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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11223 ***
+
+[Illustration: She, too, had seen Monohan seated on the after deck.
+FRONTISPIECE.]
+
+
+
+                  BIG TIMBER
+
+           A Story of the Northwest
+
+           By BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR
+
+
+
+
+
+              With Frontispiece
+               By DOUGLAS DUER
+
+
+                    1916
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I.     GREEN FIELDS AND PASTURES NEW
+II.    MR. ABBEY ARRIVES
+III.   HALFWAY POINT
+IV.    A FORETASTE OF THINGS TO COME
+V.     THE TOLL OF BIG TIMBER
+VI.    THE DIGNITY (?) OF TOIL
+VII.   SOME NEIGHBORLY ASSISTANCE
+VIII.  DURANCE VILE
+IX.    JACK FYFE'S CAMP
+X.     ONE WAY OUT
+XI.    THE PLUNGE
+XII.   AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED
+XIII.  IN WHICH EVENTS MARK TIME
+XIV.   A CLOSE CALL AND A NEW ACQUAINTANCE
+XV.    A RESURRECTION
+XVI.   THE CRISIS
+XVII.  IN WHICH THERE IS A FURTHER CLASH
+XVIII. THE OPENING GUN
+XIX.   FREE AS THE WIND
+XX.    ECHOES
+XXI.   AN UNEXPECTED MEETING
+XXII.  THE FIRE BEHIND THE SMOKE
+XXIII. A RIDE BY NIGHT
+XXIV.  "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+GREEN FIELDS AND PASTURES NEW
+
+The Imperial Limited lurched with a swing around the last hairpin curve
+of the Yale canyon. Ahead opened out a timbered valley,--narrow on its
+floor, flanked with bold mountains, but nevertheless a valley,--down
+which the rails lay straight and shining on an easy grade. The river
+that for a hundred miles had boiled and snarled parallel to the tracks,
+roaring through the granite sluice that cuts the Cascade Range, took a
+wider channel and a leisurely flow. The mad haste had fallen from it as
+haste falls from one who, with time to spare, sees his destination near
+at hand; and the turgid Fraser had time to spare, for now it was but
+threescore miles to tidewater. So the great river moved placidly--as an
+old man moves when all the headlong urge of youth is spent and his race
+near run.
+
+On the river side of the first coach behind the diner, Estella Benton
+nursed her round chin in the palm of one hand, leaning her elbow on the
+window sill. It was a relief to look over a widening valley instead of a
+bare-walled gorge all scarred with slides, to see wooded heights lift
+green in place of barren cliffs, to watch banks of fern massed against
+the right of way where for a day and a night parched sagebrush, brown
+tumble-weed, and such scant growth as flourished in the arid uplands of
+interior British Columbia had streamed in barren monotony, hot and dry
+and still.
+
+She was near the finish of her journey. Pensively she considered the end
+of the road. How would it be there? What manner of folk and country?
+Between her past mode of life and the new that she was hurrying toward
+lay the vast gulf of distance, of custom, of class even. It was bound to
+be crude, to be full of inconveniences and uncouthness. Her brother's
+letters had partly prepared her for that. Involuntarily she shrank from
+it, had been shrinking from it by fits and starts all the way, as
+flowers that thrive best in shady nooks shrink from hot sun and rude
+winds. Not that Estella Benton was particularly flower-like. On the
+contrary she was a healthy, vigorous-bodied young woman, scarcely to be
+described as beautiful, yet undeniably attractive. Obviously a daughter
+of the well-to-do, one of that American type which flourishes in
+families to which American politicians unctuously refer as the backbone
+of the nation. Outwardly, gazing riverward through the dusty pane, she
+bore herself with utmost serenity. Inwardly she was full of misgivings.
+
+Four days of lonely travel across a continent, hearing the drumming
+clack of car wheels and rail joint ninety-six hours on end, acutely
+conscious that every hour of the ninety-six put its due quota of miles
+between the known and the unknown, may be either an adventure, a bore,
+or a calamity, depending altogether upon the individual point of view,
+upon conditioning circumstances and previous experience.
+
+Estella Benton's experience along such lines was chiefly a blank and the
+conditioning circumstances of her present journey were somber enough to
+breed thought that verged upon the melancholy. Save for a natural
+buoyancy of spirit she might have wept her way across North America. 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 and station, with hitching posts at which farmers' nags
+stood dispiritedly in harness.
+
+To the Westerner such spots are common enough; he sees them not as
+fixtures, but as places in a stage of transformation. By every side
+track and telegraph station on every transcontinental line they spring
+up, centers of productive activity, growing into orderly towns and
+finally attaining the dignity of cities. To her, fresh from trim
+farmsteads and rural communities that began setting their houses in
+order when Washington wintered at Valley Forge, Hopyard stood forth
+sordid and unkempt. And as happens to many a one in like case, a wave of
+sickening loneliness engulfed her, and she eyed the speeding Limited as
+one eyes a departing friend.
+
+"How could one live in a place like this?" she asked herself.
+
+But she had neither Slave of the Lamp at her beck, nor any Magic Carpet
+to transport her elsewhere. At any rate, she reflected, Hopyard was not
+her abiding-place. She hoped that her destination would prove more
+inviting.
+
+Beside the platform were ranged two touring cars. Three or four of
+those who had alighted entered these. Their baggage was piled over the
+hoods, buckled on the running boards. The driver of one car approached
+her. "Hot Springs?" he inquired tersely.
+
+She affirmed this, and he took her baggage, likewise her trunk check
+when she asked how that article would be transported to the lake. She
+had some idea of route and means, from her brother's written
+instruction, but she thought he might have been there to meet her. At
+least he would be at the Springs.
+
+So she was whirled along a country road, jolted in the tonneau between a
+fat man from Calgary and a rheumatic dame on her way to take hot sulphur
+baths at St. Allwoods. She passed seedy farmhouses, primitive in
+construction, and big barns with moss plentifully clinging on roof and
+gable. The stretch of charred stumps was left far behind, but in every
+field of grain and vegetable and root great butts of fir and cedar rose
+amid the crops. Her first definitely agreeable impression of this land,
+which so far as she knew must be her home, was of those huge and
+numerous stumps contending with crops for possession of the fields.
+Agreeable, because it came to her forcibly that it must be a sturdy
+breed of men and women, possessed of brawn and fortitude and high
+courage, who made their homes here. Back in her country, once beyond
+suburban areas, the farms lay like the squares of a chess board, trim
+and orderly, tamely subdued to agriculture. Here, at first hand, she saw
+how man attacked the forest and conquered it. But the conquest was
+incomplete, for everywhere stood those stubborn roots, six and eight and
+ten feet across, contending with man for its primal heritage, the soil,
+perishing slowly as perish the proud remnants of a conquered race.
+
+Then the cleared land came to a stop against heavy timber. The car
+whipped a curve and drove into what the fat man from Calgary facetiously
+remarked upon as the tall uncut. Miss Benton sighted up these noble
+columns to where a breeze droned in the tops, two hundred feet above.
+Through a gap in the timber she saw mountains, peaks that stood bold as
+the Rockies, capped with snow. For two days she had been groping for a
+word to define, to sum up the feeling which had grown upon her, had been
+growing upon her steadily, as the amazing scroll of that four-day
+journey unrolled. She found it now, a simple word, one of the simplest
+in our mother tongue--bigness. Bigness in its most ample sense,--that
+was the dominant note. Immensities of distance, vastness of rolling
+plain, sheer bulk of mountain, rivers that one crossed, and after a
+day's journey crossed again, still far from source or confluence. And
+now this unending sweep of colossal trees!
+
+At first she had been overpowered with a sense of insignificance utterly
+foreign to her previous experience. But now she discovered with an
+agreeable sensation of surprise she could vibrate to such a keynote. And
+while she communed with this pleasant discovery the car sped down a
+straight stretch and around a corner and stopped short to unload sacks
+of mail at a weather-beaten yellow edifice, its windows displaying
+indiscriminately Indian baskets, groceries, and hardware. Northward
+opened a broad scope of lake level, girt about with tremendous peaks
+whose lower slopes were banked with thick forest.
+
+Somewhere distant along that lake shore was to be her home. As the car
+rolled over the four hundred yards between store and white-and-green St.
+Allwoods, she wondered if Charlie would be there to meet her. She was
+weary of seeing strange faces, of being directed, of being hustled
+about.
+
+But he was not there, and she recalled that he never had been notable
+for punctuality. Five years is a long time. She expected to find him
+changed--for the better, in certain directions. He had promised to be
+there; but, in this respect, time evidently had wrought no appreciable
+transformation.
+
+She registered, was assigned a room, and ate luncheon to the melancholy
+accompaniment of a three-man orchestra struggling vainly with Bach in an
+alcove off the dining room. After that she began to make inquiries.
+Neither clerk nor manager knew aught of Charlie Benton. They were both
+in their first season there. They advised her to ask the storekeeper.
+
+"MacDougal will know," they were agreed. "He knows everybody around
+here, and everything that goes on."
+
+The storekeeper, a genial, round-bodied Scotchman, had the information
+she desired.
+
+"Charlie Benton?" said he. "No, he'll be at his camp up the lake. He was
+in three or four days back. I mind now, he said he'd be down Thursday;
+that's to-day. But he isn't here yet, or his boat'd be by the wharf
+yonder."
+
+"Are there any passenger boats that call there?" she asked.
+
+MacDougal shook his head.
+
+"Not reg'lar. There's a gas boat goes t' the head of the lake now an'
+then. She's away now. Ye might hire a launch. Jack Fyfe's camp tender's
+about to get under way. But ye wouldna care to go on her, I'm thinkin'.
+She'll be loaded wi' lumberjacks--every man drunk as a lord, most like.
+Maybe Benton'll be in before night."
+
+She went back to the hotel. But St. Allwoods, in its dual capacity of
+health-and-pleasure resort, was a gilded shell, making a brave outward
+show, but capitalizing chiefly lake, mountains, and hot, mineral
+springs. Her room was a bare, cheerless place. She did not want to sit
+and ponder. Too much real grief hovered in the immediate background of
+her life. It is not always sufficient to be young and alive. To sit
+still and think--that way lay tears and despondency. So she went out and
+walked down the road and out upon the wharf which jutted two hundred
+yards into the lake.
+
+It stood deserted save for a lone fisherman on the outer end, and an
+elderly couple that preceded her. Halfway out she passed a slip beside
+which lay moored a heavily built, fifty-foot boat, scarred with usage, a
+squat and powerful craft. Lakeward stretched a smooth, unrippled
+surface. Overhead patches of white cloud drifted lazily. Where the
+shadows from these lay, the lake spread gray and lifeless. Where the
+afternoon sun rested, it touched the water with gleams of gold and pale,
+delicate green. A white-winged yacht lay offshore, her sails in slack
+folds. A lump of an island lifted two miles beyond, all cliffs and
+little, wooded hills. And the mountains surrounding in a giant ring
+seemed to shut the place away from all the world. For sheer wild, rugged
+beauty, Roaring Lake surpassed any spot she had ever seen. Its quiet
+majesty, its air of unbroken peace soothed and comforted her, sick with
+hurry and swift-footed events.
+
+She stood for a time at the outer wharf end, mildly interested when the
+fisherman drew up a two-pound trout, wondering a little at her own
+subtle changes of mood. Her surrounding played upon her like a virtuoso
+on his violin. And this was something that she did not recall as a trait
+in her own character. She had never inclined to the volatile--perhaps
+because until the motor accident snuffed out her father's life she had
+never dealt in anything but superficial emotions.
+
+After a time she retraced her steps. Nearing the halfway slip, she saw
+that a wagon from which goods were being unloaded blocked the way. A
+dozen men were stringing in from the road, bearing bundles and bags and
+rolls of blankets. They were big, burly men, carrying themselves with a
+reckless swing, with trousers cut off midway between knee and ankle so
+that they reached just below the upper of their high-topped, heavy,
+laced boots. Two or three were singing. All appeared unduly happy,
+talking loudly, with deep laughter. One threw down his burden and
+executed a brief clog. Splinters flew where the sharp calks bit into the
+wharf planking, and his companions applauded.
+
+It dawned upon Stella Benton that these might be Jack Fyfe's drunken
+loggers, and she withdrew until the way should be clear, vitally
+interested because her brother was a logging man, and wondering if these
+were the human tools he used in his business, if these were the sort of
+men with whom he associated. They were a rough lot--and some were very
+drunk. With the manifestations of liquor she had but the most shadowy
+acquaintance. But she would have been little less than a fool not to
+comprehend this.
+
+Then they began filing down the gangway to the boat's deck. One slipped,
+and came near falling into the water, whereat his fellows howled
+gleefully. Precariously they negotiated the slanting passage. All but
+one: he sat him down at the slip-head on his bundle and began a
+quavering chant. The teamster imperturbably finished his unloading, two
+men meanwhile piling the goods aboard.
+
+The wagon backed out, and the way was clear, save for the logger sitting
+on his blankets, wailing his lugubrious song. From below his fellows
+urged him to come along. A bell clanged in the pilot house. The exhaust
+of a gas engine began to sputter through the boat's side. From her after
+deck a man hailed the logger sharply, and when his call was unheeded, he
+ran lightly up the slip. A short, squarely-built man he was, light on
+his feet as a dancing master.
+
+He spoke now with authority, impatiently.
+
+"Hurry aboard, Mike; we're waiting."
+
+The logger rose, waved his hand airily, and turned as if to retreat down
+the wharf. The other caught him by the arm and spun him face to the
+slip.
+
+"Come on, Slater," he said evenly. "I have no time to fool around."
+
+The logger drew back his fist. He was a fairly big man. But if he had in
+mind to deal a blow, it failed, for the other ducked and caught him with
+both arms around the middle. He lifted the logger clear of the wharf,
+hoisted him to the level of his breast, and heaved him down the slip as
+one would throw a sack of bran.
+
+The man's body bounced on the incline, rolled, slid, tumbled, till at
+length he brought up against the boat's guard, and all that saved him a
+ducking was the prompt extension of several stout arms, which clutched
+and hauled him to the flush after deck. He sat on his haunches,
+blinking. Then he laughed. So did the man at the top of the slip and the
+lumberjacks clustered on the boat. Homeric laughter, as at some
+surpassing jest. But the roar of him who had taken that inglorious
+descent rose loudest of all, an explosive, "Har--har--har!"
+
+He clambered unsteadily to his feet, his mouth expanded in an amiable
+grin.
+
+"Hey, Jack," he shouted. "Maybe y' c'n throw m' blankets down too, while
+y'r at it."
+
+The man at the slip-head caught up the roll, poised it high, and cast it
+from him with a quick twist of his body. The woolen missile flew like a
+well-put shot and caught its owner fair in the breast, tumbling him
+backwards on the deck--and the Homeric laughter rose in double strength.
+Then the boat began to swing, and the man ran down and leaped the
+widening space as she drew away from her mooring.
+
+Stella Benton watched the craft gather way, a trifle shocked, her breath
+coming a little faster. The most deadly blows she had ever seen struck
+were delivered in a more subtle, less virile mode, a curl of the lip, an
+inflection of the voice. These were a different order of beings. This,
+she sensed was man in a more primitive aspect, man with the conventional
+bark stripped clean off him. And she scarcely knew whether to be amused
+or frightened when she reflected that among such her life would
+presently lie. Charlie had written that she would find things and people
+a trifle rougher than she was used to. She could well believe that.
+But--they were picturesque ruffians.
+
+Her interested gaze followed the camp tender as it swung around the
+wharf-end, and so her roaming eyes were led to another craft drawing
+near. This might be her brother's vessel. She went back to the outer
+landing to see.
+
+Two men manned this boat. As she ranged alongside the piles, one stood
+forward, and the other aft with lines to make fast. She cast a look at
+each. They were prototypes of the rude crew but now departed,
+brown-faced, flannel-shirted, shod with calked boots, unshaven for days,
+typical men of the woods. But as she turned to go, the man forward and
+almost directly below her looked her full in the face.
+
+"Stell!"
+
+She leaned over the rail.
+
+"Charlie Benton--for Heaven's sake."
+
+They stared at each other.
+
+"Well," he laughed at last. "If it were not for your mouth and eyes,
+Stell, I wouldn't have known you. Why, you're all grown up."
+
+He clambered to the wharf level and kissed her. The rough stubble of his
+beard pricked her tender skin and she drew back.
+
+"My word, Charlie, you certainly ought to shave," she observed with
+sisterly frankness. "I didn't know you until you spoke. I'm awfully glad
+to see you, but you do need _some one_ to look after you."
+
+Benton laughed tolerantly.
+
+"Perhaps. But, my dear girl, a fellow doesn't get anywhere on his
+appearance in this country. When a fellow's bucking big timber, he
+shucks off a lot of things he used to think were quite essential. By
+Jove, you're a picture, Stell. If I hadn't been expecting to see you, I
+wouldn't have known you."
+
+"I doubt if I should have known you either," she returned drily.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+MR. ABBEY ARRIVES
+
+Stella accompanied her brother to the store, where he gave an order for
+sundry goods. Then they went to the hotel to see if her trunks had
+arrived. Within a few yards of the fence which enclosed the grounds of
+St. Allwoods a man hailed Benton, and drew him a few steps aside. Stella
+walked slowly on, and presently her brother joined her.
+
+The baggage wagon had brought the trunks, and when she had paid her
+bill, they were delivered at the outer wharf-end, where also arrived at
+about the same time a miscellaneous assortment of supplies from the
+store and a Japanese with her two handbags. So far as Miss Estella
+Benton could see, she was about to embark on the last stage of her
+journey.
+
+"How soon will you start?" she inquired, when the last of the stuff was
+stowed aboard the little steamer.
+
+"Twenty minutes or so," Benton answered. "Say," he went on casually,
+"have you got any money, Stell? I owe a fellow thirty dollars, and I
+left the bank roll and my check book at camp."
+
+Miss Benton drew the purse from her hand bag and gave it to him. He
+pocketed it and went off down the wharf, with the brief assurance that
+he would be gone only a minute or so.
+
+The minute, however, lengthened to nearly an hour, and Sam Davis had his
+blow-off valve hissing, and Stella Benton was casting impatient glances
+shoreward before Charlie strolled leisurely back.
+
+"You needn't fire up quite so strong, Sam," he called down. "We won't
+start for a couple of hours yet."
+
+"Sufferin' Moses!" Davis poked his fiery thatch out from the engine
+room. "I might 'a' known better'n to sweat over firin' up. You generally
+manage to make about three false starts to one get-away."
+
+Benton laughed good-naturedly and turned away.
+
+"Do you usually allow your men to address you in that impertinent way?"
+Miss Benton desired to know.
+
+Charlie looked blank for a second. Then he smiled, and linking his arm
+affectionately in hers, drew her off along the wharf, chuckling to
+himself.
+
+"My dear girl," said he, "you'd better not let Sam Davis or any of Sam's
+kind hear you pass remarks like that. Sam would say exactly what he
+thought about such matters to his boss, or King George, or to the first
+lady of the land, regardless. Sabe? We're what you'll call primitive out
+here, yet. You want to forget that master and man business, the servant
+proposition, and proper respect, and all that rot. Outside the English
+colonies in one or two big towns, that attitude doesn't go in B.C.
+People in this neck of the woods stand pretty much on the same class
+footing, and you'll get in bad and get me in bad if you don't remember
+that. I've got ten loggers working for me in the woods. Whether they're
+impertinent or profane cuts no figure so long as they handle the job
+properly. They're men, you understand, not servants. None of them would
+hesitate to tell me what he thinks about me or anything I do. If I don't
+like it, I can fight him or fire him. They won't stand for the sort of
+airs you're accustomed to. They have the utmost respect for a woman, but
+a man is merely a two-legged male human like themselves, whether he
+wears mackinaws or broadcloth, has a barrel of money of none at all.
+This will seem odd to you at first, but you'll get used to it. You'll
+find things rather different out here."
+
+"I suppose so," she agreed. "But it sounds queer. For instance, if one
+of papa's clerks or the chauffeur had spoken like that, he'd have been
+discharged on the spot."
+
+"The logger's a different breed," Benton observed drily. "Or perhaps
+only the same breed manifesting under different conditions. He isn't
+servile. He doesn't have to be."
+
+"Why the delay, though?" she reverted to the point. "I thought you were
+all ready to go."
+
+"I am," Charlie enlightened. "But while I was at the store just now,
+Paul Abbey 'phoned from Vancouver to know if there was an up-lake boat
+in. His people are big lumber guns here, and it will accommodate him and
+won't hurt me to wait a couple of hours and drop him off at their camp.
+I've got more or less business dealings with them, and it doesn't hurt
+to be neighborly. He'd have to hire a gas-boat otherwise. Besides,
+Paul's a pretty good head."
+
+This, of course, being strictly her brother's business, Stella forbore
+comment. She was weary of travel, tired with the tension of eternally
+being shunted across distances, anxious to experience once more that
+sense of restful finality which comes with a journey's end. But, in a
+measure her movements were no longer dependent upon her own volition.
+
+They walked slowly along the broad roadway which bordered the lake until
+they came to a branchy maple, and here they seated themselves on the
+grassy turf in the shadow of the tree.
+
+"Tell me about yourself," she said. "How do you like it here, and how
+are you getting on? Your letters home were always chiefly remarkable for
+their brevity."
+
+"There isn't a great lot to tell," Benton responded. "I'm just beginning
+to get on my feet. A raw, untried youngster has a lot to learn and
+unlearn when he hits this tall timber. I've been out here five years,
+and I'm just beginning to realize what I'm equal to and what I'm not.
+I'm crawling over a hump now that would have been a lot easier if the
+governor hadn't come to grief the way he did. He was going to put in
+some money this fall. But I think I'll make it, anyway, though it will
+keep me digging and figuring. I have a contract for delivery of a
+million feet in September and another contract that I could take if I
+could see my way clear to finance the thing. I could clean up thirty
+thousand dollars net in two years if I had more cash to work on. As it
+is, I have to go slow, or I'd go broke. I'm holding two limits by the
+skin of my teeth. But I've got one good one practically for an annual
+pittance. If I make delivery on my contract according to schedule it's
+plain sailing. That about sizes up my prospects, Sis."
+
+"You speak a language I don't understand," she smiled. "What does a
+million feet mean? And what's a limit?"
+
+"A limit is one square mile--six hundred and forty acres more or
+less--of merchantable timber land," he explained. "We speak of timber as
+scaling so many board feet. A board foot is one inch thick by twelve
+inches square. Sound fir timber is worth around seven dollars per
+thousand board feet in the log, got out of the woods, and boomed in the
+water ready to tow to the mills. The first limit I got--from the
+government--will scale around ten million feet. The other two are nearly
+as good. But I got them from timber speculators, and it's costing me
+pretty high. They're a good spec if I can hang on to them, though."
+
+"It sounds big," she commented.
+
+"It _is_ big," Charlie declared, "if I could go at it right. I've been
+trying ever since I got wise to this timber business to make the
+governor see what a chance there is in it. He was just getting properly
+impressed with the possibilities when the speed bug got him. He could
+have trimmed a little here and there at home and put the money to work.
+Ten thousand dollars would have done the trick, given me a working
+outfit along with what I've got that would have put us both on Easy
+Street. However, the poor old chap didn't get around to it. I suppose,
+like lots of other business men, when he stopped, everything ran down.
+According to Lander's figures, there won't be a thing left when all
+accounts are squared."
+
+"Don't talk about it, Charlie," she begged. "It's too near, and I was
+through it all."
+
+"I would have been there too," Benton said. "But, as I told you, I was
+out of reach of your wire, and by the time I got it, it was all over. I
+couldn't have done any good, anyway. There's no use mourning. One way
+and another we've all got to come to it some day."
+
+Stella looked out over the placid, shimmering surface of Roaring Lake
+for a minute. Her grief was dimming with time and distance, and she had
+all her own young life before her. She found herself drifting from
+painful memories of her father's sudden death to a consideration of
+things present and personal. She found herself wondering critically if
+this strange, rude land would work as many changes in her as were patent
+in this bronzed and burly brother.
+
+He had left home a slim, cocksure youngster, who had proved more than a
+handful for his family before he was half through college, which
+educational finishing process had come to an abrupt stop before it was
+complete. He had been a problem that her father and mother had discussed
+in guarded tones. Sending him West had been a hopeful experiment, and in
+the West that abounding spirit which manifested itself in one continual
+round of minor escapades appeared to have found a natural outlet. She
+recalled that latterly their father had taken to speaking of Charlie in
+accents of pride. He was developing the one ambition that Benton senior
+could thoroughly understand and properly appreciate, the desire to get
+on, to grasp opportunities, to achieve material success, to make money.
+
+Just as her father, on the few occasions when he talked business before
+her, spoke in a big way of big things as the desirable ultimate, so now
+Charlie spoke, with plans and outlook to match his speech. In her
+father's point of view, and in Charlie's now, a man's personal life did
+not seem to matter in comparison with getting on and making money. And
+it was with that personal side of existence that Stella Benton was now
+chiefly concerned. She had never been required to adjust herself to an
+existence that was wholly taken up with getting on to the complete
+exclusion of everything else. Her work had been to play. She could
+scarce conceive of any one entirely excluding pleasure and diversion
+from his or her life. She wondered if Charlie had done so. And if not,
+what ameliorating circumstances, what social outlet, might be found to
+offset, for her, continued existence in this isolated region of towering
+woods. So far as her first impressions went, Roaring Lake appeared to be
+mostly frequented by lumberjacks addicted to rude speech and strong
+drink.
+
+"Are there many people living around this lake?" she inquired. "It is
+surely a beautiful spot. If we had this at home, there would be a summer
+cottage on every hundred yards of shore."
+
+"Be a long time before we get to that stage here," Benton returned. "And
+scenery in B.C. is a drug on the market; we've got Europe backed off the
+map for tourist attractions, if they only knew it. No, about the only
+summer home in this locality is the Abbey place at Cottonwood Point.
+They come up here every summer for two or three months. Otherwise I
+don't know of any lilies of the field, barring the hotel people, and
+they, being purely transient, don't count. There's the Abbey-Monohan
+outfit with two big logging camps, my outfit, Jack Fyfe's, some hand
+loggers on the east shore, and the R.A.T. at the head of the lake.
+That's the population--and Roaring Lake is forty-two miles long and
+eight wide."
+
+"Are there any nice girls around?" she asked.
+
+Benton grinned widely.
+
+"Girls?" said he. "Not so you could notice. Outside the Springs and the
+hatchery over the way, there isn't a white woman on the lake except
+Lefty Howe's wife,--Lefty's Jack Fyfe's foreman,--and she's fat and past
+forty. I told you it was a God-forsaken hole as far as society is
+concerned, Stell."
+
+"I know," she said thoughtfully. "But one can scarcely realize such
+a--such a social blankness, until one actually experiences it. Anyway, I
+don't know but I'll appreciate utter quiet for awhile. But what do you
+do with yourself when you're not working?"
+
+"There's seldom any such time," he answered. "I tell you, Stella, I've
+got a big job on my hands. I've got a definite mark to shoot at, and I'm
+going to make a bull's-eye in spite of hell and high water. I have no
+time to play, and there's no place to play if I had. I don't intend to
+muddle along making a pittance like a hand logger. I want a stake; and
+then it'll be time to make a splurge in a country where a man can get a
+run for his money."
+
+"If that's the case," she observed, "I'm likely to be a handicap to you,
+am I not?"
+
+"Lord, no," he smiled. "I'll put you to work too, when you get rested up
+from your trip. You stick with me, Sis, and you'll wear diamonds."
+
+She laughed with him at this, and leaving the shady maple they walked up
+to the hotel, where Benton proposed that they get a canoe and paddle to
+where Roaring River flowed out of the lake half a mile westward, to kill
+the time that must elapse before the three-thirty train.
+
+The St. Allwoods' car was rolling out to Hopyard when they came back. By
+the time Benton had turned the canoe over to the boathouse man and
+reached the wharf, the horn of the returning machine sounded down the
+road. They waited. The car came to a stop at the abutting wharf. The
+driver handed two suitcases off the burdened hood of his machine. From
+out the tonneau clambered a large, smooth-faced young man. He wore an
+expansive smile in addition to a blue serge suit, white Panama, and
+polished tan Oxfords, and he bestowed a hearty greeting upon Charlie
+Benton. But his smile suffered eclipse, and a faint flush rose in his
+round cheeks, when his eyes fell upon Benton's sister.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+HALFWAY POINT
+
+Miss Benton's cool, impersonal manner seemed rather to heighten the
+young man's embarrassment. Benton, apparently observing nothing amiss,
+introduced them in an offhand fashion.
+
+"Mr. Abbey--my sister."
+
+Mr. Abbey bowed and murmured something that passed for acknowledgment.
+The three turned up the wharf toward where Sam Davis had once more got
+up steam. As they walked, Mr. Abbey's habitual assurance returned, and
+he directed part of his genial flow of conversation to Miss Benton. To
+Stella's inner amusement, however, he did not make any reference to
+their having been fellow travelers for a day and a half.
+
+Presently they were embarked and under way. Charlie fixed a seat for her
+on the after deck, and went forward to steer, whither he was straightway
+joined by Paul Abbey. Miss Benton was as well pleased to be alone. She
+was not sure she should approve of young men who made such crude efforts
+to scrape acquaintance with women on trains. She was accustomed to a
+certain amount of formality in such matters. It might perhaps be laid to
+the "breezy Western manner" of which she had heard, except that Paul
+Abbey did not impress her as a Westerner. He seemed more like a type of
+young man she had encountered frequently in her own circle. At any rate,
+she was relieved when he did not remain beside her to emit polite
+commonplaces. She was quite satisfied to sit by herself and look over
+the panorama of woods and lake--and wonder more than a little what
+Destiny had in store for her along those silent shores.
+
+The Springs fell far behind, became a few white spots against the
+background of dusky green. Except for the ripples spread by their wake,
+the water laid oily smooth. Now, a little past four in the afternoon,
+she began to sense by comparison the great bulk of the western
+mountains,--locally, the Chehalis Range,--for the sun was dipping behind
+the ragged peaks already, and deep shadows stole out from the shore to
+port. Beneath her feet the screw throbbed, pulsing like an overdriven
+heart, and Sam Davis poked his sweaty face now and then through a window
+to catch a breath of cool air denied him in the small inferno where he
+stoked the fire box.
+
+The _Chickamin_ cleared Echo Island, and a greater sweep of lake opened
+out. Here the afternoon wind sprang up, shooting gustily through a gap
+between the Springs and Hopyard and ruffling the lake out of its noonday
+siesta. Ripples, chop, and a growing swell followed each other with that
+marvellous rapidity common to large bodies of fresh water. It broke the
+monotony of steady cleaving through dead calm. Stella was a good sailor,
+and she rather enjoyed it when the _Chickamin_ began to lift and yaw off
+before the following seas that ran up under her fantail stern.
+
+After about an hour's run, with the south wind beginning to whip the
+crests of the short seas into white foam, the boat bore in to a landing
+behind a low point. Here Abbey disembarked, after taking the trouble to
+come aft and shake hands with polite farewell. Standing on the float,
+hat in hand, he bowed his sleek blond head to Stella.
+
+"I hope you'll like Roaring Lake, Miss Benton," he said, as Benton
+jingled the go-ahead bell. "I tried to persuade Charlie to stop over
+awhile, so you could meet my mother and sister, but he's in too big a
+hurry. Hope to have the pleasure of meeting you again soon."
+
+Miss Benton parried courteously, a little at a loss to fathom this bland
+friendliness, and presently the widening space cut off their talk. As
+the boat drew offshore, she saw two women in white come down toward the
+float, meet Abbey, and turn back. And a little farther out through an
+opening in the woods, she saw a white and green bungalow, low and
+rambling, wide-verandahed, set on a hillock three hundred yards back
+from shore. There was an encircling area of smooth lawn, a place
+restfully inviting.
+
+Watching that, seeing a figure or two moving about, she was smitten with
+a recurrence of that poignant loneliness which had assailed her fitfully
+in the last four days. And while the _Chickamin_ was still plowing the
+inshore waters on an even keel, she walked the guard rail alongside and
+joined her brother in the pilot house.
+
+"Isn't that a pretty place back there in the woods?" she remarked.
+
+"Abbey's summer camp; spells money to me, that's all," Charlie
+grumbled. "It's a toy for their women,--up-to-date cottage, gardeners,
+tennis courts, afternoon tea on the lawn for the guests, and all that.
+But the Abbey-Monohan bunch has the money to do what they want to do.
+They've made it in timber, as I expect to make mine. You didn't
+particularly want to stay over and get acquainted, did you?"
+
+"I? Of course not," she responded.
+
+"Personally, I don't want to mix into their social game," Charlie
+drawled. "Or at least, I don't propose to make any tentative advances.
+The women put on lots of side, they say. If they want to hunt us up and
+cultivate you, all right. But I've got too much to do to butt into
+society. Anyway, I didn't want to run up against any critical females
+looking like I do right now."
+
+Stella smiled.
+
+"Under certain circumstances, appearances do count then, in this
+country," she remarked. "Has your Mr. Abbey got a young and be-yutiful
+sister?"
+
+"He has, but that's got nothing to do with it," Charlie retorted.
+"Paul's all right himself. But their gait isn't mine--not yet. Here, you
+take the wheel a minute. I want to smoke. I don't suppose you ever
+helmed a forty-footer, but you'll never learn younger."
+
+She took the wheel and Charlie stood by, directing her. In twenty
+minutes they were out where the run of the sea from the south had a fair
+sweep. The wind was whistling now. All the roughened surface was spotted
+with whitecaps. The _Chickamin_ would hang on the crest of a wave and
+shoot forward like a racer, her wheel humming, and again the roller
+would run out from under her, and she would labor heavily in the trough.
+
+It began to grow insufferably hot in the pilot house. The wind drove
+with them, pressing the heat from the boiler and fire box into the
+forward portion of the boat, where Stella stood at the wheel. There were
+puffs of smoke when Davis opened the fire box to ply it with fuel. All
+the sour smells that rose from an unclean bilge eddied about them. The
+heat and the smell and the surging motion began to nauseate Stella.
+
+"I must get outside where I can breathe," she gasped, at length. "It's
+suffocating. I don't see how you stand it."
+
+"It does get stuffy in here when we run with the wind," Benton admitted.
+"Cuts off our ventilation. I'm used to it. Crawl out the window and sit
+on the forward deck. Don't try to get aft. You might slip off, the way
+she's lurching."
+
+Curled in the hollow of a faked-down hawser with the clean air fanning
+her, Stella recovered herself. The giddiness left her. She pitied Sam
+Davis back in that stinking hole beside the fire box. But she supposed
+he, like her brother, was "used to it." Apparently one could get used to
+anything, if she could judge by the amazing change in Charlie.
+
+Far ahead loomed a ridge running down to the lake shore and cutting off
+in a bold promontory. That was Halfway Point, Charlie had told her, and
+under its shadow lay his camp. Without any previous knowledge of camps,
+she was approaching this one with less eager anticipation than when she
+began her long journey. She began to fear that it might be totally
+unlike anything she had been able to imagine, disagreeably so. Charlie,
+she decided, had grown hard and coarsened in the evolution of his
+ambition to get on, to make his pile. She was but four years younger
+than he, and she had always thought of herself as being older and wiser
+and steadier. She had conceived the idea that her presence would have a
+good influence on him, that they would pull together--now that there
+were but the two of them. But four hours in his company had dispelled
+that illusion. She had the wit to perceive that Charlie Benton had
+emerged from the chrysalis stage, that he had the will and the ability
+to mold his life after his elected fashion, and that her coming was a
+relatively unimportant incident.
+
+In due course the _Chickamin_ bore in under Halfway Point, opened out a
+sheltered bight where the watery commotion outside raised but a faint
+ripple, and drew in alongside a float.
+
+The girl swept lake shore, bay, and sloping forest with a quickening
+eye. Here was no trim-painted cottage and velvet lawn. In the waters
+beside and lining the beach floated innumerable logs, confined by
+boomsticks, hundreds of trunks of fir, forty and sixty feet long, four
+and six feet across the butt, timber enough, when it had passed through
+the sawmills, to build four such towns as Hopyard. Just back from the
+shore, amid stumps and littered branches, rose the roofs of divers
+buildings. One was long and low. Hard by it stood another of like type
+but of lesser dimension. Two or three mere shanties lifted level with
+great stumps,--crude, unpainted buildings. Smoke issued from the pipe of
+the larger, and a white-aproned man stood in the doorway.
+
+Somewhere in the screen of woods a whistle shrilled. Benton looked at
+his watch.
+
+"We made good time, in spite of the little roll," said he. "That's the
+donkey blowing quitting time--six o'clock. Well, come on up to the
+shack, Sis. Sam, you get a wheelbarrow and run those trunks up after
+supper, will you?"
+
+Away in the banked timber beyond the maples and alder which Stella now
+saw masked the bank of a small stream flowing by the cabins, a faint
+call rose, long-drawn:
+
+"Tim-ber-r-r-r!"
+
+They moved along a path beaten through fern and clawing blackberry vine
+toward the camp, Benton carrying the two grips. A loud, sharp crack
+split the stillness; then a mild swishing sound arose. Hard on the heels
+of that followed a rending, tearing crash, a thud that sent tremors
+through the solid earth under their feet. The girl started.
+
+"Falling gang dropped a big fir," Charlie laughed. "You'll get used to
+that. You'll hear it a good many times a day here."
+
+"Good Heavens, it sounded like the end of the world," she said.
+
+"Well, you can't fell a stick of timber two hundred feet high and six or
+eight feet through without making a pretty considerable noise," her
+brother remarked complacently. "I like that sound myself. Every big tree
+that goes down means a bunch of money."
+
+He led the way past the mess-house, from the doorway of which the
+aproned cook eyed her with frank curiosity, hailing his employer with
+nonchalant air, a cigarette resting in one corner of his mouth. Benton
+opened the door of the second building. Stella followed him in.
+
+It had the saving grace of cleanliness--according to logging-camp
+standards. But the bareness of it appalled her. There was a rusty box
+heater, littered with cigar and cigarette stubs, a desk fabricated of
+undressed boards, a homemade chair or two, sundry boxes standing about.
+The sole concession to comfort was a rug of cheap Axminster covering
+half the floor. The walls were decorated chiefly with miscellaneous
+clothing suspended from nails, a few maps and blue prints tacked up
+askew. Straight across from the entering door another stood ajar, and
+she could see further vistas of bare board wall, small, dusty
+window-panes, and a bed whereon gray blankets were tumbled as they fell
+when a waking sleeper cast them aside.
+
+Benton crossed the room and threw open another door.
+
+"Here's a nook I fixed up for you, Stella," he said briskly. "It isn't
+very fancy, but it's the best I could do just now."
+
+She followed him in silently. He set her two bags on the floor and
+turned to go. Then some impulse moved him to turn back, and he put both
+hands on her shoulders and kissed her gently.
+
+"You're home, anyway," he said. "That's something, if it isn't what
+you're used to. Try to overlook the crudities. We'll have supper as soon
+as you feel like it."
+
+He went out, closing the door behind him.
+
+Miss Estella Benton stood in the middle of the room fighting against a
+swift heart-sinking, a terrible depression that strove to master her.
+
+"Good Lord in Heaven," she muttered at last. "What a place to be
+marooned in. It's--it's simply impossible."
+
+Her gaze roved about the room. A square box, neither more nor less,
+fourteen by fourteen feet of bare board wall, unpainted and unpapered.
+There was an iron bed, a willow rocker, and a rude closet for clothes in
+one corner. A duplicate of the department-store bargain rug in the other
+room lay on the floor. On an upturned box stood an enamel pitcher and a
+tin washbasin. That was all.
+
+She sat down on the bed and viewed it forlornly. A wave of sickening
+rebellion against everything swept over her. To herself she seemed as
+irrevocably alone as if she had been lost in the depths of the dark
+timber that rose on every hand. And sitting there she heard at length
+the voices of men. Looking out through a window curtained with
+cheesecloth she saw her brother's logging gang swing past, stout
+woodsmen all, big men, tall men, short-bodied men with thick necks and
+shoulders, sunburned, all grimy with the sweat of their labors,
+carrying themselves with a free and reckless swing, the doubles in type
+of that roistering crew she had seen embark on Jack Fyfe's boat.
+
+In so far as she had taken note of those who labored with their hands in
+the region of her birth, she had seen few like these. The chauffeur, the
+footman, the street cleaner, the factory workers--they were all
+different. They lacked something,--perhaps nothing in the way of
+physical excellence; but these men betrayed in every movement a subtle
+difference that she could not define. Her nearest approximation and the
+first attempt she made at analysis was that they looked like pirates.
+They were bold men and strong; that was written in their faces and the
+swing of them as they walked. And they served the very excellent purpose
+of taking her mind off herself for the time being.
+
+She watched them cluster by a bench before the cookhouse, dabble their
+faces and hands in washbasins, scrub themselves promiscuously on towels,
+sometimes one at each end of a single piece of cloth, hauling it back
+and forth in rude play.
+
+All about that cookhouse dooryard spread a confusion of empty tin cans,
+gaudily labeled, containers of corn and peas and tomatoes. Dishwater and
+refuse, chips, scraps, all the refuse of the camp was scattered there in
+unlovely array.
+
+But that made no more than a passing impression upon her. She was
+thinking, as she removed her hat and gloves, of what queer angles come
+now and then to the human mind. She wondered why she should be
+sufficiently interested in her brother's hired men to drive off a
+compelling attack of the blues in consideration of them as men.
+Nevertheless, she found herself unable to view them as she had viewed,
+say, the clerks in her father's office.
+
+She began to brush her hair and to wonder what sort of food would be
+served for supper.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+A FORETASTE OF THINGS TO COME
+
+Half an hour later she sat down with her brother at one end of a table
+that was but a long bench covered with oilcloth. Chairs there were none.
+A narrow movable bench on each side of the fixed table furnished seating
+capacity for twenty men, provided none objected to an occasional nudging
+from his neighbor's elbow. The dishes, different from any she had ever
+eaten from, were of enormously thick porcelain, dead white, variously
+chipped and cracked with fine seams. But the food, if plain, was of
+excellent quality, tastily cooked. She discovered herself with an
+appetite wholly independent of silver and cut glass and linen. The tin
+spoons and steel knives and forks harrowed her aesthetic sense without
+impairing her ability to satisfy hunger.
+
+They had the dining room to themselves. Through a single shiplap
+partition rose a rumble of masculine talk, where the logging crew loafed
+in their bunkhouse. The cook served them without any ceremony, putting
+everything on the table at once,--soup, meat, vegetables, a bread
+pudding for dessert, coffee in a tall tin pot. Benton introduced him to
+his sister. He withdrew hastily to the kitchen, and they saw no more of
+him.
+
+"Charlie," the girl said plaintively, when the man had closed the door
+behind him, "I don't quite fathom your social customs out here. Is one
+supposed to know everybody that one encounters?"
+
+"Just about," he grinned. "Loggers, Siwashes, and the natives in
+general. Can't very well help it, Sis. There's so few people in this
+neck of the woods that nobody can afford to be exclusive,--at least,
+nobody who lives here any length of time. You can't tell when you may
+have to call on your neighbor or the fellow working for you in a matter
+of life and death almost. A man couldn't possibly maintain the same
+attitude toward a bunch of loggers working under him that would be
+considered proper back where we came from. Take me, for instance, and my
+case is no different from any man operating on a moderate scale out
+here. I'd get the reputation of being swell-headed, and they'd put me in
+the hole at every turn. They wouldn't care what they did or how it was
+done. Ten to one I couldn't keep a capable working crew three weeks on
+end. On the other hand, take a bunch of loggers on a pay roll working
+for a man that meets them on an equal footing--why, they'll go to hell
+and back again for him. They're as loyal as soldiers to the flag.
+They're a mighty self-sufficient, independent lot, these lumberjacks,
+and that goes for most everybody knocking about in this
+country,--loggers, prospectors, miners, settlers, and all. If you're
+what they term 'all right,' you can do anything, and they'll back you
+up. If you go to putting on airs and trying to assert yourself as a
+superior being, they'll go out of their way to hand you packages of
+trouble."
+
+"I see," she observed thoughtfully. "One's compelled by circumstances to
+practice democracy."
+
+"Something like that," he responded carelessly and went on eating his
+supper.
+
+"Don't you think we could make this place a lot more homelike, Charlie?"
+she ventured, when they were back in their own quarters. "I suppose it
+suits a man who only uses it as a place to sleep, but it's bare as a
+barn."
+
+"It takes money to make a place cosy," Benton returned. "And I haven't
+had it to spend on knickknacks."
+
+"Fiddlesticks!" she laughed. "A comfortable chair or two and curtains
+and pictures aren't knickknacks, as you call them. The cost wouldn't
+amount to anything."
+
+Benton stuffed the bowl of a pipe and lighted it before he essayed
+reply.
+
+"Look here, Stella," he said earnestly. "This joint probably strikes you
+as about the limit, seeing that you've been used to pretty soft
+surroundings and getting pretty nearly anything you wanted whenever you
+expressed a wish for it. Things that you've grown into the way of
+considering necessities _are_ luxuries. And they're out of the question
+for us at present. I got a pretty hard seasoning the first two years I
+was in this country, and when I set up this camp it was merely a place
+to live. I never thought anything about it as being comfortable or
+otherwise until you elected to come. I'm not in a position to go in for
+trimmings. Rough as this camp is, it will have to go as it stands this
+summer. I'm up against it for ready money. I've got none due until I
+make delivery of those logs in September, and I have to have that
+million feet in the water in order to make delivery. Every one of these
+men but the cook and the donkey engineer are working for me with their
+wages deferred until then. There are certain expenses that must be met
+with cash--and I've got all my funds figured down to nickels. If I get
+by on this contract, I'll have a few hundred to squander on house
+things. Until then, it's the simple life for us. You can camp for three
+or four months, can't you, without finding it completely unbearable?"
+
+"Why, of course," she protested. "I wasn't complaining about the way
+things are. I merely voiced the idea that it would be nice to fix up a
+little cosier, make these rooms look a little homelike. I didn't know
+you were practically compelled to live like this as a matter of
+economy."
+
+"Well, in a sense, I am," he replied. "And then again, making a place
+away out here homelike never struck me as being anything but an
+inconsequential detail. I'm not trying to make a home here. I'm after a
+bundle of money. A while ago, if you had been here and suggested it, you
+could have spent five or six hundred, and I wouldn't have missed it. But
+this contract came my way, and gave me a chance to clean up three
+thousand dollars clear profit in four months. I grabbed it, and I find
+it's some undertaking. I'm dealing with a hard business outfit, hard as
+nails. I might get the banks or some capitalist to finance me, because
+my timber holdings are worth money. But I'm shy of that. I've noticed
+that when a logger starts working on borrowed capital, he generally goes
+broke. The financiers generally devise some way to hook him. I prefer to
+sail as close to the wind as I can on what little I've got. I can get
+this timber out--but it wouldn't look nice, now, would it, for me to be
+buying furniture when I'm standing these boys off for their wages till
+September?"
+
+"I should have been a man," Miss Estella Benton pensively remarked.
+"Then I could put on overalls and make myself useful, instead of being a
+drone. There doesn't seem to be anything here I can do. I could keep
+house--only you haven't any house to keep, therefore no need of a
+housekeeper. Why, who's that?"
+
+Her ear had caught a low, throaty laugh, a woman's laugh, outside. She
+looked inquiringly at her brother. His expression remained absent, as of
+one concentrated upon his own problems. She repeated the question.
+
+"That? Oh, Katy John, I suppose, or her mother," he answered. "Siwash
+bunch camping around the point. The girl does some washing for us now
+and then. I suppose she's after Matt for some bread or something."
+
+Stella looked out. At the cookhouse door stood a short, plump-bodied
+girl, dark-skinned and black-haired. Otherwise she conformed to none of
+Miss Benton's preconceived ideas of the aboriginal inhabitant. If she
+had been pinned down, she would probably have admitted that she
+expected to behold an Indian maiden garbed in beaded buckskin and brass
+ornaments. Instead, Katy John wore a white sailor blouse, a brown
+pleated skirt, tan shoes, and a bow of baby blue ribbon in her hair.
+
+"Why, she talks good English," Miss Benton exclaimed, as fragments of
+the girl's speech floated over to her.
+
+"Sure. As good as anybody," Charlie drawled. "Why not?"
+
+"Well--er--I suppose my notion of Indians is rather vague," Stella
+admitted. "Are they all civilized and educated?"
+
+"Most of 'em," Benton replied. "The younger generation anyhow. Say,
+Stell, can you cook?"
+
+"A little," Stella rejoined guardedly. "That Indian girl's really
+pretty, isn't she?"
+
+"They nearly all are when they're young," he observed. "But they are old
+and tubby by the time they're thirty."
+
+Katy John's teeth shone white between her parted lips at some sally from
+the cook. She stood by the door, swinging a straw hat in one hand.
+Presently Matt handed her a parcel done up in newspaper, and she walked
+away with a nod to some of the loggers sitting with their backs against
+the bunkhouse wall.
+
+"Why were you asking if I could cook?" Stella inquired, when the girl
+vanished in the brush.
+
+"Why, your wail about being a man and putting on overalls and digging in
+reminded me that if you liked you may have a chance to get on your apron
+and show us what you can do," he laughed. "Matt's about due to go on a
+tear. He's been on the water-wagon now about his limit. The first man
+that comes along with a bottle of whisky, Matt will get it and quit and
+head for town. I was wondering if you and Katy John could keep the gang
+from starving to death if that happened. The last time I had to get in
+and cook for two weeks myself. And I can't run a logging crew from the
+cook shanty very well."
+
+"I daresay I could manage," Stella returned dubiously. "This seems to be
+a terrible place for drinking. Is it the accepted thing to get drunk at
+all times and in public?"
+
+"It's about the only excitement there is," Benton smiled tolerantly. "I
+guess there is no more drinking out here than any other part of this
+North American continent. Only a man here gets drunk openly and
+riotously without any effort to hide it, and without it being considered
+anything but a natural lapse. That's one thing you'll have to get used
+to out here, Stell--I mean, that what vices men have are all on the
+surface. We don't get drunk secretly at the club and sneak home in a
+taxi. Oh, well, we'll cross the bridge when we come to it. Matt may not
+break out for weeks."
+
+He yawned openly.
+
+"Sleepy?" Stella inquired.
+
+"I get up every morning between four and five," he replied. "And I can
+go to sleep any time after supper."
+
+"I think I'll take a walk along the beach," she said abruptly.
+
+"All right. Don't hike into the woods and get lost, though."
