“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