Sheila is set to marry her boss-although she doesn't love him, she finds the financial security that he has to offer very alluring. She is ready to give up lust and desire for the comforts of wealth.
She changes her mind when she meets a hard-loving country man, who's rugged and horny and willing to teach her everything he knows about sex and survival! He takes her for an amorous and adventurous outing in the woods, and she decides not to marry the rich man. She chooses muscle and brawn, 'cause physical pleasure is much more satisfying than money!
CHAPTER ONE
Sheila was thinking two thoughts at one time. First, about that question asked on a TV show last night: men always dreamed sexy dreams about actual women they knew. Did women? The answer-no, women had a tendency to dream about sex with a faceless, unidentifiable male.
That was true, she now thought. Even her dream-and wow, was it ever sexy!-last night was with a man whose face was a total blank. Perhaps you should feel a bit guilty about that, she pondered. The only man she was supposed to be dreaming about was Andy, who, by the way, was due anytime now with a couple of juicy steaks in his hand, and an appetite to match the eagerness of her dream. She checked out the table again. All the "fixings," as her mother would have said, were there, minus the steaks. She realized, suddenly, that she had been neglecting her friend, Welma.
"Sure you won't stay?" she asked.
"Now, honey, you know I always say the right thing at the wrong time. I wouldn't think of gumming up your little man trap."
"I love you, too," murmured Sheila absently. She did. Welma couldn't possibly appreciate a man like Andy, who was saving money for that wonderful day when there would be enough for a down payment on a house, Swedish modern.
Welma had been reared in a "paid for" house, and while her family hadn't been affluent, they hadn't been tossed from riches to rags to riches, depending upon the fluctuations of the lumber market.
Sheila waved Welma off to the movies and went in to take stock of herself. She knew what she wanted: a steady man with a steady income. To have found one in her office manager, who was also good-looking, was a bonus. Welma had called him "penny pinching," and Sheila had retorted, "It isn't every man who has a penny to pinch."
Sheila slipped into a fresh summer gingham, saved for a winter house frock. A bit faded, but Andy would approve. She tried to comb her black hair into neat waves. It remained there for all of a moment, then sprang into a riot of ringlets. At least she didn't have to waste money on permanent waves.
Her dark eyes looked a little anxious. These cozy twosome dinners were so important. They gave her an opportunity to show Andy what he could expect when they were married.
The buzzer sounded. Sheila jumped, and over went a bottle of perfume-Welma's perfume, costing a phenomenal price. And Sheila went to the door smelling like the front counter of an expensive beauty salon.
There he stood: tall, blond and handsome, and neat and grave. In fact, his face was immobile, except for his nostrils which seemed to be quivering.
"Sheila," he said sternly, "isn't that-?"
"It isn't mine, Andy; it's Welma's. I knocked it over, and-"
"She probably didn't leave in the stopper. Here, pork chops. They were on sale."
Sheila fled to the kitchen. She couldn't, she simply could not eat pork. She broke out in a rash every time she ate it. And pork chops didn't go with what she had spent half of last night preparing.
"I'll sit and scan the newspaper," Andy remarked to her retreating figure. "Noticed IBM is up again. In time that will furnish, if not buy our home."
In time, thought Sheila, it would have to do more than that. Someone will come up with a machine that will do away with all clerical workers, and then where will I be?
"Sheila," Andy's voice came from the next room, "cook those chops slowly. They must be well done, you know."
Angrily, she slapped the pink and white meat into a pan, then leaned down to look into the oven. The baked potatoes were beginning to look the way she felt, shriveled. Why couldn't he have brought steaks, which she could have grilled quickly?
She must remember how much money he'd saved. She must remember the times when food of any kind had been a blessing to her family. That usually came in January or February when thoughtful relations were eating lean with no leftovers.
She remembered all through the slow cooking. She had everything else ready. She'd allow Andy one look at the table, then remove the bowl of Chinese lilies.
"Ready," she sang out, but there he was.
"How much did those cost you?" he asked, pointing an accusing finger at the lilies.
"I grew them from pups, I mean bulbs; I mean-on, what does it matter?' A person has to have a little beauty."
She pushed the offending bowl away and heard him say, "I'm sorry, Sheila. Guess I'm so anxious to give you a whole garden of flowers, I forget you have to have a few along the way or you'll forget what they're like."
Even the chops were acceptable after that. Not that she ate any; she just made a pretense and covered quickly with cauliflower. Working in the same office with the man of one's choice was a handicap, especially since the other girls knew of her allergy.
Grandma Graham, who had spent her declining years in the Norrises' home, had said one should shut out unhappy thoughts with the clamor of counting one's blessings. Sheila began counting hers.
There was this precious apartment. Of course one did have to climb steep stairs, and sometimes, when the grocer underneath didn't make a clean sweep of old vegetables, it smelled to high heaven. But there was privacy.
A job. The pay check wasn't made of rubber and never quite stretched to cover new clothes without something snapping some place. Yet it did provide shelter and food. And Andy. Just look at him. Sheila did all through dinner. And later, as she washed and dried dishes, she peered into the little living room where he sat relaxed, watching Welma's television.
She managed to close off the unhappy thoughts right up to the moment he left. The kiss he'd placed on her cheek made her feel stamped like a bill marked paid.
Welma, coming in almost as he went out, said breezily, "People living in two rooms shouldn't cook cauliflower."
Flower. The trigger word. Sheila brightened. Andy's kisses were like flowers. He was so anxious to give her a whole garden full he forgot a few were needed along the way. Just as he was saving money for their future, so was he saving tokens of love. Imagine having a whole bankbook of love to draw on.
Welma started to ask a question, went to the kitchen, sniffed, returned and said nothing, eloquently. "You look thoughtful," she managed eventually.
"Umhum. Thinking about bank accounts, how secure they make one feel."
"Now what?" her roommate asked as Sheila lifted a stricken face.
"I began remembering Dad's bank account; how he'd have one and then he wouldn't. A big season and it would be fat. Then someone would have adenoids or a ruptured appendix or four car tires would blow out all at once. Once a flood washed our house away. We got out, but our clothes and the food Mother had put up didn't. And poof went the bank account."
Welma nodded. "Know something, Sheila? Some people put a price tag on everything. You put on a thought tag. Come to bed; less thinking and more sleeping will up your competition value."
"That and the January sales," agreed Sheila.
Under Andy's tutelage she had become economical about clothes, and had learned to keep them until they had reached the point where they might give sudden and harrowing embarrassment by a giving way at the wrong moment. "I'm shopping Saturday afternoon," she stated firmly.
That brought such anticipation she slept to dream of happier days when there were no adenoids or appendixes and her mother would follow her father's advice to "Shoot the wad; give the kids something to remember."
They often had. Every time the Norris family had a reunion there was: "Do you remember the time Mom bought me that ridiculous pink dress? Or Jamey that silly plane with a motor?" Jamey had been in a silly plane with several motors when it disappeared over the Pacific. Yet he'd had a happy time with the toy in his childhood.
Sheila turned and tossed and finally awakened to lie staring at the ceiling aglow with reflected street lights. There was something she'd never been able to straighten out in her thinking: the fun the Norris family had had even when there was almost no money; the fun they'd had spending what came in.
Yet now, she reminded herself, Dad's on unemployment insurance, having trouble paying the rent. Maybe Andy was right. Had her folks saved their money in the good days, there would have been no bad ones.
She sat up and tried to separate the odors in the tiny apartment: perfume, cauliflower and the despised pork chops with a little diesel oil thrown in as a truck rumbled past. The medley was too much and burrowing her nose in her pillow, she sought oblivion again.
Welma brought up the subject of shopping the next evening. "What do you plan to buy?" she asked with interest.
"One good dress," Sheila replied firmly.
"Two?" suggested Welma. "I know you can camouflage with collars and costume jewelry, but you can't live in one dress. Changing back to an old one is sheer misery. And for Pete's sake, honey, buy a stunner. Stop being a mouse and try looking like a lion. Do wonders for your spirit."
"I know. But I keep thinking of the folks."
Welma threw up her hands. She'd hoped to keep a certain letter until after Sheila had shopped. Now she went to her bag. "Forgot I picked this up. Maybe your Dad has a new job; that would take the brakes off your billfold."
Instead, the news locked the brakes. Rose Norris wrote that Sheila's father was taking the bus down and would arrive the next morning. He'd reach her apartment around noon. Did Sheila have a divan on which he could sleep? He wanted to be there early Monday morning to look for work.
"He's following the pattern," Welma commented soberly when Sheila had read the letter aloud. "They all come to the city; you've seen the lines outside the State Employment Agency."
Sheila had seen them. But her father was different. He was gay, with head high and laughter in his eyes.
"He must have a tip on something," she insisted. "There are employment agencies nearer than this. Well, I'd better call Andy; we had a date for tomorrow night."
"Solves my problem," Welma said lightly. "My sister wanted me for the weekend, but I didn't want to leave you alone."
"Umhum, just as you didn't like the perfume," agreed Sheila. "You're a rare roommate, Welma."
She was rare. She left the room so Sheila could call Andy, a task she dreaded. Andy had met her family at a beach picnic the previous summer. There had been mutual approval, but Sheila still felt the strain of trying to find any subject of common interest. It would be easier simply to break her date than to live through an evening with the two men.
"Sheila, I'm surprised at you," Andy said when she called. "I want to see your father. Why don't we take him out some place? What would he enjoy?"
"Anything, everything," she replied. "He has a great capacity for enjoyment. But, Andy, let me call you around five; we'll make plans then."
Instead of shopping for clothes, Sheila shopped for food, then went into a huddle with her bankbook. Thus far her father had been adamant about not taking money from his children, but she'd find a way of getting past his stiff-necked pride, providing it were necessary.
With everything ready, she sat at the dinette window looking down on the street. She wondered why, when it rained in a country noted for sunshine, the rain seemed drearier, more depressing than elsewhere.
Across the street in an old bay-windowed house converted into apartments, a woman hung lingerie on coat hangers to dry in the doubtful air. Below, people moved sluggishly, shoulders bent to the rain.
Sheila watched one man approach. His shoulders seemed more bowed than the others; his whole being was wrapped in an aura of grey endurance.
"It can't be," she murmured. Then, as the man lifted his head to scan the numbers, "but it is Dad." Nate Norris, who'd grown up in a rainy country, had always walked jauntily, face lifted to the silver downpour.
He seemed cheerful enough when she met him on the landing, had quite a tale to tell of the bus trip. First time he'd ridden on one since they'd had their first car, before she was born. And he, who had brought ancient log trucks and trailers down impossible mountain roads, had literally driven the bus for the driver.
"If there are no holes in the floor," he said, "it's not because I wasn't footing brakes that weren't there. A man takes his life in his hands when he rides one of those."
She reminded him of a few of his escapades that had turned her mother's hair prematurely grey, and he nodded. "Guess it's the difference in hazards. Give me canyons, slides, washouts any time."
No, he wasn't hungry. But Sheila, with everything ready at the flick of the switch, insisted they have lunch, then talk, and he agreed.
She turned on the television. On her way to the kitchen she glanced back and had her first real look at her father. He sat slumped in the chair, shoulders bowed, head down, a picture of complete defeat.
For a moment she hesitated. A man had a right to privacy at a time like this, yet how could she help him if she didn't know his problem?
Switches were turned off. An ottoman was drawn up before him and a determined Sheila sat on it, staring up at her father.
"Once," she reminded him, "I came home from school all whipped inside. I wouldn't talk. I was afraid to let you know what had happened because I didn't want to hurt you. Dad, do you remember what you said to me then?"
His intense blue eyes held hers, and in them she saw mirrored the scene on that day twelve years ago.
They had been living in an abandoned house on the grounds of a mill that had closed down. No rent, so he could save money to take them to a better land where there was plenty of work, a good climate, a fine future for his young ones.
This evening he had taken her out to a stump on the edge of a mill pond, turned apricot and grey and gold by the afterglow, and he'd talked to her.
"I remember," he admitted now. "I said you can't fight to win until you get your opponent out in the open."
"And you said you couldn't act as my second until you could see the opponent. Right. Now out with it; what's wrong?"
"You know I know machinery. I could take over any mill as maintenance man and keep it in top form. I can prove it. Plenty of lumber men would back me up.
"This morning I came in on the early bus; had a ten o'clock appointment. Fellow opening a new mill to the southwest. We talked. I showed him letters from men I'd worked for. Know what happened?"
Sheila waited.
"Everything was fine right up to the minute he asked me my age. I told him the truth. He got up, right smack up, and said, 'Sorry, Norris; you're too old.' "
"Oh, but, Dad, he's only one man," Sheila cried.
"The last one, Sheila. I've been hearing this same thing for the last four years. I'm fifty-seven. I can beat any young man at his job because it's vital to me. That's not enough. So here I am, through."
Sheila waited only a moment. He'd been working for the same outfit for several years. They'd moved and taken him with them. What had happened?
"Last season," Mr. Norris went on, "I had five months' work. That's all the outfit had. Carson talked to us when the woods closed. He told us to find other work. He wasn't sure he'd open up any place next spring.
And that, Sheila, means I'm through.
"Any idea what it means to be through while you've still plenty of life and skill in you? Or how I'm going to take care of your mother for the next eight years? And then, how far my social security will go toward keeping a roof over her head with rent to pay, food to buy?"
"But, Dad-"
"My unemployment insurance runs out the first of the month. I can't even get a job ditch-digging. Machines do that these days."
Sheila drew a deep breath. "Dad, you've forgotten one asset. You have your children."
CHAPTER TWO
With that brief remark Sheila gave up her future with Andy. Yet what possible happiness could she have with him, knowing her parents were in want because her father had not been like Andy, careful, saving?
She returned from her shattered dream to find he was arguing the point. He had children but he had no intention of sacrificing them. Each had all he could handle raising his own young ones. She was the only one unmarried. Did she feel she made enough to keep them as well as herself?
Sheila hadn't any answers. She knew that even with Andy teaching her how to be saving, she made barely enough to live on. A few dollars ahead, and a trip to the dentist wiped that out. The little she'd saved for clothing wouldn't pay more than one month's rent for her, parents, provided they'd move to the city. Nor could she see her restless father spending twenty-four hours a day in a small apartment.
"Good." She stood up. "Now that you've got it out of your system, we can start whittling it down to a size you can handle."
Perversely, he had a better appetite than she. He had temporarily shifted his fears, his defeat, and she was adjusting her shoulders to the burden.
She led him to talk of her brother and sisters. They wrote to her only on holidays, believing a letter to their parents sufficed. Each had moved far from the west coast, which to Sheila symbolically placed distance between their new lives and the old one. And all of them, she realized as her father proudly recounted the possessions they were accumulating, were using their incomes to the last penny.
He spoke of pediatricians, oral surgeons, psychiatric treatment for little Marian, who'd felt rejected when her small brother attracted her father's interest.
"Sometimes," he mused, "I wonder how my generation ever reached maturity." And Sheila forbore saying that a large percentage hadn't.
Once he broke off to finger the Chinese lilies, reduced to sitting in a narrow vase that would fit on the window ledge. "Pretty things. Remind me of some we had up home. Not that they look like them. Just unexpected, popping up sometimes on the road. Nearly dumped a log load once, swerving."
"What were they, Dad?"
"Blessed if I know. Be nice to have time to learn such, like getting introduced, formal."
Sheila went about washing the dishes.
Norris managed to sit more or less quietly until the wrestling matches were over; then he became restless. "Think I'll go out and look at your neighborhood, get the kinks out of me. Mind? Anything you want me to bring back?"
She shooed him off, then sank into a chair to ponder her problem unhappily.
Andy called and, on hearing her voice, asked what had happened.
"It's Dad, Andy. He can't find work because of his age, and it's having a bad effect on him."
There was a long silence; then Andy asked, "Think he'd take some man-to-man talk from me?"
"I don't know," she admitted honestly. "You must seem awfully young to him, and your life has been so different. Maybe if the subject is introduced casually-"
"Diplomatically," he corrected. "But, Andy, what could you possibly offer?"
"Assurance a man isn't shelved because of his age."
This from Andy, who'd sighed with relief when old Mr. Boone had conveniently died, thus clearing the office of anyone older than its manager.
He out-lined his plans. Instead of seeing them that evening, he'd call for them early. His mother wanted them to come down to the family home for the day.
"She said it would give our fathers a chance to become acquainted. Dad's a great guy," he confided; "he'll set your father straight."
"Andy," she wailed, "Dad will just up and die if he thinks I've discussed him with you."
"Now calm down. He'll never know. See you at seven-thirty."
Unhappily Sheila turned from the telephone. She couldn't refuse the invitation, yet she wasn't at all happy about accepting it. She had visited Andy's home once, a brief call on a Sunday afternoon. Mrs. Carter had treated her exactly as had Andrew the day she'd applied for a job: with cool, analytical, though friendly scrutiny.
Now she reminded herself that just as Andy had hired her, so had his mother given her approval of one Sheila Norris as a future daughter-in-law.
Her reluctance to go was nothing compared to her father's. Nate refused at first politely, then with rancor. All he needed at a time like this, he informed her, was to have someone tell him what he should have done twenty years ago.
Sheila, furiously washing dishes while her father watched a television crime play that all but split her ears with gunfire, wondered what women had done before the day of television.
Then when he turned it off in the middle and stood in the doorway, giving her a crooked grin, she understood why her mother had put up with him.
"Sorry, Sheila. I'll go. Do penance. I've been scorning pipsqueaks who socked their money instead of living. Now I'm having to admit they could have been right. Isn't easy."
"As a penitent, you're a complete flop. And you should be. You take in too much territory. You didn't create business conditions and you're not the only big earner who's finding things tough these days. But I will appreciate your going. I'd have had a difficult time explaining your refusal."
It wasn't too bad. True, her father nearly wore out the car floor as Andrew kept up an even pace along a freeway holding up everything unable to pass. And true, his shoulders tightened as Andy discussed business in general, in tones of optimism.
Then she forgot the two men. The Carter home was coming into view, and she wanted to study it in its winter dress. She wanted to imagine herself living there and liking it.
It was a neat little house and looked, she imagined, much the same as it had when it was purchased at the time of the Senior Carters' marriage, thirty years ago: white with a green trim. Paths were out-lined with green board liners, trees symmetrically pruned, shrubbery boxed.
Sheila doubted if there had been much change in the interior. But it was comfortable, and what more could an older couple ask than comfort?
Enviously Sheila followed Mrs. Carter as she prepared dinner. There was the large freezer filled with enough home-grown and home-prepared food to carry them more than three months, should papa be unable to work. The equally large canning closet was well stocked.
"Mother's umbrellas," Andy teased. "The trouble is we're always eating last year's food because we never catch up to what she has stored away."
Dinner was just a little tasteless. Sheila would have added seasoning, but Mrs. Carter had her own ideas about "good plain food for good plain people."
She also had good sound ideas of how to live; ideas Nate would scoff at when they were alone. Now she told of the years of saving which had allowed them to look forward to a secure future.
Sheila wondered a little at her father. He was a little too quiet during the early part of the visit, but after dinner, while she helped with the dishes, he went on a tour of the garden with Mr. Carter. When he returned his old jauntiness was back.
Andrew, having deposited his laundry and picked up the fresh lot waiting for him, seemed willing enough to leave. But on the return trip, he had Sheila sit with him and talked of future trips when they would "run down home during the fruit season."
Happily she nodded. They'd have a home, and there would be a canning closet, perhaps a freezer, and she would prepare enough food to last them three months if Andy was unable to work. Ridiculous thought. She couldn't imagine Andrew Carter not working. But it would be fun to have a larder stocked with all kinds of delectable food. And if her folks had lean days, there would be food to share with them. Imagine all of this and a man like Andy, too.
