THE sun rose clear next morning. Although a long shower of rain had come one could see no sign of it save in the drifted leaves. The earth had drunk it down quickly and seemed to be drying with its own heat. Strong felt the soil and the leaves. He blew and shook his head with surprise.
While the others lay sleeping in their tent, he made a fire and set out in quest of a spring. Half a mile or so up the lake shore a bear broke out of a thicket of young firs just ahead of him. Strong was caught again without his rifle. Satan came as swiftly as the bear had fled, but could not prevail against him. Strong was delighted with this chance of showing the strength of his new purpose. In among the fir-trees he found the carcass of a buck upon which the bear had been feeding.
"P-paunchers!" Strong muttered.
He climbed the side of the ridge and presently struck the trail leading into camp. Soon he could hear some one coming, and sat on a log and waited. It was Master, who had gone to Lost River camp and then followed the trail of the boat-jumper.
"Slept last night in a lean-to over on the Middle Branch," said he. "Been travelling since an hour before daylight and I'm hungry."
"N-news from the gal?"
"No. Have you?"
Strong shook his head solemnly. "They've t-took the hills, an' I've come over here t' work fer Uncle S-sam," said he.
"Warden?"
"Uh-huh—been app'inted," Strong answered, with a look of sadness and satisfaction.
"They're very cunning—Wilbert and the rest of them," Master said. "They've put a little salve on you and sent you out of the way. You're too serious-minded for them. That dynamite trick of yours set 'em all thinking. They won't keep you here long—you're too dead in earnest. But there's room enough for you over in the Clear Lake country, and when they get ready to shove you out come and be at home with us."
A moment of silence followed. The simple mind of the woodsman was looking deep into the darkness that surrounded the throne of the great king.
"You're camp looks as if it had been struck by lightning," Master added.
Strong showed the letter containing his appointment, and told of the threat to hang him up by the heels.
"The commissioner is on the square—he means well," said Master, "but they're using him. These lumbermen intend to drive you out of the woods, and they've got you headed for the clearing. You won't stay here long. In my opinion they'll burn this valley."
Strong looked into the face of the young man.
"What makes ye think so?" he asked.
"Because they want the timber, and because they've got you here," said Master. "I heard of your appointment. I heard, too, that Joe Socket and Pop Migley and Dennis Mulligan thought you were the right man for the place. I knew there'd be something doing, and I came in here to warn you. Don't ever trust the benevolence of Satan."
"By—" Strong paused and gave his thigh a slap. "I know w-what they're up to," he muttered, thoughtfully. "They'll make it too hot f-fer m-me here."
He told of the fire and the man who fled in the bushes.
"They're going to fire the valley, and don't intend to give you time to sit down," said Master. "It's a dangerous country just now."
"Have t' take Sinth an' the ch-childem out o' here r-right off," the hunter answered. "If you'll stay with 'em t'-day, I'll go an' g-git some duffle an' we'll p-put over the r-ridge with 'em t'-night."
Back at the old camp there were things he needed sorely, and he reckoned that he could make the round trip with a pack-basket by five in the afternoon.
"It's still and the leaves are d-damp," Strong mused. "Fire wouldn't run much t'-day."
"To-morrow I'll get a force of men and we'll surround this valley," said Master.
They hurried into camp and were greeted with merry cries. Soon they were sitting on a blanket beside the others, eating in the ancient fashion of the pioneer.
The young man had brought a letter from Gordon which contained a sum of money and welcome news. Sinth read the letter aloud.
"'My dear friends,'" she read, "'I had hoped to write you long ago, but I have been waiting for better news to tell. My struggle is over and I am now master of myself. I paid to my creditors all the money you gave me.'"
"Did you give him money?" Sinth looked up to inquire.
"Uh-huh," Strong answered.
"How much?"
"All I had."
"You're a fool!" Sinth exclaimed, and went on reading as follows:'
"'Socky had given me his little tin bank. It contained just a dollar and thirty-two cents. The sacred sum paid my fare to Benson Falls and bought my dinner. I got a job there in the mill and soon I expect to be its manager. I'm a new man. If you want a job I can place you here at good pay. In a week or two I shall—'"
Sinth stopped reading and covered her face with her apron.
"What does it s-say?" Silas inquired, soberly.
She handed the letter to him, and he read the last words: "'I shall come after the children and will then pay you in full with interest. No, I can never pay you in full, for there's something better than money that I owe you.'" Strong's face changed color. He dropped the letter and rose.
