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.