HALFWAY POINT

Miss Benton’s cool, impersonal manner seemed rather to heighten the young man’s embarrassment. Benton, apparently observing nothing amiss, introduced them in an offhand fashion.

“Mr. Abbey my sister.”

Mr. Abbey bowed and murmured something that passed for acknowledgment. The three turned up the wharf toward where Sam Davis had once more got up steam. As they walked, Mr. Abbey’s habitual assurance returned, and he directed part of his genial flow of conversation to Miss Benton. To Stella’s inner amusement, however, he did not make any reference to their having been fellow travelers for a day and a half.

Presently they were embarked and under way. Charlie fixed a seat for her on the after deck, and went forward to steer, whither he was straightway joined by Paul Abbey. Miss Benton was as well pleased to be alone. She was not sure she should approve of young men who made such crude efforts to scrape acquaintance with women on trains. She was accustomed to a certain amount of formality in such matters. It might perhaps be laid to the “breezy Western manner” of which she had heard, except that Paul Abbey did not impress her as a Westerner. He seemed more like a type of young man she had encountered frequently in her own circle. At any rate, she was relieved when he did not remain beside her to emit polite commonplaces. She was quite satisfied to sit by herself and look over the panorama of woods and lake and wonder more than a little what Destiny had in store for her along those silent shores.

The Springs fell far behind, became a few white spots against the background of dusky green. Except for the ripples spread by their wake, the water laid oily smooth. Now, a little past four in the afternoon, she began to sense by comparison the great bulk of the western mountains, locally, the Chehalis Range, for the sun was dipping behind the ragged peaks already, and deep shadows stole out from the shore to port. Beneath her feet the screw throbbed, pulsing like an overdriven heart, and Sam Davis poked his sweaty face now and then through a window to catch a breath of cool air denied him in the small inferno where he stoked the fire box.

The Chickamin cleared Echo Island, and a greater sweep of lake opened out. Here the afternoon wind sprang up, shooting gustily through a gap between the Springs and Hopyard and ruffling the lake out of its noonday siesta. Ripples, chop, and a growing swell followed each other with that marvellous rapidity common to large bodies of fresh water. It broke the monotony of steady cleaving through dead calm. Stella was a good sailor, and she rather enjoyed it when the Chickamin began to lift and yaw off before the following seas that ran up under her fantail stern.

After about an hour’s run, with the south wind beginning to whip the crests of the short seas into white foam, the boat bore in to a landing behind a low point. Here Abbey disembarked, after taking the trouble to come aft and shake hands with polite farewell. Standing on the float, hat in hand, he bowed his sleek blond head to Stella.

“I hope you’ll like Roaring Lake, Miss Benton,” he said, as Benton jingled the go-ahead bell. “I tried to persuade Charlie to stop over awhile, so you could meet my mother and sister, but he’s in too big a hurry. Hope to have the pleasure of meeting you again soon.”

Miss Benton parried courteously, a little at a loss to fathom this bland friendliness, and presently the widening space cut off their talk. As the boat drew offshore, she saw two women in white come down toward the float, meet Abbey, and turn back. And a little farther out through an opening in the woods, she saw a white and green bungalow, low and rambling, wide-verandahed, set on a hillock three hundred yards back from shore. There was an encircling area of smooth lawn, a place restfully inviting.

Watching that, seeing a figure or two moving about, she was smitten with a recurrence of that poignant loneliness which had assailed her fitfully in the last four days. And while the Chickamin was still plowing the inshore waters on an even keel, she walked the guard rail alongside and joined her brother in the pilot house.

“Isn’t that a pretty place back there in the woods?” she remarked.

“Abbey’s summer camp; spells money to me, that’s all,” Charlie grumbled. “It’s a toy for their women, up-to-date cottage, gardeners, tennis courts, afternoon tea on the lawn for the guests, and all that. But the Abbey-Monohan bunch has the money to do what they want to do. They’ve made it in timber, as I expect to make mine. You didn’t particularly want to stay over and get acquainted, did you?”

“I? Of course not,” she responded.

“Personally, I don’t want to mix into their social game,” Charlie drawled. “Or at least, I don’t propose to make any tentative advances. The women put on lots of side, they say. If they want to hunt us up and cultivate you, all right. But I’ve got too much to do to butt into society. Anyway, I didn’t want to run up against any critical females looking like I do right now.”

