The small hand closed then until it was clutching whitely the woodwork beneath it. She understood at last how much Wickersham had seen; she was never to understand entirely her mood of that moment. For had she waited she would have left him with finger ringless. Instead she wheeled without a word and climbed, white-lipped, upstairs.

Miriam Burrell loomed in one window of her bedroom when she entered--a different Miriam than the one who had once sat in just such an att.i.tude, gazing into the north. The older girl's gladness of heart throbbed in her voice.

"I don't want to leave it, Bobs," she sighed. "I love every brawling rapid and sulky, ragged old peak. Did you ever see a more perfect night?"

Through the gloom the younger girl's answer lashed back, reckless of what hurt she might do.

"I hate it!" she gasped vehemently. "I hate it--hate it! And I must ask you, please--I want to go to bed."

There is a poise which comes only with hard-bought knowledge of one's self. It was Miss Sarah's; Miriam had acquired it, too. Without a hint of resentment in her manner she rose and withdrew. But Barbara did not go to bed. She took that vacated seat at the window. And long after her breathing had ceased to be quick and sharp she was still wondering why the odor of stale alcohol should recall to her, with elusive vagueness, the threatening face of a red-haired riverman who found it hard to keep his feet.

CHAPTER XIX

SOME LETTERS AND A REPLY

Her letter came to him a week later, though she had posted it the morning she took the train from Morrison. It had lain for days in the post-office box of the East Coast Company, waiting the day when one of the teamsters should call and carry it in overland. Steve had never before seen her handwriting. It was his first letter from her; yet he recognized it the instant Big Louie put it in his hand. And he was glad that night that both Fat Joe and Garry were absent from the up-river camp--glad that he was to have the next hour alone. But when he broke the flap of it Big Louie, who lingered uneasily in the open doorway--even Big Louie, whose wits were not particularly keen--knew from the expression which pa.s.sed over his superior's face that this heavy envelope which he had brought had not contained good news. The quick contraction of muscles which tightened his jaw was too much like a spasm of pain. For her first letter, so the sentence ran, was to be her last; she wrote "less kindly than she would have wished to write,"

that she and Mr. Wickersham had decided upon the first of May, and after the silence had become a throbbing thing Big Louie decided, instinctively, that he would let go until later the demand which he had planned to make for a raise to meet that raise which, so he had heard it gossiped in town, was being paid the men in the northern lumber-camps. He stumbled going out and lost his balance so that the door crashed to behind him, violently. But Steve stood as he had stood when his eye's sought the first line of her note, nor did the crash penetrate his ears.

Repeatedly, in the interval which had elapsed since she had bidden him good-bye, the latter had told himself that she would not write, but the repet.i.tion had been unconvincing. He knew that now. With the note which smelled faintly of her there in his hand he realized that he had gone beyond mere expectation of a letter; he had dared to hope concerning its contents. How was he to know that she, too, after mailing it, had suffered as keenly as he was suffering that moment, wishing that she had employed less abrupt phrases, rebelliously regretting that she had sent it at all?

That night his fingers closed until the monogrammed sheet was reduced to a crumpled ball. The edges of the paper took fire slowly, then it exploded softly into flame upon the bed of coals in the fireplace where he had tossed it. And at that he laughed aloud, a harsh taunt for his own high hopes, without thinking how much his mirth of that moment was like what Garry's once had been. He lowered himself into a chair, and he was still there, motionless before a dead fire, when morning dawned greyly. His face had become less hard; he even found it possible to smile a little when the cook-boy, starting at the sight of him fully dressed at that hour, advised with alarmed volubility that breakfast would be ready immediately. But the few men who still remained at Thirty-Mile, felling and hauling the piles which were to carry the track across the swamp, noticed a difference in their chief that morning which made them careful to hear him, the first time he spoke an order.

Barbara did not write again, and in this, at least, the man who loved her antic.i.p.ated her correctly. The letters, however, which Garrett Devereau received each day from Miriam--bulky, extra-postage epistles--brought often news of her; and these fragments Garry, knowing without being told for whom they were meant duly delivered to Steve, in weekly or fortnightly instalments, whenever the latter's duties brought him to Morrison. For Garry and Fat Joe, who had been transferred to the lower end of the work, along with the bulk of the up-river force, had noticed that difference too.

