CHAPTER XIX
At noon next day Hollister left the mess-house table and went out tosit in the sun and smoke a pipe beyond the Rabelaisian gabble of hiscrew. While he sat looking at the peaks north of the valley, fromwhich the June sun was fast stripping even the higher snows, he saw aman bent under a shoulder pack coming up the slope that dropped awaywestward toward the Toba's mouth. He came walking by stumps andthrough thickets until he was near the camp. Then Hollister recognizedhim as Charlie Mills. He saw Hollister, came over to where he sat, andthrowing off his pack made a seat of it, wiping away the sweat thatstood in shining drops on his face.
"Well, I'm back, like the cat that couldn't stay away," Mills said.
The same queer undercurrent of melancholy, of sadness, the same hintof pain colored his words,--a subtle matter of inflection, of tone.The shadowy expression of some inner conflict hovered in his darkeyes. Again Hollister felt that indefinable urge of sympathy for thisman who seemed to suffer with teeth grimly clenched, so that nocomplaint ever escaped him. A strange man, tenacious of his blackmoods.
"How's everything?" Mills asked. "You've made quite a hole here sinceI left. Can I go to work again?"
"Sure," Hollister replied. "This summer will just about clean up thecedar here. You may as well help it along, if you want to work."
"It isn't a case of wanting to. I've got to," Mills said under hisbreath. Already he was at his old trick of absent staring into space,while his fingers twisted tobacco and paper into a cigarette. "I'd gocrazy loafing. I've been trying that. I've been to Alaska and toOregon, and blew most of the stake I made here in riotous living." Hecurled his lip disdainfully. "It's no good. Might as well be here asanywhere. So I came back--like the cat."
He fell silent again, looking through the trees out over the stone rimunder which Bland's house stood by the river. He sat there besideHollister until the bolt gang, moving out of the bunk house to work,saw and hailed him. He answered briefly. Then he rose without anotherword to Hollister and carried in his pack. Hollister saw him go aboutselecting tools, shoulder them and walk away to work in the timber.
That night Hollister wakened out of a sound sleep to sniff the airthat streamed in through his open windows. It was heavy with thepungent odor of smoke. He rose and looked out. The silence of nightlay on the valley, over the dense forest across the river, upon thefir-swathed southern slope. No leaf stirred. Nothing moved. It wasstill as death. And in this hushed blackness--lightened only by a palestreak in the north and east that was the reflection of snowy mountaincrests standing stark against the sky line--this smoky wraith creptalong the valley floor. No red glow greeted Hollister's sight. Therewas nothing but the smell of burning wood, that acrid, warm, heavyodor of smoke, the invisible herald of fire. It might be over the nextridge. It might be in the mouth of the valley. It might be thirtymiles distant. He went back to bed, to lie with that taint of smoke inhis nostrils, thinking of Doris and the boy, of himself, of CharlieMills, of Myra, of Archie Lawanne. He saw ghosts in that duskychamber, ghosts of other days, and trooping on the heels of these cameapparitions of a muddled future,--until he fell asleep again, to beawakened at last by a hammering on his door.
The light of a flash-lamp revealed a logger from the Carr settlementbelow. The smoke was rolling in billows when Hollister steppedoutside. Down toward the Inlet's head there was a red flare in thesky.
"We got to get everybody out to fight that," the man said. "Shestarted in the mouth of the river last night. If we don't check it andthe wind turns right, it'll clean the whole valley. We sent a man topull your crew off the hill."
In the growing dawn, Hollister and the logger went down through woodsthick with smoke. They routed Lawanne out of his cabin, and he joinedthem eagerly. He had never seen a forest fire. What bore upon thewoodsmen chiefly as a malignant, destructive force affected Lawanne assomething that promised adventure, as a spectacle which aroused hiswonder, his curious interest in vast, elemental forces unleashed. Theystopped at Bland's and pressed him into service.
In an hour they were deployed before the fire, marshalled to theattack under men from Carr's, woodsmen experienced in battle againstthe red enemy, this spoiler of the forest with his myriad tongues offlame and breath of suffocating smoke.
In midsummer the night airs in those long inlets and deep valleys movealways toward the sea. But as day grows and the sun swings up to itszenith, there comes a shift in the aerial currents. The wind followsthe course of the sun until it settles in the westward, and sometimesrises to a gale. It was that rising of the west wind that the loggersfeared. It would send the fire sweeping up the valley. There would beno stopping it. There would be nothing left in its wake but theblackened earth, smoking roots, and a few charred trunks standinggaunt and unlovely amid the ruin.
