by Van Reid
“Where did they go?” wondered Thump.
“Good heavens!” said Ephram again. “It was Thump!”
“Of course!” shouted Eagleton. “Old friend, once again you have freed us from the exigencies of dangerous circumstance.”
“You have saved us!” said Eagleton. He stood uncertainly. The coat felt strange about the shoulders but he buttoned it against the night air.
“Saved us!” agreed Ephram, peering into the dark. He stood, dusting his trouser legs. “And in the process driven the villains off, it seems!”
Thump looked up from the ground, wild and wide-eyed.
“We must be close upon their trail!” asserted Eagleton. He had read this phrase once in The Pathway from Remorse by Mrs. Minerva Blythe Shield.
“Stout fellow!” said Ephram, helping Thump to his feet.
“Ever in the fore!” pronounced Eagleton with an affectionate pat on Thump’s back.
This mutual admiration might have continued if it had not been interrupted by a chorus of agitated voices from the perimeter of the wood. There was a distant glow beyond the trees, and the members of the club vaguely comprehended some grave occurrence.
“What is it?” asked Eagleton as he and his fellows peered after the flames on the western bank of the Kennebec. The fire glowed over its surroundings and etched in shadow everything between itself and Blinn Hill. On those distant banks and immediately above a massive burning building stood a small settlement—houses and shops, a steepled church, and two long structures that quartered the workforce of the local enterprise.
“It’s an icehouse,” said Big Eye darkly, “and half of Iceboro with it if many more than ourselves don’t lend a hand.”
They could see, even from that distance, a train engine and several freight cars retreating from the adjacent yards. By the broad docks that reached out from the burning building, two schooners were visible.
Big Eye Pfelt, dog in arms, gave the order to harness the horses and many a hobo raced back to the camp to douse the fires and retrieve his gear. When the carriage pulled up alongside, Big Eye took the reins. “Hop on, gentlemen,” he said, “the night promises hot work!”
Men crammed themselves into the carriage. Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump climbed inside, excusing themselves to several fellows who had already squeezed themselves into every available nook and corner. The I beg your pardons and I am so sorrys quickly declined into rudimentary grunts and Oopses as the carriage rocked and ricocheted its way down the meadow. Big Eye was a wild driver when the spirit moved him, and he seemed undaunted by any inability to see obstacles in the dark. Inside the carriage it was even more difficult to see. Thump was sure they must all be traveling in a vertically transposed manner till he realized, in an unexpected flash of radiance, that he was looking nose to toe at a pair of boots.
Someone else must have taken note of Thump’s posture for he was righted suddenly. There were startled yells and grunts as they rattled against the carriage walls; a flash of light had emanated from a wooden matchstick. Some gray-bearded man of the road had actually struck a match to light his pipe in that jumbled space.
How Big Eye knew to pull up before the gate was more than the members of the Moosepath League would ever understand, but they felt the carriage bounce to a stop, and, once the gate was opened, they sailed along with a little less speed and a little more stability. When they reached the road, Big Eye had them charging like thunder itself toward the river.
Peering past bouncing heads and the swaying silhouettes of grizzled faces, Thump saw that the west-facing sides of houses and barns and trees were lit with an angry, orange glow.
50. Deus Ex Machina
She drew aside the curtain of her bedroom window and laid her face against the pane, where a spot of mist pulsed with her breath. After a moment she could see a glow above the hill across the way.
The terrific explosion had wakened her in an instant; it had confused her, the din of it entering and merging with her dreams even as she sat up and gasped; the shock from without had brought her heart into her throat and made the visions of sleep more real. A moment later, she gasped again—almost cried out—when the echoes of thunder and the memory of something near to a nightmare returned like a wave crashing off the shore.
The sound receded, and, with a hand to her breast, Dee almost laughed. Some further echo barely rattled the sashes as she first looked out and saw the glow rise from above the hill across the way. Then she cast her night things off and began to pull on whatever clothes came to hand.
