“Oh, I'm so GLAD to get you back!” cried Carroll over and over again, as she clung to him. “I don't live while you're away. And every drop of rain that patters on the roof chills my heart, because I think of it as chilling you; and every creak of this old house at night brings me up broad awake, because I hear in it the crash of those cruel great timbers. Oh, oh, OH! I'm so glad to get you! You're the light of my life; you're my whole life itself!”—she smiled at him from her perch on his knee—“I'm silly, am I not?” she said. “Dear heart, don't leave me again.”
“I've got to support an extravagant wife, you know,” Orde reminded her gravely.
“I know, of course,” she breathed, bending lightly to him. “You have your work in the world to do, and I would not have it otherwise. It is great work—wonderful work—I've been asking questions.”
Orde laughed.
“It's work, just like any other. And it's hard work,” said he.
She shook her head at him slowly, a mysterious smile on her lips. Without explaining her thought, she slipped from his knee and glided across to the tall golden harp, which had been brought from Monrovia. The light and diaphanous silk of her loose peignoir floated about her, defining the maturing grace of her figure. Abruptly she struck a great crashing chord.
Then, with an abandon of ecstasy she plunged into one of those wild and sea-blown saga-like rhapsodies of the Hungarians, full of the wind in rigging, the storm in the pines, of shrieking, vast forces hurtling unchained through a resounding and infinite space, as though deep down in primeval nature the powers of the world had been loosed. Back and forth, here and there, erratic and swift and sudden as lightning the theme played breathless. It fell.
“What is that?” gasped Orde, surprised to find himself tense, his blood rioting, his soul stirred.
She ran to him to hide her face in his neck.
“Oh, it's you, you, you!” she cried.
He held her to him closely until her excitement had died.
“Do you think it is good to get quite so nervous, sweetheart?” he asked gently, then. “Remember—”
“Oh, I do, I do!” she broke in earnestly. “Every moment of my waking and sleeping hours I remember him. Always I keep his little soul before me as a light on a shrine. But to-night—oh! to-night I could laugh and shout aloud like the people in the Bible, with clapping of hands.” She snuggled herself close to Orde with a little murmur of happiness. “I think of all the beautiful things,” she whispered, “and of the noble things, and of the great things. He is going to be sturdy, like his father; a wonderful boy, a boy all of fire—”
“Like his mother,” said Orde.
She smiled up at him. “I want him just like you, dear,” she pleaded.
Three days later the jam of the drive reached the dam at Redding. Orde took Carroll downtown in the buckboard. There a seat by the dam-watcher's little house was given her, back of the brick factory buildings next the power canal, whence for hours she watched the slow onward movement of the sullen brown timbers, the smooth, polished-steel rush of the waters through the chute, the graceful certain movements of the rivermen. Some of the latter were brought up by Orde and introduced. They were very awkward, and somewhat embarrassed, but they all looked her straight in the eye, and Carroll felt somehow that back of their diffidence they were quite dispassionately appraising her. After a few gracious speeches on her part and monosyllabic responses on theirs, they blundered away. In spite of the scant communication, these interviews left something of a friendly feeling on both sides.
“I like your Jim Denning,” she told Orde; “he's a nice, clean-cut fellow. And Mr. Bourke,” she laughed. “Isn't he funny with his fierce red beard and his little eyes? But he simply adores you.”
Orde laughed at the idea of the Rough Red's adoring anybody.
“It's so,” she insisted, “and I like him for it—only I wish he were a little cleaner.”
She thought the feats of “log-riding” little less than wonderful, and you may be sure the knowledge of her presence did not discourage spectacular display. Finally, Johnny Challan, uttering a loud whoop, leaped aboard a log and went through the chute standing bolt upright. By a marvel of agility, he kept his balance through the white-water below, and emerged finally into the lower waters still proudly upright, and dry above the knees.
Carroll had arisen, the better to see.
“Why,” she cried aloud, “it's marvellous! Circus riding is nothing to it!”
“No, ma'am,” replied a gigantic riverman who was working near at hand, “that ain't nothin'. Ordinary, however, we travel that way on the river. At night we have the cookee pass us out each a goose-ha'r piller, and lay down for the night.”
Carroll looked at him in reproof. He grinned slowly.
“Don't git worried about me, ma'am,” said he, “I'm hopeless. For twenty year now I been wearin' crape on my hat in memory of my departed virtues.”
After the rear had dropped down river from Redding, Carroll and Orde returned to their deserted little box of a house at Monrovia.
