e world--this immediate, sunlit
world.

The unconcealed joy on the face of the lookout when they arrived did
not mean anything at all to him. He stood taking great breaths of the
light, heady air that seemed to lift him above everything he had ever
known and to place him a close neighbor of the clouds.

"This is great!" he said over and over, baring his head to the keen
breeze that blew straight out of the violet tinted distance. "Believe
me, fellows, this is simply _great!_"

Whereupon the fireman who had spent two weeks there looked at him and
grinned.

"You can have it," he said with a queer inflection. "Mount Lassen's
blowing off steam again. Look at her over there! She's sure on the
peck, last day or so--you can have her for company. I donate her along
with the sun-parlor and the oil stove and the telescope and the view.
And I wish you all kinds of luck. How soon you going back, Hank? I
guess I better be showing this fellow how to use the chart; maybe
you'd like something to eat. I'm all packed and ready to hit the
trail, myself."

In the center of the little square room, mounted on a high table, was
a detail map of all the country within sight of the station--and that
meant a good many miles of up and down scenery. Over it a slender
pointer was fitted to a pin, in the center of the map, that let it
move like a compass. And so cunningly was the chart drawn and placed
upon the table that wherever one sighted along the pointer--as when
pointing at a distant smudge of smoke in the valley or on the
mountainside--there on the chart was the number by which that
particular spot was designated.

"Now, you see, suppose there's a fire starts at Massack--or along in
there," Ed, the lookout fireman, explained, pointing to a distant
wrinkle in the bluish green distance, "you swing this pointer till
it's drawing a bead on the smoke, and then you phone in the number of
the section it picks up on the chart. The lookout on Claremont, he'll
draw a bead on it too, and phone in _his_ number--see? And where them
two numbers intersect on the chart, there's your fire, boy."

Jack studied the chart like a boy investigating a new mechanical toy.
He was so interested that he forgot himself and pushed his hair
straight back off his forehead with the gesture that had become an
unconscious mannerism, spoiling utterly the plastered effect which he
had with so much pains given to his hair. But Hank and the fireman
were neither suspicio