"OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME"

The Waterbug limped. Her engine misfired continuously, and Barlow lacked the mechanical knowledge to remedy its ailment. He was satisfied to let it pound away, so long as it would revolve at all. So the boat moved slowly through that encompassing smoke at less than half speed. Outwardly the once spick and span cruiser bore every mark of hard usage. Her topsides were foul, her decks splintered by the tramping of calked boots, grimy with soot and cinders. It seemed to Stella that everything and every one on and about Roaring Lake bore some mark of that holocaust raging in the timber, as if the fire were some malignant disease menacing and marring all that it affected, and affecting all that trafficked within its smoky radius.

But of the fire itself she could see nothing, even when late in the afternoon they drew in to the bay before her brother's camp. A heavier smoke cloud, more pungent of burning pitch, blanketed the shores, lifted in blue, rolling masses farther back. A greater heat made the air stifling, causing the eyes to smart and grow watery. That was the only difference.

Barlow laid the Waterbug alongside the float. He had already told her that Lefty Howe, with the greater part of Fyfe's crew, was extending and guarding Benton's fire-trail, and he half expected that Fyfe might have turned up there. Away back in the smoke arose spasmodic coughing of donkey engines, dull resounding of axe-blades. Barlow led the way. They traversed a few hundred yards of path through brush, broken tops, and stumps, coming at last into a fairway cut through virgin timber, a sixty-foot strip denuded of every growth, great firs felled and drawn far aside, brush piled and burned. A breastwork from which to fight advancing fire, it ran away into the heart of a smoky forest. Here and there blackened, fire-scorched patches abutted upon its northern flank, stumps of great trees smoldering, crackling yet. At the first such place, half a dozen men were busy with shovels blotting out streaks of fire that crept along in the dry leaf mold. No, they had not seen Fyfe. But they had been blamed busy. He might be up above.

Half a mile beyond that, beside the first donkey shuddering on its anchored skids as it tore an eighteen-inch cedar out by the roots, they came on Lefty Howe. He shook his head when Stella asked for Fyfe.

"He took twenty men around to the main camp day before yesterday," said Lefty. "There was a piece uh timber beyond that he thought he could save. I—well, I took a shoot around there yesterday, after your brother got hurt. Jack wasn't there. Most of the boys was at camp loadin' gear on the scows. They said Jack's gone around to Tumblin' Creek with one man. He wasn't back this mornin'. So I thought maybe he'd gone to the Springs. I dunno's there's any occasion to worry. He might 'a' gone to the head uh the lake with them constables that went up last night. How's Charlie Benton?"

She told him briefly.

"That's good," said Lefty. "Now, I'd go around to Cougar Bay, if I was you, Mrs. Jack. He's liable to come in there, any time. You could stay at the house to-night. Everything around there, shacks 'n' all, was burned days ago, so the fire can't touch the house. The crew there has grub an' a cook. I kinda expect Jack'll be there, unless he fell in with them constables."

She trudged silently back to the Waterbug. Barlow started the engine, and the boat took up her slow way. As they skirted the shore, Stella began to see here and there the fierce havoc of the fire. Black trunks of fir reared nakedly to the smoky sky, lay crisscross on bank and beach. Nowhere was there a green blade, a living bush. Nothing but charred black, a melancholy waste of smoking litter, with here and there a pitch-soaked stub still waving its banner of flame, or glowing redly. Back of those seared skeletons a shifting cloud of smoke obscured everything.

Presently they drew in to Cougar Bay. Men moved about on the beach; two bulky scows stood nose-on to the shore. Upon them rested half a dozen donkey engines, thick-bellied, upright machines, blown down, dead on their skids. About these in great coils lay piled the gear of logging, miles of steel cable, blocks, the varied tools of the logger's trade. The Panther lay between the scows, with lines from each passed over her towing bitts.

Stella could see the outline of the white bungalow on its grassy knoll. They had saved only that, of all the camp, by a fight that sent three men to the hospital, on a day when the wind shifted into the northwest and sent a sheet of flame rolling through the timber and down on Cougar Bay like a tidal wave. So Barlow told her. He cupped his hands now and called to his fellows on the beach.

No, Fyfe had not come back yet.

"Go up to the mouth of Tumbling Creek," Stella ordered.

Barlow swung the Waterbug about, cleared the point, and stood up along the shore. Stella sat on a cushioned seat at the back of the pilot house, hard-eyed, struggling against that dead weight that seemed, to grow and grow in her breast. That elemental fury raging in the woods made her shrink. Her own hand had helped to loose it, but her hands were powerless to stay it; she could only sit and watch and wait, eaten up with misery of her own making. She was horribly afraid, with a fear she would not name to herself.

