ad that reputation in all his other dealings.
He was aggressive. He could drink any logger in the big firs off his
feet. He had an uncanny luck at cards. Somehow or other in every
undertaking Jack Fyfe always came out on top, so the tale ran. There
must be, she reasoned, a wide streak of the brute in such a man. It was
no gratification to her vanity to have him admire her. It did not dawn
upon her that so far she had never got over being a little afraid of
him, much less to ask herself why she should be afraid of him.

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.
They had a cottage at Roaring Springs, where she spent most of the time,
so that their three children could be in school.

"I was up here all through vacation," she told Stella. "But Lefty he got
to howlin' about bein' left alone shortly after school started again, so
I got my sister to look after the kids for a spell, while I stay. I'll
be goin' down about the time Mr. Benton's through here."

Stella eventually went out to take a look around the camp. A hard-beaten
path led off toward where rose the distant sounds of logging work, the
ponderous crash of trees, and the puff of the donkeys. She followed that
a little way and presently came to a knoll some three hundred yards
above the beach. There she paused to look and wonder curiously.

For the crest of this little hillock had been cleared and graded level
and planted to grass over an area four hundred feet square. It was
trimmed like a lawn, and in the center of this vivid green block stood
an unfinished house foundation of gray stone. No stick of timber, no
board or any material for further building lay in sight. The thing stood
as if that were to be all. And it was not a new undertaking temporarily
delayed. There was moss creeping over the thick stone wall, she
discovered when she walked over it. Whoever had laid that foundation had
done it many a moon before. Yet the sward about was kept as if a
gardener had it in charge.

A noble stretch of lake and mountain spread out before her gaze.
Straight across the lake two deep clefts in the eastern range opened on
the water, five miles apart. She cou