When she stepped into the hall, the house was quiet. Had her mother and uncle wakened? How could they not have been shaken from their beds by that crash? She closed her door softly and shushed down the stairs. She took a coat from the stand by the front door and went into the parlor, where a shadow stood by the window.
“You saw it?” said her Uncle Fale in the near darkness. He turned his head and briefly fixed a glance in her direction.
“Yes,” said Dee. “Isn’t that in the direction of Olin Bell’s farm?”
“It is, but it’s further on, across the river. Where are you going?”
Dee had on her coat and she fumbled with the buttons before returning to the hall for a hat. “To see what it is, and if I can help.”
“I’ll come, too,” said the old man.
“No, Uncle Fale. Mom will be alone and not knowing what’s happening.” Dee paused then. None of the hats seemed appropriate for going to a fire so she took a dark kerchief from its peg and tied it around her head. “I’m going ... now,” she added, almost apologetically.
“I can’t keep up with you,” he admitted. “I’ll speak to Deborah, and maybe I’ll be along. They’ll probably need every hand they can get.”
Dee stepped into the parlor just long enough to buss Uncle Fale’s cheek. She heard something from the downstairs bedroom, then, before she had the opportunity to debate her intentions with her mother, she burst from the door and ran down the walk to the street. There was a commotion toward town—someone shouting from the seat of a wagon; she saw several people climbing on board before the horse and rig dashed off in the opposite direction. Dee raised a hand and opened her mouth to shout, but they were well out of hearing. Looking west, she could only see that surging, orange glow above the hill across the road.
Someone’s front door closed with a slam. There was a voice in the night calling out, “Be careful!” Dee hurried across the road, slipped over the fence to the meadow beyond, and climbed the slope. A low trilling sound reached her ears and she was startled, then confounded, to be greeted by Mr. Porch, who seemed equally bemused to discover her on his nocturnal prowl.
“Good heavens!” she said and scooped the purring cat into her arms.
The light from afar grew as she neared the top till her line of vision broke the crest and she saw the fire itself. She was shocked by the awful flames against the dark. The sound of the fire carried to the hill—an immense, if distant, rumble—itself like unceasing thunder. She thought she heard shouts and cries within the greater body of noise, but it was the ball of fire encompassing the center of the icehouse that took her breath.
The burning building was enormous, attesting to the thriving ice business along the Kennebec, which river was famous throughout the world for the clarity of its waters. Some six hundred feet in length and four stories tall, the icehouse dwarfed everything in its vicinity—a massive wooden structure filled with sawdust and ice from the previous winter’s cutting and a type common to the scourge of fire. From Dee’s hilltop the flames seemed to lick the clouds. Iceboro was lit as bright as day, and she descried the tiny forms of people and horses scattering and congesting the roads outside the village. North of the town, a locomotive engine chugged steam, and in the river two ice schooners moved slowly down the tide, their masts sticklike silhouettes against the blaze as the vessels slipped from danger.
On the near side of the Kennebec, the roofs of houses and farms blushed with reflected light
. Lanterns dotted the yards and windows. At Olin Bell’s place, Dee saw movement near the barn.
She heard pounding hooves behind her and turned with a startled cry as a dark form rose from the shadows below. “Whoa, there!” came a voice, and the animal reigned in a few yards away on the crest of the hill. “Who’s that?”
“Dee Pilican.”
“Elmer Barnes,” said the rider. “They’ll never save that icehouse,” he reckoned aloud while his horse stamped. “The town itself could go up.”
“Was it lightning?”
“I think it must have been.” Even from this distance, the man’s face was faintly touched by the massive flames. He looked up. Stars were either fading or already gone from three quadrants of the sky. To the northwest, the eye was dazzled by the blaze. “Lightning, but no rain,” he said. “I’ve seen it once before. It’s probably pouring buckets over the Sheepscott.”
