"Don't worry," he said kindly. "Nothing's going to happen."

But she stood looking out the window after he left, uneasy with a prescience of trouble. She watched with a feverish interest the stir that presently arose about the bunkhouses. That summer a wide s.p.a.ce had been cleared between bungalow and camp. She could see moving lanterns, and even now and then hear the voices of men calling to each other. Once the _Panther's_ dazzling eye of a searchlight swung across the landing, and its beam picked out a file of men carrying their blankets toward the boat. Shortly after that the tender rounded the point. Close behind her went the _Waterbug_, and both boats swarmed with men.

Stella looked and listened until there was but a faint thrum far up the lake. Then she went to bed, but not to sleep. What ugly pa.s.sions were loosed at the lake head she did not know. But on the face of it she could not avoid wondering if Monohan had deliberately set out to cross and hara.s.s Jack Fyfe. Because of her? That was the question which had hovered on her lips that evening, one she had not brought herself to ask. Because of her, or because of some enmity that far preceded her?

She had thought him big enough to do as she had done, as Fyfe was tacitly doing,--make the best of a grievous matter.

But if he had allowed his pa.s.sions to dictate reprisals, she trembled for the outcome. Fyfe was not a man to sit quiet under either affront or injury. He would fight with double rancor if Monohan were his adversary.

"If anything happens up there, I'll hate myself," she whispered, when the ceaseless turning of her mind had become almost unendurable. "I was a silly, weak fool to ever let Walter Monohan know I cared. And I'll hate him too if he makes me a bone of contention. I elected to play the game the only decent way there is to play it. So did he. Why can't he abide by that?"

Noon of the next day saw the _Waterbug_ heave to a quarter mile abeam of Cougar Point to let off a lone figure in her dinghy, and then bore on, driving straight and fast for Roaring Springs. Stella flew to the landing. Mother Howe came puffing at her heels.

"Land's sake, I been worried to death," the older woman breathed. "When men git to quarrellin' about timber, you never can tell where they'll stop, Mrs. Jack. I've knowed some wild times in the woods in the past."

The man in the d.i.n.k was Lefty Howe. He pulled in beside the float. When he stepped up on the planks, he limped perceptibly.

"Land alive, what happened yuh, Lefty?" his wife cried.

"Got a rap on the leg with a peevy," he said. "Nothin' much."

"Why did the _Waterbug_ go down the lake?" Stella asked breathlessly.

The man's face was serious. "What happened up there?"

"There was a fuss," he answered quietly. "Three or four of the boys got beat up so they need patchin'. Jack's takin' 'em down to the hospital.

d.a.m.n that yeller-headed Monohan!" his voice lifted suddenly in uncontrollable anger. "Billy Dale was killed this mornin', mother."

Stella felt herself grow sick. Death is a small matter when it strikes afar, among strangers. When it comes to one's door! Billy Dale had piloted the _Waterbug_ for a year, a chubby, round-faced boy of twenty, a foster-son, of Mother Howe's before she had children of her own.

Stella had asked Jack to put him on the _Waterbug_ because he was such a loyal, cheery sort of soul, and Billy had been a part of every expedition they had taken around the lake. She could not think of him as a rigid, lifeless lump of clay. Why, only the day before he had been laughing and chattering aboard the cruiser, going up and down the cabin floor on his hands and knees, Jack Junior perched triumphantly astride his back.

"What happened?" she cried wildly. "Tell me, quick."

"It's quick told," Howe said grimly. "We were ready at daylight.

Monohan's got a hard crew, and they jumped us as soon as we started to clear the channel. So we cleared them, first. It didn't take so long.

Three of our men was used bad, and there's plenty of sore heads on both sides. But we did the job. After we got them on the run, we blowed up their swifters an' piles with giant. Then we begun to put the cedar through. Billy was on the bank when somebody shot him from across the river. One mercy, he never knew what hit him. An' you'll never come so close bein' a widow again, Mrs. Fyfe, an' not be. That bullet was meant for Jack, I figure. He was sittin' down. Billy was standin' right behind him watchin' the logs go through. Whoever he was, he shot high, that's all. There, mother, don't cry. That don't help none. What's done's done."

Stella turned and walked up to the house, stunned. She could not credit bloodshed, death. Always in her life both had been things remote. And as the real significance of Lefty Howe's story grew on her, she shuddered.

It lay at her door, equally with her and Monohan, even if neither of their hands had sped the bullet,--an indirect responsibility but gruesomely real to her.

G.o.d only knows to what length she might have gone in reaction. She was quivering under that self-inflicted lash, bordering upon hysteria when she reached the house. She could not shut out a too-vivid picture of Billy Dale lying murdered on the Tyee's bank, of the accusing look with which Fyfe must meet her. Rightly so, she held. She did not try to shirk. She had followed the line of least resistance, lacked the dour courage to pull herself up in the beginning, and it led to this. She felt Billy Dale's blood wet on her soft hands. She walked into her own house panting like a hunted animal.

And she had barely crossed the threshold when back in the rear Jack Junior's baby voice rose in a shrill scream of pain.

Stella scarcely heard her husband and the doctor come in. For a weary age she had been sitting in a low rocker, a pillow across her lap, and on that the little, tortured body swaddled with cotton soaked in olive oil, the only dressing she and Mrs. Howe could devise to ease the pain.

