Thrice Armed Part 19

By and by the light commenced to fade, but Eleanor's white dress still gleamed against the dull blue and crimson of the crossed flags; and in after-days, when there was anger between them, Jimmy liked to remember her sitting there at Jordan's side to speed him on the _Shasta_'s first voyage. She made a somewhat imposing figure in the little dusky cabin, and what she said struck the right note in the inauguration of that venture, for she was optimistic and forceful in speech and gesture--and Anthea now sat in the shadow.

At last old Leeson rose with a little dry chuckle. "I don't know whether speeches are expected," he said. "Still, I guess there's one toast we ought to honor, and that's the engaged pair. Anyway, it's one that's especially fitting to-night, since it seems to me that if it hadn't been for Miss Wheelock we wouldn't have been here, with steam up, on board the _Shasta_."

There was a little good-humored laughter, but Leeson, who appeared unconscious that his observations were open to misconception, proceeded calmly.

"Now," he said, "in a general way, the less women have to do with business the better; but in Miss Wheelock we have an exception. If it hadn't been for her, Forster would not have put five thousand dollars into the _Shasta_, and if he hadn't made the venture, it's quite likely I wouldn't either. It's quite a big one for people of our caliber, but we have a live man to run the thing, and he will have a wife as smart as he is standing right behind him. Well, we'll wish the pair of them long life and happiness."

Jimmy rose with his companions, but he was conscious that Anthea was regarding his sister with grave inquiry. Then Jordan made his reply conventionally, and afterward stood still a moment looking at his guests, until with a little abrupt gesture he commenced again.

"Mr. Leeson's right: it is a big thing we have on hand," he said. "We're going to fight and break a monopoly, and, if all goes as we expect it, put money into our pockets. But in one way that's only half of it. I want you to think of the honest effort, the best thing a man has to offer, that is being wasted in this country. Can't you picture the bush-ranchers hauling produce thirty miles over a trail a city man wouldn't ride a horse along to the railroad, and watching fruit 'most as good as we can raise in California rotting by the ton? I want you to think of the oat crops cut green and half-grown, and the men who raised them mending their clothes with flour-bags and measuring out their groceries by the cent's worth, after spending half a lifetime chopping out the ranch. It's wrong--clean against the economy of things. We want every pound of whatever they can send us. We have mines and mills and money, but in this Province our food is bad and dear. While every man depends on his neighbor, the greatest thing in civilization is facility of transport."

He stopped a moment for breath, and the keen sparkle in his dark eyes grew plainer. "Well, we're going to provide it, and do what we can for the men with the axe and the grub-hoe. Some day this great Province will remember what it owes them. Here it's man against nature, and the fight is hard, while we'll do more than put money in our pockets if we make it a little easier. We want a fair deal--and we'll get it somehow--but we want no more; and if we can hold on long enough, it won't be only those who sent her out who will say, 'Speed the _Shasta_!'"

He stopped amidst acclamation, for his mobile face and snapping eyes had amplified his words, and, while he handled his theme clumsily, there was, at least, no mistaking the strident ring of the dominant note in it. In that country it was, for the most part, man against nature, and not man against man, and the recognition of the fact was in all who heard him. There men wrung their money from rocky hillside and shadowy forest with toil almost incredible, creating wealth, and not filching it from their fellows; but nature is grim and somewhat terrible in the land of rock and snow, and all down the great Slope, from Wrangel to Shasta, the battle is a stern and arduous one. So there was a little kindling in the listeners' eyes, and the women also raised their gla.s.ses high as they said, "Speed the _Shasta_," knowing that this was in reality but a part of what they felt.

Then Eleanor rose, and the company, scattering for the most part, went back on deck, where it once more happened by some means that Anthea Merril and Jimmy found themselves some distance from any of the rest.

The girl looked up at him with a little smile.

"Well," she said, "what did you think of Mr. Jordan's observations?"

Jimmy laughed. "My opinion wouldn't count. I couldn't make a speech for my life."

"No?" said Anthea. "Still, you can hold a steamer's wheel, and perhaps under the circ.u.mstances that is quite as much to the purpose. In any case, while your comrade was a little flamboyant, which is much the same thing as Western, I think he meant it. After all, if we parade our sentiments, we generally act up to them."

"Jordan," said Jimmy, "seems to have quite a stock of them."

"And I understand he has put every dollar he has into the venture.

Still, I suppose he did it cheerfully; and you may find it necessary to bring those bush-ranchers' produce down against a gale of wind."

There was a smile in her eyes as she looked at him, but in spite of that Jimmy felt his face grow slightly warm. It was not, however, altogether because Anthea noticed it that she changed the subject.

