A Pagan of the Hills

by Charles Neville Buck

CHAPTER VII

From down there at the boom as the blackest hours of the night passed, Halloway and Brent sat rubber-coated on the raft watching the inflamed redness that was wiping out all that end of the village. The age-seasoned frame houses there huddled close enough for the hot contagion to sweep them with typhoon speed and they went up in spurts like pitch barrels. The wind was high enough to romp ruthlessly with spark and blaze, until even the effort at fire-fighting had been abandoned. Happily the bluster had settled to a constant gale out of the south-west and the fire-tide rolled with it to the edge and not the core of the town and when it lapped at the reeking woods it hissed out in defeat.

Alexander had withdrawn to her improvised shack and wrapped herself in her blanket. Brent gazed with a sort of hypnotized intentness on the wildness of the picture before him—an orgy of fire, wind and water. Through the wet mountains the wind shrieked and buffetted until ancient trees, made brittle by long freezing, went down. At his back, beyond the boom, sounded the dirge of the swollen waters running out. That was like the wail of a maniac exhausted by his ravings. The stage was dropping as rapidly as it had risen. Ahead, tossing a mane of smoke and a spume of spark, reveled the demoniac spirit of Fire. Brent shuddered but Halloway struck a match just then for his dead pipe under the protection of his coat lapel and in the brief flare Brent saw that his eyes were agleam, feral and animal-like, and that his lips were wolfishly drawn back from his teeth.

"This is elemental!" Halloway burst out suddenly. "I glory in it. I've been sitting here drunker than any moonshine guzzler back there at that tavern to-night. Drunk on the wild wine of the elements—drunk from the skulls of Valhalla. Great God, I love it!"

Brent rose at last and sought refuge under the insufficient roof of one of the shacks, for a down-pour had come with the wind and in key with all the extravagance of the night's mood, it was a cloud-burst.

The city man tossed restlessly and once looking out across the stretch of the rafted logs, he saw a single figure stripped to the skin in the sheeted down-pour of cold rain. He saw it only when the lightning flashed with the spectral effect of beauty. It stood straight with back-flung shoulders and head upturned into the rain like some wild high-priest of storm worship. When a flare, brighter than the others limned the whole prospect into a dazzling instant, the features burst into clarity with eyes glowing like madness, and lips parted in wild exaltation.

"He'll have a chill before morning," growled Brent, but his astonishment at the hardihood of such a shower-bath would have been more severely taxed had he been able to see behind the screening walls of Alexander's shack.

For if the colossal man standing there as God made him, reveling in the sluicing of icy sheets of water, was a picture for a painter's delight, the figure of the woman, sheltered from any eye, but likewise stripped to the flesh was one almost as heroic and far lovelier. Alexander too, was availing herself of that strong tonic which would have brought collapse to a weakling. She stood tall, beautiful, a Diana with her wet and flowing hair loosed about her white shoulders and her bosom rising and falling to the elation of the storm-bath.

The hurricane passed in the forenoon of that day leaving the ridges wet and inert, with the dejection of spent violence, but from gray clouds that hung in trailing wisps along the upper slopes a steady rain sobbed down. After breakfast Bud Sellers who had after all not availed himself of Alexander's permission to spend the night on the raft, came aboard and diffidently approached the girl.