The Shepherd of the North

by Richard Aumerle Maher

Then they took up the interminable vigil of the night, standing at their horses’ heads, their faces buried in the manes, their arms thrown over the horses’ eyes.

As the night wore on the fire, having consumed everything to the east and south, moved on deliberately into the west and north. But the sharp, 184 acrid smoke of trees left smouldering behind still kept them in exquisite, blinded torture.

The murky, grey pall of the night turned almost to black as the fires to the east died almost out in that last, lifeless hour of the night. The light of the morning showed a faint, sickly white through the smoke banks on the high hills. When it was time for the sun to be rising over Bald Mountain, the morning breezes came down lifting the heavy clouds of smoke and carrying them overhead and away into the west. They saw the world again, a grey, ash-strewn world, with not a land-mark left but the bare knobs of the hills and here and there a great tree still standing smoking like a burnt-out torch.

They mounted wearily, and taking a last look at the figure of the man lying there on his rocky bier, picked their way down to the sloping hillside. The Gaunt Rocks had saved their lives. Now they must reach Little Tupper and water if they would have their horses live. Intolerable, frightful thirst was already swelling their own lips and they knew that the plight of the horses was inevitably worse.

Ruth took the lead, for she knew the country. They must travel circuitously, avoiding the places that had been wooded for the fallen trees would still be burning and would block them everywhere. The road was impossible because it had largely run through wooded places and the trees 185 would have fallen across it. Their situation was not desperate, but at any moment a horse might drop or turn mad for water.

For two hours they plodded steadily over the hills through the hot, loose-lying ashes. In all the world it seemed that not man nor beast nor bird was alive. The top of the earth was one grey ruin, draped with the little sworls of dust and ashes that the playful wind sent drifting up into their mouths and eyes.

They dared not ride faster than a walk, for the ashes had blown level over holes and traps of all sorts in which a galloping horse would surely break his leg. Nor would it have been safe to put the horses to any rapid expenditure of energy. The little that was left in them must be doled out to the very last ounce. For they did not yet know what lay between them and French Village and the lake. If the fire had not reached the lake during the night then it was always a possibility that, with this fresh morning wind, a new fire might spring up from the ashes of the old and place an impassable barrier between them and the water.

When this thought came to them, as it must, they involuntarily quickened their pace. The impulse was to make one wild dash for the lake. But they knew that it would be nothing short of madness. They must go slowly and carefully, enduring the torture with what fortitude they could.

The story which the Bishop had heard from the 186 lips of the dying man had stirred him profoundly. He now knew definitely, what yesterday he had suspected, that men had been sent into the hills by the railroad people to set fire to the forests, thereby driving the people out of that part of the country which the railroad wished to possess. He was moved to anger by the knowledge, but he knew that he must try to drive that knowledge back into the deepest recess of his mind; must try to hide it even from himself, lest in some unguarded moment, some time of stress and mental conflict, he should by word or look, by a gesture or even by an omission, reveal even his consciousness of that knowledge. Now he knew that the situation which last night he had thought to meet in French Village would almost certainly confront him there this morning, if indeed he ever succeeded in reaching there. And he must be doubly on his guard lest the things which he might learn to-day should in his mind confuse themselves with what he had last night learned under the seal of the confessional.

Through all the night Ruth Lansing had been hearing the words of that last cry of the dying man. She did not know how near they came to her. She did not know that Jeffrey Whiting had stood with his gun levelled upon the man whom Gadbeau had killed. But, try as she would to keep back the knowledge which she knew she must never under any circumstances reveal, those words 187 came ringing upon her ears. And she knew that the secret would haunt her and taunt her always.