So now they strove to create a barrier which the fire should not pass.It was not a task to be perfunctorily carried on, there was no timefor malingering. There was a very real incitement to great effort.Their property was at stake; their homes and livelihood; even theirlives, if they made an error in the course and speed of the fire'sadvance and were trapped.
They cut a lane through the woods straight across the valley floorfrom the river to where the southern slope pitched sharply down. Theyfelled the great trees and dragged them aside with powerful donkeyengines to manipulate their gear. They cleared away the brush and thedry windfalls until this lane was bare as a traveled road--so thatwhen the fire ate its way to this barrier there was a clear space inwhich should fall harmless the sparks and embers flung ahead by thewind.
There, at this labor, the element of the spectacular vanished. Theycould not attack the enemy with excited cries, with brandishedweapons. They could not even see the enemy. They could hear him, theycould smell the resinous odor of his breath. That was all. They laidtheir defenses against him with methodical haste, chopping, heaving,hauling the steel cables here and there from the donkeys, sweating inthe blanket of heat that overlaid the woods, choking in the smoke thatrolled like fog above them and about them. And always in each man'smind ran the uneasy thought of the west wind rising.
But throughout the day the west wind held its breath. The flamescrawled, ate their way instead of leaping hungrily. The smoke rose indun clouds above the burning area and settled in gray vagueness allthrough the woods, drifting in wisps, in streamers, in fantasticcurlings, pungent, acrid, choking the men. The heat of the fire andthe heat of the summer sun in a windless sky made the valley floor asweat-bath in which the loggers worked stripped to undershirts andoveralls, blackened with soot and grime.
Night fell. The fire had eaten the heart out of a block half a milesquare. It was growing. A redness brightened the sky. Lurid colorsfluttered above the hottest blaze. A flame would run with incredibleagility up the trunk of a hundred-foot cedar to fling a yellow bannerfrom the topmost boughs, to color the billowing smoke, the green ofnearby trees, to wave and gleam and shed coruscating spark-showers anddie down again to a dull glow.
Through the short night the work went on. Here and there a man'sweariness grew more than he could bear, and he would lie down to sleepfor an hour or two. They ate food when it was brought to them. Always,while they could keep their feet, they worked.
Hollister worked on stoically into the following night, keepingLawanne near him, because it was all new and exciting to Lawanne, andHollister felt that he might have to look out for him if the wind tookany sudden, dangerous shift.
But the mysterious forces of the air were merciful. During thetwenty-four hours there was nothing but little vagrant breezes and thedrafts created by the heat of the fire itself. When day came again,without striking a single futile blow at the heart of the fire, theyhad drawn the enemy's teeth and clipped his claws--in so far as theflats of the Toba were threatened. The fire would burn up to thatcleared path and burn itself out--with men stationed along to beat outeach tiny flame that might spring up by chance. And when that wasdone, they rested on their oars, so to speak; they took time to sitdown and tal
k without once relaxing their vigilance.
In a day or two the fire would die out against that barrier, alwaysprovided the west wind did not rise and in sportive mockery flingshowers of sparks across to start a hundred little fires burning inthe woods behind their line of defense. A forest fire was never beatenuntil it was dead. The men rested, watched, patrolled their line. Theylooked at the sky and sighed for rain. A little knot of them gatheredby a tree. Some one had brought a box of sandwiches, a pail of coffeeand tin cups. They gulped the coffee and munched the food andstretched themselves on the soft moss. Through an opening they couldsee a fiery glow topped by wavering sheets of flame. They could hearthe crackle and snap of burning wood.
"A forest fire is quite literally hell, isn't it?" Lawanne asked.
Hollister nodded. His eyes were on Bland. The man sat on the ground.He had a cup of coffee in one hand, a sandwich in the other. He wasblackened almost beyond recognition, and he was viewing with patentdisgust the state of his clothes and particularly of his hands. Heset down his food and rubbed at his fingers with a soiledhandkerchief. Then he resumed eating and drinking. It appeared to hima matter of necessity rather than a thing from which he derived anysatisfaction. Near him Charlie Mills lay stretched on the moss, hishead pillowed on his folded arms, too weary to eat or drink, even atHollister's insistence.
