"To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er, or rarely, been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean,--
This is not Solitude: 't is but to hold
Converse with nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd."
It was about the middle of the forenoon, on the day marked by the incidents
narrated in the preceding chapter, when Claud Elwood, who had become pretty
well initiated into the sports of the locality, entered his light canoe,
with his fishing-tackle and fowling-piece, and pushed out upon the broad
bosom of the forest-girt Umbagog. Having had the best success, when up on
the lake the last time, on the western margin, he pulled away in that
direction, and, after rowing a couple of miles up the lake, he laid down
his oar, unrolled his elm-bark cable, and let down his stone anchor, at a
station a furlong or so from the shore.
It was a beautiful spot, and a beautiful day to enjoy it in. From the
water's edge rose, deeply enshrouded in their bright green, flowing, and
furbelowed robes of thickly interwoven pines, the undulating hills, back to
the summit level of that long, narrow tongue of forest land, which, for
many miles, only separates the Umbagog from the parallel Magalloway, the
noble stream that here comes rushing down from the British highlands, to
join the scarcely larger Androscoggin, almost at the very outset of its
"varied journey to the deep." Turning from this magnificent swell on the
west, the eye, as it wandered to the right over the bright expanse of
intervening waters, next rested on the long, crescent-shaped mountain
ridge, behind which slept, in their still deeper and wilder seclusion, the
broad Mooseeluk-maguntic and the Molechunk-a-munk, which, with the Umbagog,
make up the three principal links in this remarkable chain of lakes. Still
farther to the right lay the seemingly boundless, rolling forests, forming
the eastern and southern rim of this basin of the lakes; whose gradually
sloping sides, like some old pinnacled city, were everywhere bristling with
the giant forms of the heaven-aspiring pine, and whose nearer recesses were
pierced, in the midst, by the long, lessening line of the gleaming Umbagog;
while around the whole circle of the horizon, scattered here and there far
back into the blue distance, rose mountain after mountain in misty grandeur
to the heavens.
After thus slowly sweeping the horizon, to note, for the tenth time,
perhaps, the impressive character of the scenery, whose everywhere
intermingling beauty and grandeur he was never tired of contemplating,
Claud withdrew his gaze, and turned his attention to, the more immediate
object of his excursion. After a few moments spent in regulating his hook
and line, he strung his angle-rod, and threw out to see whether he could
succeed in tempting, at that unfavorable hour, the fickle trout from their
watery recesses. But all in vain the attempt. Not a trout was seen stirring
the water at the surface, or manifesting his presence around the hook
beneath; and all the endeavors which the tantalized angler made, by
changing the bait, and throwing the line in different directions around
him, proved, for the next hour, equally fruitless. While he was thus
engaged, intently watching his line, each moment expecting that the next
must bring him a bite, one of those peculiar, subdued, but far-reaching
sounds, which are made by the grazing of the oar against the side of the
boat in rowing, occasionally greeted his ear from some point to the south
of him; though, for a while, nothing was to be seen to indicate by whom the
sounds were produced. Soon, however, a man in a canoe, who had been
coasting, unseen, along the indentures of the shore, and whom Claud
instantly recognized as Phillips, the hunter already named, shot round a
neighboring point, and, in a few minutes more, was at his side.
"Well, what luck?" cheerily exclaimed Phillips, a keen, hawk-eyed,
self-possessed looking man, with a round, compact, and sinewy frame. "What
luck to-day, young man?"
"None whatever," replied Claud, with an air of disappointment.
"I suppose so, unless you began before ten o'clock."
"But why did you suppose so?"
"O, I knew it from my knowledge of human nature," said the hunter,
humorously. "Trout are very much like other folks, only a great deal more
sensitive to heat. Now, you don't see men, who are well fixed under a cool
shade in a sweltering hot day, very anxious to run out bare-headed in the
sun, when there is no call for it; much less, then, the trout, that can't
bear the sun and heat at all. Though there are, probably, a ton of them
within a stone's throw of us, not one will come out with this bright sun;
they are lying behind the rocks and old logs at the bottom, and won't begin
to circulate these three hours."
"And are you not a-going to try them?"
"I? No; I would as soon think of fishing now on the top of these hills.
Besides this, I have a different object. I am bound to carry home something
that will pass for fresh meat, if it is nothing but a coon. I shall haul up
my canoe somewhere about here; follow up the lake-shore a mile or so, with
the idea of catching a deer in the edge of the water, come there to keep
off the flies; then, perhaps, cross over to the Magalloway, down that, and
over to this place; when, by way of topping off, I will show you, by that
time, if you are about here so long, how trout are taken."
