The Settler

XXV

THE SUNKEN GRADE

The "Ragged Lands!" Seamed, rugged, broken, gloomy with dark spruce, sterile as a barren woman, they cumber the earth from Lake Nipissing a thousand miles westward to the edge of the prairies, and in all their weary length no stretch of meadow-land occurs. Pock-marked with sloughs, muskegs, black morasses, peppered with sand-hills that rise suddenly like eruptive boils in the sparse beard of its dwarf-growths, it is a wicked country, and was held accursed by trappers and Jesuit fathers who, of old, portaged or paddled upon its borders. Yet in construction days men poured into its dark environs; one may still see Carter's camps, moss-grown, roofless, rotting by the right of way, for his line split a fifty-mile breadth from the western verge of that mighty forest.

On the day after Carter's return from Winnipeg the westering sun gilded a long scar, brown with the sere of felled trees, that shore thirty miles of forest. Ten more miles and this, his right of way, would debouch on the Park Lands, a day's drive southward from Silver Creek; at its other end fifty miles of prairie grading would carry it down to the American border. Northerly, the cut was masked in rolling smoke of burning brush; but where, farther south, the spruce mantle had been torn from the bosom of mother earth, it gaped yellow as a gangrened wound. Over this earth-sore men and teams swarmed with the buzz and movement of flies, coming and going about a steam-digger that bit hungry mouthfuls from the bowels of a sand-hill and spat them, with hoarse coughing, upon a train of flat-cars. Beyond them a pile-driver sputtered nervously upon a lean trestle; and still farther south a track gang laid and spiked rails with furious energy, adding their quota of noise to the roar that combined with heat and dust to produce a miniature inferno.

Dipping still lower, the sun poked a golden finger down a thin survey-line that slit the forest at the head of the right of way, and touched into flame the yellow head of a young man who sat on a log near Carter. There slim poplar-brake enclosed a mossy dell, into which the frenzy of work and noise came faintly as the hum of a passing bee. It was, indeed, so cool and pleasant that the surveyor shrugged unwillingly when the advancing shadows emphasized Carter's remark that it was "time to be moving."

"What a demon of unrest!" he laughed. "Can't keep still for five minutes."

His mock disgust drew Carter's smile. "That's all very well – for you. When your transit is cased, you're done. I have a few hundred men to look after."

"Oh, confound them!" the other said. "I'll never make a philosopher of you." And as, shouldering his transit, he followed, he commented humorously on Carter's tiresome energy, affirming that he was reminded of a steam-engine that had slipped its governors. "Couldn't be more grovellingly industrious if you were qualifying for a headline on a child's copy-book. Early to bed, early to rise, makes your boss healthy, wealthy, and wise," he misquoted. And as, a few minutes later, they came out upon wood-choppers who were driving the right of way into the forest, he grimaced, "More misguided zeal."

For all his sarcasm, his eyes betrayed his appreciation, and as, pausing, they looked on, his face lit up with professional pride. Following the choppers, sawyers were cutting sizable timber into logs, piling small trees with the brush; behind them a stumping outfit practised rough dentistry upon the road-bed. All were putting in the last "licks" of a good day's work; the air whistled of falling trees, hummed to the ringing saws; the woods echoed laughter, shouts, cheery curses.

"Good boys," Carter murmured. "Regular whales. Jest eat it up, don't they?"

"Peculiar idiosyncrasy." The surveyor resumed his chaffing. "They ought to have eased up while you were away. Can't account for it, unless – yes, it's beans! Beans, sir! You feed them beans and they work or – die. Query: What effect would a bean diet have on a philosopher? Ugh! I must avoid them."

"No" – Carter indicated a figure, gigantic in the loom of the smoke, "it's not beans; it's Bender. Without him we'd have plenty converts to your theory."

"And now tired nature pities them."

In their coincidence, the last red ray might have signalled Bender's shrill whistle, or vice versa. Anyway, sudden silence fell like a mantle over the clearing. While choppers and sawyers cached tools under brush away from rusting dews, teamsters dropped bows and yokes, and all followed the patient ox-teams down the right of way.

"Joking aside," the surveyor said, as they fell in behind, "what has life for these fellows? Ill-fed, worse clothed, only an occasional spree breaks the monotony of grinding toil."

