Читать книгу Big Timber - Bertrand W. Sinclair - Страница 6

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Stella accompanied her brother to the store, where he gave an order for sundry goods. Then they went to the hotel to see if her trunks had arrived. Within a few yards of the fence which enclosed the grounds of St. Allwoods a man hailed Benton, and drew him a few steps aside. Stella walked slowly on, and presently her brother joined her.

The baggage wagon had brought the trunks, and when she had paid her bill, they were delivered at the outer wharf-end, where also arrived at about the same time a miscellaneous assortment of supplies from the store and a Japanese with her two handbags. So far as Miss Estella Benton could see, she was about to embark on the last stage of her journey.

"How soon will you start?" she inquired, when the last of the stuff was stowed aboard the little steamer.

"Twenty minutes or so," Benton answered. "Say," he went on casually, "have you got any money, Stell? I owe a fellow thirty dollars, and I left the bank roll and my check book at camp."

Miss Benton drew the purse from her hand bag and gave it to him. He pocketed it and went off down the wharf, with the brief assurance that he would be gone only a minute or so.

The minute, however, lengthened to nearly an hour, and Sam Davis had his blow-off valve hissing, and Stella Benton was casting impatient glances shoreward before Charlie strolled leisurely back.

"You needn't fire up quite so strong, Sam," he called down. "We won't start for a couple of hours yet."

"Sufferin' Moses!" Davis poked his fiery thatch out from the engine room. "I might 'a' known better'n to sweat over firin' up. You generally manage to make about three false starts to one get-away."

Benton laughed good-naturedly and turned away.

"Do you usually allow your men to address you in that impertinent way?" Miss Benton desired to know.

Charlie looked blank for a second. Then he smiled, and linking his arm affectionately in hers, drew her off along the wharf, chuckling to himself.

"My dear girl," said he, "you'd better not let Sam Davis or any of Sam's kind hear you pass remarks like that. Sam would say exactly what he thought about such matters to his boss, or King George, or to the first lady of the land, regardless. Sabe? We're what you'll call primitive out here, yet. You want to forget that master and man business, the servant proposition, and proper respect, and all that rot. Outside the English colonies in one or two big towns, that attitude doesn't go in B.C. People in this neck of the woods stand pretty much on the same class footing, and you'll get in bad and get me in bad if you don't remember that. I've got ten loggers working for me in the woods. Whether they're impertinent or profane cuts no figure so long as they handle the job properly. They're men, you understand, not servants. None of them would hesitate to tell me what he thinks about me or anything I do. If I don't like it, I can fight him or fire him. They won't stand for the sort of airs you're accustomed to. They have the utmost respect for a woman, but a man is merely a two-legged male human like themselves, whether he wears mackinaws or broadcloth, has a barrel of money of none at all. This will seem odd to you at first, but you'll get used to it. You'll find things rather different out here."

"I suppose so," she agreed. "But it sounds queer. For instance, if one of papa's clerks or the chauffeur had spoken like that, he'd have been discharged on the spot."

"The logger's a different breed," Benton observed drily. "Or perhaps only the same breed manifesting under different conditions. He isn't servile. He doesn't have to be."

"Why the delay, though?" she reverted to the point. "I thought you were all ready to go."

"I am," Charlie enlightened. "But while I was at the store just now, Paul Abbey 'phoned from Vancouver to know if there was an up-lake boat in. His people are big lumber guns here, and it will accommodate him and won't hurt me to wait a couple of hours and drop him off at their camp. I've got more or less business dealings with them, and it doesn't hurt to be neighborly. He'd have to hire a gas-boat otherwise. Besides, Paul's a pretty good head."

This, of course, being strictly her brother's business, Stella forbore comment. She was weary of travel, tired with the tension of eternally being shunted across distances, anxious to experience once more that sense of restful finality which comes with a journey's end. But, in a measure her movements were no longer dependent upon her own volition.

They walked slowly along the broad roadway which bordered the lake until they came to a branchy maple, and here they seated themselves on the grassy turf in the shadow of the tree.

"Tell me about yourself," she said. "How do you like it here, and how are you getting on? Your letters home were always chiefly remarkable for their brevity."

"There isn't a great lot to tell," Benton responded. "I'm just beginning to get on my feet. A raw, untried youngster has a lot to learn and unlearn when he hits this tall timber. I've been out here five years, and I'm just beginning to realize what I'm equal to and what I'm not. I'm crawling over a hump now that would have been a lot easier if the governor hadn't come to grief the way he did. He was going to put in some money this fall. But I think I'll make it, anyway, though it will keep me digging and figuring. I have a contract for delivery of a million feet in September and another contract that I could take if I could see my way clear to finance the thing. I could clean up thirty thousand dollars net in two years if I had more cash to work on. As it is, I have to go slow, or I'd go broke. I'm holding two limits by the skin of my teeth. But I've got one good one practically for an annual pittance. If I make delivery on my contract according to schedule it's plain sailing. That about sizes up my prospects, Sis."

"You speak a language I don't understand," she smiled. "What does a million feet mean? And what's a limit?"

"A limit is one square mile—six hundred and forty acres more or less—of merchantable timber land," he explained. "We speak of timber as scaling so many board feet. A board foot is one inch thick by twelve inches square. Sound fir timber is worth around seven dollars per thousand board feet in the log, got out of the woods, and boomed in the water ready to tow to the mills. The first limit I got—from the government—will scale around ten million feet. The other two are nearly as good. But I got them from timber speculators, and it's costing me pretty high. They're a good spec if I can hang on to them, though."