+
+She circled the segment of bay, climbed a low, rocky point, and found
+herself a seat on a fallen tree. Outside the lake heaved uneasily, still
+dotted with whitecaps whipped up by the southerly gale. At her feet
+surge after surge hammered the gravelly shore. Far through the woods
+behind her the wind whistled and hummed among swaying tops of giant fir
+and cedar. There was a heady freshness in that rollicking wind, an odor
+resinous and pungent mingled with that elusive smell of green growing
+stuff along the shore. Beginning where she sat, tree trunks rose in
+immense brown pillars, running back in great forest naves, shadowy
+always, floored with green moss laid in a rich, soft carpet for the
+wood-sprites' feet. Far beyond the long gradual lower slope lifted a
+range of saw-backed mountains, the sanctuary of wild goat and bear, and
+across the rolling lake lifted other mountains sheer from the water's
+edge, peaks rising above timber-line in majestic contour, their pinnacle
+crests grazing the clouds that scudded before the south wind.
+
+Beauty? Yes. A wild, imposing grandeur that stirred some responsive
+chord in her. If only one could live amid such surrounding with a
+contented mind, she thought, the wilderness would have compensations of
+its own. She had an uneasy feeling that isolation from everything that
+had played an important part in her life might be the least depressing
+factor in this new existence. She could not view the rough and ready
+standards of the woods with much equanimity--not as she had that day
+seen them set forth. These things were bound to be a part of her daily
+life, and all the brief span of her years had gone to forming habits of
+speech and thought and manner diametrically opposed to what she had so
+far encountered.
+
+She nursed her chin in her hand and pondered this. She could not see how
+it was to be avoided. She was there, and perforce she must stay there.
+She had no friends to go elsewhere, or training in the harsh business of
+gaining a livelihood if she did go. For the first time she began dully
+to resent the manner of her upbringing. Once she had desired to enter
+hospital training, had been properly enthusiastic for a period of months
+over a career in this field of mercy. Then, as now, marriage, while
+accepted as the ultimate state, was only to be considered through a haze
+of idealism and romanticism. She cherished certain ideals of a possible
+lover and husband, but always with a false sense of shame. The really
+serious business of a woman's life was the one thing to which she made
+no attempt to apply practical consideration. But her parents had had
+positive ideas on that subject, even if they were not openly expressed.
+Her yearnings after a useful "career" were skilfully discouraged,--by
+her mother because that worthy lady thought it was "scarcely the thing,
+Stella dear, and so unnecessary"; by her father because, as he bluntly
+put it, it would only be a waste of time and money, since the chances
+were she would get married before she was half through training, and
+anyway a girl's place was at home till she did get married. That was his
+only reference to the subject of her ultimate disposition that she
+could recall, but it was plain enough as far as it went.
+
+It was too late to mourn over lost opportunities now, but she did wish
+there was some one thing she could do and do well, some service of value
+that would guarantee self-support. If she could only pound a typewriter
+or keep a set of books, or even make a passable attempt at sewing, she
+would have felt vastly more at ease in this rude logging camp, knowing
+that she could leave it if she desired.
+
+So far as she could see things, she looked at them with measurable
+clearness, without any vain illusions concerning her ability to march
+triumphant over unknown fields of endeavor. Along practical lines she
+had everything to learn. Culture furnishes an excellent pair of wings
+wherewith to soar in skies of abstraction, but is a poor vehicle to
+carry one over rough roads. She might have remained in Philadelphia, a
+guest among friends. Pride forbade that. Incidentally, such an
+arrangement would have enabled her to stalk a husband, a moneyed
+husband, which did not occur to her at all. There remained only to join
+Charlie. If his fortunes mended, well and good. Perhaps she could even
+help in minor ways.
+
+But it was all so radically different--brother and all--from what she
+had pictured that she was filled with dismay and not a little foreboding
+of the future. Sufficient, however, unto the day was the evil thereof,
+she told herself at last, and tried to make that assurance work a change
+of heart. She was very lonely and depressed and full of a futile wish
+that she were a man.
+
+Over across the bay some one was playing an accordeon, and to its
+strains a stout-lunged lumberjack was roaring out a song, with all his
+fellows joining strong in the chorus:
+
+  "Oh, the Saginaw Kid was a cook in a camp, way up on the Ocon-to-o-o.
+  And the cook in a camp in them old days had a damn hard row to hoe-i-oh!
+  Had a damn hard row to hoe."
+
+There was a fine, rollicking air to it. The careless note in their
+voices, the jovial lilt of their song, made her envious. They at least
+had their destiny, limited as it might be and cast along rude ways,
+largely under their own control.
+
+Her wandering gaze at length came to rest on a tent top showing in the
+brush northward from the camp. She saw two canoes drawn up on the beach
+above the lash of the waves, two small figures playing on the gravel,
+and sundry dogs prowling alongshore. Smoke went eddying away in the
+wind. The Siwash camp where Katy John hailed from, Miss Benton supposed.
+
+She had an impulse to skirt the bay and view the Indian camp at closer
+range, a notion born of curiosity. She debated this casually, and just
+as she was about to rise, her movement was arrested by a faint crackle
+in the woods behind. She looked away through the deepening shadow among
+the trees and saw nothing at first. But the sound was repeated at odd
+intervals. She sat still. Thoughts of forest animals slipped into her
+mind, without making her afraid. At last she caught sight of a man
+striding through the timber, soundlessly on the thick moss, coming
+almost straight toward her.
+
+He was scarcely fifty yards away. Across his shoulders he bore a
+reddish-gray burden, and in his right hand was a gun. She did not move.
+Bowed slightly under the weight, the man passed within twenty feet of
+her, so close that she could see the sweat-beads glisten on that side of
+his face, and saw also that the load he carried was the carcass of a
+deer.
+
+Gaining the beach and laying the animal across a boulder, he
+straightened himself up and drew a long breath. Then he wiped the sweat
+off his face. She recognized him as the man who had thrown the logger
+down the slip that day at noon,--presumably Jack Fyfe. A sturdily built
+man about thirty, of Saxon fairness, with a tinge of red in his hair and
+a liberal display of freckles across nose and cheek bones. He was no
+beauty, she decided, albeit he displayed a frank and pleasing
+countenance. That he was a remarkably strong and active man she had seen
+for herself, and if the firm round of his jaw counted for anything, an
+individual of considerable determination besides. Miss Benton conceived
+herself to be possessed of considerable skill at character analysis.
+
+He put away his handkerchief, took up his rifle, settled his hat, and
+strode off toward the camp. Her attention now diverted from the
+Siwashes, she watched him, saw him go to her brother's quarters, stand
+in the door a minute, then go back to the beach accompanied by Charlie.
+
+In a minute or so he came rowing across in a skiff, threw his deer
+aboard, and pulled away north along the shore.
+
+She watched him lift and fall among the waves until he turned a point,
+rowing with strong, even strokes. Then she walked home. Benton was
+poring over some figures, but he pushed aside his pencil and paper when
+she entered.
+
+"You had a visitor, I see," she remarked.
+
+"Yes, Jack Fyfe. He picked up a deer on the ridge behind here and
+borrowed a boat to get home."
+
+"I saw him come out of the woods," she said. "His camp can't be far from
+here, is it? He only left the Springs as you came in. Does he hunt deer
+for sport?"
+
+"Hardly. Oh, well, I suppose it's sport for Jack, in a way. He's always
+piking around in the woods with a gun or a fishing rod," Benton
+returned. "But we kill 'em to eat mostly. It's good meat and cheap. I
+get one myself now and then. However, you want to keep that under your
+hat--about us fellows hunting--or we'll have game wardens nosing around
+here."
+
+"Are you not allowed to hunt them?" she asked.
+
+"Not in close season. Hunting season's from September to December."
+
+"If it's unlawful, why break the law?" she ventured hesitatingly. "Isn't
+that rather--er--"
+
+"Oh, bosh," Charlie derided. "A man in the woods is entitled to venison,
+if he's hunter enough to get it. The woods are full of deer, and a few
+more or less don't matter. We can't run forty miles to town and back and
+pay famine prices for beef every two or three days, when we can get it
+at home in the woods."
+
+Stella digested this in silence, but it occurred to her that this mild
+sample of lawlessness was quite in keeping with the men and the
+environment. There was no policeman on the corner, no mechanism of law
+and order visible anywhere. The characteristic attitude of these
+woodsmen was of intolerance for restraint, of complete self-sufficiency.
+It had colored her brother's point of view. She perceived that whereas
+all her instinct was to know the rules of the game and abide by them,
+he, taking his cue from his environment, inclined to break rules that
+proved inconvenient, even to formulate new ones to apply.
+
+"And suppose," said she, "that a game warden should catch you or Mr.
+Jack Fyfe killing deer out of season?"
+
+"We'd be hauled up and fined a hundred dollars or so," he told her. "But
+they don't catch us."
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and smiling tolerantly upon her, proceeded to
+smoke.
+
+Dusk was falling now, the long twilight of the northern seasons
+gradually deepening, as they sat in silence. Along the creek bank arose
+the evening chorus of the frogs. The air, now hushed and still, was
+riven every few minutes by the whir of wings as ducks in evening flight
+swept by above. All the boisterous laughter and talk in the bunkhouse
+had died. The woods ranged gloomy and impenetrable, save only in the
+northwest, where a patch of sky lighted by diffused pink and gray
+revealed one mountain higher than its fellows standing bald against the
+horizon.
+
+"Well, I guess it's time to turn in." Benton muffled a yawn. "Pleasant
+dreams, Sis. Oh, here's your purse. I used part of the bank roll. You
+won't have much use for money up here, anyway."
+
+He flipped the purse across to her and sauntered into his bedroom.
+Stella sat gazing thoughtfully at the vast bulk of Mount Douglas a few
+minutes longer. Then she too went into the box-like room, the bare
+discomfort of which chilled her merely to behold.
+
+With a curious uncertainty, a feeling of reluctance for the proceeding
+almost, she examined the contents of her purse. For a little time she
+stood gazing into it, a queer curl to her full red lips. Then she flung
+it contemptuously on the bed and began to take down her hair.
+
+"'A rich, rough, tough country, where it doesn't do to be finicky about
+anything,'" she murmured, quoting a line from one of Charlie Benton's
+letters. "It would appear to be rather unpleasantly true. Particularly
+the last clause."
+
+In her purse, which had contained one hundred and ten dollars, there now
+reposed in solitary state a twenty-dollar bill.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+THE TOLL OF BIG TIMBER
+
+Day came again, in the natural sequence of events. Matt, the cook,
+roused all the camp at six o'clock with a tremendous banging on a piece
+of boiler plate hung by a wire. Long before that Stella heard her
+brother astir. She wondered sleepily at his sprightliness, for as she
+remembered him at home he had been a confirmed lie-abed. She herself
+responded none too quickly to the breakfast gong, as a result of which
+slowness the crew had filed away to the day's work, her brother striding
+in the lead, when she entered the mess-house.
+
+She killed time with partial success till noon. Several times she was
+startled to momentary attention by the prolonged series of sharp cracks
+which heralded the thunderous crash of a falling tree. There were other
+sounds which betokened the loggers' activity in the near-by forest,--the
+ringing whine of saw blades, the dull stroke of the axe, voices calling
+distantly.
+
+She tried to interest herself in the camp and the beach and ended up by
+sitting on a log in a shady spot, staring dreamily over the lake. She
+thought impatiently of that homely saw concerning Satan and idle hands,
+but she reflected also that in this isolation even mischief was
+comparatively impossible. There was not a soul to hold speech with
+except the cook, and he was too busy to talk, even if he had not been
+afflicted with a painful degree of diffidence when she addressed him.
+She could make no effort at settling down, at arranging things in what
+was to be her home. There was nothing to arrange, no odds and ends
+wherewith almost any woman can conjure up a homelike effect in the
+barest sort of place. She beheld the noon return of the crew much as a
+shipwrecked castaway on a desert shore might behold a rescuing sail, and
+she told Charlie that she intended to go into the woods that afternoon
+and watch them work.
+
+"All right," said he. "Just so you don't get in the way of a falling
+tree."
+
+A narrow fringe of brush and scrubby timber separated the camp from the
+actual work. From the water's edge to the donkey engine was barely four
+hundred yards. From donkey to a ten-foot jump-off on the lake shore in a
+straight line on a five per cent. gradient ran a curious roadway, made
+by placing two logs in the hollow scooped by tearing great timbers over
+the soft earth, and a bigger log on each side. Butt to butt and side to
+side, the outer sticks half their thickness above the inner, they formed
+a continuous trough the bottom and sides worn smooth with friction of
+sliding timbers. Stella had crossed it the previous evening and wondered
+what it was. Now, watching them at work, she saw. Also she saw why the
+great stumps that rose in every clearing in this land of massive trees
+were sawed six and eight feet above the ground. Always at the base the
+firs swelled sharply. Wherefore the falling gangs lifted themselves
+above the enlargement to make their cut.
+
+Two sawyers attacked a tree. First, with their double-bitted axes, each
+drove a deep notch into the sapwood just wide enough to take the end of
+a two-by-six plank four or five feet long with a single grab-nail in the
+end,--the springboard of the Pacific coast logger, whose daily business
+lies among the biggest timber on God's footstool. Each then clambered up
+on his precarious perch, took hold of his end of the long, limber saw,
+and cut in to a depth of a foot or more, according to the size of the
+tree. Then jointly they chopped down to this sawed line, and there was
+the undercut complete, a deep notch on the side to which the tree would
+fall. That done, they swung the ends of their springboards, or if it
+were a thick trunk, made new holding notches on the other side, and the
+long saw would eat steadily through the heart of the tree toward that
+yellow, gashed undercut, stroke upon stroke, ringing with a thin,
+metallic twang. Presently there would arise an ominous cracking. High in
+the air the tall crest would dip slowly, as if it bowed with manifest
+reluctance to the inevitable. The sawyers would drop lightly from their
+springboards, crying:
+
+"Tim-ber-r-r-r!"
+
+The earthward swoop of the upper boughs would hasten till the air was
+full of a whistling, whishing sound. Then came the rending crash as the
+great tree smashed prone, crushing what small timber stood in its path,
+followed by the earth-quivering shock of its impact with the soil. The
+tree once down, the fallers went on to another. Immediately the
+swampers fell upon the prone trunk with axes, denuding it of limbs; the
+buckers followed them to saw it into lengths decreed by the boss logger.
+When the job was done, the brown fir was no longer a stately tree but
+saw-logs, each with the square butt that lay donkeyward, trimmed a
+trifle rounding with the axe.
+
+Benton worked one falling gang. The falling gang raced to keep ahead of
+the buckers and swampers, and they in turn raced to keep ahead of the
+hook tender, rigging slinger, and donkey, which last trio moved the logs
+from woods to water, once they were down and trimmed. Terrible,
+devastating forces of destruction they seemed to Stella Benton, wholly
+unused as she was to any woodland save the well-kept parks and little
+areas of groomed forest in her native State. All about in the ravaged
+woods lay the big logs, scores of them. They had only begun to pull with
+the donkey a week earlier, Benton explained to her. With his size gang
+he could not keep a donkey engine working steadily. So they had felled
+and trimmed to a good start, and now the falling crew and the swampers
+and buckers were in a dingdong contest to see how long they could keep
+ahead of the puffing Seattle yarder.
+
+Stella sat on a stump, watching. Over an area of many acres the ground
+was a litter of broken limbs, ragged tops, crushed and bent and broken
+younger growth, twisted awry by the big trees in their fall. Huge stumps
+upthrust like beacons in a ruffled harbor, grim, massive butts. From all
+the ravaged wood rose a pungent smell of pitch and sap, a resinous,
+pleasant smell. Radiating like the spokes of a wheel from the head of
+the chute ran deep, raw gashes in the earth, where the donkey had hauled
+up the Brobdingnagian logs on the end of an inch cable.
+
+"This is no small boy's play, is it, Stell?" Charlie said to her once in
+passing.
+
+And she agreed that it was not. Agreed more emphatically and with
+half-awed wonder when she saw the donkey puff and quiver on its anchor
+cable, as the hauling line spooled up on the drum. On the outer end of
+that line snaked a sixty-foot stick, five feet across the butt, but it
+came down to the chute head, brushing earth and brush and small trees
+aside as if they were naught. Once the big log caromed against a stump.
+The rearward end flipped ten feet in the air and thirty feet sidewise.
+But it came clear and slid with incredible swiftness to the head of the
+chute, flinging aside showers of dirt and small stones, and leaving one
+more deep furrow in the forest floor. Benton trotted behind it. Once it
+came to rest well in the chute, he unhooked the line, freed the choker
+(the short noosed loop of cable that slips over the log's end), and the
+haul-back cable hurried the main line back to another log. Benton
+followed, and again the donkey shuddered on its foundation skids till
+another log laid in the chute, with its end butted against that which
+lay before. One log after another was hauled down till half a dozen
+rested there, elongated peas in a wooden pod.
+
+Then a last big stick came with a rush, bunted these others powerfully
+so that they began to slide with the momentum thus imparted, slowly at
+first then, gathering way and speed, they shot down to the lake and
+plunged to the water over the ten-foot jump-off like a school of
+breaching whales.
+
+All this took time, vastly more time than it takes in the telling. The
+logs were ponderous masses. They had to be maneuvered sometimes between
+stumps and standing timber, jerked this way and that to bring them into
+the clear. By four o'clock Benton and his rigging-slinger had just
+finished bunting their second batch of logs down the chute. Stella
+watched these Titanic labors with a growing interest and a dawning
+vision of why these men walked the earth with that reckless swing of
+their shoulders. For they were palpably masters in their environment.
+They strove with woodsy giants and laid them low. Amid constant dangers
+they sweated at a task that shamed the seven labors of Hercules.
+Gladiators they were in a contest from which they did not always emerge
+victorious.
+
+When Benton and his helper followed the haul-back line away to the
+domain of the falling gang the last time, Stella had so far unbent as to
+strike up conversation with the donkey engineer. That greasy individual
+finished stoking his fire box and replied to her first comment.
+
+"Work? You bet," said he. "It's real graft, this is. I got the easy end
+of it, and mine's no snap. I miss a signal, big stick butts against
+something solid; biff! goes the line and maybe cuts a man plumb in two.
+You got to be wide awake when you run a loggin' donkey. These woods is
+no place for a man, anyway, if he ain't spry both in his head and feet."
+
+"Do many men get hurt logging?" Stella asked. "It looks awfully
+dangerous, with these big trees falling and smashing everything. Look at
+that. Goodness!"
+
+From the donkey they could see a shower of ragged splinters and broken
+limbs fly when a two-hundred-foot fir smashed a dead cedar that stood in
+the way of its downward swoop. They could hear the pieces strike against
+brush and trees like the patter of shot on a tin wall.
+
+The donkey engineer gazed calmly enough.
+
+"Them flyin' chunks raise the dickens sometimes," he observed. "Oh, yes,
+now an' then a man gets laid out. There's some things you got to take a
+chance on. Maybe you get cut with an axe, or a limb drops on you, or you
+get in the way of a breakin' line,--though a man ain't got any business
+in the bight of a line. A man don't stand much show when the end of a
+inch 'n' a quarter cable snaps at him like a whiplash. I seen a feller
+on Howe Sound cut square in two with a cable-end once. A broken block's
+the worst, though. That generally gets the riggin' slinger, but a piece
+of it's liable to hit anybody. You see them big iron pulley blocks the
+haul-back cable works in? Well, sometimes they have to anchor a snatch
+block to a stump an' run the main line through it at an angle to get a
+log out the way you want. Suppose the block breaks when I'm givin' it to
+her? Chunks uh that broken cast iron'll fly like bullets. Yes, sir,
+broken blocks is bad business. Maybe you noticed the boys used the
+snatch block two or three times this afternoon? We've been lucky in this
+camp all spring. Nobody so much as nicked himself with an axe. Breaks
+in the gear don't come very often, anyway, with an outfit in first-class
+shape. We got good gear an' a good crew--about as _skookum_ a bunch as I
+ever saw in the woods."
+
+Two hundred yards distant Charlie Benton rose on a stump and semaphored
+with his arms. The engineer whistled answer and stood to his levers; the
+main line began to spool slowly in on the drum. Another signal, and he
+shut off. Another signal, after a brief wait, and the drum rolled
+faster, the line tautened like a fiddle-string, and the ponderous
+machine vibrated with the strain of its effort.
+
+Suddenly the line came slack. Stella, watching for the log to appear,
+saw her brother leap backward off the stump, saw the cable whip
+sidewise, mowing down a clump of saplings that stood in the bight of the
+line, before the engineer could cut off the power. In that return of
+comparative silence there rose above the sibilant hiss of the blow-off
+valve a sudden commotion of voices.
+
+"Damn!" the donkey engineer peered over the brush. "That don't sound
+good. I guess somebody got it in the neck."
+
+Almost immediately Sam Davis and two other men came running.
+
+"What's up?" the engineer called as they passed on a dog trot.
+
+"Block broke," Davis answered over his shoulder. "Piece of it near took
+a leg off Jim Renfrew."
+
+Stella stood a moment, hesitating.
+
+"I may be able to do something. I'll go and see," she said.
+
+"Better not," the engineer warned. "Liable to run into something
+that'll about turn your stomach. What was I tellin' about a broken
+block? Them ragged pieces of flyin' iron sure mess a man up. They'll
+bring a bed spring, an' pack him down to the boat, an' get him to a
+doctor quick as they can. That's all. You couldn't do nothin'."
+
+Nevertheless she went. Renfrew was the rigging slinger working with
+Charlie, a big, blond man who blushed like a schoolboy when Benton
+introduced him to her. Twenty minutes before he had gone trotting after
+the haul-back, sound and hearty, laughing at some sally of her
+brother's. It seemed a trifle incredible that he should lie mangled and
+bleeding among the green forest growth, while his fellows hurried for a
+stretcher.
+
+Two hundred yards at right angles from where Charlie had stood giving
+signals she found a little group under a branchy cedar. Renfrew lay on
+his back, mercifully unconscious. Benton squatted beside him, twisting a
+silk handkerchief with a stick tightly above the wound. His hands and
+Renfrew's clothing and the mossy ground was smeared with blood. Stella
+looked over his shoulder. The overalls were cut away. In the thick of
+the man's thigh stood a ragged gash she could have laid both hands in.
+She drew back.
+
+Benton looked up.
+
+"Better keep away," he advised shortly. "We've done all that can be
+done."
+
+She retreated a little and sat down on a root, half-sickened. The other
+two men stood up. Benton sat back, his first-aid work done, and rolled a
+cigarette with fingers that shook a little. Off to one side she saw the
+fallers climb up on their springboards. Presently arose the ringing
+whine of the thin steel blade, the chuck of axes where the swampers
+attacked a fallen tree. No matter, she thought, that injury came to one,
+that death might hover near, the work went on apace, like action on a
+battlefield.
+
+A few minutes thereafter the two men who had gone with Sam Davis
+returned with the spring from Benton's bed and a light mattress. They
+laid the injured logger on this and covered him with a blanket. Then
+four of them picked it up. As they started, Stella heard one say to her
+brother:
+
+"Matt's jagged."
+
+"What?" Benton exploded. "Where'd it come from?"
+
+"One uh them Hungry Bay shingle-bolt cutters's in camp," the logger
+answered. "Maybe he brought a bottle. I didn't stop to see. But Matt's
+sure got a tank full."
+
+Benton ripped out an angry oath, passed his men, and strode away down
+the path. Stella fell in behind him, wakened to a sudden uneasiness at
+the wrathful set of his features. She barely kept in sight, so rapidly
+did he move.
+
+Sam Davis had smoke pouring from the _Chickamin's_ stack, but the
+kitchen pipe lifted no blue column, though it was close to five o'clock.
+Benton made straight for the cookhouse. Stella followed, a trifle
+uncertainly. A glimpse past Charlie as he came out showed her Matt
+staggering aimlessly about the kitchen, red-eyed, scowling, muttering
+to himself. Benton hurried to the bunkhouse door, much as a hound might
+follow a scent, peered in, and went on to the corner.
+
+On the side facing the lake he found the source of the cook's
+intoxication. A tall and swarthy lumberjack squatted on his haunches,
+gabbling in the Chinook jargon to a _klootchman_ and a wizen-featured
+old Siwash. The Indian woman was drunk beyond any mistaking, affably
+drunk. She looked up at Benton out of vacuous eyes, grinned, and
+extended to him a square-faced bottle of Old Tim gin. The logger rose to
+his feet.
+
+"H'lo, Benton," he greeted thickly. "How's every-thin'?"
+
+Benton's answer was a quick lurch of his body and a smashing jab of his
+clenched fist. The blow stretched the logger on his back, with blood
+streaming from both nostrils. But he was a hardy customer, for he
+bounced up like a rubber ball, only to be floored even more viciously
+before he was well set on his feet. This time Benton snarled a curse and
+kicked him as he lay.
+
+"Charlie, Charlie!" Stella screamed.
+
+If he heard her, he gave no heed.
+
+"Hit the trail, you," he shouted at the logger. "Hit it quick before I
+tramp your damned face into the ground. I told you once not to come
+around here feeding booze to my cook. I do all the whisky-drinking
+that's done in this camp, and don't you forget it. Damn your eyes, I've
+got troubles enough without whisky."
+
+The man gathered himself up, badly shaken, and holding his hand to his
+bleeding nose, made off to his rowboat at the float.
+
+"G'wan home," Benton curtly ordered the Siwashes. "Get drunk at your own
+camp, not in mine. _Sabe?_ Beat it."
+
+They scuttled off, the wizened little old man steadying his fat
+_klootch_ along her uncertain way. Down on the lake the chastised logger
+stood out in his boat, resting once on his oars to shake a fist at
+Benton. Then Charlie faced about on his shocked and outraged sister.
+
+"Good Heavens!" she burst out. "Is it necessary to be so downright
+brutal in actions as well as speech?"
+
+"I'm running a logging camp, not a kindergarten," he snapped angrily. "I
+know what I'm doing. If you don't like it, go in the house where your
+hyper-sensitive tastes won't be offended."
+
+"Thank you," she responded cuttingly and swung about, angry and
+hurt--only to have a fresh scare from the drunken cook, who came reeling
+forward.
+
+"I'm gonna quit," he loudly declared. "I ain't goin' to stick 'round
+here no more. The job's no good. I want m' time. Yuh hear me, Benton.
+I'm through. Com-pletely, ab-sho-lutely through. You bet I am. Gimme m'
+time. I'm a gone goose."
+
+"Quit, then, hang you," Benton growled. "You'll get your check in a
+minute. You're a fine excuse for a cook, all right--get drunk right on
+the job. You don't need to show up here again, when you've had your jag
+out."
+
+"'S all right," Matt declared largely. "'S other jobs. You ain't the
+whole Pacific coast. Oh, way down 'pon the Swa-a-nee ribber--"
+
+He broke into dolorous song and turned back into the cookhouse. Benton's
+hard-set face relaxed. He laughed shortly.
+
+"Takes all kinds to make a world," he commented. "Don't look so
+horrified, Sis. This isn't the regular order of events. It's just an
+accumulation--and it sort of got me going. Here's the boys."
+
+The four stretcher men set down their burden in the shade of the
+bunkhouse. Renfrew was conscious now.
+
+"Tough luck, Jim," Benton sympathized. "Does it pain much?"
+
+Renfrew shook his head. White and weakened from shock and loss of blood,
+nevertheless he bravely disclaimed pain.
+
+"We'll get you fixed up at the Springs," Benton went on. "It's a nasty
+slash in the meat, but I don't think the bone was touched. You'll be on
+deck before long. I'll see you through, anyway."
+
+They gave him a drink of water and filled his pipe, joking him about
+easy days in the hospital while they sweated in the woods. The drunken
+cook came out, carrying his rolled blankets, began maudlin sympathy, and
+was promptly squelched, whereupon he retreated to the float, emitting
+conversation to the world at large. Then they carried Renfrew down to
+the float, and Davis began to haul up the anchor to lay the _Chickamin_
+alongside.
+
+While the chain was still chattering in the hawse pipe, the squat black
+hull of Jack Fyfe's tender rounded the nearest point.
+
+"Whistle him up, Sam," Benton ordered. "Jack can beat our time, and this
+bleeding must be stopped quick."
+
+The tender veered in from her course at the signal. Fyfe himself was at
+the wheel. Five minutes effected a complete arrangement, and the
+_Panther_ drew off with the drunken cook singing atop of the pilot
+house, and Renfrew comfortable in her cabin, and Jack Fyfe's promise to
+see him properly installed and attended in the local hospital at Roaring
+Springs.
+
+Benton heaved a sigh of relief and turned to his sister.
+
+"Still mad, Stell?" he asked placatingly and put his arm over her
+shoulders.
+
+"Of course not," she responded instantly to this kindlier phase. "Ugh!
+Your hands are all bloody, Charlie."
+
+"That's so, but it'll wash off," he replied. "Well, we're shy a good
+woodsman and a cook, and I'll miss 'em both. But it might be worse.
+Here's where you go to bat, Stella. Get on your apron and lend me a hand
+in the kitchen, like a good girl. We have to eat, no matter what
+happens."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THE DIGNITY (?) OF TOIL
+
+By such imperceptible degrees that she was scarce aware of it, Stella
+took her place as a cog in her brother's logging machine, a unit in the
+human mechanism which he operated skilfully and relentlessly at top
+speed to achieve his desired end--one million feet of timber in
+boomsticks by September the first.
+
+From the evening that she stepped into the breach created by a drunken
+cook, the kitchen burden settled steadily upon her shoulders. For a week
+Benton daily expected and spoke of the arrival of a new cook. Fyfe had
+wired a Vancouver employment agency to send one, the day he took Jim
+Renfrew down. But either cooks were scarce, or the order went astray,
+for no rough and ready kitchen mechanic arrived. Benton in the meantime
+ceased to look for one. He worked like a horse, unsparing of himself,
+unsparing of others. He rose at half-past four, lighted the kitchen
+fire, roused Stella, and helped her prepare breakfast, preliminary to
+his day in the woods. Later he impressed Katy John into service to wait
+on the table and wash dishes. He labored patiently to teach Stella
+certain simple tricks of cooking that she did not know.
+
+Quick of perception, as thorough as her brother in whatsoever she set
+her hand to do, Stella was soon equal to the job. And as the days
+passed and no camp cook came to their relief, Benton left the job to her
+as a matter of course.
+
+"You can handle that kitchen with Katy as well as a man," he said to her
+at last. "And it will give you something to occupy your time. I'd have
+to pay a cook seventy dollars a month. Katy draws twenty-five. You can
+credit yourself with the balance, and I'll pay off when the contract
+money comes in. We might as well keep the coin in the family. I'll feel
+easier, because you won't get drunk and jump the job in a pinch. What do
+you say?"
+
+She said the only possible thing to say under the circumstances. But she
+did not say it with pleasure, nor with any feeling of gratitude. It was
+hard work, and she and hard work were utter strangers. Her feet ached
+from continual standing on them. The heat and the smell of stewing meat
+and vegetables sickened her. Her hands were growing rough and red from
+dabbling in water, punching bread dough, handling the varied articles of
+food that go to make up a meal. Upon hands and forearms there stung
+continually certain small cuts and burns that lack of experience over a
+hot range inevitably inflicted upon her. Whereas time had promised to
+hang heavy on her hands, now an hour of idleness in the day became a
+precious boon.
+
+Yet in her own way she was as full of determination as her brother. She
+saw plainly enough that she must leave the drone stage behind. She
+perceived that to be fed and clothed and housed and to have her wishes
+readily gratified was not an inherent right--that some one must foot
+the bill--that now for all she received she must return equitable value.
+At home she had never thought of it in that light; in fact, she had
+never thought of it at all. Now that she was beginning to get a
+glimmering of her true economic relation to the world at large, she had
+no wish to emulate the clinging vine, even if thereby she could have
+secured a continuance of that silk-lined existence which had been her
+fortunate lot. Her pride revolted against parasitism. It was therefore a
+certain personal satisfaction to have achieved self-support at a stroke,
+insofar as that in the sweat of her brow,--all too literally,--she
+earned her bread and a compensation besides. But there were times when
+that solace seemed scarcely to weigh against her growing detest for the
+endless routine of her task, the exasperating physical weariness and
+irritations it brought upon her.
+
+For to prepare three times daily food for a dozen hungry men is no mean
+undertaking. One cannot have in a logging camp the conveniences of a
+hotel kitchen. The water must be carried in buckets from the creek near
+by, and wood brought in armfuls from the pile of sawn blocks outside.
+The low-roofed kitchen shanty was always like an oven. The flies swarmed
+in their tens of thousands. As the men sweated with axe and saw in the
+woods, so she sweated in the kitchen. And her work began two hours
+before their day's labor, and continued two hours after they were done.
+She slept, like one exhausted and rose full of sleep-heaviness, full of
+bodily soreness and spiritual protest when the alarm clock raised its
+din in the cool morning.
+
+"You don't like thees work, do you, Mees Benton?" Katy John said to her
+one day, in the soft, slurring accent that colored her English. "You
+wasn't cut out for a cook."
+
+"This isn't work," Stella retorted irritably. "It's simple drudgery. I
+don't wonder that men cooks take to drink."
+
+Katy laughed.
+
+"Why don't you be nice to Mr. Abbey," she suggested archly. "He'd like
+to give you a better job than thees--for life. My, but it must be nice
+to have lots of money like that man's got, and never have to work."
+
+"You'll get those potatoes peeled sooner if you don't talk quite so
+much, Katy," Miss Benton made reply.
+
+There was that way out, as the Siwash girl broadly indicated. Paul Abbey
+had grown into the habit of coming there rather more often than mere
+neighborliness called for, and it was palpable that he did not come to
+hold converse with Benton or Benton's gang, although he was "hail
+fellow" with all woodsmen. At first his coming might have been laid to
+any whim. Latterly Stella herself was unmistakably the attraction. He
+brought his sister once, a fair-haired girl about Stella's age. She
+proved an exceedingly self-contained young person, whose speech during
+the hour of her stay amounted to a dozen or so drawling sentences. With
+no hint of condescension or superciliousness, she still managed to
+arouse in Stella a mild degree of resentment. She wore an impeccable
+pongee silk, simple and costly, and _her_ hands had evidently never
+known the roughening of work. In one way and another Miss Benton
+straightway conceived an active dislike for Linda Abbey. As her
+reception of Paul's sister was not conducive to chumminess, Paul did not
+bring Linda again.
+
+But he came oftener than Stella desired to be bothered with him. Charlie
+was beginning to indulge in some rather broad joking, which offended and
+irritated her. She was not in the least attracted to Paul Abbey. He was
+a nice enough young man; for all she knew, he might be a concentration
+of all the manly virtues, but he gave no fillip to either her
+imagination or her emotions. He was too much like a certain type of
+young fellow she had known in other embodiments. Her instinct warned her
+that stripped of his worldly goods he would be wholly commonplace. She
+could be friends with the Paul Abbey kind of man, but when she tried to
+consider him as a possible lover, she found herself unresponsive, even
+amused. She was forced to consider it, because Abbey was fast
+approaching that stage. It was heralded in the look of dumb appeal that
+she frequently surprised in his gaze, by various signs and tokens, that
+Stella Benton was too sophisticated to mistake. One of these days he
+would lay his heart, and hand at her feet.
+
+Sometimes she considered what her life might be if she should marry him.
+Abbey was wealthy in his own right and heir to more wealth. But--she
+could not forbear a wry grimace at the idea. Some fateful hour love
+would flash across her horizon, a living flame. She could visualize the
+tragedy if it should be too late, if it found her already bound--sold
+for a mess of pottage at her ease. She did not mince words to herself
+when she reflected on this matter. She knew herself as a creature of
+passionate impulses, consciously resenting all restraint. She knew that
+men and women did mad things under the spur of emotion. She wanted no
+shackles, she wanted to be free to face the great adventure when it
+came.
+
+Yet there were times during the weeks that flitted past when it seemed
+to her that no bondage could be meaner, more repugnant, than that daily
+slavery in her brother's kitchen; that transcendent conceptions of love
+and marriage were vain details by comparison with aching feet and
+sleep-heavy eyes, with the sting of burns, the smart of sweat on her
+face, all the never-ending trifles that so irritated her. She had been
+spoiled in the making for so sordid an existence. Sometimes she would
+sit amid the array of dishes and pans and cooking food and wonder if she
+really were the same being whose life had been made up of books and
+music, of teas and dinners and plays, of light, inconsequential chatter
+with genial, well-dressed folk. There was no one to talk to here and
+less time to talk. There was nothing to read except a batch of
+newspapers filtering into camp once a week or ten days. There was not
+much in this monster stretch of giant timber but heat and dirt and flies
+and hungry men who must be fed.
+
+If Paul Abbey had chanced to ask her to marry him during a period of
+such bodily and spiritual rebellion, she would probably have committed
+herself to that means of escape in sheer desperation. For she did not
+harden to the work; it steadily sapped both her strength and patience.
+But he chose an ill time for his declaration. Stella had overtaken her
+work and snared a fleeting hour of idleness in mid-afternoon of a hot
+day in early August. Under a branchy alder at the cook-house-end she
+piled all the pillows she could commandeer in their quarters and curled
+herself upon them at grateful ease. Like a tired animal, she gave
+herself up to the pleasure of physical relaxation, staring at a perfect
+turquoise sky through the whispering leaves above. She was not even
+thinking. She was too tired to think, and for the time being too much at
+peace to permit thought that would, in the very nature of things, be
+disturbing.
+
+Abbey maintained for his own pleasure a fast motorboat. He slid now into
+the bay unheard, tied up beside the float, walked to the kitchen,
+glanced in, then around the corner, and smilingly took a seat on the
+grass near her.
+
+"It's too perfect a day to loaf in the shade," he observed, after a
+brief exchange of commonplaces. "Won't you come out for a little spin on
+the lake? A ride in the _Wolf_ will put some color in your cheeks."
+
+"If I had time," she said, "I would. But loggers must eat though the
+heavens fall. In about twenty minutes I'll have to start supper. I'll
+have color enough, goodness knows once I get over that stove."
+
+Abbey picked nervously at a blade of grass for a minute.
+
+"This is a regular dog's life for you," he broke out suddenly.
+
+"Oh, hardly that," she protested. "It's a little hard on me because I
+haven't been used to it, that's all."
+
+"It's Chinaman's work," he said hotly. "Charlie oughtn't to let you stew
+in that kitchen."
+
+Stella said nothing; she was not moved to the defence of her brother.
+She was loyal enough to her blood, but not so intensely loyal that she
+could defend him against criticism that struck a responsive chord in her
+own mind. She was beginning to see that, being useful, Charlie was
+making use of her. His horizon had narrowed to logs that might be
+transmuted into money. Enslaved himself by his engrossing purposes, he
+thought nothing of enslaving others to serve his end. She had come to a
+definite conclusion about that, and she meant to collect her wages when
+he sold his logs, collect also the ninety dollars of her money he had
+coolly appropriated, and try a different outlet. If one must work, one
+might at least seek work a little to one's taste. She therefore
+dismissed Abbey's comment carelessly:
+
+"Some one has to do it."
+
+A faint flush crept slowly up into his round, boyish face. He looked at
+her with disconcerting steadiness. Perhaps something in his expression
+gave her the key to his thought, or it may have been that peculiar
+psychical receptiveness which in a woman we are pleased to call
+intuition; but at any rate Stella divined what was coming and would have
+forestalled it by rising. He prevented that move by catching her hands.
+
+"Look here, Stella," he blurted out, "it just grinds me to death to see
+you slaving away in this camp, feeding a lot of roughnecks. Won't you
+marry me and cut this sort of thing out? We'd be no end good chums."
+
+She gently disengaged her hands, her chief sensation one of amusement,
+Abbey was in such an agony of blushing diffidence, all flustered at his
+own temerity. Also, she thought, a trifle precipitate. That was not the
+sort of wooing to carry her off her feet. For that matter she was quite
+sure nothing Paul Abbey could do or say would ever stir her pulses. She
+had to put an end to the situation, however. She took refuge in a
+flippant manner.
+
+"Thanks for the compliment, Mr. Abbey," she smiled. "But really I
+couldn't think of inflicting repentance at leisure on you in that
+offhand way. You wouldn't want me to marry you just so I could resign
+the job of chef, would you?"
+
+"Don't you like me?" he asked plaintively.
+
+"Not that way," she answered positively.
+
+"You might try," he suggested hopefully. "Honest, I'm crazy about you.
+I've liked you ever since I saw you first. I wouldn't want any greater
+privilege than to marry you and take you away from this sort of thing.
+You're too good for it. Maybe I'm kind of sudden, but I know my own
+mind. Can't you take a chance with me?"
+
+"I'm sorry," she said gently, seeing him so sadly in earnest. "It isn't
+a question of taking a chance. I don't care for you. I haven't got any
+feeling but the mildest sort of friendliness. If I married you, it would
+only be for a home, as the saying is. And I'm not made that way. Can't
+you see how impossible it would be?"
+
+"You'd get to like me," he declared. "I'm just as good as the next man."
+
+His smooth pink-and-white skin reddened again.
+
+"That sounds a lot like tooting my own horn mighty strong," said he.
+"But I'm in dead earnest. If there isn't anybody else yet, you could
+like me just as well as the next fellow. I'd be awfully good to you."
+
+"I daresay you would," she said quietly. "But I couldn't be good to you.
+I don't want to marry you, Mr. Abbey. That's final. All the feeling I
+have for you isn't enough for any woman to marry on."
+
+"Maybe not," he said dolefully. "I suppose that's the way it goes. Hang
+it, I guess I was a little too sudden. But I'm a stayer. Maybe you'll
+change your mind some time."
+
+He was standing very near her, and they were both so intent upon the
+momentous business that occupied them that neither noticed Charlie
+Benton until his hail startled them to attention.
+
+"Hello, folks," he greeted and passed on into the cook shanty, bestowing
+upon Stella, over Abbey's shoulder, a comprehensive grin which nettled
+her exceedingly. Her peaceful hour had been disturbed to no purpose. She
+did not want to love or be loved. For the moment she felt old beyond her
+years, mature beyond the comprehension of any man. If she had voiced her
+real attitude toward Paul Abbey, she would have counseled him to run and
+play, "like a good little boy."
+
+Instead she remarked: "I must get to work," and left her downcast
+suitor without further ceremony.
+
+As she went about her work in the kitchen, she saw Abbey seat himself
+upon a log in the yard, his countenance wreathed in gloom. He was
+presently joined by her brother. Glancing out, now and then, she made a
+guess at the meat of their talk, and her lip curled slightly. She saw
+them walk down to Abbey's launch, and Charlie delivered an encouraging
+slap on Paul's shoulder as he embarked. Then the speedy craft tore out
+of the bay at a headlong gait, her motor roaring in unmuffled exhaust,
+wide wings of white spray arching off her flaring bows.
+
+"The desperate recklessness of thwarted affection--fiddlesticks!" Miss
+Benton observed in sardonic mood. Her hands were deep in pie dough. She
+thumped it viciously. The kitchen and the flies and all the rest of it
+rasped at her nerves again.
+
+Charlie came into the kitchen, hunted a cookie out of the tin box where
+such things were kept, and sat swinging one leg over a corner of the
+table, eying her critically while he munched.
+
+"So you turned Paul down, eh?" he said at last. "You're the prize chump.
+You've missed the best chance you'll ever have to put yourself on Easy
+Street."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+SOME NEIGHBORLY ASSISTANCE
+
+For a week thereafter Benton developed moods of sourness, periods of
+scowling thought. He tried to speed up his gang, and having all spring
+driven them at top speed, the added straw broke the back of their
+patience, and Stella heard some sharp interchanges of words. He quelled
+one incipient mutiny through sheer dominance, but it left him more short
+of temper, more crabbedly moody than ever. Eventually his ill-nature
+broke out against Stella over some trifle, and she--being herself an
+aggrieved party to his transactions--surprised her own sense of the
+fitness of things by retaliating in kind.
+
+"I'm slaving away in your old camp from daylight till dark at work I
+despise, and you can't even speak decently to me," she flared up. "You
+act like a perfect brute lately. What's the matter with you?"
+
+Benton gnawed at a finger nail in silence.
+
+"Hang it, I guess you're right," he admitted at last. "But I can't help
+having a grouch. I'm going to fall behind on this contract, the best I
+can do."
+
+"Well," she replied tartly. "I'm not to blame for that. I'm not
+responsible for your failure. Why take it out on me?"
+
+"I don't, particularly," he answered. "Only--can't you _sabe_? A man
+gets on edge when he works and sweats for months and sees it all about
+to come to nothing."
+
+"So does a woman," she made pointed retort.
+
+Benton chose to ignore the inference.
+
+"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."
+
+He went outside. Up in the near woods the whine of the saws and the
+sounds of chopping kept measured beat. It was late in the forenoon, and
+Stella was hard about her dinner preparations. Contract or no contract,
+money or no money, men must eat. That fact loomed biggest on her daily
+schedule, left her no room to think overlong of other things. Her huff
+over, she felt rather sorry for Charlie, a feeling accentuated by sight
+of him humped on a log in the sun, too engrossed in his perplexities to
+be where he normally was at that hour, in the thick of the logging,
+working harder than any of his men.
+
+A little later she saw him put off from the float in the _Chickamin's_
+dinghy. When the crew came to dinner, he had not returned. Nor was he
+back when they went out again at one.
+
+Near mid-afternoon, however, he strode into the kitchen, wearing the
+look of a conqueror.
+
+"I've got it fixed," he announced.
+
+Stella looked up from a frothy mass of yellow stuff that she was
+stirring in a pan.
+
+"Got what fixed?" she asked.
+
+"Why, this log business," he said. "Jack Fyfe is going to put in a crew
+and a donkey, and we're going to everlastingly rip the innards out of
+these woods. I'll make delivery after all."
+
+"That's good," she remarked, but noticeably without enthusiasm. The
+heat of that low-roofed shanty had taken all possible enthusiasm for
+anything out of her for the time being. Always toward the close of each
+day she was gripped by that feeling of deadly fatigue, in the face of
+which nothing much mattered but to get through the last hours somehow
+and drag herself wearily to bed.
+
+Benton playfully tweaked Katy John's ear and went whistling up the
+trail. It was plain sailing for him now, and he was correspondingly
+elated.
+
+He tried to talk to Stella that evening when she was through, all about
+big things in the future, big contracts he could get, big money he could
+see his way to make. It fell mostly on unappreciative ears. She was
+tired, so tired that his egotistical chatter irritated her beyond
+measure. What she would have welcomed with heartfelt gratitude was not
+so much a prospect of future affluence in which she might or might not
+share as a lightening of her present burden. So far as his conversation
+ran, Benton's sole concern seemed to be more equipment, more men, so
+that he might get out more logs. In the midst of this optimistic talk,
+Stella walked abruptly into her room.
+
+Noon of the next day brought the _Panther_ coughing into the bay,
+flanked on the port side by a scow upon which rested a twin to the iron
+monster that jerked logs into her brother's chute. To starboard was made
+fast a like scow. That was housed over, a smoking stovepipe stuck
+through the roof, and a capped and aproned cook rested his arms on the
+window sill as they floated in. Men to the number of twenty or more
+clustered about both scows and the _Panther's_ deck, busy with pipe and
+cigarette and rude jest. The clatter of their voices uprose through the
+noon meal. But when the donkey scow thrust its blunt nose against the
+beach, the chaff and laughter died into silent, capable action.
+
+"A Seattle yarder properly handled can do anything but climb a tree,"
+Charlie had once boasted to her, in reference to his own machine.
+
+It seemed quite possible to Stella, watching Jack Fyfe's crew at work.
+Steam was up in the donkey. They carried a line from its drum through a
+snatch block ashore and jerked half a dozen logs crosswise before the
+scow in a matter of minutes. Then the same cable was made fast to a
+sturdy fir, the engineer stood by, and the ponderous machine slid
+forward on its own skids, like an up-ended barrel on a sled, down off
+the scow, up the bank, smashing brush, branches, dead roots, all that
+stood in its path, drawing steadily up to the anchor tree as the cable
+spooled up on the drum.
+
+A dozen men tailed on to the inch and a quarter cable and bore the loose
+end away up the path. Presently one stood clear, waving a signal. Again
+the donkey began to puff and quiver, the line began to roll up on the
+drum, and the big yarder walked up the slope under its own power, a
+locomotive unneedful of rails, making its own right of way. Upon the
+platform built over the skids were piled the tools of the crew, sawed
+blocks for the fire box, axes, saws, grindstones, all that was necessary
+in their task. At one o'clock they made their first move. At two the
+donkey was vanished into that region where the chute-head lay, and the
+great firs stood waiting the slaughter.
+
+By mid-afternoon Stella noticed an acceleration of numbers in the logs
+that came hurtling lakeward. Now at shorter intervals arose the grinding
+sound of their arrival, the ponderous splash as each leaped to the
+water. It was a good thing, she surmised--for Charlie Benton. She could
+not see where it made much difference to her whether ten logs a day or a
+hundred came down to the boomsticks.
+
+Late that afternoon Katy vanished upon one of her periodic visits to the
+camp of her kindred around the point. Bred out of doors, of a tribe
+whose immemorial custom it is that the women do all the work, the Siwash
+girl was strong as an ox, and nearly as bovine in temperament and
+movements. She could lift with ease a weight that taxed Stella's
+strength, and Stella Benton was no weakling, either. It was therefore a
+part of Katy's routine to keep water pails filled from the creek and the
+wood box supplied, in addition to washing dishes and carrying food to
+the table. Katy slighted these various tasks occasionally. She needed
+oversight, continual admonition, to get any job done in time. She was
+slow to the point of exasperation. Nevertheless, she lightened the day's
+labor, and Stella put up with her slowness since she needs must or
+assume the entire burden herself. This time Katy thoughtlessly left with
+both water pails empty.
+
+Stella was just picking them up off the bench when a shadow darkened the
+door, and she looked around to see Jack Fyfe.
+
+"How d' do," he greeted.
+
+He had seemed a short man. Now, standing within four feet of her, she
+perceived that this was an illusion created by the proportion and
+thickness of his body. He was, in fact, half a head taller than she, and
+Stella stood five feet five. His gray eyes met hers squarely, with a
+cool, impersonal quality of gaze. There was neither smirk nor
+embarrassment in his straightforward glance. He was, in effect, "sizing
+her up" just as he would have looked casually over a logger asking him
+for a job. Stella sensed that, and resenting it momentarily, failed to
+match his manner. She flushed. Fyfe smiled, a broad, friendly grin, in
+which a wide mouth opened to show strong, even teeth.
+
+"I'm after a drink," he said quite impersonally, and coolly taking the
+pails out of her hands, walked through the kitchen and down to the
+creek. He was back in a minute, set the filled buckets in their place,
+and helped himself with a dipper.
+
+"Say," he asked easily, "how do you like life in a logging camp by this
+time? This is sure one hot job you've got."
+
+"Literally or slangily?" she asked in a flippant tone. Fyfe's
+reputation, rather vividly colored, had reached her from various
+sources. She was not quite sure whether she cared to countenance him or
+not. There was a disturbing quality in his glance, a subtle suggestion
+of force about him that she felt without being able to define in
+understandable terms. In any case she felt more than equal to the task
+of squelching any effort at familiarity, even if Jack Fyfe were, in a
+sense, the convenient god in her brother's machine. Fyfe chuckled at
+her answer.