Orde breathed deep of a new satisfaction in walking again the streets of this little sandy, sawdust-paved, shantyfied town, with its yellow hills and its wide blue river and its glimpse of the lake far in the offing. It had never meant anything to him before. Now he enjoyed every brick and board of it; he trod the broken, aromatic shingles of the roadway with pleasure; he tramped up the broad stairs and down the dark hall of the block with anticipation; he breathed the compounded office odour of ledgers, cocoa matting, and old cigar smoke in a long, reminiscent whiff; he took his seat at his roll-top desk, enchanted to be again in these homely though familiar surroundings.
“Hanged if I know what's struck me,” he mused. “Never experienced any remarkable joy before in getting back to this sort of truck.”
Then, with a warm glow at the heart, the realisation was brought to him. This was home, and over yonder, under the shadow of the heaven-pointing spire, a slip of a girl was waiting for him.
He tried to tell her this when next he saw her.
“I felt that I ought to make you a little shrine, and burn candles to you, the way the Catholics do—”
“To the Mater Dolorosa?” she mocked.
He looked at her dark eyes so full of the sweetness of content, at her sensitive lips with the quaintly upturned corners, and he thought of what her home life had been and of the real sorrow that even yet must smoulder somewhere down in the deeps of her being.
“No,” said he slowly, “not that. I think my shrine will be dedicated to Our Lady of the Joyous Soul.”
The rest of the week Orde was absent up the river, superintending in a general way the latter progress of the drive, looking into the needs of the crews, arranging for supplies. The mills were all working now, busily cutting into the residue of last season's logs. Soon they would need more.
At the booms everything was in readiness to receive the jam. The long swing arm slanting across the river channel was attached to its winch which would operate it. When shut it would close the main channel and shunt into the booms the logs floating in the river. There, penned at last by the piles driven in a row and held together at the top by bolted timbers, they would lie quiet. Men armed with pike-poles would then take up the work of distribution according to the brands stamped on the ends. Each brand had its own separate “sorting pens,” the lower end leading again into the open river. From these each owner's property was rafted and towed to his private booms at his mill below.
Orde spent the day before the jam appeared in constructing what he called a “boomerang.”
“Invention of my own,” he explained to Newmark. “Secret invention just yet. I'm going to hold up the drive in the main river until we have things bunched, then I'm going to throw a big crew down here by the swing. Heinzman anticipates, of course, that I'll run the entire drive into the booms and do all my sorting there. Naturally, if I turn his logs loose into the river as fast as I run across them, he will be able to pick them up one at a time, for he'll only get them occasionally. If I keep them until everything else is sorted, only Heinzman's logs will remain; and as we have no right to hold logs, we'll have to turn them loose through the lower sorting booms, where he can be ready to raft them. In that way he gets them all right without paying us a cent. See?”
“Yes, I see,” said Newmark.
“Well,” said Orde, with a laugh, “here is where I fool him. I'm going to rush the drive into the booms all at once, but I'm going to sort out Heinzman's logs at these openings near the entrance and turn them into the main channel.”
“What good will that do?” asked Newmark sceptically. “He gets them sorted just the same, doesn't he?”
“The current's fairly strong,” Orde pointed out, “and the river's almighty wide. When you spring seven or eight million feet on a man, all at once and unexpected, and he with no crew to handle them, he's going to keep almighty busy. And if he don't stop them this side his mill, he'll have to raft and tow them back; and if he don't stop 'em this side the lake, he may as well kiss them all good bye—except those that drift into the bayous and inlets and marshes, and other ungodly places.”
“I see,” said Newmark drily.
“But don't say a word anywhere,” warned Orde. “Secrecy is the watchword of success with this merry little joke.”
The boomerang worked like a charm. The men had been grumbling at an apparently peaceful yielding of the point at issue, and would have sacked out many of the blazed logs if Orde had not held them rigidly to it. Now their spirits flamed into joy again. The sorting went like clockwork. Orde, in personal charge, watched that through the different openings in his “boomerang” the “H” logs were shunted into the river. Shortly the channel was full of logs floating merrily away down the little blue wavelets. After a while Orde handed over his job to Tom North.
“Can't stand it any longer, boys,” said he. “I've got to go down and see how the Dutchman is making it.”
“Come back and tell us!” yelled one of the crew.
“You bet I will!” Orde shouted back.
