XXV

A few days subsequent to Andrew Daney's secret scuttling of the motor-boat Brutus, Nan Brent was amazed to receive a visit from him.

"Good-morning, Nan," he saluted her. "I have bad news for you."

"What, pray?" she managed to articulate. She wondered if Donald had been injured up in the woods.

"Your motor-boat's gone."

This was, indeed, bad news. Trouble showed in Nan's face.

"Gone where?" she faltered.

"n.o.body knows. It disappeared from the garbage-barge, alongside of which it was moored. I've had men searching for it two days, but we've given it up as lost. Was the Brutus, by any chance, insured against theft?"

"Certainly not."

"Well, the Tyee Lumber Company used reasonable care to conserve your property, and while there's a question whether the company's responsible for the loss of the boat if it's been stolen, even while under charter to us, nevertheless, you will be reimbursed for the value of the boat. Your father had it up for sale last year. Do you recall the price he was asking?"

"He was asking considerably less than he really believed the Brutus to be worth," Nan replied honestly. "He would have sold for fifteen hundred dollars, but the Brutus was worth at least twenty-five hundred. Values shrink, you know, when one requires ready cash. And I do not agree with you that no responsibility attaches to the Tyee Lumber Company, although, under the circ.u.mstances, it appears there is no necessity for argument."

"We'll pay twenty-five hundred rather than descend to argument," Daney replied crisply, "although personally I am of the opinion that two thousand would be ample." He coughed a propitiatory cough and looked round the Sawdust Pile appraisingly. "May I inquire, my girl," he asked presently, "what are your plans for the future?"

"Certainly, Mr. Daney. I have none."

"It would be a favor to the Tyee Lumber Company if you had, and that they contemplated removal to some other house. The Laird had planned originally to use the Sawdust Pile for a drying-yard"--he smiled faintly--"but abandoned the idea rather than interfere with your father's comfort. Of course, The Laird hasn't any more t.i.tle to the Sawdust Pile than you have--not as much, in fact, for I do believe you could make a squatter's right stick in any court. Just at present, however, we have greater need of the Sawdust Pile than ever. We're getting out quite a lot of airplane spruce for the British government, and since there's no doubt we'll be into the war ourselves one of these days, we'll have to furnish additional spruce for our own government. Spruce has to be air-dried, you know, to obtain the best results, and--well, we really need the Sawdust Pile. What will you take to abandon, it and leave us in undisputed possession?"

"Nothing, Mr. Daney."

"Nothing?"

"Precisely--nothing. We have always occupied it on The Laird's sufferance, so I do not think, Mr. Daney," she explained, with a faint smile, "that I shall turn pirate and ingrate now. If you will be good enough to bring me over twenty-five hundred dollars in cash to-day, I will give you a clearance for the loss of the Brutus and abandon the Sawdust Pile to you within the next three or four days."

His plan had worked so successfully that Daney was, for the moment, rendered incapable of speech.

"Will you be leaving Port Agnew?" he sputtered presently. "Or can I arrange to let you have a small house at a modest rental--"

She dissipated this verbal camouflage with a disdainful motion of her upflung hand.

"Thank you. I shall leave Port Agnew--forever. The loss of the Brutus makes my escape possible," she added ironically.

"May I suggest that you give no intimation of your intention to surrender this property?" he suggested eagerly. "If word of your plan to abandon got abroad, it might create an opportunity for some person to jump the Sawdust Pile and defy us to dispossess him."

Mr. Daney sought, by this subterfuge, to simulate an interest in the physical possession of the Sawdust Pile which he was far from feeling.

He congratulated himself, however, that, all in all, he had carried off his mission wonderfully well, and departed with a promise to bring over the money himself that very afternoon. Indeed, so delighted was he that it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from unburdening to The Laird, when the latter dropped in at the mill office that afternoon, the news that before the week should be out Nan Brent would be but a memory in Port Agnew. Later, he wondered how far from Port Agnew she would settle for a new start in life and whether she would leave a forwarding address. He resolved to ask her, and he did, when he reappeared at the Sawdust Pile that afternoon with the money to reimburse Nan for the loss of the Brutus.