+
+"Both," he replied shortly and went out.
+
+She saw him a little later out on the bay in the _Panther's_ dink,
+standing up in the little boat, making long, graceful casts with a
+pliant rod. She perceived that this manner of fishing was highly
+successful, insomuch as at every fourth or fifth cast a trout struck his
+fly, breaking water with a vigorous splash. Then the bamboo would arch
+as the fish struggled, making sundry leaps clear of the water, gleaming
+like silver each time he broke the surface, but coming at last tamely to
+Jack Fyfe's landing net. Of outdoor sports she knew most about angling,
+for her father had been an ardent fly-caster. And she had observed with
+a true angler's scorn the efforts of her brother's loggers to catch the
+lake trout with a baited hook, at which they had scant success. Charlie
+never fished. He had neither time nor inclination for such fooling, as
+he termed it. Fyfe stopped fishing when the donkeys whistled six. It
+happened that when he drew in to his cookhouse float, Stella was
+standing in her kitchen door. Fyfe looked up at her and held aloft a
+dozen trout strung by the gills on a stick, gleaming in the sun.
+
+"Vanity," she commented inaudibly. "I wonder if he thinks I've been
+admiring his skill as a fisherman?"
+
+Nevertheless she paid tribute to his skill when ten minutes later he
+sent a logger with the entire catch to her kitchen. They looked
+toothsome, those lakers, and they were. She cooked one for her own
+supper and relished it as a change from the everlasting bacon and ham.
+In the face of that million feet of timber, Benton hunted no deer. True,
+the Siwashes had once or twice brought in some venison. That, with a
+roast or two of beef from town, was all the fresh meat she had tasted in
+two months. There were enough trout to make a breakfast for the crew.
+She ate hers and mentally thanked Jack Fyfe.
+
+Lying in her bed that night, in the short interval that came between
+undressing and wearied sleep, she found herself wondering with a good
+deal more interest about Jack Fyfe than she had ever bestowed
+upon--well, Paul Abbey, for instance.
+
+She was quite positive that she was going to dislike Jack Fyfe if he
+were thrown much in her way. There was something about him that she
+resented. The difference between him and the rest of the rude crew among
+which she must perforce live was a question of degree, not of kind.
+There was certainly some compelling magnetism about the man. But along
+with it went what she considered an almost brutal directness of speech
+and action. Part of this conclusion came from hearsay, part from
+observation, limited though her opportunities had been for the latter.
+Miss Stella Benton, for all her poise, was not above jumping at
+conclusions. There was something about Jack Fyfe that she resented. She
+irritably dismissed it as a foolish impression, but the fact remained
+that the mere physical nearness of him seemed to put her on the
+defensive, as if he were in reality a hunter and she the hunted.
+
+Fyfe joined Charlie Benton about the time she finished work. The three
+of them sat on the grass before Benton's quarters, and every time Jack
+Fyfe's eyes rested on her she steeled herself to resist--what, she did
+not know. Something intangible, something that disturbed her. She had
+never experienced anything like that before; it tantalized her, roused
+her curiosity. There was nothing occult about the man. He was nowise
+fascinating, either in face or manner. He made no bid for her attention.
+Yet during the half hour he sat there, Stella's mind revolved constantly
+about him. She recalled all that she had heard of him, much of it, from
+her point of view, highly discreditable. Inevitably she fell to
+comparing him with other men she knew.
+
+She had, in a way, unconsciously been prepared for just such a measure
+of concentration upon Jack Fyfe. For he was a power on Roaring Lake, and
+power,--physical, intellectual or financial,--exacts its own tribute of
+consideration. He was a fighter, a dominant, hard-bitten woodsman, so
+the tale ran. He had gathered about him the toughest crew on the Lake,
+himself, upon occasion, the most turbulent of all. He controlled many
+square miles of big timber, and he had gotten it all by his own effort
+in the eight years since he came to Roaring Lake as a hand logger. He
+was slow of speech, chain-lightning in action, respected generally,
+feared a lot. All these things her brother and Katy John had sketched
+for Stella with much verbal embellishment.
+
+There was no ignoring such a man. Brought into close contact with the
+man himself, Stella felt the radiating force of his personality. There
+it was, a thing to be reckoned with. She felt that whenever Jack Fyfe's
+gray eyes rested impersonally on her. His pleasant, freckled face
+hovered before her until she fell asleep, and in her sleep she dreamed
+again of him throwing that drunken logger down the Hot Springs slip.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+DURANCE VILE
+
+By September first a growing uneasiness hardened into distasteful
+certainty upon Stella. It had become her firm resolve to get what money
+was due her when Charlie marketed his logs and try another field of
+labor. That camp on Roaring Lake was becoming a nightmare to her. She
+had no inherent dislike for work. She was too vibrantly alive to be
+lazy. But she had had an overdose of unaccustomed drudgery, and she was
+growing desperate. If there had been anything to keep her mind from
+continual dwelling on the manifold disagreeableness she had to cope
+with, she might have felt differently, but there was not. She ate,
+slept, worked,--ate, slept, and worked again,--till every fibre of her
+being cried out in protest against the deadening round. She was like a
+flower striving to attain its destiny of bloom in soil overrun with rank
+weeds. Loneliness and hard, mean work, day after day, in which all that
+had ever seemed desirable in life had neither place nor consideration,
+were twin evils of isolation and flesh-wearying labor, from which she
+felt that she must get away, or go mad.
+
+But she did not go. Benton left to make his delivery to the mill
+company, the great boom of logs gliding slowly along in the wake of a
+tug, the _Chickamin_ in attendance. Benton's crew accompanied the boom.
+Fyfe's gang loaded their donkey and gear aboard the scow and went home.
+The bay lay all deserted, the woods silent. For the first time in three
+months she had all her hours free, only her own wants to satisfy. Katy
+John spent most of her time in the smoky camp of her people. Stella
+loafed. For two days she did nothing, gave herself up to a physical
+torpor she had never known before. She did not want to read, to walk
+about, or even lift her eyes to the bold mountains that loomed massive
+across the lake. It was enough to lie curled among pillows under the
+alder and stare drowsily at the blue September sky, half aware of the
+drone of a breeze in the firs, the flutter of birds' wings, and the lap
+of water on the beach.
+
+Presently, however, the old restless energy revived. The spring came
+back to her step and she shed that lethargy like a cast-off garment. And
+in so doing her spirit rose in hot rebellion against being a prisoner to
+deadening drudgery, against being shut away from all the teeming life
+that throve and trafficked beyond the solitude in which she sat immured.
+When Charlie came back, there was going to be a change. She repeated
+that to herself with determination. Between whiles she rambled about in
+the littered clearing, prowled along the beaches, and paddled now and
+then far outside the bay in a flat-bottomed skiff, restless, full of
+plans. So far as she saw, she would have to face some city alone, but
+she viewed that prospect with a total absence of the helpless feeling
+which harassed her so when she first took train for her brother's camp.
+She had passed through what she termed a culinary inferno. Nothing, she
+considered, could be beyond her after that unremitting drudgery.
+
+But Benton failed to come back on the appointed day. The four days
+lengthened to a week. Then the _Panther_, bound up-lake, stopped to
+leave a brief note from Charlie, telling her business had called him to
+Vancouver.
+
+Altogether it was ten days before the _Chickamin_ whistled up the bay.
+She slid in beside the float, her decks bristling with men like a
+passenger craft. Stella, so thoroughly sated with loneliness that she
+temporarily forgot her grievances, flew to meet her brother. But one
+fair glimpse of the disembarking crew turned her back. They were all in
+varying stages of liquor--from two or three who had to be hauled over
+the float and up to the bunkhouse like sacks of bran, to others who were
+so happily under the influence of John Barleycorn that every move was
+some silly antic. She retreated in disgust. When Charlie reached the
+cabin, he himself proved to be fairly mellow, in the best of
+spirits--speaking truly in the double sense.
+
+"Hello, lady," he hailed jovially. "How did you fare all by your
+lonesome this long time? I didn't figure to be gone so long, but there
+was a lot to attend to. How are you, anyway?"
+
+"All right," she answered coolly. "You evidently celebrated your log
+delivery in the accepted fashion."
+
+"Don't you believe it," he grinned amiably. "I had a few drinks with the
+boys on the way up, that's all. No, sir, it was straight business with
+a capital B all the time I was gone. I've got a good thing in hand,
+Sis--big money in sight. Tell you about it later. Think you and Katy can
+rustle grub for this bunch by six?"
+
+"Oh, I suppose so," she said shortly. It was on the tip of her tongue to
+tell him then and there that she was through,--like Matt, the cook, that
+memorable afternoon, "completely an' ab-sho-lutely through." She
+refrained. There was no use in being truculent. But that drunken crowd
+looked formidable in numbers.
+
+"How many extra?" she asked mechanically.
+
+"Thirty men, all told," Benton returned briskly. "I tell you I'm sure
+going to rip the heart out of this limit before spring. I've signed up a
+six-million-foot contract for delivery as soon as the logs'll go over
+Roaring Rapids in the spring. Remember what I told you when you came?
+You stick with me, and you'll wear diamonds. I stand to clean up twenty
+thousand on the winter's work."
+
+"In that case, you should be able to hire a real cook," she suggested, a
+spice of malice in her tone.
+
+"I sure will, when it begins to come right," he promised largely. "And
+I'll give you a soft job keeping books then. Well, I'll lend you a hand
+for to-night. Where's the Siwash maiden?"
+
+"Over at the camp; there she comes now," Stella replied. "Will you start
+a fire, Charlie, while I change my dress?"
+
+"You look like a peach in that thing." He stood off a pace to admire.
+"You're some dame, Stell, when you get on your glad rags."
+
+She frowned at her image in the glass behind the closed door of her
+room as she set about unfastening the linen dress she had worn that
+afternoon. Deep in her trunk, along with much other unused finery, it
+had reposed all summer. That ingrained instinct to be admired, to be
+garbed fittingly and well, came back to her as soon as she was rested.
+And though there were none but squirrels and bluejays and occasionally
+Katy John to cast admiring eyes upon her, it had pleased her for a week
+to wear her best, and wander about the beaches and among the dusky
+trunks of giant fir, a picture of blooming, well-groomed womanhood. She
+took off the dress and threw it on the bed with a resentful rush of
+feeling. The treadmill gaped for her again. But not for long. She was
+through with that. She was glad that Charlie's prospects pleased him. He
+could not call on her to help him out of a hole now. She would tell him
+her decision to-night. And as soon as he could get a cook to fill her
+place, then good-by to Roaring Lake, good-by to kitchen smells and flies
+and sixteen hours a day over a hot stove.
+
+She wondered why such a loathing of the work afflicted her; if all who
+earned their bread in the sweat of their brow were ridden with that
+feeling,--woodsmen, cooks, chauffeurs, the slaves of personal service
+and the great industrial mills alike? Her heart went out to them if they
+were. But she was quite sure that work could be otherwise than
+repellent, enslaving. She recalled that cooks and maids had worked in
+her father's house with no sign of the revolt that now assailed her. But
+it seemed to her that their tasks had been light compared with the job
+of cooking in Charlie Benton's camp.
+
+Curiously enough, while she changed her clothes, her thoughts a jumble
+of present things she disliked and the unknown that she would have to
+face alone in Vancouver, she found her mind turning on Jack Fyfe. During
+his three weeks' stay, they had progressed less in the direction of
+acquaintances than she and Paul Abbey had done in two meetings. Fyfe
+talked to her now and then briefly, but he looked at her more than he
+talked. Where his searching gaze disturbed, his speech soothed, it was
+so coolly impersonal. That, she deemed, was merely another of his odd
+contradictions. He was contradictory. Stella classified Jack Fyfe as a
+creature of unrestrained passions. She recognized, or thought she
+recognized, certain dominant, primitive characteristics, and they did
+not excite her admiration. Men admired him--those who were not afraid of
+him. If he had been of more polished clay, she could readily have
+grasped this attitude. But in her eyes he was merely a rude, masterful
+man, uncommonly gifted with physical strength, dominating other rude,
+strong men by sheer brute force. And she herself rather despised sheer
+brute force. The iron hand should fitly be concealed beneath the velvet
+glove.
+
+Yet in spite of the bold look in his eyes that always confused and
+irritated her, Fyfe had never singled her out for the slightest
+attention of the kind any man bestows upon an attractive woman. Stella
+was no fool. She knew that she was attractive, and she knew why. She had
+been prepared to repulse, and there had been nothing to repulse. Once
+during Charlie's absence he had come in a rowboat, hailed her from the
+beach, and gone away without disembarking when she told him Benton was
+not back. He was something of an enigma, she confessed to herself, after
+all. Perhaps that was why he came so frequently into her mind. Or
+perhaps, she told herself, there was so little on Roaring Lake to think
+about that one could not escape the personal element. As if any one ever
+could. As if life were made up of anything but the impinging of one
+personality upon another. That was something Miss Stella Benton had yet
+to learn. She was still mired in the rampant egotism of untried youth,
+as yet the sublime individualist.
+
+That side of her suffered a distinct shock later in the evening. When
+supper was over, the work done, and the loggers' celebration was slowly
+subsiding in the bunkhouse, she told Charlie with blunt directness what
+she wanted to do. With equally blunt directness he declared that he
+would not permit it. Stella's teeth came together with an angry little
+click.
+
+"I'm of age, Charlie," she said to him. "It isn't for you to say what
+you will or will not _permit_ me to do. I want that money of mine that
+you used--and what I've earned. God knows I _have_ earned it. I can't
+stand this work, and I don't intend to. It isn't work; it's slavery."
+
+"But what can you do in town?" he countered. "You haven't the least idea
+what you'd be going up against, Stell. You've never been away from home,
+and you've never had the least training at anything useful. You'd be on
+your uppers in no time at all. You wouldn't have a ghost of a chance."
+
+"I have such a splendid chance here," she retorted ironically. "If I
+could get in any position where I'd be more likely to die of sheer
+stagnation, to say nothing of dirty drudgery, than in this forsaken
+hole, I'd like to know how. I don't think it's possible."
+
+"You could be a whole lot worse off, if you only knew it," Benton
+returned grumpily. "If you haven't got any sense about things, I have. I
+know what a rotten hole Vancouver or any other seaport town is for a
+girl alone. I won't let you make any foolish break like that. That's
+flat."
+
+From this position she failed to budge him. Once angered, partly by her
+expressed intention and partly by the outspoken protest against the
+mountain of work imposed on her, Charlie refused point-blank to give her
+either the ninety dollars he had taken out of her purse or the three
+months' wages due. Having made her request, and having met with this--to
+her--amazing refusal, Stella sat dumb. There was too fine a streak in
+her to break out in recrimination. She was too proud to cry.
+
+So that she went to bed in a ferment of helpless rage. Virtually she was
+a prisoner, as much so as if Charlie had kidnaped her and held her so by
+brute force. The economic restraint was all potent. Without money she
+could not even leave the camp. And when she contemplated the daily
+treadmill before her, she shuddered.
+
+At least she could go on strike. Her round cheek flushed with the
+bitterest anger she had ever known, she sat with eyes burning into the
+dark of her sordid room, and vowed that the thirty loggers should die of
+slow starvation if they did not eat until she cooked another meal for
+them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+JACK FYFE'S CAMP
+
+She was still hot with the spirit of mutiny when morning came, but she
+cooked breakfast. It was not in her to act like a petulant child.
+Morning also brought a different aspect to things, for Charlie told her
+while he helped prepare breakfast that he was going to take his crew and
+repay in labor the help Jack Fyfe had given him.
+
+"While we're there, Jack's cook will feed all hands," said he. "And by
+the time we're through there, I'll have things fixed so it won't be such
+hard going for you here. Do you want to go along to Jack's camp?"
+
+"No," she answered shortly. "I don't. I would much prefer to get away
+from this lake altogether, as I told you last night."
+
+"You might as well forget that notion," he said stubbornly. "I've got a
+little pride in the matter. I don't want my sister drudging at the only
+kind of work she'd be able to earn a living at."
+
+"You're perfectly willing to have me drudge here," she flashed back.
+
+"That's different," he defended. "And it's only temporary. I'll be
+making real money before long. You'll get your share if you'll have a
+little patience and put your shoulder to the wheel. Lord, I'm doing the
+best I can."
+
+"Yes--for yourself," she returned. "You don't seem to consider that I'm
+entitled to as much fair play as you'd have to accord one of your men. I
+don't want you to hand me an easy living on a silver salver. All I want
+of you is what is mine, and the privilege of using my own judgment. I'm
+quite capable of taking care of myself."
+
+If there had been opportunity to enlarge on that theme, they might have
+come to another verbal clash. But Benton never lost sight of his primary
+object. The getting of breakfast and putting his men about their work
+promptly was of more importance to him than Stella's grievance. So the
+incipient storm dwindled to a sullen mood on her part. Breakfast over,
+Benton loaded men and tools aboard a scow hitched beside the boat. He
+repeated his invitation, and Stella refused, with a sarcastic reflection
+on the company she would be compelled to keep there.
+
+The _Chickamin_ with her tow drew off, and she was alone again.
+
+"Marooned once more," Stella said to herself when the little steamboat
+slipped behind the first jutting point. "Oh, if I could just be a man
+for a while."
+
+Marooned seemed to her the appropriate term. There were the two old
+Siwashes and their dark-skinned brood. But they were little more to
+Stella than the insentient boulders that strewed the beach. She could
+not talk to them or they to her. Long since she had been surfeited with
+Katy John. If there were any primitive virtues in that dusky maiden they
+were well buried under the white man's schooling. Katy's demand upon
+life was very simple and in marked contrast to Stella Benton's. Plenty
+of grub, no work, some cheap finery, and a man white or red, no matter,
+to make eyes at. Her horizon was bounded by Roaring Lake and the mission
+at Skookumchuck. She was therefore no mitigation of Stella's loneliness.
+
+Nevertheless Stella resigned herself to make the best of it, and it
+proved a poor best. She could not detach herself sufficiently from the
+sordid realities to lose herself in day-dreaming. There was not a book
+in the camp save some ten-cent sensations she found in the bunkhouse,
+and these she had exhausted during Charlie's first absence. The uncommon
+stillness of the camp oppressed her more than ever. Even the bluejays
+and squirrels seemed to sense its abandonment, seemed to take her as
+part of the inanimate fixtures, for they frisked and chattered about
+with uncommon fearlessness. The lake lay dead gray, glassy as some great
+irregular window in the crust of the earth. Only at rare intervals did
+sail or smoke dot its surface, and then far offshore. The woods stood
+breathless in the autumn sun. It was like being entombed. And there
+would be a long stretch of it, with only a recurrence of that deadly
+grind of kitchen work when the loggers came home again.
+
+Some time during the next forenoon she went southerly along the lake
+shore on foot without object or destination, merely to satisfy in some
+measure the restless craving for action. Colorful turns of life, the
+more or less engrossing contact of various personalities, some new thing
+to be done, seen, admired, discussed, had been a part of her existence
+ever since she could remember. None of this touched her now. A dead
+weight of monotony rode her hard. There was the furtive wild life of the
+forest, the light of sun and sky, and the banked green of the forest
+that masked the steep granite slopes. She appreciated beauty, craved it
+indeed, but she could not satisfy her being with scenic effects alone.
+She craved, without being wholly aware of it, or altogether admitting it
+to herself, some human distraction in all that majestic solitude.
+
+It was forthcoming. When she returned to camp at two o'clock, driven in
+by hunger, Jack Fyfe sat on the doorstep.
+
+"How-de-do. I've come to bring you over to my place," he announced quite
+casually.
+
+"Thanks. I've already declined one pressing invitation to that effect,"
+Stella returned drily. His matter-of-fact assurance rather nettled her.
+
+"A woman always has the privilege of changing her mind," Fyfe smiled.
+"Charlie is going to be at my camp for at least three weeks. It'll rain
+soon, and the days'll be pretty gray and dreary and lonesome. You might
+as well pack your war-bag and come along."
+
+She stood uncertainly. Her tongue held ready a blunt refusal, but she
+did not utter it; and she did not know why. She did have a glimpse of
+the futility of refusing, only she did not admit that refusal might be
+of no weight in the matter. With her mind running indignantly against
+compulsion, nevertheless her muscles involuntarily moved to obey. It
+irritated her further that she should feel in the least constrained to
+obey the calmly expressed wish of this quiet-spoken woodsman. Certain
+possible phases of a lengthy sojourn in Jack Fyfe's camp shot across her
+mind. He seemed of uncanny perception, for he answered this thought
+before it was clearly formed.
+
+"Oh, you'll be properly chaperoned, and you won't have to mix with the
+crew," he drawled. "I've got all kinds of room. My boss logger's wife is
+up from town for a while. She's a fine, motherly old party, and she
+keeps us all in order."
+
+"I haven't had any lunch," she temporized. "Have you?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"I rowed over here before twelve. Thought I'd get you back to camp in
+time for dinner. You know," he said with a twinkle in his blue eyes, "a
+logger never eats anything but a meal. A lunch to us is a snack that you
+put in your pocket. I guess we lack tone out here. We haven't got past
+the breakfast-dinner-supper stage yet; too busy making the country fit
+to live in."
+
+"You have a tremendous job in hand," she observed.
+
+"Oh, maybe," he laughed. "All in the way you look at it. Suits some of
+us. Well, if we get to my camp before three, the cook might feed us.
+Come on. You'll get to hating yourself if you stay here alone till
+Charlie's through."
+
+Why not? Thus she parleyed with herself, one half of her minded to stand
+upon her dignity, the other part of her urging acquiescence in his wish
+that was almost a command. She was tempted to refuse just to see what he
+would do, but she reconsidered that. Without any logical foundation for
+the feeling, she was shy of pitting her will against Jack Fyfe's.
+Hitherto quite sure of herself, schooled in self-possession, it was a
+new and disturbing experience to come in contact with that subtle,
+analysis-defying quality which carries the possessor thereof straight to
+his or her goal over all opposition, which indeed many times stifles all
+opposition. Force of character, overmastering personality, emanation of
+sheer will, she could not say in what terms it should be described.
+Whatever it was, Jack Fyfe had it. It existed, a factor to be reckoned
+with when one dealt with him. For within twenty minutes she had packed a
+suitcase full of clothes and was embarked in his rowboat.
+
+He sent the lightly built craft easily through the water with regular,
+effortless strokes. Stella sat in the stern, facing him. Out past the
+north horn of the bay, she broke the silence that had fallen between
+them.
+
+"Why did you make a point of coming for me?" she asked bluntly.
+
+Fyfe rested on his oars a moment, looking at her in his direct,
+unembarrassed way.
+
+"I wintered once on the Stickine," he said. "My partner pulled out
+before Christmas and never came back. It was the first time I'd ever
+been alone in my life. I wasn't a much older hand in the country than
+you are. Four months without hearing the sound of a human voice. Stark
+alone. I got so I talked to myself out loud before spring. So I
+thought--well, I thought I'd come and bring you over to see Mrs. Howe."
+
+Stella sat gazing at the slow moving panorama of the lake shore, her
+chin in her hand.
+
+"Thank you," she said at last, and very gently.
+
+Fyfe looked at her a minute or more, a queer, half-amused expression
+creeping into his eyes.
+
+"Well," he said finally, "I might as well tell the whole truth. I've
+been thinking about you quite a lot lately, Miss Stella Benton, or I
+wouldn't have thought about you getting lonesome."
+
+He smiled ever so faintly, a mere movement of the corners of his mouth,
+at the pink flush which rose quickly in her cheeks, and then resumed his
+steady pull at the oars.
+
+Except for a greater number of board shacks and a larger area of stump
+and top-littered waste immediately behind it, Fyfe's headquarters,
+outwardly, at least, differed little from her brother's camp. Jack led
+her to a long, log structure with a shingle roof, which from its more
+substantial appearance she judged to be his personal domicile. A plump,
+smiling woman of forty greeted her on the threshold. Once within, Stella
+perceived that there was in fact considerable difference in Mr. Fyfe's
+habitation. There was a great stone fireplace, before which big
+easy-chairs invited restful lounging. The floor was overlaid with thick
+rugs which deadened her footfalls. With no pretense of ornamental
+decoration, the room held an air of homely comfort.
+
+"Come in here and lay off your things," Mrs. Howe beamed on her. "If
+I'd 'a' known you were livin' so close, we'd have been acquainted a week
+ago; though I ain't got rightly settled here myself. My land, these men
+are such clams. I never knowed till this mornin' there was any white
+woman at this end of the lake besides myself."
+
+She showed Stella into a bedroom. It boasted an enamel washstand with
+taps which yielded hot and cold water, neatly curtained windows, and a
+deep-seated Morris chair. Certainly Fyfe's household accommodation was
+far superior to Charlie Benton's. Stella expected the man's home to be
+rough and ready like himself, and in a measure it was, but a comfortable
+sort of rough and readiness. She took off her hat and had a critical
+survey of herself in a mirror, after which she had just time to brush
+her hair before answering Mrs. Howe's call to a "cup of tea."
+
+The cup of tea resolved itself into a well-cooked and well-served meal,
+with china and linen and other unexpected table accessories which
+agreeably surprised, her. Inevitably she made comparisons, somewhat
+tinctured with natural envy. If Charlie would fix his place with a few
+such household luxuries, life in their camp would be more nearly
+bearable, despite the long hours of disagreeable work. As it was--well,
+the unrelieved discomforts were beginning to warp her out-look on
+everything.
+
+Fyfe maintained his habitual sparsity of words while they ate the food
+Mrs. Howe brought on a tray hot from the cook's outlying domain. When
+they finished, he rose, took up his hat and helped himself to a handful
+of cigars from a box on the fireplace mantel.
+
+"I guess you'll be able to put in the time, all right," he remarked.
+"Make yourself at home. If you take a notion to read, there's a lot of
+books and magazines in my room. Mrs. Howe'll show you."
+
+He walked out. Stella was conscious of a distinct relief when he was
+gone. She had somehow experienced a recurrence of that peculiar feeling
+of needing to be on her guard, as if there were some curious, latent
+antagonism between them. She puzzled over that a little. She had never
+felt that way about Paul Abbey, for instance, or indeed toward any man
+she had ever known. Fyfe's more or less ambiguous remark in the boat had
+helped to arouse it again. His manner of saying that he had "thought a
+lot about her" conveyed more than the mere words. She could quite
+conceive of the Jack Fyfe type carrying things with a high hand where a
+woman was concerned. He had that reputation in all his other dealings.
+He was aggressive. He could drink any logger in the big firs off his
+feet. He had an uncanny luck at cards. Somehow or other in every
+undertaking Jack Fyfe always came out on top, so the tale ran. There
+must be, she reasoned, a wide streak of the brute in such a man. It was
+no gratification to her vanity to have him admire her. It did not dawn
+upon her that so far she had never got over being a little afraid of
+him, much less to ask herself why she should be afraid of him.
+
+But she did not spend much time puzzling over Jack Fyfe. Once out of her
+sight she forgot him. It was balm to her lonely soul to have some one
+of her own sex for company. What Mrs. Howe lacked in the higher culture
+she made up in homely perception and unassuming kindliness. Her husband
+was Fyfe's foreman. She herself was not a permanent fixture in the camp.
+They had a cottage at Roaring Springs, where she spent most of the time,
+so that their three children could be in school.
+
+"I was up here all through vacation," she told Stella. "But Lefty he got
+to howlin' about bein' left alone shortly after school started again, so
+I got my sister to look after the kids for a spell, while I stay. I'll
+be goin' down about the time Mr. Benton's through here."
+
+Stella eventually went out to take a look around the camp. A hard-beaten
+path led off toward where rose the distant sounds of logging work, the
+ponderous crash of trees, and the puff of the donkeys. She followed that
+a little way and presently came to a knoll some three hundred yards
+above the beach. There she paused to look and wonder curiously.
+
+For the crest of this little hillock had been cleared and graded level
+and planted to grass over an area four hundred feet square. It was
+trimmed like a lawn, and in the center of this vivid green block stood
+an unfinished house foundation of gray stone. No stick of timber, no
+board or any material for further building lay in sight. The thing stood
+as if that were to be all. And it was not a new undertaking temporarily
+delayed. There was moss creeping over the thick stone wall, she
+discovered when she walked over it. Whoever had laid that foundation had
+done it many a moon before. Yet the sward about was kept as if a
+gardener had it in charge.
+
+A noble stretch of lake and mountain spread out before her gaze.
+Straight across the lake two deep clefts in the eastern range opened on
+the water, five miles apart. She could see the white ribbon of foaming
+cascades in each. Between lifted a great mountain, and on the lakeward
+slope of this stood a terrible scar of a slide, yellow and brown, rising
+two thousand feet from the shore. A vaporous wisp of cloud hung along
+the top of the slide, and above this aërial banner a snow-capped
+pinnacle thrust itself high into the infinite blue.
+
+"What an outlook," she said, barely conscious that she spoke aloud. "Why
+do these people build their houses in the bush, when they could live in
+the open and have something like this to look at. They would, if they
+had any sense of beauty."
+
+"Sure they haven't? Some of them might have, you know, without being
+able to gratify it."
+
+She started, to find Jack Fyfe almost at her elbow, the gleam of a
+quizzical smile lighting his face.
+
+"I daresay that might be true," she admitted.
+
+Fyfe's gaze turned from her to the huge sweep of lake and mountain
+chain. She saw that he was outfitted for fishing, creel on his shoulder,
+unjointed rod in one hand. By means of his rubber-soled waders he had
+come upon her noiselessly.
+
+"It's truer than you think, maybe," he said at length. "You don't want
+to come along and take a lesson in catching rainbows, I suppose?"
+
+"Not this time, thanks," she shook her head.
+
+"I want to get enough for supper, so I'd better be at it," he remarked.
+"Sometimes they come pretty slow. If you should want to go up and watch
+the boys work, that trail will take you there."
+
+He went off across the grassy level and plunged into the deep timber
+that rose like a wall beyond. Stella looked after.
+
+"It is certainly odd," she reflected with some irritation, "how that man
+affects me. I don't think a woman could ever be just friends with him.
+She'd either like him a lot or dislike him intensely. He isn't anything
+but a logger, and yet he has a presence like one of the lords of
+creation. Funny."
+
+Then she went back to the house to converse upon domestic matters with
+Mrs. Howe until the shrilling of the donkey whistle brought forty-odd
+lumberjacks swinging down the trail.
+
+Behind them a little way came Jack Fyfe with sagging creel. He did not
+stop to exhibit his catch, but half an hour later they were served hot
+and crisp at the table in the big living room, where Fyfe, Stella and
+Charlie Benton, Lefty Howe and his wife, sat down together.
+
+A flunkey from the camp kitchen served the meal and cleared it away. For
+an hour or two after that the three men sat about in shirt-sleeved ease,
+puffing at Jack Fyfe's cigars. Then Benton excused himself and went to
+bed. When Howe and his wife retired, Stella did likewise. The long
+twilight had dwindled to a misty patch of light sky in the northwest,
+and she fell asleep more at ease than she had been for weeks. Sitting in
+Jack Fyfe's living room through that evening she had begun to formulate
+a philosophy to fit her enforced environment--to live for the day only,
+and avoid thought of the future until there loomed on the horizon some
+prospect of a future worth thinking about. The present looked passable
+enough, she thought, if she kept her mind strictly on it alone.
+
+And with that idea to guide her, she found the days slide by smoothly.
+She got on famously with Mrs. Howe, finding that woman full of virtues
+unsuspected in her type. Charlie was in his element. His prospects
+looked so rosy that they led him into egotistic outlines of what he
+intended to accomplish. To him the future meant logs in the water, big
+holdings of timber, a growing bank account. Beyond that,--what all his
+concentrated effort should lead to save more logs and more timber,--he
+did not seem to go. Judged by his talk, that was the ultimate, economic
+power,--money and more money. More and more as Stella listened to him,
+she became aware that he was following in his father's footsteps; save
+that he aimed at greater heights and that he worked by different
+methods, juggling with natural resources where their father had merely
+juggled with prices and tokens of product, their end was the same--not
+to create or build up, but to grasp, to acquire. That was the game. To
+get and to hold for their own use and benefit and to look upon men and
+things, in so far as they were of use, as pawns in the game.
+
+She wondered sometimes if that were a characteristic of all men, if that
+were the big motif in the lives of such men as Paul Abbey and Jack
+Fyfe, for instance; if everything else, save the struggle of getting and
+keeping money, resolved itself into purely incidental phases of their
+existence? For herself she considered that wealth, or the getting of
+wealth, was only a means to an end.
+
+Just what that end might be she found a little vague, rather hard to
+define in exact terms. It embraced personal leisure and the good things
+of life as a matter of course, a broader existence, a large-handed
+generosity toward the less fortunate, an intellectual elevation entirely
+unrelated to gross material things. Life, she told herself pensively,
+ought to mean something more than ease and good clothes, but what more
+she was chary of putting into concrete form. It hadn't meant much more
+than that for her, so far. She was only beginning to recognize the
+flinty facts of existence. She saw now that for her there lay open only
+two paths to food and clothing: one in which, lacking all training, she
+must earn her bread by daily toil, the other leading to marriage. That,
+she would have admitted, was a woman's natural destiny, but one didn't
+pick a husband or lover as one chose a gown or a hat. One went along
+living, and the thing happened. Chance ruled there, she believed. The
+morality of her class prevented her from prying into this question of
+mating with anything like critical consideration. It was only to be
+thought about sentimentally, and it was easy for her to so think. Within
+her sound and vigorous body all the heritage of natural human impulses
+bubbled warmly, but she recognized neither their source nor their
+ultimate fruits.
+
+Often when Charlie was holding forth in his accustomed vein, she
+wondered what Jack Fyfe thought about it, what he masked behind his
+brief sentences or slow smile. Latterly her feeling about him, that
+involuntary bracing and stiffening of herself against his personality,
+left her. Fyfe seemed to be more or less self-conscious of her presence
+as a guest in his house. His manner toward her remained always casual,
+as if she were a man, and there was no question of sex attraction or
+masculine reaction to it between them. She liked him better for that;
+and she did admire his wonderful strength, the tremendous power invested
+in his magnificent body, just as she would have admired a tiger, without
+caring to fondle the beast.
+
+Altogether she spent a tolerably pleasant three weeks. Autumn's gorgeous
+paintbrush laid wonderful coloring upon the maple and alder and birch
+that lined the lake shore. The fall run of the salmon was on, and every
+stream was packed with the silver horde, threshing through shoal and
+rapid to reach the spawning ground before they died. Off every creek
+mouth and all along the lake the seal followed to prey on the salmon,
+and sea-trout and lakers alike swarmed to the spawning beds to feed upon
+the roe. The days shortened. Sometimes a fine rain would drizzle for
+hours on end, and when it would clear, the saw-toothed ranges flanking
+the lake would stand out all freshly robed in white,--a mantle that
+crept lower on the fir-clad slopes after each storm. The winds that
+whistled off those heights nipped sharply.
+
+Early in October Charlie Benton had squared his neighborly account with
+Jack Fyfe. With crew and equipment he moved home, to begin work anew on
+his own limit.
+
+Katy John and her people came back from the salmon fishing. Jim Renfrew,
+still walking with a pronounced limp, returned from the hospital.
+Charlie wheedled Stella into taking up the cookhouse burden again.
+Stella consented; in truth she could do nothing else. Charlie spent a
+little of his contract profits in piping water to the kitchen, in a few
+things to brighten up and make more comfortable their own quarters.
+
+"Just as soon as I can put another boom over the rapids, Stell," he
+promised, "I'll put a cook on the job. I've got to sail a little close
+for a while. With this crew I ought to put a million feet in the water
+in six weeks. Then I'll be over the hump, and you can take it easy. But
+till then--"
+
+"Till then I may as well make myself useful," Stella interrupted
+caustically.
+
+"Well, why not?" Benton demanded impatiently. "Nobody around here works
+any harder than I do."
+
+And there the matter rested.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+ONE WAY OUT
+
+That was a winter of big snow. November opened with rain. Day after day
+the sun hid his face behind massed, spitting clouds. Morning, noon, and
+night the eaves of the shacks dripped steadily, the gaunt limbs of the
+hardwoods were a line of coursing drops, and through all the vast
+reaches of fir and cedar the patter of rain kept up a dreary monotone.
+Whenever the mist that blew like rolling smoke along the mountains
+lifted for a brief hour, there, creeping steadily downward, lay the
+banked white.
+
+Rain or shine, the work drove on. From the peep of day till dusk
+shrouded the woods, Benton's donkey puffed and groaned, axes thudded,
+the thin, twanging whine of the saws rose. Log after log slid down the
+chute to float behind the boomsticks; and at night the loggers trooped
+home, soaked to the skin, to hang their steaming mackinaws around the
+bunkhouse stove. When they gathered in the mess-room they filled it with
+the odor of sweaty bodies and profane grumbling about the weather.
+
+Early in December Benton sent out a big boom of logs with a hired
+stern-wheeler that was no more than out of Roaring Lake before the snow
+came. The sleety blasts of a cold afternoon turned to great, moist
+flakes by dark, eddying thick out of a windless night. At daybreak it
+lay a foot deep and snowing hard. Thenceforth there was no surcease. The
+white, feathery stuff piled up and piled up, hour upon hour and day
+after day, as if the deluge had come again. It stood at the cabin eaves
+before the break came, six feet on the level. With the end of the storm
+came a bright, cold sky and frost,--not the bitter frost of the high
+latitudes, but a nipping cold that held off the melting rains and laid a
+thin scum of ice on every patch of still water.
+
+Necessarily, all work ceased. The donkey was a shapeless mound of white,
+all the lines and gear buried deep. A man could neither walk on that
+yielding mass nor wallow through it. The logging crew hailed the
+enforced rest with open relief. Benton grumbled. And then, with the
+hours hanging heavy on his hands, he began to spend more and more of his
+time in the bunkhouse with the "boys," particularly in the long
+evenings.
+
+Stella wondered what pleasure he found in their company, but she never
+asked him, nor did she devote very much thought to the matter. There was
+but small cessation in her labors, and that only because six or eight of
+the men drew their pay and went out. Benton managed to hold the others
+against the thaw that might open up the woods in twenty-four hours, but
+the smaller size of the gang only helped a little, and did not assist
+her mentally at all. All the old resentment against the indignity of her
+position rose and smoldered. To her the days were full enough of things
+that she was terribly weary of doing over and over, endlessly. She was
+always tired. No matter that she did, in a measure, harden to her work,
+grow callously accustomed to rising early and working late. Always her
+feet were sore at night, aching intolerably. Hot food, sharp knives, and
+a glowing stove played havoc with her hands. Always she rose in the
+morning heavy-eyed and stiff-muscled. Youth and natural vigor alone kept
+her from breaking down, and to cap the strain of toil, she was soul-sick
+with the isolation. For she was isolated; there was not a human being in
+the camp, Katy John included, with whom she exchanged two dozen words a
+day.
+
+Before the snow put a stop to logging, Jack Fyfe dropped in once a week
+or so. When work shut down, he came oftener, but he never singled Stella
+out for any particular attention. Once he surprised her sitting with her
+elbows on the kitchen table, her face buried in her palms. She looked up
+at his quiet entrance, and her face must have given him his cue. He
+leaned a little toward her.
+
+"How long do you think you can stand it?" he asked gently.
+
+"God knows," she answered, surprised into speaking the thought that lay
+uppermost in her mind, surprised beyond measure that Be should read that
+thought.
+
+He stood looking down at her for a second or two. His lips parted, but
+he closed them again over whatever rose to his tongue and passed
+silently through the dining room and into the bunkhouse, where Benton
+had preceded him a matter of ten minutes.
+
+It lacked a week of Christmas. That day three of Benton's men had gone
+in the _Chickamin_ to Roaring Springs for supplies. They had returned in
+mid-afternoon, and Stella guessed by the new note of hilarity in the
+bunkhouse that part of the supplies had been liquid. This had happened
+more than once since the big snow closed in. She remembered Charlie's
+fury at the logger who started Matt the cook on his spree, and she
+wondered at this relaxation, but it was not in her province, and she
+made no comment.
+
+Jack Fyfe stayed to supper that evening. Neither he nor Charlie came
+back to Benton's quarters when the meal was finished. While she stacked
+up the dishes, Katy John observed:
+
+"Goodness sakes, Miss Benton, them fellers was fresh at supper. They was
+half-drunk, some of them. I bet they'll be half a dozen fights before
+mornin'."
+
+Stella passed that over in silence, with a mental turning up of her
+nose. It was something she could neither defend nor excuse. It was a
+disgusting state of affairs, but nothing she could change. She kept
+harking back to it, though, when she was in her own quarters, and Katy
+John had vanished for the night into her little room off the kitchen.
+Tired as she was, she remained wakeful, uneasy. Over in the bunkhouse
+disturbing sounds welled now and then into the cold, still
+night,--incoherent snatches of song, voices uproariously raised, bursts
+of laughter. Once, as she looked out the door, thinking she heard
+footsteps crunching in the snow, some one rapped out a coarse oath that
+drove her back with burning face.
+
+As the evening wore late, she began to grow uneasily curious to know in
+what manner Charlie and Jack Fyfe were lending countenance to this minor
+riot, if they were even participating in it. Eleven o'clock passed, and
+still there rose in the bunkhouse that unabated hum of voices.
+
+Suddenly there rose a brief clamor. In the dead silence that followed,
+she heard a thud and the clinking smash of breaking glass, a panted
+oath, sounds of struggle.
+
+Stella slipped on a pair of her brother's gum boots and an overcoat, and
+ran out on the path beaten from their cabin to the shore. It led past
+the bunkhouse, and on that side opened two uncurtained windows, yellow
+squares that struck gleaming on the snow. The panes of one were broken
+now, sharp fragments standing like saw teeth in the wooden sash.
+
+She stole warily near and looked in. Two men were being held apart; one
+by three of his fellows, the other _by_ Jack Fyfe alone. Fyfe grinned
+mildly, talking to the men in a quiet, pacific tone.
+
+"Now you know that was nothing to scrap about," she heard him say,
+"You're both full of fighting whisky, but a bunkhouse isn't any place to
+fight. Wait till morning. If you've still got it in your systems, go
+outside and have it out. But you shouldn't disturb our game and break up
+the furniture. Be gentlemen, drunk or sober. Better shake hands and call
+it square."
+
+"Aw, let 'em go to it, if they want to."
+
+Charlie's voice, drink-thickened, harsh, came from a earner of the room
+into which she could not see until she moved nearer. By the time she
+picked him out, Fyfe resumed his seat at the table where three others
+and Benton waited with cards in their hands, red and white chips and
+money stacked before them.
+
+She knew enough of cards to realize that a stiff poker game was on the
+board when she had watched one hand dealt and played. It angered her,
+not from any ethical motive, but because of her brother's part in it. He
+had no funds to pay a cook's wages, yet he could afford to lose on one
+hand as much as he credited her with for a month's work. She could slave
+at the kitchen job day in and day out to save him forty-five dollars a
+month. He could lose that without the flicker of an eyelash, but he
+couldn't pay her wages on demand. Also she saw that he had imbibed too
+freely, if the redness of his face and the glassy fixedness of his eyes
+could be read aright.
+
+"Pig!" she muttered. "If that's his idea of pleasure. Oh, well, why
+should I care? I don't, so far as he's concerned, if I could just get
+away from this beast of a place myself."
+
+Abreast of her a logger came to the broken window with a sack to bar out
+the frosty air. And Stella, realizing suddenly that she was shivering
+with the cold, ran back to the cabin and got into her bed.
+
+But she did not sleep, save in uneasy periods of dozing, until midnight
+was long past. Then Fyfe and her brother came in, and by the sounds she
+gathered that Fyfe was putting Charlie to bed. She heard his deep,
+drawly voice urging the unwisdom of sleeping with calked boots on, and
+Beaton's hiccupy response. The rest of the night she slept fitfully,
+morbidly imagining terrible things. She was afraid, that was the sum
+and substance of it. Over in the bunkhouse the carousal was still at its
+height. She could not rid herself of the sight of those two men
+struggling to be at each other like wild beasts, the bloody face of the
+one who had been struck, the coarse animalism of the whole
+whisky-saturated gang. It repelled and disgusted and frightened her.
+
+The night frosts had crept through the single board walls of Stella's
+room and made its temperature akin to outdoors when the alarm wakened
+her at six in the morning. She shivered as she dressed. Katy John was
+blissfully devoid of any responsibility, for seldom did Katy rise first
+to light the kitchen fire. Yet Stella resented less each day's bleak
+beginning than she did the enforced necessity of the situation; the fact
+that she was enduring these things practically under compulsion was what
+galled.
+
+A cutting wind struck her icily as she crossed the few steps of open
+between cabin and kitchen. Above no cloud floated, no harbinger of
+melting rain. The cold stars twinkled over snow-blurred forest, struck
+tiny gleams from stumps that were now white-capped pillars. A night
+swell from the outside waters beat, its melancholy dirge on the frozen
+beach. And, as she always did at that hushed hour before dawn, she
+experienced a physical shrinking from those grim solitudes in which
+there was nothing warm and human and kindly, nothing but vastness of
+space upon which silence lay like a smothering blanket, in which she,
+the human atom, was utterly negligible, a protesting mote in the
+inexorable wilderness. She knew this to be merely a state of mind, but
+situated as she was, it bore upon her with all the force of reality. She
+felt like a prisoner who above all things desired some mode of escape.
+
+A light burned in the kitchen. She thanked her stars that this bitter
+cold morning she would not have to build a fire with freezing fingers
+while her teeth chattered, and she hurried in to the warmth heralded by
+a spark-belching stovepipe. But the Siwash girl had not risen to the
+occasion. Instead, Jack Fyfe sat with his feet on the oven door, a cigar
+in one corner of his mouth. The kettle steamed. Her porridge pot bubbled
+ready for the meal.
+
+"Good morning," he greeted. "Mind my preempting your job?"
+
+"Not at all," she answered. "You can have it for keeps if you want."
+
+"No, thanks," he smiled. "I'm sour on my own cooking. Had to eat too
+much of it in times gone by. I wouldn't be stoking up here either, only
+I got frozen out. Charlie's spare bed hasn't enough blankets for me
+these cold nights."
+
+He drew his chair aside to be out of the way as she hurried about her
+breakfast preparations. All the time she was conscious that his eyes
+were on her, and also that in them lurked an expression of keen
+interest. His freckled mask of a face gave no clue to his thoughts; it
+never did, so far as she had ever observed. Fyfe had a gambler's
+immobility of countenance. He chucked the butt of his cigar in the stove
+and sat with hands clasped over one knee for some time after Katy John
+appeared and began setting the dining room table with a great clatter
+of dishes.
+
+He arose to his feet then. Stella stood beside the stove, frying bacon.
+A logger opened the door and walked in. He had been one to fare ill in
+the night's hilarity, for a discolored patch encircled one eye, and his
+lips were split and badly swollen. He carried a tin basin.
+
+"Kin I get some hot water?" he asked.
+
+Stella silently indicated the reservoir at one end of the range. The man
+ladled his basin full. The fumes of whisky, the unpleasant odor of his
+breath offended her, and she drew back. Fyfe looked at her as the man
+went out.
+
+"What?" he asked.
+
+She had muttered something, an impatient exclamation of disgust. The
+man's appearance disagreeably reminded her of the scene she had observed
+through the bunkhouse window. It stung her to think that her brother was
+fast putting himself on a par with them--without their valid excuse of
+type and training.
+
+"Oh, nothing," she said wearily, and turned to the sputtering bacon.
+
+Fyfe put his foot up on the stove front and drummed a tattoo on his
+mackinaw clad knee.
+
+"Aren't you getting pretty sick of this sort of work, these more or less
+uncomfortable surroundings, and the sort of people you have to come in
+contact with?" he asked pointedly.
+
+"I am," she returned as bluntly, "but I think that's rather an
+impertinent question, Mr. Fyfe."
+
+He passed imperturbably over this reproof, and his glance turned
+briefly toward the dining room. Katy John was still noisily at work.
+
+"You hate it," he said positively. "I know you do. I've seen your
+feelings many a time. I don't blame you. It's a rotten business for a
+girl with your tastes and bringing up. And I'm afraid you'll find it
+worse, if this snow stays long. I know what a logging camp is when work
+stops, and whisky creeps in, and the boss lets go his hold for the time
+being."
+
+"That may be true," she returned gloomily, "but I don't see why you
+should enumerate these disagreeable things for my benefit."
+
+"I'm going to show you a way out," he said softly. "I've been thinking
+it over for quite a while. I want you to marry me."
+
+Stella gasped.
+
+"Mr. Fyfe."
+
+"Listen," he said peremptorily, leaning closer to her and lowering his
+voice. "I have an idea that you're going to say you don't love me. Lord,
+_I_ know that. But you _hate_ this. It grates against every inclination
+of yours like a file on steel. I wouldn't jar on you like that. I
+wouldn't permit you to live in surroundings that would. That's the
+material side of it. Nobody can live on day dreams. I like you, Stella
+Benton, a whole lot more than I'd care to say right out loud. You and I
+together could make a home we'd be proud of. I want you, and you want to
+get away from this. It's natural. Marry me and play the game fair, and I
+don't think you'll be sorry. I'm putting it as baldly as I can. You
+stand to win everything with nothing to lose--but your domestic
+chains--" the gleam of a smile lit up his features for a second. "Won't
+you take a chance?" "No," she declared impulsively. "I won't be a party
+to any such cold-blooded transaction."
+
+"You don't seem to understand me," he said soberly. "I don't want to
+hand out any sentiment, but it makes me sore to see you wasting yourself
+on this sort of thing. If you must do it, why don't you do it for
+somebody who'll make it worth while? If you'd use the brains God gave
+you, you know that lots of couples have married on flimsier grounds than
+we'd have. How can a man and a woman really know anything about each
+other till they've lived together? Just because we don't marry with our
+heads in the fog is no reason we shouldn't get on fine. What are you
+going to do? Stick here at this till you go crazy? You won't get away.
+You don't realize what a one-idea, determined person this brother of
+yours is. He has just one object in life, and he'll use everything and
+everybody in sight to attain that object. He means to succeed and he
+will. You're purely incidental; but he has that perverted, middle-class
+family pride that will make him prevent you from getting out and trying
+your own wings. Nature never intended a woman like you to be a celibate,
+any more than I was so intended. And sooner or late you'll marry
+somebody--if only to hop out of the fire into the frying pan."
+
+"I hate you," she flashed passionately, "when you talk like that."
+
+"No, you don't," he returned quietly. "You hate what I say, because
+it's the truth--and it's humiliating to be helpless. You think I don't
+_sabe?_ But I'm putting a weapon into your hand. Let's put it
+differently; leave out the sentiment for a minute. We'll say that I want
+a housekeeper, preferably an ornamental one, because I like beautiful
+things. You want to get away from this drudgery. That's what it is,
+simple drudgery. You crave lots of things you can't get by yourself, but
+that you could help me get for you. There's things lacking in your life,
+and so is there in mine. Why shouldn't we go partners? You think about
+it."
