The Phantoms of the Fire
It was late summer, and the Georgetown road was deep with dust, which had settled like a dun pall on the bordering chaparral and pines. Since he had walked all the way from Auburn without securing a single lift, the man who was trudging along the road with the broiling afternoon sun on his back was hardly less dusty than the trees. He paused now and then to mop his face with a discoloured handkerchief, or to peer rather wistfully at the occasional cars which passed him without offering to stop. His clothing, though not actually ragged, was old and worn, and had the indescribable shapelessness of clothing that has been slept in. He was very thin, stoop-shouldered, and discouraged-looking; his general aspect was almost that of a professional tramp; and the people of the countryside were suspicious of tramps.
“Well, I guess I’ll have t’ walk all the way,” he said to himself, whining a little even in his thoughts. “But it ain’t much further now. … Gosh, but things is hot an’ dry.” He looked about him at the familiar landscape of parched grass, brushwood and yellow pines with an appraising eye. “Wonder there ain’t been more fires—there alluz is at this time o’ year.”
The man was Jonas McGillicuddy, and he was on his way home after a somewhat prolonged absence. His return was unannounced, and would prove as unexpected to his wife and three children as his departure had been. Tired of trying to extort a living from a small vineyard and pear-orchard of rocky El Dorado land, and tired also of the perennial nagging of his frail, sensitive-nerved and sorely disappointed wife, Jonas had left abruptly, three years before, after a quarrel of more than customary bitterness and acerbity with his helpmate. Since then, he had heard nothing from his family, for the good and sufficient reason that he had not sought to communicate with them. His various attempts to earn a livelihood had proved scarcely more successful than the fruit-ranching venture, and he had drifted aimlessly and ineffectually from place to place, from situation to situation—a forlorn and increasingly desperate figure, For a man of such shifting, unstable temperament, when all else had failed him, and he had wearied of the hopeless struggle, it was not unnatural to think of returning. Time had softened his memory of his wife’s undependable temper, of her shrewish outbursts; but he had not forgotten her motherly ways when she was in a more tractable humour, nor her excellent cooking.
Now, with empty pockets, since his last money had sufficed merely to pay his train-fare to Sacramento, Jonas was nearing the hills in which lay his forest-surrounded ranch beyond Georgetown. The country through which he tramped was sparsely peopled, and there were great stretches of softly rolling hills and low valleys that had not known the touch of cultivation. The ranches were often quite isolated. Beyond all, in the hazy blue of the distance, were the vague and spectral snows of the Sierras.
“Gosh, but one of Matilda’s pear pies’ll taste good,” thought the wanderer. His mouth began to water. He was not reflective enough, however, to wonder just what his reception would be, beyond an easy surmise that Matilda might give him a terrific scolding for his absence. “But mebbe she’ll be mighty glad t’see me, after all,” he consoled himself; Then he tried to picture his children, the five-year-old boy and the girl-babies of three and two respectively whom he had last seen.
“Guess they’ll have forgotten they had a papa,” he mused. The afternoon had been utterly still and airless, with a sultry brooding in its silence. Now, from the northeast, along the road he was travelling, there came a gust of wind, and with it the unmistakable acrid odour of burnt grass and trees.
“Hell, there has been a fire after all,” muttered Jonas, with an uneasy start. He peered anxiously ahead, but could see no smoke above the dun and grey-green hills. “Guess it’s all out now, anyway.”
He came to the top of the low slope he was climbing, and saw before him the burnt area, which lay on both sides of the road and was of indeterminable extent. The brown foliage of heatseared oaks and the black skeletons of bushes and pines were everywhere. A few fallen logs and old stumps were still smoking a little, as is their wont for days after the extinguishment of a forest fire. It was a scene of complete and irremediable desolation.
Jonas hurried on, with a sense of growing panic, for he was now little more than a mile from his own property. He thought of the yellow pines that stood so close and tall about his cabin—the pines which he had wished to fell, but had spared at the earnest solicitation of the nature-loving Matilda.
“They’re so pretty, Jonas,” she had said, pleadingly. “I just can’t see them go.”
“Hope the fire didn’t get into them pines,” thought Jonas now. “Gosh, but I wish I’d cut ’em down when I wuz plannin’ to. It would have been a lot safer; and I’d have had the money for the wood, too.”
The road was strewn in places with ashen leaves, with the charcoal of fallen brands, and several trees had crashed across it, but had now been removed to permit the passage of traffic. It was hotter than ever, in this charred and blackened waste, for the brief gust of wind had fallen. The dust on Jonas’ cheeks was runnelled with sweat which he no longer paused to wipe away. Irresponsible as he was, a strange gravity had come over the wastrel, and he felt an ever-deepening premonition of calamity,
He came at last to the little