Stella smiled.

“Under certain circumstances, appearances do count then, in this country,” she remarked. “Has your Mr. Abbey got a young and be-yutiful sister?”

“He has, but that’s got nothing to do with it,” Charlie retorted. “Paul’s all right himself. But their gait isn’t mine not yet. Here, you take the wheel a minute. I want to smoke. I don’t suppose you ever helmed a forty-footer, but you’ll never learn younger.”

She took the wheel and Charlie stood by, directing her. In twenty minutes they were out where the run of the sea from the south had a fair sweep. The wind was whistling now. All the roughened surface was spotted with whitecaps. The Chickamin would hang on the crest of a wave and shoot forward like a racer, her wheel humming, and again the roller would run out from under her, and she would labor heavily in the trough.

It began to grow insufferably hot in the pilot house. The wind drove with them, pressing the heat from the boiler and fire box into the forward portion of the boat, where Stella stood at the wheel. There were puffs of smoke when Davis opened the fire box to ply it with fuel. All the sour smells that rose from an unclean bilge eddied about them. The heat and the smell and the surging motion began to nauseate Stella.

“I must get outside where I can breathe,” she gasped, at length. “It’s suffocating. I don’t see how you stand it.”

“It does get stuffy in here when we run with the wind,” Benton admitted. “Cuts off our ventilation. I’m used to it. Crawl out the window and sit on the forward deck. Don’t try to get aft. You might slip off, the way she’s lurching.”

Curled in the hollow of a faked-down hawser with the clean air fanning her, Stella recovered herself. The giddiness left her. She pitied Sam Davis back in that stinking hole beside the fire box. But she supposed he, like her brother, was “used to it.” Apparently one could get used to anything, if she could judge by the amazing change in Charlie.

Far ahead loomed a ridge running down to the lake shore and cutting off in a bold promontory. That was Halfway Point, Charlie had told her, and under its shadow lay his camp. Without any previous knowledge of camps, she was approaching this one with less eager anticipation than when she began her long journey. She began to fear that it might be totally unlike anything she had been able to imagine, disagreeably so. Charlie, she decided, had grown hard and coarsened in the evolution of his ambition to get on, to make his pile. She was but four years younger than he, and she had always thought of herself as being older and wiser and steadier. She had conceived the idea that her presence would have a good influence on him, that they would pull together now that there were but the two of them. But four hours in his company had dispelled that illusion. She had the wit to perceive that Charlie Benton had emerged from the chrysalis stage, that he had the will and the ability to mold his life after his elected fashion, and that her coming was a relatively unimportant incident.

In due course the Chickamin bore in under Halfway Point, opened out a sheltered bight where the watery commotion outside raised but a faint ripple, and drew in alongside a float.

The girl swept lake shore, bay, and sloping forest with a quickening eye. Here was no trim-painted cottage and velvet lawn. In the waters beside and lining the beach floated innumerable logs, confined by boomsticks, hundreds of trunks of fir, forty and sixty feet long, four and six feet across the butt, timber enough, when it had passed through the sawmills, to build four such towns as Hopyard. Just back from the shore, amid stumps and littered branches, rose the roofs of divers buildings. One was long and low. Hard by it stood another of like type but of lesser dimension. Two or three mere shanties lifted level with great stumps, crude, unpainted buildings. Smoke issued from the pipe of the larger, and a white-aproned man stood in the doorway.

Somewhere in the screen of woods a whistle shrilled. Benton looked at his watch.

“We made good time, in spite of the little roll,” said he. “That’s the donkey blowing quitting time six o’clock. Well, come on up to the shack, Sis. Sam, you get a wheelbarrow and run those trunks up after supper, will you?”

Away in the banked timber beyond the maples and alder which Stella now saw masked the bank of a small stream flowing by the cabins, a faint call rose, long-drawn:

“Tim-ber-r-r-r!”

They moved along a path beaten through fern and clawing blackberry vine toward the camp, Benton carrying the two grips. A loud, sharp crack split the stillness; then a mild swishing sound arose. Hard on the heels of that followed a rending, tearing crash, a thud that sent tremors through the solid earth under their feet. The girl started.

