Everything around there, shacks 'n' all, was
burned days ago, so the fire can't touch the house. The crew there has
grub an' a cook. I kinda expect Jack'll be there, unless he fell in with
them constables."

She trudged silently back to the _Waterbug_. Barlow started the engine,
and the boat took up her slow way. As they skirted the shore, Stella
began to see here and there the fierce havoc of the fire. Black trunks
of fir reared nakedly to the smoky sky, lay crisscross on bank and
beach. Nowhere was there a green blade, a living bush. Nothing but
charred black, a melancholy waste of smoking litter, with here and there
a pitch-soaked stub still waving its banner of flame, or glowing redly.
Back of those seared skeletons a shifting cloud of smoke obscured
everything.

Presently they drew in to Cougar Bay. Men moved about on the beach; two
bulky scows stood nose-on to the shore. Upon them rested half a dozen
donkey engines, thick-bellied, upright machines, blown down, dead on
their skids. About these in great coils lay piled the gear of logging,
miles of steel cable, blocks, the varied tools of the logger's trade.
The _Panther_ lay between the scows, with lines from each passed over
her towing bitts.

Stella could see the outline of the white bungalow on its grassy knoll.
They had saved only that, of all the camp, by a fight that sent three
men to the hospital, on a day when the wind shifted into the northwest
and sent a sheet of flame rolling through the timber and down on Cougar
Bay like a tidal wave. So Barlow told her. He cupped his hands now and
called to his fellows on the beach.

No, Fyfe had not come back yet.

"Go up to the mouth of Tumbling Creek," Stella ordered.

Barlow swung the _Waterbug_ about, cleared the point, and stood up along
the shore. Stella sat on a cushioned seat at the back of the pilot
house, hard-eyed, struggling against that dead weight that seemed, to
grow and grow in her breast. That elemental fury raging in the woods
made her shrink. Her own hand had helped to loose it, but her hands were
powerless to stay it; she could only sit and watch and wait, eaten up
with misery of her own making. She was horribly afraid, with a fear she
would not name to herself.

Behind that density of atmosphere, the sun had gone to rest. The first
shadows of dusk were closing in, betokened by a thickening of the
smoke-fog into which the _Waterbug_ slowly plowed. To port a dimming
shore line; to starboard