The Hidden Places Part 24

Hollister worked on stoically into the following night, keeping Lawanne near him, because it was all new and exciting to Lawanne, and Hollister felt that he might have to look out for him if the wind took any sudden, dangerous shift.

But the mysterious forces of the air were merciful. During the twenty-four hours there was nothing but little vagrant breezes and the drafts created by the heat of the fire itself. When day came again, without striking a single futile blow at the heart of the fire, they had drawn the enemy's teeth and clipped his claws--in so far as the flats of the Toba were threatened. The fire would burn up to that cleared path and burn itself out--with men stationed along to beat out each tiny flame that might spring up by chance. And when that was done, they rested on their oars, so to speak; they took time to sit down and talk without once relaxing their vigilance.

In a day or two the fire would die out against that barrier, always provided the west wind did not rise and in sportive mockery fling showers of sparks across to start a hundred little fires burning in the woods behind their line of defense. A forest fire was never beaten until it was dead. The men rested, watched, patrolled their line. They looked at the sky and sighed for rain. A little knot of them gathered by a tree. Some one had brought a box of sandwiches, a pail of coffee and tin cups. They gulped the coffee and munched the food and stretched themselves on the soft moss. Through an opening they could see a fiery glow topped by wavering sheets of flame. They could hear the crackle and snap of burning wood.

"A forest fire is quite literally h.e.l.l, isn't it?" Lawanne asked.

Hollister nodded. His eyes were on Bland. The man sat on the ground.

He had a cup of coffee in one hand, a sandwich in the other. He was blackened almost beyond recognition, and he was viewing with patent disgust the state of his clothes and particularly of his hands. He set down his food and rubbed at his fingers with a soiled handkerchief. Then he resumed eating and drinking. It appeared to him a matter of necessity rather than a thing from which he derived any satisfaction. Near him Charlie Mills lay stretched on the moss, his head pillowed on his folded arms, too weary to eat or drink, even at Hollister's insistence.

"Dirty job this, eh?" Bland remarked. "I'll appreciate a bath. Phew. I shall sleep for a week when I get home."

By mid-afternoon of the next day, Sam Carr decided they had the fire well in hand and so split his forces, leaving half on guard and letting the others go home to rest. Hollister's men remained on the spot in case they were needed; he and Lawanne and Bland went home.

But that was not the end of the great blaze. Blocked in the valley, the fire, as if animated by some deadly purpose, crept into the mouth of a brushy canyon and ran uphill with demoniac energy until it was burning fiercely over a benchland to the west of Hollister's timber.

The fight began once more. With varying phases it raged for a week.

They would check it along a given line and rest for awhile, thinking it safely under control. Then a light shift of wind would throw it across their line of defense, and in a dozen places the forest would break into flame. The fire worked far up the slope, but its greatest menace lay in its steady creep westward. Slowly it ate up to the very edge of Hollister's timber, in spite of all their checks, their strategy, the prodigious effort of every man to check its vandal course.

Then the west wind, which had held its breath so long, broke loose with unrestrained exhalation. It fanned the fire to raging fury, sent it leaping in yellow sheets through the woods. The blaze lashed eagerly over the tops of the trees, the dreaded crown fire of the North Woods. Where its voice had been a whisper, it became a roar, an ominous, warning roar to which the loggers gave instant heed and got themselves and their gear off that timbered slope.

They could do no more. They had beaten it in the valley. Backed by the l.u.s.ty pressure of the west wind, it drove them off the hill and went its wanton way unhindered.

In the flat by Hollister's house the different crews came together.

There was not one of them but drooped with exhaustion. They sat about on the parched ground, on moss, against tree trunks, and stared up the hill.

Already the westerly gale had cleared the smoke from the lower valley.

It brought a refreshing coolness off the salt water, and it was also baring to their sight the spectacular destruction of the forest.

All that area where Hollisters cedars had stood was a red chaos out of which great flames leaped aloft and waved snaky tongues, blood-red, molten gold, and from which great billows of smoke poured away to wrap in obscurity all the hills beyond. There was nothing they could do now. They watched it apathetically, too weary to care.

Hollister looked on the destruction of his timber most stolidly of all. For days he had put forth his best effort. His body ached. His eyes smarted. His hands were sore. He had done his best without enthusiasm. He was not oppressed so greatly as were some of these men by this vast and useless destruction. What did it matter, after all? A few trees more or less! A square mile or two of timber out of that enormous stand. It was of no more consequence in the sum total than the life of some obscure individual in the teeming millions of the earth. It was his timber. So was his life a possession peculiar to himself. And neither seemed greatly to matter; neither did matter greatly to any one but himself.

