THE FIRE
“That was Roselle Upman that hollered,” remarked Janey Wilcox, breaking
the agitated silence which had fallen upon the supper table. “You can
tell it's him because he's had all his front teeth pulled out.”
“I wasn't born in the woods to be skeert by an owl!” replied Abner,
with a great show of tranquillity, helping himself to another slice of
bread. “Miss, you ain't half makin' out a supper!”
But this bravado could not maintain itself. In another minute there
came a loud chorus of angry yells, heightened at its finish by two or
three pistol shots. Then Abner pushed back his chair and rose slowly to
his feet, and the rest sprang up all around the table.
“Hurley,” said the farmer, speaking as deliberately as he knew how,
doubtless with the idea of reassuring the others, “you go out into the
kitchen with the women folks, an' bar the woodshed door, an' bring in
the axe with you to stan' guard over the kitchen door. I'll look out
for this part o' the house myself.”
“I want to stay in here with you, Abner,” said M'rye.
“No, you go out with the others!” commanded the master with firmness,
and so they all filed out with no hint whatever of me. The shadow of
the lamp-shade had cut me off altogether from their thoughts.
Perhaps it is not surprising that my recollections of what now ensued
should lack definiteness and sequence. The truth is, that my terror
at my own predicament, sitting there with no covering for my feet and
calves but the burdock leaves and that absurd shawl, swamped everything
else in my mind. Still, I do remember some of it.
Abner strode across to the bookcase and took up the gun, his big thumb
resting determinedly on the hammers. Then he marched to the door, threw
it wide open, and planted himself on the threshold, looking out into
the darkness.
“What's your business here, whoever you are?” he called out, in deep
defiant tones.
“We've come to take you an' Paddy out for a little ride on a rail!”
answered the same shrill, mocking voice we had heard at first. Then
others took up the hostile chorus. “We've got some pitch a-heatin'
round in the back yard!” “You won't catch cold; there's plenty o'
feathers!” “Tell the Irishman here's some more ears for him to chaw
on!” “Come out an' take your Copperhead medicine!”
There were yet other cries which the howling wind tore up into
inarticulate fragments, and then a scattering volley of cheers, again
emphasized by pistol-shots. While the crack of these still chilled my
blood, a more than usually violent gust swooped round Abner's burly
figure, and blew out the lamp.
Terrifying as the first instant of utter darkness was, the second was
recognizable as a relief. I at once threw myself out of the chair, and
crept along back of the stove to where my stockings and boots had been
put to dry. These I hastened, with much trembling awkwardness, to pull
on, taking pains to keep the big square old stove between me and that
open veranda door.
“Guess we won't take no ride to-night!” I heard Abner roar out, after
the shouting had for the moment died away.
“You got to have one!” came back the original voice. “It's needful for
your complaint!”
“I've got somethin' here that'll fit _your_ complaint!” bellowed the
farmer, raising his gun. “Take warnin'—the first cuss that sets foot
on this stoop, I'll bore a four-inch hole clean through him. I've
got squirrel shot, an' I've got buck-shot, an' there's plenty more
behind—so take your choice!”
There were a good many derisive answering yells and hoots, and someone
again fired a pistol in the air, but nobody offered to come up on the
veranda.
Emboldened by this, I stole across the room now to one of the windows,
and lifting a corner of the shade, strove to look out. At first there
was nothing whatever to be seen in the utter blackness. Then I made
out some faint reddish sort of diffused light in the upper air, which
barely sufficed to indicate the presence of some score or more dark
figures out in the direction of the pump. Evidently they _had_ built a
fire around in the back yard, as they said—probably starting it there
so that its light might not disclose their identity.
This looked as if they really meant to tar-and-feather Abner and
Hurley. The expression was familiar enough to my ears, and, from
pictures in stray illustrated weeklies that found their way to the
Corners, I had gathered some general notion of the procedure involved.
The victim was stripped, I knew, and daubed over with hot melted pitch;
then a pillow-case of feathers was emptied over him, and he was forced
astride a fence-rail, which the rabble hoisted on their shoulders
and ran about with. But my fancy balked at and refused the task of
imagining Abner Beech in this humiliating posture. At least it was
clear to my mind that a good many fierce and bloody things would happen
first.
Apparently this had become clear to the throng outside as well. Whole
minutes had gone by, and still no one mounted the veranda to seek close
quarters with the farmer—who stood braced with his legs wide apart,
bare-headed and erect, the wind blowing his huge beard sidewise over
his shoulder.
“Well! ain't none o' you a-comin'?” he called out at last, with
impatient sarcasm. “Thought you was so sot on takin' me out an' havin'
some fun with me!” After a brief pause, another taunt occurred to him.
“Why, even the niggers you're so in love with,” he shouted, “they ain't
such dod-rotted cowards as you be!”
A general movement was discernible among the shadowy forms outside.
I thought for the instant that it meant a swarming attack upon the
veranda. But no! suddenly it had grown much lighter, and the mob was
moving away toward the rear of the house. The men were shouting things
to one another, but the wind for the moment was at such a turbulent
pitch that all their words were drowned. The reddened light waxed
brighter still—and now there was nobody to be seen at all from the
window.
“Hurry here! Mr. Beech! _We're all afire!_” cried a frightened voice in
the room behind me.
It may be guessed how I turned.
The kitchen door was open, and the figure of a woman stood on the
threshold, indefinitely black against a strange yellowish-drab half
light which framed it. This woman—one knew from the voice that it was
Esther Hagadorn—seemed to be wringing her hands.
“Hurry! Hurry!” she cried again, and I could see now that the little
passage was full of gray luminous smoke, which was drifting past her
into the living-room. Even as I looked, it had half obscured her form,
and was rolling in, in waves.
