The Fire Flower/Chapter 12

URING that tragic day Sheldon never lost sight of the bewildered girl—she seemed just breathless and stunned rather than grief-stricken—for more than half an hour at a time. He watched over her while seeming to be busy rifle cleaning or fishing for a trout for luncheon. Now and then he spoke, just a little homely word of no importance other than the assurance to her that she was not utterly alone. Not once did she return an answer or offer a remark. In the late afternoon she brought great armfuls of fresh flowers, heaping them upon the wilted ones. As night came on she stood looking wistfully at them for a long time. Then she turned and, walking swiftly, went back to Johnny’s Luck. John Sheldon went with her.

They had their supper together, sitting opposite each other at the crude table. Paula ate little, nibbling absent-mindedly at the slab of chocolate, pushing the fish aside untasted, drinking the water set be- fore her. Sheldon made coffee, and she watched him curiously as he drank the black beverage; but she did not taste it.

“Look here, Paula,” he said when the silence had lasted on until after he had got his pipe going, “We’ve got some big questions ahead of us to answer, and we can’t begin too soon now. After all, death comes to us all, soon or late; it came to your father’s father and mother; it has come to mine; it will come to you and me some day. While we live we’ve got to be doing something. You’ve got to decide what you are going to do. I am going out of here in a few days, and you can’t stay here all alone.”

“I can,” she answered steadily. “I will.”

“Come now,” he objected, speaking lightly; “that’s all wrong, you know. It can’t be done. Why in the world should a young girl like you want to live all alone here in the wilderness? Before, when your father was with you, it was different. Now what is there to stay for?”

“I shall stay,” said Paula gravely, “until some day the big golden butterfly comes and takes me away, too.”

“How would you live?” he asked curiously.

“As I have always lived. We have the traps father and I made. I could make others. I know how to catch fish. I know many plants with leaves and roots good to eat when you cook them in water.”

“But what would you do all the time?”

“Why,” said Paula simply, “I would wait.”

“Wait?”

“Yes. For the big butterfly.”

Then Sheldon set himself manfully to his task. He sought to reawaken the interest which she had shown when he spoke of the world outside; he spoke of the thousand things she could see and do; he told her of other men and women; of how they dressed, of how they spent their lives, of their aims and ambitions, of their numerous joys; of aeroplanes and submarines; of telephones and talking machines; of music and theaters and churches. But Paula only shook her head, saying quietly:

“I shall stay here.”

“And never see any children?” asked Sheldon. “Little babies like Bill and Bet; little roly-poly rascals with dirty faces and bright eyes and fat, chubby hands? You’ll miss all that?”

“I’ll stay here,” said Paula. “This is my home.”

And no further answer did he get that night.

As her weary body, which had known so little rest during the last two days, began to droop in her chair, Sheldon left her, going to spend the night out in the open in front of the cabin. Paula closed the door after him, saying listlessly, “good night,” in response to his.

“You are not afraid of me any longer, are you, Paula?” he asked as he left her.

“No,” she answered. “I am not afraid of you now. You have been good to me.”

When, in the morning, he came to the cabin the door stood open. When he called there was no answer. When he went in the cabin was empty.

Even then he did not believe that she had again fled from him. He went hurriedly through the woods until he came to the heaped-up mound of flowers, fearing a little, hoping more that he was going to find her here. But, though he looked for her everywhere, he did not find her; though he lifted his voice, calling loudly, she did not answer.

It was a weary, empty day. At one moment he cursed himself for not having guarded against her flight; at the next he told himself that he could not always be watching her, and that there was no reason why he should have suspected that she was going to slip away now. When some little sound came to him through the still forest he looked up quickly, expecting to see her coming to him. When she did not come he wondered if he would ever see this wonderfully dainty, half-wild maid again.

All day long he did not give over seeking her, calling her. He grew to hate the sound of his own voice bringing its own echo alone for answer. He began to realize what her going meant; he began to see that he wanted not only to take her with him back into his own world, but that he wanted to give up that life to showing her the world he had told her about. He wanted Paula.

He tramped up and down until he covered many a mile that day. He ransacked his pack for any little articles of food which might be new to her, and they remained upon the cabin table untouched.

Noon came, and afternoon and evening, and without Paula he was lonely, he who had come far from the beaten trails to be alone!

In the early night he builded a fire in the cabin’s fireplace for the light and companionship of it, and sat staring into the flames and smoking his pipe, and all the time listening eagerly. A dozen times he thought that he heard her light footfall. But she did not come.

He got up and went to the door, standing long looking out into the quiet night, star-filled. The moon was not yet up. The night was so still, so filled with solitude, that he felt a sudden wonder that a girl, even a girl like Paula, could be far out in it, alone.

Where was she? Lying face down in the thick of the woods, crushed with the loneliness which had touched even him? Or sitting somewhere in the starlight, her lovely face upturned, her deep eyes seeking to read the eternal riddles of the stars and the night, her soul grasping at vague thoughts, her mind struggling pitifully with the problems of life and death?

All night he sat before the fire, dozing now and then, but for the most part listening, waiting. When morning came he made a hurried breakfast, and, his plan for the day formed during the hours of darkness, left the cabin.

He had come to the conclusion that there must be some hiding-place, some shelter other than the cabin, which Paula and her father had used. To that place, no doubt, the madman had fled when he had sought to avoid Sheldon; thither, perhaps, Paula had gone last night.

