," Jack summed up his world-hunger with a
shrug. "By the time I've wintered over there I'll be running round in
circles trying to catch my shadow. Plumb bugs, that's what I'll be;
and don't I know it!"

"You'll love it," Marion predicted with elaborate cheerfulness. "I
only wish I could change places with you. Think of me, shut up in a
dark little three-room cabin with one elocutionist, one chronic grouch
and one human bluebottle fly that does nothing but buzz! You're a
lucky kid to have a whole mountain all to yourself. Think of me!"

"Oh, I'll think of you, all right!" Jack returned glumly and turned
back to the denuded little station. "I'll think of you," he repeated
under his breath, feeling savagely for the top button of his thick
gray sweater. "Don't I know it!"

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MIKE GOES SPYING ON THE SPIES

Mike sat hunched forward on a box in front of the stove in the rough
little cabin where he and Murphy were facing together the winter in
Toll-Gate flat. For an hour he had stared at the broken cook stove
where a crack disclosed the blaze within. He chewed steadily and
abstractedly upon a lump of tar-weed, and now and then he unclasped
his hands and gave his left forefinger a jerk that made the knuckle
crack. Tar-weed and knuckle-cracking were two queer little habits much
affected by Mike. The weed he chewed in the belief that it not only
kept his physical body in perfect health, but purified his soul as
well; cracking the knuckles on his left forefinger cleared the muddle
of his mind when he wanted to go deep into a subject that baffled him.

Hunched forward on another box sat Murphy nursing his elbow with one
grimy palm and his pipe with the other. He would glance at Mike now
and then and with a sour grin lifting the scraggly ends of his
grizzled mustache. Murphy was resentfully contemptuous of Mike's long
silences, but he was even more contemptuous of Mike's gobbling
indistinct speech, so he let Mike alone and comforted himself with
grinning superciliously when Mike was silent, and sneering at him
openly when he spoke, and cursing his cooking when Mike cooked.

"That gurrl," Mike blurted abruptly while he cracked his knuckles,
"she'd better look out!"

"A-ah," retorted Murphy scornfully, "belike ye'd better tell her so
thin. Or belike ye better set yerself t' look out fer the gurrl--I
dunno."

"Oh, I'll look out fer her," Mike gobbled, nodding his head
mysteriously. "I bin lookin' out f