nsive, as if he were in reality a hunter and she the hunted.

Fyfe joined Charlie Benton about the time she finished work. The three
of them sat on the grass before Benton's quarters, and every time Jack
Fyfe's eyes rested on her she steeled herself to resist--what, she did
not know. Something intangible, something that disturbed her. She had
never experienced anything like that before; it tantalized her, roused
her curiosity. There was nothing occult about the man. He was nowise
fascinating, either in face or manner. He made no bid for her attention.
Yet during the half hour he sat there, Stella's mind revolved constantly
about him. She recalled all that she had heard of him, much of it, from
her point of view, highly discreditable. Inevitably she fell to
comparing him with other men she knew.

She had, in a way, unconsciously been prepared for just such a measure
of concentration upon Jack Fyfe. For he was a power on Roaring Lake, and
power,--physical, intellectual or financial,--exacts its own tribute of
consideration. He was a fighter, a dominant, hard-bitten woodsman, so
the tale ran. He had gathered about him the toughest crew on the Lake,
himself, upon occasion, the most turbulent of all. He controlled many
square miles of big timber, and he had gotten it all by his own effort
in the eight years since he came to Roaring Lake as a hand logger. He
was slow of speech, chain-lightning in action, respected generally,
feared a lot. All these things her brother and Katy John had sketched
for Stella with much verbal embellishment.

There was no ignoring such a man. Brought into close contact with the
man himself, Stella felt the radiating force of his personality. There
it was, a thing to be reckoned with. She felt that whenever Jack Fyfe's
gray eyes rested impersonally on her. His pleasant, freckled face
hovered before her until she fell asleep, and in her sleep she dreamed
again of him throwing that drunken logger down the Hot Springs slip.

CHAPTER VIII

DURANCE VILE

By September first a growing uneasiness hardened into distasteful
certainty upon Stella. It had become her firm resolve to get what money
was due her when Charlie marketed his logs and try another field of
labor. That camp on Roaring Lake was becoming a nightmare to her. She
had no inherent dislike for work. She was too vibrantly alive to be
lazy. But she had had an overdose of unaccustomed drudgery, and she was
growing desperate. If there