The Fire Flower/Chapter 3

T had been in the small hours of the night that Sheldon woke. The fire he had replenished before turning in was a mere bed of coals. He threw a log across it, and at last dozed. Again he was up and about with the first streaks of dawn. The sky was pearl-pink when he threw the diamond hitch and was ready to take up the trail again.

And now, calm-thoughted with the light of day, he hesitated. Should he go on? Or should he turn back?

As though for an answer, he went to the crossing where the scattered bones lay close to the water. And the answer to his question came to him, presenting him a fresh riddle. If he had stared wonderingly when he came upon the skull at the cliffs back yonder, now did he stare stupefied. There came a vague, misty fear that he was growing fanciful, that he was seeing things which did not exist. He got down on his knees, his face not two feet from the track in the sandy margin of the creek.

Something had passed there last night; the track was very fresh. Whatever it was that had wakened him had crossed here. And what was it? He sought to be certain; he must be conservative. The track was imperfect; the lapping of the water broke down the little ridges of sand the passing foot had pushed up; the imprint would be gone entirely in a few hours. And there was no other here, for the grass came close down to the water.

He looked quickly across the stream. There there was a little strip of wet soil. The water boiling unheeded about his boots, he strode across. Despite the man’s quiet nerves, his heart was beating like mad. For he saw that there was a track here, fresh, made last night. And another. Now he did not need to go down on his knees. The imprints were clearly outlined, as definite as though drawn upon a sheet of paper.

And they were the tracks of a bare, human foot.

If it had been the big track of a big man, Sheldon’s heart would not have hammered so. But it was the track that might have marked the passing here of a boy of ten or twelve—or of a girl!

“A child or a woman came last night and looked at me as I slept,” muttered the man wonderingly. “Here, God knows how many miles from anywhere! Bare-footed, prowling around in the middle of the night! Good God! The cursed thing is uncanny!”

As he had felt it before, but now more overwhelmingly, was his soul oppressed with the bigness of the solitude about him. He was a pygmy who had blundered into a giant’s land. He was as a little boy in the inscrutable presence of majesty and mystery. For a little it seemed to him that in the still, white dawn he stood hemmed about by the supernatural.

Why should there be two white piles of unburied human bones here in a day’s travel? Why should there be a fresh track in the wet soil made by a little naked foot in the night? Why should every bit of metallic substance disappear from the presence of those dead men? Why should his visitor of last night peer down at him and then slip away, with no word?

He frowned. Unconsciously he was connecting the bleached skeleton and the fresh track. The man had been dead perhaps half a dozen years; the track had not been there so many hours. He was growing fanciful with a vengeance.

It was with an effort of will that he cleared his mind of the wild tales which he had heard told of the Sasnokee-keewan. For a little he sought to believe that he had been so hopelessly confused in his sense of direction that he had made a great curve and had come back to some one of the outposts of civilization; that even now he was separated only by a ridge, or by a bend in the cañon, from a lumber-camp or mining settlement. But he knew otherwise. One doesn’t find bleaching human bones lying disinterred upon the edge of a village.

He sought to follow the tracks across the bed of the cañon and could not. They here were lost in the grass, which was not tall enough to bow to the light passing. But a hundred yards farther down the creek he came upon them again, fresh tracks of little bare feet, clearly outlined in a muddy crossing. The imprint of the heel was faint; the toes had sunk deep.

“Running,” grunted Sheldon. “And going like the very devil, too, I’ll bet.”

He went back for Buck.

“We’re going on, old horse,” he informed his animal. “The Lord knows what we’re getting into. But if a kid of a boy can make it, I guess we can.”

For he preferred to think of it as a boy. That a barefoot woman should be running about here in the heart of the mountains, peering down at a man sleeping, scampering away as he woke—“prowling around,” as he put it—well, it was simpler to think of a half-grown boy doing it.

“Or a man stunted in his growth,” he thought for the first time.

And the thought remained with him. One could conceive of a man who had never got his full growth physically, who was stunted mentally as well, a half-crazed, half-wild being, who fled here, who subsisted in a state little short of savagery, who crept through the moonlit forests subtly stirred by the weird moon-madness, who hunted like the other wild things.

