The few moments of Thorpe's tears eased the emotional strain under which, perhaps unconsciously, he had been laboring for nearly a year past. The tenseness of his nerves relaxed. He was able to look on the things about him from a broader standpoint than that of the specialist, to front life with saving humor. The deep breath after striving could at last be taken.
In this new attitude there was nothing strenuous, nothing demanding haste; only a deep glow of content and happiness. He savored deliberately the joy of a luxurious couch, rich hangings, polished floor, subdued light, warmed atmosphere. He watched with soul-deep gratitude the soft girlish curves of Hilda's body, the poise of her flower head, the piquant, half-wistful, half-childish set of her red lips, the clear starlike glimmer of her dusky eyes. It was all near to him; his.
“Kiss me, dear,” he said.
She swayed to him again, deliciously graceful, deliciously unselfconscious, trusting, adorable. Already in the little nothingnesses of manner, the trifles of mental and bodily attitude, she had assumed that faint trace of the maternal which to the observant tells so plainly that a woman has given herself to a man.
She leaned her cheek against her hand, and her hand against his shoulder.
“I have been reading a story lately,” said she, “that has interested me very much. It was about a man who renounced all he held most dear to shield a friend.”
“Yes,” said Thorpe.
“Then he renounced all his most valuable possessions because a poor common man needed the sacrifice.”
“Sounds like a medieval story,” said he with unconscious humor.
“It happened recently,” rejoined Hilda. “I read it in the papers.”
“Well, he blazed a good trail,” was Thorpe's sighing comment. “Probably he had his chance. We don't all of us get that. Things go crooked and get tangled up, so we have to do the best we can. I don't believe I'd have done it.”
“Oh, you are delicious!” she cried.
After a time she said very humbly: “I want to beg your pardon for misunderstanding you and causing you so much suffering. I was very stupid, and didn't see why you could not do as I wanted you to.”
“That is nothing to forgive. I acted like a fool.”
“I have known about you,” she went on. “It has all come out in the Telegram. It has been very exciting. Poor boy, you look tired.”
He straightened himself suddenly. “I have forgotten,—actually forgotten,” he cried a little bitterly. “Why, I am a pauper, a bankrupt, I—”
“Harry,” she interrupted gently, but very firmly, “you must not say what you were going to say. I cannot allow it. Money came between us before. It must not do so again. Am I not right, dear?”
She smiled at him with the lips of a child and the eyes of a woman.
“Yes,” he agreed after a struggle, “you are right. But now I must begin all over again. It will be a long time before I shall be able to claim you. I have my way to make.”
“Yes,” said she diplomatically.
“But you!” he cried suddenly. “The papers remind me. How about that Morton?”
“What about him?” asked the girl, astonished. “He is very happily engaged.”
Thorpe's face slowly filled with blood.
“You'll break the engagement at once,” he commanded a little harshly.
“Why should I break the engagement?” demanded Hilda, eying him with some alarm.
“I should think it was obvious enough.”
“But it isn't,” she insisted. “Why?”
Thorpe was silent—as he always had been in emergencies, and as he was destined always to be. His was not a nature of expression, but of action. A crisis always brought him, like a bull-dog, silently to the grip.
Hilda watched him puzzled, with bright eyes, like a squirrel. Her quick brain glanced here and there among the possibilities, seeking the explanation. Already she knew better than to demand it of him.
“You actually don't think he's engaged to ME!” she burst out finally.
“Isn't he?” asked Thorpe.
“Why no, stupid! He's engaged to Elizabeth Carpenter, Wallace's sister. Now WHERE did you get that silly idea?”
“I saw it in the paper.”
“And you believe all you see! Why didn't you ask Wallace—but of course you wouldn't! Harry, you are the most incoherent dumb old brute I ever saw! I could shake you! Why don't you say something occasionally when it's needed, instead of sitting dumb as a sphinx and getting into all sorts of trouble? But you never will. I know you. You dear old bear! You NEED a wife to interpret things for you. You speak a different language from most people.” She said this between laughing and crying; between a sense of the ridiculous uselessness of withholding a single timely word, and a tender pathetic intuition of the suffering such a nature must endure. In the prospect of the future she saw her use. It gladdened her and filled her with a serene happiness possible only to those who feel themselves a necessary and integral part in the lives of the ones they love. Dimly she perceived this truth. Dimly beyond it she glimpsed that other great truth of nature, that the human being is rarely completely efficient alone, that in obedience to his greater use he must take to himself a mate before he can succeed.
Suddenly she jumped to her feet with an exclamation.
“Oh, Harry! I'd forgotten utterly!” she cried in laughing consternation. “I have a luncheon here at half-past one! It's almost that now. I must run and dress. Just look at me; just LOOK! YOU did that!”
