“Say, my feet are simply freezing!” Marion interrupted him.  “We’ll have to start on.  It would be terrible if we missed the train, Jack.”

“You oughtn’t to go.  Honestly, I mean it.  Unless we get married, it would—­”

“Why, of course we’ll get married!  Have I got to simply propose to you?  We’ll have to change at Sacramento anyway—­or we can change there just as well as not—­and we’ll get married while we’re waiting for the train south.  I hope you didn’t think for a minute that I’d—­”

“It isn’t fair to you.”  Jack moved out from under the sheltering cedar and led the way up the gully’s rim, looking mechanically for an easy crossing.  “I’m a selfish enough brute without letting you—­”

Marion plucked at his sleeve and stopped him.

“Jack Corey, you tell me one thing.  Don’t you—­want me to—­marry you?  Don’t you care—?”

“Listen here, honey, I’ll get sore in a minute if you go talking that way!” He took her in his arms, all snow as she was, and kissed her with boyish energy.  “You know well enough that I’m crazy about you.  Of course I want you!  But look at the fix I’m in:  with just about a hundred dollars to my name—­”

“I’ve got money in my muff to buy a license, if you’ll pay the preacher, Jack.  We’ll go fifty-fifty on the cost—­”

“And a darned good chance of being sent up for that deal the boys pulled off—­”

“Oh, well, I can wait till you get out again.  Say, I just love you with that little lump between your eyebrows when you scowl!  Go on, Jack; I’m cold.  My gracious, what a storm!  It’s getting worse, don’t you think?  When does that train go down, Jack?  We’ll have to be at the station before dark, or we might get lost and miss the train, and then we would be in a fix!  I wish to goodness I’d thought to put on my blue velvet suit—­but then, how was I going to know that I’d need it to get married in?”

Jack stopped on the very edge of the bank, and held back the snow-laden branches for her to pass.  “You’re the limit for having your own way,” he grinned.  “I can see who’s going to be boss of the camp, all right.  Come on—­the sooner we get down into lower country, the less chance we’ll have of freezing.  We’ll cross here, and get down in that thick timber below.  The wind won’t catch us quite so hard, and if a tree don’t fall on us we’ll work our way down to the trail.  Give me a kiss.  This is a toll gate, and you’ve got to pay—­”

Standing so, with one arm flung straight out against the thick boughs of a young spruce, he made a fair target for Mike back there among the trees.  Mike was clean over the edge now of sanity.  The two spies had come together—­two against one, and searching for him to kill him, as he firmly believed.  When they had stood under the cedar he thought that they were hiding there, waiting for him to walk into the trap they had set.  He would have shot them, but the branches were too thick.  When they moved out along the gulch, Mike ran crouching after, his rifle cocked and ready for aim.  You would have thought that the man was stalking a deer.  When Jack stopped and turned, with his arm flung back against the spruce, he seemed to be looking straight at Mike.