Behind them a little way came Jack Fyfe with sagging creel.  He did not stop to exhibit his catch, but half an hour later they were served hot and crisp at the table in the big living room, where Fyfe, Stella and Charlie Benton, Lefty Howe and his wife, sat down together.

A flunkey from the camp kitchen served the meal and cleared it away.  For an hour or two after that the three men sat about in shirt-sleeved ease, puffing at Jack Fyfe’s cigars.  Then Benton excused himself and went to bed.  When Howe and his wife retired, Stella did likewise.  The long twilight had dwindled to a misty patch of light sky in the northwest, and she fell asleep more at ease than she had been for weeks.  Sitting in Jack Fyfe’s living room through that evening she had begun to formulate a philosophy to fit her enforced environment—­to live for the day only, and avoid thought of the future until there loomed on the horizon some prospect of a future worth thinking about.  The present looked passable enough, she thought, if she kept her mind strictly on it alone.

And with that idea to guide her, she found the days slide by smoothly.  She got on famously with Mrs. Howe, finding that woman full of virtues unsuspected in her type.  Charlie was in his element.  His prospects looked so rosy that they led him into egotistic outlines of what he intended to accomplish.  To him the future meant logs in the water, big holdings of timber, a growing bank account.  Beyond that,—­what all his concentrated effort should lead to save more logs and more timber,—­he did not seem to go.  Judged by his talk, that was the ultimate, economic power,—­money and more money.  More and more as Stella listened to him, she became aware that he was following in his father’s footsteps; save that he aimed at greater heights and that he worked by different methods, juggling with natural resources where their father had merely juggled with prices and tokens of product, their end was the same—­not to create or build up, but to grasp, to acquire.  That was the game.  To get and to hold for their own use and benefit and to look upon men and things, in so far as they were of use, as pawns in the game.

She wondered sometimes if that were a characteristic of all men, if that were the big motif in the lives of such men as Paul Abbey and Jack Fyfe, for instance; if everything else, save the struggle of getting and keeping money, resolved itself into purely incidental phases of their existence?  For herself she considered that wealth, or the getting of wealth, was only a means to an end.

Just what that end might be she found a little vague, rather hard to define in exact terms.  It embraced personal leisure and the good things of life as a matter of course, a broader existence, a large-handed generosity toward the less fortunate, an intellectual elevation entirely unrelated to gross material things.  Life, she told herself pensively, ought to mean something more than ease and good clothes, but what more she