At noon next day Hollister left the mess-house table and went out to
sit in the sun and smoke a pipe beyond the Rabelaisian gabble of his
crew. While he sat looking at the peaks north of the valley, from
which the June sun was fast stripping even the higher snows, he saw a
man bent under a shoulder pack coming up the slope that dropped away
westward toward the Toba's mouth. He came walking by stumps and
through thickets until he was near the camp. Then Hollister recognized
him as Charlie Mills. He saw Hollister, came over to where he sat, and
throwing off his pack made a seat of it, wiping away the sweat that
stood in shining drops on his face.
"Well, I'm back, like the cat that couldn't stay away," Mills said.
The same queer undercurrent of melancholy, of sadness, the same hint
of pain colored his words,--a subtle matter of inflection, of tone.
The shadowy expression of some inner conflict hovered in his dark
eyes. Again Hollister felt that indefinable urge of sympathy for this
man who seemed to suffer with teeth grimly clenched, so that no
complaint ever escaped him. A strange man, tenacious of his black
moods.
"How's everything?" Mills asked. "You've made quite a hole here since
I left. Can I go to work again?"
"Sure," Hollister replied. "This summer will just about clean up the
cedar here. You may as well help it along, if you want to work."
"It isn't a case of wanting to. I've got to," Mills said under his
breath. Already he was at his old trick of absent staring into space,
while his fingers twisted tobacco and paper into a cigarette. "I'd go
crazy loafing. I've been trying that. I've been to Alaska and to
Oregon, and blew most of the stake I made here in riotous living." He
curled his lip disdainfully. "It's no good. Might as well be here as
anywhere. So I came back--like the cat."
He fell silent again, looking through the trees out over the stone rim
under which Bland's house stood by the river. He sat there beside
Hollister until the bolt gang, moving out of the bunk house to work,
saw and hailed him. He answered briefly. Then he rose without another
word to Hollister and carried in his pack. Hollister saw him go about
selecting tools, shoulder them and walk away to work in the timber.
That night Hollister wakened out of a sound sleep to sniff the air
that streamed in through his open windows. It was heavy with the
pungent odor of smoke. He rose and looked out. The silence of night
lay on the valley, over the dense forest across the river, upon the
fir-swathed southern slope. No leaf stirred. Nothing moved. It was
still as death. And in this hushed blackness--lightened only by a pale
streak in the north and east that was the reflection of snowy mountain
crests standing stark against the sky line--this smoky wraith crept
along the valley floor. No red glow greeted Hollister's sight. There
was nothing but the smell of burning wood, that acrid, warm, heavy
odor of smoke, the invisible herald of fire. It might be over the next
ridge. It might be in the mouth of the valley. It might be thirty
miles distant. He went back to bed, to lie with that taint of smoke in
his nostrils, thinking of Doris and the boy, of himself, of Charlie
Mills, of Myra, of Archie Lawanne. He saw ghosts in that dusky
chamber, ghosts of other days, and trooping on the heels of these came
apparitions of a muddled future,--until he fell asleep again, to be
awakened at last by a hammering on his door.
The light of a flash-lamp revealed a logger from the Carr settlement
below. The smoke was rolling in billows when Hollister stepped
outside. Down toward the Inlet's head there was a red flare in the
sky.
"We got to get everybody out to fight that," the man said. "She
started in the mouth of the river last night. If we don't check it and
the wind turns right, it'll clean the whole valley. We sent a man to
pull your crew off the hill."
In the growing dawn, Hollister and the logger went down through woods
thick with smoke. They routed Lawanne out of his cabin, and he joined
them eagerly. He had never seen a forest fire. What bore upon the
woodsmen chiefly as a malignant, destructive force affected Lawanne as
something that promised adventure, as a spectacle which aroused his
wonder, his curious interest in vast, elemental forces unleashed. They
stopped at Bland's and pressed him into service.
In an hour they were deployed before the fire, marshalled to the
attack under men from Carr's, woodsmen experienced in battle against
the red enemy, this spoiler of the forest with his myriad tongues of
flame and breath of suffocating smoke.
In midsummer the night airs in those long inlets and deep valleys move
always toward the sea. But as day grows and the sun swings up to its
zenith, there comes a shift in the aerial currents. The wind follows
the course of the sun until it settles in the westward, and sometimes
rises to a gale. It was that rising of the west wind that the loggers
feared. It would send the fire sweeping up the valley. There would be
no stopping it. There would be nothing left in its wake but the
blackened earth, smoking roots, and a few charred trunks standing
gaunt and unlovely amid the ruin.
