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Updated: June 20, 2025
If she had doubted, if she had ever in the last few hours looked with misgiving upon what she felt herself impelled to do, the pressure of Jack Fyfe's lips on hers left no room for anything but an amazing thrill of pure gladness. She was happy in his arms, content to rest there, to feel his heart beating against hers, to be quit of all the uncertainties, all the useless regrets.
Except for a greater number of board shacks and a larger area of stump and top-littered waste immediately behind it, Fyfe's headquarters, outwardly, at least, differed little from her brother's camp. Jack led her to a long, log structure with a shingle roof, which from its more substantial appearance she judged to be his personal domicile.
If he had made an open bid for Stella's affection, she, entrenched behind all the accepted canons of her upbringing, would have recoiled from him, viewed him with wholly distrustful eyes. But he did nothing of the sort. He was a friend, or at least he became so. Inevitably they were thrown much together. There was a continual informal running back and forth between Fyfe's place and Abbey's.
The first was a remark of Fyfe's sister in the first hours of their acquaintance. Mrs. Henry Alden could never have denied blood kinship with Jack Fyfe. She had the same wide, good-humored mouth, the blue eyes that always seemed to be on the verge of twinkling, and the same fair, freckled skin. Her characteristics of speech resembled his.
Greater than any craving to possess a woman would be the measure of his rancor against a man who humiliated him, thwarted him. She could understand how a man like Monohan would hate a man like Jack Fyfe, would nurse and feed on the venom of his hate until setting a torch to Fyfe's timber would be a likely enough counterstroke. She shrank from the thought. Yet it lingered until she felt guilty.
It did not disturb her now, when she noticed Linda Abbey's gaze coming back to him with a veiled appraisal in her blue eyes that were so like Fyfe's own in their tendency to twinkle and gleam with no corresponding play of features. "We'll expect to see a good deal of you this summer," Mrs. Abbey said cordially at leave-taking.
Up around the mouth of the Tyee spread the vast checkerboard of Abbey-Monohan limits, and beyond that, on the eastern bank of the river, a single block, Fyfe's cedar limit, the camp he thought he would close down. Why? Immediately the query shaped in her mind. Monohan was concentrating his men and machinery at the lake head.
"Sure they haven't? Some of them might have, you know, without being able to gratify it." She started, to find Jack Fyfe almost at her elbow, the gleam of a quizzical smile lighting his face. "I daresay that might be true," she admitted. Fyfe's gaze turned from her to the huge sweep of lake and mountain chain.
Monohan stepped back and slipped out of his coat. His face was crimson. "By God, I'll teach you something," he snarled. He lunged forward as he spoke, shooting a straight-arm blow for Fyfe's face. It swept through empty air, for Fyfe, poised on the balls of his feet, ducked under the driving fist, and slapped Monohan across the mouth with the open palm of his hand. "Tag," he said sardonically.
But she did not spend much time puzzling over Jack Fyfe. Once out of her sight she forgot him. It was balm to her lonely soul to have some one of her own sex for company. What Mrs. Howe lacked in the higher culture she made up in homely perception and unassuming kindliness. Her husband was Fyfe's foreman. She herself was not a permanent fixture in the camp.
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