"Timber"/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
"Who's the best authority on timber around here?"
John Taylor, hanging over the desk in the Commercial House, put that question to Henry Wales, the proprietor. Henry applied a match to his refractory pale cigar and coughed and spit.
"Humphrey Bryant," he said.
"Lumberman?"
"Nope. Editor of the Banner. State Senator since God knows when. But he knows logs."
"Reliable?"
"Well, yes. He aint very pop'lar in his home town; got a lot of fool ideas about holdin' back the country, but I guess his word's good."
John went to the post-office after his mail and put the same question to the owlish postmaster. The man craned his neck that he might look through the wicket across the street to the office of the Blueberry Banner.
"Go over to the Banner office," he rasped asthmatically. "He's there at his desk. Hump Bryant. He knows all there is to know."
At the bank he was referred to the same man by the fussy little proprietor, and Jim Harris who met him on the street waved a hand toward the newspaper office and stated that Hump Bryant knew more about logs than Paul Bunion himself. Harris wanted to talk further but Taylor broke away; he had a feeling that the man was defiled and though he could detect no hardness behind the good humor, the words of the dying woman last night echoed in his ears and made him uneasy so long as he was within sight of Harris.
The office of the Blueberry Banner was a dingy, dusty, dark little place, smelling as all newspaper offices have smelled from time beyond reckoning. An unpainted partition divided the front from the back office and it was plastered with newspaper clippings, many of them yellowed by age and dimmed by accumulated dust. The floor was of pine, the boards worn thin except where brown knots showed up like wens. A table in one corner was stacked high with a mixture of unopened mail, bundles of old papers and what not. Dusty files of the Banner, bound in calf-skin, reposed on shelves; a picture of Lincoln hung askew over them and on the opposite wall was a lithograph of Hazen S. Pingree.
At a cluttered desk sat an old man, a small, round, old man, who struck John at once as being the original for all the Santa Clauses that ever tooled a reindeer foursome. He was writing and as Taylor entered he looked up, put the thick lead of his pencil against the tip of his tongue and studied the new comer abstractedly with his bright blue eyes. The pencil went to the pad and laboriously scrawled a coarse line; then the blue eyes came back to John's face, twinkling brightly this time.
"Good morning, Mr. Taylor," he said.
John smiled. "News travels quickly."
"Yes. There's little fresh in a weekly newspaper up here except the advertising and plate matter. Have a chair; make yourself comfortable."
"I suppose you, like every one else, know why I am up here?"
A pink tongue roved the lips behind the whiskers and the bright eyes studied Taylor's face again. He took off his glasses, which had been shoved back on his forehead, and swung one stubby leg slowly.
"Have you seen your father's logs?"
"I've seen the logs. They happen to be mine though."
"Yours, eh? What are you going to do with them?"
"That's what I came here to ask you."
"Why to me?"
"Men in town tell me you know all there is to know about logging and I need expert advice."
The old editor wheezed a laugh.
"Meet any of my political enemies?"
"If I did, I didn't find it out."
"They're lax! Wait until fall an' election time and you'll hear what a scoundrel I am—hum-m-m—It's advice you're after, eh? Since you've come to me, then, I'll get personal right off. How much do these logs stand you in where they are?"
Taylor moved uneasily.
"My pride, sir—all of it." The foot stopped swinging. "My father gave them to me for my start. He was quite sure that I would fall down. I'm inclined to think that he wants me to fall down."
The editor's eyes lost some of their brightness and something like concern showed there.
"That's too bad, son. It's a heavy investment and the job's a tough one. Do you know anything about logging yourself?"
"Nothing. Except that with logs thirteen miles from a railroad, with snow gone, the owner is up against it."
A pause.
"To cut 'em up for chemical wood wouldn't get out what you've put into them, would it? No—anybody could do that." He leaned back, locking his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. "There isn't any possibility of trucking them out by team or tractor without eating up their value. I don't know of a portable mill that's available, and with deliveries on machinery as they are, you couldn't depend on getting one for months—
"By George, Taylor, I don't know!"
A man smeared with ink appeared from the back office and the editor excused himself. He had no more than disappeared when the outer door opened and Sim Burns entered. He did not recognize Taylor until he had approached the desk; then he flushed and sniffed.
