But now the very pride that he had inherited from her turned upon him the savage weapons of memory.  He had swift visions of his mother mounting the steps of some mansion, going graciously to make a fashionable ten-minute call upon some friend, while Jack played chauffeur for the occasion.  She couldn’t go calling now on the Westlake millionaires’ wives, taunted memory.  Neither could she preside at the club teas; nor invite forty or fifty twittery women into her big double parlors and queen it over them as Jack had so often seen her do.  She could not do any of the things that had made up her life, and Jack was the reason why she could not do them.

He tried to shut out the picture of his mother, and there were times when for a few hours he succeeded.  Those were the hours he spent with Marion or in watching for her to come, or in perfecting the details of the plan she had helped him to form.  By the time he had his next four days of freedom, he had also a good-sized cache of food ready to carry to Grizzly Peak where his makeshift camping outfit was hidden.  Marion had told him that when the fire-season was over and the lookout station closed for the winter, which would be when the first snow had come to stay, he ought to be ready to disappear altogether from the ken of the Forest Service and all of the rest of Quincy.

“You can say you’re going prospecting,” she planned, “and then beat it to your cave and make it snug for the winter.  Anything you must buy after that, you can tell me about it, and I’ll manage to get it and leave it for you at our secret meeting place.  I don’t know how I’ll manage about Kate, but I’ll manage somehow—­and that’ll be fun, too.  Kate will be perfectly wild if she sees me doing mysterious things—­but she won’t find out what it’s all about, and I’ll have more fun!  I do love to badger her, poor thing.  She’s a dear, really, you know.  But she wants to know everything a person does and says and thinks; and she hasn’t any more imagination than a white rabbit, and so she wouldn’t understand if you told her every little thing.

“So I’ll have the time of my life doing it, but I’ll get things just the same, and leave them for you.  And I’ll bring you reading—­oh, have you put down candles, Jack?  You’ll need a lot of them, so you can read evenings.”

“What’s the matter with pine knots?” Jack inquired.  “Daniel Boone was great on pine-knot torches, if I remember right.  One thing I wish you would do, Marion.  I’ll give you the money to send for about a million Araby cigarettes.  I’ll write down the address—­where I always bought them.  Think you could get by with it?

“You just watch me.  Say, I do think this is going to be the best kind of a winter!  I wouldn’t miss being up here for anything.”

Jack looked at her doubtfully, but he finally nodded his head in assent.  “It could be worse,” he qualified optimistically.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN