idge, sent flaming
banners across the smoke cloud. The sky above was all curdled with
gold and crimson, while the smoke cloud below was a turgid black shot
through with sparks and tongues of flame.

Where were the fire-fighters, that they did not check the mad race of
flames before they crossed that canyon? It seemed to Jack that never
had a fire burned with so headlong a rush. Then his eyes went to the
blackened manzanita slope where Marion had been idling, and he
shivered at what might have happened down there. To comfort himself
with the sight of her safe and serene, he turned and went out, meaning
to go up where she was.

She was still sitting on the rock, gazing down the mountain, her face
sober. Her hat was off, and the wind was blowing the short strands of
her hair around her face. She was leaning back a little, braced by a
hand upon the rock. She looked a goddess of the mountain tops, Jack
thought. He stood there staring up at her, just as he had stared down
at her when she had stood looking into the lake. Did she feel as he
felt about the woods and mountains? he wondered. She seemed rather
fond of staring and staring and saying nothing--and yet, he
remembered, when she talked she gave no hint at all of any deep sense
of the beauty of her surroundings. When she talked she was just like
other town girls he had known, a bit slangy, more than a bit
self-possessed, and frivolous to the point of being flippant. That
type he knew and could meet fairly on a level. But when she was
looking and saying nothing, she seemed altogether different. Which, he
wondered, was the real Marion Rose?

While he stood gazing, she turned and looked down at him; a little
blankly at first, as though she had just waked from sleep or from
abstraction too deep for instant recovery. Then she smiled and changed
her position, putting up both hands to pat and pull her hair into
neatness; and with the movement she ceased to be a brooding goddess of
the mountain tops, and became again the girl who had perversely taken
the telephone away from him, the girl who had played mock billiards
upon his beloved chart, the girl who said--she said it now, while he
was thinking of her melodious way of saying it.

"Well, what do you know about that?" she inquired, making a gesture
with one arm toward the fire while with the other she fumbled in her
absurd little vanity bag. "It just burns as if it had a grudge against
the country, doesn't it? But isn't it