Jerusalem station is more serene in its isolation than the other five lookouts on the mountains of the north country. It has no telephone. Lane allowed to his lonely self that he got more news than he really wanted, anyhow. And most of the news was of the sort that the humorous Attean lookout, or the equally humorous Squaw Mountain man, considered likely to tease the cranky solitary on the highest and farthest outpost of the chain of lookouts. They whiled away their solitude by gossipy chattings over the wire. Lane confined himself to terse winkings that would have been gruff were it possible for a heliograph to be gruff. He seemed to take a certain grim pride in the fact that he was a thousand feet higher than any of them and commanded three hundred thousand acres. Sitting now in the glare of the September sunshine on the flat roof of his cabin, he gravely and stolidly scrawled down the words of the verse as the Attean heliograph, blinking and glaring, spoke to him in the Morse code. "Huh!" he grunted, and went on writing with stubby pencil his interrupted day's entry in his official diary. For the twenty-fifth time he wrote: "Clear, bright, and still dry." He screwed his eyelids close to peer into the heavens bending over him, hard as the bottom of a brass kettle. He took off his hat and held it edgewise at his forehead while his gaze swept the mighty range of his vision. An imaginative person might have smiled at the likeness between his brown and bald poll, thrust above the straggle of hair, and the bare and bald poll of old Jerusalem, rounding above the straggle of growth on its lower slopes. Some one bawled at him from the ground below. Lane did not start, though that was the first human voice he had heard in two months. The young man who stood there, and who had come across the gray ledges from the edge of the timber growth, carried an arm in a sling. "Do you ever look at anybody if they're nearer than ten miles away?" inquired the visitor, with the teasing irony that it seemed popular in the Umcolcus region to employ with "Ladder" Lane. When the old man stood up the fitness of his sobriquet was apparent. He unfolded himself, joint by joint, like a carpenter's rule, and stood gaunt as a bean pole and well towards seven feet in height.