He went outside.  Up in the near woods the whine of the saws and the sounds of chopping kept measured beat.  It was late in the forenoon, and Stella was hard about her dinner preparations.  Contract or no contract, money or no money, men must eat.  That fact loomed biggest on her daily schedule, left her no room to think overlong of other things.  Her huff over, she felt rather sorry for Charlie, a feeling accentuated by sight of him humped on a log in the sun, too engrossed in his perplexities to be where he normally was at that hour, in the thick of the logging, working harder than any of his men.

A little later she saw him put off from the float in the Chickamin’s dinghy.  When the crew came to dinner, he had not returned.  Nor was he back when they went out again at one.

Near mid-afternoon, however, he strode into the kitchen, wearing the look of a conqueror.

“I’ve got it fixed,” he announced.

Stella looked up from a frothy mass of yellow stuff that she was stirring in a pan.

“Got what fixed?” she asked.

“Why, this log business,” he said.  “Jack Fyfe is going to put in a crew and a donkey, and we’re going to everlastingly rip the innards out of these woods.  I’ll make delivery after all.”

“That’s good,” she remarked, but noticeably without enthusiasm.  The heat of that low-roofed shanty had taken all possible enthusiasm for anything out of her for the time being.  Always toward the close of each day she was gripped by that feeling of deadly fatigue, in the face of which nothing much mattered but to get through the last hours somehow and drag herself wearily to bed.

Benton playfully tweaked Katy John’s ear and went whistling up the trail.  It was plain sailing for him now, and he was correspondingly elated.

He tried to talk to Stella that evening when she was through, all about big things in the future, big contracts he could get, big money he could see his way to make.  It fell mostly on unappreciative ears.  She was tired, so tired that his egotistical chatter irritated her beyond measure.  What she would have welcomed with heartfelt gratitude was not so much a prospect of future affluence in which she might or might not share as a lightening of her present burden.  So far as his conversation ran, Benton’s sole concern seemed to be more equipment, more men, so that he might get out more logs.  In the midst of this optimistic talk, Stella walked abruptly into her room.

Noon of the next day brought the Panther coughing into the bay, flanked on the port side by a scow upon which rested a twin to the iron monster that jerked logs into her brother’s chute.  To starboard was made fast a like scow.  That was housed over, a smoking stovepipe stuck through the roof, and a capped and aproned cook rested his arms on the window sill as they floated in.  Men to the number of twenty or more clustered about both scows and the Panther’s deck, busy with pipe and cigarette and rude jest.  The clatter of their voices uprose through the noon meal.  But when the donkey scow thrust its blunt nose against the beach, the chaff and laughter died into silent, capable action.