Timber Part One

CHAPTER X

On Helen Foraker's suggestion, John had gone to live in the men's shanty with Milt Goddard, Black Joe and the balance of the crew that had not been shifted to the White camp.

"This is your job," she said. "I am only working for you. I'll be more comfortable if you see what is going on both on the river and at the mill, and you can't see if you stay in town."

It was not a congenial shelter for him. He was out of place, did not belong to the class of men with whom he ate and slept and his reputation as a "mixer" in that other existence he had lived did him no good here. More, Goddard was surly and gruff, as his deeply rooted jealousy prompted. Black Joe ignored John and would respond to none of his advances. When Taylor asked questions Joe would look about and grunt scornfully and say to some one:

"Did you hear that? He," brandishing his pipe stem toward John, "wants to know if—" repeating the question. Then he would answer explosively: "Of course it is!" Or: "Hell, no!" giving by tone and manner the inference that none but an addle-pate would have put such a query.

After their agreement was signed, Taylor had nothing of a personal nature in common with Helen Foraker. Their conversations were all brief and wholly concerned with the work and much of her talk was as Greek to Taylor. He watched the girl closely, with a growing humility, which, strangely, he did not resent. He saw her those first days, among the men in the ravine where teams snaked the logs from their jumble to the river's edge, where they were caught in a boom and dogged into rafts. She was sparing of words, untiring, always alert, and she knew what was going on. He heard her challenge the method of a teamster whose horses were stuck when the log they skidded jammed between two great stumps.

"Back now, and swing in gee," she said sharply. "Don't yell at them! You've got your team up in the air. Try it again—Haw, now!"

The log was obstinate, the teamster flushing as others looked on to see her directions sting his pride.

"If you don't like my way, why don't you try it yourself?" he asked.

She dropped from the log on which she stood, took the reins from him, tried and failed; let the team rest, rubbed their noses, eased the collars, and started them again—They strained together, skin wrinkling over their broad rumps, they grunted, swung, and the log started forward.

"Now you take them," she said, returning the lines. "You'll go farther with a low voice."

She had been right. The man grinned himself because he had been wrong and shown up fairly.

Taylor saw her rebuke a youth for carelessly driving in the dog-wedge.

"That won't hold," she said, kicking the wedge with her boot toe. "If that raft goes to pieces and that one log dead-heads, we're losing as much as we're paying you for a day's work. Knock it out and put it in right!"

The boy did. In the vernacular of the men, she got away with it; and because she knew and was sure she knew.

He saw a farmer who had come to work for a few days standing close behind a team as the driver prepared to skid out a log.

"That's dangerous," Helen called out.

The man grumbled that he had been in the woods before, but did not move.

The horses started forward and hung and strained—and one tooth of the heavy tongs slipped from its hold and the implement shot forward, spinning over, struck the man's thigh and bit savagely into the flesh before the horses, lurching forward at the sudden relief of strain, could be stopped. The tongs fell away but the polished steel was smeared with blood and the man's pants leg darkened quickly with it.

Helen was the first to his side, borrowing a knife, slitting his clothing, exposing the two ugly holes in the flesh, one of which spurted an alarming stream where an artery had been torn. She took the man's suspenders, bound them about his leg above the injury and twisted the tourniquet tight with a stick—She was gone most of the day, remaining in camp with the man until the doctor from Pancake had come to dress the injury, and then going herself to tell his family of the accident.

(They recounted this of her while she waited for the doctor: "'Swear', she says. 'Swear if it hurts too much. I've heard worse oaths than you can invent!'")

Another item: He heard men on the job scoffing at the idea of timber as a crop; in Pancake he saw men grin and mutter to one another as Helen passed, and knew that the girl was aware that she was being laughed at derisively. Her manner on such occasions was striking; the soldiers of his company would have given her the blanket characterization of the army and said that she was hard-boiled; his mother would have said that she carried a chip on her shoulder; Taylor himself thought her defiance splendid. She could not divorce herself from her forest; when men belittled it and the idea behind it, it was as though they had made uncouth fun of her. To be a friend of the girl required that sympathy for her undertaking be made evident; to be outside her favor it was necessary only to show no charity for the work her father started. Nothing else seemed to influence her to any extent.

Such things he saw, and others: Saw her jump lightly from log to log as she went over the face of that tangle, poised like a splendid animal, lithe and alive and as sure of her body as she was of her mind. He watched her cross the river, leaving behind a rank of logs which rose sluggishly from the immersion her weight gave them, but she reached the boom of high-riding cedars without wetting her stout boots. And he saw her in a canoe, driving the light craft upstream, arms and shoulders and torso working with a rhythm which set his heart in faster measure.

He had been at the mill one morning and was walking through the forest to the skidway. At the house Black Joe came from the woods and scarcely grunted in return to John's salutation. But after Taylor had passed, he heard the man hail him.

Turning about, he saw Aunty May standing in the kitchen door. They were within ear-shot of the woman, but Joe said, "Say, tell her Miss Helen won't be down for dinner. She wants to know if Hump Bryant's telephoned."

Taylor repressed a smile at this strange procedure which he had witnessed on several occasions, and repeated the information and the question.

"Tell him," said Aunty May, "that there ain't been a 'phone call all forenoon."

Gravely Taylor passed along the message and then, as the woman turned into the house and Joe went on, he resumed his way.

A childish shout from below checked him on the high bank and he looked down to see Bobby and Bessy in the baby trap. That was what all Foraker's Folly called the small, dry sand bar, separated from the bank by a dozen feet of shallow water and reached by a small foot bridge made of stakes driven firmly in and planks laid along them. Each fair morning Aunty May shooed her charges across the bridge and then drew the planks to shore, thereby isolating the children on their sand bar and leaving her wholly free for the housework.

"There!" she would say each time she disposed of them. "Now I know where you younguns are at!"

