CHAPTER XXVI

A Woman of Business

NELL was very happy, and prospering beyond her wildest dreams.

Fortunately for her the early part of the winter was exceptionally mild and open, so that mining operations went busily forward, and she had no lack of customers nightly to consume the food which she spent her days in cooking.

The great burden of maintaining the family rested almost entirely upon her, for Mrs. Lorimer was so ill that most of Gertrude’s time was taken up in nursing and caring for the poor invalid. Patsey was away all day at Bratley, except on Saturdays, when he was chopping and hauling wood, or on Sundays, when he took Teddy and Flossie over to the Settlement in the wood-truck, to attend the Sunday School which was held there in the tin-roofed mission hall by the smelter works.

Despite her hard work, and the drudgery of her days, Nell carried a bright face all the time, feeling herself supremely blessed in having so many depending on her, so many to love, and to love her in return.

She possessed, too, the happy knack of finding employment for everyone, so Teddy, aged five, and little Abe, the baby, both had their accustomed tasks, which they performed with a zest and energy worthy of great undertakings.

Abe was two years and a half old now, a fine sturdy youngster, who loved nothing better than movement of some kind, so he and Teddy between them dragged wood into the kitchen from the wood shed, with much snorting and hissing, in imitation of the engines arriving and starting at the depot.

Both of the small boys yielded Nell a whole-hearted devotion, and followed her about nearly all day long. But it was Flossie’s love which was the most precious to Nell, and had her life been twice as hard, she would still have felt herself amply repaid in the affection she received from her adopted family.

Dr. Russell came regularly once a week to see Mrs. Lorimer, who grew rather worse than better as the weeks went on.

Mrs. Nichols had been to see them once, but she was ailing herself, and not able to get out much.

When Christmas had passed, and the new year had begun, a heavy snow fell, and lay for three weeks. Then came a check in Nell’s business, so many of her customers took holiday, and went off to the towns until the weather broke again.

She was rather glad of the slack time, since it gave her a breathing spell, and enabled her to do many things which were so impossible when in full tide of work.

Sometimes she sighed a little ruefully over her inability to find more time for reading, and told herself that she would soon forget what little she had learned before. But in reality she was making great strides in all sorts of knowledge, and learning some of the deep lessons of life, which no books could have taught her.

The loft where she and Flossie slept was almost as bare, although more weather-tight than the one in which she had slept at the Lone House. But Nell had put her bed near the pipe of the kitchen stove, which came up through the loft, and so she and Flossie were comfortably warm even in the bitterest weather.

One use Nell made of her spare time was to rearrange her premises for the greater convenience of her work. She got Sam Peters to make her a big store cupboard, which was placed in one corner of the kitchen, and saved her endless runs into the sitting-room, where formerly she had been obliged to keep her groceries, tubs of lard, and that sort of thing. Then she made a great stock of marmalade, for the huckleberry jam was almost gone, and her store of apples, which had been brought from Lorimer’s Clearing, was dwindling fast.

The wood shed was getting empty too, for although Patsey worked hard all day Saturday, he could not in one day supply the drain of seven. So, drawing a pair of old woollen stockings over her shoes, Nell sallied out to the clear crisp cold of the winter afternoons, armed with an axe, a saw, and an old box on runners which did duty for a sledge, and enjoyed blissful hours in chopping and sawing among the dead wood on the slope behind the house.

“Nell, dear, you have all the drudgery; it is too bad! I would come and help, only I can’t leave mother,” Gertrude said, on the first afternoon when Nell returned, flushed and sparkling, from her labours in the snow.

“It isn’t drudgery, it is a real holiday, only I wish the children could enjoy it too,” Nell answered wistfully, for the two little boys and Flossie had bad colds, and were not able to stir out of doors.

“I’m afraid I should not think it such a treat as you do,” said Gertrude, shivering a little.

She was looking pale and thin, while there were dark rings round her eyes, brought there by overmuch confinement in a sick-room.

“Then it is a very good thing that I am the one who is free to go. I had been feeling rather mean, because I was having all the fun, but this, of course, restores the balance,” laughed Nell, as she divested herself of her outdoor garments.

Every day for a week she went wood-hauling in the afternoons. Then a thaw set in, her customers came back, and the old rush began.

One evening, when February was well on its way, a member of the Syndicate dropped in late to buy his supper, and then remained to talk.

He was an elderly man, who should have been rich enough by this time to have ceased living such a toilsome life, only the trouble was that although he could earn as much money as any man, he could not save it. This individual went by the name of Ike, and Nell could never discover that he had any other. She always called him Mr. Ike, a circumstance which appeared to afford him great amusement. But she had long since found that “With what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again,” was as true in the simple things of life as in the great issues of the soul; and because she always treated her customers with a ceremonious civility, she invariably received from them a similar courtesy in return.