"There was one point that wasn't quite clear to me. Why did he say you were going to break up a monopoly?"

Jimmy wished she had asked him anything else, for he had already decided that Miss Merril knew very little about her father's business.

"Well," he said awkwardly, "that's rather a difficult thing to answer.

You see, he mentioned a monopoly----"

"He certainly did."

"Then, to begin with, there is the Dunsmore road. They naturally couldn't handle produce as cheaply as we could, and, anyway, it isn't of much benefit to the ranchers who can't get at it."

"'To begin with?' That implies more than one, which is, one would fancy, the essential point of a monopoly."

"Perhaps it is," said Jimmy vaguely. "Still, when we get our hand in, there will be three."

Anthea may have had her reasons for not pressing the question then, for she laughed. "Of course!" she said. "Three monopolies. Well, I suppose one must excuse you. You can hold a steamer's wheel."

Jimmy, on the whole, felt relieved when the others sauntered in their direction, and was less grieved than he might have been under different circ.u.mstances when Austerly drew Miss Merril away. He had felt once or twice before, during discussions with his sister, that keen intelligence is not invariably a commendable thing in a woman. After that, Jordan had a good many instructions to give him, and by the time they had been imparted the rest were cl.u.s.tering around the gangway; while five minutes later Jimmy leaned on the rail watching the boats slide away toward the dusky city. Then he climbed to his bridge, and the windla.s.s commenced to rattle, but he did not know that Anthea Merril, who heard his farewell whistle, kept the others waiting on the wharf a moment or two while she watched the _Shasta_ slowly steam out to sea.

CHAPTER XIV

IN DISTRESS

The clear night was falling when Jimmy leaned on the bridge-rails as the _Shasta_ steamed out of the Inlet beneath a black wall of pines. Over her port quarter the pale lights of the climbing city twinkled tier on tier, with dim forest rolling away behind them into the creeping mist.

Beyond that, in turn, a faint blink of snow still gleamed against the dusky blueness of the east. All this was familiar, but he was leaving it behind, and ahead there lay an empty waste of darkening water, into which the _Shasta_ pushed her way with thumping engines and a drowsy gurgle at the bows. It seemed to Jimmy, in one sense, appropriate that it should be so. He had cut himself adrift from all that he had been accustomed to, and where the course he had launched upon would lead him he did not know.

That, however, did not greatly trouble him. His character was by no means a complex one, and it was sufficient for him to do the obvious thing, which, after all, usually saves everybody trouble. It was clear that Tom Wheelock needed him, and he could, at least, look back a little, though this was an occupation to which he was not greatly addicted. He understood now how his father, who had perhaps never been a strong man, had slowly broken down under a load of debt that was too heavy for him, though the nature of the man who had with deliberate intent laid it on his shoulders was incomprehensible. Jimmy, in fact, could scarcely conceive the possibility of any man scheming and plotting to ruin a fellow-being for the value of two old schooners. The apparently insufficient motive made the thing almost devilish. Merril, he felt, was outside the pale of humanity, a noxious creature to be shunned or, on opportunity, crushed by honest men.

Then he wondered for a moment whether the bondholder's daughter had inherited any portion of her father's nature, and brushed the thought aside with a little involuntary shiver. The thing was out of the question. One could, he felt, perhaps illogically, be sure of that after a glance at her; and then he straightened himself with a little abrupt movement, for it was very clear that this was, after all, no concern of his. He had never met any woman who had made the same impression on him that Anthea Merril had done, but he had already decided that he had sense enough to prevent himself from thinking of her too frequently; and it was evident that if he had not he must endeavor to acquire it.

He strove to divert his thoughts, and listened to the flow of language that rose through the open skylights from the _Shasta_'s engine-room.

Taken together with the pungent smell of burning grease and a certain harsh thumping, it suggested that things were not going well down there.

Then, looking forward, he watched the black figure of the look-out on the forecastle cut sharp and clean against the pale gleaming of the western sky as the bows swung over the long heave with a rhythmic regularity, for the _Shasta_ was drawing out into open water now. She was making eight knots, he fancied, with mastheads swaying athwart the stars, and a long smoke-trail that was a little more solid than the dusky blue transparency streaking the sea astern of her. Jimmy pulled out his pipe when a faint cold breeze fanned his cheek, and lighted it contentedly, for a steamboat travels fastest in smooth water when what moving air there is blows against her, and there was every sign of fine weather.

