But it was all so radically different—­brother and all—­from what she had pictured that she was filled with dismay and not a little foreboding of the future.  Sufficient, however, unto the day was the evil thereof, she told herself at last, and tried to make that assurance work a change of heart.  She was very lonely and depressed and full of a futile wish that she were a man.

Over across the bay some one was playing an accordeon, and to its strains a stout-lunged lumberjack was roaring out a song, with all his fellows joining strong in the chorus: 

  “Oh, the Saginaw Kid was a cook in a camp, way up on the Ocon-to-o-o. 
  And the cook in a camp in them old days had a damn hard row to hoe-i-oh! 
  Had a damn hard row to hoe.”

There was a fine, rollicking air to it.  The careless note in their voices, the jovial lilt of their song, made her envious.  They at least had their destiny, limited as it might be and cast along rude ways, largely under their own control.

Her wandering gaze at length came to rest on a tent top showing in the brush northward from the camp.  She saw two canoes drawn up on the beach above the lash of the waves, two small figures playing on the gravel, and sundry dogs prowling alongshore.  Smoke went eddying away in the wind.  The Siwash camp where Katy John hailed from, Miss Benton supposed.

She had an impulse to skirt the bay and view the Indian camp at closer range, a notion born of curiosity.  She debated this casually, and just as she was about to rise, her movement was arrested by a faint crackle in the woods behind.  She looked away through the deepening shadow among the trees and saw nothing at first.  But the sound was repeated at odd intervals.  She sat still.  Thoughts of forest animals slipped into her mind, without making her afraid.  At last she caught sight of a man striding through the timber, soundlessly on the thick moss, coming almost straight toward her.

He was scarcely fifty yards away.  Across his shoulders he bore a reddish-gray burden, and in his right hand was a gun.  She did not move.  Bowed slightly under the weight, the man passed within twenty feet of her, so close that she could see the sweat-beads glisten on that side of his face, and saw also that the load he carried was the carcass of a deer.

Gaining the beach and laying the animal across a boulder, he straightened himself up and drew a long breath.  Then he wiped the sweat off his face.  She recognized him as the man who had thrown the logger down the slip that day at noon,—­presumably Jack Fyfe.  A sturdily built man about thirty, of Saxon fairness, with a tinge of red in his hair and a liberal display of freckles across nose and cheek bones.  He was no beauty, she decided, albeit he displayed a frank and pleasing countenance.  That he was a remarkably strong and active man she had seen for herself, and if the firm round of his jaw counted for anything, an individual of considerable determination besides.  Miss Benton conceived herself to be possessed of considerable skill at character analysis.