“I'll wait here until the confounded thing is over,” said Thorpe.
“Oh, no, you won't,” replied Hilda decidedly. “You are going down town right now and get something to put on. Then you are coming back here to stay.”
Thorpe glanced in surprise at his driver's clothes, and his spiked boots.
“Heavens and earth!” he exclaimed, “I should think so! How am I to get out without ruining the floor?”
Hilda laughed and drew aside the portiere.
“Don't you think you have done that pretty well already?” she asked. “There, don't look so solemn. We're not going to be sorry for a single thing we've done today, are we?” She stood close to him holding the lapels of his jacket in either hand, searching his face wistfully with her fathomless dusky eyes.
“No, sweetheart, we are not,” replied Thorpe soberly.
Surely it is useless to follow the sequel in detail, to tell how Hilda persuaded Thorpe to take her money. She aroused skillfully his fighting blood, induced him to use one fortune to rescue another. To a woman such as she this was not a very difficult task in the long run. A few scruples of pride; that was all.
“Do not consider its being mine,” she answered to his objections. “Remember the lesson we learned so bitterly. Nothing can be greater than love, not even our poor ideals. You have my love; do not disappoint me by refusing so little a thing as my money.”
“I hate to do it,” he replied; “it doesn't look right.”
“You must,” she insisted. “I will not take the position of rich wife to a poor man; it is humiliating to both. I will not marry you until you have made your success.”
“That is right,” said Thorpe heartily.
“Well, then, are you going to be so selfish as to keep me waiting while you make an entirely new start, when a little help on my part will bring your plans to completion?”
She saw the shadow of assent in his eyes.
“How much do you need?” she asked swiftly.
“I must take up the notes,” he explained. “I must pay the men. I may need something on the stock market. If I go in on this thing, I'm going in for keeps. I'll get after those fellows who have been swindling Wallace. Say a hundred thousand dollars.”
“Why, it's nothing,” she cried.
“I'm glad you think so,” he replied grimly.
She ran to her dainty escritoire, where she scribbled eagerly for a few moments.
“There,” she cried, her eyes shining, “there is my check book all signed in blank. I'll see that the money is there.”
Thorpe took the book, staring at it with sightless eyes. Hilda, perched on the arm of his chair, watched his face closely, as later became her habit of interpretation.
“What is it?” she asked.
Thorpe looked up with a pitiful little smile that seemed to beg indulgence for what he was about to say.
“I was just thinking, dear. I used to imagine I was a strong man, yet see how little my best efforts amount to. I have put myself into seven years of the hardest labor, working like ten men in order to succeed. I have foreseen all that mortal could foresee. I have always thought, and think now, that a man is no man unless he works out the sort of success for which he is fitted. I have done fairly well until the crises came. Then I have been absolutely powerless, and if left to myself, I would have failed. At the times when a really strong man would have used effectively the strength he had been training, I have fallen back miserably on outer aid. Three times my affairs have become critical. In the crises I have been saved, first by a mere boy; then by an old illiterate man; now by a weak woman!”
She heard him through in silence.
“Harry,” she said soberly when he had quite finished, “I agree with you that God meant the strong man to succeed; that without success the man hasn't fulfilled his reason for being. But, Harry, ARE YOU QUITE SURE GOD MEANT HIM TO SUCCEED ALONE?”
The dusk fell through the little room. Out in the hallway a tall clock ticked solemnly. A noiseless servant appeared in the doorway to light the lamps, but was silently motioned away.
“I had not thought of that,” said Thorpe at last.
“You men are so selfish,” went on Hilda. “You would take everything from us. Why can't you leave us the poor little privilege of the occasional deciding touch, the privilege of succor. It is all that weakness can do for strength.”
“And why,” she went on after a moment, “why is not that, too, a part of a man's success—the gathering about him of people who can and will supplement his efforts. Who was it inspired Wallace Carpenter with confidence in an unknown man? You. What did it? Those very qualities by which you were building your success. Why did John Radway join forces with you? How does it happen that your men are of so high a standard of efficiency? Why am I willing to give you everything, EVERYTHING, to my heart and soul? Because it is you who ask it. Because you, Harry Thorpe, have woven us into your fortune, so that we have no choice. Depend upon us in the crises of your work! Why, so are you dependent on your ten fingers, your eyes, the fiber of your brain! Do you think the less of your fulfillment for that?”
So it was that Hilda Farrand gave her lover confidence, brought him out from his fanaticism, launched him afresh into the current of events. He remained in Chicago all that summer, giving orders that all work at the village of Carpenter should cease. With his affairs that summer we have little to do. His common-sense treatment of the stock market, by which a policy of quiescence following an outright buying of the stock which he had previously held on margins, retrieved the losses already sustained, and finally put both partners on a firm financial footing. That is another story. So too is his reconciliation with and understanding of his sister. It came about through Hilda, of course. Perhaps in the inscrutable way of Providence the estrangement was of benefit,—even necessary, for it had thrown him entirely within himself during his militant years.