So now they strove to create a barrier which the fire should not pass.
It was not a task to be perfunctorily carried on, there was no time
for malingering. There was a very real incitement to great effort.
Their property was at stake; their homes and livelihood; even their
lives, if they made an error in the course and speed of the fire's
advance and were trapped.
They cut a lane through the woods straight across the valley floor
from the river to where the southern slope pitched sharply down. They
felled the great trees and dragged them aside with powerful donkey
engines to manipulate their gear. They cleared away the brush and the
dry windfalls until this lane was bare as a traveled road--so that
when the fire ate its way to this barrier there was a clear space in
which should fall harmless the sparks and embers flung ahead by the
wind.
There, at this labor, the element of the spectacular vanished. They
could not attack the enemy with excited cries, with brandished
weapons. They could not even see the enemy. They could hear him, they
could smell the resinous odor of his breath. That was all. They laid
their defenses against him with methodical haste, chopping, heaving,
hauling the steel cables here and there from the donkeys, sweating in
the blanket of heat that overlaid the woods, choking in the smoke that
rolled like fog above them and about them. And always in each man's
mind ran the uneasy thought of the west wind rising.
But throughout the day the west wind held its breath. The flames
crawled, ate their way instead of leaping hungrily. The smoke rose in
dun clouds above the burning area and settled in gray vagueness all
through the woods, drifting in wisps, in streamers, in fantastic
curlings, pungent, acrid, choking the men. The heat of the fire and
the heat of the summer sun in a windless sky made the valley floor a
sweat-bath in which the loggers worked stripped to undershirts and
overalls, blackened with soot and grime.
Night fell. The fire had eaten the heart out of a block half a mile
square. It was growing. A redness brightened the sky. Lurid colors
fluttered above the hottest blaze. A flame would run with incredible
agility up the trunk of a hundred-foot cedar to fling a yellow banner
from the topmost boughs, to color the billowing smoke, the green of
nearby trees, to wave and gleam and shed coruscating spark-showers and
die down again to a dull glow.
Through the short night the work went on. Here and there a man's
weariness grew more than he could bear, and he would lie down to sleep
for an hour or two. They ate food when it was brought to them. Always,
while they could keep their feet, they worked.
Hollister worked on stoically into the following night, keeping
Lawanne near him, because it was all new and exciting to Lawanne, and
Hollister felt that he might have to look out for him if the wind took
any sudden, dangerous shift.
But the mysterious forces of the air were merciful. During the
twenty-four hours there was nothing but little vagrant breezes and the
drafts created by the heat of the fire itself. When day came again,
without striking a single futile blow at the heart of the fire, they
had drawn the enemy's teeth and clipped his claws--in so far as the
flats of the Toba were threatened. The fire would burn up to that
cleared path and burn itself out--with men stationed along to beat out
each tiny flame that might spring up by chance. And when that was
done, they rested on their oars, so to speak; they took time to sit
down and talk without once relaxing their vigilance.
In a day or two the fire would die out against that barrier, always
provided the west wind did not rise and in sportive mockery fling
showers of sparks across to start a hundred little fires burning in
the woods behind their line of defense. A forest fire was never beaten
until it was dead. The men rested, watched, patrolled their line. They
looked at the sky and sighed for rain. A little knot of them gathered
by a tree. Some one had brought a box of sandwiches, a pail of coffee
and tin cups. They gulped the coffee and munched the food and
stretched themselves on the soft moss. Through an opening they could
see a fiery glow topped by wavering sheets of flame. They could hear
the crackle and snap of burning wood.
"A forest fire is quite literally hell, isn't it?" Lawanne asked.
Hollister nodded. His eyes were on Bland. The man sat on the ground.
He had a cup of coffee in one hand, a sandwich in the other. He was
blackened almost beyond recognition, and he was viewing with patent
disgust the state of his clothes and particularly of his hands. He
set down his food and rubbed at his fingers with a soiled
handkerchief. Then he resumed eating and drinking. It appeared to him
a matter of necessity rather than a thing from which he derived any
satisfaction. Near him Charlie Mills lay stretched on the moss, his
head pillowed on his folded arms, too weary to eat or drink, even at
Hollister's insistence.
