terrible thing. I wish you were out of it all. Hate can only hurt you.
I'm afraid of a scar that it might leave on you through all the long,
long years of life. Can you see? I'm afraid of something that might go
deeper than all this, something that might go as deep as life. After
all, that's what I'm afraid of, I guess--Life, great, big, terrible,
menacing, Life!"
"My life?" Jeffrey asked gruffly.
"I have faced that," the girl answered evenly, "just as you have faced
it. And I am not afraid of that. No. It's what you might do in
anger--if they hurt you again. Something that would scar your heart
and your soul. Jeffrey, do you know that sometimes I've seen the
worst, the worst--even _murder_ in your eyes!"
"I wish," the boy returned shortly, "the Bishop would keep his
religion out of all this. He's a good man and a good friend," he went
on, "but I don't like this religion coming into everything."
"But how can he? He cannot keep religion apart from life and right and
wrong. What good would religion be if it did not go ahead of us in
life and show us the way?"
"But what's the use?" the boy said grudgingly. "What good does it do?
You wouldn't have thought of any of this only for that last part of
his letter. Why does that have to come into everything? It's the
Catholic Church all over again, always pushing in everywhere."
"Isn't that funny," the girl said, brightening; "I have cried myself
sick thinking just that same thing. I have gone almost frantic
thinking that if I once gave in to the Church it would crush me and
make me do everything that I didn't want to do. And now I never think
of it. Life goes along really just as though being a Catholic didn't
make any difference at all."
"That's because you've given in to it altogether. You don't even know
that you want to resist. You're swallowed up in it."
The girl flushed angrily, but bit her lips before she answered.
"It's the queerest thing, isn't it, Jeff," she said finally in a
thoughtful, friendly way, "how two people can fight about religion?
Now you don't care a particle about it one way or the other. And
I--I'd rather not talk about it. And yet, we were just now within an
inch of quarrelling bitterly about it. Why is it?"
"I don't know. I'm sorry, Ruth," the boy apologised slowly. "It's none
of my business, anyway."
They were just coming over the long hill above Ruth's home. Below them
stretched the long sweep of the road down past her house and up the
other slope until it lost itself around the shoulder of Lansing
Mountain.
Half a mile below them a rider was pushing his big roan horse up the
hill towards them at a heart-breaking pace.
"That's 'My' Stocking's roan," said Jeffrey, straightening in his
saddle; "I'd know that horse three miles away."
"But what's he carrying?" cried Ruth excitedly, as she peered eagerly
from under her shading hand. "Look. Across his saddle. Rifles! _Two_
of them!"
Brom Bones, sensing the girl's excitement, was already pulling at his
bit, eager for a wild race down the hill. But Jeffrey, after one long,
sharp look at the oncoming horseman, pulled in quietly to the side of
the road. And Ruth did the same. She was too well trained in the
things of the hills not to know that if there was trouble, then it was
no time to be weakening horses' knees in mad and useless dashes
downhill.
The rider was Myron Stocking from over in the Crooked Lake country, as
Jeffrey had supposed. He pulled up as he recognised the two who waited
for him by the roadside, and when he had nodded to Ruth, whom he knew
by sight, he drew over close to Jeffrey. Ruth, eager as she was to
hear, pushed Brom Bones a few paces farther away from them. They would
not talk freely in her hearing, she knew. And Jeffrey would tell her
all that she needed to know.
The two men exchanged a half dozen rapid sentences and Ruth heard
Stocking conclude:
"Your Uncle Catty slipped me this here gun o' yours. Your Ma didn't
see."
Jeffrey nodded and took the gun. Then he came to Ruth.
"There's some strangers over in the hills that maybe ought to be
watched. The country's awful dry," he added quietly. He knew that Ruth
would need no further explanation.
He pulled the Bishop's letter from his pocket and handed it to Ruth,
saying:
"Take this and the paper along to Mother. She'll want to see them
right away. And say, Ruth," he went on, as he looked anxiously at the
great sloping stretches of bone-dry underbrush that lay between them
and his home on the hill three miles away, "the country's awful dry.
If anything happens, get Mother and Aunt Letty down out of this
country. You can make them go. Nobody else could."
