The Fire Flower/Chapter 4

GAIN Sheldon traveled on until after nightfall and moonrise. Even the long twilight of these latitudes had faded when finally, following the monuments of an old, old trail, he came down into the valley which he had overlooked from the peak.

Horse and man were alike tired and hungry. They found a small stream, and in the first grove where there was sufficient grass, Sheldon made his camp for the night. And the fact that he was tired was not the only reason, not even the chief reason perhaps, that he did not build his customary camp-fire.

He ate a couple of cold potatoes, a handful of dried venison, a raw onion, and was content. He even decided that he’d manage without a fire in the morning. The smoke of his fire last night had, no doubt, told of his coming; he meant now to see his wild man before the wild man saw him. So he put it to himself as he tethered Buck in the heart of the grove and made his own bed. And he slept, as a man must sleep so often out on the trail, “with one eye open.”

Through the night he dozed, waking many times. He must have slept soundly just before morning. With the dawn he woke again and did not go to sleep. The uneasy sense was with him, as it had been before that something had wakened him. He sat up, listening.

Only silence and the twitterings of the birds awaking with him. And still a sound echoing in his ears which he could not believe had been only the unreal murmur in a dream. He drew on his boots and slipped out of his blankets. He was wide awake and with no wish to go to sleep again. Turning toward the creek, he stopped suddenly.

There was a sound, far off, faint, only dimly audible. A sound which was at once like the call of some wild thing, some forest creature in distress, and yet like the cry of no animal Sheldon had ever heard. He strained his ears to hear. It was gone, sinking into the silence. And yet he had heard and his blood was tingling.

He snatched up his rifle and ran downstream, dodging behind trees as he went, pausing now and then to peer through the early light, hurrying on again.

“This time, if it is you, Mr. Wild Man,” he muttered, “I’ll be the one who does the creeping up on you.”

Two hundred yards he went, hearing nothing. Then again it came, a faint, sobbing cry which, as before, stirred his blood strangely. It was so human, and yet not human, he thought. Less than human, more than human—which? Inarticulate, wordless, a bubbling cry of fear, or of physical suffering? The call was gone, sinking as it had sunk before, and again he ran on, his pulses bounding.

With sudden abruptness, before he was aware of it, he had shot out of the timbered land and upon the edge of the little blue lake he had looked down upon yesterday afternoon. Not a hundred paces from him the breeze-stirred ripples of the lake were lapping upon the sandy shore.

Here was one of those white rocks he had marked at the lake’s side. And here upon the rock, arms tossed out toward the sun, which even as he paused breathless shot a first glimmer above the tree-tops, was “his wild man.”

Clad only in the shaggy skin of a brown bear, which was caught over one shoulder, under the other, stitched at the sides with thongs; arms bare, legs, feet bare, the body a burnished copper, the hair long and blown about the shoulders, was a—girl!

He gasped as he saw, still uncertain. A dead limb cracked under his feet, and quick as a deer starts when he hears a man’s step she whirled about, fronting him. He saw her face clearly, and the arm lifted raising his rifle fell lax at his side. For surely she was young, and unless the light lied she was beautiful.

About her forehead, caught into her hair, were strange, red flowers unknown to him. Her arms were round and brown and unthinkably graceful in their swift movements. She was as alert as any wild thing he had ever seen, and had in every gesture that inimitable, swift grace which belongs by birthright to the denizens of the woodlands.

Only an instant did they confront each other thus, the man stricken with a wonder which was half incredulity; the girl still under the shock of surprise. And then, with a little cry, unmistakably of fear, she had leaped from the rock, landed lightly upon the grassy sod, and was running along the lake-shore, her hair floating behind her, flowers dropping from it as she ran.

And John Sheldon, the instant of uncertainty passed, was running mightily after her, shouting.

Not until long, long afterward did the affair strike him as having in it certain of the elements of comedy. Now, God knows, it was all sober seriousness. He shouted to her in “English, crying, “Stop; I won’t hurt you!” He shouted in an Indian dialect of which scraps came to him at his need. And then, breathless, he gave over calling.

She had turned her face a little, and he was near enough to hazard the guess that she was frightened, and that at every shout of his the fear of him but leaped the higher in the throbbing breast under the bearskin. So he just settled down to good, hard running; he, John Sheldon, who, in all the days of his life, had never so much as run after a girl, even figuratively speaking.

Even above the surge of a score of other emotions this one stood up in his heart—he counted himself as good a man as other men, and this girl was running away from him as an antelope runs away from a plodding plow-horse.

He saw her clear a fallen log, leaping lightly, and when he came to it he marveled at its size, and as he leaped feared for a second that he was not going to make it. Already she had gained on him; she was still gaining. She looked over her shoulder again; he fancied that the startled terror had gone, that she was less afraid, being confident that she was the fleeter.

“And yet, deuce take it,” he grunted in a sort of anger, “I can’t shoot her!”

The little bare, brown feet seemed to him to have wings, so light and fleet were they, so smoothly and with such amazing speed did they carry her on. Seeing that she would infallibly distance him and slip away from him into the woods where he could never hope to come upon her again, he lifted his voice once more, shouting. And then he cursed himself for a fool. For at the first sound of his voice, booming out loudly, she ran but the faster.

Then suddenly Sheldon thought that he saw his chance. Yonder, a few hundred yards ahead of her, was a wide clearing, and in it he saw that a long arm of the lake was flung far out to the right. She would have to turn there; he did not wait, but turned out now, hoping to cut her off before she could come around the head of the arm of the lake, which, no doubt, in her excitement, she had forgotten.

Straight on she ran. He saw her flash through a little clump of shrubs close to the water’s edge; saw that she was going straight on, and then guessed her purpose. She was not going to turn out. She had disappeared behind the trees. He thought that he had seen her leap far out, just a glint of sun on the bronze of her outflung arms.

Still he pounded on, turning to the right, certain that he could come to the far side before she could swim it. But the arm of the lake extended farther than he had anticipated; already she was far out, swimming as he had seen no man swim in all his life, and he knew that the race was hers. Panting, he stopped and watched; saw the flashing arms, the dark head with the hair floating behind her.

“It’s a wonder that bearskin doesn’t drown her!” was his thought.

And then, coming close to where she had disappeared behind the bushes, he saw the bearskin lying at the edge of the lake, the water lapping it. And John Sheldon, who seldom swore; never when the occasion did not demand it, said simply:

“Well, I’ll be damned. I most certainly will be damned.”

He picked the thing up and looked out across the lake. Just in time to catch the glint of the sun upon a pair of bronze arms thrown high up as though in triumph as his “quarry,” speeding through the screen of willows, disappeared again.

“The little devil!” he muttered, a little in rage, a great deal in admiration.

Carrying the trailing bearskin, still warm from the touch of her body, he turned again to the right, trudging on stubbornly along the arm of the lake. There was no particular reason why he should carry the bearskin. But on he went with it, a trophy of the chase. And in his heart was as stubborn a determination as had ever grown up in that stubborn stronghold. He’d find her, he’d get the explanation of this madness, if it was the last thing in the world he ever did.

And then suddenly, lacking neither imagination nor chivalric delicacy, he felt his face growing red with embarrassment. The situation seemed to him to be presenting its difficulties.