It was all a muddle. He was very tired, too tired to bear thinking, almost too tired to feel. He was conscious of himself as a creature of weariness sitting against a tree, his scarred face blackened like the tired faces of these other men, wondering dully what was the sum of all this sweat and strain, the shattered plans, the unrewarded effort, the pain and stress that men endure. A man made plans, and they failed. He bred hope in his soul and saw it die. He longed for and sought his desires always, to see them vanish like a mirage just as they seemed within his grasp.

Lawanne and Bland had gone home, dragging themselves on tired limbs.

Carr's men rested where they chose. They must watch lest the fire back down into the valley again and destroy their timber, as it had destroyed Hollister's. They had blankets and food. Hollister gave his own men the freedom of the house. Their quarters on the hill stood in the doomed timber. The old log house would be ashes now.

He wondered what Doris was doing, if she steadily gained her sight.

But concrete, coherent thought seemed difficult. He thought in pictures, which he saw with a strange detachment as if he were a ghost haunting places once familiar.

He found his chin sinking on his breast. He roused himself and walked over to the house. His men were sprawled on the rugs, sleeping in grotesque postures. Hollister picked his way among them. Almost by the door of his bedroom Charlie Mills sprawled on his back, his head resting on a sofa cushion. He opened his eyes as Hollister pa.s.sed.

"That was a tough game," Hollister said.

"It's all a tough game," Mills answered wearily and closed his eyes again.

Hollister went on into the room. He threw himself across the bed. In ten seconds he was fast asleep.

CHAPTER XX

For another day, a day of brilliant sunshine and roaring west wind, the fire marched up over the southern slope. Its flaming head, with a towering crest of smoke, went over a high ridge, and its lower flank smoldered threateningly a little above the valley. The second night the wind fell to a whisper, shifting freakishly into the northeast, and day dawned with a ma.s.s formation of clouds spitting rain, which by noon grew to a downpour. The fire sizzled and sputtered and died.

Twenty hours of rain cleared the sky of clouds, the woods of smoke.

The sun lifted his beaming face over the eastern sky line. The birds that had been silent began their twittering again, the squirrels took up their exploration among the tree tops, scolding and chattering as they went. Gentle airs shook the last rain drops from leaf and bough.

The old peace settled on the valley. There was little to mark the ten days of effort and noise and destruction except a charred patch on the valley floor and a mile-wide streak that ran like a bar sinister across the green shield of the slope south of the Big Bend. Even that desolate path seemed an insignificant strip in the vast stretch of the forest.

Hollister and his men went, after the rain, up across that ravaged place, and when they came to the hollow where the great cedars and lesser fir had stood solemn and orderly in brown-trunked ranks, the rudest of the loggers grew silent, a little awed by the melancholy of the place, the bleakness, the utter ruin. Where the good green forest had been, there was nothing but ashes and blackened stubs, stretches of bare rock and gravelly soil, an odor of charred wood. There was no green blade, no living thing, in all that wide s.p.a.ce, nothing but a few gaunt trunks stark in the open; blasted, sterile trunks standing like stripped masts on a derelict.

There was nothing left of the buildings except a pile of stone which had been the fireplace in the log house, and a little to one side the rusty, red skeleton of the mess-house stove. They looked about curiously for a few minutes and went back to the valley.

At the house Hollister paid them off. They went their way down to the steamer landing, eager for town after a long stretch in the woods. The fire was only an exciting incident to them. There were other camps, other jobs.

It was not even an exciting incident to Hollister. Except for a little sadness at sight of that desolation where there had been so much beauty, he had neither been uplifted nor cast down. He had been unmoved by the spectacular phases of the fire and he was still indifferent, even to the material loss it had inflicted on him. He was not ruined. He had the means to acquire more timber if it should be necessary. But even if he had been ruined, it is doubtful if that fact would have weighed heavily upon him. He was too keenly aware of a matter more vital to him than timber or money,--a matter in which neither his money nor his timber counted one way or the other, and in which the human equation was everything.

The steamer that took out his men brought in a letter from his wife, which Lawanne sent up by his Chinese boy. He had written to her the day before the fire broke out. He could not recall precisely what he wrote, but he had tried to make clear to her what troubled him and why. And her reply was brief, uncommonly brief for Doris, who had the faculty of expressing herself fully and freely.