The girl had not yet spoken. There was no need for her to ask
questions. She knew what lay under every one of Jeffrey's pauses and
silences. It was no time for many words. He was laying upon her a
trust to look after the ones whom he loved.
She put out her hand to his and said simply:
"I'm glad we didn't quarrel, Jeff."
"I was a fool," said Jeffrey gruffly, as he wrung her hand. "But I'll
remember. Forgive me, please, Ruth."
"There's nothing to forgive--ever--between us, Jeffrey. Go now," she
said softly.
Jeffrey wheeled his horse and followed the other man back over the
hill on the road which he and Ruth had come. Ruth sat still until they
were out of sight. At the very last she saw Jeffrey swing his rifle
across the saddle in front of him, and a shadow fell across her heart.
She would have given everything in her world to have had back what she
had said of seeing murder in Jeffrey's eyes.
Jeffrey and Myron Stocking rode steadily up the French Village road
for an hour or so. Then they turned off from the road and began a long
winding climb up into the higher levels of the Racquette country.
"We might as well head for Bald Mountain right away," said Jeffrey, as
they came about sundown to a fork in their trail. "The breeze comes
straight down from the east. That's where the danger is, if there is
any."
"I suppose you're right, Jeff. But it means we'll have to sleep out if
we go that way."
"I guess that won't hurt us," Jeffrey returned. "If anything happens
we might have to sleep out a good many nights--and a lot of other
people would have to do the same."
"All right then," Stocking agreed. "We'll get a bite and give the
horses a feed and a rest at Hosmer's, that's about two miles over the
hills here; and then we can go on as far as you like."
At Hosmer's they got food enough for two days in the hills, and
having fed and breathed the horses they rode on up into the higher
woods. They were now in the region of the uncut timber where the great
trees were standing from the beginning, because they had been too high
up to be accessible to the lumbermen who had ravaged the lower levels.
Though the long summer twilight of the North still lighted the tops of
the trees, the two men rode in impenetrable darkness, leaving the
horses to pick their own canny footing up the trail.
"Did anybody see Rogers in that crowd?" Jeffrey asked as they rode
along. "You know, the man that was in French Village this summer."
"I don't know," Stocking answered. "You see they came up to the end of
the rails, at Grafton, on a handcar. And then they scattered. Nobody's
sure that he's seen any of 'em since. But they must be in the hills
somewhere. And Rafe Gadbeau's with 'em. You can bet on that. That's
all we've got to go on. But it may be a-plenty."
"It's enough to set us on the move, anyway," said Jeffrey. "They have
no business in the hills. They're bound to be up to mischief of some
sort. And there's just one big mischief that they can do. Can we make
Bald Mountain before daylight?"
"Oh, certainly; that'll be easy. We'll get a little light when we're
through this belt of heavy woods and then we can push along. We ought
to get up there by two o'clock. It ain't light till near five. That'll
give us a little sleep, if we feel like it."
True to Stocking's calculation they came out upon the rocky, thinly
grassed knobs of Bald Mountain shortly before two o'clock. It was a
soft, hazy night with no moon. There was rain in the air somewhere,
for there was no dew; but it might be on the other side of the divide
or it might be miles below on the lowlands.
Others of the men of the hills were no doubt in the vicinity of the
mountain, or were heading toward here. For the word of the menace had
gone through the hills that day, and men would decide, as Jeffrey had
done, that the danger would come from this direction. But they had not
heard anything to show the presence of others, nor did they care to
give any signals of their own whereabouts.
As for those others, the possible enemy, who had left the railroad
that morning and had scattered into the hills, if their purpose was
the one that men feared, they, too, would be near here. But it was
useless to look for them in the dark: neither was anything to be
feared from them before morning. Men do not start forest fires in the
night. There is little wind. A fire would probably die out of itself.
And the first blaze would rouse the whole country.
The two hobbled their horses with the bridle reins and lay down in the
open to wait for morning. Neither had any thought of sleep. But the
softness of the night, the pungent odour of the tamarack trees
floating up to them from below, and their long ride, soon began to
tell on them. Jeffrey saw that they must set a watch.
"Curl up and go to sleep, 'My,'" he said, shaking himself. "You might
as well. I'll wake you in an hour."
A ready snore was the only answer.
