The field of amber gold

by William Bigelow Neal

A hasty examination convinced Grahame that life was not extinct, and he set about the only course that might save the flickering spark. Working as fast as was possible with half-numb fingers, he unharnessed and turned loose the stranger’s team. Trying to force them against the storm to a place they did not know would be worse than useless, and once free from sled and harness, they would drift with the storm until they found shelter in a coulee or behind a hill. Pulling the pin from the eveners, he changed his own team to the other sled.

Even as he worked, the last vestige of daylight faded and the atmosphere around him became a vast area of rushing, stinging, impenetrable gray. But one hope remained. The horses, if left to themselves, might face the blizzard and take him home. He knew it was not more than a mile and a half or two miles at the most. It was only a chance, but at any rate there was no alternative. In a few minutes the game would be played, and won or lost.

Climbing into the sled, he sacrificed the last chance of life, should the team fail him, by taking off his sheepskin-lined overcoat and wrapping it around the unconscious man below. Grasping the lines, he swung the free ends across the hips of his team with all the force the wind allowed him. They wrenched the front runners around and headed into the wind. Again the lines cut into the air, and the horses broke into a trot. Once more came the stinging whistle of leather, and they broke into a run. The wind seared Grahame’s flesh like hot iron, and he threw one arm before his face. Realizing the futility of trying to guide his horses over a road he could not see, he dropped the lines to the bottom of the box and pinned them with his feet.

Time and again the horses floundered into deep snow and Grahame’s hopes sank to zero, only to come up again as he felt the sled again lunge forward on the hard-packed road. Gaining confidence as the minutes passed, he leaned forward and talked to the team as a mother croons to her child. Then he begged and cursed and cheered them by turns. In his excitement he forgot the wind and the snow and the pain—forgot even the menace of death itself. A thought flashed before his mind of the book he had been reading only the night before. What in hell did Ben Hur know about the real article? Here was a race against the forces of nature when life itself was the stake. He laughed aloud, and with the laugh came a lurch to one side, a crash and the wild scream of broken wire, and splinters of a gate-post flew in his face. The sled slowed down on bare ground, only to lunge forward toward a black shadow ahead. An instant later he caught a fleeting vision of an orange glow, outlining the figure of a woman.

Some fifteen years before and far to the south and east, Fred Kinear had grown to early manhood. From one of the parental strains, he had inherited length, breadth and a certain degree of thickness—not the thickness of surplus flesh, but rather the depth of chest and shoulder to which nature anchors the muscles of strong men. Another strain, perhaps, had endowed him with a sunny disposition and the ability to make friends and to hold fast to those he made. Socially he was a success, because like most really strong men to whom the Creator has given a level head as well, he regarded his muscular power as a trust and drew from it the supreme confidence in himself that automatically lifts men of his type above the bully class.

As a boy Kinear was one of those who must know how every mechanical contrivance operates. His most cherished possessions were the alarm clocks and the dollar watches other people had thrown away, for the first stage of development in the natural mechanic is the desire to take things apart, followed after a time by the second stage, wherein he tries to put them together again. The purely analytic stage is common to most boys, but the synthetic period is reached only by the genuine mechanic. At the time his schoolmates were dreaming of laurels to be won in the realms of poetry, Fred was out in the backyard monkeying with a toy steam engine, and when they reached the period of vacations spent on tennis court and lake with racket and banjo, Fred was shoveling coal into a squat, puffy thing that was very hot and greasy, and had adopted the monkey wrench and oilcan as constant companions.

After he was graduated from high school, he wanted to go to college. Unfortunately for him, he was not a member of the banjo gang. What he got he had to earn, and so he found a job firing in the boiler room of a light plant. One day a boiler exploded and they carried him to a hospital on a stretcher, with a white cloth over his face. Weeks afterward, he was allowed to sit up; a little later he could move around, and still later the bandages were taken from his head. The surgeon who had patched up his face was very proud of his work, but his pride was based on his accomplishment in light of the materials he had to work with, and brought small consolation to Fred Kinear when they first brought him a mirror. What he saw was a face, it was true, but not his face nor did it bear a likeness to any face he had ever seen before. One ear was little more than a gnarled button; cheeks and chin were a series of white scars, ridged and seamed; his nose was partly gone; his eyelids were too small and fiery red, and his upper lip was drawn up in a snarl which would endure forever.

There came long hours when Kinear fought with all his might for courage to face the world again—a long uphill fight; but in the end he found a measure of peace, for he knew that after all, he was still Fred Kinear in spite of what the mirror claimed. The steam might have seared his face beyond recognition, but it had not touched his brain, and certainly his soul was intact. He was still a human being, and as such would go forth and take up his work where he had left off.

Finally one sunny day Fred left the hospital. At the corner where he waited for a street-car, a small boy came along, to stop and gaze in awe at the disfigured man. Others joined him, and soon a ring of young faces surrounded him. Kinear had a sense of humor great enough to overcome, in a measure, the bitterness of this experience, and he laughed, or at least he intended to laugh, but it was only a matter of spirit and vocal cords, because the lips did not respond, and he saw the young faces shrink back in fear at what, to them, was merely a horrible noise. Kinear never laughed again.

In the car, when he asked a question of the conductor, and under the stimulus of a terrible effort to enunciate clearly, his face twisted itself into a horrible caricature, someone laughed, and thenceforth he spoke only when it became necessary. He sat down on the long seat, and a young woman made an involuntary movement away from him. That cut deep, and his self-consciousness now caused him to misinterpret smiles and nods among the other passengers. The steam that scarred his face was as nothing compared to the manifestations of fear and ridicule and scorn that he saw, or imagined he saw; and a new process began within him. Where before it had been only the flesh that had suffered, now his very soul began to blight and shrivel, drawing in and away from the scarred shell of his body until he became a machine, driven by his mentality only. People who knew him said that from that day on, he became a soulless automaton, with a heart of iron, an emotionless, heartless creature of flesh and blood, asking sympathy of none and granting even as he received. Whether these things were true or not, the fact remained that Fred Kinear had ceased to exist as such, and from then on he was known as Scarface, or sometimes as Ironheart.