"Dirty job this, eh?" Bland remarked. "I'll appreciate a bath. Phew. Ishall sleep for a week when I get home."
By mid-afternoon of the next day, Sam Carr decided they had the firewell in hand and so split his forces, leaving half on guard andletting the others go home to rest. Hollister's men remained on thespot in case they were needed; he and Lawanne and Bland went home.
But that was not the end of the great blaze. Blocked in the valley,the fire, as if animated by some deadly purpose, crept into the mouthof a brushy canyon and ran uphill with demoniac energy until it wasburning fiercely over a benchland to the west of Hollister's timber.
The fight began once more. With varying phases it raged for a week.They would check it along a given line and rest for awhile, thinkingit safely under control. Then a light shift of wind would throw itacross their line of defense, and in a dozen places the forest wouldbreak into flame. The fire worked far up the slope, but its greatestmenace lay in its steady creep westward. Slowly it ate up to the veryedge of Hollister's timber, in spite of all their checks, theirstrategy, the prodigious effort of every man to check its vandalcourse.
Then the west wind, which had held its breath so long, broke loosewith unrestrained exhalation. It fanned the fire to raging fury, sentit leaping in yellow sheets through the woods. The blaze lashedeagerly over the tops of the trees, the dreaded crown fire of theNorth Woods. Where its voice had been a whisper, it became a roar, anominous, warning roar to which the loggers gave instant heed and gotthemselves and their gear off that timbered slope.
They could do no more. They had beaten it in the valley. Backed by thelusty pressure of the west wind, it drove them off the hill and wentits wanton way unhindered.
In the flat by Hollister's house the different crews came together.There was not one of them but drooped with exhaustion. They sat abouton the parched ground, on moss, against tree trunks, and stared up thehill.
Already the westerly gale had cleared the smoke from the lower valley.It brought a refreshing coolness off the salt water, and it was alsobaring to their sight the spectacular destruction of the forest.
All that area where Hollisters cedars had stood was a red chaos out ofwhich great flames leaped aloft and waved snaky tongues, blood-red,molten gold, and from which great billows of smoke poured away towrap in obscurity all the hills beyond. There was nothing they coulddo now. They watched it apathetically, too weary to care.
Hollister looked on the destruction of his timber most stolidly ofall. For days he had put forth his best effort. His body ached. Hiseyes smarted. His hands were sore. He had done his best withoutenthusiasm. He was not oppressed so greatly as were some of these menby this vast and useless destruction. What did it matter, after all? Afew trees more or less! A square mile or two of timber out of thatenormous stand. It was of no more consequence in the sum total thanthe life of some obscure individual in the teeming millions of theearth. It was his timber. So was his life a possession peculiar tohimself. And neither seemed greatly to matter; neither did mattergreatly to any one but himself.
It was all a muddle. He was very tired, too tired to bear thinking,almost too tired to feel. He was conscious of himself as a creature ofweariness sitting against a tree, his scarred face blackened like thetired faces of these other men, wondering dully what was the sum ofall this sweat and strain, the shattered plans, the unrewarded effort,the pain and stress that men endure. A man made plans, and theyfailed. He bred hope in his soul and saw it die. He longed for andsought his desires always, to see them vanish like a mirage just asthey seemed within his grasp.
Lawanne and Bland had gone home, dragging themselves on tired limbs.Carr's men rested where they chose. They must watch lest the fire backdown into the valley again and destroy their timber, as it haddestroyed Hollister's. They had blankets and food. Hollister gave hisown men the freedom of the house. Their quarters on the hill stood inthe doomed timber. The old log house would be ashes now.
He wondered what Doris was doing, if she steadily gained her sight.But concrete, coherent thought seemed difficult. He thought inpictures, which he saw with a strange detachment as if he were a ghosthaunting places once familiar.
He found his chin sinking on his breast. He roused himself and walkedover to the house. His men were sprawled on the rugs, sleeping ingrotesque postures. Hollister picked his way among them. Almost by thedoor of his bedroom Charlie Mills sprawled on his back, his headresting on a sofa cushion. He opened his eyes as Hollister passed.
"That was a tough game," Hollister said.
"It's all a tough game," Mills answered wearily and closed his eyesagain.
Hollister went on into the room. He threw himself across the bed. Inten seconds he was fast asleep.