He drove the team and buckboard down the marsh road to Heinzman's mill. There he found evidences of the wildest excitement. The mill had been closed down, and all the men turned in to rescue logs. Boats plied in all directions. A tug darted back and forth. Constantly the number of floating logs augmented, however. Many had already gone by.
“If you think you're busy now,” said Orde to himself with a chuckle, “just wait until you begin to get LOGS.”
He watched for a few moments in silence.
“What's he doing with that tug?” thought he. “O-ho! He's stringing booms across the river to hold the whole outfit.”
He laughed aloud, turned his team about, and drove frantically back to the booms. Every few moments he chuckled. His eyes danced. Hardly could he wait to get there. Once at the camp, he leaped from the buckboard, with a shout to the stableman, and ran rapidly out over the booms to where the sorting of “H” logs was going merrily forward.
“He's shut down his mill,” shouted Orde, “and he's got all that gang of highbankers out, and every old rum-blossom in Monrovia, and I bet if you say 'logs' to him, he'd chase his tail in circles.”
“Want this job?” North asked him.
“No,” said Orde, suddenly fallen solemn, “haven't time. I'm going to take Marsh and the SPRITE and go to town. Old Heinzman,” he added as an afterthought, “is stringing booms across the river—obstructing navigation.”
He ran down the length of the whole boom to where lay the two tugs.
“Marsh,” he called when still some distance away, “got up steam?”
There appeared a short, square, blue-clad man, with hard brown cheeks, a heavy bleached flaxen moustache, and eyes steady, unwavering, and as blue as the sky.
“Up in two minutes,” he answered, and descended from the pilot house to shout down a low door leading from the deck into the engine room.
“Harvey,” he commanded, “fire her up!”
A tall, good-natured negro reached the upper half of his body from the low door to seize an armful of the slabs piled along the narrow deck. Ten minutes later the SPRITE, a cloud of white smoke pouring from her funnel, was careening down the stretch of the river.
Captain Marsh guided his energetic charge among the logs floating in the stream with the marvellous second instinct of the expert tugboat man. A whirl of the wheel to the right, a turn to the left—the craft heeled strongly under the forcing of her powerful rudder to avoid by an arm's-length some timbers fairly flung aside by the wash. The displacement of the rapid running seemed almost to press the water above the level of the deck on either side and about ten feet from the gunwale. As the low marshes and cat-tails flew past, Orde noted with satisfaction that many of the logs, urged one side by the breeze, had found lodgment among the reeds and in the bayous and inlets. One at a time, and painfully, these would have to be salvaged.
In a short time the mills' tall smokestacks loomed in sight. The logs thickened until it was with difficulty that Captain Marsh could thread his way among them at all. Shortly Orde, standing by the wheel in the pilot-house, could see down the stretches of the river a crowd of men working antlike.
“They've got 'em stopped,” commented Orde. “Look at that gang working from boats! They haven't a dozen 'cork boots' among 'em.”
“What do you want me to do?” asked Captain Marsh.
“This is a navigable river, isn't it?” replied Orde. “Run through!”
Marsh rang for half-speed and began to nose his way gently through the loosely floating logs. Soon the tug had reached the scene of activity, and headed straight for the slender line of booms hitched end to end and stretching quite across the river.
“I'm afraid we'll just ride over them if we hit them too slow,” suggested Marsh.
Orde looked at his watch.
“We'll be late for the mail unless we hurry,” said he. Marsh whirled the spokes of his wheel over and rang the engine-room bell. The water churned white behind, the tug careened.
“Vat you do! Stop!” cried Heinzman from one of the boats.
Orde stuck his head from the pilot-house door.
“You're obstructing navigation!” he yelled. “I've got to go to town to buy a postage-stamp.”
The prow of the tug, accurately aimed by Marsh, hit square in the junction of two of the booms. Immediately the water was agitated on both sides and for a hundred feet or so by the pressure of the long poles sidewise. There ensued a moment of strain; then the links snapped, and the SPRITE plunged joyously through the opening. The booms, swept aside by the current, floated to either shore. The river was open.
Orde, his head still out the door, looked back. “Slow down, Marsh,” said he. “Let's see the show.” Already the logs caught by the booms had taken their motion and had swept past the opening. Although the lonesome tug Heinzman had on the work immediately picked up one end of the broken boom, and with it started out into the river, she found difficulty in making headway against the sweep of the logs. After a long struggle she reached the middle of the river, where she was able to hold her own.
“Wonder what next?” speculated Orde. “How are they going to get the other end of the booms out from the other bank?”
