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The tin cup struck the bottom of the flour barrel. Mary Baird remained motionless, bent far over, her arm inside, until limp fingers released the cup. Then she slumped to the floor and stared out the window.

Snow was heaped high there, higher than the eaves, and beyond and above was the white slope of a mountain. All around the cabin were great Alaskan peaks, except in one narrow place through which the sea pushed its tides to the door.

Mary was still on the rough hewed floor when Jim came from up the river. The cabin was dark now and she did not answer his startled cry. He lighted the lamp and saw her.

“You hurt?” he called.

She shook her head. Jim knelt beside her. “Feeling sick?” he asked tenderly.

“The flour is most gone,” Mary whispered.

Jim laughed. “The tug will come. It’s long past due.”

Mary rose to her feet. Her slender young body moved without effort, but without life. A hand lifted wearily to brush back her dark crinkling hair.

“The tug isn’t coming,” she said. “It never was. There’s no wages. There never was any wages. It’s like it’s always been. Only now there isn’t even anything to eat.”

“Where you get these crazy ideas?” Jim demanded.

“A man was here. He told me.”

For four months she and Jim Baird had not seen any other human being, and she spoke of a visitor without excitement.

“A man here!” Jim repeated incredulously.

“He was caretaker at the other mine, in Kogish Bay.”

Mary looked at her husband now. His boyish face was creased by an unfamiliar frown as he strove to understand.

“He thinks Alaska’s no good too,” she said. “Without any wages, he can’t pay his fare back to the States. So he’s rowing. A thousand miles. In winter. Rowing all the way to Seattle. Told me he’d rather drown doing it than starve here.”

Jim moved uneasily to the stove and warmed his hands. He was only twenty-three but his thick fingers were crooked from gripping tools and his shoulders had the slope of great strength.

“This man came up the inlet just to let us know,” Mary said. “He wouldn’t have, only he’d heard a woman was here. ‘It takes a good man to take care of himself in this God-forsaken country,’ he said. ‘He’s got to be damned good to take care of himself and a woman too.’ ”

Mary was breathing faster. Her body tautened and her dark head lifted.

“I laughed when he told me that,” she said. “I don’t know how I could, but I laughed. ‘I’ve got a man to take care of me,’ I said, and I laughed again. But not after he’d gone.”

Jim sat on a bench and rested heavy arms on the table. He took off his cap and a reddish thatch burst free. His blue eyes shifted uncertainly as they met Mary’s, for he knew she was thinking of the homestead in Oregon abandoned when the sheep died in a snowstorm, of the logging contract left unfinished when the donkey engine was wrecked, of odd jobs until his sudden excitement over Alaska and their departure in the late fall.

“I started to make biscuits for supper,” Mary said. “When the cup hit the bottom of the barrel it seemed like—like there just wasn’t any use.”

Jim looked up in protest.

“But a man who owns a gold mine don’t walk off and leave it,” he said.

“This never was a mine,” Mary said. “That caretaker told me. With everybody in the States excited about the Klondike rush, you can call a well a mine and sell stock in it, just so it’s in Alaska. The man who hired you has gone inside to start a new scheme for cheating people. Even the tug captain wasn’t paid.”

Mary began to prepare supper. She worked listlessly. Her small body was like an unstrung bow, graceless and inert, holding only the promise of tough resilience, of that beauty in leashed energy.

Jim looked at her sullenly after they had eaten.

“So I can’t take care of you?” he demanded.

“I didn’t say that. I—”

“You think it.”

“What else can I think? You’re always starting something. But when it goes wrong you quit.”

Mary turned to wash the dishes. It was the first time she had admitted Jim’s failure to provide that trust which was so much a part of their early ecstasy. Down in the States, with people, homes, jobs to be had, all the familiar things of life, she had been able to push back the growing fear.

But Alaska stripped Mary of all these defenses. Emptiness and great distances stunned her. Deep snow and cold, roar of gales and swirl of tides, had imprisoned her in the rough cabin since their arrival from the south. Loneliness had denied her any escape from thinking. She was face to face with the fact that Jim Baird had always run from failure.

