could have spent five or six hundred, and I wouldn't have missed it. But
this contract came my way, and gave me a chance to clean up three
thousand dollars clear profit in four months. I grabbed it, and I find
it's some undertaking. I'm dealing with a hard business outfit, hard as
nails. I might get the banks or some capitalist to finance me, because
my timber holdings are worth money. But I'm shy of that. I've noticed
that when a logger starts working on borrowed capital, he generally goes
broke. The financiers generally devise some way to hook him. I prefer to
sail as close to the wind as I can on what little I've got. I can get
this timber out--but it wouldn't look nice, now, would it, for me to be
buying furniture when I'm standing these boys off for their wages till
September?"

"I should have been a man," Miss Estella Benton pensively remarked.
"Then I could put on overalls and make myself useful, instead of being a
drone. There doesn't seem to be anything here I can do. I could keep
house--only you haven't any house to keep, therefore no need of a
housekeeper. Why, who's that?"

Her ear had caught a low, throaty laugh, a woman's laugh, outside. She
looked inquiringly at her brother. His expression remained absent, as of
one concentrated upon his own problems. She repeated the question.

"That? Oh, Katy John, I suppose, or her mother," he answered. "Siwash
bunch camping around the point. The girl does some washing for us now
and then. I suppose she's after Matt for some bread or something."

Stella looked out. At the cookhouse door stood a short, plump-bodied
girl, dark-skinned and black-haired. Otherwise she conformed to none of
Miss Benton's preconceived ideas of the aboriginal inhabitant. If she