The Fire Flower/Chapter 10

N the wilderness which is the Sasnokee-keewan a man seeking to escape a pursuer need not have the slightest difficulty. This fact Sheldon was forced to admit immediately.

There were trackless forests where a fugitive could laugh at a score of hunters, rocky slopes over which he could run, leaving no sign of his passing, thickets in which he might lie in safety while a man who was looking for him went by so close that one might easily toss a stone to the other.

But for an hour Sheldon sought for Paula and her father, hoping that through some fortunate chance he might stumble upon them. He returned to the forking of the trails where the girl had directed him to the right. Now he took the other path, leading toward the northeast. But in a little while it branched and branched again, and there were no tracks in the grassy soil to help him.

He followed one trail after another, always coming back when there had been nothing to persuade him that he was not perhaps setting his back toward those he sought. And in the end he gave over his quest as hopeless and retraced his steps to Johnny’s Luck.

The back door was wide open as he had left it. He stepped inside, moving cautiously, realizing that one or both of them might have returned here before him. But there was no sign that either had done so. The other door was shut, the bar across it. The cabin’s interior had been In no way disturbed since he had been there last.

It seemed that there was nothing that he could do now. To be sure he might rifle their few belongings in an endeavor to learn who they were, so that if he was forced to go back alone to the “world outside,” he could see to give word of them to any relatives they might have. But he disliked the job; certainly he would resort to no such action until it had become evident that it was the only thing to do. He went out, closed the door after him, and turned his back upon Johnny’s Luck. For, while he had the opportunity, it would be well to look to Buck and to his pack.

His horse he found browsing leisurely in the grove where he had left him. The pack in the gulch had not been disturbed. Sheldon went to it for a fresh tin of tobacco; made into a little bundle enough food for a couple of meals, and with a thoughtful smile he slipped his one slab of chocolate into his pocket. Then, having moved Buck a little deeper into the grove, he turned again toward Johnny’s Luck. Soon or late the madman or the girl would come back to their cabin. While his patience lasted Sheldon would wait there for them.

This time, when he came again into the cabin, where still there was no sign that its owners had been there since he had left it, he closed the back door and flung the front one wide open. For if the madman and the girl came back, Sheldon preferred to have them come this way, so that he could see them in the clearing that had once been a street of Johnny’s Luck. Then, with nothing else to do, he strode back and forth in the rough room and smoked his pipe and stared about him.

So it was that at last one of the pictures upon the wall caught and held his attention. It was an old line-cut from a newspaper, held in place by little pegs through the corners. The man pictured might have been fifty or he might have been thirty; the artist had achieved a sketch of which neither he nor his subject need be proud. The thing which interested Sheldon was the printed legend under the drawing:

In ten lines was an article “of interest to the scientific world,” announcing that Professor Hamilton, representing the interests of the newly endowed College of Entomology, an institution whose aims “are the pervestigation into the rarer varieties of the lepidoptera flying in the North American altitudes over 7,000 feet,” was preparing for an expedition into the less known regions of the Canadian northwest.

Here was matter of interest to John Sheldon. That such a clipping should be found upon the wall of a log cabin in the Sasnokee-keewan in itself set him musing. But as he stood looking at it other thoughts, more closely connected with the matter in his mind, suggested themselves. Perhaps the madman had also been a scientist, an entomologist, hence a man of education. That would explain how it came about that Paula spoke an English which was not that of a rough miner.

But another chance discovery brought Sheldon closer to the truth. The cupboard door was open. In plain sight upon a low shelf was a thick volume. Sheldon took it up. It was an abstrusely technical treatise upon butterflies by Charles Francis Hamilton, Ph.D., and was dedicated:

“Good Lord!” muttered Sheldon.

To be sure there might have been no end of explanations beside the one which presented itself to him first. But here was a tenable theory, one to which he clung rather more eagerly than he as yet understood.

The madman was no other than Charles Francis Hamilton, entomologist of note about 1860. Not only had the man not always been mad, but at one time had a brilliant mind. He had come into the unknown parts of the great Northwest, so much of which is still unknown to-day, even though men have made roads through it. And there he had lost his sanity.

One could conceive of some terrible illness which had broken the man and twisted his brain hideously, or of an accident from which merely the physical part of him had recuperated, or of some terrible experience such as is no stranger in the wilderness, hardship on top of hardship, starvation, perhaps, when a man is lost and bewildered, some shock which would unseat the reason.

Somewhere he had found Paula. It might be as she herself said, that he was her father; that he had brought her, a little girl, into the mining country. Or it was quite as conceivable that he had “acquired” some little motherless, fatherless waif, no blood kin to him, and had reared her as his own daughter, naming her “Paula.” In any case, it was made clear why she did not use the speech of the illiterate.

And it was equally obvious that the girl might be sane.

“Of course she is!” said Sheldon, disgusted with himself for his perfectly natural suspicions. “What girl raised in a place like this all her life by a madman wouldn’t be a trifle—different?”

And with renewed interest and impatience he awaited their return. Meanwhile he turned the pages of the book slowly. Here and there he came upon a slip of paper, yellow with the years, upon which were notes set down neatly and in a small, legible hand. For the most part these notes consisted of Latin names and abbreviations which meant nothing to John Sheldon. Against each annotation there stood a date. These dates went back as far as 1868; some were as recent as 1913.

Get an alienist and an entomologist together over this thing,” thought Sheldon, “and they could figure to the day when Hamilton went mad!”

For distinctly the more recent notes were in the same hand but not inspired by the same brain as the earlier ones. In the latter there was the cold precision of the scientist; in the others the burning enthusiasm of a madman.

A note in the body of the text awoke in Sheldon this train of thought. Under the heading Papilioninae (The Swallow Tail Butterflies) there was written in lead pencil:

Sheldon turned a couple of pages. Here were further notes under a new heading, Sub-family Parnassiinae. The words were:

Sheldon shook his head and sighed. To him the penciled words were strangely pathetic. So plainly was there to be seen the working of the scientific brain which sought to tabulate important facts in connection with the new Parnassian, so evident the insane cunning which compromised by putting down a string of crosses to baffle him who might come upon these notes.

“There is but the one in the world and I have found it!” was a foot-note. And then, scattered through the volume were such penciled jottings as:

Sheldon stared out through the open door, his gaze going over the dead, forgotten town, and to the little lake lying languid in the sunshine. For the instant he forgot Charles Francis Hamilton and his thoughts were all for Paula.

A girl reared in the solitude, taught the weird, wild fancies of a madman, accepting insanity for infallible wisdom! How should a man deal with such as she must be? If Midas died—then what?

“Would she go with me back to the world?” he wondered. “Or is the rest of her life to be that of a wild, hunted thing? Even if I can find her, which is extremely doubtful, can I convince her that the strongest beliefs of her whole life are wrong?”

In truth he found that his perplexities were but growing. But with his jaw set he vowed to himself that if he did find her he’d take her out with him if he had to bind her with a rope, like the wild thing she was. Suddenly there came to him through the stillness a long-drawn cry of pure terror. It came from far off, back of the cabin toward the mountainside.

Rifle in hand Sheldon ran out of the house and plunged into the forest.