ddered.
It lay at her door, equally with her and Monohan, even if neither of
their hands had sped the bullet,--an indirect responsibility but
gruesomely real to her.

God only knows to what length she might have gone in reaction. She was
quivering under that self-inflicted lash, bordering upon hysteria when
she reached the house. She could not shut out a too-vivid picture of
Billy Dale lying murdered on the Tyee's bank, of the accusing look with
which Fyfe must meet her. Rightly so, she held. She did not try to
shirk. She had followed the line of least resistance, lacked the dour
courage to pull herself up in the beginning, and it led to this. She
felt Billy Dale's blood wet on her soft hands. She walked into her own
house panting like a hunted animal.

And she had barely crossed the threshold when back in the rear Jack
Junior's baby voice rose in a shrill scream of pain.

* * * * *

Stella scarcely heard her husband and the doctor come in. For a weary
age she had been sitting in a low rocker, a pillow across her lap, and
on that the little, tortured body swaddled with cotton soaked in olive
oil, the only dressing she and Mrs. Howe could devise to ease the pain.
All those other things which had so racked her, the fight on the Tyee,
the shooting of Billy Dale, they had vanished somehow into thin air
before the dread fact that her baby was dying slowly before her
anguished eyes. She sat numbed with that deadly assurance, praying
without hope for help to come, hopeless that any medical skill would
avail when it did come. So many hours had been wasted while a man rowed
to Benton's camp, while the _Chickamin_ steamed to Roaring Springs,
while the _Waterbug_ came driving back. Five hours! And the skin, yes,
even shreds of flesh, had come away in patches with Jack Junior's
clothing when she took it off. She bent over him, fearful that every
feeble breath would be his last.

She looked up at the doctor. Fyfe was beside her, his calked boots
biting into the oak floor.

"See what you can do, doc," he said huskily. Then to Stella: "How did it
happen?"

"He toddled away from Martha," she whispered. "Sam Foo had set a pan of
boiling water on the kitchen floor. He fell into it. Oh, my poor little
darling."

They watched the doctor bare the terribly scalded body, examine it,
listen to the boy's breathing, count his pulse. In the end he re-dressed
the tiny body with stuff from the case with whi