Yet she was glad when he didn't suggest coming up to the apartment. He imagined she and her father had things to discuss. He'd see her at the office the next day.
Dutifully he kissed her while Nate watched, and then walked away.
"Well, Dad?" she asked proudly.
Norris shook his head. "Poor fellow hasn't a chance. Got himself born in the wrong family. Has never and will never live."
"Bull"
"Like that food his mother puts up. It's last year's, Sheila. They're so busy looking out for the future they get nothing out of the now."
Dutifully she set her lips.
She waited until they were in the smelly little apartment, their topcoats off, then turned. "All right; what happened when you and Mr. Carter went out to look at the garden?"
"We had quite a time. He took me to his mountain cabin."
"His what?"
"That's what he called it. A six-by-eighteen room built onto the back of the garage. The door was padlocked. It's the one place his wife isn't allowed.
"In there he has shelves of books on adventure. The walls are plastered with colored cutouts of far away places. That little six-by-eighteen room is where he does his living, vicariously."
Sheila sank into a chair. "You mean that seeing another man having to live in dreams so downgraded security that you-"
"Nope, don't mean that at all. If he hasn't the gumption to stand up to his woman, he doesn't deserve anything better."
"But you came back looking so happy."
"I am. Here, read this."
Out of his pocket he drew a small magazine, creased to a certain page and held it out to her. "Free land, Sheila, for the homesteading of it, and in our own state."
For a moment hope flared like a beacon lighting not only her parents' future but her own. She read the article, then silently rose and put on the coffeepot.
"Let's have it," barked her father.
"In this day and age, with everyone grabbing, why is this land free? What's the matter with it? I'd say no water."
Nate Norris straddled a chair, resting his arms on the back. "A lot of it is desert; agreed. The principal lack is enterprise. Your generation is afraid of hardship. You want paved roads, water out of a faucet, everything cut and dried before you pick it up in a package. Like old man Carter, you do your adventuring before a television set or in a back room locked away from reality. You forget our people were pioneers."
She hadn't forgotten; she'd been brought up on pioneer stories. In fact, her parents had done a modern version of pioneering in their early married days. They had been married in 1950. With only chance jobs, they'd made a down payment on a logged off acre, lived in a makeshift tent until they could wreck an old building that had been given them, and rebuilt it into a compact little cottage, thirty years ago.
"Sorry, Dad. I seem cursed with a practical streak. I think of you and Mother living miles from anyone, grubbing out an existence. Suppose one of you was hurt-"
When she turned from pouring the coffee she saw that the old grey look of defeat was back. Nate's shoulders were slumped over, the light gone from his eyes.
"You may be right," he agreed.
Welma chose that moment to breeze in. "Storm brewing on the Pacific, so my family came home. Hey, folks, looks like a storm brewing here. Shall I stay and ride with the gale, or-"
"Stay," Nate and Sheila said in unison.
"Sheila is being practical," her father explained.
"Price or thought tags?" asked Welma. "You know, Mr. Norris, our little Sheila has developed an analytical neurosis. Face her with a decision and she chews it up until you can't recognize it."
"Then I'll tell you, and you give me a quick answer. Here." He handed her the article. "Read and reply."
Welma read, then lifted her head, her eyes shining. "What a lark!"
"But, Welma, suppose they couldn't find water?"
"Look, sweetie, are you trying to tell me your father isn't smart enough to find a hundred and sixty acre plot, in several million acres of land, with water? And not too far from roads? I'd say this land is available because our people have lost their vision."
Defensively, Sheila wheeled on her. "Can you imagine living for days in sizzling heat and no shade? Or with snow to the eaves and no fuel? Or running out of food, or-"
"Wait a minute." Welma held out her hand. "A thought is trying to work through, something someone told me. I'd better double check tomorrow. Can you stay over another day, Mr. Norris?"
"I can take a late bus. Can't give me an inkling, can you?"
She did, later. She knew a couple who had a mining claim in the Norrises' home state. It was not far from the coast, so the weather would be comparatively mild. There were roads, providing access to forestry throughout the general area. There were windfalls to supply wood for the man with a good saw and muscle power. Of course farming was out.
When she named the area, Nate straightened. He'd hunted and fished in those mountains as a young man. Beautiful country. With water, he told Sheila.
"And income?" she asked unhappily.
"What income have I got here? I've been trying to find any kind of a job for four months. I'd be back in my home country. I'd find something."
"There might be income too," Welma mused. "Oh, not much. A few dollars now and then; enough to buy flour to make bread to go with the fish you might catch."
The next day Andy Carter broke a rule he'd laid down months before, when he'd first decided to find out what manner of girl this was who disturbed his calm plan of progress. He invited Sheila out to lunch.
"I'm worried, Sheila," he confessed. "Dad was up to something yesterday, but I don't know what. Mother wormed some of it out of him. Do you know what he advised your father to do?"
"He didn't advise; he merely showed him an article on homesteading. Dad liked the idea."
As she went on, a new Andy Carter appeared across the table, a light Sheila had never seen flashed in his eyes. Then as she presented her arguments against the venture the light died and commendation took its place.
"I like the way you analyzed that, Sheila. I'll bet you've saved your parents a lot of future misery. At first the project sounds like one endless hunting trip. I've noticed hunters who live for the open season, who enjoy coming home and talking about their adventure more than they enjoy roughing it."
He said he'd made a number of calls the past two days, to talk to men he knew about jobs for Nate Norris. He'd had no luck at all.
"It should be some comfort to your father to know he is not an isolated case, but one of hundreds of thousands."
It might be thin comfort, Sheila agreed, but it didn't pay rent or provide food; she wondered if Andy could realize what having nothing meant. She held one sharp memory. The flood had been dramatic. People on highlands had hurried to aid the stricken families.
Usually help was rushed to any disaster area. But it was the long, lean stretches with dwindling supplies that broke the spirit; the moment when the last oats in a bag, purchased from a feed store for bulk, had given out and there was nothing to replace them; when they were in a strange state where they were not eligible for relief.
Sheila stiffened her shoulders. She would prefer even last year's food as a daily diet, a drab, uninteresting cottage.
"Sheila," the lunch over, Andy leaned toward her, "I drew a hundred from savings this morning when I went to the bank. Could you slip that to your father to sort of tide him over?"
Eyes filled with tears, she shook her head.
"I love you for it, Andy, but Dad would know I could never save that much on my salary, and I doubt if he'd even take it from me. But I do thank you for both of us."
Suddenly, she felt very close to Andy. For so long they had been seeing one another, and they had become quite serious, but it wasn't until that moment that she felt really close to him. She knew his intentions were good, and now she wanted to show him how much she appreciated him.
"Andy, do you think we could ... well ... we could go somewhere where we could, you know ... be alone?"
Andy stared at her dumbstruck. "Why, I don't know. I guess so. But why?"
"Oh, Andy, sometimes I don't know about you. Come on. Let's go to your apartment and I'll show you."
Laughing, they both walked quickly out to his car. Within minutes they were in his living room, giggling and playing, eventually flopping down on his couch.
Andy wasted no time diving right in. They were still in a happy mood, and as they undressed one another, they smiled contentedly. But as more and more of their bodies were bared, their laughter changed to sighs.
Where they once giggled their pleasure, they now gasped and groaned.
Andy leaned over and dropped his head against Sheila's firm breasts. He licked and sucked ravenously at her nipples, running his tongue up and down and all around her smooth tit-flesh.
"Yes, Andy, that's so good," she sighed, pulling him closer, trying to get him to caress more and more of her creamy breasts.
Then Andy pushed her back down onto the couch. She lay on her back with her legs spread wide, revealing the hairy patch of her pubic bush and the pink edges of her labia.
Panting with delight, Andy moved his tongue down her belly until he reached her navel, lingering there for a moment while he enjoyed feeling her squirm beneath him. Then he eased his tongue between her cuntlips, teasing her hard clit with the end of his tongue while blowing gently across her curly bush.
Thrilling sensations of passion coursed through Sheila's loins as she gave in to Andy's desires. The more he worked at her moist pussy, the hotter she became, until she was hunching up off the couch violently.
Andy understood that he had just about done everything he could to arouse Sheila. And now he wanted nothing more than to thrust his rock-hard penis deep into the depths of her vagina.
Sheila could feel the muscles of Andy's legs quiver and stiffen between her thighs. She knew what he wanted desperately, and she spread her legs as wide as she could to accommodate him.
"Go ahead," she murmured. "Put it in me now, Andy. I want it ... please ... please."
He moved over her, twitching all over, his cock bouncing against her thigh. She felt it pushing up against her cunt-hair, poking around for the best angle of entry. Then she could feel his red-hot prick-tip shoving gently against her swollen labia. He shoved his hips forward suddenly and sent his penis sinking deeply into her depths. Groaning ecstatically, he removed his shaft just halfway and then thrust it back in again, filling her to the limit with his hard man-meat.
"Oooohh, yes," Sheila moaned. She wanted to tell Andy how nice it felt, that she was already responding to the steady in and out thrusting of his penis, but he was too wrapped up in his passion to hear her.
So Sheila had to content herself with extracting as much pleasure from their fucking as she could, trying to equal the intensity of his desire, trying to reach a climax just as powerful as the one he was heading toward.
Gradually, Sheila began to feel the knot of orgasm tightening in her belly. Her vaginal muscles were spasming wildly as the heat flashing through her belly began to spread all over her body. Her tits were swollen, her belly was flushed and her head was dizzy with sexual heat.
And then her vaginal muscles began clenching so tightly that each time he thrust into her, she grabbed his penis when it slammed forward and released it when he withdrew.
He was taking her higher and higher toward bliss. They gyrated sensuously, grinding and wallowing on the couch, caught in the fierce intensity of their sexual emotions. Harder and harder they thrashed, threatening to break something in the wake of their struggle toward climax.
Then Andy let loose a long, grumbling sigh, signaling his release. As he spasmed inside her, Sheila came, also.
To Sheila, the rest of the day sped by in a haze of delight. She was practically engaged to a man who could draw a hundred dollars from his savings to help her parents. Once she'd married him, they'd never be down to the last oats in the feed store bag. They would be secure.
When she reached the apartment Welma and her father were almost too busy talking to greet her. When Nate did look up, he shouted, "Gal, quit your job. You're joining the new gold rush. We're all heading for the hills!"
"But, Dad, I-" She stopped, then added, "And Andy?"
"Come look," Welma ordered her, and propelled her into the bedroom. There she took Sheila by the shoulders and shook her.
"I know what you're thinking. Andy won't wait. You feel you're running out on love. Well, listen, Sheila. Romance is where you find it. If it's real, it's like gold: it can't be lost by waiting."
"Why should I go with them?"
"Because of your mother. Your Dad may have to be away from the claim for days. Do you want her to wait there, alone?"
There was no argument against that. And it would mean leaving Andy.
CHAPTER THREE
"Oh, stop looking tragic," cried Welma. "Think of the fun ahead. Instead of bending over stacks of papers, forever sorting and filing, you'll be in the mountains with peaks and canyons before your eyes. No stuffy apartment, no office smelling like the inside of an oil can."
Sheila lifted her head. She remembered a gold and scarlet sunset at the foot of a purple mist-filled canyon. She remembered the scent of pine and cedar, not drenched with an oil base.
"Sheila, you've changed so," Welma went on. "When I first knew you, you made a lark of living. Remember the weekend we were both broke?"
"Correction: we had eighty cents between us."
"And I talked a butcher out of bones for a dog we didn't have, and we made soup."
"And we found an old package of cake mix and made pancakes because we didn't have an oven. Weren't they delicious?"
"Of course they were. It was our attitude toward them that counted, Sheila. We could have sat and groused and lost a whole weekend of fun. A person can lose a lifetime of fun by looking at things the wrong way."
Fun. Sheila's mind dwelt on the word. The Norris family had always had fun. And look at them now. Oh well, as long as she couldn't be happy letting her folks go alone to wherever they were going, she might as well enjoy it as much as she could.
"Ready?" Welma asked, and when Sheila nodded, Welma dropped an enveloping parka over her head. "I'm supposed to have brought you in for this. Picked it up at the surplus store."
Sheila made a convincing entrance. "Look, Dad, I'm wearing my tent. Now if you two will let me in on the secret, just where are we going?"
They tried to talk at the same time. Welma had a friend with a mining claim. They'd proved it and now owned the land. The claim was nothing, but the big cabin in the hills was a source of constant comfort.
"They knew of other claims available," Nate took up the story. "Quite a few were staked out in accessible areas, but later they were abandoned."
"And Jack knew of an abandoned logging camp. For some reason everyone had walked off and left things, even dishes on the table. He believes it was because of a slide that cut off their rail line and road."
Sheila shuddered. She'd lived in slide areas, knew how mountains could grow restless when man began interfering with their sides, and in retaliation slough down tons of dirt and rock.
"I'll fix a windlass," Nate went on, "drag lumber up the hill to this claim of Welma's friend, then haul it to the one we find. And I'll get such furniture as we need until I can make some. I'll buy a stove, some kerosene lamps-"
They crowded into the tiny kitchenette, talking, forgetting to eat until Sheila, aware of food and its cost, made a remark.
Welma was called away, by a prearranged plan, Sheila believed, so she and her father might have an hour alone before he left for the northbound bus.
"Dad, how much money do you have?" Sheila demanded. "And no hedging. We're in this together."
"Nine dollars and eighty-seven cents cash." He pulled out a wallet and spewed the money on the table. "And," probably he reached for an inside pocket and drew out a savings account book, "one hundred and thirty dollars. I've been saving ten a week out of my unemployment. Your mother like to've died when she found out, but I told her we wouldn't have had a penny if she'd known about it."
It was more than she thought, but pitifully inadequate to start such a venture. Of the two more unemployment checks coming, only one might be saved.
"I'll have to give two weeks' notice," she murmured. "I'll save what I can."
He said there was no point in her using carfare to see him to the bus. He'd be getting on his way. She was not sorry. She wanted to talk to Andy immediately, to break the news over the telephone so their morning meeting at the office would create less of a strain.
"Feel pretty good about this," Nate said as he stood at the door. "With you coming along, your mother won't mind. It's the loneliness of claims that women have to buck. I figure that's why most men give up before they've proven up on their land."
She waited until he had left the building, sat a moment staring out on the lights, dusky with misty rain, then squared her shoulders in anticipation of the ordeal ahead.
Fifteen minutes later Welma came in to find Sheila striding around the small apartment, curls bobbing.
"Men," she replied to Welma's question. "Men!"
"Which means you called Andy and he couldn't see the advantage of-"
"See it?" cried Sheila. "He nearly came through the telephone. Here I was ready to dry his tears because I'd have to be away for months, and do you know what he said?" she demanded indignantly.
"I don't dare guess."
"He said, 'Wonderful. What's to keep you from filing near your folks so we'll have a claim too?' He even offered to subsidize it, whatever that means."
"Pay for the improvements required to prove a claim." Welma spoke laconically but her voice was bubbling.
"But Andy-I mean he doesn't believe in gambling on anything."
"Except the stock market."
"Welma, you know he only buys sure things."
"Umhum, whatever those are. Well, it should relieve your mind. Now you can sally forth, knowing full well your tall, blond, and handsome won't look at another girl; his eyes will be full of gold dust. Wonder if he knows anything about the slim pickings?"
"I told him," Sheila reported grimly. "I told him people were panning and counting themselves lucky if they found enough flakes to buy bread and hamburger. However, he said, having a place in the hills was worth something, when we could get it for nothing."
"What's for nothing?" quipped Welma, and quickly said she was going to bed. She'd had a long weekend babysitting with nieces and nephews too old to paddle.
She said not to worry about the apartment; she could find someone readily enough. Or maybe she'd break down and marry a man with a house. She had two weeks in which to decide.
Two weeks! Imagine tossing away all you'd worked for on the chance of finding something better. Two years of small jobs during the day and school at night. Finding a type of work she liked with enough salary to make privacy possible. Above all, finding a man who would provide security in all things, then in two weeks just tossing them over one's shoulder.
"Attitude," warned Welma, trailing her robe to the cubicle they called a bathroom, arms loaded with creams and curlers.
"But-"
"Ah, but think of your parents settled, and you and Andy with a summer home, perhaps a home which you can use when you run up winter weekends to be sure that your folks are all right. And if Andy ever did lose a job, perish the thought, you would have a choice: living with his folks or in them thar hills."
Except that she and Andy would have a home of their own in town; eventually, that is. Right now Andy said the taxes made town property a poor investment for someone with his income.
For one awful moment Sheila had a vision of a dilapidated car loaded with children and household goods huffing and puffing up some mountain road; history repeating itself.
"Ah," she breathed, "but Dad never had a roof to tuck his family in under."
She felt more cheerful when she awakened.
Now that she was handing in her resignation they could go out to lunch openly. Sheila's spirits soared as Andy discussed possibilities. He wouldn't see her that evening, because he was going to the main library to pick up everything available on mining claims and related subjects.
"I'll be up as soon as your folks are located," he confided. "Then we'll choose a place within shouting distance. I was telling Mr. Hathaway about the venture this morning. He said his great-grandparents chose claims with others in their party. Building at corners enabled them to create a small settlement. Like this."
He drew out an envelope and on its back drew a vast square; then he crossed it, cutting it into four parts. Where the lines met in the center he drew small buildings.
"We could build right across the line here. You could almost step into your folks' cabin."
Soberly Sheila nodded, wondering if Andy had ever been in the mountains, if he had any idea of the terrain; above all, if he had any idea how much a water supply meant and just how one could coax a stream into a precise section.
Her first letter from my mother reflected her own doubts but did clear the air. "Anything is better than having your father pace the floor and worry. Now he can pace lines, dig and saw and be too tired to worry."
She was pretty well packed and wasting sleeping hours wondering whether to ship her luggage or find some way for her folks to carry her worldly goods, when a letter from her father solved that problem.
"You'd be surprised at the fellows interested in this deal; some of them with wives and young kids, a couple of oldsters like myself and some singles.
"One of these will bring my car down for you to use. He's picking up a truck to deliver farther up the coast from our turn-off and will carry us and our load."
There was more, but this portion was important. She wondered why, if other wives were going along, she should accompany her parents; then she remembered the mountains and how far apart cabins could be located.
"That's a break," Welma murmured when she spoke of the car.
"Wait until you see it," Sheila told her. "Even two years ago I felt like I was driving an eggshell."
She didn't meet the man who brought the car. It was left in the nearest supermarket parking lot, a note stuck under her door telling her where to find it.
Andy joined her in the search, and though the rain had stopped and low fog clung to city pavements, nothing could disguise the car's age or its weariness.
"But it runs," Andy insisted logically, "or it wouldn't have reached here. Now, instead of paying parking fees at a garage, I'll take it in for a thorough servicing.
"Tomorrow I'll let you off at noon and you will have a half-day's start. What do you think of that?"
"Do you want the truth?" she asked.
After a moment spent studying the somber eyes under the mop of fog-curled hair, he shook his head. "No. We haven't time to make up. You trot home. I'll stop by as soon as I've talked to a garage man, and then we'll have dinner."
"Andy, I'd better drive it to the garage."
"Are you intimating I'm not as good a driver as your father?"
"I'm not intimating. I'm telling you. If Dad was ever given a good car, he'd plow down traffic like an unmanned power mower. But he can handle wrecks that won't budge for anyone else, except me."
They almost quarreled on this last evening. Sheila saw young couples inside the supermarket wheeling carts, gathering food from the shelves. She wondered if she and Andy really had any idea how lucky they were. Within an hour they'd be sitting across a narrow table, planning a future together.
