A FIRE IN THE MOUNTAINS
A day in August can be as depressing as a typical one in May is
inspiring, or in June entrancing. As the season advanced Nature appeared
to be growing languid and faint. There was neither cloud by day nor dew
at night. The sun burned rather than vivified the earth, and the grass
and herbage withered and shrivelled before its unobstructed rays. The
foliage along the roadsides grew dun-colored from the dust, and those who
rode or drove on thoroughfares were stifled by the irritating clouds that
rose on the slightest provocation. Pleasure could be found only on the
unfrequented lanes that led to the mountains or ran along their bases.
Even there trees that drew their sustenance from soil spread thinly on
the rocks were seen to be dying, their leaves not flushing with autumnal
tints, but hanging limp and bleached as if they had exhaled their vital
juices. The moss beneath them, that had been softer to the tread than a
Persian rug, crumbled into powder under the foot. Alf went to gather
huckleberries, but, except in moist and swampy places, found them
shrivelled on the bushes. Even the corn leaves began to roll on the
uplands, and Leonard shook his head despondingly. Webb's anxieties,
however, were of a far deeper character, and he was philosophical enough
to average the year's income. If the cows did come home hungry from their
pasture, there was abundance of hay and green-corn fodder to carry them
through until the skies should become more propitious. Besides, there was
an unfailing spring upon the place, and from this a large cask on wheels
was often filled, and was then drawn by one of the quiet farm-horses to
the best of the flower beds, the young trees, and to such products of the
garden as would repay for the expenditure of time and labor. The ground
was never sprinkled so that the morning sun of the following day would
drink up the moisture, but so deluged that the watering would answer for
several days. It was well known that partial watering does only harm.
Nature can be greatly assisted at such times, but it must be in
accordance with her laws. The grapevine is a plant that can endure an
unusual degree of drought, and the fruit will be all the earlier and
sweeter for it. An excellent fertilizer for the grape is suds from the
laundry, and by filling a wide, shallow basin, hollowed out from the
earth around the stems, with this alkaline infusion, the vines were kept
in the best condition. The clusters of the earlier varieties were already
beginning to color, and the season insured the perfect ripening of those
fine old kinds, the Isabella and Catawba, that too often are frost-bitten
before they become fit for the table.
Thus it would appear that Nature has compensations for her worst
moods--greater compensations than are thought of by many. Drought causes
the roots of plants and trees to strike deep, and so extends the range of
their feeding-ground, and anchors vegetation of all kinds more firmly in
the soil.
Nevertheless, a long dry period is always depressing. The bright green
fades out of the landscape, the lawns and grass-plots become brown and
sear, the air loses its sweet, refreshing vitality, and is often so
charged with smoke from forest-fires, and impalpable dust, that
respiration is not agreeable. Apart from considerations of profit and
loss, the sympathy of the Clifford household was too deep with Nature to
permit the indifference of those whose garden is the market stall and the
florist's greenhouse, and to whom vistas in hotel parlors and piazzas are
the most attractive.
"It seems to me," Leonard remarked at the dinner-table one day, "that
droughts are steadily growing more serious and frequent."
"They are," replied his father. "While I remember a few in early life
that were more prolonged than any we have had of late years, they must
have resulted from exceptional causes, for we usually had an abundance of
rain, and did not suffer as we do now from violent alternations of
weather. There was one year when there was scarcely a drop of rain
throughout the summer. Potatoes planted in the late spring were found in
the autumn dry and unsprouted. But such seasons were exceedingly rare,
and now droughts are the rule."
"And the people are chiefly to blame for them," said Webb. "We are
suffering from the law of heredity. Our forefathers were compelled to
fell the trees to make room for the plow, and now one of the strongest
impulses of the average American is to cut down a tree. Our forests, on
which a moist climate so largely depends, are treated as if they
encumbered the ground. The smoke that we are breathing proves that fires
are ravaging to the north and west of us. They should be permitted no
more than a fire in the heart of a city. The future of the country
depends upon the people becoming sane on this subject. If we will send to
the Legislature pot-house politicans who are chiefly interested in
keeping up a supply of liquor instead of water, they should be provided
with a little primer giving the condition of lands denuded of their
forests. There is scarcely anything in their shifty ways, their blind
zeal for what the 'deestrict' wants to-day, regardless of coming days,
that so irritates me as their stupidity on this subject. A man who votes
against the protection of our forests is not fit for the office of
road-master. After all, the people are to blame, and their children will
pay dear for their ignorance and the spirit which finds expression in the
saying, 'After me the deluge'; and there will be flood and drought until
every foot of land not adapted to cultivation and pasturage is again
covered with trees. Indeed, a great deal of good land should be given up
to forests, for then what was cultivated would produce far more than
could be obtained from a treeless and therefore rainless country."