"Mornin'," he said, rather timidly. John nodded. Silence, while Burns shuffled—He cleared his throat. "I expect I owe you an apology, Mr. Taylor," he said with a servile whine in his voice.
"No, I don't think so."
This reassured the man, who said with more confidence: "All of us makes mistakes. I didn't know who you was or—"
Bryant reëntered the room in time to interrupt Burns' attempt to ingratiate himself with the son of the rich Luke Taylor, whose identity he had learned soon after reaching Pancake the night before.
"Want to pay what I owe, Hump," he said, drawing out a purse. "It's two dollars."
"Just the price of a fifty-cent work shirt," said the editor with a chuckle. Sim did not respond. "Is this an election bet, Sim, or a promise?"
"I don't notice you're spreadin' yourself on congratulations."
"No, and your hearing is excellent," grimly.
"I knew what you was up to, Bryant! I knew you tried to get somebody to run ag'in me."
"Yup. They're all afraid of you up there, Sim. Your uncle was town boss so long he got 'em thinking it belongs to the Burns family."
"If we don't own it, we seem to be in charge."
"And more's the pity, Sim!"
The man turned to the door.
"Much obliged for the two-dollar plaster." Slam! And a rattle of loose glass: the only reply.
The old man laughed to himself and sat down, but he did not turn to Taylor at once. He watched Burns cross the street. A limp curtain in an upper front room of the Commercial House moved back and Jim Harris' face appeared. His hand beckoned to the new supervisor. Sim went into the hotel and up the stairs.
From a drawer Bryant took a worn note book and opened it slowly. He glanced at the clock and on a fresh page wrote:
"May 6, 1920. 11.09 a.m. Sim Burns."
He riffled the pages slowly. Many of them were covered with just such notes: dates and time and names; nothing more. He dropped the book and folded his hands across his stomach and looked at John very soberly.
"Son, I'm up a tree and don't see a way down," he said.
The boy looked through the window again and the editor watched his profile carefully. For a moment they were so and then Taylor's expression changed as a shade of hope filtered through its seriousness. Helen Foraker was coming across the muddy street, the bright red of her jacket a vivid splotch of color in the drab little town.
"She," gesturing, "sent me here," John said.
Helen entered and the men rose, the old editor bowing with a mixture of courtliness and paternal affection.
"Sit down, Helen," he said gently. "Mr. Taylor says you sent him to me."
"Indirectly. I asked him to locate Pancake's best logger. I knew who it would be, but I didn't want to send him to you because I didn't want to risk suspicion."
"Suspicion?"
She nodded. "What have you told Mr. Taylor?"
She glanced at John and Bryant said:
"He brings a problem I can't solve. It isn't in the book."
"Give up?" The girl's eyes danced.
"Give up," said the other, bowing.
"And you?" Taylor merely shrugged for reply.
"Then my proposal won't have much competition!"
The editor's fat leg stopped swinging. "Your proposal? You mean you want to buy these logs?"
"No. I want to handle them, though, and maybe saw the lumber."
"Saw it!" The desk chair rocked forward with a wail of its old springs. "How in the world, Helen, are you going to get it to the mill? It's sixteen miles by road and that means—"
"That hauling is impossible, but there is the river!"
She looked at Taylor with that and he quickly retorted:
"River? You can't float hardwood!"
It was one of the few facts of logging on which he was sure and he thought, for the moment, that his ignorance was being imposed upon, but she said:
"The ash, basswood and hemlock, except the butt-logs, will float. You remember the cedar poles I cut two years ago?" turning to the editor, "and the water went down? We were short-handed and I left them banked. They're right at the mouth of this ravine. We can dog the maple and beech and birch to the hemlock and cedar and raft it to my mill. It will be very simple."
She looked again at Taylor.
"I'll make you that proposition: get the logs to my mill at the cost and twenty per cent and if you think I am going to trim you, you can hire somebody to watch. You can ship your logs by rail from the mill siding or I'll saw them; custom job—and you'd better let me saw them. There isn't any jack-works to get them from the pond to the track and your hardwood will begin deadheading in a hurry, so it ought to come out of the water as fast as it gets to the mill. Cars are hard to get right now and you might have to handle twice."
She turned to Bryant who had watched closely.
