Jack grinned with a sour kind of amusement at her tone, but his reply was an oblique answer to her question.
"Remember that nice air-hole in the top where the wind whistled in and made a kind of tune? You ought to spend a night up there now listening to it."
Marion threw a piece of bark spitefully at a stump beyond the snow mound. "But you have a fire," she said argumentatively. "And you have all kinds of reading, and plenty to eat."
"Am I kicking?"
"Well, you sound as if you'd like to. You simply don't know how lucky you are. You ought to be shut up in that little cabin with Kate and the professor."
"Lead me to 'em," Jack suggested with suspicious cheerfulness.
"Don't be silly. Are there lots of bears up there, Jack?"
"Maybe, but I haven't happened to see any, except two or three that ran into the brush soon as they got a whiff of me. And this one I hunted out of a hole under a big tree root. It's a lie about them wintering in caves. They'd freeze to death."
"You—you aren't really uncomfortable, are you, Jack?"
"Oh, no." Jack gave the "no" what Kate would have called a sliding inflection deeply surcharged with irony.