"Bravo, Webb!" cried Burt; "we must send you to the Legislature."
"How is the evil to be prevented?" Leonard asked.
"Primarily by instruction and the formation of public opinion. The
influence of trees on the climate should be taught in all our schools as
thoroughly as the multiplication-table. The national and state
governments would then be compelled to look beyond the next election, and
to appoint foresters who would have the same power to call out the people
to extinguish a forest fire that the sheriff has to collect his posse to
put down mob violence. In the long-run fire departments in our forest
tracts would be more useful than the same in cities, for, after all,
cities depend upon the country and its productiveness. The owners of
woodland should be taught the folly of cutting everything before them,
and of leaving the refuse brush to become like tinder. The smaller growth
should be left to mature, and the brush piled and burned in a way that
would not involve the destruction of every sprout and sapling over wide
areas. As it is, we are at the mercy of every careless boy, and such
vagrants as Lumley used to be before Amy woke him up. It is said--and
with truth at times, I fear--that the shiftless mountaineers occasionally
start the fires, for a fire means brief high-priced labor for them, and
afterward an abundance of whiskey."
Events furnished a practical commentary on Webb's words. Miss Hargrove
had come over to spend the night with Amy, and to try some fine old
English glees that she had obtained from her city home. They had just
adjourned from the supper-table to the piazza when Lumley appeared, hat
in hand. He spoke to Leonard, but looked at Amy with a kind of wondering
admiration, as if he could not believe that the girl, who looked so fair
and delicate in her evening dress, so remote from him and his
surroundings, could ever have given him her hand, and spoken as if their
humanity had anything in common.
The Cliffords were informed that a fire had broken out on a tract
adjoining their own. "City chaps was up there gunning out o' season,"
Lumley explained, "and wads from their guns must 'a started it."
As there was much wood ranked on the Clifford tract, the matter was
serious. Abram and other farm-hands were summoned, and the brothers acted
as did the minute-men in the Revolution when the enemy appeared in their
vicinity. The young men excused themselves, and bustle and confusion
followed. Burt, with a flannel blouse belted tightly around his waist,
soon dashed up to the front piazza on his horse, and, flourishing a rake,
said, laughingly, "I don't look much like a knight sallying forth to
battle-do I?"
"You look as if you could be one if the occasion arose," Miss Hargrove
replied.
During the half-jesting badinage that followed Amy stole away. Behind the
house Webb was preparing to mount, when a light hand fell on his
shoulder. "You will be careful?" said Amy, appealingly. "You don't seem
to spare yourself in anything. I dread to have you go up into those
darkening mountains."
"Why, Amy," he replied, laughing, "one would think I was going to fight
Indians, and you feared for my scalp."
"I am not so young and blind but that I can see that you are quietly half
reckless with yourself," she replied; and her tone indicated that she was
a little hurt.
"I pledge you my word that I will not be reckless tonight; and, after
all, this is but disagreeable, humdrum work that we often have to do.
Don't worry, little sister. Burt will be there to watch over me, you
know," he added. "By the way, where is he? It's time we were off."
"Oh, he's talking romantic nonsense to Miss Hargrove. He won't hurt
himself. I wish I was as sure of you, and I wish I had more influence
over you. I'm not such a very little sister, even if I don't know enough
to talk to you as you would like;" and she left him abruptly.
He mastered a powerful impulse to spring from his horse and call her
back. A moment's thought taught him, however, that he could not trust
himself then to say a word, and he rode rapidly away.
