while Hank was saddling up to go. For Hank's fingers went several
times to his rifle and hovered there, itching to do murder, while
Hank's mind revolved the consequences. Murder would be
madness--suicide, practically. The boy would be missed when he did not
answer the telephone. Some one would be sent up from the Forest
Service and the murder would be discovered, unless--unless Hank could
hide the body. There was the lake--but the lake was so clear! Besides,
there was always the chance at this season of the year that some
tourist would be within sight. Some tourist might even hear the shot.
It would be risky--too risky. Like Jack's, his rage cooled while he
busied himself mechanically with saddling his horse. After all, Hank
was not criminally inclined, except as anger drove him. He set the
pack-saddle and empty sacks on the pack horse, led his horse a few
feet farther away and mounted, scowling.
In the saddle he turned and looked for the first time full at Jack.
"You think you're darn smart!" he snarled wryly because of a cut lip
that had swollen all on one side. "You may think you're smart, but
they's another day comin'. You wait--that's all I got to say!"
It did not make him feel any better when Jack laughed suddenly and
loud. "_R-r-r-evenge_! By my heart's blood, I shall have r-r-evenge!"
he intoned mockingly. "Gwan outa my sight, Hank. You ain't making any
hit with me at all. _Scat!"_
"All right fer you!" Hank grumbled, in the futile repartee of the
stupid. "You think you're smart, but I don't. You wait!" Then he rode
away down the trail, glowering at the world through puffy lids and
repeating to himself many crushing things he wished he had thought to
say to Jack.
Jack himself had recourse to a small bottle of iodine left there by a
predecessor, painting his scratches liberally, and grinning at himself
in the little mirror because Hank had not once landed a bruising blow
on his face. After that he washed the dishes and went to the spring
for a bucket of fresh water, whistling all the way. It was amazing how
that fight had cleared his mental atmosphere.
After that, he perched up on the little rock pinnacle just behind the
station, and stared down the mountain toward Toll-Gate Flat, where she
lived. He saw Hank ride into the balsam thicket; and he, too, thought
of several things he regretted not having said to Hank. What rotten
luck it was that he should be held up here on that pinnacle while Hank
Brown could ride at his leisure down into that tiny valley! The
government ought to gather up all the Hank Browns in the country and
put them up on such places as these, and let decent fellows do the
riding around.
Down there, beyond the trail, on a slope where the manzanita was not
quite so matted together, he saw something move slowly. Then it
stopped, and he got a gleam of light, the reflection, evidently of
some bright object. He lifted the telescope and focussed it, and his
heart came leaping up into his throat just as the figure came leaping
into close view through the powerful lense.
It was Marion Rose, up by the hydrometer that looked something like a
lone beehive perched on a wild slope by itself. She was sitting on a
rock with her feet crossed, and she was inspecting her chin in the
tiny mirror of her vanity bag. Some blemish--or more likely an insect
bite, from the way her fingertip pressed carefully a certain point of
her chin--seemed to hold all her attention. It was the sun flashing on
the bit of mirror that had made the gleam.
Jack watched her hungrily; her slim shape, leaning negligently
sidewise; her hat pushed back a little; her hair, the color of ripe
corn, fluffed where the wind had blown it; the clear, delicate, creamy
tint of her skin, her mouth curved in soft, red lines that held one's
eyes fascinated when they moved in speech. He watched her, never
thinking of the rudeness of it.
And then he saw her lift her face and look up to the peak, directly at
him, it seemed to him. His face turned hot, and he lowered the glass
guiltily. But of course she could not see him--or if she could, he
looked no more than a speck on the rock. He lifted the telescope
again, and her face jumped into close view. She was still looking up
his way, the little mirror turning idly in her hand. Her face was
thoughtful; almost wistful, he dared to think. Perhaps she was
lonesome, too. She had told him that she had spells of being terribly
lonesome.
Jack had an inspiration. He climbed hurriedly down off the rock, got
his own looking glass and climbed back again. He turned the glass so
that the sun shown on it aslant and threw a glare toward her. Then he
lifted the telescope quickly to see if she noticed the sparkle. After
a moment he decided that she had seen it but did not quite know what
had caused it. At any rate, she was still looking that way, which was
something.
