"In time, yes," he said. "But when you go into the open market with logs, you don't always find a buyer right off the reel. I'd have to hire 'em towed from here to Vancouver, and there's some bad water to get over. Time is money to me right now, Stell. If the thing dragged over two or three months, by the time they were sold and all expenses paid, I might not have anything left. I'm in debt for supplies, behind in wages. When it looks like a man's losing, everybody jumps him. That's business. I may have my outfit seized and sold up if I fall down on this delivery and fail to square up accounts right away. Damn it, if you hadn't given Paul Abbey the cold turn-down, I might have got a boost over this hill. You were certainly a chump."
"I'm not a mere pawn in your game yet," she flared hotly. "I suppose you'd trade me for logs enough to complete your contract and consider it a good bargain."
"Oh, piffle," he answered coolly. "What's the use talking like that. It's your game as much as mine. Where do you get off, if I go broke? You might have done a heap worse. Paul's a good head. A girl that hasn't anything but her looks to get through the world on hasn't any business overlooking a bet like that. Nine girls out of ten marry for what there is in it, anyhow."
"Thank you," she replied angrily. "I'm not in the market on that basis."
"All this stuff about ideal love and soul communion and perfect mating is pure bunk, it seems to me," Charlie tacked off on a new course of thought. "A man and a woman somewhere near of an age generally hit it off all right, if they've got common horse sense—and income enough so they don't have to squabble eternally about where the next new hat and suit's coming from. It's the coin that counts most of all. It sure is, Sis. It's me that knows it, right now."
He sat a minute or two longer, again preoccupied with his problems.
"Well," he said at last, "I've got to get action somehow. If I could get about thirty men and another donkey for three weeks, I'd make it."
He went outside. Up in the near woods the whine of the saws and the sounds of chopping kept measured beat. It was late in the forenoon, and Stella was hard about her dinner preparations. Contract or no contract, money or no money, men must eat. That fact loomed biggest on her daily schedule, left her no room to think overlong of other things. Her huff over, she felt rather sorry for Charlie, a feeling accentuated by sight of him humped on a log in the sun, too engrossed in his perplexities to be where he normally was at that hour, in the thick of the logging, working harder than any of his men.
A little later she saw him put off from the float in the Chickamin's dinghy. When the crew came to dinner, he had not returned. Nor was he back when they went out again at one.
Near mid-afternoon, however, he strode into the kitchen, wearing the look of a conqueror.