by Wesley Ellis
A sighing murmur rose from the group huddled around the bits of furniture. It was quickly overriden by the shouts of firefighters, who rushed back with their buckets and bags to douse the triangle of bright flames that had suddenly begun to dance between the studding that remained standing. Jessie and the Captain watched for a moment before moving on to join the group around the salvaged household goods.
Captain Tinker hobbled to the rocker and put his hand on the shoulder of the stonefaced woman sitting in it. He said, “We’re all as sorry as can be, Rose. Count on Martha and me to help any way we can.”
“Thank you, Captain,” she replied. “I guess it could’ve been worse. Jethro and me are still alive. The barn and the sheds didn’t go, and the stock’s all saved. We’ll make out.”
“How’d it start, Rose?” he asked.
“Dear only knows. One minute me and Jethro was in the bedroom getting ready to go to bed, and the next minute there was fire all around the house on the outside.”
“It didn’t start from a flue, the kitchen, maybe?” he asked. “Or a stove in the parlor?”
Rose Garvey shook her head. “No. I’ve been wondering while I sat here how it begun.”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t from a flue?”
“Sure as sure, Captain. I let the kitchen fire die out after I’d cooked supper. That was around sundown, and when Jethro heard the clock in the parlor strike nine, he said it was bedtime. And the only stove that’s been lit since the weather turned at summer was that one in the kitchen.”
“No, it couldn’t have been a flue, then,” Tinker said, as much to himself as to Rose Garvey and Jessie. He went on, “Fires don’t start by themselves, though. There’s got to be a reason.” He took Jessie’s arm and led her a step or two away from the group. “You live outdoors a lot, and you’ve got to be smart, seeing you’re Alex Starbuck’s daughter. I want you to do something for me, Jessie.”
“Anything you ask, Captain.”
“That fire’s just about out now. In a few minutes, when the fuss around the house dies down, you go up and walk around a little bit. Take your time, and use your eyes and nose.”
“Nose?”
“You’ve smelled a place on the ground where somebody’s used coal oil to start a fire, haven’t you, Jessie?”
“I smell that every branding season. We use coal oil at the Circle Star to kindle our branding fires fast. There’s so little wood around there that we don’t have any kindling.”
“Then you know what you’ll be trying to find.”
“You think the fire was set, don’t you, Captain Tinker?”
“If it didn’t start in a flue, it had to be.”
“Yes, of course,” Jessie replied thoughtfully.
“You don’t have to say anything about what you’ve found, if you find anything at all. We’ll talk about it later.”
Jessie nodded. The Captain did not have to tell her that the Garvey farm spread over land that would be needed by the railroad for their right-of-way through the north pass out of Hidden Valley.
When Captain Tinker went back to rejoin the group around Rose Garvey, Jessie made her way toward the burned skeleton that had once been a house. Other spectators, late arrivals, were beginning to go up to the ruins for a close look, and most of the men who’d been fighting the blaze were standing near the skeleton with their gear at hand to use if a gust of wind should cause a sudden flareup. The men who’d been on the barn were coming down the high ladder that leaned against the building, and in the moving, shifting crowd, no one paid attention to Jessie.
Begining at the corner of the house nearest her, Jessie moved slowly along its end, scanning the ground closely, stopping occasionally to bend down and sniff the parched soil. She’d covered the end and was halfway around the rear, near the spot where the back door had been, before she found what the Captain had suspected. Here, Garvey had built a flagstone walkway to the well. A few feet from the house, the walk split into a Y, and one arm going to the well, the other to the barn. In the angle where the Y began, the unmistakable odor of coal oil was very strong.
Though large stretches of live coals glowed redly on many of the studs that remained erect, and there were coals in the center of the devastated dwelling where the rafters had collapsed, the flames had almost completely died away. Darkness obscured detail on the ground around the walk, and Jessie dropped to her knees, trying to see whether obvious traces of the liquid remained on the ground or the flagstone. Bending down, her head close to the ground, she could see a faint sheen of the oil on one of the flat stones that made up the walk.
