The Lookout Man, B. M. Bower [free ebooks for android .TXT] 📗

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—"

"Why, you've been running!" she cried, in a surprised tone. "Were you down there in it? I thought you had to stay up on top." She had to raise her voice to make him hear her.

Her absolute ignorance of the danger exasperated him. He took her by the arm and swung her up the trail. "We've got to beat it!" he yelled in her ear. "Can't you see it's coming this way?"

"It can't come fast enough to catch us," she answered impatiently. "It's away back there down the hill yet. Wait! I want to watch it for a minute."

A bushy cedar tree ten feet away to their left suddenly burst into flame and burned viciously, each branch a sheet of fire.

"Well, what do you know about that?" cried Marion Rose. "It jumped from away down there!"

"Come on!" Pulling her by the arm, Jack began running again up the hill, leaving the road where it swung to the east and taking a short cut through the open space in the brush. "Run!" he urged, still pulling at her arm. "We've—got to—swing around it—"

She ran with him, a little of their peril forcing itself upon her consciousness and making her glance often over her shoulder. And Jack kept pulling at her arm, helping her to keep her feet when she stumbled, which she did often, because she would not look where she was going.

"Don't look—run!" he urged, when another brand fell in a fir near them and set the whole tree ablaze. The air around them was hot, like the breath of a furnace.

She did not answer him, but she let him lead her whither he would. And they came breathless to the rocky outcropping through which the pack trail wormed its way farther down the hill. There he let her stop, for he knew that they had passed around the upper edge of the fire, and were safe unless the wind changed. He helped her upon a high, flat-topped boulder that overlooked the balsam thicket and manzanita slope, and together they faced the debauchery of the flames.

Even in the few minutes since Jack had stopped on that rocky knoll the fire had swept far. It had crossed the Crystal Lake road and was now eating its way steadily up the timbered hillside beyond. The manzanita slope where the girl had sat and signalled with her mirror was all charred and stripped bare of live growth, and the flames were licking up the edges beyond.

Jack touched her arm and pointed to the place. "You said it couldn't travel very fast," he reminded her. "Look down there where you sat fooling with the little mirror."

Marion looked and turned white. "Oh!" she cried. "It wasn't anywhere near when I started up the road. Oh, do you suppose it has burned down as far as the cabin? Because there's Kate—can't we go and see?"

"We can't, and when I left the lookout the fire was away up this side of Toll-Gate, and not spreading down that way. Wind's strong. Come on—I expect I better beat it back up there. They might phone."

"But I must hunt Kate up! Why, she was all alone there, taking a nap in the hammock! If it should—"

"It won't," Jack reiterated positively. "I ought to know, oughtn't I? It's my business to watch fires and see how they're acting, isn't it?" He saw her still determined, and tried another argument. "Listen here. It isn't far up to the station. We'll go up there, and I'll phone down to the office to have the firemen stop and see if she's all right. They'll have to come right by there, to get at the fire. And you can't cross that burning strip now—not on a bet, you couldn't. And if you could," he added determinedly, "I wouldn't let you try it. Come on—we'll go up and do that little thing, telephone to the office and have them look after Kate."

Marion, to his great relief, yielded to the point of facing up hill with him and taking a step or two. "But you don't know Kate," she demurred, turning her face again toward the welter of burning timber. "She'll be worried to death about me, and it