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

paid him a salary. Headlong as was his nature, there was in him the quality of being loyal to a trust. He could make all preparations for leaving—but until the fire was out and the forest safe for the time being, he could not go.

Then, quite early the next day, Marion herself came up the trail with three movie magazines and a loaf of bread that she had purloined from Kate's makeshift pantry. On this day she was not so frivolous, but helpful and full of sympathy. Jack could not believe that she had told his secret to Kate; and because he could not believe it he asked her point blank whether Kate had come spying up there deliberately, and was vastly reassured by Marion's vehement denial.

They worked out a heliograph code that day, and they planned an exploring trip to Taylor Rock the next time Jack was relieved. It seemed very important that Jack should have a picturesque hide-out there; a secret cave, perhaps, with a tilting rock to cover the doorway.

"It would be great," declared Marion, clasping her hands together with her favorite ecstatic gesture. "If we could just find a cave with a spring away back in it, don't you know, and a ledge outside where you could watch for enemies—wouldn't that be keen? It makes me wish I had done something, so I had to hide out in the hills. And every day at a certain time, I can come up here where that hydrometer thing was before it burned, and signal to you. And we'll find a place where I can leave magazines and things like that, and you can come and get them. Honestly, I've always wished I could be an outlaw—if I could be one without doing anything really bad, you know. I'd love having to live in a cave somewhere. You're lucky, Jack—Johnny Carew—if you only knew it."

"I do know it. I never found it out till today, though," Jack told her with what he fancied was an enigmatic smile.

"Now listen. If you want me to help you enjoy being an outlaw, Jack Corey, you simply must cut out the sentimental stuff. Let me tell you how I feel about it. It's nothing new to have men make love—any kind of a man will sit up and say 'bow-wow' if you snap your fingers at him. That's deadly common. But here you are, a bandit and an outlaw without being bad or tough—I don't think you are, anyway. You didn't do such awful things to get in bad with the law, you see. But you're hiding out just the same, with the police sleuthing around after you, and disowned by your mother and all, just like the real thing. Why, it's a story in real life! And I want to live in that story, too, and help you just like a book heroine. I think we can make it awfully interesting, being real enough so it isn't just make-believe. It's keen, I tell you. But for once I want to see if a boy and a girl can't cut out the love interest and be just good pals, like two boys together." Marion got up and stood before him, plainly as ready to go as to stay. "If you'll agree to that I'll go and help you find your cave. Otherwise, I'll go back to camp and stay there, and you can look after yourself."

"Be calm! Be calm!" Jack pushed back his mop of hair and grinned derisively. "You should worry about any lovemaking from me. Take the bunch out at the beach, or at a dance, and I can rattle off the sentimental patter to beat the band. But it doesn't seem to fit in up here—unless a fellow meant it honest-to-goodness. And I ain't going to mean it, my dear girl. Not with you. I like you as a friend, but I fear I can never be more than a step-brother to you." He pulled off a dead twig from the bush beside him, snapped it in two and flipped the pieces down the slope. "I'd look nice, making love to a girl, the fix I'm in!" he added with a savage bitterness that gave the lie to his smiling indifference. "A fellow ought to make sure his canoe is going to stay right side up before he asks a girl to step into it."

"That's all right then. It's best to understand each other. Now, if I were you, I'd have things brought up here, a little at a time, that you'll need for your secret camp. Groceries, you know, and things. You can make a place to keep them in till you get your vacation—and listen! When I go to town I can buy you things that would look queer if you sent for them. Towels and napkins and—"

Jack gave a whoop at that, though his ignorance of primitive living did not fall far short of hers. But in the main, he took her advice with praiseworthy gratitude. He had never expected to enjoy being an outlaw. But under the influence of her enthusiasm and his own youthfulness, he began to take a certain interest in the details of her scheme—to plan with her as though it was going to be merely a camping out for pleasure. That, of course, was the boy in him rising to the bait of a secret cave in the mountains, and exchanging heliograph signals with the heroine of the adventure, and lying upon a ledge before his cave watching for enemies. There would be the bears, too, that Hank Brown had said would be ambling up there to their winter quarters. And there would be the scream of the mountain lions—Jack had more than once heard them at night down in the forest below him, and had thrilled to the sound. He would stalk the shy deer and carry meat to his cave and broil the flesh over his tiny campfire—don't tell me that the boy in any normal young man would not rise enthusiastically to that bait!

But there were other times, when Marion was not there; when Jack was alone with the stars and the dark bulk of the wooded slopes beneath him; times when the adventure paled and grew bleak before his soul, so that he shrank from it appalled. Times when he could not shut out the picture of the proud, stately Mrs. Singleton Corey, hiding humiliated and broken of spirit in a sanatorium, shamed before the world because he was her son. Not all the secret caves the mountains held could dull the pain of that thought when it assailed him in the dark stillness of the peak.

For Jack was her true offspring in pride, if no more. He had been a sensitive youngster who had resented passionately his mother's slights upon his vague memory of the dad who had given him his adventurous spirit and his rebellion against the restraints of mere convention, which was his mother's dearest god. Unknown to Mrs. Singleton Corey, he had ardently espoused the cause of his wandering dad, and had withdrawn his love from the arrogant lady-mother, who never once spoke affectionately of the man Jack loved. He had taken what money she gave him. It was his dad's money, for his dad had suffered hardship to wrest it from the earth, in the mines that kept Mrs. Singleton Corey in soft, perfumed luxury. His dad would have wanted Jack to have it, so Jack took all she would give him and did not feel particularly grateful to her because she was fairly generous in giving.

But now the very pride that he had inherited from her turned upon him the savage weapons of memory. He had swift visions of his mother mounting the steps of some mansion, going graciously to make a fashionable ten-minute call upon some friend, while Jack played