"Mamma's been priming him," Isabel nodded. "I've heard her talk about the possibility—since you've been supposed to be in deep water. She thinks Bob's a perfect gentleman—even if his father isn't quite—when Robert's merely a good little spender. Poor old daddy. He's the best of the lot, because he just naturally can't help being a ruthless old pirate, and he never held a grudge in his life against any one who beat him at his own game. He's a bear at making money and mom's a bear in society, and they've raised Bob and Laska and me to be bearcats of one sort and another too. Some combination."
Isabel applied herself to the salad for half a minute.
"Suppose you go aboard the yacht with me and I'll introduce you to dad," she proposed mischievously to Andy.
"I have no objection," he returned calmly. "Neither have I the slightest desire to meet your male parent—whose only merit in my eyes is that he is your parent. I couldn't use him in my business, and it's a cinch he couldn't use me in his."
"He might," Isabel teased. "He has lots of irons in the fire and loads of money. You sure did marry money, Andy, old scout."
"Well, I have irons in the fire myself," Andy retorted imperturbably. "And without any hankering for loads of money I expect to get all I need."
The pair of them sauntered off after dinner, still facetiously debating what they called the possibilities of a Hall-Wall entente. Rod and Mary went out on the porch. The rapids murmured in a rising key. Young Rod, who had learned to read under his mother's tutelage, curled up in a chair with a book of fairy tales. The sun dipped below the jagged backbone of Vancouver Island and the afterglow lingered, a radiant tinge over the blurred slopes that lifted to high mountains on the mainland shore.
About the head of the bay were clustered compactly the numerous portable buildings of the camp,—bunk houses, messhouses, storeroom, isolated small dwellings. A short slope bright with low salal brush dipped to the water. On that gentle pitch numbers of the men often clustered in the evening, sitting on their haunches, lying stretched on their backs, spinning Rabelaisian yarns, Homeric tales out of their woods experience, talking about their work, the war, economics,—all the infinite variety of futile gabble and profound wisdom that is embodied in a group of skilled men following a risky outdoor calling. The Pacific Coast logger is no mere beast of burden. He is master of an intricate technique as applied to the handling of enormous timbers by powerful and complicated machinery. The B.C. woods is no place for the sluggish of brain or hand.
Wall himself was heavily interested in timber and had been for years. There were probably fifty men in Rod's crew who had drawn Wall pay checks in their time. And there was not a man there but knew the Wall camps and knew little good of them. They had an evil reputation. Probably Wall himself had never seen the interior of a single one of his camps. He had no personal interest in such matters,—only in results. He got results through superintendents, who in turn passed the buck to logging bosses. And these again, because their jobs depended on high average production, drove without mercy so long as they could hold the job. There was a sardonic saying along the coast that every Wall camp always had three crews: one coming, one going, and one on the job.
The loggers frankly hated Wall and all his works. Whereas they liked Rod Norquay. Moreover, now in the third year of Rod's régime, very nearly every man there understood the situation. They were for him, to a man. Rod represented to them the very antithesis of everything John P. Wall stood for. And no mean portion of Rod's crew were intellectually capable and emotionally impelled to make out a very black case against the John P. Walls of industry.