“Aw, can that chatter, you poor fish!” Jack exploded unexpectedly, and smote Hank on his lantern jaw with the flat of his palm.  “You hick from hick-town!  You brainless ape!  You ain’t a man—­you’re a missing link!  Give you a four-foot tail, by harry, and you’d go down the mountain swinging from branch to branch like the monkey that you are!  What are you, you poor piece of cheese, to talk about a woman?”

His hand to his jaw, Hank got up from where he had sprawled on his back.  He was not a fighting man, preferring to satisfy his grudges by slurring people behind their backs.  But Jack smacked him again and thought of a few other things to which he might liken Hank, and after that Hank fought like a trapped bobcat, with snarls and kicks and gouging claws.  He scratched Jack’s neck with his grimy fingernails, and he tried to set his unwashed teeth into Jack’s left ear while the two of them rolled over and over on the slippery mat of squaw-carpet.  And for that he was pummeled unmercifully before Jack tore himself loose and got up.

“Now, you beat it!” Jack finished, panting.  “And after this you keep your tongue off the subject of women.  Don’t dare to mention even a squaw to me, or I’ll pitch you clean off the peak!”

Hank mumbled an insult, and Jack went after him again.  All the misery, all the pent-up bitterness of the past three months rose within him in a sudden storm that clouded his reason.  He fought Hank like a crazy man—­not so much because Hank was Hank and had spoken slightingly of that slim girl, but because Hank was something concrete, something which Jack could beat with his fists and that could give back blow for blow.  Too long had he waged an unequal conflict with his own thoughts, his aloneness; with regrets and soul hunger and idleness.  When he had spent his strength and most of his rage together, he let Hank go and felt tenderly his own bruised knuckles.

He never knew how close he was to death in the next five minutes, while Hank was saddling up to go.  For Hank’s fingers went several times to his rifle and hovered there, itching to do murder, while Hank’s mind revolved the consequences.  Murder would be madness—­suicide, practically.  The boy would be missed when he did not answer the telephone.  Some one would be sent up from the Forest Service and the murder would be discovered, unless—­unless Hank could hide the body.  There was the lake—­but the lake was so clear!  Besides, there was always the chance at this season of the year that some tourist would be within sight.  Some tourist might even hear the shot.  It would be risky—­too risky.  Like Jack’s, his rage cooled while he busied himself mechanically with saddling his horse.  After all, Hank was not criminally inclined, except as anger drove him.  He set the pack-saddle and empty sacks on the pack horse, led his horse a few feet farther away and mounted, scowling.

In the saddle he turned and looked for the first time full at Jack.  “You think you’re darn smart!” he snarled wryly because of a cut lip that had swollen all on one side.  “You may think you’re smart, but they’s another day comin’.  You wait—­that’s all I got to say!”