"Miriam says for me to keep my feet dry this cold weather," he'd tell the other man, laughingly, "and Barbara sends her regards to all of us, and hopes that we are making splendid headway." Or again: "Barbara's looking a little pale, Miriam writes. She says she's--er--trying to do altogether too much for her endurance."

Whatever the bit of news was Garry pa.s.sed it on religiously, a little guiltily, sometimes, because of his own great happiness. Once he had failed, signally, to read behind his friend's moody silences; his surmise concerning the reason for Steve's changed bearing was not so wide of the mark this time. Often, within himself, Garry's wrath seethed hot, but he was no longer as ready as he had once been with verbal, cynical criticism. Only to Fat Joe did he dare pour out his soul with that vivid incisiveness which always held Joe spellbound.

"He's eating his heart out over _her_," he'd explode, "over a girl who is proving every day that she isn't worth a minute's heart-ache of a man like him. I used to think she had brains, if any of them did; I used to think that Barbara Allison was something besides a fluffy little fool! Why can't he see for himself that she's just as worthless as most of the rest of them?"

And from there, without knowing how truly funny such argument sounded, coming from his lips, he would soar to wonderful heights of profanity.

But save for the pleasure which he took in the pyrotechnics, his outbursts made little impression upon Fat Joe. The latter maintained a sort of placid superiority, perhaps because he had learned early that this att.i.tude aggravated Garry's rages; perhaps because he was so very certain of his man.

"I wouldn't go to getting all stirred up like this, so early in the game," he'd reply with unvaried calm. "Shucks, it's too early to begin counting either man's pile of chips--" either man to both minds meaning Steve and Wickersham, without the naming of names. "You are too liable to premature enthusiasms or discouragements, Garry. That's why I mostly manage to beat you as easy as he beats me, whenever we throw a hand or two. Ain't you never going to learn that a man must gamble a bit on the cards still waiting to be dealt?"

And again, confidently:

"He's worried--of course he is! He ain't enjoyin' his meditations a little bit these days, but he's enjoyin' 'em more all by himself than he would be if we were up there with him, forcin' him to look everlastingly like four aces, when it's deuces at present he's holding.

He's worried, and that's why I don't grow nervous myself. Because it is only the man who is too sure who is awful likely to finish broke.

Don't you waste any pity on him yet, and I wouldn't let him hear me pa.s.sing uncomplimentary words concerning his girl, either, if I was you. Lightning ain't particular where it strikes when it's been a long time cooped up. Every man to his own taste in such matters, says I--and shucks, man, can't you tell, just from seein' 'em together that they was made for each other? If a man quit every time a woman began to put him over the jumps we'd have a dangerous decrease in marriage licences staring us in the face. He's just learning to care more for her, that's all, and caring a lot about anybody never was a comfortable state to be in. It's entirely too uncertain and unsettling--but you wouldn't enjoy not caring about anybody at all, yourself, would you?"

Garry admitted that he wouldn't.

"Well, then, don't waste your time pitying him." A cold gleam flickered in those bleached blue eyes. "Don't you suppose I'd have taken apart long ago this animated ice-chest who is making all the trouble, just to see what makes him so cold, if I didn't know I'd be spoiling the big show? Couldn't you see, without my tellin' you, that I'd rise up some day and leave him looking like a premature blast, after all I've learned he's plannin' to slip us, if I wasn't sure that he's going to get it, worse than I could ever give it to him, from that girl herself? Well, I would. He makes me shiver, that man; makes me crawl and itch to take his head in one hand and his throat in the other and exert a little strength in opposite directions. Give our entry time! The game is running dead against him at present, I'll admit, but he's husbanding his chips. He ain't drawing wild and squandering his chances. And he's only _begun_ to play."

Which, in part, was very, very true; in part not so close to the facts.

Before snow came that fall Steve had recovered his outward confidence, at least; he had begun to hope again, while he waited and labored prodigiously against the coming of spring. But in his heart he was no longer sure; he could not summon back that serene self-surety which, toward the end, had shaken even the girl's certainty in herself. He could no longer argue convincingly with a vision of her, as he had often argued with Barbara herself, that his way would be her way in the end. For he had begun to realize the width of that gulf which he knew must seem to exist between them, if not to her then to the eyes of others of her world.

