The Divided Soul

by G. B. Lancaster

THE DIVIDED SOUL

By G. B. LANCASTER.

POLSON'S CAMP was at lunch, with a heat-sick sky overhead and a racked, pallid earth underfoot, and the reason of its labours for the last eighteen months lying useless in the drying river-bed below. Billies and pannikins burned red-hot to the touch, and a damper was curled inside out, like dried leather, where Barrett had left it in the sun. Cortiss picked it up and sent it at Barrett's head with words to match. But Barrett lay on his elbows and stomach, and continued to curse the universe, uncaring.

Cortiss settled back under the three inches of shade flung by a manuka bush.

"This 'ere camp's dry-rotted," he said.

He spoke to no one in particular, and Kefford answered, his breath coming stertorously, his great, bull throat swelled with heat where the loose shirt fell away—

"This 'ere camp's a blank fool! That's what! Farren's is closed down, an' Montgomery's is closed down—an' there ain't goin' ter be no water ter carry the logs this side everlastin'. Why ain't we closed down, then?"

Din spat out a mouthful of tea-leaves and tossed the end of his damper to a weka that was tasting his bootlaces.

"That's easy! Guv us another! Don't we all know as Harry won't close down while there's ernuff of us lef for him ter curse at? An' there won't be that long! I'm weared to a shadder—an' less. Pity as I hadn't the sense to go south six months ago. They gits wet wi' suthin' 'sides sweat down there."

Behind the big crane where the cicadas were shrieking. Gearing grappled with the sickness of heat-sunstroke.

"Pity I hadn't the sense never ter come up ter Mercury!" he groaned. "Pity I hadn't the sense never ter come ter New Zealand!"

"Oh, rats! Pity you hadn't the sense never ter git born!" Westall slung down his pannikin and turned from the quiver of heat over parched river and earth and sky. "You ain't the spunk of a wren, Gearing. That's what is the matter wi' you. Why don't yer up an' tell Harry yer goin' ter cut it? That's what I'm goin' ter do."

Cortiss knew New Zealand from her head to her feet, and he knew his fellows in like degree. He rolled out of a flax bush, with his moist, peaky face upturned.

"Hare yer, me auntylope wi' the shinin' 'ead?" he said. "Hand what's 'Arry goin' ter say, are yer thinkin'? There ain't much meat as 'e can't make inter 'ash when he 'as a mind to. Hand you won't need much seasonin', Westall."

Westall was not over nice in his habits, and the camp approved Cortiss with a generosity that brought Westall upright swiftly.

"You wait till I teach yer, Cortiss! You as I cud pick the stuffin' outer wi' me finger-nail."

"Try hit on ter Swale." Cortiss jerked Swale neatly into the foreground. "'E's about 'arf my size, hand near quarter my pluck. 'Sides, 'e's got a ache to-day, so you might 'ave a look in. Swale—Hi'll 'ave you out o' that. Ain't there heven the helements o' liver an' pluck left ter us?"

Tarson grinned, softly beating the yellow mud from his hands. Well he knew that the wrath of men was ever dearer to little Cortiss than the kiss of woman. But the love of a man's game, such as would hurry the blood in clogging veins and put pride to the lagging step, was dearer yet. And the drought had taken all such from Polson's Camp when it came to knock away the scaffolding of habit and to strip each man naked to the character which he had been building up inside the scaffolding.

"The Salvation Army's been converting Gresham's," he said irrelevantly. "And No. 2's dry-rotted, and all the rest are closed down. What is Mercury going to say of Polson's, eh?"

A sentence came clear-cut from the dusty scrub by the logging-track.

"If any chap wants to know what Polson's says o' Mercury—it's rotten!"

Mercury Bay lies very near the top of New Zealand, and the geography books do not generally say anything about it. But because every inhabited patch of God's earth must stand sponsor at the Last Day for the passions of the men it has bred, Mercury has a value of its own, and, without any doubt, there will be a mixed account for it to render.

Gearing pulled himself upright, smearing the dust from his flat, pallid face and blue eyes.

"Half twelve," he said. "Kefford, it's you an' I for startin'. D'you think it'll be any cooler in the loggin'-track?"

Kefford felt slowly in his coat-pockets, and his purple face took on a nasty look.