"I haven't decided where I shall go, Mr. Daney," Nan informed him truthfully, "except that I shall betake myself some distance from the Pacific Coast--some place where the opportunities for meeting people who know me are nebulous, to say the least. And I shall leave no forwarding address. When I leave Port Agnew"--she looked Mr. Daney squarely in the eyes as she said this--"I shall see to it that no man, woman, or child in Port Agnew--not even Don McKaye or The Laird, who have been most kind to me--shall know where I have gone."

"I'm sorry matters have so shaped themselves in your life, poor girl, that you're feeling bitter," Mr. Daney replied, with genuine sympathy, notwithstanding the fact that he would have been distressed and puzzled had her bitterness been less genuine. In the realization that it _was_ genuine, he had a wild impulse to leap in the air and crack his ankles together for very joy. "Will I be seeing you again, Nan, before you leave?"

"Not unless the spirit moves you, Mr. Daney," she answered dryly. She had no dislike for Andrew Daney, but, since he was the husband of Mrs.

Daney and under that person's dominion, she distrusted him.

"Well then, I'll bid you good-by now, Nan," he announced. "I hope your lot will fall in pleasanter places than Port Agnew. Good-by, my dear girl, and good luck to you--always."

"Good-by, Mr. Daney," she replied. "Thank you for bringing the money over."

XXVI

By an apparent inconsistency in the natural order of human affairs, it seems that women are called upon far oftener than men to make the hardest sacrifices; also, the call finds them far more willing, if the sacrifice is demanded of them by love. Until Andrew Daney had appeared at the Sawdust Pile with the suddenness of a genie (and a singularly benevolent genie at that), Nan had spent many days wondering what fate the future held in store for her. With all the ardor of a prisoner, she had yearned to leave her jail, although she realized that freedom for her meant economic ruin. On the Sawdust Pile, she could exist on the income from the charter of the Brutus, for she had no rent to pay and no fuel to buy; her proximity to the sea, her little garden and a few chickens still further solved her economic problems. Away from the Sawdust Pile, however, life meant parting with her baby. She would have to place him in some sort of public inst.i.tution if she would be free to earn a living for them both, and she was not aware that she possessed any adaptability for any particular labor which would enable her to earn one hundred dollars a month, the minimum sum upon which she could, by the strictest economy, manage to exist and support her child. Too well she realized the difficulty which an inexperienced woman has in securing employment in an office or store at a wage which, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, may be termed lucrative, and, lacking funds wherewith to tide her over until she should acquire experience, or even until she should be fortunate enough to secure any kind of work, inevitable starvation faced her.

Her sole a.s.set was her voice; she had a vague hope that if she could ever acquire sufficient money to go to New York and buy herself just sufficient clothing to look well dressed and financially independent, she might induce some vaudeville impresario to permit her to spend fifteen minutes twice or four times daily, singing old-fashioned songs to the proletariat at something better than a living wage. She had an idea for a turn to be ent.i.tled, "Songs of the 'Sixties."

The arrival of Andrew Daney with twenty-five hundred dollars might have been likened to an eleventh-hour reprieve for a condemned murderer. Twenty-five hundred dollars! Why, she and Don could live two years on that! She was free--at last! The knowledge exalted her--in the reaction from a week of contemplating a drab, barren future, she gave no thought to the extreme unlikelihood of anyone's daring to steal a forty-foot motor-boat on a coast where harbors are so few and far between as they are on the Pacific. Had old Caleb been alive, he would have informed her that such action was a.n.a.logous to the theft of a hot stove, and that no business man possessed of a grain of common sense would have hastened to reimburse her for the loss after an inconsequential search of only two days. Had she been more worldly wise, she would have known that business men do not part with twenty-five hundred dollars that readily--otherwise, they would not be business men and would not be possessed of twenty-five hundred dollars. Nan only realized that, in handing her a roll of bank-notes with a rubber band round them, Andrew Daney had figuratively given her the key to her prison, against the bars of which her soul had beaten for three long years.