And here Andy was wasting their last evening together, even giving her half a day off to get rid of her faster.
It took him only two hours to drive four and a half blocks. But they didn't have dinner together. Andy had to go back to his apartment to clean up and, Sheila presumed, to cool down.
"But never mind," he said staunchly over the telephone. "You're going to have a real car to drive. I left orders to give her a thorough overhaul. The night shift will work on it. See you in the morning."
Welma welcomed the change in plans. "If you're smart, you'll take so long to pack the car you can't start before the next morning. I've half a mind to chuck everything and join you."
"I wouldn't ask it of you."
"Ask it? Sheila, what's wrong with you?"
"Maybe it's the weather."
"Well, you're taking the inside route. You'll run out of fog once you're over the mountains."
Sheila left the next day at one o'clock. Welma had forgotten Andy's efficiency. He knew how to pack cars. He had overlooked nothing.
Methodically he checked her driver's license, made sure of car insurance, kicked all four tires, a habit Sheila had never been able to understand, and finally handed her the hundred dollars he'd drawn from the bank the first day.
"If you have it, you won't need it," he informed her.
When he kissed her goodbye, Sheila had the weird sensation he'd kicked a fifth tire, made sure it was solid and waved a starting flag.
Instantly the car responded and she drove off.
Hours passed, but the miles were slow in keeping pace. Fog clung to the highways like a last hope. Gargantuan trucks roared up, all lights blazing, swept past her and were swallowed up. Passenger cars either wheeled recklessly or felt their way along. Sheila adopted a snail's pace.
She felt relieved when the junction appeared, turned east to the shortcut Andy had marked on her map. She'd find a sunny hilltop and stop for the box lunch Andy had thoughtfully provided, complete with a thermos of coffee. She was ready for it; breakfast had been eight hours ago.
The car found the mountain, pulled huskily up and over the foggy summit, down the other side and onto a long highway, a deserted one with only deserted summer cottages or eating shacks plastered with "Closed For the Season" signs. Even in the fog she could see these.
"It's like a nightmare," Sheila worried as the old dial clock moved from three to threethirty and the fog pressed closer; an icy fog that -rimmed such bushes as she could see with silver.
"Only thirty miles to go," she said aloud. "Thirty miles to the nearest motel. Then I'll find out if I've been dreaming or simply died and wakened in a deserted land."
Behind her the fog seemed to thicken and billow, yet it was a different color, a deep blue color.
Startled, she pulled into a turnout. In another moment she was out of the car and the car was enveloped in a cloud.
"Smoke," whimpered Sheila. "It's on fire!"
For one horrible moment she stood frozen to the graveled turnout, counting every precious possession packed within the car: linen and dishes and small pieces of silver bought and hoarded for the day she and Andy would have a home; letters and favorite books and clothes.
And then she began to run. If the car was afire, in time the gasoline tank would explode, and she didn't want to be within striking distance when it blew up.
Tires screamed and a horn blared, and Sheila ran back. Out of nowhere had come a truck, its very brake bands telling her in a trucker's language what it thought of anyone who dashed onto a highway, even one as deserted as this.
In another moment the big vehicle had turned in, stopped, shuddered, and out of the cab had jumped an angry man.
"Just what," he roared, "have you done to that car?"
Shock was replaced by anger of her own. "And just what business is it of yours?"
"I spent three hours on it. It worked perfectly when I left it for-say, are you Nate's daughter?"
"Do you think anyone not related to him would steal such a wreck?"
"You're Nate's daughter," stated the man. Then he pushed past her, lifted the hood and said, "Aha, just what I thought. What fool fixed that thermostat?"
Andy had said he'd had something fixed so she'd be sure of keeping warm in this icy weather. She sure had. So had the car. "Get in. When I bring up water, start the engine. Can't leave you here all night. No tools to take the blasted thing off. Have to take you to the next town."
"You," she informed him, "don't have to take me any place." Then curiosity overcame her anger. "How do you happen to be here now?"
"Stopped at your apartment to make sure you'd found your car. Girl there came home from work early to give you a good send-off and found you'd already gone. She called some guy and learned the route. He should have his head examined. The idea of sending you out on a cutoff with no houses and nearly no traffic this time of the year."
"It saved sixty-two miles," Sheila informed him loftily, "and no end of time."
"Yeah?"
That was all he said. He wheeled around, brought tin gas cans from the truck and disappeared into the fog.
Shivering with shock, chill, and exasperation, Sheila crept back into the now smokeless car.
Out of the fog came the man, the front of his pants and jacket slathered with mud, a good portion of it on his face. Must have slipped coming up some bank. To Sheila it looked wonderful. That would teach him not to bark at strange girls.
"Okay, sister, turn her over."
Sheila jerked to attention, caught the sharp glance of eyes as gray and icy as the landscape, and pressed the starter.
This man, she thought, idling the engine, is as stimulating as a splash of cold water, and then a second frightening thought struck. He was one of the two single men who'd be joining the group following her own family into the mountains to file claims. They were stuck with each other as members of the same party.
CHAPTER FOUR
As she sat, stunned at the thought of what could have happened had not this man come along, Sheila seemed to hear Welma's voice repeating the word, "Attitude."
All right, she'd be grateful. Imagine having to spend a night here in this fog-bound wilderness, waiting for a car, almost afraid to stop one should it come along.
"Okay, shut her off."
The man had come around to where she could see him. He'd wiped some of the mud from his face, but the wiping hadn't improved him much.
Sheila lowered the window to offer a contrite, "I'm sorry I was snappish. Frankly, I was scared. I thought the car was on fire and would explode."
"So that's why you were running."
He had beautiful teeth. He should smile more often.
"I wasn't feeling any too good myself," he confessed. "When your friends said some garage had serviced Galloping Gertie, I had qualms. No orthodox mechanic should be allowed within a mile of her. Your Dad has original ideas about repairs."
Sheila nodded. It was said in certain circles that, given a defunct motor, a saw, and some bailing wire, Nate Norris could set up a gyro camp. He had a way with machinery.
"Like some coffee?" she asked.
"I would."
But when she tried to pour some from the thermos her hands shook, so he took it away from her. "You eaten anything today?"
She shook her head and pointed to the lunch box.
"I was going to picnic when I found some sun."
"Grab yourself a bite and let's get going. You'll have to stop for a refill before you reach the other side. We'll spend the night there. Fog's closing in too much for me to keep track of you in the dark."
Dutifully Sheila grabbed, but when she opened the lunchbox her cheeks turned scarlet. An open-faced letter greeted her, complete with love and kisses.
Of course Andy had thought she'd open the box when she was alone, sitting among the pines, a silvery stream frothing along the roadside. There was a stream, but if it did any frothing it was too far down the bank for her to see.
She couldn't swallow a bite if she tried.
The man wheeled to the truck cab, returned with a nut-filled candy bar, and thrust it at her.
"Eat it even if it chokes you and then get going."
"But I want to ask questions, your name and why you're on the inland route, if you're going to carry the folks and their stuff, and-"
"Talk tonight. Name's Jed Justine. Step on it, and remember I'm trying to keep that truck behind you, so don't loiter."
Sheila got going, firmly believing even her toes were quivering with apprehension, though the car started easily enough. It rolled merrily uphill, or so she thought until she looked at the temperature gauge and saw it too was rolling merrily-up to the danger mark.
Again a turnoff and refill, and Sheila drove on, filled with fresh fear. Jed had taken time to tell her what could have happened had some well-meaning person, who did not know cars, filled the radiator without the motor running. A split block, and this particular car could be left at the roadside for junk.
When they reached a small town at the junction of the main inland highway Jed Justine pulled in beside a motel.
"Take a hot shower, drink some coffee and rest an hour. I'll pick you up and see that you eat properly."
Sheila thought of a lot of striking words, but she was afraid her teeth would chatter if she opened her mouth.
"I'll find a spot, then buy some tools and come back and fix that tin can so we can make time tomorrow."
Sheila longed to say she'd take the car to a garage. She had the money to pay for extensive repairs; hadn't Andy given her that hundred for emergencies? Then she remembered what the last garage had done when confronted with her father's rebuilding job and hurried into the motel.
She hurried back once. Andy didn't approve of ski pants unless there was snow. Nevertheless ski pants were indicated.
"Now that's something like it," Justine remarked when he called for her. "Only your Dad can run that car with the heater going and water in the radiator. I had visions of stopping every fifty miles to chop you out, thaw you, and get you going again. Here, good food, if not fancy."
They had crossed the Interstate Highway, dodging trucks that roared through the fog and cars that crept, and then stopped before a multicolored sign fuzzed by mist.
Inside was a U-shaped counter and a few booths with every seat filled. Jed Justine spotted two men lingering over pie and coffee and fixed them with a compelling eye; whereupon they got up, and left the table.
"I'm not really hungry," Sheila began as the waitress, beaming on Justine, waved a menu at her.
"I am. And I don't intend to sit across from someone who's mincing along. How's the steak, and tell the truth?"
The waitress told the truth, and he ordered chops. Sheila sat amused, studying him. With the dirt off his face and without that disreputable cap he'd been wearing, he was quite presentable, even good-looking. The yellow lights of the cafe reflected copper tones in his hair, much too wavy and a complete waste on a man. He obviously agreed. He'd tried to stick it down with something not advertised on television.
"Now, those questions," he began abruptly.
"Why the inland route if you're picking up the folks?"
"I switched trucks with Danny. This gets delivered to Roseburg. I'll hitch a ride back. Phoned your Dad, and he said I'd better be the one to trail you. You'd wrap Danny around your finger."
"And you don't wrap?"
"I don't wrap. Now one for me. Why did you take this route?"
Andy had worked it out carefully. He'd estimated mileage. He'd also estimated mountains and, with one eye on the old car, had chosen the lesser of two evils. Besides, he had reasoned, the coast route would naturally be more heavily shrouded with fog. But could she tell this man another man had planned the route, and that she, Nate Norris's daughter, had obeyed him?
"Choice of fog. If I had to go over, I preferred a field to a cliff with the Pacific at the bottom."
"Next time check with State Highway. Sea fog blows away. Tulle fog clings. Thought you'd know that."
Sheila felt a primitive urge to raise the flat of her hand to that freshly shaven cheek, because he was right. She had known and hadn't been able to argue Andy out of it.
"Eat," said Justine, and Sheila ate.
There was stationery in the writing desk. Sheila looked at it, thought of Andy and of her promise to write each step of the way, but she couldn't tell him of this step. A postcard would have to suffice.
Nor could she enjoy the television in the cozy warmth of the room when Jed was just outside working on the car, not two feet from shrubs wearing coats of ice.
After the hood banged down, bringing on protesting lights, she tried to sleep. She knew she had because she had such awful dreams. But they were nothing compared to the reality of the next day.
"That overheating yesterday melted a wire," Jed mumbled, after she'd coasted to a barely visible turnout in a dun gray world. "Let's hope there are no more chain reactions, I don't carry a garage set-up with me."
There were no more chain reactions; there was a blowout that made Sheila feel she'd been shot. Why else would the car go out of control, swerve straight into the path of a behemoth with glaring eyes coming out of a tunnel of mist?
When she had limped it to the side of the road, Jed came up. "It would almost be easier to have you try to drive this truck and me the car. That was a gas truck you just missed."
"I planned it that way," Sheila told him sweetly. "I adore blowouts. I arrange for them. I come equipped with radar and know to the split-second when a gas tank is looming. Thrills, you know."
He just gave a grunt, but he exploded when, after moving half the contents of the trunk to the roadside to find the spare, he looked at it. "I thought your Dad liked you. We'll stop in the next town for something with rubber on it."
"He did the best he could under the circumstances," she defended him softly.
"I'm sorry. I should have checked before I turned the car over to you. And stop shivering!"
She couldn't. A wind had come in from some place, and before her amazed eyes was blowing fog before it, revealing to the left a satin blue lake -rimmed by high mountains, dotted with fir-covered islands.
"Everything is going to be all right now," she said, "after three stops for repairs."
"Three times and out." He nodded. "That's Nate for you. If I wasn't afraid Gertie would come apart at the seams, I'd have you drive on to Roseburg; then I'd drive the car back.
But I don't know what that extra four hundred miles would do to her."
Sheila, eyeing the now clear mountains, studied the terrain. "Jed, how is Dad going to use this car getting up to a claim?"
He looked at her, looked away, then looked back. "He bought a wrecked jeep. That's part of the truckload. He plans to use part of Gertie to put the jeep in running order. Danny and I have a halfway good one; we'll see him through."
She laughed freely. "Pick up a coil of bailing wire, will you, Jed? And don't tell the government what it's missing in not having Nate Norris around. He'd die if they closed him in on a missile base."
For the first time she saw approval in his glance and understood why the waitress of the previous evening had brought him the best of everything.
She tried to look deep into his eyes, to let him know that she liked being with him, that she found him attractive-and desirable. He looked back at her, and she watched the twinkle in his eye turn to a lusty gleam. Yes, he understood, she told herself. But could it be happening so quickly? After all, there was Andy to think about and ... and what? No, she knew she had to have Jed. It would be her initiation into a new life, the life in the country, a freer life, a life unfettered by the demands of city living, unrestricted by the demands of rent and gas prices and utility bills. A whole new world was opening up for her, and she wanted to share that now with Jed, intimately.
"Do you think we could go over to your truck for a minute," she asked coyly. "I've never seen a big rig like that before from the inside, and I really don't feel like driving just yet."
"Hey, little lady, don't you think you're moving a little too fast. I think you better hold your horses, that's what I think."
Sheila looked at him intensely, trying to show him with her eyes that she wasn't kidding around. "Jed," she said forcefully. "I don't think you and I have to play games. I think we both know the score."
"Hey," he said suddenly, "I think you're right about that. There wouldn't be anything wrong with a quick trip to the cab of my truck. Nothing wrong at all. In fact, it would be downright uplifting, if you know what I mean."
Sheila felt comfortable knowing that Jed could joke with her like that. She always enjoyed her sex more when she could laugh and play with her partner, because that always made it easier for them to get close-as close as they needed to get to experience the pleasure waiting to be unleashed in their bodies.
Jed fairly hauled her right up off her feet and then pushed her inside his truck. He had a sleeping compartment in the back that was big enough for both of them, and from the way he scrambled up the steps and inside the cab, Sheila could tell that he was eager to get back into that cozy compartment.
"It ain't much," he said, starting to unbutton his shirt, "but it's home."
They both laughed while they undressed, and Sheila couldn't help thinking back to the last time she had fucked with Andy. It had been good, that much was certain, and they had laughed and joked just like she and Jed were doing now. But somehow with Andy, the lovemaking didn't seem as raw and natural. And Sheila knew that was because Jed was more of a man than Andy. Just how much more she wasn't certain, but she was dying to find out.
When she caught her first glimpse of Jed's cock, she was given her first clue to how much more of a man Jed was. His penis was much larger and thicker than Andy's, and she could hardly wait to feel it jammed between her labia, wringing out orgasm after orgasm. She always enjoyed bigger pricks because of the way the hard veined shaft stroked her clit on the outstroke. It was much easier for her to come while impaled on a big penis. She often wondered how women could stand fucking men with tiny cocks.
When they were finally naked, Jed took her in his arms and kissed her rudely. Wrapping his big hands around her shoulders, he pulled her close and then jammed his tongue down her throat. Sheila wasn't used to such brutal treatment, but it didn't take her long to develop a taste for it.
And while Jed mauled her, she tried to caress him tenderly. She thought that would make a good balance to their lovemaking, until the moment came when they were both working uncontrollably toward orgasm. She took pride in her ability to make a man come, and now she was about to make herself proud of her abilities again.
While Jed squeezed her tits roughly, she reached down and gingerly caressed his shaft, moving her smooth hands up and down the full length of his penis. Then she moved her hand down to his testicles, digging her fingernails into the wrinkled skin of his scrotum just enough to cause him to groan with pleasure.
They stroked and massaged one another until the moment arrived for them to fuck. Jed slipped his prick easily into her wet pussy and it wasn't long before they were lost to their deepest emotions. It was tremendously satisfying for both of them.
Afterwards, Jed walked her back to her car, smiling. "I'll trail you over the Sisklyous, then head on," he said. "Better hole in for the night before taking the coast grade."
He went back to his cab, and Sheila got into her car. Like an old horse back on familiar ground, Gertie went into a gallop, and Sheila's spirits galloped right along with her.
Happily she drove on, her mood lasting right down the other side of the range to where a steaming car was pulled to one side, a huddle of children parked on an old running board.
From behind she heard the squeal of brakes and slowed, watching the truck come to a halt through her rear view mirror. Jed jumped down, crossed the highway and went into consultation with the man.
He caught up with her miles farther on, passed and motioned her to a truckers' cafe. Over coffee and hamburgers redolent of chopped onion and catsup and every other type of sauce available, he laid down the final law.
He'd drive easier if she'd stop at a motel. He'd deliver the truck, catch the midnight bus back and be ready to go on with her the next morning.
And Sheila, swaying with weariness, agreed.
It was not even a road to negotiate in the daylight, but she did all right. Jed Justine in the seat beside her slept without a twitch as she maneuvered around the switchbacks.
"Why didn't you wake me," he howled in dismay when she stopped on a coast road swathed in fog. "How did you get us here?"
"Gertie was brung up in these here hills," she intoned. "Now you can play conquering hero and take us to where the folks are camped."
The fog had thinned by the time they reached a state camping ground.
Hope was high. Her father was vibrant with life. Even her mother was amused. And around the shelter they'd thrown up were cars, two house trailers and the two jeeps.
American gypsies, thought Sheila, looking for the women's heads, shrouded in bandanas against the chill air.
Sheila and Jed were swept into the group with warm welcome. Someone called, "Chow," and they gathered on a chilly green bench before a table featuring a vast pot of beans, potatoes in jackets and cole slaw. Sheila had forgotten how good lean-time food could taste when one was hungry.
Talk was constant; everyone deferred to Nate Norris. He'd spent the morning with the county assessor and had a good rundown on available claims.
He figured the couples with children should have first chance at claims near roads, kids having a way of coming down with things that made their folks long for doctors. Older couples would come next. The young fry could take to the hills.
The men would leave immediately, taking sleeping bags with them. The women were not to worry if they were out a couple of days.
Sheila watched the men go off, Jed and Danny particularly. Danny, she'd found, was the antithesis of Jed. More like Andy, she had decided as she'd watched him organizing the party with great attention to detail.
For a little while her mother was busy with the other women; then she joined Sheila on a sunny bench, sinking onto it with a sigh.
"Well?" she asked.
"Andy likes the idea," was Sheila's reply. "I am surprised."
Sheila admitted she had been shocked, then tried to explain Andy's feeling. "I think he studies ahead," she said thoughtfully. "He likes to have an ace in the hole, two strings to his bow, that sort of thing."
"You mean he lives in tomorrow."
"I like to think of it as preparing for tomorrow," Sheila said defensively.
At another time of the year this would have been a fine place to camp, but as the afternoon waned, Sheila envied the men, by now above the fog line.
Lights in trailer houses glowed early, and fretful children added a discordant note to the rhythmic boom of the surf.
"Might as well go to bed," decided Mrs. Norris. "It's warmer."
The men returned the next afternoon, excitement in their voices.
"Bonanza!" Nate shouted, striding across the parking lot. "Mother, I've found us a home, trees, soil, a stream, and right across from it a claim for Sheila."
CHAPTER FIVE
There were cries of delight from the women when Danny came up with two steelhead. He'd taken time to go to a pool he knew.