Abner had heard her, and strode across the room now, gun still in
hand, into the thick of the smoke, pushing Esther before him and
shutting the kitchen door with a bang as he passed through. I put in
a terrified minute or two alone in the dark, amazed and half-benumbed
by the confused sounds that at first came from the kitchen, and by the
horrible suspense, when a still more sinister silence ensued. Then
there rose a loud crackling noise, like the incessant popping of some
giant variety of corn. The door burst open again, and M'rye's tall form
seemed literally flung into the room by the sweeping volume of dense
smoke which poured in. She pulled the door to behind her—then gave a
snarl of excited emotion at seeing me by the dusky reddened radiance
which began forcing its way from outside through the holland window
shades.
“Light the lamp, you gump!” she commanded, breathlessly, and fell with
fierce concentration upon the task of dragging furniture out from the
bed-room. I helped her in a frantic, bewildered fashion, after I had
lighted the lamp, which flared and smoked without its shade, as we
toiled. M'rye seemed all at once to have the strength of a dozen men.
She swung the ponderous chest of drawers out end on end; she fairly
lifted the still bigger bookcase, after I had hustled the books out
on to the table; she swept off the bedding, slashed the cords, and
jerked the bed-posts and side-pieces out of their connecting sockets
with furious energy, till it seemed as if both rooms must have been
dismantled in less time than I have taken to tell of it.
The crackling overhead had swollen now to a wrathful roar, rising above
the gusty voices of the wind. The noise, the heat, the smoke, and
terror of it all made me sick and faint. I grew dizzy, and did foolish
things in an aimless way, fumbling about among the stuff M'rye was
hurling forth. Then all at once her darkling, smoke-wrapped figure shot
up to an enormous height, the lamp began to go round, and I felt myself
with nothing but space under my feet, plunging downward with awful
velocity, surrounded by whirling skies full of stars.
* * * * *
There was a black night-sky overhead when I came to my senses again,
with flecks of snow in the cold air on my face. The wind had fallen,
everything was as still as death, and someone was carrying me in his
arms. I tried to lift my head.
“Aisy now!” came Hurley's admonitory voice, close to my ear. “We'll be
there in a minyut.”
“No—I'm all right—let me down,” I urged. He set me on my feet, and I
looked amazedly about me.
The red-brown front of our larger hay-barn loomed in a faint unnatural
light, at close quarters, upon my first inquiring gaze. The big sliding
doors were open, and the slanting wagon-bridge running down from their
threshold was piled high with chairs, bedding, crockery, milk-pans,
clothing—the jumbled remnants of our household gods. Turning, I looked
across the yard upon what was left of the Beech homestead—a glare of
cherry light glowing above a fiery hole in the ground.
Strangely enough this glare seemed to perpetuate in its outlines the
shape and dimensions of the vanished house. It was as if the house were
still there, but transmuted from joists and clap-boards and shingles,
into an illuminated and impalpable ghost of itself. There was a weird
effect of transparency about it. Through the spectral bulk of red light
I could see the naked and gnarled apple-trees in the home-orchard on
the further side; and I remembered at once that painful and striking
parallel of Scrooge gazing through the re-edified body of Jacob Marley,
and beholding the buttons at the back of his coat. It all seemed some
monstrous dream.
But no, here the others were. Janey Wilcox and the Underwood girl had
come out from the barn, and were carrying in more things. I perceived
now that there was a candle burning inside, and presently Esther
Hagadorn was to be seen. Hurley had disappeared, and so I went up the
sloping platform to join the women—noting with weak surprise that
my knees seemed to have acquired new double joints and behaved as if
they were going in the other direction. I stumbled clumsily once I was
inside the barn, and sat down with great abruptness on a milking-stool,
leaning my head back against the hay-mow, and conscious of entire
indifference as to whether school kept or not.
Again it was like some half-waking vision—the feeble light of the
candle losing itself upon the broad high walls of new hay; the huge
shadows in the rafters overhead; the women-folk silently moving about,
fixing up on the barn floor some pitiful imitation, poor souls, of
the home that had been swept off the face of the earth, and outside,
through the wide sprawling doors, the dying away effulgence of the
embers of our roof-tree lingering in the air of the winter night.
Abner Beech came in presently, with the gun in one hand, and a
blackened and outlandish-looking object in the other, which turned out
to be the big pink sea-shell that used to decorate the parlor mantel.
He held it up for M'rye to see, with a grave, tired smile on his face.
“We got it out, after all—just by the skin of our teeth,” he said, and
Hurley, behind him, confirmed this by an eloquent grimace.
M'rye's black eyes snapped and sparkled as she lifted the candle and
saw what this something was. Then she boldly put up her face and kissed
her husband with a resounding smack. Truly it was a night of surprises.
“That's about the only thing I had to call my own when I was married,”
she offered in explanation of her fervor, speaking to the company at
large. Then she added in a lower tone, to Esther: “_He_ used to play
with it for hours at a stretch—when he was a baby.”
“'Member how he used to hold it up to his ear, eh, mother?” asked
Abner, softly.
M'rye nodded her head, and then put her apron up to her eyes for
a brief moment. When she lowered it, we saw an unaccustomed smile
mellowing her hard-set, swarthy face.
The candle light flashed upon a tear on her cheek that the apron had
missed.
“I guess I _do_ remember!” she said, with a voice full of tenderness.
Then Esther's hand stole into M'rye's and the two women stood together
before Abner, erect and with beaming countenances, and he smiled upon
them both.
It seemed that we were all much happier in our minds, now that our
house had been burned down over our heads.