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

times during the recital. And Jack found the phrase soothing whenever she uttered it, and plunged straightway into further revelations of his ebullient past.

"I suppose," he ventured, when he could think of nothing more to tell and so came back to the starting point, "I ought to beat it outa here while the beating's good. I can't go back—on account of mother. I could hotfoot it up to Canada, maybe...."

"Don't you do it!" Marion wound the string of her vanity bag so tightly round and round her index finger that her pink, polished nail turned purple. She next unwound the string and rubbed the nail solicitously. "Just because we're down there at Toll-Gate doesn't mean you aren't safe up here. Why, you're safer, really. Because if any one got track of you, we'd hear of it right away—Kate and I walk to town once in a while, and there's hardly a day passes that we don't see somebody to talk to. Everybody talks when they meet you, in this country, whether they know you or not. And I could come up right away and tell you. Having a bandit treed up here on top would make such a hit that they'd all be talking about it. It certainly would be keen to listen to them and know more about it than any of them."

"Oh, would it! I'm glad it strikes you that way—it don't me." What a fool a fellow was when he went spilling his troubles into a girl's ears! He got up and walked glumly down to the niche in the rocks where he hid from tourists, and stood there with his hands in his pockets, glowering down at the fierce, ember-threaded waves of flame that surged through the forest. Dusk only made the fire more terrible to him. Had this new trouble not launched itself at him, he would be filled with a sick horror of the destruction, but as it was he only stared at it dully, not caring much about it one way or the other.

Well, he asked himself, what kind of a fool would he make of himself next? Unloading his secret and his heartache to a girl that only thought it would be "keen" to have a bandit treed up here at the lookout station! Why couldn't he have kept his troubles to himself? He'd be hollering it into the phone, next thing he knew. They'd care, down there in the office, as much as she did, anyway. And the secret would probably be safer with them than it would be with her.

He had a mental picture of her hurrying to tell Fred: "What do you know about it? Jack Corey, the bandit, is treed up at the lookout station! He told me all the inside dope—" The thought of her animated chatter to Fred on the subject of his one real tragedy, made him clench his hands.

The very presence of her brought it back too vividly, though that had not struck him at first, when his hunger for human sympathy had been his keenest emotion. What a fool he had been, to think that she would care! What a fool he had been to think that these mountains would shelter him; to think that he could forget, and be forgotten. And Hen had told them that Jack Corey did it! That was about what Hen would do—sneak out of it. And the man wasn't dead yet; not recovered either, for that matter. There was still the chance that he might die.

There was his mother hiding herself away from her world in a sanitarium. It was like her to do that—but it was hard to know he had broken up all the pleasant, well-ordered little grooves of her life; hard to know how her pride must suffer because he was her son. She would feel now, more than ever, that Jack was just like his father. Being like his father meant reproach because he was not like her, and that was always galling to Jack. And how she must hate the thought of him now.

He wished savagely that Marion Rose could go home. He wanted to be alone with his loneliness. It seemed to him now that being alone meant merely peace and contentment. It was people, he told himself finally, who had brought all this trouble and bitterness into his life.

He wished she would go and leave him alone, but that was manifestly impossible. Angry and hurt though he was, he could not contemplate the thought of letting her go down there into that blackened waste with the thick sprinkling of bonfires where stumps were all ablaze, fallen tangles of brush were smoldering, and dead trees flared like giant torches or sent down great blazing branches. She might get through without disaster, but it would be by a miracle of good luck. Even a man would hesitate to attempt the feat of working his way across the burning strip.

There was no other place where she could go. She could not go alone, in the dark, down the mountain to any of the lower ranches. She would get lost. A man would not try that either, unless forced to it. A man would rather spend the night under a tree than fight through miles of underbrush in the night. And she could not take the old Taylorville road down to Indian Valley, either. It was too far and too dark, and a slight change of the wind would send the fire sweeping in that direction. She might get trapped. And none of these impossibilities took into account the prowling wild animals that are at the best untrustworthy in the dark.

She would have to stay. And he would have to stay, and there did not seem to Jack to be any use in making a disagreeable matter still more disagreeable by sulking. He discovered that he was hungry. He supposed, now he came to think of it, that Marion Rose would be hungry, too. The protective instinct stirred once more within him and pushed back his anger. So he turned and went back to the little station.

Marion had lighted the little lamp, and she was cooking supper over the oil stove. She had found where he stored his supplies in a tightly built box under a small ledge, and she had helped herself. She had two plates and two cups set out upon his makeshift table, and while he stopped in the door she turned from the stove and began cutting slices of bread off one of the loaves which Hank had brought that day. With her head bent toward the lamp, her hair shown like pale gold. Her face looked very serious—a bit sad, too, Jack thought; though he could not see where she had any reason to be sad; she was not hiding away from the law, or anything like that.

When she became conscious of his presence she glanced up at him with swift inquiry. "How's the fire?" she wanted to know, quite as though that was the only subject that interested them both.

"She's all there," he returned briefly, coming in.

"Everything's ready," she announced cheerfully. "You must be half starved. Do you see what time it is? nearly eight o'clock already. And I never dreamed it, until a bird or something flew right past my face and brought me to myself. I was watching Mount Lassen. Isn't it keen, to have a volcano spouting off right in your front view? And a fire on the other side, so if you get tired looking at one, you can turn your head and look at the other one. And for a change, you can watch the lake, or just gaze at the scenery; and