King Spruce Part 16

She reached the edge of the distant woodland.

Immediately his cry changed to "Shoot her!" He did not mean it the first time he cried it. He did mean it the second time. The deputies stared after her and joggled their weapons on their arms.

"Shoot her, or fifty thousand acres of timber are gone!"

But that was quarry before which official guns quailed.

In his fury and his panic and his desperate fear for his fortune, Britt seized a gun from the nearest deputy and aimed it.

Wade struck it up, muttering an indignant oath. Britt made as though to club him out of the way. The young man clutched the gun and twisted it from Britt's quivering clutch. When Britt lunged forward to seize another rifle Wade struck him under the jaw, and he went down like a felled ox.

The girl was out of sight in the woods, but yellow smoke shot with bright flame marked her course.

"I could have told him," mused old Christopher, looking on the Honorable Pulaski, struggling dizzily to his feet, "havin' watched her more or less since I named her, that she wa'n't a real sociable kind of a girl to joke with on matters that's as serious to women as love is."

Sheriff Bennett Rodliff spoke the prologue to that conflagration:

"There is h--l in the core of that fire," he said.

Sometimes a little mischief, started by chance down the slopes of events, gathers like a rolling s...o...b..ll into a vast bulk of evil. But more often in matters of evil it is the intent of the impulse that governs. It seems at such times as though inanimate nature were responding to human malevolence.

The fire that started that day on Misery leaped to its grim business with a spontaneity as fierce as the mad hate behind it.

One man acts in a crisis with more directness and efficiency than many men, each of whom waits on the other. They had stood and stared after the girl when she ran into the woods with the hissing fire streaming behind her. The pursuers that finally did start stopped promptly to witness the fight between the young man and the baron of the Umcolcus.

Human fists in play afford more of a spectacle than even an incipient conflagration. When the man who goes down is a man who in the past has always been aggressor and victor, interest is more acute.

Dwight Wade did not linger to prolong the conflict to which the furious Britt invited him. Christopher Straight had started for the woods on the track of the fugitive girl, and Wade ran after him, his knuckles tingling gloriously. The thrill of that one moment, when his fist met the flesh of the man who had insulted him, made him realize that when one searches the depths of human nature hate, as well as love, has its delights.

Pressing closely on the heels of Christopher, who had waited for him, he dove into the yellow smoke.

"We've got to find that young she-devil!" gasped the old man. "It's better for us to find her than for Britt to get hold of her."

But by that time the quest was an uncertain one.

There is craftiness in a woods fire when it is seeking to establish itself.

The fire sent up first from the crackling slash thick, rolling, bitter clouds of smoke to veil its beginnings. Running to the left, where the fresher clouds seemed to be springing, the two men caught sight of the girl. But she was already far to the right, running and leaping like a deer, her hideous torch still flaming. Then the smoke shut down and she was hidden.

A blazing ma.s.s of tops, twisted in a blowdown, fronted them, and they were forced to make a long detour. They saw the wind wrench torches out of the ma.s.s, torches that whirled aloft and went scaling away to the north. Puffs of smoke showed where they had alighted. Here and there the tops of little spruces and firs set a net for the torches, afforded roosting-places for the flame birds that winged their red flight across the sky. The flame did not merely burn these trees; the trees fairly exploded; their resinous fronds and ta.s.sels were like powder grains.

A wind gust rent the smoke for an instant and showed the pursuers the spread of the growing destruction. It already was sprinkled over acres.

"She's started fair, and the devil's helpin' her!" mourned the old man.

At that moment the huge bulk of a man went lurching past them. It was Abe, the foolish giant of the Skeets. In the glimpse they caught before the smoke swallowed him, in his hairy nakedness, he seemed a gigantic satyr; he leaped here and there to avoid the blazing patches in the leaf litter and humus, and his movements seemed like a grotesque dance.

"The old woman has sent him after the girl," explained Christopher, with quick comprehension. "Come on!"

Dodging, choking, crouching for air, they followed him. At last they overtook the author of all the mischief. She threw away her torch when they came upon her, and faced them without shame. She was panting in utter exhaustion, and clung to a tree for support.

"Bring her, Abe!" commanded Christopher, in a tone that the giant understood, and he took her up in his brawny arms despite her angry struggles. "No, not that way!" shouted the old man, when Abe whirled to make his way back through the fire zone. "It's spread too far," he explained to Wade; "we've got to keep ahead of it." With a blow to emphasize his order, he drove Abe ahead of him, and they hurried towards the north, the conflagration at their heels.

