"Timber"/Chapter 28
CHAPTER XXVIII
During those hot June days no cloud obscured the sun, but its light came hampered to the parched barrens through strata of smoke from many fires. Far and near the country was patched with blaze; flames running through brush and dry grass, hot and greedy for an hour, to be baffled by some sandy road which it could not leap, or a lake or marsh which balked it; other fires, in the depths of swamp, smouldered for days, sending up vast quantities of dense smoke; hot blazes in slashings licked up logging litter and reduced the soil itself to ash by the fierce heat.
The supervisors, who are local fire officers, met the situation with all the variability of mankind. "Let her burn," said some. "It'll make it easier to clear," while others slaved at the deadening drudgery of checking fires in cut-over land.
The district warden, red of eyes, skin grimed by smoke, voice hoarse from days in it, covered his counties in frantic drives to touch the worst spots and keep his deputies at the grind.
Fire! At once man's best servant and worst enemy! Ah, you city dwellers, who explain so casually the faint pall that drifts on roaming winds as smoke from burning forests! It is remote, it does not touch you; you know none of the terror men know who watch its crimson ring close on their forests, their homes, their future, their very lives!
Within the boundaries of Foraker's Folly was efficient preparedness. In the open shed where Helen's car stood, hung a rack of brass fire extinguishers, with drums of soda and tight cans of water. It could be lowered in a moment to the body of the car and clamped firmly there to be hastened to any point in the forest. This was a recently adopted idea, suggested by New England methods. At a half-dozen points through her property small sheds housed two-wheeled carts laden with similar apparatus, and shovels and axes. Also, three telephones were placed in strategic points so word of danger might be sent to the house without delay for there is but one way to control forest fire: Get there quick! As Black Joe sagely instructed the new patrolmen, "Get that when you c'n spit her out!"
All day long a look-out swung in the top of Watch Pine, but when the smoke was dense that vigilance was not enough and from three to a dozen men patroled the outer fire lines. Some of these rode horses which were harnessed and ready to be galloped to one of the equipment stations and drag the apparatus to action.
It was racking work. With evening came relief, because fire in the open loses its vigor with dusk; but each night which brought no rain only promised increased tension for the morrow and Helen Foraker felt her nerves stretching taut. The smoke cloud was enough to think about, let alone that other cloud which hung over her—or the emptiness in her heart!
There was emptiness there, and it grew with the days and this afternoon as she felt herself rocked gently by the wind—for she was on lookout herself—the girl stared out across the forest that had been her whole life and was struck by its inadequacy. There was something lacking, something vital had gone, and its passing dated to the hour of John Taylor's departure.
She had known too little sympathy, had had too little support in those years she had been forced to fight with men like Sim Bums, she had put up with ridicule and feeble attempts at double dealing and with the burden of her work, but she had always met them with a stout fighting spirit. They had stirred her temper and left her heart untouched, but now she seemed only to be making fighting gestures, with no spirit behind them.
Bobby Kildare appeared below and called in his high treble that he wanted to come up. Bobby always wanted to come up! He begged throughout the summer to be in the crow's nest and, taken there, begged to be left alone with the responsibility of watching for smoke.
"All right; come slowly, Bobby," she warned and, eager hands and feet and eyes all alert, he came up the ladder, held to slow progress only by her repeated caution.
"There!" he sighed as he set foot on the platform and Helen dropped the trap closed. "There, I am!"
His face was very bright, lips parted eagerly as he took the field glass and stared to south and west.
"No fires in sight," he said. "Huh!" and looked at her and shifted his feet and Helen laughed at his enthusiastic happiness.
"No fires near, Bobby—where were you this morning?"
"To the—at the mill, playin' with the Injun boys and Henny Raymer.
"Aunt Helen, are you going away?"
"Away? No. Why?"
"Oh, Henny said his father told his mother that you were going away. He said it was a party."
"Party?"
"Well, Henry said you'd been invited to go away by the voters—who is voters, Aunt Helen?"
She answered him absently and took the glass to stare with unseeing eyes out across the smoke-screened land.
That first warning from the anonymous Citizens' Committee had come on Tuesday. Wednesday brought another which she had not opened at once because she received it with other mail at the mill just as the saw struck a railroad spike buried in a log and scattered in ringing bits.
Raymer had scratched his head and looked at her with startled, owlish eyes.
"Somebody done that," he said dully. "An' this mornin' th' weights had been taken out of th' idler box an' she wouldn't saw. We lost two hours."
Later, as she read the curt warning, she saw connection.
Today was Thursday and the relief which had followed the call from Humphrey Bryant, telling her that the case against him in probate court had been dropped for lack of witnesses, was dissipated by the arrival of another warning.
