humbly grateful glance up to the stars-and-stripes that fluttered
lazily from the short flagstaff, and went in as though he had business
there, and as though that business was urgent.
A couple of young fellows at wide, document-littered desks looked up
at him with a mild curiosity, said good morning and waited with an air
of expectancy for him to state his errand. Under pretense of throwing
his cigarette outside, Jack turned and opened the door six inches or
so. The man who had followed him was going past, and he did not look
toward the house. He was busy reading a newspaper while he walked, but
he was not the tall man with the shrewd blue eyes and the knowing
little smile; which was some comfort to Jack. He closed the door and
turned again toward the two; and because he knew he must furnish some
plausible reason for his presence, he said the first thing that came
to his tongue--the thing that is always permissible and always
plausible.
"Fellow told me I might get a job here. How about it?" Then he smiled
good-naturedly and with a secret admiration for his perfect aplomb in
rising to the emergency.
"You'll have to ask Supervisor Ross about that," said one. "He's in
there." He turned his thumb toward the rear room, the door of which
stood wide open, and bent again over the map he had been studying. So
far as these two were concerned, Jack had evidently ceased to exist.
He went, therefore, to the room where the supervisor was at work
filling in a blank of some kind; and because his impromptu speech had
seemed to fill perfectly his requirements, he repeated it to Ross in
exactly the same tone of careless good nature, except that this time
he really meant part of it; because, when he came to think of it, he
really did want a job of some sort, and the very atmosphere of quiet,
unhurried efficiency that pervaded the place made him wish that he
might become a part of it.
It was a vagrant wish that might have died as quickly as it had been
born; an impulse that had no root in any previous consideration of the
matter. But Ross leaned back in his chair and was regarding him
seriously, as a possible employee of the government, and Jack
instinctively squared his shoulders to meet the look.
Followed a few questions, which Jack answered as truthfully as he
dared. Ross looked him over again and asked him how he would like to
be a fireman. Whereat Jack looked bewildered.
"What I mean by that in this case," the supervisor explained, "is that
I could put you up on Mount Hough, in the lookout station. That's--do
you know anything at all about the Forest Service, young fellow?"
Jack blushed, gulped down a lie and came out with the truth. "I got
in this morning," he said. "I don't know a darned thing about it, but
I want to get to work at something. And I guess I can learn anything
that isn't too complicated."
Ross laughed to himself. "About the most complicated thing you'll have
to learn," he said, "is how to put in your time. It's hard to get a
man that will stay at lookout stations. Lonesome--that's all. It's
about as bad as being a sheepherder, only you won't have any sheep for
company. Up on Mount Hough you'll have to live in a little glass house
about the size of this room, and do your cooking on an oil stove. Your
work will be watching your district for fires, and reporting them
here--by phone. There's a man up there now, but he doesn't want to
stay. He's been hollering for some one to take his place. You're
entitled to four days relief a month--when we send up a man to take
your place. Aside from that you'll have to stay right up on that peak,
and watch for fires. The fellow up there will show you how to use the
chart and locate fires so you can tell us exactly where it is that you
see smoke. You can't leave except when you're given permission and
some one comes to take your place. We send up your supplies and mail
once a week on a pack horse. Your pay will be seventy dollars a month.
"I don't want you to take it unless you feel pretty sure you can
stick. I'm tired of sending men up there for a week or two and having
them phoning in here a dozen times a day about how lonesome it is,
then quitting cold. We can't undertake to furnish you with amusement,
and we are too busy to spend the day gossiping with you over the phone
just to help you pass the time." He snapped his mouth together as
though he meant every word of it and a great deal more. "Do you want
the job?" he asked grimly.
Jack heard a chuckle from the next room, and his own lips came
together with a snap.
"Lead me to it," he said cheerfully. "I'd stand on my head and point
the wind with my legs for seventy dollars a month! Sounds to me like a
good place to save money--what?"
"Don't know how you'd go about spending much as long as you stayed up
there," Ross retorted drily. "It's when a man comes down that his
wages begin to melt."
