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She had known always what a woman should do in such case, what she had been taught a woman should do: grin, as Monohan had said, and take her medicine. For her there was no alternative. Fyfe had made that clear. But her heart cried out in rebellion against the necessity. To her, trying to think logically, the most grievous phase of the doing was the fact that nothing could ever be the same again.
At the end of a few minutes, he turned the starting crank. The multiple cylinders fired with a roar. He moved back behind the wrecked windshield where the steering gear stood. "Well, Miss Ship-wrecked Mariner," said he lightly, "where do you wish to be landed?" "Over there, if you please." Stella pointed to where the red roof of the bungalow stood out against the green. "I'm Mrs. Fyfe."
Fyfe was beside her, his calked boots biting into the oak floor. "See what you can do, doc," he said huskily. Then to Stella: "How did it happen?" "He toddled away from Martha," she whispered. "Sam Foo had set a pan of boiling water on the kitchen floor. He fell into it. Oh, my poor little darling."
Half a mile beyond that, beside the first donkey shuddering on its anchored skids as it tore an eighteen-inch cedar out by the roots, they came on Lefty Howe. He shook his head when Stella asked for Fyfe. "He took twenty men around to the main camp day before yesterday," said Lefty. "There was a piece uh timber beyond that he thought he could save.
In his continued presence there she saw incalculable sources of trouble. She stood leaning over the bed rail, staring wistfully at her boy for a few minutes. When she faced the mirror in her room, she was startled at the look in her eyes, the nervous twitch of her lips. There was a physical ache in her breast. "You're a fool, a fool," she whispered to her image. "Where's your will, Stella Fyfe?
Another, a big roader, Fyfe explained, puffed at the water's edge. She could see a string of logs tearing down the skid-road. "He's going pretty strong, that brother of yours," Fyfe remarked. "If he holds his gait, he'll be a big timberman before you know it." "He'll make money, I imagine," Stella admitted, "but I don't know what good that will do him. He'll only want more.
But that Fyfe could not tell her. "Hale showed me her picture once," he said, "but I never saw her. Oh, I suppose she's married some other fellow long ago. Hale was a good sort. He was out-lucked, that's all." The Panther slid in to the float. Jack and Stella went ashore. Lefty Howe came down to meet them. Thirty-five or forty men were stringing away from the camp, back to their work in the woods.
"Yes?" Fyfe said. "Quick work. I didn't even know about the shooting till I came in here to-night about dark. Well," he snapped his fingers, "exit Monohan. He's a dead issue, far as we're concerned. Wouldn't you like something to eat, Stella? I'm hungry, and I was dog-tired when I landed here. Say, you can't guess what I was thinking about, lady, standing there when you came in."
Something in her look arrested Monohan. He glanced around, twisted about, froze in his tracks, his back to her. Fyfe came up. Of the three he was the coolest, the most rigorously self-possessed. He glanced from Monohan to his wife, back to Monohan. After that his blue eyes never left the other man's face. "What did I say to you yesterday?" Fyfe opened his mouth at last.
There was a note of infinite regret in his voice, a sadness that stabbed Stella Fyfe like a lance. She did not dare look at him. Something rose chokingly in her throat. She felt and fought against a slow welling of tears to her eyes.
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