“Falling gang dropped a big fir,” Charlie laughed. “You’ll get used to that. You’ll hear it a good many times a day here.”

“Good Heavens, it sounded like the end of the world,” she said.

“Well, you can’t fell a stick of timber two hundred feet high and six or eight feet through without making a pretty considerable noise,” her brother remarked complacently. “I like that sound myself. Every big tree that goes down means a bunch of money.”

He led the way past the mess-house, from the doorway of which the aproned cook eyed her with frank curiosity, hailing his employer with nonchalant air, a cigarette resting in one corner of his mouth. Benton opened the door of the second building. Stella followed him in.

It had the saving grace of cleanliness according to logging-camp standards. But the bareness of it appalled her. There was a rusty box heater, littered with cigar and cigarette stubs, a desk fabricated of undressed boards, a homemade chair or two, sundry boxes standing about. The sole concession to comfort was a rug of cheap Axminster covering half the floor. The walls were decorated chiefly with miscellaneous clothing suspended from nails, a few maps and blue prints tacked up askew. Straight across from the entering door another stood ajar, and she could see further vistas of bare board wall, small, dusty window-panes, and a bed whereon gray blankets were tumbled as they fell when a waking sleeper cast them aside.

Benton crossed the room and threw open another door.

“Here’s a nook I fixed up for you, Stella,” he said briskly. “It isn’t very fancy, but it’s the best I could do just now.”

She followed him in silently. He set her two bags on the floor and turned to go. Then some impulse moved him to turn back, and he put both hands on her shoulders and kissed her gently.

“You’re home, anyway,” he said. “That’s something, if it isn’t what you’re used to. Try to overlook the crudities. We’ll have supper as soon as you feel like it.”

He went out, closing the door behind him.

Miss Estella Benton stood in the middle of the room fighting against a swift heart-sinking, a terrible depression that strove to master her.

“Good Lord in Heaven,” she muttered at last. “What a place to be marooned in. It’s it’s simply impossible.”

Her gaze roved about the room. A square box, neither more nor less, fourteen by fourteen feet of bare board wall, unpainted and unpapered. There was an iron bed, a willow rocker, and a rude closet for clothes in one corner. A duplicate of the department-store bargain rug in the other room lay on the floor. On an upturned box stood an enamel pitcher and a tin washbasin. That was all.

She sat down on the bed and viewed it forlornly. A wave of sickening rebellion against everything swept over her. To herself she seemed as irrevocably alone as if she had been lost in the depths of the dark timber that rose on every hand. And sitting there she heard at length the voices of men. Looking out through a window curtained with cheesecloth she saw her brother’s logging gang swing past, stout woodsmen all, big men, tall men, short-bodied men with thick necks and shoulders, sunburned, all grimy with the sweat of their labors, carrying themselves with a free and reckless swing, the doubles in type of that roistering crew she had seen embark on Jack Fyfe’s boat.

In so far as she had taken note of those who labored with their hands in the region of her birth, she had seen few like these. The chauffeur, the footman, the street cleaner, the factory workers they were all different. They lacked something, perhaps nothing in the way of physical excellence; but these men betrayed in every movement a subtle difference that she could not define. Her nearest approximation and the first attempt she made at analysis was that they looked like pirates. They were bold men and strong; that was written in their faces and the swing of them as they walked. And they served the very excellent purpose of taking her mind off herself for the time being.

She watched them cluster by a bench before the cookhouse, dabble their faces and hands in washbasins, scrub themselves promiscuously on towels, sometimes one at each end of a single piece of cloth, hauling it back and forth in rude play.

All about that cookhouse dooryard spread a confusion of empty tin cans, gaudily labeled, containers of corn and peas and tomatoes. Dishwater and refuse, chips, scraps, all the refuse of the camp was scattered there in unlovely array.

But that made no more than a passing impression upon her. She was thinking, as she removed her hat and gloves, of what queer angles come now and then to the human mind. She wondered why she should be sufficiently interested in her brother’s hired men to drive off a compelling attack of the blues in consideration of them as men. Nevertheless, she found herself unable to view them as she had viewed, say, the clerks in her father’s office.

She began to brush her hair and to wonder what sort of food would be served for supper.