The peril of water was deeply planted in their hearts and they never attempted the easy wade to shore.

However, playing in the clean sand grew monotonous and though the children never openly protested, they were full of excuses to delay their isolation, full of enthusiasm when released and ever on the watch for some passer who might be waylaid and induced to talk. Bobby, seeing Taylor, had halted him without excuse, but when John stopped the youngster pointed toward shore and cried:

"Look! Looky!"

"At what?"

"There! Somepin— "

"A kic-kic," said Bessy.

Bobby grinned. "She means a cricket. That's what it is. I fought it was somepin worse."

Taylor smiled, seeing the ruse, commented casually and started on.

"Did you see Black Joe?" Bobby was standing on the shore side of the bar now, toes almost in the water, and Bessy was beside him, finger in her mouth, wide-eyed in expectancy at this game she knew so well.

"Yes, I saw Joe. Why?"

"Oh—we seen—saw him too."

Bessy waved a hand at the river behind her.

"We see wog go by-by," she trebled.

Her brother smiled and straightened her sunbonnet. "She says, we watch the logs go by," he interpreted.

"Wotta wog—wotta big wog."

"That means lots of big logs. She don't talk very plain."

Pause. Bobby broke it hastily, for pauses were dangerous.

"Did you see Aunty May? Was she all right?"

Taylor laughed heartily and said that Aunty May appeared in good health and squatted on the brink. This change, forecasting a visit, made Bobby grin.

"Aunty May says you need a—a—a—now, you know what Grandpa Humpy Bryant is?"

"An editor?"

"Nope. What he is for Bessy an' me. "

"He's your guardian, isn't—"

Taylor had interrupted himself but Bobby took no notice of his queer smile.

"That's what!" he cried. "Garden! Aunty May says you need one."

"Oh, so Aunty May thinks I need a guardian?"

"Uh-huh. She says so."

"What do you think, Bobby?"

Thus confronted with a question, the nature of which was beyond him, the boy was embarrassed.

"I don't fink," he said and laughed. Then, losing his self-consciousness: "I'm like what Aunty May says Aunt Helen is: I don't say somepin unless I fink somepin. An' when she finks she says. That's what Aunty May says. She only finks about somepin 'portant, Aunty May says."

"And then, likely, I'm not very important, Bobby?"

Again the child was beyond his depth and twisted his fingers.

"Milt, he finks about you. He says to Aunt Helen you're a damn dude—"

"Oh-h-h-h!" broke in Bessy, looking up at her brother, who flushed quickly. He crossed his heart solemnly, bending over her, grasping and shaking one of her arms. "Honest, Bessy, brother won't say it again. Honest, cross my heart!"

Taylor sat down on the bank, dangling his legs in the yellow sand.

"So Milt says I'm a dude, does he?"

Bobby nodded eagerly. Here was something he could follow; and this was becoming a deliciously long interruption to the morning's captivity.

"He says that to Aunt Helen two-free days ago. He says you a—a—," glancing cautiously at Bessy—"a dude, an' you don't know what's goin' on wif your logs an' you let a woman make money for you—That's what Milt says."

"Waf-wog! waf-wog!" shrilled Bessie as a raft rounded the far bend.

The children discarded Taylor, who had served his purpose with them for that day. He rose and went on, and they did not even turn to wave farewell.

"So I need a guardian—and I'm a damned dude—and I don't know what is going on with my logs—and I'm letting a woman make money for me—"

He looked up through the pines and laughed ruefully.

"I'll be damned if I don't have to plead guilty on two counts!" he said. "And—I'm not sure of the others."

Later he added:

"And she always says what she thinks, and she doesn't say anything about me. Therefore," making the mathematical symbol of deduction in the air with a forefinger, "she doesn't think about me at all."

It was that evening. Helen Foraker was at her desk and looked up with surprise as Taylor entered, for it was the first time he had been in her house since their business agreement.

"Did you ever stop to think," he began without preface, "that I don't know much about what's going on?"

"I have it right here; the daily reports from the mill," she said.

"Not that," smiling. "Those are your figures and I'd like to be able to know whether they're right or not. Not because I doubt you, but because this is my job. I'm so ignorant that I don't know anything about my own business!"

She sat back in her chair.

"I've been wondering if you'd wake up," she said quietly.

"Wondering! I didn't suppose you took time to think about me."

She traced a line on the blotter before her with a dry pen.

"I've had lots of time to think about you, John Taylor. A lot of time to wonder about you—and not enough time to make up my mind. I've never known many kinds of people; I've never known any one like you. I thought I sized you up the first time I saw you and I haven't had much evidence to change my opinion. Women are supposed to have a certain keen intuition; perhaps we have; perhaps that has kept me wondering if you wouldn't wake up.

"Sit down."

He took a chair and she folded her arms, looking squarely at him.

"Most people I have known don't wonder about themselves and so they don't understand themselves. That morning when we went to look at your logs you told me more about yourself than any—stranger ever has. What you said backed up my first impression, but because you said it made me suspect that something had given you a jolt. Ever since, I've been wondering if you'd be content to hang around the edges and let circumstances make a boomerang of your father's trick."

She stopped, and Taylor smiled gravely.

"Circumstances?" he asked. "You mean you've wondered if I'd be content to ride into my father's good opinion on your shoulders!"

She protested, but he rose abruptly from his chair.

"Yes, it is you!" he cried suddenly excited. "What prospect I have of making a little success here is because that drunken boy gave me the wrong turn at Seven Mile and sent me here to spend the first night under your roof! And it's you who have made me want to wake up. You took me with you to Thad Parker's that night and I looked death in the face and caught a glimpse of life," voice low and growing tense. "The next day you talked to me about waste and duty and Americanism in the terms of saw-logs and made it more convincing than any flag-waving I've ever listened to. I've watched you dominate men who won't even accept me as a companion. I've watched you do things that to you are everyday accomplishments which are away beyond me—

"Just being here has gotten under my skin! I didn't realize it until today, but I've been uncomfortable and out of place and I haven't known why. Now I do know. I'm thrown against a girl who is doing things for herself and for me. You're making money for me, you're winning my father's favor for me, and I don't like it!"

