other day. I was going to
bring you down a chunk. It isn't half bad; change from deer meat and
rabbits and grouse, anyway."

Marion shook her head. "There it is again. I couldn't take it home
without lying about where I got it. And Kate would catch me up on
it--she takes a perfectly fiendish delight in cornering me in a lie,
lately." She brightened a little. "I'll tell you, Jack. We'll go up to
the cave and cook some there. Kate can't," she told him grimly, "tell
what I've been eating, thank goodness, once it's swallowed!"

"It's too hard hiking up there through the snow," Jack hastily
objected. "Better not tackle it. Tell you what I can do though. I'll
whittle off a couple of steaks and bring them down tomorrow, and we'll
hunt a safe place to cook them. Have a barbecue," he grinned somberly.

"Oh, all right--if I can give Kate the slip. Did you skin him?"
reverting with some animation to the slaying of the bear. "It must
have been keen."

"It was keen--till I got the hide off the bear and onto my bed."

"You don't sound as if it was a bit thrilling." She looked at him
dubiously. "How did it happen? You act as if you had killed a
chipmunk, and I want to be excited! Did the bear come at you?"

"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 un