Part 14

Near him flames were leaping above a fallen top and running in tiny jets over dry duff like the waste of a fountain. Swiftly Strong cut branches of green birch and began to lay about him. He stopped the flames and then dug with his hatchet until he struck sand. He scooped it into his hat and soon smothered the cinders.

His face had a troubled expression as he returned to the boat-jumper.

"Who you been yellin' at?" Sinth asked.

"C-careless cuss," he answered, evasively.

Socky wore a look of indignation. He glibly repeated the oath which he had heard his uncle use.

"Hush! The Sundayman'll ketch you," Sinth answered, severely.

Strong gave a whistle of surprise.

"Uncle Silas ain't 'fraid o' no Sundayman," Socky guessed.

"Y-yes I be--could kill me with a s-snap of his finger," Strong declared.

Socky trembled as he thought of that one inhabitant of the earth who was greater than his Uncle Silas and said no more.

"S-see here, boy," said Strong, as he put his fingers under Socky's chin and raised his head' a little, "I w-won't never swear ag'in if y-you won't."

He held out his great hand and Socky took it.

"Y-you agree?"

Socky nodded with a serious look, and so it happened that Silas became the master of his own tongue. He had "boiled over" for the last time--so he thought. The old habit which had grown out of a thousand trials and difficulties must give way, and henceforth he would be emperor of his own spirit.

As to the fire and the man who had fled before him, Strong was perplexed, but kept his own counsel. He knew that the law permitted lumbermen to enter burned lands on the State preserve and take all timber which fire had damaged. A fire which might only have scorched the trunks while it devoured the crowns above them gave a rich harvest to some lucky lumberman. Having gained access, he stripped the earth, helping himself to the living as well as the dead trees. _Fire, therefore, had become a source of profit wherein lay the temptation to kindle it._

Silas Strong knew that his land of refuge was doomed--that the forerunner of its desolation was even then hiding somewhere in the near, dusky woods. He thought of the peril after a dry summer. The mould of the forest would burn like tinder.

The dethroned Emperor reached the shore of Rainbow, put up a tent, and helped to get supper ready. After supper he lay down to rest in the firelight, and told the children about the great bear and the panther-bird. Sinth, weary after that long day of travel, had gone to sleep. After an hour or so Strong rose and looked down at her.

"Sh-sh!--don't w-wake her," he warned them. "I'll put ye t' b-bed."

He helped them undress.

"You'll have to hear our prayers," Socky whispered.

Strong nodded. He sat on a box and they knelt between his knees and he put his hands on their heads and bowed his own.

When they had finished he bent lower and dictated this brief kind of postscript, "An' keep us from all d-danger this n-night."

They repeated the words with no suspicion of what lay behind them.

Then Socky whispered, "Say something 'bout the Sundayman."

"An' keep the Sundayman away," Strong added.

They repeated the words, and then, as if his heart were still unsatisfied, Socky added these, "An' please take care o' my Uncle Silas."

The Emperor lay thinking long after his weary companions had gone to sleep. He thought of that angry outcry and his heart smote him; he thought of the danger. Perhaps, after all, they would not dare to burn the woods now. But Strong resolved to keep awake and be ready for trouble if it came. By-and-by he lighted a lantern and wrote in his old memorandum-book as follows:

_"Strong use to say prufanity does more harm when ye keep it in than when ye let it natcherly drene off but among childem it's as ketchin' as the measles. Sounds like thunder when it comes out of a boy's mouth an hits like chain lightnin."_

Long before midnight rain began to fall. Strong rose and went out under the trees and lifted his face and hands, in a picturesque and priestlike attitude, to feel the grateful drops and whispered, "Thank God!" It was a gentle shower but an hour of it would be enough. He went back to his bed and lay listening. The faded leaves that still clung in the maple-tops above them rattled like a thousand tambourines. After an hour of the grateful downpour Strong's fear abated and he "let go" and sank into deep slumber.

Almost the last furrow in the old sod of his character had been turned.