Captain Marsh had reversed the SPRITE. The tug lay nearly motionless amidstream, her propeller slowly revolving.
Up river all the small boats gathered in a line, connected one to the other by a rope. The tug passed over to them the cable attached to the boom. Evidently the combined efforts of the rowboats were counted on to hold the half-boom across the current while the tug brought out the other half. When the tug dropped the cable, Orde laughed.
“Nobody but a Dutchman would have thought of that!” he cried. “Now for the fun!”
Immediately the weight fell on the small boats, they were dragged irresistibly backward. Even from a distance the three men on the SPRITE could make out the white-water as the oars splashed and churned and frantically caught crabs in a vain effort to hold their own. Marsh lowered his telescope, the tears streaming down his face.
“It's better than a goat fight,” said he.
Futilely protesting, the rowboats were dragged backward, turned as a whip is snapped, and strung out along the bank below.
“They'll have to have two tugs before they can close the break that way,” commented Orde.
“Sure thing,” replied Captain Marsh.
But at that moment a black smoke rolled up over the marshes, and shortly around the bend from above came the LUCY BELLE.
The LUCY BELLE was the main excuse for calling the river navigable. She made trips as often as she could between Redding and Monrovia. In luck, she could cover the forty miles in a day. It was no unusual thing, however, for the LUCY BELLE to hang up indefinitely on some one of the numerous shifting sand bars. For that reason she carried more imperishable freight than passengers. In appearance she was two-storied, with twin smokestacks, an iron Indian on her top, and a “splutter-behind” paddle-wheel.
“There comes his help,” said Orde. “Old Simpson would stop to pick up a bogus three-cent piece.”
Sure enough, on hail from one of the rowboats, the LUCY BELLE slowed down and stopped. After a short conference, she steamed clumsily over to get hold of one end of the booms. The tug took the other. In time, and by dint of much splashing, some collisions, and several attempts, the ends of the booms were united.
By this time, however, nearly all the logs had escaped. The tug, towing a string of rowboats, set out in pursuit.
The SPRITE continued on her way until beyond sight. Then she slowed down again. The LUCY BELLE churned around the bend, and turned in toward the tug.
“She's going to speak us,” marvelled Orde. “I wonder what the dickens she wants.”
“Tug ahoy!” bellowed a red-faced individual from the upper deck. He was dressed in blue and brass buttons, carried a telescope in one hand, and was liberally festooned with gold braid and embroidered anchors.
“Answer him,” Orde commanded Marsh.
“Hullo there, commodore! what is it?” replied the tug captain.
The red-faced figure glared down for a moment.
“They want a tug up there at Heinzman's. Can you go?”
“Sure!” cried Marsh, choking.
The LUCY BELLE sheered off magnificently.
“What do you think of that?” Marsh asked Orde.
“The commodore always acts as if that old raft was a sixty-gun frigate,” was Orde's non-committal answer. “Head up stream again.”
Heinzman saw the SPRITE coming, and rowed out frantically, splashing at every stroke and yelling with every breath.
“Don't you go through there! Vait a minute! Stop, I tell you!”
“Hold up!” said Orde to Marsh.
Heinzman rowed alongside, dropped his oars and mopped his brow.
“Vat you do?” he demanded heatedly.
“I forgot the money to buy my stamp with,” said Orde sweetly. “I'm going back to get it.”
“Not through my pooms!” cried Heinzman.
“Mr. Heinzman,” said Orde severely, “you are obstructing a navigable stream. I am doing business, and I cannot be interfered with.”
“But my logs!” cried the unhappy mill man.
“I have nothing to do with your logs. You are driving your own logs,” Orde reminded him.
Heinzman vituperated and pounded the gunwale.
“Go ahead, Marsh!” said Orde.
The tug gathered way. Soon Heinzman was forced to let go. For a second time the chains were snapped. Orde and Marsh looked back over the churning wake left by the SPRITE. The severed ends of the booms were swinging back toward either shore. Between them floated a rowboat. In the rowboat gesticulated a pudgy man. The river was well sprinkled with logs. Evidently the sorting was going on well.
“May as well go back to the works,” said Orde. “He won't string them together again to-day—not if he waits for that tug he sent Simpson for.”
Accordingly, they returned to the booms, where work was suspended while Orde detailed to an appreciative audience the happenings below. This tickled the men immensely.
“Why, we hain't sorted out more'n a million feet of his logs,” cried Rollway Charlie. “He hain't SEEN no logs yet!”
