“Though it’s ten to one I won’t have a corporal’s guard left when I want to start work again,” he grumbled.  “I’m well within my rights if I put my foot down hard on any jinks when there’s work, but I have no license to set myself up as guardian of a logger’s morals and pocketbook when I have nothing for him to do.  These fellows are paying their board.  So long as they don’t make themselves obnoxious to you, I don’t see that it’s our funeral whether they’re drunk or sober.  They’d tell me so quick enough.”

To this pronouncement of expediency Stella made no rejoinder.  She no longer expected anything much of Charlie, in the way of consideration.  So far as she could see, she, his sister, was little more to him than one of his loggers; a little less important than, say, his donkey engineer.  In so far as she conduced to the well-being of the camp and effected a saving to his credit in the matter of preparing food, he valued her and was willing to concede a minor point to satisfy her.  Beyond that Stella felt that he did not go.  Five years in totally different environments had dug a great gulf between them.  He felt an arbitrary sense of duty toward her, she knew, but in its manifestations it never lapped over the bounds of his own immediate self-interest.

And so when she blundered upon knowledge of a state of affairs which must have existed under her very nose for some time, there were few remnants of sisterly affection to bid her seek extenuating circumstances.

Katy John proved the final straw.  Just by what means Stella grew to suspect any such moral lapse on Benton’s part is wholly irrelevant.  Once the unpleasant likelihood came to her notice, she took measures to verify her suspicion, and when convinced she taxed her brother with it, to his utter confusion.

“What kind of a man are you?” she cried at last in shamed anger.  “Is there nothing too low for you to dabble in?  Haven’t you any respect for anything or anybody, yourself included?”

“Oh, don’t talk like a damned Puritan,” Benton growled, though his tanned face was burning.  “This is what comes of having women around the camp.  I’ll send the girl away.”

“You—­you beast!” she flared—­and ran out of the kitchen to seek refuge in her own room and cry into her pillow some of the dumb protest that surged up within her.  For her knowledge of passion and the workings of passion as they bore upon the relations of a man and a woman were at once vague and tinctured with inflexible tenets of morality, the steel-hard conception of virtue which is the bulwark of middle-class theory for its wives and daughters and sisters—­with an eye consistently blind to the concealed lapses of its men.

Stella Benton passed that morning through successive stages of shocked amazement, of pity, and disgust.  As between her brother and the Siwash girl, she saw little to choose.  From her virtuous pinnacle she abhorred both.  If she had to continue intimate living with them, she felt that she would be utterly defiled, degraded to their level.  That was her first definite conclusion.