“How long has he been drinking to excess?”
“About ten years, I think. Of course, he would always take a few drinks with the men around pay-day, but after Mother died, he began taking his drinks between pay-days. Then he took to going down to Sequoia on Saturday nights and coming back on the mad-train, the maddest of the lot. I suppose he was lonely, too. He didn't get real bad, however, till about two years ago.”
“Just about the time my father's eyes began to fail him and he ceased coming up into the woods to jack Mac up? So he let the brakes go and started to coast, and now he's reached the bottom! I couldn't get him on the telephone to-day or yesterday. I suppose he was down in Arcata, liquoring up.”
She nodded miserably.
“Well, we have to get logs to the mill, and we can't get them with old John Barleycorn for a woods-boss, Moira. So we're going to change woods-bosses, and the new woods-boss will not be driven off the job, because I'm going to stay up here a couple of weeks and break him in myself. By the way, is Mac ugly in his cups?”
“Thank God, no,” she answered fervently. “Drunk or sober, he has never said an unkind word to me.”
“But how do you manage to get money to clothe yourself? Sinclair tells me Mac needs every cent of his two hundred and fifty dollars a month to enjoy himself.”
“I used to steal from him,” the girl admitted. “Then I grew ashamed of that, and for the past six months I've been earning my own living. Mr. Sinclair was very kind. He gave me a job waiting on table in the camp dining room. You see, I had to have something here. I couldn't leave my father. He had to have somebody to take care of him. Don't you see, Mr. Bryce?”
“Sinclair is a fuzzy old fool,” Bryce declared with emphasis. “The idea of our woods-boss's daughter slinging hash to lumberjacks. Poor Moira!”
He took one of her hands in his, noting the callous spots on the plump palm, the thick finger-joints that hinted so of toil, the nails that had never been manicured save by Moira herself. “Do you remember when I was a boy, Moira, how I used to come up to the logging-camps to hunt and fish? I always lived with the McTavishes then. And in September, when the huckleberries were ripe, we used to go out and pick them together. Poor Moira! Why, we're old pals, and I'll be shot if I'm going to see you suffer.”