, they come out here, and n.o.body has any use for them. What can you do with the man who gets sick the first time he sleeps in the rain, and can't do without his dinner? Oh, I know all about the preservation of the species, but west of the Great Lakes we've no room for any species that isn't tough and fit."

He broke off for a moment. "After all, this is the single man's country, and--we--know that it demands from him the best that he was given, from the grimmest toil of his body to the keenest effort of his brain. Marriage is a detail--an incident; we're here to fight, to grapple with the wilderness, and to break it in, and that burden wasn't laid upon us only for the good of ourselves. When we've flung our trestles over the rivers, and blown room for the steel track out of the canon's side, the oat-fields and the orchards creep up the valleys, and the men from the cities set up their mills. Prospector, track-layer, chopper, follow in sequence here, and then we're ready to hold out our hands to the thousands you've no use or food for back yonder. I'm not sure it matters that the men who do the work don't often share the results of it. We bury them beside our bridge trestles and under tons of shattered rock, and, perhaps, when their time comes, some of them aren't sorry to have done with it. Anyway, they've stood up to man's primeval task."

He rose with another half-deprecatory laugh, but his eyes snapped.

"You don't talk like that in your country--it would hurt some of you--but if we spread ourselves now and then, you can look round and see the things we do." Then he touched Nasmyth's shoulder. "Oh, yes, you understand--for somebody has taught you--and by-and-by, you're going to feel the thing getting hold of you."

He moved towards the doorway, but turned as he reached it. "Talking's cheap, and I have several dozen blamed big firs to saw up, as well as Waynefleet's tonic to mix. He'll come along for it when that p.r.i.c.k I gave him commences to heal."

CHAPTER X

THE CALLING CAnON

There were four wet and weary men in the Siwash canoe that Nasmyth, who crouched astern, had just shot across the whirling pool with the back feathering stroke of his paddle which is so difficult to acquire.

Tom from Mattawa, grasping a dripping pole, stood up in the bow.

Gordon and Wheeler, the pulp-mill manager, knelt in the middle of the boat. Wheeler's hands were blistered from gripping the paddle-haft, and his knees were raw, where he had pressed them against the bottom of the craft to obtain a purchase. It was several years since he had undertaken any severe manual labour, though he was by no means unused to it, and he was cramped and aching in every limb. He had plied pole or paddle for eight hours, during which his companions had painfully propelled the craft a few miles into the canon. He gasped with relief when Mattawa ran the bow of the canoe in upon the shingle, and then rose and stretched himself wearily. The four men stepped ash.o.r.e.

Curiously they looked about them, for they had had little opportunity for observation. Those who undertake to pole a canoe up the rapids of a river on the Pacific slope usually find it advisable to confine their attention strictly to the business in hand.

Immediately in front of them the river roared and seethed amid giant boulders, which rose out of a tumultuous rush of foam, but while it was clearly beyond the power of flesh and blood to drive the canoe up against the current, a strip of shingle, also strewn with boulders and broken by ledges of dripping rock, divided the water from the wall of the canon. The canon, a tremendous slope of rock with its dark crest overhanging them, ran up high above their heads; but they could see the pines clinging to the hillside which rose from the edge of the other wall across the river, so steep that it appeared impossible to find a foothold upon it.

The four men were down in the bottom of a great rift in the hills, and, though it would be day above for at least two hours, the light was faint in the hollow and dimmed by drifting mist. It was a spot from which a man new to that wild country might well have shrunk, and the roar of water rang through it in tremendous, nerve-taxing pulsations. Nasmyth and his companions, however, had gone there with no particular purpose--merely for relaxation--though it had cost them hours of arduous labour, and the journey had been a more or less hazardous one. Wheeler, the pulp-mill manager, was waiting for his machinery, and, Nasmyth had finished the dam. When they planned the journey for pleasure, Mattawa and Gordon had gone with them ostensibly on a shooting trip. There are game laws, which set forth when and where a man may shoot, and how many heads he is ent.i.tled to, but it must be admitted that the Bush-rancher seldom concerns himself greatly about them. When he fancies a change of diet, he goes out and kills a deer. Still, though all the party had rifles no one would have cared very much if they had not come across anything to shoot at.

