“Listen!” she cried suddenly, and Jack turned his head quickly before he remembered that the word had come to mean nothing more than a superfluous ejaculation hung, like a bangle on a bracelet, to the sentences of modern youth.  “Listen, it’s going to be dark before that fire burns itself out of the way.  How am I going to get home?  Which way would be best to go around it, do you think?”

“No way at all,” Jack replied shortly.  “You can’t go home.”

“Why, forevermore!  I’ll have to go somewhere else, then—­to some farm house where I can phone.  Kate would be simply wild if—­”

“Forget the farm house stuff.  There aren’t any such trimmings to these mountains.  The next farm house is down around Keddie, somewhere.  Through the woods, and mountain all the way.”  He said it rather crossly, for his nerves were what he called edgy, and the girl still irritated him.

“Well, what do you know about that?”

He had known she would say that.  Cross between a peacock and a parrot, she must be, he thought vindictively.  It was maddening that she would not—­could not, perhaps?—­live up to that goddess-on-the-mountain-top look she had sometimes.

“I don’t know anything about it except that it’s hard luck for us both.”

“Well, what—?” She paused in the act of putting away her first-aid-to-the-complexion implements, and looked at him with her wide, purple eyes.  “Why, you cross, mean, little stingy boy, you!  You can have your old peak then.  I’ll go down and jump in the lake.”  She began to climb down from the little pinnacle quite as if she meant to do exactly as she said.

“Aw, come out of it!” Jack tried not to turn and look at her anxiously, but he was a human being.

“I’m not in it—­yet,” Marion retorted with dark meaning, and jumped to the ground.

“Hey! you wanta break a leg?” He swung toward her.

“Just to spite you, I wouldn’t mind.  Only you’d throw me down there amongst all those rocks and trees and make it my neck.  Oh, would you look at that!”

“That” happened to be Mount Lassen, belching forth a stupendous column of ashes and smoke.  Up, up, up it went, as though it meant to go on and on into infinity.  Jack had seen it too often to be affected as he had been that first night.  He looked at Marion instead.  She was standing with her hands clinched by her side, and her breath sucking in.  As the black column mounted higher and higher, she lifted herself to her toes, posing there absolutely unconscious of herself.  Jack saw her face grow pale; saw her eyes darken and glow with inner excitement.  She was once more the goddess on the mountain top, gazing down at one of the wonders she had wrought.  It was as though she pulled that black column up and up and up with the tensity of her desire.

The column mushroomed suddenly, rolling out in great, puffy billows before it dipped and went streaming away on the wind.  The mountain beneath it spewed sluggish masses of vapor and ashes up into the black moil above, until the whole mountain was obscured and only an angry, rolling cloud churning lumpishly there, told what was hidden beneath.