“Pig!” she muttered.  “If that’s his idea of pleasure.  Oh, well, why should I care?  I don’t, so far as he’s concerned, if I could just get away from this beast of a place myself.”

Abreast of her a logger came to the broken window with a sack to bar out the frosty air.  And Stella, realizing suddenly that she was shivering with the cold, ran back to the cabin and got into her bed.

But she did not sleep, save in uneasy periods of dozing, until midnight was long past.  Then Fyfe and her brother came in, and by the sounds she gathered that Fyfe was putting Charlie to bed.  She heard his deep, drawly voice urging the unwisdom of sleeping with calked boots on, and Beaton’s hiccupy response.  The rest of the night she slept fitfully, morbidly imagining terrible things.  She was afraid, that was the sum and substance of it.  Over in the bunkhouse the carousal was still at its height.  She could not rid herself of the sight of those two men struggling to be at each other like wild beasts, the bloody face of the one who had been struck, the coarse animalism of the whole whisky-saturated gang.  It repelled and disgusted and frightened her.

The night frosts had crept through the single board walls of Stella’s room and made its temperature akin to outdoors when the alarm wakened her at six in the morning.  She shivered as she dressed.  Katy John was blissfully devoid of any responsibility, for seldom did Katy rise first to light the kitchen fire.  Yet Stella resented less each day’s bleak beginning than she did the enforced necessity of the situation; the fact that she was enduring these things practically under compulsion was what galled.

A cutting wind struck her icily as she crossed the few steps of open between cabin and kitchen.  Above no cloud floated, no harbinger of melting rain.  The cold stars twinkled over snow-blurred forest, struck tiny gleams from stumps that were now white-capped pillars.  A night swell from the outside waters beat, its melancholy dirge on the frozen beach.  And, as she always did at that hushed hour before dawn, she experienced a physical shrinking from those grim solitudes in which there was nothing warm and human and kindly, nothing but vastness of space upon which silence lay like a smothering blanket, in which she, the human atom, was utterly negligible, a protesting mote in the inexorable wilderness.  She knew this to be merely a state of mind, but situated as she was, it bore upon her with all the force of reality.  She felt like a prisoner who above all things desired some mode of escape.

A light burned in the kitchen.  She thanked her stars that this bitter cold morning she would not have to build a fire with freezing fingers while her teeth chattered, and she hurried in to the warmth heralded by a spark-belching stovepipe.  But the Siwash girl had not risen to the occasion.  Instead, Jack Fyfe sat with his feet on the oven door, a cigar in one corner of his mouth.  The kettle steamed.  Her porridge pot bubbled ready for the meal.