All that night the wind howled up the mountainside and ranted through the forest so that Marion could not sleep.  Twice she heard a tree go splitting down through the outstretched arms of its close neighbors, to fall with a crash that quivered the cabin.  She was glad that Jack’s camp was in a cave.  She would have been terribly worried if he had to stay out where a tree might fall upon him.  She pictured the horror of being abroad in the forest with the dark and that raging wind.  She hoped that the morning would bring calm, because she wanted to see Jack again and take him some magazines, and tell him about Hank.

In the morning it was snowing and raining by turns, with gusty blasts of wind.  Marion looked out, even opened the door and stood upon the step; but the storm dismayed her so that she gave up the thought of going, until a chance sentence overheard while she was making the professor’s bed in the little lean-to changed her plan of waiting into one of swift action.  She heard Douglas say to Kate that, if Fred did decide to inform the chief of police, they should be hearing something very soon now.  With the trial probably started, they would certainly waste no time.  They would wire up to the sheriff here.

“Oh, I wish you hadn’t told Fred,” Kate began to expostulate, when Marion burst in upon them furiously.

“You told, did you?” she accused Kate tempestuously.  “Doug, of all people!  You knew the little runt couldn’t keep his hands off—­you knew he’d be so darned righteous he’d make all the trouble he could for other people, because he hasn’t got nerve enough to do anything wrong himself.  You couldn’t keep it to yourself, for all your promises and your crocodile tears!  I ought to have known better than trust you with anything.  But I’ll tell you one thing more, you two nasty nice creatures that are worse than scrawling snakes—­I’ll tell you this:  It won’t do you one particle of good to set the police after Jack.  So go ahead and tell, and be just as treacherous and mean as you like.  You won’t have the pleasure of sending him to jail—­because they’ll never catch him.  My heavens, how I despise and loathe you two!”

While she spat venom at them she was stamping her feet into her overshoes, buttoning her sweater, snatching up this thing and that thing she wanted, drawing a woolly Tarn O’Shanter cap down over her ears, hooking a cheap fur neckpiece that she had to tug and twist because it fitted so tightly over her sweater collar.  She took her six-shooter—­she was still deadly afraid of Hank Brown—­and she got her muff that matched the neck fur.  Her eyes blazed whenever she looked at them.

“Marion, listen to reason!  You can’t go out in this storm!” Kate began to whimper.

“Will you please shut up?” Marion whirled on her, primitive, fighting rage contorting her face.  “I can go anywhere I like.  I only wish I could go where I’d never see you again.”  She went out and pulled the door violently shut.  Stood a minute to brace herself for what she had to do, and went into the storm as a swimmer breasts the breakers.