Stella passed that over in silence, with a mental turning up of her nose.  It was something she could neither defend nor excuse.  It was a disgusting state of affairs, but nothing she could change.  She kept harking back to it, though, when she was in her own quarters, and Katy John had vanished for the night into her little room off the kitchen.  Tired as she was, she remained wakeful, uneasy.  Over in the bunkhouse disturbing sounds welled now and then into the cold, still night,—­incoherent snatches of song, voices uproariously raised, bursts of laughter.  Once, as she looked out the door, thinking she heard footsteps crunching in the snow, some one rapped out a coarse oath that drove her back with burning face.

As the evening wore late, she began to grow uneasily curious to know in what manner Charlie and Jack Fyfe were lending countenance to this minor riot, if they were even participating in it.  Eleven o’clock passed, and still there rose in the bunkhouse that unabated hum of voices.

Suddenly there rose a brief clamor.  In the dead silence that followed, she heard a thud and the clinking smash of breaking glass, a panted oath, sounds of struggle.

Stella slipped on a pair of her brother’s gum boots and an overcoat, and ran out on the path beaten from their cabin to the shore.  It led past the bunkhouse, and on that side opened two uncurtained windows, yellow squares that struck gleaming on the snow.  The panes of one were broken now, sharp fragments standing like saw teeth in the wooden sash.

She stole warily near and looked in.  Two men were being held apart; one by three of his fellows, the other by Jack Fyfe alone.  Fyfe grinned mildly, talking to the men in a quiet, pacific tone.

“Now you know that was nothing to scrap about,” she heard him say, “You’re both full of fighting whisky, but a bunkhouse isn’t any place to fight.  Wait till morning.  If you’ve still got it in your systems, go outside and have it out.  But you shouldn’t disturb our game and break up the furniture.  Be gentlemen, drunk or sober.  Better shake hands and call it square.”

“Aw, let ’em go to it, if they want to.”

Charlie’s voice, drink-thickened, harsh, came from a earner of the room into which she could not see until she moved nearer.  By the time she picked him out, Fyfe resumed his seat at the table where three others and Benton waited with cards in their hands, red and white chips and money stacked before them.

She knew enough of cards to realize that a stiff poker game was on the board when she had watched one hand dealt and played.  It angered her, not from any ethical motive, but because of her brother’s part in it.  He had no funds to pay a cook’s wages, yet he could afford to lose on one hand as much as he credited her with for a month’s work.  She could slave at the kitchen job day in and day out to save him forty-five dollars a month.  He could lose that without the flicker of an eyelash, but he couldn’t pay her wages on demand.  Also she saw that he had imbibed too freely, if the redness of his face and the glassy fixedness of his eyes could be read aright.