Behind that density of atmosphere, the sun had gone to rest. The first shadows of dusk were closing in, betokened by a thickening of the smoke-fog into which the Waterbug slowly plowed. To port a dimming shore line; to starboard, aft, and dead ahead, water and air merged in two boat lengths. Barlow leaned through the pilot-house window, one hand on the wheel, straining his eyes on their course. Suddenly he threw out the clutch, shut down his throttle control with one hand, and yanked with the other at the cord which loosed the Waterbug's shrill whistle.

Dead ahead, almost upon them, came an answering toot.

"I thought I heard a gas-boat," Barlow exclaimed. "Sufferin' Jerusalem! Hi, there!"

He threw his weight on the wheel, sending it hard over. The cruiser still had way on; the momentum of her ten-ton weight scarcely had slackened, and she answered the helm. Out of the deceptive thickness ahead loomed the sharp, flaring bow of another forty-footer, sheering quickly, as her pilot sighted them. She was upon them, and abreast, and gone, with a watery purl of her bow wave, a subdued mutter of exhaust, passing so near than an active man could have leaped the space between.

"Sufferin' Jerusalem!" Barlow repeated, turning to Stella. "Did you see that, Mrs. Jack? They got him."

Stella nodded. She too had seen Monohan seated on the after deck, his head sunk on his breast, irons on his wrists. A glimpse, no more.

"That'll help some," Barlow grunted. "Quick work. But they come blame near cuttin' us down, beltin' along at ten knots when you can't see forty feet ahead."

An empty beach greeted them at Tumbling Creek. Reluctantly Stella bade Barlow turn back. It would soon be dark, and Barlow said he would be taking chances of piling on the shore before he could see it, or getting lost in the profound black that would shut down on the water with daylight's end.

Less than a mile from Cougar Bay, the Waterbug's engine gave a few premonitory gasps and died. Barlow descended to the engine room, hooked up the trouble lamp, and sought for the cause. He could not find it. Stella could hear him muttering profanity, turning the flywheel over, getting an occasional explosion.

An hour passed. Dark of the Pit descended, shrouding the lake with a sable curtain, close-folded, impenetrable. The dead stillness of the day vanished before a hot land breeze, and Stella, as she felt the launch drift, knew by her experience on the lake that they were moving offshore. Presently this was confirmed, for out of the black wall on the west, from which the night wind brought stifling puffs of smoke, there lifted a yellow effulgence that grew to a red glare as the boat drifted out. Soon that red glare was a glowing line that rose and fell, dipping and rising and wavering along a two-mile stretch, a fiery surf beating against the forest.

Down in the engine room Barlow finally located the trouble, and the motor took up its labors, spinning with a rhythmic chatter of valves. The man came up into the pilot house, wiping the sweat from his grimy face.

"Gee, I'm sorry, Mrs. Fyfe," he said. "A gas-engine man would 'a' fixed that in five minutes. Took me two hours to find out what was wrong. It'll be a heck of a job to fetch Cougar Bay now."

But by luck Barlow made his way back, blundering fairly into the landing at the foot of the path that led to the bungalow, as if the cruiser knew the way to her old berth. And as he reached the float, the front windows on the hillock broke out yellow, pale blurs in the smoky night.

"Well, say," Barlow pointed. "I bet a nickel Jack's home. See? Nobody but him would be in the house."

"I'll go up," Stella said.

"All right, I guess you know the path better'n I do," Barlow said. "I'll take the Bug around into the bay."

Stella ran up the path. She halted halfway up the steps and leaned against the rail to catch her breath. Then she went on. Her step was noiseless, for tucked in behind a cushion aboard the Waterbug she had found an old pair of her own shoes, rubber-soled, and she had put them on to ease the ache in her feet born of thirty-six hours' encasement in leather. She gained the door without a sound. It was wide open, and in the middle of the big room Jack Fyfe stood with hands thrust deep in his pockets, staring absently at the floor.

She took a step or two inside. Fyfe did not hear her; he did not look up.

"Jack."

He gave ever so slight a start, glanced up, stood with head thrown back a little. But he did not move, or answer, and Stella, looking at him, seeing the flame that glowed in his eyes, could not speak. Something seemed to choke her, something that was a strange compound of relief and bewilderment and a slow wonder at herself,—at the queer, unsteady pounding of her heart.

"How did you get way up here?" he asked at last.

"Linda wired last night that Charlie was hurt. I got a machine to the Springs. Then Barlow came down this afternoon looking for you. He said you'd been missing for two days. So I—I—"

She broke off. Fyfe was walking toward her with that peculiar, lightfooted step of his, a queer, tense look on his face.