+
+"I don't need to," she answered coolly. "It wouldn't work. You don't
+appear to have any idea what it means for a woman to give herself up
+body and soul to a man she doesn't care for. For me it would be plain
+selling myself. I haven't the least affection for you personally. I
+might even detest you."
+
+"You wouldn't," he said positively.
+
+"What makes you so sure of that?" she demanded.
+
+"It would sound conceited if I told you why," he drawled. "Listen. We're
+not gods and goddesses, we human beings. We're not, after all, in our
+real impulses, so much different from the age when a man took his club
+and went after a female that looked good to him. They mated, and raised
+their young, and very likely faced on an average fewer problems than
+arise in modern marriages supposedly ordained in Heaven. You'd have the
+one big problem solved,--the lack of means to live decently,--which
+wrecks more homes than anything else, far more than lack of love.
+Affection doesn't seem to thrive on poverty. What is love?"
+
+His voice took on a challenging note.
+
+Stella shook her head. He puzzled her, wholly serious one minute, a
+whimsical smile twisting up the corners of his mouth the next. And he
+surprised her too by his sureness of utterance on subjects she had not
+supposed would enter such a man's mind.
+
+"I don't know," she answered absently, turning over strips of bacon with
+the long-handled fork.
+
+"There you are," he said. "I don't know either. We'd start even, then,
+for the sake of argument. No, I guess we wouldn't either, because you're
+the only woman I've run across so far with whom I could calmly
+contemplate spending the rest of my life in close contact. That's a
+fact. To me it's a highly important fact. You don't happen to have any
+such feeling about me, eh?"
+
+"No. I hadn't even thought of you in that way," Stella answered
+truthfully.
+
+"You want to think about me," he said calmly. "You want to think about
+me from every possible angle, because I'm going to come back and ask you
+this same question every once in a while, so long as you're in reach and
+doing this dirty work for a thankless boss. You want to think of me as a
+possible refuge from a lot of disagreeable things. I'd like to have you
+to chum with, and I'd like to have some incentive to put a big white
+bungalow on that old foundation for us two," he smiled. "I'll never do
+it for myself alone. Go on. Take a gambling chance and marry me, Stella.
+Say yes, and say it now."
+
+But she shook her head resolutely, and as Katy John came in just then,
+Fyfe took his foot off the stove and went out of the kitchen. He threw a
+glance over his shoulder at Stella, a broad smile, as if to say that he
+harbored no grudge, and nursed no wound in his vanity because she would
+have none of him.
+
+Katy rang the breakfast gong. Five minutes later the tattoo of knives
+and forks and spoons told of appetites in process of appeasement.
+Charlie came into the kitchen in the midst of this, bearing certain
+unmistakable signs. His eyes were inflamed, his cheeks still bearing the
+flush of liquor. His demeanor was that of a man suffering an intolerable
+headache and correspondingly short-tempered. Stella barely spoke to him.
+It was bad enough for a man to make a beast of himself with whisky, but
+far worse was his gambling streak. There were so many little ways in
+which she could have eased things with a few dollars; yet he always
+grumbled when she spoke of money, always put her off with promises to be
+redeemed when business got better.
+
+Stella watched him bathe his head copiously in cold water and then seat
+himself at the long table, trying to force food upon an aggrieved and
+rebellious stomach. Gradually a flood of recklessness welled up in her
+breast.
+
+"For two pins I would marry Jack Fyfe," she told herself savagely.
+"_Anything_ would be better than this."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+THE PLUNGE
+
+Stella went over that queer debate a good many times in the ten days
+that followed. It revealed Jack Fyfe to her in a new, inexplicable
+light, at odd variance with her former conception of the man. She could
+not have visualized him standing with one foot on the stove front
+speaking calmly of love and marriage if she had not seen him with her
+own eyes, heard him with somewhat incredulous ears. She had continued to
+endow him with the attributes of unrestrained passion, of headlong
+leaping to the goal of his desires, of brushing aside obstacles and
+opposition with sheer brute force; and he had shown unreckoned qualities
+of restraint, of understanding. She was not quite sure if this were
+guile or sensible consideration. He had put his case logically,
+persuasively even. She was very sure that if he had adopted emotional
+methods, she would have been repelled. If he had laid siege to her hand
+and heart in the orthodox fashion, she would have raised that siege in
+short order. As it stood, in spite of her words to him, there was in her
+own mind a lack of finality. As she went about her daily tasks, that
+prospect of trying a fresh fling at the world as Jack Fyfe's wife
+tantalized her with certain desirable features.
+
+Was it worth while to play the game as she must play it for some time
+to come, drudge away at mean, sordid work and amid the dreariest sort of
+environment? At best, she could only get away from Charlie's camp and
+begin along new lines that might perhaps be little better, that must
+inevitably lie among strangers in a strange land. To what end? What did
+she want of life, anyway? She had to admit that she could not say fully
+and explicitly what she wanted. When she left out her material wants,
+there was nothing but a nebulous craving for--what? Love, she assumed.
+And she could not define love, except as some incomprehensible transport
+of emotion which irresistibly drew a man and a woman together, a divine
+fire kindled in two hearts. It was not a thing she could vouch for by
+personal experience. It might never touch and warm her, that divine
+fire. Instinct did now and then warn her that some time it would wrap
+her like a flame. But in the meantime--Life had her in midstream of its
+remorseless, drab current, sweeping her along. A foothold offered. Half
+a loaf, a single slice of bread even, is better than none.
+
+Jack Fyfe did not happen in again for nearly two weeks and then only to
+pay a brief call, but he stole an opportunity, when Katy John was not
+looking, to whisper in Stella's ear:
+
+"Have you been thinking about that bungalow of ours?"
+
+She shook her head, and he went out quietly, without another word. He
+neither pleaded nor urged, and perhaps that was wisest, for in spite of
+herself Stella thought of him continually. He loomed always before her,
+a persistent, compelling factor.
+
+She knew at last, beyond any gainsaying, that the venture tempted,
+largely perhaps because it contained so great an element of the unknown.
+To get away from this soul-dwarfing round meant much. She felt herself
+reasoning desperately that the frying pan could not be worse than the
+fire, and held at least the merit of greater dignity and freedom from
+the twin evils of poverty and thankless domestic slavery.
+
+While she considered this, pro and con, shrinking from such a step one
+hour, considering it soberly the next, the days dragged past in
+wearisome sequence. The great depth of snow endured, was added to by
+spasmodic flurries. The frosts held. The camp seethed with the
+restlessness of the men. In default of the daily work that consumed
+their superfluous energy, the loggers argued and fought, drank and
+gambled, made "rough house" in their sleeping quarters till sometimes
+Stella's cheeks blanched and she expected murder to be done. Twice the
+_Chickamin_ came back from Roaring Springs with whisky aboard, and a
+protracted debauch ensued. Once a drunken logger shouldered his way into
+the kitchen to leer unpleasantly at Stella, and, himself inflamed by
+liquor and the affront, Charlie Benton beat the man until his face was a
+mass of bloody bruises. That was only one of a dozen brutal incidents.
+All the routine discipline of the woods seemed to have slipped out of
+Benton's hands. When the second whisky consignment struck the camp,
+Stella stayed in her room, refusing to cook until order reigned again.
+Benton grumblingly took up the burden himself. With Katy's help and that
+of sundry loggers, he fed the roistering crew, but for his sister it was
+a two-day period of protesting disgust.
+
+That mood, like so many of her moods, relapsed into dogged endurance.
+She took up the work again when Charlie promised that no more whisky
+should be allowed in the camp.
+
+"Though it's ten to one I won't have a corporal's guard left when I want
+to start work again," he grumbled. "I'm well within my rights if I put
+my foot down hard on any jinks when there's work, but I have no license
+to set myself up as guardian of a logger's morals and pocketbook when I
+have nothing for him to do. These fellows are paying their board. So
+long as they don't make themselves obnoxious to you, I don't see that
+it's our funeral whether they're drunk or sober. They'd tell me so quick
+enough."
+
+To this pronouncement of expediency Stella made no rejoinder. She no
+longer expected anything much of Charlie, in the way of consideration.
+So far as she could see, she, his sister, was little more to him than
+one of his loggers; a little less important than, say, his donkey
+engineer. In so far as she conduced to the well-being of the camp and
+effected a saving to his credit in the matter of preparing food, he
+valued her and was willing to concede a minor point to satisfy her.
+Beyond that Stella felt that he did not go. Five years in totally
+different environments had dug a great gulf between them. He felt an
+arbitrary sense of duty toward her, she knew, but in its manifestations
+it never lapped over the bounds of his own immediate self-interest.
+
+And so when she blundered upon knowledge of a state of affairs which
+must have existed under her very nose for some time, there were few
+remnants of sisterly affection to bid her seek extenuating
+circumstances.
+
+Katy John proved the final straw. Just by what means Stella grew to
+suspect any such moral lapse on Benton's part is wholly irrelevant. Once
+the unpleasant likelihood came to her notice, she took measures to
+verify her suspicion, and when convinced she taxed her brother with it,
+to his utter confusion.
+
+"What kind of a man are you?" she cried at last in shamed anger. "Is
+there nothing too low for you to dabble in? Haven't you any respect for
+anything or anybody, yourself included?"
+
+"Oh, don't talk like a damned Puritan," Benton growled, though his
+tanned face was burning. "This is what comes of having women around the
+camp. I'll send the girl away."
+
+"You--you beast!" she flared--and ran out of the kitchen to seek refuge
+in her own room and cry into her pillow some of the dumb protest that
+surged up within her. For her knowledge of passion and the workings of
+passion as they bore upon the relations of a man and a woman were at
+once vague and tinctured with inflexible tenets of morality, the
+steel-hard conception of virtue which is the bulwark of middle-class
+theory for its wives and daughters and sisters--with an eye consistently
+blind to the concealed lapses of its men.
+
+Stella Benton passed that morning through successive stages of shocked
+amazement, of pity, and disgust. As between her brother and the Siwash
+girl, she saw little to choose. From her virtuous pinnacle she abhorred
+both. If she had to continue intimate living with them, she felt that
+she would be utterly defiled, degraded to their level. That was her
+first definite conclusion.
+
+After a time she heard Benton come into their living room and light a
+fire in the heater. She dried her eyes and went out to face him.
+
+"Charlie," she declared desperately, "I can't stay here any longer. It's
+simply impossible."
+
+"Don't start that song again. We've had it often enough," he answered
+stubbornly. "You're not going--not till spring. I'm not going to let you
+go in the frame of mind you're in right now, anyhow. You'll get over
+that. Hang it, I'm not the first man whose foot slipped. It isn't your
+funeral, anyway. Forget it."
+
+The grumbling coarseness of this retort left her speechless. Benton got
+the fire going and went out. She saw him cross to the kitchen, and later
+she saw Katy John leave the camp with all her belongings in a bundle
+over her shoulder, trudging away to the camp of her people around the
+point.
+
+Kipling's pregnant line shot across her mind:
+
+"For the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skins."
+
+"I wonder," she mused. "I wonder if we are? I wonder if that poor,
+little, brown-skinned fool isn't after all as much a victim as I am. She
+doesn't know better, maybe; but Charlie does, and he doesn't seem to
+care. It merely embarrasses him to be found out, that's all. It isn't
+right. It isn't fair, or decent, or anything. We're just for him to--to
+use."
+
+She looked out along the shores piled high with broken ice and snow,
+through a misty air to distant mountains that lifted themselves
+imperiously aloof, white spires against the sky,--over a forest all
+draped in winter robes; shore, mountains, and forest alike were chill
+and hushed and desolate. The lake spread its forty-odd miles in a
+boomerang curve from Roaring Springs to Fort Douglas, a cold, lifeless
+gray. She sat a long time looking at that, and a dead weight seemed to
+settle upon her heart. For the second time that day she broke down. Not
+the shamed, indignant weeping of an hour earlier, but with the essence
+of all things forlorn and desolate in her choked sobs.
+
+She did not hear Jack Fyfe come in. She did not dream he was there,
+until she felt his hand gently on her shoulder and looked up. And so
+deep was her despondency, so keen the unassuaged craving for some human
+sympathy, some measure of understanding, that she made no effort to
+remove his hand. She was in too deep a spiritual quagmire to refuse any
+sort of aid, too deeply moved to indulge in analytical self-fathoming.
+She had a dim sense of being oddly comforted by his presence, as if she,
+afloat on uncharted seas, saw suddenly near at hand a safe anchorage and
+welcoming hands. Afterward she recalled that. As it was, she looked up
+at Fyfe and hid her wet face in her hands again. He stood silent a few
+seconds. When he did speak there was a peculiar hesitation in his
+voice.
+
+"What is it?" he said softly. "What's the trouble now?"
+
+Briefly she told him, the barriers of her habitual reserve swept aside
+before the essentially human need to share a burden that has grown too
+great to bear alone.
+
+"Oh, hell," Fyfe grunted, when she had finished. "This isn't any place
+for you at all."
+
+He slid his arm across her shoulders and tilted her face with his other
+hand so that her eyes met his. And she felt no desire to draw away or
+any of that old instinct to be on her guard against him. For all she
+knew--indeed, by all she had been told--Jack Fyfe was tarred with the
+same stick as her brother, but she had no thought of resisting him, no
+feeling of repulsion.
+
+"Will you marry me, Stella?" he asked evenly. "I can free you from this
+sort of thing forever."
+
+"How can I?" she returned. "I don't want to marry anybody. I don't love
+you. I'm not even sure I like you. I'm too miserable to think, even. I'm
+afraid to take a step like that. I should think you would be too."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"I've thought a lot about it lately," he said. "It hasn't occurred to me
+to be afraid of how it may turn out. Why borrow trouble when there's
+plenty at hand? I don't care whether you love me or not, right now. You
+couldn't possibly be any worse off as my wife, could you?"
+
+"No," she admitted. "I don't see how I could."
+
+"Take a chance then," he urged. "I'll make a fair bargain with you. I'll
+make life as pleasant for you as I can. You'll live pretty much as
+you've been brought up to live, so far as money goes. The rest we'll
+have to work out for ourselves. I won't ask you to pretend anything you
+don't feel. You'll play fair, because that's the way you're
+made,--unless I've sized you up wrong. It'll simply be a case of our
+adjusting ourselves, just as mating couples have been doing since the
+year one. You've everything to gain and nothing to lose."
+
+"In some ways," she murmured.
+
+"Every way," he insisted. "You aren't handicapped by caring for any
+other man."
+
+"How do you know?" she asked.
+
+"Just a hunch," Fyfe smiled. "If you did, he'd have beaten me to the
+rescue long ago--if he were the sort of man you _could_ care for."
+
+"No," she admitted. "There isn't any other man, but there might be.
+Think how terrible it would be if it happened--afterward."
+
+Fyfe shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Sufficient unto the day," he said. "There is no string on either of us
+just now. We start even. That's good enough. Will you?"
+
+"You have me at a disadvantage," she whispered. "You offer me a lot that
+I want, everything but a feeling I've somehow always believed ought to
+exist, ought to be mutual. Part of me wants to shut my eyes and jump.
+Part of me wants to hang back. I can't stand this thing I've got into
+and see no way of getting out of. Yet I dread starting a new train of
+wretchedness. I'm afraid--whichever way I turn."
+
+Fyfe considered this a moment.
+
+"Well," he said finally, "that's a rather unfortunate attitude. But I'm
+going into it with my eyes open. I know what I want. You'll be making a
+sort of experiment. Still, I advise you to make it. I think you'll be
+the better for making it. Come on. Say yes."
+
+Stella looked up at him, then out over the banked snow, and all the
+dreary discomforts, the mean drudgery, the sordid shifts she had been
+put to for months rose up in disheartening phalanx. For that moment Jack
+Fyfe loomed like a tower of refuge. She trusted him now. She had a
+feeling that even if she grew to dislike him, she would still trust him.
+He would play fair. If he said he would do this or that, she could bank
+on it absolutely.
+
+She turned and looked at him searchingly a long half-minute, wondering
+what really lay behind the blue eyes that met her own so steadfastly. He
+stood waiting patiently, outwardly impassive. But she could feel through
+the thin stuff of her dress a quiver in the fingers that rested on her
+shoulder, and that repressed sign of the man's pent-up feeling gave her
+an odd thrill, moved her strangely, swung the pendulum of her impulse.
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+Fyfe bent a little lower.
+
+"Listen," he said in characteristically blunt fashion. "You want to get
+away from here. There is no sense in our fussing or hesitating about
+what we're going to do, is there?"
+
+"No, I suppose not," she agreed.
+
+"I'll send the _Panther_ down to the Springs for Lefty Howe's wife," he
+outlined his plans unhesitatingly. "She'll get up here this evening.
+To-morrow we will go down and take the train to Vancouver and be
+married. You have plenty of good clothes, good enough for Vancouver. I
+know,"--with a whimsical smile,--"because you had no chance to wear them
+out. Then we'll go somewhere, California, Florida, and come back to
+Roaring Lake in the spring. You'll have all the bad taste of this out of
+your mouth by that time."
+
+Stella nodded acquiescence. Better to make the plunge boldly, since she
+had elected to make it.
+
+"All right. I'm going to tell Benton," Fyfe said. "Good-by till
+to-morrow."
+
+She stood up. He looked at her a long time earnestly, searchingly, one
+of her hands imprisoned tight between his two big palms. Then, before
+she was quite aware of his intention, he kissed her gently on the mouth,
+and was gone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This turn of events left Benton dumbfounded, to use a trite but
+expressive phrase. He came in, apparently to look at Stella in amazed
+curiosity, for at first he had nothing to say. He sat down beside his
+makeshift desk and pawed over some papers, running the fingers of one
+hand through his thick brown hair.
+
+"Well, Sis," he blurted out at last. "I suppose you know what you're
+doing?"
+
+"I think so," Stella returned composedly.
+
+"But why all this mad haste?" he asked. "If you're going to get married,
+why didn't you let me know, so I could give you some sort of decent
+send-off."
+
+"Oh, thanks," she returned dryly. "I don't think that's necessary. Not
+at this stage of the game, as you occasionally remark."
+
+He ruminated upon this a minute, flushing slightly.
+
+"Well, I wish you luck," he said sincerely enough. "Though I can hardly
+realize this sudden move. You and Jack Fyfe may get on all right. He's a
+good sort--in his way."
+
+"His way suits me," she said, spurred to the defensive by what she
+deemed a note of disparagement in his utterance. "If you have any
+objections or criticisms, you can save your breath--or address them
+direct to Mr. Fyfe."
+
+"No, thank you," he grinned. "I don't care to get into any argument with
+_him_, especially as he's going to be my brother-in-law. Fyfe's all
+right. I didn't imagine he was the sort of man you'd fancy, that's all."
+
+Stella refrained from any comment on this. She had no intention of
+admitting to Charlie that marriage with Jack Fyfe commended itself to
+her chiefly as an avenue of escape from a well-nigh intolerable
+condition which he himself had inflicted upon her. Her pride rose in
+arms against any such belittling admission. She admitted it frankly to
+herself,--and to Fyfe,--because Fyfe understood and was content with
+that understanding. She desired to forget that phase of the
+transaction. She told herself that she meant honestly to make the best
+of it.
+
+Benton turned again to his papers. He did not broach the subject again
+until in the distance the squat hull of the _Panther_ began to show on
+her return from the Springs. Then he came to where Stella was putting
+the last of her things into her trunk. He had some banknotes in one
+hand, and a check.
+
+"Here's that ninety I borrowed, Stell," he said. "And a check for your
+back pay. Things have been sort of lean around here, maybe, but I still
+think it's a pity you couldn't have stuck it out till it came smoother.
+I hate to see you going away with a chronic grouch against me. I suppose
+I wouldn't even be a welcome guest at the wedding?"
+
+"No," she said unforgivingly. "Some things are a little too--too
+recent."
+
+"Oh," he replied casually enough, pausing in the doorway a second on his
+way out, "you'll get over that. You'll find that ordinary, everyday
+living isn't any kid-glove affair."
+
+She sat on the closed lid of her trunk, looking at the check and money.
+Three hundred and sixty dollars, all told. A month ago that would have
+spelled freedom, a chance to try her luck in less desolate fields. Well,
+she tried to consider the thing philosophically; it was no use to bewail
+what might have been. In her hands now lay the sinews of a war she had
+forgone all need of waging. It did not occur to her to repudiate her
+bargain with Jack Fyfe. She had given her promise, and she considered
+she was bound, irrevocably. Indeed, for the moment, she was glad of
+that. She was worn out, all weary with unaccustomed stress of body and
+mind. To her, just then, rest seemed the sweetest boon in the world. Any
+port in a storm, expressed her mood. What came after was to be met as it
+came. She was too tired to anticipate.
+
+It was a pale, weary-eyed young woman, dressed in the same plain
+tailored suit she had worn into the country, who was cuddled to Mrs.
+Howe's plump bosom when she went aboard the _Panther_ for the first
+stage of her journey.
+
+A slaty bank of cloud spread a somber film across the sky. When the
+_Panther_ laid her ice-sheathed guard-rail against the Hot Springs wharf
+the sun was down. The lake spread gray and lifeless under a gray sky,
+and Stella Benton's spirits were steeped in that same dour color.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED
+
+Spring had waved her transforming wand over the lake region before the
+Fyfes came home again. All the low ground, the creeks and hollows and
+banks, were bright green with new-leaved birch and alder and maple. The
+air was full of those aromatic exudations the forest throws off when it
+is in the full tide of the growing time. Shores that Stella had last
+seen dismal and forlorn in the frost-fog, sheathed in ice, banked with
+deep snow, lay sparkling now in warm sunshine, under an unflecked arch
+of blue. All that was left of winter was the white cap on Mount Douglas,
+snow-filled chasms on distant, rocky peaks. Stella stood on the Hot
+Springs wharf looking out across the emerald deep of the lake, thinking
+soberly of the contrast.
+
+Something, she reflected, some part of that desolate winter, must have
+seeped to the very roots of her being to produce the state of mind in
+which she embarked upon that matrimonial voyage. A little of it clung to
+her still. She could look back at those months of loneliness, of
+immeasurable toil and numberless indignities, without any qualms. There
+would be no repetition of that. The world at large would say she had
+done well. She herself in her most cynical moments could not deny that
+she had done well. Materially, life promised to be generous. She was
+married to a man who quietly but inexorably got what he wanted, and it
+was her good fortune that he wanted her to have the best of everything.
+
+She saw him now coming from the hotel, and she regarded him
+thoughtfully, a powerful figure swinging along with light, effortless
+steps. He was back on his own ground, openly glad to be back. Yet she
+could not recall that he had ever shown himself at a disadvantage
+anywhere they had been together. He wore evening clothes when occasion
+required as unconcernedly as he wore mackinaws and calked boots among
+his loggers. She had not yet determined whether his equable poise arose
+from an unequivocal democracy of spirit, or from sheer egotism. At any
+rate, where she had set out with subtle misgivings, she had to admit
+that socially, at least, Jack Fyfe could play his hand at any turn of
+the game. Where or how he came by this faculty, she did not know. In
+fact, so far as Jack Fyfe's breeding and antecedents were concerned, she
+knew little more than before their marriage. He was not given to
+reminiscence. His people--distant relatives--lived in her own native
+state of Pennsylvania. He had an only sister who was now in South
+America with her husband, a civil engineer. Beyond that Fyfe did not go,
+and Stella made no attempt to pry up the lid of his past. She was not
+particularly curious.
+
+Her clearest judgment of him was at first hand. He was a big, virile
+type of man, generous, considerate, so sure of himself that he could be
+tolerant of others. She could easily understand why Roaring Lake
+considered Jack Fyfe "square." The other tales of him that circulated
+there she doubted now. The fighting type he certainly was, aggressive in
+a clash, but if there were any downright coarseness in him, it had never
+manifested itself to her. She was not sorry she had married him. If they
+had not set out blind in a fog of sentiment, as he had once put it,
+nevertheless they got on. She did not love him,--not as she defined that
+magic word,--but she liked him, was mildly proud of him. When he kissed
+her, if there were no mad thrill in it, there was at least a passive
+contentment in having inspired that affection. For he left her in no
+doubt as to where he stood, not by what he said, but wholly by his
+actions.
+
+He joined her now. The _Panther_, glossy black as a crow's wing with
+fresh paint, lay at the pier-end with their trunks aboard. Stella
+surveyed those marked with her initials, looking them over with a
+critical eye, when they reached the deck.
+
+"How in the world did I ever manage to accumulate so much stuff, Jack?"
+she asked quizzically. "I didn't realize it. We might have been doing
+Europe with souvenir collecting our principal aim, by the amount of our
+baggage."
+
+Fyfe smiled, without commenting. They sat on a trunk and watched Roaring
+Springs fall astern, dwindle to a line of white dots against the great
+green base of the mountain that rose behind it.
+
+"It's good to get back here," he said at last. "To me, anyway. How about
+it, Stella? You haven't got so much of a grievance with the world in
+general as you had when we left, eh?"
+
+"No, thank goodness," she responded fervently.
+
+"You don't look as if you had," he observed, his eyes admiringly upon
+her.
+
+Nor had she. There was a bloom on the soft contour of her cheek, a
+luminous gleam in her wide, gray eyes. All the ill wrought by months of
+drudging work and mental revolt had vanished. She was undeniably good to
+look at, a woman in full flower, round-bodied, deep-breasted, aglow with
+the unquenched fires of youth. She was aware that Jack Fyfe found her so
+and tolerably glad that he did so find her. She had revised a good many
+of her first groping estimates of him that winter. And when she looked
+over the port bow and saw in behind Halfway Point the huddled shacks of
+her brother's camp where so much had overtaken her, she experienced a
+swift rush of thankfulness that she was--as she was. She slid her gloved
+hand impulsively into Jack Fyfe's, and his strong fingers shut down on
+hers closely.
+
+They sat silent until the camp lay abeam. About it there was every sign
+of activity. A chunky stern-wheeler, with blow-off valve hissing, stood
+by a boom of logs in the bay, and men were moving back and forth across
+the swifters, making all ready for a tow. Stella marked a new bunkhouse.
+Away back on the logging ground in a greater clearing she saw the
+separate smoke of two donkey engines. Another, a big roader, Fyfe
+explained, puffed at the water's edge. She could see a string of logs
+tearing down the skid-road.
+
+"He's going pretty strong, that brother of yours," Fyfe remarked. "If
+he holds his gait, he'll be a big timberman before you know it."
+
+"He'll make money, I imagine," Stella admitted, "but I don't know what
+good that will do him. He'll only want more. What is there about
+money-making that warps some men so, makes them so grossly
+self-centered? I'd pity any girl who married Charlie. He used to be
+rather wild at home, but I never dreamed any man could change so."
+
+"You use the conventional measuring-stick on him," her husband answered,
+with that tolerance which so often surprised her. "Maybe his ways are
+pretty crude. But he's feverishly hewing a competence--which is what
+we're all after--out of pretty crude material. And he's just a kid,
+after all, with a kid's tendency to go to extremes now and then. I kinda
+like the beggar's ambition and energy."
+
+"But he hasn't the least consideration for anybody or anything," Stella
+protested. "He rides rough-shod over every one. That isn't either right
+or decent."
+
+"It's the only way some men can get to the top," Fyfe answered quietly.
+"They concentrate on the object to be attained. That's all that counts
+until they're in a secure position. Then, when they stop to draw their
+breath, sometimes they find they've done lots of things they wouldn't do
+again. You watch. By and by Charlie Benton will cease to have those
+violent reactions that offend you so. As it is--he's a youngster,
+bucking a big game. Life, when you have your own way to hew through it,
+with little besides your hands and brain for capital, is no silk-lined
+affair."
+
+She fell into thought over this reply. Fyfe had echoed almost her
+brother's last words to her. And she wondered if Jack Fyfe had attained
+that degree of economic power which enabled him to spend several
+thousand dollars on a winter's pleasuring with her by the exercise of a
+strong man's prerogative of overriding the weak, bending them to his own
+inflexible purposes, ruthlessly turning everything to his own advantage?
+If women came under the same head! She recalled Katy John, and her face
+burned. Perhaps. But she could not put Jack Fyfe in her brother's
+category. He didn't fit. Deep in her heart there still lurked an abiding
+resentment against Charlie Benton for the restraint he had put upon her
+and the license he had arrogated to himself. She could not convince
+herself that the lapses of that winter were not part and parcel of her
+brother's philosophy of life, a coarse and material philosophy.
+
+Presently they were drawing in to Cougar Point, with the
+weather-bleached buildings of Fyfe's camp showing now among the
+upspringing second-growth scrub. Fyfe went forward and spoke to the man
+at the wheel. The _Panther_ swung offshore.
+
+"Why are we going out again?" Stella asked.
+
+"Oh, just for fun," Fyfe smiled.
+
+He sat down beside her and slipped one arm around her waist. In a few
+minutes they cleared the point. Stella was looking away across the lake,
+at the deep cleft where Silver Creek split a mountain range in twain.
+
+"Look around," said he, "and tell me what you think of the House of
+Fyfe."
+
+There it stood, snow-white, broad-porched, a new house reared upon the
+old stone foundation she remembered. The noon sun struck flashing on the
+windows. About it spread the living green of the grassy square, behind
+that towered the massive, darker-hued background of the forest.
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed. "What wizard of construction did the work. _That_
+was why you fussed so long over those plans in Los Angeles. I thought it
+was to be this summer or maybe next winter. I never dreamed you were
+having it built right away."
+
+"Well, isn't it rather nice to come home to?" he observed.
+
+"It's dear. A homey looking place," she answered. "A beautiful site, and
+the house fits,--that white and the red tiles. Is the big stone
+fireplace in the living room, Jack?"
+
+"Yes, and one in pretty nearly every other room besides," he nodded.
+"Wood fires are cheerful."
+
+The _Panther_ turned her nose shoreward at Fyfe's word.
+
+"I wondered about that foundation the first time I saw it," Stella
+confessed, "whether you built it, and why it was never finished. There
+was moss over the stones in places. And that lawn wasn't made in a
+single season. I know, because dad had a country place once, and he was
+raging around two or three summers because the land was so hard to get
+well-grassed."
+
+"No, I didn't build the foundation or make the lawn," Fyfe told her. "I
+merely kept it in shape. A man named Hale owned the land that takes in
+the bay and the point when I first came to the lake. He was going to be
+married. I knew him pretty well. But it was tough going those days. He
+was in the hole on some of his timber, and he and his girl kept waiting.
+Meantime he cleared and graded that little hill, sowed it to grass, and
+laid the foundation. He was about to start building when he was killed.
+A falling tree caught him. I bought in his land and the timber limits
+that lie back of it. That's how the foundation came there."
+
+"It's a wonder it didn't grow up wild," Stella mused. "How long ago was
+that?"
+
+"About five years," Fyfe said. "I kept the grass trimmed. It didn't seem
+right to let the brush overrun it after the poor devil put that labor of
+love on it. It always seemed to me that it should be kept smooth and
+green, and that there should be a big, roomy bungalow there. You see my
+hunch was correct, too."
+
+She looked up at him in some wonder. She hadn't accustomed herself to
+associating Jack Fyfe with actions based on pure sentiment. He was too
+intensely masculine, solid, practical, impassive. He did not seem to
+realize even that sentiment had influenced him in this. He discussed it
+too matter-of-factly for that. She wondered what became of the
+bride-to-be. But that Fyfe could not tell her.
+
+"Hale showed me her picture once," he said, "but I never saw her. Oh, I
+suppose she's married some other fellow long ago. Hale was a good sort.
+He was out-lucked, that's all."
+
+The _Panther_ slid in to the float. Jack and Stella went ashore. Lefty
+Howe came down to meet them. Thirty-five or forty men were stringing
+away from the camp, back to their work in the woods. Some waved greeting
+to Jack Fyfe, and he waved back in the hail-fellow fashion of the camps.
+
+"How's the frau, Lefty?" he inquired, after they had shaken hands.
+
+"Fine. Down to Vancouver. Sister's sick," Howe answered laconically.
+"House's all shipshape. Wanta eat here, or up there?"
+
+"Here at the camp, until we get straightened around," Fyfe responded.
+"Tell Pollock to have something for us in about half an hour. We'll go
+up and take a look."
+
+Howe went in to convey this message, and the two set off up the path. A
+sudden spirit of impishness made Jack Fyfe sprint. Stella gathered up
+her skirt and raced after him, but a sudden shortness of breath overtook
+her, and she came panting to where Fyfe had stopped to wait.
+
+"You'll have to climb hills and row and swim so you'll get some wind,"
+Fyfe chuckled. "Too much easy living, lady."
+
+She smiled without making any reply to this sally, and they entered the
+house--the House of Fyfe, that was to be her home.
+
+If the exterior had pleased her, she went from room to room inside with
+growing amazement. Fyfe had finished it from basement to attic without a
+word to her that he had any such undertaking in hand. Yet there was
+scarcely a room in which she could not find the visible result of some
+expressed wish or desire. Often during the winter they had talked over
+the matter of furnishings, and she recalled how unconsciously she had
+been led to make suggestions which he had stored up and acted upon. For
+the rest she found her husband's taste beyond criticism. There were
+drapes and rugs and prints and odds and ends that any woman might be
+proud to have in her home.
+
+"You're an amazing sort of a man, Jack," she said thoughtfully. "Is
+there anything you're not up to? Even a Chinese servant in the kitchen.
+It's perfect."
+
+"I'm glad you like it," he said. "I hoped you would."
+
+"Who wouldn't?" she cried impulsively. "I love pretty things. Wait till
+I get done rearranging."
+
+They introduced themselves to the immobile-featured Celestial when they
+had jointly and severally inspected the house from top to bottom. Sam
+Foo gazed at them, listened to their account of themselves, and
+disappeared. He re-entered the room presently, bearing a package.
+
+"Mist' Chol' Bentlee him leave foh yo'."
+
+Stella looked at it. On the outer wrapping was written:
+
+    _From C.A. Benton to Mrs. John Henderson Fyfe_
+    _A Belated Wedding Gift_
+
+She cut the string, and delved into the cardboard box, and gasped. Out
+of a swathing of tissue paper her hands bared sundry small articles. A
+little cap and jacket of knitted silk--its double in fine, fleecy
+yarn--a long silk coat--a bonnet to match,--both daintily embroidered.
+Other things--a shoal of them--baby things. A grin struggled for
+lodgment on Fyfe's freckled countenance. His blue eyes twinkled.
+
+"I suppose," he growled, "that's Charlie's idea of a joke, huh?"
+
+Stella turned away from the tiny garments, one little, hood crumpled
+tight in her hand. She laid her hot face against his breast and her
+shoulders quivered. She was crying.
+
+"Stella, Stella, what's the matter?" he whispered.
+
+"It's no joke," she sobbed. "It's a--it's a reality."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+IN WHICH EVENTS MARK TIME
+
+From that day on Stella found in her hands the reins over a smooth,
+frictionless, well-ordered existence. Sam Foo proved himself such a
+domestic treasure as only the trained Oriental can be. When the labor of
+an eight-room dwelling proved a little too much for him, he urbanely
+said so. Thereupon, at Fyfe's suggestion, he imported a fellow
+countryman, another bland, silent-footed model of efficiency in personal
+service. Thereafter Stella's task of supervision proved a sinecure.
+
+A week or so after their return, in sorting over some of her belongings,
+she came across the check Charlie had given her: that two hundred and
+seventy dollars which represented the only money she had ever earned in
+her life. She studied it a minute, then went out to where her husband
+sat perched on the verandah rail.
+
+"You might cash this, Jack," she suggested.
+
+He glanced at the slip.
+
+"Better have it framed as a memento," he said, smiling. "You'll never
+earn two hundred odd dollars so hard again, I hope. No, I'd keep it, if
+I were you. If ever you should need it, it'll always be good--unless
+Charlie goes broke."
+
+There never had been any question of money between them. From the day
+of their marriage Fyfe had made her a definite monthly allowance, a
+greater sum than she needed or spent.
+
+"As a matter of fact," he went on, "I'm going to open an account in your
+name at the Royal Bank, so you can negotiate your own paper and pay your
+own bills by check."
+
+She went in and put away the check. It was hers, earned, all too
+literally, in the sweat of her brow. For all that it represented she had
+given service threefold. If ever there came a time when that hunger for
+independence which had been fanned to a flame in her brother's kitchen
+should demand appeasement--she pulled herself up short when she found
+her mind running upon such an eventuality. Her future was ordered. She
+was married--to be a mother. Here lay her home. All about her ties were
+in process of formation, ties that with time would grow stronger than
+any shackles of steel, constraining her to walk in certain ways,--ways
+that were pleasant enough, certain of ease if not of definite purpose.
+
+Yet now and then she found herself falling into fits of abstraction in
+which Roaring Lake and Jack Fyfe, all that meant anything to her now,
+faded into the background, and she saw herself playing a lone hand
+against the world, making her individual struggle to be something more
+than the petted companion of a dominant male and the mother of his
+children. She never quite lost sight of the fact that marriage had been
+the last resort, that in effect she had taken the avenue her personal
+charm afforded to escape drudgery and isolation. There was still
+deep-rooted in her a craving for something bigger than mere ease of
+living. She knew as well as she knew anything that in the natural
+evolution of things marriage and motherhood should have been the big
+thing in her life. And it was not. It was too incidental, too
+incomplete, too much like a mere breathing-place on life's highway.
+Sometimes she reasoned with herself bluntly, instead of dreaming, was
+driven to look facts in the eye because she did dream. Always she
+encountered the same obstacle, a feeling that she had been defrauded,
+robbed of something vital; she had forgone that wonderful, passionate
+drawing together which makes the separate lives of the man and woman who
+experiences it so fuse that in the truest sense of the word they become
+one.
+
+Mostly she kept her mind from that disturbing introspection, because
+invariably it led her to vague dreaming of a future which she told
+herself--sometimes wistfully--could never be realized. She had shut the
+door on many things, it seemed to her now. But she had the sense to know
+that dwelling on what might have been only served to make her morbid,
+and did not in the least serve to alter the unalterable. She had chosen
+what seemed to her at the time the least of two evils, and she meant to
+abide steadfast by her choice.
+
+Charlie Benton came to visit them. Strangely enough to Stella, who had
+never seen him on Roaring Lake, at least, dressed otherwise than as his
+loggers, he was sporting a natty gray suit, he was clean shaven, Oxford
+ties on his feet, a gentleman of leisure in his garb. If he had started
+on the down grade the previous winter, he bore no signs of it now, for
+he was the picture of ruddy vigor, clear-eyed, brown-skinned, alert,
+bubbling over with good spirits.
+
+"Why, say, you look like a tourist," Fyfe remarked after an appraising
+glance.
+
+"I'm making money, pulling ahead of the game, that's all," Benton
+retorted cheerfully. "I can afford to take a holiday now and then. I'm
+putting a million feet a month in the water. That's going some for small
+fry like me. Say, this house of yours is all to the good, Jack. It's got
+class, outside and in. Makes a man feel as if he had to live up to it,
+eh? Mackinaws and calked boots don't go with oriental rugs and oak
+floors."
+
+"You should get a place like this as soon as possible then," Stella put
+in drily, "to keep you up to the mark, on edge aesthetically, one might
+put it."
+
+"Not to say morally," Benton laughed. "Oh, maybe I'll get to it by and
+by, if the timber business holds up."
+
+Later, when he and Stella were alone together, he said to her:
+
+"You're lucky. You've got everything, and it comes without an effort.
+You sure showed good judgment when you picked Jack Fyfe. He's a
+thoroughbred."
+
+"Oh, thank you," she returned, a touch of irony in her voice, a subtlety
+of inflection that went clean over Charlie's head.
+
+He was full of inquiries about where they had been that winter, what
+they had done and seen. Also he brimmed over with his own affairs. He
+stayed overnight and went his way with a brotherly threat of making
+the Fyfe bungalow his headquarters whenever he felt like it.
+
+"It's a touch of civilization that looks good to me," he declared. "You
+can put my private mark on one of those big leather chairs, Jack. I'm
+going to use it often. All you need to make this a social center is a
+good-looking girl or two--unmarried ones. You watch. When the summer
+flock comes to the lake, your place is going to be popular."
+
+That observation verified Benton's shrewdness. The Fyfe bungalow did
+become popular. Two weeks after Charlie's visit, a lean, white cruiser,
+all brass and mahogany above her topsides, slid up to the float, and two
+women came at a dignified pace along the path to the house. Stella had
+met Linda Abbey once, reluctantly, under the circumstances, but it was
+different now--with the difference that money makes. She could play
+hostess against an effective background, and she did so graciously. Nor
+was her graciousness wholly assumed. After all, they were her kind of
+people: Linda, fair-haired, perfectly gowned, perfectly mannered,
+sweetly pretty; Mrs. Abbey, forty-odd and looking thirty-five, with that
+calm self-assurance which wealth and position confer upon those who hold
+it securely. Stella found them altogether to her liking. It pleased her,
+too, that Jack happened in to meet them. He was not a scintillating
+talker, yet she had noticed that when he had anything to say, he never
+failed to attract and hold attention. His quiet, impersonal manner never
+suggested stolidness. And she was too keen an observer to overlook the
+fact that from a purely physical standpoint Jack Fyfe made an
+impression always, particularly on women. Throughout that winter it had
+not disturbed her. It did not disturb her now, when she noticed Linda
+Abbey's gaze coming back to him with a veiled appraisal in her blue eyes
+that were so like Fyfe's own in their tendency to twinkle and gleam with
+no corresponding play of features.
+
+"We'll expect to see a good deal of you this summer," Mrs. Abbey said
+cordially at leave-taking. "We have a few people up from town now and
+then to vary the monotony of feasting our souls on scenery. Sometimes we
+are quite a jolly crowd. Don't be formal. Drop in when you feel the
+inclination."
+
+When Stella reminded Jack of this some time later, in a moment of
+boredom, he put the _Panther_ at her disposal for the afternoon. But he
+would not go himself. He had opened up a new outlying camp, and he had
+directions to issue, work to lay out.
+
+"You hold up the social end of the game," he laughed. "I'll hustle
+logs."
+
+So Stella invaded the Abbey-Monohan precincts by herself and enjoyed
+it--for she met a houseful of young people from the coast, and in that
+light-hearted company she forgot for the time being that she was married
+and the responsible mistress of a house. Paul Abbey was there, but he
+had apparently forgotten or forgiven the blow she had once dealt his
+vanity. Paul, she reflected, was not the sort to mourn a lost love long.
+
+She had the amused experience too of beholding Charlie Benton appear an
+hour or so before she departed and straightway monopolize Linda Abbey in
+his characteristically impetuous fashion. Charlie was no diplomat. He
+believed in driving straight to any goal he selected.
+
+"So _that's_ the reason for the outward metamorphosis," Stella
+reflected. "Well?"
+
+Altogether she enjoyed the afternoon hugely. The only fly in her
+ointment was a greasy smudge bestowed upon her dress--a garment she
+prized highly--by some cordage coiled on the _Panther's_ deck. The black
+tender had carried too many cargoes of loggers and logging supplies to
+be a fit conveyance for persons in party attire. She exhibited the
+soiled gown to Fyfe with due vexation.
+
+"I hope you'll have somebody scrub down the _Panther_ the next time I
+want to go anywhere in a decent dress," she said ruefully. "That'll
+never come out. And it's the prettiest thing I've got too."
+
+"Ah, what's the odds?" Fyfe slipped one arm around her waist. "You can
+buy more dresses. Did you have a good time? That's the thing!"
+
+That ruined gown, however, subsequently produced an able, forty-foot,
+cruising launch, powerfully engined, easy in a sea, and comfortably,
+even luxuriously fitted as to cabin. With that for their private use,
+the _Panther_ was left to her appointed service, and in the new boat
+Fyfe and Stella spent many a day abroad on Roaring Lake. They fished
+together, explored nooks and bays up and down its forty miles of length,
+climbed hills together like the bear of the ancient rhyme, to see what
+they could see. And the _Waterbug_ served to put them on intimate terms
+with their neighbors, particularly the Abbey crowd. The Abbeys took to
+them wholeheartedly. Fyfe himself was highly esteemed by the elder
+Abbey, largely, Stella suspected, for his power on Roaring Lake. Abbey
+_père_ had built up a big fortune out of timber. He respected any man
+who could follow the same path to success. Therefore he gave Fyfe double
+credit,--for making good, and for a personality that could not be
+overlooked. He told Stella that once; that is to say, he told her
+confidentially that her husband was a very "able" young man. Abbey
+senior was short and double-chinned and inclined to profuse perspiration
+if he moved in haste over any extended time. Paul promised to be like
+him, in that respect.
+
+Summer slipped by. There were dances, informal little hops at the Abbey
+domicile, return engagements at the Fyfe bungalow, laughter and music
+and Japanese lanterns strung across the lawn. There was tea and tennis
+and murmuring rivers of small talk. And amid this Stella Fyfe flitted
+graciously, esteeming it her world, a fair measure of what the future
+might be. Viewed in that light, it seemed passable enough.
+
+Later, when summer was on the wane, she withdrew from much of this
+activity, spending those days when she did not sit buried in a book out
+on the water with her husband. When October ushered in the first of the
+fall rains, they went to Vancouver and took apartments. In December her
+son was born.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+A CLOSE CALL AND A NEW ACQUAINTANCE
+
+With the recurrence of spring, Fyfe's household transferred itself to
+the Roaring Lake bungalow again. Stella found the change welcome, for
+Vancouver wearied her. It was a little too crude, too much as yet in the
+transitory stage, in that civic hobbledehoy period which overtakes every
+village that shoots up over-swiftly to a city's dimensions. They knew
+people, to be sure, for the Abbey influence would have opened the way
+for them into any circle. Stella had made many friends and pleasant
+acquaintances that summer on the lake, but part of that butterfly clique
+sought pleasanter winter grounds before she was fit for social activity.
+Apart from a few more or less formal receptions and an occasional
+auction party, she found it pleasanter to stay at home. Fyfe himself had
+spent only part of his time in town after their boy was born. He was
+extending his timber operations. What he did not put into words, but
+what Stella sensed because she experienced the same thing herself, was
+that town bored him to death,--such town existence as Vancouver
+afforded. Their first winter had been different, because they had sought
+places where there was manifold variety of life, color, amusement. She
+was longing for the wide reach of Roaring Lake, the immense
+amphitheater of the surrounding mountains, long before spring.
+
+So she was quite as well pleased when a mild April saw them domiciled at
+home again. In addition to Sam Foo and Feng Shu, there was a nurse for
+Jack Junior. Stella did not suggest that; Fyfe insisted on it. He was
+quite proud of his boy, but he did not want her chained to her baby.
+
+"If the added expense doesn't count, of course a nurse will mean a lot
+more personal freedom," Stella admitted. "You see, I haven't the least
+idea of your resources, Jack. All I know about it is that you allow me
+plenty of money for my individual expenses. And I notice we're acquiring
+a more expensive mode of living all the time."
+
+"That's so," Fyfe responded. "I never have gone into any details of my
+business with you. No reason why you shouldn't know what limits there
+are to our income. You never happened to express any curiosity before.
+Operating as I did up till lately, the business netted anywhere from
+twelve to fifteen thousand a year. I'll double that this season. In
+fact, with the amount of standing timber I control, I could make it
+fifty thousand a year by expanding and speeding things up. I guess you
+needn't worry about an extra servant or two."
+
+So, apart from voluntary service on behalf of Jack Junior, she was free
+as of old to order her days as she pleased. Yet that small morsel of
+humanity demanded much of her time, because she released through the
+maternal floodgates a part of that passionate longing to bestow love
+where her heart willed. Sometimes she took issue with herself over that
+wayward tendency. By all the rules of the game, she should have loved
+her husband. He was like a rock, solid, enduring, patient, kind, and
+generous. He stood to her in the most intimate relation that can exist
+between a man and a woman. But she never fooled herself; she never had
+so far as Jack Fyfe was concerned. She liked him, but that was all. He
+was good to her, and she was grateful.
+
+Sometimes she had a dim sense that under his easy-going exterior lurked
+a capacity for tremendously passionate outbreak. If she had been
+compelled to modify her first impression of him as an arrogant, dominant
+sort of character, scarcely less rough than the brown firs out of which
+he was hewing a fortune, she knew likewise that she had never seen
+anything but the sunny side of him. He still puzzled her a little at
+times; there were odd flashes of depths she could not see into, a
+quality of unexpectedness in things he would do and say. Even so,
+granting that in him was embodied so much that other men she knew
+lacked, she did not love him; there were indeed times when she almost
+resented him.
+
+Why, she could not perhaps have put into words. It seemed too fantastic
+for sober summing-up, when she tried. But lurking always in the
+background of her thoughts was the ghost of an unrealized dream, a
+nebulous vision which once served to thrill her in secret. It could
+never be anything but a vision, she believed now, and believing,
+regretted. The cold facts of her existence couldn't be daydreamed away.
+She was married, and marriage put a full stop to the potential
+adventuring of youth. Twenty and maidenhood lies at the opposite pole
+from twenty-four and matrimony. Stella subscribed to that. She took for
+her guiding-star--theoretically--the twin concepts of morality and duty
+as she had been taught to construe them. So she saw no loophole, and
+seeing none, felt cheated of something infinitely precious. Marriage and
+motherhood had not come to her as the fruits of love, as the
+passionately eager fulfilling of her destiny. It had been thrust upon
+her. She had accepted it as a last resort at a time when her powers of
+resistance to misfortune were at the ebb.
+
+She knew that this sort of self-communing was a bad thing, that it was
+bound to sour the whole taste of life in her mouth. As much as possible
+she thrust aside those vague, repressed longings. Materially she had
+everything. If she had foregone that bargain with Jack Fyfe, God only
+knew what long-drawn agony of mind and body circumstances and Charlie
+Benton's subordination of her to his own ends might have inflicted upon
+her. That was the reverse of her shield, but one that grew dimmer as
+time passed. Mostly, she took life as she found it, concentrating upon
+Jack Junior, a sturdy boy with blue eyes like his father, and who grew
+steadily more adorable.
+
+Nevertheless she had recurring periods when moodiness and ill-stifled
+discontent got hold of her. Sometimes she stole out along the cliffs to
+sit on a mossy boulder, staring with absent eyes at the distant hills.
+And sometimes she would slip out in a canoe, to lie rocking in the lake
+swell,--just dreaming, filled with a passive sort of regret. She could
+not change things now, but she could not help wishing she could.
+
+Fyfe warned her once about getting offshore in the canoe. Roaring Lake,
+pent in the shape of a boomerang between two mountain ranges, was
+subject to squalls. Sudden bursts of wind would shoot down its length
+like blasts from some monster funnel. Stella knew that; she had seen the
+glassy surface torn into whitecaps in ten minutes, but she was not
+afraid of the lake nor the lake winds. She was hard and strong. The
+open, the clean mountain air, and a measure of activity, had built her
+up physically. She swam like a seal. Out in that sixteen-foot Peterboro
+she could detach herself from her world of reality, lie back on a
+cushion, and lose herself staring at the sky. She paid little heed to
+Fyfe's warning beyond a smiling assurance that she had no intention of
+courting a watery end.