"It sounds big," she commented.

"It is big," Charlie declared, "if I could go at it right. I've been trying ever since I got wise to this timber business to make the governor see what a chance there is in it. He was just getting properly impressed with the possibilities when the speed bug got him. He could have trimmed a little here and there at home and put the money to work. Ten thousand dollars would have done the trick, given me a working outfit along with what I've got that would have put us both on Easy Street. However, the poor old chap didn't get around to it. I suppose, like lots of other business men, when he stopped, everything ran down. According to Lander's figures, there won't be a thing left when all accounts are squared."

"Don't talk about it, Charlie," she begged. "It's too near, and I was through it all."

"I would have been there too," Benton said. "But, as I told you, I was out of reach of your wire, and by the time I got it, it was all over. I couldn't have done any good, anyway. There's no use mourning. One way and another we've all got to come to it some day."

Stella looked out over the placid, shimmering surface of Roaring Lake for a minute. Her grief was dimming with time and distance, and she had all her own young life before her. She found herself drifting from painful memories of her father's sudden death to a consideration of things present and personal. She found herself wondering critically if this strange, rude land would work as many changes in her as were patent in this bronzed and burly brother.

He had left home a slim, cocksure youngster, who had proved more than a handful for his family before he was half through college, which educational finishing process had come to an abrupt stop before it was complete. He had been a problem that her father and mother had discussed in guarded tones. Sending him West had been a hopeful experiment, and in the West that abounding spirit which manifested itself in one continual round of minor escapades appeared to have found a natural outlet. She recalled that latterly their father had taken to speaking of Charlie in accents of pride. He was developing the one ambition that Benton senior could thoroughly understand and properly appreciate, the desire to get on, to grasp opportunities, to achieve material success, to make money.

Just as her father, on the few occasions when he talked business before her, spoke in a big way of big things as the desirable ultimate, so now Charlie spoke, with plans and outlook to match his speech. In her father's point of view, and in Charlie's now, a man's personal life did not seem to matter in comparison with getting on and making money. And it was with that personal side of existence that Stella Benton was now chiefly concerned. She had never been required to adjust herself to an existence that was wholly taken up with getting on to the complete exclusion of everything else. Her work had been to play. She could scarce conceive of any one entirely excluding pleasure and diversion from his or her life. She wondered if Charlie had done so. And if not, what ameliorating circumstances, what social outlet, might be found to offset, for her, continued existence in this isolated region of towering woods. So far as her first impressions went, Roaring Lake appeared to be mostly frequented by lumberjacks addicted to rude speech and strong drink.

"Are there many people living around this lake?" she inquired. "It is surely a beautiful spot. If we had this at home, there would be a summer cottage on every hundred yards of shore."

"Be a long time before we get to that stage here," Benton returned. "And scenery in B.C. is a drug on the market; we've got Europe backed off the map for tourist attractions, if they only knew it. No, about the only summer home in this locality is the Abbey place at Cottonwood Point. They come up here every summer for two or three months. Otherwise I don't know of any lilies of the field, barring the hotel people, and they, being purely transient, don't count. There's the Abbey-Monohan outfit with two big logging camps, my outfit, Jack Fyfe's, some hand loggers on the east shore, and the R.A.T. at the head of the lake. That's the population—and Roaring Lake is forty-two miles long and eight wide."

"Are there any nice girls around?" she asked.

Benton grinned widely.

"Girls?" said he. "Not so you could notice. Outside the Springs and the hatchery over the way, there isn't a white woman on the lake except Lefty Howe's wife—Lefty's Jack Fyfe's foreman—and she's fat and past forty. I told you it was a God-forsaken hole as far as society is concerned, Stell."

"I know," she said thoughtfully. "But one can scarcely realize such a—such a social blankness, until one actually experiences it. Anyway, I don't know but I'll appreciate utter quiet for awhile. But what do you do with yourself when you're not working?"

"There's seldom any such time," he answered. "I tell you, Stella, I've got a big job on my hands. I've got a definite mark to shoot at, and I'm going to make a bull's-eye in spite of hell and high water. I have no time to play, and there's no place to play if I had. I don't intend to muddle along making a pittance like a hand logger. I want a stake; and then it'll be time to make a splurge in a country where a man can get a run for his money."

"If that's the case," she observed, "I'm likely to be a handicap to you, am I not?"

"Lord, no," he smiled. "I'll put you to work too, when you get rested up from your trip. You stick with me, Sis, and you'll wear diamonds."

She laughed with him at this, and leaving the shady maple they walked up to the hotel, where Benton proposed that they get a canoe and paddle to where Roaring River flowed out of the lake half a mile westward, to kill the time that must elapse before the three-thirty train.

The St. Allwoods' car was rolling out to Hopyard when they came back. By the time Benton had turned the canoe over to the boathouse man and reached the wharf, the horn of the returning machine sounded down the road. They waited. The car came to a stop at the abutting wharf. The driver handed two suitcases off the burdened hood of his machine. From out the tonneau clambered a large, smooth-faced young man. He wore an expansive smile in addition to a blue serge suit, white Panama, and polished tan Oxfords, and he bestowed a hearty greeting upon Charlie Benton. But his smile suffered eclipse, and a faint flush rose in his round cheeks, when his eyes fell upon Benton's sister.