“You’re wasting good paper on weeds,” he said at last, gesturing with his knife toward the delicate, black-stemmed fronds of maidenhair and the stiff, serrated ribbons of sword-fern.
“They aren’t weeds,” she said, her voice dropping into that cool, defensive cadence she used when people in the settlement asked why she didn’t take in sewing like other women. “The Boston journals pay fifty cents apiece for verified sheets of the coastal flora. That’s three yards of calico or four pounds of nails if you send them through the purser on the *Olympia*.”
Louis looked at her over the rim of his tin mug, his expression neither mocking nor kind, but weighing. “You think you’re going to buy a well with fern-leaves?”
“I’m going to buy my own flour,” she said, her color rising. “And I won’t be owing the mill store for iron or borrowing your team to haul it.”
He set his mug down with a small rattle. “The iron’s already on the ground, Opal. You can haul it back yourself tomorrow if you’re so particular about the debt, but the horses belong to me and I’ve got a contract to sink that pump before the commissioners come out from Port Townsend on the Monday steamer.”
She stared at him, her hand tightening around her tin cup until her knuckles whitened. “The commissioners aren’t due until October.”
“They changed the sailing,” he said, leaning back and crossing his heavy arms over his chest. “Drummond wants the water-right for his shingle mill up the creek. If that pump isn’t throwing four gallons a minute by Saturday noon, he’ll file on your spring before you’ve got the first length of pipe squared away.”
The news hit the quiet room like a gust of cold air through an unlatched door. Drummond was the manager of the upper mill—a man who ran three crews of rough-cut lumberjacks and had three votes on the county road board. If he laid claim to the spring at the head of the ravine, the cabin, the clearing, and the three acres of bottom-land Opal had spent two years grubbing out by hand would revert to wild timber ground under the homestead acts.
“He wouldn’t dare,” she whispered, her gaze dropping to the oilcloth table. “The spring is inside the half-mile ditch line.”
“Drummond doesn’t care about ditches, he cares about steam,” Louis said, his voice losing its mocking edge and dropping into the flat, hard register of men who had worked the river drives from Maine to the Columbia. “He needs twenty barrels an hour to feed his boilers when the creek goes dry next month. He saw the wagon in the nettles this morning. He knows you’re short-handed.”
Opal stood up so sharply her wooden stool tipped backward against the wall with a hollow clatter. She did not right it. She walked to the small four-pane window that looked out toward the dark, murmurous line of the salt marsh where the tide was beginning to hiss through the pickle-weed.
“We have to set the crib tonight,” she said.
“It’s pitch-dark in twenty minutes, and the mud’s like soup after the afternoon turn,” Louis said, though he did not move to stop her as she reached for her shawl on the peg by the door.
“The tide is low at midnight,” she said, her voice shaking slightly with the force of her resolve. “If we wait for dawn, Drummond will have his chainmen out before the frost is off the fern. Get the lanterns.”
The lanterns were square, heavy-bodied affairs of pierced tin with yellow horn sides that smelled of burnt lard and coal-oil. When Louis struck a long Swedish match against the heel of his boot and touched the cotton wick, the yellow glare jumped across the grease-spotted floorboards, throwing their two long, distorted shadows up against the unlatched rafters where bunches of dried sage and winter savory hung by their stems.
“You’ve got no sense of a shift, Opal,” he said, but he reached for his duck-cloth jacket all the same, sliding his arms into the stiff sleeves with a dry rustle of canvas. “A man works twelve hours on the tramway, he sleeps six. That’s what the book says.”
“The book doesn’t say anything about Drummond’s shingle mill,” she snapped, tying her woolen scarf tight under her chin so that only her nose and her dark, hard-set eyes showed above the gray wool. “Bring the four-foot cant-hook and the heavy maul. If we don’t drop the sill-timbers into the blue clay before the midnight water covers the gravel bar, we might as well pack our shift-bags for Whidbey Island.”
They went down the trail together in the thick, wet dark, the twin spots of yellow light bobbing over the sword-fern and the rotting stumps of cedar that loomed like gravestones along the path. The air was salt-heavy and cold, smelling of mud and the particular bitter rot of exposed eel-grass along the salt-chute. By the time they reached the gravel shelf where the creek met the tide-flat, the water had drawn back into a narrow, black thread between two gray banks of slime, leaving the weed-matted stones slick and glistening under the lanterns.
