Yet in her own way she was as full of determination as her brother.  She saw plainly enough that she must leave the drone stage behind.  She perceived that to be fed and clothed and housed and to have her wishes readily gratified was not an inherent right—­that some one must foot the bill—­that now for all she received she must return equitable value.  At home she had never thought of it in that light; in fact, she had never thought of it at all.  Now that she was beginning to get a glimmering of her true economic relation to the world at large, she had no wish to emulate the clinging vine, even if thereby she could have secured a continuance of that silk-lined existence which had been her fortunate lot.  Her pride revolted against parasitism.  It was therefore a certain personal satisfaction to have achieved self-support at a stroke, insofar as that in the sweat of her brow,—­all too literally,—­she earned her bread and a compensation besides.  But there were times when that solace seemed scarcely to weigh against her growing detest for the endless routine of her task, the exasperating physical weariness and irritations it brought upon her.

For to prepare three times daily food for a dozen hungry men is no mean undertaking.  One cannot have in a logging camp the conveniences of a hotel kitchen.  The water must be carried in buckets from the creek near by, and wood brought in armfuls from the pile of sawn blocks outside.  The low-roofed kitchen shanty was always like an oven.  The flies swarmed in their tens of thousands.  As the men sweated with axe and saw in the woods, so she sweated in the kitchen.  And her work began two hours before their day’s labor, and continued two hours after they were done.  She slept, like one exhausted and rose full of sleep-heaviness, full of bodily soreness and spiritual protest when the alarm clock raised its din in the cool morning.

“You don’t like thees work, do you, Mees Benton?” Katy John said to her one day, in the soft, slurring accent that colored her English.  “You wasn’t cut out for a cook.”

“This isn’t work,” Stella retorted irritably.  “It’s simple drudgery.  I don’t wonder that men cooks take to drink.”

Katy laughed.

“Why don’t you be nice to Mr. Abbey,” she suggested archly.  “He’d like to give you a better job than thees—­for life.  My, but it must be nice to have lots of money like that man’s got, and never have to work.”

“You’ll get those potatoes peeled sooner if you don’t talk quite so much, Katy,” Miss Benton made reply.

There was that way out, as the Siwash girl broadly indicated.  Paul Abbey had grown into the habit of coming there rather more often than mere neighborliness called for, and it was palpable that he did not come to hold converse with Benton or Benton’s gang, although he was “hail fellow” with all woodsmen.  At first his coming might have been laid to any whim.  Latterly Stella herself was unmistakably the attraction.  He brought his sister