"I'm havin' my pipe first," he said.

Din dropped an armful of chains with a crash, and more than one man halted irresolute. For, by order of Harry Danvers, fire of any sort was a forbidden sin out here on the bush-land, where the young leaves withered with the heat, and the springs dried into white mud, and the green of fern and moss was blasted to dull ochre chips that crisped and slipped underfoot. But the devil of strike and discontent was over the camp, and each man hated and suspected his fellow-men and—himself.

Cortiss's face shot out from between the gleaming flanks of the bullocks he was coupling.

"'Ello, my hingenyous hydrangea!" he called. "Hi wish you luck when 'Arry gits the stink o' that 'bacca."

Kefford blew the wreaths high in the thin air, and Gearing's mouth watered.

"Jes' what I'm wantin' to set me up. Gosh, there's Harry!"

A swift foot crashed down through the dried manuka scrub behind Kefford; a sharp twist jerked the pipe from his teeth, snapped it in two, and dropped it. Then Harry Danvers put his foot on the pieces and said—

"Hand over your matches, Kefford, and get up to your team. And don't be a fool, unless you want something else first. Do you? Get out of that coat, then!"

He cast his own, standing up, all bone and taut sinews, in the quivering air, and the lines of his face made strange reading. There was sign of the brute there, of the leader, of the gay, reckless lover, of the man of silence and endurance, of the man who had fought temptation and fled from it and broken before it over and over again.

But Harry asked from no man pity or help, although he had stood before as now—one man against a camp and that camp riddled through with mutiny. He waited, with the shadeless sun on his half-smiling face and keen eyes, and the men waited also, breathless and eager to see blood spilt, so that it was not their own.

Then the slushy—he had come down to gather up plates and pannikins for the cook—giggled in a broken treble, and Kefford pitched his full weight forward with a curse. Harry swung aside as the great fist cut down through the air, laid Kefford on his back with a level left-hander, plucked the bullock-whip from the crook of a fuchsia tree, and tossed it over.

"Pick that up and get back to your work," he said. "Make a start there, Cortiss; you're blocking the way. Gearing, tell Thompson I'll be up at the head in two hours."

Gearing gasped as Kefford slouched across to his team, cowed and sullen.

"Tell him," he murmured, falling into line. "You bet I'll tell him—what'll put a kink inter them straight eyebrows o' his."

The last sled crawled off the logging-bank, and Tarson paused with his hand on the haulage chain.

"You won't do that too many times more," he said. "Every mother's son of 'em is ready to kick. Can't you feel it in the air, Harry?"

Harry lifted his shoulders a little, his lips yet curved with a smile.

"Kick," he said. "They'll kick every day and all day until they bust the whole show up. But I'll sweat the fight out of 'em while I can."

"We're stale," said Tarson, staring down the river-bed, where a half-score lumpers dawdled with bars among the logs—"stale as last Easter's buns. You haven't got a decent collar-pull out of us this two months—and you won't, I'm thinking. The drought's flayed us, body and soul. We're empty little nutshells, Harry, without kernel enough to rattle."

Harry nodded. Drought of another sort had flayed him years back with the marks that no after-time will heal.

"You'd best send Bob up to grease the chain-barrel before the next load comes along," he said. "She's squealing like a scared girl. And make the dump a couple of yards further out, Tarson. The sand is beginning to run."

He crossed to the back of the logging-bank, where a gang was patching the underway of clamped logs and trodden, dusty clay. The men fumbled their tools carelessly and without heart, and Harry's eyes contracted, glancing over the stooped backs and the burnt necks.

"Hand me that adze a moment, Tommy," he said. "And get a bit of rag for that thumb of yours; it'll give you beans if you get the dirt into it. Martin, sling that cross-tie to the right. To the right, I tell you. Well, how are you going to wedge the stop in? Will you——"

It was ten minutes before he passed Tarson again. Tarson was overhauling the crane connections, with Bob dripping grease on him from the tops, and he was angry. He straightened, with his lips uncertain under the thin moustache, and thrust back his wet hair with a blackened hand.

"It's utter nonsense, Harry," he said. "Sling it up. You won't hold them till the rains come. You won't hold me. There aren't going to be any rains. There's going to be the end of the world, an' purgatory's begun already. I'm sick of this, I tell you—dead sick!"

