"I want to get enough for supper, so I'd better be at it," he remarked.
"Sometimes they come pretty slow. If you should want to go up and watch
the boys work, that trail will take you there."
He went off across the grassy level and plunged into the deep timber
that rose like a wall beyond. Stella looked after.
"It is certainly odd," she reflected with some irritation, "how that man
affects me. I don't think a woman could ever be just friends with him.
She'd either like him a lot or dislike him intensely. He isn't anything
but a logger, and yet he has a presence like one of the lords of
creation. Funny."
Then she went back to the house to converse upon domestic matters with
Mrs. Howe until the shrilling of the donkey whistle brought forty-odd
lumberjacks swinging down the trail.
Behind them a little way came Jack Fyfe with sagging creel. He did not
stop to exhibit his catch, but half an hour later they were served hot
and crisp at the table in the big living room, where Fyfe, Stella and
Charlie Benton, Lefty Howe and his wife, sat down together.
A flunkey from the camp kitchen served the meal and cleared it away. For
an hour or two after that the three men sat about in shirt-sleeved ease,
puffing at Jack Fyfe's cigars. Then Benton excused himself and went to
bed. When Howe and his wife retired, Stella did likewise. The long
twilight had dwindled to a misty patch of light sky in the northwest,
and she fell asleep more at ease than she had been for weeks.
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