XXXI

THE sun rose clear next morning. Although a long shower of rain had come one could see no sign of it save in the drifted leaves. The earth had drunk it down quickly and seemed to be drying with its own heat. Strong felt the soil and the leaves. He blew and shook his head with surprise.

While the others lay sleeping in their tent, he made a fire and set out in quest of a spring. Half a mile or so up the lake shore a bear broke out of a thicket of young firs just ahead of him. Strong was caught again without his rifle. Satan came as swiftly as the bear had fled, but could not prevail against him. Strong was delighted with this chance of showing the strength of his new purpose. In among the fir-trees he found the carcass of a buck upon which the bear had been feeding.

"P-paunchers!" Strong muttered.

He climbed the side of the ridge and presently struck the trail leading into camp. Soon he could hear some one coming, and sat on a log and waited. It was Master, who had gone to Lost River camp and then followed the trail of the boat-jumper.

"Slept last night in a lean-to over on the Middle Branch," said he. "Been travelling since an hour before daylight and I'm hungry."

"N-news from the gal?"

"No. Have you?"

Strong shook his head solemnly. "They've t-took the hills, an' I've come over here t' work fer Uncle S-sam," said he.

"Warden?"

"Uh-huh--been app'inted," Strong answered, with a look of sadness and satisfaction.

"They're very cunning--Wilbert and the rest of them," Master said. "They've put a little salve on you and sent you out of the way. You're too serious-minded for them. That dynamite trick of yours set 'em all thinking. They won't keep you here long--you're too dead in earnest. But there's room enough for you over in the Clear Lake country, and when they get ready to shove you out come and be at home with us."

A moment of silence followed. The simple mind of the woodsman was looking deep into the darkness that surrounded the throne of the great king.

"You're camp looks as if it had been struck by lightning," Master added.

Strong showed the letter containing his appointment, and told of the threat to hang him up by the heels.

"The commissioner is on the square--he means well," said Master, "but they're using him. These lumbermen intend to drive you out of the woods, and they've got you headed for the clearing. You won't stay here long. In my opinion they'll burn this valley."

Strong looked into the face of the young man.

"What makes ye think so?" he asked.

"Because they want the timber, and because they've got you here," said Master. "I heard of your appointment. I heard, too, that Joe Socket and Pop Migley and Dennis Mulligan thought you were the right man for the place. I knew there'd be something doing, and I came in here to warn you. Don't ever trust the benevolence of Satan."

"By--" Strong paused and gave his thigh a slap. "I know w-what they're up to," he muttered, thoughtfully. "They'll make it too hot f-fer m-me here."

He told of the fire and the man who fled in the bushes.

"They're going to fire the valley, and don't intend to give you time to sit down," said Master. "It's a dangerous country just now."

"Have t' take Sinth an' the ch-childem out o' here r-right off," the hunter answered. "If you'll stay with 'em t'-day, I'll go an' g-git some duffle an' we'll p-put over the r-ridge with 'em t'-night."

Back at the old camp there were things he needed sorely, and he reckoned that he could make the round trip with a pack-basket by five in the afternoon.

"It's still and the leaves are d-damp," Strong mused. "Fire wouldn't run much t'-day."

"To-morrow I'll get a force of men and we'll surround this valley," said Master.

They hurried into camp and were greeted with merry cries. Soon they were sitting on a blanket beside the others, eating in the ancient fashion of the pioneer.

The young man had brought a letter from Gordon which contained a sum of money and welcome news. Sinth read the letter aloud.

"'My dear friends,'" she read, "'I had hoped to write you long ago, but I have been waiting for better news to tell. My struggle is over and I am now master of myself. I paid to my creditors all the money you gave me.'"

"Did you give him money?" Sinth looked up to inquire.

"Uh-huh," Strong answered.

"How much?"

"All I had."

"You're a fool!" Sinth exclaimed, and went on reading as follows:'

"'Socky had given me his little tin bank. It contained just a dollar and thirty-two cents. The sacred sum paid my fare to Benson Falls and bought my dinner. I got a job there in the mill and soon I expect to be its manager. I'm a new man. If you want a job I can place you here at good pay. In a week or two I shall--'"

Sinth stopped reading and covered her face with her apron.