Morning coming over the higher eastern hills found them stiff and
weary, but alert. The woods below them were still banked in darkness
as they ate their dry food and caught their horses for the day that
was before them. There was no water to be had up here, and they knew
their horses must be gotten down to some water course before night.
A half circle of open country belted by heavy woods lay just below
them. Eagerly, as the light crept down the hill, they scanned the area
for sign of man or horse. Nothing moved. Apparently they had the world
to themselves. A fresh morning breeze came down over the mountain and
watching they could see the ripple of it in the tops of the distant
trees. The same thought made both men grip their rifles and search
more carefully the ground below them, for that innocent breeze blowing
straight down towards their homes and loved ones was a potential
enemy more to be feared than all the doings of men.
Down to the right, two miles or more away, a man came out of the
shadow of the woods. They could only see that he was a big man and
stout. There was nothing about him to tell them whether he was friend
or foe, of the hills or a stranger. Without waiting to see who he was
or what he did, the two dove for their saddles and started their
horses pell-mell down the hill towards him.
He saw them at once against the bare brow of the hill, and ran back
into the wood.
In another instant they knew what he was and what was his business.
They saw a light moving swiftly along the fringe of the woods. Behind
the light rose a trail of white smoke. And behind the smoke ran a line
of living fire. The man was running, dragging a flaming torch through
the long dried grass and brush!
The two, riding break-neck down over the rocks, regardless of paths or
horses' legs, would gladly have killed the man as he ran. But it was
too far for even a random shot. They could only ride on in reckless
rage, mad to be at the fire, to beat it to death with their hands, to
stamp it into the earth, but more eager yet for a right distance and a
fair shot at the fiend there within the wood.
Before they had stumbled half the distance down the hill, a wave of
leaping flame a hundred feet long was hurling itself upon the forest.
They could not stamp that fire out. But they could kill that man!
The man ran back behind the wall of fire to where he had started and
began to run another line of fire in the other direction. At that
moment Stocking yelled:
"There's another starting, straight in front!"
"Get him," Jeffrey shouted over his shoulder. "I'm going to kill this
one."
Stocking turned slightly and made for a second light which he had seen
starting. Jeffrey rode on alone, unslinging his rifle and driving
madly. His horse, already unnerved by the wild dash down the hill, now
saw the fire and started to bolt off at a tangent. Jeffrey fought with
him a furious moment, trying to force him toward the fire and the man.
Then, seeing that he could not conquer the fright of the horse and
that his man was escaping, he threw his leg over the saddle, and
leaping free with his gun ran towards the man.
The man was dodging in and out now among the trees, but still using
his torch and moving rapidly away.
Jeffrey ran on, gradually overhauling the man in his zigzag until he
was within easy distance. But the man continued weaving his way among
the trees so that it was impossible to get a fair aim. Jeffrey dropped
to one knee and steadied the sights of his rifle until they closed
upon the running man and clung to him.
Suddenly the man turned in an open space and faced about. It was
Rogers, Jeffrey saw. He was unarmed, but he must be killed.
"I am going to kill him," said Jeffrey under his breath, as he again
fixed the sights of his rifle, this time full on the man's breast.
A shot rang out in front somewhere. Rogers threw up his hands, took a
half step forward, and fell on his face.
Jeffrey, his finger still clinging to the trigger which he had not
pulled, ran forward to where the man lay.
He was lying face down, his arms stretched out wide at either side,
his fingers convulsively clutching at tufts of grass.
He was dying. No need for a second look.
His hat had fallen off to a little distance. There was a clean round
hole in the back of the skull. The close-cropped, iron grey hair
showed just the merest streak of red.
Just out of reach of one of his hands lay a still flaming railroad
torch, with which he had done his work.
Jeffrey peered through the wood in the direction from which the shot
had come. There was no smoke, no noise of any one running away, no
sign of another human being anywhere.
Away back of him he heard shots, one, two, three; Stocking, probably,
or some of the other men who must be in the neighbourhood, firing at
other fleeing figures in the woods.
He grabbed the burning torch, pulled out the wick and stamped it into
a patch of burnt ground, threw the torch back from the fire line, and
started clubbing the fire out of the grass with the butt of his
rifle.