They turned with new enthusiasm to the work of shunting “H” logs into the channel.
In ten minutes, however, the stableman picked his way out over the booms with a message for Orde.
“Mr. Heinzman's ashore, and wants to see you,” said he.
Orde and Jim Denning exchanged glances.
“'Coon's come down,” said the latter.
Orde found the mill man pacing restlessly up and down before a steaming pair of horses. Newmark, perched on a stump, was surveying him sardonically and chewing the end of an unlighted cigar.
“Here you poth are!” burst out Heinzman, when Orde stepped ashore. “Now, this must stop. I must not lose my logs! Vat is your probosition?”
Newmark broke in quickly before Orde could speak.
“I've told Mr. Heinzman,” said he, “that we would sort and deliver the rest of his logs for two dollars a thousand.”
“That will be about it,” agreed Orde.
“But,” exploded Heinzman, “that is as much as you agreet to drive and deliffer my whole cut!”
“Precisely,” said Newmark.
“Put I haf all the eggspence of driving the logs myself. Why shoult I pay you for doing what I haf alretty paid to haf done?”
Orde chuckled.
“Heinzman,” said he, “I told you I'd make you scratch gravel. Now it's time to talk business. You thought you were boring with a mighty auger, but it's time to revise. We aren't forced to bother with your logs, and you're lucky to get out so easy. If I turn your whole drive into the river, you'll lose more than half of it outright, and it'll cost you a heap to salvage the rest. And what's more, I'll turn 'em in before you can get hold of a pile-driver. I'll sort night and day,” he bluffed, “and by to-morrow morning you won't have a stick of timber above my booms.” He laughed again. “You want to get down to business almighty sudden.”
When finally Heinzman had driven sadly away, and the whole drive, “H” logs included, was pouring into the main boom, Orde stretched his arms over his head in a luxury of satisfaction.
“That just about settles that campaign,” he said to Newmark.
“Oh, no, it doesn't,” replied the latter decidedly.
“Why?” asked Orde, surprised. “You don't imagine he'll do anything more?”
“No, but I will,” said Newmark.
Early in the fall the baby was born. It proved to be a boy. Orde, nervous as a cat after the ordeal of doing nothing, tiptoed into the darkened room. He found his wife weak and pale, her dark hair framing her face, a new look of rapt inner contemplation rendering even more mysterious her always fathomless eyes. To Orde she seemed fragile, aloof, enshrined among her laces and dainty ribbons. Hardly dared he touch her when she held her hand out to him weakly, but fell on his knees beside the bed and buried his face in the clothes. She placed a gentle hand caressingly on his head.
So they remained for some time. Finally he raised his eyes. She held her lips to him. He kissed them.
“It seems sort of make-believe even yet, sweetheart,” she smiled at him whimsically, “that we have a real, live baby all of our own.”
“Like other people,” said Orde.
“Not like other people at all!” she disclaimed, with a show of indignation.
Grandma Orde brought the newcomer in for Orde's inspection. He looked gravely down on the puckered, discoloured bit of humanity with some feeling of disappointment, and perhaps a faint uneasiness. After a moment he voiced the latter.
“Is—do you think—that is—” he hesitated, “does the doctor say he's going to be all right?”
“All right!” cried Grandma Orde indignantly. “I'd like to know if he isn't all right now! What in the world do you expect of a new-born baby?”
But Carroll was laughing softly to herself on the bed. She held out her arms for the baby, and cuddled it close to her breast.
“He's a little darling,” she crooned, “and he's going to grow up big and strong, just like his daddy.” She put her cheek against the sleeping babe's and looked up sidewise at the two standing above her. “But I know how you feel,” she said to her husband. “When they first showed him to me, I thought he looked like a peanut a thousand years old.”
Grandma Orde fairly snorted with indignation.
“Come to your old grandmother, who appreciates you!” she cried, possessing herself of the infant. “He's a beautiful baby; one of the best-looking new-born babies I ever saw!”
Orde escaped to the open air. He had to go to the office to attend to some details of the business. With every step his elation increased. At the office he threw open his desk with a slam. Newmark jumped nervously and frowned. Orde's big, open, and brusque manners bothered him as they would have bothered a cat.
“Got a son and heir over at my place,” called Orde in his big voice.
“This old firm's got to rustle now, I tell you.”
“Congratulate you, I'm sure,” said Newmark rather shortly. “Mrs. Orde is doing well, I hope?”
“Fine, fine!” cried Orde.