“Will you take me down?” asked Dee, approaching the horse, one hand up to touch the animal’s muzzle. Ezra Porch leapt from her arm and dashed away. Dee rubbed her shoulder where the cat had scratched her. “You can drop me by Olin Bell’s farm,” she said to Elmer. “I see him hitching his wagon.”
Elmer Barnes did not stand on ceremony but offered his hand and pulled her up behind him. “Hang on,” he said. He was a good horseman, and he may have picked his way a little more carefully down the hill with Dee riding pillion; under other, less dire circumstances, one might have guessed that it was simply too pleasant having her arms about his waist to hurry.
“Olin!” Dee called from her perch, but her voice was competing with the roar of the fire across the river. She could make out the movements in Olin’s farmyard more clearly as things stood out in silhouette against the blaze. There was an explosion from the icehouse; no doubt some cache of sawdust had been heated to the point of combustion. A section of roof and wall shot out over the river in a shower of flame and sparks.
Olin Bell was climbing onto his wagon, which he had filled with barrels and casks for carting water. Dee called out again. He would hardly have recognized her in the dark, with her chestnut hair caught up in a black kerchief, but he knew her voice. Elmer swung his horse’s flank around and she dropped to the ground, saying to Olin, “Let me go with you!”
“I don’t know, Dee,” he said above the rumble. “The docks are too close to the fire, so they’re landing the boats at a little shelf almost across from us here.” He pointed. “The crossing from this side is above the icehouse, and the boats have to drift past the fire. It’s a little chancy.”
Dee had climbed up next to him. She squeezed his near hand and said, “Go.” A carriage clattered by, and several voices shouted out, “Ho!” and, “Hey there, Olin!” Then Elmer Barnes rode off before Olin was able to steer the wagon out of his yard and onto the road leading upriver.
Dee couldn’t take her eyes from the snarling, crackling fire till her attention was caught by a clutch of figures running away from a collapsing wall and the abstract perception of flames against the night—monstrous cousins to the comforting blaze in one’s parlor hearth—metamorphosed into a tangible demon. Trees along the near shore of the river cast spasmodic shadows across the road, and as the carriage drew near the crossing the people and horses and wagons along the bank appeared to waver in the strange light. The roar was incessant, and, Dee thought, it must be deafening to anyone fighting the blaze.
Half a dozen volunteers were already loaded on one of the boats coursing the river—overloaded, according to one voice in the waiting crowd. “I’ve got some barrels and casks!” shouted Olin, and these were rolled down the bank, where they might be floated behind the next waiting boat.
Dee was surprised by the size of the crowd. Olin took hold of her arm as he pressed his way through. “Can you swim?” he asked her.
“Why?” she gasped.
“If we drift close enough to that building,” he explained with a nod, “and the near wall collapses, we may have to bale out.”
“Do you think?” she said almost with a laugh.
The look in his eye betrayed a flash of humor. “Do you still want to go?” he asked, which question was both warning and invitation.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
Dee bumped past men and women as Olin led her toward the boat. She did not ask why they were breaking through the line or why no one demanded they wait their turn; Olin had a manner about him that she had not seen before—a steadiness and an awareness of where he was going and what he intended to do mixed, perhaps, with a hint of dread that made the first two aspects of his demeanor the more impressive. In another moment, several men almost tipped themselves into the water offering their seats to Dee as she stepped into the next boat. She plunked herself down, opposite Olin and between two somewhat ragged individuals. The boat was filled with unfamiliar faces that had, perhaps, not seen the business end of a scrubbing brush for some time.
“Ma’am,” said one of these fellows. She could hardly hear him for the noise of the fire and the babble of conversation, but he lifted his hat. Like a chorus, they all chimed in and hats were raised in descending order down the length of the boat.
“I don’t know you gentlemen,” she said over the din.
“We were spending the night up Blinn Hill.”
Dee’s mouth made an 0 silently. They were hoboes, of course.
“Woke me out of a clean sleep, that bolt did,” shouted the fellow. “I was dreaming about chickens.”
