Chapter 10. When Forests Are Ablaze

________________________________________________
_ 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 hoarsely. "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 space 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 passed 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.

They found the telephone ringing like mad, and Jack turned red around the ears and stuttered a good deal before he was through answering the questions of the supervisor, and explaining why he had not answered the phone in the last hour.

"Here, let me talk," commanded Marion suddenly, and took the receiver out of Jack's hand. "I'll tell you where he was," she called crisply to the accusing voice at the other end. "I was down the hill, right in the track of the fire, and I couldn't get back to the cabin at all, and--ah--this gentleman saw me through the telescope and ran down there and got me out of it. And right where I had been sitting on a rock, the fire has burned just everything! And I wish you would get word somehow to Miss Kate Humphrey, at Toll-Gate cabin, that Marion Rose is all right and will be home just as soon as she can get down there without burning her shoes. And--oh, will you please tell her that I took the bread out of the oven before I left, and that it's under the box the cream came in? I put it there to keep the bluejays away from it till she woke up, and she may not know where to look.... Yes, thank you, I think that will be all.... But listen! This man up here saved my life, though of course it is a pity he was not here to answer the phone, every minute of the day. What I want to say is that it was my fault, and I hope you'll please excuse me for having a life that needed to be saved just when you called! I wouldn't for the world.... Oh, don't mention it! I just didn't want you to blame him, is all. Good-by."

She turned to Jack with a little frown. "People seem to think, just because you work for a living, that your whole mission in life is to take orders on the jump. It was that way at the Martha Washington, and every other place I ever worked. That man down there seems to think that your life begins and ends right here in this little glass box. What made you apologize for keeping a telephone call waiting while you went out and saved a perfectly good life? Men are the queerest things!"

She went out and climbed upon the rock where Jack had lain watching her, and set herself down as comfortably as possible, and stared at the fire while Jack located on the chart the present extent of the blazing area, and sent in his report. When he had finished he did not go out to her immediately. He stood staring down the hill with his eyebrows pinched together. Now and then he lifted his hand unconsciously and pushed his heavy thatch of hair straight back from his forehead, where it began at once to lie wavy as of old. He was feeling again the personal sense of tragedy and loss in that fire; cursing again his helplessness to check it or turn it aside from that beautiful stretch of timber over toward Genessee.

Now the shadows had crept down the slope again to where the fire glow beat them back while it crisped the balsam thicket. Behind him the sun, sinking low over the crest of a far-off ridge, sent flaming banners across the smoke cloud. The sky above was all curdled with gold and crimson, while the smoke cloud below was a turgid black shot through with sparks and tongues of flame.

Where were the fire-fighters, that they did not check the mad race of flames before they crossed that canyon? It seemed to Jack that never had a fire burned with so headlong a rush. Then his eyes went to the blackened manzanita slope where Marion had been idling, and he shivered at what might have happened down there. To comfort himself with the sight of her safe and serene, he turned and went out, meaning to go up where she was.

She was still sitting on the rock, gazing down the mountain, her face sober. Her hat was off, and the wind was blowing the short strands of her hair around her face. She was leaning back a little, braced by a hand upon the rock. She looked a goddess of the mountain tops, Jack thought. He stood there staring up at her, just as he had stared down at her when she had stood looking into the lake. Did she feel as he felt about the woods and mountains? he wondered. She seemed rather fond of staring and staring and saying nothing--and yet, he remembered, when she talked she gave no hint at all of any deep sense of the beauty of her surroundings. When she talked she was just like other town girls he had known, a bit slangy, more than a bit self-possessed, and frivolous to the point of being flippant. That type he knew and could meet fairly on a level. But when she was looking and saying nothing, she seemed altogether different. Which, he wondered, was the real Marion Rose?

While he stood gazing, she turned and looked down at him; a little blankly at first, as though she had just waked from sleep or from abstraction too deep for instant recovery. Then she smiled and changed her position, putting up both hands to pat and pull her hair into neatness; and with the movement she ceased to be a brooding goddess of the mountain tops, and became again the girl who had perversely taken the telephone away from him, the girl who had played mock billiards upon his beloved chart, the girl who said--she said it now, while he was thinking of her melodious way of saying it.

"Well, what do you know about that?" she inquired, making a gesture with one arm toward the fire while with the other she fumbled in her absurd little vanity bag. "It just burns as if it had a grudge against the country, doesn't it? But isn't it perfectly gorgeous, with all that sunset and everything! It looks like a Bliffen ten-reel picture. He ought to see it--he could get some great pointers for his next big picture. Wouldn't that be just dandy on the screen?" She had found her powder puff and her tiny mirror, and she was dabbing at her nose and her cheeks, which no more needed powder than did the little birds that chirped around her. Between dabs, she was looking down the mountain, with an occasional wave of her puff toward some particularly "striking effect" of fire and sunset and rolling smoke and tall pines seen dimly in the background.

