And since she could not see
that as a possibility, there was nothing to do but play the game
according to the cards she held. Of these the trump was work, the inner
glow that comes of something worth while done toward a definite,
purposeful end. She took up her singing again with a distinct relief.

Time passed quickly and uneventfully enough between the wedding day and
the date of her Granada engagement. It seemed a mere breathing space
before the middle of July rolled around, and she was once more aboard a
Vancouver boat. In the interim, she had received a letter from the
attorney who had wound up her father's estate, intimating that there was
now a market demand for that oil stock, and asking if he should sell or
hold for a rise in price which seemed reasonably sure? Stella
telegraphed her answer. If that left-over of a speculative period would
bring a few hundred dollars, it would never be of greater service to her
than now.

All the upper reach of Puget Sound basked in its normal midsummer haze,
the day Stella started for Vancouver. That great region of island-dotted
sea spread between the rugged Olympics and the foot of the Coast range
lay bathed in summer sun, untroubled, somnolent. But nearing the
international boundary, the _Charlotte_ drove her twenty-knot way into a
thickening atmosphere. Northward from Victoria, the rugged shores that
line those inland waterways began to appear blurred. Just north of
Active Pass, where the steamers take to the open gulf again, a vast bank
of smoke flung up blue and gray, a rolling mass. The air was pungent,
oppressive. When the _Charlotte_ spanned the thirty-mile gap between
Vancouver Island and the mainland shore, she nosed into the Lion's Gate
under a slow bell, through a smoke pall thick as Bering fog. Stella's
recollection swung back to Charlie's uneasy growl of a month earlier.
Fire! Throughout the midsummer season there was always the danger of
fire breaking out in the woods. Not all the fire-ranger patrols could
guard against the carelessness of fishermen and campers.

"It's a tough Summer over here for the timber owners," she heard a man
remark. "I've been twenty years on the coast and never saw the woods so
dry."

"Dry's no name," his neighbor responded. "It's like tinder. A cigarette
stub'll start a blaze forty men couldn't put out. It's me that knows it.
I've got four limits on the North Arm, and there's fire on two sides of
me. You bet I'm praying for rain."