Jack considered this point, standing with his feet planted a little
apart and his hands in his pockets, which is the accepted pose of the
care-free scion of wealth who is about to distinguish himself. He
believed that he knew best how to ward off suspicion of his motives in
thus exiling himself to a mountain top. He therefore grinned amiably
at Ross.
"Well, then, I won't come down," he stated calmly. "What I'm looking
for is a chance to make some money without any chance of spending it.
Lead me to this said mountain with the seventy-dollar job holding down
the peak."
Ross looked at him dubiously as though he detected a false note
somewhere. Good looking young fellows with the tangible air of the
towns and easy living did not, as a rule, take kindly to living alone
on some mountain peak. He stared up into Jack's face unwinkingly,
seeking there the real purpose behind such easy acceptance.
Jack stared back, his eyes widening and sobering a little as he
discovered that this man was not so easily put off with laughing
evasion. He wondered if Ross had read the papers that morning, and if
he, like the tall man at the postoffice, was mentally fitting him into
the description of the auto bandit that was being trailed.
Instinctively he rose to the new emergency.
"On the level, I want work and I want it right away," he said. "Being
alone won't bother me--I always get along pretty well with myself. I
want to get ahead of the game about five hundred dollars, and this
looks to me like a good chance to pile up a few iron men. I'm game for
the lonesomeness. It's a cold dollars-and-cents proposition with me."
He stopped and eyed the other a minute. "Does that answer what's in
your mind?" he asked bluntly.
Forest Supervisor Ross turned away his glance and reached for his pen.
"That's all right," he half apologized. "I want you to understand what
you're going up against, that is all. What's your name?"
Having the question launched at him suddenly like that, Jack nearly
blurted out his own name from sheer force of habit. But his tongue was
his friend for once and pronounced the last word so that Ross wrote
"John Carew" without hesitation. And Jack Corey, glancing down as the
supervisor wrote, stifled a smile of satisfaction.
"It happens to be the day when we usually send up supplies," said Ross
when he had finished recording the fact of Jack's employment as
fireman. "Our man hasn't started yet, and you can go up with him. Come
back here in an hour, can you? There'll be a saddle horse for you.
Don't try to take too much baggage. Suitcase, maybe. You can phone
down for anything you need that you haven't got with you, you know. It
will go up next trip. Clothes and grub and tobacco and such as
that--use your own judgment, and common sense."
"All right. Er--thank you, sir." Jack blushed a bit over the
unaccustomed courtesy of his tone, and turned into the outer office.
"Oh--Carew! Don't fall into the fool habit of throwing rocks down into
the lake just to see them bounce! One fellow did that, and came near
getting a tourist. You'll have to be careful."
"I certainly will, Mr. Ross."
The other two men gave him a friendly nod, and Jack went out of the
office feeling almost as cheerful as he had tried to appear.
CHAPTER FIVE
"IT'S A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY," SANG JACK
Riding at a steady, climbing walk up a winding road cut into the
wooded mountainside; with a pack-horse loaded with food and new, cheap
bedding which Jack had bought; with chipmunks scurrying over the tree
trunks that had gone crashing down in some storm and were gathering
moss on their rotting bark; with the clear, yellow sunlight of a
mountain day in spring lying soft on the upper branches, Jack had a
queer sense of riding up into a new, untroubled life that could hold
no shred of that from which he had fled. His mother, stately in her
silks and a serenely unapproachable manner, which seemed always to say
to her son that she was preoccupied with her own affairs, and that her
affairs were vastly more important than his youthful interests and
problems, swam vaguely before his consciousness, veiled by the swift
passing of events and the abrupt change from city to unspoiled
wilderness.
When his companion stopped to let the horses "get their wind," Jack
would turn in the saddle and look back over the network of gulches
and deep canyons to where the valley peeped up at him shyly through
the trees, and would think that every step made him that much safer.
He did not face calmly the terror from which he had fled. Still
mentally breathless from the very unexpectedness of the catastrophe,
he shrank from the thought of it as if thinking would betray him. He
had not so far concerned himself with his future, except as it held
the possibility of discovery. So he quizzed his companion and got him
talking about the mountains over which he was to play guardian angel.
