The Lookout Man Part 8

"She's on! I'll be John Browned if she ain't on to it already!" Jack chortled to the birds, and sent her a signal. She answered that with a flash. He managed two flashes without losing her in the telescope, and she immediately sent two flashes in reply. Three he gave, and she answered with three. He could see her laughing like a child with a new game. He could see the impish light in her eyes when she glanced up, like a woman engrossed in her favorite pastime of be-deviling some man. He laughed back at her, as though she was as near to him as she looked to be. He quite forgot that she was not, and spoke to her aloud.

"Some little heliographing--what? Come on up, and we'll make up a code, so we can talk! Aw, come on--it ain't so far! Husky girl like you can climb it in no time at all. Aw, come on!"

A couple of tourists, panting up to the peak with unsightly amber goggles and a kodak and a dog, found him addressing empty air and looked at him queerly. Jack could have murdered them both when he turned his head and saw them gaping open-mouthed at his performance.

But he did not. He climbed shame-facedly down and answered the usual questions with his usual patient courtesy, and hoped fervently that they would either die at once of heart failure or go back to the lake and leave him alone. Instead, they took pictures of the station and the rocks and of him--though Jack was keen-witted enough to keep in the shade and turn his face away from the camera.

They were such bores of tourists! The woman was sunburned and frowsy, and her khaki outing suit was tight where it should be loose, and hung in unsightly wrinkles where it should fit snugly. Her high-laced mountain boots were heavy and shapeless, and she climbed here and there, and stood dumpily and stared down at Jack's beloved woods through her amber gla.s.ses until she nearly drove him frantic. She kept saying: "Oh, papa, don't you wish you could get a snap of that?" and "Oh, papa, come and see if you can't snap this!"

Papa was not much better. Papa's khaki suit had come off a pile on the counter of some department store--the wrong pile. Papa kept taking off his hat and wiping his bald spot, and hitching his camera case into a different position, so that it made a new set of wrinkles in the middle of his back. The coat belt strained against its b.u.t.tons over papa's prosperous paunch, and he wheezed when he talked.

And down there on the manzanita slope, little flashes of light kept calling, calling, and Jack dared not answer. One, two--one, two, three--could anything in the world be more maddening?

Then all at once a puff of smoke came ballooning up through the trees, down beyond the girl and well to the right of the balsam thicket. Jack whirled and dove into the station, his angry eyes flashing at the tourists.

"There's a forest fire started, down the mountain," he told them harshly. "You better beat it for Keddie while you can get there!" He slammed the door in their startled faces and laid the pointer on its pivot and swung it toward the smoke.

The smoke was curling up already in an ugly yellowish brown cloud, spreading in long leaps before the wind. Jack's hand shook when he reached for the telephone to report the fire. The chart and his own first-hand knowledge of the mountainside told him that the fire was sweeping down north of Toll-Gate Creek toward the heavily timbered ridge beyond.

Heedless of the presence or absence of the tourists, he s.n.a.t.c.hed the telescope and climbed the rock where he could view the slope where the girl had been. The smoke was rolling now over the manzanita slope, and he could not pierce its murkiness. He knew that the slope was not yet afire, but the wind was bearing the flames that way, and the manzanita would burn with a zipping rush once it started. He knew. He had stood up there and watched the flames sweep over patches of the shrub.

He rushed back into the station, seized the telephone and called again the main office.

"For the Lord sake, hustle up here and do something!" he shouted aggressively. "The whole blamed mountain's afire!" That, of course, was exaggeration, but Jack was scared.

Out again on the rock, he swept the slope beneath him with his telescope. He could not see anything of the girl, and the swirling smoke filled him with a horror too great for any clear thought. He climbed down and began running down the pack trail like one gone mad, never stopping to wonder what he could do to save her; never thinking that he would simply be sharing her fate, if what he feared was true--if the flames swept over that slope.

He stumbled over a root and fell headlong, picked himself up and went on again, taking great leaps, like a scared deer. She was down there.

And when the fire struck that manzanita it would just go _swoosh_ in every direction at once.... And so he, brave, impulsive young fool that he was, rushed down into it as though he were indeed a G.o.d and could hold back the flames until she was safe away from the place.

CHAPTER TEN

WHEN FORESTS ARE ABLAZE

It seemed to Jack that he had been running for an hour, though it could not have been more than a few minutes at most. Where the trail swung out and around a steep, rocky place, he left it and plunged heedlessly straight down the hill. The hot breath of the fire swept up in gusts, bearing charred flakes that had been leaves. The smoke billowed up to him, then drove back in the tricky air-currents that played impishly around the fire. When he could look down to the knoll where the hydrometer stood, he saw that it was not yet afire, but that the flames were working that way faster even than he had feared.

Between gasps he shouted her name as Hank Brown had repeated it to him. He stopped on a ledge and stared wildly, in a sudden panic, lest he should somehow miss her. He called again, even while reason told him that his voice could not carry any distance, with all that crackle and roar. He forced himself to stand there for a minute to get his breath and to see just how far the fire had already swept, and how fast it was spreading.

Even while he stood there, a flaming pine branch came whirling up and fell avidly upon a buck bush beside him. The bush crackled and shriveled, a thin spiral of smoke mounting upward into the cloud that rolled overhead. Jack stood dazed, watching the yellow tongues go licking up the smaller branches. While he stood looking, the ravaging flames had devoured leaves and twigs and a dead branch or two, and left the bush a charred, smoking, dead thing that waved its blackened stubs of branches impotently in the wind. Alone it had stood, alone it had died the death of fire.