A man’s voice broke into her concentration, asking, “Did you lose something, Jessie?”
Looking up into the gloom, Jessie recognized Jed Clemson standing a short distance away. She said, “No. Captain Tinker asked me to look for something.”
“From the looks of things, you’ve found it.”
“I think I have.” She hesitated for a moment, then decided it wasn’t likely that the Captain would object to her sharing what she’d found with his nephew. She said, “Come here and look and smell the ground, Jed. See if I’m right.”
“Right about what?” Jed asked. He came to where Jessie was kneeling, and hunkered down beside her. His eyes followed her finger, pointed at the stained flagstone. He bent forward, lowered his head, and sniffed. “Coal oil.”
“That’s what the Captain asked me to look for.”
“He suspects somebody set the house afire?”
“What he said was that if the fire didn’t start in a flue, someone must have started it from outside. And Mrs. Garvey told us that the fire in her kitchen stove went out hours ago.”
“You and Captain Bob have been busy while I was up on the barn roof,” Jed commented. He looked at the smeared stone in thoughtful silence. “Captain Bob’s generally right,” he said. He extended his hand to help Jessie rise. “Come on, let’s go tell him about this.”
“Let’s do it quietly, though, Jed, where nobody else can hear us,” Jessie suggested. She took Jed’s hand and pulled herself to her feet. “I’m not sure the Captain wants anybody else to know just yet that the fire was deliberately set.”
They rounded the corner of the house. A half-dozen lanterns had been lighted by now, but compared to the brilliance that the burning house had so recently shed on the scene, the lanterns were as ineffective as fireflies in dispelling the gloom. There were very few men still keeping watch on the dying embers now; all but two or three had joined the crowd clustered around the chair where Rose Garvey sat.
Jessie and Jed began working their way through the crowd. As they drew closer to its center, Jessie saw that a man with a soot-smeared face stood beside Captain Tinker, behind the chair in which Mrs. Garvey was sitting. Jessie could see that the man who was standing facing them had obviously not been among those fighting the fire. His coat looked bandbox-fresh, and a clean white collar gleamed below the brim of the gray derby that he’d pushed to the back of his head. The faces of the Captain and the Garveys were turned toward the newcomer, and as Jessie and Jed drew closer, she could hear what the man was saying. She knew who he was then, and didn’t need Jed’s whispered indentification.
“That’s Prosser, the land agent for the railroad,” he said.
“I had an idea that was who he was,” she replied. “Come on, Jed. Let’s get up to where we can whisper to the Captain and tell him what we found.” They began wiggling through the crowd.
Prosser was saying persuasively, “Now you don’t want to rebuild here, I’m sure. Why, this place will always have unhappy memories for you, Mrs. Garvey. If you take my offer, you can buy a farm somewhere else and build a fine new house, buy brand-new furniture, everything you need to give you a fresh start. You won’t always be reminded of what happened to you here.”
“I’d as soon stay,” Rose Garvey said quietly. “And I imagine Jethro would too.”
“Certain sure, I would!” Garvey said emphatically.
“It’s a lot of money I’m offering you,” Prosser told him.
“They don’t want your money, Prosser,” Captain Tinker said. “But I guess a man like you wouldn’t understand how most folks feel about a place they’ve built with their own hands and lived in for twenty or so years.”
“Tinker, you stay out of this!” Prosser snapped.
“I’m in it up to my scuppers already, and I intend to stay in it!” the Captain shot back. “There’s miles and miles of land around this Valley where you can put your railroad tracks down. Go someplace else, and leave these folks alone!”
“I’m not talking to you,” Prosser retorted. “If you’d stayed out of this from the beginning, Hidden Valley would be a lot better off!” He turned back to the Garveys. “Now I’ve made you folks a good offer. I know that right now you’re both tired and upset, and I’m not going to press you to make up your minds tonight. I’ll stop back tomorrow—”
“We won’t be here,” Garvey said. “We’ve had offers from a lot of folks to stay with them tonight, and we’ll take one of them as soon as we get a few minutes’ peace.”
