A RIDE BY NIGHT

Stella sang in the gilt ballroom of the Granada next afternoon, behind the footlights of a miniature stage, with the blinds drawn and a few hundred of Vancouver's social elect critically, expectantly listening. She sang her way straight into the heart of that audience with her opening number. This was on Wednesday. Friday she sang again, and Saturday afternoon.

When she came back to her room after that last concert, wearied with the effort of listening to chattering women and playing the gracious lady to an admiring contingent which insisted upon making her last appearance a social triumph, she found a letter forwarded from Seattle. She slit the envelope. A typewritten sheet enfolded a green slip,—a check. She looked at the figures, scarcely comprehending until she read the letter.

She looked at the check again. Nineteen thousand, five hundred—payable to her order. Two years ago such a sum would have lifted her to plutocratic heights, filled her with pleasurable excitement, innumerable anticipations. Now it stirred her less than the three hundred dollars she had just received from the Granada Concert committee. She had earned that, had given for it due measure of herself. This other had come without effort, without expectation. And less than she had ever needed money before did she now require such a sum.

Yet she was sensibly aware that this windfall meant a short cut to things which she had only looked to attain by plodding over economic hills. She could say good-by to singing in photoplay houses, to vaudeville engagements, to concert work in provincial towns. She could hitch her wagon to a star and go straight up the avenue that led to a career, if it were in her to achieve greatness. Pleasant dreams in which the buoyant ego soared, until the logical interpretation of her ambitions brought her to a more practical consideration of ways and means, and that in turn confronted her with the fact that she could leave the Pacific coast to-morrow morning if she so chose.

Why should she not so choose?

She was her own mistress, free as the wind. Fyfe had said that. She looked out into the smoky veil that shrouded the water front and the hills across the Inlet, that swirled and eddied above the giant fir in Stanley Park, and her mind flicked back to Roaring Lake where the Red Flower of Kipling's Jungle Book bloomed to her husband's ruin. Did it? She wondered. She could not think of him as beaten, bested in any undertaking. She had never been able to think of him in those terms. Always to her he had conveyed the impression of a superman. Always she had been a little in awe of him, of his strength, his patient, inflexible determination, glimpsing under his habitual repression certain tremendous forces. She could not conceive him as a broken man.

Staring out into the smoky air, she wondered if the fires at Roaring Lake still ravaged that noble forest; if Fyfe's resources, like her brother's, were wholly involved in standing timber, and if that timber were doomed? She craved to know. Secured herself by that green slip in her hand against every possible need, she wondered if it were ordained that the two men whose possession of material resources had molded her into what she was to-day should lose all, be reduced to the same stress that had made her an unwilling drudge in her brother's kitchen. Then she recalled that for Charlie there was an equivalent sum due,—a share like her own. At the worst, he had the nucleus of another fortune.

Curled among the pillows of her bed that night, she looked over the evening papers, read with a swift heart-sinking that the Roaring Lake fire was assuming terrific proportions, that nothing but a deluge of rain would stay it now. And more significantly, except for a minor blaze or two, the fire raged almost wholly upon and around the Fyfe block of limits. She laid aside the papers, switched off the lights, and lay staring wide-eyed at the dusky ceiling.

At twenty minutes of midnight she was called to the door of her room to receive a telegram. It was from Linda, and it read:

Stella reached for the telephone receiver. The night clerk at the C.P.R. depot told her the first train she could take left at six in the morning. That meant reaching the Springs at nine-thirty. Nine and a half hours to sit with idle hands, in suspense. She did not knew what tragic dÉnouement awaited there, what she could do once she reached there. She knew only that a fever of impatience burned in her. The message had strung her suddenly taut, as if a crisis had arisen in which willy-nilly she must take a hand.

So, groping for the relief of action, some method of spanning that nine hours' wait, her eye fell upon a card tucked beside the telephone case. She held it between, finger and thumb, her brows puckered.

She took down the receiver again and asked for Seymour 9X.

"Western Taxi," a man's voice drawled.

"I want to reach Roaring Hot Springs in the shortest time possible," she told him rather breathlessly. "Can you furnish me a machine and a reliable chauffeur?"

"Roaring Springs?" he repeated. "How many passengers?"

"One. Myself."

"Just a minute."