He paused, breathing rapidly, and saw a look in the girl's eyes that had never been there before when she looked at him, a vague shadow of admiration, and his heart leaped.

"My mind should be good for a little something—Lord knows it's had preparation and rest enough! I have a stout back and strong hands," spreading his big, white palms. "I want to do things for myself, I want to make my own money, to win my father's good opinion, but I don't know how to use the tools I have to work with."

He stopped abruptly and let his hands fall limply to his sides. Then he asked very simply:

"Will you teach me?"

In such a manner, the John Taylor who had come to the Blueberry to humor his father, that he might win wealth without soiling his great hands and who had first learned that there is some money from which fair-minded men recoil, reached the understanding that the reward is only one factor in achievement; in such a manner the John Taylor, who had been self-assured and self-satisfied and superficial, humbled himself, yet in that deference was nothing servile, but rather it had the nobility of simplicity and frankness; in such a manner, the man who had set out to find material things which would make one woman happy, came to another woman to find that peace which can come only with respect of self.

Helen's hands dropped to her chair arms and a happy flush spread over her cheeks, brightening her large eyes.

"I will teach you all I can, John Taylor!" she said.

Like an ambitious boy on his first job he sat that night while she sketched for him the rudiments of what he must learn before he could know what was being done for him. There was talk of Schribner rule and Doyle rule; allowance for defect, mill over-run; of costs and markets; of lumber grades and transportation, of felling and bucking and swamping; of circular and bandsaws and kerf, of those fundamentals which he had hoped to skip in any business; talk of the grubbing he had loathed, and this night he did not shy from it, but questioned and listened and remembered.

It was late when he rose. Helen followed him to the door and stood on the threshold looking out into the spring night. Frogs sang and the jovial chorus of crickets played above the murmurings of the river and the light breeze whispering in the pines. A screech owl uttered its tremulous call not far off and a whip-poor-will cried in the swamp. Taylor looked up at the girl. Her arm resting against the casing was very delicate in line but, silhouetted against the light, it seemed then like a part of some competent, dexterous machine; her face was mostly in shadow, but where the lamp glow fell on one cheek was an impression of softness, of gentleness, strong in its call to his senses. She was talking, but he was unconscious of her words; just heedful of the musical timbre of her voice.

His breath caught and a strange creep went over his skin. For the first time she was for him a woman, a female; she had been an antagonist, an example, and now she was a girl, wholly different from any he had ever known, capable, far-sighted, keen of mind—and most lovely! He walked slowly toward the men's shanty. Pauguk muttered savagely from her kennel as she caught his scent. Manifestations of the appeal which had emanated from Helen went as quickly as they had come, but they left him unsteadied; that moment had taken something away—he did not know what.

He entered the bunk building where a light still burned. Goddard was mending a horse collar and looked up and his gray eyes lighted unpleasantly, but he did not speak. Taylor brought out pen and paper and sat at the table beneath the hanging oil lamp to write to Marcia Murray. For a long interval he was there; a dozen times he started forward and touched the page with his pen, but no mark was made.

He did not want to write to Marcia Murray! He could not share with her this new enthusiasm for the job that he was to do with his own mind, his own back, his own hands! For this night she had no part in his life; for the first time in months he went through those last moments before turning in without remembering the sound of her words, the feel of her breath on his cheek, the touch of her cool fingers, the steady look in her clear eyes. Something had come into his heart which left no place for little Marcia. Marcia, the girl for whom he had braved his father's vitriolic scorn, for whom he had come on this distasteful errand!

The others had gone to their blankets; he rose, blew out the lamp and went to the door. A light was extinguished in Helen Foraker's room. He saw an indistinct figure appear at the window and draw back the curtains and linger a moment and disappear—and again that delicious creep went over his body.

From an indefinite distance, a slow, accelerating throb beat upon the air, stout and measured and progressing to its gentle rumble: the drumming of a cock partridge. Again it came—and again, as the bird, fevered with the great impulse in him, made the darkness pulse with his love making. Very quietly, as though awed by some soul-moulding experience, Taylor turned back to his bunk; the stimulus did not leave him; he tossed restlessly, eyes open, sleeping in brief snatches until dawn; he rose in the new day, to a new manner of living, of thinking, to work with Helen Foraker's men and his logs, to talk markets with Humphrey Bryant, to sit evenings with the girl and talk timber and labor and board-feet and now and then be unable to hear even his own words because of the blood that the beauty of her face sent crowding into his ears.

And so it was that he could write to his father that evening and tell him briefly that he had turned the stone to bread, and that his letters to Marcia Murray from thenceforth were not impelled by the urge which made the grouse beat his wings through the night, but were concerned with men and the deeds of commerce!

CHAPTER XI

Living as he did within the boundaries of Foraker's Folly, John Taylor's perspective was too close to yield a comprehensive picture of the whole. He had heard the forest spoken of derisively in Pancake, had heard men of the crew who worked in it and about the mill talk disparagingly of the property. But these comments had been standardized, the voicing of ideas of long standing, and had contained no detail. It was a foregone conclusion in the community that the project was the venture of a visionary and destined to fail. Most men found satisfaction in this belief. For long ago they, or older men they respected, had forecasted such a calamity.

Taylor knew that some of the pine was cut each winter but that the trees taken out were not harvested for their own value but for the good that their removal would do those which were left; cripples, the unthrifty or the light gluttons only, were taken. Banks of these still flanked the mill which, before it commenced to saw the hardwood, was busied making these logs into thin box lumber and lath. Pulp-wood bolts had been shipped, he knew, and cars of small slabs and edging for fuel. Of what was cut, there was no waste.

