“Let Fred advise you about the rifle before you buy.  Fred’s tremendously clever about nature stuff, Marion.  He’ll know just what you want.  I think a gun will maybe be necessary.  You know there are bear—­”

“Oh, good night!” cried Marion.  But in the next breath she added, “I wonder if there are any nice hunters after the bears!”

CHAPTER SEVEN

GUARDIAN OF THE FORESTS

In mid July the pines and spruces and firs have lost their pale green fingertips which they wave to the world in spring, and have settled down to the placid business of growing new cones that shall bear the seed of future forests as stately as these.  On the shadowed, needle-carpeted slopes there is always a whispery kind of calm; the calm of Nature moving quietly about her appointed tasks, without haste and without uncertainty, untorn by doubts or fears or futile questioning; like a broad-souled, deep-bosomed mother contentedly rearing her young in a sheltered home where love abides in the peace which passeth understanding.

Gray squirrels, sleek and bright-eyed and graceful always, lope over the brown needles, intent upon some urgent business of their own.  Noisy little chipmunks sit up and nibble nervously at dainties they have found, and flirt their tails and gossip, and scold the carping bluejays that peer down from overhanging branches.  Perhaps a hoot owl in the hollow trees overhead opens amber eyes and blinks irritatedly at the chattering, then wriggles his head farther down into his feathers, stretches a leg and a wing and settles himself for another nap.

Little streams go sliding down between banks of bright green grass, and fuss over the mossy rocks that lie in their beds.  Deer lift heads often to listen and look and sniff the breeze between mouthfuls of the tender twigs they love.  Shambling, slack-jointed bears move shuffling through the thickets, like the deer, lifting suspicious noses to test frequently the wind, lest some enemy steal upon them unaware.

From his glass-walled eyrie, Jack Corey gazed down upon the wooded slopes and dreamed of what they hid of beauty and menace and calm and of loneliness.  He saw them once drenched with rain; but mostly they lay warm under the hot sunshine of summer.  He saw them darkling with night shadows, he saw them silvered with morning fogs which turned rose tinted with the first rays of sunrise, he saw them lie soft-shaded in the sunset’s after glow, saw them held in the unearthly beauty of the full moonlight.

Like the deer and the bear down there, his head was lifted often to look and to sniff the wind that blew strongly over the peak.  For now the winds came too often tainted with the smoke of burning pines.  The blue haze of the far distance deepened with the thickening air.  Four times in the last ten days he had swung the pointer over the mapped table and sighted it upon brown puffballs that rose over the treetops—­the first betraying marks of the licking flames below.  He had watched the puff balls grow until they exploded into rolling clouds of smoke, yellow where the flames mounted high in some dead pine or into a cedar, black where a pitch stump took fire.