Sometimes a little mischief, started by chance down the slopes of events, gathers like a rolling snowball into a vast bulk of evil. But more often in matters of evil it is the intent of the impulse that governs. It seems at such times as though inanimate nature were responding to human malevolence.
The fire that started that day on Misery leaped to its grim business with a spontaneity as fierce as the mad hate behind it.
One man acts in a crisis with more directness and efficiency than many men, each of whom waits on the other. They had stood and stared after the girl when she ran into the woods with the hissing fire streaming behind her. The pursuers that finally did start stopped promptly to witness the fight between the young man and the baron of the Umcolcus. Human fists in play afford more of a spectacle than even an incipient conflagration. When the man who goes down is a man who in the past has always been aggressor and victor, interest is more acute.
Dwight Wade did not linger to prolong the conflict to which the furious Britt invited him. Christopher Straight had started for the woods on the track of the fugitive girl, and Wade ran after him, his knuckles tingling gloriously. The thrill of that one moment, when his fist met the flesh of the man who had insulted him, made him realize that when one searches the depths of human nature hate, as well as love, has its delights.
Pressing closely on the heels of Christopher, who had waited for him, he dove into the yellow smoke.
“We’ve got to find that young she-devil!” gasped the old man. “It’s better for us to find her than for Britt to get hold of her.”
But by that time the quest was an uncertain one.
There is craftiness in a woods fire when it is seeking to establish itself.
The fire sent up first from the crackling slash thick, rolling, bitter clouds of smoke to veil its beginnings. Running to the left, where the fresher clouds seemed to be springing, the two men caught sight of the girl. But she was already far to the right, running and leaping like a deer, her hideous torch still flaming. Then the smoke shut down and she was hidden.
A blazing mass of tops, twisted in a blowdown, fronted them, and they were forced to make a long detour. They saw the wind wrench torches out of the mass, torches that whirled aloft and went scaling away to the north. Puffs of smoke showed where they had alighted. Here and there the tops of little spruces and firs set a net for the torches, afforded roosting-places for the flame birds that winged their red flight across the sky. The flame did not merely burn these trees; the trees fairly exploded; their resinous fronds and tassels were like powder grains.