ts of side, they say. If they want to hunt us up and
cultivate you, all right. But I've got too much to do to butt into
society. Anyway, I didn't want to run up against any critical females
looking like I do right now."

Stella smiled.

"Under certain circumstances, appearances do count then, in this
country," she remarked. "Has your Mr. Abbey got a young and be-yutiful
sister?"

"He has, but that's got nothing to do with it," Charlie retorted.
"Paul's all right himself. But their gait isn't mine--not yet. Here, you
take the wheel a minute. I want to smoke. I don't suppose you ever
helmed a forty-footer, but you'll never learn younger."

She took the wheel and Charlie stood by, directing her. In twenty
minutes they were out where the run of the sea from the south had a fair
sweep. The wind was whistling now. All the roughened surface was spotted
with whitecaps. The _Chickamin_ would hang on the crest of a wave and
shoot forward like a racer, her wheel humming, and again the roller
would run out from under her, and she would labor heavily in the trough.

It began to grow insufferably hot in the pilot house. The wind drove
with them, pressing the heat from the boiler and fire box into the
forward portion of the boat, where Stella stood at the wheel. There were
puffs of smoke when Davis opened the fire box to ply it with fuel. All
the sour smells that rose from an unclean bilge eddied about them. The
heat and the smell and the surging motion began to nauseate Stella.

"I must get outside where I can breathe," she gasped, at length. "It's
suffocating. I don't see how you stand it."

"It does get stuffy in here when we run with the wind," Benton admitted.
"Cuts off our ventilation. I'm used to it. Crawl out the window and sit
on the forward deck. Don't try to get aft. You might slip off, the way
she's lurching."

Curled in the hollow of a faked-down hawser with the clean air fanning
her, Stella recovered herself. The giddiness left her. She pitied Sam
Davis back in that stinking hole beside the fire box. But she supposed
he, like her brother, was "used to it." Apparently one could get used to
anything, if she could judge by the amazing change in Charlie.

Far ahead loomed a ridge running down to the lake shore and cutting off
in a bold promontory. That was Halfway Point, Charlie had told her, and
under its shadow lay his camp. Without any previous knowledge of camps,
she was approaching this one with less eager ant