"W-well," he stammered.
"He sha'n't have 'em," said Sinth, decisively. "Tut, tut!" Silas answered.
He raised the boy in his arms and kissed him. "W-we're both f-fools," he said, huskily.
"You ain't exac'ly fools, but yer both childern," said Sinth, wiping her eyes.
"Well, you know the Bible says we must become as a little child," said Master. "After all, money is only a measure of value, and one thing it does with absolute precision—a man's money measures the depth of his heart."
STRONG left camp with his pack and rifle and two bear-traps. He was nearing the dead buck when a shot stopped him, and a bullet cut through his left fore-arm. The deadly missile came no swifter than his understanding of it.
He dropped as if a death-blow had struck him, and, clinging to his rifle, crept in among the firs. He flung off the straps of his basket. He lay still a moment and then cautiously got to his knees. Blood was trickling down his hand, but he gave no heed to it. The ball had come from higher ground, towards which he had been walking. The man who had tried to kill him could not have stood more than two hundred feet away. Strong sat, rifle in hand, peering through the fir branches—alert as a panther waiting for its prey. Soon he caught a glimpse of his enemy fleeing between distant tree columns. The sight seemed to fill him with deadly anger.
He leaped to his feet, seized his pack-basket, and started swiftly in pursuit of him. He gained the summit of the high ground and saw a broad slash covered with berry bushes and sloping to the flats around Bushrod Creek. A trail cut through it from the edge of the woods near him.
He stopped and listened. He could hear the sound of retreating footsteps and could see briers moving some thirty rods down the slash. His heart had shaken off its rage. He was now the cunning, stealthy, determined hunter. He saw a dry, stag-headed pine in the edge of the briers near him and hurried up its shaft like a bear pressed by the dogs. On a dead limb, some thirty feet above ground, he halted and looked away. He could see nothing of his unknown foe.
Slowly Strong descended from the dead tree. He had just begun to feel the pain of his wound. Blood was dripping fast from it; he looked like a butcher in the midst of his task. He muttered as he began to roll his sleeve, "G-guess they do inten't' shove me out o' this c-country."
He blew as he looked at the wound.
"B-Business is p-prosperin'," he went on, as he held one end of a big red handkerchief between his teeth and wound it above the torn muscles and firmly knotted the ends.
"W-war!" he muttered, as he went to the near bushes and began to gather spiders' webs.
It is to be regretted that for a moment he forgot his promise to Socky and "boiled over" from the heat of his passion.
He sat on the ground and with his knife scraped away the blood clots.
"D-damn soft-nose bullet!" he muttered, with a serious look, smoothing, down the fibres of torn flesh.
He spread the webs upon his wound, and held them close awhile under his great palm. Soon he moistened a lot of tobacco and put it on the webs and held it there. After an hour or so the blood stopped. Then, gradually, he relieved the tension of his handkerchief, and by-and-by used it for a bandage on his wound.
He rose and shouldered his pack and began to search for the tracks of his enemy. He soon discovered those of the bear which had fled before him that morning.
"S-see here, Strong," he muttered, "th-this won't scurcely do. I arrest you, S. Strong, Esquire. Y-you're my prisoner. T-tryin' t' kill a man—you b-bloodthirsty devil! C-come with me. We'll hunt fer b-bears."
The Emperor had often addressed himself with severe and even copious condemnation, but this was the first time that he had ever taken S. Strong by the coat-collar and violently faced him about.
He could see clearly where the bear had broken through the wet briers on his way down to the flat country. It was a moment of peril, and he gave himself no time for argument. He hurried away in the trail of the bear. It lay before him, unmistakable as the wake of a boat, and would show where the animal was wont to cross the water below. He came soon to a great log lying from shore to shore of that inlet of Rainbow which was called Bushrod Creek. He could see tracks near the end of the log, and there, with a spruce pole for a lever, he set his traps in the sand so that, if the first were not sprung, the second would be sure to take hold. He covered the great, yawning, seven-toothed jaws of steel and fastened heavy clogs upon both trap chains. Then he took the piece of bacon from his pack and hung it on a branch above the traps.
Shrewdly the hunter had made his plan.
That bear would probably return to the dead buck, and the scent of the bacon would attract him to that particular crossing.
He tore two pages from his memorandum-book, and wrote this warning on each:
He fastened them to stakes and posted them on two sides of the point of danger.