So saying, the hunter dipped his springy oar into the water, and, with a
few vigorous strokes, sent his canoe to the shore, and, having moored it to
a root, he glided into the thickets, and disappeared with a tread so
noiseless as to leave Claud, for many minutes, wholly in doubt whether the
man was standing still in the bushes or proceeding on his excursion.
It was now noon, and Claud, seeing no prospect of any immediate success in
his piscatory employment, which had been made to appear to him, by the
remarks of the hunter, more discouraging than ever, drew up his anchor, and
rowed to a point of the shore which was embowered by a group of magnificent
pines. Here, finding a cool spring, as well as a refreshing shade, he drew
out his lunch, and very leisurely proceeded to discuss it, with the
ice-cold water of the spring by which he had seated himself for the
purpose. His fare was coarse; but it was partaken with a relish of which
those who have never experienced the effects of the air and exercise,
incident to a life in the woods, can have no just conception; and to which
the palled appetite of the
"vain lords of luxury and ease,
Whom slumber soothes not, pleasure cannot please,"
is poor in comparison, though all the king's banquets and metropolitan
feasts in the world should vie together to make good the substitute.
Claud's life had thus far been, in the main, a quiet and commonplace one;
nothing having occurred to him to arouse those strong and over-mastering
passions to which it is the lot of most of us, at some period of our lives,
to become subjected. It had been checkered, however, by one bit of romance,
which, to say the least, had greatly excited his imagination. About a year
previous to the time of which we are now writing, and one day while he was
walking the streets of Boston, a small, closely-enwrapped package was put
in his hand by an unknown boy, who, with the simple announcement, "_For
you, Sir_," turned quickly away, and made off with the air of one who has
completed his mission, and would avoid being questioned. Glancing within
the wrapper, and perceiving it inclosed a small encased picture, or
likeness, of some female, which he thought must have been delivered to him
through mistake, Claud looked hastily round for the messenger, and, not
seeing him, he walked backward and forward along the street, and lingered
some time in the vicinity, still expecting the boy would soon return to
claim the package. But, being disappointed in this, he went home, and,
retiring to his room, undid the wrapper, which he carefully but vainly
examined for some name, mark, or other clue to the mystery; and then, with
much interest, fell to inspecting the picture. It was, obviously, a
well-painted miniature likeness of a fair, dark-eyed girl, but representing
no remembered face, except in the peculiar expression of the strong and
commanding countenance; which, he thought, either in man or woman, he must
have somewhere before encountered. The whole likeness, indeed, together
with the circumstances under which it came into his hands, made, at the
time, a lively impression on his mind; and, keeping the affair wholly to
himself, he often contemplated that fair face in private; and, for months
afterwards, he never was in a public assembly, where the sex were present,
without running his eye over it in search of the original. But, as he never
found it, the impression gradually wore away, and, in the exciting changes
that had occurred in the fortunes of his family, it had been nearly
obliterated from his mind; when, that morning, while searching his trunk
for some implement belonging to his gun, he came across the miniature, and
put it in his pocket. And now, in the leisure that followed his repast, he
bethought him of it; and, laying it before him on the bed of moss on which
he was reclining, he contemplated it with renewed interest, and that sort
of dreamy enthusiasm which the sudden revival of old associations in such
solitudes is apt to awaken in the mind, especially when those associations
are connected, as now, with a matter of mystery and romance.
After indulging in his reveries a while, he put up his miniature, aroused
himself from his day-dream, and rose to his feet when, feeling inclined for
some kind of action, he decided on a short excursion in the woods, in the
direction of the Magalloway, where probably he would fall in with Phillips,
and return with him to the lake. Accordingly, after loading his gun with
ball and buckshot, so as to be prepared for any large wild animals he might
chance to encounter, he leisurely took his way through the heavy, ascending
forest that lay in his course; here pausing to note the last night's bed of
some solitary bear, and there to trace the marks of the death-struggle of a
victim deer, that, with all its vigilance and wondrous agility, had been
surprised and brought down by the stealthy and far-leaping catamount. The
ever-varying tenants of the forest, also, were constantly presenting as he
passed on, some novelty to attract his unaccustomed eye; now in the smooth,
tall shaft of the fusiform fir--the dandy of the forest--standing up with
its beautiful cone-shaped top among its rougher neighbors, trim and
straight as the bonneted cavalier of the old pictures, among the slouchy
forms of his homelier but worthier opponents; now in the low and stocky
birch standing on its broad, staunch pedestal of strongly-braced roots
below, and throwing out widely above its giant arms, as if striving to
shoulder and stay up the weight of the superincumbent forest; and now in
the imperial pine, proudly lifting its tall form an hundred feet over the
tops of the plebeian trees around, to revel in the upper currents of the
air, or bathe its crowning plumes of living green in the clouds of heaven.