"What does it s-say?" Silas inquired, soberly.

She handed the letter to him, and he read the last words: "'I shall come after the children and will then pay you in full with interest. No, I can never pay you in full, for there's something better than money that I owe you.'" Strong's face changed color. He dropped the letter and rose.

"W-well," he stammered.

"He sha'n't have 'em," said Sinth, decisively. "Tut, tut!" Silas answered.

He raised the boy in his arms and kissed him. "W-we're both f-fools," he said, huskily.

"You ain't exac'ly fools, but yer both childern," said Sinth, wiping her eyes.

"Well, you know the Bible says we must become as a little child," said Master. "After all, money is only a measure of value, and one thing it does with absolute precision--a man's money measures the depth of his heart."

XXXII

STRONG left camp with his pack and rifle and two bear-traps. He was nearing the dead buck when a shot stopped him, and a bullet cut through his left fore-arm. The deadly missile came no swifter than his understanding of it.

He dropped as if a death-blow had struck him, and, clinging to his rifle, crept in among the firs. He flung off the straps of his basket. He lay still a moment and then cautiously got to his knees. Blood was trickling down his hand, but he gave no heed to it. The ball had come from higher ground, towards which he had been walking. The man who had tried to kill him could not have stood more than two hundred feet away. Strong sat, rifle in hand, peering through the fir branches--alert as a panther waiting for its prey. Soon he caught a glimpse of his enemy fleeing between distant tree columns. The sight seemed to fill him with deadly anger.

He leaped to his feet, seized his pack-basket, and started swiftly in pursuit of him. He gained the summit of the high ground and saw a broad slash covered with berry bushes and sloping to the flats around Bushrod Creek. A trail cut through it from the edge of the woods near him.

He stopped and listened. He could hear the sound of retreating footsteps and could see briers moving some thirty rods down the slash. His heart had shaken off its rage. He was now the cunning, stealthy, determined hunter. He saw a dry, stag-headed pine in the edge of the briers near him and hurried up its shaft like a bear pressed by the dogs. On a dead limb, some thirty feet above ground, he halted and looked away. He could see nothing of his unknown foe.

Slowly Strong descended from the dead tree. He had just begun to feel the pain of his wound. Blood was dripping fast from it; he looked like a butcher in the midst of his task. He muttered as he began to roll his sleeve, "G-guess they do inten't' shove me out o' this c-country."

He blew as he looked at the wound.

"B-Business is p-prosperin'," he went on, as he held one end of a big red handkerchief between his teeth and wound it above the torn muscles and firmly knotted the ends.

"W-war!" he muttered, as he went to the near bushes and began to gather spiders' webs.

It is to be regretted that for a moment he forgot his promise to Socky and "boiled over" from the heat of his passion.

He sat on the ground and with his knife scraped away the blood clots.

"D-damn soft-nose bullet!" he muttered, with a serious look, smoothing, down the fibres of torn flesh.

He spread the webs upon his wound, and held them close awhile under his great palm. Soon he moistened a lot of tobacco and put it on the webs and held it there. After an hour or so the blood stopped. Then, gradually, he relieved the tension of his handkerchief, and by-and-by used it for a bandage on his wound.

He rose and shouldered his pack and began to search for the tracks of his enemy. He soon discovered those of the bear which had fled before him that morning.

"S-see here, Strong," he muttered, "th-this won't scurcely do. I arrest you, S. Strong, Esquire. Y-you're my prisoner. T-tryin' t' kill a man--you b-bloodthirsty devil! C-come with me. We'll hunt fer b-bears."

The Emperor had often addressed himself with severe and even copious condemnation, but this was the first time that he had ever taken S. Strong by the coat-collar and violently faced him about.