It was then past eleven and too late for the long journey to Lost River camp. He decided to go to Henyon's on the Middle Branch and get the trapper to come and keep watch while he took Sinth and the children to Benson Falls.
On his way out of the slash he killed a deer, and dressed and hung him on a tree. Then he set out for the trail to Henyon's.
He had walked for an hour or so when his pace began to slacken.
"T-y-ty!" he whispered, stopping suddenly. "S. Strong, what's the m-matter? Yer all of a-tremble."
Strong felt sick and weary, and took off his pack and sat down to rest on a bed of leaves. Then he discovered that the handkerchief upon his arm was dripping wet. Again he stopped the blood by cording.
He lay back on the ground suffering with faintness and acute pain. Soon obeying the instinct of man and beast, which prompts one to hide his weakness and even his death-throes, he crept behind the top of a fallen tree.
His heart had been overstrained of late by worry and heavy toil. Now for the first time he could feel it laboring a little as if it missed the blood which had been dripping slowly but steadily from his arm. At last a day was come that had no pleasure in it—a day when the keepers of the house had begun to tremble.
Soon the warm sunlight fell through forest branches on the great body of Strong, who had lost command of himself and become the prisoner of sleep.
In the memorandum-book there is an entry without date in a script of unusual size. Those large letters were made slowly and with a trembling hand. It was probably written while he sat there in the lonely, autumn woods before giving up to his weakness. This is the entry:
"Theys days when I dont blieve God is over per-ticklar with a man bout swearin."
SOON after breakfast that morning Master had hitched the ox to the boat-jumper.
"My land! Where ye goin'?" Sinth inquired.
"To-morrow we're going out to Benson Falls with you and the children," said Master. "I thought we'd better take the ox and what things you need to-day as far as Link Harris's. That's about four miles down the Leonard trail. The ox will have all he can do to-morrow if he starts from Harris's."
The young man said nothing of another purpose which he had in mind—that of learning, as soon as possible, the nearest way out of the Rainbow country.
"What does that mean?" Sinth asked.
"Only this—we may have trouble with these pirates, and we want to get you out of the way. We'll have to travel, and we can't leave you in the camp alone. You and the children can ride over, and we'll come back afoot."
So Sinth packed her satchels and a big camp-bag, and all made the journey to Harris's where they left the ox and the jumper.
It was near six o'clock when they returned to the little camp at Rainbow. Strong was not there, and after supper, while the dusk fell, they sat on a blanket by the fire, and Sinth raked the old scrap-heap of family history to which a score of ancestors had contributed, each in his time. It was all a kind of folk-lore—mouldy, rusty, distorted, dreamlike. It told of bears in the pig-pen, of moose in the door-yard, of panthers glaring through the windows at night, of Indians surrounding the cabin, and of the torture by fire and steel.
At bedtime Silas had not arrived. Sinth, however, showed no sign of worry. He knew the woods so well, and there were bear and fish and sundry temptations, each greater than his bed.
"Mebbe he's took after a bear," Sinth suggested, while she began to undress the children.
"You remember we heard him shoot soon after he left here," said Master. "It may be he wounded a bear and followed him."
"Like as not," she answered.
In a moment she put her hand on Master's arm and whispered to him.
"Say!" said she, "I don't want to make trouble, but if I was you I wouldn't wait no longer for that old fool."
She stalled the needles into her ball of yarn and rolled up her knitting. She continued, with a sigh of impatience:
"I'd go over to Buckhom an' git that girl, if I had to bring 'er on my back."
"That's about what I propose to do," said the young man, with a laugh.
"I'm sick o' this dilly-dally in'," said Sinth, "an' I guess she is, too."
With that she led Socky and Sue into the tent. When the others had gone to bed Master began to think of the shot which had broken the silence of the autumn woods that morning. He lighted a lantern and followed as nearly as he could the direction his friend had taken. By-and-by he stopped and whistled on his thumb and stood listening. The woods were silent. Soon he could see where Strong had crossed a little run and roughed the leaves beyond it. Master followed his tracks and came to the dead deer. He saw that a bear had found it, and near by there were signs of a struggle and of fresh blood. Now satisfied that Strong had shot and followed the bear, he hurried back to camp.
He spread a blanket before the fire and laydown to think and rest in the silence. Buck-horn was only four miles from the upper end of Rainbow. One could put his canoe in the Middle Branch and go without a carry to the outlet of Slender Lake—little more than a great marsh—then up the still water to a landing within half an hour of Dunmore's. He would make the journey in a day or two, and, if possible, take the girl out of the woods.
