He broke off suddenly, a perplexed look on his face, an uneasiness, a hesitation in his manner.
"What is it, Barlow?" Stella asked kindly. "How is everything up the lake?"
It was common enough in her experience, that temporary embarrassment of a logger before her. She knew them for men with boyish souls, boyish instincts, rude simplicities of heart. Long ago she had revised those first superficial estimates of them as gross, hulking brutes who worked hard and drank harder, coarsened and calloused by their occupation. They had their weaknesses, but their virtues of abiding loyalty, their reckless generosity, their simple directness, were great indeed. They took their lives in their hands on skid-road and spring-board, that such as she might flourish. They did not understand that, but she did.
"What is it, Barlow?" she repeated. "Have you just come down the lake?"
"Yes'm," he answered. "Say, Jack don't happen to be here, does he?"
"No, he hasn't been here," she told him.
The man's face fell.
"What's wrong?" Stella demanded. She had a swift divination that something was wrong.
"Oh, I dunno's anythin's wrong, particular," Barlow replied. "Only—well, Lefty he sent me down to see if Jack was at the Springs. We ain't seen him for a couple uh days."
Her pulse quickened.