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"You don't look much different, Jack," his sister observed critically, as the Waterbug backed away from the wharf in a fine drizzle of rain. "Except that as you grow older, you more and more resemble the pater. Has matrimony toned him down, my dear?" she turned to Stella. "The last time I saw him he had a black eye!" Fyfe did not give her a chance to answer.
Stella looked out over the smoky lake and back at the logger again, a sudden resolution born of intolerable uncertainty, of a feeling that she could only characterize as fear, sprang full-fledged into her mind. "Wait for me," she said. "I'm going with you." The Waterbug limped. Her engine misfired continuously, and Barlow lacked the mechanical knowledge to remedy its ailment.
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. Barlow leaned through the pilot-house window, one hand on the wheel, straining his eyes on their course.
Stella had asked Jack to put him on the Waterbug because he was such a loyal, cheery sort of soul, and Billy had been a part of every expedition they had taken around the lake. She could not think of him as a rigid, lifeless lump of clay.
So many hours had been wasted while a man rowed to Benton's camp, while the Chickamin steamed to Roaring Springs, while the Waterbug came driving back. Five hours! And the skin, yes, even shreds of flesh, had come away in patches with Jack Junior's clothing when she took it off. She bent over him, fearful that every feeble breath would be his last. She looked up at the doctor.
Noon of the next day saw the Waterbug heave to a quarter mile abeam of Cougar Point to let off a lone figure in her dinghy, and then bore on, driving straight and fast for Roaring Springs. Stella flew to the landing. Mother Howe came puffing at her heels. "Land's sake, I been worried to death," the older woman breathed.
Once the Panther's dazzling eye of a searchlight swung across the landing, and its beam picked out a file of men carrying their blankets toward the boat. Shortly after that the tender rounded the point. Close behind her went the Waterbug, and both boats swarmed with men. Stella looked and listened until there was but a faint thrum far up the lake. Then she went to bed, but not to sleep.
She was direct, bluntly so, and she was not much given to small talk. Fyfe and Stella met the Aldens at Roaring Springs with the Waterbug. Alden proved a genial sort of man past forty, a big, loose-jointed individual whose outward appearance gave no indication of what he was professionally, a civil engineer with a reputation that promised to spread beyond his native States.
"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.
And the Waterbug served to put them on intimate terms with their neighbors, particularly the Abbey crowd. The Abbeys took to them wholeheartedly. Fyfe himself was highly esteemed by the elder Abbey, largely, Stella suspected, for his power on Roaring Lake. Abbey père had built up a big fortune out of timber. He respected any man who could follow the same path to success.
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