Newmark dropped the subject and plunged into a business matter. Orde's attention, however, was flighty. After a little while he closed his desk with another bang.
“No use!” said he. “Got to make it a vacation. I'm going to run over to see how the family is.”
Strangely enough, the young couple had not discussed before the question of a name. One evening at twilight, when Orde was perched at the foot of the bed, Carroll brought up the subject.
“He ought to be named for you,” she began timidly. “I know that, Jack, and I'd love to have another Jack Orde in the family; but, dear, I've been thinking about father. He's a poor, forlorn old man, who doesn't get much out of life. And it would please him so—oh, more than you can imagine such a thing could please anybody!”
She looked up at him doubtfully. Orde said nothing, but walked around the bed to where the baby lay in his little cradle. He leaned over and took the infant up in his gingerly awkward fashion.
“How are you to-day, Bobby Orde?” he inquired of the blinking mite.
The first season of the Boom Company was most successful. Its prospects for the future were bright. The drive had been delivered to its various owners at a price below what it had cost them severally, and without the necessary attendant bother. Therefore, the loggers were only too willing to renew their contracts for another year. This did not satisfy Newmark, however.
“What we want,” he told Orde, “is a charter giving us exclusive rights on the river, and authorising us to ask toll. I'm going to try and get one out of the legislature.”
He departed for Lansing as soon as the Assembly opened, and almost immediately became lost in one of those fierce struggles of politics not less bitter because concealed. Heinzman was already on the ground.
Newmark had the shadow of right on his side, for he applied for the charter on the basis of the river improvements already put in by his firm. Heinzman, however, possessed much political influence, a deep knowledge of the subterranean workings of plot and counterplot, and a “barrel.” Although armed with an apparently incontestable legal right, Newmark soon found himself fighting on the defensive. Heinzman wanted the improvements already existing condemned and sold as a public utility to the highest bidder. He offered further guarantees as to future improvements. In addition were other and more potent arguments proffered behind closed doors. Many cases resolved themselves into a bald question of cash. Others demanded diplomacy. Jobs, fat contracts, business favours, influence were all flung out freely—bribes as absolute as though stamped with the dollar mark. Newspapers all over the State were pressed into service. These, bought up by Heinzman and his prospective partners in a lucrative business, spoke virtuously of private piracy of what are now called public utilities, the exploiting of the people's natural wealths, and all the rest of a specious reasoning the more convincing in that it was in many other cases only too true. The independent journals, uninformed of the rights of the case, either remained silent on the matter, or groped in a puzzled and undecided manner on both sides.
Against this secret but effective organisation Newmark most unexpectedly found himself pitted. He had anticipated being absent but a week; he became involved in an affair of months.
With decision he applied himself to the problem. He took rooms at the hotel, sent for Orde, and began at once to set in motion the machinery of opposition. The refreshed resources of the company were strained to the breaking point in order to raise money for this new campaign opening before it. Orde, returning to Lansing after a trip devoted to the carrying out of Newmark's directions as to finances, was dismayed at the tangle of strategy and cross-strategy, innuendo, vague and formless cobweb forces by which he was surrounded. He could make nothing of them. They brushed his face, he felt their influence, yet he could place his finger on no tangible and comprehensible solidity. Among these delicate and complicated cross-currents Newmark moved silent, cold, secret. He seemed to understand them, to play with them, to manipulate them as elements of the game. Above them was the hollow shock of the ostensible battle—the speeches, the loud talk in lobbies, the newspaper virtue, indignation, accusations; but the real struggle was here in the furtive ways, in whispered words delivered hastily aside, in hotel halls on the way to and from the stairs, behind closed doors of rooms without open transoms.
Orde in comic despair acknowledged that it was all “too deep for him.” Nevertheless, it was soon borne in on him that the new company was struggling for its very right to existence. It had been doing that from the first; but now, to Orde the fight, the existence, had a new importance. The company up to this point had been a scheme merely, an experiment that might win or lose. Now, with the history of a drive behind it, it had become a living entity. Orde would have fought against its dissolution as he would have fought against a murder. Yet he had practically to stand one side, watching Newmark's slender, gray-clad, tense figure gliding here and there, more silent, more reserved, more watchful every day.
The fight endured through most of the first half of the session. When finally it became evident to Heinzman that Newmark would win, he made the issue of toll rates the ditch of his last resistance, trying to force legal charges so low as to eat up the profits. At the last, however, the bill passed the board. The company had its charter.
