CHAPTER TEN

WHEN FORESTS ARE ABLAZE

It seemed to Jack that he had been running for an hour, though it could not have been more than a few minutes at most.  Where the trail swung out and around a steep, rocky place, he left it and plunged heedlessly straight down the hill.  The hot breath of the fire swept up in gusts, bearing charred flakes that had been leaves.  The smoke billowed up to him, then drove back in the tricky air-currents that played impishly around the fire.  When he could look down to the knoll where the hydrometer stood, he saw that it was not yet afire, but that the flames were working that way faster even than he had feared.

Between gasps he shouted her name as Hank Brown had repeated it to him.  He stopped on a ledge and stared wildly, in a sudden panic, lest he should somehow miss her.  He called again, even while reason told him that his voice could not carry any distance, with all that crackle and roar.  He forced himself to stand there for a minute to get his breath and to see just how far the fire had already swept, and how fast it was spreading.

Even while he stood there, a flaming pine branch came whirling up and fell avidly upon a buck bush beside him.  The bush crackled and shriveled, a thin spiral of smoke mounting upward into the cloud that rolled overhead.  Jack stood dazed, watching the yellow tongues go licking up the smaller branches.  While he stood looking, the ravaging flames had devoured leaves and twigs and a dead branch or two, and left the bush a charred, smoking, dead thing that waved its blackened stubs of branches impotently in the wind.  Alone it had stood, alone it had died the death of fire.

“Marion Rose!” he shouted abruptly, and began running again.  “Marion Rose!” But the hot wind whipped the words from his lips, and the deep, sullen roar of the fire drowned his voice.  Still calling, he reached the road that led to Crystal Lake.  The wind was hotter, the roar was deeper and louder and seemed to fill all the world.  Hot, black ash flakes settled thick around him.

Then, all at once, he saw her standing in the middle of the road, a little farther up the hill.  She was staring fascinated at the fire, her eyes wide like a child’s, her face with the rapt look he had seen when she stood looking down from the peak into the heart of the forest.  And then, when he saw her, Jack could run no more.  His knees bent under him, as though the bone had turned suddenly to soft gristle, and he tottered weakly when he tried to hurry to her.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she called out when she saw him.  Her words came faintly to him in all that rush and crackle of flame and wind together.  “I never saw anything like it before—­did you?  It sprung up all at once, and the first I knew it was sweeping along.”

“Don’t stand here!” Jack panted hoarsely.  “Good Lord, girl!  You—­”