“Who slipped up behind a man and drove a knife into his back! Who even made way with the clothing, everything, leaving the bones to whiten through summer and winter as other animals of prey left the creatures they had killed!”

Big were the forests, limitless, seeming as vast as infinity itself, resting heavy and still upon a man’s soul. The feeling of last night, the loneliness, the sort of unnamed dread came back upon John Sheldon. He shook it off with an impatient imprecation. But all day it hovered about him. Again he was glad of his horse’s companionship.

Not a nervous man, still he was not without imagination. He began to be oppressed with the stillness of the wilderness. As he pushed on down-stream, watchful for other tracks, he came into a valley which widened until it was perhaps a mile across, carpeted with grass, timbered with the biggest trees he had seen since leaving Belle Fortune, their boles five and six and seven feet through, every one a monument of majesty, planted centuries before some long-forgotten ancestor of John Sheldon learned of a land named America.

There were wide, open spaces. One looking through the giant trunks seemed always looking down the long, dimly lit aisle of the chief temple of the gods of the world. Power, and venerable age—and silence! A silence so eternal that it seemed veritably tangible and indomitable. A man wanted at once to call out, to shatter the heavy stillness which bore upon his soul, and felt his lips grown mute. The creek gurgled, here and there a cone fell or there was the twitter of a bird; these sounds passed through the silence, accentuated it, were a part of it, a foil to it, but in no way disturbed the ancient reign of silence.

Through this world, which might have come at dawn from the hand of its Maker, Sheldon pushed on swiftly, his brain alive with a hundred questions and fancies. Where there was loose, soft dirt, where there was a likely crossing, he looked for tracks. And as hour after hour passed he found nothing to indicate that he was not, as he had imagined until this morning, alone in this part of the Sasnokee-keewan.

And yet he thought that last night’s visitor was ahead of him. True, a half-demented, supercunning wild man might have hidden behind any of those big tree-trunks, might even now be watching him with feverishly bright eyes. Sheldon must chance that; he could not seek behind every tree in this forest of countless thousands. But he could feel pretty well assured that the creature he sought had not fled to east or to west any considerable distance. For on either hand, seen here and there through the trees, the sides of the cañon rose to steep cliffs where a man would have to toil for hours to make his way half-way up.

Noon came. Again Sheldon was in a swiftly narrowing gorge. No longer was the world silent about him. The roar and thunder of water shouting and echoing through the rocky defile nearly deafened him. Suddenly his path seemed shut off in front. It was impossible to get a horse over the ridge here on either hand; impossible to ford the torrent where many a treacherous hole hid under boiling water. He lunched and rested here, wondering if he must turn back.

While Buck browsed, Sheldon sought the way out. He turned to his right, climbing the flank of the mountain. A man could go up readily enough at this spot, clambering from one rock to another. The boulders were not unlike easily imagined steps placed by the giant deity of the wild. But it took no second look to be sure that never was the horse foaled that could follow its master here.

Tempting the man there rose from the ridge a tall, bare, and barren peak from which he could hope to have an extended sweep of world about him. He thought that he could come to it within an hour. And if he were to retrace his steps a little, seeking an escape from the cul de sac into which the stream had led him, it was well to have a look at the country now from some such peak.

He had done this before, perhaps half a dozen times, always selecting carefully the peak which promised the widest expanse of view with the least brush to struggle through. But never had he had the unlimited panorama which rewarded him now. At last he was at the top, after not one but two hours’ hard climb; and he felt that, in sober truth, he had found the top of the world, that he had surmounted it, that he was less in its realm than in that of the wide, blue sky.

Far below the thunder of the stream he had just left was lost, smothered in the walls of its own cañon, stifled among the forests. Here there mounted only the whisper from the imperceptibly stirring millions of branches, not unlike the vague murmur in a sea shell. The peak itself might have been the altar of the god of silence.

East, west, south, whence he had come, Sheldon saw ridge on ridge, peak after peak, No-Luck Land running away until, with other ridges and peaks, it melted into the sky-line.

Looking north, and almost at his feet, the mountainside fell away precipitously. He estimated that he was at an altitude not less than eleven thousand feet. There was snow here, plenty of it, thawing so slowly that not nearly all of it would be gone when the winter came again.

