CHAPTER XXIV
The sheep were taking their midday rest, and Hugh and Alice exchanged certain confidences as they kept watch over them, sitting side by side on a dead log. Always, it seemed to them, they had more to tell each other than time would possibly permit. There was only one thing, it seemed to Hugh, that they didn’t talk of: his real station in life before he came to Smoky Land. He had never told her of his wealth, of the Old Colonel sitting in the club. For once in his life his credentials were his own manhood and his own personality, and he wanted no others. It was the test, and no irrelevant matters must enter in.
And all at once he paused in the middle of a sentence, staring curiously at the ground. The shadow of their figures in the sunlight was no longer to be seen.
“Good Lord, Alice,” he exclaimed. “What’s happened to the sun?”
They both looked up at once. And they found it without difficulty. But it was not that potent orb that the long summer days had taught them to respect. It was a feeble sun, a mere red disk in the strange, gray-blue sky.
“Clouds?” Hugh asked. A queer little stir went over his body. It was as if instinct—not yet dead but only blunted in human beings—had spoken within his being, giving him knowledge that his conscious self had not yet grasped. He was angry with himself for the tone. He had tried to keep all urgency out of it, and yet it seemed so breathless, so charged with dread.
“No,” the girl answered clearly. “It’s smoke.”
They were silent a breath. Both of them were testing the direction of the wind. Both of them knew at the same instant that their whole world depended largely upon this. It was not blowing hard at present, yet there was wind enough to sweep the fire through the tree-tops. And, more than anything, they remembered the parched and inflammable condition of the woods and brush.
Both of them discovered the truth the same instant. “We’re right in its track,” Hugh said.
They waited a long time, hardly speaking. The sky slowly thickened with smoke. They saw it rising, in great billowing clouds, toward Bear Canyon. Listening closely, they heard—at the vague frontier of hearing—the distant crackle of the fire.