“Well, what do you know about that!” Marion murmured several times during the recital.  And Jack found the phrase soothing whenever she uttered it, and plunged straightway into further revelations of his ebullient past.

“I suppose,” he ventured, when he could think of nothing more to tell and so came back to the starting point, “I ought to beat it outa here while the beating’s good.  I can’t go back—­on account of mother.  I could hotfoot it up to Canada, maybe....”

“Don’t you do it!” Marion wound the string of her vanity bag so tightly round and round her index finger that her pink, polished nail turned purple.  She next unwound the string and rubbed the nail solicitously.  “Just because we’re down there at Toll-Gate doesn’t mean you aren’t safe up here.  Why, you’re safer, really.  Because if any one got track of you, we’d hear of it right away—­Kate and I walk to town once in a while, and there’s hardly a day passes that we don’t see somebody to talk to.  Everybody talks when they meet you, in this country, whether they know you or not.  And I could come up right away and tell you.  Having a bandit treed up here on top would make such a hit that they’d all be talking about it.  It certainly would be keen to listen to them and know more about it than any of them.”

“Oh, would it!  I’m glad it strikes you that way—­it don’t me.”  What a fool a fellow was when he went spilling his troubles into a girl’s ears!  He got up and walked glumly down to the niche in the rocks where he hid from tourists, and stood there with his hands in his pockets, glowering down at the fierce, ember-threaded waves of flame that surged through the forest.  Dusk only made the fire more terrible to him.  Had this new trouble not launched itself at him, he would be filled with a sick horror of the destruction, but as it was he only stared at it dully, not caring much about it one way or the other.

Well, he asked himself, what kind of a fool would he make of himself next?  Unloading his secret and his heartache to a girl that only thought it would be “keen” to have a bandit treed up here at the lookout station!  Why couldn’t he have kept his troubles to himself?  He’d be hollering it into the phone, next thing he knew.  They’d care, down there in the office, as much as she did, anyway.  And the secret would probably be safer with them than it would be with her.

He had a mental picture of her hurrying to tell Fred:  “What do you know about it?  Jack Corey, the bandit, is treed up at the lookout station!  He told me all the inside dope—­” The thought of her animated chatter to Fred on the subject of his one real tragedy, made him clench his hands.

The very presence of her brought it back too vividly, though that had not struck him at first, when his hunger for human sympathy had been his keenest emotion.  What a fool he had been, to think that she would care!  What a fool he had been to think that these mountains would shelter him; to think that he could forget, and be forgotten.  And Hen had told them that Jack Corey did it!  That was about what Hen would do—­sneak out of it.  And the man wasn’t dead yet; not recovered either, for that matter.  There was still the chance that he might die.