Far ahead of them Jerusalem Mountain lifted the poll of its gray ledge.

It blocked the broad valley to the north. For those in the van of that fire it was the rock of refuge. The tote road led that way. The fugitives crashed through the undergrowth into the road. The fire had already crossed it to the south of them. They took their way to the north, their eyes on Jerusalem Mountain.

CHAPTER IX

BY ORDER OF PULASKI D. BRITT

"Twinkle, twinkle, 'Ladder' Lane, With your wavin' winder-pane, Up above the world so high, Like a flash-bug in the sky."

The fire-lookout at the Attean station winked this ditty humorously with playful heliograph to "Ladder" Lane, lookout on the high, bald poll of old Jerusalem k.n.o.b. The Attean lookout got it by telephone from Castonia. Lyrist unreported.

Jerusalem station is more serene in its isolation than the other five lookouts on the mountains of the north country. It has no telephone.

Lane allowed to his lonely self that he got more news than he really wanted, anyhow. And most of the news was of the sort that the humorous Attean lookout, or the equally humorous Squaw Mountain man, considered likely to tease the cranky solitary on the highest and farthest outpost of the chain of lookouts. They whiled away their solitude by gossipy chattings over the wire. Lane confined himself to terse winkings that would have been gruff were it possible for a heliograph to be gruff. He seemed to take a certain grim pride in the fact that he was a thousand feet higher than any of them and commanded three hundred thousand acres.

Sitting now in the glare of the September sunshine on the flat roof of his cabin, he gravely and stolidly scrawled down the words of the verse as the Attean heliograph, blinking and glaring, spoke to him in the Morse code.

"Huh!" he grunted, and went on writing with stubby pencil his interrupted day's entry in his official diary. For the twenty-fifth time he wrote:

"Clear, bright, and still dry."

He screwed his eyelids close to peer into the heavens bending over him, hard as the bottom of a bra.s.s kettle. He took off his hat and held it edgewise at his forehead while his gaze swept the mighty range of his vision. An imaginative person might have smiled at the likeness between his brown and bald poll, thrust above the straggle of hair, and the bare and bald poll of old Jerusalem, rounding above the straggle of growth on its lower slopes.

Some one bawled at him from the ground below. Lane did not start, though that was the first human voice he had heard in two months.

The young man who stood there, and who had come across the gray ledges from the edge of the timber growth, carried an arm in a sling.

"Do you ever look at anybody if they're nearer than ten miles away?"

inquired the visitor, with the teasing irony that it seemed popular in the Umcolcus region to employ with "Ladder" Lane.

When the old man stood up the fitness of his sobriquet was apparent. He unfolded himself, joint by joint, like a carpenter's rule, and stood gaunt as a bean pole and well towards seven feet in height.

The name painted on the door of the photograph "saloon" that even now lies rotting on the banks of Ragm.u.f.f in Castonia settlement is: "Linus Lane. Tintypes and Views." No one in Castonia ever knew whither he had come. Oxen or horses and a teamster hired for each trip had dragged the rumbling van from settlement to settlement at the edge of the woods, and finally to Castonia, where it arrived hobbling on three wheels, one corner supported by a dragging sapling. Lane strode ahead, swearing over his shoulder at the driver, and his ill-temper did not seem to leave him even when he had opened his door for business. It is remembered that his first customer was old Bailey, who was corresponding with an unknown woman down-country, and who came for a tintype with hair and whiskers colored to the hue of the raven's wing, evidently desiring to make an impression on his correspondent. And when old Bailey, shocked and disappointed at the painful verity of the tintype, had muttered that it didn't seem to be a very pretty picture, Lane, who was doubled like a jack-knife under the saloon's low roof, had yelled at him:

"Pretty picture! You come to me with a face like a scrambled egg dropped into a bucket of soot and complain because you don't get a pretty picture! Get out of here!"

And he stopped slicing up the sheet of tintypes, slammed it on the floor, drove out old Bailey, nailed up the door of the saloon, and started for the big woods with his few possessions on his back.

To those who remonstrated on behalf of the offended old Bailey, Lane said he had been feeling like that for some time, and was taking to the woods before he expressed his disgust by killing some one.

Therefore, the job on the top of Jerusalem that fell to him quite naturally, after his many years' sojourn as a recluse at its foot, was a job that fitted admirably with his scheme of life.

"And it looks up there like it must have looked when Noah said, 'All ash.o.r.e that's goin' ash.o.r.e,' on Mount Ariat, or wherever 'twas he throwed anchor," announced Tommy Eye, of Britt's crew, returning once from a Sunday trip to the fire station.