Jessie and Jed had worked their way to Captain Tinker’s side while Prosser was talking to the Garveys. The old man looked at Jessie, and his thick white eyebrows went up questioningly. She nodded and moved still closer to his side. Tinker bent toward her.
“You were right, Captain,” Jessie whispered in his ear. “It was arson. Jed and I found traces of coal oil behind the house, just outside the back door.”
“I was pretty sure there’d be some signs, if we looked close enough,” he said. “But it won’t do much good unless we can tie it to Prosser, or somebody else connected with the railroad.”
“Aren’t you going to face Prosser with it?” she asked.
Tinker shook his head. “Not right now. We need a lot more to go on than we’ve got. You and Jed just keep quiet.”
Jessie nodded and returned her attention to the discussion between Prosser and the Garveys.
“I’m trying to do you people a favor,” Prosser said. “I’m ready to pay you hard cash, Mr. Garvey, right this minute!” He began taking bundles of banknotes from his coat pockets. Putting them in a thick stack, he waved them in Garvey’s face. “Here. This is yours right now, if you take my offer!”
Garvey looked at the stack of money, and then down at his wife. She shook her head. He said, “You got your answer, Mr. Prosser. Now just go away and let us be, will you?”
“You don’t seem to understand,” Prosser insisted. “I’m offering you a good price for a few acres of farmland and a burned-down shell of a house!”
“You’re trying to get hold of our land so your pick-and-shovel crews can rip it up and put down railroad tracks!” Garvey broke in. “You’re not pulling any wool over our eyes.”
Prosser shook his head sadly. “You folks have just been listening to a lot of ugly lies.” He paused for a moment, then went on, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mr. Garvey.” Groping in his coat pocket, he produced two more sheaves of bills. “I’ll raise my last offer by two thousand dollars. That’s more than this place of yours was worth with your house still standing.”
Garvey bent over his wife’s shoulder and asked her, “Does that sound any better to you, Rose?”
She shook her head. “I feel just the same as I did when we were talking before Mr. Prosser got here, Jethro. We’ll go ahead and move our stuff into the barn and live there while we’re building a new house.”
Straightening up, Garvey faced the railroad agent again. “I guess you heard what she said, Mr. Prosser. We won’t be taking your offer.”
“All right!” Prosser snapped. “But I warn you right now, you’ll live to regret this!”
Cramming his derby down on his head, Prosser pushed rudely through the crowd, and while all eyes turned to watch his departure, he found his buggy and drove away.
“Well, he won’t bother you anymore for a while,” Captain Tinker observed. “And don’t worry too much. Things will work out all right.”
“We know they will, Captain,” Garvey said. “We’ve had all the furniture we’ll need offered to us already, so we can move into the barn right away and be real comfortable.”
“And whatever else you need, let me know,” Tinker told him. “I’ll see that you get it.”
“That goes for us too,” a fresh voice said behind Jessie.
She and the Captain turned. Jed Clemson and an older couple had moved through the dispersing crowd.
“Jessie, I’d like you to meet my folks,” Jed said. “My mother and father. I’ve been telling them about you.”
“I’m Henry Clemson, and this is Alice,” Jed’s father said. “Both of us feel like we know the Starbuck family as well as we do our own kin, after hearing Bob talk about your father for all these years.”
“You’ll have to come for supper, when you’ve got time,” Alice Clemson said. “You tell Jed when, and I’ll fix you up a real Hidden Valley meal. We don’t live too far from here, right over that way.”
As she spoke, Mrs. Clemson half-turned and extended her hand to point in the direction of their home. Jessie’s eyes followed the pointing finger, and her gasp caused the other to look as well. A patch of red was beginning to color the sky where Alice Clemson was pointing.
Chapter 9
“Oh, dear God, don’t let it be our house!” Mrs. Clemson exclaimed. “We left Peony there by herself!”