She saw again Phil Rowe's ruthless smile; heard again his oblique threats.
Goddard came in that evening.
"What's the weather report?" he asked, eyeing her steadily, as though his mind were not on his question or the fire menace.
"Continued fair," she answered and did not look up.
She was strangely uneasy with Goddard now, a new reaction to him, born with the events of Monday morning when he had confronted Taylor with his charge.
"Saw Sim Burns today." He fussed with his hat as though reluctant to go on, but Helen said, "Yes?" and he proceeded: "He says he's got some cedar he's sold to Chief Pontiac. Wants to drive it down and says he'll serve notice on you to open the boom at Seven Mile unless you do it yourself."
"How much cedar has he?"
"I don't know. They got out some posts last winter. I recollect some poles, too, but there couldn't be over a carload."
"We can put it over the boom for him cheaper than we can tear it out."
"Yeah. I said that, but he wouldn't listen. Wants the river open."
The girl tapped her desk with a pencil.
"So that's another item, is it?"
"Looks that way. He's doin' it to make trouble. The county's pretty well stirred up, Helen," looking at her closely. "They're talking nasty!"
"Talk is easy to stand."
"But there's more than talk. Those warnings you get; what's happened at the mill—I tell you, Helen, they're too many for you."
"You'd have me quit?"
His eyes shifted.
"I don't want to see you—broken." His eyes raised again to her face, dog-like, and she knew the plea that was in them, the plea which she had forbidden him to speak. "You won't listen to me," he said heavily, "an' I was right once, wasn't I? Wasn't I right—about Taylor?"
"Yes" she said. "Yes, you were right," in a tone suddenly thin, and which rose alarmingly in pitch.
Helen dreamed as she slept that night. Taylor came to her and said as he had said one other time, using the words of Bobby: "And if I try hard to learn all that you will teach me—when I know as much as you, will you marry me?"
He seemed to be standing very close to her. He held out his arms and, staring into his face, trying to rebell, her feet had carried her forward. He had smiled as his arms closed about her, imprisoning her, her forest, her life, making her helpless—Then his lips had lowered to hers and as their mouths touched her heart raced, her cheeks took fire, and in her ears was a strange ringing, ringing—a ringing which grew louder and more insistent.
She found herself in the middle of the room, bewildered by a glow in the sky and by the sound of the insistent telephone bell. She ran barefooted down the stairs to lift the receiver.
"This is Raymer," a voice said. "A deck of logs is on fire and the others are in danger."
"Is your pump working?" faculties clearing.
"The hose had been cut. We need help!"
"Coming!"
She called to Goddard out the door, dressed and flew to the garage where men were clamping the platform of fire extinguishers on the body of the car. They raced through the night, with the stain of fire growing brilliant before them and came out at Seven Mile to see the mill in sharp silhouette and flames leaping high from one bank of her pine logs, the next one to it smoking threateningly.
The chemicals went into play and the fire was held to the one place, but it was daylight before buckets, used when the worst heat was over, could drench out the last embers.
The hose, which was on its reel in the mill, had been carefully cut in a half dozen places.
That day came another warning:
"What happened last night is only a start. Unless you make a move to clear out, we will show you what real vengeance is.—Citizens' Committee."
It had been mailed twenty-four hours before the fire broke out.
That noon John Taylor, walking between two of his lumber piles at Seven Mile siding, stopped shortly and then squatted and eyed the ground, touching it here and there lightly. Some one had been sitting there and moving his feet restlessly—not many hours ago, either. And in the sand was another mark, perhaps like that made by a bicycle—
John walked back along the edge of the swamp later. The road was little used and grass grew rank in it. But here and there where the ruts ran through black muck the imprint of an automobile tire was set in perfect pattern. The car had stopped at Charley Stump's cabin and turned about there. He returned to Pancake on the afternoon freight and before going to his room at Mrs. Holmquist's he stopped a moment before the Commercial House and eyed the tires on Jim Harris' automobile.
It may be recorded here that the next evening the Widow Holmquist was talking with her neighbor as she watered her garden.
"Yah, he ees a funny man," she said. "He ben out all hours of de night. Nefer see nodding like it, an' yust to tank that he'd bring that old Charley Stump to my house yust to give him a cigar an' set mit him in my house! Yim Harris, he was askin' me about him today, too. Dere's somethin' funny!"
That night Jim Harris, Phil Rowe and Wes Hubbard sat in Rowe's room. Harris was writing with a pencil laboriously, disguising his hand. He chuckled and then, as he finished, muttered: "Signed, Citizens' Committee!"
The others smiled. They did not see the face which had peered at them over the transom lower nor hear the man move stealthily away down the hall, carrying the chair on which he had stood.