A voice called, “Haul away!” and the boat was briefly adrift before the men at the oars took over.
“Were you?” said Dee.
The hobo nodded. “I had one for supper.” Despite this assertion, he looked hungry. Dee’s expression was noticeably sympathetic. He lowered his gaze abashedly. “You look familiar to me, now I think on it.”
“Oh?” Had she ever seen the man? She searched his face, then glanced across at Olin, who was watching her.
“You didn’t feed a road man or two, did you?” asked the hobo. “Outside your kitchen door?” he added, and, finally, “Last Thanksgiving?”
“I remember something like,” she said.
The fellow nodded, satisfied that he had identified her. Then he was back to his original thesis. “There was a whole lot us of up there,” he said. “Tonight, that is. Up at Blinn Hill. Some have gotten across already.”
“Iceboro will be glad to have you,” she said.
“That turkey and stuffing was some good,” he said.
The heat from the fire was daunting as they closed with the opposite shore. The roar of the flames appeared to rough the waters, their light gilding the river. As the boat glided past the burning icehouse, its passengers heard the shouts of firefighters above the awful clamor. Dee reached out and clutched Olin’s hand without looking at him. The heat and light were like a weight upon them when they bumped the shore. Horsemen across the river waited to catch a line and pull the boats back to the crossing.
There was a bucket line climbing the bank a few yards away. “Perhaps you want to help over there,” suggested Olin, clearly hoping to keep her as far from the fire as possible.
Dee was having none of it. “It’s people nearer the fire who’ll be needing a rest,” she said, and he saw that it was useless to argue with her.
The noise and the heat increased as they reached the top of the bank at the southern extremity of the burning building. The fire was preeminent, but, like strident grace notes, the cries of men and the hiss of steam played beneath the larger uproar. The street was crowded with wavering lines of bucket brigades. Certain lone men shouted orders. Others simply looked lost.
A horse, pulling a wagon loaded with barrels of water, screamed as it reared in the street, and Olin leaped forward to take hold of the panicked animal’s bridle, calling out to the driver, “Get this horse away from here! Get him away and put some men between the shafts!”
“We have to do something!” shouted the driver. “The lines aren’t
working!” Indeed, one of the nearer bucket brigades stood idle as the men at its head argued. The fire at this end had grown too hot to approach.
“The houses across the street are in danger,” said Olin to Dee, then he strode toward the center of debate. The roar of the fire was insistent and she could not hear what he was saying to the men at the head of the stalled line, but he was pointing to the buildings across the street from the fire and obviously redirecting their efforts with the steady bearing of command.
There was a single loud bang amidst the storm of the fire and a renewed wave of heat engulfed the street. The horse reared and kicked and the wagon jerked out from under the driver. Dee jumped aside and people scattered as horse and wagon and water careened down the street. The driver was left on the cobbles, shouting in pain over a twisted leg.
“It’s broken,” said Dee, hunkering over the injured man. It was a relief, in this heat, to take off her coat and stuff it under the groaning man’s head. “Go organize your line,” she said to Olin, who came bounding over, “but leave me two men to help move him.”
Olin simply nodded, spoke to two burly fellows, and began to reorganize the bucket brigade to protect the rest of the town.
The injured driver let out a terrible scream as the two big men lifted him—None too gently! Dee thought. “One of these houses down the street,” she said and hurried ahead.
An elderly woman met her on the sidewalk. “Mrs. Mulligan will open her house, I know,” she said. “Fallow me.” They had not gone very far before they came upon three men sprawled on the sidewalk, where they had been dragged after breathing too much smoke. The men were still gasping and retching, and the soot and ash and smoke permeating the atmosphere even this distance from the fire only exacerbated their state. “We’ll come back for them,” said Dee. She was impressed by the old woman’s pace, and they were all out of breath by the time the driver was laid, fainting, on a parlor sofa.
“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Mulligan. “Where’s a doctor?”