He was quickly brought to his senses, when the forgotten cartridge in
his gun accidentally exploded and the bullet went whizzing past his
ear. He dropped the gun nervously and finding a sharp piece of sapling
he began to work furiously, but systematically at the line of fire.
The line was thin here, where it had really only that moment been
started, and he made some headway. But as he worked along to where it
had gotten a real start he saw that it was useless. Still he clung to
his work. It was the only thing that his numbed brain could think of
to do for the moment.
He dug madly with the sapling, throwing the loose dirt furiously after
the fire as it ran away from him. He leaped upon the line of the fire
and stamped at it with his boots until the fire crept up his trousers
and shirt and up even to his hair. And still the fire ran away from
him, away down the hill after its real prey. He looked farther on
along the line and saw that it was not now a line but a charging,
rushing river of flame that ran down the hill, twenty feet at a jump.
Nothing, nothing on earth, except perhaps a deluge of rain could now
stop that torrent of fire.
He stepped back. There was nothing to be done here now, behind the
fire. Nothing to be done but to get ahead of it and save what could be
saved. He looked around for his horse.
Just then men came riding along the back of the line, Stocking and old
Erskine Beasley in the lead. They came up to where Jeffrey was
standing and looked on beyond moodily to where the body of Rogers
lay.
Jeffrey turned and looked, too. A silence fell upon the little group
of horsemen and upon the boy standing there.
Myron Stocking spoke at last:
"Mine got away, Jeff," he said slowly.
Jeffrey looked up quickly at him. Then the meaning of the words
flashed upon him.
"I didn't do that!" he exclaimed hastily. "Somebody else shot him from
the woods. My gun went off accidental."
Silence fell again upon the little group of men. They did not look at
Jeffrey. They had heard but one shot. The shot from the woods had been
too muffled for them to hear.
Again Stocking broke the silence.
"What difference does it make," he said. "Any of us would have done it
if we could."
"But I didn't! I tell you I didn't," shouted Jeffrey. "The shot from
the woods got ahead of me. That man was facing me. He was shot from
behind!"
Old Erskine Beasley took command.
"What difference does it make, as Stocking says. We've got live men
and women and children to think about to-day," he said. "Straighten
him out decent. Then divide and go around the fire both ways. The
alarm can't travel half fast enough for this breeze, and it's rising,
too," he added.
"But I tell you--!" Jeffrey began again. Then he saw how useless it
was.
He looked up the hill and saw his horse, which even in the face of
this unheard-of terror had preferred to venture back toward his
master.
He caught the horse, mounted, and started to ride south with the party
that was to try to get around the fire from that side.
He rode with them. They were his friends. But he was not with them.
There was a circle drawn around him. He was separated from them. They
probably did not feel it, but he felt it. It is a circle which draws
itself ever around a man who, justly or unjustly, is thought guilty of
blood. Men may applaud his deed. Men may say that they themselves
would wish to have done it. But the circle is there.
Then Jeffrey thought of his Mother. She would not see that circle.
Also he thought of a girl. The girl had only a few hours before said
that she had sometimes seen even murder in his eyes.
V
MON PERE JE ME 'CUSE
Down the wide slope of Bald Mountain the fire raved exultingly,
leaping and skipping fantastically as it ran. It was a prisoner
released from the bondage of the elements that had held it. It was a
spirit drunk with sudden-found freedom. It was a flood raging down a
valley. It was a maniac at large.
The broad base of the mountain where it sat upon the backs of the
lower hills spread out fanwise to a width of five miles. The fire
spread its wings as it came down until it swept the whole apron of the
mountain. A five-mile wave of solid flame rolled down upon the hills.
Sleepy cattle on the hills rising for their early browse missed the
juicy dew from the grass. They looked to where the sun should be
coming over the mountain and instead they saw the sun coming down the
side of the mountain in a blanket of white smoke. They left their feed
and began to huddle together, mooing nervously to each other about
this thing and sniffing the air and pawing the earth.
Sleepy hired men coming out to drive the cattle in to milking looked
blinking up at the mountain, stood a moment before their numb minds
understood what their senses were telling them, then ran shouting back
to the farm houses, throwing open pasture gates and knocking down
lengths of fence as they ran. Some, with nothing but fear in their
hearts, ran straight to the barns and mounting the best horses fled
down the roads to the west. For the hireling flees because he is a
hireling.
