"Why? He'll never climb up here—and if he did he wouldn't know you. He couldn't recognize your face by the number of your car, you know!" Then she added, with beautiful directness, "It wouldn't be so bad, if you hadn't been the ringleader and put the other boys up to robbing cars. But I suppose—"
Jack got up again, but this time he towered belligerently above her. "Who says I was the ringleader? If it was Fred I'll go down there and push his face into the back of his neck for him! Who—"
"Oh, just those nice friends of yours. They wouldn't own up to anything except being with you, but told everybody that it was you that did it. But honestly I didn't believe that. Hardly any of us girls at the Martha did. But Fred—"
Just then the telephone rang again, and Jack had to go in and report the present extent of the fire, and tell just where and just how fast it was spreading, and what was the direction of the wind. The interruption steadied him, gave him time to think.
Since the girl knew him, and knew the circumstances of his flight, and since the boys had turned on him, Jack argued with himself that he might just as well tell her what little there was to tell. There was nothing to be gained by trying to keep the thing a secret from her. Besides, he craved sympathy, though he did not admit it. He craved the privilege of talking about that night to some one who would understand, and who could be trusted. Marion Rose, he felt, was the only person in the world he could tell. He could talk to her—Lord, what a relief that would be! He could tell her all about it, and she would understand. Her sympathy at that moment seemed the most precious thing in the world.
So he went outside and sat down again on the bench, and told her the exact truth about that night; how it had started in drunken foolery, and all the rest of it. He even explained the exact route he had taken home so as to come into town apparently from Pasadena.
"Well, what do you know about that!" Marion murmured several times during the recital. And Jack found the phrase soothing whenever she uttered it, and plunged straightway into further revelations of his ebullient past.
"I suppose," he ventured, when he could think of nothing more to tell and so came back to the starting point, "I ought to beat it outa here while the beating's good. I can't go back—on account of mother. I could hotfoot it up to Canada, maybe...."
"Don't you do it!" Marion wound the string of her vanity bag so tightly round and round her index finger that her pink, polished nail turned purple. She next unwound the string and rubbed the nail solicitously. "Just because we're down there at Toll-Gate doesn't mean you aren't safe up here. Why, you're safer, really. Because if any one got track of you, we'd hear of it right away—Kate and I walk to town once in a while, and there's hardly a day passes that we don't see somebody to talk to. Everybody talks when they meet you, in this country, whether they know you or not. And I could come up right away and tell you. Having a bandit treed up here on top would make such a hit that they'd all be talking about it. It certainly would be keen to listen to them and know more about it than any of them."
"Oh, would it! I'm glad it strikes you that way—it don't me." What a fool a fellow was when he went spilling his troubles into a girl's ears! He got up and walked glumly down to the niche in the rocks where he hid from tourists, and stood there with his hands in his pockets, glowering down at the fierce, ember-threaded waves of flame that surged through the forest. Dusk only made the fire more terrible to him. Had this new trouble not launched itself at him, he would be filled with a sick horror of the destruction, but as it was he only stared at it dully, not caring much about it one way or the other.