"Nero fiddled when Rome was burning," he said harshly. "Did you come to sing while my Rome goes up in smoke?"

A little, half-strangled sob escaped her. She turned to go. But he caught her by the arm.

"There, lady," he said, with a swift change of tone, "I didn't mean to slash at you. I suppose you mean all right. But just now, with everything gone to the devil, to look up and see you here—I've really got an ugly temper, Stella, and it's pretty near the surface these days. I don't want to be pitied and sympathized with. I want to fight. I want to hurt somebody."

"Hurt me then," she cried.

He shook his head sadly.

"I couldn't do that," he said. "No, I can't imagine myself ever doing that."

"Why?" she asked, knowing why, but wishful to hear in words what his eyes shouted.

"Because I love you," he said. "You know well enough why."

She lifted her one free hand to his shoulder. Her face turned up to his. A warm wave of blood dyed the round, white neck, shot up into her cheeks. Her eyes were suddenly aglow, lips tremulous.

"Kiss me, then," she whispered. "That's what I came for. Kiss me, Jack."

If she had doubted, if she had ever in the last few hours looked with misgiving upon what she felt herself impelled to do, the pressure of Jack Fyfe's lips on hers left no room for anything but an amazing thrill of pure gladness. She was happy in his arms, content to rest there, to feel his heart beating against hers, to be quit of all the uncertainties, all the useless regrets. By a roundabout way she had come to her own, and it thrilled her to her finger tips. She could not quite comprehend it, or herself. But she was glad, weeping with gladness, straining her man to her, kissing his face, murmuring incoherent words against his breast.

"And so—and so, after all, you do care." Fyfe held her off a little from him, his sinewy fingers gripping gently the soft flesh of her arms. "And you were big enough to come back. Oh, my dear, you don't know what that means to me. I'm broke, and I'd just about reached the point where I didn't give a damn. This fire has cleaned me out. I've—"

"I know," Stella interrupted. "That's why I came back. I wouldn't have come otherwise, at least not for a long time—perhaps never. It seemed as if I ought to—as if it were the least I could do. Of course, it looks altogether different, now that I know I really want to. But you see I didn't know that for sure until I saw you standing here. Oh, Jack, there's such a lot I wish I could wipe out."

"It's wiped out," he said happily. "The slate's clean. Fair weather didn't get us anywhere. It took a storm. Well, the storm's over."

She stirred uneasily in his arms.

"Haven't you got the least bit of resentment, Jack, for all this trouble I've helped to bring about?" she faltered.

"Why, no" he said thoughtfully. "All you did was to touch the fireworks off. And they might have started over anything. Lord no! put that idea out of your head."

"I don't understand," she murmured. "I never have quite understood why Monohan should attack you with such savage bitterness. That trouble he started on the Tyee, then this criminal firing of the woods. I've had hints, first from your sister, then from Linda. I didn't know you'd clashed before. I'm not very clear on that yet. But you knew all the time what he was. Why didn't you tell me, Jack?"

"Well, maybe I should have," Fyfe admitted. "But I couldn't very well. Don't you see? He wasn't even an incident, until he bobbed up and rescued you that day. I couldn't, after that, start in picking his character to pieces as a mater of precaution. We had a sort of an armed truce. He left me strictly alone. I'd trimmed his claws once or twice already. I suppose he was acute enough to see an opportunity to get a whack at me through you. You were just living from day to day, creating a world of illusions for yourself, nourishing yourself with dreams, smarting under a stifled regret for a lot you thought you'd passed up for good. He wasn't a factor, at first. When he did finally stir in you an emotion I had failed to stir, it was too late for me to do or say anything. If I'd tried, at that stage of the game, to show you your idol's clay feet, you'd have despised me, as well as refused to believe. I couldn't do anything but stand back and trust the real woman of you to find out what a quicksand you were building your castle on. I purposely refused to let you to, when you wanted to go away the first time,—partly on the kid's account, partly because I could hardly bear to let you go. Mostly because I wanted to make him boil over and show his teeth, on the chance that you'd be able to size him up.

"You see, I knew him from the ground up. I knew that nothing would afford him a keener pleasure than to take away from me a woman I cared for, and that nothing would make him squirm more than for me to check-mate him. That day I cuffed him and choked him on the Point really started him properly. After that, you—as something to be desired and possessed—ran second to his feeling against me. He was bound to try and play even, regardless of you. When he precipitated that row on the Tyee, I knew it was going to be a fight for my financial life—for my own life, if he ever got me foul. And it was not a thing I could talk about to you, in your state of mind, then. You were through with me. Regardless of him, you were getting farther and farther away from me. I had a long time to realize that fully. You had a grudge against life, and it was sort of crystallizing on me. You never kissed me once in all those two years like you kissed me just now."