Harry looked at the man curiously. The white of the baked dust was on him, and on the straddled legs of the crane, and on the piled logs and the clumps of gay manuka that dotted the naked faces of the hills. And, looking, he felt that it was also on his own soul.

"Sick of it," he said. "Bah! Aren't we all sick—of everything? Don't imagine that you're dancing to your own tune, man. The whole world is whistling it. But—there's just the question of who gives in first, you see. Charlie, hold on there, you——"

He leapt down through the crackling scrub to the parched clay of the river-bed, and Tarson grunted, tightening a nut in the revolving-gear.

"So Harry's full up, too," he said. "That puts the perpendicular roof on the entertainment. We'll all be out on strike to-morrow, and then the chips'll fly."

Harry knew this quite as certainly as Tarson did. It mattered rather more to him. And then, standing out in the merciless sun, with the stench of drying weed in the backwaters, and of heated men on the bank, and of brazen, flowering flax and kowhai along the scarred faces, he felt suddenly that it did not matter. Respect, honour, love—all that a man has were gone. Let power go with the rest. And—there remained yet three bottles of brandy under his bunk.

He crossed the logging-bank, kicked up the dust of the bush-track beyond, passed into the clearing—where great hinaus made a bank to block out the air, and the smell of burnt fat from the eating-whare half choked him—went into his tent, and dropped the flap behind. In the sudden darkness after the glare his seared brain saw yet the bare hills and wide river-bed gaunt and desolate under the sun. He fell on his bunk, pressing his eyeballs with his fingers.

"Well," he said, as though one listened, close bending, "what's to do now? I've held them—longer than another man could or would. And I've kept myself straight. And what's to come of it? They'll go out on strike, and I'll get the sack at headquarters. Oh, I'm done—I'm done! There'll be a big row before I get them out of this. And I can't stop it. But I've worked with all the soul and body of me. Desirée!"

He lay still, and a fly-catcher, seeking a bee across the tent, brushed his cheek with a wing soft as a girl's lips. Then he moved with an oath, came to his knees, and groped in the stamped tussock of the floor for the bottles.

It is the devil in man which fits him to become a god in some future existence. This because only through sin overcome can a soul rise to godhood. The soul in Harry was divided, as is the soul of every man who has lived fully. By day and month and year it forced him to fight and to fall and to fight again. But it is not good for any man that there should be none to say "Well done!" at the fighting.

A yell split the still air of the clearing. It brought the cook from his fire, a dribbling saucepan in his hands and the round-eyed slushy gaping behind his shoulder. It brought Harry out, cool, close-lipped, alert. For on a North Island logging-camp the men wear their feelings—and little else—outside their skins, and Harry did not know what that yell might mean. Just who told him that there was fire in the hills he never remembered. It seemed that the whole earth shouted it at him with tongues of horror, and he stood a moment with the wild, heated faces pressing round him. Then that sixth sense which knows how and when to snatch at men's heart-strings woke in him, and he jumped for the implement-shed.

The men were after him, eager, swift-handed, as he slung out the tools to them. The smell of haste, of vivid excitement, was in the air, and Cortiss was trolling out a war-song as he tripped and ran with his double-armful of raw-hide beaters. All the dull, blank, muggy hillside seemed suddenly tingling with delirious joy, and the men laughed as they had not laughed these three months, with the blood singing through their veins for fight, and the strong life quick in them. For the moment the dry-rot was forgotten.

Harry understood, and he swerved towards Cortiss as the two ran up the slope together.

"That's it," he said. "Wake 'em! Wake 'em up! We've got 'em going, Cortiss, but who's to keep them going when they find that it won't be all buns and milk up there?"

Cortiss broke his song to answer, and his little, sharp eyes held the adoration which few men give to their fellows.

"You," he said—"you, hon your pertickler own. 'Arry, you cud turn 'em hinside hout hif you'd hon'y b'lieve hit."

Up the steep faces the logging-tracks lay all ways through a muddle of young undergrowth and broken timber. Rails warped and left years back tripped the men; the unshaded sun scorched them where the tussock crests spread bare to it; rabbit-holes stretched them flat on the sand-ridges, and deep guts with a flash of toothed rock below daunted them. But a power which was not their own drove them forward to the hurrying lilt of Cortiss's song. Then Harry took it up, and the thread of triumph ringing through it drove Jamie Macintosh half wild.