He could see clearly where the bear had broken through the wet briers on his way down to the flat country. It was a moment of peril, and he gave himself no time for argument. He hurried away in the trail of the bear. It lay before him, unmistakable as the wake of a boat, and would show where the animal was wont to cross the water below. He came soon to a great log lying from shore to shore of that inlet of Rainbow which was called Bushrod Creek. He could see tracks near the end of the log, and there, with a spruce pole for a lever, he set his traps in the sand so that, if the first were not sprung, the second would be sure to take hold. He covered the great, yawning, seven-toothed jaws of steel and fastened heavy clogs upon both trap chains. Then he took the piece of bacon from his pack and hung it on a branch above the traps.

Shrewdly the hunter had made his plan.

That bear would probably return to the dead buck, and the scent of the bacon would attract him to that particular crossing.

He tore two pages from his memorandum-book, and wrote this warning on each:

STOP TRAPS AHED

S. STRONG.

He fastened them to stakes and posted them on two sides of the point of danger.

It was then past eleven and too late for the long journey to Lost River camp. He decided to go to Henyon's on the Middle Branch and get the trapper to come and keep watch while he took Sinth and the children to Benson Falls.

On his way out of the slash he killed a deer, and dressed and hung him on a tree. Then he set out for the trail to Henyon's.

He had walked for an hour or so when his pace began to slacken.

"T-y-ty!" he whispered, stopping suddenly. "S. Strong, what's the m-matter? Yer all of a-tremble."

Strong felt sick and weary, and took off his pack and sat down to rest on a bed of leaves. Then he discovered that the handkerchief upon his arm was dripping wet. Again he stopped the blood by cording.

He lay back on the ground suffering with faintness and acute pain. Soon obeying the instinct of man and beast, which prompts one to hide his weakness and even his death-throes, he crept behind the top of a fallen tree.

His heart had been overstrained of late by worry and heavy toil. Now for the first time he could feel it laboring a little as if it missed the blood which had been dripping slowly but steadily from his arm. At last a day was come that had no pleasure in it--a day when the keepers of the house had begun to tremble.

Soon the warm sunlight fell through forest branches on the great body of Strong, who had lost command of himself and become the prisoner of sleep.

In the memorandum-book there is an entry without date in a script of unusual size. Those large letters were made slowly and with a trembling hand. It was probably written while he sat there in the lonely, autumn woods before giving up to his weakness. This is the entry:

_"Theys days when I dont blieve God is over per-ticklar with a man bout swearin."_

XXXIII

SOON after breakfast that morning Master had hitched the ox to the boat-jumper.

"My land! Where ye goin'?" Sinth inquired.

"To-morrow we're going out to Benson Falls with you and the children," said Master. "I thought we'd better take the ox and what things you need to-day as far as Link Harris's. That's about four miles down the Leonard trail. The ox will have all he can do to-morrow if he starts from Harris's."

The young man said nothing of another purpose which he had in mind--that of learning, as soon as possible, the nearest way out of the Rainbow country.

"What does that mean?" Sinth asked.

"Only this--we may have trouble with these pirates, and we want to get you out of the way. We'll have to travel, and we can't leave you in the camp alone. You and the children can ride over, and we'll come back afoot."

So Sinth packed her satchels and a big camp-bag, and all made the journey to Harris's where they left the ox and the jumper.

It was near six o'clock when they returned to the little camp at Rainbow. Strong was not there, and after supper, while the dusk fell, they sat on a blanket by the fire, and Sinth raked the old scrap-heap of family history to which a score of ancestors had contributed, each in his time. It was all a kind of folk-lore--mouldy, rusty, distorted, dreamlike. It told of bears in the pig-pen, of moose in the door-yard, of panthers glaring through the windows at night, of Indians surrounding the cabin, and of the torture by fire and steel.

At bedtime Silas had not arrived. Sinth, however, showed no sign of worry. He knew the woods so well, and there were bear and fish and sundry temptations, each greater than his bed.

"Mebbe he's took after a bear," Sinth suggested, while she began to undress the children.

"You remember we heard him shoot soon after he left here," said Master. "It may be he wounded a bear and followed him."

