“If I fall down on this, it’ll just about finish me,” he continued glumly.  “These people are not going to allow me an inch leeway.  I’ll have to deliver on that contract to the last stipulated splinter before they’ll pay over a dollar.  If I don’t have a million feet for ’em three weeks from to-day, it’s all off, and maybe a suit for breach of contract besides.  That’s the sort they are.  If they can wiggle out of taking my logs, they’ll be to the good, because they’ve made other contracts down the coast at fifty cents a thousand less.  And the aggravating thing about it is that if I could get by with this deal, I can close a five-million-foot contract with the Abbey-Monohan outfit, for delivery next spring.  I must have the money for this before I can undertake the bigger contract.”

“Can’t you sell your logs if these other people won’t take them?” she asked, somewhat alive now to his position—­and, incidentally, her own interest therein.

“In time, yes,” he said.  “But when you go into the open market with logs, you don’t always find a buyer right off the reel.  I’d have to hire ’em towed from here to Vancouver, and there’s some bad water to get over.  Time is money to me right now, Stell.  If the thing dragged over two or three months, by the time they were sold and all expenses paid, I might not have anything left.  I’m in debt for supplies, behind in wages.  When it looks like a man’s losing, everybody jumps him.  That’s business.  I may have my outfit seized and sold up if I fall down on this delivery and fail to square up accounts right away.  Damn it, if you hadn’t given Paul Abbey the cold turn-down, I might have got a boost over this hill.  You were certainly a chump.”

“I’m not a mere pawn in your game yet,” she flared hotly.  “I suppose you’d trade me for logs enough to complete your contract and consider it a good bargain.”

“Oh, piffle,” he answered coolly.  “What’s the use talking like that.  It’s your game as much as mine.  Where do you get off, if I go broke?  You might have done a heap worse.  Paul’s a good head.  A girl that hasn’t anything but her looks to get through the world on hasn’t any business overlooking a bet like that.  Nine girls out of ten marry for what there is in it, anyhow.”

“Thank you,” she replied angrily.  “I’m not in the market on that basis.”

“All this stuff about ideal love and soul communion and perfect mating is pure bunk, it seems to me,” Charlie tacked off on a new course of thought.  “A man and a woman somewhere near of an age generally hit it off all right, if they’ve got common horse sense—­and income enough so they don’t have to squabble eternally about where the next new hat and suit’s coming from.  It’s the coin that counts most of all.  It sure is, Sis.  It’s me that knows it, right now.”

He sat a minute or two longer, again preoccupied with his problems.

“Well,” he said at last, “I’ve got to get action somehow.  If I could get about thirty men and another donkey for three weeks, I’d make it.”