Nevertheless she went. Renfrew was the rigging slinger working with Charlie, a big, blond man who blushed like a schoolboy when Benton introduced him to her. Twenty minutes before he had gone trotting after the haul-back, sound and hearty, laughing at some sally of her brother's. It seemed a trifle incredible that he should lie mangled and bleeding among the green forest growth, while his fellows hurried for a stretcher. Two hundred yards at right angles from where Charlie had stood giving signals she found a little group under a branchy cedar. Renfrew lay on his back, mercifully unconscious. Benton squatted beside him, twisting a silk handkerchief with a stick tightly above the wound. His hands and Renfrew's clothing and the mossy ground was smeared with blood. Stella looked over his shoulder. The overalls were cut away. In the thick of the man's thigh stood a ragged gash she could have laid both hands in. She drew back. Benton looked up. "Better keep away," he advised shortly. "We've done all that can be done." She retreated a little and sat down on a root, half-sickened. The other two men stood up. Benton sat back, his first-aid work done, and rolled a cigarette with fingers that shook a little. Off to one side she saw the fallers climb up on their springboards. Presently arose the ringing whine of the thin steel blade, the chuck of axes where the swampers attacked a fallen tree. No matter, she thought, that injury came to one, that death might hover near, the work went on apace, like action on a battlefield. A few minutes thereafter the two men who had gone with Sam Davis returned with the spring from Benton's bed and a light mattress. They laid the injured logger on this and covered him with a blanket. Then four of them picked it up. As they started, Stella heard one say to her brother: "Matt's jagged." "What?" Benton exploded. "Where'd it come from?" "One uh them Hungry Bay shingle-bolt cutters's in camp," the logger answered. "Maybe he brought a bottle. I didn't stop to see. But Matt's sure got a tank full." Benton ripped out an angry oath, passed his men, and strode away down the path. Stella fell in behind him, wakened to a sudden uneasiness at the wrathful set of his features. She barely kept in sight, so rapidly did he move. Sam Davis had smoke pouring from the _Chickamin's_ stack, but the kitchen pipe lifted no blue column, though it was close to five o'clock. Benton made straight for the cookhouse. Stella followed, a trifle uncertainly. A glimpse past Charlie as he came out showed her Matt staggering aimlessly about the kitchen, red-eyed, scowling, muttering to himself. Benton hurried to the bunkhouse door, much as a hound might follow a scent, peered in, and went on to the corner.