There were just enough slices to go around, enough to point up the excellence of hashed brown potatoes fried with onions and a vast pot of canned wild blackberries with dumplings.
Must be the chill air, thought Sheila, enjoying every bite.
Plopped up in her makeshift bed that night, she wrote to Andy. There seemed little to say. Her father had picked out a claim just east of their own. She would return and file on it later when the men came in for supplies.
She sealed the letter, then started writing Welma, her pencil flying over pages. Now that it was over, her trip seemed comical.
"Once when I was a kid I was out picking huckleberries. I'd found a fine stand of them. Heard someone on the other side stripping the branches, and yelled this was my patch. Then I looked up and there, towering on the other side, was a big brown bear. I went one way and I think he went the other; I didn't stop to look.
"This Jed Justine is as frightening as that bear. He towers and growls, only he doesn't run the other way."
He growled the next morning. Since she was filing, she knew, didn't she, that she'd have to have shelter on her claim? That meant a stove of some kind, water buckets, a real coffeepot. And did she have a tarp of her own until they could get a roof up?
"Thank you," she said gravely. "I'll take care of it this morning."
"And don't forget," he added, "there'll be no place to store doll rags for months. There's a lean-to shack on your claim, but it has to be knocked down, moved, and a face put on it."
"I'll be very glad to pay scale."
"Oh, for Pete's sake-" barked Jed, and strode off.
Sheila retreated behind the nearest tree to bring out her billfold and count her money. Thank goodness she hadn't shopped for clothes.
Shocked, Sheila found she had a hundred and sixty dollars.
"Mother," she wailed, rushing over to where Mrs. Norris was frying mush, "I've got too much money. I only spent six dollars for a five hundred and twenty mile trip."
"Wonderful; you should tell your Dad how you did it."
"But I didn't. Jed must have put in gas at night and other times when I was in a cafe. And he paid for the last motel, because I waited and he said it saved him bus fare. Oh, dear, I can't take-"
The spatula nearly struck Sheila as Mrs. Norris wheeled. "That's enough. Accept whatever Jed does for you. It's not for you; it's for your father. Nate did something for the Justines when you were too young to remember. Now write out your grocery list and let me check before you go into town."
Chastened, Sheila found a rustic seat with a table and, huddled in the cold morning air, tried to write. Coffee, oatmeal, beans.
"Mother," she raced back, "how much has Dad spent on that jeep?"
Mrs. Norris cast her eyes toward the fog and shrugged her shoulders. She did not know.
"Well, I can't eat if you're hungry. I have a hundred and sixty dollars and fifty-eight cents."
"Your own?"
"Yes. I also have a hundred of Andy's."
"We'll go shopping," agreed Mrs. Norris, and beamed. "I just knew food would be forthcoming. But don't tell your Dad what you have; he'll wheedle it out of you for some piece of machinery."
They laughed together over Nate's great weakness.
Only Danny Johnson, Jed Justine, and the Norris family breakfasted together that morning. The party was beginning to break up preparatory to going to individual claims.
A reluctant Nate was pulled from the jeep just as it gave its first prolonged cough of life, and covered with grease and oil, was sent to wash.
"Isn't this something?" he asked on his return, and Sheila, remembering the man she had seen on the street below her apartment, agreed it was. "Nobody," he informed them, "can fry mush like my wife. Crisp on both sides."
Mrs. Norris took a look at the car and said they would have to empty it if she were to bring back what she'd need, but they unpacked only the truck.
Hours later they returned with gear sticking out the windows and far out of the back where a red flag warned of an excess load. Sheila was worn but thankful her mother had accompanied her.
"Sleeping bags are fine, but should you have to leap out at any time, you'd feel trapped."
Sheila had bought a used steel cot and mattress for half what a bag would have cost. She had blankets.
She'd fallen in love with a small potbellied stove, but Mrs. Norris had pointed out a tiny three-foot-square range would also bake, and she'd be a long way from the bread counter of a grocery store.
As for groceries, Sheila had uttered protests as her mother had piled food packages on her cart. Mrs. Norris had stood stock-still to say, "Child, you've lived in the wilds. This is only January. We can still have a heavy snow. We know we'll have rain. There are no bridges yet. If you remember the picture Dad drew of your claim, streams sweep down on either side to converge just beyond the witness tree."
When they drove into camp they found it deserted, all signs of anyone ever having stopped there gone, except for a stack of kin dling and small wood. Tied to the largest piece was a note.
"If that isn't like a man," cried her mother, reading it. "The boys have gone on to move that shack down for you so you'll have a place for you-"
"Junk?" asked Sheila.
"Well, yes," conceded her mother.
It wasn't too late to stop them, Sheila realized. They could drive on to the last stopping place and follow their trail. Jed might think he was doing this for Nate Norris's daughter, but he was doing it for a strange man as well. She couldn't be indebted to Justine; or allow Andy that indignity. She'd go back to her original plan: stay with her parents until she were free to return to town.
Mrs. Norris smiled at her. "Have you decided?" she asked.
"How did you know?"
"I've been living with your father thirty years. You are a lot like him. You'll give all you've got, but you can't take."
"I think I could take if it were for me alone," she mused.
"It has to be, at first, Sheila. You're the one who'll file the claim. That's the way it should be. Later if Mr. Carter wants in on it, you can sell him half and repay your Dad and the boys." Sheila nodded.
As long as the men wouldn't return until the next day, Sheila treated her mother to a night at a motel. Mrs. Norris enjoyed every minute of it, from a shampoo under a hot shower to the one-station television program.
Sheila, who'd made two trips to the camp for her possessions, spent the evening outside in the chill fog repacking, sacrificing beautiful boxes, wrapping china in fine linen to save space and eventually laying aside pieces of crockery to take to the second-hand store and trade for a slat-back folding chair with foot rest, a card table and a water-damaged bolt of Dutch blue denim.
The proprietor, amused, gave her a moth-eaten back pack she admired.
She filed the next morning. Her father had left her the description and had spoken to the county assessor about her intentions. She found him a friendly person, slightly amused at her seriousness.
"Afraid you won't find much gold there," he said paternally, "but a lot of living. Come to think of it, that's what life's for, isn't it?"
Outside the courthouse, she stood a moment watching the town appear and recede as wind pulled fog out and puffed it in. Unexpectedly, she was enjoying this.
I guess every woman likes to shop, she reasoned.
In the next block she spent a reckless two dollars on seeds.
She scowled as she walked on. Jed, unemployed, had wasted money on juke boxes.
"Moms," she asked, coming into the motel, "just why aren't Jed and Danny working? They're log truckers, aren't they? And they must be union, or they wouldn't have had those trucks to deliver. So why-"
Mrs. Norris hesitated a moment. "Oh, young folks like adventure. They've probably saved enough out of back pay to take a chance. Well, girl, shoulders back; from now on we rough it."
Danny came for them shortly after noon. Nate and Jed were putting the finishing touches on the shack. They'd been able to haul it down to within shouting distance of the Norris claim by jeep. The women folks would sleep there until Nate had a shelter of his own.
He made a final quick run into town, and Sheila's eyes squinted when she saw what he brought back: a stack of flattened cartons and a roll of celloglass.
Then they were off. The Norris car would follow the jeep to the first claim taken by their party, just off an access road. It would be safe there. Necessities had already been transferred to the jeep.
"I'm beginning to understand why so few treasures came across the plains," Sheila confided to her mother as they started out. "If you broke the heirloom china you couldn't stop at a store to replace it because there were no stores. So you traded for unbreakables before you got under way."
"Ummm," murmured Mrs. Norris. "Look ahead. We're coming out of the fog."
They had left the coast highway to climb steep county roads, pass ranches set farther and farther apart. Below them fog billowed like a sea of dreams; above, hilltops gleamed red in the sun, splotched with small stands of trees.
Ranches gave way to wilderness. Occasionally there was a crude building of old lumber, eyeless and deserted. Once a woman came out of one to wave, and Sheila was thankful she had joined her parents. Her mother could otherwise have looked equally lonely.
An hour later they turned up an access road to find one of the party trailers not too far off the road. Children were milling around a father and brother throwing up a cabana they would close in for extra room on rainy days.
Their visit was short. Transferring to the jeep, they went on, Sheila shivering despite the parka she'd donned. A wind came sweeping down from the Sisklyou range, beautiful but ice-covered.
And then they saw the cliff ahead, rockbound, aloof, its top in line with the tip of an old giant of the forest that had defied timber men. The boundary marker: the witness tree.
Sheila let her mother fill her pack, then started the ascent.
Her father and Jed waited at the top; Jed quickly relieved her of the pack.
"Your land," he greeted her.
CHAPTER SIX
Nate had gone down to help Mrs. Norris. Now she appeared, moving slowly, saying breathlessly, "I'd a sight sooner be unemployed up here than milling around seeing other folks' misery. My goodness, look at that view."
"And look at the shack!" Nate ordered.
Sheila whirled. Obligingly the sun had leveled for its evening dip into the Pacific to send a wash of red gold over the weather silvered boards of the small building.
"Why, it's beautiful," she cried, and looked at Jed.
"Not bad. We'll sling on an overhang as soon as we hoist boards from the old camp, and cut off the lash of the southwest storms. I'd better get down and give Danny a hand."
By the time they reached the building, the sun was down and the glamour had faded, yet the small protection it gave from the sudden chill was comforting.
Soon after relaying the jeep's contents up the hill, the three men had the little stove up and kindling and short wood ready.
Kerosene lanterns were filled and hung, and while Sheila and her mother worked over the little stove, the inexplicable flattened cartons proved their worth. They were nailed to the inner walls, each an additional blanket against the encroaching cold. Celloglass went over the windows, and the old tarp Sheila had bought in trade was spread on the floor.
Watching her mother work, Sheila wondered how many women could have produced a heartening supper in so short a time under such circumstances.
Almost before the stove was up she had potatoes washed, split and oiled for the oven. Narrow pans Sheila had bought for the small oven were filled with biscuits ready for last minute baking. Hamburger steaks were patted out, seasoned, and Sheila set to work with an old wooden bowl and chopper.
"Throw in a hand of raisins and the men will eat their slaw. One onion will do, and we can risk an apple."
Being the least "weathered," Sheila took her plate to a box behind the stove while the other four sat at her card table.
The three men left as soon as the second pot of coffee was drained. They'd set up a shelter of sorts, a cave of windfalls with a tarp overhead. A fire at the entrance would keep them comfortable; not that they weren't so "done in" they could sleep standing up on an iceberg, Nate contributed happily.
"Dad likes to work, doesn't he?" Sheila commented as she lay on her canvas cot. Her mother was in her small bed; the red eye of the stove danced between them.
She carried her thought through to a pink dawn, forgot it as she went outside to look out and found that her mountain and those around seemed floating in a rose-colored sea. Fog still covered the lowlands.
The men were already working. Looking at the white frost on the shack, she wondered how they could handle such cold boards. But when they came in they seemed filled with the zest of living and ate heartily.
"Dad," she asked when they had a moment alone, "do you know Mr. Carter's age?"
"Fifty in April."
"What? I thought he was in his early sixties."
"No oxygen in his lungs." And he strode off.
From below sounded the protest of a jeep starting on a cold morning, and the three men were off to gather boards for the Norris cabin.
Sheila looked around her. This was to be her claim, her twenty acres.
Slowly she walked around her small domain, six hundred feet more or less east and west along the cliff.
When she came to the shack, she found her mother, hatchet in hand, busily preparing wood for the stove. "It will give the men time to work on our place," she explained.
One by one Mrs. Norris scratched items off Sheila's list. Her father would have hinges in his "mess of odds and ends." He could cut a pole. Staining the old boards would be a waste of time; they were pretty as they were, all silvered. Only the roofing paper passed.
"Sheila, you've got to remember there's only so much cash money to see us through. Should we run out and your father be driven to hunt out of season, he could be caught and fined.
"This first year can be downright hard. Next summer, with a garden, and us taking advantage of wild berries and such, and Dad out working, we'll make out better. And we won't be owing anybody."
The Carters owed no one. Andy had told her the only purchase his parents had ever made on time was the cottage they'd bought during their early married years.
"Now you run along to where the shack stood and see if you can't find boards for shelves. Don't forget a long one for your clothes closet."
Sheila walked back down to a spot near where the original filer had placed his shelter within a few yards of the stream he would work. There were boards there, but all were imperfect.
Someone had used some for firewood, thrusting ends now charred. Others had been torn from the building and had ragged ends. Sheila almost turned away, thinking she would buy ready-cut shelving the next time she went to town. Then suddenly she saw them as so many loaves of bread, so many cans of coffee. Her father could saw off the useless parts.
"Good," said her mother after the third trip. "Now get my saw out of my suitcase and get busy. You'd better draw lines, and don't forget to angle your corners with the shack."
Sheila stood looking so bemused her mother said, "Well, for goodness sake, put your knee on this after you've laid it across this stump like so; then saw, like this."
Doggedly, sometimes angrily, Sheila sawed. Suddenly she caught the rhythm of the saw.
"Why that's fine, honey," Mrs. Norris exclaimed. "Took me a lot longer to learn. Now run back and see if you can find something for cleats for these to rest on. Could be we'll get them up before the boys come in."
Swiftly Sheila worked, measuring with a notched alder pole, then standing back to find the two east corners neatly filled with shelves from floor to low ceiling.
"Now, then, take that packing paper and crimp the edges for covering. You remember how."
The sun was well overhead when Sheila stood back and looked at her morning's work. Shelves with scalloped paper held a neat array of the purchases she'd brought up the previous evening.
They heard the men long before the jeep came into view.
The men appeared one by one, each carrying a gift as proudly as though he brought boxes of candy or beautiful bunches of flowers.
A large granite ware water pitcher. A bowl of a different color. Last and most important, Jed came carrying a window frame.
"So you won't feel you're in solitary confinement during bad weather," he told her.
They looked at the shelves and whistled.
"You'd be handy to have around a house," Danny said.
She would spend the next day making stained denim curtains for shelves, closet and window strips. There would be enough for a pad for the lounging chair as well.
"That's rainy weather work," her mother objected. "Tomorrow we'll help the boys. I wouldn't be surprised if you and I could put up a lot of siding while they're doing other things."
They did. It wasn't too unlike piecing a quilt, Sheila found; just pounding your thumb with a hammer instead of sticking your finger with a needle.
As her father had set up the big family range as soon as the red clay chimney was up, they had their midday meal in the new house: butter beans her mother had put to soak the night before, a can of Sheila's corned beef to give them flavor and color, and a coffee cake with oatmeal crumb topping her mother had whipped up.
There was a spectacular sunset that night. Out of the west came vast clouds. Purple ribbed with scarlet, they swept up, splashing the world below with their color until purple mountain vied with scarlet peak and all rode a sea of blue shadow.
The chill of approaching night sent Sheila scurrying up the hill to light the small stove and stand shivering until its welcome heat announced it was ready for work.
When the others came up in the dusk, a large pan of macaroni and cheese came from the oven, its bubbling top golden brown.
"Not bad," said Jed, and Sheila longed to turn the empty pan bottom side up on his handsome head. Andy would have appreciated what she had concocted for five out of practically nothing.
The rain came that night, a few tentative drops, then a gentle hiss. "I'll bet the boys are chanting, 'Glad we got the roof on,'" said Mrs. Norris sleepily.
The next day Sheila started on the noisiest ride of her life. Danny and she were dispatched to town for sinks, a new length of pipe, odds and ends, and the mail.
Behind them the empty trailer rattled and banged over the rough ground. "We'll talk in town, at lunch," shouted Danny.
They stopped at the post office first. On top of the small packet handed Sheila was a telegram. Puzzled, she opened it; Danny watched her anxiously.
"Disregard contents of first letter. Second follows. Love, Andy."
Now she sheafed swiftly through her mail for the first letter, opened it, read two lines and turned so white Danny put out a strong arm to steady her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Danny would tell Jed later he'd never felt as sorry for anyone. There she stood in her father's slicker and tin hat, telegram in one hand, letter in the other, looking both angry and stricken.
"Ask when the next north-bound mail is due, will you, Danny?"
It came at two o'clock and would be distributed soon afterward. Danny promised they'd wait. Meanwhile he took the jeep to a lumber yard, and Sheila hovered at the secondhand store and the market.
Hiding behind an ancient dresser with a mirror half as big as her shack's end wall, she reread the letter.
"Darling, I'm making a quick trip up to marry you. I'll feel better about everything if you are Mrs. Carter. Don't bother about making it a festive affair; just Justice of the Peace or whatever they use there. We'll have a formal celebration when I get my vacation.
"Don't file on the claim until after the ceremony. I'll wire date and approximate time of arrival.
All my affection, Andy."
Danny was the perfect companion. He asked no questions but implied perfect belief in her. She needed it. He didn't insist she eat, so she ate. She even had apple pie a la mode, because heaven knew when she'd see ice cream again.
Well, she'd send Andy his money air-hopping right back to him.
She did, by certified check.
Danny told Jed Sheila had acted funny all through lunch. "Sort of like a balloon, so full of something her skin looked thin. I was scared of pricking it. Then that letter came in on the two o'clock bus. She read it and went all soft again."
And wished she could get that certified check out of the bank postal box.
Poor Andy, she thought all the way home as lumber slapped and metal jangled. Wouldn't his mother turn to him instead of to his father? And Mr. Carter-how must he feel?
She thought that until they were near the cabin that would shelter her parents and she saw her father come striding toward them, alive, happy, undefeated.
So Mr. Carter had been laid off, had he? Well, the senior Carters had a home and a deep freeze full of food and bulging canning closets. Why were they tearing their hair? The lay-off was temporary, the plant closed down for a slump season. It would open up again; it wasn't like a logging camp.
"What's eating you?" Nate demanded when they were alone.
When she told him, he said, "Tough on a fellow like him. The old girl will blame him. Wouldn't be surprised if he moved his bed out to that cabin of his."
Sheila looked ahead to where her mother was happily setting up a wash bench under a shelter the men had run out from one end of the cabin. Nearby, a pipe brought up from the derelict mill was running off its rust, the water being brought down from a spring. It would be clear in time.
"Look, Sheila, running water and no water bill."
"Dad," she whispered, "aren't we lucky having her!"
"And who was smart enough to pick her?"
"My, do you ever hate yourself!" she chided. Except for the white wings in her black hair, wings which had appeared when her son's plane was reported missing, she looked like a girl, slim, active, color in her cheeks and sparkle in her black eyes.
"Remind me to remind you, you're my best girl friend," Sheila said, giving her a hug.
"Now what brought that on? What did you get in meat?"
"Sale on mutton shanks; day's best buy, so I picked up two fat garlic bulbs to take off the curse."
"Good. Come on; I'll give you a hot dish to take up to your shack. Better start now; it will be dark early tonight."
They went into the twenty by twenty cabin, already taking on the look of home. The walls had yet to be insulated with the patterned building paper Sheila had bought that day, but familiar drapes hung over the celloglass windows (for additional warmth); slip covers were on the divan and big chairs. The dining table was neatly set; the bed corner screened off by plaid drapes hooked to wires.
"You'll have to rustle your own wood after today," her mother warned. "Nate left you a good axe. He'll be helping the boys for a few days. If you want to sleep down here-"
"If you want me-"
"Frankly, I don't, Sheila. If there's no one around to watch, I can be lazy."
Sheila nodded. She'd felt that way when Welma went off for weekends.
"I can use a little of that myself," she confessed.
"Except that you can't afford it. You're working your claim alone. Now skat before it's too dark to climb the cliff."
It was Jed who helped carry her supplies to the shack. "We'll be out of your way tomorrow," he remarked.