Like the boy he was, he lay down on his stomach, balanced the
telescope across a splintered notch in the rock so that he could
steady it with one hand, and with the other he tilted the mirror;
inadvertently tilted the telescope also, and came near smashing the
mirror before he got the two balanced again. Well, she was still
looking, at any rate. And now she was frowning a little, as though
she was puzzled.
He signalled again, and this time he managed to keep her in the field
of the telescope. He saw her smile suddenly and glance down at her
vanity mirror. Still smiling, she lifted it and turned it to the sun,
looking from it to the peak.
"She's on! I'll be John Browned if she ain't on to it already!" Jack
chortled to the birds, and sent her a signal. She answered that with a
flash. He managed two flashes without losing her in the telescope, and
she immediately sent two flashes in reply. Three he gave, and she
answered with three. He could see her laughing like a child with a new
game. He could see the impish light in her eyes when she glanced up,
like a woman engrossed in her favorite pastime of be-deviling some
man. He laughed back at her, as though she was as near to him as she
looked to be. He quite forgot that she was not, and spoke to her
aloud.
"Some little heliographing--what? Come on up, and we'll make up a
code, so we can talk! Aw, come on--it ain't so far! Husky girl like
you can climb it in no time at all. Aw, come on!"
A couple of tourists, panting up to the peak with unsightly amber
goggles and a kodak and a dog, found him addressing empty air and
looked at him queerly. Jack could have murdered them both when he
turned his head and saw them gaping open-mouthed at his performance.
But he did not. He climbed shame-facedly down and answered the usual
questions with his usual patient courtesy, and hoped fervently that
they would either die at once of heart failure or go back to the lake
and leave him alone. Instead, they took pictures of the station and
the rocks and of him--though Jack was keen-witted enough to keep in
the shade and turn his face away from the camera.
They were such bores of tourists! The woman was sunburned and frowsy,
and her khaki outing suit was tight where it should be loose, and hung
in unsightly wrinkles where it should fit snugly. Her high-laced
mountain boots were heavy and shapeless, and she climbed here and
there, and stood dumpily and stared down at Jack's beloved woods
through her amber glasses until she nearly drove him frantic. She kept
saying: "Oh, papa, don't you wish you could get a snap of that?" and
"Oh, papa, come and see if you can't snap this!"
Papa was not much better. Papa's khaki suit had come off a pile on the
counter of some department store--the wrong pile. Papa kept taking off
his hat and wiping his bald spot, and hitching his camera case into a
different position, so that it made a new set of wrinkles in the
middle of his back. The coat belt strained against its buttons over
papa's prosperous paunch, and he wheezed when he talked.
And down there on the manzanita slope, little flashes of light kept
calling, calling, and Jack dared not answer. One, two--one, two,
three--could anything in the world be more maddening?
Then all at once a puff of smoke came ballooning up through the trees,
down beyond the girl and well to the right of the balsam thicket. Jack
whirled and dove into the station, his angry eyes flashing at the
tourists.
"There's a forest fire started, down the mountain," he told them
harshly. "You better beat it for Keddie while you can get there!" He
slammed the door in their startled faces and laid the pointer on its
pivot and swung it toward the smoke.
The smoke was curling up already in an ugly yellowish brown cloud,
spreading in long leaps before the wind. Jack's hand shook when he
reached for the telephone to report the fire. The chart and his own
first-hand knowledge of the mountainside told him that the fire was
sweeping down north of Toll-Gate Creek toward the heavily timbered
ridge beyond.
Heedless of the presence or absence of the tourists, he snatched the
telescope and climbed the rock where he could view the slope where the
girl had been. The smoke was rolling now over the manzanita slope,
and he could not pierce its murkiness. He knew that the slope was not
yet afire, but the wind was bearing the flames that way, and the
manzanita would burn with a zipping rush once it started. He knew. He
had stood up there and watched the flames sweep over patches of the
shrub.
He rushed back into the station, seized the telephone and called again
the main office.
"For the Lord sake, hustle up here and do something!" he shouted
aggressively. "The whole blamed mountain's afire!" That, of course,
was exaggeration, but Jack was scared.
Out again on the rock, he swept the slope beneath him with his
telescope. He could not see anything of the girl, and the swirling
smoke filled him with a horror too great for any clear thought. He
climbed down and began running down the pack trail like one gone mad,
never stopping to wonder what he could do to save her; never thinking
that he would simply be sharing her fate, if what he feared was
true--if the flames swept over that slope.
He stumbled over a root and fell headlong, picked himself up and went
on again, taking great leaps, like a scared deer. She was down there.
And when the fire struck that manzanita it would just go _swoosh_ in
every direction at once.... And so he, brave, impulsive young fool
that he was, rushed down into it as though he were indeed a god and
could hold back the flames until she was safe away from the place.
CHAPTER TEN
WHEN FORESTS ARE ABLAZE
It seemed to Jack that he had been running for an hour, though it
could not have been more than a few minutes at most. Where the trail
swung out and around a steep, rocky place, he left it and plunged
heedlessly straight down the hill. The hot breath of the fire swept up
in gusts, bearing charred flakes that had been leaves. The smoke
billowed up to him, then drove back in the tricky air-currents that
played impishly around the fire. When he could look down to the knoll
where the hydrometer stood, he saw that it was not yet afire, but that
the flames were working that way faster even than he had feared.
Between gasps he shouted her name as Hank Brown had repeated it to
him. He stopped on a ledge and stared wildly, in a sudden panic, lest
he should somehow miss her. He called again, even while reason told
him that his voice could not carry any distance, with all that crackle
and roar. He forced himself to stand there for a minute to get his
breath and to see just how far the fire had already swept, and how
fast it was spreading.
Even while he stood there, a flaming pine branch came whirling up and
fell avidly upon a buck bush beside him. The bush crackled and
shriveled, a thin spiral of smoke mounting upward into the cloud that
rolled overhead. Jack stood dazed, watching the yellow tongues go
licking up the smaller branches. While he stood looking, the ravaging
flames had devoured leaves and twigs and a dead branch or two, and
left the bush a charred, smoking, dead thing that waved its blackened
stubs of branches impotently in the wind. Alone it had stood, alone it
had died the death of fire.
"Marion Rose!" he shouted abruptly, and began running again. "Marion
Rose!" But the hot wind whipped the words from his lips, and the deep,
sullen roar of the fire drowned his voice. Still calling, he reached
the road that led to Crystal Lake. The wind was hotter, the roar was
deeper and louder and seemed to fill all the world. Hot, black ash
flakes settled thick around him.
Then, all at once, he saw her standing in the middle of the road, a
little farther up the hill. She was staring fascinated at the fire,
her eyes wide like a child's, her face with the rapt look he had seen
when she stood looking down from the peak into the heart of the
forest. And then, when he saw her, Jack could run no more. His knees
bent under him, as though the bone had turned suddenly to soft
gristle, and he tottered weakly when he tried to hurry to her.
"Isn't it wonderful?" she called out when she saw him. Her words came
faintly to him in all that rush and crackle of flame and wind
together. "I never saw anything like it before--did you? It sprung up
all at once, and the first I knew it was sweeping along."
"Don't stand here!" Jack panted hoarsely. "Good Lord, girl! You--"
"Why, you've been running!" she cried, in a surprised tone. "Were you
down there in it? I thought you had to stay up on top." She had to
raise her voice to make him hear her.
Her absolute ignorance of the danger exasperated him. He took her by
the arm and swung her up the trail. "We've got to beat it!" he yelled
in her ear. "Can't you see it's coming this way?"
"It can't come fast enough to catch us," she answered impatiently.
"It's away back there down the hill yet. Wait! I want to watch it for
a minute."
A bushy cedar tree ten feet away to their left suddenly burst into
flame and burned viciously, each branch a sheet of fire.
"Well, what do you know about _that_?" cried Marion Rose. "It jumped
from away down there!"
"Come on!" Pulling her by the arm, Jack began running again up the
hill, leaving the road where it swung to the east and taking a short
cut through the open space in the brush. "Run!" he urged, still
pulling at her arm. "We've--got to--swing around it--"
She ran with him, a little of their peril forcing itself upon her
consciousness and making her glance often over her shoulder. And Jack
kept pulling at her arm, helping her to keep her feet when she
stumbled, which she did often, because she would not look where she
was going.
"Don't look--run!" he urged, when another brand fell in a fir near
them and set the whole tree ablaze. The air around them was hot, like
the breath of a furnace.
