Mike struck his axe into a log and followed her, keeping in the brush just outside the trail.  His lips moved ceaselessly under his ragged, sandy mustache.  Because Marion had smiled when she looked at him, he called her, among other things, a she-devil.  He thought she had laughed at him because she was nearly ready to have him hanged.  Marion did not look back.  She was quite certain today that Kate would not follow her, and the professor was fagged from yesterday’s tramp through the snow.  She hurried, fully expecting that Jack had gone down early to the meeting place and was waiting for her there.

Mike had no trouble in keeping close to her, for the wind blew strongly against her face and the pines creaked and mourned overhead, and had he called to her she would scarcely have heard him.  She left the road at the top of the hill and went across to the gully where Kate had sprained her ankle.  Today Marion did not trouble to choose bare ground, so she went swiftly.  At the top of the gully where Jack had met her before, she stopped, her eyes inquiring of every thicket near her.  She was panting from the stiff climb, and her cheeks tingled with the cold.  But presently she “who-whoed” cautiously, and a figure stepped out from behind a cedar and came toward her.

“Oh, there you—­oh!” she cried, and stopped short.  It was not Jack Corey at all, but Hank Brown, grinning at her while he shifted his rifle from the right hand to the left.

“Guess you thought I was somebody else,” he drawled, coming up to her and putting out his hand.  “Pretty cold, ain’t it?  Yuh travelin’ or just goin’ somewheres?” He grinned again over the ancient witticism.

“Oh, I—­I was just out for a walk,” Marion laughed uneasily.  “Where are you going, Mr. Brown?”

“Me, I’m travelin’ fer my health.  Guess you aim t’ git walkin’ enough, comin’ away over here, this kind of a day.”

“Why, I hike all over these mountains.  It gets lonesome.  I just walk and walk everywhere.”

Grinning, Hank glanced down at her feet.  “Yes, I’ve seen lots of tracks up around this way, and up towards Taylor Kock.  But I never thought they were made by feet as little as what yours are.”

“Why, forevermore!  I suppose I ought to thank you for that.  I make pretty healthy looking tracks, let me tell you.  And I don’t claim all the tracks, because so many hunters come up here.”

Hank looked at her from under his slant eyebrows.  “Guess they’s some that ain’t crazy about huntin’ too,” he observed shrewdly.  “Feller that had the lookout last summer, guess he hangs out somewhere around here, don’t he?  Must, or you wouldn’t be calling him.  Got a claim, maybe.”

“Why do you think so?  I go all over these hills, and I—­”

“I was kinder wonderin’,” said Hank.  “I guess you must know ’im purty well.  I just happened to notice how clost them two sets of tracks are, over by that big tree.  Like as if somebody with kinda little feet had stood around talking to a feller for quite a spell.  I kinda make a study of tracks, you see—­’cause I hunt a good deal.  Ever study tracks?”