“Oh, ma'am, I hope you will forgive me; it was I set fire to it, and I would give all I have in the world if I had not done it.”
“What is the danger?”
“Oh, I'm terribly afear'd that we shall all be burnt up,” said the fellow, beginning to whimper.
“Why did you run such a risk, and your master from home, and no one on the place to render the least assistance?”
“I did it for the best,” blubbered the lad. “What shall we do?”
“Why, we must get out of it as fast as we can, and leave the house to its fate.”
“We can't get out,” said the man, in a low, hollow tone, which seemed the concentration of fear; “I would have got out of it if I could; but just step to the back door, ma'am, and see.”
I had not felt the least alarm up to this minute; I had never seen a fallow burnt, but I had heard of it as a thing of such common occurrence that I had never connected with it any idea of danger. Judge then, my surprise, my horror, when, on going to the back door, I saw that the fellow, to make sure of his work, had fired the field in fifty different places. Behind, before, on every side, we were surrounded by a wall of fire, burning furiously within a hundred yards of us, and cutting off all possibility of retreat; for could we have found an opening through the burning heaps, we could not have seen our way through the dense canopy of smoke; and, buried as we were in the heart of the forest, no one could discover our situation till we were beyond the reach of help.
I closed the door, and went back to the parlour. Fear was knocking loudly at my heart, for our utter helplessness annihilated all hope of being able to effect our escape—I felt stupefied. The girl sat upon the floor by the children, who, unconscious of the peril that hung over them, had both fallen asleep. She was silently weeping; while the fool who had caused the mischief was crying aloud.
A strange calm succeeded my first alarm; tears and lamentations were useless; a horrible death was impending over us, and yet I could not believe that we were to die. I sat down upon the step of the door, and watched the awful scene in silence. The fire was raging in the cedar-swamp immediately below the ridge on which the house stood, and it presented a spectacle truly appalling. From out the dense folds of a canopy of black smoke, the blackest I ever saw, leaped up continually red forks of lurid flame as high as the tree tops, igniting the branches of a group of tall pines that had been left standing for saw-logs.