CHAPTER VIII
THE TORCH, AND THE LIGHTING OF IT
"We know how to riffle a log jam apart, Though it's tangled and twisted and turned; But the love of a woman and ways of the heart Are things that we never learned."
--Leeboomook Song.
The sheriff and his men tramped into the little clearing and gave the usual greeting of woods wayfarers--the nod and the almost voiceless grunt. The Honorable Pulaski was a little more talkative. He was also in excellent humor.
"Hear you and Rod Ide have hitched hosses, Wade!" he cried. "Sheriff here was tellin' me. I'm mighty glad of it. That lets me out of thinkin' I got you up here on a wild-goose chase. I was sorry to dump you, but it would take nine time-keepers to make a foreman like Colin MacLeod, and when he put it up to me you had to go. It was business, and business beats fun up this way."
The young man did not reply. Words seemed useless just then.
The Honorable Pulaski turned from him briskly and ran an appraising eye over the miserable huddle of huts. With the true scent of primitive natures for impending trouble, the population of Misery edged around this group of new arrivals--the men in advance and wistful, the women behind and sullen.
"Well, boys," said the Honorable Pulaski, "it's just this way about it, and we can all be reasonable and do business like business men." His air was that of a man dealing with children or savages. "As far as I'm personally concerned, I hate to bother you. But I represent the other owners of this township, and the other owners aren't as reasonable about some things as I am."
He paused to light a long cigar. No one spoke. He proffered one to Wade, who shook his head with a little unnecessary vigor.
Britt talked as he puffed.
"Now--pup--pup--now, boys--pup--you know as well as I do that you've squatted right in the middle of a lot of slash that we had to leave, and it lays in a bad way for fire. You ain't so careful about fire as you ought to be." He held up his cigar. "Here's my style. I don't smoke till I'm out of the trail. I--pup--pup--own land, and that makes a difference. You don't own land. I don't want to bring up old stories, but you know and I know that the prospects of six cents a quart for blueberries makes you forgetful about what's been said to you. You've started some devilish big fires. Here's the September big winds about due--and this one that's just springing up to-day is a fair sample--and all is, the owners can't afford to run chances of a fire that will stop God knows where if it gets running in this five thousand acres of dry tops and slash.
"Here's Mr. Ide's representative," he continued, flapping a hand towards Wade. "They've got black growth to the north, and he'll tell you just the same thing."
"Well, Mister Mealy-mouth," sneered young Jule, over the heads of the others, "git to where you're goin' to. We don't want no sermons. It's move ag'in, hey?"
"It's move," snapped the Honorable Pulaski, his ready temper starting at the woman's insolent tone, "and it's move damn sudden."
Whether it was a groan or growl that came from the wretched huddle, Wade, looking on them with infinite pity, could not determine.
"I could put ye plumb square out of the county," roared Britt; "I've got land jurisdiction enough to do it. But you be reasonable and I'll be reasonable. I won't drive ye too far. I'll have four horses over from my cedar operation to tote what duds you want to take and haul the old women. Sheriff Rodliff and his men here will go along, and see that you have grub and don't have to light fires. In fact, everything will be arranged nice for you, and you'll like it when you get there."
"Where?" asked young Jed.
"On Little Lobster--the old Drake farm," said the Honorable Pulaski, trying to speak enthusiastically and signally failing.
"O my Gawd!" moaned young Jed; "most twenty miles to hoof it, and when ye git there no wood bigger'n alder-withes, and all the stones the devil let drop when his puckerin'-string bruk! Hain't a berry. Hain't northin' to earn a livin'."
"You never earned your living, and you don't want to earn your living," retorted Britt. "You just want to stay up here in the big timber and start fires."
"No, Mr. Britt, we just want the chance to be human beings!" cried a tense and piercing voice. The girl had reappeared in the door of the hut. Above the meek lamentations of those about her, her voice was as the scream of a young hawk above the baaing of sheep. She pushed her way through them and stood before the Honorable Pulaski, palpitating, glowing, splendid in her fury. But she propped her brown hands on her hips--a woman of the mob--and Wade noted the attitude, and flushed at the shamed thought of the likeness to Elva Barrett.