He heard a good deal about hunting and fishing; and when they climbed
a little higher, Hank Brown pointed out to him where a bear and two
half grown cubs had been killed the fall before. He ought to have a
rifle, said Hank. There was always the chance that he might get a shot
at a bear; and as for deer, the woods were full of them. Then he told
more stories and pointed out the very localities where the incidents
had occurred.
"See that rocky peak over there? That's where the bears hole up in the
winter. Network of caves, up there. King Solomon's the name the people
that live here call it--but it's down on the map as Grizzly Peak.
Ain't any grizzlies, though--black bear mostly. They're smaller and
they ain't so fighty."
It was on the tip of Jack's tongue to observe that a man might hide
out here for months and months and never be seen, much less caught;
but he checked himself, and remarked only that he would certainly have
to get a gun. He would like, he declared, to take home some good
heads, and maybe a bear skin or two. He forced himself to speak of
home in the careless tone of one who has nothing to hide, but the
words left an ache in his throat and a dull heaviness in his chest.
Hank Brown went on talking and saw nothing wrong with his mood.
Indeed, he never saw anything wrong with a man who would listen to
Hank's hunting and fishing stories and not bore him with stories of
his own prowess. Wherefore, Jack was left alone in peace to fight the
sudden, nauseating wave of homesickness, and in a little while found
himself listening to the steady monotone of Hank Brown's voice.
So, they came to a tiny, sunken meadow, one side of which was fenced
with poles, rimmed round with hills set thick with heavy timber. On
the farther side of the meadow, almost hidden from sight, was a square
log cabin, solid, gloomily shaded and staring empty-eyed at a tiny,
clear stream where the horses scared an eight-inch trout out of a pool
when they lowered eager noses to drink thirstily.
After that they climbed up into a more open country, clothed with
interlaced manzanita bushes and buck brush and thickets of young
balsam fir. Here, said Hank Brown, was good bear country. And a little
farther on he pulled up and pointed down to the dust of the trail,
where he said a bear had crossed that morning. Jack saw the imprint of
what looked like two ill-shaped short feet of a man walking
barefooted--or perhaps two crude hands pressed into the dirt--and was
thrilled into forgetfulness of his trouble.
Before they had gone another mile, he had bought Hank's rifle and all
the cartridges he happened to have with him. He paid as much as a new
rifle would have cost, but he did not know that--though he did know
that he had scarcely enough money left in his pocket to jingle when
the transaction was completed. He carried the rifle across the saddle
in front of him and fingered the butt pridefully while his eyes went
glancing here and there hopefully, looking for the bear that had
crossed the trail that morning. The mere possession of the rifle bent
his mood toward adventure rather than concealment. He did not think
now of the lookout station as a refuge so much as a snug lair in the
heart of a wonderful hunting ground.
He wanted to hear more about the bear and deer which Hank Brown had
shot on these slopes. But Hank was no longer in the mood for
recounting his adventures. Hank was congratulating himself upon
selling that rifle, which had lately shown a tendency to jam if he
worked the lever too fast; and was trying to decide just what make and
calibre of rifle he would buy with the money now in his pocket; and he
was grinning in his sleeve at the ease with which he had "stung" this
young tenderfoot, who was unsuspectingly going up against a
proposition which Hank, with all his love for the wild, would never
attempt of his own free will.
At first sight, the odd little glass observatory, perched upon the
very tip-top of all the wilderness around, fascinated Jack. He had
never credited himself with a streak of idealism, nor even with an
imagination, yet his pulse quickened when they topped the last steep
slope and stood upon the peak of the world--this immediate, sunlit
world.
The unconcealed joy on the face of the lookout when they arrived did
not mean anything at all to him. He stood taking great breaths of the
light, heady air that seemed to lift him above everything he had ever
known and to place him a close neighbor of the clouds.
"This is great!" he said over and over, baring his head to the keen
breeze that blew straight out of the violet tinted distance. "Believe
me, fellows, this is simply _great!_"
Whereupon the fireman who had spent two weeks there looked at him and
grinned.