+
+So one day in mid-July she waved a farewell to Jack Junior, crowing in
+his nurse's lap on the bank, paddled out past the first point to the
+north, and pillowing her head on a cushioned thwart, gave herself up to
+dreamy contemplation on the sky. There was scarce a ripple on the lake.
+A faint breath of an offshore breeze fanned her, drifting the canoe at a
+snail's pace out from land. Stella luxuriated in the quiet afternoon. A
+party of campers cruising the lake had tarried at the bungalow till
+after midnight. Jack Fyfe had risen at dawn to depart for some distant
+logging point. Stella, once wakened, had risen and breakfasted with him.
+She was tired, drowsy, content to lie there in pure physical
+relaxation. Lying so, before she was aware of it, her eyes closed.
+
+She wakened with a start at a cold touch of moisture on her face,--rain,
+great pattering drops. Overhead an ominously black cloud hid the face of
+the sun. The shore, when she looked, lay a mile and a half abeam. To the
+north and between her and the land's rocky line was a darkening of the
+lake's surface. Stella reached for her paddle. The black cloud let fall
+long, gray streamers of rain. There was scarcely a stirring of the air,
+but that did not deceive her. There was a growing chill, and there was
+that broken line sweeping down the lake. Behind that was wind, a summer
+gale, the black squall dreaded by the Siwashes.
+
+She had to buck her way to shore through that. She drove hard on the
+paddle. She was not afraid, but there rose in her a peculiar tensed-up
+feeling. Ahead lay a ticklish bit of business. The sixteen-foot canoe
+dwarfed to pitiful dimensions in the face of that snarling line of
+wind-harried water. She could hear the distant murmur of it presently,
+and gusty puffs of wind began to strike her.
+
+Then it swept up to her, a ripple, a chop, and very close behind that
+the short, steep, lake combers with a wind that blew off the tops as
+each wave-head broke in white, bubbling froth. Immediately she began to
+lose ground. She had expected that, and it did not alarm her. If she
+could keep the canoe bow on, there was an even chance that the squall
+would blow itself out in half an hour. But keeping the canoe bow on
+proved a task for stout arms. The wind would catch all that forward
+part which thrust clear as she topped a sea and twist it aside, tending
+always to throw her broadside into the trough. Spray began to splash
+aboard. The seas were so short and steep that the Peterboro would rise
+over the crest of a tall one and dip its bow deep in the next, or leap
+clear to strike with a slap that made Stella's heart jump. She had never
+undergone quite that rough and tumble experience in a small craft. She
+was being beaten farther out and down the lake, and her arms were
+growing tired. Nor was there any slackening of the wind.
+
+The combined rain and slaps of spray soaked her thoroughly. A puddle
+gathered about her knees in the bilge, sloshing fore and aft as the
+craft pitched, killing the natural buoyancy of the canoe so that she
+dove harder. Stella took a chance, ceased paddling, and bailed with a
+small can. She got a tossing that made her head swim while she lay in
+the trough. And when she tried to head up into it again, one comber
+bigger than its fellows reared up and slapped a barrel of water inboard.
+The next wave swamped her.
+
+Sunk to the clamps, Stella held fast to the topsides, crouching on her
+knees, immersed to the hips in water that struck a chill through her
+flesh. She had the wit to remember and act upon Jack Fyfe's coaching,
+namely, to sit tight and hang on. No sea that ever ran can sink a canoe.
+Wood is buoyant. So long as she could hold on, the submerged craft would
+keep her head and shoulders above water. But it was numbing cold. Fed by
+glacial streams, Roaring Lake is icy in hottest midsummer.
+
+What with paddling and bailing and the excitement of the struggle,
+Stella had wasted no time gazing about for other boats. She knew that if
+any one at the camp saw her, rescue would be speedily effected. Now,
+holding fast and sitting quiet, she looked eagerly about as the swamped
+canoe rose loggily on each wave. Almost immediately she was heartened by
+seeing distinctly some sort of craft plunging through the blow. She had
+not long to wait after that, for the approaching launch was a lean-lined
+speeder, powerfully engined, and she was being forced. Stella supposed
+it was one of the Abbey runabouts. Even with her teeth chattering and
+numbness fastening itself upon her, she shivered at the chances the man
+was taking. It was no sea for a speed boat to smash into at thirty miles
+an hour. She saw it shoot off the top of one wave and disappear in a
+white burst of spray, slash through the next and bury itself deep again,
+flinging a foamy cloud far to port and starboard. Stella cried futilely
+to the man to slow down. She could hang on a long time yet, but her
+voice carried no distance.
+
+After that she had not long to wait. In four minutes the runabout was
+within a hundred yards, open exhausts cracking like a machine gun. And
+then the very thing she expected and dreaded came about. Every moment
+she expected to see him drive bows under and go down. Here and there at
+intervals uplifted a comber taller than its fellows, standing, just as
+it broke, like a green wall. Into one such hoary-headed sea the white
+boat now drove like a lance. Stella saw the spray leap like a cascade,
+saw the solid green curl deep over the forward deck and engine hatch
+and smash the low windshield. She heard the glass crack. Immediately the
+roaring exhausts died. Amid the whistle of the wind and the murmur of
+broken water, the launch staggered like a drunken man, lurched off into
+the trough, deep down by the head with the weight of water she had
+taken.
+
+The man in her stood up with hands cupped over his mouth.
+
+"Can you hang on a while longer?" he shouted. "Till I can get my boat
+bailed?"
+
+"I'm all right," she called back.
+
+She saw him heave up the engine hatch. For a minute or two he bailed
+rapidly. Then he spun the engine, without result. He straightened up at
+last, stood irresolute a second, peeled off his coat.
+
+The launch lay heavily in the trough. The canoe, rising and clinging on
+the crest of each wave, was carried forward a few feet at a time, taking
+the run of the sea faster than the disabled motorboat. So now only a
+hundred-odd feet separated them, but they could come no nearer, for the
+canoe was abeam and slowly drifting past.
+
+Stella saw the man stoop and stand up with a coil of line in his hand.
+Then she gasped, for he stepped on the coaming and plunged overboard in
+a beautiful, arching dive. A second later his head showed glistening
+above the gray water, and he swam toward her with a slow, overhand
+stroke. It seemed an age--although the actual time was brief
+enough--before he reached her. She saw then that there was method in
+his madness, for the line strung out behind him, fast to a cleat on the
+launch. He laid hold of the canoe and rested a few seconds, panting,
+smiling broadly at her.
+
+"Sorry that whopping wave put me out of commission," he said at last.
+"I'd have had you ashore by now. Hang on for a minute."
+
+He made the line fast to a thwart near the bow. Holding fast with one
+hand, he drew the swamped canoe up to the launch. In that continuous
+roll it was no easy task to get Stella aboard, but they managed it, and
+presently she sat shivering in the cockpit, watching the man spill the
+water out of the Peterboro till it rode buoyantly again. Then he went to
+work at his engine methodically, wiping dry the ignition terminals, all
+the various connections where moisture could effect a short circuit. At
+the end of a few minutes, he turned the starting crank. The multiple
+cylinders fired with a roar.
+
+He moved back behind the wrecked windshield where the steering gear
+stood.
+
+"Well, Miss Ship-wrecked Mariner," said he lightly, "where do you wish
+to be landed?"
+
+"Over there, if you please." Stella pointed to where the red roof of the
+bungalow stood out against the green. "I'm Mrs. Fyfe."
+
+"Ah!" said he. An expression of veiled surprise flashed across his face.
+"Another potential romance strangled at birth. You know, I hoped you
+were some local maiden before whom I could pose as a heroic rescuer.
+Such is life. Odd, too. Linda Abbey--I'm the Monohan tail to the Abbey
+business kite, you see--impressed me as pilot for a spin this afternoon
+and backed out at the last moment. I think she smelled this blow. So I
+went out for a ride by myself. I was glowering at that new house through
+a glass when I spied you out in the thick of it."
+
+He had the clutch in now, and the launch was cleaving the seas, even at
+half speed throwing out wide wings of spray. Some of this the wind
+brought across the cockpit. "Come up into this seat," Monohan commanded.
+"I don't suppose you can get any wetter, but if you put your feet
+through this bulkhead door, the heat from the engine will warm you. By
+Jove, you're fairly shivering."
+
+"It's lucky for me you happened along," Stella remarked, when she was
+ensconced behind the bulkhead. "I was getting so cold. I don't know how
+much longer I could have stood it."
+
+"Thank the good glasses that picked you out. You were only a speck on
+the water, you know, when I sighted you first."
+
+He kept silent after that. All his faculties were centered on the seas
+ahead which rolled up before the sharp cutwater of the launch. He was
+making time and still trying to avoid boarding seas. When a big one
+lifted ahead, he slowed down. He kept one hand on the throttle control,
+whistling under his breath disconnected snatches of song. Stella studied
+his profile, clean-cut as a cameo and wholly pleasing. He was almost as
+big-bodied as Jack Fyfe, and full four inches taller. The wet shirt
+clinging close to his body outlined well-knit shoulders, ropy-muscled
+arms. He could easily have posed for a Viking, so strikingly blond was
+he, with fair, curly hair. She judged that he might be around thirty,
+yet his face was altogether boyish.
+
+Sitting there beside him, shivering in her wet clothes, she found
+herself wondering what magnetic quality there could be about a man that
+focussed a woman's attention upon him whether she willed it or no. Why
+should she feel an oddly-disturbing thrill at the mere physical nearness
+of this fair-haired stranger? She did. There was no debating that. And
+she wondered--wondered if a bolt of that lightning she had dreaded ever
+since her marriage was about to strike her now. She hoped not. All her
+emotions had lain fallow. If Jack Fyfe had no power to stir her,--and
+she told herself Jack had so failed, without asking herself why,--then
+some other man might easily accomplish that, to her unutterable grief.
+She had told herself many a time that no more terrible plight could
+overtake her than to love and be loved and sit with hands folded,
+foregoing it all. She shrank from so tragic an evolution. It meant only
+pain, the ache of unfulfilled, unattainable desires. If, she reflected
+cynically, this man beside her stood for such a motif in her life, he
+might better have left her out in the swamped canoe.
+
+While she sat there, drawn-faced with the cold, thinking rather amazedly
+these things which she told herself she had no right to think, the
+launch slipped into the quiet nook of Cougar Bay and slowed down to the
+float.
+
+Monohan helped her out, threw off the canoe's painter, and climbed back
+into the launch.
+
+"You're as wet as I am," Stella said. "Won't you come up to the house
+and get a change of clothes? I haven't even thanked you."
+
+"Nothing to be thanked for," he smiled up at her. "Only please remember
+not to get offshore in a canoe again. I mightn't be handy the next
+time--and Roaring Lake's as fickle as your charming sex. All smiles one
+minute, storming the next. No, I won't stay this time, thanks. A little
+wet won't hurt me. I wasn't in the water long enough to get chilled, you
+know. I'll be home in half an hour. Run along and get dressed, Mrs.
+Fyfe, and drink something hot to drive that chill away. Good-by."
+
+Stella went up to the house, her hand tingling with his parting grip.
+Over and above the peril she had escaped rose an uneasy vision of a
+greater peril to her peace of mind. The platitudes of soul-affinity, of
+irresistible magnetic attraction, of love that leaped full-blown into
+reality at the touch of a hand or the glance of an eye, she had always
+viewed with distrust, holding them the weaknesses of weak, volatile
+natures. But there was something about this man which had stirred her,
+nothing that he said or did, merely some elusive, personal attribute.
+She had never undergone any such experience, and she puzzled over it
+now. A chance stranger, and his touch could make her pulse leap. It
+filled her with astonished dismay.
+
+Afterward, dry-clad and warm, sitting in her pet chair, Jack Junior
+cooing at her from a nest among cushions on the floor, the natural
+reaction set in, and she laughed at herself. When Fyfe came home, she
+told him lightly of her rescue.
+
+He said nothing at first, only sat drumming on his chair-arm, his eyes
+steady on her.
+
+"That might have cost you your life," he said at last. "Will you
+remember not to drift offshore again?"
+
+"I rather think I shall," she responded. "It wasn't a pleasant
+experience."
+
+"Monohan, eh?" he remarked after another interval. "So he's on Roaring
+Lake again."
+
+"Do you know him?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," he replied briefly.
+
+For a minute or so longer he sat there, his face wearing its habitual
+impassiveness. Then he got up, kissed her with a queer sort of
+intensity, and went put. Stella gazed after him, mildly surprised. It
+wasn't quite in his usual manner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+A RESURRECTION
+
+It might have been a week or so later that Stella made a discovery which
+profoundly affected the whole current of her thought. The long twilight
+was just beginning. She was curled on the living-room floor, playing
+with the baby. Fyfe and Charlie Benton sat by a window, smoking,
+conversing, as they frequently did, upon certain phases of the timber
+industry. A draft from an open window fluttered some sheet music down
+off the piano rack, and Stella rescued it from Jack Junior's tiny,
+clawing hands. Some of the Abbeys had been there the evening before. One
+bit of music was a song Linda had tried to sing and given up because it
+soared above her vocal range. Stella rose to put up the music. Without
+any premeditated idea of playing, she sat down at the piano and began to
+run over the accompaniment. She could play passably.
+
+"That doesn't seem so very hard," she thought aloud. Benton turned at
+sound of her words.
+
+"Say, did you never get any part of your voice back, Stell?" he asked.
+"I never hear you try to sing."
+
+"No," she answered. "I tried and tried long after you left home, but it
+was always the same old story. I haven't sung a note in five years."
+
+"Linda fell down hard on that song last night," he went on. "There was a
+time when that wouldn't have been a starter for you, eh? Did you know
+Stella used to warble like a prima donna, Jack?"
+
+Fyfe shook his head.
+
+"Fact. The governor spent a pot of money cultivating her voice. It was
+some voice, too. She--"
+
+He broke off to listen. Stella was humming the words of the song, her
+fingers picking at the melody instead of the accompaniment.
+
+"Why, you can," Benton cried.
+
+"Can what?" She turned on the stool.
+
+"Sing, of course. You got that high trill that Linda had to screech
+through. You got it perfectly, without effort."
+
+"I didn't," she returned. "Why, I wasn't singing, just humming it over."
+
+"You let out a link or two on those high notes just the same, whether
+you knew you were doing it or not," her brother returned impatiently.
+"Go on. Turn yourself loose. Sing that song."
+
+"Oh, I couldn't," Stella said ruefully. "I haven't tried for so long.
+It's no use. My voice always cracks, and I want to cry."
+
+"Crack fiddlesticks!" Benton retorted. "I know what it used to be.
+Believe me, it sounded natural, even if you were just lilting. Here."
+
+He came over to the piano and playfully edged her off the stool.
+
+"I'm pretty rusty," he said. "But I can fake what I can't play of this.
+It's simple enough. You stand up there and sing."
+
+She only stood looking at him.
+
+"Go on," he commanded. "I believe you can sing anything. You have to
+show me, if you can't."
+
+Stella fingered the sheets reluctantly. Then she drew a deep breath and
+began.
+
+It was not a difficult selection, merely a bit from a current light
+opera, with a closing passage that ranged a trifle too high for the
+ordinary untrained voice to take with ease. Stella sang it effortlessly,
+the last high, trilling notes pouring out as sweet and clear as the
+carol of a lark. Benton struck the closing chord and looked up at her.
+Fyfe leaned forward in his chair. Jack Junior, among his pillows on the
+floor, waved his arms, kicking and gurgling.
+
+"You did pretty well on that," Charlie remarked complacently. "Now
+_sing_ something. Got any of your old pieces?"
+
+"I wonder if I could?" Stella murmured. "I'm almost afraid to try."
+
+She hurried away to some outlying part of the house, reappearing in a
+few minutes with a dog-eared bundle of sheets in her hand. From among
+these she selected three and set them on the rack.
+
+Benton whistled when he glanced over the music.
+
+"The Siren Song," he grunted. "What is it? something new? Lord, look at
+the scale. Looks like one of those screaming arias from the 'Flying
+Dutchman.' Some stunt."
+
+"Marchand composed it for the express purpose of trying out voices,"
+Stella said. "It _is_ a stunt."
+
+"You'll have to play your own accompaniment," Charlie grinned. "That's
+too much for me."
+
+"Oh, just so you give me a little support here and there," Stella told
+him. "I can't sing sitting on a piano stool."
+
+Benton made a face at the music and struck the keys.
+
+It seemed to Stella nothing short of a miracle. She had been mute so
+long. She had almost forgotten what a tragedy losing her voice had been.
+And to find it again, to hear it ring like a trumpet. It did! It was too
+big for the room. She felt herself caught up in a triumphant ecstasy as
+she sang. She found herself blinking as the last note died away. Her
+brother twisted about on the piano stool, fumbling for a cigarette.
+
+"And still they say they can't come back," he remarked at last. "Why,
+you're better than you ever were, Stella. You've got the old sweetness
+and flexibility that dad used to rave about. But your voice is bigger,
+somehow different. It gets under a man's skin."
+
+She picked up the baby from the floor, began to play with him. She
+didn't want to talk. She wanted to think, to gloat over and hug to
+herself this miracle of her restored voice. She was very quiet, very
+much absorbed in her own reflections until it was time--very shortly--to
+put Jack Junior in his bed. That was a function she made wholly her own.
+The nurse might greet his waking whimper in the morning and minister to
+his wants throughout the day, but Stella "tucked him in" his crib every
+night. And after the blue eyes were closed, she sat there, very still,
+thinking. In a detached way she was conscious of hearing Charlie leave.
+
+Later, when she was sitting beside her dressing table brushing her hair,
+Fyfe came in. He perched himself on the foot rail of the bed, looking
+silently at her. She had long grown used to that. It was a familiar
+trick of his.
+
+"How did it happen that you've never tried your voice lately?" he asked
+after a time.
+
+"I gave it up long ago," she said. "Didn't I ever tell you that I used
+to sing and lost my voice?"
+
+"No," he answered. "Charlie did just now. You rather took my breath
+away. It's wonderful. You'd be a sensation in opera."
+
+"I might have been," she corrected. "That was one of my little dreams.
+You don't know what a grief it was to me when I got over that throat
+trouble and found I couldn't sing. I used to try and try--and my voice
+would break every time. I lost all heart to try after a while. That was
+when I wanted to take up nursing, and they wouldn't let me. I haven't
+thought about singing for an age. I've crooned lullabies to Jacky
+without remembering that I once had volume enough to drown out an
+accompanist. Dad was awfully proud of my voice."
+
+"You've reason to be proud of it now," Fyfe said slowly. "It's a voice
+in ten thousand. What are going to do with it?"
+
+Stella drew the brush mechanically through her heavy hair. She had been
+asking herself that. What could she do? A long road and a hard one lay
+ahead of her or any other woman who essayed to make her voice the basis
+of a career. Over and above that she was not free to seek such a career.
+Fyfe himself knew that, and it irritated her that he should ask such a
+question. She swung about on him.
+
+"Nothing," she said a trifle tartly. "How can I? Granting that my voice
+is worth the trouble, would you like me to go and study in the East or
+abroad? Would you be willing to bear the expense of such an undertaking?
+To have me leave Jack to nursemaids and you to your logs?"
+
+"So that in the fullness of time I might secure a little reflected glory
+as the husband of Madame Fyfe, the famous soprano," he replied slowly.
+"Well, I can't say that's a particularly pleasing prospect."
+
+"Then why ask me what I'm going to do with it?" she flung back
+impatiently. "It'll be an asset--like my looks--and--and--"
+
+She dropped her face in her hands, choking back an involuntary sob. Fyfe
+crossed the room at a bound, put his arms around her.
+
+"Stella, Stella!" he cried sharply. "Don't be a fool."
+
+"D--don't be cross, Jack," she whispered. "Please. I'm sorry. I simply
+can't help it. You don't understand."
+
+"Oh, don't I?" he said savagely. "I understand too well; that's the
+devil of it. But I suppose that's a woman's way,--to feed her soul with
+illusions, and let the realities go hang. Look here."
+
+He caught her by the shoulders and pulled her to her feet, facing him.
+There was a fire in his eye, a hard shutting together of his lips that
+frightened her a little.
+
+"Look here," he said roughly. "Take a brace, Stella. Do you realize what
+sort of a state of mind you're drifting into? You married me under more
+or less compulsion,--compulsion of circumstances,--and gradually you're
+beginning to get dissatisfied, to pity yourself. You'll precipitate
+things you maybe don't dream of now, if you keep on. Damn it, I didn't
+create the circumstances. I only showed you a way out. You took it. It
+satisfied you for a while; you can't deny it did. But it doesn't any
+more. You're nursing a lot of illusions, Stella, that are going to make
+your life full of misery."
+
+"I'm not," she sobbed. "It's because I haven't any illusions
+that--that--Oh, what's the use of talking, Jack? I'm not complaining. I
+don't even know what gave me this black mood, just now. I suppose that
+queer miracle of my voice coming back upset me. I feel--well, as if I
+were a different person, somehow; as if I had forfeited any right to
+have it. Oh, it's silly, you'll say. But it's there. I can't help my
+feeling--or my lack of it."
+
+Fyfe's face whitened a little. His hands dropped from her shoulders.
+
+"Now you're talking to the point," he said quietly. "Especially that
+last. We've been married some little time now, and if anything, we're
+farther apart in the essentials of mating than we were at the
+beginning. You've committed yourself to an undertaking, yet more and
+more you encourage yourself to wish for the moon. If you don't stop
+dreaming and try real living, don't you see a lot of trouble ahead for
+yourself? It's simple. You're slowly hardening yourself against me,
+beginning to resent my being a factor in your life. It's only a matter
+of time, if you keep on, until your emotions center about some other
+man."
+
+"Why do you talk like that?" she said bitterly. "Do you think I've got
+neither pride nor self-respect?"
+
+"Yes. Both a-plenty," he answered. "But you're a woman, with a rather
+complex nature even for your sex. If your heart and your head ever clash
+over anything like that, you'll be in perfect hell until one or the
+other gets the upper hand. You're a thoroughbred, and high-strung as
+thoroughbreds are. It takes something besides three meals a day and
+plenty of good clothes to complete your existence. If I can't make it
+complete, some other man will make you think he can. Why don't you try?
+Haven't I got any possibilities as a lover? Can't you throw a little
+halo of romance about me, for your own sake--if not for mine?"
+
+He drew her up close to him, stroking tenderly the glossy brown hair
+that flowed about her shoulders.
+
+"Try it, Stella," he whispered passionately. "Try wanting to like me,
+for a change. I can't make love by myself. Shake off that infernal
+apathy that's taking possession of you where I'm concerned. If you can't
+love me, for God's sake fight with me. Do _something_!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+THE CRISIS
+
+Looking back at that evening as the summer wore on, Stella perceived
+that it was the starting point of many things, no one of them definitely
+outstanding by itself but bulking large as a whole. Fyfe made his
+appeal, and it left her unmoved save in certain superficial aspects. She
+was sorry, but she was mostly sorry for herself. And she denied his
+premonition of disaster. If, she said to herself, they got no raptures
+out of life, at least they got along without friction. In her mind their
+marriage, no matter that it lacked what she no less than Fyfe deemed an
+essential to happiness, was a fixed state, final, irrevocable, not to be
+altered by any emotional vagaries.
+
+No man, she told herself, could make her forget her duty. If it should
+befall that her heart, lacking safe anchorage, went astray, that would
+be her personal cross--not Jack Fyfe's. _He_ should never know. One
+might feel deeply without being moved to act upon one's feelings. So she
+assured herself.
+
+She never dreamed that Jack Fyfe could possibly have foreseen in Walter
+Monohan a dangerous factor in their lives. A man is not supposed to have
+uncanny intuitions, even when his wife is a wonderfully attractive
+woman who does not care for him except in a friendly sort of way.
+Stella herself had ample warning. From the first time of meeting, the
+man's presence affected her strangely, made an appeal to her that no man
+had ever made. She felt it sitting beside him in the plunging launch
+that day when Roaring Lake reached its watery arms for her. There was
+seldom a time when they were together that she did not feel it. And she
+pitted her will against it, as something to be conquered and crushed.
+
+There was no denying the man's personal charm in the ordinary sense of
+the word. He was virile, handsome, cultured, just such a man as she
+could easily have centered her heart upon in times past,--just such a
+man as can set a woman's heart thrilling when he lays siege to her. If
+he had made an open bid for Stella's affection, she, entrenched behind
+all the accepted canons of her upbringing, would have recoiled from him,
+viewed him with wholly distrustful eyes.
+
+But he did nothing of the sort. He was a friend, or at least he became
+so. Inevitably they were thrown much together. There was a continual
+informal running back and forth between Fyfe's place and Abbey's.
+Monohan was a lily of the field, although it was common knowledge on
+Roaring Lake that he was a heavy stock-holder in the Abbey-Monohan
+combination. At any rate, he was holidaying on the lake that summer.
+There had grown up a genuine intimacy between Linda and Stella. There
+were always people at the Abbeys'; sometimes a few guests at the Fyfe
+bungalow. Stella's marvellous voice served to heighten her popularity.
+The net result of it all was that in the following three months source
+three days went by that she did not converse with Monohan.
+
+She could not help making comparisons between the two men. They stood
+out in marked contrast, in manner, physique, in everything. Where Fyfe
+was reserved almost to taciturnity, impassive-featured, save for that
+whimsical gleam that was never wholly absent from his keen blue eyes,
+Monohan talked with facile ease, with wonderful expressiveness of face.
+He was a finished product of courteous generations. Moreover, he had
+been everywhere, done a little of everything, acquired in his manner
+something of the versatility of his experience. Physically he was fit as
+any logger in the camps, a big, active-bodied, clear-eyed, ruddy man.
+
+What it was about him that stirred her so, Stella could never determine.
+She knew beyond peradventure that he had that power. He had the gift of
+quick, sympathetic perception,--but so too had Jack Fyfe, she reminded
+herself. Yet no tone of Jack Fyfe's voice could raise a flutter in her
+breast, make a faint flush glow in her cheeks, while Monohan could do
+that. He did not need to be actively attentive. It was only necessary
+for him to be near.
+
+It dawned upon Stella Fyfe in the fullness of the season, when the first
+cool October days were upon them, and the lake shores flamed again with
+the red and yellow and umber of autumn, that she had been playing with
+fire--and that fire burns.
+
+This did not filter into her consciousness by degrees. She had steeled
+herself to seeing him pass away with the rest of the summer folk, to
+take himself out of her life. She admitted that there would be a gap.
+But that had to be. No word other than friendly ones would ever pass
+between them. He would go away, and she would go on as before. That was
+all. She was scarcely aware how far they had traveled along that road
+whereon travelers converse by glance of eye, by subtle intuitions,
+eloquent silences. Monohan himself delivered the shock that awakened her
+to despairing clearness of vision.
+
+He had come to bring her a book, he and Linda Abbey and Charlie
+together,--a commonplace enough little courtesy. And it happened that
+this day Fyfe had taken his rifle and vanished into the woods
+immediately after luncheon. Between Linda Abbey and Charlie Benton
+matters had so far progressed that it was now the most natural thing for
+them to seek a corner or poke along the beach together, oblivious to all
+but themselves. This afternoon they chatted a while with Stella and then
+gradually detached themselves until Monohan, glancing through the
+window, pointed them out to his hostess. They were seated on a log at
+the edge of the lawn, a stone's throw from the house.
+
+"They're getting on," he said. "Lucky beggars. It's all plain sailing
+for them."
+
+There was a note of infinite regret in his voice, a sadness that stabbed
+Stella Fyfe like a lance. She did not dare look at him. Something rose
+chokingly in her throat. She felt and fought against a slow welling of
+tears to her eyes. Before she sensed that she was betraying herself,
+Monohan was holding both her hands fast between his own, gripping them
+with a fierce, insistent pressure, speaking in a passionate undertone.
+
+"Why should we have to beat our heads against a stone wall like this?"
+he was saying wildly. "Why couldn't we have met and loved and been
+happy, as we could have been? It was fated to happen. I felt it that day
+I dragged you out of the lake. It's been growing on me ever since. I've
+struggled against it, and it's no use. It's something stronger than I
+am. I love you, Stella, and it maddens me to see you chafing in your
+chains. Oh, my dear, why couldn't it have been different?"
+
+"You mustn't talk like that," she protested weakly. "You mustn't. It
+isn't right."
+
+"I suppose it's right for you to live with a man you don't love, when
+your heart's crying out against it?" he broke out. "My God, do you think
+I can't see? I don't have to see things; I can feel them. I know you're
+the kind of woman who goes through hell for her conceptions of right and
+wrong. I honor you for that, dear. But, oh, the pity of it. Why should
+it have to be? Life could have held so much that is fine and true for
+you and me together. For you do care, don't you?"
+
+"What difference does that make?" she whispered. "What difference can it
+make? Oh, you mustn't tell me these things, I mustn't listen. I
+mustn't."
+
+"But they're terribly, tragically true," Monohan returned. "Look at me,
+Stella. Don't turn your face away, dear. I wouldn't do anything that
+might bring the least shadow on you. I know the pitiful hopelessness of
+it. You're fettered, and there's no apparent loophole to freedom. I know
+it's best for me to keep this locked tight in my heart, as something
+precious and sorrowful. I never meant to tell you. But the flesh isn't
+always equal to the task the spirit imposes."
+
+She did not answer him immediately, for she was struggling for a grip on
+herself, fighting back an impulse to lay her head against him and cry
+her agony out on his breast. All the resources of will that she
+possessed she called upon now to still that tumult of emotion that
+racked her. When she did speak, it was in a hard, strained tone. But she
+faced the issue squarely, knowing beyond all doubt what she had to face.
+
+"Whether I care or not isn't the question," she said. "I'm neither
+little enough nor prudish enough to deny a feeling that's big and clean.
+I see no shame in that. I'm afraid of it--if you can understand that.
+But that's neither here nor there. I know what I have to do. I married
+without love, with my eyes wide open, and I have to pay the price. So
+you must never talk to me of love. You mustn't even see me, if it can be
+avoided. It's better that way. We can't make over our lives to suit
+ourselves--at least I can't. I must play the game according to the only
+rules I know. We daren't--we mustn't trifle with this sort of a feeling.
+With you--footloose, and all the world before you--it'll die out
+presently."
+
+"No," he flared. "I deny that. I'm not an impressionable boy. I know
+myself."
+
+He paused, and the grip of his hands on hers tightened till the pain of
+it ran to her elbows. Then his fingers relaxed a little.
+
+"Oh, I know," he said haltingly. "I know it's got to be that way. I have
+to go my road and leave you to yours. Oh, the blank hopelessness of it,
+the useless misery of it. We're made for each other, and we have to grin
+and say good-by, go along our separate ways, trying to smile. What a
+devilish state of affairs! But I love you, dear, and no matter--I--ah--"
+
+His voice flattened out. His hands released hers, he straightened
+quickly. Stella turned her head. Jack Fyfe stood in the doorway. His
+face was fixed in its habitual mask. He was biting the end off a cigar.
+He struck a match and put it to the cigar end with steady fingers as he
+walked slowly across the big room.
+
+"I hear the kid peeping," he said to Stella quite casually, "and I
+noticed Martha outside as I came in. Better go see what's up with him."
+
+Trained to repression, schooled in self-control, Stella rose to obey,
+for under the smoothness of his tone there was the iron edge of command.
+Her heart apparently ceased to beat. She tried to smile, but she knew
+that her face was tear-wet. She knew that Jack Fyfe had seen and
+understood. She had done no wrong, but a terrible apprehension of
+consequences seized her, a fear that tragedy of her own making might
+stalk grimly in that room.
+
+In this extremity she banked with implicit faith on the man she had
+married rather than the man she loved. For the moment she felt
+overwhelmingly glad that Jack Fyfe was iron--cool, unshakable. He would
+never give an inch, but he would never descend to any sordid scene. She
+could not visualize him the jealous, outraged husband, breathing the
+conventional anathema, but there were elements unreckonable in that
+room. She knew instinctively that Fyfe once aroused would be deadly in
+anger and she could not vouch for Monohan's temper under the strain of
+feeling. That was why she feared.
+
+So she lingered a second or two outside the door, quaking, but there
+arose only the sound of Fyfe's heavy body settling into a leather chair,
+and following that the low, even rumble of his voice. She could not
+distinguish words. The tone sounded ordinary, conversational. She prayed
+that his intent was to ignore the situation, that Monohan would meet him
+halfway in that effort. Afterward there would be a reckoning. But for
+herself she neither thought nor feared. It was a problem to be faced,
+that was all. And so, the breath of her coming in short, quick
+respirations, she went to her room. There was no wailing from the
+nursery. She had known that.
+
+Sitting beside a window, chin in hand, her lower lip compressed between
+her teeth, she saw Fyfe, after the lapse of ten minutes, leave by the
+front entrance, stopping to chat a minute with Linda and Charlie Benton,
+who were moving slowly toward the house. Stella rose to her feet and
+dabbed at her face with a powdered chamois. She couldn't let Monohan go
+like that; her heart cried out against it. Very likely they would never
+meet again.
+
+She flew down the hall to the living room. Monohan stood just within
+the front door, gazing irresolutely over his shoulder. He took a step or
+two to meet her. His clean-cut face was drawn into sullen lines, a deep
+flush mantled his cheek.
+
+"Listen," he said tensely. "I've been made to feel like--like--Well, I
+controlled myself. I knew it had to be that way. It was unfortunate. I
+think we could have been trusted to do the decent thing. You and I were
+bred to do that. I've got a little pride. I can't come here again. And I
+want to see you once more before I leave here for good. I'll be going
+away next week. That'll be the end of it--the bitter finish. Will you
+slip down to the first point south of Cougar Bay about three in the
+afternoon to-morrow? It'll be the last and only time. He'll have you for
+life; can't I talk to you for twenty minutes?"
+
+"No," she whispered forlornly. "I can't do that. I--oh,
+good-by--good-by."
+
+"Stella, Stella," she heard his vibrant whisper follow after. But she
+ran away through dining room and hall to the bedroom, there to fling
+herself face down, choking back the passionate protest that welled up
+within her. She lay there, her face buried in the pillow, until the
+sputtering exhaust of the Abbey cruiser growing fainter and more faint
+told her they were gone.
+
+She heard her husband walk through the house once after that. When
+dinner was served, he was not there. It was eleven o'clock by the
+time-piece on her mantel when she heard him come in, but he did not come
+to their room. He went quietly into the guest chamber across the hall.
+
+She waited through a leaden period. Then, moved by an impulse she did
+not attempt to define, a mixture of motives, pity for him, a craving for
+the outlet of words, a desire to set herself right before him, she
+slipped on a dressing robe and crossed the hall. The door swung open
+noiselessly. Fyfe sat slumped in a chair, hat pulled low on his
+forehead, hands thrust deep in his pockets. He did not even look up. His
+eyes stared straight ahead, absent, unseeingly fixed on nothing. He
+seemed to be unconscious of her presence or to ignore it,--she could not
+tell which.
+
+"Jack," she said. And when he made no response she said again,
+tremulously, that unyielding silence chilling her, "Jack."
+
+He stirred a little, but only to take off his hat and lay it on a table
+beside him. With one hand pushing back mechanically the straight,
+reddish-tinged hair from his brow, he looked up at her and said briefly,
+in a tone barren of all emotion:
+
+"Well?"
+
+She was suddenly dumb. Words failed her utterly. Yet there was much to
+be said, much that was needful to say. They could not go on with a cloud
+like that over them, a cloud that had to be dissipated in the crucible
+of words. Yet she could not begin. Fyfe, after a prolonged silence,
+seemed to grasp her difficulty. Abruptly he began to speak, cutting
+straight to the heart of his subject, after his fashion.
+
+"It's a pity things had to take his particular turn," said he. "But now
+that you're face to face with something definite, what do you propose to
+do about it?"
+
+"Nothing," she answered slowly. "I can't help the feeling. It's there.
+But I can thrust it into the background, go on as if it didn't exist.
+There's nothing else for me to do, that I can see. I'm sorry, Jack."
+
+"So am I," he said grimly. "Still, it was a chance we took,--or I took,
+rather. I seem to have made a mistake or two, in my estimate of both you
+and myself. That is human enough, I suppose. You're making a bigger
+mistake than I did though, to let Monohan sweep you off your feet."
+
+There was something that she read for contempt in his tone. It stung
+her.
+
+"He hasn't swept me off my feet, as you put it," she cried. "Good
+Heavens, do you think I'm that spineless sort of creature? I've never
+forgotten I'm your wife. I've got a little self-respect left yet, if I
+was weak enough to grasp at the straw you threw me in the beginning. I
+was honest with you then. I'm trying to be honest with you now."
+
+"I know, Stella," he said gently. "I'm not throwing mud. It's a damnably
+unfortunate state of affairs, that's all. I foresaw something of the
+sort when we were married. You were candid enough about your attitude.
+But I told myself like a conceited fool that I could make your life so
+full that in a little while I'd be the only possible figure on your
+horizon. I've failed. I've known for some time that I was going to fail.
+You're not the thin-blooded type of woman that is satisfied with
+pleasant surroundings and any sort of man. You're bound to run the gamut
+of all the emotions, sometime and somewhere. I loved you, and I thought
+in my conceit I could make myself the man, the one man who would mean
+everything to you."
+
+"Just the same," he continued, "you've been a fool, and I don't see how
+you can avoid paying the penalty for folly."
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"You haven't tried to play the game," he answered tensely. "For months
+you've been withdrawing into your shell. You've been clanking your
+chains and half-heartedly wishing for some mysterious power to strike
+them off. It wasn't a thing you undertook lightly. It isn't a
+thing--marriage, I mean--that you hold lightly. That being the case, you
+would have been wise to try making the best of it, instead of making the
+worst of it. But you let yourself drift into a state of mind where
+you--well, you see the result. I saw it coming. I didn't need to happen
+in this afternoon to know that there were undercurrents of feeling
+swirling about. And so the way you feel now is in itself a penalty. If
+you let Monohan cut any more figure in your thoughts, you'll pay bigger
+in the end."
+
+"I can't help my thoughts, or I should say my feelings," she said
+wearily.
+
+"You think you love him," Fyfe made low reply. "As a matter of fact, you
+love what you think he is. I daresay that he has sworn his affection by
+all that's good and great. But if you were convinced that he didn't
+really care, that his flowery protestations had a double end in view,
+would you still love him?"
+
+"I don't know," she murmured. "But that's beside the point. I do love
+him. I know it's unwise. It's a feeling that has overwhelmed me in a
+way that I didn't believe possible, that I had hoped to avoid. But--but
+I can't pretend, Jack. I don't want you to misunderstand. I don't want
+this to make us both miserable. I don't want it to generate an
+atmosphere of suspicion and jealousy. We'd only be fighting about a
+shadow. I never cheated at anything in my life. You can trust me still,
+can't you?"
+
+"Absolutely," Fyfe answered without hesitation.
+
+"Then that's all there is to it," she replied, "unless--unless you're
+ready to give me up as a hopeless case, and let me go away and blunder
+along the best I can."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"I haven't even considered that," he said. "Very likely it's unwise of
+me to say this,--it will probably antagonize you,--but I know Monohan
+better than you do. I'd go pretty far to keep you two apart--now--for
+your sake."
+
+"It would be the same if it were any other man," she muttered. "I can
+understand that feeling in you. It's so--so typically masculine."
+
+"No, you're wrong there, dead wrong," Fyfe frowned. "I'm not a
+self-sacrificing brute by any means. Still, knowing that you'll only
+live with me on sufferance, if you were honestly in love with a man that
+I felt was halfway decent, I'd put my feelings in my pocket and let you
+go. If you cared enough for him to break every tie, to face the
+embarrassment of divorce, why, I'd figure you were entitled to your
+freedom and whatever happiness it might bring. But Monohan--hell, I
+don't want to talk about him. I trust you, Stella. I'm banking on your
+own good sense. And along with that good, natural common sense, you've
+got so many illusions. About life in general, and about men. They seem
+to have centered about this one particular man. I can't open your eyes
+or put you on the right track. That's a job for yourself. All I can do
+is to sit back and wait."
+
+His voice trailed off huskily.
+
+Stella put a hand on his shoulder.
+
+"Do you care so much as all that, Jack?" she whispered. "Even in spite
+of what you know?"
+
+"For two years now," he answered, "you've been the biggest thing in my
+life. I don't change easy; I don't want to change. But I'm getting
+hopeless."
+
+"I'm sorry, Jack," she said. "I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am.
+I didn't love you to begin with--"
+
+"And you've always resented that," he broke in. "You've hugged that
+ghost of a loveless marriage to your bosom and sighed for the real
+romance you'd missed. Well, maybe you did. But you haven't found it yet.
+I'm very sure of that, although I doubt if I could convince you."
+
+"Let me finish," she pleaded. "You knew I didn't love you--that I was
+worn out and desperate and clutching at the life line you threw. In
+spite of that,--well, if I fight down this love, or fascination, or
+infatuation, or whatever it is,--I'm not sure myself, except that it
+affects me strongly,--can't we be friends again?"
+
+"Friends! Oh, hell!" Fyfe exploded.
+
+He came up out of his chair with a blaze in his eyes that startled her,
+caught her by the arm, and thrust her out the door.
+
+"Friends? You and I?" He sank his voice to a harsh whisper. "My
+God--friends! Go to bed. Good night."
+
+He pushed her into the hall, and the lock clicked between them. For one
+confused instant Stella stood poised, uncertain. Then she went into her
+bedroom and sat down, her keenest sensation one of sheer relief. Already
+in those brief hours emotion had well-nigh exhausted her. To be alone,
+to lie still and rest, to banish thought,--that was all she desired.
+
+She lay on her bed inert, numbed, all but her mind, and that traversed
+section by section in swift, consecutive progress all the amazing turns
+of her life since she first came to Roaring Lake. There was neither
+method nor inquiry in this back-casting--merely a ceaseless, involuntary
+activity of the brain.
+
+A little after midnight when all the house was hushed, she went into the
+adjoining room, cuddled Jack Junior into her arms, and took him to her
+own bed. With his chubby face nestled against her breast, she lay there
+fighting against that interminable, maddening buzzing in her brain. She
+prayed for sleep, her nervous fingers stroking the silky, baby hair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+IN WHICH THERE IS A FURTHER CLASH
+
+One can only suffer so much. Poignant feeling brings its own
+anaesthetic. When Stella Fyfe fell into a troubled sleep that night, the
+storm of her emotions had beaten her sorely. Morning brought its
+physical reaction. She could see things clearly and calmly enough to
+perceive that her love for Monohan was fraught with factors that must be
+taken into account. All the world loves a lover, but her world did not
+love lovers who kicked over the conventional traces. She had made a
+niche for herself. There were ties she could not break lightly, and she
+was not thinking of herself alone when she considered that, but of her
+husband and Jack Junior, of Linda Abbey and Charlie Benton, of each and
+every individual whose life touched more or less directly upon her own.
+
+She had known always what a woman should do in such case, what she had
+been taught a woman should do: grin, as Monohan had said, and take her
+medicine. For her there was no alternative. Fyfe had made that clear.
+But her heart cried out in rebellion against the necessity. To her,
+trying to think logically, the most grievous phase of the doing was the
+fact that nothing could ever be the same again. She could go on. Oh,
+yes. She could dam up the wellspring of her impulses, walk steadfast
+along the accustomed ways. But those ways would not be the old ones.
+There would always be the skeleton at the feast. She would know it was
+there, and Jack Fyfe would know, and she dreaded the fruits of that
+knowledge, the bitterness and smothered resentment it would breed. But
+it had to be. As she saw it, there was no choice.
+
+She came down to breakfast calmly enough. It was nothing that could be
+altered by heroics, by tears and wailings. Not that she was much given
+to either. She had not whined when her brother made things so hard for
+her that any refuge seemed alluring by comparison. Curiously enough, she
+did not blame her brother now; neither did she blame Jack Fyfe.
+
+She told herself that in first seeking the line of least resistance she
+had manifested weakness, that since her present problem was indirectly
+the outgrowth of that original weakness, she would be weak no more. So
+she tried to meet her husband as if nothing had happened, in which she
+succeeded outwardly very well indeed, since Fyfe himself chose to ignore
+any change in their mutual attitude.
+
+She busied herself about the house that forenoon, seeking deliberately a
+multitude of little tasks to occupy her hands and her mind.
+
+But when lunch was over, she was at the end of her resources. Jack
+Junior settled in his crib for a nap. Fyfe went away to that area back
+of the camp where arose the crash of falling trees and the labored
+puffing of donkey engines. She could hear faint and far the voices of
+the falling gangs that cried: "Tim-ber-r-r-r." She could see on the
+bank, a little beyond the bunkhouse and cook-shack, the big roader
+spooling up the cable that brought string after string of logs down to
+the lake. Rain or sun, happiness or sorrow, the work went on. She found
+it in her heart to envy the sturdy loggers. They could forget their
+troubles in the strain of action. Keyed as she was to that high pitch,
+that sense of their unremitting activity, the ravaging of the forest
+which produced the resources for which she had sold herself irritated
+her. She was very bitter when she thought that.
+
+She longed for some secluded place to sit and think, or try to stop
+thinking. And without fully realizing the direction she took, she walked
+down past the camp, crossed the skid-road, stepping lightly over main
+line and haul-back at the donkey engineer's warning, and went along the
+lake shore.
+
+A path wound through the belt of brush and hardwood that fringed the
+lake. Not until she had followed this up on the neck of a little
+promontory south of the bay, did she remember with a shock that she was
+approaching the place where Monohan had begged her to meet him. She
+looked at her watch. Two-thirty. She sought the shore line for sight of
+a boat, wondering if he would come in spite of her refusal. But to her
+great relief she saw no sign of him. Probably he had thought better of
+it, had seen now as she had seen then that no good and an earnest chance
+of evil might come of such a clandestine meeting, had taken her stand as
+final.
+
+She was glad, because she did not want to go back to the house. She did
+not want to make the effort of wandering away in the other direction to
+find that restful peace of woods and water. She moved up a little on the
+point until she found a mossy boulder and sat down on that, resting her
+chin in her palms, looking out over the placid surface of the lake with
+somber eyes.
+
+And so Monohan surprised her. The knoll lay thick-carpeted with moss. He
+was within a few steps of her when a twig cracking underfoot apprised
+her of some one's approach. She rose, with an impulse to fly, to escape
+a meeting she had not desired. And as she rose, the breath stopped in
+her throat.
+
+Twenty feet behind Monohan came Jack Fyfe with his hunter's stride,
+soundlessly over the moss, a rifle drooping in the crook of his arm. A
+sunbeam striking obliquely between two firs showed her his face plainly,
+the faint curl of his upper lip.
+
+Something in her look arrested Monohan. He glanced around, twisted
+about, froze in his tracks, his back to her. Fyfe came up. Of the three
+he was the coolest, the most rigorously self-possessed. He glanced from
+Monohan to his wife, back to Monohan. After that his blue eyes never
+left the other man's face.
+
+"What did I say to you yesterday?" Fyfe opened his mouth at last. "But
+then I might have known I was wasting my breath on you!"
+
+"Well," Monohan retorted insolently, "what are you going to do about it?
+This isn't the Stone Age."
+
+Fyfe laughed unpleasantly.
+
+"Lucky for you. You'd have been eliminated long ago," he said. "No, it
+takes the present age to produce such rotten specimens as you."
+
+A deep flush rose in Monohan's cheeks. He took a step toward Fyfe, his
+hands clenched.
+
+"You wouldn't say that if you weren't armed," he taunted hoarsely.
+
+"No?" Fyfe cast the rifle to one side. It fell with a metallic clink
+against a stone. "I do say it though, you see. You are a sort of a
+yellow dog, Monohan. You know it, and you know that I know it. That's
+why it stings you to be told so."
+
+Monohan stepped back and slipped out of his coat. His face was crimson.
+
+"By God, I'll teach you something," he snarled.
+
+He lunged forward as he spoke, shooting a straight-arm blow for Fyfe's
+face. It swept through empty air, for Fyfe, poised on the balls of his
+feet, ducked under the driving fist, and slapped Monohan across the
+mouth with the open palm of his hand.
+
+"Tag," he said sardonically. "You're It."
+
+Monohan pivoted, and rushing, swung right and left, missing by inches.
+Fyfe's mocking grin seemed to madden him completely. He rushed again,
+launching another vicious blow that threw him partly off his balance.
+Before he could recover, Fyfe kicked both feet from under him, sent him
+sprawling on the moss.
+
+Stella stood like one stricken. The very thing she dreaded had come
+about. Yet the manner of its unfolding was not as she had visualized it
+when she saw Fyfe near at hand. She saw now a side of her husband that
+she had never glimpsed, that she found hard to understand. She could
+have understood him beating Monohan senseless, if he could. A murderous
+fury of jealousy would not have surprised her. This did. He had not
+struck a blow, did not attempt to strike.
+
+She could not guess why, but she saw that he was playing with Monohan,
+making a fool of him, for all Monohan's advantage of height and reach.
+Fyfe moved like the light, always beyond Monohan's vengeful blows,
+slipping under those driving fists to slap his adversary, to trip him,
+mocking him with the futility of his effort.
+
+She felt herself powerless to stop that sorry exhibition. It was not a
+fight for her. Dimly she had a feeling that back of her lay something
+else. An echo of it had been more than once in Fyfe's speech. Here and
+now, they had forgotten her at the first word. They were engaged in a
+struggle for mastery, sheer brute determination to hurt each other,
+which had little or nothing to do with her. She foresaw, watching the
+odd combat with a feeling akin to fascination, that it was a losing game
+for Monohan. Fyfe was his master at every move.
+
+Yet he did not once attempt to strike a solid blow, nothing but that
+humiliating, open-handed slap, that dexterous swing of his foot that
+plunged Monohan headlong. He grinned steadily, a cold grimace that
+reflected no mirth, being merely a sneering twist of his features.
+Stella knew the deadly strength of him. She wondered at his purpose, how
+it would end.
+
+The elusive light-footedness of the man, the successive stinging of
+those contemptuous slaps at last maddened Monohan into ignoring the
+rules by which men fight. He dropped his hands and stood panting with
+his exertions. Suddenly he kicked, a swift lunge for Fyfe's body.
+
+Fyfe leaped aside. Then he closed. Powerful and weighty a man as Monohan
+was, Fyfe drove him halfway around with a short-arm blow that landed
+near his heart, and while he staggered from that, clamped one thick arm
+about his neck in the strangle-hold. Holding him helpless, bent
+backwards across his broad chest, Fyfe slowly and systematically choked
+him; he shut off his breath until Monohan's tongue protruded, and his
+eyes bulged glassily, and horrible, gurgling noises issued from his
+gaping mouth.
+
+"Jack, Jack!" Stella found voice to shriek. "You're killing him."
+
+Fyfe lifted his eyes to hers. The horror he saw there may have stirred
+him. Or he may have considered his object accomplished. Stella could not
+tell. But he flung Monohan from him with a force that sent him reeling a
+dozen feet, to collapse on the moss. It took him a full minute to regain
+his breath, to rise to unsteady feet, to find his voice.
