Nevertheless she paid tribute to his skill when ten minutes later he sent a logger with the entire catch to her kitchen.  They looked toothsome, those lakers, and they were.  She cooked one for her own supper and relished it as a change from the everlasting bacon and ham.  In the face of that million feet of timber, Benton hunted no deer.  True, the Siwashes had once or twice brought in some venison.  That, with a roast or two of beef from town, was all the fresh meat she had tasted in two months.  There were enough trout to make a breakfast for the crew.  She ate hers and mentally thanked Jack Fyfe.

Lying in her bed that night, in the short interval that came between undressing and wearied sleep, she found herself wondering with a good deal more interest about Jack Fyfe than she had ever bestowed upon—­well, Paul Abbey, for instance.

She was quite positive that she was going to dislike Jack Fyfe if he were thrown much in her way.  There was something about him that she resented.  The difference between him and the rest of the rude crew among which she must perforce live was a question of degree, not of kind.  There was certainly some compelling magnetism about the man.  But along with it went what she considered an almost brutal directness of speech and action.  Part of this conclusion came from hearsay, part from observation, limited though her opportunities had been for the latter.  Miss Stella Benton, for all her poise, was not above jumping at conclusions.  There was something about Jack Fyfe that she resented.  She irritably dismissed it as a foolish impression, but the fact remained that the mere physical nearness of him seemed to put her on the defensive, as if he were in reality a hunter and she the hunted.

Fyfe joined Charlie Benton about the time she finished work.  The three of them sat on the grass before Benton’s quarters, and every time Jack Fyfe’s eyes rested on her she steeled herself to resist—­what, she did not know.  Something intangible, something that disturbed her.  She had never experienced anything like that before; it tantalized her, roused her curiosity.  There was nothing occult about the man.  He was nowise fascinating, either in face or manner.  He made no bid for her attention.  Yet during the half hour he sat there, Stella’s mind revolved constantly about him.  She recalled all that she had heard of him, much of it, from her point of view, highly discreditable.  Inevitably she fell to comparing him with other men she knew.

She had, in a way, unconsciously been prepared for just such a measure of concentration upon Jack Fyfe.  For he was a power on Roaring Lake, and power,—­physical, intellectual or financial,—­exacts its own tribute of consideration.  He was a fighter, a dominant, hard-bitten woodsman, so the tale ran.  He had gathered about him the toughest crew on the Lake, himself, upon occasion, the most turbulent of all.  He controlled many square miles of big timber, and he had gotten it all by his own effort in the eight years since he came to Roaring Lake as a hand logger.  He was slow of speech, chain-lightning in action, respected generally, feared a lot.  All these things her brother and Katy John had sketched for Stella with much verbal embellishment.