d.

But she did not sleep, save in uneasy periods of dozing, until midnight
was long past. Then Fyfe and her brother came in, and by the sounds she
gathered that Fyfe was putting Charlie to bed. She heard his deep,
drawly voice urging the unwisdom of sleeping with calked boots on, and
Beaton's hiccupy response. The rest of the night she slept fitfully,
morbidly imagining terrible things. She was afraid, that was the sum
and substance of it. Over in the bunkhouse the carousal was still at its
height. She could not rid herself of the sight of those two men
struggling to be at each other like wild beasts, the bloody face of the
one who had been struck, the coarse animalism of the whole
whisky-saturated gang. It repelled and disgusted and frightened her.

The night frosts had crept through the single board walls of Stella's
room and made its temperature akin to outdoors when the alarm wakened
her at six in the morning. She shivered as she dressed. Katy John was
blissfully devoid of any responsibility, for seldom did Katy rise first
to light the kitchen fire. Yet Stella resented less each day's bleak
beginning than she did the enforced necessity of the situation; the fact
that she was enduring these things practically under compulsion was what
galled.

A cutting wind struck her icily as she crossed the few steps of open
between cabin and kitchen. Above no cloud floated, no harbinger of
melting rain. The cold stars twinkled over snow-blurred forest, struck
tiny gleams from stumps that were now white-capped pillars. A night
swell from the outside waters beat, its melancholy dirge on the frozen
beach. And, as she always did at that hushed hour before dawn, she
experienced a physical shrinking from those grim solitudes in which
there was nothing warm and human and kindly, nothing but vastness of
space upon which silence lay like a smothering blanket, in which she,
the human atom, was utterly negligible, a protesting mote in the
inexorable wilderness. She knew this to be merely a state of mind, but
situated as she was, it bore upon her with all the force of reality. She
felt like a prisoner who above all things desired some mode of escape.

A light burned in the kitchen. She thanked her stars that this bitter
cold morning she would not have to build a fire with freezing fingers
while her teeth chattered, and she hurried in to the warmth heralded by
a spark-belching stovepipe. But the Siwash girl had not risen to the
occasion.