Marion thought that snow on the mountain would be “keen,” and suggested that Jack try a pair of her shoes, and see if he couldn’t manage to wear them whenever there was snow.  His feet were very small for a man’s, and hers were—­well, not tiny for a woman, and she would spend so much time hiking around over the hills that a person would think, of course, she had made the tracks.  Being an impulsive young woman who believed in doing things on the spot, she thereupon retired behind a corner of rock, and presently threw one of her high-lace boots out to Jack.  It crumpled his toes, but Jack thought he could wear it if he had to.  So that point was settled satisfactorily, and they went on planning impossibilities with a naive enthusiasm that would have horrified Murphy.

Any man could have told Jack things to dampen his enthusiasm for wintering on the top of King Solomon.  But Jack, for perfectly obvious reasons, was not asking any man for information or advice upon that subject.  Hank Brown would have rambled along the trail of many words and eventually have told Jack some things that he ought to know—­only Hank Brown came no more to Mount Hough lookout station.  A stranger brought Jack’s weekly pack-load of supplies; a laconic type of man who held his mind and his tongue strictly to the business at hand.  The other men who came there were tourists, and with them Jack would not talk at all if he could help it.

So he went blandly on with his camp building, four precious days out of every month.  He chopped dead manzanita bush and carried it on his back to his hide-out, and was tickled with the pile he managed to store away in one end of the cave.  Working in warm weather, it seemed to be a great deal of wood.

From the lookout station he watched the slow building of the storm that so worried Murphy because of the Toll-Gate people.  He watched the circled sweep of the clouds rushing from mountain ridge to mountain ridge.  Straight off Claremont they came, and tangled themselves in the treetops of the higher slopes.  The wind howled over the mountain so fiercely that he could scarcely force his way against it to the spring for water.  And when he filled his bucket the wind sloshed half of it out before he could reach the puny shelter of his station.  If he had ever wondered why that station was banked solid to the window-sills with rocks, he wondered no more when he felt that gale pushing and tugging at it and shrieking as if it were enraged because it could not pick the station up bodily and fling it down into the lake below.

“Gee!  I’m glad I’ve got a cave the wind can’t monkey with, to winter in,” he congratulated himself fatuously once, when the little boxlike building shook in the blast.

That night the wind slept, and the mountain lay hushed after the tumult.  But the clouds hung heavy and gray at dark, and in the morning they had not drifted on.  It was as though the mountain tops had corralled all the clouds in the country and held them penned like sheep over the valleys.  With the gray sunrise came the wind again, and howled and trumpeted and bullied the harassed forests until dark.  And then, with dark came the stinging slap of rain upon the windows, and pressed Jack’s loneliness deep into the soul of him.