Now and then a vague unrest comes upon the Bushman, and he sets off for the wilderness, and stays there while his provisions hold out. He usually calls it prospecting, but as a rule he comes back with his garments rent to tatters, and no record of any mineral claim or timber rights, but once more contentedly he goes on with his task. It may be a reawakening of forgotten instincts, half-conscious l.u.s.t of adventure, or a mere desire for change, that impels him to make the journey, but it is at least an impulse with which most men who toil in those forests are well acquainted.

Nasmyth and Mattawa pulled the canoe out, and when they sat down and lighted their pipes, Wheeler grinned as he drew up his duck trousers and surveyed his knees, which were raw and bleeding. Then he held up one of his hands that his comrades might notice the blisters upon it.

He was a little, wiry man with dark eyes, which had a snap in them.

"Well," he observed, "we're here, and I guess any man with sense enough to prefer whole bones to broken ones would wonder why we are.

It's most twelve years since I used to head off into the Bush this way in Washington."

Gordon glanced at him with a twinkle in his eyes. "Now," he observed, "you've hit the reason the first time. When you've done it once, you'll do it again. You have to. Perhaps it's Nature's protest against your axiom that man's chief business is dollar-making. Still, I'm admitting that this is a blamed curious place for Nasmyth to figure on killing a wapiti in. Say, are you going to sleep here to-night, Derrick?"

It was very evident that none of the big wapiti--elks, as the Bushman incorrectly calls them--could have reached that spot, but Nasmyth laughed.

"I felt I'd like to see the fall--I don't know why," he said. "It's scarcely another mile, and I've been up almost that far with an Indian before. There's a ravine with young spruce in it where we could sleep."

"Then," announced Wheeler resolutely, "we're starting right now. When I pole a canoe up a place of this kind I want to see where I'm going.

I once went down a big rapid with the canoe-bottom up in front of me in the dark, and one journey of that kind is quite enough."

They dumped out their camp gear, and took hold of the canoe, a beautifully modelled, fragile thing, hollowed out of a cedar log, and for the next half-hour hauled it laboriously over some sixty yards of boulders and pushed it, walking waist-deep, across rock-strewn pools.

Then they went back for their wet tent, axes, rifles, blankets, and a bag of flour, and when they had reloaded the canoe, they took up the poles again. It was the hardest kind of work, and demanded strength and skill, for a very small blunder would have meant wreck upon some froth-lapped boulder, or an upset into the fierce white rush of the river, but at length they reached a deep whirling pool, round which long smears of white froth swung in wild gyrations. The smooth rock rose out of the pool without even a cranny one could slip a hand into, and the river fell tumultuously over a ledge into the head of it. The water swept out of a veil of thin white mist, and the great rift rang with a bewildering din. One felt that the vast primeval forces were omnipotent there. As the men looked about them with the spray on their wet faces and the white mist streaming by, Mattawa, who stood up forward, dropped suddenly into the bottom of the canoe.

"In poles," he said. "Paddle! Get a move on her!" Nasmyth, who felt his pole dip into empty water, flung it in and grabbed his paddle, for the craft shot forward suddenly with the swing of the eddy towards the fall. He did not know whether the stream would sweep them under it, but he was not desirous of affording it the opportunity. For perhaps a minute they exerted themselves furiously, gasping as they strained aching arms and backs, and meanwhile, in spite of them, beneath the towering fall of rock, the canoe slid on toward the fall. It also drew a little nearer to the middle of the pool, where there was a curious bevelled hollow, round which the white foam spun. It seemed to Nasmyth that the stream went bodily down.

"Paddle," said Mattawa hoa.r.s.ely. "Heave her clear of it."