“But I must hunt Kate up!  Why, she was all alone there, taking a nap in the hammock!  If it should—­”

“It won’t,” Jack reiterated positively.  “I ought to know, oughtn’t I?  It’s my business to watch fires and see how they’re acting, isn’t it?” He saw her still determined, and tried another argument.  “Listen here.  It isn’t far up to the station.  We’ll go up there, and I’ll phone down to the office to have the firemen stop and see if she’s all right.  They’ll have to come right by there, to get at the fire.  And you can’t cross that burning strip now—­not on a bet, you couldn’t.  And if you could,” he added determinedly, “I wouldn’t let you try it.  Come on—­we’ll go up and do that little thing, telephone to the office and have them look after Kate.”

Marion, to his great relief, yielded to the point of facing up hill with him and taking a step or two.  “But you don’t know Kate,” she demurred, turning her face again toward the welter of burning timber.  “She’ll be worried to death about me, and it would be just like her to start right out to hunt me up.  I’ve simply got to get back and let her know I’m all right.”

Jack threw back his head and laughed aloud—­think how long it had been since he really had laughed!  “What’s the matter with phoning that you’re all right?  I guess the wire will stand that extra sentence, maybe—­and you can phone in yourself, if you want to convince them ab-so-lutely.  What?”

“Well, who’d ever have thought that I might phone a message to Kate!  Down there in that hole of a place where we live, one can scarcely believe that there are telephones in the world.  Let’s hurry, then.  Kate will be perfectly wild till she hears that I am safe.  And then—­” she quirked her lips in a little smile, “she’ll be wilder still because I’m not there where she supposed I’d be when she waked up.”

Jack replied with something slangy and youthful and altogether like the old Jack Corey, and led her up the steep trail to the peak.  They took their time, now that they were beyond the fire zone.  They turned often to watch the flames while they got their breath; and every time Marion stopped, she observed tritely that it was a shame such beautiful timber must burn, and invariably added, “But isn’t it beautiful?” And to both observations Jack would agree without any scorn of the triteness.  Whereas he would have been furious had a mere tourist exclaimed about the beauty of a forest fire, which to him had always seemed a terrible thing.

They found the telephone ringing like mad, and Jack turned red around the ears and stuttered a good deal before he was through answering the questions of the supervisor, and explaining why he had not answered the phone in the last hour.