“That’s all right then.  It’s best to understand each other.  Now, if I were you, I’d have things brought up here, a little at a time, that you’ll need for your secret camp.  Groceries, you know, and things.  You can make a place to keep them in till you get your vacation—­and listen!  When I go to town I can buy you things that would look queer if you sent for them.  Towels and napkins and—­”

Jack gave a whoop at that, though his ignorance of primitive living did not fall far short of hers.  But in the main, he took her advice with praiseworthy gratitude.  He had never expected to enjoy being an outlaw.  But under the influence of her enthusiasm and his own youthfulness, he began to take a certain interest in the details of her scheme—­to plan with her as though it was going to be merely a camping out for pleasure.  That, of course, was the boy in him rising to the bait of a secret cave in the mountains, and exchanging heliograph signals with the heroine of the adventure, and lying upon a ledge before his cave watching for enemies.  There would be the bears, too, that Hank Brown had said would be ambling up there to their winter quarters.  And there would be the scream of the mountain lions—­Jack had more than once heard them at night down in the forest below him, and had thrilled to the sound.  He would stalk the shy deer and carry meat to his cave and broil the flesh over his tiny campfire—­don’t tell me that the boy in any normal young man would not rise enthusiastically to that bait!

But there were other times, when Marion was not there; when Jack was alone with the stars and the dark bulk of the wooded slopes beneath him; times when the adventure paled and grew bleak before his soul, so that he shrank from it appalled.  Times when he could not shut out the picture of the proud, stately Mrs. Singleton Corey, hiding humiliated and broken of spirit in a sanatorium, shamed before the world because he was her son.  Not all the secret caves the mountains held could dull the pain of that thought when it assailed him in the dark stillness of the peak.

For Jack was her true offspring in pride, if no more.  He had been a sensitive youngster who had resented passionately his mother’s slights upon his vague memory of the dad who had given him his adventurous spirit and his rebellion against the restraints of mere convention, which was his mother’s dearest god.  Unknown to Mrs. Singleton Corey, he had ardently espoused the cause of his wandering dad, and had withdrawn his love from the arrogant lady-mother, who never once spoke affectionately of the man Jack loved.  He had taken what money she gave him.  It was his dad’s money, for his dad had suffered hardship to wrest it from the earth, in the mines that kept Mrs. Singleton Corey in soft, perfumed luxury.  His dad would have wanted Jack to have it, so Jack took all she would give him and did not feel particularly grateful to her because she was fairly generous in giving.