 

Wi' a hundred pipers and a', and a',
Wi' a hundred pipers and a' …

 

They came into the bush, and it smothered and heated them, with its closed vines and its startled fluttering of unseen birds and its smells of all wet, sweet rottenness since earth began. Lawyer-thorns hooked them under ears and nostrils; great tree-ferns beat dried leaves against their mouths; maidenhair and long-rotted tree-boles came away in their hands as they swarmed out of the cool gullies to a barren hilltop with a finger of pale smoke crooked over the ranges behind it. One wind-blown taste of salt sea air was blasted before the harshness of burning wood, and Harry grunted as he dropped, hand by hand, down a rock ridge to the tramline.

"Will they stand up to it?" he said. "And if I have to smash one, will the rest work, or—will they smash me?"

Cortiss fell all-fours on the corduroy. His tongue was hanging out, and he took no notice of the breathless questions around him.

"Cortiss! Corty, you little skunk … d'you see it? How big is it? Where——"

Then they doubled the corner, and the universe gave answer.

Far off, very far off, the great distances of the ranges lay spread before them, spouting flame as whales spout water at play, crested with smoke, dun, black, and scarlet, running into wild-fire shapes that flung shadows on the naked sky and passed and came again. And very faintly, like the echo from another world, sounded a crying and a sobbing and a complaining borne on a dull, low under-roar of pain.

Two minutes of thought would have made the men hopeless. Harry did not give it. He glanced round, and his voice rang out to catch the last straggler panting under the pines.

"We'll save the kauri," he said, "and we're the only camp on the river could do it. There's dry-rot in the others. But we're all right, eh, boys? We'll do it—with the choppers. Sling those beaters down. If we put our backs into it, we won't need 'em."

Tarson never knew how it was done. He asked Harry an hour later, stopping to shake the sweat off his hands. Harry grinned. He had just pushed forward the last of his outposts.

"They don't know, either … an' by night they won't want to. We may save the kauri spur, Tarson, but we're going to shake the dry-rot out of Polson's, anyway."

Harry was an engineer as well as a bushman and a drunkard. It is always necessary for a Colonial to be several things, although the last is not indispensable. He knew exactly what could be done at this present, and—what was more valuable—he knew how to make the men do it. Polson held the only bit of kauri timber along the river, and in hard cash it was worth many men's lives. It stood on a spur by itself, because the best timber will not mix with other, and a steep gully ran down either side the spur. They had begun the tapping of this kauri a week back, and here, at head of the logging- track, Harry found the bullocks yet in their chains, with Thompson only to guard six teams.

"Bring 'em along," he said curtly, and went upward to the neck of the spur.

Illustration: "'Get down to it, men,'"

The bush was thick on the neck—thick with tall, dark matais and hinaus, with quivering five-finger and shining broad-leaf and nikau palms of a thirty-foot leaf. Flowering supplejack bound them, and clematis spilling blossom and convolvulus knotted with the thousand-root kia-kia vine. Budded moss was close underfoot, with threadlike ferns and glowing berries, and far up, in a red-topped tree, a moko-moko swung and sang, uncaring.

Harry gave his orders, curt and very clear. Then he left the men to cut and lay the green swathe of trees whereon they would later take their fire baptism, and called up Thompson.

"You'll take a couple of bullocks down with a sled," he said, "and bring back tea and damper. Whips of tea, and strong. Take the slushy back with you; he'll cut off someone's head if you don't. And look sharp. We'll be at it all night, without shifts."

"Will they do it?" asked Thompson, remembering.

A queer light flashed in Harry's eyes for a second.

"Which of them has the pluck to be the first funker, do you think?" he said, and went back.

Because men in the bulk are more like a flock of sheep than the theorist will ever believe, each man will jump a straw on the ground if his leader jumps it. This fact has been responsible for the making and breaking of most empires. It was responsible for the following hours of stress, when the men worked, half naked and dripping, with hands that slipped and blistered on the axe-hafts and the saw-handles, and eyes that smarted and ran tears as the smoke began to drift softly through the bush, acrid, blinding, and drying to the throat.