Sheila looked up, surprised. "I'm sorry if I've made you feel that way. Do you think I have no gratitude at all?"
"Gratitude!" He spun and went down for another load.
When he returned he had the little transistor at its loudest pitch, sending out a rollicking tune and effectively drowning out any chance conversation.
"Well," he turned it down a little, "be seeing you. Don't let your growing pains get you down."
She would learn not to slam doors. It took her ten minutes to pick up cans and kettles.
So now she was alone. Carefully she opened the door and peered out. The world was a bowl of dark grey. Swiftly she closed the door, comforting herself with the thought she could see the light in the cabin if they ever got the glass for the big window.
She brought out Andy's letter and studied it, trying to read behind the hastily scribbled lines.
"Dad acts knocked out," he'd written. Of course, he'd have a really tough time finding another job like the one he had. "He's been with this same firm twenty-five years. You'd think the U.S. government had closed down for a slump season. Accountants stay put, once they're entrenched."
Hmm, mused Sheila, so do mill mechanics, as long as they can. But when a place is timbered off She read on. "This proves what I've always told the folks. A man should have more than a paid-for home; he should have a paying hobby, something to fall back upon. All Dad's ever done is collect adventure books. Well, he'll have time to reread the lot of them in the next three months."
Sheila reread one paragraph several times. Andy had written he felt he shouldn't take on the responsibility of a wife at such a time. At the moment his folks were comfortably fixed financially, but should his father not be recalled, he would have to see them through until his dad could find a job.
"You above all can understand this," he wrote.
As she looked out the next morning, a watery-eyed sun peered over the eastern range, then drew down an eyelid of cloud, and the skies wept.
"So I make drapes," she tossed out to the grey and shadow-blue world.
But by the time she'd made coffee and toast and the fire was sizzling with wet wood, she'd changed her mind. Heavy rains would come. She didn't want to sit shivering. The only way to offset that was to do what her her mother had said, "rustle wood."
She'd bought waders for the day she would start panning for gold at the mouth of North Creek. Now she added these to jeans, sweat shirt and parka and started out.
After she'd stumbled over low growing salal bushes a few times, she learned to lift the waders in a goosestep. She learned, too, why woodsmen carried their axes over their shoulders.
By evening she was too tired to prepare food and sacrificed a can of chow mein she'd brought from the apartment. She ate hungrily, breaking off many times to shift kindling drying in the oven.
As she fell into bed, three men sitting around a fire on a ridge a mile away spoke of the day.
"I still think we ought to give her a hand," said one.
"I've got me more than one reason not to," returned another. "Come to think of it if you'd spend less time with those field glasses and more time at your work, you'd get a shanty up faster."
By the second evening, Sheila had quite a sizable stack of wood behind the shack. She also had a black eye, a bruised lip and three broken fingernails.
Nate, coming up just before dusk, took a look at his daughter and bit his lips. "To think a daughter of mine would try to chop a limb like that. Leave it be; I'll bring my chain saw up for those."
"You bring the saw up," Sheila informed him gratingly, "and I'll cut it up. Any time I let any little old alder knock me out-"
"Now, Sheila, you know how I feel about my tools. You're not taking your temper out on anything I cherish. Came up to tell you Danny's going in tomorrow, in case you want to go or send mail."
"Costs me money to go near stores," she stated, "but I will send in some mail. When do we get our box up?"
"When we have time to cut some posts. But it will be a two-mile hike to the county road, crosswise over that hill."
When he found she'd sacrificed the tarp she'd used for the floor to cover her wood, he said he'd take time next morning to throw up a shed roof for shelter. She'd have the wood sweating, tucked in like that. Wet as it was, it needed air blowing through.
Her letter to Andy wasn't the warmly sympathetic one she had planned. Her hands ached. Her head ached. Her eyes burned from the smoke and steam of wood drying both in the oven and on the grill she'd mounted on stones on top.
All she wanted to write was, "So you think the Carters are having a tough time. You should see me."
Grimly she set herself to her task. She wrote, "Fortunately I received your wire before I read the letter saying you'd be up to marry me. I might have wasted money on a wedding dress.
"I returned the hundred dollars because it didn't seem fair to use it. This claim," the assessor told me, hasn't much gold but a lot of living. He can say that again, but I'd change his tone of voice.
"You'd better come up and file on one of your own, one that has better prospects. There are men here you can hire to prove it for you. You only have to put in a hundred dollars per year for three years to get your patent."
She finished with "Love, Sheila," and let it go.
The letter finished, she wrote more freely to Welma. "You and your attitudes! I had the wrong attitude today. I was fighting, and I got the worst of it. Things, not people, fought back. You should see me."
She wrote about Danny, the blond giant now growing a beard. "He looks more like Santa Claus every day. You'd love him; he's big and gentle and thoughtful."
Rising to get more paper, she groaned and thought of Jed's remark about "growing pains." She added a final note to her letter.
"Jed, the bear, likes music. Sounds queer here in the wilds to hear something I danced to in the city. Funny thing: the other evening when he was being superior, I looked out, and I'd have sworn the clouds were rolling to the beat."
Knowing she should check groceries as snow might fall at any time, Sheila went into a huddle with her billfold.
She had given her mother twenty-five of the hundred and sixty-one. She herself now had sixty left and no means of earning anything more.
Whereas she had been tired, she was not tired and worried.
She didn't sleep well, and when her father came cheerily to the door in the morning, chain saw and other gear in hand, she looked anything but happy.
"Been thinking," he confided, coming in to settle for a cup of coffee, "about this wood cutting. We'll really get on it this summer, be well stocked before the next cold season sets in. Chain saw's fine for felling your timber, but when it comes to whacking it into small pieces-"
"You saw a dilly of a saw down at the second-hand store," offered Sheila darkly.
"You mean you saw it?"
"In your eyes. Dad, listen. Between us we haven't enough money for food for any length of time. Let's let next winter's wood go until next winter." Her voice faltered a little. "Let's not live in tomorrow."
The light died in his eyes. "Soon as you and your mother are settled, I'll go fern whacking. The way you women spend a man's money!"
He took his temper out by throwing up her wood shelter, and Sheila heard him talking earnestly to someone unseen as hammer connected with thumb. When she thought he'd cooled a little, she took her black eye out to help him.
Danny, coming up for mail and a list, looked once and looked away. Nate said nothing, happily. Naturally Danny could only surmise, and Jed laughed.
"You don't think Nate would-" Danny ventured.
"Might want to, but she wouldn't let him. No, Danny, that's one of the penalties of living alone. There's nobody to blame it on."
"Some day maybe I'll find out why you don't like that swell little kid."
"When you do, let me in on it, will you?"
Days passed; a soft snow fell and melted. This was to be a green year, a strange year in many places. Danny brought up his battery radio for Sheila. No need of it, with Jed's going all day and half the night, and she took surprising comfort from it.
She had thought she'd be bored, but thus far hadn't found time.
Gradually she worked the blue denim into curtains. Occasionally her mother came up to help, but more often she went down there to lend an extra hand.
"Mother," she confessed one day, "I've never wanted anything as much as I want glass in that window."
Mrs. Norris could sympathize; she could also remind her how much food the money for a window would buy.
She asked Sheila to go into town with her father the next day. "It shames him to buy bargains, and he doesn't get our money's worth."
Sheila agreed. She'd see how far she could stretch the ten dollars she would take with her.
Nate had a passenger when Sheila came down to join him. Jed, a pad under him, sat with his back to the jeep seat and clung to the sides as they rattled down to the first road.
With the Norris duo, he went to the post office and naturally had to be right at Sheila's elbow when she cried, "No, oh, no!"
"Now what?" demanded her father.
"This is from Andy. He wants to know when we can meet the bus. He's sending his father up to stake a claim."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nate and Jed stood staring at Sheila with such blank expressions, she cried, "Say something."
Nate obliged. "The poor old duck."
"What will he use for transportation?" asked Jed.
"Probably thinks he can pick up a string of burros and pack in," came the thoughtful answer. "Sheila, what was that young man of yours thinking about to let his father build up a dream?"
"He is not my young man," flared Sheila before she thought. "I mean, how do I know what any man thinks, or if he does? From what I've seen of the male of the species, they leap in and act and then think."
"That," cut in Jed companionably, "is because you women get into such predicaments, we have to leap first and think second to get you out."
"This calls for a mug," stated her father. "Come, daughter, you can read your love letters while we drink." And, sizzling, Sheila had to follow them to a cafe.
"Coffee," Sheila told the counter girl.
"And doughnuts," Jed added.
"I don't want any."
But what waitress ever listened to anyone else with Jed around? All right, let him pay for uneaten ones. She would read her mail; plow right through Andy's letter, then creep through one from his mother.
She sputtered as she crept. "I am counting on you to see Andrew keeps his feet dry," wrote Mrs. Carter. And Sheila gulped coffee and crammed half a doughnut into her mouth, then gulped coffee to get it down.
Be calm, she told herself, wishing she could slip an unused doughnut back on her plate before Jed saw what she'd done.
"I am mailing an extra supply direct to you. Please use only lukewarm water in your washing machine."
"Washing machine!" And the second half of the doughnut started after the first.
Ice-gray eyes danced, and the waitress came swiftly, obeying a signal.
"Electric blanket!" Sheila's voice came out full force this time. "Is the woman crazy?"
She handed the letter to her father. Soberly he read it, but his shoulders moved. Finally he sat shaking his head thoughtfully. "That Andy of yours is a better guy than I figured. He knew his Dad could never cut away from her apron strings if she knew what old Andrew was getting into. Figure she's been seeing Westerns and thinks there'll be hotels."
"Well, Jed?"
Jed stood up. "Just trying to reason it out. Is this Andrew coming to file or prove what his son's-"
Sheila wheeled. "You know Andy isn't coming in on my ground."
Nate nodded, his lips twitching. "See what you mean. 'Course there are folks who don't know gold when they see it in the window passing by."
"Yeah," agreed Jed. "Finish that second doughnut and let's get going," he ordered Sheila.
And she, finding she'd worked her way right around to one small piece, lifted it to throw it, saw the waitress, popped it into her mouth and smiled. "Just always taking care of me, aren't you, Jed honey?"
He was first out of the door, but Nate caught it before it smashed back into them.
He had the grace to apologize when they started up the street, and Sheila accepted.
"Now that that's settled," said her father happily, "will you two wildcats join me in a few moments of figuring what to do with Andrew. If we had a little more cash-"
"He'll have that, Dad," Sheila assured him.
"I know, but we can't charge him room and board no matter how much he has and we haven't. And we can't turn the old boy loose in the wilds to make his own way. All he knows is what he's read in a book. If that book didn't happen to be set up here in our hills, he's a gone goose."
They walked absently for a block, then Jed said, "Think we could teach him smoke signals? That old canyon house is in pretty good shape. Needs a new roof and a new floor, but it has walls. We can see the chimney from our place."
"How's the claim?"
"Understand it's not bad; not really worth working, but what around here is right now? Costs more to get it out than you get for it if you hire. Can the old man cook?" he asked Sheila.
"I doubt it," she murmured. "And he isn't that old; he's younger than Dad, sort of."
"Is anybody?" Jed asked, and ducked.
Sheila supposed she should call Andy. She couldn't place a collect call to his office, and when she thought of paying for a daytime call all she could see were pans of beans, a few stews, and a soup bone.
"How's his heart?" Jed barked suddenly. "We're only up a little over two thousand feet, but he's been living at sea level. Add physical exertion at altitude-"
"If it were even later in the year, with prospects of good weather-" Sheila worried.
"Now look, you kids," Nate stepped in front and faced them, "you can talk about hardships. You can point out every tough deal he'll-have to face up here, and there will be plenty.
"But I'm telling you this: any physical strain up here will be nothing to what he'll face with a dream shattered and that wife of his gnawing at his nerves. If he has to crack up, let it be up here where he's doing something he wants to do for a change."
Jed nudged Sheila as she started to protest.
"All right, so I spend a two-pound can of coffee on a telegram," she sighed. "Come on, boys. I'm going to need help composing it."
"Give us a few days' leeway," Jed urged. "I'll go pick up a stove now and start drying the place out. Let's check with the weather bureau, get a five day forecast."
After much waste of paper, the telegram was handed in and the three went on their ways.
When the three converged at the jeep, Sheila's eyes widened. Jed was trying to fit two purchases into the small boxed rear that had replaced the second seat.
"Look what I found," he said happily. "When the old fellow's son comes up to check on his dad, he'll find you still belong to the human race."
"Oh, Jed," was all Sheila could manage. For there, wrapped in some tattered old quilts, were two large windowpanes.
"And a package of dry calcimine. Found both where they're wrecking a store; highway is cutting through." And because Sheila wasn't looking at her father, she accepted happily, giving hardly a glance at the big stove destined for the Carter cabin.
She visited the cabin next day with her mother. It took a two-hour hard climb. Once when Mrs. Norris sat on a boulder to catch her breath, she wondered aloud if Jed had had a motive in suggesting the place.
"We won't be tempted to run over with a pan of hot biscuits or a bowl of soup."
"Why should Jed care?" Sheila asked, but her mother had started on, saving her breath for the climb.
There was an easier way, but that called for a seven-mile hike.
When they came out on the lip of the canyon, which ran north and south, Sheila nodded with satisfaction. This should be paradise to a man who'd lived in adventure stories. A log cabin was set into a shallow half-moon of a cliff, and below and beyond, hundreds of miles of mountains lay like a rumpled rug.
Jed and Danny were busy with the stove, Nate chinking the storm wall.
"Why didn't you take this for yourself?" she asked.
"Look at the soil; think your mother could garden here?"
She hurried forward. "I'll clean out."
"Now don't go spoiling the place for Carter," rapped her father. "Get it all prissied up and he'll think he's back in his wife's home. You girls set out the lunch and keep from under our feet."
They found a spot next to the wall of the east side, sun-warmed and free of the icy wind, rolled up some small boulders and built a low fire for the coffeepot. When the rich aroma came out to mingle with the fragrance of wood smoke, they called the men.
Danny came from an upper hill to say water could be piped down; not much of a flow, but enough to keep one person going if he wasn't impatient.
"Picnic," he added, settling back against a sun-warmed rock.
They all rode back in the jeep, each confident Mr. Carter would be comfortable and at the same time would be unaware of the work that had gone into creating that comfort. He would firmly believe he was roughing it, just like the heroes in the stories he read.
"Seems almost a shame," Danny commented.
"He won't have any idea of the muscle work Sheila put into her place."
Jed and Danny left early the next morning for the coast town, the trailer bumping along behind their jeep. They would bring supplies and such furniture as Mr. Carter might need up to his cabin, dropping him off to walk down to the Norris place.
Sheila spent the morning bringing up water in every available pail to empty into pots and bringing into the cabin as much wood as she could store.
She had finally set her clock by the radio though she was a little hazy as to the date, and now watched it. The clouds still held their burden. If the boys could get back before snowfall, she could run down and talk to Mr. Carter.
Mrs. Norris came up shortly before noon, carrying Nate's field glasses. With these they could watch the distant ledge along which the jeep would travel after dropping Mr. Carter.
Sheila kept the little radio going. At two o'clock snow was falling up the coast.
"If they don't get a hump on," Mrs. Norris remarked, "they're going to find themselves snowed in at the wrong place."
Sheila borrowed the glasses, searched the ridge, then cried, "Mother, look and see if you see what I do."
Obligingly she complied. "I declare that's the boys' jeep, but there are four heads in it, and one's a woman's. And, Sheila, they're going straight on to the canyon lip."
"You don't suppose Mrs. Carter-"
"Who else? Or, maybe that's Andy with a scarf around his head."
Sheila doubted it. He had a ski outfit that made him look like an advertisement for Timber Line, Sun Valley, and Squaw Lodge combined.
"Well, I won't have to cook for a couple of days. Guess I'd better get back home. Want to come along?"
For a moment Sheila was tempted, then she shook her head. "Not after all of the work I did to be snowed in comfortably."
"You'll be all right; fire a few shots if you're not. Nate can make his way up."
Sheila sat before the window looking out on a scene she might have painted as a child: a hodgepodge of dark blues and grays. Behind her, stove and radio vied in making sound effects, but her attention was focused on the sky.
The snow began falling.
Sheila spent a good part of the afternoon at the window looking at nothing, but was finally rewarded with a bleep from the jeep. The boys were making their way back to their own camp.
"Hey, Sheila, open up!" roared a voice outside. "Friend approaches with a box of candy from the best beloved."
The two big young men stomped into the cabin, shaking snow from their shoulders, taking off caps to shake them outside and let in half the icy wind on the mountain.
"Great, isn't it?" Jed asked, and Sheila didn't know whether he meant the storm or the big box he thrust at her.
"Coffee?" she asked hopefully.
"And anything else you have handy," Jed agreed. "Mr. Andrew Carter and his girl friend had no time for food, except to buy."
"Girl friend?"
"It's his daughter, Sheila." Danny told her.
"And wow! Is she a beauty," added Jed. "And is she strong and capable! She mended the jeep for us on the way up."
CHAPTER NINE
Sheila sat down on the first object handy-the far end of the folding lounge chair, which folded. Danny was there to stand her up, while Jed straightened out the chair and picked up the cushions.
"Don't tell me you've never met her," he said.
"I haven't. I knew Andy had a sister, but she's been away and he's never talked about her much."
"I know. Seems she and her dad kept up a correspondence, though. Shook him quite a bit when he couldn't get word to her; his office was closed in time to stop the mail from being forwarded home. Seems Mama had cut off friendly relations until daughter 'came to her senses.' "
"She didn't approve of Caroline joining the marines," Danny offered. "Women's division, of course. She thought she should stay home and-"
"Get married," supplied Jed. "Caroline said she'd never met a man worth cooking for and went out to find one."
"Did she?" asked Sheila.
"She didn't say, but she wasn't wearing an engagement ring. Ah, this is fine." And he took the straight chair, lifting wet shoes to the edge of the stove, balancing the cup of reheated coffee neatly.
Sheila brought out oatmeal cookies and opened the box of candy Andy had sent up by his father. Politely Danny took one; Jed merely curled his lip.
"Sure take a load off our minds having her there. Just a bit worried about anyone coming up this time of the year without some knowledge of what he's facing."
"And she has?"
"I doubt anything would faze her much," Jed said, thoughtfully.
As though someone had handed her a photograph, Sheila saw herself huddled beside the smoking car, completely helpless. This Caroline would have picked it up with one hand, run down the bank, poured in water and carried it back up, she thought indignantly. At least that was what Jed's voice implied.
"It will be nice for you to have such a handy sister-in-law," observed Danny wistfully.
"Capable," yawned Jed. "Well, come on, Danny. Let's get out of here while we can. Coming with us?"
Sheila looked bewildered.
"We're staying with your folks; couldn't make it up to our place now without chains. Caroline wanted the chains for something. Besides, it's a shame to waste all that good food your mother's cooked."
"Now, Jed," groaned Danny, "don't let Sheila think we're mooching. We brought-"
"I know you're not." Sheila became wistful. She wished she might go down and join the fun. But how would they sleep her, with one more than they expected already there?
"We'll dig you out in the morning if we can make the climb," Jed tossed over his shoulder as they left.
"How about the Carters?"
"Old boy has a built-in snow shovel," Jed called back.
Danny lingered, as Sheila shivered at the door.
"Doesn't seem quite right to go off and leave you alone in a storm," he said, "you being so little and all."
Sheila, a vision of the capable Caroline in mind, tossed her head. "Think nothing of it. In a pinch I can call in a nice friendly bear. You'd better start before you need chains, Danny."