Carter's nod was non-committal. "They work hard – yes, but then work is only terrible to the young and shiftless; your grown man loves it."

"If congenial."

"Generally is. You see, there's always something that a fellow thinks he can do a bit better than any one else – Bill, there, planes his stumps; Ole, that big Swede, is chain lightning on a cant-hook; Michigan Red rides a log down a rapid like a ballet-dancer, and has Jehu beat out on the reins; Big Hans lifts more'n any other man in camp. Summing it, from whip-cracking to stable-cleaning every job has its professor, who gets a heap of fun out of proving his title. Looking a bit closer, these chaps get more sunshine, fresh air, and sleep than your city workers, and if the grub is rough they ain't bothered none with indigestion. Hans finds a flavor in his beans that your big financial gun doesn't get out of his canvas-back. As for amusement, the regular lumber-jack does blow a year's salary on a week's bust, as you say; but most of these are farmers, some of 'em neighbors of mine. If they're rushed in summer they have time to burn in winter, and what of socials, dances, picnics, they strike a fair balance with pleasure."

"But what is ahead of them?"

Carter shrugged. "Death, of course; in the mean time, hard work, harder living, a family, and a mortgage to keep 'em from oversleep. But they'll breathe clean and live clean, work in the sun and outlive two generations of city people. Barring accidents, they'll average fourscore years, and so, when the last word is said, I don't know but that happiness lies down instead of up the ladder."

The surveyor curiously studied his thoughtful face. "You are climbing?"

But Carter was equal to the contradiction. "We was talking of averages – "

"Were," the other interrupted.

Grimacing, Carter repeated: "Were talking of averages. The exception gets his fun climbing, and don't find out how much of a fool he is till he looks down from the top."

"Doesn't," the other put in, and Carter resaid the word.

The corrections sprang from a compact that was now as old as their acquaintance. A graduate in engineering, the young fellow was widely read and cultured far beyond the needs of his profession, and as they talked, smoking, in their office-tent of evenings, his allusions to and illustrations from the realms of science, literature, art had given Carter glimpses of Helen's world, a universe in which touch, taste, smell, sight, and other things gave place to feeling, memory, perception. And so he had been stimulated to conscious attempts at improvement.

"I feel like a two-year-old!" he had exclaimed one evening early in their acquaintance. "I 'd like to know more of that. D' you suppose I could get that book in town? An' say, if you catch me straddling the traces – manners, speech, an' so forth – I wish you'd lam me one. Of course I'm pretty set, but if I could just tone down a bit on a few of the big things, the little ones might slip by unnoticed."

In the nature of things a construction-camp is bound to suffer a chronic drouth of news, and in default of other subjects Carter's marital troubles had received exhaustive and analytical treatment at the hands of the Silver Creek men and others. Filtering through many strata, enough of the gossip had reached the surveyor to inform him of the motive under this rough appeal, and he readily consented. So, in their talks thereafter, he had trimmed out the wilder growths of Carter's speech, giving rule and reason, for, as he laughingly assured him, his big pupil had an uncanny appetite for underlying law.

"Now 'tain't reasonable to suppose that you have to learn all the individual cases," he would say, when the surveyor tripped him on some expression; "what's the law of it?" And he would offer humorous opinions on the eccentricities of the tongue. "The darn language seems to have grown from wild seed, an' though Lindley Murray – ain't that his name? – lopped a bit here an' pruned a bit there, he couldn't straighten the knarls and twists in the trunks. An' I don't know but that it's as well that way Leave them grammarians alone, an' they'd clip an' trim the language till it was tame as the cypress hedges that my old aunt uster shape into crowing roosters, gillypots, an' pilaster pillars at home back East." In saying which he touched a profound etymological truth that is altogether ignored by the scientific inventors of universal languages.

One who had not seen him for some months – Helen, for instance – could not have failed, this evening, to notice how his faithful delving in that wild orchard had begun to bring forth fruit in his speech. Evincing fewer "aint's," it had more "ings," and even attained, on occasion, to correct usage in "number" of verbs. Equally forcible, as full of curt figures, its epigrammatic quality had gained rather than lost by better expression.

