a brief clamor. In the dead silence that followed,
she heard a thud and the clinking smash of breaking glass, a panted
oath, sounds of struggle.

Stella slipped on a pair of her brother's gum boots and an overcoat, and
ran out on the path beaten from their cabin to the shore. It led past
the bunkhouse, and on that side opened two uncurtained windows, yellow
squares that struck gleaming on the snow. The panes of one were broken
now, sharp fragments standing like saw teeth in the wooden sash.

She stole warily near and looked in. Two men were being held apart; one
by three of his fellows, the other _by_ Jack Fyfe alone. Fyfe grinned
mildly, talking to the men in a quiet, pacific tone.

"Now you know that was nothing to scrap about," she heard him say,
"You're both full of fighting whisky, but a bunkhouse isn't any place to
fight. Wait till morning. If you've still got it in your systems, go
outside and have it out. But you shouldn't disturb our game and break up
the furniture. Be gentlemen, drunk or sober. Better shake hands and call
it square."

"Aw, let 'em go to it, if they want to."

Charlie's voice, drink-thickened, harsh, came from a earner of the room
into which she could not see until she moved nearer. By the time she
picked him out, Fyfe resumed his seat at the table where three others
and Benton waited with cards in their hands, red and white chips and
money stacked before them.

She knew enough of cards to realize that a stiff poker game was on the
board when she had watched one hand dealt and played. It angered her,
not from any ethical motive, but because of her brother's part in it. He
had no funds to pay a cook's wages, yet he could afford to lose on one
hand as much as he credited her with for a month's work. She could slave
at the kitchen job day in and day out to save him forty-five dollars a
month. He could lose that without the flicker of an eyelash, but he
couldn't pay her wages on demand. Also she saw that he had imbibed too
freely, if the redness of his face and the glassy fixedness of his eyes
could be read aright.

"Pig!" she muttered. "If that's his idea of pleasure. Oh, well, why
should I care? I don't, so far as he's concerned, if I could just get
away from this beast of a place myself."

Abreast of her a logger came to the broken window with a sack to bar out
the frosty air. And Stella, realizing suddenly that she was shivering
with the cold, ran back to the cabin and got into her be