It lasted several days, and the _Shasta_ stopped only twice at sea: once to cool a crank-pin, and again for a longer while because there was something wrong with her condenser. In due time she crept into a deep, mountain-walled inlet where the little white _Sorata_ lay, and Jimmy gazed in astonishment when he saw the piled-up produce on the strip of shingle beach between still, green water and climbing forest. He was even more astonished when certain bronzed men in battered wide hats and soil-stained jean came off, and conveyed him almost by force to the rude banquet laid out in a little frame hotel. Hitherto they had hauled the few goods they put on the market rather more than eight leagues along an infamous trail which for a part of that distance led over a mountain range.

Jimmy feasted that day, for the banquet was repeated with very little variation three times over, and his last speech was very much to the purpose as well as characteristic of him.

"Boys," he said, "we've steam up, and in view of the freight we're charging you Wellington coal is dear. Besides, even to oblige you, I really couldn't eat anything more."

They paddled him off in state in a big Siwash canoe, and their shouts rang far across the silent pines when the little rusty _Shasta_ crawled away into the evening mist; while long after it had hid her from their sight, Jimmy, standing on his bridge, heard the faint wail of the pipes.

There was, as usual, a North Briton among them, and the wild music of another land of rock and pine and inlet six thousand miles away crept up the screw-torn wake in elfin fashion. Jimmy, at least, knew the burden of it: "Will ye no' come back again?"

His blood tingled a little as he listened. They had held out their hands to him, and made him one of them, and it was, he vaguely felt, a thing to be proud of, for there was a certain greatness in these simple, all-enduring men. They grappled with giant forests and rent stubborn rocks, clearing the way for thousands yet to come, with limbs that ached from the axe stroke and hands that bled upon the drill. They feared nothing, and looked for nothing except the prosperity which they would hardly share, but which would surely come; and all down the long Slope their kind are perfecting a manhood that is probably worth more than all the gold, silver, iron and wheat raised beneath the Beaver or the Stars.

It was the same at the next inlet, for that trip was very much of the nature of a triumphal procession, only that as yet the battle was not won; and when at last the _Shasta_ turned her bows southward, she was full to the hatches and deep in the water. As it happened, she met a strong southwester, which piled the long Pacific heave upon the reefs to port in big foam-crested walls, and after the first twelve hours of it there was scarcely a dry inch on board her. She went into it with dipping forecastle that swung up again veiled in cataracts of white and green until her forefoot was clear, and, with complaining engines, made scarcely four knots an hour. There were inlets that offered her shelter, but hour by hour Jimmy, clinging, battered by flying spray, to his reeling bridge, drove her ahead. The time for making speeches, at which he did not shine, had gone, and it was now his business to keep the promise he had made the ranchers, that he would not lose an hour in conveying their produce to the market. That, at least, was a thing he could do, and, though his drenched limbs grew stiff and his eyesight dim, he did it with the dogged thoroughness of his kind, standing high in the stinging drift as he drove her, swept and streaming, at the tumbling seas. He, too, was one of the enduring toilers, and, like the invincible men with the axes who had recognized the stamp he bore, he found a certain grim pleasure in the conflict.

It was toward dusk on the second evening when they steamed into sight of a little schooner, which showed as a gray smear of slanted canvas scarcely distinguishable from the crag a couple of miles to lee of her.

Jimmy wondered what she was doing there in that weather with only one jib and a reefed boom foresail set, until his gla.s.ses showed him that her mainmast was broken off. That made the thing clearer, and in case more should be wanted, a flag fluttered aloft and blew out half-way up her foremast upside down. It was an appeal that is very seldom made in vain at sea, and meant in that particular case that she would be ash.o.r.e in an hour or two unless somebody towed her off.

Jimmy closed his gla.s.ses with a snap, and hailing a very wet seaman sent him for the engineer. The latter climbed to the bridge, and nodded when he glanced at the vessel.

"Well," he said, "you'll have to take them off. She's not going to claw off sh.o.r.e without her mainsail. There would be a little money in the thing if we could tow her, but we can't. I'm taking steep chances of bringing the engines down about my head by shoving her into it as I'm doing."

As though to give point to the speech, the _Shasta_ flung her stern high just then, and shook in every plate as with a frantic clanging the engines ran away. Then she put her bows in, and dim crag and wallowing schooner were blotted out by a cloud of spray.

"We have got to try," said Jimmy quietly. "There's a point that would give us shelter twenty miles away."

"Twenty miles!" and the engineer, from whose blackened singlet the water streamed, laughed scornfully. "It's 'bout as likely we'd tow her to Honolulu. Still, I guess you're skipper."

Jimmy nodded. He had not troubled to impress the fact upon his crew, but he invariably acted on it. "You had better raise a little more steam,"

he said; "it is very likely that we'll want it."

Then, as the dripping engineer vanished from the bridge, he seized the whistle lanyard, and signed to the man behind him who gripped the wheel.