“Good evening, Miss Hamblyn,” said the miner, lifting his cap with a flourish when he entered the room, then dropping it back on his head with a weary air as he subsided on to the bench near the door.

“Good evening, Mr. Ike. Have you been taking a holiday?” she asked; for she had not seen Ike, who was one of her most regular customers, for nearly a fortnight.

“Yes; and I’ve been quite a considerable way too. Had a run down to Vancouver City, and spent ten days or more loafing round hearing the news.”

“You must have found the city pretty lively after Camp’s Gulch,” remarked Nell, as she ladled a pint of soup into the miner’s tin can.

“It was a sight too lively for me. I suppose I must be getting old and rusty, for I find I ain’t half nimble enough to keep up with city folks nowadays,” he answered, rather gruffly; by which she understood that he had been gambling, and had probably lost almost all the cash he had taken with him, and had returned with empty pockets.

“You would not find it so cold in Vancouver City as here among the hills?” she asked.

“It was cold enough. A sharper spell of winter weather than we often get in these parts,” he answered. Then, suddenly remembering an item of news which might interest her, he lifted his head and became talkative. “I heard a little about a friend of yours away down in the city,” he said, with a short gruff laugh.

“A friend of mine? But I don’t know anyone in Vancouver City,” she said, in surprise, then suddenly shivered, thinking that he might be referring to Doss Umpey.

“Not by sight, perhaps, for I don’t think you saw him, not that time when you had most to do with him, leastwise.” And Ike paused to relieve his feelings with a rumbling laugh.

“What do you mean?” demanded Nell, in a bewildered tone.

“I mean that I happened on news of Dick Brunsen, and he’s dead,” said Ike, stating the fact rather as if it were good news than otherwise.

But Nell turned ghastly white, and seized hold of the table to keep herself from falling, while she echoed faintly—

“Dead? How?”

Ike was sampling his soup, so failed to notice her agitation. Taking a deep draught from the tin can, he then wiped his lips on his jacket sleeve, and proceeded to answer her questions.

“Oh, he died real game. I always said he was a lad of parts, only the trouble was he’d got such a lot of misdirected energy that it was bound to get him into trouble sooner or later. He’d got two pals, one was his father, the veriest old hypocrite that ever drew breath, and the other was a chap they called Doss Umpey, a pretty good match for Brunsen senior by all accounts. A long time ago, when I was a young man, they two and an Irishman named Logan were up to no end of law-breaking, smuggling across the border, setting up coaches, and all that sort of thing; then Logan got pinched, and the other two turned virtuous, or pretended to.”

Nell nodded. So much of Doss Umpey’s past she already knew from Mrs. Nichols, but she was wondering what fresh revelations were to be made by Ike, or what he would say if she were to tell him that she had lived so long at the Lone House with the old man, believing him to be really her grandfather, and not merely the stepfather of her mother.

Ike had paused for another draught of soup; when it was swallowed he went on with his story.

“It seems that when we lifted Master Dick out of that Chinaman’s coffin, where you’d chained him up so secure, and he had paid back that little lump of dollars out of which he had cheated us, he and the two old chaps tracked off to Nelson, and worked there for awhile, with the eyes of the police on them all the time. Then suddenly they disappeared, and when next they were heard of, it was at Skeena, and they were giving it out that they had struck it rich on the shores of the Babine Lake, an uncertain number of miles from Skeena, and in a district pretty thickly sprinkled with Tacla Indians.”

“But Skeena is very cold, isn’t it?” asked Nell, thinking how Doss Umpey used to grumble about the cold during the long winters on Blue Bird Ridge.

“Rayther nippy, but it doesn’t count for much if you’ve wintered at Klondike, as I have,” replied Ike, taking another pull at the soup, which nearly emptied the can.

Nell shivered. She had the feeling of wanting to pull the information out of him, but Ike was not the sort of man to be hurried over any story he had to tell, so she was forced to wait patiently, and let him go his own way.

“There was a man stopping at Carter’s—he was working at Cate’s shipyard just then, but he had been in Skeena a month before, and had left the day after the thing happened,” went on Ike.

“What happened?” asked Nell, with a little stamp of her foot, for his slowness of narration thoroughly exasperated her.

