up
her life, and Jack was the reason why she could not do them.

He tried to shut out the picture of his mother, and there were times
when for a few hours he succeeded. Those were the hours he spent with
Marion or in watching for her to come, or in perfecting the details of
the plan she had helped him to form. By the time he had his next four
days of freedom, he had also a good-sized cache of food ready to carry
to Grizzly Peak where his makeshift camping outfit was hidden. Marion
had told him that when the fire-season was over and the lookout
station closed for the winter, which would be when the first snow had
come to stay, he ought to be ready to disappear altogether from the
ken of the Forest Service and all of the rest of Quincy.

"You can say you're going prospecting," she planned, "and then beat it
to your cave and make it snug for the winter. Anything you must buy
after that, you can tell me about it, and I'll manage to get it and
leave it for you at our secret meeting place. I don't know how I'll
manage about Kate, but I'll manage somehow--and that'll be fun, too.
Kate will be perfectly wild if she sees me doing mysterious
things--but she won't find out what it's all about, and I'll have more
fun! I do love to badger her, poor thing. She's a dear, really, you
know. But she wants to know everything a person does and says and
thinks; and she hasn't any more imagination than a white rabbit, and
so she wouldn't understand if you told her every little thing.

"So I'll have the time of my life doing it, but I'll get things just
the same, and leave them for you. And I'll bring you reading--oh, have
you put down candles, Jack? You'll need a lot of them, so you can read
evenings."

"What's the matter with pine knots?" Jack inquired. "Daniel Boone was
great on pine-knot torches, if I remember right. One thing I wish you
would do, Marion. I'll give you the money to send for about a million
Araby cigarettes. I'll write down the address--where I always bought
them. Think you could get by with it?

"You just watch me. Say, I do think this is going to be the best kind
of a winter! I wouldn't miss being up here for anything."

Jack looked at her doubtfully, but he finally nodded his head in
assent. "It could be worse," he qualified optimistically.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MURPHY HAS A HUMOROUS MOOD

Though Fred and the professor shouldered pick and shovel at sunrise
every morning and laid them down thankfully at