Let us rather look to the end of the summer. It now became a question of re-opening the camps. Thorpe wrote to Shearer and Radway, whom he had retained, that he would arrive on Saturday noon, and suggested that the two begin to look about for men. Friday, himself, Wallace Carpenter, Elizabeth Carpenter, Morton, Helen Thorpe, and Hilda Farrand boarded the north-bound train.
The train of the South Shore Railroad shot its way across the broad reaches of the northern peninsula. On either side of the right-of-way lay mystery in the shape of thickets so dense and overgrown that the eye could penetrate them but a few feet at most. Beyond them stood the forests. Thus Nature screened her intimacies from the impertinent eye of a new order of things.
Thorpe welcomed the smell of the northland. He became almost eager, explaining, indicating to the girl at his side.
“There is the Canada balsam,” he cried. “Do you remember how I showed it to you first? And yonder the spruce. How stuck up your teeth were when you tried to chew the gum before it had been heated. Do you remember? Look! Look there! It's a white pine! Isn't it a grand tree? It's the finest tree in the forest, by my way of thinking, so tall, so straight, so feathery, and so dignified. See, Hilda, look quick! There's an old logging road all filled with raspberry vines. We'd find lots of partridges there, and perhaps a bear. Wouldn't you just like to walk down it about sunset?”
“Yes, Harry.”
“I wonder what we're stopping for. Seems to me they are stopping at every squirrel's trail. Oh, this must be Seney. Yes, it is. Queer little place, isn't it? but sort of attractive. Good deal like our town. You have never seen Carpenter, have you? Location's fine, anyway; and to me it's sort of picturesque. You'll like Mrs. Hathaway. She's a buxom, motherly woman who runs the boarding-house for eighty men, and still finds time to mend my clothes for me. And you'll like Solly. Solly's the tug captain, a mighty good fellow, true as a gun barrel. We'll have him take us out, some still day. We'll be there in a few minutes now. See the cranberry marshes. Sometimes there's a good deal of pine on little islands scattered over it, but it's very hard to log, unless you get a good winter. We had just such a proposition when I worked for Radway. Oh, you'll like Radway, he's as good as gold. Helen!”
“Yes,” replied his sister.
“I want you to know Radway. He's the man who gave me my start.”
“All right, Harry,” laughed Helen. “I'll meet anybody or anything from bears to Indians.”
“I know an Indian too—Geezigut, an Ojibwa—we called him Injin Charley. He was my first friend in the north woods. He helped me get my timber. This spring he killed a man—a good job, too—and is hiding now. I wish I knew where he is. But we'll see him some day. He'll come back when the thing blows over. See! See!”
“What?” they all asked, breathless.
“It's gone. Over beyond the hills there I caught a glimpse of Superior.”
“You are ridiculous, Harry,” protested Helen Thorpe laughingly. “I never saw you so. You are a regular boy!”
“Do you like boys?” he asked gravely of Hilda.
“Adore them!” she cried.
“All right, I don't care,” he answered his sister in triumph.
The air brakes began to make themselves felt, and shortly the train came to a grinding stop.
“What station is this?” Thorpe asked the colored porter.
“Shingleville, sah,” the latter replied.
“I thought so. Wallace, when did their mill burn, anyway? I haven't heard about it.”
“Last spring, about the time you went down.”
“Is THAT so? How did it happen?”
“They claim incendiarism,” parried Wallace cautiously.
Thorpe pondered a moment, then laughed. “I am in the mixed attitude of the small boy,” he observed, “who isn't mean enough to wish anybody's property destroyed, but who wishes that if there is a fire, to be where he can see it. I am sorry those fellows had to lose their mill, but it was a good thing for us. The man who set that fire did us a good turn. If it hadn't been for the burning of their mill, they would have made a stronger fight against us in the stock market.”
Wallace and Hilda exchanged glances. The girl was long since aware of the inside history of those days.
“You'll have to tell them that,” she whispered over the back of her seat. “It will please them.”
“Our station is next!” cried Thorpe, “and it's only a little ways. Come, get ready!”
They all crowded into the narrow passage-way near the door, for the train barely paused.
“All right, sah,” said the porter, swinging down his little step.
Thorpe ran down to help the ladies. He was nearly taken from his feet by a wild-cat yell, and a moment later that result was actually accomplished by a rush of men that tossed him bodily onto its shoulders. At the same moment, the mill and tug whistles began to screech, miscellaneous fire-arms exploded. Even the locomotive engineer, in the spirit of the occasion, leaned down heartily on his whistle rope. The saw-dust street was filled with screaming, jostling men. The homes of the town were brilliantly draped with cheesecloth, flags and bunting.
