Strange indeed were her thoughts as she sat there staring at the fire. At times it was the fire itself that held her attention. Led on by the challenge of wind and storm, it went roaring and laughing up the chimney, for all the world as if it meant to dispel the damp and cold from every cabin in the mountains. A moment later, slapped squarely in the face by a deluge of rain, it shrunk down within itself until the whole cabin was in darkness.
“It—it’s given up,” Florence would whisper to herself with a half sob. “But no! There it is rising from its own blackened ruins to roar with cheer again.
“It’s like life,” she told herself. And, indeed, how like her own life it was. Only a few days before she had been fired with hope and desire to be of service to these mountain people. Now, with hopes drowned and courage well nigh gone, she waited only to battle her way through the coming trial and the election that seemed certain defeat. A lump rose in her throat at the thought.
But again, as the fire battling its way once more up the chimney flung free its challenge to the elements, she was driven to believe that courage, hope and desire to serve would again burn brightly in her heart.
“Hope!” she whispered. “What hope can there be? The election is lost! The winter school a thing of the past. How can it be otherwise? And yet I do hope!”
These thoughts passed. She had become suddenly conscious of her immediate surroundings. She was well within the natural stone gateway through which entrance had been forbidden heretofore. She was in the midst of a strange and mysterious people, in the very cabin of their leader. Of this last she felt sure.
She recalled with a sudden shock the weird tales she had heard told of these people, of the peddler with his rich pack of linens and box of jewelry, and of the one-armed fiddler who had passed this way to be seen no more.
“And now I am here,” she whispered, her limbs trembling with terror. “And on such a night!”
Even as she spoke there came such a rolling crash of thunder as set the dishes in the little wall cupboard rattling and brought a huge cross-log on the fire down with a thud and sputter that sent sparks flying everywhere. She caught the rush of water outside, not alone the constant beating of the rain, but louder and more terrifying than that, the mighty rush and roar of a cataract. Swollen to twenty times its natural size, Laurel Creek had become a mighty Niagara.
Turning about, she allowed her gaze to sweep the room. In one corner on a bed little Hallie slept peacefully. In the opposite corner the man with the hooked nose had thrown himself across the other bed. The two women had vanished, probably into the other room of the cabin. In the corner, with head pillowed on his uninjured arm, Bud Wax slept.