l.

CHAPTER V

THE TOLL OF BIG TIMBER

Day came again, in the natural sequence of events. Matt, the cook,
roused all the camp at six o'clock with a tremendous banging on a piece
of boiler plate hung by a wire. Long before that Stella heard her
brother astir. She wondered sleepily at his sprightliness, for as she
remembered him at home he had been a confirmed lie-abed. She herself
responded none too quickly to the breakfast gong, as a result of which
slowness the crew had filed away to the day's work, her brother striding
in the lead, when she entered the mess-house.

She killed time with partial success till noon. Several times she was
startled to momentary attention by the prolonged series of sharp cracks
which heralded the thunderous crash of a falling tree. There were other
sounds which betokened the loggers' activity in the near-by forest,--the
ringing whine of saw blades, the dull stroke of the axe, voices calling
distantly.

She tried to interest herself in the camp and the beach and ended up by
sitting on a log in a shady spot, staring dreamily over the lake. She
thought impatiently of that homely saw concerning Satan and idle hands,
but she reflected also that in this isolation even mischief was
comparatively impossible. There was not a soul to hold speech with
except the cook, and he was too busy to talk, even if he had not been
afflicted with a painful degree of diffidence when she addressed him.
She could make no effort at settling down, at arranging things in what
was to be her home. There was nothing to arrange, no odds and ends
wherewith almost any woman can conjure up a homelike effect in the
barest sort of place. She beheld the noon return of the crew much as a
shipwrecked castaway on a desert shore might behold a rescuing sail, and
she told Charlie that she intended to go into the woods that afternoon
and watch them work.

"All right," said he. "Just so you don't get in the way of a falling
tree."

A narrow fringe of brush and scrubby timber separated the camp from the
actual work. From the water's edge to the donkey engine was barely four
hundred yards. From donkey to a ten-foot jump-off on the lake shore in a
straight line on a five per cent. gradient ran a curious roadway, made
by placing two logs in the hollow scooped by tearing great timbers over
the soft earth, and a bigger log on each side. Butt to butt and side to
side, the outer sticks half their thickness above the inner, they