ossibilities 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 stin