It was his memories which gave him consolation those long nights, but they also gave him doubt. Remembering the daintiness of her as she had come to him, the night of her party, recalling the things to which she had been accustomed since she had opened her eyes on the first light of day, he began to ask himself as every man like him has asked who ever loved a woman, how in any fairness he could expect her to accept the little which he could offer in return. To Steve and Fat Joe, to the men of his gang, his confidence was that of the old, old Steve who, ten years before, had c.o.c.ked his head at one of Allison's switch engines and promised gravely, "I'll hev to be gittin' one of them for myself, some-day." But his heart ached. And when that ache became so leaden that he couldn't endure it any longer in silence, he carried it to the one person in his life who was best calculated to understand.

Diffidently he broached the subject with Miss Sarah, approaching it in a roundabout fashion least likely to deceive that bright-eyed little lady.

"Garry is saving his money against the fatal day," he laughed one night. "He has become a rank miser! Joe says he goes for days at a time, borrowing his tobacco, and he won't play anything but penny-ante now, when he can be coaxed to play at all!"

Miss Sarah was too kind to look at him directly that evening.

"The regeneration of Garry is one of the things which had made my life most happy," she answered. And then, paving the way for what she knew was on his mind. "I suppose you will be surprising us yourself, one of these days. And no doubt you'll be just as happily positive as Garry is, that your choice is the only one in the world."

They were alone in the big living-room. Caleb was still in town, gossiping with Hardwick Elliott. And Steve's bruised smile clutched at Miss Sarah's heart.

"I!" he overdid his amus.e.m.e.nt. "I have lived too much alone, I'm afraid, ever to prove very attractive to any woman's fancy. Bachelors are not always born; they are sometimes the habits of loneliness."

"Stuff and nonsense!" the good woman ridiculed him. "Why--why, if it weren't for a suspicion that you might have your eye on some small person or other, I'd drop everything and hunt one up for you, myself.

Why, Stephen, what a remark for me to hear from you!"

Both were silent for a moment.

"Marriage is a mighty--expensive proposition," he commented at length, profoundly.

"Is Garry such a plutocrat any more?"

"That is not a fair ill.u.s.tration for us to employ," he countered, and Barbara Allison was not the only woman who loved his lazily final statements. "Both Garry and Miriam have been taught that there are worse things than the hardship of making last year's limousine do for another season."

Miss Sarah laughed at this drollery. She was a better antagonist than most. She had practiced on Caleb.

"Can't one girl learn what another has been taught?" she wanted to know. "Stephen, do you mean to sit there and infer that you could continue to _care_ for a girl who could not care for you, just for yourself?"

His reply told her how tired he had become in trying to stem the tide of doubt alone. It warned her, too, that she had gone too close, for he veered off sharply. Steve persisted in generalities, but he wanted to talk.

"I have been wondering if that is not an old-fashioned att.i.tude," he said. "Women, they tell, us, have broadened since they usurped many places in the business world once held by men. They are looking mighty keen-eyed toward the vote now, and a share in the legislation of their growing affairs, or at least so they explain. You have heard many men say 'business is business.' Maybe you have watched quite a few charming brides walk to the altar, and wondered if that wasn't their sentiment, too."

She chose to be suddenly vexed with him.

"I do not like such humor, and of course you are joking. I have heard Garrett Devereau talk in just such a strain too often to be amused by it. And if you mean----"

"If I meant it, I was crying the baby," stated the man coldly, and Miss Sarah knew that he was rebuking himself. "I could care for such a girl--yes. But I doubt if I would marry a woman who had even the smallest doubt. There are too many sharp places to be smoothed over, without chancing that tragedy of discontent. It's merely habit that's to blame again, that's all." He cast about for a parallel. "One does not miss sugar so very much from a meal, until he knows he can't have it. And then--well, Miss Sarah, I have many times talked peevishly, for a man, because there was none to be had."

"We are talking of women. What about salt?" she inquired quickly.

"That is very indispensable, too, but----"

"Of the two which do you always take care shall not be missing from your pack, whenever you turn into the woods?"

"I see where you are heading, but----"

"I do not like dissemblance, Stephen," she warned. "You know without the salt of love the sugar of life can grow sickeningly cloying."