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 had hit the mark,
and he dropped upon the bench by the doorway and buried his face in
his shaking hands. But youth does not suffer without making some
struggle against the pain. Suddenly he lifted his head and looked at
her with passionate resentment.
"Well, why don't you run and tell?" he cried harshly. "There's the
telephone in there. Why don't you call up the office and have them
send the sheriff hot-footing it up here? If Jack Corey's such a
villain, why don't you do something about it? For the Lord's sake
don't stand there looking at me as if I'm going to swallow you whole!
Get somebody on the phone, and then beat it before I cut loose and be
the perfectly awful villain you think I am!"
Marion took a startled step away from him, turned and came
hesitatingly toward him. And as she advanced she smiled a little
ostentatiously whimsical smile and touched the butt of her
six-shooter.
"I'm heeled, so I should be agitated," she said flippantly. "I always
was crazy to get the inside dope on that affair. Tell me. Were you
boys honest-to-goodness bandits, or what?"
"What, mostly." Jack gave her a sullen, upward glance from under his
eyebrows. "Go ahead and play at cat-and-mouse, if you want to.
Nobody'll stop you, I guess. Have all the fun you want--you're getting
it cheap enough; cheaper by a darned sight than you'll get the inside
dope you're crazy for."
"_What_ do you _know_ about it!--me running on to Jack Corey, away up
here on the top of the world!" But it was hard to be flippant while
she looked down into that stricken young face of his, and saw the
white line around his lips that ought to be smiling at life; saw, too,
the trembling of his bruised hands, that he tried so hard to hold
steady. She came still closer; so close that she could have touched
his arm.
"It was the papers called you such awful things. I didn't," she said,
wistfully defensive. "I couldn't--not after seeing you on the beach
that day, playing around like a great big kid, and not making eyes at
the girls when they made eyes at you. You--you didn't act like a
villain, when I saw you. You acted like a big boy that likes to have
fun--oh, just oodles of fun, but hasn't got a mean hair in his head. I
know; I watched you and the fellows you were with. I was up on the
pier looking down at you whooping around in the surf. And next day,
when the girls at the Martha Washington read about it in the papers, I
just couldn't believe it was true, what they said about you boys being
organized into bandits and all that, and leading a double life and
everything.
"But it did look bad when you beat it--about two jumps ahead of the
police, at that. You see Fred was along with the man that was shot,
and being in the garage and around automobiles all the time, he
thought to read the number of your car, and remembered it; near enough
anyway, so that he knew for sure it was the Singleton Corey car by the
make and general appearance of it, and identified it positively when
he saw it in your garage. And that did make it look bad!"
"What did mother do when they--?" Jack did not look up while he
stammered the question that had been three months feeding his
imagination with horrors.
"Why, she didn't do anything. She went right away, that very morning,
to a sanitarium and would not see anybody but her own private nurse
and her own private doctor. They gave out bulletins about how she
slept and what she had for breakfast, and all that. But, believe me,
brother, they didn't get any dope from her! She just simply would not
be interviewed!"
Jack let out a long breath and sat up. At the corners of his mouth
there lurked the temptation to smile. "That's mother--true to form,"
he muttered admiringly.
"Of course, they scouted around and got most of the boys that were
with you, but they couldn't get right down to brass tacks and prove
anything except that they were with you at the beach. They're still
holding them on bail or something, I believe. You know how those
things kind of drop out of the news. There was a big police scandal
came along and crowded all you little bandits off the front page. But
I know the trial hasn't taken place yet, because Fred would have to be
a witness, so he'd know, of course. And, besides, the man hasn't died
or got well or anything, yet, and they're waiting to see what he's
going to do."
"Who's Fred?" Jack stood up and leaned toward her, feeling all at once
that he must know, and know at once, who Fred might be.
"Why, he's Kate's brother. He's down here at Toll-Gate cabin, working
out the assessments--"
Jack sat down again and caressed his bruised knuckles absently.
"Well, then, I guess this is the finish," he said dully, after a
minute.
"Why? He'll never climb up here--and if he did he wouldn't know you.
He couldn't recognize your face by the number of your car, you know!"
Then she added, with beautiful directness, "It wouldn't be so bad, if
you hadn't been the ringleader and put the other boys up to robbing
cars. But I suppose--"
Jack got up again, but this time he towered belligerently above her.
"Who says I was the ringleader? If it was Fred I'll go down there and
push his face into the back of his neck for him! Who--"
"Oh, just those nice friends of yours. They wouldn't own up to
anything except being with you, but told everybody that it was you
that did it. But honestly I didn't believe that. Hardly any of us
girls at the Martha did. But Fred--"
Just then the telephone rang again, and Jack had to go in and report
the present extent of the fire, and tell just where and just how fast
it was spreading, and what was the direction of the wind. The
interruption steadied him, gave him time to think.
Since the girl knew him, and knew the circumstances of his flight, and
since the boys had turned on him, Jack argued with himself that he
might just as well tell her what little there was to tell. There was
nothing to be gained by trying to keep the thing a secret from her.