She heard a faint burble of talk away at the other end of the wire. Then the same voice speaking crisply.

"We gotta big six roadster, and a first-class driver. It'll cost you seventy-five dollars—in advance."

"Your money will be waiting for you here," she answered calmly. "How soon can you bring the car around to the Hotel Granada?"

"In ten minutes, if you say so."

"Say twenty minutes, then."

"All right."

She dressed herself, took the elevator down to the lobby, instructed the night clerk to have a maid pack her trunk and send it by express to Hopyard, care of St. Allwoods Hotel on the lake. Then she walked out to the broad-stepped carriage entrance.

A low-hung long-hooded, yellow car stood there, exhaust purring faintly. She paid the driver, sank into the soft upholstering beside him, and the big six slid out into the street. There was no traffic. In a few minutes they were on the outskirts of the city, the long asphalt ribbon of King's Way lying like a silver band between green, bushy walls. They crossed the last car track. The driver spoke to her out of one corner of his mouth.

"Wanna make time, huh?"

"I want to get to Roaring Lake as quickly as you can drive, without taking chances."

"I know the road pretty well," he assured her. "Drove a party clear to Rosebud day before yesterday. I'll do the best I can. Can't drive too fast at night. Too smoky."

She could not gage his conception of real speed if the gait he struck was not "too fast." They were through New Westminster and rolling across the Fraser bridge before she was well settled in the seat, breasting the road with a lurch and a swing at the curves, a noise under that long hood like giant bees in an empty barrel.

Ninety miles of road good, bad and indifferent, forest and farm and rolling hill, and the swamps of Sumas Prairie, lies between Vancouver and Roaring Lake. At four in the morning, with dawn an hour old, they woke the Rosebud ferryman to cross the river. Twenty minutes after that Stella was stepping stiffly out of the machine before Roaring Springs hospital. The doctor's Chinaman was abroad in the garden. She beckoned him.

"You sabe Mr. Benton—Charlie Benton?" she asked. "He in doctor's house?"

The Chinaman pointed across the road. "Mist Bentle obah dah," he said. "Velly much sick. Missa Bentle lib dah, all same gleen house."

Stella ran across the way. The front door of the green cottage stood wide. An electric drop light burned in the front room, though it was broad day. When she crossed the threshold, she saw Linda sitting in a chair, her arms folded on the table-edge, her head resting on her hands. She was asleep, and she did not raise her head till Stella shook her shoulder.

Linda Abbey had been a pretty girl, very fair, with apple-blossom skin and a wonderfully expressive face. It gave Stella a shock to see her now, to gage her suffering by the havoc it had wrought. Linda looked old, haggard, drawn. There was a weary droop to her mouth, her eyes were dull, lifeless, just as one might look who is utterly exhausted in mind and body. Oddly enough, she spoke first of something irrelevant, inconsequential.

"I fell asleep," she said heavily. "What time is it?"

Stella looked at her watch.

"Half-past four," she answered. "How is Charlie? What happened to him?"

"Monohan shot him."

Stella caught her breath. She hadn't been prepared for that.

"Is he—is he—" she could not utter the words.

"He'll get better. Wait." Linda rose stiffly from her seat. A door in one side of the room stood ajar. She opened it, and Stella, looking over her shoulder, saw her brother's tousled head on a pillow. A nurse in uniform sat beside his bed. Linda closed the door silently.

"Come into the kitchen where we won't make a noise," she whispered.

A fire burned in the kitchen stove. Linda sank into a willow rocker.

"I'm weary as Atlas," she said. "I've been fretting for so long. Then late yesterday afternoon they brought him home to me—like that. The doctor was probing for the bullet when I wired you. I was in a panic then, I think. Half-past four! How did you get here so soon? How could you? There's no train."

Stella told her.

"Why should Monohan shoot him?" she broke out. "For God's sake, talk, Linda!"

There was a curious impersonality in Linda's manner, as if she stood aloof from it all, as if the fire of her vitality had burned out. She lay back in her chair with eyelids drooping, speaking in dull, lifeless tones.

"Monohan shot him because Charlie came on him in the woods setting a fresh fire. They've suspected him, or some one in his pay, of that, and they've been watching. There were two other men with Charlie, so there is no mistake. Monohan got away. That's all I know. Oh, but I'm tired. I've been hanging on to myself for so long. About daylight, after we knew for sure that Charlie was over the hill, something seemed to let go in me. I'm awful glad you came, Stella. Can you make a cup of tea?"

