“Nothing like that.  I came at the bear.  I just hunted around till I found a bear that had gone byelow, and I killed him and borrowed his hide.  It was a mean trick on him—­but I was cold.”

“Oh, with all those blankets?”

Jack grinned with a sour kind of amusement at her tone, but his reply was an oblique answer to her question.

“Remember that nice air-hole in the top where the wind whistled in and made a kind of tune?  You ought to spend a night up there now listening to it.”

Marion threw a piece of bark spitefully at a stump beyond the snow mound.  “But you have a fire,” she said argumentatively.  “And you have all kinds of reading, and plenty to eat.”

“Am I kicking?”

“Well, you sound as if you’d like to.  You simply don’t know how lucky you are.  You ought to be shut up in that little cabin with Kate and the professor.”

“Lead me to ’em,” Jack suggested with suspicious cheerfulness.

“Don’t be silly.  Are there lots of bears up there, Jack?”

“Maybe, but I haven’t happened to see any, except two or three that ran into the brush soon as they got a whiff of me.  And this one I hunted out of a hole under a big tree root.  It’s a lie about them wintering in caves.  They’d freeze to death.”

“You—­you aren’t really uncomfortable, are you, Jack?”

“Oh, no.”  Jack gave the “no” what Kate would have called a sliding inflection deeply surcharged with irony.

“Well, but why don’t you keep the fire going?  The smoke doesn’t show at all, scarcely.  And if you’re going to tramp all over the mountains and let everybody see you, it doesn’t matter a bit.”

Jack lit his third cigarette.  “What’s going on in the world, anyway?  Any news from—­down South?”

“Well, the papers don’t say much.  There’s been an awful storm that simply ruined the beaches, they say.  Fred has gone down—­something about your case, I think.  And then he wanted to see the men who are in on this timber scheme.  They aren’t coming through with the assessment money the way they promised, and Fred and Doug and Kate had to dig up more than their share to pay for the work.  I didn’t because I didn’t have anything to give—­and Kate has been hinting things about that, too.”

“I wish you’d take—­”

“Now, don’t you dare finish that sentence!  When I came up here with them they agreed to do my assessment work and take it out of the money we get when we sell, and they’re to get interest on all of it.  Kate proposed it herself, because she wanted me up here with her.  Let them keep the agreement.  Fred isn’t complaining—­Fred’s just dandy about everything.  It’s only—­”

“Well, I guess I’ll be getting back.  It’s a tough climb up to my hangout.”  Jack’s interest in the conversation waned abruptly with the mention of Fred.  “Can’t you signal about ten o’clock tomorrow, if you’re coming out?  Then I’ll bring down some bear meat.”