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