"
He went outside. Up in the near woods the whine of the saws and the
sounds of chopping kept measured beat. It was late in the forenoon, and
Stella was hard about her dinner preparations. Contract or no contract,
money or no money, men must eat. That fact loomed biggest on her daily
schedule, left her no room to think overlong of other things. Her huff
over, she felt rather sorry for Charlie, a feeling accentuated by sight
of him humped on a log in the sun, too engrossed in his perplexities to
be where he normally was at that hour, in the thick of the logging,
working harder than any of his men.
A little later she saw him put off from the float in the _Chickamin's_
dinghy. When the crew came to dinner, he had not returned. Nor was he
back when they went out again at one.
Near mid-afternoon, however, he strode into the kitchen, wearing the
look of a conqueror.
"I've got it fixed," he announced.
Stella looked up from a frothy mass of yellow stuff that she was
stirring in a pan.
"Got what fixed?" she asked.
"Why, this log business," he said. "Jack Fyfe is going to put in a crew
and a donkey, and we're going to everlastingly rip the innards out of
these woods. I'll make delivery after all."
"That's good," she remarked, but noticeably without enthusiasm. The
heat of that low-roofed shanty had taken all possible enthusiasm for
anything out of her for the time being. Always toward the close of each
day she was gripped by that feeling of deadly fatigue, in the face of
which nothing much mattered but to get through the last hours somehow
and drag herself wearily to bed.
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