Big Timber | Page 2

She had no tried standard by which to measure life's values
for she had lived her twenty-two years wholly shielded from the human
maelstrom, fed, clothed, taught, an untried product of home and schools.
Her head was full of university lore, things she had read, a smattering
of the arts and philosophy, liberal portions of academic knowledge, all
tagged and sorted like parcels on a shelf to be reached when called for.
Buried under these externalities the ego of her lay unaroused, an
incalculable quantity.
All of which is merely by way of stating that Miss Estella Benton was a
young woman who had grown up quite complacently in that station of
life in which--to quote the Philistines--it had pleased God to place her,
and that Chance had somehow, to her astonished dismay, contrived to
thrust a spoke in the smooth-rolling wheels of destiny. Or was it
Destiny? She had begun to think about that, to wonder if a lot that she
had taken for granted as an ordered state of things was not, after all,
wholly dependent upon Chance. She had danced and sung and played
lightheartedly accepting a certain standard of living, a certain position
in a certain set, a pleasantly ordered home life, as her birthright, a
natural heritage. She had dwelt upon her ultimate destiny in her secret
thoughts as foreshadowed by that of other girls she knew. The Prince
would come, to put it in a nutshell. He would woo gracefully. They
would wed. They would be delightfully happy. Except for the matter of
being married, things would move along the same pleasant channels.

Just so. But a broken steering knuckle on a heavy touring car set things
in a different light--many things. She learned then that death is no
respecter of persons, that a big income may be lived to its limit with
nothing left when the brain force which commanded it ceases to
function. Her father produced perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand
dollars a year in his brokerage business, and he had saved nothing.
Thus at one stroke she was put on an equal footing with the
stenographer in her father's office. Scarcely equal either, for the
stenographer earned her bread and was technically equipped for the
task, whereas Estella Benton had no training whatsoever, except in
social usage. She did not yet fully realize just what had overtaken her.
Things had happened so swiftly, to ruthlessly, that she still verged upon
the incredulous. Habit clung fast. But she had begun to think, to try and
establish some working relation between herself and things as she
found them. She had discovered already that certain theories of human
relations are not soundly established in fact.
She turned at last in her seat. The Limited's whistle had shrilled for a
stop. At the next stop--she wondered what lay in store for her just
beyond the next stop. While she dwelt mentally upon this, her hands
were gathering up some few odds and ends of her belongings on the
berth.
Across the aisle a large, smooth-faced young man watched her with
covert admiration. When she had settled back with bag and suitcase
locked and strapped on the opposite seat and was hatted and gloved, he
leaned over and addressed her genially.
"Getting off at Hopyard? Happen to be going out to Roaring Springs?"
Miss Benton's gray eyes rested impersonally on the top of his head,
traveled slowly down over the trim front of his blue serge to the
polished tan Oxfords on his feet, and there was not in eyes or on
countenance the slightest sign that she saw or heard him. The large
young man flushed a vivid red.
Miss Benton was partly amused, partly provoked. The large young man
had been her vis-à-vis at dinner the day before and at breakfast that

morning. He had evinced a yearning for conversation each time, but it
had been diplomatically confined to salt and other condiments, the
weather and the scenery. Miss Benton had no objection to young men
in general, quite the contrary. But she did not consider it quite the thing
to countenance every amiable stranger.
Within a few minutes the porter came for her things, and the blast of
the Limited's whistle warned her that it was time to leave the train. Ten
minutes later the Limited was a vanishing object down an aisle slashed
through a forest of great trees, and Miss Estella Benton stood on the
plank platform of Hopyard station. Northward stretched a flat, unlovely
vista of fire-blackened stumps. Southward, along track and siding,
ranged a single row of buildings, a grocery store, a shanty with a huge
sign proclaiming that it was a bank, dwelling, hotel and blacksmith
shop whence arose the clang of hammered iron. A dirt road ran
between town