After he had telephoned the alarm to headquarters he would watch anxiously the spreading pall.  To stand up there helpless while great trees that had been a hundred years or more in the growing died the death of fire, gave him a tragic feeling of having somehow betrayed his trust.  Every pine that fell, whether by old age, fire or the woodmen’s axe, touched him with a sense of personal loss.  It was as though he himself had made the hills and clothed them with the majestic trees, and now stood godlike above, watching lest evil come upon them.  But he did not feel godlike when through the telescope he watched great leaping flames go climbing up some giant pine, eating away its very life as they climbed; he was filled then with a blind, helpless rage at his own ineffectiveness, and he would stand and wonder why God refused to send the rain that would save these wonderful, living things, the trees.

At night, when the forests drew back into the darkness, he would watch the stars slide across the terrible depth of purple infinity that seemed to deepen hypnotically as he stared out into it.  Venus, Mars, Jupiter—­at first he could not tell one from another, though he watched them all.  He had studied astronomy among other things in school, but then it had been merely a hated task to be shirked and slighted and forgotten as one’s palate forgets the taste of bitter medicine.  Up here, with the stars all around him and above him for many nights, he was ashamed because he could not call them all by name.  He would train his telescope upon some particularly bright star and watch it and wonder—­Jack did a great deal of wondering in those days, after his first panicky fight against the loneliness and silence had spent itself.

First of all, he awoke to the fact that he was about as important to the world as one of those little brown birds that hopped among the rocks and perked its head at him so knowingly, and preened its feathers with such a funny air of consequence.  He could not even believe that his sudden disappearance had caused his mother any grief beyond her humiliation over the manner and the cause of his going.  She would hire some one to take care of the car, and she would go to her teas and her club meetings and her formal receptions and to church just the same as though he were there—­or had never been there.  If he ever went back....  But he never could go back.  He never could face his mother again, and listen to her calmly-condemnatory lectures that had no love to warm them or to give them the sweet tang of motherly scolding.

It sounds a strange thing to say of Jack Corey, that scattered-brained young fellow addicted to beach dancing and joy rides and all that goes with these essentially frothy pastimes; a strange thing to say of him that he was falling into a more affectionate attitude of personal nearness to the stars and to the mountains spread out below him than he had ever felt toward Mrs. Singleton Corey.  Yet that is how he managed to live through the lonely days he spent up there in the lookout station.