At what price only Newmark could have told. He had fought with the tense earnestness of the nervous temperament that fights to win without count of the cost. The firm was established, but it was as heavily in debt as its credit would stand. Newmark himself, though as calm and reserved and precise as ever, seemed to have turned gray, and one of his eyelids had acquired a slight nervous twitch which persisted for some months. He took his seat at the desk, however, as calmly as ever. In three days the scandalised howls of bribery and corruption had given place in the newspapers to some other sensation.
“Joe,” said Orde to his partner, “how about all this talk? Is there really anything in it? You haven't gone in for that business, have you?”
Newmark stretched his arms wearily.
“Press bought up,” he replied. “I know for a fact that old Stanford got five hundred dollars from some of the Heinzman interests. I could have swung him back for an extra hundred, but it wasn't worth while. They howl bribery at us to distract attention from their own performances.”
With this evasive reply Orde contented himself. Whether it satisfied him or whether he was loath to pursue the subject further it would be impossible to say.
“It's cost us plenty, anyway,” he said, after a moment. “The proposition's got a load on it. It will take us a long time to get out of debt. The river driving won't pay quite so big as we thought it would,” he concluded, with a rueful little laugh.
“It will pay plenty well enough,” replied Newmark decidedly, “and it gives us a vantage point to work from. You don't suppose we are going to quit at river driving, do you? We want to look around for some timber of our own; there's where the big money is. And perhaps we can buy a schooner or two and go into the carrying trade—the country's alive with opportunity. Newmark and Orde means something to these fellows now. We can have anything we want, if we just reach out for it.”
His thin figure, ordinarily slightly askew, had straightened; his steel-gray, impersonal eyes had lit up behind the bowed glasses and were seeing things beyond the wall at which they gazed. Orde looked up at him with a sudden admiration.
“You're the brains of this concern,” said he.
“We'll get on,” replied Newmark, the fire dying from his eyes.
In the course of the next eight years Newmark and Orde floated high on that flood of apparent prosperity that attends a business well conceived and passably well managed. The Boom and Driving Company made money, of course, for with the margin of fifty per cent or thereabouts necessitated by the temporary value of the improvements, good years could hardly fail to bring good returns. This, it will be remembered, was a stock company. With the profits from that business the two men embarked on a separate copartnership. They made money at this, too, but the burden of debt necessitated by new ventures, constantly weighted by the heavy interest demanded at that time, kept affairs on the ragged edge.
In addition, both Orde and Newmark were more inclined to extension of interests than to “playing safe.” The assets gained in one venture were promptly pledged to another. The ramifications of debt, property, mortgages, and expectations overlapped each other in a cobweb of interests.
Orde lived at ease in a new house of some size surrounded by grounds. He kept two servants: a blooded team of horses drew the successor to the original buckboard. Newmark owned a sail yacht of five or six tons, in which, quite solitary, he took his only pleasure. Both were considered men of substance and property, as indeed they were. Only, they risked dollars to gain thousands. A succession of bad years, a panic-contraction of money markets, any one of a dozen possible, though not probable, contingencies would render it difficult to meet the obligations which constantly came due, and which Newmark kept busy devising ways and means of meeting. If things went well—and it may be remarked that legitimately they should—Newmark and Orde would some day be rated among the millionaire firms. If things went ill, bankruptcy could not be avoided. There was no middle ground. Nor were Orde and his partner unique in this; practically every firm then developing or exploiting the natural resources of the country found itself in the same case.
Immediately after the granting of the charter to drive the river the partners had offered them an opportunity of acquiring about thirty million feet of timber remaining from Morrison and Daly's original holdings. That firm was very anxious to begin development on a large scale of its Beeson Lake properties in the Saginaw waters. Daly proposed to Orde that he take over the remnant, and having confidence in the young man's abilities, agreed to let him have it on long-time notes. After several consultations with Newmark, Orde finally completed the purchase. Below the booms they erected a mill, the machinery for which they had also bought of Daly, at Redding. The following winter Orde spent in the woods. By spring he had banked, ready to drive, about six million feet.
For some years these two sorts of activity gave the partners about all they could attend to. As soon as the drive had passed Redding, Orde left it in charge of one of his foremen while he divided his time between the booms and the mill. Late in the year his woods trips began, the tours of inspection, of surveying for new roads, the inevitable preparation for the long winter campaigns in the forest. As soon as the spring thaws began, once more the drive demanded his attention. And in marketing the lumber, manipulating the firm's financial affairs, collecting its dues, paying its bills, making its purchases, and keeping oiled the intricate bearing points of its office machinery, Newmark was busy—and invaluable.
