t was common enough in her experience, that temporary embarrassment of
a logger before her. She knew them for men with boyish souls, boyish
instincts, rude simplicities of heart. Long ago she had revised those
first superficial estimates of them as gross, hulking brutes who worked
hard and drank harder, coarsened and calloused by their occupation. They
had their weaknesses, but their virtues of abiding loyalty, their
reckless generosity, their simple directness, were great indeed. They
took their lives in their hands on skid-road and spring-board, that such
as she might flourish. They did not understand that, but she did.

"What is it, Barlow?" she repeated. "Have you just come down the lake?"

"Yes'm," he answered. "Say, Jack don't happen to be here, does he?"

"No, he hasn't been here," she told him.

The man's face fell.

"What's wrong?" Stella demanded. She had a swift divination that
something was wrong.

"Oh, I dunno's anythin's wrong, particular," Barlow replied.
"Only--well, Lefty he sent me down to see if Jack was at the Springs. We
ain't seen him for a couple uh days."

Her pulse quickened.

"And he has not come down the lake?"

"I guess not," the logger said. "Oh, I guess it's all right. Jack's
pretty _skookum_ in the woods. Only Lefty got uneasy. It's desperate hot
and smoky up there."

"How did you come down? Are you going back soon?" she asked abruptly.

"I got the _Waterbug_," Barlow told her. "I'm goin' right straight
back."

Stella looked out over the smoky lake and back at the logger again, a
sudden resolution born of intolerable uncertainty, of a feeling that she
could only characterize as fear, sprang full-fledged into her mind.
"Wait for me," she said. "I'm going with you."

CHAPTER XXIV

"OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME"

The _Waterbug_ limped. Her engine misfired continuously, and Barlow
lacked the mechanical knowledge to remedy its ailment. He was satisfied
to let it pound away, so long as it would revolve at all. So the boat
moved slowly through that encompassing smoke at less than half speed.
Outwardly the once spick and span cruiser bore every mark of hard usage.
Her topsides were foul, her decks splintered by the tramping of calked
boots, grimy with soot and cinders. It seemed to Stella that everything
and every one on and about Roaring Lake bore some mark of that holocaust
raging in the timber, as if the fire were some malignant disease
menacing and marring all tha