Douglas Durkin - The Heart of Cherry McBain (Douglas Durkin) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

King knew no rest that night. Early in the morning he left the bunkhouse where he had been lying during the night and went out into the open where the light of another day was growing in an eastern sky all rose and gold. He found a path leading into the woods and followed it for some distance among the trees to a spot where it led across a little stream. Here he sat down and for a long time looked at the water and the trees and the changing colors of the sky.

When the red sun pushed its way at last above the tree-tops, there came the sound of men stirring in the camp, and the distant sharp rattle of the wheels of a wagon bumping along over a rough trail. A new day had begun – a day when strong men would go out to work, singing and bantering as they went.

King got up from his place beside the stream and stood with his face to the east. Slowly he lifted his right hand and closed his fingers. Then he laid his left hand over it.

In the east the day was springing.

In his heart there was a prayer – a prayer such as big men speak when they have seen the wrong they have done. And who shall say that the prayer was not heard?

In his face there was a resolve – a resolve that expressed itself in the tightening of the fingers that closed over his right hand. And who shall say that the resolve was not recorded?

In a country where women are seldom seen, the presence of a pretty girl of twenty-one is a matter worthy of record – even if she is the daughter of a railway construction boss. For Keith McBain, reticent, profane to a frankly amazing degree on those rare occasions when he did speak to his men, was a seasoned old man of his class. Silent and unapproachable – as is the manner of camp bosses – Keith McBain seemed at times the least human of them all. "Old Silent" the men called him, partly on account of an instinctive grudge they all bore him for his mode of hard dealing, and partly, too, on account of a kind of unreasoned affection which they cherished for him because of his rough-handed honesty and his indomitable will. When Old Silent spoke no man spoke back. Not that he was a man to fear physically – he was a small, dyspeptic, nervous man whom anyone of his deep-chested camp-followers could have brushed aside with one hand. It was rather the man's face that they feared, with its black piercing eyes that never shifted their glance when he spoke, and its black sardonic smile that made an impenetrable mask for a soul that no man had ever seen revealed. His men all feared him – some of them hated him – and yet they never left him, once their names had been placed on the pay-roll.

Once only in the memory of those who worked for him had the hope ever arisen that the old contractor's manner might soften and his hard face relax in the presence of the men. Just a year ago, nearly a hundred miles back along the line, Keith McBain had lost his wife after a long illness. She had lingered for weeks in a pathetic fight for life, and the old camp boss had watched by her bedside almost continuously, leaving the oversight of the work wholly in the hands of his foremen. Never had a gang of men worked so hard as those men had worked day after day while Old Silent was absent from his place, not only out of deference to the frail woman who was struggling gamely against too great odds, but out of sheer respect for their old boss whose burden of sorrow was daily growing heavier. And when at last the word came that the struggle was over, the men had sat about very late into the night and had spoken in whispers. Keith McBain had made the grave with his own hands, just off the right-of-way, and had marked the spot with a pile of stones and a rough-hewn cross. Then in the days that followed he had been more silent than ever, more unremitting in his dealing with the men, and, if possible, more profane. And yet every last one of his men could not help knowing that Keith McBain's heart was breaking. His light had burned late into the night – and every night – for months following the day that had brought him his great sorrow.

Cherry McBain had come unannounced into the camp. In fact the men had not known of her existence until she rode into camp one afternoon a couple of weeks before the death of Mrs. McBain. Only a few of the more fortunate among them had had a glimpse of her as she came up the trail escorted by McBain's timekeeper, who had gone out to meet her and bring her to the camp. But the few that had seen her knew at once that she was the daughter of the woman who was dying in Keith McBain's cabin – so striking was the resemblance between mother and daughter.

During the days that immediately followed her arrival Cherry was never seen abroad except late in the evenings when she walked out with her father and came back with her arms laden with wild flowers and fern. But when Keith McBain turned again to resume his duties after the darkest episode of his life had been closed, Cherry McBain wandered alone along the new grade or saddled her horse and explored the trails wherever they led in both directions from the camp.

Men who work a whole season in the woods or on a right-of-way, and at the end of the season fling their total earnings away in one hilarious week or two in the nearest city, are likely to classify women roughly and perhaps quickly, even if for ten months out of every twelve they never hear the sound of a woman's voice. They may sometimes make errors in their classifications, but not often. The first morning that Cherry McBain strolled along the edge of the works and paused here and there to watch the men as they swung their teams round in the ever moving circle that carried the earth away from both sides of the right-of-way to the centre where it was graded up into the first rough form of a road-bed – that morning the men registered their own judgments concerning the daughter of Old Silent. In her dark eyes there was the fearless look of her father, the look that pierced through the surface and saw through the veneer to what lay behind. In her smile there was the essence of her mother's gentle nature – a nature before which men down through the centuries have bowed in silent worship.

But there was something more, something that was her own. Men saw it in her lightning glance and in the quick toss she gave her head when she shook back her wind-blown, dark-brown hair. Not one of the men had been able to tell exactly what it was that was there, but all alike were convinced that while Keith McBain might command obedience in his men and squelch even his foreman with a look or an explosive word or two, he had no look that could have served him in a contest with the will of Cherry McBain.

It was six o'clock by the time King reached McBain's camp on his return trip. In the distance he saw the men leaving the grade and making their way towards the camp, the sound of their voices coming to him with heartening effect after his long silent trip, during which his mind had gone back irresistibly to the days when he and his brother had romped together as boys.

When he came to where the path led from the trail to McBain's cabin he turned abruptly, and getting down from the saddle allowed his horse to follow him while he made his way on foot along the narrow path. The little cabin was built of logs and stood well back from the trail, in the protecting shade of a clump of tamaracs.

Keith McBain was sitting by the doorway, his pipe in his mouth, his eyes turned to the hills that rose up, scraggly and covered with fallen and charred timbers, to the south of the cabin.

King's first feeling was one of pity. The old man who sat there smoking his pipe and musing was a broken man, and every line on his face showed it. There was in his eyes the look of a man whose power of will was almost gone. There was a look of fear in them, a fear lest he should reveal his weakness to others. He had an odd trick of glancing quickly about him as if he wished to assure himself that no one was coming upon him unannounced. His mouth was tight-lipped, his face covered with a short-clipped beard that once had been black but now showed gray and pale against the bloodless cheeks.