+
+"You can't win all the time," he gasped. "By God, I'll show you that you
+can't."
+
+With that he turned and went back the way he had come. Fyfe stood
+silent, hands resting on his hips, watching until Monohan pushed out a
+slim speed launch from under cover of overhanging alders and set off
+down the lake.
+
+"Well," he remarked then, in a curiously detached, impersonal tone.
+"The lightning will begin to play by and by, I suppose."
+
+"What do you mean?" Stella asked breathlessly.
+
+He did not answer. His eyes turned to her slowly. She saw now that his
+face was white and rigid, that the line of his lips drew harder together
+as he looked at her; but she was not prepared for the storm that broke.
+She did not comprehend the tempest that raged within him until he had
+her by the shoulders, his fingers crushing into her soft flesh like the
+jaws of a trap, shaking her as a terrier might shake a rat, till the
+heavy coils of hair cascaded over her shoulders, and for a second fear
+tugged at her heart. For she thought he meant to kill her.
+
+When he did desist, he released her with a thrust of his arms that sent
+her staggering against a tree, shaken to the roots of her being, though
+not with fear. Anger had displaced that. A hot protest against his brute
+strength, against his passionate outbreak, stirred her. Appearances were
+against her, she knew. Even so, she revolted against his cave-man
+roughness. She was amazed to find herself longing for the power to
+strike him.
+
+She faced him trembling, leaning against the tree trunk, staring at him
+in impotent rage. And the fire died out of his eyes as she looked. He
+drew a deep breath or two and turned away to pick up his rifle. When he
+faced about with that in his hand, the old mask of immobility was in
+place. He waited while Stella gathered up her scattered hairpins and
+made shift to coil her hair into a semblance of Order. Then he said
+gently:
+
+"I won't break out like that again."
+
+"Once is enough."
+
+"More than enough--for me," he answered.
+
+She disdained reply. Striking off along the path that ran to the camp,
+she walked rapidly, choking a rising flood of desperate thought. With
+growing coolness paradoxically there burned hotter the flame of an
+elemental wrath. What right had he to lay hands on her? Her shoulders
+ached, her flesh was bruised from the terrible grip of his fingers. The
+very sound of his footsteps behind her was maddening. To be suspected
+and watched, to be continually the target of jealous fury! No, a
+thousand times, no. She wheeled on him at last.
+
+"I can't stand this," she cried. "It's beyond endurance. We're like
+flint and steel to each other now. If to-day's a sample of what we may
+expect, it's better to make a clean sweep of everything. I've got to get
+away from here and from you--from everybody."
+
+Fyfe motioned her to a near-by log.
+
+"Sit down," said he. "We may as well have it out here."
+
+For a few seconds he busied himself with a cigar, removing the band with
+utmost deliberation, biting the end off, applying the match, his brows
+puckered slightly.
+
+"It's very unwise of you to meet Monohan like that," he uttered finally.
+
+"Oh, I see," she flashed. "Do you suggest that I met him purposely--by
+appointment? Even if I did--"
+
+"That's for you to say, Stella," he interrupted gravely. "I told you
+last night that I trusted you absolutely. I do, so far as really vital
+things are concerned, but I don't always trust your judgment. I merely
+know that Monohan sneaked along shore, hid his boat, and stole through
+the timber to where you were sitting. I happened to see him, and I
+followed him to see what he was up to, why he should take such measures
+to keep under cover."
+
+"The explanation is simple," she answered stiffly. "You can believe it
+or not, as you choose. My being there was purely unintentional. If I had
+seen him before he was close, I should certainly not have been there. I
+have been at odds with myself all day, and I went for a walk, to find a
+quiet place where I could sit and think."
+
+"It doesn't matter now," he said. "Only you'd better try to avoid things
+like that in the future. Would you mind telling me just exactly what you
+meant a minute ago? Just what you propose to do?"
+
+He asked her that as one might make any commonplace inquiry, but his
+quietness did not deceive Stella.
+
+"What I said," she began desperately. "Wasn't it plain enough? It seems
+to me our life is going to be a nightmare from now on if we try to live
+it together. I--I'm sorry, but you know how I feel. It may be unwise,
+but these things aren't dictated by reason. You know that. If our
+emotions were guided by reason and expediency, we'd be altogether
+different. Last night I was willing to go on and make the best of
+things. To-day,--especially after this,--it looks impossible. You'll
+look at me, and guess what I'm thinking, and hate me. And I'll grow to
+hate you, because you'll be little better than a jailer. Oh, don't you
+see that the way we'll feel will make us utterly miserable? Why should
+we stick together when no good can come of it? You've been good to me.
+I've appreciated that and liked you for it. I'd like to be friends. But
+I--I'd hate you with a perfectly murderous hatred if you were always on
+the watch, always suspecting me, if you taunted me as you did a while
+ago. I'm just as much a savage at heart as you are, Jack Fyfe. I could
+gladly have killed you when you were jerking me about back yonder."
+
+"I wonder if you are, after all, a little more of a primitive being than
+I've supposed?"
+
+Fyfe leaned toward her, staring fixedly into her eyes--eyes that were
+bright with unshed tears.
+
+"And I was holding the devil in me down back there, because I didn't
+want to horrify you with anything like brutality," he went on
+thoughtfully. "You think I grinned and made a monkey of _him_ because it
+pleased me to do that? Why, I could have--and ached to--break him into
+little bits, to smash him up so that no one would ever take pleasure in
+looking at him again. And I didn't, simply and solely because I didn't
+want to let you have even a glimpse of what I'm capable of when I get
+started. I wonder if I made a mistake? It was merely the reaction from
+letting him go scot-free that made me shake you so. I wonder--well,
+never mind. Go on."
+
+"I think it's better that I should go away," Stella said. "I want you to
+agree that I should; then there will be no talk or anything disagreeable
+from outside sources. I'm strong, I can get on. It'll be a relief to
+have to work. I won't have to be the kitchen drudge Charlie made of me.
+I've got my voice. I'm quite sure I can capitalize that. But I've got to
+go. Anything's better than this; anything that's clean and decent. I'd
+despise myself if I stayed on as your wife, feeling as I do. It was a
+mistake in the beginning, our marriage."
+
+"Nevertheless," Fyfe said slowly, "I'm afraid it's a mistake you'll have
+to abide by--for a time. All that you say may be true, although I don't
+admit it myself. Offhand, I'd say you were simply trying to welch on a
+fair bargain. I'm not going to let you do it blindly, all wrought up to
+a pitch where you can scarcely think coherently. If you are fully
+determined to break away from me, you owe it to us both to be sure of
+what you're doing before you act. I'm going to talk plain. You can
+believe it and disdain it if you please. If you were leaving me for a
+man, a real man, I think I could bring myself to make it easy for you
+and wish you luck. But you're not. He's--"
+
+"Can't we leave him out of it?" she demanded. "I want to get away from
+you both. Can you understand that? It doesn't help you any to pick _him_
+to pieces."
+
+"No, but it might help you, if I could rip off that swathing of
+idealization you've wrapped around him," Fyfe observed patiently. "It's
+not a job I have much stomach for however, even if you were willing to
+let me try. But to come back. You've got to stick it out with me,
+Stella. You'll hate me for the constraint, I suppose. But until--until
+things shape up differently--you'll understand what I'm talking about
+by and by, I think--you've got to abide by the bargain you made with me.
+I couldn't force you to stay, I know. But there's one hold you can't
+break--not if I know you at all."
+
+"What is that?" she asked icily.
+
+"The kid's," he murmured.
+
+Stella buried her face in her hands for a minute.
+
+"I'd forgotten--I'd forgotten," she whispered.
+
+"You understand, don't you?" he said hesitatingly. "If you leave--I keep
+our boy."
+
+"Oh, you're devilish--to use a club like that," she cried. "You know I
+wouldn't part from my baby--the only thing I've got that's worth
+having."
+
+"He's worth something to me too," Fyfe muttered. "A lot more than you
+think, maybe. I'm not trying to club you. There's nothing in it for me.
+But for him; well, he needs you. It isn't his fault he's here, or that
+you're unhappy. I've got to protect him, see that he gets a fair shake.
+I can't see anything to it but for you to go on being Mrs. Jack Fyfe
+until such time as you get back to a normal poise. Then it will be time
+enough to try and work out some arrangement that won't be too much of a
+hardship on him. It's that--or a clean break in which you go your own
+way, and I try to mother him to the best of my ability. You'll
+understand sometime why I'm showing my teeth this way."
+
+"You have everything on your side," she admitted dully, after a long
+interval of silence. "I'm a fool. I admit it. Have things your way. But
+it won't work, Jack. This flare-up between us will only smoulder. I
+think you lay a little too much stress on Monohan. It isn't that I love
+him so much as that I don't love you at all. I can live without
+him--which I mean to do in any case--far easier than I can live with
+you. It won't work."
+
+"Don't worry," he replied. "You won't be annoyed by me in person. I'll
+have my hands full elsewhere."
+
+They rose and walked on to the house. On the porch Jack Junior was being
+wheeled back and forth in his carriage. He lifted chubby arms to his
+mother as she came up the steps. Stella carried him inside, hugging the
+sturdy, blue-eyed mite close to her breast. She did not want to cry, but
+she could not help it. It was as if she had been threatened with
+irrevocable loss of that precious bit of her own flesh and blood. She
+hugged him to her, whispering mother-talk, half-hysterical, wholly
+tender.
+
+Fyfe stood aside for a minute. Then he came up behind her and stood
+resting one hand on the back of her chair.
+
+"Stella."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I got word from my sister and her husband in this morning's mail. They
+will very likely be here next week for a three days' stay. Brace up.
+Let's try and keep our skeleton from rattling while they're here. Will
+you?"
+
+"All right, Jack. I'll try."
+
+He patted her tousled hair lightly and left the room. Stella looked
+after him with a surge of mixed feeling. She told herself she hated him
+and his dominant will that always beat her own down; she hated him for
+his amazing strength and for his unvarying sureness of himself. And in
+the same breath she found herself wondering if,--with their status
+reversed,--Walter Monohan would be as patient, as gentle, as
+self-controlled with a wife who openly acknowledged her affection for
+another man. And still her heart cried out for Monohan. She flared hot
+against the disparaging note, the unconcealed contempt Fyfe seemed to
+have for him.
+
+Yet in spite of her eager defence of him, there was something ugly about
+that clash with Fyfe in the edge of the woods, something that jarred. It
+wasn't spontaneous. She could not understand that tigerish onslaught of
+Monohan's. It was more the action she would have expected from her
+husband.
+
+It puzzled her, grieved her, added a little to the sorrowful weight that
+settled upon her. They were turbulent spirits both. The matter might not
+end there.
+
+In the next ten days three separate incidents, each isolated and
+relatively unimportant, gave Stella food for much puzzled thought.
+
+The first was a remark of Fyfe's sister in the first hours of their
+acquaintance. Mrs. Henry Alden could never have denied blood kinship
+with Jack Fyfe. She had the same wide, good-humored mouth, the blue eyes
+that always seemed to be on the verge of twinkling, and the same fair,
+freckled skin. Her characteristics of speech resembled his. She was
+direct, bluntly so, and she was not much given to small talk. Fyfe and
+Stella met the Aldens at Roaring Springs with the _Waterbug_. Alden
+proved a genial sort of man past forty, a big, loose-jointed individual
+whose outward appearance gave no indication of what he was
+professionally,--a civil engineer with a reputation that promised to
+spread beyond his native States.
+
+"You don't look much different, Jack," his sister observed critically,
+as the _Waterbug_ backed away from the wharf in a fine drizzle of rain.
+"Except that as you grow older, you more and more resemble the pater.
+Has matrimony toned him down, my dear?" she turned to Stella. "The last
+time I saw him he had a black eye!"
+
+Fyfe did not give her a chance to answer.
+
+"Be a little more diplomatic, Dolly," he smiled. "Mrs. Jack doesn't
+realize what a rowdy I used to be. I've reformed."
+
+"Ah," Mrs. Alden chuckled, "I have a vision of you growing meek and
+mild."
+
+They talked desultorily as the launch thrashed along. Alden's profession
+took him to all corners of the earth. That was why the winter of Fyfe's
+honeymoon had not made them acquainted. Alden and his wife were then in
+South America. This visit was to fill in the time before the departure
+of a trans-Pacific liner which would land the Aldens at Manila.
+
+Presently the Abbey-Monohan camp and bungalow lay abeam. Stella told
+Mrs. Alden something of the place.
+
+"That reminds me," Mrs. Alden turned to her brother. "I was quite sure I
+saw Walter Monohan board a train while we were waiting for the hotel car
+in Hopyard. I heard that he was in timber out here. Is he this Monohan?"
+
+Fyfe nodded.
+
+"How odd," she remarked, "that you should be in the same region. Do you
+still maintain the ancient feud?"
+
+Fyfe shot her a queer look.
+
+"We've grown up, Dolly," he said drily. Then: "Do you expect to get back
+to God's country short of a year, Alden?"
+
+That was all. Neither of them reverted to the subject again. But Stella
+pondered. An ancient feud? She had not known of that. Neither man had
+ever dropped a hint.
+
+For the second incident, Paul Abbey dropped in to dinner a few days
+later and divulged a bit of news.
+
+"There's been a shake-up in our combination," he remarked casually to
+Fyfe. "Monohan and dad have split over a question of business policy.
+Walter's taking over all our interests on Roaring Lake. He appears to be
+going to peel off his coat and become personally active in the logging
+industry. Funny streak for Monohan to take, isn't it? He never seemed
+to care a hoot about the working end of the business, so long as it
+produced dividends."
+
+Lastly, Charlie Benton came over to eat a farewell dinner with the
+Aldens the night before they left. He followed Stella into the nursery
+when she went to tuck Jack Junior in his crib.
+
+"Say, Stella" he began, "I have just had a letter from old man Lander;
+you remember he was dad's legal factotum and executor."
+
+"Of course," she returned.
+
+"Well, do you recall--you were there when the estate was wound up, and I
+was not--any mention of some worthless oil stock? Some California
+wildcat stuff the governor got bit on? It was found among his effects."
+
+"I seem to recall something of the sort," she answered. "But I don't
+remember positively. What about it?"
+
+"Lander writes me that there is a prospect of it being salable. The
+company is reviving. And he finds himself without legal authority to do
+business, although the stock certificates are still in his hands. He
+suggests that we give him a power of attorney to sell this stuff. He's
+an awfully conservative old chap, so there must be a reasonable prospect
+of some cash, or he wouldn't bother. My hunch is to give him a power of
+attorney and let him use his own judgment."
+
+"How much is it worth?" she asked.
+
+"The par value is forty thousand dollars," Benton grinned. "But the
+governor bought it at ten cents on the dollar. If we get what he paid,
+we'll be lucky. That'll be two thousand apiece. I brought you a blank
+form. I'm going down with you on the _Bug_ to-morow to send mine. I'd
+advise you to have yours signed up and witnessed before a notary at
+Hopyard and send it too."
+
+"Of course I will," she said.
+
+"It isn't much," Benton mused, leaning on the foot of the crib, watching
+her smooth the covers over little Jack. "But it won't come amiss--to me,
+at least. I'm going to be married in the spring."
+
+Stella looked up.
+
+"You are?" she murmured. "To Linda Abbey?"
+
+He nodded. A slight flush crept over his tanned face at the steady look
+she bent on him.
+
+"Hang it, what are you thinking?" he broke out. "I know you've rather
+looked down on me because I acted like a bounder that winter. But I
+really took a tumble to myself. You set me thinking when you made that
+sudden break with Jack. I felt rather guilty about that--until I saw how
+it turned out. I know I'm not half good enough for Linda. But so long as
+she thinks I am and I try to live up to that, why we've as good a chance
+to be happy as anybody. We all make breaks, us fellows that go at
+everything roughshod. Still, when we pull up and take a new tack, you
+shouldn't hold grudges. If we could go back to that fall and winter, I'd
+do things a lot differently."
+
+"If you're both really and truly in love," Stella said quietly, "that's
+about the only thing that matters. I hope you'll be happy. But you'll
+have to be a lot different with Linda Abbey than you were with me."
+
+"Ah, Stella, don't harp on that," he said shame-facedly. "I was rotten,
+it's true. But we're all human. I couldn't see anything then only what I
+wanted myself. I was like a bull in a china shop. It's different now.
+I'm on my feet financially, and I've had time to draw my breath and take
+a squint at myself from a different angle. I did you a good turn,
+anyway, even if I was the cause of you taking a leap before you looked.
+You landed right."
+
+Stella mustered a smile that was purely facial. It maddened her to hear
+his complacent justification of himself. And the most maddening part of
+it was her knowledge that Benton was right, that in many essential
+things he had done her a good turn, which her own erratic inclinations
+bade fair to wholly nullify.
+
+"I wish you all the luck and happiness in the world," she said gently.
+"And I don't bear a grudge, believe me, Charlie. Now, run along. We'll
+keep baby awake, talking."
+
+"All right." He turned to go and came back again.
+
+"What I really came in to say, I've hardly got nerve enough for." He
+sank his voice to a murmur. "Don't fly off at me, Stell. But--you
+haven't got a trifle interested in Monohan, have you? I mean, you
+haven't let him think you are?"
+
+Stella's hands tightened on the crib rail. For an instant her heart
+stood still. A wholly unreasoning blaze of anger seized her. But she
+controlled that. Pride forbade her betraying herself.
+
+"What a perfectly ridiculous question," she managed to reply.
+
+He looked at her keenly.
+
+"Because, if you have--well, you might be perfectly innocent in the
+matter and still get in bad," he continued evenly. "I'd like to put a
+bug in your ear."
+
+She bent over Jack Junior, striving to inject an amused note into her
+reply.
+
+"Don't be so absurd, Charlie."
+
+"Oh, well, I suppose it is. Only, darn it, I've seen him look at you in
+a way--Pouf! I was going to tell you something. Maybe Jack has--only
+he's such a close-mouthed beggar. I'm not very anxious to peddle
+things." Benton turned again. "I guess you don't need any coaching from
+me, anyhow."
+
+He walked out. Stella stared after him, her eyes blazing, hands clenched
+into hard-knuckled little fists. She could have struck him.
+
+And still she wondered over and over again, burning with a consuming
+fire to know what that "something" was which he had to tell. All the
+slumbering devils of a stifled passion awoke to rend her, to make her
+rage against the coil in which she was involved. She despised herself
+for the weakness of unwise loving, even while she ached to sweep away
+the barriers that stood between her and love. Mingled with that there
+whispered an intuition of disaster to come, of destiny shaping to
+peculiar ends. In Monohan's establishing himself on Roaring Lake she
+sensed something more than an industrial shift. In his continued
+presence there she saw incalculable sources of trouble. She stood
+leaning over the bed rail, staring wistfully at her boy for a few
+minutes. When she faced the mirror in her room, she was startled at the
+look in her eyes, the nervous twitch of her lips. There was a physical
+ache in her breast.
+
+"You're a fool, a fool," she whispered to her image. "Where's your will,
+Stella Fyfe? Borrow a little of your husband's backbone.
+Presently--presently it won't matter."
+
+One can club a too assertive ego into insensibility. A man may smile and
+smile and be a villain still, as the old saying has it, and so may a
+woman smile and smile when her heart is tortured, when every nerve in
+her is strained to the snapping point. Stella went back to the living
+room and sang for them until it was time to go to bed.
+
+The Aldens went first, then Charlie. Stella left her door ajar. An hour
+afterward, when Fyfe came down the hall, she rose. It had been her
+purpose to call him in, to ask him to explain that which her brother had
+hinted he could explain, what prior antagonism lay between him and
+Monohan, what that "something" about Monohan was which differentiated
+him from other men where she was concerned. Instead she shut the door,
+slid the bolt home, and huddled in a chair with her face in her hands.
+
+She could not discuss Monohan with him, with any one. Why should she
+ask? she told herself. It was a closed book, a balanced account. One
+does not revive dead issues.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+THE OPENING GUN
+
+The month of November slid day by day into the limbo of the past. The
+rains washed the land unceasingly. Gray veilings of mist and cloud
+draped the mountain slopes. As drab a shade colored Stella Fyfe's daily
+outlook. She was alone a great deal. Even when they were together, she
+and her husband, words did not come easily between them. He was away a
+great deal, seeking, she knew, the old panacea of work, hard,
+unremitting work, to abate the ills of his spirit. She envied him that
+outlet. Work for her there was none. The two Chinamen and Martha the
+nurse left her no tasks. She could not read, for all their great store
+of books and magazines; the printed page would lie idle in her lap, and
+her gaze would wander off into vacancy, into that thought-world where
+her spirit wandered in distress. The Abbeys were long gone; her brother
+hard at his logging. There were no neighbors and no news. The savor was
+gone out of everything. The only bright spot in her days was Jack
+Junior, now toddling precociously on his sturdy legs, a dozen steps at a
+time, crowing victoriously when he negotiated the passage from chair to
+chair.
+
+From the broad east windows of their house she saw all the traffic that
+came and went on the upper reaches of Roaring Lake, Siwashes in dugouts
+and fishing boats, hunters, prospectors. But more than any other she saw
+the craft of her husband and Monohan, the powerful, black-hulled
+_Panther_, the smaller, daintier _Waterbug_.
+
+There was a big gasoline workboat, gray with a yellow funnel, that she
+knew was Monohan's. And this craft bore past there often, inching its
+downward way with swifters of logs, driving fast up-lake without a tow.
+Monohan had abandoned work on the old Abbey-Monohan logging-grounds. The
+camps and the bungalow lay deserted, given over to a solitary watchman.
+The lake folk had chattered at this proceeding, and the chatter had come
+to Stella's ears. He had put in two camps at the lake head, so she heard
+indirectly: one on the lake shore, one on the Tyee River, a little above
+the mouth. He had sixty men in each camp, and he was getting the name of
+a driver. Three miles above his Tyee camp, she knew, lay the camp her
+husband had put in during the early summer to cut a heavy limit of
+cedar. Fyfe had only a small crew there.
+
+She wondered a little why he spent so much time there, when he had
+seventy-odd men working near home. But of course he had an able
+lieutenant in Lefty Howe. And she could guess why Jack Fyfe kept away.
+She was sorry for him--and for herself. But being sorry--a mere
+semi-neutral state of mind--did not help matters, she told herself
+gloomily.
+
+Lefty Howe's wife was at the camp now, on one of her occasional visits.
+Howe was going across the lake one afternoon to see a Siwash whom he had
+engaged to catch and smoke a winter's supply of salmon for the camps.
+Mrs. Howe told Stella, and on impulse Stella bundled Jack Junior into
+warm clothing and went with them for the ride.
+
+Halfway across the six-mile span she happened to look back, and a new
+mark upon the western shore caught her eye. She found a glass and
+leveled it on the spot. Two or three buildings, typical logging-camp
+shacks of split cedar, rose back from the beach. Behind these again the
+beginnings of a cut had eaten a hole in the forest,--a slashing
+different from the ordinary logging slash, for it ran narrowly, straight
+back through the timber; whereas the first thing a logger does is to cut
+all the merchantable timber he can reach on his limit without moving his
+donkey from the water. It was not more than two miles from their house.
+
+"What new camp is that?" she asked Howe.
+
+"Monohan's," he answered casually.
+
+"I thought Jack owned all the shore timber to Medicine Point?" she said.
+
+Howe shook his head.
+
+"Uh-uh. Well, he does too, all but where that camp is. Monohan's got a
+freak limit in there. It's half a mile wide and two miles straight back
+from the beach. Lays between our holdin's like the ham in a sandwich.
+Only," he added thoughtfully, "it's a blame thin piece uh ham. About the
+poorest timber in a long stretch. I dunno why the Sam Hill he's cuttin'
+it. But then he's doin' a lot uh things no practical logger would do."
+
+Stella laid down the glasses. It was nothing to her, she told herself.
+She had seen Monohan only once since the day Fyfe choked him, and then
+only to exchange the barest civilities--and to feel her heart flutter at
+the message his eyes telegraphed.
+
+When she returned from the launch trip, Fyfe was home, and Charlie
+Benton with him. She crossed the heavy rugs on the living room floor
+noiselessly in her overshoes, carrying Jack Junior asleep in her arms.
+And so in passing the door of Fyfe's den, she heard her brother say:
+
+"But, good Lord, you don't suppose he'll be sap-head enough to try such
+fool stunts as that? He couldn't make it stick, and he brings himself
+within the law first crack; and the most he could do would be to annoy
+you."
+
+"You underestimate Monohan," Fyfe returned. "He'll play safe,
+personally, so far as the law goes. He's foxy. I advise you to sell if
+the offer comes again. If you make any more breaks at him, he'll figure
+some way to get you. It isn't your fight, you know. You unfortunately
+happen to be in the road."
+
+"Damned if I do," Benton swore. "I'm all in the clear. There's no way he
+can get me, and I'll tell him what I think of him again if he gives me
+half a chance. I never liked him, anyhow. Why should I sell when I'm
+just getting in real good shape to take that timber out myself? Why, I
+can make a hundred thousand dollars in the next five years on that block
+of timber. Besides, without being a sentimental sort of beggar, I don't
+lose sight of the fact that you helped pull me out of a hole when I sure
+needed a pull. And I don't like his high-handed style. No, if it comes
+to a showdown, I'm with you, Jack, as far as I can go. What the hell
+_can_ he do?"
+
+"Nothing--that I can see." Fyfe laughed unpleasantly. "But he'll try. He
+has dollars to our cents. He could throw everything he's got on Roaring
+Lake into the discard and still have forty thousand a year fixed income.
+Sabe? Money does more than talk in this country. I think I'll pull that
+camp off the Tyee."
+
+"Well, maybe," Benton said. "I'm not sure--"
+
+Stella passed on. She wanted to hear, but it went against her grain to
+eavesdrop. Her pause had been purely involuntary. When she became
+conscious that she was eagerly drinking in each word, she hurried by.
+
+Her mind was one urgent question mark while she laid the sleeping
+youngster in his bed and removed her heavy clothes. What sort of
+hostilities did Monohan threaten? Had he let a hopeless love turn to the
+acid of hate for the man who nominally possessed her? Stella could
+scarcely credit that. It was too much at variance with her idealistic
+conception of the man. He would never have recourse to such littleness.
+Still, the biting contempt in Fyfe's voice when he said to Benton: "You
+underestimate Monohan. He'll play safe ... he's foxy." That stung her to
+the quick. That was not said for her benefit; it was Fyfe's profound
+conviction. Based on what? He did not form judgments on momentary
+impulse. She recalled that only in the most indirect way had he ever
+passed criticism on Monohan, and then it lay mostly in a tone, suggested
+more than spoken. Yet he knew Monohan, had known him for years. They had
+clashed long before she was a factor in their lives.
+
+When she went into the big room, Benton and Fyfe were gone outdoors. She
+glanced into Fyfe's den. It was empty, but a big blue-print unrolled on
+the table where the two had been seated caught her eye. She bent over
+it, drawn by the lettered squares along the wavy shore line and the
+marked waters of creeks she knew.
+
+She had never before possessed a comprehensive idea of the various
+timber holdings along the west shore of Roaring Lake, since it had not
+been a matter of particular interest to her. She was not sure why it now
+became a matter of interest to her, unless it was an impression that
+over these squares and oblongs which stood for thousands upon thousands
+of merchantable logs there was already shaping a struggle, a clash of
+iron wills and determined purposes directly involving, perhaps arising
+because of her.
+
+She studied the blue-print closely. Its five feet of length embraced all
+the west shore of the lake, from the outflowing of Roaring River to the
+incoming Tyee at the head. Each camp was lettered in with pencil. But
+her attention focussed chiefly on the timber limits ranging north and
+south from their home, and she noted two details: that while the limits
+marked A-M Co. were impartially distributed from Cottonwood north, the
+squares marked J.H. Fyfe lay in a solid block about Cougar Bay,--save
+for that long tongue of a limit where she had that day noted the new
+camp. That thrust like the haft of a spear into the heart of Fyfe's
+timberland.
+
+There was the Abbey-Monohan cottage, the three limits her brother
+controlled lying up against Fyfe's southern boundary. Up around the
+mouth of the Tyee spread the vast checkerboard of Abbey-Monohan limits,
+and beyond that, on the eastern bank of the river, a single
+block,--Fyfe's cedar limit,--the camp he thought he would close down.
+
+Why? Immediately the query shaped in her mind. Monohan was concentrating
+his men and machinery at the lake head. Fyfe proposed to shut down a
+camp but well-established; established because cedar was climbing in
+price, an empty market clamoring for cedar logs. Why?
+
+Was there aught of significance in that new camp of Monohan's so near
+by; that sudden activity on ground that bisected her husband's property?
+A freak limit of timber so poor that Lefty Howe said it could only be
+logged at a loss.
+
+She sighed and went out to give dinner orders to Sam Foo. If she could
+only go to her husband and talk as they had been able to talk things
+over at first. But there had grown up between them a deadly restraint.
+She supposed that was inevitable. Both chafed under conditions they
+could not change or would not for stubbornness and pride.
+
+It made a deep impression on her, all these successive, disassociated
+finger posts, pointing one and all to things under the surface, to
+motives and potentialities she had not glimpsed before and could only
+guess at now.
+
+Fyfe and Benton came to dinner more or less preoccupied, an odd mood for
+Charlie Benton. Afterwards they went into session behind the closed door
+of Fyfe's den. An hour or so later Benton went home. While she listened
+to the soft _chuff-a-chuff-a-chuff_ of the _Chickamin_ dying away in the
+distance, Fyfe came in and slumped down in a chair before the fire where
+a big fir stick crackled. He sat there silent, a half-smoked cigar
+clamped in one corner of his mouth, the lines of his square jaw in
+profile, determined, rigid. Stella eyed him covertly. There were times,
+in those moods of concentration, when sheer brute power seemed his most
+salient characteristic. Each bulging curve of his thick upper arm, his
+neck rising like a pillar from massive shoulders, indicated his power.
+Yet so well-proportioned was he that the size and strength of him was
+masked by the symmetry of his body, just as the deliberate immobility of
+his face screened the play of his feelings. Often Stella found herself
+staring at him, fruitlessly wondering what manner of thought and feeling
+that repression overlaid. Sometimes a tricksy, half-provoked desire to
+break through the barricade of his stoicism tempted her. She told
+herself that she ought to be thankful for his aloofness, his
+acquiescence in things as they stood. Yet there were times when she
+would almost have welcomed an outburst, a storm, anything rather than
+that deadly chill, enduring day after day. He seldom spoke to her now
+except of most matter-of-fact things. He played his part like a
+gentleman before others, but alone with her he withdrew into his shell.
+
+Stella was sitting back in the shadow, still studying him, measuring him
+in spite of herself by the Monohan yardstick. There wasn't much basis
+for comparison. It wasn't a question of comparison; the two men stood
+apart, distinctive, in every attribute. The qualities in Fyfe that she
+understood and appreciated, she beheld glorified in Monohan. Yet it was
+not, after all, a question of qualities. It was something more subtle,
+something of the heart which defied logical analysis.
+
+Fyfe had never been able to set her pulse dancing. She had never craved
+physical nearness to him, so that she ached with the poignancy of that
+craving. She had been passively contented with him, that was all. And
+Monohan had swept across her horizon like a flame. Why couldn't Jack
+Fyfe have inspired in her that headlong sort of passion? She smiled
+hopelessly. The tears were very close to her eyes. She loved Monohan;
+Monohan loved her. Fyfe loved her in his deliberate, repressed fashion
+and possessed her, according to the matrimonial design. And although now
+his possession was a hollow mockery, he would never give her up--not to
+Walter Monohan. She had that fatalistic conviction.
+
+How would it end in the long run?
+
+She leaned forward to speak. Words quivered on her lips. But as she
+struggled to shape them to utterance, the blast of a boat whistle came
+screaming up from the water, near and shrill and imperative.
+
+Fyfe came out of his chair like a shot. He landed poised on his feet,
+lips drawn apart, hands clenched. He held that pose for an instant, then
+relaxed, his breath coming with a quick sigh.
+
+Stella stared at him. Nerves! She knew the symptoms too well. Nerves at
+terrible tension in that big, splendid body. A slight quiver seemed to
+run over him. Then he was erect and calmly himself again, standing in a
+listening attitude.
+
+"That's the _Panther_?" he said. "Pulling in to the _Waterbug's_
+landing. Did I startle you when I bounced up like a cougar, Stella?" he
+asked, with a wry smile. "I guess I was half asleep. That whistle jolted
+me."
+
+Stella glanced out the shaded window.
+
+"Some one's coming up from the float with a lantern," she said. "Is
+there--is there likely to be anything wrong, Jack?"
+
+"Anything wrong?" He shot a quick glance at her. Then casually: "Not
+that I know of."
+
+The bobbing lantern came up the path through the lawn. Footsteps
+crunched on the gravel.
+
+"I'll go see what he wants," Fyfe remarked, "Calked boots won't be good
+for the porch floor."
+
+She followed him.
+
+"Stay in. It's cold." He stopped in the doorway.
+
+"No. I'm coming," she persisted.
+
+They met the lantern bearer at the foot of the steps.
+
+"Well, Thorsen?" Fyfe shot at him. There was an unusual note of
+sharpness in his voice, an irritated expectation.
+
+Stella saw that it was the skipper of the _Panther_, a big and burly
+Dane. He raised the lantern a little. The dim light on his face showed
+it bruised and swollen. Fyfe grunted.
+
+"Our boom is hung up," he said plaintively. "They've blocked the river.
+I got licked for arguin' the point."
+
+"How's it blocked?" Fyfe asked.
+
+"Two swifters uh logs strung across the channel. They're drivin' piles
+in front. An' three donkeys buntin' logs in behind."
+
+"Swift work. There wasn't a sign of a move when I left this morning,"
+Fyfe commented drily. "Well, take the _Panther_ around to the inner
+landing. I'll be there."
+
+"What's struck that feller Monohan?" the Dane sputtered angrily. "Has he
+got any license to close the Tyee? He says he has--an' backs his
+argument strong, believe me. Maybe you can handle him. I couldn't. Next
+time I'll have a cant-hook handy. By jingo, you gimme my pick uh Lefty's
+crew, Jack, an' I'll bring that cedar out."
+
+"Take the _Panther_ 'round," Fyfe replied. "We'll see."
+
+Thorsen turned back down the slope. In a minute the thrum of the boat's
+exhaust arose as she got under way.
+
+"Come on in. You'll get cold standing here," Fyfe said to Stella.
+
+She followed him back into the living room. He sat on the arm of a big
+leather chair, rolling the dead cigar thoughtfully between his lips,
+little creases gathering between his eyes.
+
+"I'm going up the lake," he said at last, getting up abruptly.
+
+"What's the matter, Jack?" she asked. "Why, has trouble started up
+there?"
+
+"Part of the logging game," he answered indifferently. "Don't amount to
+much."
+
+"But Thorsen has been fighting. His face was terrible. And I've heard
+you say he was one of the most peaceable men alive. Is it--is Monohan--"
+
+"We won't discuss Monohan," Fyfe said curtly. "Anyway, there's no danger
+of _him_ getting hurt."
+
+He went into his den and came out with hat and coat on. At the door he
+paused a moment.
+
+"Don't worry," he said kindly. "Nothing's going to happen."
+
+But she stood looking out the window after he left, uneasy with a
+prescience of trouble. She watched with a feverish interest the stir
+that presently arose about the bunkhouses. That summer a wide space had
+been cleared between bungalow and camp. She could see moving lanterns,
+and even now and then hear the voices of men calling to each other. Once
+the _Panther's_ dazzling eye of a searchlight swung across the landing,
+and its beam picked out a file of men carrying their blankets toward the
+boat. Shortly after that the tender rounded the point. Close behind her
+went the _Waterbug_, and both boats swarmed with men.
+
+Stella looked and listened until there was but a faint thrum far up the
+lake. Then she went to bed, but not to sleep. What ugly passions were
+loosed at the lake head she did not know. But on the face of it she
+could not avoid wondering if Monohan had deliberately set out to cross
+and harass Jack Fyfe. Because of her? That was the question which had
+hovered on her lips that evening, one she had not brought herself to
+ask. Because of her, or because of some enmity that far preceded her?
+She had thought him big enough to do as she had done, as Fyfe was
+tacitly doing,--make the best of a grievous matter.
+
+But if he had allowed his passions to dictate reprisals, she trembled
+for the outcome. Fyfe was not a man to sit quiet under either affront or
+injury. He would fight with double rancor if Monohan were his adversary.
+
+"If anything happens up there, I'll hate myself," she whispered, when
+the ceaseless turning of her mind had become almost unendurable. "I was
+a silly, weak fool to ever let Walter Monohan know I cared. And I'll
+hate him too if he makes me a bone of contention. I elected to play the
+game the only decent way there is to play it. So did he. Why can't he
+abide by that?"
+
+Noon of the next day saw the _Waterbug_ heave to a quarter mile abeam of
+Cougar Point to let off a lone figure in her dinghy, and then bore on,
+driving straight and fast for Roaring Springs. Stella flew to the
+landing. Mother Howe came puffing at her heels.
+
+"Land's sake, I been worried to death," the older woman breathed. "When
+men git to quarrellin' about timber, you never can tell where they'll
+stop, Mrs. Jack. I've knowed some wild times in the woods in the past."
+
+The man in the dink was Lefty Howe. He pulled in beside the float. When
+he stepped up on the planks, he limped perceptibly.
+
+"Land alive, what happened yuh, Lefty?" his wife cried.
+
+"Got a rap on the leg with a peevy," he said. "Nothin' much."
+
+"Why did the _Waterbug_ go down the lake?" Stella asked breathlessly.
+The man's face was serious. "What happened up there?"
+
+"There was a fuss," he answered quietly. "Three or four of the boys got
+beat up so they need patchin'. Jack's takin' 'em down to the hospital.
+Damn that yeller-headed Monohan!" his voice lifted suddenly in
+uncontrollable anger. "Billy Dale was killed this mornin', mother."
+
+Stella felt herself grow sick. Death is a small matter when it strikes
+afar, among strangers. When it comes to one's door! Billy Dale had
+piloted the _Waterbug_ for a year, a chubby, round-faced boy of twenty,
+a foster-son, of Mother Howe's before she had children of her own.
+Stella had asked Jack to put him on the _Waterbug_ because he was such a
+loyal, cheery sort of soul, and Billy had been a part of every
+expedition they had taken around the lake. She could not think of him as
+a rigid, lifeless lump of clay. Why, only the day before he had been
+laughing and chattering aboard the cruiser, going up and down the cabin
+floor on his hands and knees, Jack Junior perched triumphantly astride
+his back.
+
+"What happened?" she cried wildly. "Tell me, quick."
+
+"It's quick told," Howe said grimly. "We were ready at daylight.
+Monohan's got a hard crew, and they jumped us as soon as we started to
+clear the channel. So we cleared them, first. It didn't take so long.
+Three of our men was used bad, and there's plenty of sore heads on both
+sides. But we did the job. After we got them on the run, we blowed up
+their swifters an' piles with giant. Then we begun to put the cedar
+through. Billy was on the bank when somebody shot him from across the
+river. One mercy, he never knew what hit him. An' you'll never come so
+close bein' a widow again, Mrs. Fyfe, an' not be. That bullet was meant
+for Jack, I figure. He was sittin' down. Billy was standin' right behind
+him watchin' the logs go through. Whoever he was, he shot high, that's
+all. There, mother, don't cry. That don't help none. What's done's
+done."
+
+Stella turned and walked up to the house, stunned. She could not credit
+bloodshed, death. Always in her life both had been things remote. And as
+the real significance of Lefty Howe's story grew on her, she shuddered.
+It lay at her door, equally with her and Monohan, even if neither of
+their hands had sped the bullet,--an indirect responsibility but
+gruesomely real to her.
+
+God only knows to what length she might have gone in reaction. She was
+quivering under that self-inflicted lash, bordering upon hysteria when
+she reached the house. She could not shut out a too-vivid picture of
+Billy Dale lying murdered on the Tyee's bank, of the accusing look with
+which Fyfe must meet her. Rightly so, she held. She did not try to
+shirk. She had followed the line of least resistance, lacked the dour
+courage to pull herself up in the beginning, and it led to this. She
+felt Billy Dale's blood wet on her soft hands. She walked into her own
+house panting like a hunted animal.
+
+And she had barely crossed the threshold when back in the rear Jack
+Junior's baby voice rose in a shrill scream of pain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Stella scarcely heard her husband and the doctor come in. For a weary
+age she had been sitting in a low rocker, a pillow across her lap, and
+on that the little, tortured body swaddled with cotton soaked in olive
+oil, the only dressing she and Mrs. Howe could devise to ease the pain.
+All those other things which had so racked her, the fight on the Tyee,
+the shooting of Billy Dale, they had vanished somehow into thin air
+before the dread fact that her baby was dying slowly before her
+anguished eyes. She sat numbed with that deadly assurance, praying
+without hope for help to come, hopeless that any medical skill would
+avail when it did come. So many hours had been wasted while a man rowed
+to Benton's camp, while the _Chickamin_ steamed to Roaring Springs,
+while the _Waterbug_ came driving back. Five hours! And the skin, yes,
+even shreds of flesh, had come away in patches with Jack Junior's
+clothing when she took it off. She bent over him, fearful that every
+feeble breath would be his last.
+
+She looked up at the doctor. Fyfe was beside her, his calked boots
+biting into the oak floor.
+
+"See what you can do, doc," he said huskily. Then to Stella: "How did it
+happen?"
+
+"He toddled away from Martha," she whispered. "Sam Foo had set a pan of
+boiling water on the kitchen floor. He fell into it. Oh, my poor little
+darling."
+
+They watched the doctor bare the terribly scalded body, examine it,
+listen to the boy's breathing, count his pulse. In the end he re-dressed
+the tiny body with stuff from the case with which a country physician
+goes armed against all emergencies. He was very deliberate and
+thoughtful. Stella looked her appeal when he finished.
+
+"He's a sturdy little chap," he said, "and we'll do our best. A child
+frequently survives terrific shock. It would be mistaken kindness for me
+to make light of his condition simply to spare your feelings. He has an
+even chance. I shall stay until morning. Now, I think it would be best
+to lay him on a bed. You must relax, Mrs. Fyfe. I can see that the
+strain is telling on you. You mustn't allow yourself to get in that
+abnormal condition. The baby is not conscious of pain. He is not
+suffering half so much in his body as you are in your mind, and you
+mustn't do that. Be hopeful. We'll need your help. We should have a
+nurse, but there was no time to get one."
+
+They laid Jack Junior amid downy pillows on Stella's bed. The doctor
+stood looking at him, then drew a chair beside the bed.
+
+"Go and walk about a little, Mrs. Fyfe," he advised, "and have your
+dinner. I'll want to watch the boy a while."
+
+But Stella did not want to walk. She did not want to eat. She was
+scarcely aware that her limbs were cramped and aching from her long
+vigil in the chair. She was not conscious of herself and her problems,
+any more. Every shift of her mind turned on her baby, the little mite
+she had nursed at her breast, the one joy untinctured with bitterness
+that was left her. The bare chance that those little feet might never
+patter across the floor again, that little voice never wake her in the
+morning crying "Mom-mom," drove her distracted.
+
+She went out into the living room, walked to a window, stood there
+drumming on the pane with nervous fingers. Dusk was falling outside; a
+dusk was creeping over her. She shuddered.
+
+Fyfe came up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, and turned her
+so that she faced him.
+
+"I wish I could help, Stella," he whispered. "I wish I could make you
+feel less forlorn. Poor little kiddies--both of you."
+
+She shook off his hands, not because she rebelled against his touch,
+against his sympathy, merely because she had come to that nervous state
+where she scarce realized what she did.
+
+"Oh," she choked, "I can't bear it. My baby, my little baby boy. The one
+bright spot that's left, and he has to suffer like that. If he dies,
+it's the end of everything for me."
+
+Fyfe stared at her. The warm, pitying look on his face ebbed away,
+hardened into his old, mask-like absence of expression.
+
+"No," he said quietly, "it would only be the beginning. Lord God, but
+this has been a day."
+
+He whirled about with a quick gesture of his hands, a harsh, raspy laugh
+that was very near a sob, and left her. Twenty minutes later, when
+Stella was irresistibly drawn back to the bedroom, she found him sitting
+sober and silent, looking at his son.
+
+A little past midnight Jack Junior died.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+FREE AS THE WIND
+
+Stella sat watching the gray lines of rain beat down on the asphalt, the
+muddy rivulets that streamed along the gutter. A forlorn sighing of wind
+in the bare boughs of a gaunt elm that stood before her window reminded
+her achingly of the wind drone among the tall firs.
+
+A ghastly two weeks had intervened since Jack Junior's little life
+blinked out. There had been wild moments when she wished she could keep
+him company on that journey into the unknown. But grief seldom kills.
+Sometimes it hardens. Always it works a change, a greater or less
+revamping of the spirit. It was so with Stella Fyfe, although she was
+not keenly aware of any forthright metamorphosis. She was, for the
+present, too actively involved in material changes.
+
+The storm and stress of that period between her yielding to the lure of
+Monohan's personality and the burial of her boy had sapped her of all
+emotional reaction. When they had performed the last melancholy service
+for him and went back to the bungalow at Cougar Point, she was as
+physically exhausted, as near the limit of numbed endurance in mind and
+body as it is possible for a young and healthy woman to become. And
+when a measure of her natural vitality re-asserted itself, she laid her
+course. She could no more abide the place where she was than a pardoned
+convict can abide the prison that has restrained him. It was empty now
+of everything that made life tolerable, the hushed rooms a constant
+reminder of her loss. She would catch herself listening for that baby
+voice, for those pattering footsteps, and realize with a sickening pang
+that she would never hear them again.
+
+The snapping of that last link served to deepen and widen the gulf
+between her and Fyfe. He went about his business grave and preoccupied.
+They seldom talked together. She knew that his boy had meant a lot to
+him; but he had his work. He did not have to sit with folded hands and
+think until thought drove him into the bogs of melancholy.
+
+And so the break came. With desperate abruptness Stella told him that
+she could not stay, that feeling as she did, she despised herself for
+unwilling acceptance of everything where she could give nothing in
+return, that the original mistake of their marriage would never be
+rectified by a perpetuation of that mistake.
+
+"What's the use, Jack?" she finished. "You and I are so made that we
+can't be neutral. We've got to be thoroughly in accord, or we have to
+part. There's no chance for us to get back to the old way of living. I
+don't want to; I can't. I could never be complaisant and agreeable
+again. We might as well come to a full stop, and each go his own way."
+
+She had braced herself for a clash of wills. There was none. Fyfe
+listened to her, looked at her long and earnestly, and in the end made a
+quick, impatient gesture with his hands.
+
+"Your life's your own to make what you please of, now that the kid's no
+longer a factor," he said quietly. "What do you want to do? Have you
+made any plans?"
+
+"I have to live, naturally," she replied. "Since I've got my voice back,
+I feel sure I can turn that to account. I should like to go to Seattle
+first and look around. It can be supposed I have gone visiting, until
+one or the other of us takes a decisive legal step."
+
+"That's simple enough," he returned, after a minute's reflection. "Well,
+if it has to be, for God's sake let's get it over with."
+
+And now it was over with. Fyfe remarked once that with them luckily it
+was not a question of money. But for Stella it was indeed an economic
+problem. When she left Roaring Lake, her private account contained over
+two thousand dollars. Her last act in Vancouver was to re-deposit that
+to her husband's credit. Only so did she feel that she could go free of
+all obligation, clean-handed, without stultifying herself in her own
+eyes. She had treasured as a keepsake the only money she had ever earned
+in her life, her brother's check for two hundred and seventy dollars,
+the wages of that sordid period in the cookhouse. She had it now. Two
+hundred and seventy dollars capital. She hadn't sold herself for that.
+She had given honest value, double and treble, in the sweat of her brow.
+She was here now, in a five-dollar-a-week housekeeping room, foot-loose,
+free as the wind. That was Fyfe's last word to her. He had come with
+her to Seattle and waited patiently at a hotel until she found a place
+to live. Then he had gone away without protest.
+
+"Well, Stella," he had said, "I guess this is the end of our experiment.
+In six months,--under the State law,--you can be legally free by a
+technicality. So far as I'm concerned, you're free as the wind right
+now. Good luck to you."
+
+He turned away with a smile on his lips, a smile that his eyes belied,
+and she watched him walk to the corner through the same sort of driving
+rain that now pelted in gray lines against her window.
+
+She shook herself impatiently out of that retrospect. It was done. Life,
+as her brother had prophesied, was no kid-glove affair. The future was
+her chief concern now, not the past. Yet that immediate past, bits of
+it, would now and then blaze vividly before her mental vision. The only
+defense against that lay in action, in something to occupy her mind and
+hands. If that motive, the desire to shun mental reflexes that brought
+pain, were not sufficient, there was the equally potent necessity to
+earn her bread. Never again would she be any man's dependent, a pampered
+doll, a parasite trading on her sex. They were hard names she called
+herself.
+
+Meantime she had not been idle; neither had she come to Seattle on a
+blind impulse. She knew of a singing teacher there whose reputation was
+more than local, a vocal authority whose word carried weight far beyond
+Puget Sound. First she meant to see him, get an impartial estimate of
+the value of her voice, of the training she would need. Through him she
+hoped to get in touch with some outlet for the only talent she
+possessed. And she had received more encouragement than she dared hope.
+He listened to her sing, then tested the range and flexibility of her
+voice.
+
+"Amazing," he said frankly. "You have a rare natural endowment. If you
+have the determination and the sense of dramatic values that musical
+discipline will give you, you should go far. You should find your place
+in opera."
+
+"That's my ambition," Stella answered. "But that requires time and
+training. And that means money. I have to earn it."
+
+The upshot of that conversation was an appointment to meet the manager
+of a photoplay house, who wanted a singer. Stella looked at her watch
+now, and rose to go. Money, always money, if one wanted to get anywhere,
+she reflected cynically. No wonder men struggled desperately for that
+token of power.
+
+She reached the Charteris Theater, and a doorman gave her access to the
+dim interior. There was a light in the operator's cage high at the rear,
+another shaded glow at the piano, where a young man with hair brushed
+sleekly back chewed gum incessantly while he practiced picture
+accompaniments. The place looked desolate, with its empty seats, its
+bald stage front with the empty picture screen. Stella sat down to wait
+for the manager. He came in a few minutes; his manner was very curt,
+business-like. He wanted her to sing a popular song, a bit from a Verdi
+opera, Gounod's Ave Maria, so that he could get a line on what she
+could do. He appeared to be a pessimist in regard to singers.
+
+"Take the stage right there," he instructed. "Just as if the spot was on
+you. Now then."