The next morning an eager excitement told Mary that Jim was already planning to start something new. She had seen this fresh zeal spring from disaster, had even been caught up by it. Now she did not even wonder what he planned when he dug a path to the blacksmith shop or ask what he was doing there so long.

Nor was she aroused by a new glow in the dark cabin. Mary had not seen the sun for four months but at last it had climbed above the mountains. Jim threw open the door.

“You ought to see this!” he exclaimed boyishly as he grasped her hand and pulled her outside.

“Ain’t it a pretty country?” he demanded.

Peaks and ridges were intensely white against the blue. Drifts a hundred feet deep had been packed and sculptured by lofty gales and hung far out in giant curls. Smoke streamed from the tip of a great mountain, or so it seemed as wind whirled powdery snow away. Lower down the trees were massed and rounded by their white burden. Everywhere, after the dark winter, the sun glinted so dazzlingly their eyes ached.

“Gosh, it’s pretty!” Jim Baird whispered.

Mary squinted up at the bright splendor and saw only bleakness and hostility, an aloof mockery of her despair.

“It’s horrible!” she cried. “Like that man said yesterday, what’s the good of a country that’s all standing on end and never gives a human a chance?”

“There’s plenty of chances,” Jim answered.

His air of excitement persisted through the noon meal and after he had eaten he took his snowshoes to the beach. It was a strange land, Mary thought, where a man carried snowshoes when he rowed away in a boat.

He had not returned at dusk and she walked down to the water. That high banked path and the cabin had been Mary’s world for four months. Yet the deep bowl in which the cabin stood only added to her sense of imprisonment.

Twisting and turning, the sea had found its way far back among the mountains. It had squeezed through a narrow opening between cliffs and spread out into a basin, but beyond that the mountains would not let it pass. They granted a small river and a valley for it, let the valley spread to a wide flat. That was all. Steep, high, jagged, shutting out the low winter sun, the mountains encircled Mary Baird.

She hated them. She hated the sea and its tides. It flowed off the flats to leave an ugly expanse and then flowed back. There was no sense in that. There was no sense in more snow falling when the land was already buried, in fierce winds adding to the violence of a sea already stirred by savage currents. There was no sense in both land and sea beating the courage and the life out of men and women.

Night came before Jim Baird returned. He was tired and wet from wallowing in deep snow but his eyes were aglow.

“How’d you like a lot of money?” he shouted. “Ten barrels of flour?”

“It would be fine,” Mary said. “Only—it isn’t just money, Jim. Or flour.”

“Then what you raise all the rumpus about?” he demanded in amazement.

“It’s you. Knowing you can—can do anything. You’d feel so good about that.”

“I’ll show you what I can do,” he said. “It was luck, losing that caretaker job I never had.”

“Luck!” Mary gasped. “When we have to row to Wrangell?”

The thought had terrified her since she learned the tug was not coming, for it meant battling currents and winter gales for 160 miles in a rowboat.

Jim laughed exultantly. “We’re not going,” he said. “I start work in the morning. Been looking over that timber today. Thought about it all winter. The towboat skipper who brought us said there’ll be a new town in Tongass Narrows. That’s not far. And Wrangell’s growing. There’ll be other towns. That means a lot of lumber. A lot of logs.”

“Logs!” Mary jeered. “You tried that in Washington. And here you haven’t even got a donkey engine.”

“My dad took the first timber out of Hood Canal. Hand-logged it. That steep slope across the basin—trees’ll never stop from stump to salt water. Saws and axes here, too. Plenty of half-inch chain to make boom chains. A chance like this—you don’t see me rowing to Seattle.”

“You’ve got to row somewhere!” Mary cried. “What are we going to eat?”

Jim went to the corner where their supplies were stored.

“Thirty pounds of flour around the sides of that barrel,” he said. “Quite a few beans and potatoes. Some rice. Pork’s low but I can get deer. Fish, too. Plenty of clams. Good lord, Mary! We can make this country give us a living and feed us too.”

“Give us a living!” she cried fiercely. “This country couldn’t. It’s dead. It never was alive.”

“Those trees have been alive a long while to get as big as they are,” Jim said.