Stella could and did, but she drank none of it herself. A dead weight of apprehension lay like lead in her breast. Her conscience pointed a deadly finger. First Billy Dale, now her brother, and, sandwiched in between, the loosed fire furies which were taking toll in bodily injury and ruinous loss.

Yet she was helpless. The matter was wholly out of her hands, and she stood aghast before it, much as the small child stands aghast before the burning house he has fired by accident.

Fyfe next. That was the ultimate, the culmination, which would leave her forever transfixed with remorseful horror. The fact that already the machinery of the law which would eventually bring Monohan to book for the double lawlessness of arson and attempted homicide must be in motion, that the Provincial police would be hard on his trail, did not occur to her. She could only visualize him progressing step by step from one lawless deed to another. And in her mind every step led to Jack Fyfe, who had made a mock of him. She found her hands clenching till the nails dug deep.

Linda's head drooped over the teacup. Her eyelids blinked.

"Dear," Stella said tenderly, "come and lie down. You're worn out."

"Perhaps I'd better," Linda muttered. "There's another room in there."

Stella tucked the weary girl into the bed, and went back to the kitchen, and sat down in the willow rocker. After another hour the nurse came out and prepared her own breakfast. Benton was still sleeping. He was in no danger, the nurse told Stella. The bullet had driven cleanly through his body, missing as by a miracle any vital part, and lodged in the muscles of his back, whence the surgeon had removed it. Though weak from shock, loss of blood, excitement, he had rallied splendidly, and fallen into a normal sleep.

Later the doctor confirmed this. He made light of the wound. One couldn't kill a young man as full of vitality as Charlie Benton with an axe, he informed Stella with an optimistic smile. Which lifted one burden from her mind.

The night nurse went away, and another from the hospital took her place. Benton slept; Linda slept. The house was very quiet. To Stella, brooding in that kitchen chair, it became oppressive, that funeral hush. When it was drawing near ten o'clock, she walked up the road past the corner store and post-office, and so out to the end of the wharf.

The air was hot and heavy, pungent, gray with the smoke. Farther along, St. Allwoods bulked mistily amid its grounds. The crescent of shore line half a mile distant was wholly obscured. Up over the eastern mountain range the sun, high above the murk, hung like a bloody orange, rayless and round. No hotel guests strolled by pairs and groups along the bank. She could understand that no one would come for pleasure into that suffocating atmosphere. Caught in that great bowl of which the lake formed the watery bottom, the smoke eddied and rolled like a cloud of mist.

She stood a while gazing at the glassy surface of the lake where it spread to her vision a little way beyond the piles. Then she went back to the green cottage.

Benton lifted alert, recognizing eyes when she peeped in the bedroom door.

"Hello, Sis," he greeted in strangely subdued tones. "When did you blow in? I thought you'd deserted the sinking ship completely. Come on in."

She winced inwardly at his words, but made no outward sign, as she came up to his bedside. The nurse went out.

"Perhaps you'd better not talk?" she said.

"Oh, nonsense," he retorted feebly. "I'm all right. Sore as the mischief and weak. But I don't feel as bad as I might. Linda still asleep?"

"I think so," Stella answered.

"Poor kid," he breathed; "it's been tough on her. Well, I guess it's been tough on everybody. He turned out to be some bad actor, this Monohan party. I never did like the beggar. He was a little too high-handed in his smooth, kid-glove way. But I didn't suppose he'd try to burn up a million dollars' worth of timber to satisfy a grudge. Well, he put his foot in it proper at last. He'll get a good long jolt in the pen, if the boys don't beat the constables to him and take him to pieces."

"He did start the fire then?" Stella muttered.

"I guess so," Benton replied. "At any rate, he kept it going. Did it by his lonesome, too. Jack suspected that. We were watching for him as well as fighting fire. He'd come down from the head of the lake in that speed boat of his, and this time daylight caught him before he could get back to where he had her cached, after starting a string of little fires in the edge of my north limit. He had it in for me, too, you know; I batted him over the head with a pike-pole here at the wharf one day this spring, so he plunked me as soon as I hollered at him. I wish he'd done it earlier in the game. We might have saved a lot of good timber. As it was, we couldn't do much. Every time the wind changed, it would break out in a new place—too often to be accidental. Damn him!"

