By the time his second relief was at hand, he was tempted to take what money he had earned and go as far as it would take him.  He did not believe he could stand another month of that terrible isolation, even with his new friendliness toward the stars and the forest to lighten a little of his loneliness.  Youth hungers for a warmer, more personal companionship than Nature, and Jack was never meant for a hermit.  He grew sullen.  He would stand upon his pinnacle where he could look down at Crystal Lake, and hate the tourists who came with lunches and their fishing tackle, and scrambled over the rocks, and called shrilly to one another, and laughed, and tried to invent new ways of stringing together adjectives that seemed to express their enthusiasm.  He would make biting remarks to them which the distance prevented their hearing, and he would wish savagely that they would fall in the lake, or break a leg on some of the boulders.

When those with a surplus of energy started up the steep climb to the peak, he would hurry into his little glass room, hastily part and plaster his hair down as a precaution against possible recognition, and lock his door and retire to a certain niche in a certain pile of rocks, where he would be out of sight and yet be close enough to hear the telephone, and would chew gum furiously and mutter savage things under his breath.  Much as he hungered for companionship he had a perverse dread of meeting those exclamatory sightseers.  It seemed to Jack that they cheapened the beauty of everything they exclaimed over.

He could hear them gabble about Mount Lassen, and his lip would curl with scorn over the weakness of their metaphors.  He would grind his teeth when they called his glass prison “cute,” and wondered if anybody really lived there.  He would hear some man trying to explain what he did not know anything at all about, and he would grin pityingly at the ignorance of the human male, forgetting that he had been just as ignorant, before fate picked him up and shoved him head-foremost into a place where he had to learn.

Sometimes he was not forewarned of their visits, and would be trapped fairly; and then he would have to answer their foolish questions and show them what the map was for, and what the pointer was for, and admit that it did get lonesome sometimes, and agree with them that it was a fine view, and point out where Quincy lay, and all the rest of it.  It amazed him how every one who came said practically the same things, asked the same questions, linked the same adjectives together.

Thus passed his second month, which might be called his pessimistic month.  But he did not take his money and go.  He decided that he would wait until he had grown a beard before he ventured.  He realized bitterly that he was a fugitive, and that it would go hard with him now if he were caught.  From the papers which Supervisor Ross had sent him every week he had learned that the police were actually and