He began work in the shop the next morning. He had that ready mechanical skill common in men of his time and he started the forge confidently.

“The welding had me fooled,” he admitted at supper. “Toggle on a boom chain’s got to be right with these tides and williwaws. Spoiled some iron, but I’ve got the knack now.”

Mary did not comment. This same eagerness had moved her greatly when they were married two years before, but Jim had talked sheep for endless hours, only to forget them when they died in the storm. He had lived logs until the donkey engine was wrecked. Now as Mary stared at him she wondered how soon something would happen to crush this newest enthusiasm.

Jim spent two days at the anvil. Mary had helped with the sheep. She had cooked for the crew on the logging contract. Her zeal for the task had equaled Jim’s then, but now she did not go near the shop or ask about the work.

When the boom chains were finished, Jim went up the river and shot a deer. He rowed to the mouth of the inlet and caught four large spring salmon and dug two sacks of clams.

“We’ll eat,” he laughed. “And tomorrow we’ll get logs.”

He was gone before dawn. He did not return until after dark. For days that had continued. The weather was milder now and the snow soft. Jim wallowed in it, climbing the steep slope of a ridge across the basin. Downed timber formed pits into which he dropped from sight as he struggled up with long awkward saw and ax and falling wedges.

Jim’s clothes were wet before he began work. They were soaked at noon. Cold struck through when he slid down to the beach at night. A bitter wind chilled him as he rowed home in the darkness.

He did not complain. Mary could only guess what the work must be when he took off his clothing. Often his hands were so numb he could not unlace his leather-topped rubber shoes. His feet were ghastly white and without feeling. His teeth chattered and he shivered while he ate. But always he was jubilant.

“Got in a big one today. It’ll scale four thousand feet. That’s twenty dollars. In one day, Mary!”

To Mary they were still logs, not money. No one had offered to buy them, and always there was the thought of Jim’s inability to meet reverses. She felt certain these would come. The hostility of the land insured it. Sometimes her tenderness was aroused when she saw how he toiled, but more often it was resentment that his energy was to be wasted.

“Thirty thousand feet in the water now,” he said one night. “A hundred and fifty dollars. How you like that?”

“It isn’t so much the money,” Mary said. “If I only thought you would—”

“Would what?” he demanded when she stopped.

“It’s sticking until—”

“Sticking! What do you think it takes to run a log in all that snow?”

“Oh, I know you work hard, Jim. Only—”

“And you’ll know money when I put it in your hand.”

Rain beat down the snow. The sun rode higher and the days lengthened. Bare spots appeared on the flat and under trees. But winter left the land raw and barren.

More rain came, and then sun to melt the snow on the higher slopes. The river churned down the valley. It brought great trunks of uprooted trees and quantities of smaller drift to mill about the basin until the tide carried them out. The still white threat had given way to a roaring brown menace. For Mary there could be neither peace nor security in so savage a land.

But Jim Baird’s spirits soared. He caught salmon and dug clams. Deer came to the flat and were easily killed. Snow did not impede hand-logging and he could work longer hours. Toil failed to take the spring from his step. His body grew lean and stronger.

“Alaska’s the place we’ve been looking for,” he exulted. “Money to be made. Food for the taking.”

No answering light came to Mary’s eyes. Even that suggestion of a tough spirit in a tough body had receded.

“There’ll be a lot of logging,” Jim rushed on. “And it will pay big. Enough timber down the inlet to keep me busy for years. I could put in a camp, Mary. Have a crew. Alaska’s bound to boom. Maybe a sawmill. Get all the profit.”

She did not speak. She had heard Jim count his sheep by the thousands. Now it was millions of feet of timber.

“And we’ve got such a nice place here,” he said. “I’ll build a good house for you. Fix it up right. It’s such a pretty place, Bayard Inlet. We’d settle down. Make it home. Wouldn’t you like that, Mary, staying here, getting ahead? You’d never be lonesome if—we’ve got to have kids sometime.”

Mary did not reply, nor was there response in her body when he drew her to him. She did not resist. Rather there was a longing for this zest in life which moved Jim so deeply and which was hers no longer.