He knew of the nursery behind the big house where seeds were taken from cones and planted and the seedlings removed to long furrows where they progressed a year before being transplanted to those places where trees were not thick enough on the ground. Black Joe had charge of the nursery and John had watched him at his work evenings and in those days when he was not needed elsewhere, had heard the old fellow muttering to the baby pines as he fussed over them with pride and tenderness.

As the days grew fair and less rain fell he learned of the fear of fire. Beside Helen's house Watch Pine reared itself, a great old tree, five feet through at the butt, rising straight and true for seventy feet before it flung its tattered banners to the air, a dignified veteran, standing above and guarding over that younger generation of its kind. Beneath the branches a crow's nest had been built, and up the trunk was a stout ladder. On dry days some one was on watch there through the hours of daylight, scanning the forest and adjacent country with a glass for the smoke which would herald danger.

But these were high points of information, unrelated, largely meaningless.

It was a few days after his first cars of lumber had rolled out of the siding at Seven Mile that John came upon Sim Burns in the woods. The new supervisor was walking along a fire line, note book in hand, pacing carefully and counting trees, and did not see Taylor until they were close together.

"Hello, Mr. Taylor," he said in his harsh voice, and sniffed. "How are th' logs turnin' out?"

"Well enough," John said.

"Makin' up th' tax rolls," Burns volunteered. "Just lookin' over this piece.

"My goodness, but this property has been let off easy! Taxes on this'll come in handy for roads an' a new court house."

"I suppose taxes on this stuff do run high."

"High! My goodness, she ain't paid anything like she should have paid. You see, our county's been run by old men. They never come in here to make their valuation. They told Foraker when he started he couldn't grow timber as a crop; they've stuck to that idea. No progress, Mr. Taylor, no progress. This piece has always been taxed just like waste land. Assessed for four dollars an acre last year an' look at it," with a wave of his long, dirty hand. "I'll bet this piece right here'll go twenty thousand to the acre right today!"

"No!"

"Sure! Ask anybody. An' four dollars an acre! My goodness, it's worth twenty-five dollars a thousand stumpage to any man. You ought to be interested, Mr. Taylor, now that you are one of our tax payers."

Indeed John was interested, but not because he owned forty acres of cut-over land in Blueberry County. He left Burns abruptly and went on, staring incredulously into the pine. Twenty thousand to the acre, and twenty-five dollars a thousand stumpage!

There were ten thousand acres of pine here, he knew. Ten thousand times—

He gave a whistle of amazement. The figures mounted dizzily. He stopped dead still in his tracks. What a property!

And Helen was in a corner. He recalled the threat of taxation that Burns had made that first night, remembered Milt Goddard's prediction of failure the next morning; remembered, also, the girl's words, as she told her foreman that the pinch was coming, that the hardest time was at hand for Foraker's Folly.

Why not? he asked himself. She had helped him—this was a property to stir the most sluggish of imaginations. His imagination, his ambition was mounting. His paltry few logs would be sawed within three weeks—and then, what?

He thought back to Old Luke, of how he revered the Michigan forests which he had subdued; surely he had made his father see that he was not afraid to work, not above grubbing; as surely, he felt, his father would now stand ready to back him—would be as willing to help him as he had been ready to impose upon his helplessness with a cruel practical joke.

He walked on slowly, thinking, multiplying and losing his breath again before the ascending totals—" It will help her, when she needs help," he told himself. "I don't know what she needs, just—but—And if I could help her there'd be no obligation; and with no obligation I wouldn't feel small—and then, perhaps—"

He stopped his thinking aloud as a flush came into his cheeks. In his eyes was a light of ambition which had nothing to do with trees and logs and dollars and once more that creep went over his body as it had when he first heard the partridge drumming for his mate—

That evening John wrote a second letter to his father, longer, containing references to detail that he knew were intelligent references. The last paragraph read:

"By the way, how much backing would you give me if I could come to you with a chance to get behind several thousand acres of Michigan white pine that will go, say, twenty thousand to the acre?"

He sent that letter to Pancake by Goddard who took it with a surly nod; then John lighted his pipe and walked the river's bank to dream and see rising before him a future of incredible glory—

Little did he reckon the fires of avarice that would be lighted by what he had written, the thwarted impulses which would be touched to life again! Little did he dream of the misery that would follow in its wake, of the heartsickness, the desperation, the regret. He could not see himself friendless, caught in a net of chicanery and ruthless plotting, with the joy of this night wiped out by the unhappiness that was to come!

CHAPTER XII

It was Sunday, on a clear, still, June morning. The men's shanty was deserted, the mill silent, the teams at White's camp stamping lazily in the stable.

The world was a glory of vivid life. All about growth had replaced the dormant grayness which had prevailed when John Taylor arrived in the country. Out on the plains June grass blades of heavy green had hidden the tufts of last season's dead stalks; brakes thrust their tender, curled fronds through the moss, and sweet-fern and sedge, those useless growths of the barrens, were, for the fortnight, things of beauty. Aspens and birch were in tremulous leaf, oak and maple had burst from their maroon buds and flaunted polished foliage to the sun. Within the forest the pines were stirring, terminal buds had opened and new, light needles were stretching for air and light. A company of birds made the somber shadows joyous and the Blueberry, wandering through the forest, sped crystal clear over golden sand or dark depths, reflecting the graceful ranks of spruce and balsam which edged it, taking on a border of luscious green where reeds shot through the surface.

