The Lookout Man

by B. M. Bower

Jack did not dare look again, lest he betray to the shrewd eyes behind the glasses a guilty interest in the article. He took his cigarette from his mouth and moistened his lips, and tried to hide the trembling of his fingers by flicking off the ash. As soon as he dared he walked on down the street, and straightway found that he was walking himself out of town altogether. He turned his head and looked back, saw the tall man glancing after him, and went on briskly, with some effort holding himself back from running like a fool. He felt that he had blundered in coming down this way, where there was nothing but a blacksmith shop and a few small cottages set in trim lawns. The tall man would know that he had no business down here, and he would wonder who he was and what he was after. And once that tall man began to wonder....

"Auto Bandits Trailed!" seemed to Jack to be painted on his back. That headline must mean him, because he did not believe that any of the others would think to get out of town before daylight as he had done. Probably that article had Jack's description in it.

He no longer felt that he had lost himself; instead, he felt trapped by the very mountains that five minutes ago had seemed so like a sheltering wall between him and his world. He wanted to get into the deepest forest that clothed their sides; he wanted to hide in some remote canyon.

He turned his head again and 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 it; because, when he came to think of it, he really did want a job of some sort, and the very atmosphere of quiet, unhurried efficiency that pervaded the place made him wish that he might become a part of it.

It was a vagrant wish that might have died as quickly as it had been born; an impulse that had no root in any previous consideration of the matter. But Ross leaned back in his chair and was regarding him seriously, as a possible employee of the government, and Jack instinctively squared his shoulders to meet the look.

Followed a few questions, which Jack answered as truthfully as he dared. Ross looked him over again and asked him how he would like to be a fireman. Whereat Jack looked bewildered.