She pulled his head down and kissed him again.

"So that I wasn't restraining you with any hope for my own advantage," he went on. "There was the kid, and there was you. I wanted to put a brake on you, to make you go slow. You're a complex individual, Stella. Along with certain fixed, fundamental principles, you've got a streak of divine madness in you, a capacity for reckless undertakings. You'd never have married me if you hadn't. I trusted you absolutely. But, I was afraid in spite of my faith. You had draped such an idealistic mantle around Monohan. I wanted to rend that before it came to a final separation between us. It worked out, because he couldn't resist trying to take a crack at me when the notion seized him.

"So," he continued, after a pause, "you aren't responsible, and I've never considered you responsible for any of this. It's between him and me, and it's been shaping for years. Whenever our trails crossed there was bound to be a clash. There's always been a natural personal antagonism between us. It began to show when we were kids, you might say. Monohan's nature is such that he can't acknowledge defeat, he can't deny himself a gratification. He's a supreme egotist. He's always had plenty of money, he's always had whatever he wanted, and it never mattered to him how he gratified his desires.

"The first time we locked horns was in my last year at high school. Monohan was a star athlete. I beat him in a pole vault. That irked him so that he sulked and sneered, and generally made himself so insulting that I slapped him. We fought, and I whipped him. I had a temper that I hadn't learned to keep in hand those days, and I nearly killed him. I had nothing but contempt for him, anyway, because even then, when he wasn't quite twenty, he was a woman hunter, preying on silly girls. I don't know what his magic with women is, but it works, until they find him out. He was playing off two or three fool girls that I knew and at the same time keeping a woman in apartments down-town,—a girl he'd picked up on a trip to Georgia,—like any confirmed rounder.

"Well, from that time on, he hated me, always laid for a chance to sting me. We went to Princeton the same year. We collided there, so hard that when word of it got to my father's ears, he called me home and read the riot act so strong that I flared up and left. Then I came to the coast here and got a job in the woods, got to be a logging boss, and went into business on my own hook eventually. I'd just got nicely started when I ran into Monohan again. He'd got into timber himself. I was hand logging up the coast, and I'd hate to tell you the tricks he tried. He kept it up until I got too big to be harassed in a petty way. Then he left me alone. But he never forgot his grudge. The stage was all set for this act long before you gave him his cue, Stella. You weren't to blame for that, or if you were in part, it doesn't matter now. I'm satisfied. Paradoxically I feel rich, even though it's a long shot that I'm broke flat. I've got something money doesn't buy. And he has overreached himself at last. All his money and pull won't help him out of this jack pot. Arson and attempted murder is serious business."

"They caught him," Stella said. "The constables took him down the lake to-night. I saw him on their launch as they passed the Waterbug."

"Yes?" Fyfe said. "Quick work. I didn't even know about the shooting till I came in here to-night about dark. Well," he snapped his fingers, "exit Monohan. He's a dead issue, far as we're concerned. Wouldn't you like something to eat, Stella? I'm hungry, and I was dog-tired when I landed here. Say, you can't guess what I was thinking about, lady, standing there when you came in."

She shook her head.

"I had a crazy notion of touching a match to the house," he said soberly, "letting it go up in smoke with the rest. Yes, that's what I was thinking I would do. Then I'd take the Panther and what gear I have on the scows and pull off Roaring Lake. It didn't seem as if I could stay. I'd laid the foundation of a fortune here and tried to make a home—and lost it all, everything that was worth having. And then all at once there you were, like a vision in the door. Miracles do happen!"

Her arms tightened involuntarily about him.

"Oh," she cried breathlessly. "Our little, white house!"

"Without you," he replied softly, "it was just an empty shell of boards and plaster, something to make me ache with loneliness."

"But not now," she murmured. "It's home, now."

"Yes," he agreed, smiling.

"Ah, but it isn't quite." She choked down a lump in her throat. "Not when I think of those little feet that used to patter on the floor. Oh, Jack—when I think of my baby boy! My dear, my dear, why did all this have to be, I wonder?"

Fyfe stroked her glossy coils of hair.

"We get nothing of value without a price," he said quietly. "Except by rare accident, nothing that's worth having comes cheap and easy. We've paid the price, and we're square with the world and with each other. That's everything."

"Are you completely ruined, Jack?" she asked after an interval. "Charlie said you were."