+
+It wasn't a heartening process to stand there facing the gum-chewing
+pianist, and the manager's cigar glowing redly five rows back, and the
+silent emptinesses beyond,--much like singing into the mouth of a gloomy
+cave. It was more or less a critical moment for Stella. But she was
+keenly aware that she had to make good in a small way before she could
+grasp the greater opportunity, so she did her best, and her best was no
+mediocre performance. She had never sung in a place designed to show
+off--or to show up--a singer's quality. She was even a bit astonished
+herself.
+
+She elected to sing the Ave Maria first. Her voice went pealing to the
+domed ceiling as sweet as a silver bell, resonant as a trumpet. When the
+last note died away, there was a momentary silence. Then the accompanist
+looked up at her, frankly admiring.
+
+"You're _some_ warbler," he said emphatically, "believe _me_."
+
+Behind him the manager's cigar lost its glow. He remained silent. The
+pianist struck up "Let's Murder Care," a rollicking trifle from a
+Broadway hit. Last of all he thumped, more or less successfully, through
+the accompaniment to an aria that had in it vocal gymnastics as well as
+melody.
+
+"Come up to the office, Mrs. Fyfe," Howard said, with a singular change
+from his first manner.
+
+"I can give you an indefinite engagement at thirty a week," he made a
+blunt offer. "You can sing. You're worth more, but right now I can't pay
+more. If you pull business,--and I rather think you will,--have to sing
+twice in the afternoon and twice in the evening."
+
+Stella considered briefly. Thirty dollars a week meant a great deal more
+than mere living, as she meant to live. And it was a start, a move in
+the right direction. She accepted; they discussed certain details. She
+did not care to court publicity under her legal name, so they agreed
+that she should be billed as Madame Benton,--the Madame being Howard's
+suggestion,--and she took her leave.
+
+Upon the Monday following Stella stood for the first time in a fierce
+white glare that dazzled her and so shut off partially her vision of the
+rows and rows of faces. She went on with a horrible slackness in her
+knees, a dry feeling in her throat; and she was not sure whether she
+would sing or fly. When she had finished her first song and bowed
+herself into the wings, she felt her heart leap and hammer at the
+hand-clapping that grew and grew till it was like the beat of ocean
+surf.
+
+Howard came running to meet her.
+
+"You've sure got 'em going," he laughed. "Fine work. Go out and give 'em
+some more."
+
+In time she grew accustomed to these things, to the applause she never
+failed to get, to the white beam that beat down from the picture cage,
+to the eager, upturned faces in the first rows. Her confidence grew;
+ambition began to glow like a flame within her. She had gone through
+the primary stages of voice culture, and she was following now a method
+of practice which produced results. She could see and feel that herself.
+Sometimes the fear that her voice might go as it had once gone would
+make her tremble. But that, her teacher assured her, was a remote
+chance.
+
+So she gained in those weeks something of her old poise. Inevitably, she
+was very lonely at times. But she fought against that with the most
+effective weapon she knew,--incessant activity. She was always busy.
+There was a rented piano now sitting in the opposite corner from the gas
+stove on which she cooked her meals. Howard kept his word. She "pulled
+business," and he raised her to forty a week and offered her a contract
+which she refused, because other avenues, bigger and better than singing
+in a motion-picture house, were tentatively opening.
+
+December was waning when she came to Seattle. In the following weeks her
+only contact with the past, beyond the mill of her own thoughts, was an
+item in the _Seattle Times_ touching upon certain litigation in which
+Fyfe was involved. Briefly, Monohan, under the firm name of the
+Abbey-Monohan Timber Company, was suing Fyfe for heavy damages for the
+loss of certain booms of logs blown up and set adrift at the mouth of
+the Tyee River. There was appended an account of the clash over the
+closed channel and the killing of Billy Dale. No one had been brought to
+book for that yet. Any one of sixty men might have fired the shot.
+
+It made Stella wince, for it took her back to that dreadful day. She
+could not bear to think that Billy Dale's blood lay on her and Monohan,
+neither could she stifle an uneasy apprehension that something more
+grievous yet might happen on Roaring Lake. But at least she had done
+what she could. If she were the flame, she had removed herself from the
+powder magazine. Fyfe had pulled his cedar crew off the Tyee before she
+left. If aggression came, it must come from one direction.
+
+They were both abstractions now, she tried to assure herself. The
+glamour of Monohan was fading, and she could not say why. She did not
+know if his presence would stir again all that old tumult of feeling,
+but she did know that she was cleaving to a measure of peace, of
+serenity of mind, and she did not want him or any other man to disturb
+it. She told herself that she had never loved Jack Fyfe. She recognized
+in him a lot that a woman is held to admire, but there were also
+qualities in him that had often baffled and sometimes frightened her.
+She wondered sometimes what he really thought of her and her actions,
+why, when she had been nerved to a desperate struggle for her freedom,
+if she could gain it no other way, he had let her go so easily?
+
+After all, she reflected cynically, love comes and goes, but one is
+driven to pursue material advantages while life lasts. And she wondered,
+even while the thought took form in her mind, how long she would retain
+that point of view.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+ECHOES
+
+In the early days of February Stella had an unexpected visitor. The
+landlady called her to the common telephone, and when she took up the
+receiver, Linda Abbey's voice came over the wire.
+
+"When can I see you?" she asked. "I'll only be here to-day and
+to-morrow."
+
+"Now, if you like," Stella responded. "I'm free until two-thirty."
+
+"I'll be right over," Linda said. "I'm only about ten minutes drive from
+where you are."
+
+Stella went back to her room both glad and sorry: glad to hear a
+familiar, friendly voice amid this loneliness which sometimes seemed
+almost unendurable; sorry because her situation involved some measure of
+explanation to Linda. That hurt.
+
+But she was not prepared for the complete understanding of the matter
+Linda Abbey tacitly exhibited before they had exchanged a dozen
+sentences.
+
+"How did you know?" Stella asked. "Who told you?"
+
+"No one. I drew my own conclusions when I heard you had gone to
+Seattle," Linda replied. "I saw it coming. My dear, I'm not blind, and
+I was with you a lot last summer. I knew you too well to believe you'd
+make a move while you had your baby to think of. When he was gone--well,
+I looked for anything to happen."
+
+"Still, nothing much has happened," Stella remarked with a touch of
+bitterness, "except the inevitable break between a man and a woman when
+there's no longer any common bond between them. It's better so. Jack has
+a multiplicity of interests. He can devote himself to them without the
+constant irritation of an unresponsive wife. We've each taken our own
+road. That's all that has happened."
+
+"So far," Linda murmured. "It's a pity. I liked that big, silent man of
+yours. I like you both. It seems a shame things have to turn out this
+way just because--oh, well. Charlie and I used to plan things for the
+four of us, little family combinations when we settled down on the lake.
+Honestly, Stella, do you think it's worth while? I never could see you
+as a sentimental little chump, letting a momentary aberration throw your
+whole life out of gear."
+
+"How do you know that I have?" Stella asked gravely.
+
+Linda shrugged her shoulders expressively.
+
+"I suppose it looks silly, if not worse, to you," Stella said. "But I
+can't help what you think. My reason has dictated every step I've taken
+since last fall. If I'd really given myself up to sentimentalism, the
+Lord only knows what might have happened."
+
+"Exactly," Linda responded drily. "Now, there's no use beating around
+the bush. We get so in that habit as a matter of politeness,--our sort
+of people,--that we seldom say in plain English just what we really
+mean. Surely, you and I know each other well enough to be frank, even if
+it's painful. Very likely you'll say I'm a self-centered little beast,
+but I'm going to marry your brother, my dear, and I'm going to marry him
+in the face of considerable family opposition. I _am_ selfish. Can you
+show me any one who isn't largely swayed by motives of self-interest, if
+it comes to that? I want to be happy. I want to be on good terms with my
+own people, so that Charlie will have some of the opportunities dad can
+so easily put in his way. Charlie isn't rich. He hasn't done anything,
+according to the Abbey standard, but make a fair start. Dad's
+patronizing as sin, and mother merely tolerates the idea because she
+knows that I'll marry Charlie in any case, opposition or no opposition.
+I came over expressly to warn you, Stella. Anything like scandal now
+would be--well, it would upset so many things."
+
+"You needn't be uneasy," Stella answered coldly. "There isn't any
+foundation for scandal. There won't be."
+
+"I don't know," Linda returned, "Walter Monohan came to Seattle a boat
+ahead of me. In fact, that's largely why I came."
+
+Stella flushed angrily.
+
+"Well, what of that?" she demanded. "His movements are nothing to me."
+
+"I don't know," Linda rejoined. She had taken off her gloves and was
+rolling them nervously in a ball. Now she dropped them and impulsively
+grasped Stella's hands.
+
+"Stella, Stella," she cried. "Don't get that hurt, angry look. I don't
+like to say these things to you, but I feel that I have to. I'm worried,
+and I'm afraid for you and your husband, for Charlie and myself, for all
+of us together. Walter Monohan is as dangerous as any man who's
+unscrupulous and rich and absolutely self-centered can possibly be. I
+know the glamour of the man. I used to feel it myself. It didn't go very
+far with me, because his attention wandered away from me before my
+feelings were much involved, and I had a chance to really fathom them
+and him. He has a queer gift of making women care for him, and he trades
+on it deliberately. He doesn't play fair; he doesn't mean to. Oh, I know
+so many cruel things, despicable things, he's done. Don't look at me
+like that, Stella. I'm not saying this just to wound you. I'm simply
+putting you on your guard. You can't play with fire and not get burned.
+If you've been nursing any feeling for Walter Monohan, crush it, cut it
+out, just as you'd have a surgeon cut out a cancer. Entirely apart from
+any question of Jack Fyfe, don't let this man play any part whatever in
+your life. You'll be sorry if you do. There's not a man or woman whose
+relations with Monohan have been intimate enough to enable them to
+really know the man and his motives who doesn't either hate or fear or
+despise him, and sometimes all three."
+
+"That's a sweeping indictment," Stella said stiffly. "And you're very
+earnest. Yet I can hardly take your word at its face value. If he's so
+impossible a person, how does it come that you and your people
+countenanced him socially? Besides, it's all rather unnecessary, Linda.
+I'm not the least bit likely to do anything that will reflect on your
+prospective husband, which is what it simmers down to, isn't it? I've
+been pulled and hauled this way and that ever since I've been on the
+coast, simply because I was dependent on some one else--first Charlie
+and then Jack--for the bare necessities of life. When there's mutual
+affection, companionship, all those intimate interests that marriage is
+supposed to imply, I daresay a woman gives full measure for all she
+receives. If she doesn't, she's simply a sponge, clinging to a man for
+what's in it. I couldn't bear that. You've been rather painfully frank;
+so will I be. One unhappy marriage is quite enough for me. Looking back,
+I can see that even if Walter Monohan hadn't stirred a feeling in me
+which I don't deny,--but which I'm not nearly so sure of as I was some
+time ago,--I'd have come to just this stage, anyway. I was drifting all
+the time. My baby and the conventions, that reluctance most women have
+to make a clean sweep of all the ties they've been schooled to think
+unbreakable, kept me moving along the old grooves. It would have come
+about a little more gradually, that's all. But I have broken away, and
+I'm going to live my own life after a fashion, and I'm going to achieve
+independence of some sort. I'm never going to be any man's mate again
+until I'm sure of myself--and of him. There's my philosophy of life, as
+simply as I can put it. I don't think you need to worry about me. Right
+now I couldn't muster up the least shred of passion of any sort. I seem
+to have felt so much since last summer, that I'm like a sponge that's
+been squeezed dry."
+
+"I don't blame you, dear," Linda said wistfully. "A woman's heart is a
+queer thing, though. When you compare the two men--Oh, well, I know
+Walter so thoroughly, and you don't. You couldn't ever have cared much
+for Jack."
+
+"That hasn't any bearing on it now," Stella answered. "I'm still his
+wife, and I respect him, and I've got a stubborn sort of pride. There
+won't be any divorce proceedings or any scandal. I'm free personally to
+work out my own economic destiny. That, right now, is engrossing enough
+for me."
+
+Linda sat a minute, thoughtful.
+
+"So you think my word for Walter Monohan's deviltry isn't worth much,"
+she said. "Well, I could furnish plenty of details. But I don't think I
+shall. Not because you'd be angry, but because I don't think you're
+quite as blind as I believed. And I'm not a natural gossip. Aside from
+that, he's quite too busy on Roaring Lake for it to mean any good. He
+never gets active like that unless he has some personal axe to grind. In
+this case, I can grasp his motive easily enough. Jack Fyfe may not have
+said a word to you, but he certainly knows Monohan. They've clashed
+before, so I've been told. Jack probably saw what was growing on you,
+and I don't think he'd hesitate to tell Monohan to walk away around. If
+he did,--or if you definitely turned Monohan down; you see I'm rather in
+the dark,--he'd go to any length to play even with. Fyfe. When Monohan
+wants anything, he looks upon it as his own; and when you wound his
+vanity, you've stabbed him in his most vital part. He never rests then
+until he's paid the score. Father was always a little afraid of him. I
+think that's the chief reason for selling out his Roaring Lake interests
+to Monohan. He didn't want to be involved in whatever Monohan
+contemplated doing. He has a wholesome respect for your husband's rather
+volcanic ability. Monohan has, too. But he has always hated Jack Fyfe.
+To my knowledge for three years,--prior to pulling you out of the water
+that time,--he never spoke of Jack Fyfe without a sneer. He hates any
+one who beats him at anything. That ruction on the Tyee is a sample.
+He'll spend money, risk lives, all but his own, do anything to satisfy a
+grudge. That's one of the things that worries me. Charlie will be into
+anything that Fyfe is, for Fyfe's his friend. I admire the spirit of the
+thing, but I don't want our little applecart upset in the sort of
+struggle Fyfe and Monohan may stage. I don't even know what form it will
+ultimately take, except that from certain indications he'll try to make
+Fyfe spend money faster than he can make it, perhaps in litigation over
+timber, over anything that offers, by making trouble in his camps,
+harassing him at every turn. He can, you know. He has immense resources.
+Oh, well, I'm satisfied, Stella, that you're a much wiser girl than I
+thought when I knew you'd left Jack Fyfe. I'm quite sure now you aren't
+the sort of woman Monohan could wind around his little finger. But I'm
+sure he'll try. You'll see, and remember what I tell you. There, I think
+I'd better run along. You're not angry, are you, Stella?"
+
+"You mean well enough, I suppose," Stella answered. "But as a matter of
+fact, you've made me feel rather nasty, Linda. I don't want to talk or
+even think of these things. The best thing you and Charlie and Jack Fyfe
+could do is to forget such a discontented pendulum as I ever existed."
+
+"Oh, bosh!" Linda exclaimed, as she drew on her gloves. "That's sheer
+nonsense. You're going to be my big sister in three months. Things will
+work out. If you felt you had to take this step for your own good, no
+one can blame you. It needn't make any difference in our friendship."
+
+On the threshold she turned on her heel. "Don't forget what I've said,"
+she repeated. "Don't trust Monohan. Not an inch."
+
+Stella flung herself angrily into a chair when the door closed on Linda
+Abbey. Her eyes snapped. She resented being warned and cautioned, as if
+she were some moral weakling who could not be trusted to make the most
+obvious distinctions. Particularly did she resent having Monohan flung
+in her teeth, when she was in a way to forget him, to thrust the strange
+charm of the man forever out of her thoughts. Why, she asked bitterly,
+couldn't other people do as Jack Fyfe had done: cut the Gordian knot at
+one stroke and let it rest at that?
+
+So Monohan was in Seattle? Would he try to see her?
+
+Stella had not minced matters with herself when she left Roaring Lake.
+Dazed and shaken by suffering, nevertheless she knew that she would not
+always suffer, that in time she would get back to that normal state in
+which the human ego diligently pursues happiness. In time the legal tie
+between herself and Jack Fyfe would cease to exist. If Monohan cared for
+her as she thought he cared, a year or two more or less mattered little.
+They had all their lives before them. In the long run, the errors and
+mistakes of that upheaval would grow dim, be as nothing. Jack Fyfe would
+shrug his shoulders and forget, and in due time he would find a fitter
+mate, one as loyal as he deserved. And why might not she, who had never
+loved him, whose marriage to him had been only a climbing out of the
+fire into the frying-pan?
+
+So that with all her determination to make the most of her gift of song,
+so that she would never again be buffeted by material urgencies in a
+material world, Stella had nevertheless been listening with the ear of
+her mind, so to speak, for a word from Monohan to say that he
+understood, and that all was well.
+
+Paradoxically, she had not expected to hear that word. Once in Seattle,
+away from it all, there slowly grew upon her the conviction that in
+Monohan's fine avowal and renunciation he had only followed the cue she
+had given. In all else he had played his own hand. She couldn't forget
+Billy Dale. If the motive behind that bloody culmination were thwarted
+love, it was a thing to shrink from. It seemed to her now, forcing
+herself to reason with cold-blooded logic, that Monohan desired her less
+than he hated Fyfe's possession of her; that she was merely an added
+factor in the breaking out of a struggle for mastery between two
+diverse and dominant men. Every sign and token went to show that the pot
+of hate had long been simmering. She had only contributed to its boiling
+over.
+
+"Oh, well," she sighed, "it's out of my hands altogether now. I'm sorry,
+but being sorry doesn't make any difference. I'm the least factor, it
+seems, in the whole muddle. A woman isn't much more than an incident in
+a man's life, after all."
+
+She dressed to go to the Charteris, for her day's work was about to
+begin. As so often happens in life's uneasy flow, periods of calm are
+succeeded by events in close sequence. Howard and his wife insisted that
+Stella join them at supper after the show. They were decent folk who
+accorded frank admiration to her voice and her personality. They had
+been kind to her in many little ways, and she was glad to accept.
+
+At eleven a taxi deposited them at the door of Wain's. The Seattle of
+yesterday needs no introduction to Wain's, and its counterpart can be
+found in any cosmopolitan, seaport city. It is a place of subtle
+distinction, tucked away on one of the lower hill streets, where
+after-theater parties and nighthawks with an eye for pretty women, an
+ear for sensuous music, and a taste for good food, go when they have
+money to spend.
+
+Ensconced behind a potted palm, with a waiter taking Howard's order,
+Stella let her gaze travel over the diners. She brought up with a
+repressed start at a table but four removes from her own, her eyes
+resting upon the unmistakable profile of Walter Monohan. He was dining
+vis-à-vis with a young woman chiefly remarkable for a profusion of
+yellow hair and a blazing diamond in the lobe of each ear,--a plump,
+blond, vivacious person of a type that Stella, even with her limited
+experience, found herself instantly classifying.
+
+A bottle of wine rested in an iced dish between them. Monohan was toying
+with the stem of a half-emptied glass, smiling at his companion. The
+girl leaned toward him, speaking rapidly, pouting. Monohan nodded,
+drained his glass, signaled a waiter. When she got into an elaborate
+opera cloak and Monohan into his Inverness, they went out, the plump,
+jeweled hand resting familiarly on Monohan's arm. Stella breathed a sigh
+of relief as they passed, looking straight ahead. She watched through
+the upper half of the café window and saw a machine draw against the
+curb, saw the be-scarfed yellow head enter and Monohan's silk hat
+follow. Then she relaxed, but she had little appetite for her food. A
+hot wave of shamed disgust kept coming over her. She felt sick,
+physically revolted. Very likely Monohan had put her in _that_ class, in
+his secret thought. She was glad when the evening ended, and the Howards
+left her at her own doorstep.
+
+On the carpet where it had been thrust by the postman under the door, a
+white square caught her eye, and she picked it up before she switched on
+the light. And she got a queer little shock when the light fell on the
+envelope, for it was addressed in Jack Fyfe's angular handwriting.
+
+She tore it open. It was little enough in the way of a letter, a couple
+of lines scrawled across a sheet of note-paper.
+
+    "_Dear Girl:_
+
+    "I was in Seattle a few days ago and heard you sing. Here's hoping
+    good luck rides with you.
+
+    "JACK."
+
+Stella sat down by the window. Outside, the ever-present Puget Sound
+rain drove against wall and roof and sidewalk, gathered in wet,
+glistening pools in the street. Through that same window she had watched
+Jack Fyfe walk out of her life three months ago without a backward look,
+sturdily, silently, uncomplaining. He hadn't whined, he wasn't whining
+now,--only flinging a cheerful word out of the blank spaces of his own
+life into the blank spaces of hers. Stella felt something warm and wet
+steal down her cheeks.
+
+She crumpled the letter with a sudden, spasmodic clenching of her hand.
+A lump rose chokingly in her throat. She stabbed at the light switch and
+threw herself on the bed, sobbing her heart's cry in the dusky quiet.
+And she could not have told why, except that she had been overcome by a
+miserably forlorn feeling; all the mental props she relied upon were
+knocked out from under her. Somehow those few scrawled words had flung
+swiftly before her, like a picture on a screen, a vision of her baby
+toddling uncertainly across the porch of the white bungalow. And she
+could not bear to think of that!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the elm before her window broke into leaf, and the sodden winter
+skies were transformed into a warm spring vista of blue, Stella was
+singing a special engagement in a local vaudeville house that boasted a
+"big time" bill. She had stepped up. The silvery richness of her voice
+had carried her name already beyond local boundaries, as the singing
+master under whom she studied prophesied it would. In proof thereof she
+received during April a feminine committee of two from Vancouver bearing
+an offer of three hundred dollars for her appearance in a series of
+three concerts under the auspices of the Woman's Musical Club, to be
+given in the ballroom of Vancouver's new million-dollar hostelry, the
+Granada. The date was mid-July. She took the offer under advisement,
+promising a decision in ten days.
+
+The money tempted her; that was her greatest need now,--not for her
+daily bread, but for an accumulated fund that would enable her to reach
+New York and ultimately Europe, if that seemed the most direct route to
+her goal. She had no doubts about reaching it now. Confidence came to
+abide with her. She throve on work; and with increasing salary, her fund
+grew. Coming from any other source, she would have accepted this further
+augmentation of it without hesitation, since for a comparative beginner,
+it was a liberal offer.
+
+But Vancouver was Fyfe's home town; it had been hers. Many people knew
+her; the local papers would feature her. She did not know how Fyfe would
+take it; she did not even know if there had been any open talk of their
+separation. Money, she felt, was a small thing beside opening old sores.
+For herself, she was tolerably indifferent to Vancouver's social
+estimate of her or her acts. Nevertheless, so long as she bore Fyfe's
+name, she did not feel free to make herself a public figure there
+without his sanction. So she wrote to him in some detail concerning the
+offer and asked point-blank if it mattered to him.
+
+His answer came with uncanny promptness, as if every mail connection had
+been made on the minute.
+
+    "If it is to your advantage to sing here," he wrote, "by all means
+    accept. Why should it matter to me? I would even be glad to come and
+    hear you sing if I could do so without stirring up vain longings and
+    useless regrets. As for the other considerations you mention, they
+    are of no weight at all. I never wanted to keep you in a glass case.
+    Even if all were well between us, I wouldn't have any feeling about
+    your singing in public other than pride in your ability to command
+    public favor with your voice. It's a wonderful voice, too big and
+    fine a thing to remain obscure.
+
+    "JACK."
+
+He added, evidently as an afterthought, a somewhat lengthy postscript:
+
+    "I wish you would do something next month, not as a favor to me
+    particularly, but to ease things along for Charlie and Linda. They
+    are genuinely in love with each other. I can see you turning up your
+    little nose at that. I know you've held a rather biased opinion of
+    your brother and his works since that unfortunate winter. But it
+    doesn't do to be too self-righteous. Charlie, then, was very little
+    different from any rather headlong, self-centered, red-blooded
+    youngster. I'm afraid I'm expressing myself badly. What I mean is
+    that while he was drifting then into a piggy muddle, he had the
+    sense to take a brace before his lapses became vices. Partly
+    because--I've flattered myself--I talked to him like a Dutch uncle,
+    and partly because he's cast too much in the same clean-cut mold
+    that you are, to let his natural passions run clean away with him.
+    He'll always be more or less a profound egotist. But he'll be a good
+    deal more of a man than you, perhaps, think.
+
+    "I never used to think much of these matters. I suppose my own
+    failure at a thing in which I was cocksure of success had made me a
+    bit dubious about anybody I care for starting so serious an
+    undertaking as marriage under any sort of handicap. I do like
+    Charlie Benton and Linda Abbey. They are marrying in the face of her
+    people's earnest attempt to break it up. The Abbeys are hopelessly
+    conservative. Anything in the nature of our troubles aired in public
+    would make it pretty tough sledding for Linda. As it stands, they
+    are consenting very ungracefully, but as a matter of family pride,
+    intend to give Linda a big wedding.
+
+    "Now, no one outside of you and me and--well you and me--knows that
+    there is a rift in our lute. I haven't been quizzed--naturally. It
+    got about that you'd taken up voice culture with an eye to opera as
+    a counteracting influence to the grief of losing your baby. I
+    fostered that rumor--simply to keep gossip down until things shaped
+    themselves positively. Once these two are married, they have
+    started--Abbey _père_ and _mère_ will then be unable to frown on
+    Linda's contemplated alliance with a family that's produced a
+    divorce case.
+
+    "I do not suppose you will take any legal steps until after those
+    concerts. Until then, please keep up the fiction that the house of
+    Fyfe still stands on a solid foundation--a myth that you've taken no
+    measures to dispel since you left. When it does come, it will be a
+    sort of explosion, and I'd rather have it that way--one amazed yelp
+    from our friends and the newspapers, and it's over.
+
+    "Meantime, you will receive an invitation to the wedding. I hope
+    you'll accept. You needn't have any compunctions about playing the
+    game. You will not encounter me, as I have my hands full here, and
+    I'm notorious in Vancouver for backing out of functions, anyway. It
+    is not imperative that you should do this. It's merely a safeguard
+    against a bomb from the Abbey fortress.
+
+    "Linda is troubled by a belief that upon small pretext they would be
+    very nasty, and she naturally doesn't want any friction with her
+    folks. They have certain vague but highly material ambitions for her
+    matrimonially, which she, a very sensible girl, doesn't subscribe
+    to. She's a very shrewd and practical young person, for all her
+    whole-hearted passion for your brother. I rather think she pretty
+    clearly guesses the breach in our rampart--not the original mistake
+    in our over-hasty plunge--but the wedge that divided us for good. If
+    she does, and I'm quite sure she does, she is certainly good stuff,
+    because she is most loyally your champion. I say that because
+    Charlie had a tendency this spring to carp at your desertion of
+    Roaring Lake. Things aren't going any too good with us, one way and
+    another, and of course he, not knowing the real reason of your
+    absence, couldn't understand why you stay away. I had to squelch
+    him, and Linda abetted me successfully. However, that's beside the
+    point. I hope I haven't irritated you. I'm such a dumb sort of brute
+    generally. I don't know what imp of prolixity got into my pen. I've
+    got it all off my chest now, or pretty near.
+
+    "J.H.F."
+
+Stella sat thoughtfully gazing at the letter for a long time.
+
+"I wonder?" she said aloud, and the sound of her own voice galvanized
+her into action. She put on a coat and went out into the mellow spring
+sunshine, and walked till the aimless straying of her feet carried her
+to a little park that overlooked the far reach of the Sound and gave
+westward on the snowy Olympics, thrusting hoary and aloof to a perfect
+sky, like their brother peaks that ringed Roaring Lake. And all the time
+her mind kept turning on a question whose asking was rooted neither in
+fact nor necessity, an inquiry born of a sentiment she had never
+expected to feel.
+
+Should she go back to Jack Fyfe?
+
+She shook her head impatiently when she faced that squarely. Why tread
+the same bitter road again? But she put that self-interested phase of it
+aside and asked herself candidly if she _could_ go back and take up the
+old threads where they had been broken off and make life run smoothly
+along the old, quiet channels? She was as sure as she was sure of the
+breath she drew that Fyfe wanted her, that he longed for and would
+welcome her. But she was equally sure that the old illusions would never
+serve. She couldn't even make him happy, much less herself.
+Monohan--well, Monohan was a dead issue. He had come to the Charteris to
+see her, all smiles and eagerness. She had been able to look at him and
+through him--and cut him dead--and do it without a single flutter of her
+heart.
+
+That brief and illuminating episode in Wain's had merely confirmed an
+impression that had slowly grown upon her, and her outburst of feeling
+that night had only been the overflowing of shamed anger at herself for
+letting his magnetic personality make so deep an impression on her that
+she could admit to him that she cared. She felt that she had belittled
+herself by that. But he was no longer a problem. She wondered now how he
+ever could have been. She recalled that once Jack Fyfe had soberly told
+her she would never sense life's real values while she nursed so many
+illusions. Monohan had been one of them.
+
+"But it wouldn't work," she whispered to herself. "I couldn't do it.
+He'd know I only did it because I was sorry, because I thought I should,
+because the old ties, and they seem so many and so strong in spite of
+everything, were harder to break than the new road is to follow alone.
+He'd resent anything like pity for his loneliness. And if Monohan has
+made any real trouble, it began over me, or at least it focussed on me.
+And he might resent that. He's ten times a better man than I am a woman.
+He thinks about the other fellow's side of things. I'm just what he said
+about Charlie, self-centered, a profound egotist. If I really and truly
+loved Jack Fyfe, I'd be a jealous little fury if he so much as looked at
+another woman. But I don't, and I don't see why I don't. I want to be
+loved; I want to love. I've always wanted that so much that I'll never
+dare trust my instincts about it again. I wonder why people like me
+exist to go blundering about in the world, playing havoc with themselves
+and everybody else?"
+
+Before she reached home, that self-sacrificing mood had vanished in the
+face of sundry twinges of pride. Jack Fyfe hadn't asked her to come
+back; he never would ask her to come back. Of that she was quite sure.
+She knew the stony determination of him too well. Neither hope or
+heaven nor fear of hell would turn him aside when he had made a
+decision. If he ever had moments of irresolution, he had successfully
+concealed any such weakness from those who knew him best. No one ever
+felt called upon to pity Jack Fyfe, and in those rocked-ribbed
+qualities, Stella had an illuminating flash, perhaps lay the secret of
+his failure ever to stir in her that yearning tenderness which she knew
+herself to be capable of lavishing, which her nature impelled her to
+lavish on some one.
+
+"Ah, well," she sighed, when she came back to her rooms and put Fyfe's
+letter away in a drawer. "I'll do the decent thing if they ask me. I
+wonder what Jack would say if he knew what I've been debating with
+myself this afternoon? I wonder if we were actually divorced and I'd
+made myself a reputation as a singer, and we happened to meet quite
+casually sometime, somewhere, just how we'd really feel about each
+other?"
+
+She was still musing on that, in a detached, impersonal fashion, when
+she caught a car down to the theater for the matinée.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+AN UNEXPECTED MEETING
+
+The formally worded wedding card arrived in due course. Following close
+came a letter from Linda Abbey, a missive that radiated friendliness and
+begged Stella to come a week before the date.
+
+    "You're going to be pretty prominent in the public eye when you sing
+    here," Linda wrote. "People are going to make a to-do over you. Ever
+    so many have mentioned you since the announcement was made that
+    you'll sing at the Granada concerts. I'm getting a lot of reflected
+    glory as the future sister-in-law of a rising singer. So you may as
+    well come and get your hand into the social game in preparation for
+    being fussed over in July."
+
+In the same mail was a characteristic note from Charlie which ran:
+
+    "_Dear Sis:_
+
+    "As the Siwashes say, long time I see you no. I might have dropped a
+    line before, but you know what a punk correspondent I am. They tell
+    me you're becoming a real noise musically. How about it?
+
+    "Can't you break away from the fame and fortune stuff long enough to
+    be on hand when Linda and I get married? I wasn't invited to your
+    wedding, but I'd like to have you at mine. Jack says it's up to you
+    to represent the Fyfe connection, as he's too busy. I'll come over
+    to Seattle and get you, if you say so."
+
+She capitulated at that and wrote saying that she would be there, and
+that she did not mind the trip alone in the least. She did not want
+Charlie asking pertinent questions about why she lived in such grubby
+quarters and practiced such strict economy in the matter of living.
+
+Then there was the detail of arranging a break in her engagements, which
+ran continuously to the end of June. She managed that easily enough, for
+she was becoming too great a drawing card for managers to curtly
+override her wishes.
+
+Almost before she realized it, June was at hand. Linda wrote again
+urgently, and Stella took the night boat for Vancouver a week before the
+wedding day. Linda met her at the dock with a machine. Mrs. Abbey was
+the essence of cordiality when she reached the big Abbey house on
+Vancouver's aristocratic "heights," where the local capitalists, all
+those fortunate climbers enriched by timber and mineral, grown wealthy
+in a decade through the great Coast boom, segregated themselves in
+"Villas" and "Places" and "Views," all painfully new and sometimes
+garish, striving for an effect in landscape and architecture which the
+very intensity of the striving defeated. They were well-meaning folk,
+however, the Abbeys included.
+
+Stella could not deny that she enjoyed the luxury of the Abbey ménage,
+the little festive round which was shaping about Linda in these last
+days of her spinsterhood. She relished the change from unremitting
+work. It amused her to startle little groups with the range and quality
+of her voice, when they asked her to sing. They made a much ado over
+that, a genuine admiration that flattered Stella. It was easy for her to
+fall into the swing of that life; it was only a lapsing back to the old
+ways.
+
+But she saw it now with a more critical vision. It was soft and
+satisfying and eminently desirable to have everything one wanted without
+the effort of striving for it, but a begging wheedling game on the part
+of these women. They were, she told herself rather harshly, an
+incompetent, helpless lot, dependent one and all upon some man's favor
+or affection, just as she herself had been all her life until the past
+few months. Some man had to work and scheme to pay the bills. She did
+not know why this line of thought should arise, neither did she so far
+forget herself as to voice these social heresies. But it helped to
+reconcile her with her new-found independence, to put a less formidable
+aspect on the long, hard grind that lay ahead of her before she could
+revel in equal affluence gained by her own efforts. All that they had
+she desired,--homes, servants, clothes, social standing,--but she did
+not want these things bestowed upon her as a favor by some man, the
+emoluments of sex.
+
+She expected she would have to be on her guard with her brother, even to
+dissemble a little. But she found him too deeply engrossed in what to
+him was the most momentous event of his career, impatiently awaiting the
+day, rather dreading the publicity of it.
+
+"Why in Sam Hill can't a man and a woman get married without all this
+fuss?" he complained once. "Why should we make our private affairs a
+spectacle for the whole town?"
+
+"Principally because mamma has her heart set on a spectacle," Linda
+laughed. "She'd hold up her hands in horror if she heard you. Decorated
+bridal bower, high church dignitary, bridesmaids, orange blossoms, rice,
+and all. Mamma likes to show off. Besides, that's the way it's done in
+society. _And_ the honeymoon."
+
+They both giggled, as at some mirthful secret.
+
+"Shall we tell her?" Linda nodded toward Stella.
+
+"Sure," Benton said. "I thought you had."
+
+"The happy couple will spend their honeymoon on a leisurely tour of the
+Southern and Eastern States, remaining for some weeks in Philadelphia,
+where the groom has wealthy and influential connections. It's all
+prepared for the pay-a-purs," Linda whispered with exaggerated secrecy
+behind her hand.
+
+Benton snorted.
+
+"Can you beat that?" he appealed to Stella.
+
+"And all the time," Linda continued, "the happy couple, unknown to every
+one, will be spending their days in peace and quietness in their shanty
+at Halfway Point. My, but mamma would rave if she knew. Don't give us
+away, Stella. It seems so senseless to squander a lot of money gadding
+about on trains and living in hotels when we'd much rather be at home by
+ourselves. My husband's a poor young man, Stella. 'Pore but worthy.' He
+has to make his fortune before we start in spending it. I'm sick of all
+this spreading it on because dad has made a pile of money," she broke
+out impatiently. "Our living used to be simple enough when I was a kid.
+I think I can relish a little simplicity again for a change. Mamma's
+been trying for four years to marry me off to her conception of an
+eligible man. It didn't matter a hang about his essential qualities so
+long as he had money and an assured social position."
+
+"Forget that," Charlie counseled slangily. "I have all the essential
+qualities, and I'll have the money and social position too; you watch my
+smoke."
+
+"Conceited ninny," Linda smiled. But there was no reproof in her tone,
+only pure comradeship and affection, which Benton returned so openly and
+unaffectedly that Stella got up and left them with a pang of envy, a
+dull little ache in her heart. She had missed that. It had passed her
+by, that clean, spontaneous fusing of two personalities in the biggest
+passion life holds. Marriage and motherhood she had known, not as the
+flowering of love, not as an eager fulfilling of her natural destiny,
+but as something extraneous, an avenue of escape from an irksomeness of
+living, a weariness with sordid things, which she knew now had obsessed
+her out of all proportion to their reality. She had never seen that
+tenderness glow in the eyes of a mating pair that she did not envy them,
+that she did not feel herself hopelessly defrauded of her woman's
+heritage.
+
+She went up to her room, moody, full of bitterness, and walked the
+thick-carpeted floor, the restlessness of her chafing spirit seeking the
+outlet of action.
+
+"Thank the Lord I've got something to do, something that's worth doing,"
+she whispered savagely. "If I can't have what I want, I can make my life
+embrace something more than just food and clothes and social trifling.
+If I had to sit and wait for each day to bring what it would, I believe
+I'd go clean mad."
+
+A maid interrupted these self-communings to say that some one had called
+her over the telephone, and Stella went down to the library. She wasn't
+prepared for the voice that came over the line, but she recognized it
+instantly as Fyfe's.
+
+"Listen, Stella," he said. "I'm sorry this has happened, but I can't
+very well avoid it now, without causing comment. I had no choice about
+coming to Vancouver. It was a business matter I couldn't neglect. And as
+luck would have it, Abbey ran into me as I got off the train. On account
+of your being there, of course, he insisted that I come out for dinner.
+It'll look queer if I don't, as I can't possibly get a return train for
+the Springs before nine-thirty this evening. I accepted without
+stuttering rather than leave any chance for the impression that I wanted
+to avoid you. Now, here's how I propose to fix it. I'll come out about
+two-thirty and pay a hurry-up five-minute call. Then I'll excuse myself
+to Mrs. Abbey for inability to join them at dinner--press of important
+business takes me to Victoria and so forth. That'll satisfy the
+conventions and let us both out. I called you so you won't be taken by
+surprise. Do you mind?"
+
+"Of course not," she answered instantly. "Why should I?"
+
+There was a momentary silence.
+
+"Well," he said at last, "I didn't know how you'd feel about it. Anyway,
+it will only be for a few minutes, and it's unlikely to happen again."
+
+Stella put the receiver back on the hook and looked at her watch. It
+lacked a quarter of two. In the room adjoining, Charlie and Linda were
+jubilantly wading through the latest "rag" song in a passable soprano
+and baritone, with Mrs. Abbey listening in outward resignation. Stella
+sat soberly for a minute, then joined them.
+
+"Jack's in town," she informed them placidly, when the ragtime spasm
+ended. "He telephoned that he was going to snatch a few minutes between
+important business confabs to run out and see me."
+
+"I could have told you that half an hour ago, my dear," Mrs. Abbey
+responded with playful archness. "Mr. Fyfe will dine with us this
+evening."
+
+"Oh," Stella feigned surprise. "Why, he spoke of going to Victoria on
+the afternoon boat. He gave me the impression of mad haste--making a
+dash out here between breaths, as you might say."
+
+"Oh, I hope he won't be called away on such short notice as that," Mrs.
+Abbey murmured politely.
+
+She left the room presently. Out of one corner of her eye Stella saw
+Linda looking at her queerly. Charlie had turned to the window, staring
+at the blue blur of the Lions across the Inlet.
+
+"It's a wonder Jack would leave the lake," he said suddenly, "with
+things the way they are. I've been hoping for rain ever since I've been
+down. I'll be glad when we're on the spot again, Linda."
+
+"Wishing for rain?" Stella echoed. "Why?"
+
+"Fire," he said shortly. "I don't suppose you realize it, but there's
+been practically no rain for two months. It's getting hot. A few weeks
+of dry, warm weather, and this whole country is ready to blow away. The
+woods are like a pile of shavings. That would be a fine wedding
+present--to be cleaned out by fire. Every dollar I've got's in timber."
+
+"Don't be a pessimist," Linda said sharply.
+
+"What makes you so uneasy now?" Stella asked thoughtfully. "There's
+always the fire danger in the dry months. That's been a bugaboo ever
+since I came to the lake."
+
+"Yes, but never like it is this summer," Benton frowned. "Oh, well, no
+use borrowing trouble, I suppose."
+
+Stella rose.
+
+"When Jack comes, I'll be in the library," she said. "I'm going to read
+a while."
+
+But the book she took up lay idle in her lap. She looked forward to that
+meeting with a curious mixture of reluctance and regret. She could not
+face it unmoved. No woman who has ever lain passive in a man's arms can
+ever again look into that man's eyes with genuine indifference. She may
+hate him or love him with a degree of intensity according to her nature,
+be merely friendly, or nurse a slow resentment. But there is always that
+intangible something which differentiates him from other men. Stella
+felt now a shyness of him, a little dread of him, less sureness of
+herself, as he swung out of the machine and took the house steps with
+that effortless lightness on his feet that she remembered so well.
+
+She heard him in the hall, his deep voice mingling with the thin,
+penetrating tones of Mrs. Abbey. And then the library door opened, and
+he came in. Stella had risen, and stood uncertainly at one corner of a
+big reading table, repressing an impulse to fly, finding herself
+stricken with a strange recurrence of the feeling she had first disliked
+him for arousing in her,--a sense of needing to be on her guard, of
+impending assertion of a will infinitely more powerful than her own.
+
+But that was, she told herself, only a state of mind, and Fyfe put her
+quickly at her ease. He came up to the table and seated himself on the
+edge of it an arm's length from her, swinging one foot free. He looked
+at her intently. There was no shadow of expression on his face, only in
+his clear eyes lurked a gleam of feeling.
+
+"Well, lady," he said at length, "you're looking fine. How goes
+everything?"
+
+"Fairly well," she answered.
+
+"Seems odd, doesn't it, to meet like this?" he ventured. "I'd have
+dodged it, if it had been politic. As it is, there's no harm done, I
+imagine. Mrs. Abbey assured me we'd be free from interruption. If the
+exceedingly cordial dame had an inkling of how things stand between us,
+I daresay she'd be holding her breath about now."
+
+"Why do you talk like that, Jack?" Stella protested nervously.
+
+"Well, I have to say something," he remarked, after a moment's
+reflection. "I can't sit here and just look at you. That would be rude,
+not to say embarrassing."
+
+Stella bit her lip.
+
+"I don't see why we can't talk like any other man and woman for a few
+minutes," she observed.
+
+"I do," he said quietly. "You know why, too, if you stop to think. I'm
+the same old Jack Fyfe, Stella. I don't think much where you are
+concerned; I just feel. And that doesn't lend itself readily to
+impersonal chatter."
+
+"How do you feel?" she asked, meeting his gaze squarely. "If you don't
+hate me, you must at least rather despise me."
+
+"Neither," he said slowly. "I admire your grit, lady. You broke away
+from everything and made a fresh start. You asserted your own
+individuality in a fashion that rather surprised me. Maybe the incentive
+wasn't what it might have been, but the result is, or promises to be. I
+was only a milestone. Why should I hate or despise you because you
+recognized that and passed on? I had no business setting myself up for
+the end of your road instead of the beginning. I meant to have it that
+way until the kid--well, Fate took a hand there. Pshaw," he broke off
+with a quick gesture, "let's talk about something else."
+
+Stella laid one hand on his knee. Unbidden tears were crowding up in her
+gray eyes.
+
+"You were good to me," she whispered. "But just being good wasn't
+enough for a perverse creature like me. I couldn't be a sleek pussy-cat,
+comfortable beside your fire. I'm full of queer longings. I want wings.
+I must be a variation from the normal type of woman. Our marriage didn't
+touch the real me at all, Jack. It only scratched the surface. And
+sometimes I'm afraid to look deep, for fear of what I'll see. Even if
+another man hadn't come along and stirred up a temporary tumult in me, I
+couldn't have gone on forever."
+
+"A temporary tumult," Fyfe mused. "Have you thoroughly chucked that
+illusion? I knew you would, of course, but I had no idea how long it
+would take you."
+
+"Long ago," she answered. "Even before I left you, I was shaky about
+that. There were things I couldn't reconcile. But pride wouldn't let me
+admit it. I can't even explain it to myself."
+
+"I can," he said, a little sadly. "You've never poured out that big,
+warm heart of yours on a man. It's there, always has been there, those
+concentrated essences of passion. Every unattached man's a possible
+factor, a potential lover. Nature has her own devices to gain her end. I
+couldn't be the one. We started wrong. I saw the mistake of that when it
+was too late. Monohan, a highly magnetic animal, came along at a time
+when you were peculiarly and rather blindly receptive. That's all.
+Sex--you have it in a word. It couldn't stand any stress, that sort of
+attraction. I knew it would only last until you got one illuminating
+glimpse of the real man of him. But I don't want to talk about him.
+He'll keep. Sometime you'll really love a _man_, Stella, and he'll be a
+very lucky mortal. There's an erratic streak in you, lady, but there's a
+bigger streak that's fine and good and true. You'd have gone through
+with it to the bitter end, if Jack Junior hadn't died. The weaklings
+don't do that. Neither do they cut loose as you did, burning all their
+economic bridges behind them. Do you know that it was over a month
+before I found out that you'd turned your private balance back into my
+account? I suppose there was a keen personal satisfaction in going on
+your own and making good from the start. Only I couldn't rest
+until--until--"
+
+His voice trailed huskily off into silence. The gloves in his left hand
+were doubled and twisted in his uneasy fingers. Stella's eyes were
+blurred.
+
+"Well, I'm going," he said shortly. "Be good."
+
+He slipped off the table and stood erect, a wide, deep-chested man,
+tanned brown, his fair hair with its bronze tinge lying back in a smooth
+wave from his forehead, blue eyes bent on her, hot with a slumbering
+fire.
+
+Without warning, he caught her close in his arms so that she could feel
+the pounding of his heart against her breast, kissed her cheeks, her
+hair, the round, firm white neck of her, with lips that burned. Then he
+held her off at arm's length.
+
+"That's how _I_ care," he said defiantly. "That's how I want you. No
+other way. I'm a one-woman man. Some time you may love like that, and if
+you do, you'll know how I feel. I've watched you sleeping beside me and
+ached because I couldn't kindle the faintest glow of the real thing in
+you. I'm sick with a miserable sense of failure, the only thing I've
+ever failed at, and the biggest, most complete failure I can conceive
+of,--to love a woman in every way desirable; to have her and yet never
+have her."
+
+He caught up his hat, and the door clicked shut behind him. A minute
+later Stella saw him step into the tonneau of the car. He never looked
+back.
+
+And she fled to her own room, stunned, half-frightened, wholly amazed at
+this outburst. Her face was damp with his lip-pressure, damp and warm.
+Her arms tingled with the grip of his. The blood stood in her cheeks
+like a danger signal, flooding in hot, successive waves to the roots of
+her thick, brown hair.
+
+"If I thought--I could," she whispered into her pillow, "I'd try. But I
+daren't. I'm afraid. It's just a mood, I know it is. I've had it before.
+A--ah! I'm a spineless jellyfish, a weathercock that whirls to every
+emotional breeze. And I won't be. I'll stand on my own feet if I can--so
+help me God, I will!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+THE FIRE BEHIND THE SMOKE
+
+This is no intimate chronicle of Charlie Benton and Linda Abbey, save in
+so far as they naturally furnish a logical sequence in what transpired.
+Therefore the details of their nuptials is of no particular concern.
+They were wedded, ceremonially dined as befitted the occasion, and
+departed upon their hypothetical honeymoon, surreptitiously abbreviated
+from an extravagant swing over half of North America to seventy miles by
+rail and twenty by water,--and a month of blissful seclusion, which
+suited those two far better than any amount of Pullman touring, besides
+leaving them money in pocket.
+
+When they were gone, Stella caught the next boat for Seattle. She had
+drawn fresh breath in the meantime, and while she felt tenderly, almost
+maternally, sorry for Jack Fyfe, she swung back to the old attitude.
+Even granting, she argued, that she could muster courage to take up the
+mantle of wifehood where she laid it off, there was no surety that they
+could do more than compromise. There was the stubborn fact that she had
+openly declared her love for another man, that by her act she had
+plunged her husband into far-reaching conflict. Such a conflict existed.
+She could put her finger on no concrete facts, but it was in the air.
+She heard whispers of a battle between giants--a financial duel to the
+death--with all the odds against Jack Fyfe.
+
+Win or lose, there would be scars. And the struggle, if not of and by
+her deed, had at least sprung into malevolent activity through her. Men,
+she told herself, do not forget these things; they rankle. Jack Fyfe was
+only human. No, Stella felt that they could only come safe to the old
+port by virtue of a passion that could match Fyfe's own. And she put
+that rather sadly beyond her, beyond the possibilities. She had felt
+stirrings of it, but not to endure. She was proud and sensitive and
+growing wise with bitterly accumulated experience. It had to be all or
+nothing with them, a cleaving together complete enough to erase and
+forever obliterate all that had gone before. And since she could not see
+that as a possibility, there was nothing to do but play the game
+according to the cards she held. Of these the trump was work, the inner
+glow that comes of something worth while done toward a definite,
+purposeful end. She took up her singing again with a distinct relief.
+
+Time passed quickly and uneventfully enough between the wedding day and
+the date of her Granada engagement. It seemed a mere breathing space
+before the middle of July rolled around, and she was once more aboard a
+Vancouver boat. In the interim, she had received a letter from the
+attorney who had wound up her father's estate, intimating that there was
+now a market demand for that oil stock, and asking if he should sell or
+hold for a rise in price which seemed reasonably sure? Stella
+telegraphed her answer. If that left-over of a speculative period would
+bring a few hundred dollars, it would never be of greater service to her
+than now.
+
+All the upper reach of Puget Sound basked in its normal midsummer haze,
+the day Stella started for Vancouver. That great region of island-dotted
+sea spread between the rugged Olympics and the foot of the Coast range
+lay bathed in summer sun, untroubled, somnolent. But nearing the
+international boundary, the _Charlotte_ drove her twenty-knot way into a
+thickening atmosphere. Northward from Victoria, the rugged shores that
+line those inland waterways began to appear blurred. Just north of
+Active Pass, where the steamers take to the open gulf again, a vast bank
+of smoke flung up blue and gray, a rolling mass. The air was pungent,
+oppressive. When the _Charlotte_ spanned the thirty-mile gap between
+Vancouver Island and the mainland shore, she nosed into the Lion's Gate
+under a slow bell, through a smoke pall thick as Bering fog. Stella's
+recollection swung back to Charlie's uneasy growl of a month earlier.
+Fire! Throughout the midsummer season there was always the danger of
+fire breaking out in the woods. Not all the fire-ranger patrols could
+guard against the carelessness of fishermen and campers.
+
+"It's a tough Summer over here for the timber owners," she heard a man
+remark. "I've been twenty years on the coast and never saw the woods so
+dry."