Louis set his lantern down on a flat granite boulder and walked out onto the muck, testing the bottom with the toe of his boot. The mud gave way with a wet, sucking *glop* that swallowed the heel four inches deep.
“Hard bottom’s down about three feet,” he muttered, swinging his shoulder against the oak sill-timber they had dragged down that afternoon. “We’ll have to box it in right here where the spring breaks through the gravel. Give me that spade.”
Opal did not give him the spade; she took the second one from the rack on the drag-sled and waded into the black mire beside him, her skirts immediately graying with silt to the knee. They did not speak again for an hour. The work was rhythmic and brutal: sink the iron edge into the stiff blue clay, lift the dead weight of the wet silt, twist the wrist to clear the spade, and fling the muck over the low timber wall they were building around the springhead. The steam sawmill across the water had shut down its saws for the night, leaving only the steady, lunging throb of its donkey-engine pumping bilge out of the lumber scows. Every few minutes the great red eye of a steamer’s port light would slide silently down the deep-water channel outside the spit, its wash sending a low, greasy swell up the creek that lapped against their ankles and made the lantern flames flicker in their pierced tin boxes.
Louis worked with his hat pushed back on his forehead, the sweat cutting white channels through the coal-dust and mud on his temples. He was faster with a shovel than she was, his broad shoulders swinging like a pendulum, but Opal had the better eye for the level; three times she stopped him with a sharp lift of her hand when his side of the timber crib was dipping an inch toward the salt-run.
“Hold,” she said, wiping her forearm across her forehead and leaving a streak of black muck right across her eyebrow. “If you sink that corner another half-inch, the whole frame will slide toward the channel when the flood comes in at dawn.”
Louis straightened up, leaning on his shovel handle and breathing hard through his nose, his chest rising and falling beneath the wet wool of his shirt. He looked down at her by the yellow light of the lantern—her hair had come unpinned from the straw hat and hung in dark, salt-damp strands around her neck, and her boots were lost entirely in the gray ooze—and suddenly his mouth twitched into that slow, difficult grin.
“You’re a stubborn piece of work, Marshall,” he said.
“And you’re slow as a loaded wood-scow,” she retorted, though her voice lacked its earlier edge. She shifted her grip on the shovel handle. “Give me that lever before the mud fills the hole back in.”
They got the four square cedar timbers pinned together with iron drift-bolts just as the tide turned. The water began to creep back up the creek bed, cold and grey, lipping silently over the newly laid cedar flooring of the crib before they had even finished shoveling the gravel back around the outside joints. Louis hauled the heavy galvanized suction pipe down from the dry bank, his muscles straining under the dead weight of the iron until the veins stood out dark and thick on his neck.
“Hold the lantern lower,” he grunted, sliding the flange down through the center of the timber box until the iron shoe bit into the clean, hard-packed gravel below the blue silt. “If we hit a knot in the old drift-wood down there, we’re done for the night.”
Opal leaned over the edge of the crib, holding the pierced-tin lantern close to the dark, swirling water. The light caught the bright, clean thread of the spring water bubbling up through the gray stones, clear as spring-rain against the salt-thickened creek water.
“It’s clean,” she whispered, her fingers touching his shoulder without her realizing it as she leaned closer to watch the iron settle. “Louis, look—it’s coming up sweet.”
He didn’t move away. He stood shoulder-deep in the cold tide-wash with the heavy pipe balanced between his hands, looking down not at the water, but at her face, where the yellow lantern light caught the wet smudge of her cheek and the small, stubborn curve of her mouth. For a second the noise of the distant sawmill and the sucking wash of the tide seemed to drop away entirely, leaving only the smell of salt and wood-smoke between them.
Caleb Sterling is an American frontier fiction writer and Old West history researcher based near Sheridan, Wyoming. Dedicated to authentic 19th-century pioneer lore, trail diaries, and homestead sagas, he has penned over 240 serialized tales celebrating the resilience, romance, and untamed spirit of the American frontier.