A good many leagues of range and forest had been traversed when they reached a tract where they had trouble in finding water. There was snow above them, but it either soaked down through the strata, or the drainage from it descended on the other side of the divide. It was also, though not quite summer yet, unusually hot weather, and the season had been exceptionally dry, and they had contented themselves for a week with the little muddy fluid they scraped up here and there from oozy pools that were lined with pine needles and rotting leaves, when they came to a big brûlée.
It filled a deep valley that was hemmed in by almost precipitous crags, and though charred logs and branches lay here and there, most of the burned forest was still standing. As a matter of fact, a fire in this region very seldom brings the trees down. It merely strips them. As the men pushed wearily on, endless ranks of blackened trunks moved steadily back before them. There was not a branch left. The trees were tremendous, half-calcined columns, and, for it was evident that any wild wind seldom entered the deep hollow, they might have stood in that condition a year or more. The trouble in traversing a brûlée is that one cannot tell when, from some cause or other, one of them may come down.
It was about noon, and they had with some difficulty dined on grindstone bread and canned stuff without a drink of any kind, when Weston, who was leading the horse, pulled it up suddenly. He was thirsty and short of temper, and in a mood that would have made it easier for him to smash through an obstacle instead of stopping, but he fancied that he saw a great blackened trunk close in front of him lean over a trifle. He was sure of it in another moment, and he urged the horse aside, for the towering column swayed and oscillated as though it strove to recover its equipoise, and then suddenly rushed earthward. He felt the wind it made strike cold upon his cheek, and then there was a deafening crash, and a cloud of fine black dust rose up. It whirled and eddied about him like the smoke of a great gun, and the powder that settled thick upon him clogged his eyelashes and filled his nostrils. The horse plunged viciously and came near dragging him off his feet.
After that there was for a few seconds a silence that seemed oppressive by contrast, until it was suddenly broken by another startling crash. It was repeated here and there, as though when each tree fell the concussion brought down another, and the brûlée was filled with shocks of sound that rang in tremendous reverberations along the steep rocks. In the meanwhile the men stood fast with tense, blackened faces peering at the eddying dust out of half-blinded eyes, until the crashes grew less frequent and there was deep silence again.
Then Weston, who patted the trembling horse, sat down and pointed to the great, shapeless pile of half-burned wood and charcoal close in front of him.
“A near thing. I think I’ll have a smoke,” he said.
“A smoke!” gasped Grenfell. “With your mouth and tongue like an ash-pit! I’d much sooner have a sherry cobbler, as they used to make it with a big lump of ice swimming in it, at the—it’s the club, I mean. That is,” he added, with a sigh, “if I could get it.”
“You can’t,” observed Devine, dryly. “I’d be content with water. But didn’t you break off rather suddenly in one place?”
“You’re young,” said Grenfell, looking at him solemnly. “If you weren’t, I should regard that observation as an impertinence. I said the club, which is sufficient. They used to make you really excellent sherry cobblers there.”
“Well,” said Devine, with his eyes twinkling, “I guess it is, and the name was half out when you stopped. I was naturally never inside the place in question, but I’ve been in Montreal. It’s kind of curious, isn’t it, to find a man who talks about such things leading a forlorn hope, as you call it?”