The White Desert Part 22

"Ten thousand feet of the four by four, at--"

"Ba'tiste!" Houston had risen suddenly. "What have you got there?"

The trapper grinned and pulled at his gray-splotched beard.

"Oh, ho! Golemar! He wan' to know. Shall we tell heem, eh? Ah, _oui_--" he shook his big shoulders and spread his hands. "Eet is--the copy of the bid!"

"The copy? The bid?"

"From the Blackburn mill. There is no one aroun'. Ba'teese, he go through a window. Ba'teese, he find heem--in a file. And he bring back the copy."

"Then--"

"M'sieu Houston, he too will bid. But he will make it lower. And this," he tapped the scribbled sc.r.a.ps of paper, "is cheaper than any one else. Eet is because of the location. M'sieu Houston--he know what they bid. He will make eet cheaper."

"But what with, Ba'tiste? We haven't a mill to saw the stuff, in the first place. This ramshackle thing we're setting up now couldn't even begin to turn out the ties alone. The bid calls for ten thousand laid down at Tabernacle, the first of June. We might do that, but how on earth would we ever keep up with the rest? The boxings, the rough lumber, the two by fourteen's finished, the dropped sidings and groved roofing, and lath and ceiling and rough fencings and all the rest?

What on earth will we do it with?"

"What with?" Ba'tiste waved an arm grandiloquently. "With the future!"

"It's taking the longest kind of a chance--"

"Ah, _oui_! But the man who is drowning, he will, what-you-say, grab at a haystack."

"True enough. Go ahead. I'll mark our figures down too, as you read."

And together they settled to the making of a bid that ran into the millions, an overture for a contract for which they had neither mill, nor timber, nor flume, nor resources to complete!

CHAPTER XV

Time dragged after that. Once the bid was on its way to Chicago, there was nothing to do but wait. It was a delay which lengthened from June until July, thence into late summer and early autumn, while the hills turned brown with the colorings of the aspens, while Mount Taluchen and its surrounding mountains once more became grim and forbidding with the early fall of snow.

The time for the opening of the bids had pa.s.sed, far in the distance, but there had come no word. Ba'tiste, long since taken into as much of a partnership agreement as was possible, went day after day to the post office, only to return empty-handed, while Houston watched with more intensity than ever the commercial columns of the lumber journals in the fear that the contract, after all, had gone somewhere else. But no notice appeared. Nothing but blankness as concerned the plans of the Mountain Plains and Salt Lake Railroad.

Medaine he saw but seldom,--then only to avoid her as she strove to avoid him. Houston's work was now in the hills and at the camp, doing exactly what the Blackburn mill was doing, storing up a reasonable supply of timber and sawing at what might or might not be the first consignment of ties for the fulfillment of the contract. But day after day he realized that he was all but beaten.

His arm had healed now and returned to the strength that had existed before the fracture. Far greater in strength, in fact, for Houston had taken his place in the woods side by side with the few lumberjacks whom he could afford to carry on his pay roll. There, at least, he had right of way. He had sold only stumpage, which meant that the Blackburn camp had the right to take out as much timber as it cared to, as long as it was paid for at the insignificant rate of one dollar and fifty cents a thousand feet. Thayer and the men in his employ could not keep him out of his own woods, or prevent him from cutting his own timber. But they could prevent him from getting it to the mill by an inexpensive process.

From dawn until dusk he labored, sometimes with Ba'tiste singing l.u.s.tily beside him, sometimes alone. The task was a hard one; the snaking of timber through the forest to the high-line roadway, there to be loaded upon two-wheeled carts and dragged, by a slow, laborious, costly process, to the mill. For every log that he sent to the saw in this wise, he knew that Thayer was sending ten,--and at a tenth of the cost. But Houston was fighting the last fight,--a fight that could not end until absolute, utter failure stood stark before him at the end of the road.