“It is our house, Alice,” Clemson said. His voice was calm, but strained. “Or one of our barns. There’s nothing else where that blaze is that would burn. But Peony’s able to take care of herself.” He turned to Jed. “Bob will look after your mother, Jed. Let’s go!”
Jed and Henry Clemson had come on saddle horses to the fire, leaving Mrs. Clemson to follow in a buggy. The departure of the Clemson men, and their shouts as they spurred past the departing firefighters, got help moving fast. Others, of course, had seen the slowly growing patch of red, and were whipping up their horses even before they heard the shouting. What had begun as a leisurely departure became a small stampede as the weary men who’d fought the Garvey fire rushed to quell the new blaze.
This time a series of circumstances combined to make the firefighters’ job easier. They had their transportation ready; no time had to be spent in hitching up a buggy or wagon. Their horses were fresh after having rested for nearly two hours after galloping from town to the first fire, and the distance to the blaze was not quite two miles, instead of more than six.
Most importantly, the Clemson house was built of logs, not boards. The flames could not eat through the solid wood and ignite the walls inside the house, and the lessened intensity of the heat allowed the firefighters to get close, instead of forcing them to attack the flames from a distance. The house’s major point of vulnerability was its roof, and the fire had not climbed to the eaves when most of the volunteers arrived.
Jed and Henry had gotten home several minutes ahead of the others leaving the Garvey house. When they’d arrived, they found fifteen-year-old Peony already attacking the blaze, scooping up shovelfuls of dirt from the dry soil a few feet from the house, and tossing the dirt on the wall. Some of the dirt fell to the ground before reaching the wall, but the remainder landed on the house and smothered an area as big as the span of a man’s outspread hands. Jed and Henry had wasted no time in running to the barn for shovels and following Peony’s example.
When the other men arrived and saw how effective the dirt was in smothering the creeping flames, they adopted the same method. Most of them carried a spade or shovel in their wagons, and many who had buckets used them to scoop up dirt. A solid line of men was soon working shoulder to shoulder along each side. Within less than a half-hour from the time the fire had started, it was being attacked by exhausted but still willing workers.
Where thin, creeping tongues of flame had reached the low eaves and kindled the vulnerable shakes that covered the roof, the men with buckets formed a line fr
om the well to the house and doused the roof. Then the bucket brigade turned its attention to the walls. Thin tongues of smoke were trickling from the logs here and there, where some dormant sparks remained, but these vanished when a bucket of water was splashed on them. Though the flames had girdled almost the entire house when the volunteers arrived from the earlier blaze, the fire was extinguished with surprising speed.
Alice Clemson had been worried and anxious when Captain Tinker’s buggy wheeled up and stopped in front of the house, but when she’d seen how quickly the fire was yielding, she said to Jessie, “That fire’s not really going to hurt our house, is it?”
“No,” Jessie replied. “The log walls are going to save it.”
“Then as soon as we’re sure it’s safe, I’m going to go in and make coffee and see what I’ve got in the pantry that I can feed those poor men. They haven’t had any rest for hours!”
“I think it’s perfectly safe to go in now,” Jessie said. “You can see the fire’s going to be completely out in just a few more minutes. I’ll come along and help you.”
Between them, Alice and Jessie made coffee and, while it was brewing, sliced what had been left of a beef roast that had been the Clemsons’ supper, and made sandwiches. When the firefighters found their job brought to such a quick and unexpected end, they stood around drinking coffee and eating and swapping stories of their experiences in fighting the two fires.
“Let’s don’t forget to give Peony credit for saving the house, though,” Henry Clemson reminded them. “She was so quick to figure out that dirt would put the fire out faster than water, that all the rest of us had to do was follow her example.”
“How’d you happen to think of shoveling dirt instead of using water, Peony?” Captain Tinker asked the girl.
“I just remembered when we had picnics and how Papa and Jed put out fire with dirt,” Peony replied. “I knew I wasn’t strong enough to haul a lot of water up from the well.”