Over on the Au Sable, forty miles away, Marcia Murray and a dozen or more of Taylor's Detroit friends were gathered at Dick Mason's Windigo Lodge for one of the protracted house parties which had given the place a name. John had half promised Marcia that he would be there for the first Sunday, but somehow his interest in her was steadily waning. He was unconscious of change until some necessity for decision brought it home to him, as on that first night when he had no interest in a letter to her, as on other nights which followed when he could write only of himself and his job, and on those rare occasions when he could not even bring out his writing materials. He had believed that he was as eager to see her as he ever had been, but while he planned the trip across country he had half consciously sought an excuse which would keep him in the forest, and when a man who wanted his hemlock bark telephoned that he would come to the mill at Seven Mile soon, John interpreted that "soon" to suit his own strongest desires. He would wait over Sunday for the buyer, and all the time he secretly hoped the man would not show up, that he would have the day to himself—and that he might see something of Helen Foraker when her eyes were not on the men who worked for her and her mind not on the forest or his logs—

In such a subtle manner the change crept through him. He told himself that he was as fond of Marcia as ever, told himself that, but a voice deep in his heart soberly, steadily denied—and when on this Sabbath morning of gold and blue and green he thought of the Marcia he was not to see that day, slender, small, cool Marcia Murray, she seemed to him peculiary unsatisfactory and inconsequential.

This was the first time he had not reacted to her without at least a superficial thrill and the realization was something of a shock. He had come to the Blueberry to find easy money; he had fchosen to discard the easy way and help produce his own wealth. He had gone that far from the reasonable creature he had been and he had gone as far, perhaps farther, in his very impulses!

On the river bank near the house Helen sat with Bobby and Bessy Kildare. Pauguk, freed from her kennel, was chained to a stump, nose between her paws, orange eyes on the face of her mistress as Helen talked to the children.

John approached slowly. The wolf dog turned and muttered under her breath, throwing a venomous glance at him, but Helen was occupied with Bobby and did not notice.

"Look!" she cried suddenly, indicating a flitting bird. "What is it?"

The boy looked sharply.

"Fly-catcher," he said. "Olive-sided fly-catcher!" very positive in tone, but his eyes searched hers with query.

"Are you sure? Listen!"

The bird had lighted in a tree and his thin, plaintive see-a-wee floated out over the river.

Bobby laughed. "Nope! Wood peewee," he said and showed confusion for his cocksureness of the moment before.

"And what does the olive fly-catcher say?"

"This," puckering his small lips and whistling a hip-pee-wee. "Like the pipin' plover," he added and laughed in delight at her smiling nod of favor.

"There's another bird! See him, Bobby?"

"He's easy! He's a flicker. An' there's a whiskey jack! See him lookin' for scraps?"

He pointed excitedly to the jay near the kitchen door.

"I seen a pine finch today, too. I knowed him because he had yellow only on his wings an' tail."

"You what? And you knowed!"

"I saw him, and I knew him," Bobby answered slowly, much abashed.

There was perspiration on his lip and the hair about his temples was damp; the vigorous color of his cheeks was stained by the flush which followed her correction, and he swallowed with his small soft throat in such a way that she leaned forward and dragged him close to her, stroking his head, laughing to cover the tenderness in her eyes.

Aunty May appeared in the doorway and called the children. Bessy started at once, waddling on her shapeless little legs, but the boy lingered and said:

"I try to learn the things you teach me, Aunt Helen. If I learn as much as you do, will you marry me when I grow up?"

"Oh, Bobby, if you're as nice a man as you are a little boy, if you try to learn always, if you are as kind then as you are now, you'd make any girl happy."

"But you!" slapping her knee insistently and looking into her face with a frown which told that he would not be put off. "Not any girl! You!"

"I'll be an old woman, then. But if I should ever have a little girl I don't know any boy I'd like to have her love except you."

Bobby eyed her with sober skepticism a moment and started away complaining:

"But you won't ever promise!"

Taylor had approached, overheard and watched, struck by the quality that was in the girl's face and voice and manner as she talked with the child; a tenderness was there, a strength of maternal feeling that he had never seen reflected in the face of any girl before; perhaps it had been in others and escaped his notice, but, as he stood there watching Bobby go and listening to Helen's casual comment on the glory of the day, he was thinking this: That the face of Marcia Murray would never yield itself to a look like that.

He sat down beside her and drew lightly on his pipe. Against the far bank a trout was feeding, breaking the velvet surface of the pool by his frisky rises.

"So I'm not the only one who learns things from you," he said watching for the fish. She laughed disparagingly and said something about having little to teach. "Oh, no! Don't say that," he interrupted. "You have everything to teach children and—men. Do all boys who learn things from you want to marry you—when they've learned enough?"

She mistook his gravity for a form of banter and laughed in protest.

"Don't laugh," he said, and then leaning forward impulsively: "Maybe I'm not so different from other boys who learn things from you—and want to learn more so they—"

A flush rushed into her cheeks, the first he had seen there, the first time he had seen her unpoised; it startled him, and her brown eyes, very wide, fast on his, startled him also and for a moment they sat there, staring at one another while words surged upward to the man's lips—

And then a house wren, perched in a pine, tail at its pert angle, began his breathless spring song; the notes poured from his throat, fast and faster, liquid and mellow and infinitely lovely, and he twitched his tail and darted his small head and moved his feet on the branch as though the thing he had to say could not be stayed, as though he must cram those precious seconds with his love-making—

Helen looked away and Taylor put the pipe stem between his teeth, relaxing, confused by what he had said, confused as well by the love song of the bird who had put into music the words that frothed to his lips and which he did not have the courage to speak—nor the right to speak, he suddenly remembered, and stirred uncomfortably.

Embarrassment held them mute until Pauguk, who had watched John ceaselessly, moved against her chain and muttered a threat.

"The men tell me you raised her from a pup," he said, because he felt that he must say something and this was all he could think to say.

Helen stretched her hand toward the dog.

"She must have been a month old when I took her. A collie of ours went wild and disappeared and was gone a year; men kept telling my father that they had seen her with the last wolf that was left in this country. Father didn't believe it until we found her in one of Black Joe's traps. The puppy was by her; they'd been traveling evidently.

