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, aft, and dead ahead, water and air merged in
two boat lengths.
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