She did not answer him, but she let him lead her whither he would. And
they came breathless to the rocky outcropping through which the pack
trail wormed its way farther down the hill. There he let her stop, for
he knew that they had passed around the upper edge of the fire, and
were safe unless the wind changed. He helped her upon a high,
flat-topped boulder that overlooked the balsam thicket and manzanita
slope, and together they faced the debauchery of the flames.
Even in the few minutes since Jack had stopped on that rocky knoll the
fire had swept far. It had crossed the Crystal Lake road and was now
eating its way steadily up the timbered hillside beyond. The manzanita
slope where the girl had sat and signalled with her mirror was all
charred and stripped bare of live growth, and the flames were licking
up the edges beyond.
Jack touched her arm and pointed to the place. "You said it couldn't
travel very fast," he reminded her. "Look down there where you sat
fooling with the little mirror."
Marion looked and turned white. "Oh!" she cried. "It wasn't anywhere
near when I started up the road. Oh, do you suppose it has burned down
as far as the cabin? Because there's Kate--can't we go and see?"
"We can't, and when I left the lookout the fire was away up this side
of Toll-Gate, and not spreading down that way. Wind's strong. Come
on--I expect I better beat it back up there. They might phone."
"But I must hunt Kate up! Why, she was all alone there, taking a nap
in the hammock! If it should--"
"It won't," Jack reiterated positively. "I ought to know, oughtn't I?
It's my business to watch fires and see how they're acting, isn't it?"
He saw her still determined, and tried another argument. "Listen here.
It isn't far up to the station. We'll go up there, and I'll phone down
to the office to have the firemen stop and see if she's all right.
They'll have to come right by there, to get at the fire. And you can't
cross that burning strip now--not on a bet, you couldn't. And if you
could," he added determinedly, "I wouldn't let you try it. Come
on--we'll go up and do that little thing, telephone to the office and
have them look after Kate."
Marion, to his great relief, yielded to the point of facing up hill
with him and taking a step or two. "But you don't know Kate," she
demurred, turning her face again toward the welter of burning timber.
"She'll be worried to death about me, and it would be just like her to
start right out to hunt me up. I've simply got to get back and let her
know I'm all right."
Jack threw back his head and laughed aloud--think how long it had been
since he really had laughed! "What's the matter with phoning that
you're all right? I guess the wire will stand that extra sentence,
maybe--and you can phone in yourself, if you want to convince them
ab-so-lutely. What?"
"Well, who'd ever have thought that I might phone a message to Kate!
Down there in that hole of a place where we live, one can scarcely
believe that there are telephones in the world. Let's hurry, then.
Kate will be perfectly wild till she hears that I am safe. And then--"
she quirked her lips in a little smile, "she'll be wilder still
because I'm not there where she supposed I'd be when she waked up."
Jack replied with something slangy and youthful and altogether like
the old Jack Corey, and led her up the steep trail to the peak. They
took their time, now that they were beyond the fire zone. They turned
often to watch the flames while they got their breath; and every time
Marion stopped, she observed tritely that it was a shame such
beautiful timber must burn, and invariably added, "But isn't it
beautiful?" And to both observations Jack would agree without any
scorn of the triteness. Whereas he would have been furious had a mere
tourist exclaimed about the beauty of a forest fire, which to him had
always seemed a terrible thing.
They found the telephone ringing like mad, and Jack turned red around
the ears and stuttered a good deal before he was through answering the
questions of the supervisor, and explaining why he had not answered
the phone in the last hour.
"Here, let me talk," commanded Marion suddenly, and took the receiver
out of Jack's hand. "I'll tell you where he was," she called crisply
to the accusing voice at the other end. "I was down the hill, right in
the track of the fire, and I couldn't get back to the cabin at all,
and--ah--this gentleman saw me through the telescope and ran down
there and got me out of it. And right where I had been sitting on a
rock, the fire has burned just everything! And I wish you would get
word somehow to Miss Kate Humphrey, at Toll-Gate cabin, that Marion
Rose is all right and will be home just as soon as she can get down
there without burning her shoes. And--oh, will you please tell her
that I took the bread out of the oven before I left, and that it's
under the box the cream came in? I put it there to keep the bluejays
away from it till she woke up, and she may not know where to look....
