The Lookout Man by B. M. Bower (electronic reader txt) 📕

just dandy on the screen?" She had found her powder puff and her tiny mirror, and she was dabbing at her nose and her cheeks, which no more needed powder than did the little birds that chirped around her. Between dabs, she was looking down the mountain, with an occasional wave of her puff toward some particularly "striking effect" of fire and sunset and rolling smoke and tall pines seen dimly in the background.

Jack wanted to climb up there and shake her out of her frivolity. Which was strange when you consider that all his life, until three months ago, he had lived in the midst of just such unthinking flippancy, had been a part of it and had considered—as much as he ever considered anything—that it was the only life worth living.

He went around the little rock pinnacle and stood looking somberly down at the devastation that was being wrought, with no greater beginning, probably, than a dropped match or cigarette stub. He was thinking hazily that so his old life had been swept away in the devastating effect of a passing whim, a foolish bit of play. The girl irritated him with her chatter—yet three months ago he himself would have considered it brilliant conversation, and would have exerted himself to keep pace with her.

"Listen!" she cried suddenly, and Jack turned his head quickly before he remembered that the word had come to mean nothing more than a superfluous ejaculation hung, like a bangle on a bracelet, to the sentences of modern youth. "Listen, it's going to be dark before that fire burns itself out of the way. How am I going to get home? Which way would be best to go around it, do you think?"

"No way at all," Jack replied shortly. "You can't go home."

"Why, forevermore! I'll have to go somewhere else, then—to some farm house where I can phone. Kate would be simply wild if—"

"Forget the farm house stuff. There aren't any such trimmings to these mountains. The next farm house is down around Keddie, somewhere. Through the woods, and mountain all the way." He said it rather crossly, for his nerves were what he called edgy, and the girl still irritated him.

"Well, what do you know about that?"

He had known she would say that. Cross between a peacock and a parrot, she must be, he thought vindictively. It was maddening that she would not—could not, perhaps?—live up to that goddess-on-the-mountain-top look she had sometimes.

"I don't know anything about it except that it's hard luck for us both."

"Well, what—?" She paused in the act of putting away her first-aid-to-the-complexion implements, and looked at him with her wide, purple eyes. "Why, you cross, mean, little stingy boy, you! You can have your old peak then. I'll go down and jump in the lake." She began to climb down from the little pinnacle quite as if she meant to do exactly as she said.

"Aw, come out of it!" Jack tried not to turn and look at her anxiously, but he was a human being.

"I'm not in it—yet," Marion retorted with dark meaning, and jumped to the ground.

"Hey! you wanta break a leg?" He swung toward her.

"Just to spite you, I wouldn't mind. Only you'd throw me down there amongst all those rocks and trees and make it my neck. Oh, would you look at that!"

"That" happened to be Mount Lassen, belching forth a stupendous column of ashes and smoke. Up, up, up it went, as though it meant to go on and on into infinity. Jack had seen it too often to be affected as he had been that first night. He looked at Marion instead. She was standing with her hands clinched by her side, and her breath sucking in. As the black column mounted higher and higher, she lifted herself to her toes, posing there absolutely unconscious of herself. Jack saw her face grow pale; saw her eyes darken and glow with inner excitement. She was once more the goddess on the mountain top, gazing down at one of the wonders she had wrought. It was as though she pulled that black column up and up and up with the tensity of her desire.

The column mushroomed suddenly, rolling out in great, puffy billows before it dipped and went streaming away on the wind. The mountain beneath it spewed sluggish masses of vapor and ashes up into the black moil above, until the whole mountain was obscured and only an angry, rolling cloud churning lumpishly there, told what was hidden beneath.

Marion relaxed, took a long, deep breath and settled again to her trim heels. She was not filled with terror as Jack had been; though that may have been because she was not cast up here like a piece of driftwood out of her world, nor was she alone. But Jack paid her the tribute of bowing mentally before her splendid courage. She gazed a while longer, awed ecstasy in her face. Then slowly she swung and stared at that other churning cloud behind her—the crimsoned-tinted cloud of destruction. She flung out both arms impulsively.

"Oh, you world!" she cried adoringly, unafraid yet worshipping. "I'd like to be the wind, so I could touch you and kiss you and beat you, and make you love me the way I love you! I'd rather be a tree and grow up here and swing my branches in the wind and then burn, than be a little petty, piffling human being—I would! I'm not afraid of you. You couldn't make me afraid of you. You can storm and rage around all you like. I only love you for it—you beautiful thing!"

It made Jack feel as though he had blundered upon a person kneeling in prayer; she was, after all, the goddess she looked, he thought whimsically. At least she had all the makings of a goddess of the mountain top. He felt suddenly inferior and gross, and he turned to leave her alone with her beautiful, terrible world. But manlike he did a frightfully human and earthly thing; he knocked his foot against an empty coal-oil can, and stood betrayed in his purpose of flight.

She turned her head and looked at him like one just waking from a too-vivid dream. She frowned, and then she smiled with a little ironical twist to her soft curving lips.

"You heard what I said about piffling human beings?" she asked him sweetly. "That is your catalogue number. Why for goodness' sake! With your hair done in that marcelle pompadour, and that grin, you look exactly like Jack Corey, that Los Angeles boy that all the girls were simply crazy about, till he turned out to be such a perfectly terrible villain!"

CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

SYMPATHY AND ADVICE

 

Every bit of color was swept from Jack's face, save the black of his lashes and eyebrows and the brown of his eyes that looked at her in startled self-betrayal. He saw the consternation flash into her face when she first understood how truly her random shot