Now, it is doubtful whether any woman ever loved a man without feeling fully a.s.sured that she, more than any other person, was better equipped to decide exactly what was best for that man. Her woman's intuition told Nan that Donald McKaye was not to be depended upon to conserve the honor of the McKaye family by refraining from considering an alliance with her. Also, knowing full well the pa.s.sionate yearnings of her own heart and the weakness of her economic position, she shrank from submitting herself to the task of repelling his advances. Where he was concerned, she feared her own weakness--she, who had endured the brutality of the world, could not endure that the world's brutality should be visited upon him because of his love for her.

Strong of will, self-reliant, a born fighter, and as stiff-necked as his father, his yearning to possess her, coupled with his instinct for fair play, might and probably would lead him to tell the world to go hang, that he would think for himself and take his happiness where he found it. By all means, this must be prevented. Nan felt that she could not permit him to risk making a sorry mess of a life of promise.

Consumed with such thoughts as these, it was obvious that Nan should pursue but one course--that is, leave Port Agnew unannounced and endeavor to hide herself where Donald McKaye would never find her. In this high resolve, once taken, she did not falter; she even declined to risk rousing the suspicions of the townspeople by appearing at the general store to purchase badly needed articles of clothing for herself and her child. She resolved to leave Port Agnew in the best clothes she had, merely pausing a few days in her flight--at Vancouver, perhaps--to shop, and then continuing on to New York.

On the morning of her departure, the butcher's boy, calling for an order, agreed, for fifty cents, to transport her one small trunk on his cart to the station. The little white house which she and her father had built with so much pride and delight, she left furnished as it was and in perfect order. As she stood at the front door and looked back for the last time, the ticking of the clock in the tiny dining-and-living room answered her mute, "Good-by, little house; good-by," and, though her heart was full enough, she kept back the tears until she saw the flag flying bravely at the cupola.

"Oh, my love, my love!" she sobbed. "I mustn't leave it flying there, flaunting my desertion in your dear eyes."

Blinded by her tears, she groped her way back to the house, hauled down the flag, furled it, and laid it away in a bureau drawer. And this time, when she left the house, she did not look back.

At the station, she purchased a ticket for Seattle and checked her trunk at the baggage-room counter. As she turned from the counter and started for the waiting-room, she caught the interested eyes of old Hector McKaye bent upon her. He lifted his hat and walked over to her.

"I happened to be looking down at the Sawdust Pile when you hauled your flag down this morning," he explained, in a low voice. "So I knew you were going away. That's why I'm here." To this extraordinary speech, the girl merely replied with an inquiring look. "I wonder if you will permit me to be as kind to you as I can," he continued. "I know it sounds a bit blunt and vulgar to offer you money, but when one needs money--"

"I have sufficient for my present needs," she replied. "Mr. Daney has paid me for the loss of my motor-boat, you know. You are very kind; but I think I shall have no need to impose further on your generosity.

I think the twenty-five hundred dollars will last me nicely until I have made a new start in life."

"Ah!" The Laird breathed softly, "Twenty-five hundred dollars. Yes, yes! So he did; so he did! And are you leaving Port Agnew indefinitely, Nan?"

"Forever," she replied. "We have robbed you of the ground for a drying-yard for nearly ten years, but this morning the Sawdust Pile is yours."

"Bless my soul!" The Laird e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Why, we are not at all in distress for more drying-s.p.a.ce."

"Mr. Daney intimated that you were. He asked me how much I would take to abandon my squatter's right, but I declined to charge you a single cent." She smiled up at him a ghost of her sweet, old-time whimsical smile. "It was the first opportunity I had to be magnanimous to the McKaye family, and I hastened to take advantage of it. I merely turned the key in the lock and departed."

"Daney has been a trifle too zealous for the Tyee interests, I fear,"

he replied gently. "And where do you plan to live?"