“All right.  I’ll cut out the smoking and go plumb crazy.”  To prove his absolute sincerity, he tore open the package, extracted a cigarette and began to smoke it with a gloomy relish.  “Didn’t bring anything to read, I suppose?” he queried after a minute which Marion spent in getting her breath and in gazing drearily out over the wintry mountainside.

“No, Kate was watching me, and I couldn’t.  I pretended at first that I was lending magazines and papers to Murphy and Mike, but she has found out that Murphy’s eyes are too bad, and Mike, the ignorant old lunatic, can’t read or write.  I haven’t squared that with her yet.  I’ve been thinking that I’d invent a ranch or something to visit.  Murphy says there’s one on Taylor Creek, but the people have gone down below for the winter; and it’s close enough so Kate could walk over and find out for herself.”

She began to pull bits of bark off the tree trunk and throw them aimlessly at a snow-mounded rock.  “It’s fierce, living in a little pen of a place like that, where you can’t make a move without somebody wanting to know why,” she burst out savagely.  “I can’t write a letter or read a book or put an extra pin in my hat, but Kate knows all about it.  She thinks I’m an awful liar.  And I’m beginning to actually hate her.  And she was the very best friend I had in the world when we came up here.  Five thousand dollars’ worth of timber can’t pay for what we’re going through, down there!”

“You cut it out,” said Jack, reaching for another cigarette.  “My part of it, I mean.  It’s that that’s raising the deuce with you two, so you just cut me out of it.  I’ll make out all right.”  As an afterthought he added indifferently, “I killed a bear the other day.  I was going to bring you down a chunk.  It isn’t half bad; change from deer meat and rabbits and grouse, anyway.”

Marion shook her head.  “There it is again.  I couldn’t take it home without lying about where I got it.  And Kate would catch me up on it—­she takes a perfectly fiendish delight in cornering me in a lie, lately.”  She brightened a little.  “I’ll tell you, Jack.  We’ll go up to the cave and cook some there.  Kate can’t,” she told him grimly, “tell what I’ve been eating, thank goodness, once it’s swallowed!”

“It’s too hard hiking up there through the snow,” Jack hastily objected.  “Better not tackle it.  Tell you what I can do though.  I’ll whittle off a couple of steaks and bring them down tomorrow, and we’ll hunt a safe place to cook them.  Have a barbecue,” he grinned somberly.

“Oh, all right—­if I can give Kate the slip.  Did you skin him?” reverting with some animation to the slaying of the bear.  “It must have been keen.”

“It was keen—­till I got the hide off the bear and onto my bed.”

“You don’t sound as if it was a bit thrilling.”  She looked at him dubiously.  “How did it happen?  You act as if you had killed a chipmunk, and I want to be excited!  Did the bear come at you?”