Behind them a little way came Jack Fyfe with sagging creel. He did not stop to exhibit his catch, but half an hour later they were served hot and crisp at the table in the big living room, where Fyfe, Stella and Charlie Benton, Lefty Howe and his wife, sat down together.
A flunkey from the camp kitchen served the meal and cleared it away. For an hour or two after that the three men sat about in shirt-sleeved ease, puffing at Jack Fyfe's cigars. Then Benton excused himself and went to bed. When Howe and his wife retired, Stella did likewise. The long twilight had dwindled to a misty patch of light sky in the northwest, and she fell asleep more at ease than she had been for weeks. Sitting in Jack Fyfe's living room through that evening she had begun to formulate a philosophy to fit her enforced environment—to live for the day only, and avoid thought of the future until there loomed on the horizon some prospect of a future worth thinking about. The present looked passable enough, she thought, if she kept her mind strictly on it alone.
And with that idea to guide her, she found the days slide by smoothly. She got on famously with Mrs. Howe, finding that woman full of virtues unsuspected in her type. Charlie was in his element. His prospects looked so rosy that they led him into egotistic outlines of what he intended to accomplish. To him the future meant logs in the water, big holdings of timber, a growing bank account. Beyond that,—what all his concentrated effort should lead to save more logs and more timber,—he did not seem to go. Judged by his talk, that was the ultimate, economic power,—money and more money. More and more as Stella listened to him, she became aware that he was following in his father's footsteps; save that he aimed at greater heights and that he worked by different methods, juggling with natural resources where their father had merely juggled with prices and tokens of product, their end was the same—not to create or build up, but to grasp, to acquire. That was the game. To get and to hold for their own use and benefit and to look upon men and things, in so far as they were of use, as pawns in the game.
She wondered sometimes if that were a characteristic of all men, if that were the big motif in the lives of such men as Paul Abbey and Jack Fyfe, for instance; if everything else, save the struggle of getting and keeping money, resolved itself into purely incidental phases of their existence? For herself she considered that wealth, or the getting of wealth, was only a means to an end.
Just what that end might be she found a little vague, rather hard to define in exact terms. It embraced personal leisure and the good things of life as a matter of course, a broader existence, a large-handed generosity toward the less fortunate, an intellectual elevation entirely unrelated to gross material things. Life, she told herself pensively, ought to mean something more than ease and good clothes, but what more she was chary of putting into concrete form. It hadn't meant much more than that for her, so far. She was only beginning to recognize the flinty facts of existence. She saw now that for her there lay open only two paths to food and clothing: one in which, lacking all training, she must earn her bread by daily toil, the other leading to marriage. That, she would have admitted, was a woman's natural destiny, but one didn't pick a husband or lover as one chose a gown or a hat. One went along living, and the thing happened. Chance ruled there, she believed. The morality of her class prevented her from prying into this question of mating with anything like critical consideration. It was only to be thought about sentimentally, and it was easy for her to so think. Within her sound and vigorous body all the heritage of natural human impulses bubbled warmly, but she recognized neither their source nor their ultimate fruits.
Often when Charlie was holding forth in his accustomed vein, she wondered what Jack Fyfe thought about it, what he masked behind his brief sentences or slow smile. Latterly her feeling about him, that involuntary bracing and stiffening of herself against his personality, left her. Fyfe seemed to be more or less self-conscious of her presence as a guest in his house. His manner toward her remained always casual, as if she were a man, and there was no question of sex attraction or masculine reaction to it between them. She liked him better for that; and she did admire his wonderful strength, the tremendous power invested in his magnificent body, just as she would have admired a tiger, without caring to fondle the beast.
Altogether she spent a tolerably pleasant three weeks. Autumn's gorgeous paintbrush laid wonderful coloring upon the maple and alder and birch that lined the lake shore. The fall run of the salmon was on, and every stream was packed with the silver horde, threshing through shoal and rapid to reach the spawning ground before they died. Off every creek mouth and all along the lake the seal followed to prey on the salmon, and sea-trout and lakers alike swarmed to the spawning beds to feed upon the roe. The days shortened. Sometimes a fine rain would drizzle for hours on end, and when it would clear, the saw-toothed ranges flanking the lake would stand out all freshly robed in white,—a mantle that crept lower on the fir-clad slopes after each storm. The winds that whistled off those heights nipped sharply.
Early in October Charlie Benton had squared his neighborly account with Jack Fyfe. With crew and equipment he moved home, to begin work anew on his own limit.
Katy John and her people came back from the salmon fishing. Jim Renfrew, still walking with a pronounced limp, returned from the hospital. Charlie wheedled Stella into taking up the cookhouse burden again. Stella consented; in truth she could do nothing else. Charlie spent a little of his contract profits in piping water to the kitchen, in a few things to brighten up and make more comfortable their own quarters.
"Just as soon as I can put another boom over the rapids, Stell," he promised, "I'll put a cook on the job. I've got to sail a little close for a while. With this crew I ought to put a million feet in the water in six weeks. Then I'll be over the hump, and you can take it easy. But till then—"