September became October with its rains, and its last flash of brilliant coloring from the lower hills, and then whiteness. November had arrived, bringing with it the first snow and turning the whole, great, already desolate country into a desert of white.

It was cold now; the cook took on a new duty of the maintenance of hot pails of bran mash and salt water for the relief of frozen hands. Heavy gum-shoes, worn over lighter footgear and reaching with felt-padded thickness far toward the knee, encased the feet. Hands numbed, in spite of thick mittens; each week saw a new snowfall, bringing with it the consequent thaws and the hardening of the surface. The snowshoe rabbit made its appearance, tracking the shadowy, silent woods with great, outlandish marks. The coyotes howled o' nights; now and then Houston, as he worked, saw the tracks of a bear, or the b.l.o.o.d.y imprints of a mountain lion, its paws cut by the icy crust of the snow as it trailed the elk or deer. The world was a quiet thing, a white thing, a cold, unrelenting thing, to be fought only by thick garments and snowshoes. But with it all, it gave Houston and Ba'tiste a new enthusiasm. They at least could get their logs to the mill now swiftly and with comparative ease.

Short, awkward-appearing sleds creaked and sang along the icy, hard-packed road of snow, to approach the piles of logs snaked out of the timber, to be loaded high beyond all seeming regard for gravitation or consideration for the broad-backed, patient horses, to be secured at one end by heavy chains leading to a patent binder which cinched them to the sled, and started down the precipitous road toward the mill. Once in a while Houston rode the sleds, merely for the thrill of it; for the singing and crunching of the logs against the snow, the grinding of bark against bark, the quick surge as the horses struck a sharp decline and galloped down it, the driver shouting, the logs kicking up the snow behind the sled in a swirling, feathery wake.

At times he stayed at the bunk house with the lumberjacks, silent as they were silent, or talking of trivial things which were mighty to them,--the quality of the food, the depth of the snow, the fact that the little gray squirrels were more plentiful in one part of the woods than another, or that they chattered more in the morning than in the afternoon. Hours he spent in watching Old Bill, a lumberjack who, in his few moments of leisure between the supper table and bed, whittled laboriously upon a wooden chain, which with dogged persistence he had lugged with him for months. Or perhaps staring over the shoulder of Jade Hains, striving to copy the picture of a motion-picture star from a worn, dirty, months-old magazine; as excited as they over the tiny things in life, as eager to seek a bunk when eight o'clock came, as grudging to hear the clatter of alarm clocks in the black coldness before dawn and to creak forth to the watering and harnessing of the horses for the work of the day. Some way, it all seemed to be natural to Barry Houston, natural that he should accept this sort of dogged, humdrum, eventless life and strive to think of nothing more. The other existence, for him, had ended in a blackened waste; even the one person in whom he had trusted, the woman he would have been glad to marry, if that could have repaid her in any way for what he thought she had done for him, had proved traitorous. His letters, written to her at general delivery, St. Louis, had been returned, uncalled for. From the moment that he had received that light, taunting note, he had heard nothing more. She had done her work; she was gone.

December came. Christmas, and with it Ba'tiste, with flour in his hair and beard, his red shirt pulled out over his trousers, distributing the presents which Houston had bought for the few men in his employ. January wore on, bringing with it more snow. February and then--

"Eet is come! Eet is come!" Ba'tiste, waving his arms wildly, in spite of the stuffiness of his heavy mackinaw, and the broad belt which sank into layer after layer of clothing at his waist, came over the brow of the raise into camp, to seize Houston in his arms and dance him about, to lift him and literally throw him high upon his chest as one would toss a child, to roar at Golemar, then to stand back, brandishing an opened letter above his head. "Eet is come! I have open eet--I can not wait.

Eet say we shall have the contract! Ah, _oui! oui! oui! oui_! We shall have the contract!"

Houston, suddenly awake to what the message meant, reached for the letter. It was there in black and white. The bid had been accepted.

There need now be but the conference in Chicago, the posting of the forfeit money, and the deal was made.