"Joe killed the dog—she was very dangerous then—and brought the pup in to show us. They were all for killing her, but somehow the little thing, backed in a corner, ready to fight with its milk teeth, seemed so pathetic and helpless and courageous that I couldn't let them—Too, I thought it would be quite a triumph to make her my friend. It was; and a very hard job."

"You like to do the difficult things."

"Perhaps. That is vanity. Nothing that is easy seems worth while."

He watched the trout rising and smoked thoughtfully. "Is that why you buried yourself here in this forest? Because it is hard?"

"I haven't buried myself. I belong to it. I'm a part of it."

"And you've never wanted anything else?"

"I've never had the time."

"It satisfied all your impulses?"

"No. Not all. What aren't satisfied will have to wait—a while."

Pause. Helen's mind was not wholly on what she had been saying; the flush still lingered in her cheeks and she did not look at Taylor. The pause grew to a moment of silence and then, as though to overcome the confusion that he had put upon her, or as if fearful that he would commence again where the wren had ended, she began:

"My father used to say that want was entirely a matter of environment. This has been my environment, so I've never wanted anything very strongly that couldn't be had here. I was born here. I grew up along with the trees, though most of them had a big start on me. I never knew my mother. I never knew many people except my father, and those few men who came here because they were interested in—my environment. I think my father would rather I'd been a boy. He never said that; he was very kind. But he trained me as he would have trained a boy.

"I ramble," she said laughing and more at ease.

"No—please tell me about him. I've been here weeks and I know nothing about this forest he started. I think your father must have been a remarkable man."

"He was—in many ways. When I knew him, though, his life revolved around one thing: this forest. Reforestation was a religion with him, land economics his theology. He infected everybody who came near him with that religion—that is, all who were intelligent enough to understand. I was down with the disease before I could wholly comprehend. I played with baby trees instead of dolls; I planted tiny forests of my own instead of keeping playhouse; I learned to fight fire before I learned to sew. I put in the years learning log scales that most girls spend learning scales on a piano. When I could read I read books on silviculture instead of stories; I knew more about chemistry that I did about clothes; more about soil than I did about boys.

"You see, we were a sort of joke in this community and had to be quite self-sufficient. After I was more than a little girl we stayed here always because we were too poor to get out. The first years took all my father's money; then came debt, and he was very conscientious. We never went anywhere to meet people; they came here: teachers of forestry, foresters from Europe.

"And then when my father died I didn't have time to feel the shock or to be lonely because responsibility all came on me, so the other things I might want to do have had to wait."

"A big burden!"

She shook her head. "Not a burden, unless the urge to paint a great picture or write a great book is a burden. It's something bigger than you are; one is helpless before an ideal."

"But now that you've put it over—"

"Put it over? Oh, no!" shaking her head slowly. "No, not yet."

"You have grown a forest."

"That's only a part. It is all Foraker's Folly for most people and the end is to make all people understand that—Foolish Foraker was not foolish."

"I see," he said vaguely.

"Are you sure that you do?" Pause. "I'm not. You're too young," flushing slightly again, "in experience, I mean. You're only weeks old in this; some men are life old in the same experience and they won't see.

"It's not this tract, not these few thousand acres my father wanted men to see. It's something else: he wanted to show what all this land might be that they call waste land, that they look on as a burden and an eye-sore. Those plains down the river are useless now; they are a burden and horrible to look at. It's not the fault of the land; it's the fault of men."

She sat up and her manner became a bit more vehement.

"Did you see Louvain?"

"No. But I got to Rheims."

"Do you see any parallel? No—of course you don't. You don't see the heel of the Him on these pine barrens. You don't visualize the devastator, the leveler of all that was beautiful and useful. Oh, we were Prussians, we Americans! We were ruthless, heedless. All we saw was forests and a market for their products, so we butchered. We only saw the hour, only thought about personal gain. It wasn't the conscious Prussian, the deliberate destroyer; it was the Hun in our hearts, the spirit of the age: thoughtless youth, my father used to say. Our pine went out to build the country where cheap lumber for cities was needed. They stripped the forests so a country might grow, just as the Prussian needed to grow and would grow quickly at the cost of his own future, even."

Taylor watched her closely and she saw the bewilderment in his face.

"Your father cut millions of feet of this pine; he bought it and paid for it and his energy made it into homes. But it was his fortune that was made, too, and it was his men who left these barrens behind; and their children are living in a country spotted with great acres of waste land, and his grandchildren will face a timber famine. Do you know that in Michigan there are millions of acres which are considered useless for all time? And not only in Michigan, but in all the Lake States; in New England, in the South, in the West.

"There's over a quarter billion acres of land that once grew forest which now lie idle between the two oceans. A lot of it can never be farmed or grazed, but in that lies our national future. Logs, lumber, forest products are the foundation of national life! Ties for railroads, and charcoal to make the iron that goes into equipment; timbers for the mines that yield coal for the locomotives and metals for every use. The shoes you wear were probably tanned with oak bark. Your necktie is silk, probably artificial silk, made from spruce pulp. The cloth in your coat was woven in wooden looms with a dog-wood shuttle; the pencil in your pocket is made from Tennessee juniper, likely, and the note book behind it came from northern spruce and balsam."

She watched a swamp sparrow perch for a moment on the telephone wire near her house.

"Take the telephone: Again, your mine timbers to get the copper, the converter poles in the smelter where the ore was reduced, the poles under the wires, the paper around the wires in the underground cables of your own city, the wooden desk for the instrument, the turpentine in its varnish and even the rubber mouthpiece you talk into and the rubber receiver came from the trees!