The silence which had fallen between them endured till they came in sight of the camp, a string of tents and log-cabins under the eaves of the forest. Then the surveyor pointed out a girl who was watching the tired stream from the door of the nearest tent.

"Why, there's Dorothy! She threatened to make the chief bring her down, but I didn't think she'd make it. Come along and I'll introduce you."

As, however, he mended his pace, Carter fell behind, and the sadness which had become habitual to his face deepened. He had heard the young fellow speak of this girl, his fiancée; and though in color and appearance she was the opposite of Helen, the swish of her skirts as she came to meet them, suggestion of perfume, the hundred elusive delicacies that make up a well-bred girl's personality, recalled his wife and oppressed him with a vivid sense of loss.

Her voice, rich and low in its tones as Helen's, strengthened the impression. "Dad said 'No,'" she laughed, after the introduction. "But – "

"Wilful woman will have her way," a voice declared from the interior of the tent; then the chief engineer, a hale man of fifty, appeared in the doorway. "Mosquitoes, alkali water, nothing would scare her." He was going on with inquiries of the health of a bridge that had developed rheumatic tendencies in its feet, when she laughingly interrupted:

"Come, dad, no business till after supper. I have already scraped acquaintance with the cook, and he says we are to come at once. So run along, little boys, and get ready."

"Wash our dirty faces, to put it plainly," the surveyor echoed her happy laugh. "Be it known unto you, fair lady, that ablutions are held to be effeminate, unnecessary, if not immoral, in construction work. However, in view of your hypersensitiveness, we will do violence to our inclinations. Come on, Carter – we for the tub."

But from a dozen yards she called him back. "This is the man you wrote me of? I knew him at once. What a splendid fellow!"

"Gorgeous!" he returned her whisper. "His wife must be a queer sort."

"Not necessarily." She added, with thoughtful intuition: "The possibilities are so many. Your friend is handsome and has a good face, but we girls are more complex than our mothers. While they were satisfied with good temper and good provision, we demand sympathy of taste and habit; that we touch without friction at a hundred points of contact. Tall as Mr. Carter is, he may fall short of such a standard."

Bending, her lover gazed admiringly into her earnest eyes. "Such a little wisehead! And did I pass in this difficult examination?"

Carter's back was turned, the cook-house door had just closed on the last teamster, her father had gone back to his calculations, so her answer was sweet as satisfactory.

When, half an hour later, the four entered the cook-house, two cookees were laying the table under one eagle eye of the cook, the other being on a roast that he was liberally basting. "Hain't you got no nose?" he answered Carter's question; but he smiled as, sniffing its rich odor, Dorothy said: "It's venison! And I'm so hungry!"

"Sure!" he corroborated. "Cree hunter brought in a quarter of moose this afternoon."

Pleased with her discernment, he seated her at the head of a table which he himself had scoured with sand to a snowy whiteness while the cookees were grinding a summer's tarnish from iron knives and spoons. Her tin plate reflected a smile that he would willingly have paid for in turkey and truffles, but lacking these, he served baked potatoes with the venison, hot biscuit, cake a hand's-breadth thick, and with a flourish set the crowning delicacy of camp life, a can of condensed cream, beside her tin coffee-cup. Then he packed the cookees outside to peel the morrow's potatoes that her appetite might not suffer from their admiring glances, an act which they classified as tyranny and ascribed to evil motives.

"She's a right smart gal," he added, after imparting a few privacies anent their birth and breeding from the door-step. "None a' your picking sort. Knows good cooking when she sees it, she does." Then he left them to digest a last piece of information that the evolution of their ancestors had been arrested in a low and bestial stage.

That supper figured as an epoch in Carter's life, because it marked a definite conscious change in his feeling towards his wife. With all men thought is more or less chaotic. Filtering slowly from feeling under pressure of experience, it remains fluid, turgid, until some specific act – it may be of a very ordinary nature – clears and precipitates it into the moulds of fixed opinion. So, though material of a sounder, more reasonable judgment of Helen had been gathering in his mind these months, injured pride had held it in abeyance – in suspension, as it were – until now that recent disappointment had left him peculiarly susceptible to impression, a resolvent was added; that occurred which precipitated his thought.

