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. He would never have recourse to such littleness.
Still, the biting contempt in Fyfe's voice when he said to Benton: "You
underestimate Monohan. He'll play safe ... he's foxy." That stung her to
the quick. That was not said for her benefit; it was Fyfe's profound
conviction. Based on what? He did not form judgments on momentary
impulse. She recalled that only in the most indirect way had he ever
passed criticism on Monohan, and then it lay mostly in a tone, suggested
more than spoken. Yet he knew Monohan, had known him for years. They had
clashed long before she was a factor in their lives.

When she went into the big room, Benton and Fyfe were gone outdoors. She
glanced into Fyfe's den. It was empty, but a big blue-print unrolled on
the table where the two had been seated caught her eye. She bent over
it, drawn by the lettered squares along the wavy shore line and the
marked waters of creeks she knew.

She had never before possessed a comprehensive idea of the various
timber holdings along the west shore of Roaring Lake, since it had not
been a matter of particular interest to her. She was not sure why it now
became a matter of interest to her, unless it was an impression that
over these squares and oblongs which stood for thousands upon thousands
of merchantable logs there was already shaping a struggle, a clash of
iron wills and determined purposes directly involving, perhaps arising
because of her.

She studied the blue-print closely. Its five feet of length embraced all
the west shore of the lake, from the outflowing of Roaring River to the
incoming Tyee at the head. Each camp was lettered in with pencil. But
her attention focussed chiefly on the timber limits ranging north and
south from their home, and she noted two details: that while the limits
marked A-M Co. were impartially distributed from Cottonwood north, the
squares marked J.H. Fyfe lay in a solid block about Cougar Bay,--save
for that long tongue of a limit where she had that day noted the new
camp. That thrust like the haft of a spear into the heart of Fyfe's
timberland.

There was the Abbey-Monohan cottage, the three limits her brother
controlled lying up against Fyfe's southern boundary. Up around the
mouth of the Tyee spread the vast checkerboard of Abbey-Monohan limits,
and beyond that, on the eastern