It might be another cabin, far out; it might be a cave in the cliffs. Sheldon inclined to the latter belief. At any rate, he told himself determinedly that he would find this retreat, and that in it he would discover those belongings of the men Hamilton had killed, their knives and rifles, their boots, perhaps. And he hoped to find Paula.

He went straightway to the cliffs near which Dr. Hamilton had died. They stretched a mile or more to both north and south. Sheldon admitted to himself at the beginning that he had his work cut out ahead of him; thorough search here for the mouth of a possible cave might consume weeks. But all the time in the world was his. He set about his task methodically.

All day he climbed in and out among the boulders and spires of rock. At night he had found nothing. He returned to the cabin and, throwing himself upon the bunk which had once been Dr. Hamilton’s, slept soundly.

In the morning he went out again, beginning his search where yesterday’s had ended. That day passed like the other, ended as it had done. In the forenoon he killed a young buck that had come down to the creek to drink, skinned it, and hung the meat upon the limb of a tree to dry, building a smudge under it.

“If I have to stay here until snow flies,” muttered Sheldon, “well, then, I’ll stay!”

A week passed. During it he had had no sign that Paula existed—no hint of the theoretical “hiding-place” which he sought. But each day he spent long hours in the quest, striving from the first glow of dawn to the coming of dusk. He had searched out every spot of the cliffs to the south, climbing high up, looking everywhere. Now, in the same systematic way, he turned toward the north. And upon the second day of the second week he came upon part of that which he sought—that and something else.

Upon a broad ledge a score of feet from the ground, hard to climb up to, grew a dense clump of bushes. Only because it was his plan to look everywhere did he go up there at all. On the ledge he saw at once what, from below, had been masked by the bushes.

There was a great hole into the cliff-side through which a man might walk standing erect. Beyond, where dim dusk brooded at midday, was the cave. A glance, as he went in, showed that it was part nature’s work and part man-made. At his feet lay a shovel with fairly fresh dirt adhering to it. Beyond was a pick. Other picks and shovels, several of them, lay at one side of the long chamber.

“Paula!” he called softly. “Are you here?”

But Paula was not there. As he moved on deeper into the cavern he saw that no one was there. There were two tumbled piles of blankets, one on each side. Against the wall by one of them were five rifles, all of old patterns, not one an automatic. He picked them up, one after the other. None was loaded; there were no unfired cartridges with them.

Several sharpened stakes had been driven into the walls which Sheldon found to be of clay almost rock-hard. From these pegs hung cured skins of both deer and bear, wildcat skins, the pelts of other animals. From one was suspended a gay little array of old, old-fashioned gowns like those in pictures of our grandmothers? Sheldon sighed, touched them lingeringly, and called again, “Paula!”

He passed on down the length of the cavern, which had been driven thirty or forty feet into the mountainside. At the far end a pick was sticking into the wall. Near the pick was a bag made of deerskin. He struck it with his foot. It was heavy, seemed filled with small stones. Wondering, he turned the contents out upon the floor.

And, at the sight disclosed there to him in the dim interior of this gloomy place, the soul of John Sheldon, mining engineer, adventurer into the far-out places, thrilled within him. The bag was half-filled with gold nuggets.

“Bait for a madman’s trap!” he said aloud, huskily. “To catch the Golden Emperor of Space!”

He went down on his knees, the gold caught up into his hands, his eyes bright with the old, forgotten, but never dying, fever. He ran back to the cave’s opening, carrying his hands full, staring at the yellow crumbling particles, light-stricken. He had never seen such gold; he had never believed gold existed like this.

He whirled and hastened back into the cavern, going to the bag which still lay on the floor. The pick, still in its place, caught his eye. He jerked it out, breaking away a dozen handfuls of the hard clay. He struck the clay with his boot-heel, breaking it apart. And from the fragments which he carried to the light there shone up at him the dull yellow of gold.

The old, old fever rode him hard, having taken him thus unaware, leaping out upon him from the dark of the unexpected. His hands shook with it. He had found gold before; he had known the wild fires it sets in a man’s brain. But never had he found gold like this, never had he known so seething a tumult.

“All men look for the mother lode!” he whispered. “Why shouldn’t it be waiting somewhere for the man who can find it? Why shouldn’t this be it?”

He had forgotten Paula. A man forgets everything when he finds gold, much gold, pure, yellow virgin gold. Often enough he ceases for the moment to be a man, and is like a wild beast hungering, tearing at bloody meat.

He went here and there eager and breathless, driving the pick into the time-hardened clay, taking with shaking hands the earth he dug out, muttering to himself as he found again and again that there was in it the glint and gleam of gold.

“There is nowhere in the world a man so rich as I!” he whispered. And then he thought of Paula.

He went out upon the ledge outside, and sat down in the sunshine and lighted his pipe. This gold was not John Sheldon’s unless John Sheldon were utterly contemptible. It was Paula’s. Her birthright. Was he the man to rob a woman? The man to cheat a girl? A girl like Paula? He shook his head.

“I was drunk on the cursed stuff!” he said half-angrily.

But if Paula did not come back? If, look as he might, days came and went, the summer passed, and Paula did not come back and he could not find her?

Then a curious fact presented itself to John Sheldon. It was this: If he were confronted with a choice in the matter, if he had to lose the wealth untold lying at his finger-tips or lose forever the golden-brown maiden—why, he could snap his fingers at the gold!

“Something has come over me!” he grunted at the thought.

He had never been more right in his life. In his own words, something had come over him.