A fiendish light was in his eyes, a ghastly drawing distorted his features. His motions were less careful and patient. He laughed harshly, then swung on to his horse. He headed up the canyon, swooped off his horse’s back, and lighted another fire. The crackle of the first conflagration had already grown to a menacing roar behind him.
A quarter of a mile farther he lighted the third fire, and then the fourth. It was not to be just a sporadic brush fire, with open lanes between. It was to be a veritable wall of flame. It was the forest fire in its full sense, sweeping swiftly and immutably over hill and valley, through thicket and open forest, and leaving only ugly sticks and black ashes in its wake. The flame pounced upon the trees. The dusky branches caught, the red demon mounted higher, and already the spaces between his first few starting fires were closing up.
But still José did not cease. For five miles across the canyons he rode—in a great crescent—stopping ever to light his fires. And when that ride was done, he turned his mount back through Smoky Land, toward a certain canyon that was a gateway out of the region to high mountains where the fire could not go. He had other work to do.
XXIV
The sheep were taking their midday rest, and Hugh and Alice exchanged certain confidences as they kept watch over them, sitting side by side on a dead log. Always, it seemed to them, they had more to tell each other than time would possibly permit. There was only one thing, it seemed to Hugh, that they didn’t talk of: his real station in life before he came to Smoky Land. He had never told her of his wealth, of the Old Colonel sitting in the club. For once in his life his credentials were his own manhood and his own personality, and he wanted no others. It was the test, and no irrelevant matters must enter in.
And all at once he paused in the middle of a sentence, staring curiously at the ground. The shadow of their figures in the sunlight was no longer to be seen.
“Good Lord, Alice,” he exclaimed. “What’s happened to the sun?”
They both looked up at once. And they found it without difficulty. But it was not that potent orb that the long summer days had taught them to respect. It was a feeble sun, a mere red disk in the strange, gray-blue sky.
“Clouds?” Hugh asked. A queer little stir went over his body. It was as if instinct—not yet dead but only blunted in human beings—had spoken within his being, giving him knowledge that his conscious self had not yet grasped. He was angry with himself for the tone. He had tried to keep all urgency out of it, and yet it seemed so breathless, so charged with dread.
“No,” the girl answered clearly. “It’s smoke.”
They were silent a breath. Both of them were testing the direction of the wind. Both of them knew at the same instant that their whole world depended largely upon this. It was not blowing hard at present, yet there was wind enough to sweep the fire through the treetops. And, more than anything, they remembered the parched and inflammable condition of the woods and brush.
Both of them discovered the truth the same instant. “We’re right in its track,” Hugh said.
They waited a long time, hardly speaking. The sky slowly thickened with smoke. They saw it rising, in great billowing clouds, toward Bear Canyon. Listening closely, they heard—at the vague frontier of hearing—the distant crackle of the fire.
All doubt was past. The time for delay was spent. That age-old terror of the wilderness, the forest fire, was sweeping toward them. It was yet distant and they had no inkling of its true origin. And as they listened, the first of the vanguard of fleeing wild creatures—a full-grown buck with magnificent horns and soft eyes—swept past them at top speed.
“You see, Hugh, don’t you?” she said rather quietly. “The whole valley seems to be afire, and we’ve got to run before it. There’s no way to hold it off—”
“But won’t the rangers see the smoke and come?”
“They couldn’t come in time. Besides, the high range hides it from the settlements. Unless a gale starts up—or accidents happen—we can drive the sheep out before it. As yet there’s no need to leave the sheep.”
“Of course not,” Hugh agreed. “We can’t leave the sheep.”
The girl looked up, a wonderful luster in her dark eyes. She was a mountain girl, inured to the terror of the flaming forest, and it was natural that she should retain perfect self-control. But she found herself wondering at this tenderfoot, this man of cities. There is no greater test of the spirit than that slow, remorseless advance of the wall of flame. The sight calls forth dreadful memories from the labyrinthal depths of the germ plasm; it chokes up the heart with cold blood and distills a poison in the nerves, yet he seemed as free from panic as she herself. And he was also the eternal shepherd. He would not leave the sheep.
“We pass the camp on the walk and I’ll get the horses,” she explained quickly. “It will be hard to control the flock if the fire gets much nearer. And I’ll try to take time to snatch a little food to keep us going through the night.”
“And your father’s lease—it’s all lost?”
“No. The grass will come up after the winter rains. If it were just a top fire the underbrush would be even heavier.” She turned to the shepherd dog, who now stood gazing, as if entranced, toward the billowing wall of smoke behind them. “Get ’em up, Shep, old boy. We’ve got to start.”
The dog obeyed; they began to drive the flocks in the direction of the foothills. It was hard work for all three