Later she was ashamed. By then she had paced the floor, barked her shins on everything within reach of them, eaten too much candy and belatedly admitted she was jealous of a girl she'd never met.
She went to bed early to conserve light, set her alarm clock but didn't need it. A wind whipped up from far-away places and moaned.
It whipped a section of celloglass loose, and she had quite a time nailing her denim curtains over the plastic tablecloth she substituted for the celloglass.
To think she'd left steam heat and electricity for this.
Eventually she dressed to keep warm, then stretched out on the folding chair and promptly went to sleep to indulge in a most horrible dream. The bear she'd literally thrown at poor Danny was at her window, knocking.
Sheila came out of her dream with such a start, she jumped and the chair folded. Grayest daylight out-lined the bear at the window, but the voice issuing from it was speaking English of sorts.
Paws that were not hairy, but gloved, pushed snow from the outside of the pane, and this time the face was almost recognizable.
"Will you unbar that door and let me in out of this?" howled Jed.
Once it was unbarred, Jed looked not at Sheila but at the celloglassed chicken wire to say bitterly, "I might have known it. Here the four of us sat around all night waiting for enough light for me to scrape my way up, and-"
"I did it with my little tack hammer," said Sheila brightly, "and me not a lady marine, either. I can make coffee, too. Oh, for goodness sake, sit down. Not there!" she cried, but not in time.
Getting up in a small space does not show a manly figure at its best. Diplomatically, Sheila turned her back, her pullover sweater only half hiding her quivering shoulders.
"Turn on the radio," she stuttered. "Let's find out about this storm."
"Had your Dad's on. It's a lollapalooza, and just getting under way. I'm to take you down there if I have to hog-tie you."
"That would be a nice, easy way," Sheila said happily. Not that she wasn't willing to go. The moaning of the wind in the small, dark hours had undermined her courage.
Jed addressed himself to the folding chair, the flapping celloglass, the tightly tacked plastic tablecloth and people who had to have claims of their own.
"Your mother worried all night."
"You mean my dad. Here, you'll feel better after a drink of this. It boiled most of the night; fresh coming up in a few minutes. Wonder how the Carters fared."
"All right."
"You haven't been over there?"
"Do I look airborne?" he snapped.
"Now, now." She laughed. "But how else would you know?"
"In the first place, they have a log cabin, on rock foundations. In the second, it's stooc up to worse storms than this because it's sheltered by three sides of the cliff. In the third, if they weren't too dog-tired to sleep through it, I'll miss my guess."
"Hm," murmured Sheila thoughtfully. "Jed, if the Carters have such a good shelter and there's prospect of getting something worthwhile out of the claim, how did it happen you and Danny overlooked it?"
"Too far away." He broke off abruptly. "All right. Remember that when the bunch of us decided to come up, we planned to locate in such a way we could check on each other?"
Sheila nodded and almost asked another question.
"We wouldn't have suggested it for Carter, but that's the last known shelter any place around, and he had to have something right now. Come on; we'd better get going. I'll put out the fire while you wrap up."
Sheila looked at him pensively. Then she began pouting exaggeratedly like a little girl.
"Don't you think we could stay here just a little while longer?" she said quietly. "I mean, you know, we're all alone and everything...."
"I don't know, Sheila. We've got a lot to do."
"But, Jed! It's so nice here right now. The fire's going and it's so clean and quiet. And we've got each other. What more could we ask for?"
Sheila asked that last question as if to imply something. And Jed knew exactly what she was getting at.
"I guess we could stay a little longer," he said, "and enjoy the fire."
They sat close together in silence, listening to the crackle of the burning logs and the sounds of their slow breathing. Jed put his arm around her and drew her close, leaning down to rub his head against hers. He breathed deeply, enjoying the fresh scent of her hair, squeezing her tighter.
"You know, Jed," she said, toying with a button on his shirt. "I think I'm falling in love with you."
"You want to know a secret?" he asked, grinning. "I think I fell in love with you back out on the highway, that day we first met. I thought you were never going to make it, but sure enough, here you are."
Sheila looked up at him and smiled. "You know I would never have made it without you, Jed."
He answered her by leaning down and kissing her full on the lips. She clung to his neck, pulling him closer. And then she leaned back all the way, pulling him down on top of her. She thrilled to the feel of his hard-muscled body covering her completely. And when she felt his cock beginning to grow against her thigh, she moaned out her pleasure.
Jed clawed at her blouse and managed to bare her breasts after fumbling with her bra for a few moments. He tossed the flimsy white garment aside and then buried his face in her smooth tit-flesh. Rubbing his chin up and down between her tits, his rough skin electrified the sensitive flesh of her cleavage.
"Oh, Jed," she sighed, running her fingers through his hair. "Oh, Jed ... ohhhh...."
Then he raised up a bit so he could lick all around her nipples. Running his tongue across her soft brown areola, he then sucked her firm tit-bud into his mouth. He did this to both her breasts until her nipples were standing up hard.
When he had removed enough of her clothes, Jed reared back to enjoy the sight of her naked body. The fire cast a sensuous warm glow across her skin which excited him thoroughly. Her belly undulated gently and her tits jiggled while she squirmed under his gaze. He had never seen a woman quite so beautiful. And knowing that she was totally his, to please him and to be pleased by him, he realized that he couldn't ask for much more.
While he stared at her luscious curves, she reached out to grasp his penis. It was fully hard and twitched in her grip. She ran her fingers up and down the shaft and then rolled the tip of her forefinger across his rosy prick-tip. A tiny droplet of presemin fluid appeared in his piss-slit, and she smear it around the slick flesh of his red cockhead.
Then she moved her hands down and gent! hefted his testicles. As she squeezed his fragile sperm-filled balls, they retreated into the wrinkled folds of his scrotum. She gasped deeply, thinking about all the warm semen stored in his testicles, and she could hardly wait to feel it spewing out of his cock into her vaginal depths.
"Now!" she hissed. "Put it in me now, Jed. Make me feel good. Ohhh, you feel so good, Jed ... ohhhhh...."
She was so aroused and desperate to fuck, that her voice had an almost tearful pleading edge to it. Spreading her legs wide, she exposed the juicy flesh of her pussy, showing Jed just how badly she wanted and needed him.
With one smooth motion, so smooth it seemed as if Jed and Sheila had been fucking for a long, long time, he entered her. He gasped out loud as he felt the entire shaft of his penis surrounded by a soothing sheath of hot vaginal flesh. Within seconds, he was pumping furiously. And then he could hold back no longer, unleashing his hot jism.
When they had recovered from their in tense lovemaking, they prepared for their journey. Sheila wrapped up woolen socks, some slippers and waders for the creek, should she slip, a parka and a back pack, and a few other necessities.
Sheila didn't appreciate the climb Jed had made until they started down. At first, she thought he was going at the wrong angle to reach the first step off the cliff, then found he was following a rope.
"Don't take a step down until I okay it!" he shouted at her.
It looked easy enough, but Jed used the upper end of the shovel he carried until he'd located the firm base of the step, ran it along to the cliff, cleared a step, then reached out a hand to her.
"Ran out of rope," he said once, and soon she saw an outcrop and on it a loop like a shadow.
They made easier progress then. Danny and Nate were at the bottom to take over.
Danny said, "This way." Nate said, "Here, Sheila." Jed simply picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, walked across the creek, twice slipping dangerously, then all but tossed her down.
"Ask Dad to give you a receipt," flashed Sheila, and ploughed on toward where she thought she'd find the Norris cabin.
They let her flounder and she, finding them going in another direction, swallowed her pride and returned to take advantage of their footsteps.
The inside of the Norris cabin was bright with light from Coleman lamps and lanterns and savory with frying ham and potatoes and coffee.
"Wash up, boys," Mrs. Norris called, and obediently they stomped back out.
"You saved the day," she went on cheerfully. "Gave them something to do. Talk about caged animals."
Sheila relaxed. Then Jed hadn't been risking his precious life to rescue her; he'd been working off surplus energy.
"I talked them into building a lean-to after breakfast. How did you fare?"
"It wasn't too bad except for the wind. I mean the way it talked, the things it said."
"Celloglass hold?"
"No, one blast brought something loose along and tore it. I reinforced it with a plastic tablecloth."
"I knew you'd make out. Call the boys before they rub their skin off."
Sheila went out to the long rear porch, which would be walled in before another nightfall, to find the three arguing about the location of a small drum stove.
They trooped in eagerly enough and at the table forgot the Norris stove to talk about the one at the Carter cabin and, naturally, the new neighbors.
"What I liked about Caroline," observed Jed, "was the way she handled her father. She knew what to buy and he didn't, but she made him feel he was a great man getting his girl what she'd always wanted, instead of an old fogey with no brains."
"Is he?" asked Sheila.
"Just starry-eyed," mused her father. "He'll , get over it. Trouble with living in dreams, a man can choose what he puts into them. He gets himself all settled before a storm strikes. Weather doesn't wait for a dream. Told me his son got a weather report."
Sheila sat up to listen.
"Storm six hundred miles off our southern coast, moving south; wouldn't strike here. What he didn't know, not even a woman can change her mind as fast as a storm center. Oh, that reminds me: letter for you, couple of them. Rose, what did you do with Sheila's mail?"
"Let her finish her breakfast," chided Mrs. Norris.
After the men had gone back to work, she brought out Sheila's mail. "Didn't think you'd want to read them with the boys staring at you."
All but a lamp over the makeshift sink had been turned off. Sheila took her mail to the best window, the only one not reinforced by a canvas flap outside.
Cautiously she opened Andy's letter.
"You don't know what a relief it is to me for you to have Dad. He acted so strangely before he left, as though he had some guilty secret. If it hadn't been for the cost of it at a time like this, mother would have gone right along with him."
Sheila tried to fit Mrs. Carter and Jed into the same picture, shivered, then realized that, had Mrs. Carter come along, they would never have left town. She would have seen to that.
She read on.
"Please see that Dad files for unemployment benefits on the 28th. He'll have to ask for work there in the nearest town, you know.
"We didn't tell him, but I have word his company has been bought out and he won't be rehired by the new one; they're bringing their own office staff to handle the merger.
"Mother would close up the house, but she can't have the utilities shut off without losing all the food she has stored in the freezer. I'm too far from home to commute. Believe me, it is a problem to know what to do."
Sheila held the letter, looking across to where her mother was setting sponge for bread. Suppose Mr. Carter never did find employment. He had fifteen years to go to be eligible for Social Security. By that time, if Andy proposed to take care of them, she would be thirty-five.
"We are hoping Dad can make something out of the claim; enough to build a decent house, anyway. When he does, Mother will sell the cottage and move up."
"My goodness, Sheila," cried her mother. "Why are you groaning?"
Sheila read that portion of the letter and said, "Mother, surely, I let him know what to expect up here. How can he think his father will do better than Dad, who knows this country?"
"Because he doesn't. Know the country, I mean. From what the boys said, the Carters read of new strikes at the mouths of creeks, and nuggets the size of tennis balls brought up by skin divers."
"So he accepts a claim on top of a ridge?"
"Well, according to the Carter logic, the nuggets had to come down from some place. And don't go blaming them, daughter; your father and I have had dreams just as outlandish about things we didn't know."
"Mother, what do you think the Carters should do?"
"Get this dream out of their system first, then gear their living to the type of locale they know. They'll survive. We all do, somehow, so we might as well make a game of it."
Sheila was serving the noon meal when a shocking thought struck. Andy had said nothing about his sister. The fact his father seemed to have a "guilty secret" meant they had no intention of telling.
And where did that place her, his fiancee?
Well, bless the snowstorm; all she need do would be to send a straight wire, "Dad and everything fine," when someone went to town.
The "lollapalooza" veered off as though belatedly remembering it was supposed to be covering the Sierras, not the Sisklyous.
A Chinook wind came in with its warm breath, and Sheila found she could climb the cliff the next afternoon without help from anyone.
It wasn't help she wanted, but company.
The men merely sat around playing pinochle, after the lean-to was finished.
She slept well that night, had her cabin spotless and was wondering how to fill the hours when a shadow passed the window.
In another moment she had opened the door to a strikingly beautiful blonde in skiing clothes.
"I'm Caroline Carter," said the vision.
CHAPTER TEN
"Isn't it a break I brought my skis along?" said Caroline, striding in. "I had to talk to you at the first possible moment."
Wouldn't she ski? thought Sheila, and chalked up another debit.
She invited Caroline in, was about to warn her about the lounge chair, held her breath as she sat down on it, released it as the chair remained upright.
Caroline was going to town to pick up a few things.
"Of course you'll run out of snow," Sheila warned.
"Of course; I'm prepared for that." She brushed aside the long hike ahead as being of no consequence and plunged into her subject. "I want to talk about Andy. I've come to ask you not to tell him I'm here. I didn't want you to know, but your father said you would have seen us drive in.
"He said the decision was up to you."
Before Sheila had time to frame a proper reply, she continued, "It's not as though you were formally engaged to him, you know."
Nate could have seen the signs. It was possible Jed would have recognized them. Caroline didn't.
"I can't think of a better way not to be, can you?" she asked sweetly.
"Oh, well," Caroline whisked up, and this time the chair folded, "if you're going to be difficult ... It's only that I wanted Dad to have one real vacation before the boom lowers. He's been dreaming about something like this ever since I can remember. I had to wrangle leave to get up and save his blessed old hide."
Sheila waited until she ran down, then said pleasantly, "Miss Carter, I neither had nor have any intention of telling Andy about you. I can use the snow as an excuse for not writing. Here," she went to a box she used as a desk and drew out the slip she'd written the previous day, "is the telegram I'd planned to send in with the first person going to town."
For a moment Caroline stared at her, then, showing the most beautiful teeth Sheila had ever seen, smiled and thrust out her hand.
"Now how about some coffee?" asked Sheila.
"I'd love it. Imagine my stuffy brother finding a girl like you."
"Maybe," Sheila held the measure, looking into the rapidly dwindling coffee grains, "Andy seems stuffy because he's had responsibility thrust on him."
"Meaning I ran out on the family? I had to, Sheila. I had to live, and if you don't live in today, how can you be sure you'll live in tomorrow?"
They spoke then of other things. Caroline said she had until late spring to decide whether or not to sign up for another stretch. She liked it in the hills. If her mother would be content to stay home and let her and her dad work the claim, they might get their bread and cheese out of it.
"No Cadillacs?"
"Just plain food, exercise, and fresh air. What else is there?"
After she'd left, to become a moving shadow across the low hills beyond, Sheila enumerated what she believed should be added to Caroline's list. Topping it was romance.
At that she took a shameful pleasure in the sight of the sun growing stronger by the moment, lapping up snow with a hot tongue.
Caroline couldn't come skimming in like a bird if this kept on.
She didn't. She came rolling home in a jeep. Sheila grabbed the field glasses her mother had left there, thinking at first it could be the boys. It wasn't. This one had been painted red, and standing up behind the seat were Caroline's skis.
"Ha!" said Sheila as the figure jumped out, went to a boulder and returned with something she began affixing to the wheels. "So that's why the boys let her borrow the chains, though why she couldn't buy chains-"
She watched until the jeep started with a buck, gained momentum and finally disappeared between snow banks, then stood watching a lonely scene with a lonely heart.
Everybody in the group had somebody. Caroline was hurrying home to her father. Jed and Danny had long ago started to settle in their place. Her father and mother were cozily housed against the cold.
And here she was alone with millions of acres of snow-covered hills. How had it happened? She was supposed to be here so her mother wouldn't feel as she was feeling right now.
Ah yes, Andy had looked upon the project as an opportunity. She would file for both of them. His idea had been good; it just hadn't worked out.
She had nothing to do and days in which to do it. She had cabin fever.
Soon after dark she was curled up on her bed, book in hand, wantonly wasting the batteries in the electric lantern.
Sheila awakened to rain on the roof. In this area at this time, it meant spring had her toe in the weather door. Everything would be easier now. The water would still be icy, but they could start working their claims. Not that she could do much along that line. Many women made a pittance gold panning, she knew, yet her dad had a plan for working the two claims together. She'd find other chores.
Perhaps the overhang on the southwest. If the posts were set and the frame was spiked into place she could nail on the roofing. She'd show the men she wasn't completely useless.
It took her three days after her father had set up the frame. It rained much of the time, but not until she had one corner more or less covered. The rainy periods she spent beneath the cover, sawing the odds and ends she had brought up from the old site. Her father's metal shears cut odds and ends of roofing paper into usable sections, and after she had laid them out on the ten-by-eighteen roof she achieved a pattern of sorts.
She achieved it twice. The first time a sudden wind came up. She had no cabin fever that evening. By the time she had picked up the breeze-scattered sections, only stubbornness kept her from falling asleep over her evening meal.
"Fine," said Mrs. Norris, toiling up the cliff the next day. "Gives a sense of space, doesn't it? Shade your shack in the summer too. Sheila, how is your money holding out?"
"What money?" she returned. "Sorry, Mother. Do you need some?"
"Plenty of provisions, but your father needs gas for the jeep. He's going in to look for work, now that we're pretty well settled. I told him to sell the car, but he said he doubted we'd get thirty dollars for it. We couldn't buy another for that."
"He has the jeep."
"I know, but we have to have something here to use next summer when the camps open."
When Sheila offered her mother ten dollars, she shook her head. "Five is enough. Nate would be sure to find some part he thinks the jeep needs." Then she chuckled. "Some wives worry about drink and gambling. I have to protect your father from machine shops. Well, he's a good man."
Sheila agreed and conceded each man had some weakness. She only wished her father's was less expensive.
"Sheila, what are you thinking?" demanded Mrs. Norris sternly.
Needing some quick cover for her treasonable thoughts, she spoke quickly. "Planters. I thought I'd set boulders between the posts, have double rows with soil between, then plant them with seeds."
"Fine. If you have any boards left from the shack, we'd better build seed beds. Fern sprouts and nettles will be popping up after the first good spell of sunshine and give us some greens, but I want young vegetable plants ready to go in the first minute we're clear of frost threat."
It was quite a trick to fit the big rocks together so a minimum of chinking, to hold in soil, was necessary. One she would forever after call "the big bruiser" refused to settle on anything but three of her toes, which chanced to be where it landed.
She had finished the first section when she heard the frantic bleep of a jeep below and, running down the first steps, saw Jed and Danny.
"Come on; distress signal," Danny called.
That meant trouble at the Carters'. Sheila hurried as fast as she could, took the seat Danny vacated and hung on as they bounded over the rough terrain.
They didn't know what was wrong, but they'd heard shots, then had seen smoke puff up from a small fire.
"It may be the old man," Danny worried. "And she can't handle him alone."
It wasn't the "old man." He came up to meet them, looking like the central figure on a Western magazine cover, looking alive and much younger than when Sheila had last seen him.
Then it was Caroline? She came racing up in smartly tailored breeches, boots, white shirt topped by a golden tan sweater that just matched her hair.
A salute and a gay, "We're ready for inspection."
Suddenly Sheila was aware of wind-tousled hair, of red dust on her sweater and slacks and on her face.
"You're all right?" Jed asked in an even tone.
"Wonderful."
"Never felt better."
"Don't ever do that again! Get that through your head. Don't ever send a distress signal unless you mean it!"
Sheila forgot dirty sweater, slacks, and dirt-begrimed face.
"Why, even Sheila would know better," Jed went on.
"I only wanted to show you what could be done in a short time with proper management," Caroline bristled.
She said this wasn't the service. This life was no more than a game being played by people who should be out working at jobs which would help the government in its present crisis. In fact, she said so many of the wrong things, Sheila's loyalty swerved a little. After all, Jed could have left that last line unsaid.