The night was dark and still. He could hear now and then the fall of a dead leaf that gave a ghostly whisper as it brushed through high branches on its way down.
Suddenly another sound caught his ear. He rose and listened. It was a distant, rhythmic beat of oars on the lake. Who could be crossing at that hour? He walked to the shore and stood looking off into inky darkness. He could still hear the sound of oars. Some one was rowing with a swift, nervous, jumping stroke, and the sound was growing fainter. Somehow it quickened the pulse of the young, man a little—he wondered why.
MASTER returned to the fire and lay back on his blanket. Little puffs of air had begun to rattle the dead leaves above him. Soon he could hear a wind coming over the woodland. It was like the roar of distant sea-billows. Waves of wind began to whistle in the naked branches overhead. In a moment the main flood of the gale was roaring through them, and every tree column had begun to creak and groan. Master rose and looked up at the sky. He could see a wavering glow through the tree-tops. The odor of smoke was in the air. He ran to call Miss Strong, and met her coming out of her tent. She had smelled the smoke and quickly dressed.
"My land, the woods are afire!" she cried.
The sky had brightened as if a great, golden moon were rising.
Sinth ran back into her tent and woke the children. With swift and eager hands the young man helped her while she put on their clothes. She said not a word until they were dressed. Then, half blinded by thickening smoke and groping on her way to the other tent, she said, despairingly, "I wonder where Silas is?"
A great, feathery cinder fell through the tree-tops.
"Come quick, we must get out of here," Master called, as he lifted the crying children. "We've no time to lose."
She flung some things in a satchel and tried to follow. In the smoke it was difficult to breathe and almost impossible to find their way. Master put down the children and tore some rope from a tent-side and tied it to the dog's collar. Then he shouted, "Go home, Zeb!" They clung to one another while the dog led them into the trail. Master had Socky and Sue in his arms. He hurried up the long slope of Rainbow Ridge, the woman following.
They could now hear the charge and raven of the flames that were tearing into a resinous swamp-roof not far away.
"Comin' fast!" Sinth exclaimed. "Can't see or breathe hardly."
"Drop your satchel and cling to my coat-tails," Master answered, stopping to give her a hold.
A burning rag of rotten timber, flying with the wind, caught in a green top above them. It broke and fell in flakes of fire. Master flung one off his coat-sleeve, and, seizing a stalk of witch-hopple, whipped the glow out of them. On they pressed, mounting slowly into better air. Just ahead of them they could see the wavering firelight on their trail. On a bare ledge near the summit they stopped to rest their lungs a moment.
They were now above the swift army of flame and a little off the west flank of it. They could see into a red, smoky, luminous gulf, leagues long and wide, beneath the night-shadow. Ten thousand torches of balsam and spruce and pine and hemlock sent aloft their reeling towers of flame and flung their light through the long valley. It illumined a black, wind-driven cloud of smoke waving over the woodland like a dismal flag of destruction. A great wedge of flame was rending its way northward. Sparks leaped along the sides of it like fiery dust beneath the feet of the conqueror. They rose high and drifted over the lake chasm and fell in a sleet of fire on the lighted waves. The loose and tattered jacket of many an old stub was tom into glowing rags and scattered by the wind. Some hurtled off a mile or more from their source, and isolated fountains of flame were spreading here and there on balsam flats near the lake margin. Some of the tall firs, when first touched by the cinder-shower, were like great Christmas-trees hung with tinsel and lighted by many candles. New-caught flames, bending in the wind, had the look of horses at full gallop. Ropes and arrows and spears and lances of fire were flying and curveting over the doomed woods.
The travellers halted only for a moment. They could feel the heat on their faces. Black smoke had begun to roll over the heights around them.
"It'll go up the valley in an hour an' cut Silas off," Sinth whimpered as they went on.
"He must have crossed the valley before now," the young man assured her.
The woman ran ahead and called, loudly, "Silas! Silas!" She continued calling as they hurried on through thickening smoke. They halted for a word at Leonard's Trail, which left the main thoroughfare to Rainbow, and, going down the east side of the ridge, fared away some ten miles over hill and dale to the open country.
It was at right angles with the way of the wind and would soon lead them out of danger.
"Make for Benson Falls with the childem!" cried Sinth. "I'm goin' after Silas." She knew that her brother would surely be coming—that, seeing the fire, he would take any hazard to reach them.
