d looked back. A man was coming behind him
down the pathway which served as a pavement. He thought it was the
tall man who had been reading about him in the paper, and again panic
seized him--only now he had but his two feet to carry him away into
safety, instead of his mother's big new car. He glanced at the houses
like a harried animal seeking desperately for some hole to crawl into,
and he saw that the little, square cottage that he had judged to be a
dwelling, was in reality a United States Forest Service headquarters.
He had only the haziest idea of what that meant, but at least it was a
public office, and it had a door which he could close between himself
and the man that followed.

He hurried up the walk laid across the neat little grass plot, sent a
humbly grateful glance up to the stars-and-stripes that fluttered
lazily from the short flagstaff, and went in as though he had business
there, and as though that business was urgent.

A couple of young fellows at wide, document-littered desks looked up
at him with a mild curiosity, said good morning and waited with an air
of expectancy for him to state his errand. Under pretense of throwing
his cigarette outside, Jack turned and opened the door six inches or
so. The man who had followed him was going past, and he did not look
toward the house. He was busy reading a newspaper while he walked, but
he was not the tall man with the shrewd blue eyes and the knowing
little smile; which was some comfort to Jack. He closed the door and
turned again toward the two; and because he knew he must furnish some
plausible reason for his presence, he said the first thing that came
to his tongue--the thing that is always permissible and always
plausible.

"Fellow told me I might get a job here. How about it?" Then he smiled
good-naturedly and with a secret admiration for his perfect aplomb in
rising to the emergency.

"You'll have to ask Supervisor Ross about that," said one. "He's in
there." He turned his thumb toward the rear room, the door of which
stood wide open, and bent again over the map he had been studying. So
far as these two were concerned, Jack had evidently ceased to exist.
He went, therefore, to the room where the supervisor was at work
filling in a blank of some kind; and because his impromptu speech had
seemed to fill perfectly his requirements, he repeated it to Ross in
exactly the same tone of careless good nature, except that this time
he really meant part of