"You can have it," he said with a queer inflection. "Mount Lassen's
blowing off steam again. Look at her over there! She's sure on the
peck, last day or so--you can have her for company. I donate her along
with the sun-parlor and the oil stove and the telescope and the view.
And I wish you all kinds of luck. How soon you going back, Hank? I
guess I better be showing this fellow how to use the chart; maybe
you'd like something to eat. I'm all packed and ready to hit the
trail, myself."
In the center of the little square room, mounted on a high table, was
a detail map of all the country within sight of the station--and that
meant a good many miles of up and down scenery. Over it a slender
pointer was fitted to a pin, in the center of the map, that let it
move like a compass. And so cunningly was the chart drawn and placed
upon the table that wherever one sighted along the pointer--as when
pointing at a distant smudge of smoke in the valley or on the
mountainside--there on the chart was the number by which that
particular spot was designated.
"Now, you see, suppose there's a fire starts at Massack--or along in
there," Ed, the lookout fireman, explained, pointing to a distant
wrinkle in the bluish green distance, "you swing this pointer till
it's drawing a bead on the smoke, and then you phone in the number of
the section it picks up on the chart. The lookout on Claremont, he'll
draw a bead on it too, and phone in _his_ number--see? And where them
two numbers intersect on the chart, there's your fire, boy."
Jack studied the chart like a boy investigating a new mechanical toy.
He was so interested that he forgot himself and pushed his hair
straight back off his forehead with the gesture that had become an
unconscious mannerism, spoiling utterly the plastered effect which he
had with so much pains given to his hair. But Hank and the fireman
were neither suspicious nor observing, and only laughed at his
exuberance, which they believed was going to die a violent death when
Jack had spent a night or two there alone.
"Is _that_ all I have to do?" he demanded, when he had located a half
dozen imaginary fires.
"That's all you get paid for doing, but that ain't all you have to do,
by a long shot!" the fireman retorted significantly. But he would not
explain until he had packed his bed on the horse that had brought up
Jack's bedding and the fresh supplies, and was ready to go down the
mountain with Hank. Then he looked at Jack pityingly.
"Well--you sure have got my sympathy, kid. I wouldn't stay here
another month for a thousand dollars. You've got your work cut out for
you, just to keep from going crazy. So long."
Jack stood on a little jutting pinnacle of rock and watched them out
of sight. He thought the great crater behind the station looked like a
crude, unfinished cup of clay and rocks; and that Crystal Lake,
reflecting the craggy slope from the deeps below, was like blueing in
the bottom of the cup. He picked up a rock the size of his fist and
drew back his arm for the throw, remembered what the supervisor had
told him about throwing stones into the lake, and dropped the rock
guiltily. It was queer how a fellow wanted to roll a rock down and
shatter that unearthly blue mirror into a million ripples.
He looked away to the northwest, where Mount Lassen sent a lazy column
of thin, grayish vapor trailing high into the air, and thought how
little he had expected to see this much-talked-of volcano; how
completely and irrevocably the past two days had changed his life.
Why, this was only Tuesday! Day before yesterday he had been whooping
along the beach at Venice, wading out and diving under the breakers
just as they combed for the booming lunge against the sand cluttered
with humanity at play. He had blandly expected to go on playing there
whenever the mood and the bunch invited. Night before last he had
danced--and he had drunk much wine, and had made impulsive love to a
girl he had never seen in his life until just before he had held her
in his arms as they went swaying and gliding and dipping together
across the polished floor, carefree as the gulls outside on the sand.
Night before last he had driven home--but he winced there, and pulled
his thoughts back from that drive.
Here were no girls to listen to foolish speeches; no wine, no music,
no boom of breakers, no gulls. There never would be any. He was as far
from all that as though he had taken flight to the moon. There was no
sound save the whispering rush of the wind that blew over the bare
mountain top. He was above the pines and he could only faintly hear
the murmur of their branches. Below him the world lay hushed, silent
with the silence of far distances. The shadows that lay on the slope
and far canyons moved like ghosts across the tumbled wilderness.