Proceeding in this manner, he at length found himself gradually descending
the western slope of the hill; when he soon arrived in the vicinity of the
river, a glimpse of which, together with a small clearing and a
tidy-looking cottage on its banks, he now caught through the tops of the
intervening trees. While still walking on, his attention was attracted to a
comparatively open place in the woods, where, at some previous period, a
severe fire had killed all the smaller trees, and consumed the underbrush,
which had been replaced by scattering shrubs of the white poplar
intermingled with a plentiful growth of the black-raspberry, whose luscious
fruit--the first to reward the pioneer, and for which he has to contend
sharply with the birds and bears to obtain his share--was now beginning to
ripen. As he was entering this open space, which appeared to extend some
distance round the point of a screening knoll, he was suddenly brought to a
stand by a noise somewhere in the bushes or woods ahead, such as had never
before saluted his ears. It was like nothing else, or _if any_ thing else,
like the wild snorting of a frightened horse prolonged into the dying note
of the steam whistle. Claud recoiled a step before the unaccustomed sound,
and involuntarily cocked and raised his gun to his shoulder. But he was
allowed no time to speculate. The next instant, the loud and piercing
shriek of a female, nearer but in the same direction, rose and rang through
the forest. With a speed quickened at every step by the rapidly repeated
cry of distress, he bounded towards the spot, when, turning the point of
the knoll, he suddenly found himself in full view of the object of his
solicitude,--a girl, in the full bloom of youthful beauty, who, with bonnet
thrown back and her loosened hair streaming in wild disorder over her
shoulders, instantly rushed forward for his protection. Claud stopped
short, in mute surprise at the unexpected apparition; for the first glance
at her face told him that the original of his mysterious miniature was
before him,--before him, here in the woods! Breathless and speechless in
her wild affright, she pointed, with a glance over her shoulder, to a
thick, high tangle of large, strongly limbed, knotty, windfallen trees, a
short distance behind her, and fled past him to the rear. Looking in the
indicated direction, the startled and perplexed young man distinguished the
outlines of a monstrous moose madly plunging at the woody barrier, and
trying to force his enormous antlers through the unyielding limbs
preparatory to leaping it in pursuit of his victim, who had eluded the
infuriated animal, and barely escaped the fatal blows of his uplifted
hoofs, by creeping under the providentially placed obstruction. Claud
instantly raised his piece, when, feeling uncertain of his aim, he withheld
his fire, and stood waiting for a fairer view. But, before he could obtain
it, the moose, tired of vain attempts to force his passage through the
bristling barricade of logs and limbs before him, disappeared for one
moment, but the next came crashing round the nearest end of it, and, with
renewed demonstrations of rage and hostility, made directly for the new
opponent he beheld in his way. Still unalarmed for his own safety, Claud
waited with levelled gun till his formidable assailant was within forty
yards of him, when he took a quick aim and fired. Reeling under the
discharge of his heavily loaded piece, and blinded by the smoke, he could
not, at first, see the effect of his fire; but when he did so, the next
instant, it was only to behold the monster brute, maddened, not stopped, by
the flesh wounds inflicted, rushing on him with a force and fury which
compelled him to leap suddenly aside, to avoid being beat into the earth by
those terrible hoofs, which he saw lifted higher and higher, at each
approaching step, for his destruction. Mindful, in his peril, of the
precautions already learned from the hunters, Claude, while the moose,
whose tremendous impetus was driving him straight ahead, could break up, so
as to turn in the pursuit,--Claud made, with all the speed of which he was
master, for a huge hemlock, luckily standing at no great distance on his
right; a course which he thought would divert the monster from pursuit of
the maiden, and, at the same time, best insure his own safety. But, so
prodigious was the rushing speed of the foiled and now doubly exasperated
moose, that the imperilled huntsman had barely time to reach the sheltering
tree and dodge behind it, before the hotly pursuing foe was at his heels,
rasping and tearing with his spiked antlers the rough bark of the tree, in
his attempts to follow round it near and fast enough to overtake and strike
down his intended victim. Round and round then sped both pursuer and
pursued, as fast as the frantic rage of the one, and the keen instinct of
self-preservation in the other, could impel them. Although the moose, from
the great width of his interfering horns, was compelled to sweep round the
tree in a circle requiring him to go over double the distance travelled by
Claude, yet so much greater was his speed, that it called for the utmost
exertions of the latter to keep clear of the battle-axe blows which he
heard falling every instant with fatal force behind him. His gun had
already been struck, shivered, and beat from his hand; and, as he glanced
over his shoulder and saw the fierce and glaring eyes of his ruthless
pursuer, and his uplifted and forward-thrown hoofs striking closer and
closer to his heels at every bound, a sense of his deadly peril flashed
over his mind with that strange and paralyzing effect which the first full
conviction of impending death often produces on the stoutest hearts. He
felt his strength giving way, his brain beginning to whirl, and he was on
the point of yielding himself to his fate; when a stream of smoke and flame
accompanied the startling report of a rifle, shot out from the edge of a
neighboring thicket. The moose gave a convulsive start, floundered forward
on his knees, swayed backward and forward an instant, then fell over
broad-side into the bushes with a heavy crash, straightened out, gasped,
and died.