For a moment Thorpe could not make out what had happened. This turmoil was so different from the dead quiet of desertion he had expected, that he was unable to gather his faculties. All about him were familiar faces upturned to his own. He distinguished the broad, square shoulders of Scotty Parsons, Jack Hyland, Kerlie, Bryan Moloney; Ellis grinned at him from the press; Billy Camp, the fat and shiny drive cook; Mason, the foreman of the mill; over beyond howled Solly, the tug captain, Rollway Charley, Shorty, the chore-boy; everywhere were features that he knew. As his dimming eyes travelled here and there, one by one the Fighting Forty, the best crew of men ever gathered in the northland, impressed themselves on his consciousness. Saginaw birlers, Flat River drivers, woodsmen from the forests of Lower Canada, bully boys out of the Muskegon waters, peavey men from Au Sable, white-water dare-devils from the rapids of the Menominee—all were there to do him honor, him in whom they had learned to see the supreme qualities of their calling. On the outskirts sauntered the tall form of Tim Shearer, a straw peeping from beneath his flax-white mustache, his eyes glimmering under his flax-white eyebrows. He did not evidence as much excitement as the others, but the very bearing of the man expressed the deepest satisfaction. Perhaps he remembered that zero morning so many years before when he had watched the thinly-clad, shivering chore-boy set his face for the first time towards the dark forest.
Big Junko and Anderson deposited their burden on the raised platform of the office steps. Thorpe turned and fronted the crowd.
At once pandemonium broke loose, as though the previous performance had been nothing but a low-voiced rehearsal.
The men looked upon their leader and gave voice to the enthusiasm that was in them. He stood alone there, straight and tall, the muscles of his brown face set to hide his emotion, his head thrust back proudly, the lines of his strong figure tense with power,—the glorification in finer matter of the hardy, reliant men who did him honor.
“Oh, aren't you PROUD of him?” gasped Hilda, squeezing Helen's arm with a little sob.
In a moment Wallace Carpenter, his countenance glowing with pride and pleasure, mounted the platform and stood beside his friend, while Morton and the two young ladies stopped half way up the steps.
At once the racket ceased. Everyone stood at attention.
“Mr. Thorpe,” Wallace began, “at the request of your friends here, I have a most pleasant duty to fulfill. They have asked me to tell you how glad they are to see you; that is surely unnecessary. They have also asked me to congratulate you on having won the fight with our rivals.”
“You done 'em good.” “Can't down the Old Fellow,” muttered joyous voices.
“But,” said Wallace, “I think that I first have a story to tell on my own account.
“At the time the jam broke this spring, we owed the men here for a year's work. At that time I considered their demand for wages ill-timed and grasping. I wish to apologize. After the money was paid them, instead of scattering, they set to work under Jack Radway and Tim Shearer to salvage your logs. They have worked long hours all summer. They have invested every cent of their year's earnings in supplies and tools, and now they are prepared to show you in the Company's booms, three million feet of logs, rescued by their grit and hard labor from total loss.”
At this point the speaker was interrupted. “Saw off,” “Shut up,” “Give us a rest,” growled the audience. “Three million feet ain't worth talkin' about,” “You make me tired,” “Say your little say the way you oughter,” “Found purty nigh two millions pocketed on Mare's Island, or we wouldn't a had that much,” “Damn-fool undertaking, anyhow.”
“Men,” cried Thorpe, “I have been very fortunate. From failure success has come. But never have I been more fortunate than in my friends. The firm is now on its feet. It could afford to lose three times the logs it lost this year—”
He paused and scanned their faces.
“But,” he continued suddenly, “it cannot now, nor ever can afford to lose what those three million feet represent,—the friends it has made. I can pay you back the money you have spent and the time you have put in—” Again he looked them over, and then for the first time since they have known him his face lighted up with a rare and tender smile of affection. “But, comrades, I shall not offer to do it: the gift is accepted in the spirit with which it was offered—”
He got no further. The air was rent with sound. Even the members of his own party cheered. From every direction the crowd surged inward. The women and Morton were forced up the platform to Thorpe. The latter motioned for silence.
“Now, boys, we have done it,” said he, “and so will go back to work. From now on you are my comrades in the fight.”
His eyes were dim; his breast heaved; his voice shook. Hilda was weeping from excitement. Through the tears she saw them all looking at their leader, and in the worn, hard faces glowed the affection and admiration of a dog for its master. Something there was especially touching in this, for strong men rarely show it. She felt a great wave of excitement sweep over her. Instantly she was standing by Thorpe, her eyes streaming, her breast throbbing with emotion.
“Oh!” she cried, stretching her arms out to them passionately, “Oh! I love you; I love you all!”