For a minute the immensity of silence and blue distance lulled his
thoughts again with the feeling of security and peace. He breathed
deep, his nostrils flared like a thoroughbred horse, his face turned
this way and that, his eyes drinking deep, satisfying draughts of a
beauty such as he had never before known. His lips were parted a
little, half smiling at the wonderful kindness of fate, that had
picked him up and set him away up here at the top o' the world.
He glanced downward, to his right. There went two objects--three, he
counted them a moment later. He stepped inside, snatched up the
telescope and focussed it eagerly on the slow-moving, black specks.
Why, there went Hank Brown and the fireman, Ed somebody, and the pack
horse with Ed's bedding lashed on its back. For perhaps a mile he
watched them going down through the manzanita and buck brush toward
the massed line of balsam firs that marked the nearest edge of the
heavy timber line.
So that was the trail that led up to his eyrie! He marked it well,
thinking that it might be a good plan to keep an eye on that trail, in
case an officer came looking for him here.
He watched Hank and Ed go down into the balsam firs. Dark shadows
crept after them down the slope to the edge of the thicket where they
had disappeared.
He watched the shadows until they gave him a vague feeling of
discomfort and loneliness. He turned away and looked down into the
bottom of the mountain's cup. The lake lay darkling there, hooded with
shadows like a nun, the snow banks at the edge indicating the band of
white against the calm face. It looked cold and lonesome down there;
terribly cold and lonesome.
Mount Lassen, when he sent a comfort-seeking glance that way, sent up
a spurt of grayish black smoke with a vicious suddenness that made him
jump. With bulging eyes he watched it mount higher and higher until he
held his breath in fear that it would never stop. He saw the column
halt and spread and fall....
When it was over he became conscious of itching palms where his nails
had dug into them and left little red marks. He discovered that he was
shaking as with a nervous chill, and that his knees were bending under
him. He sent a wild-eyed glance to the still, purple lake down there
where the snowbanks lingered, though it was the middle of May; to the
far hills that were purpling already with the dropping of the sun
behind the high peaks; to the manzanita slope where the trail lay in
shadow now. It was terribly still and empty--this piled wilderness.
He turned and hurried into his little glass-sided house and shut the
door behind him. A red beam of the sinking sun shone in and laid a bar
of light across the chart like a grin.
The silence was terrible. The emptiness pressed upon him like a weight
that crushed from him his youth and his strength and all his youthful
optimism, and left him old and weak and faded, a shadow of humanity
like those shadows down there in the canyon.
Stealthily, as if he were afraid of some tangible shape reaching out
of the silence, his hand went to the telephone receiver. He clutched
it as drowning fingers clutch at seaweed. He leaned and jerked the
receiver to his ear, and waited for the human voice that would bring
him once more into the world of men. He did not know then that the
telephone was the kind that must be rung by the user; or if he had
been told that he had forgotten. So he waited, his ears strained to
catch the heavenly sound of a human voice.
Shame crept in on the panic of his soul; shame and something that
stiffened it into the courage of a man. He felt his cheeks burn with
the flush that stained them, and he slowly lowered the receiver into
its hook.
With his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his mouth pulled down
at the corners, he stood leaning back against the desk shelf and
forced himself to look down across the wooded slopes to the valley,
where a light twinkled now like a fallen star. After a while he found
that he could see once more the beauty, and not so much the
loneliness. Then, just to prove to himself that he was not going to be
bluffed by the silence, he began to whistle. And the tune carried
with it an impish streak of that grim humor in which, so they tell
us, the song was born. It is completely out of date now, that song,
but then it was being sung around the world. And sometimes it was
whistled just as Jack was whistling it now, to brace a man's courage
against the press of circumstances.
"It's a long way to Tipperary," sang Jack, when he had whistled the
chorus twice; and grinned at the joke upon himself. After that he
began to fuss with the oil stove and to experiment with the food they
had left him, and whistled deliberately all the while.
In this wise Jack Corey lost himself from his world and entered into
his exile on a mountain top.
CHAPTER SIX
MISS ROSE FORWARD