"Eet say five thousand dollars cash, and the rest in a bond!" came enthusiastically from Ba'tiste. "Eet is simple. You have the mill, you have the timber. Ba'teese, he have the friend in Denver who will make the bond."

"But how about the machinery; we'll need a hundred-thousand-dollar plant before we're through, Ba'tiste."

"Ah!" The old French-Canadian's jaw dropped. "Ba'teese, he is like the child. He have not think of that. He have figure he can borrow ten thousand dollar in his own name. But he have not think about the machinery."

"But we must think about it, Ba'tiste. We've got to get it. With the equipment that's here, we never could hope to keep up with the contract.

And if we can't do that, we lose everything. Understand me, I'm not thinking of quitting; I merely want to look over the battlefield first.

Shall we take the chance?"

Big Ba'tiste shrugged his shoulders.

"Ba'teese, he always try to break the way," came at last. "Ba'teese, he have trouble--but he have nev' been beat. You ask Ba'teese--Ba'teese say go ahead. Somehow we make it."

"Then to-morrow morning we take the train to Denver, and from there I'll go on to Boston. I'll raise the money some way. I don't know how. If I don't, we're only beaten in the beginning instead of at the end. We'll simply have to trust to the future--on everything, Ba'tiste. There are so many things that can whip us, that--" Houston laughed shortly--"we might as well be gamblers all the way through. We'll never fulfill the contract, even with the machinery, unless we can get the use of the lake and a flume to the mill. We may be able to keep it up for a month or two, but that will be all. The expense will eat us up. But one chance is no greater than the other, and personally, I'm at the point where I don't care."

"_Oui_! Ba'teese, he have nothing. Ba'teese he only fight for the excitement. So, to-morrow we go!"

And on the next day they went, again to go over all the details of their mad, foundationless escapade with Chance, to talk it all over in the old smoking car, to weigh the balance against them from every angle, and to see failure on every side. But they had become gamblers with Fate; for one, it was his final opportunity, to take or disregard, with a faint glimmer of success at one end of the vista, with the wiping out of every hope at the other. They tried not to look at the gloomy side, but that was impossible. As the train ground its way up the circuitous grades, Houston felt that he was headed finally for the dissolution. But there was at least the consolation about it that within a short time the uncertainty of his life would be ended; the hopes either crushed forever, or realized, that--

"Ba'tiste!" They were in the snowsheds at Crestline, and Houston had pointed excitedly toward a window of the west-bound train, just pulling past them on the way down the slope. A woman was there, a woman who had turned her head sharply, but with not enough speed to prevent a sight of her by the French-Canadian who glanced quickly and gasped:

"The Judas!"

Houston leaped from his seat and ran to the vestibule of the car, but in vain. It was closed; already the other last coach of the other train was pulling past and gaining headway with the easier grade. Wondering, he returned to his seat beside his partner.

"It was she, Ba'tiste," came with conviction. "I got a good look at her before she noticed me. Then, when I pointed--she turned her head away."

"But Ba'teese, he see her."

"She's going back. What do you suppose it can mean? Can she be--"

"Ba'teese catch the nex' train to Tabernacle so soon as we have finish our business. Eet is for no good."

"I wonder--" it was a hope, but a faint one--"if she could be coming back to make amends, Ba'tiste? That--that other thing seemed so unlike the person who had been so good to me, so apart from the side of her nature that I knew--"

"She have a bad mouth," Ba'tiste repeated grimly. "She have a bad eye, she have a bad tongue. A woman with a bad tongue, she is a devil.

You--you no see it, because she come to you with a smile, when every one else, he frown. You think she is the angel, yes, _oui_? But she come to Ba'teese different. She talk to you sof' and she try to turn you against your frien'. Yes. _Oui_? _Ne c'est pas_? Ba'teese see her with the selfish mouth. Peuff! He see her when she look to heem out from the corner of her eye--so. Ba'teese know. Ba'teese come back quick, to keep watch!"