"Dunno but you'll think I waited too long, young man," cried Phillips, now
advancing with a quick, leaping step from his covert. "The fact was, I
felt, on seeing you getting into such close quarters, that I had better be
rather particular about my aim, so as to stop him at once; besides that, I
was at first a little out of breath. I had heard the fellow blow when an
hundred rods off,--then the woman scream,--then your gun; and, thinking
like enough there would be trouble, I legged it for the spot, and got to my
stand just as he treed you."
"I feel very grateful to you, Mr. Phillips, for this timely rescue,"
responded Claud, recovering his composure. "This, I suppose, is the
far-famed moose?"
"Yes, and a bouncer at that," replied the hunter, going up and, placing his
foot on the broad and still quivering flank of the huge animal. "Good
twenty hands high, and weighs, well, not much short of fifteen hundred, I
should say."
"But are they often thus dangerous?" asked Claud.
"Not very often, perhaps," rejoined the hunter. "But still the bull moose,
at this season of the year, is sometimes, when wounded, about as ugly a
customer as you meet with in the woods. This fellow I judge to have been
_oncommon_ vicious, as he begun his tantrums before he was touched at all,
it seems. I dunno but 'twas the woman put the devil into him, as women do
into two-legged animals sometimes,--don't they, young man?"
"The woman? O yes, the young lady," said Claud, reminded of his duty as a
gallant by the remark, though unwilling to appropriate to himself the
prophetic joke with which it was coupled. "Where is she? I must go and see
to her."
"She has already seen to herself, I guess," said the hunter. "As I was
coming up, I glimpsed her cutting round and running, like a wild turkey,
for the clearing, to which the moose had cut off her retreat. She has
reached the house by this time, doubtless; for it is hard by, down on the
river here, a hundred rods or such a matter."
"Who is she? Do you know the family?" eagerly inquired the young man.
"No," answered the hunter. "They are new-comers in these parts."
"What could have brought her here so far into the woods?" persisted Claud.
"The raspberries, very likely," said the other, indifferently, while taking
out and examining the edge of his knife. "But come, we must get this moose
into some condition, so that he will keep; then be off to let the settlers
know of our luck. And early to-morrow morning, we will, all hands, come up
the river in boats, and distribute him. He will make fresh meat enough to
supply the whole settlement."
The hunter now, with the assistance of his new pupil in the craft,
proceeded to dressing the moose, the process of which, bleeding,
disemboweling, and partially skinning, was soon completed; when, cutting
some stout green skids with the hatchet he ever carried in his belt, and
inserting the ends under the bulky carcass, the two contrived to raise it,
by means of old logs rolled up for the purpose, several feet from the
ground, so as to insure a free circulation of air beneath it. This being
done, the hunter kindled two log fires, one on each side, to keep off, he
said, the wolves and other carnivorous animals. They then, after cutting
out the tongue and lip, which are esteemed the tidbits of this animal, took
up their line of march for the lake, which, with the long, rapid lope of
the woodsman, measured off, as usual, in Indian file, and with little or no
interrupting conversation, they reached in a short time, and without
further adventure.
"Now," said the hunter, as he reached the spot where his canoe was tied,
and turned round towards his lagging companion,--"now, sir, what say you to
taking a five-pound trout?"
"Perfectly willing," replied Claud, smiling; "and I would even take up with
a smaller one."