"I'd like to see the cabin," Sheila offered an olive branch, and when they were inside, "Men act tough when they've had a scare."
"Oh, so that's it. Say, you look like you've been working."
Sheila started to say she'd been building a planter, but seeing the utilitarian neatness of the cabin, changed to, "rock wall, to keep the wind from sweeping in under the shack."
"Good girl."
Maybe. Now she had to build that wall next to the building as well as finish the planter. While it would cut off the cold winds of winter, winter was over. Before the next one rolled around she and Andy would be living in a steam-heated apartment.
She kept that thought firmly in mind; otherwise, she would have started rolling up rocks for a fireplace with the idea of closing in the shelter for an extra room.
A week later, she allowed herself to stand at the top of the cliff path and look at the shack as though she had never seen it before.
"Why, it's lovely," she cried, surprised, finding that in piling the rocks she had cleared a neat space in front of the shack, and at one side had created natural steps which led up to a flat-topped knoll.
She adjusted one last rock, wiped windblown curls from a moist brow, and belatedly ran her muddy hands down the sides of her slacks.
"Sheila!"
Luckily she wasn't standing near the edge. She jumped, wheeled, and looked down, and there was Andy!
"How did you get here?" she cried.
"It wasn't easy," he informed her darkly, came up the last few steps to look at his pride and joy and cried, "Sheila, you're not living in that."
"Come inside," she said. "I'll make coffee."
Almost on tiptoe he followed her, trying to answer the questions she asked.
"Sit down," she said hospitably, and too late, "Oh, not there."
He was on his hands and knees, making a painful recovery, when a second voice sounded: Caroline's, crying out, "Was that Jed? Will he rush me to town? We just had a letter from Andy; he's on his way up."
The little building had held five one evening. It wasn't big enough for three when one was an indignant brother and the other a startled sister.
"I think I have another rock I should put in," murmured Sheila, and squeezed past them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Outside, she found the sun, having spotlighted the shack and done its damage, had retreated behind a mass of black clouds.
The smoke from the chimney plumed, thinned, died; then out came Caroline and, behind her, Andy.
"Caroline drove over in Father's jeep," he informed her. "I had to hire a car to bring me half-way; walked the rest. I shall drive her home and return."
From the look of consternation in Caroline's glance, Sheila knew she had lost her aplomb. An older brother could be more devastating to one's morale than a superior officer.
She tried to give reassurance, but Caroline went hurrying down the steps. Andy followed, then turned back, and walked deliberately to Sheila, now coming down from her perch.
"Hmph," grunted a man with field glasses at his eyes, "look at the lug."
"Yeah," observed the other thoughtfully, "that's what you call bestowing a kiss. I never wasted any that way."
"Me neither. Hey, whatta you say we go down to the folks for dinner. I know where to pick up a haunch of venison. Stop on the way in and tell 'em. Ought to thaw by the time we get back."
"Yeah, I think it's safe. He's getting ready to leave now."
Andy was getting ready to leave, and Sheila was finding her heart being torn from its moorings. Something terrible had happened to Andy. He wasn't sure of himself anymore.
He looked down into her eyes and said huskily, "Sheila, Caroline says I'm not worthy of a girl like you."
And instead of helping the poor dear out, she perked up, delighted at Caroline's championship, to pipe, "She did?"
Then, before she could recover, he said contritely, "I'll buy you a new chair," and went away.
She hurried in to find the water in the teakettle lukewarm. She washed and combed her hair and put on the two-toned pullover she'd been saving for just such an occasion, then nearly smothered because she'd built up the fire to have coffee ready on his return.
That was the trouble with a shack that only opened its windows when struck by a windstorm.
She heard a jeep bleating below and rushed out to find the boys heading for town and asking her mother something. From the pantomime she could tell Mrs. Norris was trying to give them money and they were waving it away.
Sheila gave a horrified glance at the shack and the food shelf. What would she feed Andy?
All she'd planned for supper were some warmed-over beans and the last of the celery and an apple. There wasn't even time to cook poor man's fare. Or was there?
A shrill whistle from below, and she went to look down. She couldn't make out what her mother was saying. In another moment her father came from somewhere, nodded and started toward the steps.
"You're to bring your young man over to the cabin for supper," he shouted at her when half-way up.
Sheila saluted and turned back.
Because pity brings tenderness with it, Sheila greeted and treated Andy differently from city days, and he was completely bewildered.
This, he must keep reminding himself, was Sheila, his little Sheila who never questioned anything he said or did.
She even looked different, and he couldn't tell where the difference lay. In her clothes, in part, but the change was more than that. And he wasn't sure he approved. The brown and orange sweater brought out the copper tones in her dark hair and turned her eyes to butternut brown. But it was too expensive to be worn around a place like this.
Sheila, having moved the lounge chair outside, had moored Andy to a straight chair and gone about preparing the coffee started two hours earlier.
She pointed out that his father needed something he could prepare by the simple expedient of using can opener and frying pan.
"But, Sheila, that's why I'm so upset. He came up only to search for and file on a claim. You told me there were men here who could be hired to work it. And now-"
He waited while she poured the coffee. "Now he won't go back!"
Quickly Sheila turned to set down the coffeepot. What was the matter with her? She'd almost said, "Hurrah for him." Imagine preferring that old log cabin and canned goods to the thermostatically controlled heat of the Carter cottage and a freezer full of food.
Andy enumerated the reasons Mr. Carter should return home. First and most important, he'd lose his unemployment benefits. On the claim he had become self-employed.
"He has until next November to earn taxes, hasn't he?" she asked reasonably. "And your mother showed me how much food she has on hand. There are only the utilities to pay."
"But, Sheila, down there it's time to start a garden."
"My mother does all but the heavy spade work on ours," she offered.
"And there's the jeep. We have a family car."
Point by point he laid down his side of the case, summing it up in the final argument: "At the rate he's going; we won't be able to marry before we reach social security age, unless we move in with Mother. And you know about two women under one roof."
Sheila looked around her cabin with possessive eyes.
Later, she even conceded there were benefits to being poor. The Norris cabin was considerably larger than her own, but the table had limited seating space. It could handle five in a pinch, but six it refused without elbow knocking, especially when four of the six were large, husky men.
Sheila and her mother served.
Mrs. Norris whispered to Sheila in the lean-to where they'd gone to cut a second squash pie. "The minute Andy asked their advice about working his claim, he had them whipped."
"Why?" murmured Sheila, absently slipping a square of spice-dotted golden brown to a plate.
"You can't hate anyone to whom you've given money or advice which is accepted gratefully, because his acceptance proves your value to him."
Andy left early. He said it was because he didn't know the terrain and wanted to get back to the Carter cabin before dark. He was to write that having three male chaperones was too much competition for any man.
He and Caroline would leave at dawn the next morning, he to return to the southern city, she to return to her post.
By special dispensation, Sheila was allowed to walk to the jeep with Andy, alone. As Andy had parked it as close as possible to the foot of the stairway around the cliff, they managed a few moments of privacy.
"Sheila," he grasped her forearms and held her off, facing him, "what are those men to you?"
"Well, one's my father and-"
"You know I don't mean that. They are not brothers or even cousins, yet they scowl at me until I'm afraid to look at you. I never felt less engaged."
"Oh, that's all right," Sheila brightened. "I mean about the scowling, not your feeling. Jed treats me as though I hadn't a brain in my head. He's used to girls making a fuss over him."
"And you don't. I was afraid of that, I mean his attraction for women. Caroline seems quite foolish about him. Dad says that's because he bawled her out, but I don't know. If she comes back, I want you to see they don't become too well acquainted."
Sheila frowned. She had the queerest feeling at the idea of Caroline mooning around Jed.
"There's not much danger," she sighed. "He and Danny will be going out to work before she returns, if she does."
"That takes a load off my mind. And I think I'd better get a ring up to you."
Sheila looked down at her ring finger. Suddenly she put her hand behind her. "Oh, don't, Andy, not now. I'd worry about wearing it, doing the kind of work I do."
After he left, she forgot to go to her folks' home but made her way slowly up the cliff, stopping at the flat rock to watch Andy riding the jeep up to the ridge.
Dear Andy, how tenderly he had kissed her.
The rocks being warm, she sat down on one to review the talk they'd had. Somehow she was finding a peculiar comfort in the fact that Andy too had parent problems.
She carried her thoughts on up the hill.
The men had talked at dinner. They had said if the new administration put through some specific housing bill, lumber would come out of its slump and there would be plenty of work for the men in the woods.
Sheila reduced this to personal economics. Her father would work; could work seven months if things opened up soon enough. If the woods were kept open, if the fire hazard didn't become too critical, he might work until November.
And this was only the first of March! How could she stand those months of loneliness? Jed and Danny might go off at any time now and return to jobs.
She had worked herself into a gloom as deep as the evening when Jed and Danny came up with a platter.
"Your mother said you forgot to bring up this meat. We all have more than we can use."
They said other things. Jed backed away from the folding lounge chair to straddle a straight one and look as gloomy as Sheila and the weather.
"We've been thinking," Danny interpreted the gloom. "Maybe this claim of yours wasn't such a bright idea. Like that Andy of yours said, you're used to people and being busy."
"I told him you'd have been with your folks, if he hadn't had this bright idea," Jed barked.
Well, that was true.
"So we're going after lumber tomorrow," Danny continued, "to throw up an extra room on their place."
"But, Danny, when are you going to work your claim?"
She looked around the shack and saw all of the work she had done: the shelves; the many curtains; the wood box that closed and made a solid, comfortable lounging seat beside the stove; even the collapsible chair that folded at the right time with the wrong people.
"This is the first thing I ever had that was all my own," she said.
"You've made a swell little place of it," Danny commented.
"Not bad," agreed Jed.
"But not without your help."
Jed stood up. "We'll throw up the room; then you can use it if you want to. If you don't, you'd better take up some hobby or you'll go stir-crazy. Your mother said you used to be good at painting."
Sheila's lips opened, then closed. Why go into the cost of oils and canvas board?
Reluctantly, Sheila watched them leave. She was down to seventeen dollars, and she knew her mother was going to need that. The few days' work her father had picked up had brought only temporary relief.
This whole idea of her father's had been ridiculous. She should have refused to join them. That would have saved Andy as well as herself. They'd have staked their claim closer to town and she would have sent them a little money each week.
They could have squeezed through until her father's unemployment benefits began coming again.
Sheila meant to be up in time to wave to Andy from the top of the steps, but she arose only in time to grab the glasses and see the Carters heading for town in a driving rain.
From where she stood, it looked as though they were wearing a tarpaulin with head holes cut in it.
Sheila had venison for breakfast for the simple reason that she was hungry. Her flour was getting low; she was out of shortening. The oatmeal had given out days ago. There were only beans or split peas, and those took too long to cook.
Oh, for Mrs. Carter's freezer and canning closet. When she and Andy were married, she'd see both were always well stocked.
Methodically she put the split peas to soak. She would use her last onion and her last can of Vienna sausages; then she must find some way to go to town even if she had to walk in with her shabby pack on her back.
By early afternoon Sheila had worked herself into a state. She was hungry again, decided the peas had soaked long enough and built up the fire. She used precious peanut oil for biscuit shortening, found a small jar of honey she'd overlooked, then sat at the window contemplating the thought of food.
A head appeared above the rim; then Andy's father stepped up, stood for a moment breathing heavily, stretched and turned toward the shack.
Sheila rushed to the door to meet him and saw the look of happiness on his face, the change in him in the short time he'd been in the hills.
"Here," he thrust a package at her, "Andy sent you a box of candy. I took the liberty of changing it for cheese. That boy is the most impractical person I've ever met."
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sheila accepted the package, and Mr. Carter said, "Protein. Healthier. I carry a hunk around in my pocket to nibble on."
He approved of the shack and greeted the folding chair like a long lost friend. "Have much trouble breaking it in?" he asked. "Had one in my other cabin. I was the only one who could ride it. Ah," he settled down, "never thought of putting a pad on it."
Yes, he'd sent the children off, fortunately in different directions. "They're too much a-like to get along," he explained. "They're both perfectionists, like their mother. Wonderful woman. If she hadn't taken me in tow as a young man, I'd have been a waster with sand in my shoes."
Yes, he would have a bowl of soup; he'd been hoping Sheila would suggest it ever since he'd caught his first whiff. And would she mind writing down how she'd made it?
"And don't write, 'Salt to taste.' How can a man tell when putting it in how it's going to taste, and if it's too much how can he get it out?"
He didn't get around to telling her the reason for his visit until they'd eaten the last biscuit and emptied the soup pot.
He said he had hoped for a long vacation, but he was finding he couldn't take it without working a hardship on the rest of the family.
"So I found a job today, in town."
"You did?"
"I did. I had it figured out way back when I first heard rumors of the company merger. Most accountants of my caliber haunt the cities where they can command the salaries to which they've accustomed their families. I planned to find some small place where such talent would have the value of the unusual and living costs would allow me to accept without asking a salary the asker couldn't pay."
Sheila listened, amazed. Andy had been trying to spare him from the knowledge he already had and had used to work out an economic survival plan.
Carter went on. Caroline hadn't wanted him "hovering" while she shopped, so he'd gone into town with her one day and had done a little hovering in a tavern. He'd heard about a new cannery planned down the coast, had found out when they'd be ready to open and the names of those in charge.
"So today, with my boy still lecturing me from the bus window, I took off. Found my men right there at the cannery discussing things, and got me a job. Got you one, too."
"Me!" Sheila exploded.
"Only four days a week, five hours a day at first. Your mother won't need you all the time, will she? You can go back and forth with me. Minimum wage, though. Take home won't be more than twenty a week."
What she could buy with twenty dollars a week! Steaks and chops and fresh green vegetables. And my, how she would stock her shelves with canned goods. She'd buy lumber and close in the front so she could put up shelves to hold what she'd buy.
"Oh, please. Wait. What do they expect me to do?"
"Type, don't you? And file? I told them you didn't know shorthand, but they said they could tell you what they wanted written and you'd take over from there. Now why are you crying?"
"I dunno," she blubbered. "I just felt so cut off from living, I didn't think I could last until next winter."
Andrew Carter nodded. "Know just how you felt. Mother was always at me to buy insurance so we'd have enough annuities to carry us to our grave. I bucked. I said life was for living, not fading out.
"So now we live; we've both of us got claims to support. Imagine, Sheila, having to work to support a gold mine."
After their first burst of laughter, Sheila asked, "You knew all the time?"
"I read a lot," he explained. "I wanted the out-of-doors somehow, and this offered a means of getting it."
He said he'd be going into town the next day for preliminaries, suggested she go with him to meet her new employers. Then Tuesday they'd start their nine-to-four shift.
Sheila flew down the steps after he left to break the good news to her parents.
"Thank goodness for that," sighed Mrs. Norris. "I told Nate living alone was not good for a young girl."
"Now, Mother, you know that wasn't in my mind when I encouraged her."
"What was, Dad?" Sheila asked. But he banged out of the house, slamming the door so hard crockery danced.
Mrs. Norris asked about transportation and was relieved to learn Mr. Carter would be driving her.
"Your father has a job of sorts and will need the jeep. Of course you could use the car, but it's quite a walk from the road."
"But, Mother, you'll be here alone."
"There are different kinds of aloneness, Sheila. You'll both be home evenings. Knowing you're out earning the means to improve the claim and feed us will keep me contented."
As they made out a small grocery list for the next day, Sheila asked about other kinds of aloneness and what her mother considered the worst.
"The frustrated kind. Feeling finished. Having no place to go and no way to get there. You can feel that in the city as acutely as in the country."
Puzzled, she returned to her shack, her mind full of the day's contrary information.
She sat before the big window, for which she could thank Jed, and thought about him.
Imagine having to live with a man like Jed. What would Caroline do to him if she captured him? Jed seemed to admire her efficiency as well as her looks. And Caroline would never quarrel with him. She was like Andy in that she quietly waited for the storm to subside, then sailed on over calm waters.
That was good, wasn't it? Then why was Andy so upset at the idea of Caroline falling in love with Jed? For that matter, why was she?
And Sheila threw up her hands.
The next day she shopped with an abandon she had never before known. Not that she spent much, but she spent what she had freely. She even allowed Mr. Carter to stake her to a sweater she saw in a window.
"Good for your spirit, Sheila; you can pay me back fifty cents a week."
"How about you?" she asked, for hadn't he spoken of having to pay Caroline for the jeep?
He chuckled. "I'll get by. No rent to pay, you know. Silly, isn't it, to save over so many years, then not be able to lay hands on it? Well, the savings account gives Mother comfort."
He'd refused to have his evening meal at the Norris place to pay for Sheila's transportation. It wasn't, he told her mother, that he didn't know she was the best cook in the hills, but that he had a hankering to prove he could take care of himself.
Now, over coffee and pie, a particular treat before they started back, he asked Sheila if she thought she was going to like her job.
"Oh, yes," she returned with enthusiasm. "Imagine me all alone in an office, my own boss. Oh, please, I didn't mean that as it sounded. Andy is wonderful to work under."
"I understand. In your previous job you were a small cog to a big wheel. Here you're the wheel. There is a challenge to keeping that wheel moving smoothly. And your bosses?"
Sheila thought of the two men and gave a motherly smile. Experts in their own line, they looked like baffled babies tiptoeing around the little cubicle that would be her office, pointing fingers at papers, asking what she would need in the way of equipment.
It was a lot like her shack, she thought, this raw-lumbered building set on pilings, with bay waters splashing below at high tide. Knowing there was limited capital and months ahead before they could realize on their investment, she suggested she make the necessary purchases. She was on chummy relations with the second-hand store.
Sheila and Mr. Carter bounced home late that afternoon, in high spirits. Later Sheila would put a thought tag on their feelings. Sheila had spent every penny she had and would carry her lunches that first week, but she was happier than she'd been in "I don't know when." And she worried over being happy.
"It's my father coming out in me," she shouted at Mr. Carter. "He likes to 'shoot the wad.'"
"Gets full value from his investment," Carter shouted back, after they'd struck a hidden boulder, zoomed into the air and come down with a breath-taking jolt. "I've laid up dollars that aren't worth a dime today. Had I spent them I'd have had the dollars' worth."
"I suppose," she agreed.
Because of her purchases, Mr. Carter drove as close to the Norris place as possible. Later Nate would drop logs across the creek, stringers for a shallow bridge.
"Oh," cried Sheila, looking into the shadows, "something's happened to the cabin."
It had grown and taken on the look of a ranch house. A room at least thirty feet long was rapidly shaping up. Though only the uprights indicated where it would be, dusk gave it the illusion of being finished.
"Nothing like ingenuity, muscles, and cooperation. I wish," his voice had grown wistful, "but no." And he said no more. The three men from the Norris house came down to relieve the jeep of Sheila's purchases so he could get on to his cabin before dark.
Because Mrs. Norris had been waiting for the meat Sheila would bring, supper was not ready, a good excuse for the men to show Sheila the new addition.
"I'm being a lot of trouble," she mused aloud.
"This isn't for you," Jed said abruptly; "all you get is the last twelve feet. "This here," he waved at a small enclosure, "is the bathroom; just cold water, but a hot tub can be added. We can pick up a tub for practically nothing; board it up to hide the scars."
Here would be a clothes closet, and here a linen and storage room.
"None of this is for me," Sheila told them as they went in to gather around the small table. "You're turning the back room into a kitchen, aren't you? Then why don't the folks have the bedroom? I have the shack. I can sleep on the divan such nights as I spend here."
She couldn't miss the look of triumph her mother shot at Jed and wondered anew why he must always think the worst of her, see her as selfish, thoughtless.
