ly.

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 a