Читать книгу Empty Hands - Stringer Arthur - Страница 8

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Claire Endicott's first meeting with Shomer Grimshaw at Barrier Lake was not an auspicious one. Grimshaw, in fact, disapproved of the entire arrangement. He objected to women in camp, just as he objected to the foolish paraphernalia which had been brought along with them. While still unable to spare men to bring up his thirty-foot shallow-draught paddle-wheeler, which had arrived at the rail-head in sections, he had been compelled to "pack" in effeminate double-walled silk tents, collapsible army-cots, aluminum cooking toys and silver-plated fishing-rods and rifles. And while he detected an unlooked-for self-reliance in the close-muscled and cool-eyed girl who so casually inspected his grub-tent and his sleeping quarters, he remembered that a person who traveled with a French maid was not to be easily absorbed into his established order of life.

Mademoiselle Lamer, it is true, retired promptly and disdainfully to the privacy of the double-walled silk, where she applied countless unguents to a sun-burned cuticle and railed volubly against black-flies and mosquitoes. But the slim-legged girl with the butternut-brown skin gave evidence enough of a more active interest in her new world, promptly commandeering old Napoleon Faubert and directing him to show her everything from the canoes and the york-boats to the assay-tent and the burned-over lands where the blue-berries grew thickest. She studiously avoided Grimshaw, who looked unnecessarily rough in worn corduroy and flannel and spiked river shoes. But that young man was busy enough with Robert Endicott, explaining how they needed a hydroplane and an expert flier, a portable saw-mill, and sheet-iron pontoons for trying out the Malign Canyon rapids.

It was not until Endicott had started back to the rail-head to inquire into his delayed chemical shipments that Grimshaw came into actual contact with the brown-skinned girl. He watched her with a silent frown as she lighted a cigarette and smoked it. But he made no move until she tossed the lighted end into the underbrush.

"Put that out!" he commanded.

She turned and inspected him with a cursory eye.

"What do you mean?" she asked quietly enough.

"I want that cigarette butt put out," he said with no perceptible softening of the voice.

"Why?" she indifferently inquired.

He strode over to where she stood, towering thunderously over her.

"Because if you knew anything about this country, in the first place, you'd know you were breaking the law. And because, in the second place, I don't want these woods set afire. And if you want a third reason, because I said so!"

His force seemed quite wasted on her.

"Who are you?" she mildly inquired, as their glances met and locked.

"I'm the boss of this camp," he announced, knowing that this information had already been imparted to her. "And I want that fire put out."

She glanced about to where a small drift of smoke rose from the dried moss and pine-needles into which she had thrown her cigarette-end. But this, apparently, did not greatly disturb her.

"And supposing I prefer not putting it out?" she speculated aloud, with her appraising eye on his tightened jaw-muscles.

"You are going to put it out," he said, achieving a semblance of her own quietness. And again their contending glances meshed together.

She studied him for a tense moment or two and then turned and walked away. Grimshaw's eyes followed her, but he said nothing more. He strode over to the creeping blaze and stamped it out with his spiked shoes.

He saw nothing more of her for the rest of the day, but the next morning when he emerged from the grub-tent old Napoleon showed him where Claire Endicott was swimming far out on Barrier Lake. Grimshaw, as he watched the bobbing dark head on the sunlit water, did not greatly relish the situation. The girl, whatever her own attitude, had been definitely left in his charge, and he realized that she was disagreeably close to the sucking open mouth of Malign Canyon, where the waters of Barrier Lake, breaking through the Height-Of-Land, roared and rushed for miles down a series of rapids where not even an Indian would venture. It was there that the wilderness began, guarded by a line as abrupt as an international frontier, a seven-mile barrier of rock-wall and crevice and upland muskeg which reserved from man the virgin forest beyond. Through that barrier twisted and lashed and whitewatered the wasted power which Grimshaw ached to harness, and behind it lay the terra incognita which he longed to invade. But there was much to be done, he knew, before Malign Canyon could be charted.

So he climbed to higher ground, to make sure the swimmer was not advancing toward that point of treachery where the water, dark and smooth like fluid steel, poured silently out into the Grande Décharge. He saw, to his relief, that she was more than holding her own. So he lighted his pipe and walked down to the camp-landing, where he waited for her to win back. He could have gone for her in one of the canoes, but he stood there, grimly watching her as she fought her way to shore.

He waited until she drew herself up on one of the landing-planks and sat there, obviously out of breath but otherwise unperturbed. Her body looked ridiculously small in its abbreviated bathing-suit of knitted blue wool.

"I suppose you know you were within an ace of going down," observed Grimshaw, with studied quietness.

"Down where?" she asked, without even looking up at him.

"Down Malign Canyon," he retorted.

"That would have been a swim for me!" she gaily announced.

"And your final one," he solemnly amended. "No one ever went and came out alive."

He waited for her to speak, but she sat silent. So he added, as he refilled his pipe: "It would be just as well if you kept away from that part of the lake."

She turned about on the wet plank so that she confronted him.

"Don't imagine I'm made of Dresden china," she reminded him.

He did his best to make his glance a disparaging one as he looked her over.

"Nothing so fine, I imagine!" he curtly amended. And he was rewarded by seeing the color deepen on her already dark face.

"You seem to be worrying a great deal over my welfare," she retorted, by way of reprisal.

"I need to," he announced.

"But I'm rather a decent swimmer," she said with her hands linked over her upthrust knees. "I imagine I'm as much at home in the water as you are."

"Not in these waters," he told her.

"Then apparently I have a great deal to learn," she observed.

"I think you have," asserted Grimshaw, not putting too much faith in her momentary parade of meekness. And he cut their colloquy short by turning on his heel and striding back to camp.