The Chickamin with her tow drew off, and she was alone again.

“Marooned once more,” Stella said to herself when the little steamboat slipped behind the first jutting point.  “Oh, if I could just be a man for a while.”

Marooned seemed to her the appropriate term.  There were the two old Siwashes and their dark-skinned brood.  But they were little more to Stella than the insentient boulders that strewed the beach.  She could not talk to them or they to her.  Long since she had been surfeited with Katy John.  If there were any primitive virtues in that dusky maiden they were well buried under the white man’s schooling.  Katy’s demand upon life was very simple and in marked contrast to Stella Benton’s.  Plenty of grub, no work, some cheap finery, and a man white or red, no matter, to make eyes at.  Her horizon was bounded by Roaring Lake and the mission at Skookumchuck.  She was therefore no mitigation of Stella’s loneliness.

Nevertheless Stella resigned herself to make the best of it, and it proved a poor best.  She could not detach herself sufficiently from the sordid realities to lose herself in day-dreaming.  There was not a book in the camp save some ten-cent sensations she found in the bunkhouse, and these she had exhausted during Charlie’s first absence.  The uncommon stillness of the camp oppressed her more than ever.  Even the bluejays and squirrels seemed to sense its abandonment, seemed to take her as part of the inanimate fixtures, for they frisked and chattered about with uncommon fearlessness.  The lake lay dead gray, glassy as some great irregular window in the crust of the earth.  Only at rare intervals did sail or smoke dot its surface, and then far offshore.  The woods stood breathless in the autumn sun.  It was like being entombed.  And there would be a long stretch of it, with only a recurrence of that deadly grind of kitchen work when the loggers came home again.

Some time during the next forenoon she went southerly along the lake shore on foot without object or destination, merely to satisfy in some measure the restless craving for action.  Colorful turns of life, the more or less engrossing contact of various personalities, some new thing to be done, seen, admired, discussed, had been a part of her existence ever since she could remember.  None of this touched her now.  A dead weight of monotony rode her hard.  There was the furtive wild life of the forest, the light of sun and sky, and the banked green of the forest that masked the steep granite slopes.  She appreciated beauty, craved it indeed, but she could not satisfy her being with scenic effects alone.  She craved, without being wholly aware of it, or altogether admitting it to herself, some human distraction in all that majestic solitude.

It was forthcoming.  When she returned to camp at two o’clock, driven in by hunger, Jack Fyfe sat on the doorstep.

“How-de-do.  I’ve come to bring you over to my place,” he announced quite casually.