She studied the blue-print closely. Its five feet of length embraced all
the west shore of the lake, from the outflowing of Roaring River to the
incoming Tyee at the head. Each camp was lettered in with pencil. But
her attention focussed chiefly on the timber limits ranging north and
south from their home, and she noted two details: that while the limits
marked A-M Co. were impartially distributed from Cottonwood north, the
squares marked J.H. Fyfe lay in a solid block about Cougar Bay,--save
for that long tongue of a limit where she had that day noted the new
camp. That thrust like the haft of a spear into the heart of Fyfe's
timberland.
There was the Abbey-Monohan cottage, the three limits her brother
controlled lying up against Fyfe's southern boundary. Up around the
mouth of the Tyee spread the vast checkerboard of Abbey-Monohan limits,
and beyond that, on the eastern bank of the river, a single
block,--Fyfe's cedar limit,--the camp he thought he would close down.
Why? Immediately the query shaped in her mind. Monohan was concentrating
his men and machinery at the lake head. Fyfe proposed to shut down a
camp but well-established; established because cedar was climbing in
price, an empty market clamoring for cedar logs. Why?
Was there aught of significance in that new camp of Monohan's so near
by; that sudden activity on ground that bisected her husband's property?
A freak limit of timber so poor that Lefty Howe said it could only be
logged at a loss.
She sighed and went out to give dinner orders to Sam Foo. If she could
only go to her husband and talk as they had been able to talk things
over at first. But there had grown up between them a deadly restraint.
She supposed that was inevitable. Both chafed under conditions they
could not change or would not for stubbornness and pride.
It made a deep impression on her, all these successive, disassociated
finger posts, pointing one and all to things under the surface, to
motives and potentialities she had not glimpsed before and could only
guess at now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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