Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/116

108 He did not want to write to Marcia Murray! He could not share with her this new enthusiasm for the job that he was to do with his own mind, his own back, his own hands! For this night she had no part in his life; for the first time in months he went through those last moments before turning in without remembering the sound of her words, the feel of her breath on his cheek, the touch of her cool fingers, the steady look in her clear eyes. Something had come into his heart which left no place for little Marcia. Marcia, the girl for whom he had braved his father's vitriolic scorn, for whom he had come on this distasteful errand!

The others had gone to their blankets; he rose, blew out the lamp and went to the door. A light was extinguished in Helen Foraker's room. He saw an indistinct figure appear at the window and draw back the curtains and linger a moment and disappear—and again that delicious creep went over his body.

From an indefinite distance, a slow, accelerating throb beat upon the air, stout and measured and progressing to its gentle rumble: the drumming of a cock partridge. Again it came—and again, as the bird, fevered with the great impulse in him, made the darkness pulse with his love making. Very quietly, as though awed by some soul-moulding experience, Taylor turned back to his bunk; the stimulus did not leave him; he tossed restlessly, eyes open, sleeping in brief snatches until dawn; he rose in the new day, to a new manner of living, of thinking, to work with Helen Foraker's men and his logs, to talk markets with Humphrey Bryant, to sit evenings with the girl and talk timber and labor and board-feet and now and then be unable to hear even his own words