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Updated: May 6, 2025
He turned to go and came back again. "What I really came in to say, I've hardly got nerve enough for." He sank his voice to a murmur. "Don't fly off at me, Stell. But you haven't got a trifle interested in Monohan, have you? I mean, you haven't let him think you are?" Stella's hands tightened on the crib rail. For an instant her heart stood still. A wholly unreasoning blaze of anger seized her.
While she sat there, drawn-faced with the cold, thinking rather amazedly these things which she told herself she had no right to think, the launch slipped into the quiet nook of Cougar Bay and slowed down to the float. Monohan helped her out, threw off the canoe's painter, and climbed back into the launch. "You're as wet as I am," Stella said.
Her mind was one urgent question mark while she laid the sleeping youngster in his bed and removed her heavy clothes. What sort of hostilities did Monohan threaten? Had he let a hopeless love turn to the acid of hate for the man who nominally possessed her? Stella could scarcely credit that. It was too much at variance with her idealistic conception of the man.
In the following weeks her only contact with the past, beyond the mill of her own thoughts, was an item in the Seattle Times touching upon certain litigation in which Fyfe was involved. Briefly, Monohan, under the firm name of the Abbey-Monohan Timber Company, was suing Fyfe for heavy damages for the loss of certain booms of logs blown up and set adrift at the mouth of the Tyee River.
"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."
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.
"Monohan shot him because Charlie came on him in the woods setting a fresh fire. They've suspected him, or some one in his pay, of that, and they've been watching. There were two other men with Charlie, so there is no mistake. Monohan got away. That's all I know. Oh, but I'm tired. I've been hanging on to myself for so long.
Where Fyfe was reserved almost to taciturnity, impassive-featured, save for that whimsical gleam that was never wholly absent from his keen blue eyes, Monohan talked with facile ease, with wonderful expressiveness of face. He was a finished product of courteous generations.
She could not guess why, but she saw that he was playing with Monohan, making a fool of him, for all Monohan's advantage of height and reach. Fyfe moved like the light, always beyond Monohan's vengeful blows, slipping under those driving fists to slap his adversary, to trip him, mocking him with the futility of his effort. She felt herself powerless to stop that sorry exhibition.
Monohan was a lily of the field, although it was common knowledge on Roaring Lake that he was a heavy stock-holder in the Abbey-Monohan combination. At any rate, he was holidaying on the lake that summer. There had grown up a genuine intimacy between Linda and Stella. There were always people at the Abbeys'; sometimes a few guests at the Fyfe bungalow.
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