Master knew not what to do. He had begun to worry about the people at Buckhom, but his work was nearer to his hand. It was there at the fork in the trail. He sent a loud, far-reaching cry down the wind, but heard no answer.
"He'll take care of himself—you'd better get away from this valley," he called.
An oily top had taken fire below and within a hundred yards of them.
"Go, go quick, an' save them childern!" she urged. Then she ran away from him.
She hurried along the top of the ridge, calling as she went. A dim, misty glow filled the cavern of the woods around her. Just ahead drops of fire seemed to be dripping through the forest roof. It failed to catch. It would let her go a little farther, and she pressed on. A fold of the great streamer of smoke was rent away and rolled up the side of the ridge and covered her. She sank upon her knees, nearly smothered, and put her skirt over her face. The cloud passed in a moment. Her sleeve caught fire and she put it out with her hand. She felt her peril more keenly and tried to run. She heard Zeb sniffing and coughing near. Master had let him go, thinking that he might help her in some way. She stooped and called to him and took hold of the dragging rope. The dog pressed on so eagerly that he carried part of her weight. A broken bough in a tree-top just ahead of her had caught fire and swung like a big lantern. She had no sooner passed than she heard the tree burst into flame with a sound like the frying of fat. She felt her hand stinging her and saw that a little flame was running up the side of her skirt. She cried, "Mercy!" and knelt and smothered it with her hands. Gasping for breath, she fell forward, her face upon the ground.
"Silas Strong," she moaned, "you got to come quick or I won't never see you again." The dog heard her and licked her face.
Down among the ferns and mosses she found a stratum of clear air, and in a moment rose and reeled a few steps farther. The flank of the invader had overrun the heights. Her seeking was near its end. Showers of fire were falling beyond and beside her. She lay down and covered her face to protect it from heat and smoke. She rose and staggered on, calling loudly. Then she heard a bark from Zeb and the familiar halloo of Silas Strong.
Through some subtle but sure intuition the two had known what to expect of each other and had clung to the trail. She saw him running out of the smoke-cloud and whipping his arms with his old felt hat. One side of his beard was burned away. He picked her up as if she had been a child and ran down the east side of the ridge with her, leaping over logs and crashing through fallen tops. Beyond the showering sparks he stopped and smothered a circle of creeping fire on her skirt. Sinth lay in his arms moaning and sobbing. He shook her and shouted, almost fiercely, "The leetle f-fawns—wh-where be they?"
"Gone with him on Leonard's Trail," Sinth answered, brokenly.
He entered a swamp in the dim-lighted forest, now running, now striding slowly through fallen timber and up to his knees in the damp earth. Every moment the air was growing clearer. He ran over a hard-wood hill and slackened pace while he made his way half across a wide flat.
When he struck the trail to Benson Falls the fire-glow was fainter. Now and then a great, rushing billow of light swept over them and vanished. He stopped and blew and put Sinth on her feet.
"Hard n-night, sis," said he, tenderly.
She stood and made no answer. In a flare of firelight he saw that she was holding out one of her hands. He struck a match and looked at it and made a rueful cluck. The fire of the match seemed to frighten her; she staggered backward and fell with a cry. He caught her up and strode slowly on. Soon she seemed to recover self-control and lay silent. He was in great pain; he was reeling under his burden, but he kept on. She put up a hand and felt his face.
"Why, Silas," she said, in a frightened voice, "you're crying."
It was then that he fell to the ground helpless.
TERROR had begun to spread in the wilderness north of Rainbow. The smoky wind, the growing firelight had roused all the children of the forest. Chattering birds rose high and took the way of the wind to safety. One could see flying lines of wild-fowl in the lighted heavens; faintly, as they passed, one could hear their startled cries. Deer ran aimlessly through the woods like frightened sheep. From scores of camps on lake and pond and river—from Buckhorn, from Barsook, from Five Ponds, from Sabattis, from Big and Little Sandy, from Lost River—people, who had seen the fire coming, were on their way out of the woods.
Master ran at first down Leonard's Trail with the boy and girl in his arms. Soon his thoughts halted him. He had withstood the severest trial that may be set before a man. To be compelled to seek safety with the children, while a woman took the way of peril before his eyes, had made him falter a moment.
