"And he has not come down the lake?"
"I guess not," the logger said. "Oh, I guess it's all right. Jack's pretty skookum in the woods. Only Lefty got uneasy. It's desperate hot and smoky up there."
"How did you come down? Are you going back soon?" she asked abruptly.
"I got the Waterbug," Barlow told her. "I'm goin' right straight back."
Stella looked out over the smoky lake and back at the logger again, a sudden resolution born of intolerable uncertainty, of a feeling that she could only characterize as fear, sprang full-fledged into her mind. "Wait for me," she said. "I'm going with you."
CHAPTER XXIV
"OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME"
The Waterbug limped. Her engine misfired continuously, and Barlow lacked the mechanical knowledge to remedy its ailment. He was satisfied to let it pound away, so long as it would revolve at all. So the boat moved slowly through that encompassing smoke at less than half speed. Outwardly the once spick and span cruiser bore every mark of hard usage. Her topsides were foul, her decks splintered by the tramping of calked boots, grimy with soot and cinders. It seemed to Stella that everything and every one on and about Roaring Lake bore some mark of that holocaust raging in the timber, as if the fire were some malignant disease menacing and marring all that it affected, and affecting all that trafficked within its smoky radius.