All those other things which had so racked her, the fight on the Tyee, the shooting of Billy Dale, they had vanished somehow into thin air before the dread fact that her baby was dying slowly before her anguished eyes. She sat numbed with that deadly a.s.surance, praying without hope for help to come, hopeless that any medical skill would avail when it did come. So many hours had been wasted while a man rowed to Benton's camp, while the _Chickamin_ steamed to Roaring Springs, while the _Waterbug_ came driving back. Five hours! And the skin, yes, even shreds of flesh, had come away in patches with Jack Junior's clothing when she took it off. She bent over him, fearful that every feeble breath would be his last.

She looked up at the doctor. Fyfe was beside her, his calked boots biting into the oak floor.

"See what you can do, doc," he said huskily. Then to Stella: "How did it happen?"

"He toddled away from Martha," she whispered. "Sam Foo had set a pan of boiling water on the kitchen floor. He fell into it. Oh, my poor little darling."

They watched the doctor bare the terribly scalded body, examine it, listen to the boy's breathing, count his pulse. In the end he re-dressed the tiny body with stuff from the case with which a country physician goes armed against all emergencies. He was very deliberate and thoughtful. Stella looked her appeal when he finished.

"He's a st.u.r.dy little chap," he said, "and we'll do our best. A child frequently survives terrific shock. It would be mistaken kindness for me to make light of his condition simply to spare your feelings. He has an even chance. I shall stay until morning. Now, I think it would be best to lay him on a bed. You must relax, Mrs. Fyfe. I can see that the strain is telling on you. You mustn't allow yourself to get in that abnormal condition. The baby is not conscious of pain. He is not suffering half so much in his body as you are in your mind, and you mustn't do that. Be hopeful. We'll need your help. We should have a nurse, but there was no time to get one."

They laid Jack Junior amid downy pillows on Stella's bed. The doctor stood looking at him, then drew a chair beside the bed.

"Go and walk about a little, Mrs. Fyfe," he advised, "and have your dinner. I'll want to watch the boy a while."

But Stella did not want to walk. She did not want to eat. She was scarcely aware that her limbs were cramped and aching from her long vigil in the chair. She was not conscious of herself and her problems, any more. Every shift of her mind turned on her baby, the little mite she had nursed at her breast, the one joy untinctured with bitterness that was left her. The bare chance that those little feet might never patter across the floor again, that little voice never wake her in the morning crying "Mom-mom," drove her distracted.

She went out into the living room, walked to a window, stood there drumming on the pane with nervous fingers. Dusk was falling outside; a dusk was creeping over her. She shuddered.

Fyfe came up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, and turned her so that she faced him.

"I wish I could help, Stella," he whispered. "I wish I could make you feel less forlorn. Poor little kiddies--both of you."

She shook off his hands, not because she rebelled against his touch, against his sympathy, merely because she had come to that nervous state where she scarce realized what she did.

"Oh," she choked, "I can't bear it. My baby, my little baby boy. The one bright spot that's left, and he has to suffer like that. If he dies, it's the end of everything for me."

Fyfe stared at her. The warm, pitying look on his face ebbed away, hardened into his old, mask-like absence of expression.

"No," he said quietly, "it would only be the beginning. Lord G.o.d, but this has been a day."

He whirled about with a quick gesture of his hands, a harsh, raspy laugh that was very near a sob, and left her. Twenty minutes later, when Stella was irresistibly drawn back to the bedroom, she found him sitting sober and silent, looking at his son.

A little past midnight Jack Junior died.

CHAPTER XIX

FREE AS THE WIND

Stella sat watching the gray lines of rain beat down on the asphalt, the muddy rivulets that streamed along the gutter. A forlorn sighing of wind in the bare boughs of a gaunt elm that stood before her window reminded her achingly of the wind drone among the tall firs.

A ghastly two weeks had intervened since Jack Junior's little life blinked out. There had been wild moments when she wished she could keep him company on that journey into the unknown. But grief seldom kills.

Sometimes it hardens. Always it works a change, a greater or less revamping of the spirit. It was so with Stella Fyfe, although she was not keenly aware of any forthright metamorphosis. She was, for the present, too actively involved in material changes.

The storm and stress of that period between her yielding to the lure of Monohan's personality and the burial of her boy had sapped her of all emotional reaction. When they had performed the last melancholy service for him and went back to the bungalow at Cougar Point, she was as physically exhausted, as near the limit of numbed endurance in mind and body as it is possible for a young and healthy woman to become. And when a measure of her natural vitality re-a.s.serted itself, she laid her course. She could no more abide the place where she was than a pardoned convict can abide the prison that has restrained him. It was empty now of everything that made life tolerable, the hushed rooms a constant reminder of her loss. She would catch herself listening for that baby voice, for those pattering footsteps, and realize with a sickening pang that she would never hear them again.

The snapping of that last link served to deepen and widen the gulf between her and Fyfe. He went about his business grave and preoccupied.

They seldom talked together. She knew that his boy had meant a lot to him; but he had his work. He did not have to sit with folded hands and think until thought drove him into the bogs of melancholy.