In this crisis, by right of her intelligence, her daring, her superiority, the girl seemed to take her place at the head of the pathetic herd.
"That's what we want, Mr. Britt. You're driving us down to the settlements again. And then some bow-legged old farmer will lose a sheep by bears or a hen by hawks, and we'll be set upon and driven back once more to the woods. And then you'll come and huff and puff and blow our house down and chase us away to the settlement. 'The law! The law!' you keep braying like a mule. You kick us one way; the settlements kick us another. Mr. Britt, I didn't ask to be put on this earth! But now that I'm here I've a right to ground enough to set my feet on, and so have these people. We are using no more of your stolen ground here than we'd be using in another place, and here we stay!" She stamped her foot.
"You young whippet," snorted the Honorable Pulaski, "don't sneer to me about the law when I've got eviction-papers in my pocket and the high sheriff of this county at my back."
"How about the law that makes wild-land owners pay squatters for improvements to land?" demanded the girl. "I know some law, too."
"Do you call those hog-pens improvements?" He swept his fat hand at the huts.
"You may pay some one a dollar an acre for that blue sky above us and claim that, too. You may claim all of God's open country here in the big woods. But I know that you can't shut even paupers out from the lakes and the streams any more than you can take away the sunlight from us."
"I don't know where you got your law, young woman, but I'd advise you to get better posted on the difference between right of way to State waters and squatting on private land. Now, I ain't got time to--"
"We'll not go back to the settlement--not one of us." She set her feet apart and bent a fiery gaze on him.
Britt looked away from her to his circle of supporters. The deputies stooped over their gun-barrels to hide furtive grins at sight of the timber baron thus baited by a girl on his preserves. Even the broad face of the sheriff was crinkled suspiciously. The tyrant flamed with the quick passion for which he was noted in the north country.
"Look here, Rodliff!" His voice was like cracking twigs. "Pile the dunnage out of those huts. If any one gets in your way drive a stake and tie 'em to it." He thrust his bulgy nose into the air to sniff the direction of the wind. "Then set fire to every d--n crib. The wind's all right to carry it towards the bog."
"I don't believe you've got law enough in your pocket to do a thing like that, Mr. Britt," broke in Wade, with heat.
"You don't, hey?"
"Not to throw old men and women and children out of their houses and leave them shelterless a dozen miles from a building. There must be another way of getting at this eviction matter, Mr. Britt--one that's different from burning a hornet's nest."
"This don't happen to be any of your special business!" roared the tyrant. "If it was, you'd stand by property interests instead of backing State paupers."
"Mr. Sheriff, are you going to do that thing?"
"I'm here by order of the court, to do what Mr. Britt wants done to protect his property," replied the officer. "I'm to execute, not to plan nor ask questions."
"King Spruce runs this country up here, not human feelin's," muttered old Christopher in Wade's ear. "You won't get any satisfaction by buttin' in. I'm ready to move. I don't like to see such things done, and I don't believe you do. Come on!" He swung his meal-bag upon his shoulders.
But the young man lingered doggedly, his eyes on the face of the girl.
"Buckin' a high sheriff and his posse ain't ever been reckoned as a profitable business speculation in these parts," mumbled the guide. "It wouldn't amount to a hoorah in tophet, and you'd probably wind up in the county jail."
The girl was gazing shrewdly at this sudden champion. There was no shade of coquetry in her glance. It was the frank gaze of man to man.
"I protest, Mr. Britt!" cried Wade.
"And that's all the good it will do," snorted that angry master of the situation. "Rodliff, you've got my orders!"
Young Jed, sidling near Britt, with the mien of a Judas and with manifest intent to curry favor, whimpered:
"We don't back her up in all she says, Mr. Britt. We ain't got rights and we know it, but we've got feelin's. Be ye goin' to do the us'al thing about damages, Mr. Britt?"
"Why," roared the tyrant, bluffly, "ain't the land-owners always made it worth your while to move? It's all business, boys! Don't let fools bust in. We don't want fire here. Get to Little Lobster as quick as the Lord'll let ye. We'll have six months' supply of pork, flour, and plug tobacco there waitin' for ye--all with the land-owners' compliments. We've always believed that the easiest way is the best way, but you don't buy that way by buckin'. Buck, and the trade is all off--and you get thrown into another county. Close your girl's mouth and keep it shut."