“You’re the prettiest girl!” he whispered as he kissed her, and he did not see the dead look in her eyes was filmed by tears.

As always, Jim left early the next morning. Mary watched him striding down to the water, head eagerly forward, shoulders drooping a bit from the great power of his body.

She saw him stop abruptly and look across the basin. He looked a long while. At last he turned and came slowly back.

“What’s the matter?” Mary called.

Jim did not answer or look up. She ran out.

“What happened?” she demanded.

“The boom broke. The logs are gone.”

“Oh.”

It was not an exclamation, only the last shred of hope departing.

“I knew it,” she said.

“Knew what?”

“Something would happen. It always has. The sheep in Oregon. That timber contract. Your job in the Gray’s Harbor mill. Only down there we didn’t starve.”

“We’re a long way from starving,” Jim retorted. “And as for work, I can always—”

“Start something else!” Mary cried. “Sure! It’s all you ever think of. If a thing doesn’t work right off, drop it. Try something else. Only—”

She ran to the door and turned there.

“I haven’t any home!” she burst out. “I haven’t a fit dress. I haven’t enough flour to make a cake. I haven’t a neighbor to talk to. I haven’t even a curtain on a window. I wouldn’t mind if we were getting somewhere. But don’t you see? I haven’t what every woman’s got to have—a man to take care of me. I haven’t anything—because you won’t stick.”

Mary went inside. Jim did not follow. He was only twenty-three and life was still largely a matter of reflex actions. Marriage had been so simple and so natural. Mary was so pretty. She had nice clothes then and he was so proud of her. She had laughed much, had such an eager zest for life, was capable of a warmth that often startled him.

Now they were gone, the laughter, the zest and the warmth. They had been gone a long time, and he had not known it.

Jim turned from the cabin. A log was drifting through the narrows. Another came into view, moving with the gathering ebb.

He went down the path and looked across the basin. Logs were everywhere, turning with the eddies, logs he had fought for in the deep snow, logs he had promised Mary. Jim got into his boat and shoved off.

It was noon before he returned. Mary had a meal ready.

“I’ll take it along,” Jim said.

She did not see him again that day or night. At dawn she went down the path but he was not in the basin.

The day passed. It was warm, clear. Snow glistened on the peaks. It was still banked high at tide mark on the north slopes, but hairlike grass thrust through the earth at Mary’s feet and tiny flowers bloomed near a drift beside the cabin. She stared at them curiously.

A bedlam of faint sounds came from the white peaks and carried an excited, happy note. Mary locked up to see long lines of geese swinging lower. Ducks, more direct, darted down on swift wings. In a little while the basin was covered with feathered bodies and harsh cries blended into a soft contented murmur.

Jim came home at dark. Mary saw him rowing slowly from the narrows. He staggered up the path.

“I stopped ’em,” he said. “Maybe a few got away.”

He was too tired to eat. For thirty-six hours he had been towing logs, pulling his arms loose and his heart out, inching big timbers across the current. He tumbled into bed with his clothes on.

Jim was up at dawn. Fatigue had brought the first creases to his smooth face. He hurried through breakfast and did not return until dark.

“Got about forty thousand where they won’t get away,” he said at supper.

“But what did it, Jim?” Mary asked.

“Boomstick caught on a rock and a toggle broke when the tide dropped. But that won’t happen again.”

Mary looked up drearily. “Something else will.”

Jim kicked his bench across the cabin.

“You’re a lot of help!” he shouted savagely. “I chased those logs. Got ’em back. I’m putting in more. I’ll row to Wrangell for a tug and sell ’em. And you know why? To get you out of this country. Those logs’ll bring more’n enough to pay your fare.”

“My fare! You mean—?” Mary leaped up and faced him. “So that’s why you did it!”

“What you’ve been yelping for, ain’t it, neighbors and flour and clothes?”

“But Jim—”

“I’ll get ’em for you. Those logs will do it.”

Jim did not speak of the logs after that. He scarcely spoke of anything. Days were much longer now. Sometimes he was gone before Mary wakened. Rarely did he reach home before dark.

