He had seemed a short man.  Now, standing within four feet of her, she perceived that this was an illusion created by the proportion and thickness of his body.  He was, in fact, half a head taller than she, and Stella stood five feet five.  His gray eyes met hers squarely, with a cool, impersonal quality of gaze.  There was neither smirk nor embarrassment in his straightforward glance.  He was, in effect, “sizing her up” just as he would have looked casually over a logger asking him for a job.  Stella sensed that, and resenting it momentarily, failed to match his manner.  She flushed.  Fyfe smiled, a broad, friendly grin, in which a wide mouth opened to show strong, even teeth.

“I’m after a drink,” he said quite impersonally, and coolly taking the pails out of her hands, walked through the kitchen and down to the creek.  He was back in a minute, set the filled buckets in their place, and helped himself with a dipper.

“Say,” he asked easily, “how do you like life in a logging camp by this time?  This is sure one hot job you’ve got.”

“Literally or slangily?” she asked in a flippant tone.  Fyfe’s reputation, rather vividly colored, had reached her from various sources.  She was not quite sure whether she cared to countenance him or not.  There was a disturbing quality in his glance, a subtle suggestion of force about him that she felt without being able to define in understandable terms.  In any case she felt more than equal to the task of squelching any effort at familiarity, even if Jack Fyfe were, in a sense, the convenient god in her brother’s machine.  Fyfe chuckled at her answer.

“Both,” he replied shortly and went out.

She saw him a little later out on the bay in the Panther’s dink, standing up in the little boat, making long, graceful casts with a pliant rod.  She perceived that this manner of fishing was highly successful, insomuch as at every fourth or fifth cast a trout struck his fly, breaking water with a vigorous splash.  Then the bamboo would arch as the fish struggled, making sundry leaps clear of the water, gleaming like silver each time he broke the surface, but coming at last tamely to Jack Fyfe’s landing net.  Of outdoor sports she knew most about angling, for her father had been an ardent fly-caster.  And she had observed with a true angler’s scorn the efforts of her brother’s loggers to catch the lake trout with a baited hook, at which they had scant success.  Charlie never fished.  He had neither time nor inclination for such fooling, as he termed it.  Fyfe stopped fishing when the donkeys whistled six.  It happened that when he drew in to his cookhouse float, Stella was standing in her kitchen door.  Fyfe looked up at her and held aloft a dozen trout strung by the gills on a stick, gleaming in the sun.

“Vanity,” she commented inaudibly.  “I wonder if he thinks I’ve been admiring his skill as a fisherman?”