Besides, he craved sympathy, though he did not admit it. He craved the
privilege of talking about that night to some one who would
understand, and who could be trusted. Marion Rose, he felt, was the
only person in the world he could tell. He could talk to her--Lord,
what a relief that would be! He could tell her all about it, and she
would understand. Her sympathy at that moment seemed the most precious
thing in the world.
So he went outside and sat down again on the bench, and told her the
exact truth about that night; how it had started in drunken foolery,
and all the rest of it. He even explained the exact route he had taken
home so as to come into town apparently from Pasadena.
"Well, _what_ do you know about _that_!" Marion murmured several 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 say!--does the star
spangled banner still wave?"
"She still waves," Jack assented somberly, picking up the wash basin.
Why couldn't he enter the girl's foolery? He used to be full of it
himself, and he used to consider that the natural form of
companionship. He must be getting queer like all other hermits he had
ever heard of. It occurred to him that possibly Marion Rose was not
really feather-brained, but that the trouble was in himself, because
he was getting a chronic grouch.
He was thinking while he ate. He had plenty of encouragement for
thinking, because Marion herself seemed to be absorbed in her own
thoughts. When she was filling his coffee cup the second time, she
spoke quite abruptly.
"It would be terribly foolish for you to leave here, Jack Corey--or
whatever you would rather be called. I don't believe any one has the
faintest notion that you came up here into this country. If they had,
they would have come after you before this. But they're still on the
watch for you in other places, and I suppose every police station in
the country has your description tacked on the wall or some place.
"I believe you'd better stay right where you are, and wait till
something turns up to clear you. Maybe that man will get well, and
then it won't be so serious; though, of course, being right through
his lungs, the doctors claim it's pretty bad. I'll know if he dies or
not, because he's a friend of Fred's, and Fred would hear right away.
And we can make up a set of signals, and flash them with glasses, like
we were doing just for fun this afternoon. Then I won't have to climb
clear up here if something happens that you ought to know about--don't
you see? I can walk out in sight of here and signal with my vanity
mirror. It will be fun.
"And when you're through here, if I were you I'd find some nice place
here in the hills to camp. It isn't half as bad to stay right in the
mountains, as it would be to stay in town and imagine that every
strange man you see has come after you. Sometimes I wish I could get
right out where there's not a soul, and just stay there. Being in the
woods with people around is not like being in the woods with just the
woods. I've found that out. People kind of keep your mind tied down to
little things that part of you hates, don't you know? Like when I'm
with Kate, I think about facial massage and manicuring, and shows that
I'd like to see and can't, and places where I'd like to go and eat and
watch the people and dance and listen to the music, and can't; and
going to the beaches when I can't, and taking automobile trips when I
can't, and boys--and all that sort of thing. But when I'm all by
myself in the woods, I never think of those things."
"I saw you down there by the hydrometer, all by yourself. And you were
using your powder puff to beat the band." A twinkle lived for a second
or two in the somber brown of Jack's eyes.
"You did? Well, that was second nature. I wasn't thinking about it,
anyway."
"What were you thinking about when you kept staring up here? Not the
beauties of nature, I bet." A perverse spirit made Jack try to push
her back into the frivolous talk he had so lately and so bitterly
deplored.
"Well, I was wondering if you had gumption enough to appreciate being
up where you could watch the mountains all the while, and see them by
day and by night and get really acquainted with them, so that they
would tell you things they remember about the world a thousand years
ago. I wondered if you had it in you to appreciate them, and know
every little whim of a shadow and every little laugh of the sun--or
whether you just stayed up here because they pay you money for
staying. I've been so jealous of you, up here in your little glass
house! I've lain awake the last three nights, peeking through the
tree-tops at the little speck of sky I could see with stars in it, and
thinking how you had them spread out all around you--and you asleep,
maybe, and never looking!
"I'm awful sorry you're in trouble, and about your mother and all. But
I think you're the luckiest boy I know, because you just happened to
get to this place. Sometimes when I look at you I just want to take
you by the shoulder and _shake_ you!--because you don't half know how
lucky you are. Why, all that makes the world such a rotten place to
live in is because the people are starved all the while for beauty.
Not beauty you can buy, but beauty like this around us, that you can
feast on--"
"And I get pretty well fed up on it, too, sometimes," Jack put in,
still perverse.
"And for that I pity you. I was going to wash the dishes, but you can
do it yourself. I'm going out where I can forget there are any people
in the world. I'll never have another night like this--it would be too
much luck for one person."
She set down her cup, which she had been tilting back and forth in her
fingers while she spoke. She got up, pulled Jack's heavy sweater off a
nail in the corner, and went out without another word to him or a look
toward him. She seemed to be absolutely sincere in her calm disposal
of him as something superfluous and annoying. She seemed also to be
just as sincere in her desire for a close companionship with the
solitude that surrounded them.