ore 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