Below him, in the tumbled boulders, were pockets of snow, with bare spaces, and the hardy mountain flowers in the shallow soil. Down he looked and down, until it seemed as though the steep-sided mountains fell away many thousands of dizzy feet. And there below was the wide valley, all one edge of it meadow-land, all the other edge given over to a mighty forest, and at the jagged line lying between wood and field a little lake, calm and blue, with white rocks along the farther rim.

On all sides of the valley lay the sheer mountains, shutting it in so that a man might look down and see the beauties beneath him and yet hesitate to descend, thinking of the difficulties of getting both in and out.

Sheldon had not forgotten the imprint of the bare foot. Nor was he ready to give up the search he had begun, there being no little stubbornness in the man’s nature.

But he stared long down into the valley before him, thinking of the solitude to be found there; the game to be hunted if a man sought game; thinking that some time he would make his way down yonder, joying in the thought that his foot would be the first for years, perhaps generations or even centuries, to travel there. Now, however, he would turn back to where Buck waited; seek the pass that must lead out, and learn, if it was fated that he should know, who had made the tracks at the crossing.

His eyes, sweeping now across the field of tumbled rocks which topped the ridge at the base of his peak, were arrested by a flat piece of granite resting on top of a boulder which rose conspicuously above its neighbors.

''A monument! ''

Here, where only a second ago he had told himself that perhaps no other human foot than his own had come! The old sign of a man-made trail, the sign to be read from afar, to last on into eternity. For the shrieking winds of winter and the racing snows do not budge the flat rock laid carefully upon flat-topped stone.

Was he tricking himself? Had nature, in some one of her mad moods, done this trick? He strode over to it swiftly, sliding down the side of the slope up which he had clambered, making his way by leaps and bounds from rock to rock.

The monument was man-made.

Nature doesn’t go out of her way, as some man had done, to get a block of granite, carry it a hundred yards up-hill, and place it upon a rock of another kind and shade where it can be the more conspicuous.

One monument calls for another in a trackless field of stone. In a moment, farther along the ridge, he found the second monument. He hurried to it. Yonder, lower on the slope, was the third; a hundred yards farther on, the fourth!

He got the trend of the trail now, for it curved only a bit, and they ran straight, straight toward the eastern rim of the valley lying far below him. And the other way, the trail ran back toward the cañon from which he had climbed. A trail here, in the very innermost heart of the Sasnokee-keewan, where men said there were no trails!

Eagerly he turned back toward the cañon. Monument after monument he found, leading cunningly between giant boulders, under cliffs, down a little, upward a little, down again, slowly, gradually seeking the lower altitude. Again and again Sheldon lost the way, which had but rock set on rock to indicate it; but always, going back, he picked it up again.

There were a dozen monuments to show the way before he came down into the meadow a mile above the spot where he had left Buck. And here also, at the base of the slope fully two hundred yards from the willows of the creek, he found a fresh, green willow-rod. It had been dropped here not more than a few hours ago, for the white wood where the bark had been torn away was not dried out. A bit of the bark itself he could tie into a knot without breaking it. And the stick had been cut with a sharp knife, the smooth end showing how one stroke had cut evenly through the half-inch branch.

“My wild man came this way,” was Sheldon’s eager thought. “He knew the trail over the mountain, and has gone on ahead. And that knife of his—” He shuddered in spite of himself, and again cursed himself for getting what he called “nerves.” But he thought that it was a fair bet that same knife had been driven into the backs of at least two men.

He went back for his horse, walking swiftly. Three hours had slipped away since noon. But he told himself that he was not “burning daylight.” He had found a way over the mountain, a way he believed his horse could go with him. And if luck was good, he’d camp to-night in the valley down into which he had looked from the peak.

And somewhere, far ahead of him, perhaps not a thousand feet away, watching him from behind some tree or rock, was his “wild man!” He was beginning to be certain that it was a man, a little fellow, dwarfed in body and mind and soul, and yet—

And yet the track might have been that of a boy of ten, or of a woman. Right then he swore that he was going to find out whose track that was before he turned his back on the Sasnokee-keewan.

“I’d never be able to get it out of my head if I lived to be a thousand years old if I didn’t get a look at the thing,” he assured himself. “Thank God it’s early in the season.”

When he stopped to rest, he already had the habit of keeping his back to a tree.