The exhaustion of that greater effort in gathering the lost logs had left him but his face did not fill out again. The lines remained, deepened with the relentlessness of his drive.

Even bringing in game did not lighten his spirit. He got a dozen geese and ducks with a single blast from a shotgun. He killed deer on his way from work. Spring salmon came into the basin. One thrust from a spade brought up a dozen clams. But Jim no longer boasted of the prodigal nature of the land.

The snowline retreated far up the northern slopes. Grass sprouted so swiftly about the cabin the frequent treading of their feet could not keep it from growing in the path. Willows, elder and salal produced buds one day, leaves the next. Raw earth, bare rocks and the stark branches of trees and brush were buried beneath bright new green. Flowers pressed behind the snow.

Mary Baird did not shake off the weight of winter as did the earth. Her loneliness increased. She saw Jim only at meals, and then he was too tired to talk.

“There’s no need to kill yourself just to get rid of me the sooner,” she said bitterly one night.

“It’s what you wanted, to get out, ain’t it?” Jim retorted.

“Who wouldn’t? It’s dead, this country.”

“The country’s all right. It’s you that’s dead.”

Jim looked at her, and for the first time he did not think her pretty. He had never known her attractiveness was a thing of spirit, of happiness and animation. Now he saw only that it was gone.

“All you do is mope around,” he growled. “Here I’m trying to get something for you, but what do you do? Nothing. Didn’t even save the goose down for pillows. And the cook here for the mine. He told you about his garden and left some seeds. But did you plant ’em?”

“What would be the use?”

“He got radishes three weeks after planting.”

The next morning when Mary prepared Jim’s noon lunch he told her he was running a tree and would come home to eat after towing it to the boom.

“And here’s the seeds,” he said as he took them from a shelf. “We might have had green stuff by now.”

Mary did not answer. She did not look at the seeds. But when she cleared the table they lay there, challenging. Even then she did not touch them but went outside.

She had never been a hundred feet from the cabin. Snow had held her prisoner all winter, and after the snow had gone there was no desire. Now she stood looking at grass beside the path. Mary had not noticed that it was so tall.

New brush was growing against the log walls, one shoot shading the window. Mary went around to the rear, and then a little way into the forest. Her feet liked the thick moss that grew on everything, rounding and smoothing the rough ground.

When she emerged at the edge of the flat she stopped, startled. The broad level expanse was like a field of grain. The river wandered through the high grass in great curves and it was no longer brown and menacing but a clear little stream flowing over gravel. She wandered beside it until a bend thrust her back toward a mountain and up onto a bench.

Brush grew thickly here, higher than her head and almost impenetrable. Behind it the forest was like a jungle, tropical in luxuriance and in appearance, for the great leafed devil’s club suggested swamps many thousands of miles to the south. And this, Mary knew, was where snow had been banked a short time before.

She found a square opening. Ax marks and dead brush told it was the cook’s garden. New forest growth had sprung up to smother it. As Mary stared, familiar leafage told that turnips and radishes had reseeded themselves. She ripped out some native plants and uncovered a young turnip as large even then as her two fists. She drew a radish from the soft soil and crunched it with a long winter’s hunger for green things.

Mary went on up the valley to find acres of lupin, masses of solid blue. Beyond it a lush green growth climbed the mountains, worming its way above timberline in crevices among the cliffs. Everywhere Mary looked, life was thrusting eagerly from the earth.

In the river she saw mother ducks feigning injury while their broods skittered frantically for cover. A doe and a fawn looked at her curiously. Trout swarmed in pools like masses of shadow over the bright gravel. At the edge of the flat a broad bar was white with gulls. Mary heard something flutter in the grass and found a gosling. She picked it up and touched its soft down to her cheek.

Sun flooded that great bowl in the mountains. Small birds chirped in the brush. Wading birds hopped along the gravel. Crows passed in a great flock. A raven called. Two eagles stared into the sky from a dead stub. And everywhere was the fresh new green. It was as if the whole earth were pulsing with life, with new eager life. It crowded the short summer with that astonishing display of fertility and growth that is the north’s. The land, the sea, the air itself, were fairly sprouting life.

