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.

* * * * *