"Civilization can't make a move without using forest products and our forests are going and we are doing nothing with our billions of acres of idle land that once grew forests. This land that is waste is waste in the worst sense. It won't grow food crops, won't fatten cattle or sheep, but it will grow timber!" She waved her hand downstream toward the miles of desolation that stretched between them and Pancake.

"And while we are turning our backs on it, our supply of wood is shutting down. National forests? They're remote; much of their area is inaccessible. They give us only three per cent of the timber we use now. The men that own virgin forest are butchering and have a leg to stand on because there are other men like Sim Burns using taxation as a goad. We've torn down and we have not rebuilt. We can build, and that was my father's idea; to show that we can create as fast as we destroy.

"Less than fifty, years ago this land was stripped of its pine; today it m maturing another crop. The same could have been done with any other piece that grew good trees: Just keep the fire out and nature would have done much in time. Fire, fire, fire, without end! Every summer it eats across the plains country; every summer it does its damage on cutover lands in all the timber States. It not only destroys trees, but it takes the seed bearers and the seeds that lie ready to sprout and the life of the soil itself.

"To exist as a nation, we must have forests; to have forests all we need to do for a beginning is to give this worthless land a chance. We can speed up its work by helping—by keeping out fire, by planting trees by good forest practice. Can't you see all these Michigan plains growing pine again? And in Wisconsin and Minnesota, Pennsylvania and New England, the South, and everywhere where hills and valleys have become blackened eyesores? Don't you see what it would mean to people, not only in cheaper homes and steel and railroads, but something else? Fish and game and a chance to play as men were intended to play! It is so simple to do; to show people that it is simple is such a task!"

She stopped with a smile and Taylor rapped the ash from his pipe.

"That's a head-full," he said soberly.

Helen drew a deep breath.

"I'm glad I don't bore you," she said. "There are few people who will listen, few who realize their dependence on forests."

"But they must listen to you, now. You've succeeded."

"I have only commenced. You can grow the trees and that will satisfy the people who love trees. Sentiment doesn't get far; it's necessary to show profit. Is reforestation an economic possibility? men will ask. That is the question to answer."

"But you have! Look at what you have produced!"

Again she shook her head.

"There are trees, yes, but think what it has cost to grow them."

"Cost? Of course it cost, but you began with such a little capital. Your land must have been so cheap."

She shrugged.

"My father was impractical. His first costs were away higher than necessary. Compounding interest will double the investment in your land every ten years, remember; some years it has cost nearly fifty cents an acre to keep the fires out, and there are ten thousand acres of pine here. We have almost a hundred miles of fire lines that cost a lot of money, and those are only the big items. There's replanting and a hundred other things.

"For twenty years there was no income except from the scattering Norway pine which wasn't good enough to take when the first loggers went through here. After twenty years the young trees were beginning to crowd and slowing down growth, but thinning cost money and there was no return from it then. Meanwhile debts piled up and interest went marching on.

"The value of stumpage went marching on, too, which saved us. It is high now; lumber is higher than it will be six months from now, but it won't drop back to where it was before the war to stay. Never again, because the forests aren't here. The cut of Southern pine has passed its peak—did ten years ago; it will dwindle and then all that America has left will be the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

"Enough there to last forever? No. They said that of New England; they said that of Pennsylvania and New York; they said it of the Lake States. Your father must have said it: that there was enough pine in Michigan to last forever. All those men believed that except my father and when they'd cut thirty years there was no Lake State pine; so they went south, where they thought there was enough to last forever—and those forests will go out with our generation.

"In the woods when a saw gang has cut into a tree until it commences to sag and snap they stand back and cry 'Timber!' It is the warning cry of the woods; it means that trees are coming down, that men within range should stand clear. My father used to say that the cry of Timber!' was ringing in the country's ears, that the loggers had given the warning, that the last of our trees were commencing to fall—but we haven't heard! Our ears are shut to the cry, our backs are turned and unless we look sharp we'll be caught!"

She paused a moment and lifted a hand and let it fall.

"We're caught now," she said. "It's too late to grow enough in time to avoid the hurt. There will be a shortage; there is now over great regions, and it will be worse before you and I have lived a normal lifetime, in spite of all that men can do. A few years more of doing nothing and the pinch will hurt, hurt, John Taylor! Roosevelt said it again and again, ten years ago; other men have said it; government departments have said it officially. Think of Michigan, a great timber-growing state with millions of acres that will never grow anything else, paying millions of dollars every year in freight bills on lumber! And your father probably said that there was enough-pine here to last the country forever! We can make good a grain shortage in less than a year; we can overcome a meat shortage in three or four seasons, but you can't hurry timber. It needs fifty to a hundred years to reproduce itself and nothing that men know about can hurry it—and men are doing nothing adequate now, this year, this spring, this morning!"

Taylor had a flashing memory of old Luke, staring at a white moon through the plume of a yellow pine, a counterfeit pine, longing for Michigan forests again, hopeless and cynical. And he looked at this girl, sitting up cross-legged now, gazing at the river, cheeks glowing, eyes far away, and he remembered that Humphrey Bryant had said of her—that in her heart was something of Joan of Arc, of Catharine of Russia, and something of the Blessed Damosel—

She looked back at him and went on.

"That has helped my forest—the available supply pinching down. We've gotten along somehow with box lumber and lath and pulp wood from our thinnings, but the pinch is coming and we are not ready to cut now. We could cut, we could make money, but it would prove only half the argument. My father's whole object was to get his capital turning its full interest return each year and then to take that interest while maintaining the capital—not eating it up, not making the forest a temporary property. It's in the waiting period now, just as a fruit grower is with a young orchard. Our thinnings and their income are like the first few apples or cherries, just enough to stall off some of the interest accumulations. The fruit grower realizes on the increasing bearing area of the trees; we realize on the quality growth of these pines and the climbing lumber values.