Sleepy men and women and still sleeping children came tumbling out of
the houses, to look up at the death that was coming down to them. Some
cried in terror. Some raged and cursed and shook foolish fists at the
oncoming enemy. Some fell upon their knees and lifted hands to the God
of fire and flood. Then each ran back into the house for his or her
treasure; a little bag of money under a mattress, or a babe in its
crib, or a little rifle, or a dolly of rags.
Frantic horses were hastily hitched to farm wagons. The treasures were
quickly bundled in. Women pushed their broods up ahead of them into
the wagons, ran back to kiss the men standing at the heads of the
sweating horses, then climbed to their places in the wagons and took
the reins. For twenty miles, down break-neck roads, behind mad horses,
they would have to hold the lives of the children, the horses, and,
incidentally, of themselves in their hands. But they were capable
hands, brown, and strong and steady as the mother hearts that went
with them.
They would have preferred to stay with the men, these women. But it
was the law that they should take the brood and run to safety.
Men stood watching the wagons until they shot out of sight behind the
trees of the road. Then they turned back to the hopeless, probably
useless fight. They could do little or nothing. But it was the law
that men must stay and make the fight. They must go out with shovels
to the very edge of their own clearing and dig up a width of new earth
which the running fire could not cross. Thus they might divert the
fire a little. They might even divide it, if the wind died down a
little, so that it would roll on to either side of their homes.
This was their business. There was little chance that they would
succeed. Probably they would have to drop shovels at the last moment
and run an unequal foot race for their lives. But this was the law,
that every man must stay and try to make his own little clearing the
point of an entering wedge to that advancing wall of fire. No man, no
ten thousand men could stop the fire. But, against all probabilities,
some one man might be able, by some chance of the lay of the ground,
or some freak of the wind, to split off a sector of it. That sector
might be fought and narrowed down by other men until it was beaten.
And so something would be gained. For this men stayed, stifled and
blinded, and fought on until the last possible moment, and then ran
past their already smoking homes and down the wind for life.
Jeffrey Whiting rode southward in the wake of four other men down a
long spiral course towards the base of the mountain. Yesterday he
would have ridden at their head. He would have taken the place of
leadership and command among them which he had for months been taking
in the fight against the railroad. Probably he could still have had
that place among them if he had tried to assert himself, for men had
come to have a habit of depending upon him. But he rode at the rear,
dispirited and miserable.
They were trying to get around the fire, so that they might hang upon
its flank and beat it in upon itself. There was no thought now of
getting ahead of it: no need to ride ahead giving alarm. That rolling
curtain of smoke would have already aroused every living thing ahead
of it. They could only hope to get to the end of the line of fire and
fight it inch by inch to narrow the path of destruction that it was
making for itself.
If the wind had held stiff and straight down the mountain it would
have driven the fire ahead in a line only a little wider than its
original front. But the shape of the mountain caught the light breeze
as it came down and twisted it away always to the side. So that the
end of the fire line was not a thin edge of scattered fire that could
be fought and stamped back but was a whirling inverted funnel of flame
that leaped and danced ever outward and onward.
Half way down the mountain they thought that they had outflanked it.
They slid from their horses and began to beat desperately at the brush
and grasses among the trees. They gained upon it. They were doing
something. They shouted to each other when they had driven it back
even a foot. They fought it madly for the possession of a single tree.
They were gaining. They were turning the edge of it in. The hot sweat
began to streak the caking grime upon their faces. There was no air to
breathe, only the hot breath of fire. But it was heartsome work, for
they were surely pushing the fire in upon itself.
A sudden swirl of the wind threw a dense cloud of hot white smoke
about them. They stood still with the flannel of their shirt-sleeves
pressed over eyes and nostrils, waiting for it to pass.
When they could look they saw a wall of fire bearing down upon them
from three sides. The wind had whirled the fire backward and sidewise
so that it had surrounded the meagre little space that they had
cleared and had now outflanked them. Their own manoeuvre had been
turned against them. There was but one way to run, straight down the
hill with the fire roaring and panting after them. It was a playful,
tricky monster that cackled gleefully behind them, laughing at their
puny efforts.