A Gentleman of Courage: A Novel of the Wilderness

by James Oliver Curwood

Mona tried to force words from her lips, and thanked God that Adette hurried on, crying back to her that she was making an effort to overtake Jame before he got out of the clearing, to give him a lunch which he had forgotten. Carter had returned—and was on his way to the cabin in which Peter's father was hidden! And that cabin, Jame said, would be in the heart of the fire within an hour! With Peter dead or wounded on the island, and Simon gone, what hope was there now for Donald McRae? If the fire did not reach his cabin first, Carter would get him, and if the fire beat out Carter——

Mona's dry lips gave a little cry. Through the pitch-filled evergreen forest about the beaver pond the fire would sweep in a destroying inundation which no living creature could outrace if the wind was behind it; and Donald McRae, sick and helpless, would be the first human victim in its descent upon Five Fingers.

The peril which was threatening Peter's father from two directions worked a swift and thrilling change in Mona. She must beat out Carter—and she must beat out the fire! Thought of Aleck Curry became secondary to this more immediate necessity. She could settle with Aleck later. But she must reach the cabin now. There was not a minute or a second to lose if she was to get there ahead of Jame and Carter. She began to run again, following a path through the meadow into the strip of forest between the settlement and the shore of the lake. Her feet and Peter's had worn this trail smooth, and she knew that in the thickening gloom of smoke and night she was traveling faster than Carter and Jame Clamart, who were going by the rougher tote-road. In ten minutes she reached the cliff which ran westward along the lake.

Here she was high, and there were no trees to shut out her view of the ridge country. What she saw appalled her. Nowhere in the north was there any longer a wall of blackness. The world was red, with lurid flashings that came and went like mighty explosions. Westward, beyond the beaver pond, she could see the leaping of the flames in the thick spruce and cedar timberlands where ten thousand barrels of pitch and resinous oils were turning sleeping forests into boiling caldrons of fire. The smell of this oil and pitch was heavy in her nostrils, and she could hear the moaning, distant roar of the conflagration as one hears the roar of great furnaces when the fuel doors are opened. But it was the wind that brought quicker fear to her heart. It was beginning to blow strongly from the north and west, and carried with it a heat that was stifling. And with this heat and wind came also a thickening cloud of ash particles, until at last, afraid of their increasing sting, she stopped to take off her skirt and fasten it about her hair and face.

Halfway to the pond, with still another mile to go, she saw the flames leaping over the last ridge, and her heart seemed suddenly to give way in a sobbing cry of agony and despair. She was too late. Between that ridge and Peter's father was less than a mile of spruce and cedar and balsam forest, with pitch-sodden jackpines interspersed so thickly that no power less than God could hold back the speed of the holocaust. With the wind that was behind them the flames would be at the cabin before she could cover a quarter of the distance to Peter's father.

For a few moments she sank down helpless and without strength, sobbing for breath as she stared at the merciless red death which had beaten her—and Carter. And in these moments her agony was greater than when Aleck had told her about Peter, for now she was picturing a man, creeping out on his hands and knees to face that sea of flame—a man, sick and helpless, crying out for Peter, for her, and dying by inches with their names on his lips.

She staggered to her feet and went on, and in her dazed mind lived a prayer that Donald McRae might be given strength to drag himself to the shore of the lake. If that strength had not already come to him, it was now too late, for as she toiled over a high and craggy point in the cliff the wind blew hot in her face, and where the beaver pond should be was a red hell of flames.

The trail descended as she forced herself on—descended from the ramparted ledge to the smooth, sandy level of the beach, and suddenly she was conscious of the crashing of bodies in the thickets and the frenzied sound of living things. A great moose swept so near her that she sprang from his path—a monstrous beast with flaming eyes and snorting nostrils, closely followed by a darker, rounder object that she knew was a bear, racing for the safety of the water. She came to the sandy open where the trail swung straight ridgeward toward the beaver pond, and stopped, knowing she could go no farther unless she defied the death from which all other living creatures were flying.

Piteously Mona cried out—to Peter, to Simon, to Donald McRae, and then to God; and at last she fell down with her face buried in her skirt, ready to welcome death itself in this hour when not only her world but all that she loved in it were doomed to destruction.

It was a sound close to her that uncovered her face, a sound that came strangely above the moaning roar of heat-wind and flame, and staring through the gloom and against the red glare of the burning forests, she saw a grotesque shadow—something that was not moose nor deer nor any four-footed thing she had ever seen in the wilderness; and rising up before it she saw that it was a man bent under a huge, limp burden which he carried. She cried out, and a choking voice answered her—a strange, terrible, unhuman sort of voice, yet the sound of it nearly split her heart, and when the figure deposited its burden in the white sand and stood up she saw that it was Peter. She stumbled toward him. His arms caught her, and she could hear him sobbing under the strain of his fight, and his heart was beating so hard that each throb of it sent a tremor through his body. In his weakness her own strength returned, and in a moment her hands had left his face and she was at the side of the man who lay upon the sand.