It took form in Michigan Red, who entered with another teamster and sat down at the opposite table. The task that delayed them had sharpened appetite, and their attack on the food the cook set before them was positively wolfish. Using fingers as much or more than forks, they shovelled greasy beans into their mouths with knives, as stokers feed a furnace; and as they bolted masses of pork, washed whole biscuits down with gulps of coffee, Carter's glance wandered between them and the delicate girl at his side. Here, indeed, was one of the "points of contact" of her intuitive wisdom. Once before he had seen, realized it. But whereas he had thrust the thought away the night that he watched Michigan Red eat in the lumber-camp, he now gave it free admittance, mentally writhed as he realized how this and other gaucheries must have ground on Helen's sensitive mental surfaces. Fascinated by their gluttony, he watched until dulled eyes and heavy, stertorous breathing signalled repletion and the close of their meal.

On her part, Dorothy was quietly observing him. Given such knowledge as the Silver Creek teamsters had sown through the camp, it would have been easy for her to guess the rest – if his conduct had borne out her surmise. But he had learned so much and so quickly under the stings of injured pride that observation failed to reveal any wide departures from the conventional. She had to give it up – for the present.

"What a strange man!"

Her whisper dissipated his painful reflections, and, looking up, he saw that, after lighting his pipe with a coal from the stove, Michigan Red was surveying them with cool effrontery through the tobacco smoke. His fiery beard split in a sneer as Carter asked if he had finished supper. But he did not take the hint nor move when ordered to call Bender.

"Mister Bender" – he spat at the title – "is down at the grading-camp."

"I said for you to call him." Carter's tone, in its very gentleness, caused the girl to look quickly so she caught his queer expression. Compounded of curiosity, interest, expectation, his glance seemed to flicker above, below, around the red teamster, to enfold, wrap him with its subtle questioning. Impressed more than she could have been by threat or command, she waited – she knew not for what – oppressed by the loom of imminent danger.

But it was not in the teamster's book to disobey – just then. Lingering to pick another coal, he sauntered down the room under flow of that curious, flickering glance, and closed the door behind him with a bang. Sharp as the crack of a gun, Dorothy half expected to see smoke curling up to the massive roof-logs. But though her father and lover looked their surprise, Carter resumed his eating, and there was no comment until he excused himself a few minutes later.

Tugging his gray beard, the chief engineer then turned to the surveyor. "Why doesn't he fire that fellow?"

Shrugging, the young fellow passed the question up to the cook. "You've known them longest."

Thus tapped, the cook turned on a flow of information, appending his own theory of Carter's patience to a short and unflattering history of Michigan Red. "You see, Red thought he was the better man from the beginning, an' it was just up to the boss to give him fair chance to prove it. As for him, he likes the excitement. You've seen a cat play with a mouse? Well – an' when the cat does jump – "

"Good-bye mouse," the surveyor finished.

The cook's significant nod filled Dorothy with astonishment. From the social heights upon which the accident of birth had placed her, she had looked down upon the laboring-classes, deeming them rude, simple, unsophisticated. Yet here she found complex moods, a vendetta conducted with Machiavellian subtlety, a drastic code that compelled a man to cherish his enemy till he had had opportunity to strike.

The knowledge helped her to a conclusion which she stated as they walked back to her father's tent. "Such pride! I understand now why he left her. Just fancy his keeping on that man?"

"Damned nonsense, I call it," her father growled. "That fellow will make trouble for him yet."

The prediction amounted to prophecy in view of a conversation then proceeding in the bunk-house. As Michigan's table-mate had fully reported the scene at supper, the teamsters were ready with a fire of chaff when he stumbled over the dark threshold after delivering Carter's message.

"Been dinin' in fash'n'ble sassiety, Red?" a man questioned.

"Nope!" another laughed. "Voylent colors ain't considered tasty any more, so the boss fired him out 'cause his hair turned the chief's gal sick."

Hoarse chuckling accompanied the teamster's answering profanity, but when, after roundly cursing themselves, Carter, the surveyor, chief engineer, he began on Dorothy, laughter ceased and Big Hans called a stop.

"That's right." A voice seconded Hans's objection. "We ain't stuck on the boss any more'n you are, Red; but this gal isn't no kin of his'n. Leave her alone."

