repeated that to herself with determination.  Between whiles she rambled about in the littered clearing, prowled along the beaches, and paddled now and then far outside the bay in a flat-bottomed skiff, restless, full of plans.  So far as she saw, she would have to face some city alone, but she viewed that prospect with a total absence of the helpless feeling which harassed her so when she first took train for her brother’s camp.  She had passed through what she termed a culinary inferno.  Nothing, she considered, could be beyond her after that unremitting drudgery.

But Benton failed to come back on the appointed day.  The four days lengthened to a week.  Then the Panther, bound up-lake, stopped to leave a brief note from Charlie, telling her business had called him to Vancouver.

Altogether it was ten days before the Chickamin whistled up the bay.  She slid in beside the float, her decks bristling with men like a passenger craft.  Stella, so thoroughly sated with loneliness that she temporarily forgot her grievances, flew to meet her brother.  But one fair glimpse of the disembarking crew turned her back.  They were all in varying stages of liquor—­from two or three who had to be hauled over the float and up to the bunkhouse like sacks of bran, to others who were so happily under the influence of John Barleycorn that every move was some silly antic.  She retreated in disgust.  When Charlie reached the cabin, he himself proved to be fairly mellow, in the best of spirits—­speaking truly in the double sense.

“Hello, lady,” he hailed jovially.  “How did you fare all by your lonesome this long time?  I didn’t figure to be gone so long, but there was a lot to attend to.  How are you, anyway?”

“All right,” she answered coolly.  “You evidently celebrated your log delivery in the accepted fashion.”

“Don’t you believe it,” he grinned amiably.  “I had a few drinks with the boys on the way up, that’s all.  No, sir, it was straight business with a capital B all the time I was gone.  I’ve got a good thing in hand, Sis—­big money in sight.  Tell you about it later.  Think you and Katy can rustle grub for this bunch by six?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” she said shortly.  It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him then and there that she was through,—­like Matt, the cook, that memorable afternoon, “completely an’ ab-sho-lutely through.”  She refrained.  There was no use in being truculent.  But that drunken crowd looked formidable in numbers.

“How many extra?” she asked mechanically.

“Thirty men, all told,” Benton returned briskly.  “I tell you I’m sure going to rip the heart out of this limit before spring.  I’ve signed up a six-million-foot contract for delivery as soon as the logs’ll go over Roaring Rapids in the spring.  Remember what I told you when you came?  You stick with me, and you’ll wear diamonds.  I stand to clean up twenty thousand on the winter’s work.”