A couple of young fellows at wide, document-littered desks looked up at him with a mild curiosity, said good morning and waited with an air of expectancy for him to state his errand.  Under pretense of throwing his cigarette outside, Jack turned and opened the door six inches or so.  The man who had followed him was going past, and he did not look toward the house.  He was busy reading a newspaper while he walked, but he was not the tall man with the shrewd blue eyes and the knowing little smile; which was some comfort to Jack.  He closed the door and turned again toward the two; and because he knew he must furnish some plausible reason for his presence, he said the first thing that came to his tongue—­the thing that is always permissible and always plausible.

“Fellow told me I might get a job here.  How about it?” Then he smiled good-naturedly and with a secret admiration for his perfect aplomb in rising to the emergency.

“You’ll have to ask Supervisor Ross about that,” said one.  “He’s in there.”  He turned his thumb toward the rear room, the door of which stood wide open, and bent again over the map he had been studying.  So far as these two were concerned, Jack had evidently ceased to exist.  He went, therefore, to the room where the supervisor was at work filling in a blank of some kind; and because his impromptu speech had seemed to fill perfectly his requirements, he repeated it to Ross in exactly the same tone of careless good nature, except that this time he really meant part of it; because, when he came to think of it, he really did want a job of some sort, and the very atmosphere of quiet, unhurried efficiency that pervaded the place made him wish that he might become a part of it.

It was a vagrant wish that might have died as quickly as it had been born; an impulse that had no root in any previous consideration of the matter.  But Ross leaned back in his chair and was regarding him seriously, as a possible employee of the government, and Jack instinctively squared his shoulders to meet the look.

Followed a few questions, which Jack answered as truthfully as he dared.  Ross looked him over again and asked him how he would like to be a fireman.  Whereat Jack looked bewildered.

“What I mean by that in this case,” the supervisor explained, “is that I could put you up on Mount Hough, in the lookout station.  That’s—­do you know anything at all about the Forest Service, young fellow?”

Jack blushed, gulped down a lie and came out with the truth.  “I got in this morning,” he said.  “I don’t know a darned thing about it, but I want to get to work at something.  And I guess I can learn anything that isn’t too complicated.”