The vaulting uplift of
spirit, that glad little song that kept lilting in her heart, filled her
with peace and contentment, but physically she was beginning to
experience acute hunger. She recalled that she had eaten scarcely
anything that day.
"We'll go down to the camp," Fyfe suggested. "The cook will have
something left. We're camping like pioneers down there. The shacks were
all burned, and somebody sank the cookhouse scow."
They went down the path to the bay, hand in hand, feeling their way
through that fire-blackened area, under a black sky.
A red eye glowed ahead of them, a fire on the beach around which men
squatted on their haunches or lay stretched on their blankets,
sooty-faced fire fighters, a weary group. The air was rank with smoke
wafted from the burning woods.
The cook's fire was dead, and that worthy was humped on his bed-roll
smoking a pipe. But he had cold meat and bread, and he brewed a pot of
coffee on the big fire for them, and Stella ate the plain fare, sitting
in the circle of tired loggers.
"Poor fellows, they look worn out," she said, when they were again
traversing that black road to the bungalow.
"We've slept standing up for three weeks," Fyfe said simply. "They've
done everything they could. And we're not through yet. A north wind
might set Charlie's timber afire in a dozen places."
"Oh, for a rain," she sighed.
"If wishing for rain brought it," he laughed, "we'd have had a second
flood. We've got to keep pegging away till it does rain, that's all.
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