At the end of the fifth year the opportunity came, through a combination of a bad debt and a man's death, to get possession of two lake schooners. Orde at once suggested the contract for a steam barge. Towing was then in its infancy. The bulk of lake traffic was by means of individual sailing ships—a method uncertain as to time. Orde thought that a steam barge could be built powerful enough not only to carry its own hold and deck loads, but to tow after it the two schooners. In this manner the crews could be reduced, and an approximate date of delivery could be guaranteed. Newmark agreed with him. Thus the firm, in accordance with his prophecy, went into the carrying trade, for the vessels more than sufficed for its own needs. The freighting of lumber added much to the income, and the carrying of machinery and other heavy freight on the return trip grew every year.
But by far the most important acquisition was that of the northern peninsula timber. Most operators called the white pine along and back from the river inexhaustible. Orde did not believe this. He saw the time, not far distant, when the world would be compelled to look elsewhere for its lumber supply, and he turned his eyes to the almost unknown North. After a long investigation through agents, and a month's land-looking on his own account, he located and purchased three hundred million feet. This was to be paid for, as usual, mostly by the firm's notes secured by its other property. It would become available only in the future, but Orde believed, as indeed the event justified, this future would prove to be not so distant as most people supposed.
As these interests widened, Orde became more and more immersed in them. He was forced to be away all of every day, and more than the bulk of every year. Nevertheless, his home life did not suffer for it.
To Carroll he was always the same big, hearty, whole-souled boy she had first learned to love. She had all his confidence. If this did not extend into business affairs, it was because Orde had always tried to get away from them when at home. At first Carroll had attempted to keep in the current of her husband's activities, but as the latter broadened in scope and became more complex, she perceived that their explanation wearied him. She grew out of the habit of asking him about them. Soon their rapid advance had carried them quite beyond her horizon. To her, also, as to most women, the word “business” connoted nothing but a turmoil and a mystery.
In all other things they were to each other what they had been from the first. No more children had come to them. Bobby, however; had turned out a sturdy, honest little fellow, with more than a streak of his mother's charm and intuition. His future was the subject of all Orde's plans.
“I want to give him all the chance there is,” he explained to Carroll. “A boy ought to start where his father left off, and not have to do the same thing all over again. But being a rich man's son isn't much of a job.”
“Why don't you let him continue your business?” smiled Carroll, secretly amused at the idea of the small person before them ever doing anything.
“By the time Bobby's grown up this business will all be closed out,” replied Orde seriously.
He continued to look at his minute son with puckered brow, until Carroll smoothed out the wrinkles with the tips of her fingers.
“Of course, having only a few minutes to decide,” she mocked, “perhaps we'd better make up our minds right now to have him a street-car driver.”
“Yes!” agreed Bobby unexpectedly, and with emphasis.
Three years after this conversation, which would have made Bobby just eight, Orde came back before six of a summer evening, his face alight with satisfaction.
“Hullo, bub!” he cried to Bobby, tossing him to his shoulder. “How's the kid?”
They went out together, while awaiting dinner, to see the new setter puppy in the woodshed.
“Named him yet?” asked Orde.
“Duke,” said Bobby.
Orde surveyed the animal gravely.
“Seems like a good name,” said he.
After dinner the two adjourned to the library, where they sat together in the “big chair,” and Bobby, squirmed a little sidewise in order the better to see, watched the smoke from his father's cigar as it eddied and curled in the air.
“Tell a story,” he commanded finally.
“Well,” acquiesced Orde, “there was once a man who had a cow—”
“Once upon a time,” corrected Bobby.
He listened for a moment or so.
“I don't like that story,” he then announced. “Tell the story about the bears.”
“But this is a new story,” protested Orde, “and you've heard about the bears so many times.”
“Bears,” insisted Bobby.
“Well, once upon a time there were three bears—a big bear and a middle-sized bear and a little bear—” began Orde obediently.
Bobby, with a sigh of rapture and content, curled up in a snug, warm little ball. The twilight darkened.
“Blind-man's holiday!” warned Carroll behind them so suddenly that they both jumped. “And the sand man's been at somebody, I know!”
She bore him away to bed. Orde sat smoking in the darkness, staring straight ahead of him into the future. He believed he had found the opportunity—twenty years distant—for which he had been looking so long.