Hollister laid the letter on the table. The last line of that short missive kept repeating itself over and over, as if his brain were a phonograph which he had no power to stop playing:

"I shall be home next week on the Wednesday boat."

He got up and walked across the room, crossed and recrossed it half a dozen times. And with each step those words thrust at him with deadly import. He had deluded himself for a while. He had thought he could beat the game in spite of his handicap. He had presumed for a year to snap his fingers and laugh in the face of Fate, and Fate was to have the last laugh.

He seemed to have a fatalistic sureness about this. He made a deliberate effort to reason about it, and though his reason a.s.sumed that when a woman like Doris Cleveland loved a man she did not love him for the unblemished contours of his face, there was still that deep-rooted, unreasoning feeling that however she might love him as the unseen, the ideal lover, she must inevitably shrink from the reality.

He stood still for a few seconds. In the living quarters of his house there was, by deliberate intention, no mirror. Among Hollister's things there was a small hand gla.s.s before which he shaved off the hairs that grew out of the few patches of unscarred flesh about his chin, those fragments of his beard which sprouted in grotesquely separated tufts. But in the bedroom they had arranged for the housekeeper there was a large oval gla.s.s above a dresser. Into this room Hollister now walked and stood before the mirror staring at his face.

No, he could not blame her, any one, for shrinking from _that_. And when the darting shuttle of his thought reminded him that Myra did not shrink from it, he went out to the front room and with his body sunk deep in a leather chair he fell to pondering on this. But it led him nowhere except perhaps to a shade of disbelief in Myra and her motives, a strange instinctive distrust both of her and himself.

He recognized Myra's power. He had succ.u.mbed to it in the old careless days and gloried in his surrender. He perceived that her compelling charm was still able to move him as it did other men. He knew that Myra had been carried this way and that in the great, cruel, indifferent swirl that was life. He could understand a great many things about her and about himself, about men as men and women as women, that he would have denied in the days before the war.

But while he could think about himself and Myra Bland with a calmness that approached indifference, he could not think with that same detachment about Doris. She had come, walking fearlessly in her darkened world, to him in his darkened world of discouragement and bitterness. There was something fine and true in this blind girl, something that Hollister valued over and above the flesh-and-blood loveliness of her, something rare and precious that he longed to keep.

He could not define it; he simply knew that it resided in her, that it was a precious quality that set her apart in his eyes from all other women.

But would it stand the test of sight? If he were as other men he would not have been afraid; he would scarcely have asked himself that question. But he knew he would be like a stranger to her, a strange man with a repellingly scarred face. He did not believe she could endure that, she who loved beauty so, who was sensitive to subtleties of tone and atmosphere beyond any woman he had ever known. Hollister tried to put himself in her place. Would he have taken her to his arms as gladly, as joyously, if she had come to him with a face twisted out of all semblance to its natural lines? And Hollister could not say. He did not know.

He threw up his head at last, in a desperate sort of resolution. In a week he would know. Meantime--

He had no work to occupy him now. There were a few bolts behind the boom-sticks which he would raft to the mill at his leisure. He walked up to the chute mouth now and looked about. A few hundred yards up the hill the line of green timber ended against the black ruin of the fire. There the chute ended also. Hollister walked on across the rocky point, pa.s.sed the waterfall that was shrinking under the summer heat, up to a low cliff where he sat for a long time looking down on the river.

When he came back at last to the house, Myra was there, busy at her self-imposed tasks in those neglected rooms. Hollister sat down on the porch steps. He felt a little uneasy about her being there, uneasy for her. In nearly two weeks of fighting fire he had been thrown in intimate daily contact with Jim Bland, and his appraisal of Bland's character was less and less flattering the more he revised his estimate of the man. He felt that Myra was inviting upon herself something she might possibly not suspect. He decided to tell her it would be wiser to keep away; but when he did so, she merely laughed.

There was a defiant recklessness in her tone when she said:

"Do you think I need a chaperone? Must one, even in this desolate place, kow-tow to the conventions devised to prop up the weak and untrustworthy? If Jim can't trust me, I may as well learn it now as any other time. Besides, it doesn't matter to me greatly whether he does or not. If for any reason he should begin to think evil of me--well, the filthy thought in another's mind can't defile me. I can't recall that I was ever greatly afraid of what other people might think of me, so long I was sure of myself."