e it is,
then quitting cold. We can't undertake to furnish you with amusement,
and we are too busy to spend the day gossiping with you over the phone
just to help you pass the time." He snapped his mouth together as
though he meant every word of it and a great deal more. "Do you want
the job?" he asked grimly.

Jack heard a chuckle from the next room, and his own lips came
together with a snap.

"Lead me to it," he said cheerfully. "I'd stand on my head and point
the wind with my legs for seventy dollars a month! Sounds to me like a
good place to save money--what?"

"Don't know how you'd go about spending much as long as you stayed up
there," Ross retorted drily. "It's when a man comes down that his
wages begin to melt."

Jack considered this point, standing with his feet planted a little
apart and his hands in his pockets, which is the accepted pose of the
care-free scion of wealth who is about to distinguish himself. He
believed that he knew best how to ward off suspicion of his motives in
thus exiling himself to a mountain top. He therefore grinned amiably
at Ross.

"Well, then, I won't come down," he stated calmly. "What I'm looking
for is a chance to make some money without any chance of spending it.
Lead me to this said mountain with the seventy-dollar job holding down
the peak."

Ross looked at him dubiously as though he detected a false note
somewhere. Good looking young fellows with the tangible air of the
towns and easy living did not, as a rule, take kindly to living alone
on some mountain peak. He stared up into Jack's face unwinkingly,
seeking there the real purpose behind such easy acceptance.

Jack stared back, his eyes widening and sobering a little as he
discovered that this man was not so easily put off with laughing
evasion. He wondered if Ross had read the papers that morning, and if
he, like the tall man at the postoffice, was mentally fitting him into
the description of the auto bandit that was being trailed.
Instinctively he rose to the new emergency.

"On the level, I want work and I want it right away," he said. "Being
alone won't bother me--I always get along pretty well with myself. I
want to get ahead of the game about five hundred dollars, and this
looks to me like a good chance to pile up a few iron men. I'm game for
the lonesomeness. It's a cold dollars-and-cents proposition with me."
He stopped and eyed the other a minute. "Does that answer what's in
your mind?" he asked blunt