"There!" grunted old Christopher, "if ye haven't got any more sympathy to waste on critters like that"--a jab of his thumb at young Jed--"you'd better come along."
But at sight of woe on the faces of the women, and mute entreaty in the eyes of the girl, Wade still lingered.
"She's speakin' for herself," whispered young Jed, hoarsely. "She don't want to leave the woods because your boss, Colin MacLeod, is courtin' her, and she's waitin' to see him, now that he's back from down-country."
Riotous laughter "guffled" in the throat of Pulaski Britt as he stared from the scarlet face of the girl to Wade's confusion.
"Courtin' her, hey? Another case of it? I say, Rodliff, pretty soon there won't be a whole arm or leg left on my boss if this young man here keeps chasin' him round the country and breaks a bone on him for ev'ry girl the two of 'em get against together."
He laughed to the full content of his soul, and then turned on the girl.
"Why, you ragged little fool, Colin MacLeod is crazier than a hornet in a thrashin'-machine over Rod Ide's girl. He's up in camp now with an arm in a sling to make him remember a fight he and this young dude here got into over her. And he's up there beyond Pogey Notch sitting on a stump swearing at the choppers and bragging with every other breath that he'll kill the dude and marry the girl--and I don't reckon he's changed his mind in two days since I saw him last."
"You lie!" screamed the girl.
"Hold on, there, Miss Spitfire," broke in the sheriff, himself highly amused by the humor of the situation as it appeared to him, "there isn't a man between Castonia and Blunder Lake but what is talking about it. A hundred men saw the fight. I reckon five hundred have heard MacLeod ravin' about how much he loves the Ide girl. So if he ever courted you it must have been just for the sake of getting used to the game." Even the fawning male citizens of Misery Gore cackled their little chorus in the laughter that followed the high sheriff's jest.
She drew back slowly and gazed on them all, her lips rolled away from her white teeth. Those jeering faces from "outside" represented property, law, the smug self-satisfaction of all who despised Misery Gore's squalid breed.
They stood there in the midst of the land they so arrogantly claimed, ready to toss her away once more in the everlasting game of battledore and shuttlecock. They were afraid for the dollars that made them different from the wretches of Misery. They gloried in their dollars--they mocked her in that moment, the bitterness of which only her heart understood. Let them look out for their dollars, then!
Up there where the blue hills divided was sitting Colin MacLeod calling on the name of another woman and nursing a wound received for that woman's sake. Let him look out for himself!
"We can make the Blake-cutting camps with you to-night," said Britt, his mind on business once again. "We'll take good care of you, and you might as well start one time as another. Out with the stuff and down with the houses, Rodliff."
At the orders the men began to busy themselves, paying no further attention to Misery's inhabitants.
The girl ran into the hut, lifted one of the cedar splints that made the floor, and took out a section of iron gas-pipe--the most prized possession of the tribe. It was their wand of plenty. It was Mother Nature's crutch. Out of it flowed bounty.
Into the unplugged end she poured all the kerosene there was in a battered can. Then she stuffed into the tube a mass of wicking.
It was a torch--the torch for the blueberry barrens. Dragged after one, it left a blazing trail such as no other form of fire could produce.
There was a flicker of fire in the rusty stove. She thrust the wicking into the coals, and on the iron stalk a flame-flower sprang into huge blossom.
She burst through the hut's rear window and ran straight for the edge of the clearing, towards the fuel piled high in the forest aisles.
In that moment of blind and desperate fury she realized that the wind was swinging into the north. It was there that MacLeod was sitting at the foot of Pogey Notch. Ah, what a furnace-flue that would make!
She did not pause to reason. Her single wild desire was to send the fire leaping towards him.
The roar of voices behind--voices entreating, voices of malediction--made her smile. Above all was the Honorable Pulaski's bull roar. She began to drag the torch.
"Catch her! Damnation, catch that girl!" howled Britt.
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 snowball 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 mass 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 mass, 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 tassels 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.