"What is it, Barlow?" Stella asked kindly. "How is everything up the
lake?"
It 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.
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