Yes, thank you, I think that will be all.... But listen! This man up
here saved my life, though of course it is a pity he was not here to
answer the phone, every minute of the day. What I want to say is that
it was my fault, and I hope you'll please excuse me for having a life
that needed to be saved just when you called! I wouldn't for the
world.... Oh, don't mention it! I just didn't want you to blame him,
is all. Good-by."
She turned to Jack with a little frown. "People seem to think, just
because you work for a living, that your whole mission in life is to
take orders on the jump. It was that way at the Martha Washington, and
every other place I ever worked. That man down there seems to think
that your life begins and ends right here in this little glass box.
What made you apologize for keeping a telephone call waiting while you
went out and saved a perfectly good life? Men are the queerest
things!"
She went out and climbed upon the rock where Jack had lain watching
her, and set herself down as comfortably as possible, and stared at
the fire while Jack located on the chart the present extent of the
blazing area, and sent in his report. When he had finished he did not
go out to her immediately. He stood staring down the hill with his
eyebrows pinched together. Now and then he lifted his hand
unconsciously and pushed his heavy thatch of hair straight back from
his forehead, where it began at once to lie wavy as of old. He was
feeling again the personal sense of tragedy and loss in that fire;
cursing again his helplessness to check it or turn it aside from that
beautiful stretch of timber over toward Genessee.
Now the shadows had crept down the slope again to where the fire glow
beat them back while it crisped the balsam thicket. Behind him the
sun, sinking low over the crest of a far-off ridge, sent flaming
banners across the smoke cloud. The sky above was all curdled with
gold and crimson, while the smoke cloud below was a turgid black shot
through with sparks and tongues of flame.
Where were the fire-fighters, that they did not check the mad race of
flames before they crossed that canyon? It seemed to Jack that never
had a fire burned with so headlong a rush. Then his eyes went to the
blackened manzanita slope where Marion had been idling, and he
shivered at what might have happened down there. To comfort himself
with the sight of her safe and serene, he turned and went out, meaning
to go up where she was.
She was still sitting on the rock, gazing down the mountain, her face
sober. Her hat was off, and the wind was blowing the short strands of
her hair around her face. She was leaning back a little, braced by a
hand upon the rock. She looked a goddess of the mountain tops, Jack
thought. He stood there staring up at her, just as he had stared down
at her when she had stood looking into the lake. Did she feel as he
felt about the woods and mountains? he wondered. She seemed rather
fond of staring and staring and saying nothing--and yet, he
remembered, when she talked she gave no hint at all of any deep sense
of the beauty of her surroundings. When she talked she was just like
other town girls he had known, a bit slangy, more than a bit
self-possessed, and frivolous to the point of being flippant. That
type he knew and could meet fairly on a level. But when she was
looking and saying nothing, she seemed altogether different. Which, he
wondered, was the real Marion Rose?
While he stood gazing, she turned and looked down at him; a little
blankly at first, as though she had just waked from sleep or from
abstraction too deep for instant recovery. Then she smiled and changed
her position, putting up both hands to pat and pull her hair into
neatness; and with the movement she ceased to be a brooding goddess of
the mountain tops, and became again the girl who had perversely taken
the telephone away from him, the girl who had played mock billiards
upon his beloved chart, the girl who said--she said it now, while he
was thinking of her melodious way of saying it.
"Well, what do you know about that?" she inquired, making a gesture
with one arm toward the fire while with the other she fumbled in her
absurd little vanity bag. "It just burns as if it had a grudge against
the country, doesn't it? But isn't it perfectly gorgeous, with all
that sunset and everything! It looks like a Bliffen ten-reel picture.
He ought to see it--he could get some great pointers for his next big
picture. Wouldn't that be just dandy on the screen?" She had found her
powder puff and her tiny mirror, and she was dabbing at her nose and
her cheeks, which no more needed powder than did the little birds that
chirped around her. Between dabs, she was looking down the mountain,
with an occasional wave of her puff toward some particularly
"striking effect" of fire and sunset and rolling smoke and tall pines
seen dimly in the background.
Jack wanted to climb up there and shake her out of her frivolity.
Which was strange when you consider that all his life, until three
months ago, he had lived in the midst of just such unthinking
flippancy, had been a part of it and had considered--as much as he
ever considered anything--that it was the only life worth living.