"Well," he answered reflectively, "I haven't had time to balance accounts, but I guess I will be. The timber's gone. I've saved most of the logging gear. But if I realized on everything that's left, and squared up everything, I guess I'd be pretty near strapped."

"Will you take me in as a business partner, Jack?" she asked eagerly. "That's what I had in mind when I came up here. I made up my mind to propose that, after I'd heard you were ruined. Oh, it seems silly now, but I wanted to make amends that way; at least, I tried to tell myself that. Listen. When my father died, he left some supposedly worthless oil stock. But it proved to have a market value. I got my share of it the other day. It'll help us to make a fresh start—together."

She had the envelope and the check tucked inside her waist. She took it out now and pressed the green slip into his hand.

Fyfe looked at it and at her, a little chuckle deep in his throat.

"Nineteen thousand, five hundred," he laughed. "Well, that's quite a stake for you. But if you go partners with me, what about your singing?"

"I don't see how I can have my cake and eat it, too," she said lightly. "I don't feel quite so eager for a career as I did."

"Well, we'll see," he said. "That light of yours shouldn't be hidden under a bushel. And still, I don't like the idea of you being away from me, which a career implies."

He put the check back in the envelope, smiling oddly to himself, and tucked it back in her bosom. She caught and pressed his hand there, against the soft flesh.

"Won't you use it, Jack?" she pleaded. "Won't it help? Don't let any silly pride influence you. There mustn't ever be anything like that between us again."

"There won't be," he smiled. "Frankly, if I need it, I'll use it. But that's a matter there's plenty of time to decide. You see, although technically I may be broke, I'm a long way from the end of my tether. I think I'll have my working outfit clear, and the country's full of timber. I've got a standing in the business that neither fire nor anything else can destroy. No, I haven't any false pride about the money, dear. But the money part of our future is a detail. With the incentive I've got now to work and plan, it won't take me five years to be a bigger toad in the timber puddle than I ever was. You don't know what a dynamo I am when I get going."

"I don't doubt that," she said proudly. "But the money's yours, if you need it."

"I need something else a good deal more right now," he laughed. "That's something to eat. Aren't you hungry, Stella? Wouldn't you like a cup of coffee?"

"I'm famished," she admitted—the literal truth. The vaulting uplift of spirit, that glad little song that kept lilting in her heart, filled her with peace and contentment, but physically she was beginning to experience acute hunger. She recalled that she had eaten scarcely anything that day.

"We'll go down to the camp," Fyfe suggested. "The cook will have something left. We're camping like pioneers down there. The shacks were all burned, and somebody sank the cookhouse scow."

They went down the path to the bay, hand in hand, feeling their way through that fire-blackened area, under a black sky.

A red eye glowed ahead of them, a fire on the beach around which men squatted on their haunches or lay stretched on their blankets, sooty-faced fire fighters, a weary group. The air was rank with smoke wafted from the burning woods.

The cook's fire was dead, and that worthy was humped on his bed-roll smoking a pipe. But he had cold meat and bread, and he brewed a pot of coffee on the big fire for them, and Stella ate the plain fare, sitting in the circle of tired loggers.

"Poor fellows, they look worn out," she said, when they were again traversing that black road to the bungalow.

"We've slept standing up for three weeks," Fyfe said simply. "They've done everything they could. And we're not through yet. A north wind might set Charlie's timber afire in a dozen places."

"Oh, for a rain," she sighed.

"If wishing for rain brought it," he laughed, "we'd have had a second flood. We've got to keep pegging away till it does rain, that's all. We can't do much, but we have to keep doing it. You'll have to go back to the Springs to-morrow, I'm afraid, Stella. I'll have to stay on the firing line, literally."

"I don't want to," she cried rebelliously. "I want to stay up here with you. I'm not wax. I won't melt."

She continued that argument into the house, until Fyfe laughingly smothered her speech with kisses.

An oddly familiar sound murmuring in Stella's ear wakened her. At first she thought she must be dreaming. It was still inky dark, but the air that blew in at the open window was sweet and cool, filtered of that choking smoke. She lifted herself warily, looked out, reached a hand through the lifted sash. Wet drops spattered it. The sound she heard was the drip of eaves, the beat of rain on the charred timber, upon the dried grass of the lawn.

Beside her Fyfe was a dim bulk, sleeping the dead slumber of utter weariness. She hesitated a minute, then shook him.

"Listen, Jack," she said.

He lifted his head.

"Rain!" he whispered. "Good night, Mister Fire. Hooray!"

"I brought it," Stella murmured sleepily. "I wished it on Roaring Lake to-night."

Then she slipped her arm about his neck, and drew his face down to her breast with a tender fierceness, and closed her eyes with a contented sigh.

THE END