“Well, in a sense, I am,” he replied.  “And then again, making a place away out here homelike never struck me as being anything but an inconsequential detail.  I’m not trying to make a home here.  I’m after a bundle of money.  A while ago, if you had been here and suggested it, you could have spent five or six hundred, and I wouldn’t have missed it.  But this contract came my way, and gave me a chance to clean up three thousand dollars clear profit in four months.  I grabbed it, and I find it’s some undertaking.  I’m dealing with a hard business outfit, hard as nails.  I might get the banks or some capitalist to finance me, because my timber holdings are worth money.  But I’m shy of that.  I’ve noticed that when a logger starts working on borrowed capital, he generally goes broke.  The financiers generally devise some way to hook him.  I prefer to sail as close to the wind as I can on what little I’ve got.  I can get this timber out—­but it wouldn’t look nice, now, would it, for me to be buying furniture when I’m standing these boys off for their wages till September?”

“I should have been a man,” Miss Estella Benton pensively remarked.  “Then I could put on overalls and make myself useful, instead of being a drone.  There doesn’t seem to be anything here I can do.  I could keep house—­only you haven’t any house to keep, therefore no need of a housekeeper.  Why, who’s that?”

Her ear had caught a low, throaty laugh, a woman’s laugh, outside.  She looked inquiringly at her brother.  His expression remained absent, as of one concentrated upon his own problems.  She repeated the question.

“That?  Oh, Katy John, I suppose, or her mother,” he answered.  “Siwash bunch camping around the point.  The girl does some washing for us now and then.  I suppose she’s after Matt for some bread or something.”

Stella looked out.  At the cookhouse door stood a short, plump-bodied girl, dark-skinned and black-haired.  Otherwise she conformed to none of Miss Benton’s preconceived ideas of the aboriginal inhabitant.  If she had been pinned down, she would probably have admitted that she expected to behold an Indian maiden garbed in beaded buckskin and brass ornaments.  Instead, Katy John wore a white sailor blouse, a brown pleated skirt, tan shoes, and a bow of baby blue ribbon in her hair.

“Why, she talks good English,” Miss Benton exclaimed, as fragments of the girl’s speech floated over to her.

“Sure.  As good as anybody,” Charlie drawled.  “Why not?”

“Well—­er—­I suppose my notion of Indians is rather vague,” Stella admitted.  “Are they all civilized and educated?”

“Most of ’em,” Benton replied.  “The younger generation anyhow.  Say, Stell, can you cook?”

“A little,” Stella rejoined guardedly.  “That Indian girl’s really pretty, isn’t she?”

“They nearly all are when they’re young,” he observed.  “But they are old and tubby by the time they’re thirty.”