"Well, I won't,--that is, not much smaller; and I think I'll have one of at
least the size I named."
"What makes you so confident?"
"Because, it being a hot, shiny morning, they took to their coverts early,
and must be sharp-set, by this time. Besides that, it is just about the
best time for them that could be got up: a deep cloud, as you see, is
coming over the sun, and this wind is moving the water to the bottom. All
sizes will now be coming out, and the big ones, like big folks, will make
all the little ones stand back till their betters are served."
Each now taking to his canoe, they pushed out some twenty or thirty rods
into the lake, cast anchor, and threw out their lines. Claud, who baited
with grubs, soon had drawn in two, weighing as many pounds a piece, and
began to feel disposed to banter the hunter, who had baited with a flap of
moose-skin, which he had brought along with him, and which, to Claud,
seemed little likely to attract the fishes to his hook. But he soon found
himself mistaken; for, turning to give utterance to what was passing in his
mind, he beheld the other dallying with a trout, which he had hooked, and
now held flapping on the surface of the water, evidently much larger than
either of his own.
"That is a fine one!" cried Claud. "Why don't you pull him in?"
"Not big enough," said the hunter, in reply to the question; while he
turned to the fish with an impatient "Pshaw! what work the cretur makes of
it! Hop off, hop off, you fool! There," he added, as the trout at length
broke away and disappeared, "there, that is right. Now be off with yourself
till you grow bigger, and give me a chance at the fine fellow whose tail I
saw swashing up round here just now."
The hunter then carefully adjusted his bait, and threw out the whole lingth
of his line. After alternately sinking his hook, and then drawing it to the
surface, for two or three throws, the line suddenly straightened, moved
slowly backward at first, then swept rapidly round and round, or darted off
in sharp short angles, with downward and forward plunges so quick and
powerful as to make the stout sapling pole sway and bend, like a whipstock,
in the steadying hands of the hunter. For four or five minutes he made no
attempt to draw in his prize, but let the fish have full play to the length
of its tether, till its efforts had become comparatively feeble; when,
slowly bringing it alongside, he took the line in his hand, and, with a
quick jerk, landed the noble fellow safely on the bottom of the canoe.
"There, sir!" exclaimed the hunter, seizing the trout by the gills, and
triumphantly holding it up to view, "there is about what I bargained for:
two feet long, not an inch shorter,--seven pounds weight, and not an ounce
lighter! Now, being satisfied, I am done."
"What, leave off with such luck?" asked Claud in surprise.
"Yes, young man," said the other, "I hold it all but a downright sin to
draw from God's storehouse a single pound more than is really needed. This
will last my family as long as it will keep, this warm weather, with the
plenty of moose-meat we shall have. Any thing more is a waste, which
_I_ will not commit. And _you_, sir, who have just hauled in your third and
largest one, I perceive, and have now nearly as many pounds as I
have,--what can _you_ want of more? Come, let us pull up and off for our
homes. It is nearly time, any way."
Although loth to break off his sport, yet inwardly acknowledging the
justness of the hunter's philosophy, Claud reluctantly drew in and wound up
his line, hauled in his anchor, and, handling his oar, shot out abreast of
the other, who had already got under way, into the heaving waters of the
now agitated lake. Side by side, with the quick and easy dip of their
elastic single oars, the rowers now sent their light, sharp canoes, dug out
to the thinness of a board from the straight-grained dry pine, rapidly
ahead over the broken and subdued waves of the cove, in which they had been
stationed, till they rounded the intervening woody point which had cut off
the view of the lower end of the lake.
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Claud, starting back, with suspended oar, as now,
coming out in view of the lake, his eye fell on the huge pillar of smoke,
which, deeply enshrouding that part of the distant forest lying east of the
outlet of the lake with its expanded base, was rolling upward its thousand
dark, doubling folds; "good Heavens, Phillips, look yonder! Where and what
is it? It looks like a burning city."
"It is a fire, of course, and no small one, either; but where, I can't
exactly make out," slowly responded the hunter, intently fixing his keen
eyes on the magnificent spectacle which had thus unexpectedly burst on
their view in the distance. "Let me see," he continued, running his eye
along the border of the lake in search of his old landmarks: "there is the
tall stub that stands half a mile down on the west bank of the river, and
is now just visible in the edge of the smoke; but where is the king pine,
that stands nearly against it, over in your slash? Young man," he added,
with a startled air, "was your father calculating to burn that slash
to-day?"
"No, unless it looked likely to rain."
