The Shepherd of the North

by Richard Aumerle Maher

Sleepy hired men coming out to drive the cattle 138 in to milking looked blinking up at the mountain, stood a moment before their numb minds understood what their senses were telling them, then ran shouting back to the farm houses, throwing open pasture gates and knocking down lengths of fence as they ran. Some, with nothing but fear in their hearts, ran straight to the barns and mounting the best horses fled down the roads to the west. For the hireling flees because he is a hireling.

Sleepy men and women and still sleeping children came tumbling out of the houses, to look up at the death that was coming down to them. Some cried in terror. Some raged and cursed and shook foolish fists at the oncoming enemy. Some fell upon their knees and lifted hands to the God of fire and flood. Then each ran back into the house for his or her treasure; a little bag of money under a mattress, or a babe in its crib, or a little rifle, or a dolly of rags.

Frantic horses were hastily hitched to farm wagons. The treasures were quickly bundled in. Women pushed their broods up ahead of them into the wagons, ran back to kiss the men standing at the heads of the sweating horses, then climbed to their places in the wagons and took the reins. For twenty miles, down break-neck roads, behind mad horses, they would have to hold the lives of the children, the horses, and, incidentally, of themselves in their hands. But they were capable 139 hands, brown, and strong and steady as the mother hearts that went with them.

They would have preferred to stay with the men, these women. But it was the law that they should take the brood and run to safety.

Men stood watching the wagons until they shot out of sight behind the trees of the road. Then they turned back to the hopeless, probably useless fight. They could do little or nothing. But it was the law that men must stay and make the fight. They must go out with shovels to the very edge of their own clearing and dig up a width of new earth which the running fire could not cross. Thus they might divert the fire a little. They might even divide it, if the wind died down a little, so that it would roll on to either side of their homes.

This was their business. There was little chance that they would succeed. Probably they would have to drop shovels at the last moment and run an unequal foot race for their lives. But this was the law, that every man must stay and try to make his own little clearing the point of an entering wedge to that advancing wall of fire. No man, no ten thousand men could stop the fire. But, against all probabilities, some one man might be able, by some chance of the lay of the ground, or some freak of the wind, to split off a sector of it. That sector might be fought and narrowed down by other men until it was beaten. And so 140 something would be gained. For this men stayed, stifled and blinded, and fought on until the last possible moment, and then ran past their already smoking homes and down the wind for life.

Jeffrey Whiting rode southward in the wake of four other men down a long spiral course towards the base of the mountain. Yesterday he would have ridden at their head. He would have taken the place of leadership and command among them which he had for months been taking in the fight against the railroad. Probably he could still have had that place among them if he had tried to assert himself, for men had come to have a habit of depending upon him. But he rode at the rear, dispirited and miserable.

They were trying to get around the fire, so that they might hang upon its flank and beat it in upon itself. There was no thought now of getting ahead of it: no need to ride ahead giving alarm. That rolling curtain of smoke would have already aroused every living thing ahead of it. They could only hope to get to the end of the line of fire and fight it inch by inch to narrow the path of destruction that it was making for itself.

If the wind had held stiff and straight down the mountain it would have driven the fire ahead in a line only a little wider than its original front. But the shape of the mountain caught the light breeze as it came down and twisted it away always to the side. So that the end of the fire line was 141 not a thin edge of scattered fire that could be fought and stamped back but was a whirling inverted funnel of flame that leaped and danced ever outward and onward.

Half way down the mountain they thought that they had outflanked it. They slid from their horses and began to beat desperately at the brush and grasses among the trees. They gained upon it. They were doing something. They shouted to each other when they had driven it back even a foot. They fought it madly for the possession of a single tree. They were gaining. They were turning the edge of it in. The hot sweat began to streak the caking grime upon their faces. There was no air to breathe, only the hot breath of fire. But it was heartsome work, for they were surely pushing the fire in upon itself.