“Gosh, but one of Matilda’s pear pies’ll taste good,” thought the wanderer. His mouth began to water. He was not reflective enough, however, to wonder just what his reception would be, beyond an uneasy surmise that Matilda might give him a terrific scolding for his absence. “But mebbe she’ll be mighty glad t’see me, after all,” he consoled himself. Then he tried to picture his children, the five-year-old boy and the girl-babies of three and two respectively whom he had last seen.
“Guess they’ll have forgotten they had a papa,” he mused.
The afternoon had been utterly still and airless, with a sultry brooding in its silence. Now, from the north-east, along the road he was traveling, there came a gust of wind, and with it the unmistakable acrid odor of burnt grass and trees.
“Hell, there has been a fire after all,” muttered Jonas, with an uneasy start. He peered anxiously ahead, but could see no smoke above the dun and grey-green hills. “Guess it’s all out now, anyway.”
He came to the top of the low slope he was climbing, and saw before him the burnt area, which lay on both sides of the road and was of indeterminable extent. The brown foliage of heat-seared oaks and the black skeletons of bushes and pines were everywhere. A few fallen logs and old stumps were still smoking a little, as is their wont for days after the extinguishment of a forest fire. It was a scene of complete and irremediable desolation.
Jonas hurried on, with a sense of growing panic, for he was now little more than a mile from his own property. He thought of the yellow pines that stood so close and tall about his cabin—the pines which he had wished to fell, but had spared at the earnest solicitation of the nature-loving Matilda.
“They’re so pretty, Jonas,” she had said, pleadingly. “I just can’t see them go.”
“Hope the fire didn’t get into them pines,” thought Jonas now. “Gosh, but I wish I’d cut ’em down when I wuz plannin’ to. It would have been a lot safer; and I’d have had the money for the wood, too.”
The road was strewn in places with ashen leaves, with the charcoal of fallen brands, and several trees had crashed across it, but had now been removed to permit the passage of traffic. It was hotter than ever, in this charred and blackened waste, for the brief gust of wind had fallen. The dust on Jonas’ cheeks was runneled with sweat which he no longer paused to wipe away. Irresponsible as he was, a strange gravity had come over the wastrel, and he felt an ever-deepening premonition of calamity.
He came at last to the little by-road which turned off to his ranch from the Georgetown highway. Here, he found with a sinking heart, the fire had also been, and had left nothing but devastation. In spite of his fatigue, he almost ran, with long, shambling steps, and rounding a turn in the by-road, saw that the fire had stopped at the very verge of his own property. The hill-side orchard of stunted pear trees, the straggling vines of Mission and Muscat grapes, were quite as he remembered them; and beyond, in the grove of yellow pines, he could see the wreathing smoke that arose from the chimney of his cabin. Panting heavily, he paused, with a sense of relief and thanksgiving as poignant as anything of which his dulled heart was capable.
The sun had almost touched the horizon, as he climbed the winding road through the orchard and entered the grove above. Aisles of light perceptibly tinged with gold lay between the elongated shadows. Even to the sodden, insensitive Jonas, the beauty of the woodland scene, the magic of the sunset, the high, solemn, dark-green pines and the rich glow sifting among them on manzanita-bushes and beds of brown needles, were not without their charm. He drew a long breath, inhaling the clean balsams that the hot sun had drawn from the forest, and feeling as he did so a vague pleasure.
Now he could see his cabin, a long, four-roomed shack of plain, unpainted boards and weather-darkened shingles. A woman in calico was standing in front of the steps. Two little girls were beside her, and he wondered as to the whereabouts of the boy, who had been a fragile youngster, always ailing and fretful. “Mebbe Bill is sick agin,” mused Jonas. He was very glad to be home, but he felt a little doubtful, a trifle tremulous, as to the greeting he would receive from Matilda.
The woman looked up as he approached, shading her eyes with her hand from the last rays of the sun, which fell horizontally through the wood. He could see her apron, which was quite clean, as always, though worn and faded from many washings, like her dress. She did not seem to perceive him, but was apparently staring with great intentness at something among the trees. The children also stared, and huddled closer to her, clinging to the hem of her gown.
Jonas tried to call out: “Hello, Matilda,” but his throat was so dry and dusty that the words were no more than a hoarse whisper. He started to clear his throat, but the simple act was never finished, for at that moment, the whole scene before him, the trees, the cabin, the woman and the children, were lost in a roaring sheet of ruddy flame that seemed to come from all sides at once and blot out the entire world and the very sky as it towered full-grown in what could have been no more than the fraction of a second. A blast of intolerable heat, fierce as the breath of a thousand furnaces, blew in Jonas’ face and swept him backward like a hurricane. The mighty roaring pounded in his ears like a sea, and was mingled with human screams, as he went down into pitch-black gulfs of unconsciousness.
It was day when Jonas awoke, but he was too confused for a few instants to realize that the light was slanting through the tree-tops from a different direction, or that there was more of it than seemed normal in an evergreen forest. When his wits returned sufficiently to permit the comprehension of the fact that it was morning, he began to notice other things that were equally singular. He found that he was lying on his back among burnt needles, and above him towered the dark boles of fire-swept trees with the pitiful stumps of their cauterized branches. Darkly, indistinctly, in a sort of dull astonishment, he began to remember the events of the previous day, his return at sunset to the cabin, his glimpse of Matilda and the two children, and the all-engulfing sheet of flame. He looked instinctively at his clothes, with the feeling that he must have been badly burnt; but there was no trace of fire on his raiment, and the black ashes about him were cold. Nor, when he reared himself on his elbow and peered around, was there the faintest thread of smoke to indicate a recent conflagration.
He arose and stepped toward the place where the cabin had stood. It was a heap of ashes, from which protruded the ends of charred beams.
“My God!” muttered Jonas. He felt utterly dazed, and his thoughts refused to align themselves, failing to form any sort of intelligible order.
As Jonas spoke, a man arose from where he had been stooping behind the wreckage of the cabin, furtively dropping some object that he held in his hands. Seeing Jonas, the man came forward hastily. He was a gaunt individual in dirty overalls, with the profile and the general air of a somewhat elderly and dilapidated buzzard. Jonas recognized him as Samuel Slocum, one of his neighbors.
“Wal, Jonas McGillicuddy, so you’ve come back,” exclaimed this individual in raucous tones of unfeigned surprise. “Ye’re a little too late, though,” he went on, without pausing to let Jonas speak. “Everythin’ burnt up clean, day before yestiddy.”
“But the cabin wuz here las’ night,” stammered Jonas. “I came through the woods ’bout sunset, an’ I saw Matilda an’ the children in front o’ the steps, jus’ as plain as I see you. Then everythin’ seemed to go up in a burst o’ flame, an’ I didn’t know nothin’ till I woke up jus’ now.”