"No, thank goodness," she responded fervently.
"You don't look as if you had," he observed, his eyes admiringly upon her.
Nor had she. There was a bloom on the soft contour of her cheek, a luminous gleam in her wide, gray eyes. All the ill wrought by months of drudging work and mental revolt had vanished. She was undeniably good to look at, a woman in full flower, round-bodied, deep-breasted, aglow with the unquenched fires of youth. She was aware that Jack Fyfe found her so and tolerably glad that he did so find her. She had revised a good many of her first groping estimates of him that winter. And when she looked over the port bow and saw in behind Halfway Point the huddled shacks of her brother's camp where so much had overtaken her, she experienced a swift rush of thankfulness that she was—as she was. She slid her gloved hand impulsively into Jack Fyfe's, and his strong fingers shut down on hers closely.
They sat silent until the camp lay abeam. About it there was every sign of activity. A chunky stern-wheeler, with blow-off valve hissing, stood by a boom of logs in the bay, and men were moving back and forth across the swifters, making all ready for a tow. Stella marked a new bunkhouse. Away back on the logging ground in a greater clearing she saw the separate smoke of two donkey engines. Another, a big roader, Fyfe explained, puffed at the water's edge. She could see a string of logs tearing down the skid-road.
"He's going pretty strong, that brother of yours," Fyfe remarked. "If he holds his gait, he'll be a big timberman before you know it."
"He'll make money, I imagine," Stella admitted, "but I don't know what good that will do him. He'll only want more. What is there about money-making that warps some men so, makes them so grossly self-centered? I'd pity any girl who married Charlie. He used to be rather wild at home, but I never dreamed any man could change so."
"You use the conventional measuring-stick on him," her husband answered, with that tolerance which so often surprised her. "Maybe his ways are pretty crude. But he's feverishly hewing a competence—which is what we're all after—out of pretty crude material. And he's just a kid, after all, with a kid's tendency to go to extremes now and then. I kinda like the beggar's ambition and energy."
"But he hasn't the least consideration for anybody or anything," Stella protested. "He rides rough-shod over every one. That isn't either right or decent."
"It's the only way some men can get to the top," Fyfe answered quietly. "They concentrate on the object to be attained. That's all that counts until they're in a secure position. Then, when they stop to draw their breath, sometimes they find they've done lots of things they wouldn't do again. You watch. By and by Charlie Benton will cease to have those violent reactions that offend you so. As it is—he's a youngster, bucking a big game. Life, when you have your own way to hew through it, with little besides your hands and brain for capital, is no silk-lined affair."
She fell into thought over this reply. Fyfe had echoed almost her brother's last words to her. And she wondered if Jack Fyfe had attained that degree of economic power which enabled him to spend several thousand dollars on a winter's pleasuring with her by the exercise of a strong man's prerogative of overriding the weak, bending them to his own inflexible purposes, ruthlessly turning everything to his own advantage? If women came under the same head! She recalled Katy John, and her face burned. Perhaps. But she could not put Jack Fyfe in her brother's category. He didn't fit. Deep in her heart there still lurked an abiding resentment against Charlie Benton for the restraint he had put upon her and the license he had arrogated to himself. She could not convince herself that the lapses of that winter were not part and parcel of her brother's philosophy of life, a coarse and material philosophy.