Jack wanted to climb up there and shake her out of her frivolity. Which was strange when you consider that all his life, until three months ago, he had lived in the midst of just such unthinking flippancy, had been a part of it and had considered--as much as he ever considered anything--that it was the only life worth living.

He went around the little rock pinnacle and stood looking somberly down at the devastation that was being wrought, with no greater beginning, probably, than a dropped match or cigarette stub. He was thinking hazily that so his old life had been swept away in the devastating effect of a passing whim, a foolish bit of play. The girl irritated him with her chatter--yet three months ago he himself would have considered it brilliant conversation, and would have exerted himself to keep pace with her.

"Listen!" she cried suddenly, and Jack turned his head quickly before he remembered that the word had come to mean nothing more than a superfluous ejaculation hung, like a bangle on a bracelet, to the sentences of modern youth. "Listen, it's going to be dark before that fire burns itself out of the way. How am I going to get home? Which way would be best to go around it, do you think?"

"No way at all," Jack replied shortly. "You can't go home."

"Why, forevermore! I'll have to go somewhere else, then--to some farm house where I can phone. Kate would be simply wild if--"

"Forget the farm house stuff. There aren't any such trimmings to these mountains. The next farm house is down around Keddie, somewhere. Through the woods, and mountain all the way." He said it rather crossly, for his nerves were what he called edgy, and the girl still irritated him.

"Well, what do you know about that?"

He had known she would say that. Cross between a peacock and a parrot, she must be, he thought vindictively. It was maddening that she would not--could not, perhaps?--live up to that goddess-on-the-mountain-top look she had sometimes.

"I don't know anything about it except that it's hard luck for us both."

"Well, what--?" She paused in the act of putting away her first-aid-to-the-complexion implements, and looked at him with her wide, purple eyes. "Why, you cross, mean, little stingy boy, you! You can have your old peak then. I'll go down and jump in the lake." She began to climb down from the little pinnacle quite as if she meant to do exactly as she said.

"Aw, come out of it!" Jack tried not to turn and look at her anxiously, but he was a human being.

"I'm not in it--yet," Marion retorted with dark meaning, and jumped to the ground.

"Hey! you wanta break a leg?" He swung toward her.

"Just to spite you, I wouldn't mind. Only you'd throw me down there amongst all those rocks and trees and make it my neck. Oh, would you look at that!"

"That" happened to be Mount Lassen, belching forth a stupendous column of ashes and smoke. Up, up, up it went, as though it meant to go on and on into infinity. Jack had seen it too often to be affected as he had been that first night. He looked at Marion instead. She was standing with her hands clinched by her side, and her breath sucking in. As the black column mounted higher and higher, she lifted herself to her toes, posing there absolutely unconscious of herself. Jack saw her face grow pale; saw her eyes darken and glow with inner excitement. She was once more the goddess on the mountain top, gazing down at one of the wonders she had wrought. It was as though she pulled that black column up and up and up with the tensity of her desire.

The column mushroomed suddenly, rolling out in great, puffy billows before it dipped and went streaming away on the wind. The mountain beneath it spewed sluggish masses of vapor and ashes up into the black moil above, until the whole mountain was obscured and only an angry, rolling cloud churning lumpishly there, told what was hidden beneath.

Marion relaxed, took a long, deep breath and settled again to her trim heels. She was not filled with terror as Jack had been; though that may have been because she was not cast up here like a piece of driftwood out of her world, nor was she alone. But Jack paid her the tribute of bowing mentally before her splendid courage. She gazed a while longer, awed ecstasy in her face. Then slowly she swung and stared at that other churning cloud behind her--the crimsoned-tinted cloud of destruction. She flung out both arms impulsively.

"Oh, you world!" she cried adoringly, unafraid yet worshipping. "I'd like to be the wind, so I could touch you and kiss you and beat you, and make you love me the way I love you! I'd rather be a tree and grow up here and swing my branches in the wind and then burn, than be a little petty, piffling human being--I would! I'm not afraid of you. You couldn't make me afraid of you. You can storm and rage around all you like. I only love you for it--you beautiful thing!"

It made Jack feel as though he had blundered upon a person kneeling in prayer; she was, after all, the goddess she looked, he thought whimsically. At least she had all the makings of a goddess of the mountain top. He felt suddenly inferior and gross, and he turned to leave her alone with her beautiful, terrible world. But manlike he did a frightfully human and earthly thing; he knocked his foot against an empty coal-oil can, and stood betrayed in his purpose of flight.

She turned her head and looked at him like one just waking from a too-vivid dream. She frowned, and then she smiled with a little ironical twist to her soft curving lips.

"You heard what I said about piffling human beings?" she asked him sweetly. "That is your catalogue number. Why for goodness' sake! With your hair done in that marcelle pompadour, and that grin, you look exactly like Jack Corey, that Los Angeles boy that all the girls were simply crazy about, till he turned out to be such a perfectly terrible villain!" _

Read next: Chapter 11. Sympathy And Advice

Read previous: Chapter 9. Like The Boy He Was

Table of content of Lookout Man


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book