"IT'S A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY," SANG JACK


Riding at a steady, climbing walk up a winding road cut into the
wooded mountainside; with a pack-horse loaded with food and new, cheap
bedding which Jack had bought; with chipmunks scurrying over the tree
trunks that had gone crashing down in some storm and were gathering
moss on their rotting bark; with the clear, yellow sunlight of a
mountain day in spring lying soft on the upper branches, Jack had a
queer sense of riding up into a new, untroubled life that could hold
no shred of that from which he had fled. His mother, stately in her
silks and a serenely unapproachable manner, which seemed always to say
to her son that she was preoccupied with her own affairs, and that her
affairs were vastly more important than his youthful interests and
problems, swam vaguely before his consciousness, veiled by the swift
passing of events and the abrupt change from city to unspoiled
wilderness.

When his companion stopped to let the horses "get their wind," Jack
would turn in the saddle and look back over the network of gulches
and deep canyons to where the valley peeped up at him shyly through
the trees, and would think that every step made him that much safer.
He did not face calmly the terror from which he had fled. Still
mentally breathless from the very unexpectedness of the catastrophe,
he shrank from the thought of it as if thinking would betray him. He
had not so far concerned himself with his future, except as it held
the possibility of discovery. So he quizzed his companion and got him
talking about the mountains over which he was to play guardian angel.

He heard a good deal about hunting and fishing; and when they climbed