perfectly gorgeous, with all
that sunset and everything! It looks like a Bliffen ten-reel picture.
He ought to see it--he could get some great pointers for his next big
picture. Wouldn't that be just dandy on the screen?" She had found her
powder puff and her tiny mirror, and she was dabbing at her nose and
her cheeks, which no more needed powder than did the little birds that
chirped around her. Between dabs, she was looking down the mountain,
with an occasional wave of her puff toward some particularly
"striking effect" of fire and sunset and rolling smoke and tall pines
seen dimly in the background.

Jack wanted to climb up there and shake her out of her frivolity.
Which was strange when you consider that all his life, until three
months ago, he had lived in the midst of just such unthinking
flippancy, had been a part of it and had considered--as much as he
ever considered anything--that it was the only life worth living.

He went around the little rock pinnacle and stood looking somberly
down at the devastation that was being wrought, with no greater
beginning, probably, than a dropped match or cigarette stub. He was
thinking hazily that so his old life had been swept away in the
devastating effect of a passing whim, a foolish bit of play. The girl
irritated him with her chatter--yet three months ago he himself would
have considered it brilliant conversation, and would have exerted
himself to keep pace with her.

"Listen!" she cried suddenly, and Jack turned his head quickly before
he remembered that the word had come to mean nothing more than a
superfluous ejaculation hung, like a bangle on a bracelet, to the
sentences of modern youth. "Listen, it's going to be dark before that
fire burns itself out of the way. How am I going to get home? Which
way would be best to go around it, do you think?"

"No way at all," Jack replied shortly. "You can't go home."

"Why, forevermore! I'll have to go somewhere else, then--to some farm
house where I can phone. Kate would be simply wild if--"

"Forget the farm house stuff. There aren't any such trimmings to these
mountains. The next farm house is down around Keddie, somewhere.
Through the woods, and mountain all the way." He said it rather
crossly, for his nerves were what he called edgy, and the girl still
irritated him.

"Well, what do you know about that?"

He had known she would say that. Cross between a peacock and a parrot,
she must be, he thought vindictively. I