"How is it going to end, the fire?" Stella forced herself to ask. "Will you and Jack be able to save any timber?"

"If it should rain hard, and if in the meantime the boys keep it from jumping the fire-trails we've cut, I'll get by with most of mine," he said. "But Jack's done for. He won't have anything but his donkeys and gear and part of a cedar limit on the Tyee which isn't paid for. He had practically everything tied up in that big block of timber around the Point. Monohan made him spend money like water to hold his own. Jack's broke."

Stella's head drooped. Benton reached out an axe-calloused hand, all grimy and browned from the stress of fire fighting, and covered her soft fingers that rested on his bed.

"It's a pity everything's gone to pot like that, Stell," he said softly. "I've grown a lot wiser in human ways the last two years. You taught me a lot, and Jack a lot, and Linda the rest. It seems a blamed shame you and Jack came to a fork in the road. Oh, he never chirped. I've just guessed it the last few weeks. I owe him a lot that he'll never let me pay back in anything but good will. I hate to see him get the worst of it from every direction. He grins and doesn't say anything. But I know it hurts. There can't be anything much wrong between you two. Why don't you forget your petty larceny troubles and start all over again?"

"I can't," she whispered. "It wouldn't work. There's too many scars. Too much that's hard to forget."

"Well, you know about that better than I do," Benton said thoughtfully. "It all depends on how you feel."

The poignant truth of that struck miserably home to her. It was not a matter of reason or logic, of her making any sacrifice for her conscience sake. It depended solely upon the existence of an emotion she could not definitely invoke. She was torn by so many emotions, not one of which she could be sure was the vital, the necessary one. Her heart did not cry out for Jack Fyfe, except in a pitying tenderness, as she used to feel for Jack Junior when he bumped and bruised himself. She had felt that before and held it too weak a crutch to lean upon.

The nurse came in with a cup of broth for Benton, and Stella went away with a dumb ache in her breast, a leaden sinking of her spirits, and went out to sit on the porch steps. The minutes piled into hours, and noon came, when Linda wakened. Stella forced herself to swallow a cup of tea, to eat food; then she left Linda sitting with her husband and went back to the porch steps again.

As she sat there, a man dressed in the blue shirt and mackinaw trousers and high, calked boots of the logger turned in off the road, a burly woodsman that she recognized as one of Jack Fyfe's crew.

"Well," said he, "if it ain't Mrs. Jack. Say—ah—"

He broke off suddenly, a perplexed look on his face, an uneasiness, a hesitation in his manner.

"What is it, Barlow?" Stella asked kindly. "How is everything up the lake?"

It was common enough in her experience, that temporary embarrassment of a logger before her. She knew them for men with boyish souls, boyish instincts, rude simplicities of heart. Long ago she had revised those first superficial estimates of them as gross, hulking brutes who worked hard and drank harder, coarsened and calloused by their occupation. They had their weaknesses, but their virtues of abiding loyalty, their reckless generosity, their simple directness, were great indeed. They took their lives in their hands on skid-road and spring-board, that such as she might flourish. They did not understand that, but she did.

"What is it, Barlow?" she repeated. "Have you just come down the lake?"

"Yes'm," he answered. "Say, Jack don't happen to be here, does he?"

"No, he hasn't been here," she told him.

The man's face fell.

"What's wrong?" Stella demanded. She had a swift divination that something was wrong.

"Oh, I dunno's anythin's wrong, particular," Barlow replied. "Only—well, Lefty he sent me down to see if Jack was at the Springs. We ain't seen him for a couple uh days."

Her pulse quickened.

"And he has not come down the lake?"

"I guess not," the logger said. "Oh, I guess it's all right. Jack's pretty skookum in the woods. Only Lefty got uneasy. It's desperate hot and smoky up there."

"How did you come down? Are you going back soon?" she asked abruptly.

"I got the Waterbug," Barlow told her. "I'm goin' right straight back."

Stella looked out over the smoky lake and back at the logger again, a sudden resolution born of intolerable uncertainty, of a feeling that she could only characterize as fear, sprang full-fledged into her mind. "Wait for me," she said. "I'm going with you."