But if he had allowed his passions 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 dink 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. Damn 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.