"I'll see you up the hill," he said later. And when she told him she was quite capable of climbing the cliff, he snapped, "This is no time to risk a fall. You're starting a new job, remember?"
After that she had to accept. She was so angry she knew she'd do something foolish and come to a crashing fall.
He walked behind her, playing his flash on each step, and when they were at the top she wasn't sorry someone was there. She didn't mind nights in the shack if she were already inside with lights on before dark. Seeing it like this, a dark huddle against a darker background, it was a little frightening.
He built the fire while she lighted lanterns, then went out to bring in two armloads of wood. Ready to leave, he stood at the doorway staring at her.
"Sheila, I've never known any one man or woman who can rile me as you do. And I don't know why."
"It's probably my fault," she said wearily. "I had to take so much charity as a kid, I can't accept anything graciously."
What had she said! The door had banged as it had banged only once since she'd moved in. Pots, pans, and dishes crashed.
She had called his help charity; that was it. But why such a violent rejection? She must get to the bottom of this somehow.
"Jed," she stumbled over a bowl en route to the door, threw it open and saw him standing outside, "I'm sorry. I don't know what I said, but forgive it. We could have coffee."
He returned slowly, reluctantly. Sheila backed to let him in, stumbled backward over the same bowl she'd stumbled forward over, crashed into the folding chair and folded.
It was the first free laugh they had ever had together.
"There should be one in every house," Sheila said solemnly.
"With a bottle of liniment attached," he agreed. "Sheila, about this charity business-"
He helped her up, straightened the chair, and she went to look for instant coffee.
"You were talking tonight about how your fingers itched to get into those papers down at the cannery, how you wanted to straighten them up. Suppose those men were friends, not employers-wouldn't you want to do that anyway if you were given a chance?"
"I suppose. Yes, of course. I helped out in a friend's office when their girl was sick. I enjoyed doing it."
"It's the same with Danny and me. We see something that needs doing, something we can do. It's a darned sight more fun than sitting up on our claim waiting for the water to come down. Then think of your mother's cooking."
It sounded all right. Thoughtfully Sheila unwrapped cinnamon rolls she'd bought with a grand gesture at the small home bakery in town.
"Besides," she risked, "you know what Mother says: 'How would givers work up feathers for their wings if there were no receivers?'"
For the first time Jed did a little talking about himself. Not too much. His parents were dead; he'd kept an eye on a younger brother and sister until they were self-supporting. Now he owned two trucks, Danny drove one, he the other. He'd put them up for the winter.
The company for which he hauled had hired him to take a load south for a driver who'd had a minor operation; they'd had the chance to bring two trucks back. Meanwhile they'd run into Nate and heard him talk of the claims, had thought it would make a good vacation for them.
"Give us something to do in off seasons."
"Don't you plan to marry some day?"
Jed stood up and glared down at her. "I wouldn't marry the best woman on earth," he informed her.
"Don't worry," she screamed. "She wouldn't have you."
Then they stood there in the stillness of the cabin, listening to the echoes of their harsh words. They were both staring down at the floor like two little children suddenly scolded for bad behavior.
Jed was the first to look up. "I'm sorry," he said softly, so softly that Sheila could barely hear him.
"What did you say?" she said crisply.
"I said, I'm sorry."
"Well, I guess I'm sorry, too," she said.
Then Jed grinned at her and stepped forward. Taking her in his arms, he said, "And I can think of only one way to make up."
Sheila smiled, knowing exactly what he meant, and then leaned forward to accept his kiss. They embraced for a long time standing up, enjoying the feel of their bodies pressed tightly together, relishing the delicious sex-heat that passed between them.
"You know," Jed began haltingly, "ever since I met you, my life has really changed."
"Oh, Jed, you sound like a character in some romance novel."
"No, really. I don't care what you think. If that's how I feel, then that's what I'm going to tell you. I want you to know how I feel about you, and I'm going to tell you. Whether you want me to or not. If it's not good enough for you, then too bad. At least, I will have spoken my mind."
"Oh, Jed, I'm sorry. It's just that I've got this thing with Andy hanging over my head. I've felt so mixed up lately. It's like I can't get in touch with my true feelings. I feel really frustrated inside. I just wish I could figure this whole thing out. Sometimes I think I love you more than anything, and then Andy writes me another letter and I start dreaming about him again, and ... "
"Hey, let's not hear any more," Jed said softly, putting his hand across her mouth. "You're just worrying yourself too much. You need to relax and let your mind drift for a bit. You're thinking yourself to death. Now just hold me and enjoy it and give in to your feelings. That's all. Sometimes the easy way is the best way. It's so simple, Sheila, darling, just relax ... yes ... yessss...."
They kissed long and hard. And Sheila went limp in his arms, following his lead, doing just as he asked her to, paying attention only to the wonderful feelings that he was stirring up deep within her. Yes, he was so right, she told herself, just give in, just relax, just enjoy ... just make love!
Breaking off their kiss, Jed lifted her up and carried her over to her little bed. While she lay sprawled out, allowing him to do whatever he wished to her, he removed her clothes.
"That's it, baby," he murmured, realizing that she had given herself up to her passion. "Just relax and let me take over. I'll make you feel good. I'll make you forget about Andy and all those things that are troubling you. Yes, baby, just leave it to me."
Quickly shedding his clothes, Jed crawled up on the bed. He spread her legs and then dove into her crotch, slithering his tongue between her labia.
"Oooooo ...!" Sheila squealed, surprised by the unexpected sensation of his tongue snaking into her cunt.
Jed just grunted with the effort of kissing her pussy. He flicked his tongue back and forth rapidly across her clit until it grew hard and erect, protruding from its pink sheath. And at the same time, he eased his chin between her pussy-lips, working his jaws up and down in her slit.
Then he removed his tongue from her clitoris and opened his mouth wide. Moving down slowly, he pressed his lips hard against the lips of her vagina. Then he sucked in ward until he had produced a tight vacuum seal, fusing his face to her cunt.
Sheila couldn't believe how good it felt to have Jed sucking so expertly on her vagina. Massive jolts of pleasure were emanating from her loins, spreading outward until her entire body was tingling with desire. Then Jed began sucking in and out, filling her vagina with hot air and then inhaling deeply. It felt so strange, yet so satisfying, as if he were fucking her with his breath.
Finally removing his mouth from her drenched vagina, Jed wiped his face off on the sheets and then smiled broadly. He looked at her as if to say, How's that feel? But Sheila was so lost to her pleasure that he would have had to yell loudly to communicate anything to her at that point.
When he realized just how turned on she was, Jed swiftly brought his hard cock up against her warm vagina. He worked it around the juicy lips of her pussy, teasing her and enjoying it immensely.
"Please, Jed!" she gasped. "I can't wait much longer. I have to feel you now. Inside me. Now...."
But Jed waited just a little longer, thoroughly enjoying the sight of his lover squirming on the bed, caught up in the ravenous throes of her desires. She reached out frantically and tried to pull him closer, but Jed avoided her extended fingers, pulling his cock just out of her grasp.
"No, Jed! Stop that! Ohhhhh, I want it so bad!" she cried. "Stop playing with me and ... and ... ohhhhh....!"
He could hold back no longer, having exerted all his willpower to hold out as long as he did. His cock was now throbbing wildly, just as hot as was her vagina, and it was dribbling a thin stream of pre-cum.
He found the entrance to her pussy on the first try, and eased in until he was fucking her the way she wanted to be fucked. They entwined their bodies and then rode out their climaxes until they had wrung as much pleasure from their bodies as they could.
A few hours later, as Sheila lay in silence, listening to Jed breathe deeply next to her, she thought about how satisfying their lovemaking had been. But even so, thoughts of Andy began to nag at her, making it hard for her to sleep.
A determined Sheila went to the Norris cabin the next morning a good half-hour before Mr. Carter was due to pick her up. She told her mother almost all of what had occurred the night before and said, "Now tell me the whole story, regardless of any promises you've made."
Mrs. Norris looked at her, sighed, poured coffee for them both and sat down. "All right. Jed is trying to make up to us for something his stepmother did to your father."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
As the story unfolded, Sheila realized why her remarks had been a whiplash to Jed's pride.
Nate had been working at a mill owned by Jed's father at the time of the accident Sheila remembered.
"Jim Justine had come out to talk to Nate. Nate, attuned to mill sounds, heard the break of a cable and threw himself in front of Justine, took the whiplash. You've seen the scar.
"Justine was knocked out, was unconscious for days, and Jed's new stepmother took over, ran the mill and laid down the law. Nate Norris wasn't included. She even stopped his pay check, held up compensation. That's why we had such a scrimpy time, why we had to accept charity before the affair was settled.
"The mill had a small independent union, with not enough strength to force things through. They'd never needed to with Justine around. When he was out of the hospital, his wife, with the doctor backing her, took him on a long cruise.
"When the compensation check came through we bought a nice little cottage."
"I remember." Sheila's eyes were shining at the remembrance.
"But when Nate was pronounced fit to go back to work, Justine's mill wouldn't have him back. He'd been quietly adjudged criminally careless.
"He really wasn't fit to work. He found two small jobs, one at a time, and collapsed on them. Finally, we lost the cottage and the furniture and headed south."
"And Justine?"
"He didn't know what had happened for quite a while. He was told Nate had taken his compensation check and gone to 'shoot the wad.' Finally one of Nate's friends told him the truth. He checked back, confirmed it and went into such a rage at his wife, he had a stroke."
"And his wife took over again," said Sheila.
There was more. Later, at the cannery, Sheila would find herself stopping, hands full of papers, to look out across the bay to the ocean, thinking of the next years for both families.
Jim Justine's children had been sent to school and camp, but Jed hadn't remained at camp the last year.
Fourteen at the time and large, and knowing woods and woodsmen, he had run away, finally coming to his home country. He hadn't found it difficult to slip in for secret visits to his father. Mrs. Justine, indifferent to her husband's welfare, allowed the male nurse much leeway.
Somehow Justine had told his son of Nate, how Nate had saved his life, taken the cable cut for him and then been made to suffer. And he had left a legacy to his son: to seek out Nate Norris and make up to him for the injustice done by the Justines.
Now the Norrises accepted not in payment of a debt past due, but to relieve Jed and because they liked and understood him.
"Mother," Sheila asked on another morning, "why couldn't I have been told before?"
"You wear your feelings on the outside," Mrs. Norris said. "You'd have been so mealy mouthed, Jed would have thought he was building up more indebtedness to his father's memory."
"Then he's dead?"
"Oh, yes, he died that year. I imagine, soon after Jed learned the story. There was quite a battle over the estate, but Mrs. Justine convinced the court she had the children's interests at heart, and Jed was helpless."
They'd heard about it from different loggers and mill workers who had drifted south as mills closed down. Each Justine child had left home the moment he was of age. Jed had done his service stretch and returned to work to help the other two finish school. The sister had married.
"And Mrs. Justine?"
"She shut down the mills before she lost too much. We understand she is clinging to her money as tightly as her arthritic hands will allow."
Sheila could now understand why in Jed's eyes, Nate could do no wrong. Hadn't Nate Norris offered his own life to save Jim Justine?
The experience might also account for Jed's distrust of women.
There wasn't a thing she could do about Jed's feeling of indebtedness toward her father, nor did she want to. Jed was happy around Nate; most people were.
But he shouldn't go through life hating all women because of one of them. Now, what could she do to cure him? The very next time she saw Jed, she had a ridiculous desire to take his head in her hands and gently smooth back his hair.
"Do you have to stand there looking like a sick calf?" roared Jed.
"Had I known that you was standing there, I wouldn't have just looked sick."
"Here we go again," muttered Nate happily, shifting his pipe to a better talking angle. "Sheila, you're standing under a four by four, and the way Jed feels right now, you may be lying under it soon."
Sheila wheeled and headed off into the dusk. She had food at the shack. She'd choke if she had to sit across the table from that unmannerly oaf.
She had the fire started when something thumped at the door. Jed's boot. His hands were occupied with two platters.
"You're more darned trouble," he grumbled as he came in. "Your mother lit all over me. Said I had to bring these up and apologize."
"Don't let me stop you," she said sweetly.
He managed to set the platters safely on the table. But when he wheeled to barge out he caught his foot in the folding chair and went right along with it, while Sheila stood vainly trying to control her hysteria.
"Jed, honestly I don't know what to do. About that chair, I mean. This shack just isn't big enough for the two of you, for it and Andy either."
"You mean he took a header over this, too?"
"Not exactly a header." She choked. "And he had a much worse time getting up. Oh, look, Mother sent dinner for both of us. Now do let's sign a half-hour peace pact. I'm starved. I didn't have any lunch."
"Why?" he demanded sternly. "If you must know, I spent all of my money and wouldn't ask Mother for the makings."
"How did you spend it?" Out of the tissue paper in which she had hidden them came a flock of ceramic wild geese, each piece half a goose so they would fly close to the wall.
"And me without a wall for them to fly on," she wailed softly. "But I couldn't resist them. Go on, say it!"
"Welcome back to the human race," he began, then broke off to laugh. "If that isn't Nate Norris all over. Sheila, that's the first sensible thing I've ever seen you do."
Sensible? Why, Andy would have had a fit if he'd seen her throw her money away for nothing at all; money she needed for food, too.
She looked so bewildered, he pushed past her, pulled down frying pans and began reheating the cooling food.
"Where's the coffeepot?" he asked.
"On the stove without any water in it," she cried, and tried to squeeze past to the rescue.
"That figures," he said happily. "Know what? If I have time I'm going to close in that front porch of yours and give you a wall so you'll have wild geese flying the year around."
She opened her mouth, then closed it firmly. Why spoil the evening by telling him she wouldn't be there to watch them? The geese, too, would be going to a city apartment to remind her of her childhood when vast flocks flew over on Thanksgiving, singing their dirge for those brought down by hunters' guns.
"Can you build fireplaces, too? Jed, do you know how many times you have to whack a stick to make it fit into that little stove?"
"I'll bet I'll be able to by next fall. Where's the milk? Hey, this is sour; I'd better build you a cooler."
Danny came up with their dessert, approaching the shack warily. Hearing only the murmur of voices, he tapped and came in, sighing with relief.
"Thinking of closing in the porch," Jed told him. "Need a place to put that damned folding chair. It threw me again."
"Good. I know where we can get some big window frames if we act quick. Store being torn down. Couple of them still had the glass in this morning."
From there on, Sheila was only a listener, but she listened happily and even forgave Jed for walking out with Danny and forgetting to say good night until he heard Danny saying it.
"Oh, yeah, good night," was his contribution.
"Now that's togetherness," said Sheila, and ducked a pebble he threw at her. At least he laughed; that was a step in the right direction.
"You look happy," Mrs. Norris remarked the next morning when Sheila stopped to ask for a sandwich to carry with her.
"Pay day," Sheila explained, "and I have things to do. I wasn't brought up to enjoy loafing."
She was happy. As she skirted the woods to the point where Mr. Carter would pick her up, she noticed the emerald green of moss on a stump, the flush of pink on the alders lining the creek. In no time she would be finding her first trillium and would know spring wasn't teasing, but really on her way.
She spent part of the morning at the second-hand store, then rode out to the cannery on the store's truck and shushed her employer's cries of dismay. She'd bought paint. By Monday the files and desks would gleam.
"You're not working over the weekend?" exclaimed one.
"I am, too, and on my own. Please let me. It's fun, like playing house. You see, this is my office."
Sheila went into town to cash her paycheck, and since it was her first one, she decided to save most of it. She wanted to make every penny count. She would be having her evening meals with her parents; she needed only food for lunches and a thermos bottle.
She felt good with her hard-earned money. But her thoughts were soon colored darkly when she began thinking about Andy all of a sudden. He had been writing letters to her lately, blaming her indirectly for his parents' woes.
She was able to put Andy out of her mind a few days later when excitement swept through the Norris household. Nate had found a little gold. It wasn't much, but it was enough to make the venture worthwhile.
But after the family had a short celebration, Sheila thought it was time for her to have another talk with her mother. She wanted to talk about Andy and try to straighten some things out.
Sheila started out telling her mother about all the hard work she had been doing lately, while Andy reaped the benefits without doing anything at all.
"I keep blaming Andy for everything that has happened," Sheila said.
"It is easier to blame the other fellow, isn't it?" said Mrs. Norris.
"But I-" sputtered Sheila.
"You allowed Andy to talk you into taking a claim for both of you, knowing he knew nothing of conditions up here. Then when he wrote he was sending his father up to file for both of them, you made no effort to stop him, though you had no illusions about what he might find.
"Daughter, the sin of omission is nearly as bad as the one of commission. You are not helping anyone when you allow him to take advantage of you in any way.
"If you and Andy are to have a happy life, you are going to have to forget he was ever your employer; stop believing everything he says is the gospel truth. A good marriage is based upon balance; it isn't one-sided."
Sheila took her mother's words to heart. And throughout the next few days she thought about their conversation constantly, trying her best to sort things out.
Her father was spending more and more time down at the assay office and things seemed to be looking up, as far as the gold was concerned. And then Sheila got another letter from Andy. He told her that after his mother had read the latest assay report, she had decided to put the house up for sale. Andy told her he was going to buy the house, furniture and everything, because he was going to be working at a new office nearby. He concluded the letter telling her to begin bringing her things down, because their wedding couldn't be far off now.
Reading those words, Sheila figured she had no choice. She knew that she should be happy, but somehow she just felt an empty feeling in her belly. But she did as Andy instructed her to do, nonetheless.
When she left, no one was there to see her off. She felt just as bad leaving as she had when she had originally left the city to come up there. But she couldn't figure out why.
Driving swiftly, Gertie seemed to be a whole new car. But then she hit a steep grade and things were back to normal. The temperature needle began rising again. She began anxiously watching the traffic. The needle kept rising. Nervously, she scanned the radio dial and found a song that had been one of Jed's favorites. She listened to it and tried to take her mind off the rapidly overheating car. But it was too late. Just like that, a cloud of smoke began trailing out the back.
She pulled over to the side of the road, got out and leaned against the car, and began sobbing. Cars zoomed by her, heedless to her plight.
Then a truck pulled up behind her, screeching to a halt. But Sheila was so distraught, she hardly noticed.
"Trouble?" a voice asked.
Sheila looked up through tear-blurred eyes. Blinking a few times and trying to regain her composure, she cried out suddenly. "Jed! How did you get here? Oh, Jed!"
Without thinking, she turned toward him and fell into his arms. He held her tightly while she sobbed against his chest.
"Oh, Jed. I can't believe you're here. But what about Caroline?"
"I decided I was just wasting my time with a girl like that. She just wasn't my type, I'm sorry to say. Now tell me what's wrong. I never thought a silly old car boiling over would upset you like this."
"Jed ... Jed," she murmured. "I can't marry him. I just can't."
"You're talking about Andy, I presume."
"Oh, Jed, don't tease me."
"Well, you're just finding out you can't marry him, eh? Nate knew that months ago. That's why he maneuvered you into the hills. He thought once you got back into your own country, you'd find yourself and get a new perspective on things."
Sheila looked up at him wide-eyed. Suddenly everything seemed to make sense. Yes, her father had known all along that Andy wasn't the right man for her. But he was understanding enough to allow Sheila to come to her senses on her own. And now it all seemed so crystal clear. How could she have been such a fool? she asked herself.
And then she moved closer to Jed, slipping easily into his arms. They kissed for a very long time, ignoring the occasional car or truck that drove past, slowing down to take a closer look at the two lovers.
As she wrapped her arms around him tightly, she felt like she had come home after a long and arduous journey. And from the way Jed kissed her, she could tell he felt the same way.