"Well it _does_ look likely to rain, in the shape of a shower gathering
yonder, which has already given out one or two grumbles of distant thunder,
if my ears served me as well as usual."
"Yes; but such a smoke and fire can't come from our slash. It must be a
larger and more distant one."
"So I thought at first; but I begin to think different. Do you see that
perpendicular, broken line of light, occasionally flashing out from the
smoke, and extending upward to a height that no ground fire ever reached?
That is your king pine in a blaze from bottom to top. Hark! why, I can hear
it roaring clear here, like a distant hurricane. It must be a prodigious
hot fire to make all that show and noise."
"Can it endanger our buildings?" asked Claud, in alarm.
"I am afraid so," replied the other, with a dubious shake of the head. "But
hark again! 'tis your father's horn blowing for help."
"Let us row, then, as for our lives!" cried the now thoroughly aroused and
agitated young man. "If any thing happens before I get there, I shall never
forgive myself for my prolonged absence, to the last day of my life. You
will join me in going there, will you not?"
"Yes, and outstrip you by half a mile. But that won't be the best way.
Throw your anchor into the stern of my canoe, and fall in behind. There;
now keep the anchor-line slack between us, if you can," rapidly said the
hunter, bending his sinewy form to the work, with a power that sent his
canoe half out of the water at every stroke of his swiftly-falling oar.
Leaving them to bound over the billowy waters of the lake towards their
destination, with all the speed which strong arms and nerves made tense
with excitement could impart, let us anticipate their arrival, to note what
befell the objects of their anxieties, whom we so abruptly left in their
perils from the fire, to bring up the other incidents of the day having an
equal bearing on the story, with which we have thus far occupied the
present somewhat extended chapter.
The immediate danger to their house from the fire, with which we left the
alarmed Elwood and his wife contending, was, indeed, easily overcome by
dashing pails of water over the roof. But scarcely had they achieved this
temporary triumph in one place over an element proverbially terrible when
it becomes master, before it was seen kindling into flickering blazes on
the roof of the barn and the locks of hay protruding from its windows and
the crevices between the logs of which it was built. Here, also, they soon
succeeded in extinguishing the fire in the same manner. They were not,
however, allowed a moment's respite from either their labors or alarms. The
fences were by this time on fire in numerous places; and the chips and wood
in the door-yard were seen to be igniting from the sparks and cinders
which, every instant, fell thicker and hotter around their seemingly
devoted domicil. The fences, after a few vain attempts to save them, were
given up a prey to the devouring element, and the whole exertions of the
panting and exhausted sufferers were turned to saving their buildings; and
even at that they had no time to spare; for, so hot had the air become from
the burning slash, which, through its whole length, was now glowing with
the red heat of a furnace, that every vestige of moisture had soon
disappeared from the drenched roofs, and they were again on fire.
"Is there no way of raising help?" exclaimed Mrs. Elwood, in her extremity,
as she witnessed these increasing manifestations of danger.
"I never thought of that," said Elwood. "Hand me the dinner-horn. If there
are any within hearing, they will understand, with the appearance of this
fire, that we are calling for assistance."
With a few sharp, loud blasts, Elwood threw aside the horn, and again flew
to the work of extinguishing the fires where they became most threatening.
And thus, for nearly another hour, the distressed settler and his heroic
wife, suffering deeply from heat and exhaustion, toiled on, without gaining
the least on the fearful enemy by which they were so closely encompassed.
And they were on the point of giving up in despair, when the welcome shout
of "Help at hand!" from the ringing voice of the hunter, then just entering
the opening, revived hope in their sinking hearts. The next moment that
help was on the spot; but it was unnecessary. A mightier Hand was about to
interpose. From the bold, black van of the hurrying and deeply-charged rack
of cloud, that had now unheeded gained the zenith, a stream of fire, before
which all other fires paled into nothing, at that instant descended on the
top of the burning pine, and, rending it from top to bottom by the single
explosion, sent its wide-flying fragments in blazing circles to the ground.
A sharp, rattling sound, terminating in a cannon-like report, followed,
shaking the rent and crashing heavens above, and the bounding earth
beneath, in the awful concussion. Before the stunned and blinded settlers
had recovered from the shock, or the deep roll of the echoing thunder had
died away among the distant mountains, another and more welcome roar
saluted their ears. It was that of the rapidly-approaching rain striking
the foliage of the neighboring forest; and, scarcely had they time to gain
the cover of the house, before the deluging torrents poured over it with a
force and fury beneath which the quelled fires speedily sunk, hissing, into
darkness and death.