rms, if you please.

The next day was cold and windy, but Marion hurried the housework in a
way that made Kate sniff disgustedly, and started out to signal Jack
and bring him down to their last meeting place. Flash after flash she
sent that way, until the sun went altogether behind the clouds and she
could signal no more. Not a glimmer of an answering twinkle could she
win from the peak. The most she did was to stimulate old Mike to the
point of mumbling wild harangues to the uneasy pines, the gist of
which was that folks better look out how they went spyin' around after
_him_, an' makin' signs back and forth with glasses. They better look
out, because he had good eyes, if Murphy didn't have, and they
couldn't run over _him_ and tromp on him.

He was still gesticulating like a bear fighting yellow-jackets when
Marion walked past him, going up the trail. She looked at him and
smiled as she went by, partly because he looked funny, waving his arms
over his head like that, and partly by way of greeting. She never
talked to Mike, because she could not understand anything he said. She
did not consider him at all bright, so she did not pay much attention
to him at any time; certainly not now, when her mind was divided
between her emotions concerning Jack and her fresh quarrel with Kate.

Mike struck his axe into a log and followed her, keeping in the brush
just outside the trail. His lips moved ceaselessly under his ragged,
sandy mustache. Because Marion had smiled when she looked at him, he
called her, among other things, a she-devil. He thought she had
laughed at him because she was nearly ready to have him hanged. Marion
did not look back. She was quite certain today that Kate would not
follow her, and the professor was fagged from yesterday's tramp
through the snow. She hurried, fully expecting that Jack had gone down
early to the meeting place and was waiting for her there.

Mike had no trouble in keeping close to her, for the wind blew
strongly against her face and the pines creaked and mourned overhead,
and had he called to her she would scarcely have heard him. She left
the road at the top of the hill and went across to the gully where
Kate had sprained her ankle. Today Marion did not trouble to choose
bare ground, so she went swiftly. At the top of the gully where Jack
had met her before, she stopped, her eyes inquiring of every thicket
near her. She was panting from the stiff climb, and her cheeks tingled
with th