and unwieldy though it was, when
he spread it with the fur next to his blankets it was warm--especially
since he had bent the edges under his bed all around and let the hide
set that way.

Marion would have been astonished had she known how many hours out of
every twenty-four Jack spent under the strong-odored hide. Jack
himself was astonished, whenever he came out of his general apathy
long enough to wonder how he endured this brutish existence. But he
had to save wood, and he had to save food, and he had to kill time
somehow. So he crawled into his blankets long before dark, short as
the days were, and he stayed there long after daylight. That is why he
smoked so many cigarettes, and craved so much reading.

Lying there under the shelter of a rock shelf that jutted out from the
cave wall, he would watch the whirling snow sift down through the
opening in the cave's roof and pack deeper the drift upon that side.
Twice he had moved his pile of supplies, and once he had moved his
wood; and after that he did not much care whether they were buried or
not.

Lying there with only his face and one hand out from under the covers
so that he might smoke, Jack had time to do a great deal of thinking,
though he tried not to think, since thinking seemed so profitless. He
would watch the snow and listen to the wind whistling in the roof, and
try to let them fill his mind. Sometimes he wondered how any one save
an idiot could ever have contemplated passing a winter apart from his
kind, in a cave on a mountain-top. Holed up with the bears, he
reminded himself bitterly. And yet he had planned it eagerly with
Marion and had looked forward to it as an adventure--a lark with a few
picturesque hardships thrown in to give snap to the thing. Well, he
had the hardships, all right enough, and the snap, but he could not
see anything picturesque or adventurous about it.

He could have given it up, of course. His two legs would have carried
him down to the valley in a matter of three hours or so, even with the
snow hampering his progress. He could, for instance, leave his cave in
the afternoon of any day, and reach Marston in plenty of time for
either of the two evening trains. He could take the "up" train, whose
headlight tempted him every evening when he went out to watch for it
wistfully, and land in Salt Lake the next night; or he could take the
"down" train a little later, and be in San Francisco the next morning.
Then, it would be stran