"Sure they haven't? Some of them might have, you know, without being able to gratify it."
She started, to find Jack Fyfe almost at her elbow, the gleam of a quizzical smile lighting his face.
"I daresay that might be true," she admitted.
Fyfe's gaze turned from her to the huge sweep of lake and mountain chain. She saw that he was outfitted for fishing, creel on his shoulder, unjointed rod in one hand. By means of his rubber-soled waders he had come upon her noiselessly.
"It's truer than you think, maybe," he said at length. "You don't want to come along and take a lesson in catching rainbows, I suppose?"
"Not this time, thanks," she shook her head.
"I want to get enough for supper, so I'd better be at it," he remarked. "Sometimes they come pretty slow. If you should want to go up and watch the boys work, that trail will take you there."
He went off across the grassy level and plunged into the deep timber that rose like a wall beyond. Stella looked after.
"It is certainly odd," she reflected with some irritation, "how that man affects me. I don't think a woman could ever be just friends with him. She'd either like him a lot or dislike him intensely. He isn't anything but a logger, and yet he has a presence like one of the lords of creation. Funny."
Then she went back to the house to converse upon domestic matters with Mrs. Howe until the shrilling of the donkey whistle brought forty-odd lumberjacks swinging down the trail.