The heat grew with the hours, and the spirit of unrest grew with it. No man could have explained why he laboured there, dumb, blind, and aching. No man could have explained why the fire had become to him a personal enemy, to be hated and trapped and slain before rest could take him again.

But Harry Danvers knew, and he fed that spirit of hurry and mad eagerness all along the line, with a slashing word of contempt for a shirker, and a swift hand for the man tried beyond his strength, and a coarse joke for little Atkinson, cold with fear in the close-pressing heat. And slowly the big trees pitched crashing from the axe-bite, and the undergrowth crumpled, and the straining bullocks dragged piled heaps of timber flat, so that the presently coming fire might not leap the widening swathe.

It was a wild hope, but there was a glory in it, and in the rush of haste that shook the soul, and in the steady work that testified to the manhood of Polson's Camp.

Far over the mountains the sky was black, smudged ink. It was thin corkscrews, pulling the heart out of the ranges in squirts of fire. Again it was soft, white fleeces that turned to brown rocks as the men looked. And the brown rocks rammed the sky, splitting it into yellow ribbons. Hundred-foot caverns glowed along the distances, gleaming with giant eyes until a breath of wind toppled them into nothingness. Spouting columns on the ridges swayed an instant, and surged down with a rocket-tail of sparks. The smell of burning fused all other smells, and scalded the palate with the taste of it, and the heat was parching, breath-stopping, terrible.

"Hand," said Cortiss feelingly, "hit's goin' ter do hus more good than three generations o' Sunday-school."

He dropped his axe between his knees, licking his blistered palms carefully, and blinked on the hurrying life about him. In a fuschia clump Kefford and his axe grunted like rooting pigs; right forward, where a streak of light cleft the bush, Harry's lean face showed in strong, deep fines, cheek to cheek with Gearing's white-lipped, anxious one. Beyond the bullocks Gray's lank head bobbed from a falling puriri that cut the air with a shriek, and on the left, where the big saw snarled, a dozen men were slashing, breast-high, through the tree-ferns.

"This fills the bill—hand settles it," said Cortiss thankfully, and he swung up his axe again.

All along the tops the fire was coming, in scarlet and orange and the royal purple of a king. It struck arrows of light to the heart of the sleeping gullies; it painted the wild sky to the dome and beyond it; it carried all Nature's sounds on its wings, from the scream of live trees tortured to the sob of berries that burst on the ground.

Day was gone, perhaps. The men neither knew nor cared. The glare of half a distant world in flame was enough to light them at their work. Slowly the green swathe fell and broadened; slowly the high tops bent and crumpled, giving less for the fire to leap and snatch at when it should come. Slowly the heat grew and the rolling smoke sifted round them, and Kefford swore himself sick because he smashed his axe chopping a rock-face in the darkness.

Slowly the green swathe widened, and yet the fire was far off. But the first threat came, blown on the wind that hot wings had fanned. Just a wicked, red eye in the cut fern, but all men saw it, and they halted, as though at a given word. Then Gearing shrank back with blank terror in his eyes, dropped his winger, and fled down the track.

This was Harry's hour. He laughed, tripping Gearing on his face.

"There's always one rotter in a camp," he said. "Now we know him. Get down to it, men. We didn't sweat here since noon to be bested at the end."

Kefford jumped the fallen Gearing.

"Smeller!" he said, and trampled out the red eye with great, cowhide boots. Forward, Cortiss was chuckling as he swung his axe.

"Glory to ye, 'Arry, me bhoy!" he murmured. "Hif this don't put your pride back hinto you, Hi'll leather you mesilf. They was ready for buck-jumpin' all right."

Slowly the green swathe widened, catching the promise of the fire in earnest of its fulfilment. It fell from the roaring wind in flakes as of snow, in fat, whirling lumps, in blazing branches that swam down, dropping plumb through the rack. Little Atkinson was yelping from a burn on the neck, and the swathe rippled into flame more than twice. And the smoke thickened, and the heat grew, and the roar of a furnace-blast was in their ears. For the fire was coming, coming—leaping across the range-tops and pouring into the gullies, and the hope of saving the kauri spur had dwindled and blown away like grey ash before the breath. Harry knew it, but the men did not, for they had forgotten a time when the heavens were not a scarlet, galloping horror that stung their eyes. They had forgotten a time when trees along the distant hills did not fall like skittles when the ball is driven through them. They had forgotten a time when little, red mouths did not lap at them—here, over there, underfoot, to come again, laughing, snapping, stretching wider beneath their very hands. They had forgotten a time when they did not chop and slash and saw, with the sweat dripping from them, and the flying blacks smearing their sight. They had forgotten that they were men, with bodies blistered and burnt, with pores sucked dry by the scorching heat, and brains reeling and helpless in the roar that filled the world. For all thought or hope or understanding was sunk in a great eternity of strife that had no beginning nor end.