He hoped that Sinth had left the ridge, now overrun with flames, and fled down the slope. If so she would be looking for Leonard's Trail. He stopped every few paces and sent a loud halloo into the woods. Fire was crackling down the side of the ridge. As he looked back it seemed to him that the great lake of hell must be flooding into the world.
Soon the trail led him to Sinth, who was on her knees and sobbing beside her brother.
That wiry little woman had struggled there alone with energy past all belief. She thought only of the danger and forgot her pain. She had toiled with the heavy body of her brother, as the ant toils with a burden larger than itself, dragging it slowly, inch by inch, in the direction of Harris's. She had moved it a distance of some fifty feet before she heard the call of Master. Then she fell moaning and clinging to the hands of him she loved better, far better even, than she had ever permitted herself to know. It may well be doubted—O you who have probably lost patience with her long ago!—if anything in human history is more wonderful than the lonely struggle of hers in that dim, flaring, threatening hell-glow.
Master quickly knelt by the fallen Emperor. "What's the matter?" he asked.
"He's gi'n out—done fer me until he can't do no more," she wailed.
She put her arms around the great breast of the man and laid her cheek upon it tenderly. Then her heart, which had always hidden its fondness, spoke out in a broken cry:
"Silas Strong—speak t' me. I can't—I can't spare ye nohow—I can't spare ye."
The children knelt by her and called with frightened voices: "Uncle Silas! Uncle Silas!" Strong began to move. Those beloved voices had seemed to call him back. He put his hand on the head of Sinth and drew it close to him.
"B-better times!" he whispered. "B-better times, I tell ye, s-sis!"
He struggled to his knees.
"S-say," he said to Master, "I've been shot. T-tie yer han'kerchief r-round my arm quick." The young man tied his handkerchief as directed. Then Strong tried to rise, but his weight bore him down.
"Lie still," said Master. "I can carry you." He took the rope from Zeb's collar and looped it over the breast of the helpless man and drew its ends under his arms and knotted them. Then, while Sinth supported her brother, the young man reached backward over his shoulders and, grasping the rope, lifted his friend so their backs were against each other, and, leaning under his burden, struggled on with it, the others following.
It was a toilsome, painful journey to Harris's. But what is impossible when the strong heart of youth, warmed with dauntless courage, turns to its task? We that wonder as we look backward may venture to put the query, but dare not answer it.
Often Master fell to his knees and there steadied himself a moment with heaving breast, then tightened his thews again and rose and measured the way with slow, staggering feet.
An hour or so later a clear-voiced call rang through the noisy wind. They stopped and listened.
"Somebody coming," said Master.
He answered with, a loud halloo as they went on wearily. Soon they saw some one approaching in the dusky trail.
"Who's there?" the young man asked.
"Edith Dunmore," was the answer that trembled with gladness. "Oh, sir! I would have gone through the fire."
"I know," said he, "you would have gone through the fire."
"For—for you," she added, brokenly.
Master dared not lay down his burden. He toiled on, his heart so full that he could not answer. The girl walked beside him for a moment of solemn, suggestive silence. She could dimly see the prostrate body of Strong on the back of her lover, and understood. What a singular and noble restraint was in that meeting!
"I love you—I love you, and I want to help you," she said, as she walked beside him.
"Help Miss Strong," he answered. "She is badly burned."
Little Sue was overcome with weariness and fear, and could not be comforted.
The maiden carried her with one arm and with the other supported Sinth. So, slowly, they made their way over the rough trail.
"How came you here?" Master inquired, presently.
"We saw the fire coming and hurried to Slender Lake, and fled in boats and came down the river."
When, late in the night, the little band of lovers reeled across the dimlit clearing, it was in sore distress. Their feet dragged, their hearts and bodies stooped with heaviness. A company of woods-folk, who stood in front of Harris's looking off at the fire, ran to meet them. They lifted the dragging Emperor and helped the young man carry him in-doors. Master was no sooner relieved of his burden than he fell exhausted on the floor.
Edith Dunmore knelt by him and raised his hands to her lips. She helped him rise, and then for a moment they stood and trembled in each other's arms, and were like unto the oak and the vine that clings to it.
Dunmore and his mother stood looking at them. The white-haired man had taken the children in his arms.
"I thought she went to bed and to sleep long ago," he muttered.
"Without her we should have perished," said the old lady. .
"Yes, and she shall have her way," he answered. "One might as well try to keep the deer out of the lily-pads." He kissed the boy and girl, and added, with a sigh, "This world is for the young."
