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Outside the Springs and the hatchery over the way, there isn't a white woman on the lake except Lefty Howe's wife, Lefty's Jack Fyfe's foreman, and she's fat and past forty. I told you it was a God-forsaken hole as far as society is concerned, Stell." "I know," she said thoughtfully. "But one can scarcely realize such a such a social blankness, until one actually experiences it.
There's the Abbey-Monohan outfit with two big logging camps, my outfit, Jack Fyfe's, some hand loggers on the east shore, and the R.A.T. at the head of the lake. That's the population and Roaring Lake is forty-two miles long and eight wide." "Are there any nice girls around?" she asked. Benton grinned widely. "Girls?" said he. "Not so you could notice.
She recalled that only in the most indirect way had he ever passed criticism on Monohan, and then it lay mostly in a tone, suggested more than spoken. Yet he knew Monohan, had known him for years. They had clashed long before she was a factor in their lives. When she went into the big room, Benton and Fyfe were gone outdoors. She glanced into Fyfe's den.
The three of them sat on the grass before Benton's quarters, and every time Jack Fyfe's eyes rested on her she steeled herself to resist what, she did not know. Something intangible, something that disturbed her. She had never experienced anything like that before; it tantalized her, roused her curiosity. There was nothing occult about the man. He was nowise fascinating, either in face or manner.
It made a deep impression on her, all these successive, disassociated finger posts, pointing one and all to things under the surface, to motives and potentialities she had not glimpsed before and could only guess at now. Fyfe and Benton came to dinner more or less preoccupied, an odd mood for Charlie Benton. Afterwards they went into session behind the closed door of Fyfe's den.
Staring out into the smoky air, she wondered if the fires at Roaring Lake still ravaged that noble forest; if Fyfe's resources, like her brother's, were wholly involved in standing timber, and if that timber were doomed? She craved to know.
She realized how bitter a humiliation it must have been to suffer that sardonic cuffing at Fyfe's hands. Monohan wasn't the type of man who would ever forget or forgive either that or the terrible grip on his throat. Even at the time she had sensed this and dreaded what it might ultimately lead to.
Where or how he came by this faculty, she did not know. In fact, so far as Jack Fyfe's breeding and antecedents were concerned, she knew little more than before their marriage. He was not given to reminiscence. His people distant relatives lived in her own native state of Pennsylvania. He had an only sister who was now in South America with her husband, a civil engineer.
In her mind their marriage, no matter that it lacked what she no less than Fyfe deemed an essential to happiness, was a fixed state, final, irrevocable, not to be altered by any emotional vagaries. No man, she told herself, could make her forget her duty. If it should befall that her heart, lacking safe anchorage, went astray, that would be her personal cross not Jack Fyfe's. He should never know.
She had somehow experienced a recurrence of that peculiar feeling of needing to be on her guard, as if there were some curious, latent antagonism between them. She puzzled over that a little. She had never felt that way about Paul Abbey, for instance, or indeed toward any man she had ever known. Fyfe's more or less ambiguous remark in the boat had helped to arouse it again.
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