Two hundred yards distant Charlie Benton rose on a stump and semaphored with his arms.  The engineer whistled answer and stood to his levers; the main line began to spool slowly in on the drum.  Another signal, and he shut off.  Another signal, after a brief wait, and the drum rolled faster, the line tautened like a fiddle-string, and the ponderous machine vibrated with the strain of its effort.

Suddenly the line came slack.  Stella, watching for the log to appear, saw her brother leap backward off the stump, saw the cable whip sidewise, mowing down a clump of saplings that stood in the bight of the line, before the engineer could cut off the power.  In that return of comparative silence there rose above the sibilant hiss of the blow-off valve a sudden commotion of voices.

“Damn!” the donkey engineer peered over the brush.  “That don’t sound good.  I guess somebody got it in the neck.”

Almost immediately Sam Davis and two other men came running.

“What’s up?” the engineer called as they passed on a dog trot.

“Block broke,” Davis answered over his shoulder.  “Piece of it near took a leg off Jim Renfrew.”

Stella stood a moment, hesitating.

“I may be able to do something.  I’ll go and see,” she said.

“Better not,” the engineer warned.  “Liable to run into something that’ll about turn your stomach.  What was I tellin’ about a broken block?  Them ragged pieces of flyin’ iron sure mess a man up.  They’ll bring a bed spring, an’ pack him down to the boat, an’ get him to a doctor quick as they can.  That’s all.  You couldn’t do nothin’.”

Nevertheless she went.  Renfrew was the rigging slinger working with Charlie, a big, blond man who blushed like a schoolboy when Benton introduced him to her.  Twenty minutes before he had gone trotting after the haul-back, sound and hearty, laughing at some sally of her brother’s.  It seemed a trifle incredible that he should lie mangled and bleeding among the green forest growth, while his fellows hurried for a stretcher.

Two hundred yards at right angles from where Charlie had stood giving signals she found a little group under a branchy cedar.  Renfrew lay on his back, mercifully unconscious.  Benton squatted beside him, twisting a silk handkerchief with a stick tightly above the wound.  His hands and Renfrew’s clothing and the mossy ground was smeared with blood.  Stella looked over his shoulder.  The overalls were cut away.  In the thick of the man’s thigh stood a ragged gash she could have laid both hands in.  She drew back.

Benton looked up.

“Better keep away,” he advised shortly.  “We’ve done all that can be done.”

She retreated a little and sat down on a root, half-sickened.  The other two men stood up.  Benton sat back, his first-aid work done, and rolled a cigarette with fingers that shook a little.  Off to one side she saw the fallers climb up on their springboards.  Presently arose the ringing whine of the thin steel blade, the chuck of axes where the swampers attacked a fallen tree.  No matter, she thought, that injury came to one, that death might hover near, the work went on apace, like action on a battlefield.