+
+"Dry's no name," his neighbor responded. "It's like tinder. A cigarette
+stub'll start a blaze forty men couldn't put out. It's me that knows it.
+I've got four limits on the North Arm, and there's fire on two sides of
+me. You bet I'm praying for rain."
+
+"They say the country between Chehalis and Roaring Lake is one big
+blaze," the first man observed.
+
+"So?" the other replied. "Pity, too. Fine timber in there. I came near
+buying some timber on the lake this spring. Some stuff that was on the
+market as a result of that Abbey-Monohan split. Glad I didn't now. I'd
+just as soon have _all_ my money out of timber this season."
+
+They moved away in the press of disembarking, and Stella heard no more
+of their talk. She took a taxi to the Granada, and she bought a paper in
+the foyer before she followed the bell boy to her room. She had scarcely
+taken off her hat and settled down to read when the telephone rang.
+Linda's voice greeted her when she answered.
+
+"I called on the chance that you took the morning boat," Linda said.
+"Can I run in? I'm just down for the day. I won't be able to hear you
+sing, but I'd like to see you, dear."
+
+"Can you come right now?" Stella asked. "Come up, and we'll have
+something served up here. I don't feel like running the gauntlet of the
+dining room just now."
+
+"I'll be there in a few minutes," Linda answered.
+
+Stella went back to her paper. She hadn't noticed any particular stress
+laid on forest fires in the Seattle dailies, but she could not say that
+of this Vancouver sheet. The front page reeked of smoke and fire. She
+glanced through the various items for news of Roaring Lake, but found
+only a brief mention. It was "reported" and "asserted" and "rumored"
+that fire was raging at one or two points there, statements that were
+overshadowed by positive knowledge of greater areas nearer at hand
+burning with a fierceness that could be seen and smelled. The local
+papers had enough feature stuff in fires that threatened the very
+suburbs of Vancouver without going so far afield as Roaring Lake.
+
+Linda's entrance put a stop to her reading, without, however, changing
+the direction of her thought. For after an exchange of greetings, Linda
+divulged the source of her worried expression, which Stella had
+immediately remarked.
+
+"Who wouldn't be worried," Linda said, "with the whole country on fire,
+and no telling when it may break out in some unexpected place and wipe
+one out of house and home."
+
+"Is it so bad as that at the lake?" Stella asked uneasily. "There's not
+much in the paper. I was looking."
+
+"It's so bad," Linda returned, with a touch of bitterness, "that I've
+been driven to the Springs for safety; that every able-bodied man on the
+lake who can be spared is fighting fire. There has been one man killed,
+and there's half a dozen loggers in the hospital, suffering from burns
+and other hurts. Nobody knows where it will stop. Charlie's limits have
+barely been scorched, but there's fire all along one side of them. A
+change of wind--and there you are. Jack Fyfe's timber is burning in a
+dozen places. We've been praying for rain and choking in the smoke for a
+week."
+
+Stella looked out the north window. From the ten-story height she could
+see ships lying in the stream, vague hulks in the smoky pall that
+shrouded the harbor.
+
+"I'm sorry," she whispered.
+
+"It's devilish," Linda went on. "Like groping in the dark and being
+afraid--for me. I've been married a month, and for ten days I've only
+seen my husband at brief intervals when he comes down in the launch for
+supplies, or to bring an injured man. And he doesn't tell me anything
+except that we stand a fat chance of losing everything. I sit there at
+the Springs, and look at that smoke wall hanging over the water, and
+wonder what goes on up there. And at night there's the red glow, very
+faint and far. That's all. I've been doing nursing at the hospital to
+help out and to keep from brooding. I wouldn't be down here now, only
+for a list of things the doctor needs, which he thought could be
+obtained quicker if some one attended to it personally. I'm taking the
+evening train back."
+
+"I'm sorry," Stella repeated.
+
+She said it rather mechanically. Her mind was spinning a thread, upon
+which, strung like beads, slid all the manifold succession of things
+that had happened since she came first to Roaring Lake. Linda's voice,
+continuing, broke into her thoughts.
+
+"I suppose I shouldn't be croaking into your ear like a bird of ill
+omen, when you have to throw yourself heart and soul into that concert
+to-morrow," she said contritely. "I wonder why that Ancient Mariner way
+of seeking relief from one's troubles by pouring them into another ear
+is such a universal trait? You aren't vitally concerned, after all, and
+I am. Let's have that tea, dear, and talk about less grievous things. I
+still have one or two trifles to get in the shops too."
+
+After they had finished the food that Stella ordered sent up, they went
+out together. Later Stella saw her off on the train.
+
+"Good-by, dear," Linda said from the coach window. "I'm just selfish
+enough to wish you were going back with me; I wish you could sit with me
+on the bank of the lake, aching and longing for your man up there in the
+smoke as I ache and long for mine. Misery loves company."
+
+Stella's eyes were clouded as the train pulled out. Something in Linda
+Benton's parting words made her acutely lonely, dispirited, out of joint
+with the world she was deliberately fashioning for herself. Into Linda's
+life something big and elemental had come. The butterfly of yesterday
+had become the strong man's mate of to-day. Linda's heart was
+unequivocally up there in the smoke and flame with her man, fighting for
+their mutual possessions, hoping with him, fearing for him, longing for
+him, secure in the knowledge that if nothing else was left them, they
+had each other. It was a rare and beautiful thing to feel like that. And
+beyond that sorrowful vision of what she lacked to achieve any real and
+enduring happiness, there loomed also a self-torturing conviction that
+she herself had set in motion those forces which now threatened ruin for
+her brother and Jack Fyfe.
+
+There was no logical proof of this. Only intuitive, subtle suggestions
+gleaned here and there, shadowy finger-posts which pointed to Monohan
+as a deadly hater and with a score chalked up against Fyfe to which she
+had unconsciously added. He had desired her, and twice Fyfe had treated
+him like an urchin caught in mischief. She recalled how Monohan sprang
+at him like a tiger that day on the lake shore. She realized how bitter
+a humiliation it must have been to suffer that sardonic cuffing at
+Fyfe's hands. Monohan wasn't the type of man who would ever forget or
+forgive either that or the terrible grip on his throat.
+
+Even at the time she had sensed this and dreaded what it might
+ultimately lead to. Even while her being answered eagerly to the
+physical charm of him, she had fought against admitting to herself what
+desperate intent might have lain back of the killing of Billy Dale,--a
+shot that Lefty Howe declared was meant for Fyfe. She had long outgrown
+Monohan's lure, but if he had come to her or written to make out a case
+for himself when she first went to Seattle, she would have accepted his
+word against anything. Her heart would have fought for him against the
+logic of her brain.
+
+But--she had had a long time to think, to compare, to digest all that
+she knew of him, much that was subconscious impression rising late to
+the surface, a little that she heard from various sources. The sum total
+gave her a man of rank passions, of rare and merciless finesse where his
+desires figured, a man who got what he wanted by whatever means most
+fitly served his need. Greater than any craving to possess a woman would
+be the measure of his rancor against a man who humiliated him, thwarted
+him. She could understand how a man like Monohan would hate a man like
+Jack Fyfe, would nurse and feed on the venom of his hate until setting a
+torch to Fyfe's timber would be a likely enough counterstroke.
+
+She shrank from the thought. Yet it lingered until she felt guilty.
+Though it made no material difference to her that Fyfe might or might
+not face ruin, she could not, before her own conscience, evade
+responsibility. The powder might have been laid, but her folly had
+touched spark to the fuse, as she saw it. That seared her like a pain
+far into the night. For every crime a punishment; for every sin a
+penance. Her world had taught her that. She had never danced; she had
+only listened to the piper and longed to dance, as nature had fashioned
+her to do. But the piper was sending his bill. She surveyed it wearily,
+emotionally bankrupt, wondering in what coin of the soul she would have
+to pay.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+A RIDE BY NIGHT
+
+Stella sang in the gilt ballroom of the Granada next afternoon, behind
+the footlights of a miniature stage, with the blinds drawn and a few
+hundred of Vancouver's social elect critically, expectantly listening.
+She sang her way straight into the heart of that audience with her
+opening number. This was on Wednesday. Friday she sang again, and
+Saturday afternoon.
+
+When she came back to her room after that last concert, wearied with the
+effort of listening to chattering women and playing the gracious lady to
+an admiring contingent which insisted upon making her last appearance a
+social triumph, she found a letter forwarded from Seattle. She slit the
+envelope. A typewritten sheet enfolded a green slip,--a check. She
+looked at the figures, scarcely comprehending until she read the letter.
+
+    "We take pleasure in handing you herewith," Mr. Lander wrote for the
+    firm, "our check for nineteen thousand five hundred dollars,
+    proceeds of oil stock sold as per your telegraphed instructions,
+    less brokerage charges. We sold same at par, and trust this will be
+    satisfactory."
+
+She looked at the check again. Nineteen thousand, five hundred--payable
+to her order. Two years ago such a sum would have lifted her to
+plutocratic heights, filled her with pleasurable excitement, innumerable
+anticipations. Now it stirred her less than the three hundred dollars
+she had just received from the Granada Concert committee. She had earned
+that, had given for it due measure of herself. This other had come
+without effort, without expectation. And less than she had ever needed
+money before did she now require such a sum.
+
+Yet she was sensibly aware that this windfall meant a short cut to
+things which she had only looked to attain by plodding over economic
+hills. She could say good-by to singing in photoplay houses, to
+vaudeville engagements, to concert work in provincial towns. She could
+hitch her wagon to a star and go straight up the avenue that led to a
+career, if it were in her to achieve greatness. Pleasant dreams in which
+the buoyant ego soared, until the logical interpretation of her
+ambitions brought her to a more practical consideration of ways and
+means, and that in turn confronted her with the fact that she could
+leave the Pacific coast to-morrow morning if she so chose.
+
+Why should she not so choose?
+
+She was her own mistress, free as the wind. Fyfe had said that. She
+looked out into the smoky veil that shrouded the water front and the
+hills across the Inlet, that swirled and eddied above the giant fir in
+Stanley Park, and her mind flicked back to Roaring Lake where the Red
+Flower of Kipling's _Jungle Book_ bloomed to her husband's ruin. Did it?
+She wondered. She could not think of him as beaten, bested in any
+undertaking. She had never been able to think of him in those terms.
+Always to her he had conveyed the impression of a superman. Always she
+had been a little in awe of him, of his strength, his patient,
+inflexible determination, glimpsing under his habitual repression
+certain tremendous forces. She could not conceive him as a broken man.
+
+Staring out into the smoky air, she wondered if the fires at Roaring
+Lake still ravaged that noble forest; if Fyfe's resources, like her
+brother's, were wholly involved in standing timber, and if that timber
+were doomed? She craved to know. Secured herself by that green slip in
+her hand against every possible need, she wondered if it were ordained
+that the two men whose possession of material resources had molded her
+into what she was to-day should lose all, be reduced to the same stress
+that had made her an unwilling drudge in her brother's kitchen. Then she
+recalled that for Charlie there was an equivalent sum due,--a share like
+her own. At the worst, he had the nucleus of another fortune.
+
+Curled among the pillows of her bed that night, she looked over the
+evening papers, read with a swift heart-sinking that the Roaring Lake
+fire was assuming terrific proportions, that nothing but a deluge of
+rain would stay it now. And more significantly, except for a minor blaze
+or two, the fire raged almost wholly upon and around the Fyfe block of
+limits. She laid aside the papers, switched off the lights, and lay
+staring wide-eyed at the dusky ceiling.
+
+At twenty minutes of midnight she was called to the door of her room to
+receive a telegram. It was from Linda, and it read:
+
+    "Charlie badly hurt. Can you come?"
+
+Stella reached for the telephone receiver. The night clerk at the C.P.R.
+depot told her the first train she could take left at six in the
+morning. That meant reaching the Springs at nine-thirty. Nine and a half
+hours to sit with idle hands, in suspense. She did not knew what tragic
+dénouement awaited there, what she could do once she reached there. She
+knew only that a fever of impatience burned in her. The message had
+strung her suddenly taut, as if a crisis had arisen in which willy-nilly
+she must take a hand.
+
+So, groping for the relief of action, some method of spanning that nine
+hours' wait, her eye fell upon a card tucked beside the telephone case.
+She held it between, finger and thumb, her brows puckered.
+
+    TAXIS AND TOURING CARS
+    Anywhere . . . Anytime
+
+She took down the receiver again and asked for Seymour 9X.
+
+"Western Taxi," a man's voice drawled.
+
+"I want to reach Roaring Hot Springs in the shortest time possible," she
+told him rather breathlessly. "Can you furnish me a machine and a
+reliable chauffeur?"
+
+"Roaring Springs?" he repeated. "How many passengers?"
+
+"One. Myself."
+
+"Just a minute."
+
+She heard a faint burble of talk away at the other end of the wire. Then
+the same voice speaking crisply.
+
+"We gotta big six roadster, and a first-class driver. It'll cost you
+seventy-five dollars--in advance."
+
+"Your money will be waiting for you here," she answered calmly. "How
+soon can you bring the car around to the Hotel Granada?"
+
+"In ten minutes, if you say so."
+
+"Say twenty minutes, then."
+
+"All right."
+
+She dressed herself, took the elevator down to the lobby, instructed the
+night clerk to have a maid pack her trunk and send it by express to
+Hopyard, care of St. Allwoods Hotel on the lake. Then she walked out to
+the broad-stepped carriage entrance.
+
+A low-hung long-hooded, yellow car stood there, exhaust purring faintly.
+She paid the driver, sank into the soft upholstering beside him, and the
+big six slid out into the street. There was no traffic. In a few minutes
+they were on the outskirts of the city, the long asphalt ribbon of
+King's Way lying like a silver band between green, bushy walls. They
+crossed the last car track. The driver spoke to her out of one corner of
+his mouth.
+
+"Wanna make time, huh?"
+
+"I want to get to Roaring Lake as quickly as you can drive, without
+taking chances."
+
+"I know the road pretty well," he assured her. "Drove a party clear to
+Rosebud day before yesterday. I'll do the best I can. Can't drive too
+fast at night. Too smoky."
+
+She could not gage his conception of real speed if the gait he struck
+was not "too fast." They were through New Westminster and rolling across
+the Fraser bridge before she was well settled in the seat, breasting the
+road with a lurch and a swing at the curves, a noise under that long
+hood like giant bees in an empty barrel.
+
+Ninety miles of road good, bad and indifferent, forest and farm and
+rolling hill, and the swamps of Sumas Prairie, lies between Vancouver
+and Roaring Lake. At four in the morning, with dawn an hour old, they
+woke the Rosebud ferryman to cross the river. Twenty minutes after that
+Stella was stepping stiffly out of the machine before Roaring Springs
+hospital. The doctor's Chinaman was abroad in the garden. She beckoned
+him.
+
+"You sabe Mr. Benton--Charlie Benton?" she asked. "He in doctor's
+house?"
+
+The Chinaman pointed across the road. "Mist Bentle obah dah," he said.
+"Velly much sick. Missa Bentle lib dah, all same gleen house."
+
+Stella ran across the way. The front door of the green cottage stood
+wide. An electric drop light burned in the front room, though it was
+broad day. When she crossed the threshold, she saw Linda sitting in a
+chair, her arms folded on the table-edge, her head resting on her hands.
+She was asleep, and she did not raise her head till Stella shook her
+shoulder.
+
+Linda Abbey had been a pretty girl, very fair, with apple-blossom skin
+and a wonderfully expressive face. It gave Stella a shock to see her
+now, to gage her suffering by the havoc it had wrought. Linda looked
+old, haggard, drawn. There was a weary droop to her mouth, her eyes were
+dull, lifeless, just as one might look who is utterly exhausted in mind
+and body. Oddly enough, she spoke first of something irrelevant,
+inconsequential.
+
+"I fell asleep," she said heavily. "What time is it?"
+
+Stella looked at her watch.
+
+"Half-past four," she answered. "How is Charlie? What happened to him?"
+
+"Monohan shot him."
+
+Stella caught her breath. She hadn't been prepared for that.
+
+"Is he--is he--" she could not utter the words.
+
+"He'll get better. Wait." Linda rose stiffly from her seat. A door in
+one side of the room stood ajar. She opened it, and Stella, looking over
+her shoulder, saw her brother's tousled head on a pillow. A nurse in
+uniform sat beside his bed. Linda closed the door silently.
+
+"Come into the kitchen where we won't make a noise," she whispered.
+
+A fire burned in the kitchen stove. Linda sank into a willow rocker.
+
+"I'm weary as Atlas," she said. "I've been fretting for so long. Then
+late yesterday afternoon they brought him home to me--like that. The
+doctor was probing for the bullet when I wired you. I was in a panic
+then, I think. Half-past four! How did you get here so soon? How could
+you? There's no train."
+
+Stella told her.
+
+"Why should Monohan shoot him?" she broke out. "For God's sake, talk,
+Linda!"
+
+There was a curious impersonality in Linda's manner, as if she stood
+aloof from it all, as if the fire of her vitality had burned out. She
+lay back in her chair with eyelids drooping, speaking in dull, lifeless
+tones.
+
+"Monohan shot him because Charlie came on him in the woods setting a
+fresh fire. They've suspected him, or some one in his pay, of that, and
+they've been watching. There were two other men with Charlie, so there
+is no mistake. Monohan got away. That's all I know. Oh, but I'm tired.
+I've been hanging on to myself for so long. About daylight, after we
+knew for sure that Charlie was over the hill, something seemed to let go
+in me. I'm awful glad you came, Stella. Can you make a cup of tea?"
+
+Stella could and did, but she drank none of it herself. A dead weight of
+apprehension lay like lead in her breast. Her conscience pointed a
+deadly finger. First Billy Dale, now her brother, and, sandwiched in
+between, the loosed fire furies which were taking toll in bodily injury
+and ruinous loss.
+
+Yet she was helpless. The matter was wholly out of her hands, and she
+stood aghast before it, much as the small child stands aghast before the
+burning house he has fired by accident.
+
+Fyfe next. That was the ultimate, the culmination, which would leave her
+forever transfixed with remorseful horror. The fact that already the
+machinery of the law which would eventually bring Monohan to book for
+the double lawlessness of arson and attempted homicide must be in
+motion, that the Provincial police would be hard on his trail, did not
+occur to her. She could only visualize him progressing step by step from
+one lawless deed to another. And in her mind every step led to Jack
+Fyfe, who had made a mock of him. She found her hands clenching till the
+nails dug deep.
+
+Linda's head drooped over the teacup. Her eyelids blinked.
+
+"Dear," Stella said tenderly, "come and lie down. You're worn out."
+
+"Perhaps I'd better," Linda muttered. "There's another room in there."
+
+Stella tucked the weary girl into the bed, and went back to the kitchen,
+and sat down in the willow rocker. After another hour the nurse came out
+and prepared her own breakfast. Benton was still sleeping. He was in no
+danger, the nurse told Stella. The bullet had driven cleanly through his
+body, missing as by a miracle any vital part, and lodged in the muscles
+of his back, whence the surgeon had removed it. Though weak from shock,
+loss of blood, excitement, he had rallied splendidly, and fallen into a
+normal sleep.
+
+Later the doctor confirmed this. He made light of the wound. One
+couldn't kill a young man as full of vitality as Charlie Benton with an
+axe, he informed Stella with an optimistic smile. Which lifted one
+burden from her mind.
+
+The night nurse went away, and another from the hospital took her place.
+Benton slept; Linda slept. The house was very quiet. To Stella, brooding
+in that kitchen chair, it became oppressive, that funeral hush. When it
+was drawing near ten o'clock, she walked up the road past the corner
+store and post-office, and so out to the end of the wharf.
+
+The air was hot and heavy, pungent, gray with the smoke. Farther along,
+St. Allwoods bulked mistily amid its grounds. The crescent of shore line
+half a mile distant was wholly obscured. Up over the eastern mountain
+range the sun, high above the murk, hung like a bloody orange, rayless
+and round. No hotel guests strolled by pairs and groups along the bank.
+She could understand that no one would come for pleasure into that
+suffocating atmosphere. Caught in that great bowl of which the lake
+formed the watery bottom, the smoke eddied and rolled like a cloud of
+mist.
+
+She stood a while gazing at the glassy surface of the lake where it
+spread to her vision a little way beyond the piles. Then she went back
+to the green cottage.
+
+Benton lifted alert, recognizing eyes when she peeped in the bedroom
+door.
+
+"Hello, Sis," he greeted in strangely subdued tones. "When did you blow
+in? I thought you'd deserted the sinking ship completely. Come on in."
+
+She winced inwardly at his words, but made no outward sign, as she came
+up to his bedside. The nurse went out.
+
+"Perhaps you'd better not talk?" she said.
+
+"Oh, nonsense," he retorted feebly. "I'm all right. Sore as the mischief
+and weak. But I don't feel as bad as I might. Linda still asleep?"
+
+"I think so," Stella answered.
+
+"Poor kid," he breathed; "it's been tough on her. Well, I guess it's
+been tough on everybody. He turned out to be some bad actor, this
+Monohan party. I never did like the beggar. He was a little too
+high-handed in his smooth, kid-glove way. But I didn't suppose he'd try
+to burn up a million dollars' worth of timber to satisfy a grudge. Well,
+he put his foot in it proper at last. He'll get a good long jolt in the
+pen, if the boys don't beat the constables to him and take him to
+pieces."
+
+"He did start the fire then?" Stella muttered.
+
+"I guess so," Benton replied. "At any rate, he kept it going. Did it by
+his lonesome, too. Jack suspected that. We were watching for him as well
+as fighting fire. He'd come down from the head of the lake in that speed
+boat of his, and this time daylight caught him before he could get back
+to where he had her cached, after starting a string of little fires in
+the edge of my north limit. He had it in for me, too, you know; I batted
+him over the head with a pike-pole here at the wharf one day this
+spring, so he plunked me as soon as I hollered at him. I wish he'd done
+it earlier in the game. We might have saved a lot of good timber. As it
+was, we couldn't do much. Every time the wind changed, it would break
+out in a new place--too often to be accidental. Damn him!"
+
+"How is it going to end, the fire?" Stella forced herself to ask. "Will
+you and Jack be able to save any timber?"
+
+"If it should rain hard, and if in the meantime the boys keep it from
+jumping the fire-trails we've cut, I'll get by with most of mine," he
+said. "But Jack's done for. He won't have anything but his donkeys and
+gear and part of a cedar limit on the Tyee which isn't paid for. He had
+practically everything tied up in that big block of timber around the
+Point. Monohan made him spend money like water to hold his own. Jack's
+broke."
+
+Stella's head drooped. Benton reached out an axe-calloused hand, all
+grimy and browned from the stress of fire fighting, and covered her soft
+fingers that rested on his bed.
+
+"It's a pity everything's gone to pot like that, Stell," he said softly.
+"I've grown a lot wiser in human ways the last two years. You taught me
+a lot, and Jack a lot, and Linda the rest. It seems a blamed shame you
+and Jack came to a fork in the road. Oh, he never chirped. I've just
+guessed it the last few weeks. I owe him a lot that he'll never let me
+pay back in anything but good will. I hate to see him get the worst of
+it from every direction. He grins and doesn't say anything. But I know
+it hurts. There can't be anything much wrong between you two. Why don't
+you forget your petty larceny troubles and start all over again?"
+
+"I can't," she whispered. "It wouldn't work. There's too many scars. Too
+much that's hard to forget."
+
+"Well, you know about that better than I do," Benton said thoughtfully.
+"It all depends on how you _feel_."
+
+The poignant truth of that struck miserably home to her. It was not a
+matter of reason or logic, of her making any sacrifice for her
+conscience sake. It depended solely upon the existence of an emotion she
+could not definitely invoke. She was torn by so many emotions, not one
+of which she could be sure was the vital, the necessary one. Her heart
+did not cry out for Jack Fyfe, except in a pitying tenderness, as she
+used to feel for Jack Junior when he bumped and bruised himself. She had
+felt that before and held it too weak a crutch to lean upon.
+
+The nurse came in with a cup of broth for Benton, and Stella went away
+with a dumb ache in her breast, a leaden sinking of her spirits, and
+went out to sit on the porch steps. The minutes piled into hours, and
+noon came, when Linda wakened. Stella forced herself to swallow a cup of
+tea, to eat food; then she left Linda sitting with her husband and went
+back to the porch steps again.
+
+As she sat there, a man dressed in the blue shirt and mackinaw trousers
+and high, calked boots of the logger turned in off the road, a burly
+woodsman that she recognized as one of Jack Fyfe's crew.
+
+"Well," said he, "if it ain't Mrs. Jack. Say--ah--"
+
+He broke off suddenly, a perplexed look on his face, an uneasiness, a
+hesitation in his manner.
+
+"What is it, Barlow?" Stella asked kindly. "How is everything up the
+lake?"
+
+It was common enough in her experience, that temporary embarrassment of
+a logger before her. She knew them for men with boyish souls, boyish
+instincts, rude simplicities of heart. Long ago she had revised those
+first superficial estimates of them as gross, hulking brutes who worked
+hard and drank harder, coarsened and calloused by their occupation. They
+had their weaknesses, but their virtues of abiding loyalty, their
+reckless generosity, their simple directness, were great indeed. They
+took their lives in their hands on skid-road and spring-board, that such
+as she might flourish. They did not understand that, but she did.
+
+"What is it, Barlow?" she repeated. "Have you just come down the lake?"
+
+"Yes'm," he answered. "Say, Jack don't happen to be here, does he?"
+
+"No, he hasn't been here," she told him.
+
+The man's face fell.
+
+"What's wrong?" Stella demanded. She had a swift divination that
+something was wrong.
+
+"Oh, I dunno's anythin's wrong, particular," Barlow replied.
+"Only--well, Lefty he sent me down to see if Jack was at the Springs. We
+ain't seen him for a couple uh days."
+
+Her pulse quickened.
+
+"And he has not come down the lake?"
+
+"I guess not," the logger said. "Oh, I guess it's all right. Jack's
+pretty _skookum_ in the woods. Only Lefty got uneasy. It's desperate hot
+and smoky up there."
+
+"How did you come down? Are you going back soon?" she asked abruptly.
+
+"I got the _Waterbug_," Barlow told her. "I'm goin' right straight
+back."
+
+Stella looked out over the smoky lake and back at the logger again, a
+sudden resolution born of intolerable uncertainty, of a feeling that she
+could only characterize as fear, sprang full-fledged into her mind.
+"Wait for me," she said. "I'm going with you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+"OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME"
+
+The _Waterbug_ limped. Her engine misfired continuously, and Barlow
+lacked the mechanical knowledge to remedy its ailment. He was satisfied
+to let it pound away, so long as it would revolve at all. So the boat
+moved slowly through that encompassing smoke at less than half speed.
+Outwardly the once spick and span cruiser bore every mark of hard usage.
+Her topsides were foul, her decks splintered by the tramping of calked
+boots, grimy with soot and cinders. It seemed to Stella that everything
+and every one on and about Roaring Lake bore some mark of that holocaust
+raging in the timber, as if the fire were some malignant disease
+menacing and marring all that it affected, and affecting all that
+trafficked within its smoky radius.
+
+But of the fire itself she could see nothing, even when late in the
+afternoon they drew in to the bay before her brother's camp. A heavier
+smoke cloud, more pungent of burning pitch, blanketed the shores, lifted
+in blue, rolling masses farther back. A greater heat made the air
+stifling, causing the eyes to smart and grow watery. That was the only
+difference.
+
+Barlow laid the _Waterbug_ alongside the float. He had already told her
+that Lefty Howe, with the greater part of Fyfe's crew, was extending and
+guarding Benton's fire-trail, and he half expected that Fyfe might have
+turned up there. Away back in the smoke arose spasmodic coughing of
+donkey engines, dull resounding of axe-blades. Barlow led the way. They
+traversed a few hundred yards of path through brush, broken tops, and
+stumps, coming at last into a fairway cut through virgin timber, a
+sixty-foot strip denuded of every growth, great firs felled and drawn
+far aside, brush piled and burned. A breastwork from which to fight
+advancing fire, it ran away into the heart of a smoky forest. Here and
+there blackened, fire-scorched patches abutted upon its northern flank,
+stumps of great trees smoldering, crackling yet. At the first such
+place, half a dozen men were busy with shovels blotting out streaks of
+fire that crept along in the dry leaf mold. No, they had not seen Fyfe.
+But they had been blamed busy. He might be up above.
+
+Half a mile beyond that, beside the first donkey shuddering on its
+anchored skids as it tore an eighteen-inch cedar out by the roots, they
+came on Lefty Howe. He shook his head when Stella asked for Fyfe.
+
+"He took twenty men around to the main camp day before yesterday," said
+Lefty. "There was a piece uh timber beyond that he thought he could
+save. I--well, I took a shoot around there yesterday, after your brother
+got hurt. Jack wasn't there. Most of the boys was at camp loadin' gear
+on the scows. They said Jack's gone around to Tumblin' Creek with one
+man. He wasn't back this mornin'. So I thought maybe he'd gone to the
+Springs. I dunno's there's any occasion to worry. He might 'a' gone to
+the head uh the lake with them constables that went up last night.
+How's Charlie Benton?"
+
+She told him briefly.
+
+"That's good," said Lefty. "Now, I'd go around to Cougar Bay, if I was
+you, Mrs. Jack. He's liable to come in there, any time. You could stay
+at the house to-night. Everything around there, shacks 'n' all, was
+burned days ago, so the fire can't touch the house. The crew there has
+grub an' a cook. I kinda expect Jack'll be there, unless he fell in with
+them constables."
+
+She trudged silently back to the _Waterbug_. Barlow started the engine,
+and the boat took up her slow way. As they skirted the shore, Stella
+began to see here and there the fierce havoc of the fire. Black trunks
+of fir reared nakedly to the smoky sky, lay crisscross on bank and
+beach. Nowhere was there a green blade, a living bush. Nothing but
+charred black, a melancholy waste of smoking litter, with here and there
+a pitch-soaked stub still waving its banner of flame, or glowing redly.
+Back of those seared skeletons a shifting cloud of smoke obscured
+everything.
+
+Presently they drew in to Cougar Bay. Men moved about on the beach; two
+bulky scows stood nose-on to the shore. Upon them rested half a dozen
+donkey engines, thick-bellied, upright machines, blown down, dead on
+their skids. About these in great coils lay piled the gear of logging,
+miles of steel cable, blocks, the varied tools of the logger's trade.
+The _Panther_ lay between the scows, with lines from each passed over
+her towing bitts.
+
+Stella could see the outline of the white bungalow on its grassy knoll.
+They had saved only that, of all the camp, by a fight that sent three
+men to the hospital, on a day when the wind shifted into the northwest
+and sent a sheet of flame rolling through the timber and down on Cougar
+Bay like a tidal wave. So Barlow told her. He cupped his hands now and
+called to his fellows on the beach.
+
+No, Fyfe had not come back yet.
+
+"Go up to the mouth of Tumbling Creek," Stella ordered.
+
+Barlow swung the _Waterbug_ about, cleared the point, and stood up along
+the shore. Stella sat on a cushioned seat at the back of the pilot
+house, hard-eyed, struggling against that dead weight that seemed, to
+grow and grow in her breast. That elemental fury raging in the woods
+made her shrink. Her own hand had helped to loose it, but her hands were
+powerless to stay it; she could only sit and watch and wait, eaten up
+with misery of her own making. She was horribly afraid, with a fear she
+would not name to herself.
+
+Behind that density of atmosphere, the sun had gone to rest. The first
+shadows of dusk were closing in, betokened by a thickening of the
+smoke-fog into which the _Waterbug_ slowly plowed. To port a dimming
+shore line; to starboard, aft, and dead ahead, water and air merged in
+two boat lengths. Barlow leaned through the pilot-house window, one hand
+on the wheel, straining his eyes on their course. Suddenly he threw out
+the clutch, shut down his throttle control with one hand, and yanked
+with the other at the cord which loosed the _Waterbug's_ shrill whistle.
+
+Dead ahead, almost upon them, came an answering toot.
+
+"I thought I heard a gas-boat," Barlow exclaimed. "Sufferin' Jerusalem!
+Hi, there!"
+
+He threw his weight on the wheel, sending it hard over. The cruiser
+still had way on; the momentum of her ten-ton weight scarcely had
+slackened, and she answered the helm. Out of the deceptive thickness
+ahead loomed the sharp, flaring bow of another forty-footer, sheering
+quickly, as her pilot sighted them. She was upon them, and abreast, and
+gone, with a watery purl of her bow wave, a subdued mutter of exhaust,
+passing so near than an active man could have leaped the space between.
+
+"Sufferin' Jerusalem!" Barlow repeated, turning to Stella. "Did you see
+that, Mrs. Jack? They got him."
+
+Stella nodded. She too had seen Monohan seated on the after deck, his
+head sunk on his breast, irons on his wrists. A glimpse, no more.
+
+"That'll help some," Barlow grunted. "Quick work. But they come blame
+near cuttin' us down, beltin' along at ten knots when you can't see
+forty feet ahead."
+
+An empty beach greeted them at Tumbling Creek. Reluctantly Stella bade
+Barlow turn back. It would soon be dark, and Barlow said he would be
+taking chances of piling on the shore before he could see it, or getting
+lost in the profound black that would shut down on the water with
+daylight's end.
+
+Less than a mile from Cougar Bay, the _Waterbug's_ engine gave a few
+premonitory gasps and died. Barlow descended to the engine room, hooked
+up the trouble lamp, and sought for the cause. He could not find it.
+Stella could hear him muttering profanity, turning the flywheel over,
+getting an occasional explosion.
+
+An hour passed. Dark of the Pit descended, shrouding the lake with a
+sable curtain, close-folded, impenetrable. The dead stillness of the day
+vanished before a hot land breeze, and Stella, as she felt the launch
+drift, knew by her experience on the lake that they were moving
+offshore. Presently this was confirmed, for out of the black wall on the
+west, from which the night wind brought stifling puffs of smoke, there
+lifted a yellow effulgence that grew to a red glare as the boat drifted
+out. Soon that red glare was a glowing line that rose and fell, dipping
+and rising and wavering along a two-mile stretch, a fiery surf beating
+against the forest.
+
+Down in the engine room Barlow finally located the trouble, and the
+motor took up its labors, spinning with a rhythmic chatter of valves.
+The man came up into the pilot house, wiping the sweat from his grimy
+face.
+
+"Gee, I'm sorry, Mrs. Fyfe," he said. "A gas-engine man would 'a' fixed
+that in five minutes. Took me two hours to find out what was wrong.
+It'll be a heck of a job to fetch Cougar Bay now."
+
+But by luck Barlow made his way back, blundering fairly into the landing
+at the foot of the path that led to the bungalow, as if the cruiser knew
+the way to her old berth. And as he reached the float, the front
+windows on the hillock broke out yellow, pale blurs in the smoky night.
+
+"Well, say," Barlow pointed. "I bet a nickel Jack's home. See? Nobody
+but him would be in the house."
+
+"I'll go up," Stella said.
+
+"All right, I guess you know the path better'n I do," Barlow said. "I'll
+take the _Bug_ around into the bay."
+
+Stella ran up the path. She halted halfway up the steps and leaned
+against the rail to catch her breath. Then she went on. Her step was
+noiseless, for tucked in behind a cushion aboard the _Waterbug_ she had
+found an old pair of her own shoes, rubber-soled, and she had put them
+on to ease the ache in her feet born of thirty-six hours' encasement in
+leather. She gained the door without a sound. It was wide open, and in
+the middle of the big room Jack Fyfe stood with hands thrust deep in his
+pockets, staring absently at the floor.
+
+She took a step or two inside. Fyfe did not hear her; he did not look
+up.
+
+"Jack."
+
+He gave ever so slight a start, glanced up, stood with head thrown back
+a little. But he did not move, or answer, and Stella, looking at him,
+seeing the flame that glowed in his eyes, could not speak. Something
+seemed to choke her, something that was a strange compound of relief and
+bewilderment and a slow wonder at herself,--at the queer, unsteady
+pounding of her heart.
+
+"How did you get way up here?" he asked at last.
+
+"Linda wired last night that Charlie was hurt. I got a machine to the
+Springs. Then Barlow came down this afternoon looking for you. He said
+you'd been missing for two days. So I--I--"
+
+She broke off. Fyfe was walking toward her with that peculiar,
+lightfooted step of his, a queer, tense look on his face.
+
+"Nero fiddled when Rome was burning," he said harshly. "Did you come to
+sing while _my_ Rome goes up in smoke?"
+
+A little, half-strangled sob escaped her. She turned to go. But he
+caught her by the arm.
+
+"There, lady," he said, with a swift change of tone, "I didn't mean to
+slash at you. I suppose you mean all right. But just now, with
+everything gone to the devil, to look up and see you here--I've really
+got an ugly temper, Stella, and it's pretty near the surface these days.
+I don't want to be pitied and sympathized with. I want to fight. I want
+to hurt somebody."
+
+"Hurt me then," she cried.
+
+He shook his head sadly.
+
+"I couldn't do that," he said. "No, I can't imagine myself ever doing
+that."
+
+"Why?" she asked, knowing why, but wishful to hear in words what his
+eyes shouted.
+
+"Because I love you," he said. "You know well enough why."
+
+She lifted her one free hand to his shoulder. Her face turned up to his.
+A warm wave of blood dyed the round, white neck, shot up into her
+cheeks. Her eyes were suddenly aglow, lips tremulous.
+
+"Kiss me, then," she whispered. "That's what I came for. Kiss me, Jack."
+
+If she had doubted, if she had ever in the last few hours looked with
+misgiving upon what she felt herself impelled to do, the pressure of
+Jack Fyfe's lips on hers left no room for anything but an amazing thrill
+of pure gladness. She was happy in his arms, content to rest there, to
+feel his heart beating against hers, to be quit of all the
+uncertainties, all the useless regrets. By a roundabout way she had come
+to her own, and it thrilled her to her finger tips. She could not quite
+comprehend it, or herself. But she was glad, weeping with gladness,
+straining her man to her, kissing his face, murmuring incoherent words
+against his breast.
+
+"And so--and so, after all, you do care." Fyfe held her off a little
+from him, his sinewy fingers gripping gently the soft flesh of her arms.
+"And you were big enough to come back. Oh, my dear, you don't know what
+that means to me. I'm broke, and I'd just about reached the point where
+I didn't give a damn. This fire has cleaned me out. I've--"
+
+"I know," Stella interrupted. "That's why I came back. I wouldn't have
+come otherwise, at least not for a long time--perhaps never. It seemed
+as if I ought to--as if it were the least I could do. Of course, it
+looks altogether different, now that I know I really want to. But you
+see I didn't know that for sure until I saw you standing here. Oh, Jack,
+there's such a lot I wish I could wipe out."
+
+"It's wiped out," he said happily. "The slate's clean. Fair weather
+didn't get us anywhere. It took a storm. Well, the storm's over."
+
+She stirred uneasily in his arms.
+
+"Haven't you got the least bit of resentment, Jack, for all this trouble
+I've helped to bring about?" she faltered.
+
+"Why, no" he said thoughtfully. "All you did was to touch the fireworks
+off. And they might have started over anything. Lord no! put that idea
+out of your head."
+
+"I don't understand," she murmured. "I never have quite understood why
+Monohan should attack you with such savage bitterness. That trouble he
+started on the Tyee, then this criminal firing of the woods. I've had
+hints, first from your sister, then from Linda. I didn't know you'd
+clashed before. I'm not very clear on that yet. But you knew all the
+time what he was. Why didn't you tell me, Jack?"
+
+"Well, maybe I should have," Fyfe admitted. "But I couldn't very well.
+Don't you see? He wasn't even an incident, until he bobbed up and
+rescued you that day. I couldn't, after that, start in picking his
+character to pieces as a mater of precaution. We had a sort of an armed
+truce. He left me strictly alone. I'd trimmed his claws once or twice
+already. I suppose he was acute enough to see an opportunity to get a
+whack at me through you. You were just living from day to day, creating
+a world of illusions for yourself, nourishing yourself with dreams,
+smarting under a stifled regret for a lot you thought you'd passed up
+for good. _He_ wasn't a factor, at first. When he did finally stir in
+you an emotion I had failed to stir, it was too late for me to do or say
+anything. If I'd tried, at that stage of the game, to show you your
+idol's clay feet, you'd have despised me, as well as refused to believe.
+I couldn't do anything but stand back and trust the real woman of you to
+find out what a quicksand you were building your castle on. I purposely
+refused to let you to, when you wanted to go away the first
+time,--partly on the kid's account, partly because I could hardly bear
+to let you go. Mostly because I wanted to make him boil over and show
+his teeth, on the chance that you'd be able to size him up.
+
+"You see, I knew him from the ground up. I knew that nothing would
+afford him a keener pleasure than to take away from me a woman I cared
+for, and that nothing would make him squirm more than for me to
+check-mate him. That day I cuffed him and choked him on the Point really
+started him properly. After that, you--as something to be desired and
+possessed--ran second to his feeling against me. He was bound to try and
+play even, regardless of you. When he precipitated that row on the Tyee,
+I knew it was going to be a fight for my financial life--for my own
+life, if he ever got me foul. And it was not a thing I could talk about
+to you, in your state of mind, then. You were through with me.
+Regardless of him, you were getting farther and farther away from me. I
+had a long time to realize that fully. You had a grudge against life,
+and it was sort of crystallizing on me. You never kissed me once in all
+those two years like you kissed me just now."
+
+She pulled his head down and kissed him again.
+
+"So that I wasn't restraining you with any hope for my own advantage,"
+he went on. "There was the kid, and there was you. I wanted to put a
+brake on you, to make you go slow. You're a complex individual, Stella.
+Along with certain fixed, fundamental principles, you've got a streak of
+divine madness in you, a capacity for reckless undertakings. You'd never
+have married me if you hadn't. I trusted you absolutely. But, I was
+afraid in spite of my faith. You had draped such an idealistic mantle
+around Monohan. I wanted to rend that before it came to a final
+separation between us. It worked out, because he couldn't resist trying
+to take a crack at me when the notion seized him.
+
+"So," he continued, after a pause, "you aren't responsible, and I've
+never considered you responsible for any of this. It's between him and
+me, and it's been shaping for years. Whenever our trails crossed there
+was bound to be a clash. There's always been a natural personal
+antagonism between us. It began to show when we were kids, you might
+say. Monohan's nature is such that he can't acknowledge defeat, he can't
+deny himself a gratification. He's a supreme egotist. He's always had
+plenty of money, he's always had whatever he wanted, and it never
+mattered to him how he gratified his desires.
+
+"The first time we locked horns was in my last year at high school.
+Monohan was a star athlete. I beat him in a pole vault. That irked him
+so that he sulked and sneered, and generally made himself so insulting
+that I slapped him. We fought, and I whipped him. I had a temper that I
+hadn't learned to keep in hand those days, and I nearly killed him. I
+had nothing but contempt for him, anyway, because even then, when he
+wasn't quite twenty, he was a woman hunter, preying on silly girls. I
+don't know what his magic with women is, but it works, until they find
+him out. He was playing off two or three fool girls that I knew and at
+the same time keeping a woman in apartments down-town,--a girl he'd
+picked up on a trip to Georgia,--like any confirmed rounder.
+
+"Well, from that time on, he hated me, always laid for a chance to sting
+me. We went to Princeton the same year. We collided there, so hard that
+when word of it got to my father's ears, he called me home and read the
+riot act so strong that I flared up and left. Then I came to the coast
+here and got a job in the woods, got to be a logging boss, and went into
+business on my own hook eventually. I'd just got nicely started when I
+ran into Monohan again. He'd got into timber himself. I was hand logging
+up the coast, and I'd hate to tell you the tricks he tried. He kept it
+up until I got too big to be harassed in a petty way. Then he left me
+alone. But he never forgot his grudge. The stage was all set for this
+act long before you gave him his cue, Stella. You weren't to blame for
+that, or if you were in part, it doesn't matter now. I'm satisfied.
+Paradoxically I feel rich, even though it's a long shot that I'm broke
+flat. I've got something money doesn't buy. And he has overreached
+himself at last. All his money and pull won't help him out of this jack
+pot. Arson and attempted murder is serious business."
+
+"They caught him," Stella said. "The constables took him down the lake
+to-night. I saw him on their launch as they passed the _Waterbug_."
+
+"Yes?" Fyfe said. "Quick work. I didn't even know about the shooting
+till I came in here to-night about dark. Well," he snapped his fingers,
+"exit Monohan. He's a dead issue, far as we're concerned. Wouldn't you
+like something to eat, Stella? I'm hungry, and I was dog-tired when I
+landed here. Say, you can't guess what I was thinking about, lady,
+standing there when you came in."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I had a crazy notion of touching a match to the house," he said
+soberly, "letting it go up in smoke with the rest. Yes, that's what I
+was thinking I would do. Then I'd take the _Panther_ and what gear I
+have on the scows and pull off Roaring Lake. It didn't seem as if I
+could stay. I'd laid the foundation of a fortune here and tried to make
+a home--and lost it all, everything that was worth having. And then all
+at once there you were, like a vision in the door. Miracles _do_
+happen!"
+
+Her arms tightened involuntarily about him.
+
+"Oh," she cried breathlessly. "Our little, white house!"
+
+"Without you," he replied softly, "it was just an empty shell of boards
+and plaster, something to make me ache with loneliness."
+
+"But not now," she murmured. "It's home, now."
+
+"Yes," he agreed, smiling.
+
+"Ah, but it isn't quite." She choked down a lump in her throat. "Not
+when I think of those little feet that used to patter on the floor. Oh,
+Jack--when I think of my baby boy! My dear, my dear, why did all this
+have to be, I wonder?"
+
+Fyfe stroked her glossy coils of hair.
+
+"We get nothing of value without a price," he said quietly. "Except by
+rare accident, nothing that's worth having comes cheap and easy. We've
+paid the price, and we're square with the world and with each other.
+That's everything."
+
+"Are you completely ruined, Jack?" she asked after an interval. "Charlie
+said you were."
+
+"Well," he answered reflectively, "I haven't had time to balance
+accounts, but I guess I will be. The timber's gone. I've saved most of
+the logging gear. But if I realized on everything that's left, and
+squared up everything, I guess I'd be pretty near strapped."
+
+"Will you take me in as a business partner, Jack?" she asked eagerly.
+"That's what I had in mind when I came up here. I made up my mind to
+propose that, after I'd heard you were ruined. Oh, it seems silly now,
+but I wanted to make amends that way; at least, I tried to tell myself
+that. Listen. When my father died, he left some supposedly worthless oil
+stock. But it proved to have a market value. I got my share of it the
+other day. It'll help us to make a fresh start--together."
+
+She had the envelope and the check tucked inside her waist. She took it
+out now and pressed the green slip into his hand.
+
+Fyfe looked at it and at her, a little chuckle deep in his throat.
+
+"Nineteen thousand, five hundred," he laughed. "Well, that's quite a
+stake for you. But if you go partners with me, what about your singing?"
+
+"I don't see how I can have my cake and eat it, too," she said lightly.
+"I don't feel quite so eager for a career as I did."
+
+"Well, we'll see," he said. "That light of yours shouldn't be hidden
+under a bushel. And still, I don't like the idea of you being away from
+me, which a career implies."
+
+He put the check back in the envelope, smiling oddly to himself, and
+tucked it back in her bosom. She caught and pressed his hand there,
+against the soft flesh.
+
+"Won't you use it, Jack?" she pleaded. "Won't it help? Don't let any
+silly pride influence you. There mustn't ever be anything like that
+between us again."
+
+"There won't be," he smiled. "Frankly, if I need it, I'll use it. But
+that's a matter there's plenty of time to decide. You see, although
+technically I may be broke, I'm a long way from the end of my tether. I
+think I'll have my working outfit clear, and the country's full of
+timber. I've got a standing in the business that neither fire nor
+anything else can destroy. No, I haven't any false pride about the
+money, dear. But the money part of our future is a detail. With the
+incentive I've got now to work and plan, it won't take me five years to
+be a bigger toad in the timber puddle than I ever was. You don't know
+what a dynamo I am when I get going."
+
+"I don't doubt that," she said proudly. "But the money's yours, if you
+need it."
+
+"I need something else a good deal more right now," he laughed. "That's
+something to eat. Aren't you hungry, Stella? Wouldn't you like a cup of
+coffee?"
+
+"I'm famished," she admitted--the literal truth. The vaulting uplift of
+spirit, that glad little song that kept lilting in her heart, filled her
+with peace and contentment, but physically she was beginning to
+experience acute hunger. She recalled that she had eaten scarcely
+anything that day.
+
+"We'll go down to the camp," Fyfe suggested. "The cook will have
+something left. We're camping like pioneers down there. The shacks were
+all burned, and somebody sank the cookhouse scow."
+
+They went down the path to the bay, hand in hand, feeling their way
+through that fire-blackened area, under a black sky.
+
+A red eye glowed ahead of them, a fire on the beach around which men
+squatted on their haunches or lay stretched on their blankets,
+sooty-faced fire fighters, a weary group. The air was rank with smoke
+wafted from the burning woods.
+
+The cook's fire was dead, and that worthy was humped on his bed-roll
+smoking a pipe. But he had cold meat and bread, and he brewed a pot of
+coffee on the big fire for them, and Stella ate the plain fare, sitting
+in the circle of tired loggers.
+
+"Poor fellows, they look worn out," she said, when they were again
+traversing that black road to the bungalow.
+
+"We've slept standing up for three weeks," Fyfe said simply. "They've
+done everything they could. And we're not through yet. A north wind
+might set Charlie's timber afire in a dozen places."
+
+"Oh, for a rain," she sighed.
+
+"If wishing for rain brought it," he laughed, "we'd have had a second
+flood. We've got to keep pegging away till it does rain, that's all. We
+can't do much, but we have to keep doing it. You'll have to go back to
+the Springs to-morrow, I'm afraid, Stella. I'll have to stay on the
+firing line, literally."
+
+"I don't want to," she cried rebelliously. "I want to stay up here with
+you. I'm not wax. I won't melt."
+
+She continued that argument into the house, until Fyfe laughingly
+smothered her speech with kisses.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An oddly familiar sound murmuring in Stella's ear wakened her. At first
+she thought she must be dreaming. It was still inky dark, but the air
+that blew in at the open window was sweet and cool, filtered of that
+choking smoke. She lifted herself warily, looked out, reached a hand
+through the lifted sash. Wet drops spattered it. The sound she heard was
+the drip of eaves, the beat of rain on the charred timber, upon the
+dried grass of the lawn.
+
+Beside her Fyfe was a dim bulk, sleeping the dead slumber of utter
+weariness. She hesitated a minute, then shook him.
+
+"Listen, Jack," she said.
+
+He lifted his head.
+
+"Rain!" he whispered. "Good night, Mister Fire. Hooray!"
+
+"I brought it," Stella murmured sleepily. "I wished it on Roaring Lake
+to-night."
+
+Then she slipped her arm about his neck, and drew his face down to her
+breast with a tender fierceness, and closed her eyes with a contented
+sigh.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Big Timber, by Bertrand W. Sinclair
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11223 ***