ot down hard on any jinks when there's work, but I have no license
to set myself up as guardian of a logger's morals and pocketbook when I
have nothing for him to do. These fellows are paying their board. So
long as they don't make themselves obnoxious to you, I don't see that
it's our funeral whether they're drunk or sober. They'd tell me so quick
enough."

To this pronouncement of expediency Stella made no rejoinder. She no
longer expected anything much of Charlie, in the way of consideration.
So far as she could see, she, his sister, was little more to him than
one of his loggers; a little less important than, say, his donkey
engineer. In so far as she conduced to the well-being of the camp and
effected a saving to his credit in the matter of preparing food, he
valued her and was willing to concede a minor point to satisfy her.
Beyond that Stella felt that he did not go. Five years in totally
different environments had dug a great gulf between them. He felt an
arbitrary sense of duty toward her, she knew, but in its manifestations
it never lapped over the bounds of his own immediate self-interest.

And so when she blundered upon knowledge of a state of affairs which
must have existed under her very nose for some time, there were few
remnants of sisterly affection to bid her seek extenuating
circumstances.

Katy John proved the final straw. Just by what means Stella grew to
suspect any such moral lapse on Benton's part is wholly irrelevant. Once
the unpleasant likelihood came to her notice, she took measures to
verify her suspicion, and when convinced she taxed her brother with it,
to his utter confusion.

"What kind of a man are you?" she cried at last in shamed anger. "Is
there nothing too low for you to dabble in? Haven't you any respect for
anything or anybody, yourself included?"

"Oh, don't talk like a damned Puritan," Benton growled, though his
tanned face was burning. "This is what comes of having women around the
camp. I'll send the girl away."

"You--you beast!" she flared--and ran out of the kitchen to seek refuge
in her own room and cry into her pillow some of the dumb protest that
surged up within her. For her knowledge of passion and the workings of
passion as they bore upon the relations of a man and a woman were at
once vague and tinctured with inflexible tenets of morality, the
steel-hard conception of virtue which is the bulwark of middle-class
theory for its wives and daughters and sisters--w