King Spruce Part 26

He ran and recovered Barrett's wallet from among the leaves, and searched it hastily. He found among the papers a few folded blank sheets bearing John Barrett's name and monogram. There was a fountain-pen stuck in a loop. The paper and the pen he shoved into Barrett's hands.

"Write it!" he screamed. "Write it that she is your daughter, and agree to take her and do right by her. Write it! I wouldn't take your word. I want a paper. You've got to take her."

Barrett went pale, but his thick lips pinched themselves in desperate resolve. With the aspiration of his life close to realization he knew all that such a doc.u.ment could do to him. He stood up and tossed the paper away.

"I'm willing to do right by the girl in the best way I can," he said, firmly; "but as to cutting my throat for her, I won't do it. You've got my word. That's all I'll do for you."

"It's all?" asked Lane, with bitter menace. "All, after what you've done to me?"

"I won't do it," he repeated, stiffly.

The next instant, and so quickly that a cat could not have dodged, Lane struck forward with one of the irons. Barrett saw the flash and felt the impact; his brain clanged once like a great bell, and he crumbled together rather than fell.

He was standing when he revived. But his hands were lashed by strips of his torn corduroy coat--drawn behind him around the trunk of a birch and tied securely. Other strips of the cloth bound legs and body close to the tree. Lane mouthed and leaped in front of him--a maniac.

"Enjoy it!" he screamed. "There's a thousand-acre fire out in that level. Here's its chimney-flue. It's going through here on its way to Enchanted. It's going fast when it comes along, and it will be your first taste of what's laid up for you in eternity. Burn! And when you're burning just remember that your daughter set it--set it because you left her to grow up a hyena instead of a woman."

He whirled and started away at Barrett's first wild appeal.

"I wouldn't take your word! You wouldn't write it! You didn't intend to keep it!"

CHAPTER XIV

THE MESSAGE OF "PROPHET ELI"

"And the good, kind skipper and all his crew Got a purse and some medals, tew, And a lot o' praise for a-savin' me From an awful death in the ragin' sea.

And I got jawed 'cause I left that way, And the boss he docked me tew weeks' pay."

--Hired Man's Sea-song.

Lane's quick ear was the first to catch a new sound. He stopped and looked down into the Pogey trail. Barrett ceased his wails, and looked and listened, too.

Men of the woods who knew Prophet Eli of Tumbled.i.c.k were never surprised to see him appear anywhere in the Umcolcus region. And it was usually a time of trouble that he chose for his appearance. In his twenty years'

search of the forest he had found trails and avenues that were hidden to others. In places where veteran guides wandered and blundered, Prophet Eli knew a short-cut or detour, and moved with wraithlike swiftness, enjoying his reputation for surprises with the keen relish of the shatter-pate.

Those who did not call him "Prophet Eli," his own choice of t.i.tle, dubbed him "Old Trouble," for he scented disaster with an elfish sense, and followed it north, east, and west.

He came down the Pogey Notch on a ding-swingle. It was drawn by his little white stallion. A ding-swingle is the triangle of a trimmed tree-crotch, dragged apex forward, its limbs sprawling behind. With peak mounted on a sapling runner it is the woods vehicle that best conquers tote roads.

From under the prophet's knitted woollen cap, with its red k.n.o.b, his white hair trailed upon his shoulders. His white beard brushed the oddly checkered jacket, flamboyant with its bizarre colors.

"The Skeets and the Bushees are still running south," he cried at the two men, in shrill tones. "But I'm around to the front of the trouble, as usual."

He appeared to have no eyes for the plight of the trussed-up Barrett, who began to shout desperate appeals to him. He c.o.c.ked shrewd eyes at "Ladder" Lane, who, with a muttered oath, started to scramble down the slope towards him. Perhaps he saw a threat in the madman's face.

He glanced once more at Barrett, as though interested a bit in that miserable man's frantic urgings, and piped this amazing query, "Don't you think a stuttering man is an infernal fool to have a name like McKechnie Connick?"

Then he lashed his long reins against the side of his stallion and sped away down the valley.

Lane followed him, running.

They left an existent millionaire and a prospective governor helplessly grinding the skin from his shoulders against a birch-tree, and bellowing anathema on "lunatics."

The Honorable Pulaski D. Britt, sweat pouring down his purple face as he raged from crew to crew on the fire-line, was not surprised to behold Prophet Eli emerge from the smoke, riding his ding-swingle. In twenty years Mr. Britt had often beheld the prophet at troublous junctures. In his present state of vehement anxiety the king of the Umcolcus felt his temper flare at sight of this herald of ill-omen.

"Met the Skeets and the Bushees, and they're still running south. Don't you think a man with pumple-feet is an infernal fool to try to learn to skate?"

Britt, thrusting past through the underbrush of the tote road, whirled and poised his foot to kick the inoffensive stallion, as mute expression of his rage and contempt. But he withheld the kick at the apparition of "Ladder" Lane. The warden came running. He fairly burst out of the smoke.

That he was pursuing Prophet Eli for no good to the latter occurred to the Honorable Pulaski in one startled flash, as he looked at the warden's savage face. He stepped between the men. But it was not to protect the prophet, whom he dismissed from his mind as utterly as though the forest sage were a fugitive rabbit. Mr. Britt had a pregnant question to ask of Lane on his own account, and he bellowed it at him, clutching at his arm.

"Where did you leave John Barrett?"

Lane halted at his touch, and glowered on him without reply.

"What's the matter with you, Lane? You look like a crazy man. What did you want of Mr. Barrett, anyway? What did you drag him out of Barnum Withee's camp for? Don't try to bluff me. I know about it. Barnum got here with his crew at daylight to fight fire, and his men have been talking about it. What right have you got to be bothering John Barrett?

I haven't had time to get facts. I've got something else on my mind than other folk's troubles. But I know you've picked trouble with Barrett. Why, great Judas, you long-shanked fool, that man is goin'

to be the next governor of this State! You must have heard of John Barrett! Trying to arrest John Barrett! What did you take him for--a game-poacher? Or have you gone clean out of your wits? What have you done with him?"

During the timber baron's harangue Lane kept his eyes on the prophet, meeting the latter's blinking regard with sullen threat in his eyes.

"Blast ye! Answer me!" roared the Honorable Pulaski. "Where is Mr.

Barrett? I want to discuss this fire situation with him."

"Then go find him," growled the fire warden.

"Where is he?"

Lane raised his gaunt arm and swung it the circle of the horizon.

"There!" he snarled. He still kept his gaze on the prophet, as though to note the least intention to betray him. But it appeared that the sage of Tumbled.i.c.k was in no mood for dangerous revelations. He thrust up one grimy finger.

"May be there!" he remarked. He pointed the finger straight down. "May be there!" He jumped his stallion ahead with a crack of his reins and disappeared in the smoke. Lane cast after him a look baleful, but relieved, and whirled and made away in the direction of Jerusalem.

"Me standing here wasting my time on a couple of whiffle-heads with that fire waltzing into my black growth!" Britt muttered, turning his wrath on himself, since there was no one else in sight. "It must be only some fool scare about Barrett. A man like him can take care of himself."

He stumped on, turning to climb a spur of ledge from which, as commander-in-chief, he might take an observation. Less than a mile to the south, he spied the thing that he had been dreading.

The ground fire, lashed by the rising wind of the morning, had leaped off the earth and become a crown fire. It had entered the edge of the black growth.

One after the other the green tops of the hemlocks and spruces burst into the horrid bloom of conflagration. They flowered. They seeded. And the seeds were fire-brands that scaled down the wind, dropping, rooting instantly, and blossoming into new destruction.