“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