Mary forgot the garden as she went back across the flat. She felt strangely stirred and when Jim arrived at noon she did not tell where she had been. She watched him curiously as he approached, for he seemed to have changed, like the country. Something in the sharp thrust at the oars, in his stride, in his voice—she wondered if it had been there all the time, if her sight had not come back with the sun.

After they had eaten, Mary did something she had never done before. She went down the path and watched Jim row to work. He stood at the oars, pushing, his back toward her. Not once did he turn to look. Not once did the boat swerve from its course.

And as Mary watched she knew the boy she married had rowed out through the narrows the day the boom broke, and that a man had come back.

She forgot dishes. Sun shone on the peaks and the garden waited. Mary took a spade and the seeds and hurried up the valley. By mid-afternoon her back ached and muscles were weary. But ecstasy flooded through her and she turned homeward at last with a bunch of the big red radishes that had grown by themselves for Jim’s supper.

She held them up admiringly as she came around the cabin to the familiar basin. But the basin was no longer empty. A steam launch was plowing toward her from the narrows.

The dreary winter swept back to engulf Mary Baird, the long hours spent at the window watching for the tug, all the hopelessness. And now escape and safety had come. Slowly, not quite believing, she went down to the float.

“You seem to be alive,” a man grinned from the wheelhouse. “We didn’t know, up at Wrangell, if a cheechaco’d pull through. But nobody seemed to get time to find out.”

Mary stiffened. She knew what “cheechaco” meant.

“Going by and thought I’d run in,” the man continued. “Sort o’ see if you’re all right or wantin’ to go to town.”

“We’re all right,” Mary said.

“You don’t look starved.”

“There’s been plenty to eat.”

“That’s good,” the man said. “But with that sharper not payin’ you, and Alaska boomin’, I thought your man might want to get to Wrangell. Plenty o’ jobs at big wages. Lots o’ building. Sawmill runnin’ night and day.”

Mary was silent.

“Sure you don’t want to come along?” he asked. “Must be mighty lonesome for a woman here.”

Mary did not answer for a moment. She was thinking of the Jim Baird she had watched rowing to work that noon, of how big and strong he was, of how he had not looked back, of how his boat had driven straight. Jim had turned from his dead sheep, but he had fought to save his logs.

“No,” Mary said. “We don’t want to leave.”

A bell tinkled and the craft drew away. Mary scarcely saw it. She did not even thank the man for coming but walked quickly away. More than anything else, she knew she must find Jim Baird, see him, hear him speak, touch him.

The radishes were still clutched in her hand as she ran to the river. Somewhere up there, Jim had told her, it was easy to ford the stream, and when Mary found the place she plunged in without removing shoes or stockings.

When she had crossed, was going on to where Jim worked, she saw a flash of green and ruby in the air close by. Mary knew it was a humming bird, and she could not believe it. Yet it was there, jerking from flower to flower. The tiniest of all feathered creatures had come 2,000 miles to this land Mary had found so desolate, had come to build a nest and rear its young in a place where life was so prodigal it seemed to spring from the air.

Mary ran now. She was breathless and her knees trembled when she had climbed to where Jim worked.

“What’s happened?” he demanded anxiously.

“Everything!” she gasped, and then in confusion she held up the radishes.

“And I’ve planted more!” she cried. “These are for your supper. And I saw a humming bird. In Alaska, Jim! And a baby goose. The flowers—did you ever see so many? It is beautiful up the valley. Everything grows so fast and so big. And a boat came. A steamboat.”

“A boat!” he repeated, and then all the light went out of his eyes. But he said:

“Now you can get out. Come on.”

“But it’s gone. I told them we didn’t want to leave.”

“Told them what? You hating this country so and—”

Mary knew now. As when the sun had first appeared above the peaks, everything was so clear and distinct.

“But I don’t hate it!” she cried. “I love it! Don’t you see, Jim? We’re part of it.”

Jim did not understand, but there was no need to puzzle over it. Mary was in his arms now, clinging to him with a warmth he had never known.

“Oh, Jim! It’s such a pretty country.”

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

[The end of A Pretty Country, by Robert E. Pinkerton]