Fire in the Woods / Illustrated

by James De Mille

Overhead the smoke clouds still rolled, as before, in vast voluminous folds, curling, and turning, and rolling, and lowering down close to the earth, giving to all nature a gloom that was peculiar, and not without terror. But beyond this lay the sea; and it stretched far away to the horizon, reaching along that horizon to the right and to the left as far as the eye could wander. It was the sea, the sea itself; and they had wandered far from the place from which they had set out, to reach such a goal as this.

And what was the place?

It was a settlement on the sea-shore. Between them and that sea-shore there extended cultivated fields, and numerous houses dotted the green meadows, and groves, and out-houses, and barns. Farther away, and nearer the sea, they noticed a long, low, white building, that looked like a straggling farm-house, or rather two or three farmhouses joined in one. Some people could be seen at the door, and a high fence surrounded it. Between this building and the place where they were standing a road ran, and along this road some cattle were passing. Beyond the building lay a sheet of water that looked like a harbor, between which and the sea extended a narrow spit of land; in several of the fields cattle were grazing; and within stone’s throw they saw a rude farm-house, built of logs, and whitewashed.

Pat was the first to break the silence into which they had been thrown by the utter astonishment and bewilderment of this discovery.

“Sure an it’s dead beat I am, and dumb entirely,” he exclaimed. “Ony to think of our coming out of the wuds to the say. Sure an it must be Miramichi itself, so it must, an we’ve been a wandherin through the wuds sthraight back to the place we dhruv out from wid de Injin. Och, an, be the powers, but it’s a quaire wandherin that we’ve been havin. Och, but I’ll nivir git over this.”

“It isn’t Miramichi,” said Bart, whom Pat’s wild remarks had roused from the stupor into which his amazement had thrown him. “It isn’t Miramichi,” he repeated; “for that’s a river, and here we have the open sea itself. But where in the world we have got to, and how we’ve got here, I confess I have no more idea than a stone.”

Bart’s surprise was certainly greater than that of either of his companions, and very naturally too. For he had thought all along that he was going west, and that his back was turned to the sea: but now he found that his actual course had been the very opposite of what he had supposed, and intended it to be. He had been trying to get to where Phil was, but now discovered that he had been going away from him all the time.

The discovery of the truth was amazing, bewildering, and at the same time humiliating to one who had been officiating in the dignified part of leader in this adventurous and eventful journey. But humiliating as it was, there was the actual fact, and it only remained to find out the name of the place where they had so strangely arrived.

In spite of his anxiety about Phil, and his mortification about his own mistake, Bart was not altogether without a feeling of relief at this sight that revealed itself, for he saw human habitations at any rate; and he thought that he would now be able not only to find out where he was, but also, perhaps, to get assistance, and thus resume, under more favorable circumstances, the difficult task of exploring the woods in search of Phil.

“Well,” said he, at length, “there’s no use standing here. We’re somewhere, and the best thing we can now do is to find out where we are. So come along. We’re in a place where we’ll be able to get food and shelter, at any rate.”