ALL stood aghast for a moment in the light of the lamps around the bed of Strong. His clothes were burned, bloody, and torn—they lay in rags upon him. His face and hands were swollen; part of his hair and beard had been shorn off in the storm of fire through which he had fought his way. He spoke not, but there was the grim record of his fight with the flames—of the terrible punishment they had put upon him while the sturdy old lover sought his friends. All hands made haste to do what they could for him and for the woman he had carried out of the fire of the pit.
He had told Master that Annette was waiting for him at the Falls. The young man sent Harris to bring her with horse and buckboard.
Strong lay like one dead while they gave him spirits and bathed his face and hands in oil. Soon he revived a little.
"It's Business," he muttered.
In a moment his thoughts began to wander in a curious delirium filled with suggestions of the old cheerfulness. He sang, feebly:
"The briers are above my head, the brakes above
my knee,
An' the bark is gettin' kind o' blue upon the ven'son-
tree."
Rain had begun falling and daylight was on the window-panes.
The dethroned Emperor continued to sing fragments of old songs so familiar to all who knew him.
"It was in the summer-time when I sailed, when I
sailed,"
he sang. Socky stood by the bed of his uncle with a sad face.
"Th-thumbs down," Strong demanded, faintly. Master went out on the little veranda and looked down the road. He could hear the voice of his friend singing:
"The green groves are gone from the hills, Maggie."
"It is true," thought the young man as he looked off at the smouldering woods. "They are gone and so are the green hearts."
Annette came presently and Strong rose on his elbow and looked at her.
"Ann," he called, as she knelt by his bedside. "To-day—to-day! It's n-no' some day any m-more. It's to-day."
He sank back on his pillow when he saw her tears, and whispered, almost doubtfully, "Better t-times!"
He leaned forward and put up his hands as if to relieve the pressure of his pack-straps, and in a moment he had gone out of hearing on a trail that leads to the "better times" he had hoped for, let us try to believe.
So ends the history of Silas Strong, guide, contriver, lover of the woods and streams, of honor and good-fellowship. He was never to bow his head before the dreaded tyrant of this world. We may be glad of that, and remember gratefully and with renewed thought of our own standing that Strong was ahead.
A curious procession made its way out of the woods that morning. Socky and Sue walked ahead. Master and Edith and her father followed. Then came the boat-jumper with Sinth and all that remained of Silas Strong in it; then the buckboard that carried Harris and old Mrs. Dunmore and the servants. Slowly they made their way towards the sown land.
"What ye cryin' fer?" a stranger asked the children as he passed them.
"Our Uncle Silas died," was the all-sufficient reply of Socky.
Soon they could hear the roar of the saws.
"Look!" said Dunmore to his daughter, as they came in sight of the mill chimney. "There's the edge of the great world."
He looked thoughtfully at the children a moment and added:
"It all reminds me of the words of a mighty teacher, 'A little child shall lead them.'"
And what of Migley and the rest? Word of his harshness in driving Sinth and the children out of their home had travelled over the land, and not all the king's money could have saved him. Master went to the Legislature—where God prosper him!—and the young lumberman was condemned to obscurity.
Master and Edith live at Clear Lake most of the year, and the cranes have brought them a young fairy regarded by Socky and Sue, who often visit there, with deep interest and affection. Sinth will spend the rest of her days, probably, in the home of Gordon at Benson Falls.
As to Annette, like many daughters of the Puritan, she lives with a memory, and her hope is still and all in that "some day," gone now into the land of faith and mystery.
The once beautiful valley of Rainbow was turned into black ruins that night of the fire. Soon a "game pirate," who had "blabbed" in a spree, was arrested for the crime of causing it. The authorities promised to let him go if he would tell the truth. He told how he had been with "Red" Macdonald that night and saw him fire the woods. They fled to the shore of Rainbow and crossed in a boat. Near the middle of the lake they broke an oar, and a mile of green tops had begun to "fry" before they landed. They ran eastward in a panic. They crossed Bushrod Creek on a big log that spanned the water. At the farther end of it Macdonald, who was in the lead, put his foot in one bear-trap and fell into another. His friend tried to release him, but soon had to give up and run for his life.
He went with an officer and found the heap of bones that lay between two rusty traps in the desolate valley.
"After all, he got exac'ly what was comin' to him," said he, looking down at the ghastly thing. "It was him shot the 'Emp'ror o' the Woods.'" Who was to pay Macdonald for his work? That probably will never be known.