icipation than when she
began her long journey. She began to fear that it might be totally
unlike anything she had been able to imagine, disagreeably so. Charlie,
she decided, had grown hard and coarsened in the evolution of his
ambition to get on, to make his pile. She was but four years younger
than he, and she had always thought of herself as being older and wiser
and steadier. She had conceived the idea that her presence would have a
good influence on him, that they would pull together--now that there
were but the two of them. But four hours in his company had dispelled
that illusion. She had the wit to perceive that Charlie Benton had
emerged from the chrysalis stage, that he had the will and the ability
to mold his life after his elected fashion, and that her coming was a
relatively unimportant incident.

In due course the _Chickamin_ bore in under Halfway Point, opened out a
sheltered bight where the watery commotion outside raised but a faint
ripple, and drew in alongside a float.

The girl swept lake shore, bay, and sloping forest with a quickening
eye. Here was no trim-painted cottage and velvet lawn. In the waters
beside and lining the beach floated innumerable logs, confined by
boomsticks, hundreds of trunks of fir, forty and sixty feet long, four
and six feet across the butt, timber enough, when it had passed through
the sawmills, to build four such towns as Hopyard. Just back from the
shore, amid stumps and littered branches, rose the roofs of divers
buildings. One was long and low. Hard by it stood another of like type
but of lesser dimension. Two or three mere shanties lifted level with
great stumps,--crude, unpainted buildings. Smoke issued from the pipe of
the larger, and a white-aproned man stood in the doorway.

Somewhere in the screen of woods a whistle shrilled. Benton looked at
his watch.

"We made good time, in spite of the little roll," said he. "That's the
donkey blowing quitting time--six o'clock. Well, come on up to the
shack, Sis. Sam, you get a wheelbarrow and run those trunks up after
supper, will you?"

Away in the banked timber beyond the maples and alder which Stella now
saw masked the bank of a small stream flowing by the cabins, a faint
call rose, long-drawn:

"Tim-ber-r-r-r!"

They moved along a path beaten through fern and clawing blackberry vine
toward the camp, Benton carrying the two grips. A loud, sharp crack
split the stillness; then a mild swishing sound arose. Hard o