"Like as not," she answered.

In a moment she put her hand on Master's arm and whispered to him.

"Say!" said she, "I don't want to make trouble, but if I was you I wouldn't wait no longer for that old fool."

She stalled the needles into her ball of yarn and rolled up her knitting. She continued, with a sigh of impatience:

"I'd go over to Buckhom an' git that girl, if I had to bring 'er on my back."

"That's about what I propose to do," said the young man, with a laugh.

"I'm sick o' this dilly-dally in'," said Sinth, "an' I guess she is, too."

With that she led Socky and Sue into the tent. When the others had gone to bed Master began to think of the shot which had broken the silence of the autumn woods that morning. He lighted a lantern and followed as nearly as he could the direction his friend had taken. By-and-by he stopped and whistled on his thumb and stood listening. The woods were silent. Soon he could see where Strong had crossed a little run and roughed the leaves beyond it. Master followed his tracks and came to the dead deer. He saw that a bear had found it, and near by there were signs of a struggle and of fresh blood. Now satisfied that Strong had shot and followed the bear, he hurried back to camp.

He spread a blanket before the fire and laydown to think and rest in the silence. Buck-horn was only four miles from the upper end of Rainbow. One could put his canoe in the Middle Branch and go without a carry to the outlet of Slender Lake--little more than a great marsh--then up the still water to a landing within half an hour of Dunmore's. He would make the journey in a day or two, and, if possible, take the girl out of the woods.

The night was dark and still. He could hear now and then the fall of a dead leaf that gave a ghostly whisper as it brushed through high branches on its way down.

Suddenly another sound caught his ear. He rose and listened. It was a distant, rhythmic beat of oars on the lake. Who could be crossing at that hour? He walked to the shore and stood looking off into inky darkness. He could still hear the sound of oars. Some one was rowing with a swift, nervous, jumping stroke, and the sound was growing fainter. Somehow it quickened the pulse of the young, man a little--he wondered why.

XXXIV

MASTER returned to the fire and lay back on his blanket. Little puffs of air had begun to rattle the dead leaves above him. Soon he could hear a wind coming over the woodland. It was like the roar of distant sea-billows. Waves of wind began to whistle in the naked branches overhead. In a moment the main flood of the gale was roaring through them, and every tree column had begun to creak and groan. Master rose and looked up at the sky. He could see a wavering glow through the tree-tops. The odor of smoke was in the air. He ran to call Miss Strong, and met her coming out of her tent. She had smelled the smoke and quickly dressed.

"My land, the woods are afire!" she cried.

The sky had brightened as if a great, golden moon were rising.

Sinth ran back into her tent and woke the children. With swift and eager hands the young man helped her while she put on their clothes. She said not a word until they were dressed. Then, half blinded by thickening smoke and groping on her way to the other tent, she said, despairingly, "I wonder where Silas is?"

A great, feathery cinder fell through the tree-tops.

"Come quick, we must get out of here," Master called, as he lifted the crying children. "We've no time to lose."

She flung some things in a satchel and tried to follow. In the smoke it was difficult to breathe and almost impossible to find their way. Master put down the children and tore some rope from a tent-side and tied it to the dog's collar. Then he shouted, "Go home, Zeb!" They clung to one another while the dog led them into the trail. Master had Socky and Sue in his arms. He hurried up the long slope of Rainbow Ridge, the woman following.

They could now hear the charge and raven of the flames that were tearing into a resinous swamp-roof not far away.

"Comin' fast!" Sinth exclaimed. "Can't see or breathe hardly."

"Drop your satchel and cling to my coat-tails," Master answered, stopping to give her a hold.

A burning rag of rotten timber, flying with the wind, caught in a green top above them. It broke and fell in flakes of fire. Master flung one off his coat-sleeve, and, seizing a stalk of witch-hopple, whipped the glow out of them. On they pressed, mounting slowly into better air. Just ahead of them they could see the wavering firelight on their trail. On a bare ledge near the summit they stopped to rest their lungs a moment.