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

They turned their heads involuntarily and stared across the fire-scarred mountainside to where Taylor Rock thrust bleakly up into the sky. A summer unmarked by incidents worthy the name of events, spent on one mountain top; a winter that promised as little diversion upon another mountain top—

"Say, a ride on a real live street car would look as big to me right now as a three-ring circus," Jack summed up his world-hunger with a shrug. "By the time I've wintered over there I'll be running round in circles trying to catch my shadow. Plumb bugs, that's what I'll be; and don't I know it!"

"You'll love it," Marion predicted with elaborate cheerfulness. "I only wish I could change places with you. Think of me, shut up in a dark little three-room cabin with one elocutionist, one chronic grouch and one human bluebottle fly that does nothing but buzz! You're a lucky kid to have a whole mountain all to yourself. Think of me!"

"Oh, I'll think of you, all right!" Jack returned glumly and turned back to the denuded little station. "I'll think of you," he repeated under his breath, feeling savagely for the top button of his thick gray sweater. "Don't I know it!"

MIKE GOES SPYING ON THE SPIES

Mike sat hunched forward on a box in front of the stove in the rough little cabin where he and Murphy were facing together the winter in Toll-Gate flat. For an hour he had stared at the broken cook stove where a crack disclosed the blaze within. He chewed steadily and abstractedly upon a lump of tar-weed, and now and then he unclasped his hands and gave his left forefinger a jerk that made the knuckle crack. Tar-weed and knuckle-cracking were two queer little habits much affected by Mike. The weed he chewed in the belief that it not only kept his physical body in perfect health, but purified his soul as well; cracking the knuckles on his left forefinger cleared the muddle of his mind when he wanted to go deep into a subject that baffled him.

Hunched forward on another box sat Murphy nursing his elbow with one grimy palm and his pipe with the other. He would glance at Mike now and then and with a sour grin lifting the scraggly ends of his grizzled mustache. Murphy was resentfully contemptuous of Mike's long silences, but he was even more contemptuous of Mike's gobbling indistinct speech, so he let Mike alone and comforted himself with grinning superciliously when Mike was silent, and sneering at him openly when he spoke, and cursing his cooking when Mike cooked.

"That gurrl," Mike blurted abruptly while he cracked his knuckles, "she'd better look out!"

"A-ah," retorted Murphy scornfully, "belike ye'd better tell her so thin. Or belike ye better set yerself t' look out fer the gurrl—I dunno."

"Oh, I'll look out fer her," Mike gobbled, nodding his head mysteriously. "I bin lookin' out fer her all the time—but she ain't as cute as what she thinks she is. Oh, maybe she's cute, but there's them that's cuter, an' they don't live over in Europe, neither. Don't you worry—"

"Which I'm not doin' at all, me fine duck," vouchsafed Murphy boredly, crowding down the tobacco in his pipe. "An' it's you that's doin' the worryin', and fer why I dunno."

"Oh, I ain't worryin'—but that gurrl, she better look out, an' the old un she better look out too."

"An' fer what, then, Mike, should the gurrl be lookin' out? Fer a husband, maybe yer thinkin'."

Mike nodded his head in a way that did not mean assent, but merely that he was not telling all his thoughts. He fell silent, staring again at the glowing crack in the stove. Twice he snapped his knuckles before he spoke again.

"She thinks," he began again abruptly, "that everybody's blind. But that's where she makes a big mistake. They's nothin' the matter with my eyes. An' that old un, she better look out too. Why, the gurrl, she goes spyin' around t' meet the other spy, an' the old un she goes spyin' around after the gurrl, an' me I'm spyin' on—all of 'em!" He waved a dirt grimed, calloused hand awkwardly. "The whole bunch," he chortled. "They can't fool me with their spyin' around! An' the gov'ment can't fool me nayther. I know who's the spies up here, an' I kin fool 'em all. Why, it's like back in Minnesota one time—"

Murphy, having listened attentively thus far, settled back against the wall, swung a rough-shod foot and began nursing his pipe and elbow again. "A-ah, an' it's the trail to Minnesota, then," he commented disgustedly, nodding his head derisively. "Umm-hmm—it's back in Minnesota ye're wanderin' befuddled with yer sphies. So l'ave Minnesota wance more, Mike, an' put some beans a-soakin' like I explained t' ye forty-wan times a're'dy. My gorry, they're like bullets the way ye bile them fer an hour and ask that I eat thim. An' since yer eyes is so foine and keen, Mike, that ye can see sphies thick as rabbits in the woods, wud ye just pick out a few of the rocks, Mike, that will not come soft with all the b'ilin' ye can give thim? For if I come down wance more with me teeth on a rock, it's likely I might lose me temper, I dunno."

Mike grumbled and got out the beans, and Murphy went back to his smoking and his meditations. He made so little of Mike's outburst about the spies that he did not trouble to connect it with any one in the basin. Mike was always talking what Murphy called fool gibberish, that no man of sense would listen to it if he could help it. So Murphy fell to calculating how much of the money he had earned might justly be spent upon a few days' spree without endangering the grubstake he planned to take into the farther mountains in the spring. Murphy had been sober now for a couple of months, and he was beginning to thirst for the liquid joys of Quincy. Presently he nodded his head slowly, having come to a definite conclusion in his argument with himself.

"I think I'll be goin' t' town in the marnin', Mike, av I kin git a little money from the boss," he said, lookin' up. "It's comin' cold, an' more shnow, I'm thinkin', an' I must have shoepacs, I dunno. So we'll be up early in the marnin', an' it's a hefty two-hours walk t' town fer anny man—more now with the shnow. An' I be thinkin'—"

What he was thinking he did not say, and Mike did not ask. He seemed not to hear Murphy's declaration at all. Now that he had the beans soaking, Mike was absorbed in his own thoughts again. He did not care what Murphy did. Murphy, in Mike's estimation, was merely a conceited old fellow-countryman with bad eyes and a sharp tongue. Let Murphy go to town if he liked. Mike had plans of his own.

The old un, for instance, stirred Mike's curiosity a good deal. Why should she be following the girl, when the girl went tramping