They would live the cleaner their lives through for this justifying of their manhood, and Harry knew it. Therefore he kept them at it until the danger was over-near and the end had come.

The elements that a man is made of are bigger than his body—by some ten thousand times. But he is generally afraid to recognise this. It was because Harry recognised it that he won a battle that night on the kauri spur, and then lost another because he could not control the elements.

On the range-top before them the fire shook out its banners, and the blast of its breath was hell. Either side points of fire were stabbing up the gullies, spinning, rioting, dancing in whirligig knots and ribands of rainbow colouring. Harry looked at the swathe cut with such infinity of labour. It would be of the value of a woman's hair to stop that torrent of flame when it came. Harry knew, but there was a gladness on his face that had not been there these years past. For the men were under his hand now, the full forty of them. They had no brain but his, no will but his. He was a man among men—a ruler—and not any more a drunkard who had gone out on the back-pull of the tide, leaving the core of his life behind him.

Tommy, the little greaser, stumbled past him, weeping because the sun was an orange tor sheer overhead and Thompson had refused to play him for it.

"I want to put it in my pocket and go home to bed," he explained, "for I'm tired of playing skittles—very tired."

Tommy's clothes were principally a kilt, and his young body was burned and blackened. Harry tucked his billhook under his armpit and carried the boy into the logging-way.

"And the others are coming in a moment," he said. "We're all going home to bed now, Tommy."

Then he went back to find them, and his face wore the high look of a man who has fought with gods—and won.

The crackle of close musketry was in the air, and the boom of big guns along the battle-front; and the thousand voices of the nearing fire sounded like the voices of a cheering army. The men did not want to leave it. They were mad drunk with weariness and exaltation, and the fire was snarling very near before the last stumbled into the logging-track, sick, blind, and stupid, and not understanding at all that he had to thank the keen-faced, silent man in the forefront for a night's work that would be told throughout New Zealand—aye, and beyond it.

The logging-track was hot, dim, horrible as purgatory. The men crawled down it unspeaking, and even Cortiss's cracked lips refused to whistle. Then they came out to the naked sunset hills, seeing north and south a widening march of flame, and below, in the drought-whitened river-bed, the stirring of strange, little, brown streams that ran and linked in the sand as the men neared to them. For the rains had come in the hills behind the fire-belt, and the waters had come, and Polson's logs of the year past were saved.

"Thank the Lord!" said Tarson humbly; and then young Gearing laughed near him, rocking his burnt arms.

"Oh, yus! But 'ow are we goin' out? Fire down-stream, an' fire up … and water in the river! We're clipped! clipped, sure!"

Westall turned with a snarl, and his teeth showed hideously white in the blackened face.

"Harry, you devil——" he said.

But Harry swung him aside, unheeding, went down the track with bleeding, bare feet, crossed the clearing, and shut his tent-flaps behind him. And down in the river the logs began to groan and move, shouldering each other.

In the clearing, on the track, across the logging-bank, the men dropped, exhausted and uncaring. Death was on all sides, but without Harry to flay them into understanding, this did not trouble them. Tarson looked at Cortiss where he stood, swaying on his feet.

"If Harry gives out now," he said, "I'll kill him! By all things, I'll kill him! I'm going to tell him so."

Cortiss laughed vacantly.

"'Arry? Was you sayin' 'Arry'd give hout? Jes' you go hand tell 'im so, me salamander, hand see where 'e'll put ye for it!"

Tarson went into Harry's tent at the double. Then he halted, stammering—

"The—the game's not up yet, Harry," he said.