"I must be misunderstood," he muttered. "That is the best chance for us
both, unless--" But he hesitated to put into words the half-formed hope
that Miss Hargrove's appearance in the little drama of their lives might
change its final scenes. "She's jealous of her friend, at last," he
concluded, and this conviction gave him little comfort. Burt soon
overtook him, and their ride was comparatively silent, for each was busy
with his own thoughts. Lumley was directed to join them at the fire, and
then was forgotten by all except Amy, who, by a gentle urgency, induced
him to go to the kitchen and get a good supper. Before he departed she
slipped a banknote into his hand with which to buy a dress for the baby.
Lumley had to pass more than one groggery on his way to the mountains,
but the money was as safe in his pocket as it would have been in Amy's.
"I swow! I could say my prayers to her!" he soliloquized, as he hastened
through the gathering darkness with his long, swinging stride. "I didn't
know there was sich gells. She's never lectured me once, but she jest
smiles and looks a feller into bein' a man."
Miss Hargrove had noted Amy's influence over the mountaineer, and she
asked for an explanation. Amy, in a very brief, modest way, told of her
visits to the wretched cabin, and said, in conclusion: "I feel sorry for
poor Lumley. The fact that he is trying to do better, with so much
against him, proves what he might have been. That's one of the things
that trouble me most, as I begin to think and see a little of life; so
many people have no chance worth speaking of."
"The thing that ought to trouble me most is, I suppose, that those who
have a chance do so little for such people. Amy," she added, sadly, after
a moment's thought, "I've had many triumphs over men, but none like
yours; and I feel to-night as if I could give them all to see a man look
at me as that poor fellow looked at you. It was the grateful homage of a
human soul to whom you had given something that in a dim way was felt to
be priceless. The best that I can remember in my pleasure-loving life is
that I have not permitted myself selfishly and recklessly to destroy
manhood, but I fear no one is the better for having known me."
"You do yourself injustice," said Amy, warmly. "I'm the better and
happier for having known you. Papa had a morbid horror of fashionable
society, and this accounts for my being so unsophisticated. With all your
experience of such society, I have perfect faith in you, and could trust
you implicitly."
"Have you truly faith in me?" (and Amy thought she had never seen such
depth and power in human eyes as in those of Miss Hargrove, who encircled
the young girl with her arm, and looked as if seeking to detect the
faintest doubt).
"Yes," said Amy, with quiet emphasis.
Miss Hargrove drew a long breath, and then said: "That little word may do
me more good than all the sermons I ever heard. Many would try to be
different if others had more faith in them. I think that is the secret of
your power over the rough man that has just gone. You recognized the good
that was in him, and made him conscious of it. Well, I must try to
deserve your trust." Then she stepped out on the dusky piazza, and
sighed, as she thought: "It may cost me dear. She seemed troubled at my
words to Burt, and stole away as if she were the awkward third person. I
may have misjudged her, and she cares for him after all."
Amy went to the piano, and played softly until summoned without by an
excited exclamation from her friend. A line of fire was creeping toward
them around a lofty highland, and it grew each moment more and more
distinct. "Oh, I know from its position that it's drawing near our
tract," cried Amy. "If it is so bright to us at this distance, it must be
almost terrible to those near by. I suppose they are all up there just in
front of it, and Burt is so reckless." She was about to say Webb, but,
because of some unrecognized impulse, she did not. The utterance of
Burt's name, however, was not lost on Miss Hargrove.
For a long time the girls watched the scene with awe, and each, in
imagination, saw an athletic figure begrimed with smoke, and sending out
grotesque shadows into the obscurity, as the destroying element was met
and fought in ways unknown to them, which, they felt sure, involved
danger. Miss Hargrove feared that they both had the same form in mind.
She was not a girl to remain long unconscious of her heart's inclinations,
and she knew that Burt Clifford had quickened her pulses as no man had ever
done before. This very fact made her less judicial, less keen, in her
insight. If he was so attractive to her, could Amy be indifferent to him
after months of companionship? She had thought that she understood Amy
thoroughly, but was beginning to lose faith in her impression. While in
some respects Amy was still a child, there were quiet depths in her nature
of which the young girl herself was but half conscious. She often lapsed
into long reveries. Webb's course troubled her. Never had he been more
fraternal in his manner, but apparently she was losing her power to
interest him, to lure him away from the material side of life. "I can't
keep pace with him," she sighed; "and now that he has learned all about my
little range of thoughts and knowledge, he finds that I can be scarcely
more to him than Johnnie, whom he pets in much the same spirit that he does
me, and then goes to his work or books and forgets us both. He could help
me so much, if he only thought it worth his while! I'm sure I'm not
contented to be ignorant, and many of the things that he knows so much
about interest me most."