"Foraker's Folly is at the turning point. The value of the standing timber is commencing to overtake the interest which has been compounding away all these years, but neither the timber nor the investment is quite ripe. To cut now would be to over-cut the rate of growth, but in a few years, a very few years, we can harvest a part of what is here and that part will about equal the growth on the rest of the tract; it will take care of all the investment, cover all these years of compounding interest, and show that the forest is a sound, going, moneymaking venture, that it can go on forever, that there will always be something to cut, that there will always be white pine here, that there never will be useless red-oak brush and gnarled poplar, blackened snags, lifeless soil, and Thad Parkers and Jim Harrises!

"That is what my father started to prove and they called him Foolish Foraker—and I loved my father, I believe in him—and I want men to believe in him as I do!"

She stopped, breathing rapidly. Taylor was thrilled, stirred by her enthusiasm, by the glow of a crusader which was in her eyes and for a moment he looked into her face with a feeling of reverence—and then he saw her as a girl again, laughed at, whispered about by foul-mouthed yokels, fighting stupidity and small-minded men!

"A terrible load for you!" he muttered. "Why—Why doesn't the State do this? Isn't it the State's job?" She smiled tolerantly.

"My father used to say that in the history of civilization every just function of the State has followed individual enterprise. The State is thick-headed. It is the individual who lightens burdens, the individual who blazes the way that States may follow—and as for Lansing!" she laughed sadly. "Waste land has meant only a page of tabulated figures to most men there!

"My father used to say that we had an over-supply of office holders and a shortage of leaders. Michigan has done a lot, comparatively; we have state forests that are almost models in some ways, we handle our fires better than lots of other states, but, much as we've done, we haven't scratched the possibilities or made more than a feeble step in meeting a necessary problem.

"Of course, it's a job for the state. Everything, location, soil, climate, circumstances, favored this forest or it never would have had a chance of proving out. It was the one place in ten thousand where one person had even a chance of success. Individuals can't do the job for the country. It will take the state—the big state—the federal government, not twenty or thirty little governments fussing inadequately with a problem that involves all of us.

"And it needs men who can think and will think; who are men of action and not afraid of action. Not a crowd whose virtues are mostly negative!"

"And how much longer," he asked, "will you have to carry on?"

She shook her head rather wearily. "That depends on markets, on demand. Three, four—maybe a half dozen years."

"But what about—Sim Burns?"

A shadow fell across her features.

"I don't know, Humphrey Bryant is the rock on which I've stood in trouble, He has worked for years to change the timber tax laws so that ventures like this will not be driven to the wall. He has worked—he is still working. Without him there would be no chance—

"Oh, for the present, anyhow, I'm at their mercy!" She said that rather desperately and rose abruptly as though the fact excited her. "But we'll try to keep on, we'll try to keep going—"

She took Pauguk back to her kennel and Taylor started away through the forest. Until dark he walked and came out at the mill, ate with Raymer, the mill foreman, smoked and started back through the night and the forest.

The gash of the fire line let down the light from an avenue of stars to give the road beneath his feet a grayness in the flat black which was all about. No individual trees were discernible; here and there against the sky could be seen the motionless reach of tufted limb but on either side the pine was an unbroken wall, silent, motionless—And yet as he went through it that forest seemed to have the powers of speech and motion, for Helen Foraker had breathed life into it that day for him. It was no more fleshless, no more without consciousness for him than would have been a company of silent, unmoving men ranked under the stars. It was dynamic, powerful, capable of great manifestations, waiting—waiting—waiting for the word to stir—

It was an eerie feeling which enveloped him there, alone in the gloom and the silence. He felt like an intruder, like an unwelcome stranger—and small, mean, low-spirited. He, the seeker after possessions, after honest possessions, won by his own skill and effort, felt mean, because that day he had realized that he had not even sensed the example that had been all about him for weeks, had dragged it down to the level of his feeble appreciation, thought and spoken of it in his own inadequate terms.

Foraker's Folly tonight represented something that had never entered his ken: an idea beyond material gain, no matter how heroically won. Not once in her talk had Helen spoken of what it meant to her in wealth, in profit. It was an adventure in practical creation for the sake of building, designed for the benefit of no individual, developed for those who were not yet born and for their children of all time. He had been aware of men and women who had struggled unselfishly that others might find living easier, but those people had always worked among men, had stood in range of the public eye, had been of cities, of great, spectacular movements. But here, lost in this country which had been laid waste, a girl, backed only by an aged politician and a group of laborers, carried on her fight, ridiculed, unattended, that homes might be built and cities might grow, that a forest might yield and renew itself for all time!

Taylor felt as small as he had felt before Helen when he first entered her house, a searcher for an easy road to fortune. He had come far; he had done the thing which astonished even his exacting father, but tonight that was as nothing. Sight had been given him and his emulation was roused, not by possible personal triumph but by the thought that perhaps it lay in his power to help carry on this forest, the forest which had become emblematic of all that is most worthy. It was fundamental, it stood next to the supply of food, it was a bulwark against privation and the insurance of national life itself.

He stopped at a juncture of fire lines and looked at the stars. The dipper hung above him and the northern lights, shooting their green spires far toward the zenith, moved behind the treetops, setting the staunch banners of pine in bold silhouette.

"I wanted to help because it meant profit for me," he said in a thin voice. "Profit for me—and to open the way for more profit—But, no longer—not now!"

He watched the spires of restless light creep up and upward, sweeping in from right and left, seeming to come from east and west as well as from beneath the north star until they converged above his head, forming a cone, tremulous and fading swiftly.

He clasped one hand with the other and worked at its fingers slowly.

"And Marcia?" He shook his head and one knee gave suddenly. "I can't keep my promise—unless you find happiness—with me—" He started on slowly but his pace grew rapid and within a half mile of the men's shanty he burst out:

"God, Marcia—I don't want to make you happy—any more!"

Timber Part One

Formulir Kontak