"Dirty job this, eh?" Bland remarked. "I'll appreciate a bath. Phew. I
shall sleep for a week when I get home."
By mid-afternoon of the next day, Sam Carr decided they had the fire
well in hand and so split his forces, leaving half on guard and
letting the others go home to rest. Hollister's men remained on the
spot in case they were needed; he and Lawanne and Bland went home.
But that was not the end of the great blaze. Blocked in the valley,
the fire, as if animated by some deadly purpose, crept into the mouth
of a brushy canyon and ran uphill with demoniac energy until it was
burning fiercely over a benchland to the west of Hollister's timber.
The fight began once more. With varying phases it raged for a week.
They would check it along a given line and rest for awhile, thinking
it safely under control. Then a light shift of wind would throw it
across their line of defense, and in a dozen places the forest would
break into flame. The fire worked far up the slope, but its greatest
menace lay in its steady creep westward. Slowly it ate up to the very
edge of Hollister's timber, in spite of all their checks, their
strategy, the prodigious effort of every man to check its vandal
course.
Then the west wind, which had held its breath so long, broke loose
with unrestrained exhalation. It fanned the fire to raging fury, sent
it leaping in yellow sheets through the woods. The blaze lashed
eagerly over the tops of the trees, the dreaded crown fire of the
North Woods. Where its voice had been a whisper, it became a roar, an
ominous, warning roar to which the loggers gave instant heed and got
themselves and their gear off that timbered slope.
They could do no more. They had beaten it in the valley. Backed by the
lusty pressure of the west wind, it drove them off the hill and went
its wanton way unhindered.
In the flat by Hollister's house the different crews came together.
There was not one of them but drooped with exhaustion. They sat about
on the parched ground, on moss, against tree trunks, and stared up the
hill.
Already the westerly gale had cleared the smoke from the lower valley.
It brought a refreshing coolness off the salt water, and it was also
baring to their sight the spectacular destruction of the forest.
All that area where Hollisters cedars had stood was a red chaos out of
which great flames leaped aloft and waved snaky tongues, blood-red,
molten gold, and from which great billows of smoke poured away to
wrap in obscurity all the hills beyond. There was nothing they could
do now. They watched it apathetically, too weary to care.
Hollister looked on the destruction of his timber most stolidly of
all. For days he had put forth his best effort. His body ached. His
eyes smarted. His hands were sore. He had done his best without
enthusiasm. He was not oppressed so greatly as were some of these men
by this vast and useless destruction. What did it matter, after all? A
few trees more or less! A square mile or two of timber out of that
enormous stand. It was of no more consequence in the sum total than
the life of some obscure individual in the teeming millions of the
earth. It was his timber. So was his life a possession peculiar to
himself. And neither seemed greatly to matter; neither did matter
greatly to any one but himself.
It was all a muddle. He was very tired, too tired to bear thinking,
almost too tired to feel. He was conscious of himself as a creature of
weariness sitting against a tree, his scarred face blackened like the
tired faces of these other men, wondering dully what was the sum of
all this sweat and strain, the shattered plans, the unrewarded effort,
the pain and stress that men endure. A man made plans, and they
failed. He bred hope in his soul and saw it die. He longed for and
sought his desires always, to see them vanish like a mirage just as
they seemed within his grasp.
Lawanne and Bland had gone home, dragging themselves on tired limbs.
Carr's men rested where they chose. They must watch lest the fire back
down into the valley again and destroy their timber, as it had
destroyed Hollister's. They had blankets and food. Hollister gave his
own men the freedom of the house. Their quarters on the hill stood in
the doomed timber. The old log house would be ashes now.
He wondered what Doris was doing, if she steadily gained her sight.
But concrete, coherent thought seemed difficult. He thought in
pictures, which he saw with a strange detachment as if he were a ghost
haunting places once familiar.
He found his chin sinking on his breast. He roused himself and walked
over to the house. His men were sprawled on the rugs, sleeping in
grotesque postures. Hollister picked his way among them. Almost by the
door of his bedroom Charlie Mills sprawled on his back, his head
resting on a sofa cushion. He opened his eyes as Hollister passed.
"That was a tough game," Hollister said.
"It's all a tough game," Mills answered wearily and closed his eyes
again.
Hollister went on into the room. He threw himself across the bed. In
ten seconds he was fast asleep.