“Well, I guess it’s time to turn in.”  Benton muffled a yawn.  “Pleasant dreams, Sis.  Oh, here’s your purse.  I used part of the bank roll.  You won’t have much use for money up here, anyway.”

He flipped the purse across to her and sauntered into his bedroom.  Stella sat gazing thoughtfully at the vast bulk of Mount Douglas a few minutes longer.  Then she too went into the box-like room, the bare discomfort of which chilled her merely to behold.

With a curious uncertainty, a feeling of reluctance for the proceeding almost, she examined the contents of her purse.  For a little time she stood gazing into it, a queer curl to her full red lips.  Then she flung it contemptuously on the bed and began to take down her hair.

“’A rich, rough, tough country, where it doesn’t do to be finicky about anything,’” she murmured, quoting a line from one of Charlie Benton’s letters.  “It would appear to be rather unpleasantly true.  Particularly the last clause.”

In her purse, which had contained one hundred and ten dollars, there now reposed in solitary state a twenty-dollar bill.

CHAPTER V

THE TOLL OF BIG TIMBER

Day came again, in the natural sequence of events.  Matt, the cook, roused all the camp at six o’clock with a tremendous banging on a piece of boiler plate hung by a wire.  Long before that Stella heard her brother astir.  She wondered sleepily at his sprightliness, for as she remembered him at home he had been a confirmed lie-abed.  She herself responded none too quickly to the breakfast gong, as a result of which slowness the crew had filed away to the day’s work, her brother striding in the lead, when she entered the mess-house.

She killed time with partial success till noon.  Several times she was startled to momentary attention by the prolonged series of sharp cracks which heralded the thunderous crash of a falling tree.  There were other sounds which betokened the loggers’ activity in the near-by forest,—­the ringing whine of saw blades, the dull stroke of the axe, voices calling distantly.

She tried to interest herself in the camp and the beach and ended up by sitting on a log in a shady spot, staring dreamily over the lake.  She thought impatiently of that homely saw concerning Satan and idle hands, but she reflected also that in this isolation even mischief was comparatively impossible.  There was not a soul to hold speech with except the cook, and he was too busy to talk, even if he had not been afflicted with a painful degree of diffidence when she addressed him.  She could make no effort at settling down, at arranging things in what was to be her home.  There was nothing to arrange, no odds and ends wherewith almost any woman can conjure up a homelike effect in the barest sort of place.  She beheld the noon return of the crew much as a shipwrecked castaway on a desert shore might behold a rescuing sail, and she told Charlie that she intended to go into the woods that afternoon and watch them work.