"Marion Rose!" he shouted abruptly, and began running again. "Marion Rose!" But the hot wind whipped the words from his lips, and the deep, sullen roar of the fire drowned his voice. Still calling, he reached the road that led to Crystal Lake. The wind was hotter, the roar was deeper and louder and seemed to fill all the world. Hot, black ash flakes settled thick around him.

Then, all at once, he saw her standing in the middle of the road, a little farther up the hill. She was staring fascinated at the fire, her eyes wide like a child's, her face with the rapt look he had seen when she stood looking down from the peak into the heart of the forest. And then, when he saw her, Jack could run no more. His knees bent under him, as though the bone had turned suddenly to soft gristle, and he tottered weakly when he tried to hurry to her.

"Isn't it wonderful?" she called out when she saw him. Her words came faintly to him in all that rush and crackle of flame and wind together. "I never saw anything like it before--did you? It sprung up all at once, and the first I knew it was sweeping along."

"Don't stand here!" Jack panted hoa.r.s.ely. "Good Lord, girl! You--"

"Why, you've been running!" she cried, in a surprised tone. "Were you down there in it? I thought you had to stay up on top." She had to raise her voice to make him hear her.

Her absolute ignorance of the danger exasperated him. He took her by the arm and swung her up the trail. "We've got to beat it!" he yelled in her ear. "Can't you see it's coming this way?"

"It can't come fast enough to catch us," she answered impatiently.

"It's away back there down the hill yet. Wait! I want to watch it for a minute."

A bushy cedar tree ten feet away to their left suddenly burst into flame and burned viciously, each branch a sheet of fire.

"Well, what do you know about _that_?" cried Marion Rose. "It jumped from away down there!"

"Come on!" Pulling her by the arm, Jack began running again up the hill, leaving the road where it swung to the east and taking a short cut through the open s.p.a.ce in the brush. "Run!" he urged, still pulling at her arm. "We've--got to--swing around it--"

She ran with him, a little of their peril forcing itself upon her consciousness and making her glance often over her shoulder. And Jack kept pulling at her arm, helping her to keep her feet when she stumbled, which she did often, because she would not look where she was going.

"Don't look--run!" he urged, when another brand fell in a fir near them and set the whole tree ablaze. The air around them was hot, like the breath of a furnace.

She did not answer him, but she let him lead her whither he would. And they came breathless to the rocky outcropping through which the pack trail wormed its way farther down the hill. There he let her stop, for he knew that they had pa.s.sed around the upper edge of the fire, and were safe unless the wind changed. He helped her upon a high, flat-topped boulder that overlooked the balsam thicket and manzanita slope, and together they faced the debauchery of the flames.

Even in the few minutes since Jack had stopped on that rocky knoll the fire had swept far. It had crossed the Crystal Lake road and was now eating its way steadily up the timbered hillside beyond. The manzanita slope where the girl had sat and signalled with her mirror was all charred and stripped bare of live growth, and the flames were licking up the edges beyond.

Jack touched her arm and pointed to the place. "You said it couldn't travel very fast," he reminded her. "Look down there where you sat fooling with the little mirror."

Marion looked and turned white. "Oh!" she cried. "It wasn't anywhere near when I started up the road. Oh, do you suppose it has burned down as far as the cabin? Because there's Kate--can't we go and see?"

"We can't, and when I left the lookout the fire was away up this side of Toll-Gate, and not spreading down that way. Wind's strong. Come on--I expect I better beat it back up there. They might phone."

"But I must hunt Kate up! Why, she was all alone there, taking a nap in the hammock! If it should--"

"It won't," Jack reiterated positively. "I ought to know, oughtn't I?

It's my business to watch fires and see how they're acting, isn't it?"

He saw her still determined, and tried another argument. "Listen here.

It isn't far up to the station. We'll go up there, and I'll phone down to the office to have the firemen stop and see if she's all right.

They'll have to come right by there, to get at the fire. And you can't cross that burning strip now--not on a bet, you couldn't. And if you could," he added determinedly, "I wouldn't let you try it. Come on--we'll go up and do that little thing, telephone to the office and have them look after Kate."

Marion, to his great relief, yielded to the point of facing up hill with him and taking a step or two. "But you don't know Kate," she demurred, turning her face again toward the welter of burning timber.

"She'll be worried to death about me, and it would be just like her to start right out to hunt me up. I've simply got to get back and let her know I'm all right."

Jack threw back his head and laughed aloud--think how long it had been since he really had laughed! "What's the matter with phoning that you're all right? I guess the wire will stand that extra sentence, maybe--and you can phone in yourself, if you want to convince them ab-so-lutely. What?"

"Well, who'd ever have thought that I might phone a message to Kate!

Down there in that hole of a place where we live, one can scarcely believe that there are telephones in the world. Let's hurry, then.

Kate will be perfectly wild till she hears that I am safe. And then--"

she quirked her lips in a little smile, "she'll be wilder still because I'm not there where she supposed I'd be when she waked up."

Jack replied with something slangy and youthful and altogether like the old Jack Corey, and led her up the steep trail to the peak. They took their time, now that they were beyond the fire zone. They turned often to watch the flames while they got their breath; and every time Marion stopped, she observed tritely that it was a shame such beautiful timber must burn, and invariably added, "But isn't it beautiful?" And to both observations Jack would agree without any scorn of the triteness. Whereas he would have been furious had a mere tourist exclaimed about the beauty of a forest fire, which to him had always seemed a terrible thing.