"Sure!" the first man chimed in. "An' if he's feeling his oats jes' now, he'll be hit the harder when we spring our deadfall. Did you sound the graders to-day? Will they – "

"Shet up!" Michigan hissed. "That big mouth o' yourn spits clean across the camp to the office." And thereafter the conversation continued in sinister whispers that soon merged in heavy snoring. Silence and darkness wrapped the camp.

Awaking while it was still dark, the camp rubbed sleepy eyes and looked out, shivering, on smouldering smudges. Outside, the air whined of mosquitoes. At the long hay-racks horses snorted and pawed frantically under the winged torture; patient oxen uttered mained lowings. Growling and grumbling, the camp distributed itself – teamsters to feed and rebuild smudges, choppers and sawyers to the grindstone and filing-benches. It was a cold, dank world. Pessimism prevailed to the extent that a man needed to walk straitly, minding his own business, if he would avoid quarrel. But optimism came with dawn – teamsters hissed cheerfully over their currying, saw-filers and grinders indulged in snatches of song – reaching a climax with the breakfast-call. When, half an hour later, Dorothy appeared in the cook-house doorway, the camp had spilled its freight of men and teams into the forest.

Warned by the shadow, the cook looked up and saw her in Stetson hat, short skirt, high-laced shoes, a sunlit vision with the freshness of the morning upon its cheeks. "God bless you! Come right in," he exclaimed. "Your daddy an' Mr. Hart hev' gone down line. Devil's Muskeg got hungry las' night an' swallered ten thousand yards of gradin'."

As yet she knew nothing of those treacherous sinks that gulp grades, trestles, and the reputations of their builders as a frog swallows flies, and he went on, answering her puzzled look: "Morass, you know, swamp with quicksand foundation that goes clean down to China. Nope, 'tain't Mr. Carter's loss. He ain't such a fool as to go an' load a muskeg down with clay and rock. An Easterner had it on a sub-contract, an' though Mr. Carter warned him, he reckoned he could make it bear a grade on brush hurdles. Crowed like a Shanghai rooster because it carried trains for a week.

"Oh, I don't know," he commented upon her pity for the luckless contractor. "You kain't do nothin' with them Easterners. He was warned. Besides," he vengefully added, "he shedn't ha' come crowing over us. More coffee, miss?"

Leaving the cook-house, a shadow fell between her and the sun, and Carter gave her good-morning. "Breaks the poor devil," he supplemented the cook's information, "and bothers us. Cuts off our communications. We shall have to move the outfits back to prairie grading till they are re-established. I'm going down there – now, if you'd like a hand-car ride?"

Would she? In five minutes she was speeding along under urge of ten strong arms, over high trestles which gave her sudden livid gleams of water far below, through yellow cuts, across hollow-sounding bridges, always between serried ranks of sombre spruce. Sometimes the car rolled in between long lines of men who were tamping gravel under the ties. Rough fellows at the best, they had herded for months in straw and dirt, seeing nothing daintier than their unlovely selves, and as they were not the kind that mortifies the flesh, the girl was much embarrassed by the fire of eyes. Apart from that, she hugely enjoyed the ride. With feet almost touching the road-bed, she got all there was of the motion, besides most of the wind that blew her hair into a dark cloud and set wild roses blooming in her cheeks.

She gained, too, a new view-point of Carter, who chatted gayly, pointing, explaining, as though they were merely out for pleasure and another had not been just added to the heavy cares that burdened his broad shoulders. She learned more of the life, its hardship, comedy, tragedy, in half an hour's conversation, than she could have obtained for herself in a year's experience.

These different elements sometimes mixed – as when he indicated a blackened excavation. "See that? A man was sitting on the stump that was blasted out there. Reckon he got sort of tired of the world," he replied to her horrified question, "and wanted a good start for the next." Then, easily philosophical, quietly discursive, he wandered along, touching the suicide's motives. There had been different theories – drink, religion, a girl – but he himself inclined to aggravated unsociability. The sombre forest, with its immensity of sad, environing space, had translated mere moroseness into confirmed hypochondria. He had so bored the stumping outfit, to which he belonged, with pessimistic remarks on things in general that, in self-defence, they threw something at him whenever he opened his mouth; and so, bottled up, his gloom accumulated until, in an unusually dismal moment, he placed a full box of dynamite under a stump and sat down to await results.