"I'll leave it to you, Humphrey, if that isn't fair enough for a salvage job. If he shipped to a mill it'd be anyway a forty-mile rail haul and I don't know as he could get it done that close. Besides it'd add to the cost to handle them again at the pond. I don't think it's practical to get them out with a cross-haul or swing boom and tackle."
Taylor's heart filled with relief, covering the rising suspicion that perhaps these two were conspiring to gouge him on this proposal. For the first time since he had looked into that jack-pot and beheld the trick gift which his father had thrust upon him, he saw hope ahead.
Humphrey Bryant was rubbing a hand vigorously over his beard and the smile which made his eyes so bright ran out into a chuckle.
"My dear," he said to the girl. "There was at first something in you of the Blessed Damosel; then came a strain of Joan of Arc; this morning, I see the qualities of Catharine of Russia!"
John joined in the laugh and then checked himself. A moment before he had been desperate enough to consent to any sort of an arrangement, but now with the girl's proposal before him some instinct running in his blood from the blood of his canny father sounded a warning. Her statement seemed reasonable enough and simple. His logs could be transported and sawed but, he wondered, what would be left for him?
And he began rather falteringly to find that out. He asked foolish questions and was answered patiently; technical points were explained to him; the layout of the mill, which had been sawing only light pine logs into box wood, would have to be changed somewhat for the job; he learned of the bark market, of freight rates, of many factors which, an hour before, had been foreign to his interest. He learned, it is written here; he did not learn much; he was told, he understood, but the information slipped from one ear through the other, because this was all so amazingly new and remote from any interest he had ever held.
For two hours they discussed the job, and John went out to walk and talk with Ezam Grainger, the banker, and finally he went back to the office of the Banner to sign the formal agreement. With no little temerity, true, because it was like putting his name to a blank check. Still, there was in the manner of Humphrey Bryant that which induced confidence and trust, and as for the girl—he was beginning to find "her quite complex and, though he sensed the truth that she was a shrewd bargainer, he believed that those level brown eyes could conceal no crooked thought, that her fine voice would speak no untruth.
Helen and Bryant remained in the Banner office and John walked over to the Commercial House. The day seemed one of the brightest he had ever seen; the sense of inferiority that had been upon him earlier was gone, absorbed in a new sort of self-satisfaction.
Today's decision meant money; not a great deal, perhaps—but money; and honest money. Somehow, this qualification had never been of much more than casual importance but within the last twenty-four hours a change had taken place in him, as decided as a chemical reaction. He wanted money more now than he had ever wanted it before, but after last night's experience out in Thad Parker's house he was rather particular about how it should come to him!
He sat down in the dingy little office of the hotel and wrote at length to Marcia, telling her little of what had happened except that things were going well, exhausting his vocabulary in love making.
While he wrote, Helen talked gravely to Humphrey Bryant. He listened, as gravely, to the story of the visit that Sim Burns had paid her and when she finished he nodded.
"It begins to connect," he commented.
"With what?"
For a protracted interval he eyed her speculatively as a physician might look when debating the question of telling a patient the worst.
"To a movement that is on foot to build roads and more schools in the Harris Development district, that more gullible men and women may lay their hopes on the altar of his greed!" He looked down at his desk.
"This is Jenny Parker's obituary, Helen—" He paused.
"Roads and schools cost money and this is a poor county. The Thad Parkers can't build highways; Chief Pontiac Power won't; but Jim Harris needs improvements to swell his profits. Jim Harris was behind Sim Burns in his election. There's only one property left, politically unprotected, that can foot big bills."
Some of the color went from her face
"And that is why they threaten to tax Foraker's Folly out of the country?"
"It looks that way. We can't fool ourselves on the direction of the wind."
He rose and paced the floor, rummaging in the pockets of his baggy trousers. Thrice he went the width of the office before the girl, hands lax in her lap, looked up. Then she said:
"I'm depending on you, so! You're the only friend I have who can stand behind me—or before me. My father could teach me forestry, but in the game of trickery—he was a child."
The old man rested a hand on her shoulder.
"At the next session of the legislature," he said, "we may be able to make some headway in protecting you from our asinine laws. And until then, I'll be with you from soup to—Omega!"
Outside, a man loitering on the walk, started suddenly across the street. A curtain in that upstairs front room of the hotel had moved slightly. The editor took the worn book from his desk drawer and wrote painstakingly:
"11.57 a.m. Wes. Hubbard."