“The way young Dick pegged out game, of course. The three of them had been showing round a couple of nuggets, and talking big about the bucketfuls of the same stuff that might be picked up for the asking on a little stream that emptied into the Babine Lake, and, of course, they pretty soon got a crowd together to go with them, every man armed, for the Tacla Indians are an awkward lot to deal with. So they started, and were three days out from Skeena when trouble began, for a rumour went round that the nuggets hadn’t been found on the Babine at all, but had been stolen from a man what had brought them down from Juneau, and taken too much liquor on board at Skeena to be able to look after his own property. The crowd was a pretty rough one, and they pretty soon made the three stand out.”

“What is that?” asked Nell, faintly.

Ike gave another rumbling laugh. “It about amounts to standing up to be shot at. The old men hadn’t got much fight left in them, but young Dick wasn’t made like that, and they say he fought like ten men rolled in one, and knocked the crowd over in so many places all at once, that at last they just bowled him over in self-defence, as you may say.”

“Do you mean he was shot?” asked Nell, in a horrified whisper.

“That is what it amounts to, I suppose, though I never heard anyone give it a name. In fact, it might prove extremely awkward for some of that crowd, if it could be proved which of them had let off their revolvers on that occasion. Law is law in Canada, you know; and the police are about as smart as they make ’em, but they haven’t got eyes in the back of their heads, and they can’t be in fifty different places at once, so accidents do occur once in a while,” said Ike, with a big sigh; after which he finished his soup, and decided to have another pint to take away with him.

“Were they all killed?” asked Nell, whose very teeth were chattering.

Ike shook his head. “There was no particulars come through regarding the old’uns. But the worst of it was that the story about gold on the Babine was true, as the crowd found when they got there, only the Indians was there too, and had their eyes skinned. So that of the thirty or forty what went, only five came back to Skeena.”

Nell covered her face with her hands, and sobbed from sheer horror, and sympathy with the poor victim of such a tragic fate. She had no especial pity for the crowd so nearly wiped out by Tacla Indians, for their end had in it a sort of retributive justice which appealed to her ideas of fitness.

“There now, don’t you take on about a fellow being wiped out as was born to be hanged, and only missed his destiny by a fluke, as you may say.”

There was considerable consternation in Ike’s tone, and he gazed at her with so much concern that she must have laughed at his lugubrious expression had her mood not been so far removed from merriment just then.

“It is such a dreadful story!” she gasped, her voice broken and unsteady.

“There are worse things happening in the world every day. Mind you, if the fellow had not cheated people before, they would not have been so likely to think he was cheating them then,” said Ike, rising to his feet, and laying some money on the kitchen table, which served Nell as a counter.

She opened the stout leather bag which hung from her waist to give him change, while words from Holy Writ beat themselves out in her brain, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

“Now, don’t you go a-crying yourself blind over Dick Brunsen, because, as I said before, he wasn’t worth it,” said Ike, as he took his change and prepared to depart.

Nell shook her head in a dubious fashion, which might have been translated in several ways, but she made no other remark, save a polite good evening; and Ike went away pondering on the soft-heartedness of girls in general, and of this one in particular, who could sob over the end of a low-down cheat like young Dick Brunsen.

Nell shed a good many tears during the next few days over that story of wilderness tragedy, and there was no doubt at all in her own mind that Doss Umpey and the elder Brunsen must have shared the fate of young Dick; or at any rate had they escaped being shot as he was, most probably they fell victims to the Indians later.

She said no word to Gertrude about the incident. There had never been any inducement to speak much of her past to the Lorimers. Since she could say so little in praise of Doss Umpey, she had carefully refrained from speaking of him at all to anyone, except Mrs. Nichols, who already knew more about him than Nell did herself.

Just now, too, Gertrude had enough sorrow of her own to bear, for Dr. Russell had spoken plainly of Mrs. Lorimer’s condition, and said that a few weeks would probably end the poor woman’s sufferings. He was very kind to them, doing everything in his power for the comfort of the invalid; but he could not lift or lessen the strain of Gertrude’s life, and Nell often looked at her in fear and trembling, wondering what they would do if she broke down.

Then, one day, just when it seemed the strain was as great as it could be, Mrs. Nichols came up from Bratley and announced that she had come on a good long visit, because she felt that she needed change of air and scene.

Nothing could have been more opportune than her coming, and if the doctor was at the bottom of it, neither he nor Mrs. Nichols ever mentioned the fact.

So the days wore on. Each week the sun shone with more strength; the sap rose in the forests, and the millions of leaf buds grew and swelled in token that summer was coming.

Meanwhile Nell toiled steadily for her adopted family, so content with the love that was her daily and hourly reward, as never to guess or to speculate concerning the future, and what it might bring her.