There was no ignoring such a man.  Brought into close contact with the man himself, Stella felt the radiating force of his personality.  There it was, a thing to be reckoned with.  She felt that whenever Jack Fyfe’s gray eyes rested impersonally on her.  His pleasant, freckled face hovered before her until she fell asleep, and in her sleep she dreamed again of him throwing that drunken logger down the Hot Springs slip.

CHAPTER VIII

DURANCE VILE

By September first a growing uneasiness hardened into distasteful certainty upon Stella.  It had become her firm resolve to get what money was due her when Charlie marketed his logs and try another field of labor.  That camp on Roaring Lake was becoming a nightmare to her.  She had no inherent dislike for work.  She was too vibrantly alive to be lazy.  But she had had an overdose of unaccustomed drudgery, and she was growing desperate.  If there had been anything to keep her mind from continual dwelling on the manifold disagreeableness she had to cope with, she might have felt differently, but there was not.  She ate, slept, worked,—­ate, slept, and worked again,—­till every fibre of her being cried out in protest against the deadening round.  She was like a flower striving to attain its destiny of bloom in soil overrun with rank weeds.  Loneliness and hard, mean work, day after day, in which all that had ever seemed desirable in life had neither place nor consideration, were twin evils of isolation and flesh-wearying labor, from which she felt that she must get away, or go mad.

But she did not go.  Benton left to make his delivery to the mill company, the great boom of logs gliding slowly along in the wake of a tug, the Chickamin in attendance.  Benton’s crew accompanied the boom.  Fyfe’s gang loaded their donkey and gear aboard the scow and went home.  The bay lay all deserted, the woods silent.  For the first time in three months she had all her hours free, only her own wants to satisfy.  Katy John spent most of her time in the smoky camp of her people.  Stella loafed.  For two days she did nothing, gave herself up to a physical torpor she had never known before.  She did not want to read, to walk about, or even lift her eyes to the bold mountains that loomed massive across the lake.  It was enough to lie curled among pillows under the alder and stare drowsily at the blue September sky, half aware of the drone of a breeze in the firs, the flutter of birds’ wings, and the lap of water on the beach.

Presently, however, the old restless energy revived.  The spring came back to her step and she shed that lethargy like a cast-off garment.  And in so doing her spirit rose in hot rebellion against being a prisoner to deadening drudgery, against being shut away from all the teeming life that throve and trafficked beyond the solitude in which she sat immured.  When Charlie came back, there was going to be a change.  She