Thus each girl was busy with her thoughts, as they sat in the warm summer
night and watched the vivid line draw nearer. Mr. Clifford and Maggie
came out from time to time, and were evidently disturbed by the unchecked
progress of the fire. Alf had gone with his father, and anything like a
conflagration so terrified Johnnie that she dared not leave her mother's
lighted room.
Suddenly the approaching line grew dim, was broken, and before very long
even the last red glow disappeared utterly. "Ah," said Mr. Clifford,
rubbing his hands, "they have got the fire under, and I don't believe it
reached oar tract."
"How did they put it out so suddenly?" Miss Hargrove asked. "Were they
not fighting it all the time?"
"The boys will soon be here, and they can give you a more graphic account
than I. Mother is a little excited and troubled, as she always is when
her great babies are away on such affairs, so I must ask you to excuse
me."
In little more than half an hour a swift gallop was heard, and Burt soon
appeared, in the light of the late-rising moon. "It's all out," he
exclaimed. "Leonard and Webb propose remaining an hour or two longer, to
see that it does not break out again. There's no need of their doing so,
for Lumley promised to watch till morning. I'm not fit to be seen. If
you'll wait till I put on a little of the aspect of a white man, I'll
join you." He had been conscious of a feverish impatience to get back to
the ladies, having carefully, even in his thoughts, employed the plural,
and he had feared that they might have retired.
Miss Hargrove exclaimed: "How absurd! You wish to go and divest yourself
of all picturesqueness! I've seen well-dressed men before, and would much
prefer that you should join us as you are. We can then imagine that you
are a bandit or a frontiersman, and that your rake was a rifle, which you
had used against the Indians. We are impatient to have you tell us how
you fought the fire."
He gave but scant attention to Thunder that night, and soon stepped out
on the moonlit piazza, his tall, fine figure outlined to perfection in
his close-fitting costume.
"You will, indeed, need all your imagination to make anything of our task
to-night," he said. "Fighting a mountain fire is the most prosaic of hard
work. Suppose the line of fire coming down toward me from where you are
sitting." As yet unknown to him, a certain subtile flame was originating
in that direction. "We simply begin well in advance of it, so that we may
have time to rake a space, extending along the whole front of the fire,
clear of leaves and rubbish, and as far as possible to hollow out with
hoes a trench through this space. Thus, when the fire comes to this
cleared area, there is nothing to burn, and it goes out for want of fuel.
Of course, it's rough work, and it must be done rapidly, but you can see
that all the heroic elements which you may have associated with our
expedition are utterly lacking."
"Well, no matter. Amy and I have had our little romance, and have
imagined you charging the line of fire in imminent danger of being
strangled with smoke, if nothing worse."
Amy soon heard Maggie bustling about, preparing a midnight lunch for
those who would come home hungry as well as weary, and she said that she
would go and try to help. To Burt this seemed sufficient reason for her
absence, but Miss Hargrove thought, "Perhaps she saw that his eyes were
fixed chiefly on me as he gave his description. I wish I knew just how
she feels toward him!"
But the temptation to remain in the witching moonlight was too strong to
be resisted. His mellow tones were a music that she had never heard
before, and her eyes grew lustrous with suppressed feeling, and a
happiness to which she was not sure she was entitled. The spell of her
beauty was on him also, and the moments flew by unheeded, until Amy was
heard playing and singing softly to herself. "She does not join us
again!" was Miss Hargrove's mental comment, and with not a little
compunction she rose and went into the parlor. Burt lighted a cigar, in
the hope that the girls would again join him, but Leonard, Webb, and Alf
returned sooner than they were expected, and all speedily sat down to
their unseasonable repast. To Amy's surprise, Webb was the liveliest of
the party, but he looked gaunt from fatigue--so worn, indeed, that he
reminded her of the time when he had returned from Burt's rescue. But
there was no such episode as had then occurred before they parted for the
night, and to this she now looked back wistfully. He rose before the
others, pleaded fatigue, and went to his room.