Harry sat on the bunk edge with the open mouth of a black bottle gaping beside his knee. His hands dropped, his seared face was dull and sunken. Through the burnt trousers and singlet his skin showed raw and blistered, and his eyes were empty of meaning. It was a body with the soul gone out of it, and the beast only left. Tarson shivered. Then he remembered that this man had been the big cog-wheel wherein all the others had fitted and run during the past stress and agony. He touched the bent shoulder with a vague reverence.

Illustration: "Harry sat on the bunk edge with the open mouth of a black bottle gaping beside his knee."

"Harry, wake up! We're all waiting for you, man."

Harry sheered from the hand with an oath.

"Curse you! Don't! I'm flayed alive. Can't you——"

"Can't you bloomin' well come hout o' that?" demanded Cortiss, bursting through the tent-flap. "'Arry, me hemperor, we're waitin' for you, hand fightin' like brothers, hevery man of hus. Tell us if we'd better go raftin' down the river——"

Behind him came the crash of logs riding out on the waking stream with spurts of white foam between. Behind him, too, came the glare of the fire. Harry swung his legs back in the bunk and lay flat.

"Go to blazes if you like!" he said. "I don't care. Leave me alone."

Cortiss's dirty, little, tired face changed.

"You!" he said, and his voice cut like whipcord. "You as got hus into this mess, hand made hus think as you'd some hof the spunk hof a man! Hand you'd chuck hus now, would you? Oh, would you?"

"Oh, let him rip!" Tarson turned on his heel and went out. "He stinks of brandy. Corliss, come on——"

But such love and pride as Cortiss had for Harry Danvers do not break at the first test. He laid his hands on Harry tenderly.

"You're done," he said, "hand well you may be. But we wants you, 'Arry. Come hout, man. We ain't blamin' you for what's 'appened. I tell you there ain't a bloomin' kick lef in the bloomin' lot on hus. We'll follow you blind …. hand mos' pertickler blind, too, some of hus. But we mus' 'ave you to follow."

"Oh, go to blazes! D'you think I funk any of you?" Harry's laugh was not good to hear, but the cold deliberation of his words was worse. "I'm not coming, Cortiss. There's no danger from the logs. You don't want me, and … I don't want myself. So I'm not coming. I'm going to stay here—with the fire."

Cortiss swung up the black bottle by the neck and broke it against the bunk-side.

"It's that drink talkin'," he said in his throat, "not you, 'Arry——"

Harry drew in his lips over his teeth. The fumes of the brandy were loosing his tongue as he had never loosed it to a man before.

"I am not coming, Cortiss. Why should I? If I go down river, I'll soak in the first pub I come across until they kick me out. And then I'll go on to the next. That's me. You didn't know it, did you? I've kept straight—I've kept straight!—but it couldn't last. I knew. It has never lasted before. If the fire had killed me, or purged the beast out of me—— But it hasn't, and there's nothing left. So I'm going to burn here. It may ease things for me a bit in the next world. I don't know. Physical pain doesn't count for much, anyway. Now, clear out, Cortiss. They're calling you."

Cortiss rubbed his black hand across his bleared eyes. Suddenly the lashes felt like post-and-rail fences.

"Not wi' that cursed drink," he said. "'Ave you got more hof it? For Hi'll not leave you hif you 'ave, 'Arry."

Harry looked at him strangely. Then he laughed, stooped under the bunk, and tossed two bottles at Cortiss.

"Here," he said. "Now—cut before I want them back. Go, will you?"

Cortiss scudded across the clearing with the intention of casting both bottles in the river and coming back to the man whom he loved. He was half blind and half deaf, and much more than half stupid, and a great grief was tugging at his heart. And the blasting heat and the great, red light, and the shouting of the men as they dropped away down-stream on the jarring logs, were as nothing beside the awful, glorious truth that one soul was going to use this agony of a world to purge itself clean in.

At foot of the logging-bank Cortiss flung the bottles into the whirling, brown water and turned back, more by instinct than sense. But a hand from a raft reached out, snatched at him, and swung him aboard as his wits left him, and he huddled sobbing at the man's knees.

And in his bunk Harry lay still, with shut eyes and his forehead pressed down on a pictured face that was too sacred for the touch of his lips.

"It was no use, love," he whispered—"no use. I couldn't fight any more … not even for you, Desirée."